Harry and Dudley exchanged a few letters through the year, using the post box Hogwarts maintains in the Muggle world for Muggleborns to use—a school employee collects mail sent to students at that address, forwards them to the school, and puts outgoing owl post in the Muggle system. This means that Dudley knows a bit about Harry’s new pets and can’t wait to see all of them.
Achilles and Bert get on like a house on fire. Dudley thinks the axolotls are epic and the pixies kind of scary once he learns that they have a weird magic allowing any two pixies to lift much larger creatures—it’s how they handle predators, either dumping non-climbing creatures in trees or just dropping them from large heights.
Peaches’ kittens are born just a few days after returning to Privet Drive. Dudley helps with the birth, which is a horrible, stinky affair but totally worth it because the kittens are so cute. Wilfred has deigned to lie down in Harry’s lap sometimes and now he likes to drape himself over Harry’s knees, purring like a king, while the kittens climb all over the pair of them.
Harry owls pictures off to Susan and Millicent, both of whom want one of the half-kneazle kittens. He promises that if any of the kittens like them, they can keep it.
ooOoo
“Aunt Petunia?”
“What, boy?”
“I got a summer job.”
Aunt Petunia’s eyes narrow. “Oh, really? Who’d hire a freak like you?”
“Another freak, naturally,” Harry says cheerfully. He learned from Dudley that there’s something just a little off about him the older he gets, a little other. Also, he remembers his promise to himself from first year.
He’s a wizard. No one gets to make him feel lesser anymore. Least of all his aunt.
“I suppose you can go. Don’t think you’re getting out of doing the gardening!”
“I’ll cook dinners or do the gardening, not both.”
Her eyes narrow. Just as she’s clearly about to say no, Harry smiles his goblin smile.
“Gardening,” she says grudgingly, already turning away.
Yes!
The next morning, Harry takes the Knight Bus to Diagon Alley, then trots off to Market Alley, where Fiona Hornby, the owner of Feather & Bone, welcomes him with a grin. “Right, you want to work, kid?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
ooOoo
His summer quickly falls into a routine. Harry gets up every morning, whips up breakfast big enough for everyone, eats his fill, and takes off on the Knight Bus for the Alley and his job, where he learns.
Madam Hornby sets him to cutting and planing wood. She talks while she works, explaining that oak and pine are the best for magical trunks of the kind she makes. Harry does the manual tasks while eagerly watching the way she uses runes, arithmancy, and enchanting together to create wizardspace inside each trunk. Some are simple, multi-compartment affairs like Harry’s. Others have entire flats inside them with multiple bedrooms and plumbing and fully functional kitchens. Those are taxing, and Madam Hornby often has to go lie down once she’s done, but when finished they maintain themselves with only a little magic pushed into them by their owner every full moon. As long as they’re used often, she tells him, the occupant’s ambient magic is enough to keep them operational.
It helps to have magical plants or animals inside, of course. Harry understands better why so many wizards keep magical animals as familiars. Madam Hornby also impresses upon him the importance of doing a trunk for himself. “At least half of what I sell are ‘blanks’—the wood’s ready, the power-gathering runes are set, and it’s primed for the spatial expansion, but people customize themselves. The more work you do on your own, the more attuned the trunk is to you, and the better it works. That one you’ve got is good work, but if you’re serious about this, better make one yourself from scratch. I’ll even let you have the raw materials.”
Harry stays an extra hour off the clock each evening working on his own trunk under her supervision. Usually he picks up croissants and hot chocolate on the way in as a thank-you for her help.
Halfway through the summer, he lays the runes and casts the enchantment (two and a half minutes of spoken Latin and Sanskrit together, plus some really complicated wand motions) for a trunk of his own. Energy leaves him in a rush and his knees go weak, but when he recovers and checks his brand-new trunk of oak and holly, it’s got a room inside the size of his bedroom at Privet Drive. The floor is the rich red of the oak he chose and the walls and ceiling are pale holly.
Madam Hornby smiles and claps him on the back. “Well done, Harry. Next, plumbing and ventilation! Otherwise you’ll suffocate.”
“Yes, Madam Hornby!”
Getting the interior livable takes another week and a bunch more enchantments. The one for the air purification knocks him out for thirty minutes, and Madam Hornby helps with the plumbing bit, since Harry has the raw power but nowhere near the finesse with his wand. He lays the runestones and slots them into the matrix himself, though, and she walks him through all the arithmantic calculation first.
Going into the trunk feels increasingly like home.
By the end of July, Madam Hornby deems it stable enough for Harry to move his pets in. He buys wood from her to make lovely stands of sturdy oak, painted deep forest-green, for the toad and axolotl tanks. The pixie cage has its own iron stand in the corner; now that he can anchor it in one place, he expands it even more and plants a small barking dogwood tree inside, so the pixies can eat its berries. Achilles, who has been demanding a mate, gets a large habitat built into the back of the trunk-room containing a lone aduwa tree and plenty of plants native to sub-Saharan Africa, where boomslangs of the normal and magical varieties naturally live. Harry gets a female boomslang, names her Agrippa, and negotiates with the Potion Master at Slug & Jigger for sales of the boomslangs’ skin and venom. The cats don’t really need their own habitat, but he makes them one anyway, filling it with twisted driftwood for them to play on and a soft nest under a sun charm for napping and frequently stocking it with mice and birds for them to hunt.
One of the half-kneazle kittens even takes a shine to Madam Hornby. She names him Oliver and afterwards is often seen working on a project while the little tabby purrs on her shoulder.
ooOoo
Being at Diagon all the time means Harry sees the news about Sirius Black almost right away. Theo and Susan both write him to make sure he knows Black is dangerous and betrayed his family.
Harry, who has continued exchanging the occasional letter with “Lord Gaunt,” agonizes over a polite request for information.
The response is… enlightening.
ooOoo
“You negotiated neutrality with You-Know-Who?” Susan screeches.
Harry is so glad he decided to have this conversation in his trunk. “Susan, what do you want me to do, be a child soldier? Run off and kill him before I’d hit my majority? Besides, I told you, he drove himself insane and the Philosopher’s Stone made him better! He’s not actually out to kill all the Muggleborns or anything like that.”
“Harry Potter.”
“No, really. And look! Sirius Black’s innocent, the real traitor was Peter Pettigrew and he’s a rat animagus—can’t you at least look up the trial records? Please?”
“You are so lucky I trust you! Merlin’s balls!”
ooOoo
“SIRIUS BLACK NEVER HAD A TRIAL!”
Susan’s voice startles Harry so much he drops the eucalyptus he’s planing for a specialty trunk. “Merlin, Susan, don’t shout, I’m worki—what do you mean he never had a trial!”
“Exactly that!” Susan’s expression is thunderous. It’s a really good thing Madam Hornby is working on a tricky four-bedroom two-story residential trunk in her private, soundproofed workroom. “No trial! They just tossed him in Azkaban based on some half-mumbled “it was my fault, all my fault” he said when the Aurors picked him up, and the Muggle witness statements that they saw the curse blow up the street, which is so stupid because Muggles can’t see magic!”
“Oh god,” says Harry. “So that means—”
“Someone tampered with the witness statements.” Susan spins on her heel. “I’m going to my aunt.”
ooOoo
Madam Bones won’t tell Susan details, but a quiet investigation is being launched, she promises Harry. It’ll have to be good enough.
ooOoo
At the end of the summer, Harry does more arithmancy and casts another exhausting enchantment. His trunk grows another room. Harry takes the whole thing over to Neville’s house and stays there for two days while Neville helps him create a tropical jungle inside it. The atmospheric charms to keep it warm and humid are exhausting to cast, and carving runes around the whole jungle to keep its denizens inside takes forever, but when it’s done Harry has a habitat stocked with frogs and small mammals and generally perfect for a colony of tropical snakes.
Neville is very unhappy when Harry stocks it with two magical pitvipers, a pair of emerald tree boas with the uncanny ability to change their pattern so it mimics the leaves in which they hide, an anaconda big enough to eat a person, and three magical rainbow boas whose bodies shimmer in stupefying beauty. Literally stupefying: they hunt by entrancing their prey before pouncing and strangling it.
ooOoo
Two of the kneazle kittens choose to stay at the Menagerie in search of owners; the shopkeep promises Harry that they won’t go to anyone unless the kittens choose them. Hedwig, meanwhile, has been getting broody. Harry stops by Eyelops and arranges for an automatic purchase of any male Snowy she takes a shine to. His last errand is at Slug & Jigger, where the Master on call is more than happy to expand his standing arrangement with Harry to include the byproducts of the other snakes now in Harry’s menagerie.
Then he ventures into the Muggle world long enough to pick up a couple laying hens from a Muggle farm store. This way he has a constant supply of eggs to feed his snakes.
Which gives Harry an idea.
“Hey, Theo,” he says on the train, before anyone else shows up. “Want to help me hatch a basilisk?”
“Hatch a—Harry are you insane?”
“I can talk to it! I’ll be fine! And I bought a rooster, so if it tries to kill me I just make the rooster crow!”
“Oh, sweet Morgana’s tits, why did I have to befriend a complete nutter?”
ooOoo
Harry eventually promises to hold off on the basilisk thing until he’s older.
ooOoo
Dementors, Harry decides, are the one magical creature he would happily wipe from the face of the earth.
“There’s a charm for them,” Millicent says. “I want to learn it, too.”
Her face is waxy and pale. “What did you hear?” Harry says.
“My… my parents… when the Aurors killed them.”
“Oh.” Harry pauses. “I hear my mum dying. The Dark Lord tried to get her to stand aside but she wouldn’t.”
No one in the compartment quite knows what to say about that.
ooOoo
Third year is the year of electives. Harry gleefully shows up to Arithmancy, Study of Ancient Runes, and Care of Magical Creatures in their turn. Professors Vector and Babbling are wonderful. Hagrid is… not the best teacher ever, but Harry gives him a stern talking-to after the class in which he only just stops Malfoy from getting attacked by an offended Buckbeak. After that Harry and Hagrid spend a morning a week going over Hagrid’s lesson plans and appropriate safety measures.
Harry tracks down Justin the Hufflepuff. “Hey, I need more Muggle books.”
“Okay, but let me come to your study group,” Justin says immediately. His eyes are as canny as any Slytherin’s. “You lot have some of the best Potions marks. It drives Granger spare.”
Harry grins, because Theo gloats about that at least once a week. “Sure thing.”
Justin helps him order a bunch of Muggle books on teaching. Harry carts the lot down to Hagrid and insists the half-giant read them, which he does once Harry realizes Hagrid just needs a mild engorgio to read better—his hands are too big to easily hold most normal-sized books, and the distance he naturally holds books at is too far away for him to read normal-sized font.
Care of Magical Creatures lessons get a lot better after that. And Justin fits seamlessly into Harry’s study group.
ooOoo
Theo finally gets his mechanical assassination snake working. Harry whips up some Babbling Brew for its hollow brass fangs. Then they set the snake after Gryffindor fourth year Cormac McLaggen on account of a comment he made to Padma that was quite offensive.
It happens in the middle of breakfast and it’s glorious. McLaggen spews a whole range of thoughts on witches that completely ruin his chances with literally any female at Hogwarts. The best part is, everyone knows Babbling Brew only makes you tell things you really think.
Dumbledore threatens horrible punishment for the perpetrators. No one fesses up. The snake returns to Theo without a hitch.
ooOoo
Harry’s boggart is a dementor.
Figures.
Also, he dislikes Professor Lupin. The man gives Harry these weird, sad, longing looks, but never says a word to him. And he favors Gryffindors to an obscene degree. Almost none of the Slytherins even got to face the boggart in class; they only got practice because Harry hunted one down in his spare time and most of his year mates came along.
That incident earns him the attention of fifth year prefect Mercator Travers, who, after finding out boggarts might be on the DADA OWL, asks Harry for help finding and containing one for the fourth and fifth years to practice. Harry gladly does so.
ooOoo
“Hagrid, is that a grim?”
“Think so! ‘E was pretty scrawny when he showed up, but I reckon he’s right fit now.”
Something about the large black dog makes Harry feel funny. He still sits down with him and gives him an ear scratch. The dog’s tail goes thump, thump, thump on Hagrid’s floorboards.
Oh, right. “Hey, Hagrid, want me to do a space expansion in here? I learned how this summer.”
“I’n’t that illegal?”
“Only if you get caught, and who comes down here?”
Hagrid grins. “Well, I won’ say no, at tha’.”
A week later, Hagrid has a whole extra room in his hut, and an attic that didn’t exist before. The bathroom has a tub large enough for Hagrid and Harry’s turned the water pump in the backyard into a whole magical plumbing system. Hagrid puts his bed in the attic (Harry shows Hagrid how to carve strength runes on things like ladders and support beams) and turns the spare room into a work area for his hobby of hand-carving wooden figurines and instruments. “Want to make ‘em move around?” Harry says, and spends an afternoon showing Hagrid animation runes, which aren’t as good as a charm usually but last longer. Soon there’s a small army of jerkily moving wooden animals and instruments that like to play themselves.
“Sell them,” Theo says when he comes down to visit and sees the lot.
Hagrid tears up. “D’yeh reckon I could?”
“Why not?” says Harry, and brings Justin down the next day, who happily helps Hagrid write up a catalogue and order form that collectively have a sort of rustic handmade charm. The students leave copies in their common rooms and Harry (without telling Hagrid) buys a small ad in the Daily Prophet for Hagrid’s little business.
ooOoo
“Three feet by Friday on the uses of lapis lazuli in potions, Potter, and then I may consider a brief lesson on the risks of brewing with stone and mineral ingredients.”
“Yes, sir.”
ooOoo
His trunk gains a new level when Harry realizes how useful it would be to have somewhere to live. He pokes around Hogwarts for old furniture and stuffs an ancient armoire, a four-poster double bed, and a massive desk and chair down into his new room. A second new room becomes a storage and work room; Hagrid makes him cabinets and a massive table for it as a thank-you for the expansion in his trunk. After that it’s not all that hard to add a bathroom and hook it up to the plumbing enchantments Madam Hornby already helped him embed in the trunk.
Although the missing toilet in the second floor bathroom does make Myrtle wail for days.
ooOoo
Harry’s got no one to sign his Hogsmeade permission slip, so he waves his friends off and heads into the Forest instead. The dementors guard the ward line on the outer edge of the Forest, not the inner, so he can wander about a bit.
The grim who’s been hanging around Hagrid’s house comes along.
“Just don’t scare the bowtruckles off,” Harry says, approaching an elder tree frequented by the little buggers. Wand wood from bowtruckle trees is extra prized and Ollivander wrote Hagrid the week before to say he was running low of quality elder wood and did Hagrid know of a bowtruckled tree that could spare a branch or two.
The grim huffs at him, as if to say, duh, and Harry steps up to the tree. He lays his palms on it and looks up.
Ten feet above his head, a twig moves, and it’s not a twig, it’s a bowtruckle. The little creature slowly climbs down towards Harry.
“Here you go,” he says, holding up a handful of woodlice.
He’s familiar with bowtruckles by now and holds perfectly still while this one gets closer. It slowly tentatively crawls onto his palm and snatches a woodlouse.
Harry imagines he can hear the insect crunching.
More bowtruckles approach and Harry shares his bounty. When it’s gone, all but three of the bowtruckles retreat. “What’re you doing?” Harry murmurs to the other three. He plucks one of them from his shoulder and holds the little guy up at eye level. “You gotta stay here, buddy, this is your home.”
It chitters angrily at him and clings to his sleeve. The other two make similar noises; one is poking curiously at Gabby, under his collar, and the third is trying to crawl into his cloak. “Do not eat it,” Harry warns Gabby.
The grim flinches.
Harry frowns at it. “Oh, seriously? You’re a dog, why are you afraid of Parseltongue? This goddamn country, I swear. Okay, okay, fine, you little bugger!” He stops trying to prevent the bowtruckle from climbing up his sleeve. “You realize I’m going to have to add a whole new spot for you, right? With a tree and everything? There better be a sapling around here I can take. Merlin.”
Slowly, he kneels in front of the tree, draws the athame he bought over the summer, and makes a fine slash on his palm. Pressing his bleeding hand to the bark, Harry says, “Magic bless and keep you, spirit of the elder. I ask permission to take a cutting of your branches, to serve as wands in the hands of wixen. Accept my offering in exchange for your aid.”
For a long moment, all is still. Then, with a thunderous crack, a branch as big around as his arm snaps off at the trunk and crashes down. Harry yelps and throws himself aside.
It hits the ground with a thud and a flurry of leaves.
“Yikes,” Harry says to no one in particular. Then he eyes the seeping wound in the trunk and scales the tree to spread Neville’s favorite plant-healing cream on it. More leaves brush his face and hands on his climb down than is quite natural.
God, he’s going to have to carry the branch back, and the sapling he’s going to take for the bowtruckles. Levitating something that big through a dense forest won’t work well.
He should have brought his broom.
Harry casts around for a suitable elder sapling.
ooOoo
The Patronus Charm is devilishly tricky. Millicent and Harry spend one afternoon a week working on it with little success.
“We’ll get it eventually,” Harry says after one particularly discouraging evening in which neither of them managed so much as a puff of silver.
Millicent sighs.
Harry goes down and feeds chicken eggs to the pitvipers.
ooOoo
Arithmancy and Ancient Runes aren’t actually that hard. Harry doesn’t understand why Granger is drowning all the time. At least, not until Millicent mentions Granger has Divination with her.
“But Divination is at the same time as Arithmancy half the time,” Harry says.
“I know! I don’t get it. Has she skipped any lessons?”
“No.”
“Same here.”
The two of them and Theo turn to stare at the Gryffindor table, where Granger is eating dinner with two books propped open in front of her.
“I’ll bet she’s got a time turner,” Pansy Parkinson says, turning towards them. Harry tries not to be surprised the gossipy girl is bothering to talk to his group; Harry’s been sort of persona non grata to her ever since he beat Malfoy out for Seeker.
“A what?” he says.
Theo sighs. “You’re such a Muggle, Harry.” Then he explains time-turners and how Slytherins are almost never awarded any.
“Typical,” Millicent growls into her eggs.
ooOoo
On Samhain, the students who want to celebrate the traditional way find themselves called back to the Great Hall. Because Sirius Black has broken into the castle.
Harry wonders what the hell is going on. Black wasn’t one of Voldemort’s, and he didn’t betray the Potters. So there’s no reason at all for him to want to kill Harry. Plus, he went to the Gryffindor dorm.
Mostly, though, Harry spends the night griping with Theo and Millicent (very quietly) about having to skip Samhain night.
ooOoo
Seventeen of Aragog’s many descendants decide it’s time to go rogue the week after Samhain. Harry ruthlessly points out to Hagrid that if Aragog’s remaining family are actively hunting the dissidents, maybe there’s nothing left to do but hunt them first. It makes Hagrid very sad, but he and Harry catch up to the rogue acromantula trying to escape the dementor line in the direction of the nearest Muggle town, and the acromantula (led by Elbig, the same one who once tried to eat Harry) try to make a meal of them, Hagrid fights back.
So does Harry.
It’s only natural.
Harry manages to kill two of them by spraying them with oil (“Unguenti!”) and then lighting them on fire. The two screaming spider-torches distract the rest so much that a furious and weeping Hagrid can stab them through the bodies neatly.
With an honest-to-Merlin war scythe. Harry recognizes it from Binns’ endless lectures on goblin wars, except this one is Hagrid-sized, not goblin-sized, and genuinely terrifying.
Afterwards, Harry promises Hagrid he’ll bury them while Hagrid goes and negotiates with Aragog. He does actually bury them—but only after harvesting the venom, liquid spidersilk, fur, eyes, claws, spinnerets, and pincers of the dead spiders.
Acromantula parts fetch a premium. Also, one of them has an egg sac that Harry wraps in a multitude of suspension charms and stuffs in the magically expanded knapsack he always wears in the Forest, just in case he needs to stash something away.
Just in time, too, because Hagrid comes back just then to weep over the graves. Turns out acromantula usually eat their own dead kin. As far as Harry’s concerned acromantula don’t have a ton of redeeming qualities, but Aragog likes Hagrid enough to promise the corpses of these will stay undisturbed. It’s just as well. They might not take well to finding the plundered bodies of their fellows.
Selling just a quarter of the venom makes Harry enough gold for a small house. After some dithering, he tells the goblins to go ahead and buy one in an all-magical enclave somewhere and rent it out. Someplace with a lot of land. It'll be nice to have a place he can go to ground after school… or in the summers, if the Dursleys get really unbearable.
ooOoo
"Your cat tried to kill Scabbers!"
"Honestly, Ronald, cats do that, it's not as though I'm the only person in the castle with a cat!"
Madam Pince descends on the warring pair and boots them out of the library.
"Wonder what that was about," Justin says. Harry, upset because he can't get anyone to sign him a new Restricted Section pass ("I am not as careless with your well-being as some of my colleagues, Potter" had been Snape’s response to that request) just grunts.
"Oh, Hermione's cat is supposedly trying to eat Weasley's rat," Parvati says.
Neville sighs gustily. "They've been rowing about it for ages. He says her cat's been after the rat since the summer."
"That's so strange. Hasn't she got a part-kneazle? Normally they're smarter than to go for other people's familiars. Niccolo certainly is," says Susan, referencing the half-kneazle kitten Harry gave her who is named for Niccolo Machiavelli.
Harry stops. "Say that again, Suze."
"Uh, normally aren't part-kneazles smarter than that?"
"Thanks." With all the practice of two years in Slytherin, Harry swallows the epiphany he's just had and goes back to writing up his latest round of experiments with the iron cauldron. (Wit-sharpening Potion comes out better in it, but Wideye Potion doesn't and it should and Harry can't work out why.)
As soon as Susan packs up, Harry counts to thirty, makes an excuse about needing the bathroom, walks calmly out of the library, and sprints after her.
"Susan! Wait up!"
Far ahead, she whips around. "Harry! Merlin, you scared me," she says as he gets closer and slows down.
"Never mind that. Suze, remember that letter I showed you? About a certain rat?"
"Yes, what about it?"
"Granger's pet, a crossbreed known for high intelligence and responding aggressively to threats to its wixen, spent months specifically targeting one fellow Gryffindor's pet rat."
Susan's eyes get very big. "Oh balls."
"Yeah."
She gives him a canny look. "So, Harry, I have this opinion about fairness and the law."
"Okay…" Harry knows her well enough by now to be wary when she gets that look and uses her nice girl voice.
"It's like this. The law does the best it can. But sometimes it's written by people with selfish motives. Or just by people who couldn't possibly consider every eventuality. So, sometimes following the law doesn't equal fairness. I like things to be fair. Mostly that means following the law and applying the same rules to everyone. However, sometimes you have to do illegal things in order to make sure the law can be applied, because certain people try to game it, or escape it, or stuff like that, and the law can’t do anything about that. Do you follow?"
"Yes," says Harry, slightly affronted. She does Slytherspeak pretty well for an outsider but some of the upper years are twice as opaque on a daily basis just to be contrary.
Susan smiles widely. "Great. So, hypothetically speaking, if a wizard was hiding from the law as an illegal animagus, you'd have to resort to what's technically kidnapping to bring that wizard before the authorities, who could not seize someone's pet only on the grounds of a schoolboy's fanciful ideas."
"Naturally." Harry's smiling himself now.
"So," Susan continues, "you might have to find a way to send that wizard to the authorities in such a way that the wizard never sees who you are."
"Hypothetically, of course."
"Of course. You're very insightful," Harry says. "Thanks for your advice, Miss Bones."
"Pleased to be of service, Mr. Potter." She raises an imaginary toast. "To the pursuit of fairness."
Harry copies her and stands there for a minute, staring at nothing, while she walks away.
Hufflepuffs are terrifying.
ooOoo
Getting into the Gryffindor dorms is pretty easy, seeing as he has an invisibility cloak and can just follow Neville up there. Harry sits in a corner of the dorm Neville goes to until everyone is in bed and several sets of snores reverberate in the air. Then, he peeks into Weasley’s bed, whispers “Somnus” at the rat, and stuffs it into his pocket.
He takes it down to his dorm, jumps into his trunk, and pulls out one of the cages he uses to store rats before feeding them to the jungle snakes. This particular one is spelled unbreakable and, more importantly, scent-blocking. Originally that enchantment was so the snakes wouldn’t smell food and go nuts until Harry actually released the food for them. Now, it means that even if Pettigrew wakes up in it, he won’t be able to recognize Harry by scent.
The rat appears to still be totally asleep when Harry closes the cage latch. He takes a deep breath and aims his wand carefully. The cage is a lot bigger on the inside than the outside. It should work.
“Animagus revelio!”
In a whirlwind of magic, the sleeping rat turns into a fat human with long, yellowed nails and overgrown, scrubby facial hair. He’s still asleep.
“You lazy shite,” Harry says conversationally, since the cage is also soundproofed and he thinks if he doesn’t talk he’ll give in to the urge to eviscerate Pettigrew with some of the butchering charms he’s learned. “Seriously? A second-year drowsiness charm is enough for you to sleep through being magically forced into a different shape?”
Breathing hard, he stops. His hands are shaking.
I need Theo, he decides, scrambling back up out of his trunk.
Theo isn’t even too mad about getting woken up. Harry silences Theo’s bed curtains and spills about the conversation with Susan and Harry’s adventures of the night.
“So—was it—”
“Yeah.” Harry swallows. “C’mon.”
Down in the trunk, Theo stares at the human rat. “I want to kill him.”
“Yeah. Me too. I’ve got this charm that strips the skin off of something. If you use it with numbing spells and instant healing, you can harvest leather or hide from an animal, regenerate it at once, and cause nothing more than mild discomfort. Obviously I wouldn’t bother with the numbing… but I could grow it back, and flay him again… human skin is still used for stuff, right?”
“Probably somewhere.” Theo takes a deep breath. “But you need to free your godfather.”
“Yeah.”
Harry goes into his workroom and pulls some Draught of Living Death down from the racks of potions vials above his brewing station. Setting up ventilation charms in here strong enough to clear potions fumes knocked him out for almost an entire weekend, but it was so worth it. He’d had vague ideas of being able to drug instead of kill a creature that got out of control. Now it’ll be put to a different use.
He tips the potion down the sleeping Pettigrew’s mouth and watches as his breath stills. A diagnostic charm confirms the potion is working as confirmed.
“That’ll last a week.”
“Perfect,” Theo says, “seeing as we’ve a Hogsmeade weekend this week. Merlin, he’s quite fat, isn’t he? Weasley’s been overdoing it on the rat treats.”
“He barely fits in the cage even with the expansion,” Harry agrees. He shudders. “Right, then. Bed?”
“Can you sleep?”
“Probably not, but it’s worth a shot!”
In the end, Harry takes a microdose of his own Drowsiness Potion. It has chamomile and lavender elements for taste and puts him right out.
ooOoo
The day of the Hogsmeade weekend, Harry follows Gabby, Peaches, and Wilfred through the castle. Wilfred (according to Gabby, who can sort of halfway communicate with the kneazle) knows a secret way out of the school. He leads Harry out to the Whomping Willow. At first Harry is suspicious, but then Peaches darts through the branches, nothing more than a grey-and-orange blur, and presses her dainty little paws down on a particularly large knot at the base of the trunk. The tree goes still.
Wilfred and Gabby take off. Harry follows them, lugging the cage under his Cloak and swearing.
The animals were right, though; there’s a hole at the base of the tree. Harry scrambles down it and checks the cage. Pettigrew’s still asleep. Duh. The potion still has another two days to wear off—or it would, if not for the dose of Wiggenwald Potion Harry brewed specially for this and attached to the cage along with a note (written with a DictaQuill nicked from an older Ravenclaw and unconnected to Harry or his magic) explaining things.
The earthen passage is narrow, twisty, and long. Harry’s just started to wonder if it leads nowhere when he almost trips over a staircase so steep it’s basically a ladder. He climbs up it, pushes aside a heavy trapdoor, and comes out in… a hut?
Some investigation reveals an empty little hovel, full of broken furniture and the scars of something very large and very angry. Harry frowns as he ticks mentally through what could have done this. Creatures with claws, big enough to do this kind of damage, not strong or clever enough to escape somehow…
Ghost leopard, maybe? But who would put one in some crummy little house on the outskirts of Hogsmeade? Come to think of it, this might be the Shrieking Shack. The vibe is right but Harry doesn’t see a sign of ghosts and no poltergeist did this. Damage from things like Peeves leaves a sort of ectoplasmic residue that clings. Plus, poltergeists don’t form in vacuums, only somewhere with lots of turbulent ambient magic. Like, for example, a school full of magically undisciplined children sending the energy of spells gone wrong into the environment all day every day.
Come to think of it, this is great containment for a werewolf.
Harry flinches as soon as he thinks it for all he knows it’s not the full moon. God, he needs to get out of here. It’s nothing against werewolves, but what if the werewolf comes back during the day for some reason? To check up on the wards or something?
“Wilfred, Gabby, I need a way out!”
Wilfred meows impatiently, as if to say, you just had to ask.
He shows Harry a door on the second floor cleverly concealed as a still life of some flowers. No werewolf would notice it, that’s for certain, and certainly no wolf would be able to bust through the silver-reinforced wall behind the portrait. On the outside of the building, a trellis hides behind some very leafy evergreens. Smart. Conclusion: someone came here to help the werewolf settle in for the night, locked the downstairs trapdoor, and came out this way, and they did it often enough to need year-round natural concealment.
Wait.
That tunnel leads right to Hogwarts. Inside the grounds.
Which means… which means this werewolf is or was a student here.
I’m so dead.
Harry will just have to cast some really powerful scent-erasing charms when he comes back, that’s all.
He ignores the trellis, pulls his broom out of his expanded knapsack, and climbs on it. He’d packed it just in case he needed to avoid leaving footprints at any point on this journey. Getting past the dementors on a broom would’ve been hopeless, the bloody things can fly, but making his slow way on the broom and under his Cloak to the footpath is totally doable.
On the way, he can’t help tossing some snow at a group of gawking, nervous Hufflepuffs, making several of them shriek about ghosts. They take off at a run for the village.
Harry snickers.
He walks from there, keeping his hood up and face buried in his scarf. It’s cold enough that such a look isn’t weird. The cage itself is under a blanket.
At the Three Broomsticks, he politely asks the barkeep, Madam Rosmerta, if he can use her Floo to send a package. “I won’t be going anywhere, ma’am, you can wait on me—I’ll be back in five minutes, I only have to send this off, or my mum’ll kill me…”
“Yes, of course, lad.” She barely looks at him as she tosses over a key. “First door to the right of the bar. Don’t be too long.”
Harry unlocks the door with shaking hands and locks it again behind him.
This is it.
He pays three sickles for a pinch of floo powder and tosses it in the fire. “DMLE Headquarters, Amelia Bones’ office, keyword: Alligator!”
Just as Susan said, the keyword allows him to floo straight to Madam Bones’ office. “Who’s there? Susan?” a female voice says.
Harry stuffs the whole cage through the fire, yanking the blanket off as it goes, so Harry himself leaves no traces. Then he immediately closes the Floo connection with a slash of his wand that dumps water in the hearth.
He cleaned the whole thing as thoroughly as he knows how: there’s no trace of his magic, skin, fingerprints, or hair anywhere on it, and the cage itself has no identifying marks. It’s a standard product for wixen who keep small mammals of any kind. The note explains everything in handwriting that can’t be traced to Harry.
It should be fine.
Okay. Now to get back into the castle, while also erasing any trace of myself from the Shrieking Shack so the werewolf doesn’t recognize my scent.
ooOoo
The headline comes out a week later.
CLASSIFIED DMLE INVESTIGATION DISCLOSED! ANONYMOUS SOURCE EXPOSES MISCARRIAGE OF JUSTICE! SIRIUS BLACK INNOCENT! PETER PETTIGREW ILLEGAL ANIMAGUS AND SPY FOR YOU-KNOW-WHO!
It sends the Great Hall into an uproar, but Harry notices Professor Dumbledore looking rather furious for a moment before he sweeps out of the room.
“Suspicious,” Theo says in an undertone.
“Quite.”
Millicent looks between them. “Did you have something to do with this?”
Parkinson half-turns in their direction.
Harry stabs viciously at his bacon. “Let’s just say I take it personally when people betray me.”
“As any good Slytherin should,” says Millicent.
And that’s that.
ooOoo
“Congratulations, Harry.”
“Thanks, Susan.”
“Auntie wants to speak with you.”
“Does she now?”
“Oh, yes. Apparently Mr. Black wants to meet you. He thinks he was supposed to be your guardian in case James and Lily died, and obviously now that he’s free he wants to petition for it, but he might not be stable.”
“Huh. I’ll ask Snape if he can take me.”
ooOoo
Asking Snape backfires so spectacularly that Harry decides never to mention Sirius Black in his Professor’s hearing ever again.
He comes to this decision while running from the sound of shattering vials.
ooOoo
In the end, it’s Hagrid who takes him to St. Mungo’s. Harry steps into the hospital room while Hagrid waits in the hall. “Er, hello.”
“Harry!”
Merlin. Sirius Black is thin as a rail. Demons haunt his eyes and the hair, so matted and filthy in the mugshot, has been cut nearly to his scalp. He tries to sit up and can’t quite manage it.
“Stay in bed,” Harry says, stepping closer. “It’s okay, really. I know you’re—ill.”
“I’ll be right as rain in no time, you’ll see.” The hope in Black’s eyes is painful. “Do you… do you remember me? At all?”
Harry looked away. “No. Sorry.”
“Oh.” Black looks crestfallen. “Well… I was around a lot when you were a tot. I, uh, I’m an animagus.”
“Like Pettigrew?”
“Yes, like the rat. He and I and your dad and Remus.”
“Who’s Remus?”
Black stares. “Wait, you don’t know him? Remus Lupin.”
“There’s a Remus Lupin teaching Defense this year. You mean he knew my parents?”
“I… he never wrote you? Never visited?”
Harry laughs. “Are you joking? I didn’t know about magic until I got my Hogwarts letter. Remus Lupin’s been teaching Defense all year and he hasn’t said a word to me.”
“Oh. I don’t…” Black shakes his head. Something about the motion is oddly animalistic. “Never mind. Point is, your dad and Peter and I were all animagi.”
“Not Lupin?”
“Sort of,” Black says vaguely. “Your dad was a stag. I was a black dog.”
Harry’s eyes narrow. “Waitwaitwait. You—the grim?!”
“At your service,” he says, and yeah, Harry can see the grim in his dark eyes and wolfish smile.
“Wow. Wait. So you know… you heard me talking to my snake.”
Black pauses. “I thought so…”
“Gabby, c’mon out,” he hisses, and the adder pokes her head out from under Harry’s collar. “This is Gabby. I bought her back in first year. Mostly she rides around under my robe collar and makes rude comments about how bad people smell.”
That startles a harsh, barking laugh out of Black. “Sounds like my kind of gal.”
“She said you smelled funny. Dog-you, that is. And this Gryffindor girl’s pet half-kneazle thought Pettigrew was off, too—I heard he was Ron Weasley’s pet rat, and everyone’s heard them fighting about the fact her cat wouldn’t leave the rat alone.”
“Hmm.” Black looks closely at him. “You wouldn’t have anything to do with the rat finding his way to the DMLE drugged to sleep in a soundproof, scentproof cage with no memory of how he got there, would you?”
“I have no idea why you’d think that.” Harry adopts a face as innocent as a summer sky.
“Riiiight. Yeah, I saw that same expression on my little brother. He was a snake too. Merlin, I can’t believe my godson is a Slytherin.”
“You’re not… upset?”
“Hell no, I’m just glad you’re happy and everything. If any of those Death Eaters’ kids give you trouble, I’ll come and hex ‘em for you. Or tell you hexes to use. Not just the snakes. Whoever pisses you off.”
“They’re mostly alright, actually,” Harry says with a grin. It’s kind of nice having an adult who wants to be in his corner for once. “Theo Nott’s one of my best friends, actually. His dad got off with the Imperius Defense… still not sure how true that was.”
“Oh, it’s bullshit,” Black says with remarkable cheer. “But if the kid’s a good friend, yeah, go right ahead.”
“You’re, uh, saner than I expected.”
“They’ve got me on this potions regimen. Cleared things up real fast. I made mistakes, Harry… judged my brother and pushed him away. I hated how the pureblood lot made assumptions about people for their blood and then I turned around and made the same kind of assumption that any pureblood or Slytherin was automatically an evil git. Maybe it wasn’t as bad, no one was hunting them for sport, but it’s not exactly friendly, is it? Maybe Reggie wouldn’t have… I dunno.” He shakes his head again. This time the doglike effect is even more obvious. “Point is, I’m not gonna make those mistakes with you. You seem like a good kid. McGonagall came down here and really sung your praises. And if Hagrid likes you, that’s a point to you. So if you say Nott’s spawn is all right, he’s all right until he proves otherwise.”
Harry feels unexpectedly warm. “That’s… thank you.”
“Yeah. Now, tell me about yourself.”
“Well… I grew up with my mum’s family.”
“Petunia? Really? Who left you there? The whole Order knew how bad that relationship was after she showed up to the wedding and pitched such a fit Lily cried.”
“Wow, I had no idea. I guess someone just ditched me on the doorstep overnight with a note.”
“What.”
“Yeah. Uh, so I grew up with them… it wasn’t great, to be honest, but it’s okay now. They’re scared of Gabby, and my cousin and I get on ever since his boarding school made him go to therapy and he quit being a horrible bully. I got him a ball python and he named it Bert."
"Hmmm." Thankfully, Black lets the topic of the Dursleys slide. "Okay. How's Hogwarts?"
Harry beams. "Brilliant! I have some good friends. Neville Longbottom, Susan Bones, Padma Patil, Millicent Bulstrode, and Justin Finch-Fletchley are the people I hang out with most aside from Theo. He and Neville were my first friends. They didn't like each other much at first but we all liked drawing. Theo wants to be an enchanter and Neville loves herbology. They both think I'm kind of a nutter about creatures."
Black laughs. "Are you?"
"Er… probably. When I was little I wanted to be a veterinarian—a Muggle animal healer—and also tame wild animals. So when I found out dragons and stuff are real, I decided that's what I wanted to do. Hunt creatures that go rogue and heal the ones that need it. I help Hagrid in the woods sometimes. An acromantula almost ate me this one time. Another time some of them went rogue and tried to go off and eat the Muggles, so Hagrid and I had to kill them. I doused two of them in oil and set them on fire and Hagrid killed the rest with a war scythe. It was so cool! Oh, and I have a summer job helping make magic trunks and I learned how to make my own and I keep all my pets in there. I have a couple toads, a bunch of snakes, some Cornish pixies, opal axolotls, and three bowtruckles that followed me home from the woods. Plus two cats and a kneazle and some half-kneazle kittens but they don't live in the trunk, they just follow me around."
He stops and sucks in a huge breath. "Oh, shoot, I was rambling."
"Not to worry." Black's eyes, discomfitingly, are shiny with tears. "I'm just happy you're happy and you've got friends and hobbies and… Merlin, my worst fear all those years was that they'd put away some Death Eater for killing you."
"Well… I'm fine," Harry says, a little uncomfortable.
"I can see that. I'm happy," Black says.
They both avoid eye contact.
Black clears his throat. "So tell me. How the hell do you take care of all those animals, anyway?"
Harry happily rambles about his automagical habitat maintenance systems until Hagrid tells him they have to leave.
"Wait, Harry, one more thing." Sirius—he asked Harry to call him by his name—looks haunted. "Would you want to live with me? I have a house. It's kind of horrible, though."
"Oh, I have a house too! I gave the goblins some gold to buy it for me. I was going to rent it to people, but we can live there instead. It's in the enclave in Appleby."
Sirius breaks out in the truest smile Harry's seen from him yet. "Brilliant."
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