Mia Potter was the other Potter. Looking almost identical to her mother, she was a force to be reckoned with. But there was only one person who could reckon with her, and his name was Draco Malfoy.
In which the youngest Potter twin finds herself fa...
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The oak front doors stood open ahead of them, light flooding onto the drive and the lawn. Slowly, uncertainly, dressing townspeople were creeping down the steps, looking around nervously for some sign of the Death Eaters who had fled into the night. Mia's eyes, however, were fixed upon the ground at the foot of the tallest tower. She imagined that she could see a black, huddled mass lying in the grass there, though she was too far away to see anything of the sort. Even as she stared wordlessly at the place where she thought Dumbledore's body must lie, however, she saw people beginning to move toward it.
"What're they all lookin' at?" said Hagrid as he, Mia and Harry approached the castle front, Fang keeping as close as he could to their ankles. "Wha's that, lyin' on the grass?" Hagrid added sharply, heading now toward the foot of the Astronomy Tower, where a small crowd was congregating. "See it, twins? Righ' at the foot of the tower? Under where the Mark . . . Blimey . . . yeh don' think someone got thrown. . . .?"
Hagrid fell silent, the thought too horrible to express aloud. Harry walked alongside him, feeling the aches and pains in his face and his legs where the various hexes of the last half hour had hit him, though in an oddly detached way, as though somebody near him was suffering them. What was real and inescapable was the awful pressing feeling in his chest. . . .
Mia, Harry and Hagrid moved, dreamlike, through the murmuring crowd to the very front, where the shocked students and teachers had left a gap. Mia heard Hagrid's moan of pain and shock, but she did not stop. She walked slowly forward until he reached the place where Dumbledore lay and crouched down beside her. She had known there was no hope from the moment that Dumbledore ordered them downstairs, but there was still no preparation for seeing him here, spread-eagled, broken: the greatest wizard Mia had ever, or would ever, meet. Dumbledore's eyes were closed, but for the strange angle of his arms and legs, he might have been sleeping.
Mia reached out, straightened the half-moon spectacles upon the crooked nose, and wiped a trickle of blood from the mouth with his sleeve. Then she gazed down at the wise old face and tried to absorb the enormous and incomprehensible truth: that never again would Dumbledore speak to her, never again could she help. . . .The crowd murmured behind Mia. After what seemed like a long time, she became aware that he was kneeling upon something hard and looked down.
The locket they had managed to steal so many hours before had fallen out of Dumbledore's pocket. It had opened, perhaps due to the force with which it hit the ground. And although she could not feel more shock or horror or sadness than she felt already, Mia knew, as he picked it up, that there was something wrong. She turned the locket over in her hands.
This was neither as large as the locket he remembered seeing in the Pensieve, nor were there any markings upon it, no sign of the ornate S that was supposed to be Slytherin's mark. Moreover, there was nothing inside but for a scrap of folded parchment wedged tightly into the place where a portrait should have been. Automatically, without really thinking about what he was doing, Mia pulled out the fragment of parchment, opened it, and read by the light of the many wands that had now been lit behind her as Harry stood behind his sister.
