Detection charms were all over the corridor's floor, but Ginny's expression was resolute. It was easy enough to imagine Finnegan's words.

"We've planned for this, Weasley. Get a grip."

Ten years ago, she might not have let it bother her, but somehow she only grew more inclined to prove herself. Failure after failure in the long war did no favors for her ability to predict positive outcomes, but it made her more cautious. No one accused her of being sloppy, not without being proven wrong straight after. Waving her wand to un-reveal the charms beneath her feet, she pulled a set of enchanted boots out of her pack and put them on, casting a bubble-head charm on herself. She would be more at home on a broomstick, but the disillusionment charm would waver too much. Any sentinel, wizard or beast, would kill her before she hit the ground.

Planting her feet on one side of the door frame, her hands on the other, she climbed up the wall and waved her wand again, finding a few old wards she doubted any Death Eater placed. She had only a few minutes before Thomas would be in position with the banshee's cry, which would barely register from her distance. There was no trace of Tentacula Miasma in the air, easily identified by its acidic, sour smell. It was an understatement to say she did not envy Lawton, who had to contend with entering through the greenhouses.

Ginny hoped the instructions Longbottom provided would serve for their recruits, but with him out of action there was bound to be something going wrong. She could hear the words of her long dead brother as she crawled along the wall, staying out of the way of the doors and bottle-green windows.

"No plan ever survives contact with the enemy."

She could turn a patronus invisible if she needed to send a message to any of the other operatives, but the dementors would notice it. Remembering it had been thirty minutes already, she dug around in her bag for a poultice of wolfsbane and silver and rubbed it on her exposed skin. Theoretically, it would kill the noses on the wolfies, but that alone would notify them that there was an intruder. Their sense of smell connected them with the world around them, so there was no time between losing it and realizing something was wrong.

Going over the plan in her head was mostly unnecessary, but she did it anyway. The floors and the corridors had not changed in at least a decade, though if her history was well on she could add at least another thousand to that. Werewolves patrolled the higher levels because they were not trusted around students, but controlling them was not so simple. True to his word, Voldemort prepared the young witches and wizards to the very best of his ability, forcing them to learn the darkest magic to protect themselves against the creatures, beings, and the legions of ghosts that swarmed the school.

With Thomas and the older Creevey dead, their combative potential was substantially reduced, as was their ability to rescue anyone who was caught during the operation. Ginny had gone in knowing that if she were captured instead of killed on the spot, whatever happened in the rest of her life, it would not be longer than a few hours at most. The Death Eaters had learned she and her friends had no value to each other as hostages, not because they all hated each other, but because they had long since sacrificed the idea of being good boys and girls. Whatever came after Voldemort would probably be about as bad, but she was crawling on a wall, not structuring magical governments and setting precedents. The world was not something so small she could save it herself, or destroy it herself, but for any improvement to take place, the mission had to be successful.

Coming to the stairs, it was a simple process of going from one wall to another, though she was keeping her hands and feet from the surfaces of the paintings. Their original inhabitants had been cursed out, and while they were not replaced with other depictions, touching cursed objects was usually a bad idea and there was a chance they were still active. She had some idea that the original purpose behind the paintings was making the stairs look like more of a public area; making it harder to get away with throwing someone off, but she would have to ask someone more familiar with the school's history.

The office was on the fifth floor, and according to Lovegood, she would only have to get there in time. When last they had seen each other, the Ravenclaw's eyes were red around the edges, pouring over countless texts in search of something resembling a way in.

"The entire plan hinges on this. If we don't have this, we might as well not go, and if we don't go, we might as well give up, and if we give up, we might as well roll over and die. Neither of us will last very long when the wizard who cannot be called by any other name finishes warding the borders of the island." It was a monstrous plan fitting of Lord Voldemort, making the whole of Britain his for eternity. He would not, of course, content himself with that, but it was what he allowed other magical lands to believe for the time being. The Death Eaters had already tested it on Leeds, and at the drop of a hat he could alter the memories of an entire city.

"I know. I've been searching for days. I've searched for this longer than I ever searched for a Crumple-Horned Snorkack, and I thought that would be a lifelong endeavor." She turned a page wearily. "There's no way of just having the code handed to you. Only the Headmaster or Deputy may enter without knowing the code, and one appoints the other. The school's magic refuses to accept self-appointed heads."

Ginny nodded. She remembered their fourth year, when Umbridge was barred from entering the office.

The younger Creevey had brought in a witch of his same age named Mafalda who had been to the school under Voldemort for a few years, but if the bruises were any indication, she had no idea what the passwords were, past or present. It seemed unlikely the school's magic would grant him ingress, but it was just as unlikely that he would take that lying down. In all their plans they had to be ready for the gargoyle to have been reduced to dust or some kind of path cut through the stair with dark magic. It would have been simpler to take down the anti-apparation wards, but they already knew the Death Eaters put a premium on security. If anything, any form of instantaneous travel would be impossible, and the secret passages had already been caved in.

It happened after the battle, when they started grabbing family members of students involved with the resistance, torturing many of them to insanity before their last few secrets were anonymously revealed. There was no way of tracking down who gave up the secrets, but a few of her old friends were killed out of suspicion. What was left of the army, she would not describe as friends; even Lovegood was more of a comrade than anything else. She knew that was why they were picked apart so easily, why the dark wizards knew all their little secrets in a matter of hours, but it was something that made sense for them at the time. They were children and they trusted people who were nice to them, mostly other children. They formed a group where they would get a little better prepared for the danger outside, without experiencing the danger firsthand. Getting their shit kicked in was beyond a given.

The current arrangement of the survivors resembled a band of thieves more than any army, though there were similarities to intelligence. They were not trusted, they were tracked, giving reports of their actions after each mission. They were rewarded for their successes and punished for their failures. They were afraid of Longbottom before Dolohov's curses left him bedridden while her elder brother worked on a way to get him back right again. Consequently, their new leader had to be someone intimidating, and some cousin of the Patil twins appointed himself. Dhritarashta was cruel, and he knew what he was doing, so the rest of them agreed not to kill him for the time being.

Their final meeting before this particular mission came back to her as she carefully crawled along the wall, casting human detection charms every fifty feet.

"We need the sword."

No one responded. They knew they needed the sword, but there was no guarantee they would even find it. There was no guarantee it would work, and for that matter they had not even been hoping for a guarantee they would get out with it alive.

"Why would he keep the sword in the school? Irony?" It was Creevey asking. "We tried to get it years ago, but the sword in the Headmaster's office was a fake."

"I know that. That's why he would keep it there. It's the last place anyone would think to look." The leader spat. He had a dry mouth from the potions he was mainlining to recover from old injuries. "He's also arrogant. He thinks there's nothing that can be stolen out of Hogwarts." If the other Horcruxes had been any indication, the dark wizard's arrogance was the primary explanation for why he used a host of ancient artifacts to house his all-important soul. There was no way he would destroy the sword of Godric Gryffindor, even if it were an easy task.

At the end of the day Ginny was willing to go along with Dhritarashta's theory that the genuine sword was in the school. There was no other way to kill the snake, and there was no other way to kill Voldemort. With Potter dead, he had allowed the snake to eat the body rather than dragging it back to the castle, at least according to Hagrid. He was never quite the same after that, right up until his death by a team of new regime Hit Wizards.

The blade being in the school was a reasonable supposition, but everything else was up in the air. The current students were secured to the degree that capturing any one of them would be as difficult as stealing the sword, and she had about as much information as any of them did.

The banshee's cry brought her back to the present. It was a distraction for the monsters on the grounds to go to the Forest, but that was only so that Lawton could get into the greenhouses. All it meant for her was that the plan to kill a few of the teachers had already started, and she was on the clock.

The key to any good distraction was to keep the victim from realizing it was a distraction. The enemy had enough wands to retask a few of them to each target an intruder would likely hit, and an unacceptably high number of them would be sent to the Headmaster's office, even without an inkling that the real target was an artefact inside of it. Killing teachers, who were mostly Death Eaters or related to them in some way, was a believable mission for any resistance group left on the islands. Voldemort would most likely leave the office if he happened to be inside of it at the time, since he was not concerned for his own safety and had some reason to keep the teachers alive, or at least an interest in seeing what managed to kill them. There was no reason they could discern for anyone to protect the office, and if there were one guard, she could deal with something like that.

There was a small contingent of the band of thieves in the Black Lake, though she had not been told exactly who or how many of them there were. The event of her capture predicted her death with certainty, but before that a substantial amount of information could be extracted, so it was better that she was limited to only what she needed to know. Unfortunately for the extraction team and its head, she needed to know a lot.

Voldemort had worked out a deal with the merfolk, in which they would only attack human beings if they set foot in the water, but any other creature was fair game. Throwing the sword into the lake would effectively be throwing it back to its owner without having wands under its dark surface, so it was worked into the plan after Finch-Fletchley had agonized over learning their language as part of their intelligence against the enemy. They had intended to find out if the selkies would help them, but it turned out to be a rare moment of overconfidence. The extraction team had to be formed of some of the better duelists, trained in conjured tanks to hold their breath underwater in the event the merfolk could cancel their bubble-head charms, as well as to resist rapid changes in pressure.

Hearing some amount of noise below her, the assault on the teachers had started. The idea had been tossed around that they would kill the students as well, but the students were only required to defend their own lives, and subjected to the kind of treatment they were, would most likely ignore any threats to their instructors. Student deaths were rare, because the training basically worked, if one accepted that the naturally less capable would never survive and were sent elsewhere. Ginny was on time as expected, though there were students taking the moving stairs, meaning she would have to slow her ascent. They were being actively trained to detect threats, and a disillusioned witch clinging to the walls was a threat.

She could imagine what Jones would say if she were here- or still alive, for that matter.

"Worrying yourself to death isn't going to get the sword, Weasley. Hand over hand, foot over foot, you're just as far in as you're out."

The office was in sight and she scanned the area for any sentinels. She had learned more silent, invisible spells in the last month than she had in all her life before that, or at least it felt that way. There was a student about a hundred feet away from the gargoyle, so she cast the Imperius, stealing a glance over her shoulder.

"Get me into the office," she ordered as soon as she was sure there was no one else around. It seemed he had some difficulty understanding the demand. One possible explanation was that there was no way into the office, another was that he did not know of its existence because their memories were being controlled, but neither was terribly satisfactory. Magically dragging him to the gargoyle, it was strangely unresponsive. "Revelio." Nothing happened. "Damn. Dissendium. Aberto. Specialis Revelio. Surgito." The last one seemed to have an effect, but she heard something.

"What was that?" the student asked, still in a haze. Dhritarashta had cautioned against giving complicated orders to those under her control. There were tell-tale signs of the curse obvious to anyone with the slightest experience in dark magic. Secondly, they would not be as reliable without control of their own mental faculties, which they did not have by design.

"You're going to find out," Ginny said, not looking. "Kill anyone else you see on this corridor." She turned back to the gargoyle and used the enchantment removal charm several more times, but ended up using the depressing hex to collapse the floor, but she only succeeded in waking the stone guardian.

"Password?"

"Voldemort must have applied some enchantments and curses to keep you from being accessed by anyone else," she muttered. "He also would have tried every magical method to determine the password." She went down a mental list of sweets, remembering that was a common choice by Dumbledore, though it would have changed while Snape was Headmaster. "Lily Evans. James Potter. 31 October, 1981."

The gargoyle shrugged and moved.

"Harry Potter saves the day again," she muttered, remembering his telling her about the memories he had seen of their old Potions teacher. Every moment of conversation they shared she could still recall, if with the agonizing regret of his death always renewed every time she thought of the sound of his voice. She did not so much as stow her wand as she ascended the spiral staircase, casting curse revealing charms on her way up. Changing the password or entering without it might have been impossible for Voldemort, but it would be like him to slaughter anyone who made it past anyway. It was a wonder he gave up on it, to be sure, but his not having accessed it meant he never used it for sword storage. "At this point I'll have to content myself with stealing portraits."

The burglary was a complete failure. Most likely, at least two operatives would die, and more if she could not get out in time to call it off properly. At the same time, the strategic advantage of gaining access to a room in Hogwarts that their enemy did not have could not be understated. It was worth at least three lives on its own, more if there turned out to be anything of value. She found no protective enchantments on her way up the spiral staircase, but the office was alive with magic. There were charms controlling the temperature, the lighting, even the motion of the air. It was nothing terribly out of the ordinary, but they were still considered esoteric spells.

The books on the shelves were valuable, though Granger had already stolen everything that they needed about horcruxes. It was a pity she did not survive the final battle, putting first years of all people above herself as she aided an evacuation. Her efforts did little more than get her killed, and half the students she rescued decided to join the winning team, and most of the other half were dead. Ginny would have done something similar, but she was not given the opportunity, apparated out as she was by some peripheral Order member and left in Grimmauld place for weeks until it was declared unsafe. She could hardly remember a whole minute that passed where she was not practicing Unforgivable Curses, conjuring snakes to serve as targets.

Levitating several books that might serve some purpose into her pack, she scanned the room for anything else that might justify the deaths of two people. She levitated a weighty tome to have a look at it.

"Stealing, Weasley?" a croaking voice asked. She whipped around and raised a shield, but it was only the Sorting Hat. She remembered Voldemort saying something about how they would only honor his ancestor, Salazar Slytherin; it was entirely within her expectations that the hat would no longer be in use, though it had not occurred to her that it would wait in the office. "Perhaps the old Malfoys were right about letting your sort in the school."

The witch frowned, the tension in her expression remaining. If it had been a joke, it was not funny, and the Malfoys were mostly dead. With most of the threats to his life extinguished, their lord decided he preferred his more loyal servants over his more wealthy servants and made short work of them. Perhaps they had been planning a coup once their enemies were out of the way, but they never commanded the same respect as the Lord Voldemort. A fair amount of the Death Eaters supported him specifically and an enormous percentage of the population was afraid of him.

"It's an act of war," she explained. "How long have you been in here?"

"Long enough," it said, not helping. "How long have you been a cold-hearted killer?" Her frown turned into a scowl. Snape had to perform a Sorting during his short time as Headmaster, meaning the hat went along with his regime in some nominal way. It persisted in putting the students where they belonged rather than putting all the new students in Slytherin so they could be dead weight in the final battle. It was a hat, but a hat of principles, and its principles contributed to her last year being the year when one dark wizard replaced another as the head of the school.

"Not long enough," she replied. "I'm stealing you. We can continue this discussion later." Waving her wand, the hat flew to her hand and she stuffed it in her pack. Putting it on her head was obvious, but space was not an issue and she could not afford to be distracted during the escape. The logical thing to do was going out the window, but she had little doubt they were enchanted to prevent exit, since Voldemort could fly and he would have tried the window, or cursed it shut if he deemed it not a worthy effort. All the same, it made sense to try.

Applying the anti-werewolf poultice again, she pointed her wand at the one window and attempted a few curse revealing charms.

"Aberto," she incanted, not expecting the opening charm to work. Surprising no one, she was trapped. Leaving the way she came in would be time consuming, and almost certain to result in her capture. Assuming the guards and the students were not blind, they would be able to find the door where she gained entrance from the grounds. Thinking about her escape route, it would have to be at least as complicated as her way in, which she had thought would be half the battle. Concealing herself from every manner of foul creature allowed to patrol the Forest and grounds, she basically walked to the castle, the enchantments on her body made her temporarily invisible to the wards, meaning she would need to reapply them on her way out, one way or another.

After meandering around the threats on the grounds and reaching the walls, the simplest thing to do was to wait for a student to open the door on his way out, but it was too likely that any student walking out would cast human detection charms before opening the door, take the warning without making any sound, and optimistically go in the other direction. If she were unlucky, he would wait for her to go through the door and kill her. She could hardly afford to drop bodies on her way into the castle.

Necessity forced her to use a human detection charm, but she could hardly use the Imperius Curse through walls, as the range on it was basically intimate, so she resorted to amplifying her own hearing to wait for the sound of someone putting something down and leaving, allowing her to levitate it to the door and push it open from the inside. The students were warded with runes to keep their locations known to their teachers and the Headmaster, as well as open the doors during the day, but according to Finch-Fletchey, there had to be some kind of exception for magically opening the doors, because when he asked the mermfolk who were willing to work with him about students coming and going, apparently the door opened with no one passing through it sometimes. Invisibility was a possible explanation, of course, but it would not be the first or last time she took a gamble. Levitating a discarded object and pushing the door open worked, meaning she would not have to resort to transfiguring herself or trying to walk in with someone using polyjuice.

Back out of the office and into the corridor, Ginny moved slowly to keep the disillusionment charm from wavering, planting her boots on the wall again. It was a slight advantage in the effort of not being seen, and she had no reason to believe any evidence existed that she had been going up the walls at any point. A creature detection charm revealed something big on the corridor, meaning she would have to get to the stairwell as quickly as she could without making noise. Unfortunately for her, the hat had made its way to the top of her pack, its point sticking out and poking her on the shoulder as she crawled. The temptation existed to ask it what the hell it wanted, but that would only make more noise.

"Perhaps, Miss Weasley, your actions would make more sense in context," the hat started. She could assume that it was aware Voldemort controlled the school and had further reaching goals in mind, but had no time to argue, so she cast the silencing charm. Unsurprisingly, there was some sort of exception for enchanted objects. "I am afraid I cannot be silenced that easily," it explained, stressing every word for some reason.

"If I put you on my head, can you at least refrain from making noise?" she asked, her voice cracking slightly. She did not wait for its agreement. Crawling down the wall of the stairwell, she broke a window and listened for the call of a selkie above water, which was supposed to indicate the extraction team was in position, but the window repaired itself before she could listen for more than a second. At least it explained why windows did not constitute a viable entrance or exit strategy.

"What is your war?" the hat asked. The voice was in her head, though it sounded the same as always, the same as it did sixteen years earlier. Ginny intoned that her war was against Voldemort. Some useless bit of trivia reminded her that the hat once belonged to Godric Gryffindor.

"Who is it that fights him?" it continued. She was more focused on the human detection charm she needed to keep track of pursuers, but the results of the beast detection were more worrying. At length she responded that whoever was still alive of the people who wanted to kill him were his enemies. She did not need to remove the hat from her head to see its scowl, nor did she need the scowl to know she had said something redundant. Ginny confessed that if it was not enough to be against the Death Eaters and their master, then she was for the kind of world that could only be possible with them gone, the kind of world she knew as a small child. Perhaps it was still the same answer, but it was what she had.

On the ceiling of a lower corridor, the sounds of several different beasts could be heard. It was possible the school had sent most of the teachers outside to chase down the escaping operative tasked with killing them, but in any scenario the creatures would only be hunting what they could kill, and if they had become afraid of the students, anything else would do for a snack. Fighting with them would slow her down and give away her position, even if she survived. The hat, however, seemed to not understand.

"Why do you fly?" It felt like a thousand years ago that she had been sorted into Gryffindor. The world as she knew it was entirely different; even the magic seemed less magical; her wand was a weapon and her old schoolbooks were contraband. It was like her childhood had been filled with whimsical adventures; even in her first year she had hope Harry Potter would come to her rescue and just when it seemed she would decompose in the Chamber of Secrets for the next hundred years. Ginny tried to explain that from time to time a tactical retreat was necessary, that she only wanted to live so she could keep fighting. She needed the sword, but for all she knew it was locked away in a vault again, more secure now that Voldemort knew they were looking for it.

She racked her brain for where the hell the blade could be, but any kind of effort to find it would have to be waged on another day. There was a miniscule possibility the goblins still had it, but after they tortured information out of Breakpick and Holdchain, the sword had not been seen in years; there was an active search for it. There was one problem, however, that was substantially more pressing. There was a troll blocking her way out.

"Will you fight?" Killing it would hardly be a challenge, she knew. She was lethal with a killing curse at a hundred yards and the damn thing would never see it coming. "Will you live to keep fighting, or fight to keep living?" Fighting it was a different matter entirely. Fighting it would put her at the mercy of every other beast in the castle. "Who is it that fights old Tom Riddle? What kind of witch is she?"

Dropping from the ceiling, she knew the troll could hear her cast a cushioning charm. It was slow-witted, but by the time she canceled her disillusionment charm it had already lobbed a piece of masonry from a nearby column in her direction. Dodging by a fraction of an inch, she cast a conjunctivitis curse and followed that with a few stunners in what succession she could, ignoring a blindly hurled chunk of column. The unmistakable sound of a snake slithering came from around the corner behind her.

"Can I take you off now?" she asked. She had never been one for the wide-brimmed hats that never seemed to go out of fashion.

"I think you rather should," it intoned. A pair of yellow eyes stared her down as she removed the hat, steeling herself. Three good witches and wizards had already died to the fell bite of Nagini. Holding the hat above her head to return it to her pack, a glint of ruby and silver caught her eye as the hand of the reserve Seeker grabbed the hilt of a sword.

"For once I can't help but agree."

 

5052 words
== == == ==

Spoiler

Detection charms were all over the corridor's floor, but Ginny's expression was resolute. It was easy enough to imagine Finnegan's words.
Your first three verbs are “were” “was” and “was” – extremely passive start to a story, and honestly something that I find noticeable. I’d prefer active verbs, like “Detection charms littered the corridor, but Ginny just narrowed her eyes. She imagined Finnegan’s words…”

Backstory like “failure after failure in the long war” might be relevant but it doesn’t need to be here near the start of the story. I want to be invested in what’s happening now – you can bring up the backstory when it matters, rather than using it to set something up.

Here’s a nitpick that took me a while to figure out what my eyes kept tripping on – “Ginny hoped the instructions Longbottom provided would serve for their recruits…” – there’s nothing wrong with that sentence, but it pulls me out of the story slightly by reminding me that I’m not Ginny I’m only in her POV. Rather than say “Ginny hoped…” perhaps try “Hopefully Longbottom’s instructions would be good enough.” Since this is Ginny’s POV we more easily accept that those are her thoughts, rather than you telling us that she hopes, etc. Sorry if that’s not clear.

“Remembering it had been thirty minutes already…”
She just randomly remembered that? Without checking a watch or anything? While in the middle of a stressful operation? Something about the phrasing here just made me blink.

I get that it is relevant that Thomas and Creevey are dead, because it makes this harder for Ginny and she’s obviously thinking about how nice it would be if they weren’t dead, but from my standpoint as a reader it feels a bit like filler.

This started out with a traditional ‘heist’ feel to it, but then it turned into reminiscing more than anything? Granted that did eventually include the reasoning for the heist – gotta get the sword to take out Voldemort – but that could have been quickly established at the start if needed.

"Voldemort must have applied some enchantments and curses to keep you from being accessed by anyone else," she muttered. "He also would have tried every magical method to determine the password." She went down a mental list of sweets, remembering that was a common choice by Dumbledore, though it would have changed while Snape was Headmaster. "Lily Evans. James Potter. 31 October, 1981."
Is she actually standing there talking to herself out loud before trying passwords? It makes sense that she’d try passwords out loud of course, but the talking to herself feels a little awkward.

I liked this bit - "If I put you on my head, can you at least refrain from making noise?" she asked, her voice cracking slightly. She did not wait for its agreement. – the imagery of Ginny stealing the hat and being exasperated with it while trying to escape was fun, and my favorite part so far. It was around this part that I started to get a bit more into Ginny’s heist in general, as she feels like she has more going on now than in the earlier part of the story. Dropping from ceilings and whatnot had a nice Mission Impossible feel to it.

Also I liked the ending quite a bit – with her actually getting the sword from the hat. Built up to that pretty well and it paid off.

 

@Silirt - You don't need to feel bad if someone guessed it was you. You aren't required to disguise your writing unless you want to. The only real rule there is that you don't outright tell everyone what you wrote or which story is yours. If you want to disguise it as an exercise though, be my guest. Just be aware there's a difference in 'knowing' and 'guessing and being pretty sure.'