HARRY POTTER AND THE PRISONER OF AZKABAN
chapter ten
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T H E M A R A U D E R ' S
M A P
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"Wait! I want to wear my coat for this!"
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Madam Pomfrey insists on keeping Harry and Lily in the Hospital Wing for the rest of the weekend. They don't argue or complain, but Harry won't let her throw away the shattered remnants of his Nimbus Two Thousand. Lily knows that Harry knows he's being stupid, but if she had something that she was so attached to, she wouldn't let anyone throw it out either.
They have separate streams of visitors, but all intent on cheering them up. Hagrid sends them a bunch of earwiggy flowers that look like yellow cabbages, and Ginny, blushing furiously, turns up with a get-well card she made herself, which sings shrilly unless Harry keeps it shut under his bowl of fruit.
The Gryffindor team visit Harry on Sunday morning, accompanied by Oliver, who tells Harry, in a hollow, dead sort of voice, that he doesn't blame him in the slightest. Ron and Hermione leave Harry's bedside only at night, as do Blaise, Draco and Daphne with Lily, so the twins don't get to talk about Lily's vision of Ron, and they keep quiet about it whenever he visits.
But nothing anyone says or does can make the twins feel any better, because their friends know only half of what is troubling them. They haven't told anyone about the Grim. It has now appeared twice, and both appearances have been followed by near-fatal accidents; the first time, Harry had nearly been run over by the Knight Bus; the second, fallen fifty feet from his broomstick.
Is the Grim going to haunt them until Harry actually dies? Not to mention Lily's own fate if she keeps having visions. And then there are the Dementors.
"I feel sick and humiliated every time I think of them," Harry tells Lily.
Everyone says the Dementors are horrible, but no one else collapses every time they go near one.
"No one else hears echoes in their head of their dying parents."
The screams Lily had heard that day on the train had been Sirius Black's, but Harry has been hearing their mother. When the Dementors approached him, he heard the last moments of their mother's life, her attempts to protect them from the Dark Lord, and his laughter before he murdered her.
The Potter twins doze fitfully, sinking into dreams full of their worst fears and petrified pleading, jerking awake to that again and again and again...
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It's a relief to return to the noise and bustle of the main school on Monday, where Lily is forced to think about other things, even if she has to endure Draco's annoying voice. He is almost beside himself with glee at Gryffindor's defeat. He has finally taken off his bandages, and celebrates having the full use of both arms again by doing spirited imitations of Harry falling off his broom.
Draco spends much of their next Potions class doing Dementor imitations across the dungeon; Ron finally cracks, flinging a large, slippery crocodile heart at Draco, which misses him completely and hits Lily in the face instead. That causes Professor Snape to take fifty points from Gryffindor.
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"If Snape's teaching Defence Against the Dark Arts again, I'm going off sick," she hears Ron say, as they all head towards Professor Lupin's classroom after lunch.
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Invisible (III)
FanfictionLily's going into her third year at Hogwarts with a headache because her visions have been appearing without warning all summer long. They only show one man. A man that betrayed her parents and got them killed, and is now out to get her twin brother...
