“What,” said Harry, staring around, “the fuck?”
Admittedly, jumping straight into an unknown runic circle in the Department of Mysteries had not been his best idea, but it had been better than a knife to the chest. Harry rubbed his sternum and scowled. Fucking Order members flinging blades around without a clue how to do it. Just because Bellatrix had a penchant for bladed weapons didn’t mean you had to respond in kind. “Fight fire with fire,” he remembered Jules saying, and Harry had actually had to bite his tongue to not reply with, “No, you fight fire with a goddamn fire department.”
Anyways.
He’d jumped out of the way of a whirlwind of flying razor-sharp knives conjured by someone in the Order with absolutely terrible aim. There had been just enough time to see Theo hurl himself in the other direction, and Harry was glad, at least that his best friend had probably gotten away fine, but Harry himself had landed in a room full of the weirdest runes he’d ever seen and gotten about two seconds to realize oh shit this was dumb before the world blanked out. And then he woke up lying flat on his back in the middle of nowhere.
“Tempus,” he said, because fuck the Trace, he’d be gone before anyone showed up to check, and winced when he realized it was approximately twelve hours later than when he’d stumbled into that room. In fact, Harry would bet it was exactly twelve hours later, but he had no way of knowing for sure because he hadn’t exactly been casting tempus in the middle of a melee style duel.
He stood up and started jogging.
The field he was in turned into another field, then another one that had some sheep in it. The sheep and Harry looked suspiciously at each other. If there were sheep, there would be a farmer, and the odds of him having landed in a magical farm as opposed to a muggle one were astronomically low, assuming the runed room had transported him somewhere random, which meant he had to get the fuck to a road, disguise himself, and get back to a wizarding community where he could work out just what had happened last night.
It was possible things had gone very wrong. It was possible Grimmauld Place was, for some reason, unsafe. Harry’s blood boiled at the thought of his house, his safe place, being exposed or overrun by the Ministry or—
Yeah, he wasn’t taking any risks, not until he had a clue what was happening.
A few quick charms turned his hair a mousy brown and grew it out until his scar was disguised. Harry cast a glamour that would render his eyes similarly dull and brown unless someone looked too close, shucked off his robe so the cotton trousers and tunic wizards wore as underthings showed, and kept on jogging in the same direction. He’d have to hit a Muggle road eventually and if a Muggle saw him in just his underclothes he’d look like some bloke out in pyjamas, which was weird but not as weird as a wizard robe, which would look like a dress.
It took almost twenty minutes until he hopped another hedge fence and found himself on the side of a narrow paved road. It was so small no one had even bothered painting lane markers on it but wide enough for two cars. Standard countryside state of affairs. Merlin, he was really in the middle of bloody nowhere.
The Knight Bus showed up within a minute of Harry raising his wand. He shrugged his robe back on when he heard the bang and flicked his wand to do up the buttons. The ones at his throat were still closing themselves when someone he’d never seen before flung open the bus doors. “WEEEELCOME to the Knight Bus!” bellowed the youngish and extremely enthusiastic witch. “Hop right aboard! Say, what’re you doin’ all the way out here, eh?”
“Got turned around,” Harry said. “Apparition lessons.”
“Ah, yeah, takes practice, that does.”
He paid with some coins he’d forgotten about in the bottom of one his pockets, a motley collection of knuts and sickles the witch had to count through to get to eleven of the silver coins. It was just enough and she waved him into a seat.
“Say, got any copies of the Prophet?” Harry said, mimicking her accent, which was more rounded and slangy than most of his friends’ speech.
“It’ll be ‘nother three sickles.”
He scraped that much together with knuts and accepted the rolled up paper. It unfurled in his hands with a snap and Harry immediately lifted it to hide his face because he couldn’t fucking keep the shock hidden, not when the front page was taken up by a massive moving artistic reproduction of him fighting off Lord Voldemort in the Ministry’s Atrium. He knew it was him because, one, the artist had pointedly made his eyes a very bright green, and two, because the headline screamed HARRY POTTER, BOY-WHO-LIVED, FACES YOU-KNOW-WHO IN DEADLY MINISTRY BATTLE!
What the fuck. What the bloody fucking hell. This was—
Harry stared blindly at the page, occluded as hard as he ever had in his life, and read the accompanying article.
Every subsequent word just increased his gibbering confusion. Actually, confusion wasn’t a strong enough word. Bafflement. Absolute incomprehension.
Apparently, he, not Jules, was the Boy-Who-Lived. Both Potter parents were spoken of as if they’d died fifteen years ago, not just Lily. Not a single Slytherin was named as having been in the Department of Mysteries, just Neville, Hermione, Luna, Ginny, and for some reason Ron Weasley.
Most confusing was the fact that this paper very clearly thought Harry was in Gryffindor.
At the end he went back to staring blankly at the page and fought for some clarity.
Either his own memories were fucking unreliable and he’d had some kind of utter psychotic break with reality, or the entire Daily Prophet staff had gone collectively insane, or he was stuck in some kind of hallucination, or he was somehow in a version of the world where everything printed in this article was true. Harry immediately ruled out hypothesis two as improbable. Hypotheses one and three were actually a little bit terrifying to contemplate, but—he looked around. The Knight Bus worked as he remembered. So did magic. In fact, everything about his observed reality matched up perfectly with his memories, save for the events described in the papers, and he certainly felt a hell of a lot more lucid than any dream ever did. Even on the occasion he had a lucid dream it still felt… well, dreamlike. He knew he was dreaming. Things worked by dream logic, not real-life logic. Absolutely none of that was the case right now. So he probably hadn’t had some kind of psychotic break, and probably wasn’t stuck in an incredibly hyperrealistic hallucination, which would at any rate be a really stupid way to incapacitate an enemy; and for his own peace of mind, he was going to operate as if this was all really happening.
Which left hypothesis four.
Harry remembered an argument about arithmancy and time travel Hermione and Justin and Theo and Daphne had gotten into last year. Hermione had been talking about the many-worlds hypothesis, as it was called in Muggle science, and how magical researchers had pretty much confirmed that there were other dimensions out there, even if no one had discovered how to travel between them.
Lies, he wanted to tell her. The Department of Mysteries apparently does know how and they’ve been sitting on the secret, not that I blame them.
His brain was still swirling in frantic circles when Harry turned the page and saw a list of known Death Eaters killed or captured last night. Nothing on it was particularly a surprise until he saw, Sirius Black, deceased, and his world stopped.
Sirius Black. Deceased.
No.
It couldn’t—
No.
But the words on the page didn’t change.
“You alrigh’ there, mate?” said the conductor, pausing by his seat with a tray of empty hot chocolate mugs floating next to her. “Only you’ve been staring at that one page for like, ten minutes.”
“Fine,” Harry said. “Just, er, is this… Black? A Death Eater?”
“Where you been, living under a rock?” She rolled her eyes. “‘Course he’s a bloody Death Eater, been on the run for like three years now. Right mess, that was, but least the wanker’s dead now.”
Harry’s grip on the paper was crumpling it. He loosened his fingers. “Oh. Right. Yeah… my bad.”
So in this world, either Sirius really was a traitor, or he’d never gotten exonerated.
Fuck. Fuck. In this world there already was a Harry Potter. Unless Harry wanted to just fuck off to foreign shores forever, which he didn’t, he needed to solve the problem of his identity.
He couldn’t be Harry Potter. Sirius Black was dead. Regulus Black, presumably, was also dead. Harry had been blood adopted into the House of Black and had no reason to think that dimensional travel had negated that—it was bound into his very blood and bones, now, something he carried within him forever, as intrinsic as his DNA.
Which meant all he had to do was get to Gringotts.
The bus dropped him at Diagon Alley. Harry went inside and found the Leaky in an uproar; no one paid him a second glance as he slipped through the chaos and into the Alley, which wasn’t much better. People were clearly panic buying potions ingredients, books, defense equipment, and the like in droves. He slipped around an enormous queue snaking out the door of Dibbling’s Defensivewear and a street vendor hawking dodgy protection amulets and reached the steps to Gringotts disheveled and ready to be away from crowds.
It was better inside but only because people were obviously too afraid of the goblins to be disorderly. Neat queues stretched away from the tellers’ desks, every one of which was a hive of busy activity. Everyone seemed to be stocking up on gold. Harry remembered long-ago lessons in Muggle primary about bank runs and winced. Hopefully the goblins were smarter than all that.
Then again, they dealt in literal gold, not paper money printed at the government’s will, and the money was literally parked in individual vaults rather than numbers on a bank sheet. It was a less economically flexible system than the Muggle one but more reliable.
Waiting in line took forever. Harry did his best not to fidget or think about the people stuck back there in his world. Was a version of himself still there? Would Eriss be okay? Theo would take care of her—fuck, Theo.
Pansy.
Everyone.
He’d never see them again. Harry knew he absolutely could not go storming into the Ministry saying he was a dimension traveler. Either they’d lock him up in St. Mungo’s as a crazy person or the Department of Mysteries would ensure he never left their claws again. And after last night, security would be on high alert, which meant his chances of getting back into that weird room were functionally nil. If it even existed in this universe. It probably did, since most other things seemed at least parallel to his own world, but he couldn’t be sure.
Finally he reached the desk. “Name?” said the goblin, curt even for goblins.
“Hakon Black,” Harry said.
The goblin’s eyes fastened on him with intense interest. The witch behind him whispered something to the wizard with her. “Really,” said the goblin.
“I will take any test you set before me,” Harry said, channeling pureblood authority.
The goblin snapped something in their species’ harsh language. Another goblin appeared at their elbow and beckoned to Harry, who stepped smartly aside and followed it into the bowels of Gringotts.
He was led to a room and left to wait. Harry resized the chair to fit him, stowed his wand as was polite when dealing with goblins, and counted seconds.
He was just saying three hundred seventy-four when the door snapped open and a goblin he’d never seen before came in. “Call me Dilfang,” it said, stomping to the other side of the desk and sitting down. “Hakon Black, you say?”
“I am a Scion of the House of Black,” Harry said delicately.
“Oh?”
“And I have come to claim my birthright. Sirius Black is dead. He was the last known heir of that House, and I am his son in blood and magic.”
Dilfang’s eyes narrowed to slits. Without a word, he pulled a dagger out of the desk and set it down with a thump.
Harry picked it up and pricked his left ring finger, letting his blood flow onto the dagger for a few seconds before handing it back.
The goblin rolled the dagger in a strip of parchment and said an incantation over it in a language that wasn’t the goblins’ normal one and sounded like rocks rolling downhill. There was a flash of light, a puff of smoke, and when he unrolled the parchment the dagger was gone, replaced by writing in a color halfway between iron and blood.
Dilfang studied it for a few seconds, face inscrutable, and then handed it back to Harry.
Hadrian Sirius Black, it said, and then, Parent(s): James Fleamont Potter, Lily Evans Potter, Sirius Orion Black.
“The will of the late Heir Black has yet to be read,” said Dilfang. “It was filed with us, rather than the Ministry, as Mr. Black of course was a wanted felon.”
“Right.”
“Should you stake your claim to the House of Black before his will is opened, your claim would supersede his, as he never formally claimed the title of Heir Black.”
“Can I do that?”
Thirty minutes later, he'd bled on an adder stone hauled out of a vault in accordance with the Black family charter. The family magic swirled around him, crawled through and tested him, found him a true son of the House of Black, and just like that the familiar Heir's ring was his again. Harry ran his fingers over it and set about organizing his situation.
This Sirius had never claimed the Heirship, let alone the Lordship, so it was a simple matter for Harry to nullify his will. Sirius had wanted to split his personal trust half to Remus Lupin and half to this world's Harry, and Harry had no problem with that, nor with Sirius' personal effects going to this world's Harry Potter, but Grimmauld Place and the rest of the Black assets weren't going to anyone else. Harry Potter was a distant relative through his great- grandmother Dorea. He could maybe have claimed a stronger tie than Draco Malfoy or the Tonks daughter, but he had absolutely nothing on the direct offspring of the last named Heir.
Some hefty bribes bought Dilfang's discretion and falsified documents naming Harry's mother as one Moira Gunn, herself the daughter of a Muggle and a squib of unknown family. Dilfang cheerfully admitted that goblins had zero problems lying to wizards and that Harry would be just fine as long as he never tried to use the documents to fool a goblin. As Harry had completely invented Moira Gunn out of thin air, there were no assets of hers to claim, and he had no problem with that stipulation.
Lastly, he changed his name in law and magic to Hakon Sirius Black. It was no hardship to give up the name the Potters gave him.
When he inquired as to the state of the Potters' affairs, he learned that they had a formal charter with the bank. Harry promptly foreswore any claim on that House and its assets in perpetuity and paid another bribe for Dilfang to lose any documents indicating that there had ever been another Potter.
Harry supposed he could have claimed to be the child of Sirius Black and Lily Potter, but that would open a whole can of worms he didn't want to touch.
Hakon Black stepped out of the bank several hours after he'd entered it, carrying his wand and a sack of gold that he promptly went out and spent all over Diagon. He needed all the belongings someone would expect a homeschooled teenage boy to have—books, clothes, a broom though not a nice one, a trunk, stationary, potions supplies, a Wireless, an owl. He suppressed a pang in Magical Menagerie at the thought of Eriss. Had Potter found the Chamber in this world, hatched a familiar, learned of his legacy? Maybe her egg was still there, waiting. Maybe Hakon could claim her himself.
It was a nice thought, anyway.
He missed Alekta too, but he'd need an owl, so he left the Menagerie without buying anything and went to Eyelops' instead, leaving a bit later with a Great Horned Owl he dubbed Mercury.
Of course, some calculated demonstrations of his signet ring at the higher end shops like Twilfit and Tattings ensured wizarding society would be abuzz with the news of a new Black within a week.
Thus equipped, rumors spreading, Hakon took the Knight Bus again and got off at Grimmauld Place firmly cloaked in a notice-me-not to avoid Muggle attention. Mercury made angry noises inside his cage but Hakon was ready to bolt if he had to and couldn't let the bird out yet.
He stepped over the property line at the base of the stairs and frowned. The wards flexed and welcomed him, but there were other wards woven in by someone who wasn't a Black. No single person could override the ancient wards on a Black property, and the additions didn't touch Hakon, but he sensed that they very much wanted to.
There was also a significant human presence inside the house.
Hakon readied his wand, silenced the birdcage, and eased the front door open. Merlin, it wasn't even locked.
It looked exactly as it had when he and his Sirius had moved in years ago. Hakon ruthlessly crushed a pang of grief and made himself stay focused on the present. Ugly green curtains covered the spot where Sirius' mother's awful portrait must still hang, and other Black ancestors still glared down from the walls. The hideous Gothic chandelier hadn't been replaced, nor the peeling wallpaper and chipped moulding.
Who lived here?
Hakon crept along the hallway. The parlor was empty, ditto the drawing and dining rooms, but he heard voices coming up from the kitchen stairs. Amplius auri, he thought, and the sounds swam into clarity.
"—need to bring my family here."
"It would be most secure, but first we need to recast the Fidelius." Wait, Alastor Moody?
"Does Albus know yet why it failed?" Oh, he knew that voice: Remus Lupin.
"Not a clue." The first voice again, male, vaguely familiar but Hakon couldn't place it. "He's been busy dealing with the aftermath of last night. Best guess is something went wrong when Sirius died—he said in his will that the house should go to Harry, and some wards don't work without the owner's knowledge and permission."
"So we get Harry's permission," said Lupin.
"You know he has to stay with his family," said Moody, and Hakon tensed. He couldn't mean— "He's safest there, under the wards. Imagine if he'd been here today. No Fidelius, and You-Know-Who used his blood for that cursed ritual, for all we know he could track Potter here!"
"Alright, alright," said Lupin. "But surely someone could visit and ask him."
"Albus wants to be sure first." Moody again. "He's coming 'round tonight once he's smoothed everything over with Fudge. Imbecile." A spitting sound.
Hakon had had enough. A few spells masked his appearance, giving him the grey eyes and sharp features of a Black, borrowed from a few portraits within sight. The hair would do fine as it was—he'd always kept it neater than Jules or James and the Harry on the paper had had a birds' nest just like theirs. He steeled himself into the picture of Black arrogance and marched down the stairs.
"Who's there?" Moody bellowed. There was a series of banging sounds, and smoke came up the stairs. Hakon snorted.
"Ventus, protego," he incanted, stepping into the kitchen with shreds of Moody's fog wafting around him and a shimmering shield held in the air. It was dramatic and theatrical and Sirius would've laughed his arse off.
"Who are you and what are you doing in my house?" Hakon demanded.
"Alastor, stop!"
Lupin's shout was all the warning he needed. Hakon dropped and rolled. A spell shot through the space where he'd been standing. "Muris protego!" A shield of stone sprang up between him and the direction it had come from, just in time for another curse, a nasty one by the crunching sound the stone made, to hit it.
"Stop!" Lupin again. Hakon aimed at him but didn't cast anything. Lupin had his hands up. The third person, who he realized with some shock was Arthur Weasley, stood by the pantry with his wand drawn but aimed at the floor.
"Identify yourself!" Moody snarled from somewhere on the other side of the wall.
Hakon spoke to Lupin. "I'm not here to hurt anyone but I demand to know just who the fuck is squatting in my house."
"My name is Remus Lupin. This is Arthur Weasley and Alastor Moody. Alastor, really."
"Take down the damn wall, boy," said Moody, and Hakon was intimately grateful Barty had taught him how to fool that damn magical eye as he brought down the stone shield. Moody was bristling with rage and staring at him like he could peel apart Hakon's identity with eyes alone.
"And why are you in my house?" Hakon repeated.
"This isn't your house, you little—"
"Alastor." Lupin sounded angry now. "Young man, we've been living in this house for some time with permission of its legal owner. Can you tell me why you claim to own it?"
"It was my father's," said Hakon, "and he died yesterday. I went to the bank and claimed everything I could. Including this property."
Lupin looked flabbergasted. Weasley's mouth actually fell open and even Moody showed his shock.
"Father?" Lupin looked more closely at him. "You can't mean…"
"Hakon Black," Hakon said with a half-bow that allowed him to keep his wand loosely pointed at Moody. "My father was Sirius Black, though I doubt he ever knew of my existence. My mother never told him of my birth as he had already been identified as a Death Eater."
"He wasn't," Lupin said instantly, and then winced.
Hakon knew that, but of course he couldn't admit as much. He narrowed his eyes. "I'm quite sure that he spent most of my life in Azkaban, Mr. Lupin, and there has been a manhunt these past years since his unfortunate escape."
"He was innocent," Lupin said hoarsely. "I—he was falsely accused, the Potters switched Secret Keepers without telling anyone, Pettigrew was the real traitor, the one who murdered those Muggles… I … his son?"
"My mother was the daughter of a Muggle and a squib, if you're wondering where I've been," Hakon said. "She didn't want to be targeted for sullying the Black line with her dirty blood"—this spoken with sneering disdain for such an idea—"and then she didn't want anyone to know of me and judge me for the crimes of my father. Are you… certain he wasn't…"
"We were best friends. I wouldn't lie about this. I didn't believe it myself until I saw Pettigrew, heard his confession, myself."
"Oh." Hakon let shock, uncertainty, grief cross his face for a second before closing off, knowing the adults would see it as an attempt to hide his feelings. "Well. That… and you say he let you all live here? Why?"
"Well…" Lupin glanced at the others. "That's rather a long story."
"If you don't want me to kick you out, you'd better start talking," Hakon said. "The wards are keyed to me now."
"Explains the Fidelius," Weasley muttered.
"We… have been using this house as a sort of… hub for those threatened by You-Know-Who's rise," Lupin said hesitantly.
Hakon frowned, then snorted. "You mean you've been running some sort of resistance out of here? You've got bollocks, no one would think to look for that in a house belonging to the Blacks."
Moody turned to Lupin. "He's just a boy, and an unschooled one at that. We can't—"
"Excuse you, I've had an excellent home education," Hakon said loudly.
"We've brought the other children in, at least somewhat, and if it's his house—"
"Let's let Albus weigh in before we do anything hasty," Weasley said. "Mr. Black, forgive me for asking, but were you raised in the Muggle world?"
"Somewhat," Hakon said slowly. He hadn't come up with many details about his fake background yet, but he could afford to be vague; he'd only just met these people. "My mother was… protective. I didn't get out much. But I've spent more time in the Muggle world than the magical."
"I can't help but notice your use of the past tense," Lupin said gently. Hakon liked this version of him better than the one he'd known before. "Is she…?"
"Dead? Yes. She took curse damage in the last war," Hakon said flatly. "I always knew she might not… see me to my majority. We didn't have much. Definitely not enough for some fancy private healer. She passed last year. I've been getting by on her savings, but she told me if she was gone and my father was pronounced dead that I should go straight to Gringotts and claim everything, or else one of the other Blacks might and if they found out about me using blood magic they could really hurt me. Unless I beat them to it."
"A halfblood heir to the House of Black," Moody said with a cackle as disturbing as anything Barty had done while pretending to be him. "That'll ruffle some feathers, that will."
Hakon sneered. "As if I care what a bunch of inbred terrorists think of me. They'd have killed me just for existing. I want nothing to do with them."
"Well said. If you're not lying." Moody peered at him. "Got any proof of who you say you are, boy?"
"Alastor—"
"He could be another Black creeping in here in disguise, ever think of that? The Fidelius is down. For all we know it's Bellatrix."
Hakon sighed. "I swear upon my magic that my name is Hakon Sirius Black, and I am the only son of Sirius Orion Black, late heir to my House. I further swear that I have claimed the House in blood and magic and am now Heir to the Ancient and Most Noble House of Black, and that I do not intend to betray any of you to the Dark Lord." He pushed magic through his wand and it lit up. "Happy?"
"It'll do."
They showed him the empty bedrooms upstairs. No one had claimed the master suite, so Hakon immediately did, and the attached study. Apparently Sirius hadn't let anyone in here. It suited him well though he had to destroy a boggart, some doxies in the curtains, and a hell of a lot of dust.
Hakon sat down on the bed with a sigh and then jumped up when another puff of dust and a disturbing smell of dead things emanated from it. Right, that was enough. "Black elf?"
Kreacher appeared with a snap. Hakon's eyes widened. In place of the dignified elderly elf he remembered was a wizened, filthy, furious thing, clad in a tea towel that might have once been white. He peered suspiciously up at Hakon. "New Master is calling, yes, Kreacher does not know this master, but Kreacher will obey, Kreacher is a good elf, Kreacher obeyed the bad Master who is filling this house with filth, oh what poor Mistress would be saying…"
"Enough." Kreacher stopped talking. "Kreacher, I am the son of Sirius Black, Heir and one day Lord of this House. You are bound to obey me. Answer with yes or no whether you feel the bond."
"Yes, Master."
Hakon breathed, in and out, keeping a hold on his icy rage. "Good. Now. I have heard lots of stories about the House of Black. I was expecting a dutiful house-elf proud of his service to such a noble legacy. And yet here you sit, clad in rags and filth, while the house of my ancestors crumbles around you."
Kreacher peered up at him. Already something of the elf's canny intelligence was showing. "Master is disappointed?"
"Master is very disappointed. I will be having words with they who treated you so ill," Hakon breathed, "and I hereby order you to clean yourself up, return this house to its former glory, and stop with that deranged muttering. You are not to speak the words mudblood, blood traitor, filth, or scum. You are not to speak to any of the ancestral Black portraits or other living descendants of the House of Black aside from myself without my permission and supervision. Lastly, and this is very important, you will keep my secrets unto death, from everyone including other Blacks. Do you understand?"
"Yes, Master."
Hakon knelt so he and the elf were more or less the same height. "Good, because I have a secret I'm going to tell you, a very sensitive one. Look at me." He waited until Kreacher lifted his head. "Kreacher, I am here to restore the House of Black to its former glory, but to do that I need to cooperate with the people currently living here, at least for now. Lord Arcturus thought it wisest to keep the House of Black neutral regarding the Dark Lord. Until I know more about the situation, I will be following his path. I am a half-blood myself, Kreacher, but I know you can feel my magic. Tell me honestly if you think me any weaker than my pureblood ancestors."
Slowly, hesitantly, Kreacher shook his head.
One victory down. Hakon smiled. "So I don't agree with the Dark Lord that halfbloods and Muggleborns are inferior. I think wizarding traditions and culture need to be preserved and to do that families like the House of Black have to make sure they survive and thrive in the modern world. The influence of this House has been dying. I'm going to change that and I'll need your help to make sure that the House of Black does as well as it can in this war no matter who wins." He paused to let the elf take that in. "So what do you say? Are you ready to help me? Even if it means playing nice with the other people here?"
Kreacher studied him for a long moment. "Kreacher understands. Kreacher is being a good elf. Young Master is a clever Master."
"Thank you. I know you are a good and loyal elf," Hakon said warmly but with authority. His Kreacher had always responded badly when anyone treated him as an equal, being too mired in the ways of the old Blacks to change that much, and this Kreacher was clearly even worse off.
It only took the elf a few minutes to get the master suite livable. He replaced the mattress entirely—Hakon decided not to ask what had been wrong with it—and set about cleaning the suite. A tea service appeared with a plate of little sandwiches and Hakon summoned Kreacher again, asking the elf to share the food with him while telling him about the people who'd been living in the house.
An unnameable emotion, halfway between grief and anger, gripped him when Kreacher spoke of Sirius. This Sirius had not been the one Harry had known and loved. This Sirius was hunted, isolated, left alone for long months in a house that looked like the rotting remnants of his childhood. Hakon remembered how gleefully he'd renovated and how complicated his feelings were for the Black legacy. How important it was for his Sirius to get out, fly, drink, even just go for a walk. This Sirius had gotten none of that.
This Sirius had been a half-mad ghost lost in his own mind, and no one had done a damn thing about it, and now he was gone.
Harry tried not to hate this version of the Order, he really did, but Merlin, it was hard.
His rage upon hearing how they'd gutted his legacy was a much simpler thing and Hakon clung to an emotion he understood. He praised Kreacher when the elf admitted to having stolen and hidden as much as he could from the bags they'd tried to throw away, including picture albums, portraits, artifacts, jewelry, and books. So many books. "Return everything to the library. I'll adjust the wards so no one can remove anything from it they didn't carry in there themselves," Hakon said.
Kreacher left to do as he was told.
At least the elf was a good cover in case he slipped up and revealed some knowledge he shouldn't have.
Hakon showered, styled his hair, erased any trace of having recently been in a mass duel from his appearance, and settled in to meditate. He'd begun exercising his occlumency in the bank as soon as he changed his name to internalize it. The strain wasn't getting to him yet but he could not afford to react to the name Harry. Figuring out a way to permanently alter his appearance was high on his priority list as well—he was skilled with glamours, and his would last quite a while, but he couldn't be sure they'd stay in place all night or, worse, if he was hexed unconscious.
But first he had to get through this evening's meeting with Dumbledore. Reason number two for meditating. The old man would almost certainly try to read his mind. Hakon had no problems demonstrating that he knew some occlumency, but he couldn't seem too competent, not when his story was that he'd learned out of some books his squib grandmother left his mother. Which meant he had to have a rudimentary set of fake shields, and under them some thoughts that aligned with his fake identity for Dumbledore to see before Hakon threw him out, and under those his real shields, containing all of Hakon's very real and very dangerous memories. And he had to fool one of the two best legilimens living in the British Isles.
Barty would be proud. He missed his mentor.
Fuck. Hakon packed that emotion up in a box and shoved it to the bowels of his mind and occluded harder. By the time Lupin knocked on his door to call him downstairs, Hakon's true self was bundled up underneath layers of false memories and intentionally shoddy barriers that would slow down but not stop an attack. He felt like he was floating.
"Settling in?" Lupin said as they made their way downstairs.
Hakon eyed him, but the question seemed sincere, not some kind of jab. "Yes. The elf was helpful."
"He was?" Lupin looked at him sharply. "He doesn't much like any of us."
"I got that impression," Hakon said, but left it there. Lupin kept his silence the rest of their trip and couldn't hide his troubled expression. Let him wonder what all Kreacher had said.
More people than just Dumbledore had arrived. Hakon looked around the room. Both Weasley parents, Moody, Shacklebolt, Tonks the younger, an older witch he thought was Hestia Jones, and of course Dumbledore himself, sitting at the head of the table in the seat that should have been Hakon's.
Hakon didn't bother concealing his suspicion as he took them all in.
"Welcome!" Dumbledore beamed at him. "Hakon, wasn't it? Hakon Black?"
"Yes, sir. And you'd be Albus Dumbledore." Hakon didn't sit. "The man who left my father, who was apparently innocent, to rot without health care or a trial."
He was playing a role, the prodigal son, the child come to avenge his father's honor. It would track well with these Gryffindors who valued the right thing so highly and it would establish him as someone who wasn't unreasonable but wouldn't be pushed around.
It still felt like showing his hand as several people opened their mouths, outraged. Molly Weasley was quickest on the draw. "What a disrespectful thing to say! You'd best be ashamed, young man! If one of my sons—"
"It's all right, Molly, thank you," Dumbledore said. His face was different now, regretful, sad. "My boy, you cannot think I let Sirius remain persecuted on purpose. I promise you, I did everything in my power to bring him justice."
"And yet the head of Wizarding Britain's highest and really only judicial body was unable, at the height of his influence, to get my father a retrial. The Ministry sanctions the use of Veritaserum if prisoners consent, and if my father was truly innocent, like you all say, then he'd have no reason not to consent, would he? And even if I accept that you really did all you could, you want me to believe you lot don't have a single sympathetic healer who could've provided him treatment? Azkaban is a hell on earth. No Muggle country would stand for such a thing even for its worst criminals."
By the end of this speech he saw Molly, Tonks, Moody, and Jones were outraged, but Arthur Weasley looked uncomfortable, Shacklebolt more so, and Lupin downright ill.
"I assure you, he was innocent," Lupin said. "I swear it on my life, Hakon. Your father was a good and honorable man and if he'd known you lived he would have done everything he could to do right by you."
Hakon accepted that with a slow nod. "It's… good to hear that. I spent my whole life thinking he was… I truly am curious why you didn't get him a retrial, Mr. Dumbledore."
"I did everything I could, my boy," Dumbledore said softly. "My influence is not so powerful as you seem to think. Supreme Mugwump is largely a ceremonial position."
Well, that was a load of hogwash, but Hakon only saw through it because of his years preparing himself to take on his House's legal and political duties, years that his false identity didn't have. So he pretended to grudgingly accept this explanation and took a seat between Lupin and Jones.
"You are… rather well informed," said Dumbledore. "Might you tell me where you learned so many details about your father's life?"
"Kreacher," Hakon said. "You all have been treating that elf awfully. Including my late father."
"I see. And did Kreacher inform you that it was he who led to your father's death?"
Hakon stilled. "What do you mean?"
Dumbledore explained how Kreacher had interpreted a hot-headed command from Sirius to "get out" as permission to leave the house, where he'd gone to Bellatrix and told her what he could. Including the news that Sirius was busy on a certain night. Which was how Voldemort—apparently Dumbledore in all universes used the name—knew to taunt Harry Potter with visions of his tortured godfather and lure him into a trap at the Ministry, where Sirius had died at Bellatrix's wand.
Hakon listened in silence. Kreacher hadn't mentioned any of that, but he wouldn't, would he?
"I see," he said after a few seconds passed in which no one spoke. "That's… bad, but really, he was horribly mistreated by everyone here, he had to watch you gutting this house without a care for the centuries of history you tossed out with the daily rubbish, and he went to the only people who showed him any positive reinforcement. After he was shut up in here, alone, with nothing but an insane portrait to listen to. He's unstable. I'm not going to hold him accountable for that."
"You are a remarkably mature young man," Shacklebolt said in his preternaturally soothing voice. "And you're right that we perhaps should have tried harder to… help Sirius. If only getting him medical care. None of us wanted… but I think he would be proud of his son, if he had gotten to know you."
"Thank you, Mr..?"
"Shacklebolt, Kingsley Shacklebolt, my apologies. I'm an auror."
Everyone introduced themselves. Hakon nodded stiffly and when they'd gone around the table turned back to Dumbledore. "I gather you're running some kind of resistance cell out of this house? And you'd like to keep doing so, because the wards on it are centuries old, and no one would think to look here?"
"That's about the size of it," Dumbledore said cheerfully. "Tell me, what do you think of Lord Voldemort?"
Hakon opened his mouth—and there it was. An incredibly subtle legilimency probe, creeping, testing, slipping through the cracks he'd left; "I definitely don't sympathize with him," said his mouth as his brain pushed revulsion, anger, fear to the surface; as he conjured an echo of a woman's voice saying the Dark Lord would get him if he didn't go to sleep on time, memories of studying alone for hours, of the joy when he touched his wand, then desperate grief leftover from a sense of loss, and a cacophony of recent emotions, vindictive delight, shock, sadness, determination, fear again, now some anger, some intrigue, some hope—
He locked down his mind behind occlumency walls with all the solid obviousness of a skilled amateur and stopped talking.
"Hakon?" said Lupin. "Are you alright?"
"I don't appreciate people who violate my privacy," said Hakon in an icy voice. "Do that again, Mr. Dumbledore, and I'll tell the wards I'm sick of your presence. You tell me what you think borderline sentient war wards will do to you."
Weasley, Jones, and Shacklebolt paled. "Albus," said Lupin, "surely you didn't—"
"He did. I'm not a subtle occlumens but I can tell when someone's in my head," Hakon spat.
Dumbledore folded his hands on the table and resolutely ignored the disapproval radiating from Molly Weasley, Lupin, and Shacklebolt. "I apologize, Mr. Black. You understand that I have a duty to ensure the safety of all in this room, and that you are an unknown element, a potentially catastrophic security breach."
"Well, now that you've poked around, are you satisfied I'm not about to tattle on you to Voldemort?"
"Indeed I am. My condolences on your recent loss. You must have loved her very much."
Hakon had repurposed the grief he wasn't letting himself process for everything left behind in his old world, attached with temporary strings to a nebulous memory of a woman named Moira Gunn, a hazy but well loved mother figure. It was good enough for a cursory examination and it was plausible that a relatively recent loss of a mother would echo in his mind along with his most recent emotions and thoughts. "I did," he said, but didn't thank Dumbledore for the sentiment.
Dumbledore sighed heavily. "I shan't step into your mind again, my boy, you have my word. It was a safety measure and nothing more. We live in dark times."
Hakon let the moment stretch before he nodded. "Alright. I don't mind you staying here or using the house for your resistance. Although it would be nice if you stay off the top two floors—the library and master suite. I'll be living there. If you need to use the library for research, you can ask me, but I've changed the wards so no one else can remove anything from it. Some of the books you threw out were priceless relics."
"They're full of Dark magic, you rude boy, and no one should keep them," Jones said angrily.
"I am not a Dark wizard, Miss Jones, but I don't think just because you stand up to a tyrant means you get to decide what books should be cast aside. I have a Muggle education, remember? I know what it means when a society starts burning books. No matter if the people doing it claim to be the good guys."
Her mouth fell open. "Why, I never!"
"Pardon me, madam," Hakon said coldly, and turned back to Dumbledore. "Can you accept these terms?"
"Of course. The house is, after all, yours," said Dumbledore, spreading his hands. "I must ask, however—the Weasley family lived here last year for security reasons, and had considered doing so this summer as well. We'd been reconsidering those plans when the wards fell but with your permission I should once again be able to cast a Fidelius and render this home utterly untraceable. Would you be so kind as to allow them residence again?"
"That's fine," said Hakon, who wasn't about to pass up the opportunity to learn about this world from the Weasley children. Even if they hated him on sight they were all hot tempered enough to speak foolishly when angry.
"I think Hermione wanted to stay with us again," said Mrs. Weasley. "She's concerned, poor dear, not that I blame her."
"And Harry?" This from Lupin to Dumbledore. "You said we could get him from Petunia earlier this year."
Hakon locked his entire body down.
"He must remain for approximately a fortnight." Dumbledore stroked his beard. "I have an errand in which I believe he can assist me—nothing dangerous, Molly, do not fret—and then he may come here."
"I'm going to renovate the house," said Hakon before he lost it and commented on the fact that they were still leaving Harry Potter with Petunia. No way were this many adults oblivious to what his life was like there. And frankly, Hakon thought Petunia being a good guardian to a wizard kid was orders of magnitude less likely than the simple changes of the Potters both dying or Harry not having a twin. Those were matters of coincidence. Petunia's character was the result of a lifetime of hate.
The idea of renovation threw them all into a tailspin of security problems until Hakon pointed out that, one, it was his house, and two, Kreacher could do all the cosmetic work given access to supplies, and anyway it would be good for the house elf to have orders again.
It was mostly a power play—Dumbledore tried to shoot him down, Hakon argued and won. The old man didn't have a monopoly about decisions relating to Grimmauld Place anymore and Hakon needed him to know it. If he established a strong but reasonable personality early the others would be less likely to try to work around him.
At least, that was the hope. Hakon wouldn't put money on all of these people being very logical.
They invited him to eat dinner with them, and remembering Molly Weasley's cooking, Hakon agreed readily. He mostly listened to the forcibly banal conversation, but he chatted a bit with Shacklebolt about his supposed mother's home curriculum, which prompted Dumbledore to offer to arrange for Hakon to sit his OWLs in late June and accelerate the grading so he could join the sixth years in the fall. Hakon thanked him for it while internally seething. This was how Dumbledore got people in his debt.
Only once dinner was over and he'd retreated to his room did Hakon slump into bed.
Tears wouldn't come, his emotions didn't really spill over, but the echo of them left him feeling shaky, held together by string and desperation. He curled up on his side in a ball and shut his eyes and just for a few minutes let it all loose.
Time passed. He didn't know how much. Only that it was fully dark outside the enchanted window when he finally pulled himself to his feet and went into the adjoining study.
"Kreacher?"
The elf appeared with a crack, dressed in a spotless white pillowcase belted with a curtain tassel. Already he was standing a bit straighter and had clearly washed himself. "Yes, Master Hakon?"
"Bring me coffee. I'll be in the library."
A cup of gently steaming coffee waited next to a half-full pot by the time Harry got to the library. He called Kreacher again, thanked him, and set the elf to helping him tidy the library.
It was a mess. Kreacher had just put the salvaged things wherever, which was not a long term solution, but for now Harry shoved all the nasty cursed things in an armoire he had Kreacher retrieve from the attic and hexed so it would only open for a Black. The books that Molly or someone had deemed "unsuitable" would all be shelved up high in the back of the room, which meant they had to shuffle things around to make space.
Hakon sorted books and fumed. They'd tried to throw out a first edition copy of Piercing the Hearte of Magicke. Sirius had told him once it took Arcturus twenty years to find that copy, mostly because the Ministry had objected to its ideas about magical theory and demanded most of them be burned. And it was far from the only book that had enormous magical or historical value. Most of them weren't even that Dark, for Merlin’s sake. Hakon laughed when he realized the nastiest books had been moving around and hiding themselves to avoid their fellows' fate.
It took until one in the morning just to organize everything. Hakon finished his second cup of coffee, grimaced, and dove into the stack of advanced human transfiguration books he'd set aside.
By three he had to concede defeat. Human transfiguration was a NEWT subject. Self-aware magical beings had a natural resistance to any kind of change worked on them by outside magic—their minds and magic knew what their state of being was supposed to be and their magic worked to keep it that way. Self-transfiguration was marginally easier than transfiguring other people for that reason but it was still tricky and you still risked seriously hurting yourself if you screwed up. Especially if you were going for a long-term or permanent change.
Permanent changes, he read, were the hardest—you had to apply the transfiguration, and then instead of letting it wear off naturally you had to maintain it constantly, day after day, month after month, until your body "forgot" how it was "supposed" to be and got stuck in the new state. No one had done it for anything more than fairly minor changes but Hakon didn't need anything dramatic, just his eyes and some of his bone structure. The mental discipline problem was solved with occlumency and he could tolerate the constant drain on his magic. It was summer and he couldn't do any spells in front of the adults anyway.
Hakon recast the glamours before he went to sleep. Tomorrow he'd start practicing human transfiguration. Something small. His fingernails maybe.
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