The Red Skies Above

The Red Skies Above

by: Saja_Natalia

"I have an announcement," Dumbledore stood and faced the many students who were receiving their snacks and letters from the owls that swooped down and dropped packages on heads, plates, and into dishes of blood sausages and other sumptuous foods eaten at the morning meal. "The monument to commemorate the horrors that took place here during the First Battle has been added to the ground floor, right outside the Great Hall doors in the entrance hall. This was the place that the Death Eaters first broke through our barriers. The death count stands thus..."

The students all looked up from the meal that they had been devouring, some with food hanging out of their mouths that portrayed their obvious shock in the fact that Dumbledore would announce such a thing. The Slytherins though, were looking up as if delighted by the fact that gore had been added to the morning's discussion, and their eyes shone with sadistic delight.

"In Slytherin house, six students were pronounced dead. Ravenclaw had thirty-two, Hufflepuff had twenty-one, and in Gryffindor, we had the largest loss of students and family with forty-three. What matters not is the houses, but instead the very fact that chills the teachers and me, and probably many of you that in the First Battle we lost ninety-six students, comrades, family members, teachers."

Gasps filled the hall, and here and there, people began to weep for their deceased friends and family. Nothing seemed to matter anymore to me for I knew that on that sad monument to the almost one hundred deaths in Hogwarts, that one name would always stand out above the rest in my eyes.

Harry Potter

Everyone in the hall was showing some manner of respect for their peers that had fought so bravely and perished for our safety, everyone that is, except for one blonde boy and his two "friends."

Mr. Draco Malfoy was in fact laughing and wiping tears of mirth from the cold gray blocks of stone that he called eyes. The idiotic humans at his side were pounding the table in delight, sending food flying everywhere, and Draco was looking at me. All of this, though, might not have been entirely correct, for it was seen from behind a mass of honey-brown curls.

Hermione Granger's head rested on my shoulder in despair at the memory of one of her best friend's death. My sister Ginny was reaching over some biscuits, and patting Hermione on the head, while trying not to sob herself. As Dumbledore asked for a time of silence, everything seemed to move in slow motion as we bowed our heads and prayed, the silence broken only by the cries of some poor soul.

As I was deep in prayer for Harry and the rest, something peculiar happened. A large brown owl, an eagle-owl by the looks, descended onto my plate and dropped a small piece of parchment. With a ruffling of feathers, the owl took flight. I resisted the strong urge to open the note until the time of silence was over, at which time I swept it into my pocket.

We all filed into the entrance hall, relieved to be released from the clutches of sorrow that was so strong in the Great Hall. Hermione decided that she needed to go to the lavatory and Ginny followed her, ready to comfort.

Fred and George asked me if I was alright. "I'm okay, guys, honest. I just need some time alone," I managed to croak the lie from my throat. They shrugged and left me to be swallowed up by my anguish, grief, and doubt.

Sitting down at the base of a beaten up statue of Morgan le Fay, I reached into my pocket and felt my fingers grasp the paper. Pulling it out, I unfurled it, only to behold neat, flowing handwriting and the worst words I had ever seen:

Harry died because of you.

* * *

I sat up in my bed, cold sweat dripping down my face at the dream I had just witnessed for what must have been the three-hundredth time. I didn't get it. I was a full grown man, five-o'-clock shadow to prove it, and yet I was still affected by this routine dream. The moonlight, my only sliver of hope in the world of the night, streamed in and illuminated my willow wand sitting on the bedside table, fourteen inches, willow, containing a strand of precious unicorn hair. I could almost hear my thirteen year-old self telling Harry and Hermione when I had first gotten it.

The silent flash of heat lightning reminded me of the table, and the door that held the one lifeline that I had back eight years ago to when I was almost actually happy. I never wanted to look at it again. I hated it. I hated the woody texture, the yellowish coloration, the tear stains, the rips and holes. But yet, I loved it. I loved the smooth feeling of the paper in my hand. Loved the flowing and mysterious handwriting that hadn't faded, the nice creased lines given to it when I had first received the parchment, and the sere edges.

I loathed it, yet I needed it.

I turned to my bed stand, and grabbed my wand with my left hand, feeling the power of holding one of the few correct things in my life. Lifting it gingerly, I whispered the word, "Aperi!"

The bottom of the drawer lifted and revealed a pouch of crinkled black leather.

"Alohomora!"

Opening the pouch revealed a crumpled bit of parchment, stained with eight years of tears. It seemed to radiate with the actual seventeen-year-old me as I held it loosely in my palm, being careful not to tear it after all these years, even though I knew that that was quite impossible with all the protection spells I had cast on it.

Pointing my wand at the small square in my hand, I muttered, "Resea divulgaque rem tuum occultum." The paper, which had still been folded, opened magically to reveal a terrible message, many years old.

Harry died because of you.

The "H" and the first "d" had a burn mark, along with the left hand upper corner and the middle of the paper. When I had been about nineteen, I had been fed up with the dream and decided to destroy the parchment, hoping it would take away the dream. I had said a burning spell, and held my wand under the note, making the corner and center catch fire, but something about that scared me. When the paper ignited, my chest and right shoulder burned, and I quickly doused the fire, knowing that I was bonded to the letter, and not intentionally.

I stared at the paper until the sun came up, and was muttering the sentence for the thousandth time when there was a knock on my door, breaking my trance and allowing me to face the world again.

"Just a minute!" I yelled, my voice sounding odd in the silence that had been there just a moment ago.

I pulled on some blue jeans and stuffed the note into my pocket, wrenching the door open as soon as I was sure the parchment was well hidden in the confines of my pocket. Looking up at me was my fiancee Hermione Granger. She was dressed in a pleasant, pink hooded sweat shirt and black pants with the embroidery of roses twining up the left leg. Her fingernails were painted pink with a black dot in the center, and her ivory smile was the most splendid thing I had seen for quite a while.

"Hello, dear I-" her expression changed instantly to worry as she saw the state I was in, my torso and hair drenched with sweat, and my heavy breathing. "Oh, Ron! Are you alright?"

"Yes, Hermione. I'm fine, my room was just a bit-erm-hot today. I really think that I should get rid of those Chudley Cannon posters. They soak up all of the sunlight," I replied, placing a fake smile on my face.

"Good, I was worried." She gave me a kiss on the cheek. "Your mum wants to talk to us in a while, so try to get down soon," with that, Hermione turned and descended the stairs, humming a song I didn't recognize to herself on the way.

I headed down the hall, took a shower to rid myself of the beads of sweat, pulled on some fresh clothes, and pulled my long hair into a ponytail that resembled my brother, Bill's.

I decided to head downstairs. When I reached the second floor, Charley and his wife Aryl, who were staying with us while their house was being built, came out of the twins' room and almost bowled me over.

"Sorry about that, Ron. I wasn't watching where I was going. I was so-" I didn't let Charlie finish.

"Oh, that's quite alright, Charles. Just next time, watch where you're going, mate. Alright?" I asked playfully. Charlie gave me a gentle punch on the arm and went off with Aryl, probably to go discuss Morning Glories or something. Aryl's father had owned the largest enchanted flower growing business in the wizarding world and Charlie had "conveniently" become very interested in flowers shortly before their wedding.

As I stepped into the family room, I glanced at the grandfather clock. Instead of having two hands, one short, one long, our clock had, in fact, eleven hands, all the same length with the pictures (moving pictures, of course) of the eleven Weasleys: Arthur, Molly, Bill, Charlie, Aryl, Percy, Fred, George, myself, Hermione, and Ginny.

Percy's hand permanently pointed at the word, "Home," indicating that he was at his home. In Percy's case, "Home," meant heaven. He had been destroyed by the Death Eater Avery, who was imprisoned in Azkaban, only to escape a month later.

According to the clock, Aryl and Charlie were in the garden, Dad was outside, and mostly everyone else was in the kitchen, although the twins' hands normally pointed to "Up to no good," and Ginny was currently in her usual spot, "In my own little world."

Deciding that I was more hungry than curious about Ginny's location, I headed into the kitchen only to see the most bizarre sight I had seen in the past eight years.

Flooding the floor were what seemed to be rodents, but upon closer inspection, turned out to be letters. Mum was standing on the table in the middle of the room, beating down on them with a broom, a Comet 723 to be precise, and they seemed to squeak every time she hit one. Hermione and the twins were in the opposite corner from me, hexing every one of the letters that approached them. Thousands of owls, visible through the kitchen window littered the yard, perched on the fence, trees, and in some cases, each other.

"What the heck's going on in here?" I yelled above the steadily growing din of Mum's shrieks, the letters' squeaking, and the cries of spells.

At that moment, Dad came bursting in through the wooden door that led outside, owls perched on his shoulders and head. "I believe this...this...bloody monstrosity belongs to you," he said, thrusting a ball of puff he had plucked from his head at me.

"Pig!" I said, reaching out and cupping the small owl in my hands, and drawing it closer to me, shielding him from my father's building rage.

"That thing has apparently invited all the bloody owls in the all of England to our yard!" Arthur bellowed, spitting slightly on my left cheek. It was a bit difficult for him to reprimand us now, since almost all of us were his height or taller, but my father seemed to get his point across quite well.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Fred wink at George. They waded their way towards us through the sea of letters. "Father," George addressed Arthur in a very business-like manner. I was sure the twins' hands on the grandfather clock were pointing straight at, "Up to no good."

"Do not ever accuse my dear, dear baby brother for the faults of Fred and me! He's supposed to use us as his role models." At this, dad snorted. "And if you accuse him of our doings, he won't even want to be related to us, let alone look up to us."

"Get to the point," Dad grunted.

"You know how it is our nature to...er...liven life up here at the Burrow. You may or may not know that I come up with the plans, Fred checks for flaws, and then we both execute them. So, you cannot blame us for what, for once, we did not do on purpose. Although, I know if I had thought of it I'm sure we would have-" Fred cut George off to stop Arthur from turning a deeper shade of red.

"What George was trying to say was that we didn't mean to do this. In fact, we were actually trying to do something right for a change. We were sending money to Zonko's for a shipment to Weasley's Wizarding Wheezes, when the Death-er-management must have gotten mad because I counted the knuts wrong, or something. It must have happened as I was checking for flaws in our 'plan' I guess you could say. I know it sounds far-fetched, but it really is probable with the level of tolerance nowadays. We were just trying hold them off until Ron, the world's foremost expert on Latin arrived from his press conference on the matters of what to wear today to conjure something up to clear this rubbish," Fred stated.

"No problem," I replied to his plea. "Reddete unde venititis!"

The letters all stopped their squeaking and turned to look at me, or at least I thought they looked at me; they didn't really have eyes. The owls all flew over and peered in through the window. After a few minutes, the letters piled on top of each other and disappeared in a black puff of smoke. The owls followed suit about two minutes after.

"How'd you know how to do that?" Hermione asked me, her mouth hanging open in awe. "I've tried all of the spells I've learned or read about transportation, teleportation, and even destruction of inanimate objects. Nothing worked at all!"

I shrugged, but I couldn't suppress a smirk. "I just told them to go back where they came from, and they obeyed me. I don't know why it worked, but it did."

Mum helped herself down from the table, leaning on the broom for support, and said in a slowly recovering voice, "So, anyone want breakfast?"

* * *

Five minutes later, we were all sitting at a huge banquet of waffles, bangers, blood sausages, pumpkin juice, porridge, fried tomatoes, tea, coffee, and many other delicious foods.

As we all piled food onto our plates covetously, and I added milk and sugar to the tea I had just poured into my cup while Pig, who was perched on my shoulder, stole a bit of banger, Mum addressed the matter we knew would come up.

"So, my wonderful children that would never keep any secrets from me, why did we just have an invasion of owls and letters?"

I glanced over at Fred and George who carried on like this happened every day. "They liked it here," Fred stated simply. "They wished to live among us in harmony."

George joined in. "Yeah, but then they saw an old bat with a broom hitting their friends, so they attacked and called in their owl steeds for reinforcement!"

Mum groaned and rolled her eyes while Hermione and I tried desperately not to burst out laughing. "Okay. Ron, what happened, and I want the truth this time," said Mum, exasperated.

"Well, apparently, it was all Zonko's fault. Fred and George must have been a bit short when they sent the payments for-" I looked over Mum's shoulder at the twins who were pantomiming death, slashing their necks, tongues lolling about. George leaned a bit too far to the left and fell off of his chair, plunging the twins into fits of silent laughter. I had to bite my lip to stop myself from cracking up. "For some really interesting new...erm...new...erm...what was it they were buying again, Hermione?"

Hermione didn't even look up from the book she had summoned, Dragons, Phoenixes, and Cacti. "They were purchasing some new plants for the garden that keep gnomes out of it," she said without missing a beat.

"Oh!" exclaimed Mum, surprised that the twins were actually doing something useful for once. "That's quite nice of you, dears, but you know what I say: 'Never count your chickens before they milk!' ...er...no, that's not it. Maybe it was 'Don't cry over spilled chicken!'...no, that doesn't sound right either...oh, it'll come to me...oh...".

"Mum, why don't you go get dressed?" Fred asked, and I noticed for the first time that Mum was still in a nightgown.

"Oh, yes, dears. Now let's see...'Don't throw the baby out with the-' ...oh, no...that's not it either!" Mum muttered as she teetered off.

As soon as she was out of earshot, we exploded into laughter. "That was bloody brilliant, Hermione!" I exclaimed.

"Yeah, but now we're going to have to create gnome-repellant plants!" said George through tears of joy. "Although we could just hang Ron from a pole. It'd scare them all into hiding!"

"It was murder trying to keep my face straight with you two making faces at me over Mum's shoulder!" I yelled as I set Pig to go peck George's head for the gnome remark. I turned to Fred as George rolled around on the ground, both from laughing, and from trying to free himself of Pig. "'World's foremost expert in Latin?' Fred, I only know a few phrases!"

"Yes, but in the land of blind men, the one eyed one is king."

We all stopped laughing and stared at him. even Pig stopped pecking George. The moment didn't last long, though, as we were all roaring with laughter thirty seconds later.

"A what in a who? Fred, what does that mean?"

"I don't know," Fred admitted. "I just heard it on an old rerun on Dad's muggle tevelision..."

At that moment, Ginny appeared in the doorway, dressed in a white mini skirt and a navy blue poncho over a white t-shirt. She wore blue sunglasses and blue two-inch-heel shoes. Her hair was swept up in a bun that had two chopsticks, tipped with blue glitter, stuck through it. "It's television and-" she stopped, mid sentence as she watched George roll around on the floor. "I don't even want to know."

Ginny sat down beside my and levitated the pitcher of pumpkin juice over to her and made it pour into her newly summoned mug. She had gotten into the habit of doing everything with magic ever since she had graduated Hogwarts seven years ago. Never once did she pick something up without the use of her wand.

Just then, Pig hopped off of my shoulder and flew over to the window above the kitchen sink. He started rapping on it, the glass reflecting his fluffy face each time he banged it.

"Your owl has entirely lost it," Ginny stated as I got up to retrieve him.

As I reached out to grab him, he turned around and began pecking my hand, splattering little bits of blood on the counter. Even though his beak was small, it was still rather painful. "Hey, cut it out, Pig!"

He grabbed my left ring finger, and pulled my hand towards the window latch. something caught my eye, something blue. I lifted the latch, and Pig released my finger. Grabbing the blue item, I closed the window, shutting out the chilly morning air.

Examining it closer, I realized that the parchment wasn't blue, more of a green, actually, maybe aqua. It was tied with a golden string that glowed with some inner light. On the front of the rolled up parchment were the words Ronald Matthew Weasley. Unrolling it, I was almost blinded by the light of the golden ink, matched to the string, that it was written in. The handwriting of the note was fairly neat with a little bit of a resemblance to a really old Latin manuscript I had once read.

Ronald Matthew Weasley,

Hello. I haven't seen you in a very long time, my lad, and I think that you'll find that it will be very worth your while to respond to this letter as soon as possible.

The world outside of the Burrow is a terrible place now. ever since the Boy Who Lived was destroyed in the First battle at Hogwarts. Voldemort has ruled, plunging us all into misery. I know that the Burrow is full of fun, laughter, enjoyment, but the outside world is not. The wonderfulness of the joy that engulfs the Burrow is like a drug that hides the world from all who enter. If you do not notice, Fred and George are still as childish as ever. This is because they hardly ever leave the house. Weasley's Wizarding Wheezes is controlled from their room by use of owls.

Do not plunge into the false reality that is the Burrow. Step out, smell the mold, sewers, and all that is terribly, and truly rotten. Walk around, see the evil before you. Children don't go out after dark anymore, and the rosy color of their cheeks has vanished. and those who wish it not to be, must hide in shadow or be tortured to death.

Meet me at the intersection to Diagon Alley at 3:00 today. It will be well worth your while.

"Nitwit, Blubber, Oddment, Tweak!"

Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore

P.S. By the way, Ron, I know that you will show this to Miss Hermione Granger, so I am taking this opportunity to say, "Hello, Miss Granger!"

P.P.S. You may bring her along, too.

I just stared at the parchment for a moment, looked at my watch, and turned to Hermione. "We need to talk."

We exited the kitchen and entered my room. I muttered, "Colloportus," and the door was sealed. Handing the note to Hermione, she began to ask about what was going on, but she became silent as she began to read it. As her eyes moved down the page, her eyebrows grew higher and higher until they were in danger of disappearing into the mess of amber that was her fringe.

"Dumbledore wants to meet you and me in Diagon Alley at three? I thought he was dead!" Hermione exclaimed, dropping the parchment onto my floor in shock. The orange of my Chudley Cannon posters shone in her nearly white face. "Wasn't he murdered soon after the First Battle by Wormtail?" The word hung in the air, stale after all of the years since we had used it last. "I even read it in the Daily Prophet!"

"Well, Hermione, you of all people should know that the Prophet isn't even close to reliable. Do you remember all of the stories about...well, it's not that trustworthy," it had been painful to bring up Harry again. I walked over to the window and slammed my fists on the sill. " I thought he was dead, too. Cor, I wish that I'd get answers to something! Ever since the First Battle, I can't understand anything!" In the lawn, Fred and George were bagging gnomes to make a gnome-repellent plant, and Ginny was working with the parrot plants to teach them how to sing the Weird Sister's new song, I Turned my Mum into a Toad. How could the world be so horrible if this was what it was like around the Burrow. Was the "drug" of the Burrow setting in on me?

"Look, Hermione, we have two hours to get down to Diagon Alley. We better start driving now." Voldemort had outlawed the use of Floo powder, Portkeys, Apparation, brooms, changing into animagus forms for speed or any other reason, and magic carpets for anyone other than his minions. The Death Eaters could get anywhere faster than anyone else, just like Voldemort had planned, and if you disobeyed this order, you were executed or tortured and then sent to Azkaban.

Azkaban was once a place for only the worst criminals: Death Eaters, users of the Unforgivable curses, mass murderers, they all took up Azkaban, but since the last time I had read the Prophet, about seven years ago, it was overflowing with criminals of Apparating and such. Voldemort had decided to make the new Azkaban one of the most secure places in the wizarding world. Everyone had always said that Hogwarts was the safest place in the world.

"We'll have to drive to Knockturn Alley, and then sneak into Diagon Alley. From there on, it's up to Albus," it was awkward saying Albus, but I figured I was an adult and not in Hogwarts anymore, so things had to change.

Hermione came over to me and placed a hand on my shoulder, trying to calm me down. "It'll be okay, Ron. I know it. We just need to go to Diagon Alley and meet Dumbledore, if this note isn't a hoax.

"Maybe, just maybe, it'll help the horrid world beyond these walls. We need to stop living in a false reality, anyway," something in her voice made me turn around. Running down her cheek was a tear that glistened in the morning light. I reached down and brushed it away with my thumb, cupping her head in my hand.

"It'll be okay, Hermione," I comforted her, drawing her close so she could sob into me. I hated it when she cried for no reason, but I allowed her to cry all her sorrows away.