The remainder of Yule break slid by in a daze of political meetings, intelligence reports from Blaise, and one pointed conversation with Hermione about the solstice Wizengamot session, which had seen a record level of shouting when the Dark and most of the Neutral seats had shockingly slapped down a vote no one else even paid attention to.
According to Barty, the Dark Lord had been pleased.
Harry returned to school wrapped in several layers of icy indifference. The internal politics of Hogwarts meant so little, now that he was Lord Black, now that he had looked Voldemort in the face and bargained for the life of his brother, the autonomy of Harry and his people. Compared to that, what did school matter?
Everyone else seemed to see it. Harry went through the weeks following break at a remove. He walked the halls flanked by Daphne and Theo, who used withering glares and cutting words to push the other students back, back. Sometimes people tried to talk to him. Expected him to care about their petty little problems. When that happened Harry preferred to simply stare until they went away. Occasionally, if silence failed, an insult would do; once, Seaton tried to start something in the common room, and at a look from Harry, Theo put him down like the whining dog he was.
“I could simply tear it from your mind,” Voldemort hissed in Harry’s memories. Every night Harry spent an hour working on his occlumency while Theo stood guard, and every night when he was done Theo pulled him beneath the blankets and they slept back to back in Harry’s bed, curled on their sides like question marks, wands in hand.
Harry missed Barty with a physical ache but he compartmentalized that feeling as best he could. He would not be dependent. Not after everything he had gone through for his freedom.
“You are pushing yourself too hard,” Snape said, when Harry came to his office after Imbolc, bearing the latest warded package of research he and Hermione and some of the others had been doing.
“Name one thing I could let go,” Harry said. Snapped, really. He hadn’t meant to.
Snape observed him with dark eyes. Then, unexpectedly, a whisper of other at the edges of Harry’s mind. Hyperalert, Harry retreated, burying his true thoughts under layers of nothingness.
The other retreated. “Fuck you,” Harry spat, nearly vibrating. His wand was in his hand.
“Control yourself.” Snape, now, held very still. Both hands were conspicuously, visibly, empty. “Black. Harry. Control.”
Slowly, Harry mastered his rage, his—fear. “My apologies, sir.”
“There are risks to studying occlumency. We have discussed this.” Snape’s voice did not waver one iota from his normal, measured tone. They could have been discussing the price of red ink. “When you retreat too far inside your own head, for too long, you lose contact with the outside world. With others. Your emotions begin to wither as grapes left unpicked on the vine. Do you understand me? Occlumency is analogous to dissociation, a concept which Muggles understand and have studied; but reinforced with magic. It is a dangerous art. And you are abusing it.”
“How would you know?” Harry gritted out. He felt flayed raw.
“Because you reacted to a fairly passive legilimency probe by locking down entirely.” Snape looked away. “I am… not unfamiliar with the fear of mental violation.”
Oh. Shit. Right. He wasn’t, was he? Out of anyone, Snape would know best. Death Eater. Spy.
Then again, Harry could not trust Snape. Not completely. Harry wasn’t sure exactly what side Snape was on. He wasn’t sure if even Snape knew at this point.
“I’ll be more careful,” was all he said.
“You’ll spend some time a week relaxing with your occlumency relaxed,” Snape said harshly. “Instruct your shadows to guard your person whilst you do so, I care not, but you mustn’t allow your mind to become too accustomed to being occluded.”
Harry knew he was right. That didn’t make it any easier to listen, the next night in the Knights Room, with Theo and Daphne and Hermione and Justin present, all of whom had promised to watch and be ready to defend him while Harry spent two hours relaxing. It would have been the Chamber except he knew Voldemort was the glaring weakness in its otherwise reliable defenses.
It turned out Harry had rather forgotten how to relax.
“Do you even have any hobbies?” Justin said bluntly, when Harry rejected successive offers to play Gobstones, chess, Exploding Snap, and a drinking game called Wheels of Fortune.
Harry paused. “You know, no, I don’t really.” He still had quidditch, but it didn’t feel much like a hobby anymore. Harry loved flying more than he did the game. Like everything else it felt… childish. What did it matter who won the Quidditch Cup? Unless you were going be a professional player, it didn’t, and he wasn’t.
“Well, you ought to develop some,” Hermione said without looking up from a very large book. “Mental health is very important. Professor Snape is right, Harry, you need to give yourself time to relax and unwind.”
“I don’t have time,” he said, knowing even as he did so that he sounded perilously close to whining.
“Drop the research project,” Daphne said abruptly. “You can delegate that.”
“And lay off quidditch,” Theo said. “I know, you have to keep practicing, but you’ll have to hand off the captaincy after next year anyway. Have someone else on the team run a few practices a week so you don't have to go. They can stand being down a chaser, and you’re good enough that you can afford to miss it.”
“I was planning to drop quidditch after this year,” Harry said. It wasn’t uncommon for students to let the sport go for their NEWT year.
“Hobbies?” Hermione prompted.
Harry sighed. “I suppose I could take up… gardening.”
Theo snorted.
“Yeah, okay, maybe not. Stargazing? Divination?”
“The Blacks probably have some cursed tarot cards lying around,” Daphne said.
“If I take up tarot, will that satisfy you all?” Harry said. “Because I still have potions apprenticeship applications to think about starting this spring.”
“I thought you’d planned to delay it,” Justin said, startled.
“That was when I expected there to be a war on.”
They traded looks. “And now you don’t?” said Justin.
“One way or another, no.” Harry’s hand drifted to the inside of his left arm. “I don’t.”
Justin and Hermione saw the motion. They didn’t comment, for which Harry was grateful.
-----
“So.”
Draco stopped what he was doing and looked at Harry. Whatever he saw made him sit up straighter and set his quill down in such a way that his hand was left very near his wand. “Everything alright?”
Harry flicked his wand and a privacy charm locked in around them. “You play chess, right?”
“Uh… yes.”
“How do you win?”
Draco watched carefully as Harry sat down across the table from him. “By… checkmating the king.”
“Right. And to do that, you often have to eliminate the queen, no?”
“Where is this going?”
Harry tossed a scroll onto the table.
Draco opened it and his eyes narrowed. Then widened as what he was reading sunk in. “Are you… is this serious?”
“As the grave.”
“You aren’t supposed to know about this.”
Harry shrugged.
Draco nodded slowly. “So you’re… what, planning to help me?”
“Our ends are the same,” Harry said.
“Right. Right.” Draco blew out a long breath of air. “This is… better than what I had in mind.”
“I thought as much.”
Draco smacked him on the leg with a stinging hex, which Harry ignored, and kicked out a chair opposite his own at the Knights’ Room’s biggest table. “Sit down, then. And, er…”
“Spit it out,” Harry said, taking the seat.
“I’ve received my orders,” Draco said softly. “I’m to take the Mark this summer, but I will not be only…”
“A Death Eater? No. You’re mine. Should you choose to be. A… vassalage, and alliance, has been struck between the Houses of Black and Gaunt,” Harry said, knowing it was significant that he’d listed his own House first, rather than deferring to Gaunt. “I am to take the Mark as well, and Theo, but the Vipers in general will not be asked to, and my people will essentially be an autonomous group within His larger structure.”
“And the House of Black retains its independence?”
Harry’s lip curled in a sneer. “I will not be the Lord Black who signs my House into vassalage.”
“Well, then.” Draco reached for a quill and nodded at Harry with an odd mix of deference and relief. “We’d best get to work. We have a Headmaster to kill.”
-----
Harry sat bolt upright in bed, clutching his left arm and choking on a scream.
Someone was calling his name from a very great distance. Air rattled in and out of his lungs. Harry turned his head, which seemed to take an age, until he focused on Theo, sleep-rumpled and pale in the light from the wand in his hand. “Harry. Harry, c’mon, it’s me. You’re safe.”
“Theo,” Harry said numbly.
“Yes.” Theo reached out with his free hand. Harry’s eyes followed the motion until Theo’s fingers gently wrapped around his own, tugging, at which point Harry realized he was gripping his left forearm hard enough to bruise, and let go with a jerk. He crumpled forward, wracked with tremors running up and down his torso.
Theo caught him. Wrapped his arms around Harry, shifted so his shoulder propped up Harry’s head, and carefully adjusted his hands to hold but not restrain.
“What was it?” he asked softly, when Harry’s shaking stopped.
“Legilimency. Mark,” Harry got out. He was still practicing obsessively, an hour a day under Theo’s watchful eyes and ready wand, even if he’d taken Snape’s advice and made a point of relaxing with his mind unguarded for at least a little while every day. He couldn’t let up. Not when…
Pain weakened your shields. Every occlumens knew that, knew the crudest way to break an occlumens was physical torture and hope that they lacked the discipline to shatter their mind rather than collapse. In Harry’s nightmares, Voldemort leaned over him and scorched the Mark into his arm and then, while Harry was vulnerable, flayed wide open by pleasure-pain, he looked into Harry’s eyes and tore his way in—
Nausea roiled Harry’s gut. He dry-heaved, managing to keep the remains of his dinner down but unable to stop the convulsions. Theo shifted his grip to pull Harry back until they were both lying down against the pillows. “You’ll get there,” Theo said. “If anyone can keep him out, it’s you. You already have once. Granted, it may not have been his best attempt, but Father said not half a dozen Death Eaters he’s ever seen have withstood that legilimency test.”
“I know,” Harry rasped. “I know. I’ll get there. It just…” Haunts me.
Theo nodded. “The contract?”
“First draft sent off yesterday.” The agreement between the Vipers and Voldemort was a fiendishly complicated thing to build, but Harry thought it was a reasonable first attempt. He could only hope Voldemort continued to treat him as an ally rather than a rival. Undoubtedly the stress of it had provoked this nightmare.
“Father said He is inclined to be generous. He does care for Barty.”
“That’s not as reassuring as one might hope.” Harry sighed. “Drowsiness charm?”
“Are you sure?”
“Better than a potion.” Harry lifted a hand and brushed it along Theo’s cheek, then curled it around the back of his friend’s neck. “Thank you.”
He braced himself and waited while Theo picked up his wand. Whispered an incantation.
It was a strong charm, too. Harry barely had time to turn over and pull the quilt up to his chin before sleep claimed him again.
-----
Daphne and Theo’s plan was brilliant. Terrifying, yes, and fiendishly difficult, but brilliant nonetheless, and Harry knew in an instant that it was how he was going to bring James Potter down.
The only thing was—
Astoria scowled. “It should be me.”
“Absolutely not!” Harry had never heard Daphne’s voice that shrill. “Astoria Datura, if you think I would let you within a mile of that room—”
“You won’t work!” Astoria’s voice was just as shrill as Daphne’s now. Twin spots of color burned on her fair cheeks. “You’re too—too scary! It’s got to be someone who looks, you know, innocent, and sweet and shite—”
“Language,” Daphne hissed.
Astoria glared at her. “And shite,” she repeated stubbornly, “or else it won’t work as well. Also, everyone knows you’re Harry’s best friend! You know there’ll be rumors, and if it’s you then they’ll just be worse!”
“Not to mention, has your family even been invited?” Justin said, sharp eyes looking up from the parchment with the plan written on it. The rest of Harry’s inner circle waited in uneasy silence in various places throughout the Knights’ Room.
Daphne hesitated. “We always have been in the past.”
“Things are different now,” Pansy said. “Everyone’s taking sides. Your father’s firm represented a sympathizer accused of assault on a Wizengamot lord last month and you have to have seen Potter’s face when the prosecutors lost. If you haven't gotten an invite by now then you can’t gamble this plan on getting one at the last minute.”
There was silence for a few minutes, as everyone thought this over. Harry tapped his fingers softly on the table. It was a potentially fatal flaw. And it would be better if it was someone publicly associated with the Potters, not—
“I can do it.”
Everyone turned to stare at Ginny.
The redhead lifted her chin. “My family’s invited, all of us. I’ll be present. Harry, you can slip the wards. I’m a Slytherin, but—we all know that’s not what people see when they look at me.”
“Ginny,” Astoria said softly.
“If you’re old enough, then so am I.” Ginny fixed her eyes on Harry. “At my age you were stalking Ned Pritchard to a brothel and ruining him by leaking the pictures. I’m capable. I want to do this. I’m the best suited for it of your available options.”
“Convince the twins,” Harry said, “and then we’ll talk.”
“Harry,” Daphne hissed. Hermione shifted uncomfortably.
Harry shook his head. “No, Daph, Astoria was right. It can’t be you. This plan depends completely on optics. The underage girl from a good, Light family is a better candidate than an of-age Heiress to a neutral-Dark title.”
“Ethically this is dubious as all hell,” Justin said, “but it won’t be any worse because you put those memories in the head of someone who’s sixteen instead of seventeen.”
“I want to do it,” Ginny pressed.
“Talk to the twins,” Harry said again. “I’m not putting their little sister into this position without their knowledge, that’s just suicidal.” Several people snickered. “If they agree that you’re mature and capable enough, then we go ahead with it. If not, we find another way. Can you invent an excuse to get out and see them?”
“I could also just sneak out. Tell them to meet me somewhere near Hogsmeade.”
Harry had been doing worse younger, so he gave her the go-ahead, and arrived in the Knights Room before breakfast on the morning after she had intended to slip out.
Ginny arrived tired-eyed but alert. “They agreed. Said it’s a good plan. Just asked you to make sure you can take it all out, after.”
“I can,” Harry said. Creating the false memories would be the hard part, but luckily he had that covered.
Harry,
You are insane, do you know that? This entire plan is insane. Of course it was Theo and the Greengrass heiress who charmed it up. I can’t even be angry.
Are you absolutely certain you can slip the Potter wards? They disowned you, in blood and magic. You are not a Potter anymore. The ritual Theo found might work, but it requires you to get some of Julian’s blood, which you would have to do very carefully.
I’m also concerned that the Order may suspect who orchestrated this and retaliate. I’m tempted to tie you to my bed after it’s over and keep you there until they’re all destroyed and you needn’t fear one of them cursing you in Diagon.
Our Lord agreed to create the memories. You’re to meet him with Miss Weasley the day school lets out—he needs to see her in order to get the imagery right—and you can carry them until the moment of implantation. After that, the temporary mental alterations will allow her to say, with all honesty and under Veritaserum, that the events as she related them are true.
You can trust him in this. He has no wish to alienate you and this plan is superior to anything we have been able to think of. Miss Weasley will not be harmed, and you will be able to remove the alterations as if they had never been there once the situation calms. He is willing to sign a binding magical contract to that effect.
Yours,
B.
Barty,
It’s the best option and you know it. Our Lord hasn’t killed Potter yet for the same reason I haven’t—as of right now, he would only become a martyr for the cause. We have to destroy his reputation and standing in the Light. With Ogden wavering, and the House of Potter destroyed, the Light will fall apart politically. The war will be over without anyone having to cast a curse. Well, except me, but I’ve been waiting for the opportunity to curse James through a wall since I was eleven, and it has nothing to do with a war, so I don’t think that counts.
You can tie me to your bed anytime, but I don’t think they’ll retaliate. What could they do? Legally, they won’t be able to bring a case; the wards won’t even register my presence. No one will see me. The false memories will be perfect. (Speaking of which, for the comfort of Miss and Messrs. Weasley, a binding contract would be appreciated.) They may try vigilante retaliation, but assaulting a Peer is a serious enough crime to make all but the most hotheaded of them think twice, and I’m perfectly able to defend myself. It will work.
Yours,
H.
Harry sat back and frowned at the NEWT preparation material spread out in front of him.
Many Ministry jobs had a minimum NEWT requirement and just didn’t care about which ones as long as you got however many passing NEWTs as they wanted. However, if you planned to go into further education or training, or didn’t want a Ministry job, then the question became not how many NEWTs to take but which.
Potions, Ancient Runes, Arithmancy, Defense Against the Dark Arts, and Herbology are the NEWTs Harry most wanted to take. All were invaluable for a Potions mastery save DADA, which he just enjoyed and happened to be quite good at. Professional dueling probably wasn’t what Hermione and the others had in mind when they told him to get a hobby but it relieved stress and was socially acceptable and that would just have to be good enough for them.
The problem at hand wasn’t about Harry’s lack of hobbies. No. He’d meant to plan a NEWT prep review course for himself for the summer, which was why he’d written the Department of Education and requested the information packets on the exams he wanted to take. He had not expected to realize he was honestly ready to sit the exams now.
He probably wouldn’t get straight Os, but he thought he was at E level in Herbology and Arithmancy, on the cusp of an O in Ancient Runes and DADA, and well within O territory for Potions. It would just take a bit of focused topics study to get him the rest of the way in the other four.
Slowly, he reached for a blank sheet of parchment, and started to write an inquiry about summer NEWT examination sessions.
-----
In March, the Wizengamot heard arguments and held a vote on a controversial bill limiting the Aurors’ powers of search and seizure. Couched in terms of property rights, it was intended to chip away at the snarl of bureaucratic powers Dumbledore had woven around the Chief Auror. Outdated Grindelwald-era legislation said that the aurors could conduct searches based on suspected sedition, but this new law neatly negated that language, requiring approval from a panel of Wizengamot members culled at random for any search, with all justifying evidence laid before the panel.
Hazel cast her vote as Harry’s proxy in favor of the law he had helped write.
Lord Tiberius Ogden then shocked the Wizengamot by voting in favor. Lady Marchbanks, Lady Fenwick, and Sir Oliver, all longtime supporters of the Light, followed suit.
The next day, Harry read the Daily Prophet and then the report Barty dispatched to him via Snape, and when he smiled, everyone seated near him in the commons, Jarred Seaton included, paled.
-----
“It was an annotated textbook,” Padma hissed.
“Sorry?” Harry blinked at her. “Just a—are you serious? All this time—”
“Yes!” Padma, who had of late been joining Harry and Theo for some extracurricular brewing sessions, threw her things down on her seat with a thunk. “Parvati finally deigned to tell me, seeing as he fucking lost it—”
“What? How?” Theo broke in. He finished warding the door to their latest abandoned classroom-turned-potionery and joined them at the table.
“Remember yesterday? The incident with Malfoy?”
Harry felt himself still. “That was Jules?”
“Yeah. Some spell he learned from the stupid book. Parvati said the book’s old owner wrote the incantation and then just ‘for enemies’, and that was it, and the idiot decided to cast it for the first time on another student.”
“The rumors… I thought that was nonsense, that Potter did it,” Theo said, stunned. “Merlin.”
“He wasn’t even punished, not really.” Padma sank into a chair and pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes. “He dashed off and hid the book in the room we use for DA meetings, on the seventh floor.”
Harry met Theo’s eyes. They knew of the Come and Go room from Hermione, obviously, and the prospect of getting their hands on that book…
“Snape was livid.” Padma shook her head. “Parvati said Jules thought Snape was going to kill him right there. Wanted to know where he learned such a spell, obviously, and Jules panicked.”
“Well. If nothing else, now we’ll be able to kick his arse in front of Slughorn,” Harry said with relish.
Padma’s eyes glinted. She yanked her cauldron out of her bag and slammed it down on the table. “Let’s do this, then, shall we?”
Two days later, the three of them plus Blaise produced potions that sent Slughorn into raptures, even over Harry, which was rare. Jules, meanwhile, had an entirely mediocre result that left Slughorn groping for compliments.
Harry waited until they were back in the Knights’ Room to start laughing.
“What is this place?” Padma said, looking around. She’d never been there before.
Behind her back, Daphne and Theo smiled darkly.
“This is our, ah, ‘clubhouse’ of a sort,” Harry said. “We’ve been hanging ‘round in here for years.”
Padma raised an eyebrow at him. “Those are impressive wards on the door.”
“Why thank you. We did them ourselves.”
“This is how you had an organized response to Umbridge,” she realized. “Going to the… you have your own DA, don’t you?”
“Please,” Blaise sneered, “the DA is nothing but a study group with delusions of grandeur.”
“We are a… group of friends who duel. As a hobby, you understand. We help with homework, support those students who are outsiders within their Houses…” Harry shrugged, pretending not to pay much attention while watching her reaction closely.
Padma’s eyes narrowed in thought. “Lovegood. Granger, yes? She’s a friend of yours.”
“That she is,” Daphne said, “and my sister in all but name.”
“Hmm. Well. I take it by my being here that this is an invitation,” Padma said.
Harry smiled. Come into my parlor… “If you want it to be. Our politics differ from the DA’s, as you might expect, but there’s no ideological alignment test. We look out for students with open minds and potential to realize.”
“My politics are not my sister’s,” said Padma precisely, “and hers are not the same as Jules’.”
“That’s good to hear.” Harry spread his hands. “What do you say?”
Padma looked around again. Harry imagined seeing the room through her eyes: the motley collection of furniture, books scattered everywhere from shiny new releases to ancient tomes oozing magic, the dueling space cleared at one end, the expensive braziers Draco and Justin had supplied. Over the years it had gone from a dusty, forgotten corner to a welcoming space that spoke of elegance and comfort and power.
“I’d say that sitting down with you in September was an excellent decision,” Padma said drily.
“Then have a seat,” Blaise said, barely smirking, “and let’s work out a way to keep blowing Slughorn’s robes off.”
-----
In the end, getting their hands on the Boy Who Lived’s blood was entirely too easy.
The Blacks and other families had entire books on different ways to harvest people’s essence. A simple blood-seeking curse on a pair of shears in Herbology and Jules was cursing and clutching the bone-deep slice in his right arm. Blood spurted everywhere; Patil shrieked, waving her wand to stop its flow, and Weasley, who’d been sitting next to Jules, jumped back with a disgusted yell.
The entire class stopped what they were doing to look. Sprout called a halt and rushed over to Jules. She gave Patil ten points for quick thinking and use of a healing charm before telling them class was over and she was escorting Jules to the infirmary.
Patil vanished Jules’ blood off the shears and his workstation, of course, but neither she nor anyone else had noticed the vial Harry had preemptively stuck to the bottom of Jules’ usual bench, hidden under a notice-me-not and humming with the strongest blood-collection charm he could cast. Justin pretended to drop something in the rush to exit, bent down, snatched the vial with one hand and his notes in the other, and that was it, Harry had a vial full of pure, fresh Potter blood, safe under a stasis charm.
“Is it enough?” Justin said as he passed it over, later, in private.
Harry held the vial up to the light of one of the Knights Room’s sconces. “Should be. That’s, what, about an ounce? Maybe two?”
“Good.” Justin made a face. “I don’t want to do that again. Blood is just… ick.”
“You’re so spoiled,” Harry said.
“Guilty as charged.”
-----
“Speaker, you wished to know when the old one left the castle.”
Harry sat bolt upright and stared at Mariko. “He has?”
“He and the young one who shares your scent have gone. Nissa heard the old one warn the one who smells of water-magic that something will happen when they return and the one who smells of water-magic must guard the school for some hours.”
“Thank you,” Harry breathed, and then he was up and running, hurtling along every shortcut he knew to get to the Knights Room and Draco.
He gasped the password and the Knights stepped aside, letting Harry through the wards. He drew up short at the sight of Draco, Justin, and Hermione clustered around a table arguing fiercely. “Draco,” he said.
All three of them looked up. Hermione paled, Justin’s face set, and Draco bit his lip. “It’s time, then?”
“Yes. He’s gone, won’t be back for a few hours. Let’s go.”
“Right. Yes.” Draco stood. “I’ll see you lot… later, then.”
“Best of luck,” Hermione said softly.
Harry couldn’t afford to wait around any longer than that. He turned on his heel and set off for the nearest secret passageway.
They left the castle through a byzantine series of passageways designed to avoid portrait and statue surveillance. The late May evening was balmy, for Scotland; Harry whipped out his Firebolt as soon as the outdoor air washed over him, and mounted up. Draco slung a leg over the broom behind him and the two of them began casting every evasive charm they knew: disillusionment, notice-me-not, silencing, light-bending, motion-smoothing. The broom disillusioned easily but complex systems like living things were much harder to hide.
Harry took off while Draco was still finishing up the spells. “Wanker,” the blond hissed, clutching Harry’s robes one-handed and casting with the other.
“We are on a schedule,” Harry hissed back. “This depends on getting in and out without a trace.”
“I know that. Fuck, Harry, fly straight, I nearly poked you in the spine.”
Harry rolled his eyes but did his best to smooth out the flight.
Dumbledore’s wards were so powerful Harry could feel them buzzing against his skin even four feet away from the window. He took a breath. “Alright. Draco?”
“I hate this,” Draco said, sticking one hand forward, the sleeve already rolled up.
Harry’s small, portable blade bit into his skin without warning. Harry felt Draco flinch against his back and collected the blood as quickly as he could in a vial before muttering a clotting charm. Draco snatched his hand back, and it was Harry’s turn to cut his own forearm, dripping blood into the same vial until it was full, and then healing himself.
For spells like this, the blood was better fresh.
Harry swirled the vial until its contents were mixed and then took a deep breath.
This part they hadn’t been able to test in advance. Wards as strong as these tended to learn, and they might well prevent such an intrusion from working twice.
The long, silvery hair had taken weeks of planning to obtain, summoned silently off of one of Dumbledore’s robes while he was distracted by a fight Veronia and Malcolm subtly instigated involving half a dozen younger students of all four Houses. Harry twined it around his index finger, used a pulse of magic to stick it in place, and dipped the finger in the vial.
Drawing runes on himself was tricky, especially without a mirror. Harry did it from memory, the hours and hours of practice at this using red ink, and then twisted and drew them on Draco too, forehead, throat, and, once Draco pulled his robes aside, sternum. The ones on the backs of both of their hands were easier.
Harry started the incantation—well, more of a chant—as soon as it was done. Draco chimed in on the second round. By the third, Harry couldn’t tell their voices apart, and magic crawled over their skin, invasive and awful. It coated them like oil.
The sensation thickened and grew. Draco choked and faltered. Blindly, Harry reached back for him, and clamped his left hand over Draco’s arm in a bruising grip: Stay with me.
Draco’s voice steadied. Harry could feel him trembling minutely. He himself wasn’t much better off. The spell bound the essence of a third person to the blood used, creating a second skin of sorts, but it felt profoundly wrong, grating in a way the books hadn’t been able to describe. The dissonance was fucking awful.
Harry shuddered with relief when he sensed the coating of Dumbledore-essence had spread all the way over them, and nudged the broom into the ward line.
No hesitation. No doubts.
Something felt off, it wasn’t the perfect welcome Harry got from Grimmauld Place, but it wasn’t wrong either, and Harry felt the moment the wards identified their creator and returned to a passive state.
They were in.
Harry stopped chanting, and a syllable later, so did Draco. The silence felt heavy.
“We have to hurry. This won’t last long,” Harry said urgently. “Alohomora.”
The window clicked open.
“Fuck,” Draco said. “That was easy.”
Harry angled the broom so Draco could reach the sill. “Arrogance. Spell the portraits.”
Draco cast again, and then carefully poked his head through the window. “Done. They’re frozen—won’t remember any time passing.”
“Go, then.”
As soon as Draco had clambered through the window, Harry followed, setting the Firebolt aside.
They were in a hurry. They only had so long before the blood runes lost their potency. Despite all that, Harry had to stop and appreciate what they’d just done.
No one had ever broken into this office, not while Dumbledore was Headmaster, not in thirty years.
Harry snapped out of his reverie and reached into a pocket. The Muggle injector full of poison waited there, secure in a box, and he offered it to Draco with a steady hand. “He set you this task,” Harry said softly.
Draco nodded shakily and took it.
Not one to waste an opportunity, Harry didn’t wait around to watch Draco poison Dumbledore’s lemon drops. He had long salivated over some of the books on Dumbledore’s shelves, and had brought along a pocketful of copybooks for this exact reason. Twenty only, because time, so he prioritized as fast as he could, and tucked the copies away with as much smugness as a dragon sitting on a mound of gold.
Draco wasn’t done—he’d scattered the lemon drops on the desk, and was injecting them one by one before putting the doctored candies back in the bowl. Harry stepped around to the back of the desk and ran his fingers lightly along its surface, studying what Dumbledore had left out: inkwells; a fancy quill and a plainer, everyday one; several little devices of mysterious purpose; a number of transfiguration journals; a— Harry blinked. What was the Headmaster doing with a book of fairy tales? Granted, it was a stunning copy, an heirloom Beadle the Bard with a gold-embossed and jewel-encrusted cover featuring motifs from the stories: Babbity Rabbit, a cauldron, a geometric design Harry vaguely recognized. But it was still not the reading material Harry associated with the old man.
Magic prickled under his fingers. Harry turned away from the book: the feeling came from a… well, no, that wasn’t a drawer, that was just blank wood.
Secret compartment, maybe. He checked: Draco was about two thirds of the way done. Harry had a bit of time. Carefully, he pressed the magic coating him down into his right hand, until most of his body was covered in the barest layer of it and his hand was so weighed down with foreignness that it didn’t feel like his own. Harry gritted his teeth and reminded himself this is my hand, these are my fingers, I can move them, and reached through the wards to the spot they protected, a perfectly ordinary section of wood in the very corner of the desktop.
He pressed. Felt a faint click.
Shaking, Harry pulled back the hand—his hand—and watched a square of wood lift itself half an inch into the air. He pinched it between the fingers that were and were not his, lifted, and watched in awe as a perfect cylinder of wood lifted from a hole bored down into the wood bar that formed the corner and leg of the desk. Inside it was—a wand. Much like the Headmaster’s, actually, a well-varnished wood brown carved with knobs along its length. If Harry squinted they vaguely looked like apples. Applewood, maybe.
Instinct made him slip it into his pocket before he replaced the core of wood in its slot.
“Done,” Draco said tightly. “I think your spell’s fading, Harry.”
It was. Maybe Harry had pushed too hard, getting through that last ward. He stuffed the injector box back into his pocket and went for the window, desperately trying to even out the coating of disguise-magic over his skin.
Getting out the window was a mad scramble. Harry first, with the broom; then he mounted and held still, sweating with the toll of maintaining the spell, while Draco climbed out after him, whispered a charm to wake the portraits, and gently closed the panes. Harry turned and shot for the ward line as soon as he felt Draco’s arms come around his waist.
The wards clutched and pulled at them, buzzing like a storm of maddened hornets, pushing and grasping for the wrongness underneath this skin of false-magic—
And then they were through, gasping for air and sailing up into the night.
Harry flew around for a few minutes, letting the cooling night air rush over them and shred the last of the rank, oily otherness of the magic away, before he returned them to the ground outside the castle. Draco slid off the broom immediately. His eyes glittered with adrenaline. “Fuck. Fuck! We just—it fucking worked!”
“That’s what happens when you plan,” Harry said wryly.
Draco hit him in the shoulder. Harry didn’t even mind; he felt just as electrified, pulse thundering in his ears. But they didn’t have time for this. They needed to get back to the common room and sneak into their dorm, where Blaise and Theo were making sure Crabbe and Goyle, loyalists both, slept through the whole thing.
Knowing the passages better than anyone else, Harry led the way. Time seemed to crawl. All his senses were magnified to the point that he could almost see through the dark without a lumos.
Both he and Draco were still riding the adrenaline high when they got back to the dorms, creeping into their room and piling into Harry’s bed, where Theo and Blaise waited. Wards snapped up as soon as Harry closed the curtains.
“Well?” said Theo, leaning forward.
“It worked!” Draco yanked out the empty injector with a manic grin. “All his stupid bloody lemon drops laced with poison.”
“The one from Slytherin’s grimoires, right?” Blaise said.
Theo nodded. “It’s fast-acting and starts to decay when it comes into contact with organic matter. It’ll kill him and then disappear. At worst everyone assumes it was the Dark Lord; at best, it’s ruled a natural death of an old—”
He froze. They all did: the door to the boys’ dorm had opened softly, by someone who clearly knew just where to push so it didn’t squeak. Footsteps padded forward, paused by Harry’s bed.
“Psst.”
Blaise twitched the curtains aside. “Pans?”
“Get in,” Harry hissed, grabbing at her arms. He and Theo tugged Pansy into the bed, which was growing rather crowded, and shut the curtains again. Harry waited for the wards to go back up before he gestured at Pansy to speak.
She took a deep breath. Only now did Harry notice that her face was chalk-pale. “You need to come. It’s Dumbledore and—and Potter.”
-----
It was all over the school by morning.
Harry paid little attention to the rumors, which agreed on nothing other than that Dumbledore was half-conscious in the hospital wing and Jules had been with him when he was found. Harry was busy watching the Gryffindor table, where Jules, Weasley, Patil, and Brown were clustered together, whispering.
Neville sat next to them. Harry couldn’t tell, from this distance, if he was included in the conversation; but he suspected the answer was yes.
Hermione, on the other hand, sat mostly alone, exchanging a few words with Demelza Robins but otherwise focused on a book.
Ominous.
As soon as breakfast was over, Harry hunted her down. Exams had gone by and nobody had much of anything to do in these last few days before the end of term. “What happened,” he said flatly, tersely.
“They won’t tell me details,” she said, hugging herself—the Knights’ Room’s braziers were unlit, and it was cold. “Jules had some sort of—of mission, last night. He’s been taking private lessons with the Headmaster all year. Something about learning about Voldemort’s past.” Harry nodded; she’d told him as much before. “Well, I guess they went to find something. A memory, or… an artifact, I don’t know. Not a person. They were saying it. I think they succeeded but I don’t know what ‘it’ was.”
“And Neville?”
Hermione winced. “He… oh, Harry. I think he’s—with them.”
Harry pressed his fingers to his temples. “Would he know?”
“He might,” she whispered. “But, Harry, you can’t just—just go and threaten it out of him.”
“Can’t I?” said Harry nastily, but even as he said it he knew she was right; there were a whole host of reasons from the sentimental to the coldly logical why he couldn’t sanction the assault and obliviation of the Heir of Longbottom.
Hermione saw that he knew it, and sighed, reaching out to squeeze one of his hands, letting go before the contact could bother him. “Last night..?”
“We can’t be sure the poison will last,” Theo said when Harry didn’t speak. It was only the three of them, and the wards were active, but Harry still looked around to make sure they were alone for this conversation. “It’s most effective within twenty-four hours. After that its efficacy drops unpredictably, depending on environmental factors, magic, Merlin knows what else. The recipe is experimental.”
“So all that was for nothing,” Hermione said, deflating.
Not nothing, Harry thought, feeling the weight of the applewood wand in his pocket.
Outwardly, he shrugged. “I don’t know, I suppose. It was proof of concept using that spell, at any rate, which is valuable knowledge, and I was able to make a few copies of the Headmaster’s books.”
Hermione perked right up. “You did! Which?”
“I’ll show you later. I didn’t have a lot of time to peruse the selection, you understand,” he said, smirking.
She laughed a bit, then sobered. “So… what are you going to do?”
Harry and Theo traded looks. “Finish it,” Harry said flatly. “Tonight.”
-----
For the second night in a row, Harry crept through Hogwarts like a ghost, unseen and unheard.
The group was four this time rather than two. Pansy had insisted on coming and Theo had just been waiting to leave when Harry did, not saying a word. Draco, the most anxious of them, compulsively flicked his fingers against each other, but other than the soft shush, shush of his finger pads, there was no sound.
In third year, Harry had found a passage that led right up to the hospital wing, letting them out behind a tapestry of a forest whose magic had long since faded into motionlessness. A deer frozen mid-step peered out of the tapestry scene at them with a blank, lifeless eye; Harry suppressed a chill and turned away.
There were no portraits inside the infirmary, for privacy reasons, and, something that had surprised Harry for a while, no wards on the door save a proximity alert charm that they all bypassed with a single spell. Theo silenced the door and Pansy eased it open an inch, which was all the opening Harry needed for a wordless homenum revelio.
“One,” he said, barely audible. Dumbledore was, apparently, unguarded.
The sheer arrogance—
He shook his head. If the Order were going to make this egregious of a mistake, Harry would not interrupt them.
Draco eased into the room first. Moonlight lanced through the tall glass windows and washed all the color out of him until his silhouette was entirely shades of grey and silver. Harry gently pressed between Draco’s shoulder blades and he stepped towards the only occupied bed in the room.
At a gesture from Harry, Theo disappeared in the direction of Madam Pomfrey’s office and quarters, presumably to ensure she didn’t interrupt them. Pansy and Harry hung back: this was Draco’s task.
A prickle ran down Harry’s spine as Draco neared the bed. Something wasn’t right. This was too easy.
He was leaning forward, mouth open to call Draco back, when a rustle and a cough from the bed made them all freeze.
“Severus?” Dumbledore said raspily. The angle was poor but Harry could see him struggling to sit up. He could also see the exact moment Dumbledore realized who was in the room with him.
Inexplicably, he didn’t react. “Ah. Young Mister Malfoy. I confess I had expected you rather sooner.”
Draco’s mouth opened and closed a few times. “You—you—”
“Yes, I knew of your task,” Dumbledore said with sympathy that even to Harry sounded genuine. “It was not difficult to deduce the cause of the incident with the necklace… the poisoned mead… clumsy, a bit desperate, and intended for me…” He coughed. “And now, here I am, quite helpless.”
Slowly, hand trembling, Draco raised his wand.
Nothing happened.
“Draco, Draco,” Dumbledore sighed. “You are not a killer.”
“You don’t know that,” Draco said with forceful bravado. “You don’t know what I’ve done!”
“Forgive me,” rasped Dumbledore, “but with one ineffective attempt after another… one is left to wonder whether your heart was truly in this task.”
Draco scoffed. He shifted his weight the way he did when gathering his nerve; Harry should probably, he thought absently, make Draco aware of the tell. “Shows what you know,” he said more coldly. “My heart is the most committed part of me.”
Dumbledore made a doubtful sort of noise. “We have a bit of… time, my boy, to discuss your… your options.”
“I don’t need your ‘options,’” Draco sneered. “I haven’t got any. If I don’t do this, my mother will bear the punishment. And, sir, with all due respect—” his tone implied the respect due was approximately none— “after watching you run Hogwarts into the ground, I don’t think I’ll regret this.”
He was bracing himself. Preparing for the kill shot.
“I appreciate the difficulty of your position,” said Dumbledore. “Why else do you… think I have not confronted… you before now?” He paused to cough, and reached, tremblingly for a bedside table. Harry eased closer, staying off to the side under a weak, silent notice-me-not, and spied, on the same table, a wand.
Suspicion stirred.
“Because I knew,” Dumbledore went on, “that you would have been murdered if Lord Voldemort realised that I suspected you. But no harm has been done, you have hurt nobody, though you are very lucky that your unintentional victims survived ... I can help you, Draco.”
“No, you can't,” said Draco. “Nobody can. He told me to do it or he'll kill me. I've got no choice.”
“Come over to the right side, Draco, and we can hide you more completely than you can possibly imagine. What is more, I can send members of the Order to your mother tonight to hide her likewise. Your father is safe at the moment in Azkaban… when the time comes we can protect him too ... come over to the right side, Draco… you are not a killer…”
Not yet, Harry thought.
But Draco paused.
Harry made a snap decision and strode forward. “You got us here,” he said lowly, and Dumbledore’s eyes jerked over to him, confusion and then something akin to horror on the old man’s face. “It’s okay, Draco. Our Lord—” Dumbledore, impossibly, paled further at that— “will be lenient, given your other efforts. I will gladly complete this task in your stead.”
“Harry,” Dumbledore whispered. “Harry, you—”
“You do not get to call me by that name,” Harry said with savagery that caught even him by surprise. “How dare you presume familiarity with the Lord of the House of Black? Whom you have, I might add, repeatedly abandoned to abusive guardians and systematically mistreated for almost two decades? You don’t deserve to lick the bottom of my shoe.”
“Ha—I am sorry,” Dumbledore said quickly. “Mr. Black, then. I do not know… what they have told you—” He coughed again. What had happened to him? “—but it is lies. Lord Voldemort is not to be trusted.”
“And you are?” Theo said cruelly from the shadows. Dumbledore jerked, taking him in, and then Pansy sighed and stepped forward with a smile curling her lips (had she put on lipstick for this?) and Dumbledore, for the first time, began to look unnerved.
“I am disappointed in you, Draco,” he said, with a reproving look for the star of this little pageant. “Bringing your friends into potential danger like this… Or perhaps you knew you could not go through with it..?”
“We broke into your office and poisoned your lemon drops,” Harry said conversationally. “Well, Draco here did the poisoning, which would’ve counted as him killing you, even if I brewed it. But then you had to go and… I don’t know, get yourself cursed while haring about the countryside with my idiot brother, so we had to take rather extreme measures. Draco, I believe a pillow over the face should suffice; it will appear as natural causes, and, truth be told, he looks too weak to resist a niffler at the moment.”
Draco nodded sharply. The instruction galvanized him; he strode forward, snatched a pillow from the next bed over, and raised it menacingly.
Dumbledore’s wand hand twitched.
The door slammed open. Theo and Pansy spun towards it, wands out; Harry took advantage of the sudden chaos and summoned Dumbledore’s wand silently into his off hand, then wandlessly banished the applewood into its place. Only once the swap had gone off did he allow himself to take in the newcomer standing frozen before Theo and Pansy’s wands.
“Professor?” Harry said slowly.
Snape surveyed the room with eyes black as coal. “Mr. Malfoy, I see you brought company.”
“What kind of friends would let a friend commit murder alone?” Pansy said sweetly. Her face was tight, though, and Harry knew why; he was just as nervous. This had just gotten a hell of a lot more complicated.
And Dumbledore had relaxed. Why had he relaxed?
“What kind of friend indeed,” said Snape without inflection. His attention fell on Harry. “I am rather surprised to see you here.”
“I can’t imagine why,” Harry said. “I’ve more cause to kill him than almost anyone else. Certainly more than Draco.”
“Severus.”
Snape’s eyes dragged, reluctantly, towards the hospital bed.
“Please, Severus,” Dumbledore rasped. “Please.”
Snape’s arm spasmed. Revulsion and hatred twisted the lines of his face. Harry caught his breath: he still did not know what side Snape was truly on, which master he really served.
“Oh, this is ridiculous,” Theo snapped. He stalked forward, right up to the edge of Dumbledore’s bed, and looked down with an expression of such pure loathing that Dumbledore seemed frozen in place save for the hand inching towards his wand.
He never got a chance to reach it.
“This is for my mother, you bastard,” Theo said. “Avada kedavra.”
Green light flashed and the empty shell of Albus Dumbledore fell limply to the bed.
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