firecracker ???

The castle had grown quieter by February, not in any peaceful or comforting sense, but with the uneasy hush of a building storm. It wasn't silence—it was the weight of it. The corridors still bustled, students still filed in and out of classrooms, meals were still served at the same exact hour—but beneath it all, there was a tension. The walls themselves felt tighter, like they too were holding their breath, waiting for something to snap.

Elestara noticed it before most. She always did.

She saw it in the way groups of students moved—closer together, steps quicker, glances sharper. She heard it in the way voices dipped when someone new entered a room, how laughter came too forced or didn't come at all. The absence of another attack hadn't brought relief. It had brought dread. As though the stillness was a warning.

And no one embodied that tension more clearly than Ginny Weasley.

Elestara had always thought the girl was too open, too eager to please—a red-haired shadow clinging to her brother's reputation, never quite strong enough to carve space of her own. But now, there was something darker laced through her movements. Ginny looked like someone carrying a weight she didn't understand, and every day it was pulling her further beneath the surface.

At breakfast, Elestara watched from across the Great Hall as Ginny dropped her goblet of pumpkin juice for the second time that week. Her hands trembled as she reached to clean it, and her eyes—wide, frantic, darting—moved too fast to settle on anything.

Elestara tilted her head, resting her elbow lightly on the table and letting her fingers curl beneath her chin. She didn't speak. She didn't react.

But she watched.

That evening, she sat by the common room fire and penned a letter in her usual looping script, the ink gliding dark and deliberate.

She's unravelling, she wrote to Regulus. And she's trying not to let anyone see it. But I see it.

There was no need to sign her name. There never had been. Kreacher knew her handwriting by now, and Regulus knew better than anyone who would send a report so tightly composed.

Two days later, the reply arrived. She didn't blink as she slipped it into her sleeve, waiting until she was alone in the corridor before unfolding the crisp parchment.

Regulus's handwriting was precise, elegant, and as direct as ever.

If the diary claims her fully, follow Potter.

She read it twice. Then she fed it to the common room fire, watched the flames eat the message whole, and let her gaze linger long after it was ash.

Three mornings later, she saw the shift.

It began at breakfast. Ginny stood near the end of the Slytherin table—not the Gryffindor one, oddly—eyes red and rimmed with exhaustion. Her posture was stiff, her hands clumsy as they fumbled through her bag with a kind of desperate urgency.

And then it slipped.

A small book tumbled from her grasp, landing spine-first against the stone floor.

It wasn't a textbook.

Elestara knew it instantly.

Worn leather. Ink-dark. Familiar in a way that turned something cold in her chest.

Ginny stared at it like it might turn to teeth and bite her. For a moment, she didn't move. Then she scooped it up and fled the hall so quickly she left one shoe untied.

Elestara stood a moment later, calm and composed, her every motion deliberate.

"Where are you going?" Daphne asked, only half-curious.