—— ϟ ——
Noel woke up with a start, covering her eyes from the blazing sun that was peeking through the curtains. She looked over to see Theo sleeping on a small cot in her bedroom.
He had decided it was best not to leave her alone for the time being, fortunately for her it had worked as her nightmares hadn't woken her up.
Rubbing her eyes harshly, she got up quietly and made her way down. Just as she was making some tea a barn owl tapped on the kitchen window, starting her, she hadn't gotten any mail in ages.
Opening the letter she read it was from Kingsley letting her know that there would be an emergency meeting at one of their safe houses. The letter caught fire as soon as she finished reading it.
Her heart leaped in anticipation, she would finally be able to do something, Noel quickly ate breakfast and woke Theo telling him the news. The two swiftly got ready and Disapperated into the fight darkness.
Landing a bit clumsily, the two made their way up the cobblestone alley, their heads bent low, not wanting to be seen by anyone.
Entering the house the two answered the security questions and were greeted by Fred, George, Lee, Kingsley, and Remus.
Noel faded a bit at the sight of her dad and couldn't help herself but run over to him, thoroughly relieved to see him.
"Hi," she said breathlessly, clutching his arms tightly.
"Hi, Jellybean." He said, holding her just as tightly, his tense body relaxing. He looked over her shoulder and gestured for Theo to come over.
"How are you Teddy?" He asked kindly, Noel stepped back so he could give the other a hug.
"I've been well, thank you."
"Let's get down to business," Kingsley said curtly, cutting their small reunion short.
"Why are we here Kingsley, your letter sounded urgent," Noel asked, taking a seat alongside everyone else at the dining table.
"Well I was just the messenger, Lee wanted to talk to everyone."
"I have a propitious," Lee began. "I've been talking to Fred and George and I think it would be excruciatingly useful if we have a way of communicating with the wizarding world as a whole. With owls being intercepted and floo being monitored we rarely have a safe way of communicating amongst us." He said, looking at everyone there.
"I was thinking that we should start a radio show. We will use code names, we won't stay on the same station and every time anyone wants to listen in they need to use a password."
"I think it's a great idea," Fred said encouragingly. "Kingsley, you'll talk about what's happening within the ministry. Remus you'll talk about the Order members, Nott you'll talk about what's going on at Hogwarts, and Noel," Fred paused, "you'll be talking about medical issues and care."
"I haven't worked with Andromeda in weeks." Noel pointed out. When everything had started, Noel and Andromeda were the Order's two healers. Andy because she worked at St.Mungos and Noel because of her ability so whenever anyone was injured or hurt they were sent to the two women for treatment.
"Yes, but it's not safe for people to go anywhere anymore, you'll have to talk them through treatment from home."
"Okay, yeah, I can do that." Noel nodded her head.
"Great! Lee, George, and I will be hosts and cover everything else."
"We should come up with our code names," Theo suggested.
"Lee obviously has to be River." Noel grinned, causing him to laugh.
"And Remus had to be Romulus." Theo said.
The 7 spent the next couple of names cracking jokes and coming up with silly nicknames for one another, Noel hadn't felt that relaxed or happy in months and it was a welcomed feeling.
In the end, their nicknames were; Noel, Evergreen; Theo, Bear; Lee, River; Remus, Romulus; Kingsley, Royal; Fred, Rapier and George, Rodent.
"This is a great idea, Lee," Noel said, watching as he set up the microphone for their first show.
"Thank you, Noel."
Their first broadcast was short, it was really just an introduction to their new show which they've named Potterwatch. They delivered the fatal news of Bathilda Bagshot, a famous historian that was found dead with lethal amounts of Dark Magic in her small home located in Godric's Hollow, on Christmas Day.
"Have you read Rita's book about Dumbledore?" Kingsley asked Remus.
"I haven't gotten my hands on it, no. Is it any good?"
"I don't know about good but there are some shocking things in there to say the very least."
Remus looked at him from the corner of his eye, "Is it bad?"
Kingsley gave a solemn nod, "It's not looking too good for Dumbledore, that's for sure."
Remus hummed, "Secretive man he was. Now we know why, huh?"
"There's information about him and his good old friend Gellert Grindelwald. The two had plans of overthrowing the Statue of Security, for and I quote, 'The greater good.'"
Remus scoffed and shook his head in disbelief. "Not so good for the Dumbledore fans then."
"Nope, but more unfortunate for Harry, everybody knows that he was Dumbledore's golden boy. People are going to read this and assume he knew all of this and blindly followed Albus anyway."
"Poor kid." Remus shook his head, thinking of his own two and the difficulty of War. The hard and heavy weight of it.
"That's exactly what he is, a kid." Kingsley sighed. "They're all kids."
"Yeah," Remus sighed heavily, watching Noel and Theo talking to their friends, he hadn't seen Noel's smile, her true smile that makes a dimple appear in a really long time, it served as a reminder of what he was fighting for.
"Where are we?" Harry asked, peering around at a fresh mass of trees as Hermione opened the beaded bag and began tugging out tent poles. "
The Forest of Dean," she said. "I came camping here once with my mum and dad."
Here too snow lay on the trees all around and it was bitterly cold, but they were at least protected from the wind. They spent most of the day inside the tent, huddled for warmth around the useful bright blue flames that Hermione was so adept at producing, and which could be scooped up and carried around in a jar.
After two nights of little sleep, Harry's senses seemed more alert than usual. Their escape from Godric's Hollow had been so narrow that Voldemort seemed somehow closer than before, more threatening. As darkness drew in again Harry refused Hermione's offer to keep watch and told her to go to bed.
Every tiny movement seemed magnified in the vastness of the forest. Harry knew that it must be full of living creatures, but he wished they would all remain still and silent so that he could separate their innocent scurryings and prowlings from noises that might proclaim other, sinister movements. He remembered the sound of a cloak slithering over dead leaves many years ago, and at once thought he heard it again before mentally shaking himself. Their protective enchantments had worked for weeks; why should they break now? And yet he could not throw off the feeling that something was different tonight.
The night reached such a depth of velvety blackness that he might have been suspended in limbo between Disapparition and Apparition. He had just held up a hand in front of his face to see whether he could make out his fingers when it happened. A bright silver light appeared right ahead of him, moving through the trees. Whatever the source, it was moving soundlessly. The light seemed simply to drift toward him.
He jumped to his feet, his voice frozen in his throat, and raised Hermione's wand. (His had snapped in half, a result of narrowly escaping Voldemort and his snake Nagini.} He screwed up his eyes as the light became blinding, the trees in front of it pitch-black in silhouette, and still the thing came closer...
And then the source of the light stepped out from behind an oak. It was a silver-white doe, moon-bright and dazzling, picking her way over the ground, still silent, and leaving no hoofprints in the fine powdering of snow. She stepped toward him, her beautiful head with its wide, long-lashed eyes held high.
Harry stared at the creature, filled with wonder, not at her strangeness, but at her inexplicable familiarity. He felt that he had been waiting for her to come, but that he had forgotten, until this moment, that they had arranged to meet.
She continued to step deliberately through the trees, and soon her brightness was stripped by their thick black trunks. For one trembling second he hesitated. Caution murmured it could be a trick, a lure, a trap. But instinct, overwhelming instinct, told him that this was not Dark Magic. He set off in pursuit.
Snow crunched beneath his feet, but the doe made no noise as she passed through the trees, for she was nothing but light. Deeper and deeper into the forest she led him, and Harry walked quickly, sure that when she stopped, she would allow him to approach her properly.
Though the darkness had swallowed her whole, her burnished image was still imprinted on his retinas; it obscured his vision, brightening when he lowered his eyelids, disorienting him. Now fear came: Her presence had meant safety. "Lumos!" he whispered, and the wand-tip ignited.
Was he about to be attacked? Had she enticed him into an ambush? Was he imagining that somebody stood beyond the reach of the wandlight, watching him?
Nobody ran out at him, no flash of green light burst from behind a tree. Why, then, had she led him to this spot? Something gleamed in the light of the wand, and Harry spun about, but all that was there was a small, frozen pool, its cracked black surface glittering as he raised the wand higher to examine it. He moved forward rather cautiously and looked down.
The ice reflected his distorted shadow and the beam of wandlight, but deep below the thick, misty gray carapace, something else glinted. A great silver cross...
His heart skipped into his mouth: He dropped to his knees at the pool's edge and angled the wand so as to flood the bottom of the pool with as much light as possible. A glint of deep red...It was a sword with glittering rubies in its hilt....The sword of Gryffindor was lying at the bottom of the forest pool. Barely breathing, he stared down at it. How was this possible?
He pointed the wand at the silvery shape and murmured, "Accio Sword." It did not stir. He had not expected it to. If it had been that easy, the sword would have lain on the ground for him to pick up, not in the depths of a frozen pool.
A small voice inside Harry's head answered him: Their daring, nerve, and chivalry set Gryffindors apart. Harry stopped walking and let out a long sigh, his smoky breath dispersing rapidly upon the frozen air. He knew what he had to do. If he was honest with himself, he had thought it might come to this from the moment he had spotted the sword through the ice.
With fumbling fingers, Harry started to remove his many layers of clothing. Where "chivalry" entered into this, he thought ruefully, he was not entirely sure, unless it counted as chivalrous that he was not calling for Hermione to do it in his stead.
An owl hooted somewhere as he stripped off, and he thought with a pang of Hedwig. He was shivering now, his teeth chattering horribly, and yet he continued to strip off until at last he stood there in his underwear, barefooted in the snow. Noel's locked and the Horcrux felt like cubes of ice against his skin.
"Diffindo."
The ice cracked with a sound like a bullet in the silence: The surface of the pool broke and chunks of dark ice rocked on the ruffled water. As far as Harry could judge, it was not deep, but to retrieve the sword he would have to submerge himself completely, trying not to imagine how much colder he was about to become or how violently he would soon be shivering, he jumped. Every pore of his body screamed in protest: The very air in his lungs seemed to freeze solid as he was submerged to his shoulders in the frozen water. He could hardly breathe.
His fingers closed around the hilt; he pulled it upward. Then something closed tight around his neck. He thought of water weeds, though nothing had brushed him as he dived, and raised his empty hand to free himself. It was not weed: The chain of the Horcrux had tightened and was slowly constricting his windpipe. Harry kicked out wildly, trying to push himself back to the surface, but merely propelled himself into the rocky side of the pool.
Choking and retching, soaking and colder than he had ever been in his life, he came to facedown in the snow. Somewhere close by, another person was panting and coughing and staggering around. Hermione had come again, as she had come when the snake attacked...Yet it did not sound like her, not with those deep coughs, not judging by the weight of the footsteps...
Harry had no strength to lift his head and see his savior's identity. All he could do was raise a shaking hand to his throat and feel the place where the locket had cut tightly into his flesh. It was gone: Someone had cut him free. Then a panting voice spoke from over his head. "Are — you — mental?"
Nothing but the shock of hearing that voice could have given Harry the strength to get up. Shivering violently, he staggered to his feet. There before him stood Ron, fully dressed but drenched to the skin, his hair plastered to his face, the sword of Gryffindor in one hand and the Horcrux dangling from its broken chain in the other.
"Why the hell," panted Ron, holding up the Horcrux, which swung backward and forward on its shortened chain in some parody of hypnosis, "didn't you take this thing off before you dived?" Harry could not answer.
The silver doe was nothing, nothing compared with Ron's reappearance; he could not believe it. Shuddering with cold, he caught up the pile of clothes still lying at the water's edge and began to pull them on.
"It was y-you?" Harry said at last, his teeth chattering, his voice weaker than usual due to his near-strangulation.
"Well, yeah," said Ron, looking slightly confused.
"Y-you cast that doe?"
"What? No, of course not! I thought it was you doing it!"
"My Patronus is a stag." "Oh yeah. I thought it looked different. No antlers."
"How come you're here?"
Apparently, Ron had hoped that this point would come up later, if at all. "Well, I've — you know — I've come back. If —" He cleared his throat. "You know. You still want me."
There was a pause, in which the subject of Ron's departure seemed to rise like a wall between them. Yet he was here. He had returned. He had just saved Harry's life. Ron looked down at his hands. He seemed momentarily surprised to see the things he was holding. "Oh yeah, I got it out," he said, rather unnecessarily, holding up the sword for Harry's inspection. "That's why you jumped in, right?"
"Yeah," said Harry. "But I don't understand. How did you get here? How did you find us?"
"Long story," said Ron. "I've been looking for you for hours, it's a big forest, isn't it? And I was just thinking I'd have to kip under a tree and wait for morning when I saw that deer coming and you following."
"You didn't see anyone else?"
"No," said Ron.
They both looked at the ornate silver sword, its rubied hilt glinting a little in the light from Hermione's wand.
"You reckon this is the real one?" asked Ron.
"One way to find out, isn't there?" said Harry.
The Horcrux was still swinging from Ron's hand. The locket was twitching slightly. Harry knew that the thing inside it was agitated again. It had sensed the presence of the sword and had tried to kill Harry rather than let him possess it. Now was not the time for long discussions; now was the moment to destroy the locket once and for all. Harry looked around, holding Hermione's wand high, and saw the place: a flattish rock lying in the shadow of a sycamore tree.
"Come here," he said, and he led the way, brushed snow from the rock's surface, and held out his hand for the Horcrux. When Ron offered the sword, however, Harry shook his head. "No, you should do it."
"Me?" said Ron, looking shocked.
"Why?"
"Because you got the sword out of the pool. I think it's supposed to be you."
He was not being kind or generous. As certainly as he had known that the doe was benign, he knew that Ron had to be the one to wield the sword. Dumbledore had at least taught Harry something about certain kinds of magic, of the incalculable power of certain acts.
"I'm going to open it," said Harry, "and you stab it. Straightaway, okay? Because whatever's in there will put up a fight. The bit of Riddle in the diary tried to kill me."
"Tell me when," he croaked.
"On three," said Harry, looking back down at the locket and narrowing his eyes, concentrating on the letter S, imagining a serpent, while the contents of the locket rattled like a trapped cockroach. It would have been easy to pity it, except that the cut around Harry's neck still burned.
"One . . . two . . . three . . . open."
The last word came as a hiss and a snarl and the golden doors of the locket swung wide with a little click. Behind both of the glass windows within blinked a living eye, dark and handsome as Tom Riddle's eyes had been before he turned them scarlet and slit-pupiled.
Out of the locket's two windows, out of the eyes, there bloomed, like two grotesque bubbles, the heads of Harry and Hermione, weirdly distorted.
Ron yelled in shock and backed away as the figures blossomed out of the locket, first chests, then waists, then legs, until they stood in the locket, side by side like trees with a common root, swaying over Ron and the real Harry, who had snatched his fingers away from the locket as it burned, suddenly, white-hot.
"Ron, stab it, STAB IT!" Harry yelled, but Ron did not move: His eyes were wide, and the Riddle-Harry and the Riddle-Hermione were reflected in them, their hair swirling like flames, their eyes shining red, their voices lifted in an evil duet.
"Your mother confessed," sneered Riddle-Harry, while RiddleHermione jeered, "that she would have preferred me as a son, would be glad to exchange . . ."
"Who wouldn't prefer him, what woman would take you, you are nothing, nothing, nothing to him," crooned Riddle-Hermione, and she stretched like a snake and entwined herself around RiddleHarry, wrapping him in a close embrace: Their lips met.
On the ground in front of them, Ron's face filled with anguish. He raised the sword high, his arms shaking.
"Do it, Ron!" Harry yelled. Ron looked toward him, and Harry thought he saw a trace of scarlet in his eyes. "Ron — ?"
The sword flashed, plunged: Harry threw himself out of the way, there was a clang of metal and a long, drawn-out scream. Harry whirled around, slipping in the snow, wand held ready to defend himself: but there was nothing to fight.
The monstrous versions of himself and Hermione were gone: There was only Ron, standing there with the sword held slackly in his hand, looking down at the shattered remains of the locket on the flat rock.
Slowly, Harry walked back to him, hardly knowing what to say or do. Ron was breathing heavily: His eyes were no longer red at all, but their normal blue; they were also wet.
Harry stooped, pretending he had not seen, and picked up the broken Horcrux. Ron had pierced the glass in both windows: Riddle's eyes were gone, and the stained silk lining of the locket was smoking slightly. The thing that had lived in the Horcrux had vanished; torturing Ron had been its final act. The sword clanged as Ron dropped it. He had sunk to his knees, his head in his arms.
"After you left," he said in a low voice, grateful for the fact that Ron's face was hidden, "she cried for a week. Probably longer, only she didn't want me to see. There were loads of nights when we never even spoke to each other. With you gone . . ."
He could not finish; it was only now that Ron was here again that Harry fully realized how much his absence had cost them.
"She's like my sister," he went on. "I love her like a sister and I reckon she feels the same way about me. It's always been like that. I thought you knew."
"I'm sorry," Ron said in a thick voice. "I'm sorry I left. I know I was a — a —" He looked around at the darkness, as if hoping a bad enough word would swoop down upon him and claim him.
"You've sort of made up for it tonight," said Harry. "Getting the sword. Finishing off the Horcrux. Saving my life."
"That makes me sound a lot cooler than I was," Ron mumbled. "Stuff like that always sounds cooler than it really was," said Harry. "I've been trying to tell you that for years."
Simultaneously they walked forward and hugged, Harry gripping the still-sopping back of Ron's jacket.
"And now," said Harry as they broke apart, "all we've got to do is find the tent again."
a/n: updating as quickly as I can bc I can't stand them being apart anymore. Btw the photo is def Teddy stealing sweaters from his dads closet, kk bye!