The Red Rose That Has Green Thorns

Mum loved the changes in the library. The number of books in the restricted section had dwindled just slightly under one of her numerous campaigns for witches and wizards to have the right to read what they felt like reading and expanding their knowledge. The books released from the section had been things like Moste Potente Potions, and so not many of them were really dangerous. After all, if you look at the aforementioned potion book, all of the dangerous potions had at least one ingredient that would be nigh impossible for any Hogwarts student to acquire.

What Mum liked best about the library was the new wing added, encompassing the best of muggle literature over the years. There was Shakespeare, Tolkien, Homer, Dostoyevsky, Hawthorne, Twain, and many others. Hermione Jean Granger-Weasley was enamored with the fact that her petition to bring muggle novels into Hogwarts had been a success.

Astoria was partial to the library, as well, which I hadn’t been aware of before.

Dad and Aunt Ginny liked the renovations of the Quidditch Pitch, and even Scorpius’s father showed interest in it. Aunt Ginny asked James why he had never told her about the changes, and he replied with the ever-useful, “I didn’t even know, Mum!”

All of our family members who had been there during the war nodded in approval at the repairs to the parts of the castle that had been damaged, and when we reached the area that I tended to avoid because I knew that an uncle of mine had died here, Dad let out a kind of sad smile.

“It’s like this part of the castle was never damaged,” he said, looking at the portrait that had been on the wall beside the window for as long as I had been here. A younger replica of my Uncle George stood, blinking back at us, but I knew it was Fred Weasley I. “Hey, bro,” Dad said to the young man in the painting.

“If it isn’t Ickle Ronnikins!” the portrait quipped teasingly. A sad smile crossed the face of both Weasley siblings. “You ougtta get on with the tour, you know. It’s getting dark, and our Head Boy and Girl need to get some sleep.”

We left the portrait of my uncle, and the plaque dedicated to him that was below it, to show the repairs to the Astronomy Tower. Mum, in a valiant effort to lighten the mood, said brightly, “I want to see your dorm! You wrote to me and told me it was actually the Room of Requirement, didn’t you, Rose? I want to see how Professor McGonagall and Professor Flitwick saved it!"

It had been great spending time with my family and Scorpius’s family - although my father and his father didn’t really interact too much, aside from the kind of forced but civil conversation earlier - and we had all stayed together for the entire day. But that time had to come to an end, and we were currently faced with the huge bout of nerves that was preventing us from eating our eggs and bacon at breakfast the next morning. I was scooting my eggs around my plate with the prongs of my fork, trying to fathom how Andy was managing to force hers down. Scorpius had even managed to finish his three slices of bacon before resorting to picking at his eggs.

“Eat something, Rose,” Mum said, laying a hand on my shoulder from her seat beside me (where she and Dad were getting stared at, as well as the Malfoys sitting on Scorpius’s other side). “You need to get your strength up! You too, Scorpius. There’s a big day ahead of you.”

“I know,” I groaned, “but its hard to eat when you feel like you’ll puke if you do.”

“It’s important that you have energy for the task later,” Draco Malfoy said then, and our attention (Dad’s gaze was grudgingly acknowledging) turned toward him. “You both need to be at your best so you can support each other.”

“Think of it this way,” Dad said, not to be outdone by a Malfoy. “Tell yourself this might be the last meal you ever eat, so you’d better enjoy it. That’s what I started to do before Quidditch games, and it always seemed to work for me. I didn’t particularly feel like dying on an empty stomach.”

“Ugh, death by starvation,” Teddy remarked, sticking his tongue out in disgust. He, James, Al, Hugh, and Fred started laughing.

“Just relax a little,” Astoria then said, and Scorpius and I turned to look at her. “You two will do just fine. You’re the Head Boy and Girl, the top students in your year, and an exceptional young witch and wizard. What’s there to be nervous about? Sure, you may want to win, but what does it matter if you don’t? None of us will be mad at you.”

“We’ll just be proud of you for doing your best!” Aunt Ginny said, taking a bite of her hash browns.

“I believe in you,” Narcissa was looking at Scorpius with a gentle smile, and her eyes moved to me, “In both of you.”

“Yeah!” Al agreed hurriedly, to agreeing echoes of the rest of my family. Scorpius snorted and I hid my laugh behind my hand.

The upside about that conversation was that we found it a bit easier to eat afterwards.

*

After the event that was breakfast, the champions were called out to a tent on the edge of the area set aside for the third task. It was a part of the grounds that students didn’t usually go to, and was a rather large expanse of at least a hundred acres. There was a random distribution of trees and clear areas, it seemed, although there were spots that were completely concealed from watching eyes, surrounded by trees. And these trees weren’t just any trees; every tree in the plot was twice the height of those in the Forbidden Forest. There was a five foot wall surrounding the entire plot, except for at the main, frontal entrance to the area. Here, the wall towered ten feet to meet with the top of the arched entryway. We saw as much when we walked out to the tent where we would get a briefing of sorts.

Scorpius mentioned to me how he thought it was strange that we were coming out at nine in the morning, but I shrugged. I didn’t have any clue, so I didn’t know what to say in reply, so I chose silence. Andy and Carl walked in silence, but Ethan and Carmela conversed in low tones. No doubt they were speculating what this task would be and trying to formulate some sort of plan.

We walked by the main entrance of the task’s plot, and a shiver suddenly went up my spine. I froze and stared at the archway, a feeling of insecurity and foreboding worming its way into my stomach. Goosebumps formed all up and down my arms and on the back of my neck, making my hair stand on end.

“Rose? Something wrong?”

I blinked, looking at Scorpius. A blur of red in my eyesight seemed to outline some invisible object in his arms, but it went away almost as quickly as it had appeared. I let my eyelids flutter closed one more time, and then opened them and cast a smile at my boyfriend.

“No, I’m just still a little nervous.”

I lied easily, without batting an eyelash. The ease with which I said it surprised even me, and guilt welled up, but I dismissed it. I was only doing it to keep Scorpius from worrying too much. I didn’t even know if this feeling was right.

Before we entered the tent, the last thing to cross my mind was a short sequence of blurred, frantic images.

”Rose!” a voice cried, as a figure slumped to the ground.

The scene morphed.

”Rose!” several new voices wailed as a figure appeared, staggering, out of the darkness on the other side of the archway. A limp, lifeless form was in the person’s arms.

My eyes began to adjust to the inside of the tent as one more thing sounded. A disembodied voice. Familiar, of course.

”Rose!”