Where Dark Meets the Light

The Second Task

In the following weeks Neville trained little. His arm was healing from the tattoo, and he could not risk messing it up by training. Jay had insisted that he had more than enough to read, and running was permitted so his regime would not go down the drain.

In the meantime, Jay and Neville did anything they could to make Jay the bad guy everyone wanted her so hard to be. She eventually manned up and asked Malfoy Jr. out to the ball. As suspected, everyone was outraged that she took the son of a know former death eater to the ball. It was unfortunate that Nev and Jay could not share the evening. Instead he had to send glares to Jay every once in a while as she danced with Malfoy.

It was kind of sad that Jay was using the boy for a means to an end, but horrible things would happen if their plans were to fail. He did not want to go with one of their back-up plans if they could manage it, mostly because it involved, you know, breaking into the dark lord's house. So breaking on boy's heart was not really relevant, considering the amount of lives it might potentially save in the future.

Since the ball she had been spending more and more time with Malfoy and the boys, uh friends? He wasn't completely sure they were friends, since Neville was pretty sure you had to like one another in order to be friends.

He himself had taken to trying to befriend Ginny, the youngest of the Weasley family himself. A very light oriented family, and most importantly, she was the younger sister of Ronald Weasley. So when he was helping the girl with her transfiguration homework, usually afterward he was invited to play poker by Ronald.

This way he could start on building a bond with Charlie, since when Jay would be on her mission, he would be in charge of keeping the idiot safe. He truly was a nice lad, if a bit on the arrogant side, but not in a malicious way.

He did miss the time spent in public with Jay though. They made up for it during the night. Jay was using darker and darker magic in preparation for the plan. He had to look away as she killed a chicken for a ritual and painted herself with the blood of the animal to cast several curses on objects. He knew it was necessary, but he was afraid of what would become of both of them if the plan failed. The cursed objects would get stored in her trunk, so that when Neville finally rung the metaphorical bell, there would be months' worth of evidence of her fall to the dark.

He was devouring book by book, and knew why Jay had kept the material out of his reach until now. The techniques, if done wrong, could have catastrophic consequences for himself and others.

When Jay had first given him his gloves (how he wanted to put those babies on again) he had almost written off the small box on the table of her workshop. That was a mistake.

It turned out to be a trunk, actually in better condition as Jennifer's, with 6 compartments. And tonight was the first night his arm was healed enough that he could train again. That was his plan, until Jay showed up and told him to pack enough things to last two days.

They would go break into one of the old death eater houses and use whatever was left behind to furnish his trunk.

He was quite nervous. It would be the first 'mission' he would go on with Jay. It wasn't as if they even expected to run into trouble, but there was still the suspense of leaving the castle and breaking into a place that was known to have housed serial killers and maniacs. If they got caught, the plan would become useless, they would have to answer so many questions that he really didn't know how to answer, he might go to Azkaban.

And yet.

When night fell, he pretended to go to bed early but instead met Jay at the secret entrance to Hogsmeade.

"Ready?" She whispered, even though no one was near.

"Probably not, but sometimes you just gotta take the leap, right?"