Fear of a Name

Chapter Sixty-Four: The Rat and the Dog

"He did what?!"
"That's how my father came back to life so quickly," I explained. "Pettigrew found him, and they... they went to Malfoy Manor, where my mother was... and where I was..."
I saw little flashes of the events that had happened that day in my mind.
"It was my fourth birthday," I said in a quiet voice. "The sixth of August 1984 at ten minutes and eleven seconds past two in the afternoon. That's when he came back."

"You know the exact time?" Lupin asked, incredulous.
"I don't think I could ever forget it. That was when my childhood disappeared before my eyes. He tried to give me the Dark Mark, of course, it was the first thing he wanted to do when he got his wand back, but..." My voice trailed off. I took a deep breath, then continued. "Even though I had only just turned four, I knew what the Death Eaters were, what they did. I'd heard the screams of innocent people that came in the middle of the night, and I knew I didn't want to be the cause of those screams, no matter what the consequences would be. So, I refused. Needless to say, he was not very happy with me."

Lupin winced, then there was another silence.
"How did he get his body back?" Lupin said eventually.
"He wasn't exactly without a body to begin with," I started to explain, "but he was weak. Weaker than a baby, and about the same size as well. He told Pettigrew how to make a special potion of his own invention that would bring him back properly, and would make him even stronger than before... though that last part didn't actually happen. If anything, he was weaker.

"There were three main components in the potion: bone of the father — they took that from my grandfather's grave, flesh of the servant- I'd rather not go into detail about that one, and—" I paused for a second "—blood of the heir. Of course, there was other stuff in it as well, but those three were the most important."

Another silence. I could tell Lupin's mind was working in overdrive, trying to process all this new information.

I looked at the Marauders Map, suddenly aware we should've been keeping watch on Pettigrew.
"They're out of Hagrid's hut now," I said, pointing to the four dots labelled 'Harry Potter', 'Hermione Granger', 'Ronald Weasley', and 'Peter Pettigrew'. "It looks like they're walking back up to the castle — oh, wait, no, they're going in the wrong direction now..." I watched as their dots got further and further away from the castle again. It seemed as if Hermione and Harry were chasing Ron, who was, in turn, chasing Pettigrew.

"Oh Merlin, now the idiots have gone to the Whomping Willow," I said a couple of minutes later. "Honestly, it's as if Harry likes almost being killed."
And then a fifth person joined them, a person I knew well, a person I still needed to thank properly.
"Sirius," Lupin breathed.
"Merlin, this is not going to end well," I said, watching Sirius' dot going into the Whomping Willow with Ron and Pettigrew. I grabbed my wand from the desk and looked up at Lupin, whose face had gone pale from shock. "Sir. We need to go, or someone's going to end up dead or Siriusly injured. " I paused. "Sorry. This is really not the time for that."

We both hurried from the room and started to go down to the Whomping Willow.
"That reminds me," I said suddenly. "I have something I think you'll recognise."
Lupin looked at me as I put my hands to the back of my neck and unclipped the necklace, then showed it to him.
"That's Sirius' necklace, the one he stole from his mother," he muttered.
"That's how he got me out of the Manor at Christmas," I said. "He gave it to me as a Christmas present."
I clipped it back around my neck, still keeping it hidden so nobody else saw it.

Lupin quickly immobilised the Whomping Willow as soon as we got there, and we both started to run down the tunnel underneath it as fast as we could.
"I never realised this was here," I said quietly, my voice echoing ominously around us.
"That's the whole point, it's meant to be hidden," Lupin replied. "It leads to the Shrieking Shack, which is where I went every full moon when I was at Hogwarts."

We ran the rest of the way in silence. As we were almost at the end of the tunnel, I was suddenly hit by a wave of emotions. I stopped and clutched my head, my breathing getting a little deeper in my attempts to get rid of the headache that was quickly forming.
"Ivory, are you ok?" Lupin said, when he realised I'd stopped.
"Legilimency..." I just about managed to say. The headache was so bad by now that my head felt like it was going to explode.

"What?"
"I can... I can feel their... their emotions..." I said quietly, closing my eyes and starting to use occlumency to try and dull down the pain at the very least. "There's anger... and sadness... and fear... lots of fear... almost too much to... to keep out..."
I felt a hand on my shoulder, and I opened my eyes again. Lupin was looking worriedly at me.

"We don't have to go," he said, though I could tell he didn't want whatever was happening in the Shrieking Shack to just play out.
"No... I don't have to... have to go..." I corrected him quietly. "You go... I'll come later... if you need... need me to..."
"Are you sure?"
"Yeah..."
With a last worried glance at me, he quickly went along the remainder of the tunnel, and up into the Shrieking Shack. I quickly got to work building up my occlumency defences. I knew they'd have to be pretty strong, especially now Lupin had joined the others.

Having got a strong enough defence, I started to walk down the tunnel again, but then I stopped suddenly. The sound of my footsteps was mixing with another set coming from behind me. I turned around quickly, wand in hand. There was nobody there.
I swear I heard—
I stopped mid-thought as my wand flew from my hand, then suddenly disappeared from sight.