Circles Never End
Circles Never End
We spent that entire day and most of the night in the hospital, working as volunteers until enough reinforcements had arrived in the very early hours of the morning that we were able to finally stop and rest. Andre and Jae had heard about what happened and had come down to help, and to make sure that Penny was okay.
None of us wanted to stay there a moment longer than we had to so as soon as we were given the green light by the Head Healers, all seven of us Apparated back to Amethyst Avenue together.
Barnaby and I told our friends to treat our house as their own, offering food, showers, changes of clothes, beds to crash in and anything else they might need. I was comforted to have them all there but also worried. We'd already been questioned many times about what happened. We would need to get our stories straight and figure out how to handle the inquiry that would surely be coming soon.
After a bit of getting cleaned up and some food everyone accepted the beds we'd offered and went to get at least a few hours of sleep. I was planning to stay up and keep watch for Ministry Officials coming to question us, but Barnaby wouldn't hear of it. He cast a few security spells on the house and said it'd be enough to wake us if anyone came by.
We all slept but I was plagued by nightmares and awoke in the early afternoon quite distraught. Barnaby was already up and out of bed, so I made my way downstairs to find not just everyone who had stayed over, but nearly the entire Circle of Khanna in my kitchen.
Barnaby, Alexi, Chiara, Penny, Andre and Jae had been joined by Tonks, Tulip, Ben, Talbot, Merula, Ismelda, Diego, Liz, Badeea and Charlie.
I couldn't help it, seeing so many people I loved all at once hit me in the strangest way, and I started crying. I felt so much guilt over what I'd done at St Mungo's, my stupidity and recklessness could have cost the lives of more of my friends.
I stood in the doorway, silently wiping away tears as I looked at my housefull of friends. I couldn't bear it. I walked into the room and told them I was going to take myself into the Ministry and confess to what I'd done. Creating the Inferus, destroying a large part of St Mungo's, all of it. I deserved to be in Azkaban. Someone like me shouldn't be allowed to walk about freely, causing disaster everywhere I went.
"It's not your fault Samhain" Barnaby was the first to speak. But that didn't make it better, because he was wrong. It was all my fault. And I told him so, angrily.
"No it isn't. We were there too. We didn't stop you, we helped you. We all broke the rules together. And really, we had no way of knowing what would happen. We're all equally guilty here" Penny argued back at me.
"Well, I'm not actually guilty. You know, but if you lot had told me what you were planning to do I sure would be" remarked Jae with a wicked smile.
"Yeah, how dare you not invite the rest of us Strixx, that was just plain selfish of you." Merula grinned at me from across the table.
Everyone was quick to chime in on how they all felt slighted that we'd been having all the fun. Obviously Barnaby had told the story to our friends as they'd arrived that morning, and not one of them was willing to let me accept the blame for what had happened.
I just listened as my friends roasted me for a while, knowing it was coming from a place of love and comradery but still knowing I was the one who had crossed the line. It was always me. Professor Snape had once accused me of being 'the ringleader of catastrophe', and he'd been right. I was always leading my friends into dangerous situations. It used to be breaking school rules, risking death or worse, expulsion.
But when I'd graduated from school, I'd also graduated in the seriousness of my mistakes. Now I was sure I had broken at least a few laws. I'd also endangered countless other people. Healers, sick and injured witches and wizards in a bloody hospital. And for what?
To find out that touching the ring hadn't done anything to me. And it didn't matter anyway, because I'd left it attached to the Inferus's severed finger on the floor of the crumbling morgue. I'd also lost the one of a kind book Dumbledore had trusted us with, but that part didn't bother me as much. Dumbledore had been wrong to trust me.
"She's not listening anymore" Chiara laughed. That brought me out of my thoughts and as usual, I found all my friends staring at me. "Had a nice holiday at kicking yourself camp Samhain?" Ben asked with a smirk. Gah, he knew me too well. I didn't want them to make me feel better, I wanted them to agree with me that I was a dangerous lunatic. Not fit to mix with polite society, or even the thugs and other scum of the wizarding world. I was lower than that even.
"Look, you see the way her eyes drift off, she's doing it again. That's how I always know when Samhain goes on holiday in her head." Andre gleefully took his turn to take the piss.
"Samhain? Will you please listen?" Barnaby chided me gently. I nodded, for him I would.
"No one's saying you're a saint. Okay? None of us are saints. We've all done stupid, dangerous, possibly, er, well now almost definitely illegal things. No one is going to try to claim otherwise. What we're trying to tell you is you're not in this alone. You never have been and you never will be. We've all got your back. And if you're looking for someone to blame, look at me. It's my damn family that started all of this. You just got caught up along the way, trying to break the curse. Because that's who you are, and what you're best at." he finished speaking and I looked around the room at everyone. They were all nodding in agreement. Well, if I was the ringleader of catastrophe, they were my band of merry fools.
I could see arguing would get me nowhere with that lot. They all looked ready to jump back in calling me a twat for trying to take all the credit.
I sighed. I was outnumbered sixteen to one.
It dawned on me then. Seventeen. There were seventeen of us in that room. Before Rowan died we'd been a group of seventeen, excluding the younger kids like Beatrice, the twins and Cedric, and Bill because he'd already left school. That number kept cropping up, seventeen times the ring had flashed from purple to black. And there were seventeen people here, who might die because of my reckless obsessions. And we were all seventeen years old. It hit me like a bludger to the gut. I had no way of confirming it, but I knew it was true all the way down in my bones. And I also knew that Dumbledore had arrived at that point several days ago.
"Seventeen curses." I said out loud. My friends stared at me in confusion. "Seventeen times, Barnaby, that ring. It's killed seventeen people." I turned to him then and was shocked to see him produce the ring again. Nestled snugly back in its purple velvet box and looking no different that it had the previous day, if anything, slightly shinier.
"How?" was all I managed to say.
"I er, well I, summoned it, out of the morgue. Along with this." He laid the heavy, leather bound book on the table. It wasn't even singed. "The ring was still attached to the Inferus's finger, that was foul. But they both came easily enough, and I thought it best not to leave any evidence behind." Barnaby explained, looking rather guilty.
I didn't know what to say for a minute, but then finally, I accepted it. I wasn't going to get to play the martyr and go down alone. However much I didn't want to endanger or even involve these people, I could see that it wasn't up to me, and not up for discussion. They had made their point.
"Alright. Fine. What's the plan then, what do we do next?" I asked Barnaby.
Sixteen faces broke into sixteen grins. "Well that's what we'd been discussing before you showed up and derailed us" Merula said, rolling her eyes.
I laughed. "How did you all even know to come?"
"That was Barnaby, he had his head in the fireplace all morning telling us we had to get our arses back here pronto." Charlie chuckled. "I had to tell my program director there was a family emergency but I managed to get the time off."
"I said the same to my tutor." Badeea admitted.
"We were in Nepal and it was rather dull, so we figured may as well come back and see what we'd been missing out on." Ismelda butted in. Diego kicked her under the table and clarified."We'd actually been talking about how we missed you lot, and the adventures. We'd never let you face something so dangerous without us Samhain."
I smiled at my friends. "So, we need a story?"
"Already got one, of course." Tulip bragged. "It was an Erumpent horn. Just like last time. The Ministry quite plainly sucks at investigating them. Any time there's an explosion, if they can't find any real evidence of what caused it, they just say it was that." "An Erumpent horn in St Mungo's morgue?" I raised my eyebrow skeptically.
"Why not? It sounds a heck of a lot more likely than Inferi. Or at least equally likely." Penny asserted.
"Alright. And what about us, what do we say we were doing? A Healer asked me last night how close I'd been to the blast, because we were the dirtiest and most beat up looking. I told her I couldn't remember anything" I said, shrugging sheepishly at my weak cover.
"I said I'd been knocked unconscious, which was true." Barnaby laughed. "I told them I'd snuck off to the morgue for a bit of privacy with my boyfriend during lunch." Chiara admitted, grinning at Alexi. "I got told off already. Might get an official reprimand for it but that'd be it. I couldn't think of another way to explain Alexi's presence there" she finished.
"And I covered for you two. Said I'd accompanied you down to the morgue to identify the body of your late, great aunt. I actually got complimented for helping out in another department when we were short of staff, and for staying to help. Chiara and I will probably both get a pay raise. Plus all the bodies got creamated so they didn't ask too much else. No one wanted to be near that smell." Penny explained, her eyes twinkling with mischief.
"So.. everything is covered? Then what is it you're all here to help with?" I was massively confused.
"Strixx you are thick, we came to help you break the curse of course. You'd never manage it on your own, just tell us you're glad to see us and what we can do help." Merula snarked at me.
"Well I am glad to see you, all of you, thank you for coming. And you're right Merula, we do need help." I admitted. "Let's hit the books and start planning."