Harry Potter Hogwarts Caretaker

Chapter 8: Ginny

Harry heard the door open again. Hurried footsteps.

"Harry!" a woman's voice. "Are you alright Harry?"

For one tiny moment he dared to hope that Cho had come back, but that wasn't her voice. It sounded much softer and kinder. She knelt down beside him one hand gently touching his shoulder.

Harry looked up. A pretty young face surrounded by long slightly curled red hair looked down at him.

"Ginny." he said in surprise. "What are you doing here?"

"I was just coming down the stairs when I saw Cho come in and slam the door behind her. She looked so angry I decided to take a look outside and see what had happened. ... Oh no! You're bleeding! Here let me help you up." Ginny held out her hand to him.

Harry took it and climbed to his feet. His right knee hurt. He must have skinned it when he'd landed on the gravel. Both his hands were bloody as he'd tried to stop his fall with his palms and there were also some ugly scratches on his arms. His clothes were dirty and torn.

"Oh great. That was my better pair of trousers." he moaned.

Ginny smiled at him.

"If that's your worst worry at least you can't be hurt all that badly. What happened to you?"

"Cho." Harry said pretending to be busy examining his bleeding knee through a hole in his trousers. He didn't want to look Ginny in the eyes. Why was she so kind to him? He didn't deserve it. Cho had made that very clear.

"Cho? What did she do to you? Tell me!"

"It was my fault. I shouldn't have bothered her. She made it quite clear she didn't want to talk to me, but I just couldn't leave her alone. She ran off. I tried to hold her back. She shoved me and I fell down the stairs."

"Oh that bitch. Poor Harry. Come on in, I've got some good salve in my room. That will make it all better." Ginny said as if talking to a hurt child.

Somewhere deep inside Harry had to smile. She'd probably learned that tone from her mother. Or did she often get injured children in class? But Fred had said she was teaching charms. That wasn't dangerous. Maybe Ginny made a habit of picking up Cho's casualties?

"It's okay. I'm not really hurt at all. I'll be alright." he assured her.

"Nonsense. I can see that you're bleeding." Ginny insisted grabbing his arm and pulling him towards the school.

"It's not that bad. I can take care of a few scratches myself." he protested.

"And it will be a lot easier if I help you. It wont take five minutes and you'll feel a lot better afterwards. You'll see. And I can also fix your clothes for you. I'm good at sewing."

Ginny didn't let go and Harry had to accept being dragged off into her office. It looked quite different from how Harry remembered it from Flitwick's time. It reminded him of Fred's office, but there were several small decorative items that showed that this was a woman's realm. Everything looked neat and comfortable.

Ginny made Harry sit down in a very comfortable armchair just like Fred's and disappeared into her room for a moment. She returned with the salve, a towel and a bowel filled with warm water. Harry had to take off his shirt and Ginny started washing his scratched arms and torn up hands.

"I thought Fred said you were the charms teacher not the school nurse." he commented when Ginny doted over a particularly dirty scratch.

"Yes, I'm the charms teacher, but I know enough about medicine to tell you that a dirty wound runs the risk of infection. Now hold still so I can clean it!" Ginny retorted.

"A dirty wound? That's just a little scratch not a major wound. It'll heal on it's own. Really. Just leave it alone."

"Any wound can become infected, if it isn't cleaned out properly. It doesn't make a difference how big or deep it is. There, that's cleaned. Now show me your other arm!"

Harry sighed and held out his other arm for her inspection.

"Oh no! There's another deep one!" exclaimed Ginny already wetting her towel once again. "Oh, that Cho. When I get a hold of her, I'll ... I'll ... I'll ..."

"It's not Cho's fault." declared Harry. "She has every right to hate me after what I've done. I shouldn't have bothered her. Serves me right."

"Oh no, it doesn't. She should at least be so polite to listen to what you have to say. She can't just go about shoving people down stairs, because she's in a bad mood today."

"She didn't shove me because she was in a bad mood. I was bothering her. She told me she wanted nothing to do with a death eater, ex or not. I should have heeded her warning and left her alone."

"She has no right to call you a death eater. There aren't any death eaters anymore. Voldemort is dead and all the surviving death eaters are in Azkaban for the rest of their lives. They wouldn't have let you out if you were still one of them."

But Harry saw how Ginny flinched when she noticed that she was washing the dark mark on his arm. The mark that would be there for the rest of his life. The mark of a death eater. The mark of evil.

Harry kept staring down at the tattoo until Ginny stood up and ordered him to take off his trousers.

"What?!" he exclaimed in shock.

"Take off your trousers!" Ginny repeated. "You can't expect me to clean that knee of yours through the hole. And how am I supposed to sew them with you inside?"

"I can really take care of all that on my own." he protested blushing.

"Oh sure, just like you told me not to clean that scratch on your arm? No way. I'm treating those wounds for you. I can't imagine how you managed to survive in the muggle world all on your own for so long."

"They aren't wounds." Harry insisted. "They're just scratches."

"Very well, scratches. I'm treating those scratches. Now take off your trousers!"

Blushing even more Harry obeyed. He surrendered his trousers to Ginny and sat back down arms crossed in his lap to hide his boxers from her view as best he could.

Ginny however didn't appear the slightest bit interested in his underwear which was a relief. She immediately set to work on the scratches on his legs.

"Oh dear! Look at your poor knee. It's all bloody. Really, how could she. I'll teach Cho to push innocent people off stairs."

"I'm not innocent." Harry commented. "I was a death eater. See that mark on my arm? It says death eater. I'm a death eater."

"You're not." said Ginny not looking up from her work.

"Yes, I am. This tattoo says so." Harry nearly shouted.

Ginny was done with cleaning his legs and stood up to take the salve. She grabbed it, unscrewed the lid, dipped her finger in.

"That tattoo says nothing." she began applying the salve to his scratches.

"Yes, it does. It marks me as a death eater and it will do so for the rest of my life."

"So everybody who has that tattoo is a death eater?" Ginny asked still busy with the scratches and the salve, still not looking at him.

Harry wondered what she was thinking. Where was she going to take her argument?

"Yes, of course. That's what it means. That's what it's here for. It's a fact. Every child knows that." How could she argue against that?

"Hm... So what about Severus? Is he a death eater?"

"Snape?" Harry asked confused.

"Yes, Severus. Severus Snape. Is he a death eater?" she repeated shifting her attention to his other arm.

"Of course not! I thought he was instrumental in You-Know-Who's defeat? How could he be a death eater if he helped destroy them?"

"Actually he even had a hand in the spell that killed Voldemort. Albus could never have done it all on his own."

"See. Then how could he be a death eater?" asked Harry still confused.

"Because he too has the dark mark." she said pointing at the tattoo on his arm. "You said all who have it are death eaters. If that's true Severus is a death eater."

"All except for Snape." decided Harry. "Snape's special."

"So you're special too. You're not a death eater unless you want to be one, Harry. Now lets just wash your clothes and I'll make us some tea while we wait for them to dry."

"Wash them? How long do you expect me to sit around here in my underwear?"

"Until I've sewn your clothes." Ginny smiled.

"Well, can't you sew them without washing them first?"

"Of course not! I don't want to sew all the dirt in. Have a little patience. My drying charms work pretty fast."

Harry sighed. Obviously this was going to be the day he had tea with Weasleys. He hoped Charlie wouldn't come over to invite him for a cup as well.

Ginny's tea was very good though and she never did seem to notice that Harry was almost naked. She just kept on chatting naturally and Harry began to relax. Both her drying charms and her sewing were indeed very good and Harry was relieved to see that he would be able to wear his trousers a little while longer. That was necessary as he owned only two pairs and didn't have any money to buy new ones.

'I guess that must be how Ginny learned to sew that well. The Weasleys never did have any money left to buy extra clothes either if the old ones could still be mended.' He remembered how often Ron had complained about that. Ron. It had been a long time since he'd last seen his once best friend.

What would Ron think of him now? An ex death eater without a proper education who'd spent five years in Azkaban and didn't even have the money to buy a single pair of trousers.

But so far all the Weasleys had been very nice to him. Well, Percy had become a death eater and gone to Azkaban, too. Maybe that was why they were willing to give him a second chance. Because they wished that they could give one to Precy. And the Weasleys wouldn't mind that he was poor either. They were used to being poor themselves. Draco Malfoy had always made fun of them because of it.

Harry shuddered slightly at the thought of Malfoy. He'd better stay away from him. War hero or not, Harry had no doubt that Draco wasn't above teasing and sneering at an old enemy and if that enemy also happened to bear the dark mark ... No Harry didn't want to find out how Draco did react to his presence in the school. He'd been bad enough to Ron.

That reminded him of the worries he'd had this morning after talking to Fred. He decided to ask Ginny about Ron. If there were bad news it was better than to force Fred to tell him after he'd already told him about Bill, George and Percy.

"Oh Ginny, I've been wondering what became of Ron. Fred told me about the rest of your family, but somehow Ron never came up in the conversation. Where is he these days?" he looked up into her eyes hoping, praying that he wouldn't see tears forming there.

To his relieve Ginny smiled.

"Oh Ron's doing research for his studies somewhere in Egypt at the moment. We don't talk about him much because Mum and Dad are very angry with him for not taking a real job, as they say. That's probably why Fred didn't mention him."

"Studies? What kind of studies?" Harry asked intrigued.

"Oh about cultures. He's planning to write a book comparing the different lifestyles of wizards in different countries. He says he'll earn lots of money once the book is written, but at the moment he's just travelling all over the world spending the family's savings on bus tickets and hotels and not earning a single Knut. You can imagine why we aren't too happy with that."

"Well, I guess so." Harry replied, but thought that the Weasley's financial situation must have improved a lot to allow Ron such luxuries. It was good to know.

"Well, thanks for patching me and my clothes back up and for the tea as well.

"Any time, Harry, any time. That's what friends are for."

Harry walked back to his office with the hint of a smile on his face. At least somebody still wanted to be his friend despite all that he'd done.

In the next chapter: we meet one of Harry's oldest friends (now who could that be), someone named Blinky is mentioned, Twichy visits again and Peeves causes some trouble.