Redo

Chapter 4

"You sure took your sweet time." Hermione said, looking over a book at Ron. She had always loved reading, but she had pretty much dropped the hobby in favour of looking at Harry's case. She was happy that she had picked it up again.

"I see you got Harry to go to bed." Ron said, looking around and not seeing Harry.

"Actually Nev did, I'm not entirely sure how, plus I won the game of rock paper scissors, he always starts with rock." Hermione sighed as she put her book down, looking at Ron like she was his mother. "You still haven't told me what took you so long."

"Didn't you think it was a little odd how Malfoy was acting? It wasn't like how he did last time, so I asked him if he remembered. He does. He said that we should be careful of people who seemed to be close to him last time but don't remember that time, but he didn't explain much. I invited him to the meeting. What took most of the time though was him proving a sleeping potion he developed was safe, then I had to haul him to Slytherin." Ron said, sitting heavily on the sofa, looking rather a lot more like the 17 year old he had been before.

"Oh, he's not going to use what happened last time to hurt Harry, right?" Hermione asked, looking a little more interested.

"He swore he wouldn't. I think he has more to say that he'll tell everyone in the meeting. He said he thinks he knows what spell turned back time." Ron sighed, feeling exhausted. He had been used to feeling tired because as last time, but during the recent time he had been sleeping much better, just knowing Harry was alive.

"Well, that's not important right now. Have you read the Daily Prophet recently?" Hermione changed the subject, picking up the newspaper in question from beside her where it was folded neatly in such a way the front page was missing.

"No, after everything Skeeter said about Harry for more reads I decided to never buy it again, even mum stopped reading it. You know this." Ron said, he knew the reason why she was hired, but honestly they couldn't call it a newspaper if she was the most popular writer.

"That's true, but like it or not there's only the Daily Prophet or the Quibbler, and neither are reliable. Anyway, read the first page." Hermione said, tossing it at Ron. Sure, when the war was raging the Quibbler could be trusted to be more honest than the Daily Prophet, even if before that they neglected actual news.

On the first page was a picture that wasn't supposed to show up until third year, the picture of Sirius shortly after being placed in Azkaban. Looking at this picture it wasn't hard to understand how people believed he was insane or would do that to his friends. In all fairness as much of his mind as he might have kept he was still in Azkaban for 12 years.

"Sirius escaped?" Ron asked, looking at the picture, not bothering to read through the article.

"How much do you want to bet that he remembers? At least it happened while we're already at Hogwarts. He'll probably come here and we can get him and Harry to talk, hopefully before someone tells Harry the Bull version of events." Hermione said, looking intensely into the fire as she though of how much anguish Harry had gone through, and all for nothing. "By the way where is Scabbers?"

"Left him at home, dad's looking into who we can trust to hand him into. He can't escape." Ron reassured. "I'm going to bed, see you tomorrow."

"Okay, sleep well, I'm going to read for a little longer." Hermione said, Crooshanks beside her where she stroked him, he had tried hard to get into the boys dorm, but at least not today.

Ron trudged tiredly up to the dorm room, ready to just collapse into his bed and sleep too late before having breakfast and going to their lessons. He couldn't remember his first year timetable for the life of him, but he did remember what they had learnt. When he reached the dorm room though, Harry was upright and sweating, tears also in his eyes.