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katherinewilliams221b · 4 years

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For A Greater Good 14/18

not my gif just the text. Some Things Are Meant To Stay Hidden

Summary: Kate Williams, young healer and member of the Order, joins Durmstrang’s staff at Dumbledore’s request. Her mission? Find a Death Eater and survive long enough to tell the story. Set in 1996.

Pairing: Charlie Weasley x ofc/mc

Masterlist

[Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3] [Part 4] [Part 5]

[Part 6] [Part 7] [Part 8] [Part 9] [Part 10]

[Part 11] [Part 12] [Part 13]

5 months ago,

“You must stop at once.”

“Where is it, Karkarov?” The former headmaster looked around before returning to the conversation.

“I don’t think you understand what you’re getting yourself into…”

“You dragged me into this ten years ago! Finish what you started.”

“I had the time to meditate about it, and now I implore you to do the same if you don’t want to end up dead.”

“He is looking for you, you know? And He’ll find you, eventually. You’re nothing but a coward. I bet the British Ministry of Magic would appreciate knowing where you are. It will take just one owl to inform my contact there.”

“Don’t try to pretend you haven’t sent someone to find me. You thought I would be so stupid to hide in the castle?”

“Tell me how to find Grindelwald’s room and you can slither back to your secret spot.”

“What do you expect to find there?”

“Something He might want.”

Karkarov scoffed.

“What did he promise you? The resurrection stone, it’s not real. You won’t find it there and He doesn’t have it.”

“They exist!” Agitated, the teacher approached Karkarov. “They exist and they are in that room.”

“You have no idea what you are doing.” Contemplating if he should give away his secret, he decided to put some fear in the teacher’s eyes. “Do you know how I left that abominable place they call Azkaban?”

“I know. You sang like a bird.”

“None of the names were useful to them… but perhaps the new ones will. If you behave, I won’t mention yours.”

The teacher grabbed Karkarov’s arm and exposed his mark.

“You don’t deserve this.”

“And you will never get it.”

Both of them drew out their wands as a warning.

“Who ‘s that?” Asked Karkarov.

The teacher turned and frowned at the image of Flavia Hodges leaving her classroom.

“You told me everyone was at the quidditch match.” Hodges turned and when she saw them, she was left frozen in place.

“Her sight is not her best ability but…”

“Take care of it.”

After helping Cassandra and Leron leave the classroom unseen, Kate wandered the corridors of the castle instead of going to prepare the activities for her class the following week.

Nor did she go to see Corentin, knowing that they had a project pending that they could not delay any longer.

She wanted to go home. She had had enough of the whole thing, and the possibility of not being able to return in a near future scared her. How much longer was the nightmare going to last?

A pair of eyes were on her, she sensed it, and tried to appear as unbothered as she could. The attempt at discovering who was watching her through legilimency failed, so she turned around to check her back. There was nothing out of the ordinary, just students coming and going.

As she turned to continue on her way, she came face to face with Kent Jorgensen, who only glanced at her before looking around.

“I’d like to talk to you. Not here. There are too many prying ears.”

Kate knew that Cassandra would tell Jorgensen that someone else knew the secret that they had managed to keep hidden, but she didn’t expect it to be so soon. She followed him to the front door, and they went outside. “A walk?”

“To the greenhouse.” The phrase came out as a command rather than the suggestion she had in mind.

“To the greenhouse, then.”

They walked silently the short way to Kate’s workplace and when she closed the door behind her, Jorgensen finally spoke.

“So you know.”

“Yes.” She put on some gloves to protect herself from the bite of the fanged geraniums and started placing the pots on the central table, side by side, unconsciously creating a barrier between the two. She grabbed a spray and casually started to take care of her plants.

“I think I owe you an apology.” Jorgensen commented, looking around. “You have made a very interesting place out of that old building. Where did you get the umbrella flowers?”

Kate stopped spraying the geraniums and looked him straight in the eye. “Why do you owe me an apology?” Jorgensen lowered his head.

“I misjudged you. I thought you were here for him. When... what are you doing?”

“Yesterday I gave them gumbumbles to eat. If I don’t clean their teeth, the treacle can wilt them.” While Jorgensen was talking Kate had opened a drawer and pulled out some forceps she put in the mouth of one of the geraniums so she could sprinkle a greyish substance inside.

“Leron is not conscious when he is under the influence of the Billywig. When I heard that Flavia had suffered these ‘accidents’ I thought... I was afraid for him.” Jorgensen frowned as he saw Kate put her hand into the geranium’s mouth.

“The tongue must also be cleaned,” she simply said. When she finished with that plant, she left her gadgets on the table. The time for evasion was over.

“I apologise to you too.” Jorgensen looked surprised. “I thought you were behind Flavia’s accidents.”

“And why would you think such a thing?”

“Well... you must admit that you didn’t look innocent when you talked about it.”

The professor put his hands behind his back, “So Rhode really didn’t bring you here to take him away?” Kate shook her head, hoping he would believe her.

“I’ve already told Steiner. Rhode doesn’t know anything, and if she finds out, it won’t be because of me.”

Kate continued her routine, taking care of each of the geraniums while Jorgensen eyed at her.

“He’s always been like that, you know? His wife’s death only made it worse.”

“Steiner told me you don’t want to send him to a hospital.”

“She doesn’t want to. I’ve been flirting with the idea since the day he hit Micael.” He paused, and Kate looked up as she sensed a deep sadness. “He’s my friend though, nobody knows him better than us.”

“I understand what you mean.”

“Losing the people you love is a heavy pain. As if a rock bigger than you were crushing your chest. It’s our responsibility to learn to get rid of the weight that keeps us from moving forward and go on our way with a little bit of dirt in our pockets, to remind us of what we have experienced.”

As Kate put the pots back and cleaned the soil off the table while taking glances at him. Jorgensen was left pensive for a moment and continued to speak, perhaps to himself, in a monologue he wished would help him clear his head.

“Leron took refuge in a familiar place, a dark place where he could neither see nor feel. A decision that is taking its toll on him.”

Kate sat down on one of the benches, the table still keeping the distance between them. Better that way, she thought, despite the situation with Jorgensen had taken quite a turn, she didn’t trust anyone in that school.

“Is there anything else you want to ask me?” He questioned.

“I know he’s meeting someone in the woods.” Jorgensen’s eyebrow shot to his hairline, “With whom?”

“With his supplier, of course. The Billywigs are not native to this area. That man is very elusive. Every day I fly over the forest to find him, but by the time I get down he’s gone. I have never managed to catch Leron with billywigs in his hand because he used to hide them here before entering the castle”.

Kate pondered this new information for a long time. She couldn’t imagine how she would feel if any of her friends were going through a similar situation, and she couldn’t find anything to tell Jorgensen that would help him in the least.

“It must be very difficult,” she finally said. The professor nodded and rolled up his sleeves, revealing some red scratches.

“Cassandra told me you saw one of his light episodes. But if he’s got over three billywigs in him... things get a little twisted.”

“Do you think he will get over it?”

“I’m hoping he will.”

“As we have already discussed, obtaining hybrids comprises two phases; we have already made enough crosses and we have a pure line of umbrella flowers. The next step will be to cross them again, this time with fanged geraniums”.

Kate tapped her fingers against her thigh, waiting impatiently for the class to finish. She placed a pot on the greenhouse table, with a seemingly calm geranium.

She gave several instructions on how to treat it, pointing to the teeth and thorns as points to watch for, and let them experiment on their own.

She put her hand to her chest, following the dragon-shaped silhouette of her necklace through the clothes. In a short time it would all be over.

The thought grieved her too. Over the months she had developed a special affection for these children and not only because she feared they would run around in the same hallways with a loose Death Eater, but because she genuinely liked them.

And Corentin. Oh, what would she have done without him these months? He was being of great help in her mission; both investigating and being the only thing that prevented her from collapsing completely.

“After transferring the pollen, don’t forget to cover the geranium pots.” She said almost shouting, so she could be heard among the voices of the children.

When they heard the castle bell, Kate practically pushed them out of the greenhouse, closed the door and shot out to the castle, throwing a “See you on Friday!” Over her shoulder.

It was the day. The day Corentin and Kate agreed to start the trip to Grindelwald‘s room. Kate was a walking ball of nerves; not only for the excitement of investigating secret parts of a magnificent castle, but she would also be alone and probably in the dark.

“Here you go.” Corentin whispered, handing her the complete map.

The week prior, Kate and Corentin had done their best to find a way through Nerida’s painting. They racked their brains thinking about it until the only solution left was to find another way.

It didn’t take long for them to follow the path that led to the room and discover, to their great surprise and a touch of concern, that the starting point was a well-known place.

The library.

Now all that was needed was to find the how.

Behind the wall guarded by the librarian’s desk, Kate and Corentin were hiding in the dark.

Corentin looked at the stairs that led to the first floor of the tower where section C of the library was located. “It’s impossible for you to go up. The path ends here.”

Kate inspected the opposite wall, noticing nothing out of the ordinary. “Do you think it will have a Muggle mechanism like the painting?”

Corentin hummed, but did not answer the question.

With steady hands, Kate began to probe the stone in search of something; she did not know what, but something.

She gasped when a strange sensation ran through her body. In one corner, the wall had stopped being material to the touch and her fingertips disappeared.

She quickly reached out and looked at Corentin. “I have seen this spell before. There is... there is a door in a tower that cannot be opened. I went through it to go to a teachers’ meeting.”

She tested the wall again, this time inserting her arm up to her elbow, and took it out again, confirming her theory.

“I felt air on the other side.”

“Good luck, then.”

Kate wielded her wand a little harder than usual and with a long sigh after nodding to Corentin, ventured deep into the building.

It was not completely dark. A light could be seen in the distance. She made her way with the light emanating from her wand to the first torch. The path had narrowed in her wake without her noticing, and the space she had to manoeuvre had become limited.

The map had not yet blurred, but she didn’t risk losing it completely, so she approached it delicately towards the fire.

There was at an intersection with two possible directions and she took the one on the right as indicated on the map. The one on the left led to some stairs that went up to the first floor.

The passage became even narrower, forcing her to turn sideways and walk facing the wall. As she moved forward, she heard voices near her. They were not obvious; the sound was lost in the stone, but she could tell that she was just behind the advanced duelling classroom.

A sound of an explosion startled her, and there, pressed against two walls, she held her breath, thinking, irrationally, that the entire structure would collapse, leaving her buried and forgotten forever.

Her rational part of her brain understood that it was just a spell that had bounced off the wall, confirming that Libor Marek was on the other side.

Without wasting any more time, she kept going, as she could, the long way until it widened.

She took a deep breath and stopped.

The map was almost gone, but the last lines indicated that she had to go down the stairs right in front of her. Kate began to descend with little enthusiasm and soon reached the last step. It was on the same level as the castle kitchens.

Her footsteps echoed around her, and she wondered if anyone could hear her.

Suddenly, something else reverberated on the walls of the passage. A metallic, dry and very short sound almost imperceptible were it not for the fact that she was walking very slowly.

She stood still and waited.

She waved her light back and forth, but there was no one with her. As she moved one foot to begin her expedition again, she heard it once more, this time recognising the sound as something she should have avoided.

Behind her, part of the wall began to fall out of place; a seemingly endless stone wall closed off her path, and when she thought she could only go forward, she realised that she had been hopelessly trapped; another wall closed off the passage.

She folded the now-empty map as best she could and kept it up her sleeve so she could approach the wall freely. She cursed when she heard the noise again.

The walls began to move towards her. Kate frantically searched for something to help her escape the fate that awaited her in a few minutes. With her wand between her teeth, she groped the wall that was pushing her back and with wide eyes watched as the second one was getting closer and closer to her back.

She tried to stop them with a repelling spell, but the space was getting smaller and smaller with every second. In desperation she continued to touch the stone that was oppressing her and for a second her hand sank.

As fast as she could, she went through the rock the same way she entered the tunnel system in the library, and appeared on the other side. Several torches lit up part of the way.

Behind her, the two walls met, raising a cloud of dust that made her cough. Now there was no turning back.

She lost track of time as she walked. The corridor was long as it crossed the castle from side to side. Luckily for her, she didn’t need to have her wand lit. With several torches at her disposal, she turned right, where a flight of steps would bring her closer to her goal. When she reached the top, she was left in the dark again.

The feeling was strange. She was not on the main floor, but neither was she in the depths from which she had come.

With a last glance at the paper, she turned left, venturing out on the last stretch of the journey.

The tunnels drawn on the map were disappearing, but Kate had already reached her destination. She stopped at the crossroads and lit up the area with her wand.

To her left was the long awaited gate and to her right, stairs to the first floor that reached a dead end. With the map erased and no torches nearby, she sensed that that was the space where Nerida’s painting was.

With a deep breath to calm herself down, she took the metal mop and pulled, discovering that the door was open. Thinking that the last stretch to her goal had been suspiciously easy, she ventured into the room.

She immediately covered her nose and mouth with her sleeve; decades of dampness and pestilence had accumulated in the room, and the fact that the only point of ventilation was the door she entered would not help the situation.

She felt around the nearest walls and found a candlestick. Waving her wand very delicately so as not to overdo the size of the flames, she pronounced, “Incendio”.

She was startled when all the candles in the room lit up in an electric blue, revealing several disturbing elements.

She took two steps back, closing the door with her back in the process.

Recovering her temper, she approached the first thing that caught her attention: a large glass cylinder that almost reached the ceiling, filled with a green liquid that was most likely stagnant water.

A skeleton of a creature which could perfectly well have been a snake or some type of sea serpent, rested on the bottom surrounded by smaller bones. She wrinkled her nose and looked away to the rest of the room.

Just to the right of the tube was a desk filled with sketches and writings. It was not the only place where there were scrolls, though; the walls were practically wallpapered with drawings and notes. The Deathly Hallows symbol was obsessively drawn all over the place.

At the door, Kate recognised the map of Nerida recreated with several pieces of paper.

She focused on the desk where there were more documents. She frowned at the particularly dark drawings of creatures that were not exactly human, but Kate could not recognise what they were.

On one sheet of paper the word ‘Inferi’ was written.

Above the desk and completely covered by scrolls was a world map, with some pins in certain places. A small piece of paper was written on it: ‘Peverell?’

She surrounded the chair that stood in her way and came to a shelf full of jars; some empty and others with ingredients for potions.

She touched something with her foot and almost jumped up to the ceiling.

A crystal ball rested on a complex system of tubes and wires that she could not identify. With the hit, the ball vibrated for a few moments and Kate held her breath.

Relieved when the ball was finally in place, she bent down to read the label attached to it: ‘Erik Aaberg.’

“No...” She sighed. She had found the place where he had captured the obscurus.

On the ground there were more drawings, this time of several children with detailed descriptions.

In the silence, she heard her own saliva coming down her throat as she imagined how Grindelwald chose his victim.

Beyond the system that once contained an obscurus, she glimpsed the feet of a black lectern she had never seen before.

She conjured up lumos again so she could see better and stood up to read the scroll that rested there.

Curious.

It looked new, and the layer of dust was not as evident as in the other objects. She unrolled it and began to read.

Alecto Carrow

Amycus Carrow

Walden Macnair

Lucius Malfoy

Narcisa Malfoy

Isidora Gonore

Thorfinn Rowle

Antonin Dolohov

Cyprus Raynott

Malina Hadwise

Corban Yaxley

Gaspar Avery

The list stopped there, but the trembling of her jaw did not. She recognised several names: Corban Yaxley had become friends with her grandfather many years ago, after he had dealt with a plague of acromantulas in the mansion where she lived as a child; Lucius Malfoy, a man from the Ministry who would not leave Mr Weasley alone, his son was studying with Charlie’s brother; Cyprus Raynott! Her father’s workmate, and the person who had come to Durmstrang to find Igor Karkarov.

She recognised Dolohov’s name from the newspapers; he was imprisoned in Azkaban for being... a Death Eater.

Would... would it be possible that... all of them...

But she couldn’t warn anyone. Not Mr. Weasley, not her father, not anyone from the Ministry. As safe as the Durmstrang post was, such a letter would be easily intercepted, and even more so if someone was waiting for it. Because that list was unequivocally what the school’s Death Eater wanted to find at all costs.

She could try to communicate via her patronus, but she had refused to learn that spell from Dumbledore, not only because she had only managed to cast her patronus once in her life but because she considered it a dangerous way to send messages.

She read the list again, but none of the teachers appeared on the paper.

An unknown sound left her frozen in place. It wasn’t footsteps or voices, but like a crackling sound around her. No, it was as if someone was writing beside her; it was a sound of a quill on paper.

She instinctively took the scroll to her ear, and the noise became more evident.

She waited for a few seconds and out of nowhere, just below Gaspar Avery, a new name appeared that made her blood run cold.

Severus Snape.

Her breath was laboured, and a heavy sensation pressed against her chest. She looked around frantically, wondering what her next step might be. She did not want to leave the room behind, but she could not stay there long either.

She rolled up the scroll again and tucked it up her sleeve in a hurry. With one last look at Grindelwald’s belongings, she headed for one of the candlesticks to extinguish the flames. As she blew, all the lights went out.

She closed the door behind her and cast some protective incantations to make it at least more difficult to enter. She checked the doorknob twice and slipped through the shadows into the dead-end corridor.

The wall was cold to the touch, there was only stone, but there had to be a way out that did not go through the hapless maze that she had come from. She murmured ‘lumos’ and bent down to look for the mechanism that had opened the painting, but this time she was on the other side of the wall, so she had little hope.

She felt a buzz as she ran her hand along the bottom of the wall which intensified as she reached the third from the right.

Practically lying on the floor, she looked for a way to operate some mechanism that would open the door. By applying a little pressure, she could feel the ‘click’.

She thought she saw the wall light up suddenly, with a blue glow that disappeared in the second, but when she got up the wand had come near her face so she didn’t give it much importance.

Nothing.

What had made that sound?

When she touched the wall again, she thought it had been a fatal mistake: she felt a pull in her stomach and a force that pushed her forward. Her hands went through the wall first and touched something solid again, the painting, which as she continued to be consumed by the castle, opened up as she pushed it.

In less than a couple of seconds Nerida Vulchanova had spat her out of the bowels of her fortress and from the ground, relieved that she had not hit her head, she saw the waves that had been created on the stone as she passed solidify again. The painting closed and Nerida watched her from the heights.

“Thanks... I guess.” She said to the painting.

She crawled a little until she was leaning against the wall and massaged her arm. The hidden object burned against her skin. She had to go to her room immediately and hide it; or take it with her at all times; or say ‘thank you very much’ to Rhode and leave in the first carriage to London.

To her left was an armchair which promised to be much nicer than the floor, and she mustered the courage to get up to it.

Just when she had caught her breath, someone came through the door. The shelves prevented her from seeing who had entered, but she did see the figure standing at a display case.

Effectively putting her own feelings aside, Kate sensed contradictory feelings in the stranger; a deep sadness, helplessness, confidence, arrogance.

She stood up, alerting the intruder. The teacher’s long earrings swayed as she bowed her head.

“Miss Williams, what brings you here?” Yankelevich commented casually. Kate approached the teacher, not to engage in conversation, but to find out what she was looking at so gloomily.

“I like to come here. It’s a quiet place.” She glanced at the display case and read the plaque of the largest trophy there was. Lena Yankelevich.

“My sister. Magnificent seeker.”

Libor Marek came through the door creating a great din, and both witches turned around. Kate took advantage of that to go to the door and say goodbye quickly, without stopping to wonder why there were so many people in that room and with the name of her former potions teacher hammering into her brain.

[Part 15]

A/N: you have no idea how hard it was to write this chapter lmao.

Tag List: @am-i-space @eldritchscreech @cazreadsstuff @meteora-fc @the-navistar-carol

#charlie weasley #charlie weasley fanfiction #charlie weasley x mc #charlie weasley x jacob's sibling #dursmstrang #kate williams

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