Harry
News of the vandalized sixth year boys’ dorm was all over Slytherin by breakfast and had made its rounds of the school by lunch. People stared at Draco, whispered, pointed, sometimes glared or scowled or laughed. Through it all he wore a very Malfoy sort of haughty disdain like an armored second skin. None of their speculation or taunts seemed to touch him.
Hermione was a different story. She fairly bristled at every hissed mud-fucker or gold-digger that followed her and Draco between classes. If this kept up Harry half expected her hair to start crackling with actual lightning.
But Harry couldn’t spend too much time worrying about it today—Daphne could help Hermione cope with it, and if nothing else Draco and Hermione could take care of themselves, if any of it went beyond ugly words and anonymous whispers. No, Harry was busy figuring out how to talk to Celesta.
He finally managed to corner her in her afternoon free period. It overlapped with Harry’s History of Magic class, but so far Binns hadn’t actually been excommunicated, so for another few months at least he could skip history with no consequences at all. Knowing that she was leaving Charms, he caught up to the seventh years and called her name.
Celesta’s face sharpened when she turned and saw him. Harry waited there while she said a few words to the others, and then stepped forward to meet her when they went on and left her standing there alone.
“This is about that prank,” she said in lieu of a greeting.
“How very direct,” said Harry. “Would you like to do this here, or somewhere less exposed?”
Celesta heaved an aggravated sigh. “I suppose I wouldn’t mind studying in the Knights’ Room a bit anyway.”
How very generous of you, he refrained from saying.
After a silent minute of walking, she said abruptly, “Do you have any idea about who was behind last night?”
“Ideas, yes. Proof, none. They used scent-disguising charms,” said Harry, alert for any shift of expression that might hint she had told someone that he habitually kept a snake near him at night.
He saw none. Only anger, in the drawn-back corner of her mouth and the sharpness of her stride. “Bastards,” she muttered. Then, clearly catching Harry’s skeptical look, she scowled. “I don’t have to sign up for one of Granger’s righteous crusades to think it’s sick. She’s a better witch than Seaton or any of his crew. They should be so lucky to have her look at them twice. Fuckers don’t have a single right to an opinion about who she courts. Or, for that matter, who a Malfoy courts. They should look to their own pathetic no-account families first. The Seatons might be an old line, but what have they ever done with that time? Grangers the type to found a new House, or lift an old one to new heights. The best Seaton will ever do is try not to gamble his sad little vaults away.”
Somewhat to his own surprise, Harry found himself grinning by the end of her tirade. “Sounds like you’ve got some pent-up frustration there, Fawley.”
“Fuck off.”
“Nope,” he said cheerily.
Celesta sniffed. “Collywode has been an irritant lately. She’s a small-minded idiot, her and everyone like her, and I have my reasons to disagree with them, same as you.”
“I don’t think all our reasons are the same.”
“No, maybe not.” Celesta smiled. “Cheers to compatible ends.”
Harry lifted an imaginary glass in her direction. He’d heard dumber toasts.
When they got to the Knights’ Room, Celesta wasted no time in settling into a chair and looking expectantly at him.
“We’re concerned about the situation with the board,” said Harry, doing her the courtesy of wasting no time. “Augusta Longbottom believes that a number of them have been sufficiently alarmed by the scandals around Hogwarts lately that they would replace Dumbledore with a traditionalist. And if the Dark Lord gets to them—we don’t know who he’d pressure them to choose, but I don’t care to have a set of the Dark Lord’s eyes on us constantly.”
“The Dark Lord would be very grateful to whoever gives him what he needs to oust Dumbledore from his roost. Which I thought was also a goal of yours.”
“Not unless he’s going to be replaced by someone who will improve this place. Right now, I have no way to guarantee that.”
“At least you know your limits,” Celesta said with a hint of scorn.
Again he found himself smiling. Celesta, if nothing else, was a challenge. “You and I both know the Dark Lord is dangerous. He knows us—how we work, the sorts of things we value, the tricks we learn in Slytherin. He will see the Vipers and turn us to his ends.”
“You’re protecting Theo.”
“And Everett,” said Harry pointedly, “and Pansy, and Adrian, and you. Among others.”
“Mmm.”
“Do you want to join him?”
“Do you want me to lie to my family?” Celesta countered. “To my brother and uncle, and my mother when she is freed, about how I almost died?”
Harry leaned forward. “You are a Fawley, yes. You have an obligation to tell your family what happened and I know they would benefit from telling the Dark Lord that Dumbledore’s covered up a murder attempt at Hogwarts. But you’re not defined by your family any more than I am by mine. We can’t afford to think only as children anymore. Their generation handed us this mess, and we’re not going to clean it up by making the same mistakes they did.”
For a long moment, she looked at him, and Harry, steady, held her gaze.
“Alright,” she said, finally, “so long as there is an investigation, and whoever did this gets caught. Keeping secrets is only a problem if the secret is valuable. Do you understand, Harry?”
“Yes.”
“Then yes. I’ll do as you ask.”
“I appreciate it,” Harry said. He leaned back into his chair and let her see his conviction. “And for what it’s worth… I intend to find them before anyone else does.”
A ghost of a smile crossed her face, there and gone. “Now that I can get behind.”
Harry glanced at his watch.“I’ll not take up any more of your time. NEWTs and so forth.”
“Aren’t you generous,” said Celesta, deadpan, rising with regal grace. Then she paused, back to Harry, at the entrance to the room. “And the answer is no.”
“No..?”
“No, I don’t want to join him,” she spat, soft and furious, and then before Harry could reply she was gone.
Barty
Merton Quigley was the sort of wizard no one really looked at twice. Teeth a little crooked, but not so much as to provoke distaste; hair perennially limp, as if drained of all spring and vigor; hands prone to fidgeting, usually half-hidden in pockets or sleeves. He had the air of someone who had just gotten up from a kip on a sofa that had given him a crick in his neck. Of his colleagues among the financial auditors in the Minister’s Office, only two spoke to him with any regularity, and even they seemed mostly to be making pity conversation.
In short, Merton Quigley was the perfect target, at least for Barty’s specific needs.
Auditors were lowly quill-pushers, not remotely important enough to go through the rigorous and regular identity checks Shacklebolt had imposed on the various departments’ leadership; but auditors also required access to most parts of the Ministry, including at least part of the Archives. It helped that absolutely no one in the entire Ministry liked having to do financial audits, and so overwhelmingly chose to ignore the auditors’ existence as much as possible as the auditors went about their jobs.
Barty had been wearing Merton Quigley’s face for two weeks now, and was no fonder of it than he had been when his Lord first gave him his orders and a shortlist of potential marks. No matter how much time he spent under polyjuice the creeping wrongness of bodies not his own never faded.
At least this one wasn’t as bad as Moody’s. That had been a nightmare.
“Mornin’, Mert!” someone called from inside the employees’ lounge in their wing.
“Morning,” Barty said, waving back at Carlin Bennett, a tax specialist and one of the aforementioned two people with whom Quigley was on ‘conversational acquaintance’ terms.
Unfortunately Bennett took the reciprocal acknowledgement as an invitation, and hurried out of the lounge to walk with Barty, holding two turnovers wrapped in a napkin. He didn’t offer one and Barty didn’t ask. Eating under polyjuice wasn’t always the best idea—he’d done plenty of that as Moody, and born the nausea when the potion wore off and his body had to cope with the product of someone else’s digestive tract. As Quigley he could and did choose to eat before and after the transformation.
Bennett mumbled something rendered unintelligible by his mouthful of turnover.
“Pardon?”
“I said,” Bennett swallowed mightily, “what d’you think of that new law they’re talkin’ about?”
“Which one?” said Barty, who, as Quigley, didn’t care overmuch for politics and generally kept to himself.
“Oh, it’s this new thing ‘gainst sedition and libel, think it was that Peasegood fellow what proposed it, the one we had to audit a couple years back?”
Barty made a vague noise of assent and faded aside in Quigley’s usual manner so that Bennett could precede him through the door into the cramped office their team of auditors occupied. Quigley and Bennet had adjacent desks, which normally Barty found annoying, but he wanted to hear this, so he looked expectantly at Bennet as they moved to sit.
“So old Peasegood puts it forward—”
Lindsay Walcott interrupted him: “Oi, are you still banging on about that?” Predictably, she didn’t once look at Barty, just leaning back from her own desk to make a face at Bennett around the partitions.
“It’s important!” Bennett insisted. “It’ll get the bastards writing that Soothsayer rag—”
“I think it’s a good paper,” Walcott said airily.
Bennett snorted. “You would.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
The three of them were slightly early, and the other four people in this office, as yet, weren’t here—most importantly, the head of their office, Annabet Roth. Without interference this was almost certainly going to get heated: Barty settled in to watch the show.
“You know what I mean—it sounds good, but you can tell the people writing it just want to cause chaos, out there makin’ blood magic sound normal—”
“All they did was discuss some finer points of theory,” Barty said mildly. It wasn’t usual for Quigley to get into a conversation like this, but what the hell, Barty’s mission here would hopefully wrap up within a few weeks.
Waving at him, Bennett snapped, “See? This s’the problem—now you think it’s fine if it’s, I don’t know, harmless or theoretical or what have you, but that’s what they want you to think. Probably a bunch of old pureblood tossers,” he added darkly, which was hilarious considering the Bennetts had been career Ministry loyalists for as long as the Ministry existed. Barty had done his research. The Bennetts liked to think they were progressive because their children often married first- or second-generation halfbloods. “Those are the types to muck around with dangerous magic—”
“Well, I don’t see the harm in a bit of scholarship, and whoever they are, they’ve got a point about some o’ the stuff they wrote about, you know—” Walcott, unnecessarily, lowered her voice— “some of those political figures—”
“If you want gossip, get Witch Weekly,” Bennett said with a roll of his eyes. “Weasley and Diggory and that lot’re no better or worse than anyone else. It’s asking for trouble, is what it is. We’re not even twenty years off the war with You-Know-Who and now there’s all this noise about Death Eaters comin’ back for more, and these Soothsayer wankers are nattering on about censorship and corruption and makin’ people think maybe they’ve got a point. Bloody anarchists if you ask me.”
By now Walcott had flushed a mottled pink. “Maybe we could do with a little anarchy, ever think of that? Maybe shaking things up around here wouldn’t be so bad!”
“Figures you wouldn’t understand,” said Bennett with a scoff.
Walcott’s eyes narrowed to slits. “Oh? Why’s that, because I’m not, I dunno, four generations pure?”
“I’m no pureblood,” Bennett said defensively, which was only true according to the standards of people as batshit insane as Regulus’ parents. “It’s nothing to do with blood status—just, some of our families have been around longer, invested in the Ministry—you can’t really understand how important it is from outside—oi, don’t look at me like that, Walcott, I’m not saying anything about you personally, it’s just how things are.”
Barty exercised the full force of his self-control, and did not laugh.
“How things are shouldn’t always stay the same,” hissed Walcott. Her face had bypassed red and, according to the fine tradition of fair-skinned Britons in a temper, was now approaching crimson.
“Look, you’ll want to be careful with that kind of talk,” Bennett said. Probably he was aiming for a friendly sort of tone, but he missed by a mile and landed firmly in the realm of condescension, which Walcott, who drew herself up like an angered cat, clearly found objectionable. “If this bill clears the ‘Gamot you could get in real trouble for—”
He cut off abruptly, and Walcott ducked back behind the partition around her desk: Roth had just entered the office with Maugham and O’Faolain on her heels, the three of them deep in discussion about one of the office’s present cases. Barty kept his head down and manner unassuming. Cara O’Faolain was the only person besides Bennett who was friendly to Quigley, but she had tunnel vision when focused, and likely wouldn’t think about anything beyond the file she and Maugham were working on until lunch. No need for Barty to involve himself with any degree of social interaction.
Well, except Bennett; the two of them worked in the same partition, as Roth liked to have her staff work in pairs so they could catch each other’s mistakes. Barty couldn’t get away from Bennett’s quiet huff or his muttered, “Merlin, some people, you know? She better clean that up fastlike.”
“Mmm,” said Barty. His noncommittal response did not appear to quite satisfy Bennett’s desire for validation, but they did actually have work to do and their superior was now here to make sure that they were doing it, so there was no further talk about sedition or the Wizengamot.
Which left Barty free to consider the matter himself, in light of certain information to which Bennett and Walcott were not privy. Namely that Peasegood, while long a moderate Wizengamot vote, had been the target of a Death Eater surveillance operation only two months prior. Barty had been tangentially involved in the op at first, until things at the Ministry picked up and he had to spend more time coordinating with Yaxley and a few others on assignments like this one.
Barty was an escaped felon on the run from the law. He had no day job with colleagues who would note suspicious absences nor reputation to maintain. He was therefore uniquely suited to long-term infiltration and surveillance even aside from the fact that the Dark Lord had personally trained Barty in both areas before his fall.
So, while Barty couldn’t say with certainty that Peasegood had been successfully bought, persuaded, or pressured into advancing the Dark Lord’s legislative agenda, he did have strong reason to believe that was the case. Such internal information was typically compartmentalized within the Death Eaters so it wasn’t odd that Barty did not know of it until it became public.
What did surprise him was the apparent bent of this bill against language that favored his Lord’s views. If it defined sedition vaguely enough, then Barty could understand why such a bill would be useful after his Lord made a definitive move to consolidate power over the Ministry, but now, with that power still precariously divided amongst career bureaucrats, supporters of Shacklebolt’s bloc, and those sympathetic to the Dark…
The actual text of the bill was not yet public knowledge. Fortunately, Barty had certain access that others didn’t.
It took only an hour or two of work to come upon a case file on his and Bennett’s docket that necessitated a trip to the Archive. Barty didn’t want any of his real comrades, or his Lord’s eyes within the Ministry, noticing his interest in this bill, but he didn’t need to worry about that, not when his actual assignment was to spend as much time in the Archives as possible analyzing their wards. He volunteered to make the trip down there and was promptly awash in request forms the rest of the audit office had been putting off.
Barty waited to roll his eyes until he was safely alone in the corridor. Lazy and predictable, all of them.
The clerk on duty in the Archive’s front office was one of three Barty had been very carefully cultivating for the last few weeks. Godden looked unusually beleaguered today, and winced when he saw Barty enter, either because of the auditor’s robes or the pile of scrolls in Barty’s arms.
“Apologies for this. My, er, whole office needs files today, I guess,” Barty said, imitating the uncertain, anxious way Quigley often pitched his voice up at the end of a sentence.
Godden sighed. “Of course they do. Let me see.”
He began poking through the scrolls. Barty, meanwhile, leaned on the desk, and flicked his wand below his waist, out of Godden’s line of sight and hidden from the door by Barty’s robes, just in case someone else happened to come in. The ward-analyzer enchantment that he cast was of his own design, and while it was the best such spell Barty knew, it was also one of the least convenient, requiring either a significant uninterrupted stretch of time or many shorter moments for Barty to parse the feedback it gave him on wards in his vicinity. And even if he got to stand here for a whole fifteen to twenty minutes while Godden trawled through the unreliably organized Archive for various documents, he couldn’t write a bloody thing down, meaning he had to wait until he got back to his desk, and try to remember as much as possible in the meantime.
Today he got lucky. One of the files Maugham and O’Faolain needed had been misplaced or something and Barty wound up waiting almost three-quarters of an hour for Godden to come back with a badly tied scroll and a profoundly depressed look on his face. “That’s the last of it,” Godden said, all but throwing the scroll down on the desktop amongst its fellows.
Barty ended the spell and poked through the pile. “Er… hang on, there’s supposed to be a bit for the ‘Gamot admin offices?”
“What? No there isn’t,” Godden snapped. “This is all you gave me.”
“No, there was—oh, bugger…” Barty trailed off, pretending to riffle through the request forms Godden had pushed to the side, and then through his pockets. “It’s just, I ran into one of the girls working there ‘Gamot admin offices on the way over? And she asked me to pick up this thing for her—whole packet on some, some sedition bill? Merlin, I could’ve sworn I had the requisition form—bloody hell—”
“Quigley, I can’t dispense any documentation without a proper requisition form, you know that.”
“I know, I know, it’s just…” Barty adopted a contrite, pathetic sort of pleading look that he’d worked out was well suited to Quigley’s features, as if he were sorry for the inconvenience caused by his very existence. “She was in a real hurry, and I don’t want to be one of those wankers who leaves a pretty witch in the lurch—”
Godden looked like he very much wanted to say something like For fuck’s sake and refrained only due to professional courtesy. “And you’re carrying a torch for this lass? I’m not here to help you get a date.”
“No, no, that’s not what I meant,” said Barty, while flushing and ducking his head in such a way that said he had, in fact, meant exactly that. “Sorry. It’s fine. I’m sorry. I probably just dropped the form… will you send me a memo if it turns up?”
The clerk was clearly wavering. Barty turned guileless, watery, stolen eyes on him, and waited. Three, two—
“What exactly did she need?” Godden said with a grimace.
Got you.
“R-really?”
Godden scowled. “Quigley, don’t make me rethink—”
“Sorry, sorry, right—er, the draft bills if you have them,” Barty pretended to think, “and any precedent from the Grindelwald era? You know, anything that talks about sedition and, and libel, and the like, back then—”
“I understand perfectly well what precedent is. Wait here.”
Barty left five minutes later with his entire office’s document requisitions for the day and an extra box full of materials related to this proposed anti-sedition measure, including the current draft to be presented to the Wizengamot at its next full session. He’d make copies of it all and return it later when the after-hours clerk, a new hire who rarely interacted with the old guard like Godden, was on duty. No one would notice that “Quigley” had access to a bevy of for the most part classified documentation. Whether it was useful for Barty’s purposes remains to be seen.
If nothing else, he had acquired a substantial amount of ward data. Barty was pretty sure it would only be another few weeks, at most, until he could slip the powerful enchantments restricting access to life, death, and lineage records. A critical phase in his Lord’s plans, a critical mistake they had made last time.
As for the bill his Lord was pushing through a moderate proxy… Barty would reserve judgment until he had time to study it.
Harry
Visiting Dumbledore did not count towards Harry’s idea of a good time. Unfortunately, if he was going to protect Celesta, it was kind of a necessity.
“Jerbil’s Jawbreakers,” he said with a faint grimace that the gargoyle outside Dumbledore’s office reflected before it leapt aside. Once on the moving staircase, though, Harry shut his eyes and centered himself, using the brief window of time to wrap his mind in layer after layer of magic, occlumency barriers locking into place until he felt a telltale floating sensation. Any more would be unsustainable for more than a few minutes and risked deterioration of his conversational skills. Any less and his mind would be intolerably vulnerable. It was a delicate balance.
At the top, he knocked, and waited politely for the Headmaster to call out “Enter” before he pushed the door open.
“Welcome, welcome! Lemon drop?” Dumbledore said with a genial smile.
“No, thank you, sir,” said Harry, as always.
“Very well. Please, take a seat, Mr. Black.”
Harry did as bade. Despite the warm tone and twinkling eyes, there was a hardness in Dumbledore’s face, pinched tightness lurking around his eyes and in the muscles of his jaw. Perversely, it was a comfort. They’d keep up the veneer of civility but they did not like one another and didn’t care to pretend otherwise.
“What can I do for you today?”
“I was hoping to ask whether there’s been any progress determining who vandalized my dorm,” Harry said. True, though a pretext.
Dumbledore sighed. For a moment, every one of his many years showed in his face, and Harry was struck by the impression that this exhaustion, this weary resignation, was sincere. “Thus far, I am afraid to say that all we can determine, and I am sorry to tell you this, is that it must have been a Slytherin.”
“I’m not surprised.”
“No?” Now his tone held a hint of challenge.
Harry spread his hands in a What can you do? sort of gesture. “Every House has its unpleasant aspects, Headmaster. I am not blind to those that plague my own.”
Dumbledore then seemed to look at him, really look at him, for the first time in—well, ever, as far as Harry could remember. Look at Harry and not a wayward Potter or an adopted Black or an untrustworthy snake. Whether he liked what he saw, though, Harry couldn't tell. “Yes, well. Unfortunately there is insufficient evidence to point towards anyone in particular. If you seek details about the forensic enchantments, however, I must direct you to Professors Snape and Vector.”
“I see.”
“However, I do thank you for your…” Dumbledore seemed to cast about for the right word. “...attention to the well-being of your House mates.”
“Friendship is such a wonderful thing, isn’t it?” Harry smiled with all his teeth. “And thank you, Headmaster, for your prompt response.”
“Naturally. Hogwarts takes hateful violence like this very seriously.”
And there was the opening Harry needed. He took it. “And the other recent act of hateful violence? Has there been any progress with that investigation?”
“There is a world of difference between the use of slurs like those wielded by the vandals and a prank gone awry.”
Harry nodded slowly. “A prank. I see. Well, I’m sure you can understand that Lord Black is very interested in the perpetrators of that prank, considering it went so badly awry that seven people nearly died.”
A thundercloud formed on Dumbledore’s face and then dissolved in the span of a second. “One might expect Lord Black to understand that children’s harmless antics can occasionally get out of hand.”
“Lord Black remembers when his own antics got out of hand,” Harry retorted, “and believes he would have been better off if someone showed him consequences for, among other things, attempted murder by proxy.”
“I respect Lord Black’s opinion, but he is not a trained educator.”
And you are? Harry swallowed his distaste. “No, but he is a concerned parent, and he is not the only concerned parent very interested in what exactly happened. Some of us have been putting our families off for some time now in the hopes that we could reassure them that the school was investigating and the culprit would be found. We don’t want to worry them any more than necessary, I’m sure you can understand that?”
“Yes, of course. Your loyalty to your families is,” Dumbledore looked like he’d bitten into a lemon candy and found an actual lemon, “commendable.”
“At the very least, it would be nice to promise them something has been done. After all, if someone messed up a prank badly enough to nearly kill seven other students once, they might do it again. And it wouldn’t be right for them to just get away with this.”
Dumbledore’s mask of kindness finally melted away. The twinkle vanished and left his eyes as hard and cold as ice chips. “Mr. Black, if you mean to say that you plan to take matters into your own hands—”
“Oh no, certainly not,” said Harry. He was lying, but Dumbledore didn’t have to know that. “No, no, that sort of thing ought to be left to the professionals, don’t you think?”
Now Dumbledore caught on: his eyes narrowed a fraction, and when his wand hand twitched Harry reinforced his occlumency, though he was starting to forget what it felt like to have feet. “Do you really propose to call the Aurors over a schoolyard prank, my boy?”
Harry shrugged. “I don’t know, sir. I assume you might have already done that if that was what was best for your students.” If you really put our best interests first. “I was just thinking it might reassure our parents to know that the school is taking it seriously. Lord Black thought maybe he could use his training with the DMLE to search for evidence but I told him that would be a conflict of interest.”
“I see. Perhaps…” Dumbledore eyed Harry like he had looked up from a game of checkers and suddenly found himself playing backgammon instead. “Would your friends, and their parents, be satisfied to know that a professional investigation is underway, even if that investigation is undertaken privately rather than through the DMLE?”
“Headmaster,” said Harry with another too-wide smile, “it’s like you read my mind.”
Two days later, everyone on the Slytherin quidditch team received a formal letter from the Headmaster, letting them know that he had brought in a professional to gather forensic evidence from the preservation-charmed team lounge, and requesting that they make themselves available to speak with said investigator. Harry read his and was relieved to see the Headmaster picked Roger McKinnon. Aurors in general made Harry kind of twitchy but McKinnon had been civil during the search of Grimmauld Place. Hopefully he would exercise similar restraint in this case, too.
“Thank you,” Celesta murmured, later, flashing the fancy parchment and its embossed Hogwarts crest so Harry knew what she was talking about. “I’ll let my uncle know someone played a prank and the school is looking into it.”
“Family is important,” said Harry. Already he was calculating how they might be able to access whatever McKinnon found in the lounge and locker room: he doubted that one lone Auror would manage to find the attacker, but the DMLE had plenty of proprietary forensic spells and it at the very least wouldn’t hurt for Harry to see the results of them. With his physical activity so limited, he would have plenty of time to go through the Auror’s findings and do his own investigation of how exactly the team had been attacked.
Harry needed distractions. So far, recovery was going slowly. Painfully so: Harry consumed as much of various potions as he did solid food, all of it meant to shore up his bones, muscles, and soft tissue in the wake of the attack on the quidditch team. A bit of coordination with his Vipers ensured no one ever saw him drink them at the table. Draco and Celesta were both fine, or close enough that faking it didn’t cost them much, and whether Ginny even knew what pain felt like was anyone’s guess. And Anita and Noah would both recover alright.
Graham, on the other hand… Two weeks after the attack, Graham still couldn’t walk properly. Graham hadn’t been able to go back to classes. Graham might have permanent muscle damage.
When Harry found the one who’d done this—
Oh, he would get them eventually. He would be quiet. Careful. Patient—yes, he was livid, but he could wait. As soon as Roger McKinnon or any other source turned up any leads, Harry would use one of the many options at his fingertips, from veritaserum to legilimency to polyjuice, and he would hunt this fucker down.
And, in the meantime, he refused to give whoever tried to kill him the satisfaction of fucking up Harry’s entire life. Maybe he couldn’t do anything physically strenuous for a while, and maybe his weakness kept him up at night, but he could damn well hold a quill.
Harry wrote a perfectly polite response to the Headmaster of Hogwarts School confirming that he would be available for an interview at their investigator’s earliest convenience. Then he put that away and went to look for Daphne and Hermione, who he was sure would find breaking into an Auror’s personal effects to be a fun challenge.
Veronica
It would be a lie to claim surprise, but, Veronica thought with a dull sort of anger, she really hadn’t expected this.
She dragged her eyes up from the vials of ruined potion. Lilian had already collected the rack with her bases, which of course were perfect, and was walking back to her table, having given Veronica not even a glance.
But Veronica was sure she knew who’d done this.
“Oh dear, oh dear!” Slughorn lamented. Veronica jumped: she hadn’t noticed him coming over, so focused was she on her roommate. “What a pity, Miss Butler—mmm.” He picked up one of the vials and peered at it. Veronica fisted her hands in her pockets. “Did you perchance forget a set of stirs in our previous class?”
“Maybe, sir.” No. She hadn’t. Potions might not be Veronica’s best subject but she’d never let Harry down by failing at it. It wasn’t like following instructions was hard.
Slughorn made a humming sound. “I’m afraid I can’t allow you to participate in today’s lesson with this, Miss Butler, it would be dangerous to use your base, and I haven’t any to spare. Why don’t you go and sit with—ah, Miss Pym!”
The other girl looked up from her cauldron. “Yes, sir?” she said, voice carrying.
“Would you be so kind—” Slughorn set off towards her desk, and Veronica, unhappily trailed after him— “as to let Miss Butler here observe you today?”
“Oh, yeah, of course,” said Lilian with a smile so fake it made Veronica’s teeth hurt. “No problem.”
“Ten inches by Friday, Miss Butler, on what went wrong with your base, and another ten inches on today’s brewing process, as you are unable to brew it yourself,” Slughorn instructed her. “Keep a close eye on Miss Pym here! Exemplary potioning skills, if I do say so m’self.”
Lilian dimpled. “Thank you, sir.”
“I speak only the truth! Carry on, carry on,” Slughorn chortled.
Malcolm caught Veronica’s eye as she took a seat. She made a face back at him. There were only five Slytherins in their year; she and Graham and Malcolm got on well, but the third boy, Cathar Redwood, kept to himself, and Lilian had never warmed up to Veronica. Malcolm well knew that Veronica and her roommate existed in a chilly sort of truce.
If Graham were here, he’d get it too. But he was still in the hospital wing. Veronica’s stomach pinched like it did every time she remembered—
“So sorry what happened to your potion,” Lilian said sweetly.
“Yeah.” Veronica propped her cheek on one hand and channeled Dylan “Real pity, that was. You’re so kind to let me watch for today. I really appreciate it.”
Lilian’s eyes flicked up, shadowed with uncertainty. Ha. “You’re welcome. Always happy to do a favor for a fellow Slytherin, right?”
Oh no, that couldn’t stand, this wasn’t a favor and Veronica didn’t owe her. She forced a laugh and thought quickly. “I’d like to see someone try to tell Sluggie no.”
There, that should work, it was just a joke but it’d remind Lilian she was only doing this favor because a professor told her to—
“He’s my favorite professor,” Lilian said. “You know, Veronica, if you want, I could ask him to supervise a make-up lesson. I’d be happy to walk you through the base again, so you know you can do it right.”
I know you did something to it. “No, it’s alright,” Veronica said. Her voice was too tight. Too close to giving her anger away.
“There’s nothing wrong with asking for help,” said Lilian chidingly. “Especially if you have, you know, a disadvantage.”
Ice water dripped down Veronica’s spine. But— “I suppose that’s why you’ve told everyone about remedial charms last year?”
Lilian’s hand, steady on her pestle, slipped. Half-ground erklepods sprayed across the table, and the violently pink dust inside them puffed up into the air. Some of it got on Lilian’s robe. Ha. That would stain in defiance of all magical attempts to get it out.
“Those weren’t remedial charms,” Lilian hissed, batting uselessly at her sleeve. “I had to—it was—”
Veronica had a sudden idea, and grinned. She knew exactly what had happened: Lilian got caught cheating on a charms exam and Flitwick made her help grade first-year essays once a week for the whole year. However— “Well, you did have to go off to Flitwick’s office all the time. And everyone remembers how you weren’t on the end-of-year ranking for Charms. Who d’you think they’ll believe?”
Especially since Lilian hadn’t told anyone about the cheating thing. Veronica only found out because she saw Lilian’s copy of the disciplinary report, and that only because Lilian forgot and left it out on her bedside table.
Lilian didn’t say anything, but her movements were jerky as she gathered up the spilled erklepods and added a few more to the mortar to make up for the ones that got lost, so Veronica knew she’d heard the threat.
They passed the rest of the class period in silence. Veronica grabbed her stuff and bolted as soon as Slughorn dismissed them. Let Lilian clean up her own cauldron. “What a snot,” Veronica muttered under her breath.
“You okay?”
She turned, found Malcolm had caught up with her already. “Fine.”
“She was always a prat when we were kids,” Malcolm offered. “Just ignore her.”
“It’s not that easy,” said Veronica, hearing the whine in her own voice and hating it.
Malcolm bumped her shoulder with his. “C’mon, you got out of having to do anything in class today, so it’s not all bad.”
“She’s been so much worse lately. I thought—I mean, we’ve never been friends, but we just sort of got on with things and didn’t bother each other.”
Malcolm glanced over his shoulder. Veronica followed suit; their classmates were strung out behind them in the corridor, but at a bit of a distance, thanks to Veronica’s rapid exit. He still lowered his voice. “It’s Draco and Hermione, isn’t it? Stirring things up.”
Silence answered him. Veronica looked at her feet. They’d all heard the whispers—blood traitor and Mudblood lover haunting Draco, and gold digging bitch was one of the nicer things said about Hermione. Not that, like, everyone said it, probably most people didn’t, but there were enough to make themselves heard.
“It’s not their fault,” she said finally. “Hermione and Draco, I mean.”
“No, I didn’t mean—just… I guess it’s better now, all of it dragged out,” Malcolm said. “Like, we know, now, who thinks that sort of shite. It just blows.”
Veronica nodded miserably. Malcolm threw an arm around her shoulder, which helped, but still… “I can’t even risk walking around alone right now,” she said, “and neither can you.”
For opposite reasons. Graham, even aside from the attack on the quidditch team, had been jumped by his brother and his brother’s friends before. Malcolm’s family wouldn’t raise anyone’s hackles, but for some, a green tie was damning enough, and for others, Malcolm and Graham’s friendship with Veronica would make them targets by association.
If it wasn’t for the Vipers, Veronica didn’t know how she’d be getting by. She could take care of herself, she knew how to tell if someone was sneaking up on her and she knew enough magic to hide or hold people off long enough to run. So Veronica might hate that the halls of her school weren’t safe like they should be, but it didn’t eat at her, not the way it probably would if she was helpless. The way it probably did other kids who hadn’t had a Harry to help them, a Daphne or a Hermione to show them how scary a witch could be.
She sighed and wrapped her arm around Malcolm in return.
“I,” Malcolm said loftily, “will be fine.”
Veronica rolled her eyes. “So confident.”
“Yes, well,” Veronica could hear the grin in Malcolm’s voice, “I’m the fastest runner of the three of us, so—”
She shoved a cackling Malcolm into the wall.
Harry
There was one dubious benefit of having to suspend all quidditch practice for the foreseeable future: Harry now had significantly more time for correspondence, homework, and his duties to his House.
Working on Gatlin’s mostly-theoretical potions assignments was actually a nice break from classwork that bordered on tedious, and when that was done, from Wizengamot paperwork that managed to be both more important and more boring.
The pile of parchment he had to review was particularly obnoxious right now. Eight times a year, the Wizengamot met for week-long sessions every member was “strongly encouraged” to attend in person, rather than the judicial panels and rotating committees that convened in between full sessions. Petitions could be heard before a relevant committee in between, but all proposed laws and any major policy proposals or judicial cases could only be brought before the Wizengamot in full.
In the second week of December, nearly every single Lord or Lady of the Wizengamot would converge on London to spend ten hours a day shouting at each other in the bowels of the Ministry.
Harry couldn’t decide if he was anxious about not being there or relieved that school gave him a halfway convincing excuse to avoid it. Technically he could get out of classes by claiming family business but no one would blame him if he didn’t.
It had been tempting, considering how much work he was putting towards this session in particular. Visiting Riasmoore had convinced Harry that something had to be done for its residents and others like them. Unfortunately, he was far from the only person who had opinions about the scattered and isolated all-magical communities: enough of the old houses stood to lose profits if the unrecognized townships and enclaves had more business that passing any sweeping policy change was functionally impossible. If Harry wanted to sneak anything through it would have to be small enough to avoid much attention and dry enough to lose the interest of the Wizengamot members so arrogant they thought reading detailed policy proposals was beneath them.
The first major attempt, a loophole allowing any serious bulk purchases to avoid the extra fees regardless of where they were sent, came from a conversation with Justin. Harry hoped that the wealthy families with entrenched financial interests in Diagon and Hogsmeade would assume any purchases of this size were being made by their peers. And in fairness, the threshold they set was too high for any small businesses in places like Riasmoore to meet.
However, if a consortium of enclaves could be formed… Harry still remembered Justin’s glee when they realized nothing like a Muggle purchasing consortium had ever existed in the wizarding economy: there were so few small buyers or investors that none of them had ever thought of it. Not to mention, magical Britain didn’t have a stock exchange in which shares of a company could be traded; any partnerships were a matter of individual investment contracts and joint ownerships overseen by Gringotts’ contract division and the Minister’s Finance Office. Their plan was to link magical towns and enclaves across the UK into a purchasing consortium that could afford bulk purchases of raw goods like potions ingredients and textiles. Once purchased, they’d be divided amongst the participating businesses relative to each one’s investment.
Harry finished going over the proposal for the umpteenth time and rolled his neck to loosen his aching muscles. If he made this thing any more detailed it would start to actively contradict itself. Nothing to do now but send the latest version to Vanessa, and hope.
All the other Wizengamot members would see before the first day was the sponsoring seat, the policy area, title, and a brief summary, which they’d be submitting as soon as Vanessa cleared all the legal language technicalities. House Black—Policy Proposal, Domestic Commerce—Reduction in Barriers to Large Bulk Purchase. Likewise, all Harry would see, once the week’s agenda was sent out, was the type, title, and summary of other seats’ new proposals. The exact text of each would only be made available to seat-holders at the end of the first day.
In each session, new proposals like his were put to debate, at the end of which anyone could call a “clearing” vote. If that vote passed, the measure would be on the docket at the beginning of the subsequent session for a brief discussion period and then a ratification vote. If the clearing vote failed, further debate on that proposal would be deferred to the debate segment of the next session. Everything up for ratification on this session’s first day was familiar to Harry; he and Sirius and Vanessa had discussed it all, and solidified House Black’s stance on them weeks ago.
The bulk of the Wizengamot’s business in full session came from anything introduced for the first time and put to debate. Proposals from within the Ministry, at least, could be reviewed beforehand in detail. The lack of advance specifics on submissions from individual Houses, intended to minimize favor-trading for support in the debates, meant that each one would be the subject of intense speculation—or, at least, the ones assumed to be significant would be. Others, usually those put forward by a minor seat or bearing a bland, particularized title like Reduction in Barriers to Large Bulk Purchase, usually didn’t get as much attention in advance.
Or, to pick another example: Empower Law Enforcement to Discourage Organized Violence. But this wasn’t one of the Blacks’ proposals. No, Harry wasn’t even sure this one was real.
All the House’s formal mail went through an owl box service that screened it for curses and malicious contents. This package had shown up in a bulk delivery, with no sender information, addressed specifically to Heir Black, not to the House generally or to Sirius, meaning the sender had wanted Harry to read it. One look at its contents had piqued Harry’s interest: not only did it contain an early draft of a proposed bill to be put before the Wizengamot, but also reference numbers for legal precedent and draft notes, none of which should be available before the session started. The agenda hadn’t even been released yet; Harry didn’t know the titles of anything anyone else had up for debate yet.
It might be a prank. It might be a red herring meant to distract him. Mindful of that, Harry had made himself get through all his actual tasks first, but now that he’d finished he gave in to his curiosity, and went straight to the text of the proposed law.
Section 1
That if any persons shall unlawfully combine or conspire together, with intent to oppose any policy or policies of the Ministry for Magic of the United Kingdom, or to impede the operation of any Act or Decree of the said Ministry, or to intimidate or prevent any person holding a place or office in or under the said Ministry from undertaking, performing or executing their trust or duty; and if any person or persons with intent as aforesaid, shall counsel, advise or attempt to procure any insurrection, riot, unlawful assembly, or combination, whether such conspiracy, threatening, counsel, advice or attempt shall have the proposed effect or not, they shall be deemed guilty of seditious , and on conviction, before any judicial authority of the Ministry for Magic having jurisdiction thereof, shall be punished by a prison term…
Harry frowned. Skipped over the punishment and looked over the next section, picking out specific words and phrases:
That if any person shall write, print, utter or publish, or shall cause or procure to be written, printed, uttered or published, or shall knowingly and willingly assist or aid in writing, printing, uttering or publishing, any false, scandalous and malicious writing or writings against the Ministry…
…or to stir up sedition within the magical People of the United Kingdom…
…or to excite any unlawful opposition or resistance to any law of the Ministry for Magic, or any decree of its Minister…
Well. Fuck.
Harry double-checked; there was no other information on the bill, just the text of it, which might change after the minimum time elapsed for debate, if the Wizengamot voted to convene a temporary review committee and bring it back with amendments instead of scheduling it for a ratification vote as it was. The precedent references, at least, he could look up, though he’d have to be careful, and hide these in a string of other, unrelated Archive requests. But there was nothing about the sponsoring House.
Which was telling in and of itself: this could be useful to the more militant elements of the Order he remembered already coalescing around Thorne when Harry had last been allowed around their meetings. It was also the sort of thing he suspected the Death Eaters would love.
Too many questions, and too few answers. Harry looked at the text of the bill again and decided he didn’t care where it came from. It was a bad law no matter who was in power to exercise it.
Harry reached for a thin black journal, inked his quill, and set about writing all of this down. The journal was linked to one in Sirius’ study and separate from the one Harry used for his friends—at a certain point the network of linked enchantments got clumsy and unwieldy, too much for one notebook to support. Daphne and Hermione had said something about trying to finesse the arithmancy behind them so it would work at scale but in the meantime Harry had just set this up. Some things—like the notes he was currently jotting down on the bill and his recommended stance for House Black to take on it—were too sensitive to trust to an owl.
The other journal glared at him from the corner of his eye. Harry ignored it. He would not, could not, ask Barty about this. If it was a Death Eater plot then Barty would be obliged to report Harry’s interest; and even if it wasn’t, the Death Eaters probably wouldn’t object to this law going through, not when their sympathizers in the DMLE would benefit from it.
Although he should make a note to talk to Hermione about this. There was no universe in which she wouldn’t have an opinion.
Pansy
It was the quiet that alerted her, the rolling wave of held breaths and fear that settled over the Great Hall. Like the moment the clouds gather but before rain starts to pour down. She paused with a fork halfway to her mouth, and then, catching sight of the chilling fixation with which Theo stared at the paper, slowly set it back down.
She wasn’t the only one who’d noticed. “Hey,” Harry said quietly. “Theo.”
Theo didn’t move, other than his eyes, which jumped up from the Prophet to focus on Harry’s face. Pansy was very glad that Theo had sat with his back to the rest of the Hall this morning: that blankly cold expression, if outsiders saw it, wouldn’t do any good for Slytherin’s reputation.
“What is it?” Harry said quietly.
The noise level was picking back up. Rising rapidly towards something like hysteria. Pansy could taste the fear, acrid and sour.
Theo turned the Prophet and put it face-up on the table so they could all see.
Taking a bludgeoning hex to the abdomen didn’t leave Pansy this winded. She got it, now—understood the quiet, the horror, the fear; understood what had the Great Hall in bedlam.
MASS BREAKOUT FROM AZKABAN! blared the headline, and underneath it, a row of pictures, a list of names. Lestrange. Rowle. Malfoy. Rookwood.
Draco made a wounded sort of noise. Unable to move, Pansy was glad Blaise put a subtle hand on Draco’s back, steadying him—someone needed to and Pansy couldn’t be that person right now.
One photograph in particular stared accusingly at her. A photograph of a witch with Pansy’s dark eyes, straight hair, and upturned nose; with, though it was not evident in the picture, all the adrenaline-hunger Pansy didn’t inherit, and none of Pansy’s interest in politics. Mum.
Merlin, she looked horrible, drawn and pale, hair stringy and lank. Mum would never be caught dead looking like this.
Except Mum had been caught, hadn’t she? Pansy swallowed a wild laugh. Caught alive, not dead, caught running around hunting children through the Ministry in robes and a mask. Caught, and imprisoned.
And now escaped. Pansy had mostly sublimated her worry: the dementors’ alliance with the Dark Lord made sure the people imprisoned last spring wouldn’t endure more than the bland food and uncomfortable cots given to inmates. The escape wasn’t a surprise. If anything Pansy had expected it to happen sooner. Knowing Mum was free loosened something knotted in Pansy’s chest that she hadn’t even known was there.
On the other hand, if Mum was free…
They’d never spoken about the Dark Lord: not, at least, about what would happen if he came back. Not even last year after he was back. Everything had been normal, over Yule, and Pansy had thought maybe Mum was staying out of it this time, or at least not being very active.
How very wrong she had been.
Daphne’s hand landed on her shoulder, slender fingers belying the strength of her grip. It was just too tight to be comforting but Pansy was grateful anyway. Fingers digging into the painful hollow above her collarbone reminded her where, when, she was.
Down the table, she saw a variety of reactions, most subtle: pinching eyes and too-stiff shoulders, faint smug smiles and gloating whispers. Alex Rowle, rigid as a board. Evalyn Travers, every bit as tense but hiding it better; Pansy knew her tells, though, from hours spent dueling and studying and sometimes just talking, gathered in a room full of people wearing silver scaled rings.
It still surprised Pansy sometimes how much they all felt like hers.
A crescendo of raised voices drew her attention back to the rest of the Hall: several people had begun screaming at each other between the Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw tables, their Housemates surging forward, dragging back a boy in black and yellow who was crying as he struggled to reach a Ravenclaw Pansy knew was a Yaxley cousin. The Yaxley sported a mean little smile for the half second Pansy had a clear line of sight on him, and then he was gone, lost in a knot of people, some Gryffindors getting involved now too—
“ENOUGH!” Dumbledore’s magically augmented voice rolled through the hall, ate the rest of their sound, left silence and stillness in its wake.
Everyone looked back at him. Apprehensive, defiant, anxious, afraid.
There was a speech. Pansy couldn’t bring herself to listen to it. Mostly she just stared down at her own eyes printed on the morning paper, rendered alien by a fanatic’s glee.