Novus Orbis | Fred Weasley x Insert | ON HIATUS

Chapter 35 - Seventeen

Today is going to be miserable.

It's the first thing Y/n's mind breathes into existence on the morning of August 3rd, when she opens her eyes to the wood of her four-poster in the dark of her shared bedroom in 12, Grimmauld Place, London. It stays in her mind as she pulls back the duvet, swings her feet over the side of the bed, and plants her bare feet onto the cold rug. Blinking out into the dark space and trying to make out the shapes across from her, no matter how familiar they yet are. She stops, however, to really ponder this thought, upon opening her drawer and seeing at the very top a familiar folded jumper belonging to a certain someone.

Last night ended on a soured note, after she was pulled out of the twins' room by Molly and chewed up for running out, and for yelling, and for causing a scene all over a silly shop, and for being in Fred's room, in his bed, and really, anything else the foul woman could think to yell at her for. She hadn't yelled back as she'd thought she would, rather took it all and stared at the woman with a murderous look, arms crossed against her chest in defiance. When Mrs. Weasley had rather finished, seeing the girl's expression, she expressed that she only cared for Y/n's safety and her future. But the girl would have none of it, storming out of the kitchen and up the stairs to her shared bedroom, slamming the door so hard that it shook a picture frame nearly clean off the dresser across the room.

No, she thinks as she pulls a fresh shirt out of the other side of the compartment, putting it on and slipping into his sweater. It's going to be less miserable, but miserable nonetheless. She ponders it further when she glances at her wand on the dresser, having been set there the night before in the knowledge that today, she's going to be able to use it without getting an owl from the Ministry. Maybe only a little bit miserable.

Putting her wand in her back pocket, Y/n looks around finally as her eyes adjust to the dim light of the room. The window in this bedroom is real, she deducts, noting that its position is that of where the one up and to the left of the front door would be. Hermione and Ginny are still asleep, blankets tucked up around their shoulders as they lie back-to-back on the mattress across the room. She glances at them only as she sits to pull her socks and kicks on, making her bed quickly and then heading for the door. Stepping out onto the landing, she closes the door behind her, shoed feet softly shuffling down the carpeted stairs as she heads for the library.

This house was definitely enchanted to be bigger on the inside, she thinks, and not for the first time since she arrived at the house. Lovely, without a doubt–but for a townhouse in between two others, it has far too many rooms. Just as last year, the twins have not woken her–there aren't any sounds or smells coming from the kitchen, and the house is silent as she makes for the room tucked away down the stairs and at the end of the hall. Slipping through the cracked door and shutting it softly behind her, she pads further back into the room and towards her favourite seat, grabbing a book she had left there the night before about the properties of different plants in potions and sitting down.

The full moon is the next evening, and she thinks of her Mandrake leaves, tucked away in a small pouch in the corner of the top drawer in her bureau. The nervousness, of course, comes from many factors: being caught before she's completed the process. Being horribly, irreversibly mutated. Messing something up in between, and having to start all over again. And finally, not being able to find in good time the ingredients she needs. But she has a sneaking suspicion that Sirius probably has most everything on hand–after all, the man is an unregistered animagus himself. What's to say he wouldn't help someone else again? But then again–he was a reckless teenager, as she is now, and he is now an older man with plenty of experience.

He is also still reckless, she reminds herself, thinking of when Hermione told her about his staying just outside of Hogsmeade and venturing in to be adopted by the locals as a lovely stray over the course of the last school year. She sighs as she recognises her focus slipping away from the page she's been on for several minutes now, her cheek resting against her fist and her gaze getting blurry every so often. Sighing, she closes the book, knowing that in the morning with her brain rushing about to think about these things, she's not going to get any good reading done.