"If your whole life turns out to be a lie, what will you do then?"
"If everything you knew turns out to be a hoax, what will you do then?"
Graciana Duerre Weasley, twin sister of Ron Weasley, is a troublemaker. Mischievous but a little introvert, bo...
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NUMBER TWELVE, GRIMMAULD PLACE was a lonely house. And it was more lonely than ever because her father wasn't alive. Before when she lived here, her father had been there. Grace wasn't yet used to the silence in the runaways, the only sound coming from themselves. Just the four of them, stitched in the silence for two days, two days in which they were entirely Kreacher-less and entirely progress-less.
Kreacher did not return the following day, nor the day after that. However, two cloaked men had appeared in the square outside number twelve, and they remained there into the night, gazing in the direction of the house that they could not see.
The presence of the Death Eaters outside increased the ominous mood inside number twelve. They had not heard a word form anyone beyond Grimmauld Place since Arthur's Patronus, and the strain was starting to tell. Restless and irritable, Ron had developed an annoying habit of playing with the Deluminator in his pocket; This particularly infuriated Hermione, who was whiling away the wait for Kreacher by studying The Tales of Beedle the Bard and did not appreciate the way the lights kept flashing on and off.
"Will you stop it!" she cried on the third evening of Kreacher's absence, as all the light was sucked from the drawing room yet again.
"Sorry, sorry!" said Ron, clicking the Deluminator and restoring the lights. "I don't know I'm doing it!"
"Well, can't you find something useful to occupy yourself?"
"What, like reading kids' stories?"
"Dumbledore left me this book, Ron –"
"—and he left me the Deluminator, maybe I'm supposed to use it!"
Unable to stand the bickering, Grace and Harry slipped out of the room unnoticed by either of them. Halfway down the flight of stairs into the hall, however, Grace heard a tap on the front door, then metallic clicks and the grinding of the chain.
Every nerve in her body seemed to tauten: Both her and Harry pulled out their wands, moved into the shadows beside the decapitated elf heads, and waited. The door opened: Grace saw a glimpse of the lamp-lit square outside, and a cloaked figure edged into the hall and closed the door behind it. The intruder took a step forward, and Moody's voice asked, "Severus Snape?" Then the dust figure rose from the end of the hall and rushed him, raising its dead hand.
"It was not I who killed you, Albus," said a quiet voice.
The jinx broke: The dust-figure exploded again, and it was impossible to make out the newcomer through the dense gray cloud it left behind.
