章 2248: 6
Intercession by VigoGrimborne
Chapter 6
Harry got a very good idea of how his summer at the Burrow was going to go from the first five minutes after he stepped through the Floo, Taylor wrapped securely over his shoulders to tag along since she said she couldn't actually use the Floo herself. Ginny led the way, but he still stumbled when he stepped out; Floo travel was a disorienting mystery to him.
"Harry!" He was immediately accosted by bright lights, colors, and a double-sided embrace from the two older boys who had immediately preceded him and Ginny. "Mind the step!"
They took him by the shoulders, narrowly missing grabbing Taylor too. "Don't kick the gnomes!" one said loudly.
"The broom shed is off-limits without supervision!' the other added.
"Don't go in the attic!"
"Don't ask what happens if it gets windy out!"
"Avoid mum at all costs when she has a green rag in her hands."
"Dad's shed is a Muggle paradise, if you like that sort of thing ask him to show you around. Bring supplies, it will be a three-day expedition before you can get him to stop asking questions."
"Candy left out in the open is for anyone to take, don't be shy!"
"If you see a Lovegood in the forest at night, give them a mushroom and run–"
"Fred! George!" Harry recognized Mrs. Weasley's voice from the Howler she sent Ron in first year. "What do you think you are doing?"
"Being prats." One of the twins winced and let go, and Ginny came into view. "George, off him before I kick you too."
Harry tried his best to match the name to the face of the twin who was apprehensive instead of dramatically hopping around on one leg and lamenting his grievous injuries, but he doubted he would be able to tell them apart, going forward.
The twins backed away from him, but he was given no time to recover or look at the Weasleys' home, because he was immediately swept up in an entirely unexpected embrace. "We're thrilled to have you over for the summer, Harry," Mrs. Weasley said as she let him go, now somewhat more winded than he had been a minute ago. "Don't mind the twins, they'll behave. You'll be bunking with Ronald, I hope you don't mind, and I've taken the liberty of sending Arthur out for a snake cage, he should be back any moment now–"
A door slammed elsewhere in the house, and Harry was mercifully abandoned for a moment as Molly Weasley rushed away. Fred and George had disappeared, while Ron and Percy Weasley were nowhere to be seen, so it was just him and Ginny in a nice, homey living room.
Ginny grimaced apologetically. "Sorry about that."
"I… don't think I've seen your mother's face yet?" he said, dazed and confused. "Just her chest." Which he had been squished against.
"Some families are much more… touchy… than others," Taylor supplied.
"What she said," Ginny agreed. "Fair warning, Ron and I have convinced her you're obviously not Harry Potter, but she's going to comment on your scar and the resemblance at least three times before she gets over it. She does that for everything she doesn't understand. Come on, I'll show you Ron's room."
Harry clung to the shred of normalcy that was Ginny, hurriedly picking up his trunk and following her up a narrow set of stairs. He could hear a commotion elsewhere in the house, a distant babble of many voices. "Is it… always like this?" he asked. The Hufflepuff common room was rowdy sometimes, but only sometimes. He had, for some reason, never quite thought about what nine Weasleys in an enclosed space might be like.
"Yes, but we won't be spending much time in the house," Ginny told him. "Mum will stick us with chores if we do. You too, she's a big believer in everyone pitching in, without magic. Think of this as the place you only come back to for free food and a bed whenever you need it."
That sounded somewhat rude to the Weasleys, but Harry was willing to follow Ginny's lead, as this was her home.
"Ron's room." Ginny declared, thumping her elbow on one of the many doors lining the upstairs hallway at irregular intervals. "Oy, prat, you have two seconds, put it away!"
True to her word, she shoved the door open two seconds later. Ron was sitting on his bed, pulling things out of his trunk. "What did you think I had out?" he asked suspiciously. "Hey, Harry."
"Prank products," Ginny lied, her neck flushing red. Harry had a good idea what she had actually meant, but he supposed he wouldn't want to explain it to Ron, either. "Harry's bunking with you, don't mess with his stuff or I'll hex you."
"You and what magic?" Ron retorted. "Mum's already got my wand, she'll take yours too if she catches you casting anything."
"Watch." Ginny plucked a Sickle off Ron's dresser – "Oy!" he objected – and held it in the palm of her hand. "There are advantages to studying ahead," she said ominously, closing her hand around the sickle and waving her other hand over her knuckles in a gesture that was, to Harry, oddly familiar. "Evanesco!" She flicked her hand open, revealing a distinct lack of coin.
Ron's eyes bulged. "Blimey!" he yelled. "That's an OWL-level spell! And you didn't use a wand!"
"Yes, so play nice," she warned.
Ron's eyes narrowed. "Hey… You owe me a sickle!"
"Here." Ginny reached into her robes and pulled out a single sickle. A suspiciously identical sickle, not that Ron noticed. "Take mine. You got a space for the snake cage mum mentioned?"
"We're not going to need a cage," Harry objected. He was not putting his mum, snake or not, into any form of cage.
"He could use Scabbers' old cage," Ron said, pointing to an abandoned cage perched atop a stack of books in the corner. "Don't know why he needs a new one for a snake."
Harry was doubly sure that his mum was not going to use the perverted rat Death Eater's cage.
Someone came up the stairs – each step creaked loudly, providing ample warning – and Harry heard a jolly "Hello!" behind him. He turned to see Arthur Weasley, a tall man who bore a striking resemblance to all of his sons, carrying a length of metal pipe. "I'm here with the snake cage," he said. "The Muggle told me he puts snakes in these all the time. It's quite small, so it should be no trouble to find somewhere for it in Ron's room."
Harry, Ginny, and Ron all looked dubiously at the length of PVC piping.
"Dad," Ron began, "are you sure that's for snakes to live in?"
"The Muggle said it was," Arthur said. "I asked for something to put snakes in, and he asked me if I meant to buy a snake, and I said no, I needed the thing he puts snakes into. So he sold me this pipe."
"Was this Muggle a plumber, by any chance?" Taylor hissed. Harry repeated the question.
"Yes, but he had something for snakes," Arthur said. He held the length of pipe up to look down it. "It makes sense, doesn't it? They're long and tube-like, they would have long and tube-like homes…"
"Hissy is an outdoor snake," Harry said, "so thanks, but I'll just…" He held his hands out for the pipe. Arthur gave it to him. "Hold onto this? In case she wants it. But she's probably going to make a den somewhere out in the forest."
"Yes, you do that. Welcome to the Burrow, Harry!" Arthur ruffled his hair, then left. Downstairs, something exploded.
"Fred Weasley, you give me that candy right this instant! Don't you go pranking our guest! George Weasley, I see you sneaking those plates, don't you think I don't!"
"And just think, Harry," Ginny said sarcastically, raising her voice to be heard over her mother's rant. "This is only seven ninths of the usual Weasley household. Bill and Charlie are off doing their own things."
"You'll get used to it once your ears adjust," Ron said.
The Weasleys were, in Taylor's opinion, a perfectly acceptable family. Chaotic, with far too much shouting and craziness to go around a rather alarmingly cobbled-together house, but where it counted they were family. Their days were filled with arguments and pranks and yelling, but none of it ever really went beyond scolding and minor grudges. At the end of the day, they all went to sleep under the same roof, ready to do it all over again with varying levels of enthusiasm.
She would not claim their way of living was completely alien to her; having insects in every home in a several block radius back on Earth Bet had exposed her to any number of different family dynamics. It was, however, almost antithetical to how she preferred to live. The noise, the constant petty arguments, everyone knocking elbows at the table and in the yard and everywhere on the property… She was happy to be a weekend snake, not a full-time resident, and she could tell she wasn't the only one who was glad to be able to pick and choose how much Weasley family time she was privy to.
Percy, the oldest brother still living at home, was in and out at odd hours, talking about an internship involving, as best Taylor could tell, either the government or a particularly lawyer-driven cauldron-making company. Fred and George, for all that they precipitated most of the madness, held court in their room some days, making like reclusive mad scientists until their mother inevitably came up to check on them. Ronald could be seen flying the family brooms all hours of the day, running through impractical-looking Quidditch drills with a fervor bordering on religious. Ginny often went out into the woods. Arthur Weasley had his shed of random Muggle appliances that he clearly did not fully understand, but treasured regardless. Molly Weasley had the kitchen as her domain.
They all had their retreats, their little fiefdoms the others by unspoken agreement tried not to barge into if at all possible. Few of them actually used those retreats with any degree of regularity, but they did exist. It was an interesting, subtle little balance on otherwise only vaguely-controlled chaos.
Taylor had plenty of time to observe the Weasleys over the weekends and come to these conclusions, but her main focus was Harry. This, just like her weekend visits over the school year, was precious time with him. Precious enough to enlist Sirius in apparating her to the edge of their property and back every weekend, though he had no problem providing such help. Today, especially, she was grateful Sirius was cooperative.
Well, relatively cooperative. She didn't have to bribe or extort him.
"Crack of dawn, crack of my arse," Sirius grumbled as he stumbled downstairs, wearing a robe of the bath variety, not the wizarding kind. "It's not even four!"
"Arthur Weasley asked about where I come from when I come to Harry," Taylor explained again, only mildly sympathetic. It was not as if Sirius didn't have early warning that she would need his assistance now. "I need to be 'seen' slithering out of a gnome hole so he stops asking questions. He gets up very early and goes out to his shed in… half an hour or so." The man did love fiddling with burnt-out lightbulbs. He'd even managed to get the filament out of one without shattering it, though she had no idea why or how he had done so.
"Aren't gnomes nasty, territorial buggers who would fight a snake if they saw one?" Sirius asked with a yawn. "Hold up a tic, gotta be fully awake to apparate." He smacked himself in the face, hard. "There."
"They were territorial." Until their most convenient hole caught a bad case of plague-level insect infestation. The little creatures weren't smart enough to do anything about that, so they abandoned the hole. Which was good; she would feel bad about killing them, even in self-defense. They were eerily humanoid in appearance, even if they were obviously stupider than the average parrot.
Long gone were the stressful situations where she would willingly fill someone's eyes with maggots or the like. Now, when all that was at stake was a hole she only wanted for the summer to keep up appearances, she was more than willing to be merciful.
They left Grimmauld Place by the front door, stepped out of the anti-apparition wards, and Sirius took her arm. "On one, one," he said, and they immediately twisted out of existence with no further warning, spinning back into place on the edge of a treeline far from London.
It said a lot about how Taylor felt about Sirius that not only did she trust him to teleport her, her first reaction to a sudden teleportation was to smack him, not pull in every insect to dogpile him. "Warning!" she barked.
"Sun!" he retorted. "Sirius no do good when tired."
He twisted away with a muted crack of displaced air.
"It's not like I'm a morning person either," she complained to the empty forest. One painful transformation later, she was ready to 'happen across' Arthur Weasley, then wait for Harry. From there, it was up to him what they did for the day, though if she had to guess it would involve at least one Weasley.
"Hissy," Harry called out a few hours later. Taylor slithered up to him and laid herself out straight so he could easily pick her up. She was lucky familiars were expected to be more intelligent than the average animal; half the things she did that would otherwise be construed as anomalous were instead part of her disguise. It certainly went a long way towards explaining how Pettigrew got away with hiding in plain sight for eleven years.
"Hermione is coming over today, Mrs. Weasley just sent the owl back telling her she could," Harry informed her. "Her parents and the Weasleys have been owling back and forth all week. There's going to be a sort of magical cook-out. Mr. Weasley says me and Hermione can help him figure out his Muggle grill…"
They would be lucky if it was actually any kind of grill at all, if Taylor had the measure of Mr. Weasley. Still, a magical cook-out sounded interesting. She didn't know much about how magic affected the preparation of food, despite sleeping in the Hogwarts kitchen every weekend for several months. Elf cooking might as well have been conjuring, for all she could follow the many, many food teleportations and bright flashes of light.
Harry took her inside, sidestepped a suspicious plate of cookies sitting on the floor in the middle of the hallway, and went to help Mrs. Weasley with the food prep. Taylor got the sense that he had volunteered for the job, and that Mrs. Weasley was pleased with that, because she hit him with a bubblehead charm before setting him to cut onions. The twins, when she wrangled them into the kitchen, did not receive any such protection.
The hours slipped away, between food preparation, avoiding mayhem, and generally hanging around. Taylor had to slither off of Harry at one point, when Percy Weasley sat Harry down to regale him about cauldron thickness legislation. Harry shot her a dirty look when Percy wasn't looking, for escaping when he could not, but really… Harry would have a right to complain once he had several more decades of experience. He was young and unused to the droning torture that was a boring, inescapable monologue from a bureaucrat. For her, it was either escape or see if Percy Weasley could drone effectively with a snake winding around his torso to look him in the eye.
She went to find Ginny and had her cause a distraction to get Harry out only a few minutes later, so all was forgiven. Then it was noon, Mrs. Weasley was conjuring a table from thin air out in the yard, Mr. Weasley was hauling out an actual, semi-new charcoal grill from his shed, and Hermione came in through the floo.
Followed by her parents.
Her Muggle parents, who had no trouble at all using the Floo on their own.
"Say, why's your snake smacking its head on the wall?" Arthur Weasley asked Harry.
"So… much… trouble…" Taylor hissed. "Would it kill wizards to say these things? To write them in their books? Would it have killed me to ask someone? Sirius, an Auror, a random idiot in the street? Why did I assume I needed my own magic to teleport using fire? I should have known better than to assume!"
"I don't know?" Harry said. He picked her up by the torso – she was all torso, but he lifted near the middle of her body – and held her to his chest.
"I am an absolute, bumbling idiot too stuck-up to ask for help," Taylor said bitterly.
"She's probably just hot," Harry offered, unable to relay exactly what he was hearing. 'My familiar is mad she didn't know she could use the Floo' wasn't an acceptable explanation. "It's warm in here."
Over by the fire, Mrs. Granger was talking to Mrs. Weasley. "Yes, it's quite a shock at first," she said, "It's just like getting off an escalator, you know, but with flames instead of steps. I dare say I prefer it to the four-hour drive it would have been to get here any other way."
This was what she got for assuming stepping into fire was as dangerous as manual teleportation. Stupid obvious assumptions. She could have made it to Hogsmeade months before she did. She wouldn't have needed Sirius, that was for sure. Not to get there, at least. And then there was coming here every weekend, though Sirius did that for her easily enough and it was much more clandestine that way…
On second thought, maybe it wouldn't have changed much at all for her to have been using the Floo from the start. She still felt extremely stupid.
"Harry!" Taylor got squished into a greeting hug. Hadn't these kids only been apart for a few weeks?
"Hermione!" he gestured toward the back door, and they made their escape from the continued boring adult-talk. Outside, Fred and George were busy doing something to a bucket and a recalcitrant chicken. Ron was up on a broom above it all, and Luna was poking at the charcoal grill.
"Neville will be here soon," Ginny told Hermione. "Luna can't stay all day, though."
"Daddy is taking me to Germany for the rest of the summer," Luna chimed in. "My Portkey leaves at sundown."
"Dean Thomas and Lavender Brown are going to show up sometime, if Ron is to be believed," Ginny continued. "Lee, too. You know Lee?"
"No?" Hermione said.
"Lucky," Ginny retorted. "He's the third wheel to Fred and George. Evil git."
"We resent that remark," one of the twins called out.
"Third wheel implies romance," the other retorted. "Between us, no less."
"You are connected at the hip," Ron called out, swooping down over the twins.
"Why are we the butt of the joke today, brother?" one twin asked the other. Try as he might, Harry was never quite sure he knew which was which. They had to be doing it on purpose.
"You're outnumbered," Ginny said smugly. "Even when Lee gets here, it'll be three on more than a dozen."
"The odds were never in our favor," one twin retorted.
"But we have things cooking," the other added ominously. "Just you wait…"
"Fred Weasley, you leave the chickens alone!" Molly shouted.
The twins dropped the chicken, picked up the bucket, and ran for the fence. "We will return!"
"You will rue the day you mocked us!"
"Send Lee off this way when he gets here, will you?"
Arthur, Molly, and the Grangers came outside, along with Neville.
"Who wants to help me set up the grill?" Arthur asked.
"Me!" Luna raised her hand. Harry raised his too.
"Come on," Ginny tugged at Hermione before she could volunteer. "Harry says he doesn't think you've flown a broom since first year."
"I haven't," Hermione said slowly.
"Flying is a necessary skill for every witch, and more importantly, I want enough people to have a girls versus boys Quidditch game later," Ginny said. "It'll be fun! Neville, you play defense."
Taylor left Harry, dropping down to slither in the cool grass. "That's a big snake," Mr. Granger remarked.
"Would this be Hissy?" Mrs. Granger asked.
"Oh, yeah, that's her." Harry sent Hermione's retreating form a searching look, then shrugged his shoulders. "Don't worry, she's mostly harmless." He went off to stop Luna from tipping the grill over.
Some time later, with the sun high overhead, the party was in full swing. The kids, sans the Weasley twins and their plus one, were up in the air on brooms, taking turns at various ball-based games, since there weren't enough brooms for a full Quidditch match. Harry had helped Luna and Arthur get the grill set up, but he and Luna had abandoned the man to his fate of figuring out how to cook freshly-butchered chicken over charcoal without 'cheating' with magic. Meanwhile, Molly Weasley and the Grangers were relaxing in the shade, watching the children and, to be quite frank, gossiping far more than they should.
It was fine while they were discussing Hermione; Taylor learned a lot about her son's first magical friend, including some entertainingly embarrassing childhood stories. The Muggle experience as parents of a magical child was a good topic too, though Mrs. Weasley was surprisingly oblivious as to how the Muggle world worked, given her husband's job and fascination. Talk of Ginny was where it got iffy; Taylor didn't think discussing Ginny's issues with the possession in her first year was fair 'slightly tipsy afternoon' gossip material.
Were she human and an acknowledged part of the gathering, that was where she would have steered the conversation away… Assuming she was around to hear them. If she was able to participate as she pleased, she probably would have been taking pity on Arthur and teaching him how to use the meat thermometer he had almost the right idea about.
But she was a snake, and uncomfortably overheated in the muggy British summer weather, so she was stuck in her borrowed gnome hole, listening through bugs.
Times like this reminded her of exactly how much Dumbledore was still taking from her and Harry, every day. It was his fault she couldn't reveal herself. His fault it was too risky to show up, even as a random stranger with a fake backstory to explain her presence. His fault she was stuck as a snake observing her son's life, with him aware of her presence but unable to acknowledge it in public.
It was Dumbledore's fault Molly Weasley was currently pontificating on Harry's situation, leaving Taylor with a choice between setting bugs on her or letting her spew her well-meaning but completely misinformed drivel.
"It's so sad," Molly said mournfully, "but Dumbledore said not to set him straight about his parentage, and you know Dumbledore knows what he's doing, so I've been trying, but I don't see why I should hold my tongue. It's not as if that Muggle he lived with is here now, and he deserves to know who his parents were."
"Hmm," Mr. Granger said.
"Perhaps you should give her the benefit of the doubt," Mrs. Granger suggested.
"Her – the Muggle?" Molly asked. "No, I don't think I will. Harry should have gone to a good wizarding family, I don't know what happened with that. We might not have been able to take him at the time, but there were plenty of families asking to have him. Dumbledore said he put him where he would be safest, but then a few years later he asked whether we knew where Harry was – like he'd gone missing! She must have lost him! Then he comes to Hogwarts, and not a peep out of her. Not one letter to the parents of his friends."
"Do you write the parents of all your childrens' friends?" Mrs. Granger asked. "That sounds like it must take a lot of time out of your schedule."
"The ones I don't already know," Mrs. Weasley confirmed. "I need to make sure my children have good friends. And then there's this business with him claiming she's his actual mother… Poppycock! I know a Potter when I see one. James looked just like him."
Taylor was actually beginning to worry that Mrs. Weasley's semi-drunken ramblings were getting to the Grangers. Mr. Granger hadn't said anything in twenty minutes beyond the occasional grunt, and Mrs. Granger was subtly defending Taylor, but less and less as time went on.
They didn't know her. They knew she left letters with them, and they knew a bit about her son, along with whatever Hermione had committed to paper in her letters back to them, but she had never met them face to face. It seemed an unnecessary risk up until now.
That would have to change. Soon. Today, if she could manage it. She couldn't afford for them to doubt whether they were doing the right thing in helping her. If they went to Dumbledore everything would fall apart.
"He needs a mother figure in his life, Merlin knows the poor dear keeps pushing me away whenever I try to help with that," Molly continued.
"He's had one," Mrs. Granger said.
"A proper one, who knows what he's going through, with magic," Molly waved her hand. "You know. There is a difference."
That was exactly the wrong thing to say, though Molly was too tipsy to notice. Whatever they were drinking, it wasn't strong, but Molly's glass refilled itself without her doing anything.
"Molly, dear, I think this chicken is finally done," Arthur called out. "Call the children in, would you?"
"Oh… Yes, the children. I was just saying." Molly waved her glass at Arthur as he walked over. "Give me a moment, I'll do a charm."
It was at that moment that the sky turned bright, fluorescent purple and every bug that Taylor had within a block of the Weasley home got splattered out of the air by a sudden, unexpected gunk coating their bodies.
"We regret nothing," one of the twins declared a few hours later.
"We regret that it didn't work, you mean," the other retorted.
"Coating everything in purple goop wasn't the point?" Lee asked.
"That is not how you apologize, boys!" Mrs. Weasley yelled from the next room over.
"We mean that we're sorry you all got coated in purple gunk," Lee offered.
"Yeah, that wasn't the plan," one of the twins agreed. "Just changing colors? Amateur hour."
"It cleaned up easily enough," Mrs. Granger assured them. "This was a very interesting day." Mr. Granger nodded in agreement.
"Do it again and I'll turn you inside out," Hermione offered.
"I'll help," Ginny said. "Harry, why don't you go escort Hermione and her parents home, then come back through the Floo?"
Harry had assumed Hermoine didn't need any help Flooing back to the Alley, and he didn't quite see the point–
"And take Hissy, she needs to get out before she bites a twin and finds out they taste terrible," Ginny continued, shoving his mother at him.
"I want to talk to them," Taylor explained, thereby shining light on what Harry had thought was a pointless exercise.
"If you insist," he told Ginny. "Uh… Diagon Alley?"
"Yes, the Leaky Cauldron, be sure to call it out clearly," Hermione reminded them. She went first, taking a pinch of Floo powder and throwing it down into the flames.
One disorienting Floo trip later, they were in the Leaky Cauldron. Harry wondered how his mum was going to change back without being seen.
"I'll take her," Hermione said. "Mum, dad, I'll be back in a second." She set off for the bathroom, his mum clutched in both hands.
Her parents watched her go. "Is there something I don't know about witch hygienics?" her dad asked.
"Probably," her mum said absently, "but I have no idea what she wants with Harry's snake. Harry?"
"I'm just glad I'm not the absolute last person to know about this plan," he offered. Maybe he'd missed his mum plotting with Ginny while he was watching Molly trying to convince Luna that she couldn't go to Germany still completely purple from her skin to her robes. If so, he did not regret his choice in the slightest. As it turned out, 'I am taking a Portkey' really meant 'I currently have a Portkey on me that will whisk me away at the designated time no matter what I am doing at the moment.' Such as arguing with Molly Weasley, for instance.
Hermione returned from the bathroom, without a snake.
"Hermione, did you… forget something?" Her mother asked.
"No?" Hermione said innocently. "But guess who I ran into?"
Harry supposed she hadn't ever told her parents about who Hissy really was. He wondered if this was actually going to work to hide the connection between Hissy and Taylor. The Grangers seemed smart enough to see through it.
Nevertheless, it was Taylor who emerged from the bathroom, in her witch's robes. "Fancy meeting you here," she said.
The Grangers both eyed her suspiciously.
"Why don't we go to your car and talk." She smiled, hugged Harry briefly, and gestured back at the Floo. "I'll find my own way home," she said. "Apparently, all I need to do is use any old fireplace."
Right, he remembered that. " I'll keep the Weasley grate open."
"Perfect." She turned to the Grangers. "It was high past time we met properly. My fault, I'm sorry for leaving it so long."
"It's no trouble," Mrs. Granger said. "Perchance, are you…" She wiggled her arm.
"Prone to hissing?" Taylor led them to the door leading out into London. "That's one of the things I wanted to talk about…"
The Burrow was never truly silent, not even in the middle of the night. The thing in the attic thumped around. The house itself creaked and sighed in the wind. Ronald Weasley snored loud enough to wake the dead.
All of these noises covered Harry's stealthy escape from Ron's room, and subsequent trip down the stairs and out the front door. It was nearly midnight, the time Ginny had whispered to him in passing while Molly mashalled her children and him to de-gnome the front lawn. The excessive secrecy probably wasn't necessary, but it made sneaking out all the more fun.
Out behind the burrow, out of sight of the windows but not that far away, Ginny soared through the air, pulling random dives and flips in the night sky. She dove down to skim the grass with her feet, pulling up beside Harry. "Broom's over here, I got it out for you." She led him to another similar broom, sitting in the grass, and in moments he was up in the sky with her.
"I've been doing this for years," she told him as they flew, completely unsupervised. "It was the only way I was able to use the brooms before Hogwarts. After, too. Mum likes to worry when it suits her, and to pretend everything is fine the rest of the time."
"Your mum obviously cares a lot," Harry offered. "Maybe she just isn't good at showing it the way you would prefer?" He wouldn't like Mrs. Weasley's obsessive attention turned on him, either. But how was Mrs. Weasley supposed to know that?
"You might be right… I can't say you don't know her, after spending a month here," Ginny admitted. She began flying her broom around Harry in vertical circles. "What's your home like? Compared to ours."
Harry wondered for a moment why she was asking him this now, but if this was what she wanted to talk about he wasn't averse to answering.
"Quiet," he said. "Spacious. It's me and mum, and nobody else. There's a whole neighborhood of other kids, though." Including a few of his old friends. He hadn't seen them in… going on three years, now. He wondered if they would recognize him when he returned, or vice versa. Three years was a long time, and a lot had changed for him since he last saw them.
"Sounds nice," Ginny said wistfully. "I wouldn't mind living somewhere with more people around. I'm growing up, but the Burrow and everything around it is staying the same. I get why Bill and Charlie moved to other countries when they graduated. I don't think I've seen much of anything, yet."
They flew in silence for a little while. Ginny led him through a few basic tricks on their brooms, each of which he copied without much effort. Flying really wasn't very hard, and out here, in the warm night air, it was pleasant. Peaceful, more so than any moment he'd had since coming to the Burrow.
"I put my Harry Potter book collection up in the attic last week," Ginny said, apropos of nothing.
"Hmm," Harry hummed as he flew through a small cloud of gnats, blinking hard to make sure none stuck in his eyes. "Why?"
"I grew out of them," Ginny said. "It's… You know, they're badly written?"
"I suspected," Harry said.
"Full of inconsistencies," Ginny continued. "And even if they weren't, Harry Potter in them is a lucky, tragic prat who has everything happen to him. He sweeps every damsel in distress off her feet before anything bad can happen, and he fixes everything with special artifacts and spells and tools and sidekicks people give him just for being Harry Potter."
"Sounds unbelievable." He thought of Potter's invisibility cloak. And his obscure Japanese spell. And his one-armed, magically-cursed mum who spent the weekends pretending to be his familiar. "Or, well, unbelievable that it happens more than a couple of times."
"I used to think I wanted Harry Potter to sweep me off my feet," Ginny admitted, her voice distant. "Now, though… I don't think I would like that person if we ever met, and I think I want to do the sweeping of feet. Does that make sense?"
"Sure?" Harry was not equipped for the direction this conversation seemed to be going. "Ginny, I–"
Ginny looked over at him. "Not you, prat," she said with a fond smile. "Don't get that thought in your head."
"It was in yours first, given you jumped to telling me otherwise before I could say anything," Harry objected.
"Sorry, not sorry," Ginny laughed. "Can you imagine how awkward that would be, if I told you all of that and then let you jump to conclusions? Stupid. Only idiots let problems start by not saying what they mean…"
She trailed off, and Harry could see that she was frowning. "What?" he asked.
"Just wondering how much of Tom went into me thinking that, and how much of the old Ginny who had a crush on Harry Potter," Ginny said softly. "It's been more than a year, but I keep noticing things. He's not in here, not still hiding in my head waiting to strike, but I haven't found all of the changes yet. I don't like thinking that I don't know myself."
"Small things, mostly?" Harry asked. "After a year, what could there be that you wouldn't have already thought about, except unimportant stuff?"
Ginny laughed bitterly. "You'd be surprised," she said, "and it's always a guessing game. Is it all me, Tom's influence, or something neither of us would have done on our own?"
Ironically, Harry felt this was a safer subject of conversation than the thankfully nonexistent turn of events that Ginny confessing a crush on him would have been. This, at least, he knew something about. "I can hit you with my anti-possession spell a few more times when we get back to school," he suggested. "Or I can teach it to you."
"Teach me," Ginny demanded. "I don't know why you haven't taught it to us all, yet. Hasn't Hermione asked to learn? She wants to know everything." She smiled fondly.
"She told me she was going to research other cultures to find something similar but different in origin so we could cover our bases better," Harry recalled. "She hasn't said anything since." Meaning she was probably still looking for the perfect spell to compliment his own, never mind that she could learn both… Hermione had her own way of doing things.
"We should all learn," Ginny said, "but that won't fix my problem. I'm not worried about him having influence. I'm worried about recognizing it when I see it. It's… not nothing, but it's kind of stupid. This is me, now, Tom or Ginny or both combined. You'll stop me if I go dark, right?"
"I will, and Hermione definitely will," Harry assured her. "She might even keep a closer eye on you if you asked her to." Hermione and Ginny were often together when either one of them was planning something illicit. More often than not Hermione was the instigator, come to think of it. The Restricted section of the library came to mind.
"I told her about Tom's influence before the end of last term," Ginny admitted.
"Wow, I had no idea." Hermione was doing good not treating Ginny any differently now that she knew.
"It's not nothing, but I wish it was easier to stop worrying," Ginny concluded. "I know what I need to do, I just can't help thinking too much about it. Does that make sense?"
"Of course." He turned his broom and flew in front of her. "Want to race back to the Burrow?" He thought he had a handle on this broom, and what better way to get Ginny to stop thinking than a high-speed chase?
Ginny grinned. "You're on."
They shot off into the darkness, twin rockets spreading through the sky, and Harry knew that the serious conversation was over for the night.
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