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Again, that disclaimer about the parts from the books, altered only slightly, applies. I didn’t write those parts, and I’m not getting any payment for including them here. I’m just borrowing them for entertainment purposes.
What’s going on:
Shiloe looked around. From the looks on everyone’s faces, he guessed they were all wondering what was going to happen to the last spider. Hermione’s hand shook slightly as, for the third time, she raised it into the air.
“Yes?” Said Moody, looking at her.
“Avada Kedavra.” Hermione whispered.
And on to the chapter!
Several people looked uneasily around at her, including Ron.
“Ah.” Said Moody, another slight smile twisting his lopsided mouth. “Yes, the last and worst. Avada Kedavra… The Killing Curse.”
He put his hand into the glass jar, and almost as though it knew what was coming, the third spider scuttled frantically around the bottom of the jar, trying to evade Moody’s fingers, but he trapped it, and placed it upon the desktop. It started to scuttle frantically across the wooden surface.
Moody raised his wand, and Shiloe felt a sudden thrill of foreboding.
“Avada Kedavra!” Moody roared, bright green slimy magic pouring forth from his wand with a putrid smell to it. Shiloe knew he was the only one that could smell the magic, but he’d never forget the stench the Killing Curse caused. It was nearly unbearable.
There was a flash of blinding green light and a rushing sound, as though a vast, invisible something was soaring through the air — instantaneously the spider rolled over onto its back, unmarked, but unmistakably dead. Several of the students stifled cries; Ron had thrown himself backward and almost toppled off his seat as the spider skidded toward him.
Moody swept the dead spider off the desk onto the floor.
“Not nice,” He said calmly. “Not pleasant. And there’s no countercurse. There’s no blocking it. Only one known person has ever survived it, and he’s sitting right in front of me.”
Shiloe felt his face redden as Moody’s eyes (both of them) looked into his own. He could feel everyone else looking around at him too. Shiloe stared at the blank blackboard as though fascinated by it, but not really seeing it at all.
So that was how Harry’s parents had died… Exactly like that spider. Had they been unblemished and unmarked too? Had they simply seen the flash of green light and heard the rush of speeding death, before life was wiped from their bodies?
Harry had been picturing his parents’ deaths repeatedly for three years now, ever since he’d found out they had been murdered, ever since he’d found out what had happened that night: Wormtail had betrayed his parents’ whereabouts to Voldemort, who had come to find them at their cottage. How Voldemort had killed Harry’s father first. How James Potter had tried to hold him off, while he shouted at his wife to take Harry and run; Voldemort had advanced on Lily Potter, told her to move aside so that he could kill Harry; how she had begged him to kill her instead, refused to stop shielding her son, and so Voldemort had murdered her too, before turning his wand on Harry.
Harry knew these details because he had heard his parents’ voices when he had fought the dementors last year — for that was the terrible power of the dementors: to force their victims to relive the worst memories of their lives, and drown, powerless, in their own despair…
‘But no more.’ Shiloe decided. ‘I can do my best to shield him from creatures, too. Especially ones that deal with emotion.’
Moody was speaking again, from a great distance, it seemed to Shiloe. With a massive effort, he pulled himself back to the present and listened to what Moody was saying.
“Avada Kedavra’s a curse that needs a powerful bit of magic behind it — you could all get your wands out now and point them at me and say the words, and I doubt I’d get so much as a nosebleed. But that doesn’t matter. I’m not here to teach you how to do it.
“Now, if there’s no counter curse, why am I showing you? Because you’ve got to know. You’ve got to appreciate what the worst is. You don’t want to find yourself in a situation where you’re facing it. CONSTANT VIGILANCE!” He roared, and the whole class jumped again.
“Now… Those three curses — Avada Kedavra, Imperius, and Cruciatus — are known as the Unforgivable Curses. The use of any one of them on a fellow human being is enough to earn a life sentence in Azkaban. That’s what you’re up against. That’s what I’ve got to teach you to fight. You need preparing. You need arming. But most of all, you need to practice constant, never-ceasing vigilance. Get out your quills and copy this down...”
They spent the rest of the lesson taking notes on each of the Unforgivable Curses. No one spoke until the bell rang — but when Moody had dismissed them and they had left the classroom, a torrent of talk burst forth. Most people were discussing the curses in awed voices — “Did you see it twitch?” “— and when he killed it — just like that!”
They were talking about the lesson, Shiloe thought viciously, as though it had been some sort of spectacular show, but he hadn’t found it very entertaining — and nor, it seemed, had Hermione.
“Hurry up!” She said tensely to Shiloe and Ron.
“Hungry?” Asked Ron in confusion.
“No,” said Hermione curtly, pointing up a side passage. “Neville.”
Shiloe was thankful that she wanted to do the same thing he did— Make sure Neville was all right.
Neville was standing alone, halfway up the passage, staring at the wall opposite him with the same horrified, wide-eyed look he had worn when Moody had demonstrated the Cruciatus Curse.
“Neville?” Hermione said gently.
Neville looked around.
“Oh hello.” He said, his voice much higher than usual. “Interesting lesson, wasn’t it? I wonder what’s for dinner, I’m — I’m starving, aren’t you?”
“Neville, are you all right?” said Hermione.
Shiloe wanted to touch him, but held back, afraid that he’d overload and lose control of his powers, exposing himself and endangering Harry.
“Oh yes, I’m fine.” Neville gabbled in the same unnaturally high voice. “Very interesting dinner — I mean lesson — what’s for eating?”
Ron gave Shiloe a startled look.
“Neville,” Shiloe started to ask, “What’s wr-”
But an odd clunking noise sounded behind them, and they turned to see Professor Moody limping toward them. All four of them fell silent, watching him apprehensively, but when he spoke, it was in a much lower and gentler growl than they had yet heard.
“It’s all right, sonny.” He said to Neville. “Why don’t you come up to my office? Come on… We can have a cup of tea…”
Neville looked even more frightened at the prospect of tea with Moody. He neither moved nor spoke. Moody turned his magical eye upon Shiloe.
“You all right, are you, Potter?”
“Yes.” Said Shiloe, almost defiantly.
Moody’s blue eye quivered slightly in its socket as it surveyed Shiloe. Then he said, “You’ve got to know. It seems harsh, maybe, but you’ve got to know. No point pretending… Well… Come on, Longbottom, I’ve got some books that might interest you.”
Neville looked pleadingly at Shiloe, Ron, and Hermione, but Shiloe couldn’t find any plausible excuse to keep him from tea with a teacher, so Neville had no choice but to allow himself to be steered away, one of Moody’s gnarled hands on his shoulder.
“What was that about?” said Ron, watching Neville and Moody turn the corner.
“I don’t know,” said Hermione, looking pensive.
“Some lesson, though, eh?” Said Ron to Shiloe as they set off for the Great Hall. “Fred and George were right, weren’t they? He really knows his stuff, Moody, doesn’t he? When he did Avada Kedavra, the way that spider just died, just snuffed it right —”
But Ron fell suddenly silent at the look on Shiloe’s face and didn’t speak again until they reached the Great Hall, when he said he supposed they had better make a start on Professor Trelawney’s predictions tonight, since they would take hours.
Shiloe groaned, but agreed.
*****
Shiloe and Ron walked to Gryffindor Tower, and Shiloe, who had been thinking of nothing else all through dinner, now raised the subject of the Unforgivable Curses himself.
“Wouldn’t Moody and Dumbledore be in trouble with the Ministry if they knew we’d seen the curses?” He asked as they approached the Fat Lady.
“Yeah, probably.” Said Ron. “But Dumbledore’s always done things his way, hasn’t he, and Moody’s been getting in trouble for years, I reckon. Attacks first and asks questions later — look at his dustbins. Balderdash.”
The Fat Lady swung forward to reveal the entrance hole, and they climbed into the Gryffindor common room, which was crowded and noisy.
“Shall we get our Divination stuff, then?” Shiloe asked.
“I s’pose.” Ron groaned.
They went up to the dormitory to fetch their books and charts, to find Neville there alone, sitting on his bed, reading. He looked a good deal calmer than at the end of Moody’s lesson, though still not entirely normal. His eyes were rather red.
“You all right, Neville?” Shiloe asked him gently.
“Oh yes.” Said Neville, “I’m fine, thanks. Just reading this book Professor Moody lent me...”
He held up the book: Magical Water Plants of the Mediterranean.
“Apparently, Professor Sprout told Professor Moody I’m really good at Herbology.” Neville said. There was a faint note of pride in his voice that Shiloe had rarely heard there before. “He thought I’d like this.”
Telling Neville what Professor Sprout had said, Shiloe thought, had been a very tactful way of cheering Neville up, for Neville very rarely heard that he was good at anything. It was the sort of thing Professor Lupin would have done.
Shiloe and Ron took their copies of “Unfogging the Future” back down to the common room, found a table, and set to work on their predictions for the coming month. An hour later, they had made very little progress, though their table was littered with bits of parchment bearing sums and symbols, and Shiloe’s brain was as fogged as though it had been filled with the fumes from Professor Trelawney’s fire.
“I haven’t got a clue what this lot’s supposed to mean,” he said, staring down at a long list of calculations.
“You know,” said Ron, whose hair was on end because of all the times he had run his fingers through it in frustration, “I think it’s back to the old Divination standby.”
“What — make it up?”
“Yeah,” said Ron, sweeping the jumble of scrawled notes off the table, dipping his pen into some ink, and starting to write.
“Next Monday,” he said as he scribbled, “I am likely to develop a cough, owing to the unlucky conjunction of Mars and Jupiter.” He looked up at Shiloe. “You know her — just put in loads of misery, she’ll lap it up.”
“Right,” said Shiloe, crumpling up his first attempt and lobbing it over the heads of a group of chattering first years into the fire. “Okay… on Monday, I will be in danger of — er — burns.”
“Yeah, you will be.” Said Ron darkly. “We’re seeing the Skrewts again on Monday. Okay, Tuesday, I’ll… erm…”
“Lose a treasured possession,” Shiloe suggested, flicking through “Unfogging the Future” for ideas.
“Good one,” said Ron, copying it down. “Because of… Erm… Mercury. Why don’t you get stabbed in the back by someone you thought was a friend?”
“Yeah… Cool…” said Shiloe, scribbling it down, “because… Venus is in the twelfth house.”
“And on Wednesday, I think I’ll come off worst in a fight.”
“Aaah, I was going to have a fight. Okay, I’ll lose a bet.”
“Yeah, you’ll be betting I’ll win my fight.”
They met each other’s eyes and smiled, and Shiloe felt a strange thrill run though him at the easy camaraderie he and the redhead had found. Maybe he’d be able to allow at least one of Harry’s best friends into his Pack without too much fuss.
Shiloe cast ‘Tempus’ and cursed. “I have to go!” He told Ron hurriedly as Neville came down the dormitory stairs.
Neville smiled at him. “I’ll join you, shall I?” Neville asked with a grin.
“I think that should be fine.” Shiloe accepted, adding under his breath, “Since we’re headed to the same place.”
Shiloe packed up his stuff and they rushed to the fourth floor, getting there three minutes before seven, winded.
Cedric was already waiting for them, and he smiled. “Oh, good. Here to let us in?” He asked teasingly.
Shiloe chuckled, letting them in and seeing Draco and Blaise turn the corner, chatting. He left the door opened just the tiniest bit for them.
“Sorry.” He said to Cedric. “I was doing some homework with Ron. He’s easier to get along with now, I don’t know why.”
Neville smiled. “That’s good! He’s brilliant at strategy and planning, and you could probably benefit from that.”
Shiloe snorted. “I doubt that. I plan pretty well, myself. But Harry could.” He allowed.
“He’s told me to keep it quiet, but I know I can trust you.” Draco whispered to Blaise as they came in, Shiloe’s enhanced hearing picking up the words.
Blaise nodded. “We’ll need to talk about this later.” He said, before walking up to Shiloe. “We missed you.” The black boy breathed, leaning in to kiss Shiloe lovingly. “And it’s almost time.” Blaise added against his lips.
Shiloe wrapped his arms around Blaise’s waist. “I’m happy to hear that.” He raised an eyebrow. “Hmm… I see one, two, three, four, five anchors. I DO believe we’re missing someone. Where is Sev?”
“Potions lab, dungeons. He seems to have lost track of the time.” Helga’s voice answered vacantly from her frame.
Shiloe sighed. “Fine, can I get a door?” He asked testily.
“No.” Rowena commented. “Give him ten minutes, and he will come to a good stopping point. He will check the time then. The potion is very volatile right now. I won’t have you injuring either yourself or your anchor out of foolishness. Stupid boy.”
Shiloe huffed and crossed his arms, walking over the flop onto the couch. “Merlin’s balls! A simple ‘no’ would have sufficed, don’t you think?!” He grumbled.
Draco chuckled. “Simple is one thing I’ve found most Purebloods AREN’T.” He informed the green-eyed teen, who was, literally, under a personal storm cloud at the time.
Shiloe looked up at the cloud and sighed. Apparently, Neville’s emotional outburst had only gone unnoticed earlier because Shiloe had been overexerting himself trying to keep his shields strong enough to block out ALL the Outsiders’ emotions, making him block out the anchors he wasn’t ‘tuned into’ at the time, as well. He was losing control of his powers, and he could feel his shields weakening, before they shuddered, and finally shattered as one.
When his shields had finally snapped, magical exhaustion rolled over him in waves and he slumped to the side, blackness claiming him.
