Chapter Text
The cauldron is too big for her arms and exactly the right size for everyone to forget she's carrying it.
Flourish and Blotts smells the way it always does at the end of summer — hot dust and old glue and the sweetish rot of a thousand unread pages breathing at once — except today there's a sharper smell underneath it too, something like scorched sugar, which Ginny eventually places as the flashbulbs. There's a queue that starts at the till and ends somewhere out past the window, coiled twice around itself, and more people crammed into the shop than she's ever seen indoors that wasn't a Quidditch final.
Her mother steers them through it like she's done this a hundred times, which she has, though never quite like this. *Get the set books first, we'll queue after, mind the shelf — Ronald, put that down —* and Ginny is handed the cauldron somewhere around the entrance and hasn't been asked to put it down since. It bangs against her shins with every step. Nobody notices when she switches arms.
By the Charms section her mother has stopped moving altogether, gone soft and pink and useless in the specific way she does over other people's babies, and it takes Ginny a moment to understand this isn't sentiment — it's the banner. GILDEROY LOCKHART, it says, in letters twice her height, SIGNING COPIES OF MAGICAL ME TODAY, 12:30–4:30. Her mother already owns everything he's ever written, arranged at home with a care she doesn't extend to the family's actual schoolbooks, and now here is a fresh stack pressed to her chest like something precious she might be asked to surrender at any moment.
"Isn't he handsome," she says, to no one in particular, to everyone, and Fred makes a low sound in his throat that isn't quite a word, and George answers it with a sound that also isn't quite a word, and something passes between the two of them that leaves them both looking like they might combust from the effort of not laughing. Ginny watches the whole exchange happen a foot above her head. She's been trying to learn that language for two years. She still doesn't have it.
Ron, wedged between a bookshelf and a witch with an enormous stuffed vulture on her hat, looks like he'd rather be anywhere else in Britain.
The signing itself is chaos distilled — a man far too golden for the dim little shop, teeth doing something no human teeth ought to be able to do, rising to shake her mother's hand and hold it a beat too long while a camera goes off so close that Ginny sees its shape printed green on the inside of her eyelids. He says something to the room about how *fated*, how *fortunate*, that the Weasleys of all families should — and then he's already turned, teeth aimed at someone else, and her mother is still holding her hand out to the space where his had been.
It's on the way out, wedged in the crush by the door, that it happens.
She hears her father's voice change before she understands why. It drops into a register she's only heard twice before — once when Percy's owl came back with a chunk missing from its wing, once when the Ministry car was three years late running — and when she turns, there's a man she's never seen standing very close to him. Pale in a way that isn't like being ill, more like something bleached on purpose. Expensive in the unhurried way that makes the rest of the shop look shabby by comparison, including — she registers this with a small hot flush — her own family. His hand is closed over the shoulder of a boy about Ron's age, not resting there. Gripping. The way you'd hold something to stop it bolting.
"— shouldn't think you'd need to *buy* anything," the man is saying, pitched for an audience, "what with all those raids you're paid to make. Surprised they let you out with a full vault at all —"
"Funny," her father says, in the flat voice he uses when he means the opposite of funny, "you're one to talk about how people spend."
She doesn't follow the rest of it. It's all old words worn smooth from handling — *House*, and *blood*, and *some of us*, and *ought to be ashamed* — and she has the sense, the way you can sense weather turning before the first drop falls, that this is a fight that started long before she was born and will still be going long after she's forgotten today entirely. Fred's hand closes light around her shoulder, not gripping, just there. George shifts half a step in front of her without seeming to decide to.
The pale man's eyes go over the four of them the way you'd count change and find it short. They land last on Ginny, on the cauldron in her arms, and something moves through his face — small, unhurried, gone before she can name it.
Somebody's book — hers, her old Transfiguration text, worn soft at the corners — is in his hand, and then it's back in her cauldron, and she can't say when either of those things happened, only that her arms are heavier again and the shop has already closed back over the space where he stood. Her father's ears have gone the particular red they go when he's furious and trying hard not to be, in public, in front of a boy who isn't his.
"Come on," her mother says, too brightly, herding them all toward the door like geese. "Come on, we'll be late for the apothecary —"
Ginny doesn't think about the cauldron again. A book that wasn't there this morning is there now; she must have miscounted her list, or her mother added something at the till while she wasn't looking. It happens. Nothing about today has been the sort of day where anyone would think to mention it to her either way.
---
She unpacks everything onto her bed that night, sorting it into the piles her mother taught her — robes, books, the little tin of ink that always seems to leak no matter how carefully it's wrapped — and it's in the third pile, underneath a dragon-hide-bound Standard Book of Spells, that she finds it.
It isn't on her list.
It's smaller than her other books, and thinner, bound in something black that doesn't quite catch the light the way leather should. No title stamped on the cover. No title on the spine either, when she checks, turning it over twice to be sure. She opens it out of habit more than curiosity, and the pages inside are blank — every one, not even lined, just paper the colour of old milk, waiting for something to be done to it.
She tries to remember buying it. Goes back through the whole afternoon in her head — the queue, the banner, her mother's stack of golden hardbacks, the cauldron handle cutting its line into her palm — and there isn't a version of the day that includes choosing this book, or paying for it, or anyone putting it into her hands at all.
She almost goes down to ask. Gets as far as the top step, the book held loosely in both hands, her mother's voice audible below, arguing cheerfully with Fred about whether six Every-Flavour Beans constitutes one purchase or several.
She doesn't go down.
She isn't sure why, exactly, except that the question, rehearsed once in her head — *Mum, is this one of mine?* — comes out sounding smaller than she means it to. Sounding like something that would get folded into the general noise of the house and forgotten within the hour, the way most of what she says is. And there's a small, unfamiliar, not entirely comfortable pleasure in the alternative: that this is a thing none of them packed for her, none of them chose, none of them even know exists. That for once, something in this house arrived for her and her alone, unwitnessed.
She goes back to her room instead.
She puts the book under her pillow instead of in her trunk with everything else. She doesn't examine why that felt like the obvious place for it.