Dumbledore's Army and the Year of Darkness

Chapter 2: Growing Up

There were so many more of them than he had expected. Neville had added up the remaining members of the D.A., and the numbers had worried him deeply. Only twelve of the original thirty were still at the school - scarcely enough for a good brawl, much less a serious battle - but as he looked around the Room of Requirement, easily three times that many faces stared back at him. He had hoped his count might be off, but this was absurd.

He shifted nervously, clutching the scrap of parchment that held his notes as though it would protect him from the expectant stares of so many pairs of eyes. "Well ..." His voice cracked, and he cleared his throat, feeling himself flush with embarrassment. "Um ... this is ... there's a lot of you. I'd really thought ... uh ... that it would be just ... a couple of us." Fantastic. Just fantastic. Real way to inspire them in their choice of leader.

Romilda Vane tossed her head, sweeping her thick, dark hair out of her eyes with one hand. "You don't mind having a few more wands on your side, do you?"

"No! It's just ... not what I expected." He looked around the room again, realizing that he didn't even know most of the people there. "I guess ... we should start with a count or a roll call or a sign-in or something. That's what Harry did last time."

On cue, the air shimmered, and a quill appeared on the table at the head of the room, neatly sitting in a bottle of fresh ink alongside a long roll of parchment. Neville gestured to it. "Everyone knows that Hermione put a jinx on it last time. I'm not going to do that." Now that he was back on the ground covered in his notes, he grew more confident, and the words started to come easier. "Marietta deserved to have to carry around what she had done for a year when she ratted us out, but if anyone does something like that this time, well, we won't have to worry about being expelled. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that we'd probably be killed or at best sent to Azkaban, much less what they'd do to our families, and personally, I think having that on your conscience would be a lot worse than anything that you could have on your face."

In the front row, Michael Corner crossed his arms and smirked. "That's a real nice sentiment, mate, but I'll be the first to say I'd rather not trust my life to no one here having a streak of yellow." Ernie cleared his throat indignantly at this, and Michael shot him a look of exasperation. "Oh, really, Ernie, that was nothing against you lot. It was one of ours last time, anyway!"

Ginny stood, her pretty face set in surprisingly harsh lines of determination. "I think we should trust each other. Neville's right, the stakes are too high for anyone to sell out their friends. It would be - "

"No. Michael has a point." Neville was surprised to hear the firmness in his own voice as he cut her off. "And I wasn't finished before. I agree with him completely. If being friends was enough, Harry would still have parents."

The words seemed to echo through a room that was abruptly deafening in its silence, and Neville cleared his throat again.

"You all read about Peter Pettigrew after the ... you know, the whole thing at the Ministry. He betrayed James and Lily Potter, even when he knew it meant they'd be killed, and that should have included Harry, too. If someone can betray his best friend and his whole family, even a helpless baby, we can't say it won't happen to us. But we can't expect it to be just a simple matter of some ugly pimples warding it off, either."

Neville looked down at his notes, reminding himself that he had decided on this before the meeting ever began. That didn't make it any easier. As he forced himself to raise his head and seek out the wide, eager blue eyes he was looking for among the crowd, he felt almost dirty for what he was about to do. "Colin, would you come up here, please?"

Colin Creevey bounced to his feet and almost sprinted to the front of the room, snapping to attention. "Sir?"

Neville smiled gently at the boy who was only ten months younger than he himself, but still seemed so much a child. "Colin, I want to do something. There's a spell called the Fidelius Charm. It's pretty complicated, but I think it's our best hope. Trusting that none of us will tell that the D.A. has come back, where we're meeting, or who's in it is a lot to gamble on, but if I do this, you would be the Secret-Keeper, and that would mean that the only way You-Know-Who and his followers could find out about us is if you told willingly. It couldn't be broken by the Imperius Curse, Veritaserum, or anything like that, but if you told: even if you were under the Cruciatus Curse, even if they were going to kill Dennis ...."