Raindrops on Roses

Chapter 12: The Best Summer Ever Part 1

2023

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Rose Weasley turned sixteen in Italy that year. She spent her days walking around Muggle Rome with her mother, who had never been but had done a lot of reading in preparation, and Wizarding Venice, well-connected as they were by a series of Floo points set up specifically for tourism - a concept quite alien to the wizarding population of Britain except for special occasions like the Quidditch World Cup. It was a bit chaotic - the two families made up nine people, after all, and there was the problem of disguising Albus' dad sufficiently to avoid being mobbed in the street. There were still a couple of incidents despite all the precautions they could legally take.

"Wishing you brought the cloak, now?" she heard her father saying to Harry after one such incident where they had been held up for half an hour on the way to dinner. "We could always Disillusion you, I suppose."

"I'm not going invisible to go to a meal with my own family," her uncle replied hotly.

"We could apply for some Polyjuice," Ron suggested, grinning. "I think Dean knows a guy at il Ministero."

"Remember when it was still legal to cook it up in a school bathroom? Good times."

"Yeah, we ruined it for everyone, breaking into high-security Ministry buildings like wanton criminals. Shame."

Her father and uncle were also not always with them. They assured everyone that they were not working, they were after all on holiday, but the Italian Ministry were also having problems with the Shadow. It seemed that he had feelers everywhere in Europe, and might even be branching out to other parts of the world. It made him incredibly hard to track down, as her father was wont to complain in private.

"The stuff's getting worse," she heard him tell her mother. "It started off your generic Dark objects, ancient curses, that sort of thing, but there's so much of it that it has to be coming from somewhere. There aren't that many old dark objects just lying around, unless they've got a secret mine of them."

"You mean they might be making them?" Hermione sounded disgusted by the suggestion. "Do we know if they're real? If it's so widespread..."

"Oh, it's real, what we've got of it, anyway," Ron said darkly. "Some of the things blew up Harry's Sneakoscope. It's only a matter of time before people start dying. Probably they already have, we just don't know it yet."

Rose was left with a paranoid feeling that lasted a few days, wary of everything she touched. Lily insisted that she was going to help catch the Shadow when she left Hogwarts and became an Auror, but Rose hoped that he would be caught long before that.

Apart from that, though, it was a very good holiday, and Rose felt they deserved it after the stress of OWLs, the results of which she awaited anxiously while trying to feign indifference. "Are you sure they'll get here, Mum?" she asked after a few weeks of nail-biting in private. "Maybe the owls won't be able to find us."

"Hogwarts owls can find people anywhere, dear," Hermione assured her. "If one could find me in Bulgaria and your father in Egypt, it'll get here."

"Maybe we should borrow one," Albus muttered. "That's the third time Emmett's come back, useless bird."

Rose thought privately that his owl's inability to deliver his letter to Scorpius had less to do with Emmett's abilities than it did his grandparents' ability to receive them. The lack of correspondence was, while not unexpected, still worrying. But as her mother pointed out, there was little she could do about it.