With the castle asleep, the entirety of the names on the map were very sedentary, and it wasn't until Harry had moved his wand closer to the map, about to mutter mischief managed, that he noticed movement.
The movement was curious for a number of re...
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"IT WASN'T A DREAM."
"Harry, how is that even possible?"
It was morning in the Gryffindor common room, a morning that seemed way too calm to Harry Potter. After the eventful night he had had, he thought for surethat something must have changed - Hogwarts had had an intruder, and for all he knew, that girl could have very well been a Death Eater. Why weren't people in a panic? "I don't know, Hermione," he finally answered.
"I mean, that doesn't make any sense," continued Ron Weasley, baffled at the information he's just received from his best friend. "Even Peter Pettigrew's name showed up on the map - and he was a bloody rat."
Had he not been so captive in his own thoughts, Harry would have been angered at Ron's comment - first of all, for even mentioning the man who had given up his parents to Voldemort, but also because he was right - it didn't make any sense. He couldn't help himself from staring intently at the fireplace, where just two years prior he had spoken to his godfather about the Triwizard Tournament. He tried to imagine what Sirius would say to what happened last night, but all he could hear was the horrid cackling of Bellatrix Lestrange.
Hermione Granger, sitting between the boys on the floor of the nearly empty common room, looked at Harry with concern, as she found herself doing much too often. Things had changed in their world, so many things, and Harry, a damaged child thrown into a damaged world, had taken more blows than anyone. "Harry, are you sure that - " he looked up at her - "are you sure that it wasn't just a dream?"
"It wasn't a dream," he said. Harry knew very well that it wasn't a dream. His dreams didn't change much anymore, and this was well beyond anything he could have ever dreamt. "McGonagall was there."
"McGonagall - ?"
"Yeah," he confirmed. "She knew her, the intruder. She talked to her like - like she was a student - "
"Was she?"
"Hardly anyone knows about the passage she came in through," Harry explained. "And besides, she looked our age - don't you think we would've seen her around before?" Ron and Hermione silently agreed and resigned at his question. He had already described the girl to them, and neither of them could put a familiar face to his description, so it was very likely that if she wasn't a fragment of Harry's imagination, she very well could have been a threat to the school. "But McGonagall knew her name - Kala - Kala-something. I don't know - it didn't sound English."
The three of them sat in silence for a moment, caught in deep thought of their odd situation, wondering, once again, why it was always them. Both together and apart, they had gone through so much, and would go through so much more. Even this school year, Harry was beginning to look into Voldemort's memories with Dumbledore to try to find his weaknesses, and with that, atop his suspicions of Malfoy, all his course work, Quidditch, and his constant worrying about Lyra and his godfather, there wasn't room for much more. But now there was this: the intruder. Where does she fit in?
