Harry laughed as he caught her around the waist. "Now, Miss Weasley," he began in a formal tone, "do you thank all your teachers this way? I'm not quire sure it passes as acceptable behavior for a student/teacher relationship."
Ginny swatted his arm playfully. "Don't be a prat, Harry." She let herself slip out of his lap and back onto solid ground.
"To start your training, we'll need to brew the animagus potion. I don't have all the ingredients needed, as I asked you for exactly what I needed over the summer, and nothing more. I'll need to stop by Diagon Alley to pick them up, perhaps this weekend."
"Harry, you can't just go to Diagon Alley," Ginny protested, turning swiftly towards where he was still seated in the armchair.
"And just why not?" Harry asked, amused at her reaction.
"What if you got caught? You could be expelled for something like that. I wouldn't be able to live with myself if you got in trouble because of me," she scolded hotly.
"Don't be silly," he stated, earning him a sharp glare from the hot-tempered girl. "First of all, I won't be caught. Secondly, Dumbledore wouldn't dare turn me out even if he did find out. I'd be in for the lecture of a lifetime, sure, and he'd be keeping a much closer eye on me than he has been, but there is no way he'd even consider kicking me out."
"How can you be so sure?" she asked him.
"Just trust me on this one. Dumbledore would do everything in his power to keep me here, to keep me under his thumb and locked up as securely as possible, if he had his way. That's why he doesn't know about any of my summer-time discoveries and adventures. As long as he doesn't suspect that I'm capable of going out on my own, he won't keep close enough watch on me to actually prevent me from doing so. I think that's why he offered me the assistant professorship, to try to keep me busy and satisfied here, to distract me from what's going on outside. He thinks that as long as I have something to focus on, I'll leave the war in his hands until he deems me ready."
"Harry?" Ginny asked uncertainly. "What do you mean?"
"Hmm?" he said distractedly. "Oh, nothing, just going off on a tangent. Basically he thinks that I'll be content to sit on the sidelines and watch the war play out, but he's got another thing coming. I'll play the good little boy for now, to keep him off my back until I'm ready. I managed to get quite a lot done this summer without anyone noticing, and I left the house nearly every day if for nothing else than to get some exercise as an animagus."
"So that's why you were always telling us not to feel bad for you, that this summer was so much better than usual. Here we were cooped up in the house feeling sorry for you because you were stuck with the muggles with absolutely nothing to do; all the while you were out gallivanting around Diagon Alley and running around as a panther," she exclaimed in a mixture of mirth and indignation.
"I did tell you not to feel bad for me," Harry said around a smug smile. "It's not my fault nobody listened."
"Nobody listened because we all just assumed you were stuck in the house with your relatives all day every day. When you weren't begging us to get you out of there, we assumed that it was because you didn't want to face us, that you were still feeling guilty about what happened in June. Imagine our surprise when you showed up at King's Cross with long hair, no glasses, a physique that is already driving the female population of this castle crazy, and instead of being all gloomy, you laugh and smile and joke around."
"But I sent out letters saying I was doing much better…" Harry began.
"I know what you said in your letters," Ginny interrupted him, standing from her seat. "But it would be just like you to say 'I'm fine' when you're dying, emotionally or physically." His only response was a grin and a nod. "See? We didn't know what to think. I thought that you'd be okay, but I never expected this." She gesticulated wildly in his direction with her hands before falling back into her chair with an "oomph."
"Got that out of your system now?" he asked with unabashed amusement.
She glared at him, but the effect was ruined as a smile tugged at her lips. "For now, anyway."
He let loose a mild chuckle before continuing. "Good. Now as I was saying earlier, I'll need to run over to Diagon Alley for a quick run to the apothecary this weekend. I think it opens at 8:00, so maybe I'll go during breakfast tomorrow. We'll need to come up with a cover story to tell people if they ask me where I was at breakfast."
"But Harry, how will you get off the grounds to disapparate?" Ginny asked him.
Harry cocked an eyebrow at her and grinned roguishly. "I have my ways."
She rolled her eyes at him and said, "So what will we tell anyone who asks where you were?"
"Hmmm," he wondered as he tapped his foot on the hearthrug in front of the fire. "How about this? We push it back to Sunday morning. I need you to come to breakfast with me first thing in the morning, so you're there before everyone else. I'll eat a quick breakfast and tell you that I'll be in my office to finish preparations for the day's classes. Anyone who is there will have seen me and possibly heard me. And you can say that I stopped by but went up to my office to get some work done. I'll bring my invisibility cloak with me, so I can sneak in and out and back into my office without anyone being any the wiser."
"Sounds like you've got it covered," she told him.
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