Harry’s head was pounding; why, he couldn’t remember. The dull, steady throbbing robbed him of the sleep he sought to preserve. Strange sounds of whistling, the screech of metal and eerily hushed voices seeped into his conscious. His eyelids fluttered open and he struggled to gain control of his vision. He didn’t know where his glasses were, though it was doubtful that he would have the strength to so much as put them on. The large blurbs of six or so people stood over him, or were they carrying him? Yes, through the aching and soreness he could feel that his body was strapped onto some sort of contraption. Whether or not the people that had him were friends or enemies did not matter to him.
All that mattered were the people closest to him -- Ron, Hermione, and…Ginny. Ron was missing, captured by the enemy. Hermione...for all he knew she could be one of the blobs standing over him, he couldn’t think about any other possibility…what he had seen during the battle was ghastly enough to last a lifetime. Ghastly … Ginny … Where was Ginny? He tried to lift his head to look around for Ginny but to no avail. This sudden weakness could mean only one thing, at some point he had been drugged. This was an unsettling thought, he could feel etchings of fear begin to permeate throughout his conscious mind but then a voice broke through the haze and lightened his heart considerably.
“He’s waking up,” Hermione stated automatically though her tone was betrayed by a quiver in her bottom lip.
“I’ll get Madam Pomfrey,” Luna’s airy voice replied and one of the blurbs he had counted earlier disappeared.
“I’m worried,” said Neville, his anxious voice coming from the left side of Harry’s body. “It’s not normal for him to keep waking up with the amount of sleeping potion he’s been given.”
“No, it’s not,” Hermione agreed abjectly.
“Do you think he’s resisting the potion?” Seamus asked Hermione.
“It’s very rare for a person to have the willpower to do so,” she responded timidly.
“Well if anyone does it’s our Harry,” Madam Pomfrey announced, seconds before she opened his mouth and spilled some murky liquid steaming down his throat causing him to cough profusely. “That should do the trick,” she told the people surrounding him before hustling out of sight.
“That’s what she said the first two times,” Seamus muttered under his breath.
“Right then,” Dean’s assertive voice broke through the murmurings of agreement going on in the group, “you’re clear to board. Make sure you take it easy on the turns, we’ve already had several mishaps and I doubt the patients appreciated it.”
“Is Ginny…” Hermione paused and then continued with some hesitation, “awake?”
“Yes,” Dean said with an equally lengthy pause, “she’s back in form now.”
With that bizarre statement Harry felt the dizziness seep into his mind and the blurred outlines of his friends were lost to the black clouds that overwhelmed his vision. As he sank back into the oblivion that he had been struggling with, one thought brought him the peace he needed to lose himself to deep slumber:
Ginny’s safe.
When Harry regained consciousness it was due in part to the blinding stream of light that the sun was sending into the compartment he occupied. As though on a mission, the glares burned into his pupils, ripping him from the shelter of the black abyss and replacing it with a pool of red. His mind felt compressed and weighed down with menacing dread, but he couldn’t recall the cause of his foreboding. With much hesitation, he opened his eyes and reached to his left for his glasses. When, instead of grasping his glasses he found that he had grasped a human knee, he jerked himself up, his head throbbing in protest of being so unceremoniously yanked around.
“I believe you’re looking for these,” Ginny’s voice reached his ears, soothing his senses. She placed his glasses onto his face, taking care not to poke him in either eye.
When the world came into focus Harry recognized that they were sitting in one of the compartments of the Hogwarts Express. The meadows leaping across the window signaled that they had already been traveling for quite a few hours.
“We’re about halfway to the train station,” Ginny confirmed his suspicions. “You’ve been asleep for five or so hours. I was beginning to worry that Madam Pomfrey had overdone it with the sleeping potion.”
With the mention of Madam Pomfrey the memory of the last few hours he spent at Hogwarts hit him with the force of a bludger to the head. The questions he wanted to ask Ginny became so jumbled together that he was able to do little more that stutter. Finally, the realization of Ron’s capture enabled him to attain the control over his emotions that he so desperately needed. Emotions could be dissected later, but action had to be taken now in order to save Ron. Once he had regained his control, Harry looked at Ginny and felt his hard-fought control ebb away from him.
She looked dreadful. Although her head had been healed, most likely by Madam Pomfrey, her skin remained pale and stretched out over her face like wax on a skeleton. Her eyes were haunted with the sorrow of the images she had witnessed and she looked as though joy would never grace her lovely features again. Without thought, he wobbled over to her side of the compartment, realizing as he went that his body was still weak despite his wakeful mind. He sat, embracing her in a consoling manner as she had done for him in the past. It seemed like a lifetime ago that the memories in the memoirs had drawn them together.
Now, however, the fighting, pain, deaths, and missing people were a reality, not memories of the past. He couldn’t fathom how the Order members had dealt with these losses and inflictions when his own heart now wrenched so painfully that it threatened to burst from his chest in a vain attempt to stop the ceaseless torment that was gripping the very edges of his sanity. Dumbledore dead…Colin dead…Dennis dead…Ron missing…Then there was Pansy; he had murdered her with the killing curse meant for Draco. It was all just too much to take in.
“They got Padma as well,” Ginny whispered, and Harry knew she had been listening to his thoughts.
“She’s dead?” Harry asked, swallowing hard. Ginny nodded in affirmation before burying herself in his chest and letting the tears she had cut off when he awoke resume their course down the lines they had etched into her face. Fighting back the urge to join in her sorrow Harry asked, “Anyone else?”
“A couple first years,” Ginny responded with a hiccup, “and Evan Bailey.”
Harry was startled and felt somewhat vindicated when he heard that Evan Bailey had been killed.
“Someone from our side killed him?” he asked softly, hoping he was not overstretching her already raw nerves with his questioning.
“I did,” Ginny pronounced direly.
Her proclamation knocked the wind out of him. With a gasp he asked, “Are you sure?”
Ginny nodded her response. After some time passed and neither of them spoke, Ginny let out an audible sigh and explained, “He was directing the Death Eaters with him to Ron so that they could capture him.”
“You mean to say they purposefully wanted to capture Ron?” Harry cried out in distress. The idea that Ron was there intended target was a possibility that Harry had not entertained.
“That’s exactly what I’m saying,” Ginny agreed.
“Why? What would they want with Ron?” Harry implored.
Ginny shook her head in frustration, “All I could hear them thinking was that they needed to get Ron, nothing else.”
Harry mulled the news in his mind, but he could find no reason for Ron being the intended target. It was a forgone conclusion in his mind that she killed Evan in order to stop him from getting to Ron.
“No,” Ginny declared.
“No what?” Harry asked, wondering what part of his thoughts she was disagreeing with.
“I didn’t kill Evan to stop him from getting to Ron,” Ginny clarified, “it was after they captured Ron and shoved him into the green flames. I tried to go in after him, but I couldn’t get anywhere near the flames without being burned. The two Death Eaters had already gone so I did the only thing I could think of.”
“What was that,” Harry asked, a feeling of unnatural nervousness gripping him in anticipation of what he was about to hear.
“I tried to possess Evan so that I could go after Ron using Evan’s body,” Ginny confessed.
“But you couldn’t?” Harry inquired, morbidly fascinated despite himself.
“I couldn’t,” Ginny agreed. “I saw and felt everything he ever felt. His dreams, fears, desires... He was the one that betrayed Dumbledore’s Army and gave away our secrets to Snape’s Slytherin Soldiers. That’s why they were so ready for us.”
“I should have realized he was a traitor,” Harry railed at himself.
“So should I,” Ginny said, grief-stricken.
“So he let the Slytherin’s into Gryffindor to light it on fire?” Harry presumed.
“Actually, he was also the one who lit Gryffindor on fire. That was the plan all along. We had traitors within our midst the entire time and never realized it,” she said despondently.
“Who else was there?” Harry wondered aloud to himself.
“His friend, the one that was with him the night we ended up in front of the Ministry, he was a Ravenclaw. Mercil Greemal. He’s the one who set fire to Ravenclaw. The only common room the Slytherin’s actually needed to break into was the Hufflepuff’s,” Ginny interjected.
“How could we have missed that?” Harry groaned.
“We became preoccupied with the Ministry,” Ginny remarked. “All the while, they were giving Dumbledore the potion in the form of sweets. How could he have anticipated being poisoned by some of the youngest kids in school? It was genius.”
Harry couldn’t wrap his mind around the concept that they had been so thoroughly hoodwinked. Even though he knew that Peter Pettigrew was a prime example of a traitor from within, it baffled him that two were within their midst all along without arousing any suspicion of where their true loyalties lay.
“Actually, they were Slytherin’s all along,” Ginny commented.
Harry felt a slight ire at the way she piped in when he was trying to sort his thoughts but was intrigued enough to ask, “Who were Slytherin’s?”
“Evan and Mercil,” Ginny responded. If she noted his annoyance she didn’t show it.
“What do you mean?” Harry asked.
“The Sorting Hat placed them in Slytherin when they arrived three years ago,” Ginny told him in a conciliatory manner.
“How can that be?” Harry bellowed in frustration. “We are required to join the house that the Sorting Hat selects,” he insisted.
“That’s true,” Ginny conceded, “the Sorting Hat places us in the house we want but that year the too many boys wanted to go into Slytherin. Dumbledore asked Snape to select three boys to be sent to the other houses to even out the numbers.”
“Is that even allowed?” Harry inquired.
“Of course,” Ginny nodded. “Don’t forget the Sorting Hat only selects the house you desire. There have been times in the past when too many students were selected for a certain house and the head of the house was forced to seek lodging elsewhere for the students. The castle is only so big.”
Harry felt his throat go suddenly dry. “You mean we’ve had a Slytherin in our midst the whole time and we didn’t know! I put that kid on our house team!”
“I was as surprised as you are when I saw everything from Evan’s perspective,” Ginny reassured him.
“You haven’t explained how he died,” Harry prodded.
“When I possessed him, everything that I saw of his life, everything I’ve told you, it all happened in a matter of seconds,” Ginny explained with a sigh. “I was so overwhelmed…I didn’t realize that possessing someone feels like that…I mistakenly thought that I was losing myself to his identity so I made an error.”
“What error was that?” Harry pushed.
“I forgot the cardinal rule of possession,” Ginny whimpered. “To possess is to hold another humans soul in your own. When I left him…”
“You didn’t let go of his soul,” Harry ominously completed her thought.
Ginny looked as though the weight of the world was settled on her shoulders as she blinked back tears.
“I didn’t let go of his soul,” she confirmed. “When I left him, I accidentally ripped it from his body and he died.”
Harry shuddered at the thought.
“Did you see where they were planning to take Ron?”
“No, not where they planned to take him. I couldn’t see his future plans, only those that had already taken place. I do know one thing though. Peter Pettigrew and Bellatrix Lestrange were the Death Eaters with Evan, find them and they’ll lead us to Ron.”
Harry put his head in his hands to stop the barrage of thoughts colliding with each other. If ever he needed a pensive, now was the time. Wormtail and Bellatrix were within his grasp and instead of going after them he had a childish spat with Draco. Instead of avenging the death of Sirius, Cedric, and his parents’, he allowed himself to be distracted by pettiness. Ron was missing and it was entirely his fault. Just as he was dipping into a hot bathe of self-loathing the train came to a screeching halt at Platform 9 ¾. Besides the scattering sounds of kids rushing to and fro and reuniting with their families the sound of a loud thudding reached Harry’s ears. Suddenly, he heard a voice that lifted his spirits, if only slightly:
”Yeh lot! Where ‘re ye then?”