Creatures of Smoke and Shadow

Creatures of Smoke and Shadow

Chapter One: Waiting for the Time to Pass

Ronald Weasley sat on his hands, staring out of the bedroom window at the grey morning sky. It had been the same for five days now - constant rain. At the moment, it was coming down in thick sheets. Everything beyond the newly planted (and slightly lopsided) flutterby bush in the back garden was an indistinct grey blob. Ron had planted that bush himself, when his mother had forced him to do some gardening. There hadn't been a sighting of clear blue sky since that day. Ron half wondered whether his mother had done a rain spell to keep him indoors, and out of trouble.

There had been a lot of talk in the last few days, about getting involved in 'matters which didn't concern him'. It turned out that Molly Weasley wasn't altogether happy with her youngest son throwing himself, and his even younger sister, at Death Eaters.

He hadn't exactly done it on purpose, and Ron severely doubted whether his sister would have been deterred by anything that he could have said. Still, the blame had been apportioned, and it seemed as though Ginny had been found innocent.

So, day after day, Ron sat staring out of the window, and thinking about what had happened to him in the last month. He often suffered through short periods of catatonia, when he remembered that he had been in the same building as the most evil wizard alive. Ron did not even dare to use the wizard's name, so he would probably have had a heart attack had they come face to face.

Confrontations with Lord Voldemort were his best friend's territory. Harry had escaped from or vanquished the dark wizard four or five times now, in increasingly impressive ways.

Ron occasionally felt guilty that Harry had always had to fight these battles alone, although he wasn't sure that he would be particularly useful if he tried to help. The last time Ron had assisted Harry, there had been devastatingly embarrassing results. He had been hit with an Inebriation hex, after which he had been a burden to his friends, who were fighting for their lives. He still had the (practically self-inflicted) scars that had resulted from his incompetence, angry red welts in criss-cross patterns down his forearms.

A knock at his door stirred him from his melancholy thoughts. Ginny, no doubt. If one good thing had resulted from the fight at the Ministry of Magic, it was the refreshed relationship he had with his sister. They had spent most of their summer so far in each others company, talking more openly than they had done since before Ron went to Hogwarts.

'Come in,' he called, without turning his head.

The old door creaked as it swung open to admit his visitor.

'Thinking about Harry again?' Ginny asked.

'It isn't fair? I mean, why does everything always happen to him? What did he ever do?'

'You know, I remember a couple of years ago, you seemed pretty jealous about that.'

'A lot can change in a couple of years,' Ron stated plainly, fingers playing along the edge of the window frame to keep themselves busy.

He turned to study his sister. Her face was drawn, her eyes dull and slightly red. There was no sign of the vibrant girl he had grown up with.

'When was the last time you slept Gin?' he asked, voice thick with concern.

'Last night.'

There was no mistaking the defensive note in her words. Up until quite recently Ron would have let her get away with the obvious lie, but respecting Ginny's secrets suddenly seemed less important.

'I mean, for more than an hour. Proper sleep, without nightmares...'

'...well then you're not one to talk. I've heard the noises you make when you're in bed. You're not doing any better than me, so I don't think you should be patronising, ok?'

There was a moment of silence, the siblings standing at opposite ends of the room.

'I just...' Ron spluttered.

'I, I know...' Ginny managed to get out, 'but you need to look after yourself, not just me.'

'But, you shouldn't have been there. It's my fault that you're going through all of this.'

'Don't start that. We get enough of that from mum.'

Ginny paced over to Ron, and placed a hand onto his shoulder as he turned to look out of the window again.

'I was there because I wanted to be,' she continued. 'I accepted the chance of near-death experiences and nightmares, they come with the territory. I would do exactly the same thing again, and do you know why?'

'Because you care about Harry as much as I do,' Ron replied. It wasn't a difficult question.

'No, you idiot,' replied his sister, making him snap his head round so quickly that he cricked his neck.

'Huh?'

'Because I care about all of you. Harry and Hermione might be just like family to me, but you are my family. Don't forget that.'

Ron was gob smacked, he didn't know what to say to that. He tentatively pulled his little sister into an awkward hug, and kissed her lightly on the top of the head.

'We'll get through this,' he said, 'and we'll be there to get Harry through the next thing, and the thing after that.'

'Yeah,' she replied, although she didn't sound convinced.

'Listen. We'll be fine, I want you to believe me. We are going to survive this until You-Know-Who is gone.'

'Right,' said Ginny, a lot more confidently.

'Now, what's this about you thinking of Harry like family? Are you imagining wedding bells in the future..?'

Ginny blushed, broke free of the hug, and smacked Ron on the arm.

'I think of him like a brother of course. I have a boyfriend now, in case you'd forgotten.'

'Of course, Dean Thomas.' Ron said with a scowl. He had forgotten: with everything that had happened, Ginny had hardly mentioned him.

'Why did you pull that face? I thought he was one of your best friends.'

'He is, but still...'

Ron thought for a second, trying not to put his point across too bluntly.

'...you're obsessed with Harry!'

'Am not.'

'You've said more about Harry in the last two days than you've ever said about Dean.'

'That's not fair! You know why that is. Harry nearly died last month.'

'Well ok, that's true, but you've even said more about... Seamus Finnegan than Dean this holiday.'

'Maybe... Maybe I want to keep my love life private from you,' Ginny said, although her face was turning red.

'Come to think of it, you can't be keeping in touch with Dean, 'cos I have the only owl in this house that can deliver mail, and you've never borrowed him.'

Ginny's face was definitely redder than normal now. It was a Weasley curse, one that Ron knew only too well. Embarrassment was very obvious on their pale freckled faces.

'You aren't going out with him, are you!?' Ron said triumphantly. It wasn't a question.

Ginny covered her face with her hands, and made a noise that could only be classified as a squeak.

'Why would you make something like that up?'

That was a question, but Ron already knew the answer to it.

'It is Harry, isn't it?'

Ginny nodded quickly, eyes still covered, ears practically glowing. The effect was diminishing, and Ginny, who could often be quite intimidating despite her petite stature, seemed smaller than ever.

'You don't need to be so embarrassed. It isn't exactly a surprise... Ginny..?'

She was trembling now, her shoulders bobbing gently up and down, hands pressed firmly to her face. Ron's suspicions that she was crying were confirmed when a solitary teardrop escaped from between her fingers.

'What's wrong?'

'I'm so stupid...'

'Of course you're not. You're one of the brightest people I know. You make me feel stupid most of the time.'

'I've made such a mess of this Harry thing. I just didn't want him to think I was...'

'What?'

'...obsessed.'

Ron noticed the repetition of the word he had used earlier, and mentally kicked himself for being so tactless. He placed a hand onto one of hers, and pulled it upwards. Ginny dropped the other hand to her side. She looked awful, her cheeks were streaked with tears, and her young face held an unnaturally old expression. It was more obvious than ever that she needed sleep, but Ron thought that he probably shouldn't tell her that.

'Harry knows that you're a good person. He'll come around eventually. I mean, have you ever told him how you feel?'

Ginny looked at him curiously through her tears.

'Are you trying to offer me relationship advice?' she spluttered, between sobs, clearly amused.

'Is there something funny about that?'

Ginny snorted out a laugh, which made her nose run, adding to the devastation. Ron was glad that he could provide a distraction, although he was slightly concerned about what his sister found so hilarious.

'No offence Ron,' she replied eventually, 'but you haven't been doing much better than me yourself.'

Ron winced at the cutting statement, but didn't retort. Ginny seemed to be pulling herself together, and even he had enough tact not to insult her while she was feeling insecure.

'I think that we should go downstairs, get something to eat. I'm starving,' he said instead, as warmly as he could manage.

'You're definitely a man of habit Ron,' Ginny laughed. 'Just give me a sec. I need to go to the bathroom and clean my face.'

'Ok then sis. I'll see you down there,' he agreed, walking to the door, and hoping that his mother was going to be in a more forgiving mood today.

- HPHPHP -

Ron, as it turned out, was in luck, for that morning his mother had far more pressing things on her mind. When he entered the kitchen, it was to find her pacing back and forth across the tiled floor, reading from the Daily Prophet with a grim expression.

'Good morning Ron,' she said, without lifting her eyes from the article. 'I was beginning to think that you were avoiding me.'

His mother looked up and into his eyes, with a weary smile.

'I'm sorry,' she added, very sincerely.

Ron was flabbergasted. He had never heard her apologise before, or at least, not to him. He couldn't quite form a coherent sentence.

'S'okay,' he finally managed to get out.

'I've just been so worried. About all of you. Bill is in deep with the goblins, who could turn to Voldemort at any second. Charlie - off on his own recruiting for the Order - he's a target. Fred and George... well it's only a matter of time before Death Eaters attack Diagon Alley.'

She paused to take a deep breath.

'But you and Ginny, you were supposed to be safe. You were meant to be under Dumbledore's protection.'

'We would have gone straight to Dumbledore if he'd been there. Now that he's back, everything will be ok.'

'I wish I had your optimism, but You-Know-Who is just going to keep getting stronger. Dumbledore won't be able to fight forever.'

She threw the newspaper down onto the table and, a second before it unfolded, Ron glimpsed a headline on the page she had been reading.

Trouble at the top - Ministry fears Espionage in the Minister's office.

The reason for her pacing became immediately apparent. Ron's estranged brother Percy worked for Cornelius Fudge, the Minister of Magic. A spy in the office would put him in grave danger. His mother couldn't admit to being worried though. Her pride wouldn't allow her to acknowledge Percy, not whilst he stubbornly refused to return her owls.

It was up to Ron to say something. For the second time that day, he wished he knew a little more about handling delicate situations. If Hermione was here, what would she say? Ron tried to imagine, but nothing came to mind, and the pause was getting longer and longer...

'Percy's a bright wizard you know...' he blurted out.

His mother stared at him tensely for a few moments, clearly completely baffled, before her gaze shifted to the Daily Prophet resting on the kitchen table. Her shoulders slumped in realisation.

'I just mean...' Ron tried to justify his outburst, '...well, he'll be able to look after himself...'

There was another uncomfortable silence before Ron managed to finish.

'...if he needs to.'

Their eyes met, and there was an understanding between them. Ron knew that he didn't need to say any more, and that his mother was grateful, but also that she would always be worried for all of her children.

As his mother turned to the stove, and began to cast breakfast-making spells, Ron sat down at a chair and picked the Prophet up himself. He wasn't really a 'newspaper reader', but these days it paid to know what was going on, particularly if your best friend was The Boy Who Lived.

The front cover was taken up almost entirely by the faces of a man and woman in black robes, under the heading 'Death Eater Trials Begin'. The woman was the more imposing of the two, with an obvious grace and beauty in her features, which were only slightly tempered by the deranged look in her piercing eyes. Her sleek black hair looked slightly unkempt, and her head vibrated in the picture frame with manic restlessness. The man in the frame next to her looked almost bored, his long blonde hair tied back neatly, his grey eyes idly drifting from Ron to his mother and back again with complete contempt.

The pictures were captioned, but Ron already knew both of the Death Eaters personally. Bellatrix Lestrange, the psychotic cousin of Harry's godfather, and Lucius Malfoy, father of Ron's least favourite Hogwarts student, Draco Malfoy.

He began to read the narrow column of text, which had been squashed up to the edge of the page to make room for the extra large photographs.

At twelve o'clock yesterday afternoon, the consecutive trials of Death Eaters Lucius Malfoy and Bellatrix Lestrange began. Bellatrix Lestrange (formerly Bellatrix Black) escaped from the attack on the Ministry with He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named himself, but was later apprehended as she attempted to breach the wards on the house of Madam Bones, head of the Magical Law Enforcement office. Lestrange has previously been convicted of torture, murder, treason against the Ministry and the use of mind control. Her trial was a mere formality, which concluded in the early hours of the evening. She is to be returned to Azkaban forthwith, to serve out the remainder of her sentence - the duration of which has been increased since her daring jailbreak. Supreme Mugwump of the Wizengamot, Albus Dumbledore, has decreed that Lestrange will not be granted a parole hearing 'until she is at least two hundred and fifty years old, or dead, whichever occurs first'.

Lucius Malfoy, who was found within the Department of Mysteries during the Death Eater attack in June, had also previously been arrested nearly fifteen years ago, after You-Know-Who's apparent destruction. The Wizengamot later proclaimed that he was innocent, by virtue of diminished capacity. His insistence that he was under the effects of the Imperius curse, together with the testimony of numerous character witnesses, had not only enabled Mr. Malfoy to escape incarceration, but were instrumental in a significant compensation settlement from the MLE office for wrongful imprisonment. Family friends who were hoping for a repeat of these happenings however were in for a surprise.

In a statement clearly designed to shock, Malfoy plead guilty to all of the charges levelled against him: one count of treason against the Ministry, sixteen murders, four rapes, eight instances of Imperius control and countless uses of the Cruciatus curse. He then confessed to a number of further murders, in which the Ministry had not implicated him. The bodies of some of the victims he listed have not yet been discovered, so the accuracy of his claims cannot be verified at this time, but the Wizengamot has decided to take each of these alleged incidents into account when reaching a verdict, which should be delivered later this afternoon.

When asked to justify his actions Malfoy gave a gentle laugh and stated 'I act solely out of concern for the future of wizardkind. I do what must be done, and I fear that history will remember you all as weaklings, fools who oppose progress for the sake of sentimentality. The crimes which you convict me of will not be crimes for long. It is not a crime to murder an ant, because ants are below men, further down the food-chain. Well, mudbloods are further down the chain than wizards. They are glorified Muggle magicians, worse than the Muggles themselves, because they pretend to be something they are not. Change will come. I have been here at the beginning, and I will be a free man once the world is as it should be.'

Nothing beyond this point was audible to the reporter, due to the sheer volume of jeering and shouting in the courtroom, although a tamperproof transcript of Mr. Malfoy's testimony will be made available in due course.

All other Death Eaters arrested at the Ministry of Magic this summer have plead innocent to the charges facing them. Their trials will begin next Thursday, with in-depth coverage exclusive to the Daily Prophet.

Ron put down the paper, disgustedly. He had, of course, already heard of Bellatrix Lestrange's recapture. Her picture had been on the front of the newspaper practically every day - female Death Eaters were in short supply, and the Daily Prophet editor seemed to find her far more interesting than the men she had aligned herself with. Most of the stories featuring Bellatrix were about 'the tragedy of a vibrant young witch led astray by promises of power'. Ron, having met the woman in question, knew that she was one of the most dangerous Death Eaters, and that she was also insane. He supposed that the 'innocent woman corrupted' angle sold more papers, although it seemed a little sexist, not to mention insensitive to Bellatrix's many victims.

The Bellatrix section today however had been factual and to the point. It was the coverage of Lucius Malfoy's trial that had disturbed Ron the most. He hadn't realised quite how involved Lucius was in the torture. Malfoy had always seemed like the political type, the sort to help Voldemort by diverting funds and corrupting those in government, rather than the torturing type. Judging by the sheer number of charges pressed against him however, he must have enjoyed it. The murders would be the most highly punished, but Ron didn't find them quite so unsettling as the torture charges. The Cruciatus curse was horrendous to witness - Ron had been upset after seeing it performed on a spider. Only a truly sadistic bastard would be able to hold that curse on a human. And rape - that couldn't be part of Voldemort's grand scheme, so it must have been for personal pleasure. Somehow, it was the rape charges that made everything seem real. Crimes committed using magic seemed too clinical to be sinister. It was just a case of pointing a wand and saying a few words in Latin - which was exactly what Ron was being taught every day in school. Rape was physical and brutal.

Ron wondered what Draco thought about his fathers crimes. As a young child he had been raised by the psychopath, but since he had turned eleven, most of his time had been spent at Hogwarts. Maybe his soul hadn't been completely corrupted yet. Draco was a vindictive, spoiled, arrogant brat, but did he truly believe that torture and murder were alright, so long as they were for some 'greater good'? Ron supposed that the real test would come once they left school. Draco would have to make a choice - to become a Death Eater like his father or to run and hide.

Ron looked at the picture of Lucius again and frowned. He looked exactly like Draco would in forty years. There wasn't a single feature in Lucius' face that wasn't replicated in his son's. Even the expression was identical, and Draco had never done anything to make Ron believe that he was different on the inside either.

Ginny entered the room, looking slightly perkier now, and Ron quickly sat on the paper. There was no need for his sister to read articles about Death Eater violence, or about her brother's precarious position. He shook his head, to clear the Malfoys from his mind, and began to think about more important things. Like breakfast.

- HPHPHP -

It had been another uneventful day in a long string of uneventful days, thought Ron that evening as he stripped down to his boxers and climbed into bed. There was no telling how long this summer would drag on for if it continued to rain. He wished that he was a seventeen year old. Then he would be allowed to perform magic out of school, which would solve all of his problems. He could Apparate to Harry's house, to find out how he was really feeling. The letters seemed fairly cheerful, which Ron knew for a fact was just Harry's way of putting a brave face on the situation.

He could go and see Hermione, although that would no doubt frustrate him even more than the boredom. It wasn't that Ron didn't like Hermione, far from it, it was just that life was always a lot more complicated when she was involved. There had always been a tension between them, since the first day they had met. After the Triwizard Ball it had seemed that each had discovered feelings for the other, but still, a year and a half later, no relationship had materialised. Now other feelings clouded Ron's mind, and made the issue a lot less clear. He was growing up, and that involved certain changes. Whilst Ron began to mature into an adult, his feelings for Hermione didn't seem to be developing in the same way, and although she was blossoming into a beautiful woman, he was stuck with some kind of platonic eleven year old emotion. That was deeply disturbing to Ron, because with his teenage hormones, he could be excited by something as childishly suggestive as someone eating a banana.

Maybe, he thought, it was too late for them to make it work. Maybe girls started to lose their sex appeal once you had been friends with them for so many years. Maybe he was overthinking the whole thing, and it would resolve itself when they finally got together. Maybe...

Ron fell asleep thinking about Hermione, for the first time in almost a year, but his dreams soon drifted to the war, and became nightmares.

- HPHPHP -

Not for the first time, Ron managed barely any sleep that night. The waking world, although dull, was usually far more peaceful than his subconscious. He repeatedly woke, only to discover that the sun still hadn't risen. Each time, it took him longer to drift back to sleep.

The boring day that Ron had expected was not to be, because when Ron finally awoke at a sensible hour, it was to discover another pair of eyes locked with his own.