Disclaimer: Harry Potter does not belong to me.
The green flames of Floo travel made Harry’s head spin; he fought to stay relatively steady, knowing that when he came out of the other end he’d need to be on his feet. The journey was over quickly; Harry landed on his feet just behind Remus, wand drawn and ready.
The shop was a wreck. Spell and curses shot across the room, bouncing off shelves, colliding with various products and creating random explosions. Harry thought he saw a red-haired figure dart through the growing smokiness and started towards it, but then there was a bang louder than the others and the door burst open. Hooded figures in black rushed in, three, four, five, six, more “ two at the front fell down almost immediately and Harry realised that he had sent out a Stunning Spell without even thinking. The other Stunner had come from Hermione on his left. She tugged on his arm.
“Come on, get under cover,” she called, dragging him behind a row of shelves just before a volley of curses reached their previous position. Harry leant out and cast Stunning Spells in return before ducking behind the shelving again.
“Harry, you’ve got to be careful “ they’re just wrecking the place now, but if they find out you’re here “ Harry, where are you -?”
Harry had seen a body drop to the floor the other side of the shop, and had darted out and around the counter before Hermione had realised what he was doing. The dust from the destruction was thick in the air, and had settled in a film all over his face and hair, but all the same he kept his face turned away from the Death Eaters in the doorway, now fighting Remus and Kingsley. Hermione was right. He was making this more dangerous just by being here; if any of them realised that the Chosen One had come to fight they could and probably would summon more help.
Harry reached the figure on the floor, and saw that it was a woman with short blond hair “ Verity, her name was, one of Fred and George’s assistants. Harry grabbed her arms and dragged her back behind the counter, and then put a hand a little hesitantly to her neck to check for a pulse. He couldn’t find it, but she seemed to be breathing “ he made a mental note to ask Hermione to teach him how to check someone’s pulse later, and leant out from behind the counter to fire off more stunning spells.
Suddenly, there was a clattering noise from the fireplace and Arthur, Bill, Fleur and Charlie all came charging out of it, wands raised. The Death Eaters, seven of them, were now fighting in the middle of the shop, but it was clear that they hadn’t expected this much resistance, and were backing away a little. The twins, Ron and Hermione came out to fight properly just as Harry did; they had the Death Eaters backing into the doorway, before a shriek from a cloaked figure on the floor wrenched through the noise.
“Avada Kedavra!”
“GEORGE!”
One of the largest shelves hit the floor with an almighty crash, flames spiralling upwards from it. Harry was blinking and coughing, fighting to see what had happened. He realised a few seconds later that the Death Eaters had disapparated; the figures moving through the dust and smoke were no longer duelling.
“A-ag-aguamenti,” Harry heard Hermione cough from a few feet to his left. He turned to see her pouring water from her wand onto the flames, which slowly became ashes.
“George? George? George, can you hear me?” Fred’s voice was panicked, with an edge of hysteria, as the smoke began to clear. Harry moved forward, desperate to know…
“Move, out of the way!”
Charlie.
“Bill, go and find Pomfrey. Dad, help me get this off him.”
Harry could see better now, and he was not glad of it. Beneath the fallen shelves, an arm was splayed out. Fred was kneeling over it, white-faced. Charlie’s voice was steady, but his expression was no calmer.
“Dad! What’s going on?”
Harry turned, and saw Ginny had just arrived through the fireplace.
“Is everyone alright?” she asked, before she saw what had happened. She didn’t have much time to react, though, because Bill was already moving. He put a hand on her shoulder and pulled her away.
“Ginny, come on, we have to go and get help. Let’s go.”
His voice was rough with fear, but she followed him back into the flames. Harry turned back to see Mr Weasley and Charlie carefully levitating the shelves off of George who lay, unmoving, on the floor. Harry could see Hermione reach for Ron’s hand in the corner of his eye. Lupin was kneeling over George next to Fred, checking his pulse. Tonks came towards Harry.
“You three should go,” she said. “The Ministry will be all over here soon, Harry, and none of you can help any more now.” She turned to Ron. “You’ll know as soon anyone does,” she said.
Ron barely reacted, white beneath his freckles, still staring over at his older brothers. Hermione took his hand, and Harry took the other arm, and they made their way back through the Floo.
*
It was half an hour that they waited in the kitchen in Grimmauld Place with Ginny; a far shorter time than they had waited for news of Ron’s father, over two years ago, Harry knew “ but somehow it seemed the same, as though they had always been sat there, unable to move until some kind of news reached them. Finally, Arthur and Charlie stumbled wearily through the fireplace, looking exhausted.
“He’ll be alright,” Charlie said before collapsing in a chair. Ron embraced Hermione and Ginny turned into Harry’s arms wordlessly. Harry held her, smelling the smoke from the explosions still in her hair, as her small form shook gently with the relief.
“You’re okay; you’re okay; it’s going to be fine…” he murmured quietly into her ear. They stayed like that for a long while, before everyone parted and retreated to their respective beds in exhausted silence.
*
The next few days were quiet again. Fred was eventually convinced to leave his twin’s side and come home for something to eat, but seemed determined to be optimistic about the shop.
“We’ve lost a lot of stock,” he said to Harry over their chicken, “including all of the stuff we showed the Order. Some rat of a Death Eater was poking their nose in the back, looking for it “ we had to destroy it before it got into the wrong hands.” He shrugged.
After the meal, he caught Harry for a moment in the hall.
“I know you and Ron and Hermione,” he said quietly, “are going to leave again soon. You’ll have to.”
Harry did not answer; he had been thinking exactly the same thing. Fred nodded to himself.
“Me and George were working on a variation of the bracelets; we kept them aside, in here instead of the shop.”
He took a case out of his pocket.
“There’s one for each of the three of you, and Ginny; me and George already have our own. If you press your thumb to the back it’ll send a pulse to the others, and we can come and help you out.”
Harry took the case from him and slipped it into his own jacket, his expression grateful.
“Thanks,” he said. Fred nodded again.
“Good luck, Harry,” he said, before returning to St Mungo’s through the kitchen fire.
A little later, in the privacy of his and Ron’s room, Harry opened the little black case. It contained four silvery necklaces, each bearing a pendant the size and shape of a fingerprint. Each one was labelled with a name, and as Harry turned them towards the light he could see that each pendant was marked with a symbol: Hermione’s had a wand, Ron’s a sword, Ginny’s some kind of circular, swirling symbol and Harry’s a slender bolt of lightning.
He showed the others later. Hermione was impressed, Ron and Ginny too, but none of them felt the urge to be excited about them. On the contrary, the mood was very serious.
“You three are leaving, aren’t you?” Ginny said quietly in the dim light. Harry glanced to the others, and then back at her. She was playing with a lock of her hair and looking absent-mindedly out of the window. He nodded.
“We have to,” he said. “The longer we stay, waiting around, the riskier it’ll be.”
“But what about the other Horcruxes?” Ginny asked. “You don’t know where they are.”
Harry saw Ron and Hermione glance at each other in the corner of his eye. He rubbed the back of his neck, hating the quiet, hating the dark, hating the choices to be made. But making them nonetheless.
“We need to stay on the move,” he said softly. “We’ll have to find them as we go. Ginny, I know that you “”
Words failed him, especially with Ron in the room who was suddenly looking slightly more alert. Ginny turned, and gave Harry a wry smile.
“Yes, I know. Go on.” There was no bitterness in her expression at all, only patience and a little worry. “Go save the world.”
*
They stayed in old Muggle hotels for a while, on Harry’s money, writing fake names on the register and paying in cash. The nights were long and the days were longer still, spent wandering aimlessly on country roads and sitting in the dark corners of quiet pubs. They kept away from big cities; too much risk of being recognised. Harry’s scar seemed to ache constantly, and sometimes he would have to stop as they walked or sit up suddenly in bed, part of his mind somewhere else, the images bloody and painful. After a while, they stopped speaking to each other.
Not everything was dark; Harry got used to walking a little faster than Ron and Hermione so that they could lag a little behind him and hold hands. He did not like to walk behind them when they did so, though, thoughts of Ginny back at Hogwarts flooding his mind.
Harry had worn his necklace since the day he had received it. It hung, cool and unnoticeable, the chain just long enough to not be clearly visible but not so long that it was not in easy reach. He ran it between his fingers, often without even realising it. The world seemed to have slowed to a standstill.
“I’ve got an idea.”
Harry looked up at Ron’s voice. They were sitting on a fence that ran alongside the country road they had been walking, eating slightly dry sandwiches.
“Which is?” Harry asked, surprised. Ron shifted position slightly, crumbs from the sandwich-wrapping falling to the ground.
“We should start practicing “ duelling,” he said. “All three of us.”
Hermione swallowed the piece of sandwich she was eating, her expression thoughtful.
“Ron’s got a point, Harry,” she said. “We’ve not got any new leads yet; until we do, we should keep in practice. And maybe actually having something to do will help us think.”
*
They started the next time they found somewhere quiet “ on this occasion a clearing about fifteen minutes walk from the road. They decided that one person should keep watch while the other two duelled; Hermione volunteered to watch first. Harry knew that she was edgy and worried about being caught, but he did not see how they could be, and told her so. She just gave him an absent-minded nod in return, her eyes scanning the clearing as she cast monitoring charms.
Ron and Harry practiced against each other first, then Hermione and Ron, then Harry and Hermione. It became a regular pattern every day “ travelling in the early morning, getting something to eat at midday, and then spending the afternoons duelling before returning to civilisation for a bed that night. Harry began to notice certain things about each of their duelling styles: Ron was very much the tactician, working out the pattern of the duel with attack and counter-spell as though he was playing chess, which was thrown off by responding irrationally; Hermione relied on her more complex knowledge of magic to fight but struggled to deal with the speed of the fight; Harry himself fought mostly by instinct, trusting his nerves and relying on his speed to pull him through when nothing else did. He discussed this with the two of them one night and they were still talking in the early morning about how to improve. Weeks passed.
One sunnier afternoon, Harry had just managed to beat Ron when he finally vocalised thought that had been bothering him.
“What if one of the Horcruxes is at Hogwarts?” he said. Ron, who was bent over breathing heavily, looked up at him.
“Wouldn’t Dumbledore’ve found it, though?” he asked. Harry frowned, thinking, as Hermione made her way over to better hear their conversation.
“He probably would’ve “ but he didn’t really have time, did he?” he responded quietly. “He might have even assumed that Voldemort could never have hidden one there.”
“So why do you think that he did?” Hermione asked curiously. Ron sat down on the ground, still getting his breath back. Harry and Hermione joined him on the grass.
Harry tried to find a way of explaining what he felt to be true, right.
“It’s like… Voldemort hides them in places that are protected or important or useful,” he said. “Like the two in Little Hangleton, and the locket in the cave. Hogwarts is well-protected, there are hundreds of places in there that he could have hidden it “ and if he’s planning to take over, it’s somewhere no one would suspect.”
The other two thought about this for a minute. Harry tried not to let it show on his face that he hadn’t told them quite everything, but he could not help but wonder if this was part of why Dumbledore had left this task to him “ a boy who had so much in common with Tom Riddle, who would be able to see how he thought…
“But where in Hogwarts?” Hermione asked. “You’re right, Harry “ there are hundreds of places that he could have hidden it.”
“The Hufflepuff common room.”
Harry and Hermione turned to look at Ron in surprise and confusion. He gave half a smile.
“Well, if Harry’s right and there’s one in Hogwarts, we know it has to be the cup, right? The snake’s with him and the locket’s wherever Regulus Black hid it.”
The other two nodded.
“You think he hid it in the Hufflepuff common room, though? Wouldn’t he be more likely to hide it in the Slytherin one?” Hermione asked, but Harry had already caught up with Ron’s train of thought.
“If a Slytherin found something really valuable in their common room “ well, I don’t know about all of them, but someone like Malfoy or Crabbe or Goyle would probably keep it for their own. Sell it, or show it off. That’s risky,” he said. “But if one of the Hufflepuffs found an heirloom of their own house hidden in their common room, they’d probably look after it even more “ it’d be even more well-protected.”
Ron nodded. Hermione did not look convinced.
“If we’re going to look in Hogwarts, I think we should check both,” she said firmly. “Which means not only are we going to have to be able to return to Hogwarts without notice, but we’ll need to get in to two common rooms that we don’t have the password for.”
“Hufflepuff shouldn’t be too hard,” Harry said. “I’m sure Ernie and the others will let us in.”
“What about Slytherin, though?” Ron asked. “I don’t think we’ve got much of a chance of pulling off the same trick twice.”
The others fell into silence, thinking. Harry’s mind flicked to their second year, feeling conspicuous as Goyle standing in the Slytherin common room… and then, oddly, to Malfoy’s white, terrified face at the top of the astronomy tower… Harry had felt almost sympathetic to him after that, if he hadn’t attacked Ginny…
And then it clicked.
“I know how we’ll get in,” Harry said quietly, already putting ideas together in his mind.
“How?” Hermione asked.
Harry gave the other two a grim smile.
“Draco Malfoy,” he said.
*
Thanks for reading so far; reviews are like cookies but for my brain.
Hazel