Stay - Mattheo Riddle

Chapter 110

"I think they've stopped arguing," said Hermione, to cover the awkward silence "Shall we go down and help your mum with dinner?"

"Yeah, all right," said Ron. The five of them left Ron's room and went back downstairs to find Mrs. Weasley alone in the kitchen, looking extremely bad-tempered.

"We're eating out in the garden," she said when they came in. "There's just not room for twelve people in here. Could you take the plates outside, Hermione and Ginny? Bill and Charlie are setting up the tables. Knives and forks, please, you three," she said to Kirra, Ron, and Harry, pointing her wand a little more vigorously than she had intended at a pile of potatoes in the sink, which shot out of their skins so fast that they ricocheted off the walls and ceiling.

"Oh for heaven's sake," she snapped, now directing her wand at a dustpan, which hopped off the sideboard and started skating across the floor, scooping up the potatoes. "Those two!" she burst out savagely, now pulling pots and pans out of a cupboard, and Kirra knew she meant Fred and George. 

"I don't know what's going to happen to them, I really don't. No ambition, unless you count making as much trouble as they possibly can. . . ." Mrs. Weasley slammed a large copper saucepan down on the kitchen table and began to wave her wand around inside it.

Kirra looked down at the floor in sympathy for two of her best friends, she just wished that Mrs Weasley would see how much they loved what they were doing, and Kirra truly believed that they had a good future in the prank creating business.

A creamy sauce poured from the wand tip as she stirred. "It's not as though they haven't got brains," she continued irritably, taking the saucepan over to the stove and lighting it with a further poke of her wand, "but they're wasting them, and unless they pull themselves together soon, they'll be in real trouble. I've had more owls from Hogwarts about them than the rest put together. If they carry on the way they're going, they'll end up in front of the Improper Use of Magic Office."

Mrs. Weasley jabbed her wand at the cutlery drawer, which shot open. The three fourteen year olds quickly jumped out of the way as several knives soared out of it, flew across the kitchen, and began chopping the potatoes, which had just been tipped back into the sink by the dustpan.

"I don't know where we went wrong with them," said Mrs.Weasley, putting down her wand and starting to pull out still more saucepans. "It's been the same for years, one thing after another, and they won't listen to —" Kirra went to stand up for the twins but she was cut off

"OH NOT AGAIN !" She had picked up her wand from the table, and it had emitted a loud squeak and turned into a giant rubber mouse. "One of their fake wands again!" she shouted. "How many times have I told them not to leave them lying around?"

She grabbed her real wand and turned around to find that the sauce on the stove was smoking.

"C'mon," Ron said hurriedly to Kirra and Harry, seizing a handful of cutlery from the open drawer, "let's go and help Bill and Charlie." They left Mrs. Weasley and headed out the back door intothe yard.

They had only gone a few paces when Hermione's bandy-legged ginger cat, Crookshanks, came pelting out of the garden, bottlebrush tail held high in the air, chasing what looked like a muddy potato on legs. 

Kirra recognized it instantly as a gnome. Barely ten inches high, its horny little feet pattered very fast as it sprinted across the yard and dived headlong into one of the Wellington boots that lay scattered around the door. 

Kirra could hear the gnome giggling madly as Crookshanks inserted a paw into the boot, trying to reach it. Meanwhile, a very loud crashing noise was coming from the other side of the house.