Chapter 1
All Was Not Well. It’s dark in the room, but Harry Potter can still just make out the figure of George Weasley standing in front of him. A shock of red hair and the signature look of someone who is going to cause trouble. But at second glance, Harry can see that this person has two ears, where George should only have one, and that George’s eyes don’t twinkle like that anymore and his mouth no longer quirks up the way it used to and the realisation hits him like a tonne of cinderblocks that this isn’t George Weasley, It’s Fred. The scene dissolves and rematerializes around him but now he isn’t standing in a dark room, he’s outside the Room of Requirement and he’s standing with Hermione and Ron and Fred, George and Percy. Percy had just jinxed Thicknesse who was on the ground looking rather similar to a sea urchin.
Fred is laughing, ‘you actually are joking, Perce… I don’t think I’ve heard you joke since we were-‘
But then the air around them erupts and they are all thrown away, and when it seemed only a split second beforehand they were all in relative safety, the universe is ripped apart. Harry is flying through the air, nearly dropping his wand and landing with a thud on the stone floor, hearing the shrieks and yells of his companions without knowing what has happened to them. And then the world somehow resolves itself- snaps back into reality like a rubber band pulled too tightly- into pain and semi-darkness: he is half buried under a pile of stones and the warm stickiness on his cheek tells him that he is bleeding rather heavily. Then he hears a terrible cry, one which pulls at his insides and expresses a sort of agony that cannot be caused by flames or curses, and he stands up, more frightened then he might ever have been in his life.
‘No – no – no – no!’ somebody is shouting. ‘No! Please no! Fred! No!’
And Percy is shaking his little brother and Ron is kneeling beside them and George looks almost as dead as his twin and Fred stares, ever unseeing, at the roof, and the look of entertainment makes a permanent home on his face. And hopeless sorrow pours into Harry like an ocean and the halls of Hogwarts are gone again and he is back in the dark room with Fred.
‘You did this to me! It’s your fault that I’m dead! Can’t you see that if you weren’t here, if Voldemort had killed you as a baby like he was meant to, none of this would have happened! I would still be here! Running the store with George! Messing with my brothers! Giving Ginny’s dates a rough time! I would have still been alive! ALIVE! BUT NO YOU HAD TO SURVIVE AND WE ALL FOUGHT FOR YOU HARRY! LOOK WHERE THAT GOT US!? I’M DEAD! DEAD BECAUSE OF YOU!’ Fred is screaming, and Harry knows that every word he utters is the truth, because he wouldn’t’ve been dead if Harry was first.
‘I’m sorry’ He whispers ‘I am so sorry. I can’t even at look myself in the mirror. I am sorry Fred. I’m so-‘
‘Harry, Harry mate, wake up. You’re having another dream. Harry!’ harry could hear Ron faintly beneath Fred’s screaming and he felt himself being shaken but the dream had got him trapped. ‘Hermione, he’s not waking up!’
‘Sonorous’ he heard over Fred shouting, and the word sounds familiar, though he can’t remember from where, ‘Harry!’
Hermione’s voice is so loud that it wakes Harry. And if not for the silencing charms cast on the room would have woken half of the entire school. However all through the Gryffindor dorms, people are stirring, some shoot bolt upright in bed, others merely cracking an eyelid and rolling over to go back to sleep. Because this was now quite a common occurrence at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, every few nights, a selection of students and teachers alike would be awoken by a sonorous-ed wake up call for Harry Potter.
In the Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw rooms the cries could very occasionally be heard, only when the silencing charms broke, and whether or not the students woke up on these nights was closely correlated to whether or not they could sleep through a clap of thunder at night. From the Slytherin dungeons, almost nobody woke, even the, save for a few exceptionally jumpy other eighth years and the very occasional younger light sleeper. No one had worked out why the sound travelled that far in the first place (Seamus had laughed and said “magic”). But if you were never sleeping in the first place, you can’t be woken, which is why Draco Malfoy heard Hermione’s shouting more often than most.