Their eyes weren’t the same.
Harry had heard, so many times, that he had Lily’s eyes. The shade of his mother smiled at him and all he could think was that her eyes were brighter than average but still normal. Still human. Harry’s, when he didn’t bother wandlessly dampening their color, were not.
“Hello, Harry.”
“Mum,” said Harry, feeling abruptly like a small child in a nearly adult body. “I…”
“Was expecting Sirius? You didn’t specify, and… well, I wanted to see you.”
Harry’s eyes were having trouble focusing on Lily—she wasn’t transparent, not like a ghost, but something about her wasn’t fully present, and he had to consciously stare in order to see her clearly. He opened his mouth but didn’t know what to say.
“I’m proud of you,” Lily said softly.
Something deep inside Harry broke. Or healed over. He wasn’t sure. All he knew was that he couldn’t remember any time in his entire life when he had been laid this bare.
“I was afraid… that you’d hate me,” he whispered.
“Oh, Harry, no.” Lily’s smile faded; she leaned towards him with an almost desperate expression. “We know you’ve led a difficult life and been forced to make decisions that, well, I would rather you have never had to make. I wish that you could have grown up happy and loved and been a carefree Slytherin boy in a world where being a Slytherin was not cause for judgment. I wish that you had not had to become what you are. But you’ve survived and even thrived. You’ve found love, and loyalty, and an interest about which you’re truly passionate.” A dark look crossed her face. “I will have words with Petunia when she arrives… I’m so sorry, Harry, that she didn’t… treat you like she should have. That you ended up there at all.”
“Not your fault,” Harry said. He reached out a hand for her, and then, not wanting to know if she was real or a mirage, let it drop.
Lily smiled again, a heartbreaking mix of happiness and grief. “I wish we’d had more time, but… that year, with you and Jules… those were the happiest months of my life. I don’t regret any of my choices.”
Harry tried to smile back, and was pretty sure it came out looking weird. Lily didn’t seem to mind. “Just… take care of him,” she added quietly. “I know you have been, as best you can.”
“I will. I’m not going to let him die,” Harry said.
He wouldn’t. He had a plan.
A thought occurred to him, and he swallowed hard. “Is… James… you made it sound like you can… talk to each other. Other people who’ve died, I mean.”
Lily’s expression flickered and then shut down like a screen going blank. “Some mysteries are for you to find out in your own time, Harry. If you wish to speak with your father you’ll have to call him. I have… limits. This magic is unnatural.”
“Does it hurt you?”
“It is—uncomfortable.”
Harry looked closer, at the crow’s feet around her eyes, the tension in her shoulders. She held herself like he did, and hid her pain like he did too. “I don’t want to hurt you. You should go,” he said. “Do I have to send you back, or…”
“As soon as you want me gone, I will be.” Her lips firmed up into a smile again. “I love you, my son. Never forget that.”
His throat wouldn’t work, so Harry nodded, and then shut his eyes for a count of ten.
When he opened them again, she was gone.
The stone sat in his palm, drinking in light, taunting him. Harry had it in his fingers before he realized that he’d moved. Stilling his hand was an enormous effort of will.
It had pained her. It wasn’t natural. It wasn’t right.
In the story, Cadmus had held his lover at his side with the Stone, and eventually gone mad, killing himself to be with her. The souls it called back weren’t their own alive selves. It wasn’t the same.
Not even the Resurrection Stone could give him Sirius back.
Harry pulled his hand away and dropped the Stone back on the desk. Its magic tugged at him. Whispering of the secrets he could learn, the godfather he could save…
“Fuck you,” he told it, and then he yanked open the cabinet behind him, which was lead-lined and enchanted to contain the influence of magical artifacts like this one, and chucked the ring inside. The cabinet slammed shut again and locked with a satisfying click.
The other two Hallows—for what else could they be?—sat innocently on the desktop.
Harry glared at them, and then groaned. There was really no good practical reason not to carry the fucking Elder Wand, the Deathstick, the Wand of Destiny, around as a backup. He was ambidextrous, had trained himself to fight with two wands, and yet had never replaced the holly wand. His ash wand had served him faithfully. More so with every year that went by—Harry could feel himself growing into its curiosity and stubbornness. At eleven Harry had lacked the experience to match the wand. Sometimes he hadn’t known what to do with it. Hadn’t been sure enough of himself to be its true master, although it had, indubitably, chosen him. Now, though, he felt more attuned to it than he ever had the holly, even if a part of him would always love the wand that roared to life in his hand in Ollivander’s.
“Accio holster,” he said, and strapped a second holster to the inside of his right forearm. The ash would stay in its place at his left hand, and the Elder Wand should be just fine at his right.
As for the Cloak…
It was a useful weapon, but unlike the Wand, it was incredibly fucking obvious just what he had, and if anyone noticed Harry using not an invisibility cloak but the Invisibility Cloak, well, that would be pretty conclusive proof he had been in Potter Manor at some point. Jules and probably half a dozen other people could confirm the Cloak’s last residence had been James’ study.
Sometimes Harry wondered if they’d even noticed the theft yet.
Keeping two Hallows in the same container seemed like a bad idea, so Harry hid the cloak in the space concealed under the floor of the secret compartment at the back of the study’s wardrobe. (The Blacks who had come before him were relentlessly paranoid.) It would be there if he ever needed it, but carrying it around all the time… no.
The Deathly Hallows, he thought wonderingly, and then said aloud, “Merlin, my life is weird.”
The Ministry fell in August.
Well. Fell implied something dramatic. A collapse. A single moment, a before and an after. That wasn’t how it happened. Harry didn’t think it was possible to identify any one point in time or any one imperiused government lackey who made the difference. The shift was slow, seismic, a movement so gradual he didn’t even realize how much progress he had made until Harry found himself sitting in his study reviewing reports from three dozen separate people who all answered to him.
The Heads of the Floo Network Authority and the Portkey Office were in his pocket—one voluntarily, the other leashed by blackmail. A solid fifty percent of the underlings in the Internal Affairs Office, which set the Ministry-wide employee regulations and had an enormous amount of power, were either sympathizers or active members of the Death Eaters, and of the other fifty, a good portion were persuadable moderates. The Deputy Manager of the IA was herself beholden to Harry unless she wanted the Blacks’ point person at St. Mungo’s to involve himself in her sister’s care.
Draco and Rodolphus Lestrange, who much to Harry’s surprise apparently was quite good with numbers, had cornered the International Magical Training Standards Office; Harry himself owned the debt of the Vice Chair of the entire Department of International Cooperation, which oversaw the IMTSO among other offices, and the wizard had been so grateful to see a more favorable loan agreement that he’d signed the contract without reading it too closely. Silly of him, really. Never sign a wizard contract without looking at the fine print. Especially one handed to you by the House of Black.
Eirin Glossop, a middle-aged witch in the Financial Data Collection office and an old friend of Death Eater Reaghan Fawley, had been the one to tip them off that Dirk Cresswell should really be allowed to stay in the Goblin Liaison Office. Harry and Justin had done less than an hour of research to put a pitch together. Cresswell couldn’t say no to a meeting with the Lord of the House of Black, and once Harry had him in a room, all it took was an offer of funding for language training in the Office and a willingness to open up negotiations about nonhuman wand rights for Cresswell to flat-out say he’d support anyone, up to and including the Dark Lord, if they could actually deliver on those promises.
Apparently the goblins had gone this long without beheading their latest Liaison because Cresswell actually liked them. Harry thought the average ten-year-old could’ve told Fudge and his lot that sending a string of bigoted arsewipes to negotiate with a famously touchy and honor-driven culture was a bad idea, but he wasn’t about to avoid capitalizing on a mistake that convenient.
Magical Accidents and Catastrophes wasn’t his area—Harry wasn’t entirely sure which of the Death Eaters had been assigned there—but there was a witch on the Obliviator Squad who he’d met first in a series of interviews about what the Obliviators thought they needed to take better care of Muggleborns and then continued to see for lunch once a week. Myleigh Hillard was old enough to be his grandmother, and lonely, and bitter after years of Ministry policy allowing her to cast no more than an obliviate and some basic healing charms, no matter the situation she found in an underage magic incident. Harry wasn’t really sure if she explicitly knew who he answered to but her sharp eyes tended to linger on his left arm and the gossip she passed along was pointedly relevant to any hypothetical individual seeking to covertly keep a finger on the Department's pulse.
Through Hillard Harry knew funding for the Muggle Liaison Office, Invisibility Task Force, and Muggle-Worthy Excuse Committee had all been almost doubled. He put in a word with Barty and a week later she had been tapped to chair the freshly minted Muggle Relations and Muggleborn Policy Review Commission, tasked with combing through every Ministry regulation and Wizengamot statute relevant to those areas and recommending reforms.
“I’m not sure who recommended me for the position,” she said at their next lunch, with a significant sort of look, “but I’m very grateful to whomever that person might be. Having the opportunity to dig into the policies… after all these years, everything I’ve seen, all my experience… it means the world to me.”
“I’m sure someone just saw how much good you could do if your talents weren’t being wasted,” Harry said simply, and that was the end of the conversation.
The Department of Mysteries was an entire clusterfuck. Harry didn’t know if anyone had poked that particular hornet’s nest yet, and hoped not. The Unspeakables liked to do their research and be left well alone. If the Death Eaters could just handle everything else and solidify their position before trying to bring an entire Department full of paranoid academics to heel, that would be great.
And then there was the DMLE.
Harry sat back and grinned. Merlin, it really had been the lynchpin—especially the Chief Auror’s position, now occupied by one Corban Yaxley, who Harry had made a point of sending Theo to work with whenever possible.
To no one’s surprise, Theo had taken to helping prune the Auror Corps with an unholy level of glee.
Harry gave it six months to a year before the last of James’ flunkies within the Corps would be quietly transferred, retired, or suspended for one infraction or another. Some of them hadn’t done anything wrong other than develop a fanatic level of blind trust in several deeply flawed individuals, and Theo had talked Yaxley into making sure those people were just laterally shuffled into desk jobs or given early retirement with a pension. But the Aurors who had write-ups for violent arrests that James had overlooked, or were known to get confessions using whatever tactics worked, or took bribes, or falsified evidence… those people would be fired or run off the Corps.
The Office for the Detection and Confiscation of Counterfeit Defensive Spells and Protective Objects—Harry winced just thinking the terrible old name—had been rechristened the Office for Regulation of Harmful Magics and was now headed up by the son of a witch the Blacks’ old files had named as a friend of the House, decades ago. Her son remembered the excellent relationship his mother had with the Blacks and how much of a positive impact it had. Now Raymon Winickus was in charge of an entire Ministry Office and quite determinedly taking a sledgehammer to their policies, starting over almost from scratch.
The Misuse of Muggle Artifacts Office was so underfunded and ostracized even within the DMLE that Yaxley had decided budget problems and an ever-deepening pile of red tape would be enough. No one would care about its slow death. The Wizengamot Administration Service had similarly been pretty easy to manage. It was full of halfbloods, purebloods of minor families, and the occasional lucky Muggleborn, all of whom resented the nepotism that landed their less qualified classmates in higher-paying higher-positioned glamorous jobs in the other Departments. Harry had dropped by in his capacity as the Black Lord, been performatively horrified at their pay and working conditions, and set about bashing some ears while “accidentally” being overheard. Within a week the administrators’ pay had seen a fifteen percent increase and there was talk of an internship program to start using their talent and knowledge of obscure statutes and records on the Wizengamot floor as subject matter experts and policy researchers. Now almost the entire Service universally thought Harry hung the moon and stars, which made Barty laugh whenever they talked about it.
The Wizengamot itself was the last piece to come together. If anything, Harry thought, could be the single moment when he knew the Ministry was theirs, it was when the Wizengamot passed by a margin of three votes a bill to allocate seats to enclaves in relation to their population.
The Wizengamot grew by almost a third overnight and the first action the new body took was to pass a law Harry had helped draft and given to one of the newly elected enclave representatives to present. It reduced barriers to enclave formation; lowered taxes on new-formed enclaves for their first five years; and established an Office of Land Reclamation whose entire job was to identify large tracts of preferably undeveloped Muggle-owned land, buy them, and sell them on at no profit to form enclaves with their own cropland and protected forests. Harry was as proud of it as anything he had ever done and raised his wand to vote aye with a surge of triumph in his heart.
Naturally, the press sought the youngest Wizengamot Lord’s opinion. “I think it’s brilliant,” he’d said to a DictaQuill. “The average British witch or wizard doesn’t live on a noble House’s lands anymore, and they can’t meet the unreasonable and punitive regulations the Ministry previously imposed on would-be enclaves. Now, wixen of any blood status can form their own communities. We’ll protect the Statute of Secrecy, we’ll see more shops and small businesses… and to be honest, I think the Wizengamot needed some fresh blood.” This last, of course, was accompanied by a wink. The quote made the Prophet’s front page.
The best part was that Voldemort didn’t even need to try to control all the new representatives or the formation of new enclaves. He’d wanted to, but Harry convinced him not to: the preexisting enclaves deeply resented the Ministry and would not be kind to the political establishment. Most of the localized rural wixen, as Harry had personally seen in Riasmoore, were culturally pretty traditional but had no general objection to Muggleborns, and their leaders would reflect those policies. And it was better, Harry had argued, if the Wizengamot really did function more or less democratically. It would look good and add legitimacy to the new regime. “Who’s going to sign up with a vigilante squad trying to take down a government that’s actually working for them for the first time in two hundred years?” he’d said.
Voldemort’s smile, then, had been chilling.
Harry shook aside the mental review of their position. He had too much to do to waste time going over information he already knew cold. Justin and Draco had an entire investment scheme to foster new businesses and home construction in the seven new enclaves whose incorporation proposals had hit the new Independent Enclave Regulation Office before the paint dried on its walls.
Hermione had been the one to send out a survey to almost four thousand people, collate their responses, and give Harry a report on the types of funding people needed, when they needed it, and who they were. He’d passed that information on to a couple of people in Treasury and they’d come back with a whole program of grants, subsidies, and loans offered through Gringotts courtesy of Mr. Dirk Cresswell himself, tailored especially for wixen who were poor or first-generation magical. He knew the Experimental Charms Licensing Committee had a similar program now, one which Hermione and Barty had put together personally, extending research grants and licenses to anyone with a decent idea, with special interest in proposals submitted by disenfranchised wixen. Already a number of the oldest families had volunteered to open their libraries to research requests from licensed scholars.
Between the enclaves, the sudden upsurge in research, and the various policies that would now start to mobilize and enable every wixen and not just the rich or well-connected, Harry predicted it would only take a few decades to close the developmental gap between magic and Muggle technology. By that point they could start aggressively buying back land, where necessary, and perhaps even think about preemptively wiping undeveloped land off the Muggle maps, so that magical and mundane flora and fauna could flourish undisturbed by plastic and pollution.
Harry didn’t want to kick the Muggles out of England, or subjugate them, or ideally even have to ever deal with Muggles finding out about the wizards in their midst. But he was going to give his people the best damn chance he could to keep themselves secret, and if that failed, to enter negotiations with the Muggles on a strong footing, so that if nothing else they would be safe.
This world had welcomed him home, when he was eleven and alone.
He’d be damned if he let it backslide into a stagnant pool of social rot on his watch.
Contrary to the wild rumors told among Jules’ Gryffindor set, according to Hermione, Death Eater meetings had absolutely nothing to do with wild orgies and everything to do with incredibly tedious minutiae. Harry much preferred his usual method of letting Barty be the go-between and just getting on with things, but the meetings were, occasionally, necessary, and Harry’s presence at them particularly so.
He was the youngest of them and occupied a rare position. He had, therefore, a lot to prove.
“I have,” Harry said, “a plan.”
Voldemort raised a thin eyebrow at him. “Another?”
“He is just full of plans,” sneered Wilkes the elder.
Harry looked down the table full of Death Eaters just in time to see Bellatrix’s knife land in the table a scant inch from Wilkes’ wand hand. “Do not,” Bellatrix said, “mock the Lord Black.”
“One shouldn’t kick an animal too stupid to learn a lesson from it,” Harry said. Bellatrix cackled and flexed her wrist; the knife shot back into it with a snap and she raked her attention around the table in a challenge.
Most of the other Death Eaters looked down rather than meet her eyes.
Harry could really get to like her.
“The Lord Black’s plans have been, to a one, invaluable to our cause, and enabled us to take de facto control of the Ministry without more than an Imperius Curse here and there,” Barty said coldly. “You can criticize once you’ve contributed literally anything other than complaints that you haven’t gotten to torture enough people.”
“As you were ssssaying?” Voldemort said, with a dark look at Wilkes that made Harry almost pity the fool.
“Yes. Well, poor Minister Scrimgeour has been running about rather helplessly. We have him quite confused about why things keep seeming to go wrong and with a bit of luck he’ll remain oblivious to the true extent of our control until after he’s voted out of office.”
There was a bit of a stir. “You think a vote of no confidence is imminent?” said Lord Nott sharply.
Harry smiled thinly at Theo’s father. “The wixen population of Britain has been pushed aside for too long. Muggleborns resent the pureblooded establishment that offers them a world of magic and wonder but never allows them to fully participate, consigning them to a life with a foot in each world, unable to function amongst Muggles without a Muggle education but unable to exercise the breadth of their talents as wizards either. Non-noble pure- and halfbloods likewise resent Ministry policies that have locked them out of prosperity and forced them to progressively abandon the magic their grandparents taught them. Neither traditional political bloc of recent years has represented either group. All they need,” he gestured at the map on the wall that tracked enclaves and wizarding settlements, “is a glimmer of hope. A hint that their voices will actually matter. They’ll disagree with each other and settle it in the Wizengamot. That’s fine. What they won’t do is tolerate a Minister who barely knows they exist any longer than they have to.”
Lord Nott smiled back at him.
“Let’s say you’re right,” said Yaxley, who Harry respected on the basis of Yaxley literally never getting perturbed by anything, ever. “It wouldn’t be that difficult to rig an election, would it?”
“No,” said Harry slowly, “but imagine if we didn’t have to.”
Several people scoffed or laughed. Bellatrix let out a menacing hiss that was closer to Parseltongue than any non-snake Harry had ever heard.
“Do explain,” Voldemort drawled.
Harry spread his hands. “It’s simple. Legitimacy. We didn’t interfere with the enclave’s choices of representative and they have proven to be reasonable moderates. There are differences of opinion within even a group so unified as ours; having some level of debate is healthy in a government, and proves to the people that their opinions matter. There is no better way to build up that legitimacy than to hold a general election for Minister and leave it alone. Muggle political science has shown over and over again that a voting populace can tell, by and large, when their votes matter and when they do not. Our people’s votes haven’t mattered in a long time.”
“What if you’re wrong? What if they pick, I don’t know, Diggory?” Yaxley said.
It wasn’t a challenge, just a devil’s advocate argument, and a reasonable one. Harry smirked at him. “Who cares? We control the Ministry. If worse comes to worst, we let this Minister argue against the Wizengamot, and cast them as the enemy of the enclave representatives who are just trying to help their communities. Within a year, two at the most, we can build up a popular following around an alternative candidate, a true moderate with broad appeal, and call for a vote of no confidence when an opportunity arises.”
“Do you have anyone in mind, then, for the wixen who shall challenge Mister Scrimgeour?” said Voldemort.
This was the slightly dangerous bit. “Naturally, you could, my Lord,” said Harry, “and yet I believe I have seen you maneuvering towards installing a… perhaps not puppet Minister, but someone sympathetic to our aims, who can manage the dull day-to-day political affairs of that Office.”
For a long moment, no one spoke. Probably the Death Eaters were shocked at Harry’s audacity but he held Voldemort’s red eyes and waited without a flinch.
Voldemort’s inhuman, handsome face cracked open into a smile, and then a laugh. No one else joined in but he didn’t seem to care. “Oh, you have chosen well with this one,” he said, looking affectionately at Barty, and then back to Harry. “You are a credit to the Houses Gaunt and Black. Indeed, I confess my interests lie in rather more… esoteric realms. Who would you suggest as your challenge candidate, to rule in our stead?”
“An accomplished Muggleborn witch of my long acquaintance,” Harry said. “Hazel Laurens. She is well-connected with several prestigious and well-established wizarding firms; her wife is the junior partner at Greengrass, Tate, & Morris. Laurens knows our world and customs more than well enough to connect to small communities of wixen who have been around centuries, and as a Muggleborn herself, she understands the challenges faced by first-generation wixen.”
“Ability over blood,” said Lady Parkinson.
Yaxley was nodding slowly. “It is a sound plan, my Lord. I know of Tate and of Laurens through the DMLE. Both are respected, accomplished, and more than qualified. Laurens is… more moderate, perhaps, than our own aims.”
Voldemort waved a hand. “Black is correct that a degree of political enfranchisement generates legitimacy… so long as this Laurens is sympathetic to our agenda, I do not see the harm… although I mussst ask, where, in your plan, doessss Lord Voldemort feature?”
“I defer to your opinion in that respect, my Lord.” Harry made a noncommittal gesture. “The legend of Lord Voldemort, the Heir of Slytherin, could fade. Or that legend could be grown and cultivated—within a generation or two, fear and hatred can turn to love. I imagine, should you choose, that you could even take up the mantle of Lord Gaunt and assume an identity no different from any other Lord of the Wizengamot. Or make the Department of Mysteries yours.”
“All the world my oyster,” Voldemort mused. Something cruel glittered in his eyes. “Very well, Black. Yaxley, Bellatrix, you may assist him and Bartemius however they require. And young Mr. Nott is, of course, at your disposal,” he said, with another soft, cold laugh.
Or I’m at his, Harry thought, remembering the night before, Theo watching while Barty fucked Harry in the potions lab. But that wasn’t the sort of thing one said in a Death Eater gathering.
Even one from which Snape was conspicuously absent.
-----
Everything had fallen apart.
Only two weeks had gone by since they went on the run and Jules couldn’t believe how quickly things had gone wrong. Andi had thought they had at least until the winter holidays. Maybe until next summer if Scrimgeour kept it together. But despite Scrimgeour still being Minister, there was a Death Eater as Chief Auror and Corps had quietly begun investigating Order members on sedition charges.
Jules hadn’t much liked the whole sedition thing when Ethan explained it to him, but if it was the only way to catch Dark wizards hiding from the Aurors, then he guessed he understood it. But now Dad and Dumbledore’s whole system was being used against the Order and Jules couldn’t help feeling a little justified that it was rebounding on them. Even if it meant he was now living in a tent because their safe houses weren’t so safe anymore.
They’d run in the middle of Bill and Fleur’s wedding reception, a tense event on account of Fleur and Molly still were barely speaking. Then Kingsley’s patronus had shown up to tell them Yaxley’s appointment had been confirmed by the new, rigged Wizengamot, and he’d immediately ordered a round of searches.
Luckily Parvati and Ron and Jules had all been preparing in advance. They had expanded bags full of supplies. Jules bitterly missed the Invisibility Cloak (and feared who could have taken it) as they fled on foot through Muggle London to a youth hostel and booked in for the night.
“We can’t stay in the Muggle world long, we’ll make these people into targets,” he’d insisted, and the next day, it was off to the woods in a tent.
Since then he had barely gotten any news.
Andi was under close watch. She’d managed to get off an untraceable owl note warning him not to contact Ethan, who was in and out of the DMLE thanks to suspicions of fraud. Remus had been fined and assigned community service for reckless endangerment of the public, an injustice that set Jules’ blood boiling. And with all these new ‘enclaves,’ people were moving around all the time, and some people weren’t willing to risk their families by harboring Jules, who was officially wanted for questioning in the death of James Potter.
“It’s such a fucking stupid pretense,” Parvati snarled, looking at the latest Daily Prophet, which they had at least been getting consistently thanks to a few Order members’ efforts. “As if you could have had anything to do with that!”
“Leave it,” Jules said, head in his hands. “Just… leave it.”
There was nothing for it. They just had to hope Ethan’s plan worked.
A crack from outside the tent made all three of them freeze. Parvati inched for the rope she had rigged up; if she yanked on it on the way out the door, the tent would automagically collapse in on itself and snap into her bag. Everything inside would be a huge mess but at least it made for a quick exit. Although how anyone had found them—
“Guys?”
Ron’s eyes got wide. Parvati, evidently deciding to trust in their wards, inched over to the tent flap and pulled it aside.
Jules’ ears had been right; it was Neville standing a little ways away, looking around in confusion. Jules got out his wand, the spruce warm and comfortable within his palm, and stepped outside.
As soon as he crossed the ward boundary Neville snapped around to face him, wand up and legs poised to fight. He only relaxed a little when he saw Jules.
“What did Cormac McLaggen call Katie last year during exams, and what did you call him for it?” Jules asked.
Neville’s face hardened slightly. “He called her a frigid cunt and I called him a festering abscess of a person. And then I stunned him.”
Jules nodded: no one had been around for that incident except himself, one of McLaggen’s friends, Katie, and Ron.
“What did you give your brother for his birthday that you didn’t want your father to see?” Neville asked.
Air whistled through Jules’ teeth as he inhaled hard. “A book called Parselmouths in History,” he said stiffly.
Neville lowered his wand. “It’s good to see you.”
“Yeah. You too.”
Neville was silent.
Jules cleared his throat. “What, er, what are you doing here?”
“I invited him.”
Parvati had come out of the tent and crossed the ward boundary; she approached, golden coin spinning between her fingers. “Come on. Let’s get inside. It’s not safe out here.”
“You sent him coordinates?” Jules said, a bit angrily, as they ducked back into the tent and sat down around the kitchen.
“Yes.” Parvati looked back at him without a flinch. “We can’t do this alone. We need news, and we need help.”
She was right, but it sucked. And Jules also wasn’t entirely sure what Neville could contribute.
It turned out that Neville could contribute a lot.
He knew what was going on politically—he’d been around for the last two weeks, watching the fallout. But more than that, he knew what was really going on, behind the scenes, and when he told them Jules’ stomach fell through his feet towards the center of the planet.
“It’s Harry.”
“What?” Jules managed.
“It’s Harry. Doing all this. Behind…” Neville waved his hands a bit wildly. “Look. G-Gran keeps files.”
“So do we,” said Jules, uncomprehending.
“But you don’t know them well,” Neville said. “Gran’s been going through them, alright, and… there’s too many ties back to the House of Black for coincidence. Families they’ve worked with before. Tactics they’ve used in the past.”
“That sounds like hearsay,” said Parvati. “And how can one person have done all this?”
Neville shook his head. “No, Parvati, you don’t get it. The Blacks are… Typically they stayed neutral, not Dark, in the past, at least the main branch did, the Lord or Lady and their Heir. On the rare occasion that the entire House picked a side, that side won. Every time.”
“And you’re saying you think Harry’s picked…” Jules couldn’t even say it.
“I don’t think. I know.”
And Neville explained.
A secret group of students, like the DA but trained harder, better, taught to kill if they had to. Muggleborns and purebloods alike called to Harry’s banner and convinced Harry would make all their dreams come true. “He cares,” Neville said, his voice subdued now, “I know he does, but not enough. Not more than he cares about himself.”
The news that Harry had been… involved with a Death Eater, with Barty Crouch Jr., one of the worst of the bloody rat bastards—that made Ron cry out and Parvati go grey and Jules want to vomit on the floor.
“And… I think…” Neville lifted his miserable brown eyes to Jules’. “I’m so sorry, Jules. I think he had something to do with Dumbledore and your father dying.”
-----
Merlin, Harry would never get used to parties. Even the tolerable ones, like this had been, were tedious, at least by the end. Tedious people, tedious conversation, tedious music. His feet were sore from dancing with everyone who wanted to, which was quite a good number, although Theo had made a point of cutting in and leading Harry around the dance floor with a markedly possessive air every few songs.
The dancing had been nice. The chance to confirm opinions amongst the enclave leaders were shifting even more so. Soon having a Dark Mark wouldn’t be something to hide. Soon there would be enough support to exonerate Barty—Vanessa already had the case drawn up, including a forged witness statement from a now-dead Longbottom house-elf that Barty had tried to resist and been forced to participate in the Longbottoms’ torture by Rodolphus Lestrange (who himself was perfectly happy staying on his ancestral manor for the rest of his life and had no problems being the Dark Lord’s scapegoat). They were going to hang the whole affair around Crouch Sr.’s neck and as soon as he got home Harry was going to raise a toast in honor of the old man’s tombstone crumbling.
“You okay?” Theo asked, twining their fingers together.
“Exhausted.”
“You’ve been doing too much.”
Harry shrugged. It had to get done, and someone had to do it, and he was already delegating a lot. The tasks he was carrying were things he actually had to do himself.
It just so happened there were a lot of those.
Theo sighed. “I’ll be glad when this all settles down and I can just apply for an experimentation license to last the next decade.”
“We’ll all get Masteries,” said Harry, thinking of Shosana Malikova, a Parselmouth and Potions Master based in the States willing to mentor him in both subjects, “and you and Hermione will rock the Ancient Runes field every six months with new discoveries—”
“And you’ll revolutionize potions, maybe write some new textbooks, kick some arse as a professional duelist. Who knows?” Theo nudged him in the ribs. “Maybe you’ll teach Defense or Potions at Hogwarts someday.”
“Merlin knows I’d be better than either Snape or… literally any of our myriad Defense professors.”
Theo laughed. The sound was bright and clear, ringing off the cobblestone path under their feet and then swallowed by the manicured wood to either side. The Hopkirks had generously donated use of their old gardens for tonight’s event, and the glow from behind them, of lamps inside a temporary building, was bright enough to cast Harry and Theo’s fuzzy shadows ahead of them as they walked.
They approached the ward boundary, and Harry grimaced. “I wish you didn’t have to go back to school.”
“There were valid reasons. As Babbling’s teacher assistant I can get at least a third of my Mastery work done, and keep an eye on things in the school while I’m at it.”
Harry knew. He even agreed. That didn’t mean he had to like it. In a few days the students would board the Express, carrying Theo away to Scotland for months on end. And Harry did appreciate having people he trusted at the school watching over everything. The situation was so fragile right now and Hogwarts’ students had proven themselves able and willing to form organized resistance to authority they didn’t like. If the remnants of Jules’ little defense club got together and started fomenting some kind of countermovement…
That wouldn’t end well for anyone.
It was only the slightest shift in the light. A whisper of a hint of a movement. And yet every one of Harry’s senses was suddenly on screaming, high alert.
He checked ahead: still a hundred meters from the low stone fence that marked the wardline. Trees on either side, less manicured now that they were farther from the tent and the walking gardens.
Theo’s fingers tightened on his. Harry tapped his thumb twice on the back of Theo’s hand in response.
A scuff, a flash of white. Harry and Theo moved in the same instant, breaking aside to fall into back to back dueling stances. Harry’s wands snapped into his hands even as he heard Theo bringing up a shield. Another burst of light, from the trees facing Harry this time; he shielded with the Elder Wand, fired an area-of-effect vertigo curse with the ash, and listened closely. At least two separate voices had reacted. Fuck.
“Four over here,” Theo said tightly. Harry risked a glance: he’d dropped the shield but stood ready. “Think they’ll give it up?”
It was possible. Harry and Theo were known to be good duelists. Now that the ambush had lost its advantage—
“Bombarda!”
Or not.
Harry and Theo fell back into low crouches with their backs pressed together. Their shields were already forming over themselves as they tucked their legs in and presented as small a target as possible. The curse shuddered off the dual layer of protegos and exploded midair; the shock wave rocked Harry but didn’t hurt them.
Bombarda was a fire-based blasting curse, not like the pressure-based reducto, and a lot more destructive.
This wasn’t just an ambush. This was an assassination.
A flurry of curses shot out of the trees from Theo’s direction. He swore. Harry heard Theo dueling but his attention was taken up by the precise cutting curses being shot at him from not two but three different angles on his side of the path.
The two of them deflected and returned fire where they could and made their way, step by step, towards the ward line. Harry sent off a silent curse, heard a yell and the sound of a body hitting the ground. He grinned. That one wouldn’t be getting up anytime soon, although St. Mungo’s would probably be able to get their legs working again.
A cutting curse eked past his shields and bit deep into Harry’s left shoulder. Fuck. His mobility was compromised. He switched, using the ash wand to cast a shield and the Elder for offensive spells.
The change was immediate. The Elder Wand was alive in his hand in a way Harry didn’t trust. It sang to him of blood and battle and victory. It dove into curses almost before Harry thought of them. His vision sharpened, his footwork became more precise.
Theo grunted with pain and his steps faltered.
Harry lifted his left arm, though his bicep almost couldn’t, and focused on the ash wand, the wand of Vincent Potter nee Gaunt, from whom Harry had gotten his Slytherin inheritance. Casting a Parselmagic curse through it was as easy as breathing. Twin screams rang in the night and Harry was finally free to turn and help Theo.
“Something in my bones,” Theo said through gritted teeth. He was still standing but, Harry saw with some alarm, Theo’s left shin was bending to the side. There were multiple curses that caused bones to lose rigidity and all of them were bad news.
Harry checked. Fifty meters to the wardline. Theo couldn’t run with his bones like this, and if he fell, hit his head, the risk of damage to his brain—
No.
“Hold a shield up,” he said, “and don’t move.”
“Not a problem,” Theo gasped. He had a hand wrapped around his ribcage in a concerning way.
Harry went on the offensive.
There were only two people left. Both were highly skilled duelists and unafraid to use illegal magic. Harry planted his feet between them and Theo and relied on his bludger-honed dodging skills to keep both of his wands freed up for offensive casting.
One of the figures made a dash for the tree line. Harry sent a rain of parsel-based blasting curses but they dodged every one and then they were closer, right up behind a tree for cover, able to snipe from around its trunk while their partner made a similar dash, for a tree close to the path and off to Harry’s left. Suddenly he was caught trying to defend from two angles. His left arm was going numb and he could barely hold a protego with it anymore.
The Elder Wand, in comparison, was ecstatic. Harry found himself sinking into its bloodthirsty glee as seconds ticked by and his energy flagged.
Whether he or the wand found the opening he couldn’t be sure: it was miniscule, the smallest fraction of a second when a cramp or an itch left the caster to Harry’s right vulnerable in between spells. Harry didn’t have time for an incantation or a wand motion. He wasn’t even sure what curse it was that he cast: he just jabbed his wand at them and wanted them down.
A grunt of pain. Then he saw a body fall even as he was turning back to the person on his left.
“Harry!”
Harry’s blood ran cold. He kept turning. His enemy was still sending curses; Harry’s left arm hung uselessly and he raised a wandless shield between him and the attacker, panting with the effort of it, so he was free to check on Theo.
His friend had conjured a clever sort of exoskeleton that wrapped around his legs and hips, holding him upright. Harry would’ve been impressed if he hadn’t also just spotted what made Theo cry out: the wixen Harry cursed earlier, legs dead and dragging, had crawled out of the woods and started firing on Theo from the ground.
Rage shot through Harry like lightning. His magic responded. A light burst to life over all their heads, throwing the path and trees into stark relief. Both of the attackers wore black cloth masks over their faces and shapeless dueling robes. He didn’t know them. He didn’t care to know. He just wanted them to die.
In his hand, the Elder Wand sang.
A shuffle and grunt drew Harry’s eyes back to Theo. His shoulder sagged in on itself. Theo’s wand arm hung limp and useless. He looked up, at Harry.
Kill them, the Wand seemed to whisper.
Kill them, and risk Theo.
Harry jerked the Wand out of the opening motions of the Killing Curse. The enemy in the trees shouted and charged, closing the distance with curses flying.
Wandless magic wrapped around Theo. Protected and lifted him so he could be moved without jostling. Harry’s vision greyed with effort. He tightened his grip on the Elder Wand and its ecstatic fury kept him on his feet.
But he would not get distracted.
“Protego maximus!” he roared, and whether it was his power or the Elder Wand’s that did it, he didn’t know, but the resulting shield-dome was the brightest and strongest Harry had ever seen.
He didn’t think about it. Just pulled Theo close with his magic and ran.
Wards rippled over his skin. Harry’s wandless spell faltered. He caught Theo in his arms and apparated.
Harry slumped in his chair. The healers had tried to force him into his own room to get checked out for magical exhaustion, but he flat-out refused to leave Theo’s side, so eventually they had just run their diagnostics while Harry sat unmoving in a visitors’ chair in the corner of Theo’s private room. Calvis Nott could be heard down the hall bellowing at the Aurors who wanted to wake Theo up for a statement.
No one would be waking Theo up anytime soon. The healers had had to vanish his pelvis, half his ribs, his lumbar spine, both of his tibias and one fibula, his left scapula and humerus, and most of his sternum, all of which were being regrown while some of the most complicated enchantments Harry had ever seen kept Theo’s organs and soft tissue in place. If they woke him he might move and if he moved he might disrupt the regrowth of his vertebrae and that was unacceptable.
In the end the Aurors had just taken Harry’s statement, checked his ash wand, and accepted his explanation of uncontrolled wandless magic. Shacklebolt was among them, the only face Harry knew for sure had Order ties, and Calvis had watched him closely, but Shacklebolt gave no hint of anything other than professional conduct, so they left him alone.
The door opened, and Harry looked up. Calvis. He nodded once and went back to staring at Theo’s sleeping body in the dark.
“He’ll make a full recovery,” Calvis said softly, shutting the door behind himself. “The supports he conjured kept his body from collapsing and crushing any soft tissue or internal organs and your magic protected him from further impact damage during apparition. The healers say if you had not gotten him here in time he may have been permanently injured.”
“We both saved each other’s lives. That was an ambush. If not for him, I would have been surrounded, and maybe overwhelmed.”
In the dark, Harry couldn’t see Calvis’ face. “You have been my son’s true friend and companion. When he was eleven and he told me he had befriended the stray Potter heir… well. I don’t think anyone could have foreseen this. But I thank you. You have changed… everything.”
“Strange, isn’t it?” Harry said. “That a chance meeting over telescopes should have changed so much. I wonder sometimes if I might have resisted Slytherin had I met someone else before Theo.”
“Yes, Draco’s manners left something to be desired at that age,” said Calvis drily, startling a huff of aborted laughter out of Harry.
They waited in silence for a few moments, Calvis standing perfectly still. Harry suspected he was doing what Harry had been for the last few hours—just listening to Theo breathe.
“The Aurors found nothing to identify your attackers,” Calvis said. “Signs of a fight, obviously. Curse damage. Your count was seven—there was an eighth, a reserve member most likely, who seems to have hidden until you were gone and then come forward to gather up the others. We don’t know if any of them died…”
“The room is warded,” Harry said flatly.
“Ah. In that case.” Calvis brushed his fingers over his left arm. “This is under geas, you understand.”
The Dark Mark on Harry’s arm shivered. He felt its magic bind him. “Yes.”
“You used a parsel curse?”
“I did. And… I don’t know what else. At least one of them suffered severe nerve damage to the lower body that will require an extremely specialized course of potions to heal.” Harry conjured parchment, quill, and ink, absently flicking a ball of light into the air from his fingertips, and started writing. He handed the finished list to Calvis. “The main nerve-regenerator ingredients. If an eye can be kept on the apothecaries…”
Calvis took the list, opened the door, and spoke briefly with someone in the hall. Then he came back in sans list. “It’ll make it to the relevant hands.”
“Two of them might be dead. The parsel curse wasn’t… a nice one. I don’t know what Theo did—he initially counted four, and when I turned to help him, there were two left.”
“Aurors found imprints of bodies where they had fallen, but any blood had been vanished. It’s impossible to tell if they lived.”
“And impossible to know who they were,” Harry finished.
“Precisely.”
Fuck.
Harry conjured a second chair, and sent it floating over to Calvis with a wave.
“My thanks.”
Theo’s father settled himself into the chair and joined Harry’s silent vigil.
-----
His wards pulsed and Severus came awake in a second. He slept with his wand holster on, a bag at the ready, and a soft robe rather than pyjamas, all of which meant he was on his feet and ready to run before his Floo finished expelling his late-night visitor.
Severus ducked into the tiny pocket of expanded space he had built into the gap between the drywall and the house’s exterior vinyl siding. No one would notice unless they knew to look for it. Climbing down from his bedroom to the ground floor took seconds. He found a faint mark in the drywall and pressed close to it.
On the other side of the wall a painting hung—a Muggle still life of a forest, nothing particularly exciting, but perfect concealment for a spyhole. Severus blinked twice when he saw Andromeda Tonks, as unkempt as he had ever seen her, heaving multiple people out of the Floo and onto his living room floor.
At the very least he could be sure this wasn’t an assassination.
Severus backtracked. The expanded space-pockets inside his walls only had a few ingress points. The nearest was within the stairwell and required a bit of a crawl. He stood on a step charmed to creak under feet that were not his and transfigured his robe into something more stiff and formal.
Then he strode down the stairs and into his living room. “Andromeda! What is—”
“Help them,” Andromeda said tersely, her wand already darting like an anxious hummingbird through the air over Garrett Robards, who was moaning and clearly in the grips of a painful curse.
Severus turned his attention to the others. Zoey Sideris was whimpering and exhibiting similar symptoms to Robards. Alvar Cornfoot, Ivar Dillonsby, and Ethan Thorne rounded out the people on his floor. Of the three, Thorne appeared fine, at worst stunned; Cornfoot kept twitching; and Dillonsby, somewhat to Severus’ concern, was bleedingly sluggishly from a brutal lattice of gashes that had carved their way into his face, chest, arms, and hands. He rather looked as though he had walked face-first into a tornado of kitchen knives.
Vanishing the blood revealed it to be worse than mere physical damage. Rot had already sunk its claws into Dillonsby’s exposed muscles and blood—far too quickly to be natural. Severus summoned his emergency potions kit from the kitchen and magicked two doses of immune-boosting potion directly into Dillonsby’s stomach. It was hard on the body but there was no time to wake him and force him to drink. That done, he found the harshest purifying agent he had on hand and used his hands and wand to pack it into the wounds, deepest first.
They would scar. The purifying agent damaged localized tissue in the process of burning out contagion. But Dillonsby would live.
As soon as he was stable, Severus moved on to Cornfoot, and rapidly identified a particularly insidious curse at work, one that tunneled its way through his body along the nerves and overwhelmed the peripheral nervous system with random noise. Cornfoot was lucky none of the random signals had yet stopped his heart. As it was he was likely to have a hypersensitive pain response for months while the damage healed. The most Severus could do for him now was pull the curse out of him. That alone took him a half an hour or more of low, precise chanting and intense focus.
By the time he was done Severus had a pounding headache and a throat like sandpaper. He poured a dose of his standard neural regenerator and a pain potion down Cornfoot’s throat, cast a charm to make him swallow, and sat back, rubbing at dry eyes.
Andromeda was still hard at work over Sideris and Robards. Bloody buggering fuck, he’d hoped she could manage that much. Severus forced himself to his feet. “What’s wrong with them?”
“I don’t know! It’s not responding to anything—”
Severus set to work. Andromeda Tonks had been born a Black and was raised to magics the Ministry called Dark Arts like some people were to the piano or quidditch. She was the farthest thing from squeamish. But she had gone years without seriously practicing or studying that kind of deep magic and Severus himself had been immersed in it, by choice, since he was but a teen.
The answer became clear to him and he sat back. Fuck. This was bad. This implied one of two scenarios as the cause of all these injuries, and while both were awful, one was… worse.
“What happened?” Severus said icily.
Andromeda glared at him. “Severus, so help me Merlin, if you don’t—”
“You can’t help them.”
“What… do you mean?”
“Tell me,” Severus said, “what happened.”
She rubbed her eyes. “I don’t know.”
Severus tilted his head.
Normally Andromeda’s occlumency was more than adequate of keeping him out. But he gambled that her exhaustion, stress, and fear would weaken it, and he won, easing soft as silk into her mind. It was right there: a lie, and behind it—
Andromeda’s face twisted up into a snarl as she threw him out. “Do not ever look into my mind again, Severus Snape.”
“You lied,” he said tonelessly. He had seen more frightening things this week than Andromeda Tonks. “You do know, or at the very least you suspect. Tell me.”
Under his veneer of calm, his heart was racing.
“I believe that they targeted a known Death Eater and associate.”
“Who.”
Andromeda was silent. But it didn’t matter. She had already confirmed his suspicion.
Severus shook his head. “You utter fucking fools. You tried to kill Hadrian Black, didn’t you?”
“How did you know?”
“Because they,” Severus pointed at Robards and Sideris, “are suffering under a parselmagic curse. I can’t lift it. No one in Britain can save Black or the Dark Lord himself. And somehow I don’t think Mr. Black is going to be very inclined to help. Frankly, neither am I. It was idiotic of you to just stuff them through my Floo at godsawful o’clock and pray I was both home and alone.”
“I couldn’t keep them at home. Ted is—it’s bad enough Robin…”
“What happened to Willicker?”
“Dead,” Andromeda said curtly. “Don’t know what. Violet Crockett brought them all back and left again. Ted’s dealing with Robin’s body. We can’t… if we get searched again, if there’s any suspicion…”
“And you think no one will suspect?”
“Harry Black is a problem,” Andromeda snapped. “For everyone. The Blacks’ neutrality has long frustrated those who wish to use them. If Black dies, Narcissa’s boy will have a claim, and the Dark Lord would certainly prefer a Malfoy in control of the House of Black. She looked at him sharply and then with dawning horror. “Unless… unless you have reason to believe Harry Black isn’t neutral.”
“I don’t,” said Severus.
But he didn’t think it convinced her.
“And Thorne?” he said, when it became clear the conversation was over. “Is there a reason you didn’t renervate him?”
“He’s had nerve damage. I had to stun him to stop him trying to heal himself.”
Severus cast a few diagnostics and grimaced. Whether it was Black or the companion who had done this, they were precise, thorough, and powerful. “He has essentially no functioning motor or sensory nerves below his waist. I can brew potions for his recovery but it will take time. And ingredients I am not sure I have on hand.”
“Good enough.”
Andromeda promised him someone would come by in the morning to collect the wounded and deliver the supplies he needed. Then she was gone and it was up to Severus to move them upstairs and stabilize them. Dillonsby would live. Cornfoot might wish he had not. Thorne would recover fully and could be woken safely but Severus had no intention of dealing with an alert and irritating Ethan Thorne at this hour.
Only once he had them all settled did he allow himself to stop and think.
Severus had not shared with the Order the rumors he had heard of Harry Black. The young wizard was one of the most promising potioners Severus had ever taught and he refused to be the reason one of them chose to attack Black and cut his potential short. Evidently it had happened anyway, but judging by the damage and the spells used, Black had been accompanied by a known or suspected Death Eater, and both parties had fought back viciously.
There was a secret about him amongst the Dark Lord’s ranks. Severus had intentionally never learned it. His Vow concerned Julian, not his former twin.
Yet Severus had thought that at most Black was willing to work with the Death Eaters, likely for the sake of Nott or Parkinson or one of his other friends whose families were deep in the Dark Lord’s pockets. If Black had been alone in the company of a Death Eater and the two had fought back so effectively then it seemed Black was closer to them than Severus had expected.
Severus was also not a fool. The tides had, lately, been shifting, in a way he could not prevent and Albus had not foreseen. There had been no crackdowns. No mass arrests or repression. If anything, the opposite had been going on since mid-July or thereabouts—enclaves growing, an enormous paradigm shift in the Wizengamot, policy reviews, funding streams diverting or joining. Severus’ orders as the new Headmaster of Hogwarts had likewise been entirely reasonable: he was to improve the curriculum across the board, remove Binns from his post, find a competent Defense professor and make assurances that the curse on the position was no more, and coordinate with the Ministry to evaluate all incoming students’ health for signs of physical emotional abuse at home.
People liked what had been happening. And the enclavers, to the best of Severus’ knowledge, attributed most of their newfound power to Harry Black.
Perhaps Black was doing more than support the Death Eaters. Perhaps he was actively working with or for them.
The contract… Severus had allowed Black to steal it from his office, had known that it came from the Dark Lord himself. At the time he suspected Crouch had used it as a lure to draw Black closer to them. What if he’d been wrong? What if it was not a lure but a peace offering or gesture of good faith?
Severus closed his eyes and his mind raced along the contours of the problem. Considering every angle. Comparing and discarding every fact, rumor, hint, and whisper. It was what he was good at it. It was why he was both a good potioner and a better spy.
In the end he sat up, wrote a letter, and sealed it in an envelope, all with steady hands. On it he wrote Hadrian Sirius Lord Black. His owl, Asphodel, took it and flew out the window before Severus could change his mind.
He hoped this was not a mistake.
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