"Will you look at this?" the twin he thought was Fred said as the quartet of brothers entered. "Either we've gotten slower-"
"-Or Mum's gotten so fast she can feed herself while cooking for everyone else," the other twin finished for him.
"Nonsense, dears," Molly said as she slapped Ron's hand away from her eggs. "Harry made this for me."
The boys looked to him in disbelief.
"No matter what you do-," George said seriously.
"-We're never gonna call you 'Dad,'" Fred finished for him.
Harry couldn't help but chuckle, which had a pleasantly soothing effect on his nerves.
There came another pop! from outside before Mr. Weasley's voice cried out as he entered.
"Morning, Weasleys!" he called and the Weasley clan answered back in kind as Percy started to hand out the Hogwarts letters as everyone found their seats.
"Looks like they sent us Harry's as well," Percy said, passing Harry his specially addressed envelope as the owl took off again. He'd never noticed before how the green ink looked so much like one of Snape's poisons.
"Dumbledore must know you're here, Harry," Mr. Weasley said cheerfully. "Doesn't miss a trick, that man."
'Why did he have to say that?' Harry mentally moaned as his nervousness jumped up by several notches. He decided to look on with Ron as he read his letter, just in case his had been enchanted to attack him or something.
Ron immediately flipped over to the Second Year reading list to see how much trouble they'd be in for this year. There was The Standard Book of Spells, Grade 2 by Miranda Goshawk, which Hermione had already been studying away on for the past month, and then seven books by Gilderoy Lockhart.
This had to have been the same Lockhart which Cadogan and Lichfield had spoken so poorly of, though he didn't voice any of those concerns to Mrs. W-Molly yesterday when she had been gushing about his advice from the pest control book she had. He had tried to look through it himself later in the day but it seemed to be nothing more than a glowing review of how good the man was at dealing with everything and a bunch of nonsensical words he tried to pass off as spells, none of which had worked for him. With seven books it was sort of lucky the man had only used the Blood Quill to sign the contract and not write the whole book or he wouldn't have any blood left.
Fred, who had finished his own list, peered over at Ron's.
"You've been told to get all of Lockhart's books too!" he said. "The new Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher must be a fan - bet it's a witch." He then caught his mother's eye and busied himself with his letter again.
"That lot won't come cheap," George said with a quick look to his parents. "Lockhart's books are really expensive."
"Well, we'll manage," Molly said, though she did look worried.
Perhaps this was something he could offer in exchange for them signing the agreement? Buying everyone a load of expensive books seemed a reasonable trade to him.
"I expect we'll be able to pick up a lot of Ginny's things secondhand," Molly continued.
It was only then anyone noticed something wrong; Ginny was trying to covertly look around as if she suspected one of her brothers of hiding something from her. She didn't have an envelope.
As Harry was about to voice his concern another owl swooped in to land on the table. It carried a single letter; Ginny looked relieved. George got to it first and looked concerned; he had noticed the absence of her letter too.
"Mum," he said quietly as he passed it over. "It's for you and Dad."
There a moment of silence as the husband and wife read the short letter. As the only outsider there Harry got the sense that he was intruding on someone's funeral.
"It's from McGonagall," Molly said. "The money for the Hopefuls program hasn't come through. They say they can't give out any scholarships at all this year. Arthur?" At a loss she looked to her husband. He seemed lost as well.
With a sob, little Ginny ran from the table and up to her room.
"George, will you-?" his mother asked. The boy was already moving towards the stairs before she had even finished the question.
Harry felt horrible. The Hogwarts Hopefuls hadn't been something to help graduating students find jobs, like Barchoke thought, it was to help kids who could only hope to go to Hogwarts in the first place. That day at Gringotts he'd never thought about what stopping the transfer could mean for the lives of other people. It was one thing to make older people look after themselves and something else entirely to take an opportunity away from a kid, even if it was Ginny.
He tried to tell himself the whole thing was Dumbledore's fault for stealing the money in the first place, that the old man hadn't cared if Harry had everything from his parents drained away before he knew it was even there so he shouldn't care now what it took to get it back, but that just wasn't something he was able to do.
"We don't need a set of books each," Fred told his parents in an unusually serious tone. "We've still got Bill and Charlie's old books. And if we could pry this year's out of Percy's hands-"
"-They're yours," his prefect brother quickly agreed.
"-Then George and I can share," he continued. "One set of Lockhart books could do for all of us for all the good they'll do."
"I'm sure Bill and Charlie would help a bit," Mr. Weasley said uncertainly. "And if anything could get Aunt Muriel to help-"
"The old crone would blame us, Arthur," Molly said. "And we can't ask our children to pay for this."
"I could pay for it," Harry said drawing all the Weasleys' eyes to him.
"Thank you, Harry," Molly said when she was able to speak again. "But we can't ask you to pay for it either."
"I can pay for it," he pressed, "because I was going to be paying for it originally anyway."
The Weasleys looked confused; Harry took a breath before continuing.
"I - I said last week that someone had been stealing from me," Harry chose to look only to Molly since she had been the one to stand up for his privacy back then. "Well, they weren't just stealing money," he explained. "They were giving it away too. One of the things they gave to was called the Hogwarts Hopefuls; it looked like they had been doing it for years. We didn't know what it was," Harry said quickly. "Nobody at Gringotts had ever heard of it, so we stopped it," he shrugged. "I never thought I'd know someone who needed it," Harry finished weakly.
.....
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