The door to The Burrow shut behind Sunset and Luna and they stood there for a moment just coming to terms with the situation. "Well, that's a mess," Sunset remarked.

"Oh, yes," Luna agreed. "More than the one we had in the living room after coming back from the hospital. Fortunately, I don't see that there's any way for us to get involved in it."

"...Re-repressing that and moving on," Sunset said, wishing Luna hadn't reminded her of that stomach-turning image. It was a good thing that Professor McGonagall had been there and had known a spell seemingly for cleaning up murder scenes; Sunset would not have enjoyed having to deal with it herself. "Aren't you worried about your friend?"

Luna hmmed, thinking about the matter as they headed down the footpath away from The Burrow. "Well, it certainly is a pickle, but it may be for the best. Ginny always did have strange ideas about Harry Potter, and all else being equal, it might not be a terrible experience for her to have met the real thing as soon as possible."

"You're one to talk about having strange ideas," Sunset remarked with some sarcasm.

Luna nodded. "Yes," she agreed. "I am. I would consider myself an expert, as a matter of fact."

Sunset couldn't really argue with that. "Still, though," she said. "If the worst that Dumbledore suspects is true about Harry Potter, then he might not be in a very happy situation. He certainly didn't look it. Your friend could actually be in danger."

Luna frowned at that. "True," she said, looking down. "But Dumbledore did say that as Harry's familiar, she should have been integrated into whatever wards and enchantments are on the property. Whatever other oversights there were with the wards, I have no doubt that she's physically safe."

"Well," Sunset said, looking around to make sure that they were alone. "That's assuming that she got the whole familiar thing right, anyway. She didn't seem to be entirely sure how it had gone down."

Luna winced at the oblique mention of the seelie queen and stopped to look around herself. Fortunately for the both of them, Titania was nowhere to be seen.

"You know," Sunset said as they started to walk again. "I really would have thought she'd show up, just then. I don't like not knowing where she is, knowing she's in the area."

"She might have returned to Faerie," Luna pointed out. "As she was a snorkack here on Earth, she must have your snorkack physicality herself, meaning Faerie cannot benefit from it while she's gone. She'd want to spend some time back there to make the most use of it, I would think."

Sunset thought that was a nice and tidy answer, but she didn't trust it. "Or maybe she split it up," she argued, not quite willing to let down her guard just yet.

"It wouldn't last forever, though," Luna mused. "Or she would have all the human physicality she could ever want, having gained it from humans previously, and I think I can say, from my own experience, that my effect on Faerie was certainly waning by the time you and daddy came for me. I don't know if she would leave it behind, where it could pass her by in Faerie time."

That brought up a good point. "If it does wear down," she said, thinking over the matter. "Then she would be on the lookout for more."

Luna nodded. "Which explains Ginny."

"Which explains Ginny," Sunset agreed. "So now we not only have to be worried about what might happen to her because of Harry Potter, but because Titania isn't done with her, since Titania didn't get any of her physicality."

"But we already knew that," Luna concluded. "If only because Ginny has attracted her attention."

"Great," Sunset groused. "What are the chances she makes it to Hogwarts before making another deal, do you think?"

"Oh, quite good, I would think," Luna said. "The muggle world is one of the safest places from the fae that you can be."

"Ah, right, the iron," Sunset said, remembering that most of the iron that Luna and her father had wielded against the fae had been of muggle manufacture. "So the fae are a uniquely magical problem."

"Not even that," Luna said as the two of them approached The Rookery. "Having to deal with the fae is quite unusual for most people. For most, they have heard the stories and know only enough as to want nothing to do with them. The idea of something so outside their knowledge makes them uncomfortable, and so they desire to pretend it does not exist. Most of the time, it obliges."

"So, it's a local thing?" Sunset reasoned.

"Some of that," Luna allowed. "The forests and hills here are certainly more porous than most, but no, I wouldn't say it's local. Ireland has it worse, I think, and some families just tend to attract the fae."

"Lucky us," Sunset said, having no doubt that she was now among their number.

Five minutes later, Luna was in her father's study looking over his notes for the next issue of The Quibbler while Sunset was in the kitchen looking at what passed for an icebox in the Lovegood home, seeing what she had to work with.

She sighed.

This was her life now; making dinner for an eleven-year-old instead of looking through spell books or doing anything at all towards finding her way home.

Well, it was better than living in the forest on the edge of town eating bark, mushrooms and shrubbery, anyway.

⁂

Ginny's heart was beating like that of a full-sized horse as she and the boy who was in the cupboard with her listened for any sound of movement in the dark of the house. Surely it had to be after midnight by now, she thought, and there was no chance of running into the insufferable Dursleys. Ginny hadn't even had to interact with them directly and she was already on her last nerve regarding the probably-not family of the boy who wasn't Harry Potter. Just listening to them kvetch and yammer over the dinner table grated like nothing else. As much as her six older brothers all got on her nerves from time to time, she'd never imagined that a family dinner could be so nettlesome and antagonistic.

Briefly, it crossed her mind to wonder how long it would be until she saw her family again, but it hadn't yet been quite long enough for the lack to really set in, so she ignored it in favor of waiting for the boy to decide that the Dursleys really had gone into a deep enough sleep that the two of them could risk sneaking into the kitchen to get something for themselves.

Finally, the boy pulled his ear away from the cupboard door and nodded.

"Ugh, finally," Ginny groaned as quietly as she could manage while still getting across her absolute despair. "I'm starving."

It was hard to tell in the dark, but it looked like the boy rolled his eyes at her. "It's not like I got anything today either," he remarked, rubbing his shoulder, and Ginny felt at least a little cowed. She had heard the ruckus that that Petunia woman had caused when Harry had gotten caught trying to sneak a dinner roll into his oversized shirt to bring back to her, and it had not been pretty. Losing the chance to sneak bites during cleanup was the least of it.

"I know, I know," Ginny said, feeling a pit in her stomach that probably wasn't just the hunger. "But I don't think this stomach has ever had food in it."

"Is that how that works?" the boy asked, honestly curious.

"I don't know!" Ginny hissed while still trying to keep quiet. "But it certainly feels like it."

Shaking his head, the boy went back to what he was doing without saying anything. As for what he was doing, that turned out to be bending over on his knees in the small space of the cupboard, carefully getting his fingers underneath the cupboard door, and slowly lifting. Once he'd pried the door up a finger's width, he then, gently leaned into the door with his shoulder, pressing into it until the soft sound of the latch popping free echoed through the silence of the night.

Ginny didn't need to be told to stay quiet as the two of them waited to see if the noise had gathered any attention.

It hadn't.

The boy slowly swung the door open, and to Ginny's confusion, it almost looked like daylight out in the rest of the house. It took her a moment to realize that there was nothing wrong or out of the ordinary going on, unless you counted her eyes being so well-adjusted to the darkness of the cupboard that she could clearly read the street sign on the corner from out the living room window.

Wait—no—she couldn't have read that even in broad daylight before.

Oh, right, her eyes were huge now, and she was some kind of flying equine. That probably explained it. She guessed flying ponies had good eyesight? She knew that birds had good eyesight, mainly because one previous seeker of the Holyhead Harpies was a peregrine animagus, which she claimed was responsible for her having better eyesight than ninety percent of the seekers in the league, and apparently Ginny wasn't much different from her now.

Neat.

You know, if you ignored the part where she was actually a tiny horse all the time instead of just some of the time like an actual animagus.

Of course, Ginny's focus on her eyesight distracted her from the main thing she should have been concerning herself with, which was the fact that she had four legs ending in hooves now and she'd never actually used them before.

The sound of hooves on Petunia's highly-polished wood flooring startled her, and the shock sent her tumbling snout-first into it in a series of thumps that were muffled only by the fact that she was soft and covered in fur.

"Ow," she said into the floor.

Ugh, the wood smelled sharply of furniture polish, too.

After another tense period of waiting to see if the Dursleys had noticed anything, Ginny carefully got to her hooves, paying much more attention to them in the process. Merlin; she'd gotten almost halfway used to her limbs ending in blunt appendages—not really, but enough to not be thinking about them for every second of the day—but standing on all-fours was an adjustment she really didn't know how to adapt to.

"Maybe you should stay inside," the boy whispered, hovering over her cautiously.

Ginny winced at the suggestion. She knew that it was the reasonable thing to do. She knew that she wasn't nearly familiar enough with her new body to be doing anything at all complicated, let alone something that might have real consequences, like sneaking around an unfamiliar house to steal food from the belligerent and volatile owners.

All the same, "No."

The boy didn't look entirely happy with that, but he kept quiet rather than make an issue of it.

Fortunately, Ginny did not trip on the way into the kitchen, though she took her sweet time going about it and still wasn't completely silent. She had plenty of experience sneaking around houses, but even ignoring actually moving her legs, figuring out what order to move her legs in took significant trial and error—mostly error—and walking quietly on human feet had been child's play compared to trying to do it with hooves. Maybe if she'd ever had the chance to learn to walk in heels, she might have done better at it, but she was eleven, and even the oldest pair in her mother's closet was much too large for her.

She'd checked.

Eventually, though, she did make it around the corner to the kitchen, where the boy was digging through the pantry looking for things that wouldn't be missed. Ginny closed in close behind him, thinking that she ought to be part of the decision process, but frowned at what she saw.

"What is all of this?" she asked, whispering with confusion.

If the boy thought the question was unusual, he didn't show it as he responded matter-of-factly, "Tea, peanuts, Jaffa Cakes, five different brands of crisps, digestives, and an old jar of Branston Pickle that probably ought to be in the fridge."

"...Okay," Ginny said, stepping back and shaking her head. Packaged foods weren't new to her or anything, but in the wizarding world it was mostly sweets and the like. It was a bit odd to see peanuts packaged up like they were chocolate frogs. Peanuts already had shells to begin with, didn't they?

Ginny let her eyes wander while she was musing on the weird things that muggles do, and found them drifting out the kitchen window. As short and tiny as she was—and she was shorter and tinier than she'd been as a human—all she could see was a small square of the night sky, but inside that small square was a striking crescent moon behind a handful of clouds that just made her want to go out and touch them, which was an odd thing to think.

...

Oh, right, she had wings, didn't she? Damn. Learning to walk on hooves was terrible, but suddenly she had an incredible urge to go outside and try out her wings, because surely that would go much better, right? Flying couldn't possibly be as confusing as having four entire legs, and she really wanted to be able to spread her wings before going back into that cramped, dark cupboard. Eyes glued on the moon, she whispered to the boy, "Do you think I could...?"

The boy, who had been digging through the pantry, took a moment to notice Ginny and her fascination with the outside. Eventually, though, he looked at Ginny, down at her wings, and the outside. "Um," he said, seeming to really consider it. Apparently, though, he missed the point entirely, as the next thing he did was look down at the small handful of things that he had clutched against his chest in a napkin. "...If you want to catch something instead, I guess that would be okay. I don't think anyone would see you, as long as it's quick."

Ginny stared at the boy. "...Catch something?" she said, repeating the words as if doing so would make them make any sense. She then looked down to the things that he was holding the same as he did. Right. The food, which meant... "You mean..." she looked outside, and balked, recoiling and scrunching her muzzle up in distaste. "Eww!" she said, communicating her disgust in the strongest terms she could manage while still staying quiet.

He seemed confused by her reaction at first, which made her wonder what he must consider normal. Did he get locked out of the house and have to... do that? "Oh, right," the boy said with mild enlightenment. "You're not actually an animal."

Ginny blinked and was belatedly insulted. "No, I am not an animal!" she reiterated, finally seeing where he was coming from and not happy about it. "Ugh, you...! I eat ham sandwiches, not rats! I'll be happy if the closest thing I get to a rat during a meal will be the time I caught Scabbers sniffing around my plate at the dinner table."

"Erm, right... Anyway... I don't have any ham sandwiches—opening the fridge is a risk—but I've got... well, it's a bunch of junk food, but it tastes good and it'll keep you from getting too thin," he said, only half joking.

Ginny looked at her stubby orange foreleg which was probably at least two, if not three times the size her wrist had been as a human, and thought that she wasn't at risk of that. She then looked at Harry in the moonlight, though, and had to remind herself that getting enough to eat was a real problem she was facing.

"...It's fine." she said. "I like most things. Um. Not lima beans, though. Or carrots; it's like eating wood, and they get disgusting if you cook them."

"No danger of that here," he said, "I didn't learn what a carrot was until I went to primary."

Ginny gave the boy a flat look. "You said the same thing about your name," she pointed out, wondering if he was making things up.

"Well, yeah," he said quite reasonably. "I also didn't learn about magnets until I went there either. It's a school; that's what it's for, and the Dursleys don't like it when I ask questions."

Ginny decided to drop the subject there on account of not knowing what a magnet was, herself. She'd never been to school, either. Were magnets taught at Hogwarts? Probably not, if it was a muggle thing.

"Anyway," he said, holding the napkin full of snack foods out and looking down at her hooves. "How are you going to...?"

Ginny thought about trying to hold the food in her hooves, but eventually had to admit that there'd be a mess if she dropped it and didn't want to take that risk, so she had the boy set the napkin full of snack foods on the ground in front of her.

On closer inspection, there were a fair few kinds of crisps, pretzels and similar sorts of greasy, salty or biscuity things. Aside from one or two that she couldn't identify, they weren't all that strange at all once they were out of their packaging, though they were all the sorts of things that her mother only would have given her once in a while, not as a meal.

"These are really things they won't miss?" she asked him, not disbelieving, exactly, just uncertain. If you took a single one of Ron's biscuits, for example, he'd definitely notice.

The boy shrugged. "These are skimmed off the top of all the things they go through the most of. You might think that it'd be better to sneak one of the granola bars out of the box in the back of the pantry, but they're thick as bricks and Aunt—I mean—Petunia has been avoiding the rest of them for a year. I guarantee she knows exactly how many are left and would notice the instant one went missing."

Weird, but that was good enough for Ginny and she bent down and picked a crisp up with her mouth.

It was good.

Almost worth having to eat it off a napkin on the floor like a dog.

One thing brought her up short; it looked like a thin, dry sausage inside a clear casing with printing on it. She tried eating it, but the casing was too tough for her teeth and clearly not intended to be eaten. Stymied, she looked closer at it and asked, "What's a... 'Peperami Wideboy?' Is that something your supposed-cousin calls himself, like when Percy writes his name on leftover watercress sandwiches that no one else likes anyway? How'd he label them like this? It looks professional."

Ginny looked up from her inspection of the snack, expecting an answer, only to find the boy on the ground, clutching his stomach, red in the face from laughing silently. It took a while of her sitting there, perturbed, to get him to actually explain that, no, that was just what the snack was called, no matter the similarities to his (not actually) cousin. He also explained the 'plastic' wrapper, which apparently kept the meat inside from spoiling. It didn't really seem to be an improvement over regular sausage casings.

She had half the dried, spiced sausage left in her mouth when the boy looked up with a start and asked, "Actually—can you eat that?"

Ginny blinked, crossing her eyes down her snout at the piece of meat sticking out from between her teeth. Carefully, she extracted the remainder of the thing by holding it between her forehooves, and said. "It seems like it's working so far?"

"I mean, horses don't eat meat," he said, then cocked his head to the side. "Or at least, I think they don't."

Ginny shrugged, and put the thing back in her mouth before she could drop it. Moments later, she swallowed and said. "I guess we'll find out. If I die, I'm blaming you," she cheerfully declared.

All in all, by the time the two of them headed back to the cupboard, Ginny's mood was greatly improved, which was a sad state of affairs, but it didn't take much to be better than sitting around in the dark in a cupboard. As they were passing through the living room, though, Ginny's eyes were drawn back outside through the window there.

Worrying at her lip, she said, "I know I shouldn't, but I really, really want to go outside and try flying with my wings..."

The boy considered that for a while, looking at her wings. "You know... There's a park nearby. It might be better if you hid out there instead of in the cupboard."

Ginny was tempted, but... "No," she said with a heavy sigh. Tip-hoofing the rest of her way to the aforementioned cupboard, she slipped inside and whispered, "Let me tell you about the statute of secrecy..."

⁂

Professor Minerva McGonagall was not inexperienced with being vexed, but she usually had a better focus for her ire than the two parchment envelopes and their associated letters, which were sitting in the center of her desk.

It had been a week since the truth about Harry Potter's situation had come to her attention during the events surrounding Ginny Weasley being turned into the boy's familiar, and she'd tried many things to actually get the pair of letters sent to her soon-to-be students.

Every one of them had failed. Every time she took an action with the specific event to get Harry and Ginny to live anywhere but Number Four, Privet Drive—and coming to Hogwarts apparently counted—her actions were stymied. She had suffered spilled inkwells, hand cramps, interruptions and eventually just a sudden and inexplicable feeling of dread that had prevented her from sending the letters. It was fascinating, in a way, the lengths that the wards were able to go to in order to prevent him from leaving his so-called 'home' for any length of time, and the fact that they could reach her at Hogwarts in Scotland suggested interesting things about the spells that had gone into the wards' making. She'd heard of precious few that did anything similar; only the fidelius came to mind, and it wasn't that. Really, the whole thing would probably be fertile ground for someone's research if it wasn't preventing her from looking into Harry Potter's home life and inviting the children to Hogwarts.

Muttering to herself, she paced back and forth in front of her desk, doubly irritated that the matter had her so roiled that she was strutting around dramatically not too unlike Severus Snape. Really, the way the man liked to swoop around with his robes reminded her of teen girls spinning their skirts. The man was in his thirties now; she really wished that he would grow up.

Disgusted with herself once she'd had that thought, Minerva decided that walking back and forth in her office was no way to go about things, and decided instead to get some air and stretch her legs—specifically, all four of them.

One moment, Minerva McGonagall, Professor of transfiguration was there, then, between one turn and the next, she was replaced with the most dignified black cat in the castle, which was true even outside of the summer months when her only competition was the ratty and haggard Mrs. Norris, the caretaker's familiar.

Slipping past the door to her office, Minerva bounded down the hall of the castle, putting worrying thoughts of children and letters aside for the moment to see if she could match her best zoomies-time down to the greenhouses. There was an actually-real pretend door down the charms corridor on the third floor that might get her to the great hall faster, if she could catch the right cycle.

Hours later, Minerva was stalking the abandoned classrooms on the seventh floor when she spotted one of the house elves cleaning up what was probably one of Peeves the Poltergeist's messes. The mess wasn't important, though; it was the house elf that gave her an idea. It was a stroke of luck, really, as the house elves considered it to be a mark of pride not to be seen doing their work, but cats were cats and the house elf in question was only all too happy to be distracted being mired in purple muck.

Making good time back to her office, Minerva became the human transfiguration professor once again, took a moment to tidy her robes, and began to enact her plan.

First, she conjured a box. This had nothing to do with her cat nature; instead, it was a lure for an entirely different class of creature than she was. Specifically, the box that she conjured was an 'out' box of the type that muggle office workers used. Conjuring plastic wasn't something that she taught to her students—the parents of the pureblood students would have fits—but she was a master of transfiguration on top of being a professor.

Next, she collected the letters; not just Harry and Ginny's letters, but all the rest of the muggleborn introduction letters that she hadn't gotten to quite yet. She was technically behind on those, but with the amount of the headmaster's work that she was doing on top of her own, she was pretty much always behind on something. Nevertheless, here and now it was a good thing, or this probably wouldn't work.

Minerva took those letters, and she dumped them in the 'out' box. She really hoped that this would work, or she would be feeling quite foolish in just a moment.

Finally, she... left her office and called a house elf.

A small, skinny house elf with knobbly knees popped in, bowed to Minerva and asked, "What can Slinky be doing for you, Professor Kitty Miss?"

And so, Minerva told Slinky what she wanted. Specifically, it was to deal with all the outgoing mail in the outbox that she'd conjured just moments ago in her office, and make sure that every single one got a proper response. Specifically, she noted that she wouldn't be taking any 'nos,' just in case there were problems.

Later, she would feel a bit remiss about setting a house elf loose on the year's entire complement of muggleborn students and their families, but on the bright side, the box was empty when she returned to her office and she had the entire rest of the day free.

⁂

It wasn't just the fact that Ginny had wings now that she wanted to be able to go outside and run and fly; those were things that she normally got to do fairly regularly—less so the flying, but sneaking a ride on her brothers' brooms was something she did every time she got a chance. She was, in some respects, a country girl and wasn't used to being cooped up inside all day. She especially wasn't used to being cooped up inside with a boy she barely knew, whose only identifiable qualities were all lies.

It was fortunate, then, that she wasn't there long before the boy who everyone thought was Harry Potter was finally released from his three week long punishment for something involving a zoo. What, exactly, had happened at the zoo she wasn't sure, because any time life around the Dursleys was described, they both quickly found something else to focus on—and there was a lot else to focus on, as Ginny had a lot to say about the wizarding world, or what she knew about it.

That said, while it was good and all to have some time to herself during the day when the boy was out doing his chores and things, it came with an unforeseen downside; having to be even more still and quiet inside the cupboard while he was gone. It would be strange if, for instance, they heard breathing or the shuffling of hoofsteps while she was stretching. She hadn't thought that it would be all that hard to deal with, but several times the Dursleys had complained about odd noises from around the house, and while that might have just been their paranoia about anything unusual happening in their vicinity, they had specifically mentioned the sound of hoofsteps out on the street.

Ginny had not, so far, ever actually gone out to the street, but she was cognizant enough of muggles to know that they didn't use horses any more.

More to the point, though, the boy had said as much in explaining the matter to her.

So Ginny huddled and hid in the dark of the cupboard while the boy was out trimming the lawn or washing the fences or whatever it was that oppressed orphan celebrity stand-ins do.

The more that Ginny heard the Dursleys interact with the boy, though, the more guilty she felt for calling him 'the boy' in her head. She couldn't very well call him Harry, because he was no Harry Potter, but all the same, she hated having anything in common with that odious monster of a man that her cupboard-mate had used to call uncle.

Wishing didn't make it so, though, and she couldn't really come up with anything, so 'boy' it was, for now.

Maybe when his Hogwarts letter came, they'd find out his real name.

That day came about a week after Ginny had first arrived, though the first she heard of it was the fat walrus of a man shouting from the dinner table, "Who in the bloody hell is 'Ginny Weasley'? Do you know any Weasley's Pet? They're not on this street, I'll tell you that!"

Ginny had, at first, panicked, thinking that she had been seen or heard, having had the door of the cupboard cracked open just a hair for light and a whisper of fresh air, but of course that didn't make sense, since just seeing her wouldn't give him her name. It was only when she pushed the cupboard door open just a bit more and peeked through the crack that she saw that he was sitting at the dining room table shuffling through the mail, which must mean that her Hogwarts letter had come.

It blindsided her a bit, if she was being honest. Sure, she had accidentally bargained with Titania for exactly that to happen, but she had thought that the terms of the deal had been satisfied with making her into Harry Potter's familiar. The payment, though, had been for eleven days of her life, which also just happened to make her old enough to go to Hogwarts regardless.

The relief hit her like a wave. Honestly, she hadn't even been sure that she would get her letter next year, being a tiny winged horse and all. This was... this was more than she had expected.

"Hold on a second," Vernon said, flipping the letter back and forth and frowning. "This barmy letter has no stamp! Damn kids; I don't know what they're up to with this."

"Dad!" Dudley shouted in his ear. "Dad! Harry's got one too!"

Ginny was baffled as the following kerfuffle went from one state of hysteria to the next. First, Vernon and Petunia were all in a panic, clearly realizing what the letter was. The boy, of course, knew too, as she'd told him about the letters, but apparently he hadn't had the chance or the forethought to hide it from them.

After panic, though, they progressed directly into paranoia. “Watching—spying—might be following us,” she heard Vernon mutter, which... Well, it might have been true if the boy was actually Harry Potter, but if he was actually Harry Potter he wouldn't have been left in a place like this.

Finally, they came entirely around to denial, and elected to ignore the whole thing as if it hadn't happened. Under normal circumstances, Ginny would be quite distraught to see the fat old muggle leave for work with her Hogwarts letter fisted between his meaty fingers, but she had the feeling that that wouldn't be the end of it.

Titania wasn't one to leave things half done, after all, and she'd like to see that great big oaf try and tell the seelie queen 'no.'

Even through all that, though, Ginny had another question on her mind that was even more urgent than the idea of Titania making a visit to this quaint little muggle suburb.

"What was the name?" Ginny asked the boy later that day after Petunia had run him ragged polishing the entire kitchen until it gleamed as punishment for the morning's debacle.

The boy blinked as he ducked into the cupboard, glancing back over his shoulder to make sure that Ginny wouldn't be seen. "What?" he said, missing the point.

"The letter," Ginny clarified. "What was the name on your Hogwarts letter?"

"The name?" he asked, not seeing what she was getting at. "It was my name."

Ginny rolled her eyes. "Yes, I know, that's how it works," she said, attempting sarcasm but unable to quite hide her eagerness. "The letters are all addressed by magic—I think the Quill of Acceptance is involved?—anyway, it ought to have had your real name on it, so what was it?"

The boy blinked. "It just said 'Harry Potter,'" he informed her.

Ginny sat back, flummoxed. "Wait, really?" she asked.

The boy nodded. "Well, yes," he said. "It had our cupboard on it and everything."

Ginny was lost for words, trying to fit this into her idea of how the world worked.

"Why's that odd?" he asked. "Didn't you say that that fairy promised that you'd go to Hogwarts with 'Harry Potter?' She couldn't do that if it wasn't my name, right? I mean, she'd know, wouldn't she? I'm pretty sure that names are important with fairies."

Well, yes, that was true. "I... but..." That couldn't be right, could it?

Ginny didn't say anything more to Harry for the rest of the day. Not until Vernon came home from work and tromped right on over to the cupboard. Ginny was fairly on the ball about keeping track of what was going on outside the cupboard, but even so, she had to scramble to the wide end of the space where she wouldn't be seen before he violently yanked the door open.

It was fortunate that the man couldn't actually fit inside of the cupboard enough to see her, because he certainly tried as he made a show of sticking his head in and looking around.

Ginny squeezed herself as tightly into the corner as she could possibly manage. It might not have been so bad if she was a darker color, but her Weasley-red hair had followed her into her new form and her entire coat was bright copper orange.

Harry—and she still felt weird calling him that, even if it really was his name—immediately grabbed the man's attention by asking after his letter, to which he was quickly rebuffed. The exchange that followed, though, was out of character enough to shock them both.

“Er—yes, Harry—about this cupboard. Your aunt and I have been thinking... you’re really getting a bit big for it... we think it might be nice if you moved into Dudley’s second bedroom."

Aside from the galling revelation that Dudley had a second bedroom, that was just... strange. Had he really been stewing over the letter all day and come to this? She couldn't blame the boy when he bewilderedly asked, "Why?" even if the response was the expected angry retort of, "Don't ask questions!"

Having said his piece, Vernon backed away from the cupboard and stood there watching over Harry as he silently gathered up his few meager possessions, which were his ill-fitting clothes, mostly, but also schoolbooks and other things from his previous year at muggle school. Ginny didn't pay too much attention to the details because she fully expected there to be a final examination of the cupboard when he was done, and, again, she was violently orange and not supposed to be there.

Harry, too, knew what was coming and he gave her a sad sort of helpless look as he gathered up the first load of items. She almost missed it, but just at the last moment before he left, he motioned upwards with his head. Ginny followed the motion with her eyes, but there was nothing there; just the underside of the stairs, dusty and lined with cobwebs that had caught all manner of dust and grit falling through the cracks from above over the years.

In hindsight, though, being the underside of the stairs, it did go up pretty far, ending in a narrow corner of darkness that no one would ever give a second thought to, and the central beam that supported the stairs had enough of a gap to hold on to—or it would have, if she had appendages that were capable of holding onto things.

Ugh, she was going to have to try, though, wasn't she? It was too late for Harry to carry her up inside a pile of laundry or something, and that probably wouldn't have worked anyway. She was small, but not that small, and Harry didn't look like he could lift anything bigger than a kneazle—which she was, if only barely.

Looking up into the mess of cobwebs at the top of the cupboard, Ginny cringed at the prospect of getting it all in her hair. A moment later, she remembered that she had a coat and feathers now, too, and the revulsion redoubled. The only thing worse than getting cobwebs in her everywhere would be getting caught, though, and her time was running out. Sighing and explicitly not thinking about what would happen if she failed—because covering herself in cobwebs and still getting caught was worse still—she prepared herself and...

She hesitated.

Harry came down the stairs rattling little bits of dust loose, followed shortly thereafter by the heavy thumping of Vernon's footsteps. If she had any chance of not being heard, now was the time, but... but...

Cobwebs in her everywhere. The very idea revolted her. She might be a sporty country girl who was now a tiny flying horse, but she was still a girl.

Suddenly, just before the moment had passed, she had an idea. Glancing down, she located one of Harry's old shirts that had been missed on the first pass, grabbed it up in her hoof and chucked it upwards into the cobweb-ridden space she was soon to be occupying, clearing away the vast majority of them and falling back down in a disgusting clump at the far end of the cupboard. Barely confirming that it had done the job, Ginny got her hoofs underneath her and she jumped.

She wouldn't have made it if she didn't have wings. She did have wings, though, and she even managed to flap them adequately in the cramped space, launching her up to the support beam, which she scrabbled to grab onto with her hooves.

It... worked.

It really, really, shouldn't have worked, but it did, and she found herself hanging onto the support beam from below. She knew that her hooves were flexible, giving her pretty much the entire range of motion that her wrist had had as a human, if not more, but she still couldn't actually explain how she was managing to stay in place. Admittedly, in addition to being small, she was also lighter than she had any right to expect, but that still didn't explain anything.

Oh, well, maybe it was accidental magic.

What it hadn't been, though, was quiet, because, more effective than expected or not, hooves were not quiet, and Vernon stopped dead two thirds of the way down the steps, holding his breath and listening to identify the sound.

Under any other circumstances, Ginny would have appreciated the irony in her sudden need to sneeze, because that was the sort of thing that always happened in the books when Harry Potter and his friends were in an old, dusty place hiding from the villains, and here she was in an old, dusty cupboard with a Harry Potter hiding from... well, they probably counted as villains, she supposed.

At the moment, though, she failed to see the humor in it. The dust in her eyes might have had something to do with it, or maybe it was the very real danger that she would be in if she was found out. Well, in the worst case she could probably just run, she supposed, but she wasn't sure what she'd do then, and, again, really didn't want the ministry after her for violating the statute of secrecy by running down a muggle neighborhood in broad daylight.

Ginny managed to stifle her sneeze, though, and had surprisingly little difficulty holding herself up, so even as Vernon had satisfied himself that he hadn't heard anything after all, waddled his way the rest of the way down the stairs and herded Harry into the cupboard to gather the rest of his things, she managed to stay in place like a bowtruckle hanging from a branch in the fall.

It took Harry two more trips to empty the cupboard, mostly because he wasn't even given a box or anything to carry things in. If he had, he probably could have done it in one trip; that was how little he had. After three trips, though, Ginny was getting stiff, if nothing else.

Tiny winged horses really weren't built for hanging from stair joists.

Finally, though, the ordeal came to an end with Petunia slamming the cupboard door shut while making noises of being glad to finally have her cupboard back.

Moments later, Ginny came to a clattering thump on the cupboard floor. Given a lifetime's worth of experience with her wings, she might have managed to turn around in midair and soften her landing, but she'd had one week with them, none of it in the air. The clopping of hooves was not quiet.

Ginny swiveled her ear, listening for the tap-tap-tap of Petunia's shoes to see if she was going to have to hide again, but fortunately, after a tense period of listening, she continued on her way to the kitchen, muttering about pipes knocking in the walls.

It was much later than their usual midnight trips to the kitchen—maybe two or three in the morning—when Harry finally came for her. He apologized, of course. "Well, it isn't as if I know what'll wake them up from Dudley's second bedroom, is it? As it is, they've spent ages tonight muttering about the sounds of horses coming from somewhere."

Ginny flushed, but held her ground. "Well, I'm sorry, but you're the one who suggested I climb up to the rafters. We're lucky enough that I was able to do it at all."

"Well, sure," he allowed. "But you could have at least stayed quiet for the rest of the day."

Ginny puffed up her cheeks in an annoyed pout. "I have. I've barely moved at all."

Harry looked at her doubtfully. "You're saying you haven't been pacing around in here now that there's room?" he asked, giving the suddenly more spacious space a look.

"No, I haven't!" Ginny insisted. "I swear. It must be the paranoia that's getting to them."

"...You're sure?" he asked, giving her a look that she couldn't decipher.

"Yes, I'm sure!" she hissed.

He looked uneasy.

"...Why?" she asked.

"...I might have heard something like that during dinner too," he said.

Well, that was weird.

"They're getting to you," she eventually decided. "They heard me once—which I couldn't do anything about—and now they're jumping at everything, and it's got you imagining things too."

"Yeah, maybe..." he said, unconvinced.

⁂

Ginny's faith in Titania was upheld when, soon after Harry had gone down to cook breakfast the next morning, there was a loud shout of "There's another four!" followed by the banging and crashing of a scuffle involving the two largest Dursleys, and when Harry showed up at their new room with his collar upturned and his hair more mussed than normal, it became clear that he was involved as well.

Honestly, the boy needed to pick his battles a bit more carefully. Ginny had figured out quickly that she couldn't out-wrestle her older brothers, but she'd never let that stop her getting her licks in whenever the opportunity presented itself, and several other times besides.

"You know what the letters are, and now you know they aren't going to stop coming," Ginny said, following him as he closed the door and made his way to the rickety old bed that had been in the room—at least, until he stopped and looked down at her hooves.

Ginny paused, then made an effort to walk more quietly. It was hard enough wading through the mess of broken toys without knocking over any piles or making too much mess, but she still had only a week of experience walking on hooves, and they really weren't made for being silent.

She still insisted that it wasn't her that the Dursleys were hearing, though.

"I know, but I want to see it for myself," Harry said, dropping onto the worn mattress as quietly as possible. "To make sure it's real."

Ginny paused a second to listen for anyone in the hall before leaping up onto the bed assisted by a flap of her wings. It was unsteady, but reasonably silent and she needed the practice. "What?" she said, standing over him at the foot of the bed. "Am I not real enough for you?"

Harry raised an eyebrow at her posing and shook his head. "Well, you are an incredibly orange winged pony. I might be mad and seeing things, like pink elephants or flying pigs."

Ginny pranced forward and gave him a swift kick on the knee. "Rude. I am not an elephant or a pig."

Harry winced in pain. Pulling his leg back, he began rubbing it, and Ginny scoffed at that. She hadn't kicked him that hard... though she did have hooves now, and she'd felt the knock of bone. Oops? "It's a saying," he said. "Seeing pink elephants, or saying something will happen when pigs fly. Ow."

"Sorry," Ginny mumbled, shuffling in place as if her mother was standing there over her making her apologize.

"Anyway," he said. "If I was imagining you, I wouldn't be the only one."

⁂

The next day, six letters had arrived through the mail slot earlier than usual and Vernon's corresponding yell of rage had woken the whole house. Harry had talked about sneaking down to get to the mail before him, but he'd argued with Ginny for so long about it that he hadn't actually had the time to fix the alarm clock for it like he'd wanted. From the sound of the yelling downstairs, though, that was a good thing, because Vernon had apparently had the same idea and the mood in the house was tense enough that Harry not being down there could only be a net benefit.

Still, she had the strange impression that something wonderful had been lost, and she didn't know why. Oh well. Hopefully it would at least show Harry that she was always right and he should listen to her.

That thought was lost, though, as Harry returned from breakfast with strange news. "After the letters came—six of them, this time—I heard Petunia whispering to Vernon." He stumbled over the names only slightly now, almost always managing not to call them his aunt and uncle. "She said that when she got up for a drink of water in the middle of the night, she looked out the window and saw something in the dark. Something the size of a dog, with ratty hair and holes in its legs."

Ginny lifted her leg up in front of her, cocked her head while looking at it, then looked up at Harry, who met her eyes. "I don't have holes in my legs," she said, stating the obvious.

Harry shook his head. "No—and you weren't out on the lawn before dawn either."

"Oh, so you believe me now," Ginny snarked, making a joke of it.

"And your hair's fine," he added.

Ginny frowned. Her hair did look fine—for now, at least. She was peripherally aware of the fact that she would need a shower sometime in the month before Hogwarts, and would jump at the chance if the Dursleys ever all left somewhere together, but that was not something to worry about right now.

"Ginny?" Harry prompted, startling her out of her thoughts. "Assuming we're not all going mad, do you have any idea what it might be? It's not got to do with the letters, has it?"

Ginny thought about it, but she was, after all, only an eleven-year-old girl that had yet to go to Hogwarts, and she was hating how much of an excuse that was sounding like every time she said it. It was true, though. "No," she said at length. "Luna's talked about all sorts of creatures, but she's never mentioned anything like that, and if Hogwarts used them to deliver letters, I'd have heard of it. My brothers' letters always came by owl."

"You've no idea at all, then?" he said, disappointed.

Ginny sighed in frustration. "Well, I can't say that there isn't some dead horse creature that exists, but why would it be here now? The timing doesn't match up with the letters anyway."

"You don't think it has something to do with the fairies, do you?" he asked. "She said it was the size of a dog, and you're the only tiny horse thing I've ever heard of."

"Ponies do exist, you know," Ginny remarked. "And so do young horses."

"Is that a no?" he asked.

Ginny didn't have an answer to that.

⁂

Over the next few days, Ginny was glad to be confined to the room as the mood in the house got progressively sourer and more volatile. She herself was woken up one night by the sound of galloping hooves racing down the street, and in the mornings, more and more letters came. Bizarrely, this included, as repeated to her by Harry, inside every one of a dozen eggs.

Ginny gave him a look when he'd told her that. "If you had to call her over to show her the pan with the letters in," she said. "Then couldn't you have snuck one to keep for yourself?"

Harry flushed and looked away, avoiding her gaze. "...Well, it was just so barmy that I had to show her, you know?" he defended. "...And now I kind of want to see what they'll do next."

Ginny stared at the boy in front of her as if she was seeing him for the first time. Then, she broke out into a grin. "I'm guessing they come in through the bathroom tomorrow," she said, and the two of them spent the rest of the day coming up with crazier and crazier ways that the folded pieces of parchment might make it inside the house.

⁂

The letters didn't come in through the bathroom the next day. One moment, Vernon was crowing loud enough for Ginny to hear him from upstairs about there being no post on Sundays, and the next it sounded like there was a whole flock of bats and owls fighting to conquer the living room.

Deathly curious and tired of staying out of trouble, Ginny opened the bedroom door—an awkward feat with hooves—and peeked out down the hall, not expecting to see anything. And she didn't see anything... much. From the sound and the sight of several dozen of the envelopes breezing in from downstairs, though, she got the picture well enough. She'd have to wait for Harry to get the full story on exactly where they had come from, though.

Still, she found herself regretting it a little. With that many letters flying around, Harry couldn't very well not pick one up—she could easily go over and pick one up for herself without getting caught—which meant that their little game was over before it had hardly started.

The rapid thumping of feet coming up the stairs had Ginny ducking back inside, but she'd barely gotten the door quietly closed when Harry came barreling through, breathing heavily and absolutely shedding letters with every movement. He even had one stuck in his collar, and he had to take a second to remove it.

"What's—" Ginny began to ask, but like with the door, Harry was already way ahead of her.

"Vernon's gone mad," he said, stopped, then corrected himself. "I mean—for real, now. He's told us all to grab our things and take them to the car because we're leaving for anywhere that isn't here. He even cuffed Dudley around the head for trying to grab the downstairs VCR."

Ginny thought that a VCR was one of the muggle things that her father had in his shed, but that wasn't important right then. No, what was important was imagining that entitled brat getting belted one by his own father. True, she'd never actually had to interact with him herself, but honestly, she'd been listening to things going on in this house for two weeks now. She had her limits.

Oh, right, and the Dursleys were taking Harry away somewhere to avoid the letters. That was an issue, too.

Ginny chewed her lip as Harry threw together what he could and stuffed it all inside one of the uglier shirts he'd inherited from Dudley which he tied off at the neck and arms. On one hand... err... hoof? She had hooves, now, so on one hoof, she could just pick up one of her letters from the floor and then...

Well, that was the question, wasn't it? Where would that leave her? There was enough food in the house to last her until Hogwarts if the Dursleys were gone that long, but she wouldn't have any of the supplies she needed or any way to get to Hogwarts. It was strange enough that her mother hadn't been by to take her 'baby girl' back home, so Titania must be doing something to keep people away, so... she was going to have to follow Harry, somehow, wasn't she?

Oh, who was she kidding, she'd been going to do that anyway. That's the kind of thing that people always did in books, and if she knew one thing it was that if people in books did it, it was the right and moral thing to do.

...How, though? Ginny knew what a car was, as her father had one that he was fixing up, but Vernon's wasn't likely to have undetectable extension charms on the boot like his did, so she really didn't fancy her chances fitting in it with all the other luggage, let alone managing to stay hidden.

The only other option was following behind some other way, though, and she fancied her chances doing that even less, even before you got into the potential Statute of Secrecy issues. She'd ridden the Knight Bus before, so she had some idea what muggle roads were like and how fast the cars moved. She'd also heard from her father about wizards getting hit by them, and it wasn't pretty.

Unfortunately, by the time Ginny had settled on her course of action, the car was screeching its tires pulling away.

"Bollocks!" Ginny cursed as she ran out to the window and watched the car pull away. She hesitated, shifting from hoof to hoof in indecision before she said, "Sod it," and pried the window open.

Well, there was no way for her to catch up on foot—and not because she no longer had feet. The car was really moving, and she only had seconds until it would be out of sight. Maybe if she flew high enough, none of the muggles would notice? She sure hoped so, because either way, she was going to find out. Keeping an eye on the car, she leapt up to the windowsill and launched herself into the air.

Ginny flapped as hard and fast as she could, desperate to get as much height and speed as possible to keep up with the car and get high enough to avoid notice by the muggles, and honestly, for her first real flight ever, she didn't think she did too bad. It took her a while and more than a few near-disasters to figure things out—the weathervane on Number Seven would never be the same—but she did technically manage to stay in the air the entire time, so that was something.

Getting higher up also helped a lot. Aside from there being much less up in the air for her to have to dodge, the higher she got, the easier it was to keep track of the car that she was following. If anything, her eyes were actually even better at long ranges now, and they'd already been better than her human ones when all she had to look at was Privet Drive. No matter how high she went, she didn't have any more trouble making out details on the ground.

Ginny's real break came when she got up to cloud level, though. It was a sunny day with a smattering of clouds, and she had some idea that hiding in them was her best bet for staying unnoticed, but what actually happened hit her like an ogre at 6,500 feet. Or she hit it. The point was, she was keeping both her eyes on the car, so she didn't see the cloud coming and she certainly didn't expect it to feel like fluffy marshmallow and stop her cold in the air.

Panicked, Ginny scrambled up through the cloud and popped her head up out the top of it, quickly getting her eyes back on the car before she lost it. It was only then, when she was sure that she wasn't going to lose them, that Ginny realized exactly what had happened and where she was: sitting on top of a cloud.

Now, as Ginny had become very aware of in the last two weeks, she was only eleven years old and hadn't yet begun her schooling. That said, she was still pretty sure that clouds were not, in fact, solid, nor could animals or creatures that were otherwise solid sit on them. Ghosts, perhaps, might pretend to, if any of the stories her brothers had told her about them were true, but Ginny was quite certain that she wasn't a ghost. While she evidently might not remember dying if it had happened to her, she was still shockingly orange, and that was proof enough for her.

Also, she was actually sitting on and touching the cloud, which was rather the opposite of how ghosts worked, so she definitely wasn't dead, which was a relief.

In fact, the more she sat there watching the car far below and kneading the cloud underneath her hooves, the more she thought that this was a very good thing indeed.

Curious, Ginny gripped the cloud in between her hooves and started flapping her wings. Sure enough, the cloud began to move, keeping her hidden as she pushed herself to keep up with the car.

She had no idea what the hell was going on, but it was probably magic, and it was awesome. She might even not get arrested today after all.

⁂

Once Ginny had commandeered her little slice of cloud, following the Dursley car became easy. The cloud had to be pushed, which took a little bit of effort, but it was marginally less than keeping herself in the air, so it was a win in her book. More so, it allowed her to actually stop and rest when necessary, and the cloud even kept going in the direction she pushed it for a little while.

Her only regret was that she wasn't in the car with Harry, because by the strange, zig-zag path they took, going down one street, then doubling back to go the other direction seemingly at a whim, Vernon either didn't know where he was, where he was going, or possibly both, and by some of the paths he took, it might even be intentional. The rant that was going on in the car was probably epic... though, it probably would get old after several hours of listening to it.

If it was intentional as some way of losing any wizards who might be following them, though, the definitive answer to that was, 'no'. The current scenario settled the matter on that without a shadow of a doubt. In fact, the more he looped around and doubled back on his own trail, the easier it was to follow him. Not only did it mean that she didn't have to go as fast to keep up, but if she did perchance lose sight of him, all she had to do was look for the car that was acting like a loon, turning around in the middle of the street or suddenly taking turns without warning.

As an unexpected benefit, Ginny also learned a great deal about the muggle world that day. Oh, she'd been into the local muggle village back home, visited Godric's Hollow on occasion and seen London from out the Leaky Cauldron and the like, but one thing that none of her experiences so far in life had prepared her for was just the sheer size of things and how many muggles there were.

Up here, on her own in the clouds without even a broom, it was just... incredible. She almost regretted having to keep her eyes on the Dursleys' car, because there was just so much to see. Even though they'd started out in the suburbs and driven further out into the country, as high as she was, she'd been able to see the city that must have been London and it had just been so massive, wide and sprawling, the tall buildings blocking her view of the horizon, that she could hardly believe it. It was a hundred... no, a thousand Hogwarts'.

There was so much of it that it was too much to even properly understand.

The details, though; those she got a much better idea of while watching the Dursley car tear down side roads and make a general nuisance of itself. The small towns and villages that Vernon drove through were much closer to what she could understand, their function and structure not unfamiliar, though even then, she could see dozens of them dotted along the landscape connected by a web of roads each filled to one extent or another with cars representing more people than she could even count.

By the time the sun began to set and the Dursley car pulled into a lot around a gloomy-looking building with a glowing sign out front labeling it a hotel, Ginny's eyes had been opened. Vernon's, on the other hand, must have been closed, because he missed putting his car fully inside the small white square, which even she could tell was where it was supposed to go.

Contacting Harry that night turned out not to be possible since he was sharing a room with Dudley, which was maddeningly frustrating. Ginny felt like her head was full of so much new information and she just wanted to sit around and unload it all on him—maybe get him to explain a few things, like what the cars with flashing lights on them were or the purpose of the hollow metal frameworks that looked like towers built by particularly ambitious spiders. She didn't want to sound like her oft-ridiculed father and his obsession with muggle things, but from where she was now, she was finding them all but impossible to ignore.

Rather than getting to do that, though, Ginny instead went hungry and spent the night between two branches of a nearby tree. It wasn't the first time she'd slept in a tree and she was fortunate enough that it was a warm summer night, but still, it wasn't what she would have called an entirely enjoyable experience and she resented it an extra half again as much for making her miss the cupboard.

Maybe it was her fear of being discovered that had her feeling so exposed, or maybe just the fact that she was outside and exposed, having not had clothes since being dumped at the Dursleys, but she'd slept only fitfully, barely able to shake the feeling that she was being watched.

⁂

Spending a late night in her office was nothing new for Minerva McGonagall, especially in the lead up to the new school year. And during the school year. And when preparing for the end of the school year. Really, doing half of the Headmaster's work left her not a lot of time when she wasn't working late, but this, somehow, was still one for the history books.

She was scanning through the responses that she'd gotten to the Muggleborn introduction letters. It was... something. Minerva had thought that she'd known what she was getting into by inflicting one of the house elves of Hogwarts on the entire year of muggleborn students and their families, but even so, this was... excessive.

Of course, worse than what was said was what wasn't being said. Reading between the lines of the letters, all of them eager and ready to schedule an in-person appointment, Minerva could tell that no small number of them were less willing to talk to her so much as have a talk with her. About the house elves, and the menace they'd resorted to in prompting all of these responses.

Sighing, she put the last letter down, took off her glasses and pinched the bridge of her nose. The worst part, of course, was that she had responses from every single one of them except the one—or rather, two—that she had taken this fool path in order to ferret out. In letters from Harry Potter and Ginny Weasley, she had still come up empty.

It was understandable, then, how keenly she perked up when she heard the distinct tapping of the Headmaster's shoes approaching her door. As he entered, her eyes zeroed in on his hands, but if he was bringing news from the Potter and Weasley children, it wasn't in the form of having intercepted their letters.

"Headmaster?" she greeted him, wanting to get right to the point. If this wasn't about her two immediate concerns, then she wanted to know right away so that she could get back to trying to work it out herself. The nominal deadline for enrollment was approaching, and while they wouldn't let that stop them from enrolling the children if it really came down to it, getting a response before then would make things much, much simpler.

Minerva liked simple, if only out of necessity, her workload being what it is.

Fortunately, it didn't seem that she would have to shoo the headmaster out of her office, because the first words out of his mouth were, "It seems that Harry has left the premises of Privet Drive, and, in fact, that he is no longer in Surrey or the surrounding area at all."

Minerva's eyebrows raised at that and she leaned forward in her chair. "Do you mean that the wards have fallen?" she asked, but Dumbledore shook his head.

"No, they still remain," he informed her. "This, therefore, must be a temporary thing, or it would have been prevented, of course."

Minerva nodded at that, forcing herself to relax back into her chair. "Yes," she agreed, having gotten quite a good feel for what the wards over the two children would and would not allow over the past two weeks.

"It behooves me to ask, then, if you have any news from Harry?" he said, scanning over her desk with his eyes for any sign of letters involving Harry Potter. "Have you managed to contact him?"

Minerva let out a heavy breath. "Oh, yes," she said, not sounding entirely as prideful as the words suggested. They were rather dry, in fact, fully aware that her next week at least would be spent mollifying justifiably irate muggleborn parents. "It was all very clever."

The headmaster, sod him, looked only too curious at her statement.

Shaking her head head wordlessly, Minerva sighed, considered explaining the entire matter, then thought better of it. Looking to the side of her desk, she called, "Slinky?"

A small pop sounded at the house elf's arrival, and she announced herself by asking, "Yes, Professor Kitty Miss?"

"Slinky," she said, addressing the house elf. "The headmaster has informed me that Harry Potter is no longer at the residence of his relatives. Perhaps you would care to inform us of the situation there?"

Slinky bowed, cheerfully obsequious. "Oh, yes, Professor Kitty Miss! The nasty humans is being very spooked, Miss, and is taking the Great Harry Potter to get away from all the letters!"

"...All the letters, you say?" Minerva had to ask, if only to distract herself from the first real word that they had received about Harry's situation with his relatives seemingly confirming all their worries. At least, she didn't think that any of the Hogwarts elves were the type to refer to muggles as nasty humans, though with some of them being rescues, she supposed you couldn't always be sure.

"Yes, Professor Kitty Miss," the house elf beamed with pride. "They is having ripped up the first one. And the second one. And the third one. And—"

"So," Minerva interrupted. "All of them so far?"

"Oh, no, absolutely not!" the house elf said, quite aghast at the interpretation. "Some were put in the scary spinning knife jar thing and they is burning a great number. They is having given up on that now that they are running, though."

Minerva mouthed the words 'scary spinning knife jar' to herself before recognizing the description as a muggle blender. She couldn't say that the description was inaccurate, but all the same she was quickly developing the kind of headache that she always got when dealing with house elves.

Taking a deep breath, Minerva placed her hands together on the desk, leaned forward and asked a question she very much didn't think she wanted an answer to. "Precisely how many letters have you sent?"

Slinky got a distant look in her eyes and started doing something with her fingers that resembled counting, though she failed to follow it and she suspected that trying would only make her headache worse. How many fingers did house elves have, again?

At length, the house elf hopped joyfully in place and concluded, "One thousand, seven-hundred and fifty-three!"

Minerva closed her eyes. She had asked. She had known that she wasn't going to like the answer, but she had asked anyway. Briefly, she considered where to go from here and decided in the end that she ought to quit while she was ahead. "...Thank you, Slinky. You may go."

The house elf disappeared with a quiet pop and Minerva gestured at the empty space. "Well, there you go," she concluded.

"Quite," Dumbledore agreed with a genial smile, as if the entire conversation with the house elf had been nothing out of the ordinary. "And it does give us an opportunity, wouldn't you say? With Harry away from the wards and there being no shortage of letters, I expect that I may just be able to send someone to intervene in the situation and prompt things along."

Minerva was doubtful and a little bit suspicious. "Really, now, Albus? And who, precisely, do you propose to send? Knowing what I do and suspecting worse, I doubt the wards will let me anywhere near the boy even if he's no longer directly under them. They certainly haven't had any trouble affecting me here."

Dumbledore shook his head. "No, I don't imagine they will. It will have to be someone else."

Minerva sighed. "Which just leaves us back where we started, with there being no one we trust with Harry who will not see his situation and immediately fall afoul of the wards. You heard how the house elf referred to his relatives, didn't you? If even one of them can see there's a problem, I can't imagine there's anyone at all reasonable who you can send."

"In fact," Dumbledore said. "I shall send Hagrid."

Minerva pursed her lips. "Hagrid is a good man, but he's as subtle as a nundu," she said. "Both would seem to preclude him from being of help here."

"On the contrary, my dear professor. Those are precisely the qualities that we need," Dumbledore said. "Hagrid is a good man—friendly, kind, genuinely without guile and open with his opinions—and he expects the same of everyone else. The wards cannot be tricked, but Hagrid has not been informed of them and we don't need him to go against them; merely to encourage things to happen. The particular brand of well-meaning chaos that he tends to bring into things seems just the right sort of thing for this situation, don't you think?"

Minerva frowned, not entirely comfortable with the suggestion, but not quite able to put a finger on why. "You mean for him to bumble his way into a solution?"

Dumbledore tsked, giving Minerva a disappointed look. "Now, that's a distinctly unkind way to put it, don't you think? I don't mean for him to do anything but his best, which I trust him to do. It might be that his innate resistance to magic will protect him from the wards' distant influence, and he will simply go there and pick young Harry and Ginevra up and take them to Diagon Alley for their things."

Minerva hemmed and hawed over the situation, but she eventually had to admit that there didn't seem to be a better choice within the constraints that they were working under. "You have a point," she admitted. "But I don't have to like it. Honestly, I do like the man, but what kind of introduction will that be for the children? What kind of first impression will that be for Potter?"

To this, Dumbledore chuckled, catching Minerva off guard. "I'm afraid, as they say, that that ship has already sailed, Professor. From what I gathered, Harry's first impression of the Wizarding World was the moment that a snorkack of some description fell out of a portal in front of him, and I doubt that young Ginevra has been at all quiet on matters in the weeks hence."

That was a fair assessment, Minerva allowed. "I suppose that is true," she said. "She knows as much as any average eleven-year-old wizarding student, in any case, which is as much as we can expect from any of our onboarding students, and more than most. I swear, some of the students we get here have hardly ever even left their family manors."

"Indeed," Dumbledore agreed, and if his agreement was a little less than enthused, well, they were both teachers. "I suppose that I ought to set the ball rolling, then," he said, preparing to leave. "It may not be the ideal path forward, but it is a path forward, and that will have to do."

"'Perfect' being the enemy of 'good' has never quite sat right with me," Minerva grumbled, though the pile of letters in front of her from all the muggleborn parents that she still had to deal with put the lie to her conviction on the matter. Eventually, she picked one up and waved the headmaster off. "Fine. I would ask you to let me know how it goes, but I'm certain I'll hear about it one way or another."

"Of course," Dumbledore said, making his way out of the room.

Minerva was just beginning to focus on her interrupted work when she had a thought. "I don't suppose you're going to let Hagrid know about Ginevra's new form?" she asked, returning her gaze to the Headmaster, but there was no sign of him save, perhaps, the sound of a chuckle from down the hall.

⁂

The Dursleys didn't seem to have slept well either from the look of them as they came out of the hotel, though at least some of Vernon's sour attitude might have been down to the two stacks of letters both several inches thick bound up in twine that he threw powerfully into the car as soon as he opened the door.

Being nothing more than bundles of letters, they just bounced a bit, not even having the decency for the twine to break.

Ginny expected the Dursleys to get into the car and keep driving, but Petunia dithered, getting into an argument with Vernon. Unfortunately, while Ginny's ears were much better and more directional than they had been as a human, they weren't anything close to as good as her eyes, so Ginny had to risk getting closer to hear them, and she liked to think that being orange helped her this time, being that it was barely after dawn.

"No, Vernon, I won't calm down!" Petunia hissed, clearly self conscious about being seen, but also no good at actually staying quiet. "Not until you tell me where it is that you're taking us!"

Vernon harrumphed, causing his mustache to wiggle like a frightened caterpillar, but eventually attempted to placate his wife. "It'll be fine, Pet," he wheedled. "I've got a lead on a place where we can get some peace and quiet; it's an island just off the coast; there'll be hardly anyone around for miles; no mailman will get anywhere near us."

Petunia gave him a scathing look. "Really, Vernon?" she said. "That's your answer to all this? That's your answer after listening to hoofsteps all night and waking up to find every single salt shaker in the entire hotel standing spaced evenly across the floors of our rooms? To take us to some... some hut on a rock out in the ocean with no one else nearby?"

Vernon wilted under the weight of his wife's weary, tired eyes. "I... ah... well... you may have a point," he begrudgingly admitted. Crossing his arms, he began to think, which took considerable effort. Eventually, he came to a decision. "Alright. Yes. I know a man who can cut us a deal at his hotel; a real high class place, with serious no-nonsense security; the kind of place that ministers stay at when they're passing through. He owes me a favor, but It still won't be cheap. We'll stay there a few days and let them deal with whoever's behind this nonsense. I bet their kind never had to deal with real weapons." Moments later, he added under his breath, "It'll save me the trouble, too."

Once that was settled, the second day of driving went much like the first but with less of Vernon's nonsense driving since it apparently hadn't helped. Ginny did not enjoy the tense minutes of flying up to cloud level, but it was early in the morning and overcast so she was technically at less danger of being seen than the day before. It sure didn't feel like it, though.

Ginny spent that day focusing a little less on the ground and a little more on the sky. Partially, this was because she was still processing everything from the day before and didn't really have the spare mental capacity to take any more in, but also because as the day went on, the overcast sky turned into something almost like rolling hills, and from the looks of it there was a storm coming in on the horizon.

It was all very pretty, but Ginny didn't want to still be in the sky when it arrived.

Fortunately, the Dursleys arrived at their destination just before the storm, hurrying to get their luggage inside as the first heavy drops fell. The hotel was, as Vernon had implied, a very large, posh-looking place with at least twenty floors. Harry was the last one in, as his sack made from a tied-together shirt came slightly undone, and no one helped him fix it or grab the things that had fallen out the bottom.

Ginny felt bad for him—really she did—but it was hard to muster the indignation in his stead when she failed to see any way for her to get down to shelter herself without being seen. She had to wait, perching on her wet, gray cloud until the storm proper started, then dart down to a convenient tree amidst the pouring rain.

From the vantage point of her tree, Ginny searched the grounds of the hotel for a better source of cover, but much to her dismay, she didn't spot anything that she hadn't seen from her cloud. The area that the hotel was in was much more dense with buildings than the last one, and she was lucky enough that there was even a tree for her to perch in. The only upside that Ginny could see was that each room seemed to have a balcony, so she could probably at least get a few words with Harry here and there to keep herself up-to-date on what was going on...

...Assuming Harry realized this, too, and let her know which one he was staying in, anyway. He probably would. He was smart enough, and was very accommodating, considering he'd had her dumped on him with no rhyme or reason—or even any involvement at all on his part. Really, it was surprising he'd dealt with all of this as calmly as he had.

Harry did not show up on the balcony that night, which... well... was fair. She wouldn't want to come out into the wind and the rain either, if she had a choice. She didn't, though, and it really set a poor mood as the evening turned into night.

Ugh. Ginny curled up on the branch of her tree, wrapping her wings about herself and fluffing them up for warmth as she'd figured out how to do not long into the storm. In a certain kind of irony, it seemed that her wings repelled water, while the rest of her didn't. That was just... real great. What kind of creature was she really? Not that the same question couldn't be asked of any number of magical creatures.

Ginny shivered, her stomach groaning painfully because she hadn't eaten since two nights ago. "What I wouldn't do for one of mom's apple pies right now," she said out loud, trying to think of what she could do to scrounge up some food. She refused to catch squirrels or whatever it was that Harry had thought she was going to do on that first night... but horses ate plants, right? If she went on any longer like this, she was going to end up gnawing on the lawn.

Right. 'If' it went on any longer. The Dursleys were planning on spending several days here. There was no 'if.' It wasn't as if some food was going to just—

Ginny blinked.

When did that apple pie get there, she wondered, soggy and bewildered much like the apple pie. Well, she hoped the apple pie wasn't bewildered, but it had just appeared on the branch of a tree in the middle of a storm. She wasn't going to dismiss the possibility that it was capable of bewilderment, either because it was capable of getting here itself or because it didn't know why it was there either.

Whether or not the pie had the ability to reason wasn't what made Ginny the most wary, though. Ever since running into Titania outside of Luna's house, the subject of the fae had become much more immediately relevant to her life and her decisions. "...I'm not going to just eat any random food that a faerie puts in front of me," she announced into the storm, almost believing herself.

"We is not being in Faerie, Miss Weasey-pony!" came a squeaky voice from behind Ginny. "Slinky is hearing your request."

Ginny let out a yelp, knocking the pie off the branch. To her shame, she panicked more about losing the pie than about the voice that had surprised her, and dove forward, managing barely to catch it in her hooves somehow. Since the pie was no longer perched on the branch, though, that meant that Ginny herself was no longer perched on the branch.

Fortunately, after two solid days of flying, Ginny's body remembered the action of flight before she did, and she found herself floating in place, pie in hoof, looking at... "A house elf?"

"Yes'm!" the house elf responded, bowing proudly. Ginny took her in and thought she looked not unlike a wrinkly, shaved cat. It was exactly like the pictures of house elves she'd seen, but wet. And wearing a Hogwarts tea towel.

She put things together rather quickly, if she didn't say so herself. "You're the one delivering the letters?" she deduced.

"Yes'm!" the house elf repeated, her teeth beginning to chatter.

Ginny felt immediately bad about keeping her here, and started to dismiss her, when she suddenly had a better idea. "I don't suppose Hogwarts has any tents with muggle-repelling charms on them?" she asked. "You know, for student use. Uh, I can take my letter now, if it'll make me a student and that matters."

"Yes'm!" the house elf said once more, sounding just a little grateful as she disappeared with a pop that was drowned out by the sound of the heavy rain.

⁂

The tent that Slinky brought Ginny and placed on the roof of the hotel was small—barely any bigger on the inside than the outside—but it came with dry towels, hot tea and an apple pie that was pure bliss even with its sogginess. The pit in her stomach had only gotten more prominent now that she was presented with food, and Ginny was making an effort to stay well-mannered and ladylike as her mother would have put it, even when all she had to eat with were hooves the size of teacups. She was doing okay, she thought, and was starting on her third slice of pie when a sudden thought struck her.

"This isn't... actually one of my mom's pies, is it?" she asked Slinky, who had stuck around to make sure that Ginny had everything she needed and wasn't going to freeze to death—or, not before responding to her letter, anyway. She was oddly insistent about that, and Ginny knew that house elves could get odd, sometimes.

"Yes'm!" the house elf confirmed happily in that same exact tone, causing Ginny to pause with the slice of pie balanced in her hoof just shy of her mouth.

Ginny looked closer at the pie, and yes, even through the dark and the sogginess, it did have the look of the braiding that her mother liked to do on the crust... and her mother did often bake when she was worried... and Ginny had no doubt that after two weeks without her daughter, her mother was worried.

Shrugging, Ginny took another bite of the pie. She doubted that her mother would have minded if she knew where the pie had ended up.

"So, if you're the one handling the letters," Ginny said, eyeing the house elf, who definitely had all the expected appendages and was entirely lacking in hooves. "Who or what is haunting them?"

Slinky shuddered as if she was back out in the storm. "It is being the dark ones, Miss Weasy-pony! Thems now with hooves and horns, but they is being the same wicked ones as always!"

The dark ones? That wasn't helpful. "Okay," she said, then asked, "But who are 'the dark ones'? What are they called?"

Slinky whipped her head back and forth, flinging drops of water off her long pointed ears as she shook her head. "Oh, no, Miss, we is not speaking the name, miss."

Ginny blinked, her eyes wide. "You don't mean..." she ducked closer and whispered. "He who must not be named? He's supposed to be dead!"

"No, Miss Weasy-pony!" Slinky said, shaking her head in a more gentle rejection, this time. "It is not being him. It is being them. The dark ones. From Faerie."

...Oh. Oh no. She was talking about the unseelie, wasn't she? Ginny had to put aside her thoughts on just how inconvenient it was when you didn't actually know who and there was more than one of them, because, well...

As much as Titania was a capital-P problem, all that Ginny knew about the unseelie was that they were similarly dangerous, but they didn't ask nicely.

Ginny shot up, all thoughts of pie forgotten. "We have to warn Harry!" she shouted, adrenaline—and sugar—pumping through her veins.

If there was anything that bugged Ginny about being a small winged horse, it was being small enough for a house elf to gently set bony hands on her shoulders and sit her back down. "You is not needing to worry about The Great Harry Potter," Slinky reassured her.

Ginny wanted to point out that he wasn't really that Harry Potter, but it was more important for her to turn, look at the house elf and ask, "Why?"

Slinky's face slipped into a slightly mischievous grin and said, "The same as last night, Slinky is making it so the dark ones cannot enter without finding salt. It is being not pleasant for Slinky, but Slinky's kind has not the bane any more. It is having been bred out, like the iron."

Ginny stopped as she processed that.

It... really should have been obvious to her that house elves were fae, shouldn't it?

"Besides, Miss Weasy-Pony," Slinky added, not realizing that Ginny's head was still busy with the previous revelation. "It is not being Harry Potter Sir that the dark ones are after; it is being you."

"...What?" Ginny croaked, her throat suddenly ironically dry as the storm battered the tent from outside. Suddenly, she remembered the feeling that she'd had all last night of being watched. "Why?"

Slinky's head fell, her ears folding in sadness. "Slinky is sorry, but Slinky is not knowing." Suddenly, she brightened up. "Oh! But do not worry," she said.

"Because you'll protect me?" Ginny asked with naked hope. "Like Harry, with the salt, right?"

"Ah, well... no," Slinky said, her sudden cheerfulness gone as quickly as it had come. "Slinky cannot. Slinky's kind is incapable, Miss Weasy-pony, of going against the dark ones. Or the light ones. Any of the Ones, Miss, or any of the Many. We abandoned Faerie, you see, and that chains us in as many ways as it has freed us."

"Why shouldn't I worry, then?" Ginny asked, her eyes flitting to the open tent flap, very much getting a head start on the worrying. No—scratch that—it was the other way around. She had shed loads of worrying to catch up on, actually.

"Because, Miss Weasy-pony," Slinky said, looking very sad as she lifted her hand, preparing to snap her fingers. "You is not being protected so far, and you is still here. They is wanting something. Something they cannot take. That keeps you safe. Safer than Slinky can make you." Looking like she was going to cry, the house elf said, "Slinky is sorry, Miss Weasy-pony," and disappeared with a pop at the snap of her fingers.

Ginny hit the first thing that came through the tent flap with the pie. It had salt in it, right? Whatever; it worked one way or another as the thing went down on the smooth stone floor on top of the building from surprise if nothing else. She didn't get a very good look at it, but the next one confirmed everything she knew.

As Slinky had said, the things—the unseelie faeries—looked nothing like the faeries she was used to. Instead, they were small horses, like her, but also bugs, not like her. They were bigger than her, but smaller than Titania had been, and as the Dursleys had mentioned, they looked somehow decrepit with holes in their legs, though they didn't actually appear to be rotting.

They just had holes.

In their legs.

And their horns.

And their wings.

For some reason.

Ginny didn't have the time to concern herself with that, though, as the small, cramped space of the tent was not somewhere she wanted to be when she was getting swarmed by the properly nasty kind of faeries who wanted some non-specific thing from her which she doubted very much that she wanted to give.

Before more of the unseelie could block her way, Ginny raced forward, automatically using her wings to push herself just that little bit faster. She wasn't foolish enough to try and barrel through the unseelie at the entrance—the creature's crooked horn looked absolutely nasty, for one thing, and one thing was all she had time for—so instead she made it look like she was going to do so, then ducked around the side instead.

There were more of them outside, of course. The rooftop wasn't full of them, but they sure as hell weren't being discreet. After all, why would the unseelie care about the Statute of Secrecy? They didn't sign the damn thing.

...

No, Ginny had to tell herself, trying to get them to sign it now would not be helpful, even if it probably would be the most important achievement of her life and put her in the history books for ever and ever.

Ginny shook her head and looked for a way out.

What was her plan here, though? Faeries normally didn't enter the muggle world. She'd thought that was all but an immutable fact, and this place was almost as muggle as it got outside of London. Wasn't the iron in these muggle buildings supposed to keep faeries out? The buildings had iron in them, right? She wasn't misremembering that? Of course, she wasn't in the building right now, so maybe that was why.

What could she do? She sure as hell couldn't fight them.

Where could she go? Inside the hotel? She couldn't count on that stopping them.

There was one place that she knew was safe, though: whichever room that the Dursleys were in, because Slinky had prepared it with salt, which she could do, because the Seelie weren't after Harry to begin with.

But why would she bother doing that if they weren't after Harry? Had she done it for Ginny after all? Did that mean—ugh. What it meant was that house elves gave her headaches and she didn't have time for headaches. She took off, flying over the—every single one of them sprouted wings from under their carapaces and flew up to block her.

That so wasn't fair.

Actually, though, as it turned out, it was fair, because the faeries were only about as good with their wings as she was, and they were all in the middle of a storm, so she really wasn't very good, even for her two days of experience flying. She therefore managed to fly through a gap in their line, which was less a line and more resembled her brother Charlie's star charts of Sagittarius.

Charlie had not cared very much about astronomy.

Ginny had a brief moment of screaming 'what am I doing?!' in her head just as she dove over the side of the building, but it passed as the logical part of her reminded the rest that she did, in fact, have wings. It was still screaming 'what am I doing?!', mind, because seriously, when had her life turned into a Harry Potter novel? A small part of her that wasn't in denial tried to speak up, but was shushed because, really, she only had enough presence of mind to handle one thing, and that thing was swooping past every window in the hotel looking for Harry or any of the Dursleys while the wind pushed her this way and that and evil faeries chased after her.

On her second pass, Ginny was forced away from the hotel by the faeries, cursing all the while—cursing didn't count if nobody could hear it over the howling winds—only to immediately realize that she'd been going about her search all wrong. She could see for miles, pouring rain notwithstanding, so she was actually better off the further she was from what she was looking for. Even so, it took her three circuits around the hotel to actually spot what she was looking for—and it wasn't Vernon or Dudley's corpulent forms, nor was it Harry or Petunia's scarecrow-like physiques.

It was the dozens and dozens of white salt shakers with shiny metal lids spaced evenly across the floor of one of the rooms from wall to wall.

Merlin-damned crazy house elves.

Ginny dove for the window and was blocked by no less than three of her faerie pursuers. She backed off and tried to go around them, but all they had to do was keep her away from one window. Well, two windows, but they were right next to each other, so it hardly mattered. Ginny flapped her wings, hovering in place for just a few moments while she tried to think of something

And then it hit her.

But only after hitting him.

'Him,' being the middle one of the trio of faeries blocking her way, and 'it,' being one of Dudley's trainers, thrown by Harry who was standing at the open window. Ginny looked at the trainer that she had somehow caught in her hoof, then dashed forward in the air and chucked it at the middle faerie a second time. The faerie ducked away to dodge it, which was fine, because it cleared the way for Ginny to dart in and dive through the window past Harry, making a terrible ruckus as she crashed into the salt-shaker-covered floor—and also the dresser on the other side of the room.

The noise woke Dudley up, who proceeded to stare at the dripping wet and orange miniature flying horse in the room. Several seconds passed, in which Dudley stared, and Harry stared, and Ginny just stood there breathing heavily, until the silence was broken by a crash coming from the next room.

Evidently Vernon had heard the noise and discovered that the floor had been covered in salt shakers again. It was funny at first, but as soon as he recovered he was in the room yelling, and then Petunia was in the room yelling, and Ginny wasn't hearing any of it because her heart was thundering in her chest and her ears were pointed out the open window listening for any sign that the faeries were following her and that was all she was capable of caring about right just then.

Just when she was beginning to think that the whole matter was over, there came a great, thumping knock from the hotel room door. It was a knock so heavy and ominous that none of the faeries she'd seen tonight could have made it.

No, the thing on the other side of the door had to be something bigger—something greater—and Ginny expected that she knew what.

Ginny already had the attention of Titania, after all. Why would she ever think that Mab wouldn't pay her a visit when so many of her children were here?

The booming knock came again, and Ginny gulped.

"Someone should probably get that," she said into the silence that followed. "I don't think she likes waiting."

⁂

The knocking at the door of the Lovegood home came as a surprise to both of its inhabitants, being that it was already dark and well into evening. It was not, however, quite as much of a surprise as it should have been.

"Could you get that, Sunset?" Luna asked, sounding rather typically distracted.

Sunset sighed, wiped her hooves off with the dish towel and dropped off the tall stool she needed in order to use the kitchen sink. Passing by Luna, she saw that she had her fingers all tangled up in something resembling crochet if it involved paperclips and a jangling of bottle caps.

Well, at least it was something practical.

Shaking her head at the irony of that thought, Sunset made her way to the front door and opened it to the sight of exactly what she had expected: Molly Weasley, balancing two separate dishes in the air beside her with her wand.

"Ah, Mrs. Weasley," she said, stepping aside and letting her in. "What a surprise. You know, we've managed visits to the grocer several times now," she reminded her. "There's only two of us and we're both pretty small. I like to think that I've gotten grilling vegetables down well enough. It's appreciated, really, but you don't have to bring us things every couple of days."

"Oh, I know, but you know me, dear," Mrs. Weasley said, walking in and making her way over to the dining room table, which also doubled as its coffee table, its research table and... really, in the chaos of the Rookery, it was a flat space that did anything that was asked of it. "I just had a moment to myself and I couldn't help but think of you two over here all alone... and Ginny is still... well, you know how it goes."

"Yes, I know," Sunset said, and she did know, as was proven by the three dishes sitting next to the front door which Sunset levitated and hoofed over to Mrs. Weasley, exchanging them for the new pair.

"Now, I've got a shepherd's pie for Luna and a stack of brownies here," she said as she handed over each one. "There was supposed to be an apple pie for you, dear, but I'm afraid one of the others must have run off with it. Or two of the others, as the case may be. Honestly, they're such a hassle over the summer, but I do prefer it to the school year... I was dreading it enough with Ron going to Hogwarts, but now with Ginny going too, I... The house will just be empty and..."

Suddenly, Luna was there, leading Mrs. Weasley off and making noises approximating the motions of comforting the woman, much to Sunset's relief. Not only was the whole 'vocally comforting someone' thing not really, her, but also...

"I'm sure Ginny is fine, Mrs. Weasley..."

"I got a letter from Bill, and he said that the wards..."

Yeah, that. The woman was acting like her only daughter was dead and gone when actually she was behind one of the most impressive sets of magical wards that Sunset had ever heard of. Really, they were the sort of thing you read about in legends and stories—probably on the side of the villain, admittedly—but the girl probably couldn't be safer if Princess Celestia herself had cast the spell.

Sighing, Sunset glanced over at the blubbering woman and wondered if she dared hope that Princess Celestia was feeling even a fraction of the grief over her own missing ward that Mrs. Weasley was about her daughter.

Probably not.

⁂

For a brief moment, Vernon was torn between addressing the small orange pony in the room and the pounding knocking at the door, but eventually, the pounding won out and he abruptly turned on his heels to stomp over to the door and yank it open with a shout of, "What do you want?!"

Ginny wasn't sure what she thought Mab would look like, but it wasn't the giant man in a heavy leather coat resembling a chest of drawers that he had worn out to sea and slept in. Ginny's second thought was to try to remember who the king of the winter court was, because a name didn't pop immediately to mind and she really didn't want to get it wrong. When the large mountain of a man managed to squeeze himself through the hotel doorway and remove his hat, though, she spotted his wiry black beard and hair and felt very foolish, because she actually did know him, and he wasn't the king of the winter court.

Probably.

"Well, now," the large man said, taking in the room and looking for a place to set his hat. Not finding one, he shrugged and tossed it on a chair near the door. "Sorry about the late hour, you wouldn't believe the mess I had to go through to get here."

"I—wha—" Vernon said, shocked at the sight of a man who dwarfed him to such a degree. "I say, now, who do you think you are, barging in on us like this? How did a ruffian like you even get into the hotel? I hardly believe that a place like this would let a hobo like you in the door!"

Unfortunately for Vernon's chance of getting anything like an answer to his bluster, the man's attention was stolen when Ginny's eyes widened and she shouted "Hagrid!" More than relieved to see him instead of any member of the unseelie court. In fact, by the look of him, he hardly looked like he'd even been through the storm, let alone seen any of the whole host of faeries that were skulking about the place.

Hagrid, for his part, looked down in surprise at hearing his name, and his eyes widened in delight at being recognized. "Well, hello there, you little cutie," he said, pushing past Vernon like he was a stray branch in his path and crouching down to get himself closer to Ginny's level; a somewhat futile gesture, as she'd still be looking up at him if he was laying on his stomach.

"You know this man?" Vernon shouted, aghast, before it seemed to process exactly who it was that had spoken. "Wait, what am I saying? Of course the freaky animal knows the freaky mountain man—you probably come from the same place! Bunch of freaks, the lot of you!"

Ginny was really tempted to give Vernon a piece of her mind or the whole of a hoof now that she no longer had to hold her tongue in order to keep herself from being discovered, but even so, his overuse of the word 'freaks' just made it hard for her to take him seriously.

Also, Hagrid was kind of filling her entire point of view, so Vernon was easy to ignore.

Hagrid, though, was looking at Harry. "Is she your familiar?" he asked.

Harry didn't seem to know how to answer that, and also seemed to be having a more difficult time ignoring Vernon. "Uhhh..." he said, taking on a worried, hunted look. "I... guess?" he said with a great deal of uncertainty, looking every bit like he expected that to be the wrong answer.

Ginny let out a huff of air and said, "Hagrid, it's me—Ginny Weasley. You helped my mom with the crups we found in dad's shed a month ago. You're here to take me and... Harry... to Diagon, I'd guess?"

Hagrid did the sensible thing at that news and blinked. Then, he backed off on his haunches and looked her over, as if to make sure that she was still a miniature copper-orange winged equine. Flummoxed, he dug around in his coat and pulled out two more slightly rumpled envelopes of the type that had been harassing the Dursleys for a week.

Furrowing his brow, Hagrid read the addressee on the first letter, then swapped it for the other and read that one. "Huh, I didna notice that," he mumbled to himself. "I thought it was odd there was two of them, but I'd heard something about a whole gaggle of letters so I didn't ask." Shaking his head, he looked back down at Ginny. "Yer really Ginny Weasley?" he asked. "'Cause I had a parrot once that—"

"Enough!" Vernon shouted, making his way around the crouched form of Hagrid to address him. "Am I to understand that it's been you that's responsible for all these blasted letters?!" he yelled.

Hagrid stood up, not seeming at all concerned by Vernon's bluster, but as if he was trying to make out why a puppy had piddled on the carpet. "Well," he said, scratching at his beard. "Not me specifically—that'd be Professor McGonagall, I suppose—but aye; I'm from Hogwarts. What of it?"

"What of it?" Vernon asked, unable to fathom a situation where Hagrid wasn't immediately contrite for existing. "What of it?!" he repeated, stomping his foot and encroaching on Hagrid's space. "You think I don't remember what that boy's parents told us? You freaks aren't supposed to bother good, honest folk like us! Do you have any idea the hassle it's been with all these letters?! How are we supposed to explain it when I get two hundred of the damned things mailed to a hotel room we only overnighted at?!"

Hagrid was not impressed by Vernon's aggressive puffery. "Yeah?" He said, crossing his arms and looking down at the corpulent man. "Well, you ought to have given the letters to the kids, then, oughtn't ya? Speaking of which..." Hagrid looked down at the letters he had in his hand, and passed them out to their recipients. "Harry," he said, offering the boy his letter with a kind, almost prideful smile. "And Ginny."

Vernon sputtered in unvoiced fury, but held back from making a grab for the letters with the larger man looming over him.

Ginny reached out to take her letter, and only moments before making a fool of herself remembered that she had hooves. She made it work, though, balancing the letter in front of herself.

Huh, she had two first Hogwarts letters, now. Well, she had hundreds, sort of, but she didn't actually have hundreds, so it still seemed unique to her.

...

Actually, come to think of it, where was the one that the house elf had given her? Not here, certainly, so she supposed that she only had one Hogwarts letter after all.

Harry, for his part, seemed to be giving the letter a great deal more reverence than it deserved, as if he hadn't already seen hundreds of the things and needed to shake them out of his jumper back at the Dursleys' house. "Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry," he read, and proceeded to open the envelope and investigate what was inside.

Ginny followed suit, which took her a fair bit more work because, well, hooves. She hated to feel like she was harping on that, but it really was a bloody nuisance not having any fingers.

Hagrid, for all that Ginny knew him as 'that monster-mad man' and 'our third-greatest nemesis' from her brothers—specifically the twins—seemed to only have eyes for Harry at the moment. "Yeh'll know all about Hogwarts, of course," he said, watching Harry read the letter.

Harry took a moment to finish what he was reading, then looked up at Hagrid. "A little," he said, which was the wrong thing to say.

Well, it was the wrong thing to say in the measure of not pissing off Vernon, so really, it was the right thing to say.

"What?!" Vernon exploded, jaw slack, stunned that a child could actually learn something without his express input. "How?" His bafflement quickly turned to anger, and he demanded to know, "Who told you about that... that place?!"

Harry, sadly, was still used to being cowed by Vernon and not a very good liar besides, so even without meaning to, he glanced at Ginny.

"You!" Vernon bellowed, rounding on Ginny. "Just who do you think you are, you—"

"Ginny Weasley," she interrupted him, letting out all of her sass with the reassurance of a much larger man than Vernon by her side. "We just went over that a minute ago—or weren't you listening?"

Vernon was going purple with rage at her backtalk when he finally realized just what he was talking to. "Hold on, you... hooves... you're the one that's been terrorizing us for the last week!"

Ginny rolled her eyes as she tucked her letter under her wing. "Ugh, no. For the last time, that wasn't me," she insisted, hating being blamed for something that legitimately wasn't her fault, especially since she now knew who and what was responsible.

Vernon was taken aback at her denial. "What?" she sputtered. "Of course it's been you! Do you see any other tiny horses around?!"

Ginny threw her hooves up in the air out of frustration. "Yes! I was fighting off a whole sodding herd of the blighters outside just ten minutes ago! Why do you think I came crashing in here in the middle of the night? For a laugh? Please! Do I look like I have bloody great holes in my blighted legs?!"

Vernon backed off at the sheer vehemence coming off of the tiny orange pony, Petunia was shielding her poor Dudders' ears from Ginny's sudden burst of invectives, and Hagrid just looked bemused at the whole situation, not even questioning that there had been hostile equines just outside the building.

"...So, we're off to Diagon Alley, then, yeah?" Harry suggested, looking up at Hagrid with a nervous hopefulness that said he really wanted to be anywhere else just now and could they please hurry things along?

Vernon, unfortunately, reset himself on taking notice of something that he had experience with, which was making Harry miserable. "Haven't I said, you're not going?!"

"I don't think you have, actually," Harry pointed out, borrowing a little of Ginny's irreverence from the fact that violence didn't seem to be on the table with Hagrid in the room. "I think I'd have noticed."

At Vernon's statement, though, Hagrid also returned to the conversation, having found solid grounds to object on. "Not going? Of course he's going! His name's been down ever since he was born, and a great nasty muggle as you ain't gonna stop him."

Ginny had an uneasy feeling in her stomach as Hagrid mentioned Harry's name having been down ever since he was born, but she wasn't sure why. She'd already reasoned that Harry really was the boy's name after all, which was why he'd been picked to stand in for the real Harry Potter, but all the same...

Regardless, the conversation went on without her until Vernon yelled, "I AM NOT PAYING FOR SOME CRACKPOT OLD FOOL TO TEACH HIM MAGIC TRICKS!"

There was a moment of silence in the hotel room as Vernon's shout echoed out into the night.

Hagrid's massive hand gripped the handle of his pink umbrella.

Things only went downhill from there.

⁂

"I shouldn'ta oughta done that," Hagrid mused as the three of them walked rather quickly down the hall of the hotel, the storm still raging outside and drowning out the yelling of Vernon back in his room. "Lost me temper, but it didn't even work anyways. Meant ter turn him into a walrus, but I suppose he was close enough that there wasn't much left ter do."

Ginny snickered to herself as she struggled to keep up with Hagrid's stride at the same time as she was fixing the image of Vernon Dursley with whiskers and tusks in her mind for posterity. That was one too many things for her to do at once, though, and it wasn't long before she tripped and took a tumble on the thin hotel carpet. Cursing to herself, she stumbled up to her hooves, pulled her letter out from under her wing with her teeth, then took to the air. She wasn't really good enough with her wings yet to fly indoors, but she didn't let that stop her and after pinging off the floors and walls a few times, she managed to perch herself on Hagrid's shoulder.

Hagrid, for his part, took her perching on him as a natural thing, and focused on a quill and parchment that he had produced from inside his coat, on which he was furiously writing.

Dear Professor Dumbledore,
Given Harry and Ginny their letters.
Taking them to the leaky for the night.
Will be in Diagon tomorrow.
Weather's horrible. Hope you're well.
– Hagrid

Finishing his letter, he slowed his pace and fished an owl out of his coat. Ginny stopped and looked again, but that was indeed an owl and he was attaching the letter to it. Harry caught her eye and nodded inquisitively at the owl; she guessed that he was asking if that was normal, and she shook her head... though on second thought, that required a bit more explanation and she hopped down next to him.

Thinking that she needed bags strapped to her side or something, Ginny stuffed her letter back under her wing and said, "I mean, we use owls to send letters, yeah—I might have mentioned that—but this is the first time I've seen a pocket owl. Maybe it's a burrowing species?"

"There's burrowing owls?" Harry asked, never having heard of that before. "Do they not have wings, then...?"

"No, they do," Ginny said, trying to remember where she'd heard about burrowing owls aside from the fact that wizards in general tended to know lots of owl facts just as a matter of course. "It's just a nesting thing."

The owl that Hagrid was using definitely had wings, the two of them observed, as Hagrid had finished attaching the letter to it and simply chucked it like a quaffle down the hall.

It didn't do much better at flying indoors than Ginny had, and there was a crash shortly after it turned the corner. She felt slightly vindicated.

Hagrid winced. "Prolly shoulda waited until we was outside," he said. "I always forget that muggle buildings don't have as many open windows."

They stood there for a moment before Harry changed the subject and asked, "So, how did you get here, anyway? Unc—I mean, Vernon wasn't wrong when he said the security here probably wouldn't let someone who looked like you in—no offense."

Hagrid waved his hand, dismissing the implication and said, "Floo."

"You flew?" Harry said, surprised. "But you don't look like you've been out in the storm."

Ginny snickered and corrected him. "No, no, he means the floo network—through the fireplace."

"You mean floo as in a chimney floo?" Harry asked, looking at Hagrid and trying to figure out how that worked. "Like Santa Claus?"

"Naw, the floo network is... well, it's easier ter just show you," Hagrid said, and began to lead them down the stairs of the hotel, which was enough of a challenge for Ginny's short legs and hooves that she had to take wing again, which went about as well in the cramped space of the stairwell as it had in the hallway.

Eventually, after a few flights of stairs, Hagrid offered to carry her down the rest of the way and she reluctantly obliged. "Come ter think of it," he said as he was picking her up. "Yeh said something about getting into a fight outside?"

Ginny scrunched up her nose at the reminder, but it did bear explaining. "Oh, yeah," she turned to Harry and said, "The hoofsteps that the Dursleys were complaining about all week? It was faeries. Unseelie faeries."

Harry didn't look nearly concerned enough at that news. "Like the one that turned you into a pony?" he asked.

"No, no," Ginny said, shaking her head. "That was Titania—the seelie queen."

Harry cocked his head to the side in confusion. "What's the difference?"

"The seelie are the summer court." Ginny paused, then said, "I think. They might be slightly different things, I'm not sure, but they're as good as the same, anyway. They're dangerous and unpredictable, but not wholly malicious or anything. The unseelie are the winter court, and they are. Malicious, I mean."

"Aye, that's about the right of it," Hagrid, said, agreeing with Ginny's description. He paused, then, and turned Ginny around in his arms, holding her up in front of himself, wide-eyed. "Hold up; yer saying you was turned into this by Titania herself, and now the unseelie are after yeh? Here of all places?"

"Yes!" Ginny said, frustrated. "It's completely insane!"

Hagrid looked troubled as they came to the floor they were looking for and Hagrid let Ginny down. "That's... I don't rightly know what that is, but that's not something you see. Faeries, in the muggle world? It's the first time I've heard of that. They must really want something from yeh. You didn't do some fool thing like steal from 'em, did yeh?"

"No!" Ginny shouted. "Maybe Luna knows? I ran into Titania at her house, and that's all I know!"

Hagrid stroked his beard. "It's a right mystery," he said, not really having anything to say. "Good thing yeh won't have ter go back outside teh leave, we're here."

'Here' was apparently a door like most others in the hotel, except instead of having a placard with a number on it, it was just entirely blank. Hagrid made a cursory check to make sure there wasn't anyone nearby, then pointed his umbrella at the door and mumbled something under his breath, unlocking the door.

"I'd appreciate it if you didn't mention me doing magic ter anyone," Hagrid said as he led Ginny and Harry into what appeared to be a utility room. "I'm—err—not supposed ter do any, strictly speaking, but there's exceptions for things like this; it'd only make more trouble if I wasn't allowed ter cast a muggle repelling charm or two. It's one of the reasons I was so keen ter take the job, teh be honest."

Ginny stopped, looked down at herself and remembered that she was a pony. It wasn't something she often forgot, but it had slipped her mind that she'd just been walking through a public muggle place as if she wasn't a walking violation of the statute of secrecy. After spending the last two weeks of hiding from muggles, it was kind of embarrassing to forget.

Harry, though, was stuck on another part of what Hagrid had said. "Why aren't you allowed to do magic?"

Ginny was curious too, though she knew better than to ask. She was only too happy to bend an ear now that the subject had been brought up, though.

...Huh, come to think of it, she could actually bend her ears now. Weird.

“Oh, well, I was at Hogwarts meself but I—err—got expelled, ter tell yeh the truth. In me third year. They snapped me wand in half and everything. But Dumbledore let me stay on as gamekeeper. Great man, Dumbledore.”

"Why were you expelled?" Harry asked, but he was pushing his luck and Hagrid proceeded to move things on rather than answer.

"Anyways, we're here," he said.

"...Where is here?" Harry asked, looking around the room. "Or rather, what is here? This just looks like a big utility closet." Ginny, too, wanted to know, because she was expecting a fireplace and she didn't see anything even remotely like one.

As if on queue, a fan inside a tall metal box on the other side of the room began to spin up, the box clicked a few times and there was a whoosh that sounded like a fire starting, or maybe one of her twin brothers' less dangerous potions accidents.

"And that, there, is why we're here," Hagrid said, gesturing at the metal box. "It's a muggle furnace, is what it is, and it's the closest thing ter a fireplace that this place has. Y'see, Harry, floo travel is magical travel from fireplace ter fireplace, and let me tell yeh, getting this place hooked up for the night was a right hassle, it was. I'm not much liked 'round the ministry, ter be honest, and them ministry folk are petty as snubbed hippogriff chicks when they want ter be. I'm afraid I had ter drop yer name in order ter get things moving."

"My name?" Harry asked, giving Ginny an uncertain look.

Hagrid turned to Harry at the question. "Blimey, don't you know? You're famous, you are."

"Oh, um, I know that," Harry said. "That Harry Potter is famous, I mean. It's just hard to really imagine that being me, you know? I'm just... just Harry."

"Oh, yeah, that makes sense," Hagrid allowed, scratching the side of his nose as he gave that a thought. "Must've really thrown yeh when yeh found out, but I took yeh from the ruined house myself, on Dumbledore’s orders. Took yeh ter that lot upstairs..." Hagrid paused for a moment, then shook his head. "Never got the full story, there, but I got the picture Dumbledore never was happy with that."

Hagrid went on to explain how leaving Harry with the Dursleys must have been the best of a bad lot of choices, but Ginny didn't hear him, and neither did Harry.

"Wait. Wait. Hold on, Hagrid. You picked Harry Potter up from his house?" she said. "The house where..."

Hagrid nodded somberly. "Oh, aye, that I did. It was a right mess, and I don't think I'll be telling what I saw ter a couple of kids, even if one of 'em is Harry Potter. Nasty stuff. He can ask me when he's older, if he wants ter."

Ginny fell onto her rump. "But... that doesn't..."

"Umm, Ginny...?" Harry asked, looking at the stunned pony with uncertainty. Clearly not understanding the monumental shift that was going on in Ginny's head because she knew something that he didn't.

"Hagrid can't be obliviated, Harry," she hissed under her breath.

"What?" Harry said.

"Hagrid can't be obliviated," Ginny repeated. "I've heard from dad that it doesn't work on him. He also can't lie for the life of him."

Harry blinked, not getting why that mattered, at first, and then it hit him and his eyes widened. He looked at Hagrid, then back at Ginny.

"So he's...?" Harry said, looking up at Hagrid in a new light.

"Yes!" Ginny hissed.

Harry pointed at himself. "Then I'm really...?"

She threw her arms up in frustration. "I guess!"

Harry was now just as stunned as she was. "How?"

"I don't know!" Ginny insisted.

The rest of the night was a blur as Hagrid transfigured the furnace into a fireplace and took the two of them through to the Leaky Cauldron, where they were set up with a room for the night. Nothing even registered to them, as both of their minds were full up dealing with that one impossible thought, and several times, one of them would wake the other up in the middle of the night by repeating that one question.

"How?!"

⁂

Dumbledore was just about to turn in for the night when an owl came knocking at his office window. Waving his wand, he let the owl in and smiled when he saw that it was from Hagrid. Reading the note, he was both pleased and a little disappointed that things seemed to have gone smoothly enough. The fact that Hagrid was taking the children to the Leaky Cauldron for the night did speak of some level of disconnect with Harry's relatives, but not enough to immediately shatter the wards.

That was fine, though. While it might have been preferable in some ways for something to trigger a clean break, the fact that there didn't seem to be any barrier to Harry attending Hogwarts was the far more important thing, and if that could happen without causing too much of a rift between Harry and his family, then all the better. Hope springs eternal, after all.

He was filing the letter away in his personal things when, much to his surprise, another owl alighted on the windowsill. He received so many owls that it wasn't entirely surprising, though most people—and most owls—at least had the decency to have their letters delivered during the daytime. What was even more peculiar was that he recognized this owl, and its owner was hardly one to rush anything—a natural consequence of being over six hundred years old.

Yes, the owl from was his old teacher, mentor and partner in alchemy, the immortal Nicholas Flamel.

Taking the letter from the owl, he broke the seal, flipped it open and began to read...

...And read...

...And read...

By the end of the long-winded letter, Dumbledore had several questions, among them why the Philosopher's Stone was in Gringotts at all, why it was in the British branch, of all things, why he absolutely had to have it out by noon tomorrow, and what the bloody hell he was supposed to do with it.

Sighing, Dumbledore sat back down at his desk and began to pen a letter to Hagrid providing an explanation of the situation.

Next, he got out another roll of parchment and went about penning one to Flamel requesting an explanation of the situation.

Finally, he penned a third letter to Molly Weasley telling her that her daughter would be in Diagon Alley tomorrow, but warning her not to get her hopes up.

⁂

Ginny was still out of it the next morning, feeling as though she hadn't awoken from her dream until a stack of flapjacks were dropped in front of her. Even once she was sure she was awake, though, she still felt wrong-footed, as if the world had shifted under her and settled in an odd way.

If Harry Potter was Harry Potter, then did that mean that Harry Potter wasn't real? Or if Harry Potter was the real Harry Potter, then was there a fake Harry Potter going out and doing all those things that had surely happened in some way similar to his published works?

Ginny's mind went back to all the questions that Harry had had about things and his assertions that none of the people like that in the books he'd read had existed at all, but Ginny wasn't just a silly girl who had assumed otherwise out of baseless fancy. She'd talked to her mother about what Harry Potter must be like, and she'd never said anything about him being locked up in the cupboard at his awful muggle relatives' house.

By the time breakfast was done, though, Ginny just wanted to not think about the whole mess for a while, which was why she was eager to listen when Harry brought another subject up.

Her eagerness over the subject was very brief, however.

"Hagrid," Harry said, as they were leaving the Leaky Cauldron out the back. "I've just realized that I haven't any money, and you heard Uncle Vernon last night... he won’t pay for me to go and learn magic."

"Don't worry about that," Hagrid said, wiping his mouth with a handkerchief that he then stuffed back in one of the many pockets of his coat. Hogwarts is free, for one thing—you only have ter buy your supplies—and did yeh think that yer parents didn't leave yeh anything?"

That flummoxed Harry. "Sorry," he said. "I guess I'm not used to the idea of having had parents—or knowing about them, anyhow."

Ginny, though, now had a new problem spinning about in her mind. "Hold on—how am I going to pay for anything?" she asked. Admittedly, it was the same question that Harry had just asked, but in her case it was actually uncertain.

"Ah," Hagrid said, looking as if he'd only just then remembered that she was there. "Now that, I'm not sure about."

Harry looked to Ginny in somewhat the same manner, then got a determined look in his eye. "If I have money, then of course I'm paying for your things," he said, then ruined it by adding, "You're my familiar, after all."

Ginny's jaw dropped at the... the utter nerve. "I am not a pet," she hissed.

Harry immediately wilted under her anger, though it didn't take long for him to grow a bit of spine. "Of course not. Titania only did this to you so she could make you my familiar, so your whole situation is kind of my responsibility."

Ginny didn't think that that logic quite held up as well as Harry thought it did, but she also had to admit that as far as the wizarding world was concerned, he was responsible for her. That, and it did seem like the sort of thing that the real Harry Potter would do—and it was something she'd probably let the real Harry Potter do for her—and maybe everything said that he was the real Harry Potter, and—"Oh... fine," she said, giving up. She didn't have the will to complain about it right now anyway.

The trip to Gringott's was so awkward that she almost didn't enjoy the train ride... but only almost. Hagrid picked up a last-minute package for Dumbledore, which seemed strange, but she forgot all about it when they got to Harry's vault. Harry, it seemed, really did have piles and piles of money—more than Ginny had ever seen in her life—which made her feel a bit better about several things and worse about a couple of others.

After that, though, shopping for school supplies went about how she expected, having gone through the process no small number of times before, though this time there was the added entertainment of listening to Hagrid do his best to explain things at each stop, then having Ginny actually explain things in a way that an eleven-year-old muggleborn would understand. If she was being honest, she wasn't actually all that good at that, but her two weeks with Harry at the Dursleys' had clarified a lot of the things that she'd heard from her father over the years, making her miles better at it than Hagrid, who seemed to be only allowed into the muggle world on special occasion.

All in all, aside from getting insulted by Malfoy while she was getting her robes, the trip was actually a great deal more fun than any of the times she'd been through the same exact process before. Of course, she'd never been shopping for herself before, which almost certainly had something to do with it. She'd also been cooped up with the Dursleys for two weeks and then chased them all across muggle Britain, so just being back in the wizarding world was more relief than she could properly express.

If she wasn't a tiny orange pony, she'd probably say that life was pretty good just then.

Things went a little odd, though, when Hagrid announced his intent to buy Harry a birthday present.

"Tell yeh what, I’ll get yer animal," Hagrid said, terribly proud of his decision. "Not a toad, toads went outta fashion years ago—yeh’d be laughed at—and I don't like cats, they make me sneeze. I’ll get yer an owl. All the kids want owls, they’re dead useful, carry yer mail and everything.”

Ginny wasn't so sure since the only people Harry would have to send letters to were the ones that he'd meet at Hogwarts, but the more she thought about it, the more it did actually make a bit of sense. She wasn't sure what their situation was going to be from here on out, but it probably would be good if Harry had a way to contact an actual wizarding adult, and... well... Ginny would be able to write her mum, too.

Harry came up short on the idea, though. "Hang on, Hagrid," he said, preventing himself from being dragged directly to Eeylops Owl Emporium. "Doesn't Ginny count as my—err—animal?"

Hagrid blinked, looked down at the small orange pony that was Ginny, then blinked again. "Aye, she does, wrong as that might seem teh yeh." He stood there for a while looking down at the two of them with a serious look on his face.

In the silence, Ginny felt the sudden need to look over to Harry and state, "Just to be clear, I'm not carrying your mail."

Harry didn't get a chance to respond, because in exactly that moment, Hagrid had an idea. "O'course!" He said, grinning. "I'll get yer familiar an owl—that'll still make it yours in a roundabout way."

"...Is that how that works?" Harry asked, uncertain.

"Well, I'm the Hogwarts gamekeeper, so it is if I says it is," Hagrid declared, and twenty minutes later, they left Eeylops Owl Emporium with a large cage that held a beautiful snowy owl, fast asleep with her head under her wing.

Their final stop was Ollivander's wand shop, where, after trying more wands than Ginny had ever heard of, Harry finally claimed an appropriately dramatic wand, followed by an ominous statement by the shop owner.

Ginny sighed. That settled it, didn't it? He really was the real Harry Potter. That or he'd end up going evil and having to fight the real Harry Potter, anyway, but probably not. Harry was so earnest that Ginny really didn't think he had it in him to go evil.

Those thoughts all left her when Hagrid pushed her forward and Ollivander started grabbing boxes of wands for her to try.

Ginny looked down at her hooves, then back up at Ollivander. "Um...?" she said, but nobody seemed to see the obvious problem with this. "Mr. Ollivander, sir? I don't think—"

"Hornbeam and Hungarian Horntail, quite rigid, thirteen inches—rather whippy—give it a wave," Ollivander announced, holding the wand out for her.

"...HOW?!" Ginny shouted, but he just continued to hold it out for her to take. "Not only do I have hooves, but it's longer than my entire arm!"

Harry snickered.

Grumbling, Ginny stepped forward, sat down on the floor and reached out with her two front hooves, sandwiching the wand between them, only for Ollivander to yank it away like a kneazle toy.

"Willow and phoenix feather, nine and a half inches," the wand shop proprietor announced. "Go on."

Ginny fumed, but did her best, building up a pile of tried wand boxes that was nearly as large as Harry's. Eventually, she was on her last thread of patience when Ollivander offered her, "Hornbeam and Hungarian Horntail, quite rigid, thirteen inches—rather whippy—"

Ginny snapped. "This is literally the first wand you offered me, old man!" she shouted, snatching the wand out of his hand and pointing it back at him. "The! Exact! Same! One! Give it up! I'm a naffing tiny horse and I can't use a bloody wand!"

Of course, the wand chose that moment to go off, showering Ollivander with orange sparks and downy feathers from where it sat, attached neatly to her outstretched hoof.

"...What."

⁂

Ginny could apparently use her hooves almost entirely as if they were hands; who knew? Not her, certainly, and not Harry or Hagrid, either. Once she'd figured out the knack, though, it was an oddly intuitive magic to use. All she really had to do was not think about it, which was an awkward discovery to have once she realized that there were a few times that came to mind that she'd done it before.

Still, walking out of Ollivanders with a hopping three-legged gait while she spun her wand in the remaining hoof was as magical an experience as she could have ever expected. The fact that Ron would be going to Hogwarts with Charlie's old wand while she had a brand new one was... Well, it wasn't worth being a tiny winged horse, but it did amuse the part of her deep inside where petty sibling rivalries lurked.

Eventually, though, she had to put her wand away in her new saddlebags and face the fact that the day was coming to an end, and by how down Harry was suddenly looking, it seemed as if he'd realized it, too.

"Hey, uh, Hagrid," Ginny said, deciding to address the matter directly. "Strictly speaking, does Harry actually have to go back to the Dursleys'? Because—just saying—I'm sure that my mum would really like to see her daughter and I'm sure she wouldn't have any trouble putting Harry up for the rest of the summer, yeah?"

Hagrid looked at her blankly, like she hadn't spoken at all, then he blinked and shook his head as if he was trying to shake off a fly on his nose. "Sorry, lass," he said. "The Ministry'd have my hide if I took Harry anywhere but back to his relatives."

Later, when they were riding the underground south, Ginny scooted closer to whisper to Harry, "That was weird, right? The way Hagrid looked when I mentioned going home to my mum?"

"I thought so, yeah," Harry agreed, looking askance at the large man, though he was hardly alone in that as he took up several seats of the crowded rail car. Harry, though, was looking for something deeper. "Do you think it had something to do with Titania and your wish?"

"Maybe," Ginny said. Whatever it had been, though, there wasn't any sign of it now, and after a few more legs of their trip, she and Harry were left standing in front of Number Four Privet Drive once more.

Harry knocked.

There was no answer.

"They're not home yet, are they?" Ginny asked.

"Nnnope."

"How long do you think Hagrid's muggle-repelling charm will last?"

"You're asking me?!"

⁂

Sunset's horn glowed teal as she heaved the last stack of The Quibbler magazines onto the pile next to the fireplace. The process of mailing them all out to all of their subscribers was, fortunately, someone else's job. She didn't know what exactly was involved in mass-mailings when all your delivery personnel were birds and she didn't want to. It probably involved a lot of mess.

"Is that it, then?" Luna asked, carrying a large pot of onion stew into the room. Mrs. Weasley hadn't shown up with any random gifts of food that day, which probably had something to do with it being the last day before term started at Hogwarts. According to Luna, the Weasleys had never quite gotten a handle on getting ready before the last possible second, and the Burrow would inevitably be a whirlwind of chaos and shouting for the entire twenty-four hours prior.

"Yeah, that's the last of it," Sunset said, giving the towering stacks of magazines a glance. Seeing the fruits of their labor all stacked up and ready to go like that was... a new feeling, and not something that she ever thought that she'd enjoy. In contrast, though, she was kind of irked that they'd fallen into the pattern of Luna handling the food when they were left on their own to feed themselves. "You didn't have to make the food," she said, frowning as she took the pot from Luna with her magic and walked it over to the table."

"I respect that charred food is your cultural heritage," Luna said, sitting down at the table. "But food resembling phoenix pellets upsets my tummy."

"That's not—" Sunset started to say, then sighed. "They weren't supposed to burn," she grumbled. "Smoked artichokes are so a regular food thing for real people... I just don't know how to smoke artichokes."

"Of course," Luna said, by which she meant, 'I don't believe you,' though Sunset was sure that Luna actually did believe her and was just bantering, which was a regular sort of interaction in the house. "Besides, it's only fair that I cook sometimes since you did more than your share of work on the Quibbler, I can reach the countertop with only a footstool."

Sunset shrugged. "Princess Celestia always was big on having me write reports and essays rather than worksheets," she explained. "And you just don't send someone like her essays with shoddy grammar and penmanship. Still, though, I don't think that Titania intended you to use that knife to chop onions."

"I think she did, on account of she wanted me to use it and I'm using it," Luna said, very sure of herself. "Given she didn't tell me I wouldn't be able to set it down and it pops up in my hand any time I so much as think of using a knife, she's just going to have to deal with it being used to chop onions. It is very good at chopping onions; there's hardly any tears."

"And that's one of the few ways it can be used that you can say that about," Sunset mused aloud.

Luna nodded. "It wouldn't be so bad, really, if keeping it on me didn't feel like it was pressing against my spine."

"It's done wonders for your posture, though," Sunset observed.

"Mmh," Luna said, acknowledging it. "The threat of repeating a traumatic injury will do that—but you changed the subject. You did more than proofread and typeset The Quibbler, and you can't pretend you didn't have fun with your article on how the ministry was training their army of heliopaths with headpats."

Sunset tried to hide the smile of amusement that that brought, but failed. "Well... you're not wrong," she said, admitting it. "I think that Xenophilius would have approved."

Luna didn't respond, and that killed the conversation for a while. Eventually, Sunset tried to broach the subject again.

"You know, it's been a month and a half, and we're going to Hogwarts tomorrow..."

Luna nodded. "True," she said. "Which just means that they're that much closer to coming home."

Author's Note

Well, this didn't go as planned. I plotted this out as one chapter, but got a little fuzzy about the details, thinking, 'oh, I'll just do a few quick things to get summer over with and move on!' Only, it took two months and ended up at 25k words, and since I planned it out as a single thing, splitting it up will be awkward. Oh well, I think it's fun enough, and that's my metric for things these days. Next time: Hogwarts!

Thanks go out to those supporting me on Patreon and ko-fi, pomegranate horsie, Sunny, Zervon Tora, Katharine Berry, LD, Jan Sterba, senaxyva, Ersmiller, Canary In The Coal Mine, Jason Langford, Денис, J T, Andrew Pam, Southpaw, Andrew Denton, Trellmor, Kirishala, djthomp, SirHoli, IamUnknown, fused and CvBrony