Author's note: So, I know that I spend too much time apologizing for my absences. On August 8, Kateydidnt and I agreed that we each had to update a particular story before Thanksgiving. This was my assignment. Parts of it are from a chapter I wrote and never got around to posting two years ago because my beta-reader never told me whether or not it sucked. I added more and tweaked some paragraphs today. I promise to update more than once every two years from now on.

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If it hadn't been for the after-party during which we sang a lot of rude things about the Tornadoes, danced the conga around the stadium and drank too much butterbeer for our own good, Harry and I would have made it back for the Hufflepuff-Slytherin match. The euphoria was just too good to ignore, so we got back in time for dinner and knew the score by how many Slytherins had foul things to say about the rest of the students on the way into the Great Hall.

No one called someone an idiot, hag or Mudblood, but there was some very Malfoyesque taunting about people with cooler friends and one Slytherin fourth-year pointed out that the Keeper's younger sister was so fat she should be used for a backup Quaffle. They were in foul moods and that meant that we all had cause to celebrate.

I didn't bother to ask anyone in Gryffindor the final score or the details of the match. I just sidled up to Cauldwell and offered my hand.

"Brilliant job," I said.

"Thanks, Gin," he said a little breathlessly. A moment later, someone knocked him into me with a hearty clap on the back, which explained why he sounded as though he had the wind knocked out of her. I grabbed hold so he wouldn't fall on his face, but let go as soon as he'd regained his footing. "Good game?"

He wasn't the kind of Captain who whinged about who missed the match or whether he got credit. He was the kind of Captain who knew what other teams were playing on the day of his big game. The slightly-bedraggled hair ribbons in my plaits might have given me away, too.

"Good enough to celebrate," I responded. "The Cannons are leading the League and the same can't be said for Tutshill."

Owen wasn't a Cannons fan, but I knew he drew inspiration from Kenmare tactics and that meant he rejoiced with anyone who hated the Tornadoes. It was a bit like my appreciation for his role in taking the Slytherins down a notch.

"Congratulations," Cauldwell said.

"Yeah," I said, hastily doing up the bow on my right plait. "Listen, fancy joining me for a drink at the Three Broomsticks next weekend?"

I was Fred and George's younger sister and the wife of Harry Potter, so I couldn't blame him for looking wary. He probably thought I was going to buy him a butterbeer laced with U-No-Poo or something like that. I was a grown-up now, though, so that meant I had an ulterior motive.

"You're not my type, Mrs. Potter," he joked.

"I want to talk strategy," I explained.

"With your opponent?" Owen asked skeptically.

"Not about that kind of strategy," I said.

"I don't need dating advice," he protested next.

Honestly, the boy was completely misreading my intentions. "It's nothing to do with Bludgers or girlfriends," I said loudly. "I won't even mention NEWTs."

"All right," he said with a little less caution in his voice, "but you're buying."

"Deal."

We grinned very briefly at each other to show there were no hard feelings and before we could say another word, one of the Hufflepuff Chasers seized Owen's arm and dragged him away to greet some of his adoring fans. I went to find Harry and an open spot at the Gryffindor table.

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The week passed far too slowly, as it usually did when there was something to look forward to. Fred used my tickets for a mid-week match and sent a play-by-play with a souvenir pennant by way of thanks. They had achieved the top spot in the League and the fact that they stayed there was one of the best things about that week.

And then I found McGonagall waiting for me when I got to the last Quidditch practice of the week and I began wondering what I'd forgotten to worry about.

"Mrs. Potter," she said formally, "a word?"

McGonagall presiding over a Quidditch practice was a bad sign, but McGonagall calling me Mrs. Anything had to be a sure sign of disaster, since she hadn't done it since the house-warming party.

"You, too, Cootes," she barked as Ritchie passed by.

He dropped his broomstick and I couldn't blame him. McGonagall had that effect on everyone except the teachers. What was puzzling was that he carried it with him to the Captain's office as though he wanted it on hand for a quick getaway.

McGonagall didn't take any of the four chairs in the office chairs and on the principal that no one sits when their Head of House stands, we followed suit.

"How's your fever, Cootes?" McGonagall asked sharply.

Ritchie had missed half the practices last week due to being in the hospital wing on Madame Pomfrey's orders. He'd seemed fine yesterday, but I risked a quick look at him to make sure he wasn't coming over faint behind my back.

"Loads better," he blurted out. "I'm not at my best yet, but I'll be ready by the Final…"

"I imagine it was quite disruptive," McGonagall said loudly. "Classes missed, assignments turned in late, duties left unattended."

Richie had been looking pale before, but now his face flooded with color. "I think I can catch up," he said a little defensively.

"I hope not," McGonagall snapped. "Alderman hasn't flown that well in weeks."

"Alderman?" I echoed blankly. "The Hufflepuff Chaser?"

"Precisely," she confirmed. "Alderman was performing so badly that Mr. Cauldwell considered replacing him more than once. And then he made quite the miraculous recovery for Saturday's game. Scored thirteen times, as a matter of fact."

"Yeah, well, if Ron Weasley can make a dramatic comeback…" Ritchie muttered.

I ignored the jab about my brother. He had made a stunning turn+around in his first Quidditch Final. "What's that got to do with us?" I asked as politely as possible.

"Caius Flint demanded testing of all the Hufflepuff players because of their stunning success," the Gryffindor Head of House said. "Do you know what they found?"

"That someone's nicked Professor Slughorn's supply of Felix Felices?" I suggested. Neither Ritchie nor McGonagall laughed and my stomach sank. "Come off it. They didn't play that well."

"No," McGonagall agreed, "but they found that Alderman had been previously under the influence of a Duress Draught."

I knew the joke potion well. George had used the Duress Draught on me twice—once to make sure I was his slave for a day and once to give Fred a laugh when he had dragon pox—and there had been no real hard feelings. It was one of those things that they sold in Zonko's next to the nose-biting teacups.

"You didn't," I said to Ritchie.

"Duress Draught has to be vaporized and inhaled to take effect," McGonagall pointed out. "We tested his supplies and found signs of the Draught in his Potions cauldron. The only time the dose could have been administered is during his weekly Potions lesson with his partner, Richie Cootes."

"I just wanted him to make a fool of himself," he muttered, still quite red in the face.

In theory, it shouldn't have been a problem for a Hogwarts student to have it on hand, but there were two problems: this was the year after the Imperius-happy Death Eaters had been put out of commission and this was Quidditch. Drugging a fellow student was frowned upon, but drugging a fellow student to control them was even worse. But worst of all was cheating at Quidditch and getting caught by Minerva McGonagall.

"We're not disqualified, are we?" I asked McGonagall imploringly. "I won't let him back at practice until after his detention…"

"I'm afraid that's not satisfactory," Professor McGonagall said, her voice growing grave instead of stern.

"But this sort of thing happens every year," I protested. "Keepers sprout antlers. Slytherin Chasers try to trip Gryffindor Seekers… If George and Fred had been prosecuted for their pranks, they would have never made the team and Malfoy was worse."

"This was malicious and unsportsmanlike," McGonagall replied. "While there will be no criminal charges against him, I have no choice but to issue an in-house suspension…"

"Suspension!" Richie squawked.

"Of one week," she finished. "And you are banished from the House Quidditch team."

My stomach had sunk a minute before, but now it seemed to be shooting upwards into my throat. There was no arguing with it, though. This was no ordinary prank, but a deliberate effort to incapacitate a fellow student. Suspension was getting off easy and with McGonagall in charge of sentencing, we were lucky to be still in the running at all.

"You have to fight this, Ginny," Ritchie begged. "You need me. None of the reserve play as well with the others."

"You should have thought of that before you chose to be a coward," McGonagall sneered. "Mrs. Potter, do you have anything to say?"

I had a load of things to say, but a lot of them weren't meant to be heard in polite company or in front of the woman who could give me detention for bad behavior. I said the most appropriate thing I could find instead.

"I'm not fighting this."

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Needless to say, I was not in the best mood on Saturday morning. I hadn't spoken to any members of the Hufflepuff Quidditch team since Professor McGonagall broke the news and I was due to have a nice, long chat with their captain at noon. If I backed out now, I would look like a coward or a collaborator and he would probably never speak to me again. Neither of us deserved this nonsense, but I wanted to do this in as civilized a manner as possible.

Luckily for me, Harry remembered what it was like to be a Quidditch captain and brought breakfast to me that morning. We flipped a knut for the last piece of bacon, were generous with the syrup and didn't speak about Quaffles once. Harry even demonstrated his skills in disguise and did a fairly good impression of Gregory Goyle that made me snort into my orange juice.

I wasn't in a good mood by the time the plates were clear, but I was feeling better.

"Do you want me to come?" my brilliant husband offered.

"Don't you have…" I searched for a memory of what he had on his mind this week, but all I could think about was the number of jinxes that Cauldwell had learned from his two brothers. "Something to study?"

"Plenty," he said. "I'd rather be your backup, though."

I reached over to squeeze his hand gratefully. "I trust Cauldwell to not hex first and ask questions later," I assured him. "Thanks, though."

"Then can I come to Quidditch practice?" he offered.

He was so eager to help that I didn't stop to wonder if he was going to try and give some advice to the players. We needed practice more than we needed a rallying cry.

"Of course."

At that moment, I head a soft thump that meant an owl had probably dropped the morning post off. The payment and tip were already in a little flowerpot next to the door and when I opened the door a few moments later, the corridor was empty. There was the usual Daily Prophet, which I tossed to Harry, a letter from Mum and a thick scroll of parchment with unfamiliar handwriting on the outside.

"'The Potters, Hogwarts Shool of Witchcraft and Wizardry,'" I read. "Is your fan mail coming to both of us now?"

"Dunno," Harry said, setting the paper aside after glancing at the morning's headlines. "Who's it from?"

"No idea."

I opened the scroll with a flick of my wand and shook the letter out. "Not fan mail," I said grimly. "It's from Wendy Woodward."

"She's gotten long-winded, then," Harry observed. "Is all of that her letter?"

I was still reading and didn't hear him very well, but a few sentences later, I decided to read it aloud from the top.

"Dear Potters,

"It was lovely to meet you at the Quidditch game. I can understand and sympathize your reasons for not wanting to speak about the Battle of Hogwarts. You can understand that others do not share your views.

"I have approached many people who remember that long night and yes, there are some who wanted to tell their side of the story. Some were victims, some were friends of the dead and some were Death Eaters. One day, a survivor spoke to me about the mind healer she had seen at St. Mungo's."

"What?!" Harry burst out, rocking to his feet and moving quickly to my side. "If she's gotten her hands on Healer Eccleston's notes…"

I held up a hand and turned my back so he couldn't have easy access to the letter. "The healer is a Muggle-born who has encouraged the witches and wizards who come to her for help to use art therapy. She encourages her patients to draw their memories of both traumatic times and happy hours. While she would not name names, she shared some examples with me. I'm told that the artists range from the youngest sister of a Hufflepuff who was permanently disfigured to a Hogwarts teacher who shall remain nameless."

Harry did not grab the letter itself from me, but he drew the next sheet of parchment from the stack. The photograph showed a painting of an almost comically heroic man standing over the shadowy figure of a fallen enemy. The hero was almost blindingly white, but the artist had made sure to add in black messy hair and a lightning-shaped scar.

"I have decided to focus the story I had planned on what these people have to say instead," I finished reading. "I thought you might like to see what I have in advance of the print deadline.

All my best,
Wendy"

Harry was still staring at the first of the photographs, so I shuffled Wendy's letter aside and found that the youngest sister mentioned in the letter must have drawn this one. I couldn't tell from the drawing who the Hufflepuff was meant to be, but the scars were drawn so vividly that I knew the girl had noticed every one of them from the first time that her sibling had come home from the hospital wing. At the hands of the youngest artist, the scars made the Hufflepuff beautiful and I could imagine that this girl saw her sister much the same way that Fleur saw my brother Bill.

Harry reached for another and I beckoned him towards the sofa. There, we took our time reviewing the rest of the images. There was someone who had drawn the Quidditch stadium burning and another who had tried to draw the web of spells that the defenders of Hogwarts had cast over the castle.

Harry was particularly transfixed by one image that showed a clearing in what I could only assume was the Forbidden Forest. There were trees forming a ring with tree-sized giants making up the perimeter. Near the right-hand corner was a blonde woman leaning very close to a prone body.

"This has to have been done by one of the Death Eaters," he observed. "Wonder what they had to say to a mind healer."

"Do you think they needed healing for their loss or self-forgiveness for what they'd done?" I countered. "Who do you think?"

He shook his head, his hand resting on the pale silk of Narcissa Malfoy's hair. "Maybe Malfoy, but I can't see him being man enough to admit he was suffering."

I could picture the senior Malfoys having a sympathetic moment even less.

The one I least expected took me a few minutes to understand. It seemed to be a close-up of the Hogwarts ground so that the artist had outlined blades of grass and the texture of a fallen brick. The centerpiece of the painting was a pair of hands clasped together in friendship or solidarity or maybe just comfort. And behind the hands, there was a curtain of dark red.

"The girl you were with," Harry guessed at last. "Fred had died and Voldemort had chosen the hour when he would hunt me himself. You had every right to mourn and you chose to comfort an injured girl who hadn't been attended to yet."

I would have accused him of Legilimency at that point, but there was another explanation for how he had known about that bleak hour. I certainly hadn't told him very much about that night for reasons of my own. I also didn't feel like that earned me a place in this collection. It made me sound like a hero instead of a devastated sixth-year. I didn't know how he'd found out, though.

"When did you pass by?" I asked quietly.

"On my way to the forest," he said simply.

We had long ago discussed why he hadn't said goodbye to any of us, so I didn't press for details, but I felt a pang at the idea that he had been that close and not asked me to come with him. I pushed that idea to the back of my mind and remembered how grateful I was that he had come back from the forest.

I took the painting of the hands back and stacked it with the rest of the survivors' masterpieces. Harry still hadn't spoken about what he thought about the project itself.

"What do you think?"

He pushed a hand slowly through his hair, resting his palm on the scar that so many of the paintings had shown. "I think," Harry said, "that Wendelyn Woodward is no Rita Skeeter. You go on to Hogsmeade, but I want to respond to this and it might take all morning."

"You're going to give her a statement?" I asked, not bothering to conceal my surprise.

"No," he rejoined, "but I'm going to see if she can pass a message on to some of the artists."

I had seen Harry on the day after the battle, when people had come to thank him in an almost religious fashion. I had seen him share their grief and comfort those who needed to ask a little more compassion of him. It had taken me a while to talk to him about my own experience because I knew how many times he had heard the details of the war from survivors before then.

I had never appreciated until that moment how much braver he had grown since defeating Voldemort.

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I made it to the Three Broomsticks before Owen and immediately ordered him the largest butterbeer that Madam Rosemerta was willing to sell me.

"Boy troubles?" she guessed with a wink.

"Yes," I said solemnly, "but my husband doesn't mind."

She chuckled and slid what Hagrid might have considered a shot glass and a normal tankard across. "Don't let me keep you, then."

I had just found a table when Owen turned up. "All right, Ginny?"

"I've had better days," I admitted. "Have a drink."

He guffawed at the size of my apologetic butterbeer, but didn't refuse it. He'd barely made a dent in the contents when he came up for conversation.

"I guess this is your way of saying you're really sorry about Cootes?"

"Incredibly sorry," I said. "Really, if I thought a singing telegram would help, I would order one right now."

He took another long pull on the butterbeer and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. "There's a reason I'm not ready to curse you, Potter," he said. "You come from a large family of mischievously funny people, but I don't believe for second that this was your idea. It's not clever enough for you."

"Thanks," I said, honestly flattered. "I'll be swearing the rest of my team to virtue at today's practice."

"Have you found a replacement for the git yet?" he asked conversationally.

"That fourth-year Quigley," I stated. "She's all right."

Erin Quigley had been all right at trials in September, but she had apparently taken her rejection to heart. I had tried her out when I'd given her a top-secret trial last night, she had flown better than I could have expected. Until our next match, though, I didn't want anyone to know that.

"I appreciate your quick action," Owen deadpanned. "Now, what's this about strategy?"

"We want a Gryffindor-Hufflepuff game for the final," I confided.

"We do?"

"Do you want to lose to the best team or not?" I pointed out.

"I'd rather thrash the best team 360-40," he corrected, "but yes, I'd like to face Gryffindor for the final. It's been years since we had this much of a shot at the Cup."

"Exactly," I agreed, nodding vigorously. "Until last year, the most notable thing Hufflepuff had done in the last decade was give Hogwarts a Tri-Wizard Champion. I think it's your year to change that."

Owen didn't disagree with my assessment. Hufflepuffs were loyal and hard-working and that didn't really lend itself to medals. It didn't make them lesser, but it made them underestimated.

"Even if it means Gryffindor isn't the name on this year's House Cup?" he asked.

"If you can take the lead away from my Chasers, sure," I said. "I don't fancy your chances much, but…"

"Are you here to insult me or scheme?" Owen challenged.

"Scheme."

"Good." He took a thoughtful sip of his drink and I did the same, since mine was starting to lose its foam. "You thought we had a fair chance when we were facing Slytherin."

"Sure," I conceded. "Slytherin are playing for speed, not size this year. That means they've had to reinvent their playbook and they're not quite up to the challenge yet."

"I agree," he commented. "Your noble victory before Christmas should have been much closer than 230-10."

"And good as…" He coughed pointedly. "Brilliant, clever and quite-good-looking though your team is, beating Slytherin by a margin of two hundred is usually unheard of."

"So, what's your scheme?" he prompted.

I dug into my bookbag and pulled out a sealed scroll of parchment. "Ravenclaw will not go down so easily," I explained. "I've had people taking notes all year. Not just players. People who might just give Lee Jordan a run for his money someday. They have some ideas on how you can get past those tossers in blue."

By the time it was time for me to head back for practice, he'd bought me a round to say thank you. It was good to know that he wasn't going to hold Cootes' idiocy against me.