Previous Chapters:
Tags:
@Bellatrisblack @CatsAndRoblox @Rose.gold.kiisses @MeowTasticCat @Jellybean Jade @Missy Clara Oswald
Chapter Twenty-Seven: The Beetle at Bay
January had passed by alarmingly fast. Before Harry knew it, February was nearly half over as well, bringing with it wetter and warmer weather and the prospect of the second Hogsmeade visit of the year. Harry had had very little time to spare on conversations with Cho since they had agreed to visit the village together, but suddenly found himself facing a Valentine’s Day spent entirely in her company.
On the morning of the fourteenth he dressed particularly carefully. He and Theodore arrived at breakfast just in time for the arrival of the post owls. Hedwig or Phasming was not there—not that he had expected them—but Allison was wrestling a letter from the beak of an unfamiliar brown owl as they sat down.
'I was starting to get worried it wouldn't come in time...' she said frustratedly, tearing open the envelope and pulling out a small piece of parchment. Allison quickly read through the message and a grimly pleased expression spread across her face.
'Hey Harry,' she said, looking up at him. 'I need you to do something for me today, its quite important...Can you meet me at me in the Three Broomsticks around noon?'
'Well...I dunno,' said Harry dubiously. 'Cho might be expecting me to spend the whole day with her. We never said what we were going to do.'
Allison looked a little annoyed by this statement
'Fine, if you have to just have her come with you,' said Allison urgently. 'Just be there, ok?'
'Well...all right, but why?'
'I'd explain but I don't have time. I have to respond to this as soon as possible, hey Theo, walk with me—'
And she hurried out of the Great Hall, the letter clutched in one hand and a piece of uneaten toast in the other with Theodore trying to catch up with her.
‘Are you coming?’ Harry asked Tracey, but she shook her head, though a giddy smile had crossed her face.
‘This is me and Terence’s first Valentines Day, and since nearly everyone will be a Hogsmeade we wanted to spend just a quiet day together. With all that’s been going on we haven’t really gotten to hang out really since Christmas.’
‘That sounds like fun,’ said Harry, ‘but shouldn’t Terence be hosting a Quidditch practice?’
‘No,’ responded Tracey. ‘The Gryffindor’s have the field booked, and from what Ter tells me they’re going to be it. Their new Beaters, Sloper and Kirke, and just terrible.’
Harry found it very hard to understand why Terence wasn’t practicing today, even without the field, as Harry would give anything to fly again, to practice, or to play in the match a couple weeks from now.
Tracey soon left, and not long later Harry temporarily returned to his dormitory to attempt to flatten his hair. Just as he was leaving the common room he ran into Theodore.
‘Oh good, Harry, glad I caught you,’ he said quite quickly. ‘I know you got to go, but I just had to explain to you that when you meet up with Allison later she’s going to get you to do something that relates to me. I give you permission to do so.’
‘Theo, you are making zero sense,’ said Harry still walking towards the stairs.
‘I know, sorry, I might see you later.’
With that brief and odd conversation finished Harry made his way to the entrance hall to meet Cho, feeling very apprehensive and wondering what on earth they were going to talk about.
She was waiting for him a little to the side of the oak front doors, looking very pretty with her hair tied back in a long ponytail. Harry’s feet seemed to be too big for his body as he walked toward her, and he was suddenly horribly aware of his arms and how stupid they looked swinging at his sides.
‘Hi,’ said Cho slightly breathlessly.
‘Hi,’ said Harry.
They stared at each other for a moment, then Harry said, ‘Well—er—shall we go, then?’
‘Oh—yes…’
They joined the queue of people being signed out by Filch, occasionally catching each other’s eye and grinning shiftily, but not talking to each other. Harry was relieved when they reached the fresh air, finding it easier to walk along in silence than just stand there looking awkward. It was a fresh, breezy sort of day and as they passed the Quidditch stadium, Harry glimpsed the Gryffindor team skimming over the stands and felt a horrible pang that he hadn’t been able to fly in over two months…
‘You really miss it, don’t you?’ said Cho.
He looked around and saw her watching him.
‘Yeah,’ sighed Harry. ‘I do.’
‘Remember the first time we played against each other, in your third year?’ she asked him.
‘Yeah,’ said Harry, grinning. ‘You kept blocking me.’
‘And that brut Flint yelled at you to try and knock me off my broom, but you didn’t because you have honour,’ said Cho, smiling reminiscently. ‘I heard he just entered a shotgun marriage and is currently working at the betting shop in Knockturn Alley to try to make ends meet.’
‘I feel bad for the kid, but the job and the wedding is probably what he deserves after how he treated us and the other teams,’ said Harry. ‘It’s probably karma though, for being such a bully his life is going downhill while good captains are living their dreams. I had overheard from Fred and George last year at the World Cup that Oliver Wood is on the Puddlemere United team.’
‘Oh, I saw you at the World Cup, remember? We were on the same campsite. It was really good, wasn’t it?’
The subject of the Quidditch World Cup carried them all the way down the drive and out through the gates. Harry could hardly believe how easy it was to talk to her, no more difficult, in fact, than talking to his friends, and he was just starting to feel confident and cheerful when a large gang of Inquisitorial Squad girls passed them, including Pansy Parkinson, Mafalda Prewett, and Agnes Monkleigh.
‘Potter and Chang!’ screeched Pansy to a chorus of snide giggles. ‘Urgh, Chang, I don’t think much of your taste…At least Diggory was good-looking!’
They sped up, talking and shrieking in a pointed fashion with many exaggerated glances back at Harry and Cho, leaving an embarrassed silence in their wake. Harry could think of nothing else to say about Quidditch, and Cho, slightly flushed, was watching her feet.
‘Sorry about them…So…where d’you want to go?’ Harry asked as they entered Hogsmeade. The High Street was full of students ambling up and down, peering into the shop windows and messing about together on the pavements.
‘Oh…I don’t mind,’ said Cho, shrugging. ‘Um…shall we just have a look in the shops or something?’
They wandered by Dervish and Banges. A large poster had been stuck up in the window and a few Hogsmeaders were looking at it. They moved aside when Harry and Cho approached and Harry found himself staring once more at the ten pictures of the escaped Death Eaters. The poster (“By Order of the Ministry of Magic”) offered a thousand-Galleon reward to any witch or wizard with information relating to the recapture of any of the convicts pictured.
‘It’s funny, isn’t it,’ said Cho in a low voice, also gazing up at the pictures of the Death Eaters. ‘Remember when that Peter Pettigrew escaped, and there were dementors all over Hogsmeade looking for him? And now ten Death Eaters are on the loose and there aren’t dementors anywhere…’
‘Yeah,’ said Harry, tearing his eyes away from Bellatrix Lestrange’s face to glance up and down the High Street. ‘Yeah, it is weird…’
He was not sorry that there were no dementors nearby, but now he
came to think of it, their absence was highly significant. They had not only let the Death Eaters escape, they were hardly bothering to look for them…It looked as though they really were outside Ministry control now.
The ten escaped Death Eaters were staring out of every shop window he and Cho passed. But Harry tried to redirect his attention to their date.
They stood close to Dominic Maestro's music shop to listen to the enchanting tunes for a few minutes. They tried to enter Honeyduke’s put it was so packed they eventually gave up. Next Harry suggested they go to Spintwitches Sporting Needs as it was less busy, they looked around and Harry ended up buying a new pair of Quidditch gloves as the grip on his had been worn down and Cho bought a small can of Handle Polish for her broom.
Soon it had started to rain; cold, heavy drops of water kept hitting Harry’s face and the back of his neck.
‘Um…d’you want to get a coffee?’ said Cho tentatively, as the rain began to fall more heavily.
‘Yeah, all right,’ said Harry, looking around, in the furthest back corner of his mind he knew he’d been to a tea shop near by the year before, but his brain was so focused on Cho he couldn’t remember. ‘Where—?’
‘Oh, there’s a really nice place just up here, haven’t you ever been to Madam Puddifoot’s?’ she said brightly, and she led him up a side road and into a small tea shop that Harry had nearly forgotten existed. It was a cramped, steamy little place where everything seemed to have been decorated with frills or bows. Harry was reminded unpleasantly of Umbridge’s office.
‘Cute, isn’t it?’ said Cho happily.
‘Er…yeah,’ said Harry untruthfully.
‘Look, she’s decorated it for Valentine’s Day!’ said Cho, indicating a number of golden cherubs that were hovering over each of the small, circular tables, occasionally throwing pink confetti over the occupants.
‘Aaah…’
They sat down at the last remaining table, which was situated in the steamy window. Roger Davies, the Ravenclaw Quidditch Captain, was sitting about a foot and a half away with a pretty blonde girl. They were holding hands. The sight made Harry feel uncomfortable, particularly when, looking around the tea shop, he saw that it was full of nothing but couples, all of them holding hands. Perhaps Cho would expect him to hold her hand.
‘What can I get you, m’dears?’ said Madam Puddifoot, a very stout woman with a shiny black bun, squeezing between their table and Roger Davies’s with great difficulty.
‘I’ll have some coffee with some sugar and milk please, oh and some biscuits too,’ said Cho.
‘Do you do any filter kaapi?’ asked Harry. His biological father had introduced that coffee to Remus, and when Harry was a little older Remus had started making it for him and it was one of his favourites.
‘Sorry, for coffee we just do black,’ said Madam Puddifoot, who genuinely looked sympathetic.
Not really feeling like a regular coffee Harry just said, ‘Then I’ll have a mint hot chocolate, please.’
In the time it took for their coffees to arrive, Roger Davies and his girlfriend started kissing over their sugar bowl. Harry wished they wouldn’t; he felt that Davies was setting a standard with which Cho would soon expect him to compete. Thinking about it clouded his thoughts of any other topic and he didn’t want to look at Cho to see if she was also observing the kissing couple. He felt his face growing hot and tried staring out of the window, but it was so steamed up he could not see the street outside. To postpone the moment when he had to look at Cho he stared up at the ceiling as though examining the paintwork and received a handful of confetti in the face from their hovering cherub.
After a few more painful minutes Cho mentioned Umbridge; Harry seized on the subject with relief and they passed a few happy moments abusing her, but the subject had already been so thoroughly canvassed during D.A. meetings it did not last very long. Silence fell again. Harry then tried to fill in the time with a conversation about quidditch, but they had already discussed quidditch on the way here and while they were in Spintwitches Sporting Needs. Harry was very conscious of the slurping noises coming from the table next door and cast wildly around for something else to say.
‘Er…listen, d’you want to come with me to the Three Broomsticks at lunchtime? I’m meeting Allison Runcorn there.’
Cho raised her eyebrows.
‘You’re meeting Allison Runcorn? Today?’
‘Yeah. Well, she asked me to, so I thought I would. She said it was important. D’you want to come with me? She said it would be ok if you did.’
‘Oh…well…that was nice of her.’
But Cho did not sound as though she thought it was nice at all; on the contrary, her tone was cold and all of a sudden she looked rather forbidding.
A few more minutes passed in total silence, Harry drinking his hot chocolate so fast that he would soon need a fresh cup. Next door, Roger Davies and his girlfriend seemed glued together by the lips.
Cho’s hand was lying on the table beside her coffee, and Harry was feeling a mounting pressure to take hold of it. Just do it, he told himself, as a fount of mingled panic and excitement surged up inside his chest. Just reach out and grab it…Amazing how much more difficult it was to extend his arm twelve inches and touch her hand than to snatch a speeding Snitch from midair…he succeeded in putting his hand on top of hers, but after only a few seconds she withdrew it.
She was now watching Roger Davies kissing his girlfriend with a mildly interested expression.
‘He asked me out, you know,’ she said in a quiet voice. ‘A couple of weeks ago. Roger. I turned him down, though.’
‘I’m…glad?’
Harry didn’t exactly know what to say, if she wished she were sitting at the table next door being heartily kissed by Roger Davies, why had she agreed to come out with him?
He said nothing else. Their cherub threw another handful of confetti over them; some of it landed in the last cold dregs of hot chocolate Harry had been about to drink.
‘I came in here with Cedric last year,’ said Cho.
In the second or so it took for him to take in what she had said, Harry’s insides had become glacial. He could not believe she wanted to talk about Cedric now, while kissing couples surrounded them and a cherub floated over their heads. Cho’s voice was rather higher when she spoke again.
‘I’ve been meaning to ask you for ages…I guess there never is a right time…Did Cedric—did he m-m-mention me at all before he died?’
This was the very last subject on earth Harry wanted to discuss, and least of all with Cho.
‘Well—no—‘ he said quietly. ‘There—there wasn’t really time for him to say anything. Erm…so…d’you…d’you get to see a lot of Quidditch in the holidays? You support the Tornados, right?’
His voice sounded falsely bright and cheery. To his horror, he saw that her eyes were swimming with tears again, just as they had been after the last D.A. meeting before Christmas.
‘Look,’ he said desperately, leaning in so that nobody else could overhear, ‘let’s not talk about Cedric right now…Let’s talk about something else…’
But this, apparently, was quite the wrong thing to say.
‘I thought,’ she said, tears spattering down onto the table. ‘I thought you’d u-u-understand! I need to talk about it! Surely you n-need to talk about it t-too! I mean, you saw it happen, d-didn’t you?’
Everything was going nightmarishly wrong; Roger Davies’ girlfriend had even unglued herself to look around at Cho crying.
‘Well—I have talked about it,’ Harry said in a whisper, ‘to Dumbledore, my parents, Theodore, Allison, and Tra—‘
‘Oh, you’ll talk to Allison Runcorn!’ she said shrilly, her face now shining with tears, and several more kissing couples broke apart to stare. ‘But you won’t talk to me!’
‘Cho, it’s not that I don’t want to, per say, but we’ve barely had a moment together all year, and I’m not sure if here is the place to do it.’ said Harry, trying to ignore the staring. He quickly added. Cedric and I were both focused on willing the tournament, and moments after we had touched the cup he was gone. I don’t know what he would have said or done if he had more time, maybe he would have talked about you, but there is no way to know.’
This left them both in silence, this one being even worse than before as half the shop was now staring at them.
Cho’s cheeks had flushed a light pink from embarrassment, but she was a little calmer when she suddenly stood up.
‘P-perhaps it would be best if we just…just p-paid. I believe I need time to cool down and think. You also have to get to your meeting.’
Harry stared at her, utterly bewildered, as she picked up a frilly napkin and dabbed at her shining face with it.
‘Cho?’ he said weakly, wishing Roger would seize his girlfriend and start kissing her again to stop her goggling at him and Cho. ‘I don’t have to go, I can stay if you want.’
‘No, it’s ok. Go,’ Harry couldn’t understand if this was one of those moments when the person actually wants you to stay or not. Harry however couldn’t stand the stares he was getting any longer, so he stood, put a Galleon on the table, and walked towards the door. He looked back a couple times to see if she would change her mind, but she just stood there staring at her feet, so Harry left the tea shop and closed the door behind him.
It was raining hard now. Harry simply did not understand what had happened; half an hour ago they had been getting along fine.
‘Why did she do that?’ he muttered frustratedly, sloshing down the rain-washed street with his hands in his pockets. ‘Why did she want to talk about Cedric anyway? Why does she always want to drag up a subject that makes her act like a human hosepipe? And why did she seem to think me going to meet with Allison was so bad, I am just trying to help a friend.’
He turned right and broke into a splashy run, and within minutes he was turning into the doorway of the Three Broomsticks. He knew he was a little early to meet Hermione, but he thought it likely there would be someone in here with whom he could spend the intervening time. He shook his wet hair out of his eyes and looked around. Hagrid was sitting alone in a corner, looking morose.
‘Hi, Hagrid!’ he said, when he had squeezed through the crammed tables and pulled up a chair beside him.
Hagrid jumped and looked down at Harry as though he barely recognized him. Harry saw that he had two fresh cuts on his face and several new bruises.
‘Oh, it’s you, Harry,’ said Hagrid. ‘You all righ’?’
‘Yeah, I’m fine,’ lied Harry; in fact, next to this battered and mournful-looking Hagrid, he felt he did not have much to complain about. ‘Er—are you okay?’
‘Me?’ said Hagrid. ‘Oh yeah, I’m grand, Harry, grand…’
He gazed into the depths of his pewter tankard, which was the size of a large bucket, and sighed. Harry did not know what to say to him. They sat side by side in silence for a moment. Then Hagrid said abruptly, ‘In the same boat, you an’ me, aren’ we, Harry?’
‘Er—‘ said Harry.
‘Yeah…I’ve said it before…Both outsiders, like,’ said Hagrid, nodding wisely. ‘An’ both orphans. Yeah…both orphans.’
He took a great swig from his tankard.
‘Makes a diff’rence, havin’ a decent family,’ he said. ‘Me dad was decent. An’ your mum an’ dad were decent, Sirius and Remus are decent but I’m betting it’s not always the same. If Lily an’ James had lived, life woulda bin diff ’rent, eh?’
‘Yeah…I s’pose,’ said Harry cautiously. Hagrid seemed to be in a very strange mood.
‘Family,’ said Hagrid gloomily. ‘Whatever yeh say, blood’s important…’
And he wiped a trickle of it out of his eye. Harry wasn’t so sure about that, some people like the Weasley’s were very loving and caring to each other, while people like Sirius and Theodore were constantly mistreated by their biological family, and then while different Harry felt he had received just as much love from his adoptive fathers as he would have from his biological parents. This he didn’t comment on, instead he focused on Hagrid.
‘Hagrid,’ said Harry, unable to stop himself, ‘where are you getting all these injuries?’
‘Eh?’ said Hagrid, looking startled. ‘Wha’ injuries?’
‘All those!’ said Harry, pointing at Hagrid’s face.
‘Oh…tha’s jus’ normal bumps an’ bruises, Harry,’ said Hagrid dismissively. ‘I got a rough job.’
But Harry couldn’t help getting the worried dark pit feeling he got in his stomach during his very first year when Theodore would return from break with bruises and scratches. Though Hagrid didn’t have an abusive father waiting for him at his hut so what was going on?
Hagrid drained his tankard, set it back upon the table, and got to his
feet.
‘I’ll be seein’ yeh, Harry…Take care now…’
And he lumbered out of the pub looking wretched and then disappeared into the torrential rain. Harry watched him go, feeling miserable. Hagrid was unhappy and he was hiding something, but he seemed determined not to accept help. What was going on? But before Harry could think about the matter any further, he heard a voice calling his name.
‘Oh Harry, you’re already here!’
Allison had her hand in the air to get his attention from the other side of the room. He got up and made his way toward her through the crowded pub. He was still a few tables away when he realized that Allison was not alone; she was sitting at a table with the unlikeliest pair of drinking mates he could ever have imagined: Luna Lovegood and none other than Rita Skeeter, ex-journalist on the Daily Prophet and one of Allison’s least favorite people in the world.
‘How come you got here before us?’ said Allison, moving along to give him room to sit down. ‘Your date with Cho couldn’t be over that quickly? Is she here?’
‘Cho?’ said Rita at once, twisting around in her seat to stare avidly at Harry. ‘A girl?’
She snatched up her crocodile-skin handbag and dug around within it.
‘You aren’t here for Harry’s love life and you know that,’ Allison told Rita with an intimidating look oh her face. ‘So shove that back into you bag for now.’
Rita had been on the point of withdrawing an acid-green quill from her bag. Looking as though she had been forced to swallow Stinksap, she snapped her bag shut again.
‘What are you up to?’ Harry asked, sitting down and staring from Rita to Luna to Allison.
‘Your brutish bully of a friend was just about to tell me when you arrived,’ said Rita, taking a large slurp of her drink. ‘I suppose I’m allowed to talk to him, am I?’ she shot at Allison.
‘For now, yes,’ said Allison coldly.
Unemployment did not suit Rita. The hair that had once been set in elaborate curls now hung lank and unkempt around her face. The scarlet paint on her two-inch talons was chipped and there were a couple of false jewels missing from her winged glasses. She took another great gulp of her drink and said out of the corner of her mouth, ‘Pretty girl, is she, Harry?’
‘If you write one word about who Harry fancies you yourself will be on the next front cover of the Daily Prophet and everyone will know what you truly are,’ said Allison, Harry had rarely seen her so intense.
‘If not who he’s dating,’ said Rita, wiping her mouth on the back of her hand, ‘then why am I here. You haven’t told me anything yet, Miss Prissy, you just told me to turn up. Oh, one of these days…’ She took a deep shuddering breath.
‘One day you’ll get to write inaccurate mean articles about people again, cry about it to someone who cares,’ said Allison indifferently. ‘You won’t be casting Harry in a bad light today.’
‘They’ve run plenty of horrible stories about Harry this year without my help,’ said Rita, shooting a sideways look at him over the top of her glass and adding in a rough whisper, ‘How has that made you feel, Harry? Betrayed? Distraught? Misunderstood?’
‘He does feel angry and betrayed,’ said Allison in a hard, clear voice. ‘Because he told the Minister of Magic himself the truth and the Minister’s painted him as insane and a liar.’
‘So you actually stick to it, do you, that He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named is back?’ said Rita, lowering her glass and subjecting Harry to a piercing stare while her finger strayed longingly to the clasp of the crocodile bag. ‘You stand by all this garbage Dumbledore’s been telling everybody about You-Know-Who returning and you being the sole witness—?’
‘I wasn’t the sole witness,’ snarled Harry. ‘There were a dozen-odd Death Eaters there as well. Want their names?’
'I’d love them,' breathed Rita, now fumbling in her bag once more and gazing at him as though he was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. 'A great bold headline: "Potter Accuses..." A subheading: "Harry Potter Names Death Eaters Still Among Us." And then, beneath a nice big photograph of you: "Disturbed teenage survivor of You-Know- Who’s attack, Harry Potter, 15, caused outrage yesterday by accusing respectable and prominent members of the Wizarding community of being Death Eaters..."'
The Quick-Quotes Quill was actually in her hand and halfway to her mouth when the rapturous expression died out of her face.
'But of course,' she said, lowering the quill and looking daggers at Hermione, 'Your ray of sunshine here wouldn’t want that story out there, would she?'
'Actually,' said Allison in a hauntedly sweet voice, 'that is exactly what I want.'
Rita stared at her. So did Harry. Luna, on the other hand, sang, 'Ronald jumbled Weasley' dreamily under her breath and stirred her drink with a cocktail onion on a stick.
'You want me to report what he says about He-Who-Must-Not- Be-Named?' Rita asked Allison in a hushed voice.
'As a matter of fact, I do,' said Allison. 'I want you to write the true story. No fabrications. I need you to write it exactly as Harry describes it. He’ll tell you everything, he’ll tell you the names of the Death Eaters that he saw there that night, he’ll describe to you what Voldemort looks like now—oh, pull yourself together,' she added contemptuously, throwing a napkin across the table, for at the sound of Voldemort’s name, Rita had jumped so badly that she had slopped half her glass of firewhisky down herself.
Rita blotted the front of her grubby raincoat, still staring at Allison. Then she said baldly, 'The Prophet wouldn’t print it. In case you haven’t noticed, nobody believes his cock-and-bull story. Everyone thinks he’s delusional. Now, if you let me write the story from that angle—'
'We will not be having another story about how Harry has lost his sanity!' said Allison angrily. 'There are to many of those out there already. We need the wizarding world to hear the truth.'
'There’s no market for a story like that,' said Rita coldly.
'You mean the Daily Prophet won’t publish it because Fudge controls it,' said Allison irritably.
Rita gave Allison a long, hard look. Then, leaning forward across the table toward her, she said in a businesslike tone, 'All right, Fudge is leaning on the Prophet, but it comes to the same thing. They won’t print a story that shows Harry in a good light. Nobody wants to read it. It’s against the public mood. This last Azkaban breakout has got people quite worried enough. People just don’t want to believe You-Know-Who’s back.'
'So the great Daily Prophet doesn't actually report the news, just fairy tale, did I get that right?' said Allison scathingly.
Rita sat up straight again, her eyebrows raised, and drained her glass of firewhisky.
'The Prophet exists to sell itself, you silly girl,' she said coldly.
'My dad thinks it’s an awful paper,' said Luna, chipping into the conversation unexpectedly. Sucking on her cocktail onion, she gazed at Rita with her enormous, protuberant, slightly mad eyes. 'He publishes important stories that he thinks the public needs to know. He doesn’t care about making money.'
Rita looked disparagingly at Luna.
'I’m guessing your father runs some stupid little village news-letter?' she said. '"Twenty-five Ways to Mingle with Muggles" and the dates of the next Bring-and-Fly Sale?'
'No,' said Luna, dipping her onion back into her gillywater, 'he’s the editor of The Quibbler.'
Rita snorted so loudly that people at a nearby table looked around in alarm.
'"Important stories he thinks the public needs to know"?' she said witheringly. 'I could manure my garden with the contents of that rag.'
'Well, you now get the chance to raise it higher in the wizarding world," said Allison pleasantly. 'Luna says her father’s quite happy to take Harry’s interview. That’s who’ll be publishing it.'
Rita stared at them both for a moment and then let out a great whoop of laughter.
'The Quibbler!' she said, cackling. 'You think people will take him seriously if he’s published in The Quibbler?'
'Perhaps some won’t,' said Allison in a level voice. 'But others have come to realize that the Daily Prophet’s version of the Azkaban breakout does not make sense. So I think many people will be looking for a better explanation, and a different source of news available, even news published by'—she glanced sideways at Luna, 'by a—more unconventional magazine—I think they might be rather keen to read it.'
Rita did not say anything for a while, but eyed Allison shrewdly, her head a little to one side.
'All right, let’s say for a moment I’ll do it,' she said abruptly. 'What kind of fee am I going to get?'
'I don’t think Daddy exactly pays people to write for the magazine,' said Luna dreamily. 'They do it because it’s an honor, and, of course, to see their names in print.'
Rita Skeeter looked as though the taste of Stinksap was strong in her mouth again as she rounded on Allison. 'I’m supposed to do this for free?'
Allison rolled her eyes and put a small drawstring bag on the table, 'There are twenty-five Galleons in the bag.'
'Only twenty-five, that's hardly anything in the long run,' complained Rita.
'Well,' said Allison calmly, taking a sip of her drink. 'You can either write the article for free, write the article and get paid what I'm offering, or you don't write it and I have my father send you to Azkaban for being an unregistered Animagus...'
Rita looked as though she would have liked nothing better than to seize the paper umbrella sticking out of Luna’s drink and thrust it a Allison's nose.
'I don’t suppose I’ve got any choice, have I?' said Rita, her voice shaking slightly as she took the bag. She then opened her crocodile bag once more, withdrew a piece of parchment, and raised her Quick-Quotes Quill.
'Daddy will be pleased,' said Luna brightly. A muscle twitched in Rita’s jaw.
'Ready, Harry?' said Allison, turning to him. 'Ready for the world to finally know the truth?'
'I suppose,' said Harry, who finally realized what Theodore had meant earlier, as what he was about to say would put Theodore's father in an even worse light and probably put more of a spotlight on to his son.
Rita balanced the Quick-Quotes Quill at the ready on the parchment between them.
'Alright then, Rita, you can now write' said Allison serenely, fishing a cherry out of the bottom of her glass.
