At the Maker and Mark, one of Diagon’s upscale taverns, customers could rent heavily warded upstairs rooms by the hour for sensitive conversations.
Harry, luckily, had the funds to obtain one for his meeting with Snape. He arrived ten minutes before the appointed time and, as the room was empty, the proprietor allowed him upstairs, where he immediately asked Eriss to have a sniff around.
“Many people. Many cleaning magics,” she said, darting around the room’s perimeter. It was rather small, paneled with dark wood carved into geometric patterns, and lit by several unobtrusive wall sconces filled with warm yellow witchlight. Most of its space was taken up by an oblong table and six surrounding chairs. All were made of the same dark wood, well-carved and polished.
“Any watchers?” Harry asked, doing his own perimeter, looking for magical or mundane means of observation, feeling for wards.
Eriss paused by the door again. “I scent none.”
“Well, that’s reassuring, at least. Come here. Stay hidden unless he becomes a threat.”
His familiar wound her way up Harry’s leg and into his lap as he settled into one of the chairs on the table’s long side. No need to make this more awkward than it already seemed likely to be.
“Do you know what he wants?” Eriss asked.
“Not really.” The letter had been vague. Delivered the normal way, not to his Mark-magic owl portal, which suggested Snape didn’t know Harry was Marked, or didn’t want to give away that he did. It said in rather roundabout terms that he had information relevant to the Order’s war effort and that he sought an audience with Lord Black.
Snape was approaching him as a Lord of the Wizengamot, not as a student. Harry respected Snape and didn’t want to rub his personal authority into his much older professor’s face. At the same time, he couldn’t not participate in the social protocols demanded of him when someone formally invoked his title and status like this.
And then there was the issue of his and Snape’s uncertain loyalties. Well. Harry was sure of where his own loyalties were. But Harry had in the past professed a certain allegiance to the Order, and Snape had, to the best of Harry’s knowledge, convinced the Order that he was their spy. Had convinced both Dumbledore and Voldemort that he was loyal.
If Snape was still acting as the Order’s double agent, Harry did not want to be the cause of Snape getting murdered by the Dark Lord for treason. Nor did he want Snape to carry news of Harry’s allegiance to the Order. For this reason, Harry and Theo had worked out a series of runes that would temporarily suppress the distinct signature of the Dark Mark and keep Snape from feeling Harry’s. Voldemort probably wouldn’t be all that happy if he found out Harry and Theo could do this but neither of them planned on telling him.
Hopefully the meeting didn’t go too long, though. The potion they’d used to write the runes on Harry’s arm had started itching as soon as it dried.
His thoughts were cut off by a light knock on the door. “Come in,” Harry called.
Snape opened it and stepped through. His impassive black eyes swept the small room as he shut the door behind himself with a delicate snick. His hands, Harry noticed, were conspicuously empty of a wand.
“Professor Snape,” he greeted. “It’s good to see you.” For a given value of good.
“You as well, Lord Black,” said Snape, wry tone saying he was well aware of the strangeness. He sat across from Harry and placed his forearms, palms up and hands open, on the table. “I seek your counsel and protection. I invoke the right of sanctuary and safe passage.”
Oh, wow, okay, this was so not where Harry had expected the meeting to go. His mouth moved on autopilot. “Your plea has been heard and answered. The House of Black extends conditional sanctuary to Master Severus Snape.”
A previously unnoticeable tension bled out of Snape’s posture. “I… need to speak with you.”
“I gathered,” said Harry drily.
“When I was seven years old, I met a witch named Lily Evans.” Harry’s eyes widened before he could control himself. “She had no knowledge of magic,” Snape continued, “and was fascinated by every story I could tell her. We were the best of friends for many years.”
What the fuck. Had Barty known this?
“I’m assuming something changed,” Harry said.
“Yes. I was a poor, Muggle-raised halfblood in Slytherin, though descended from an old and respectable pureblood line through my mother. It was a turbulent time.” Snape seemed to be weighing his words, debating how much context to provide. “The mantra ‘ability before blood’—you may have heard your peers express such an idea—originated within the Dark Lord’s earliest movement, a small coterie of largely pureblood wizards who called themselves the Knights of Walpurgis. Grindelwald’s movement was the culmination of many decades of worsening prejudice against Muggles and Muggleborn wixen. Many of the Wizengamot lords of the time held similar ideals. The Dark Lord, who is himself no pureblood, found our system frustratingly corrupt and stagnant. The Knights sought to disrupt those prejudices and the complacency among Ministry and aristocratic leaders.”
Harry nodded; he knew, more or less, all this history.
“The Knights found themselves pushed out of the political process and shifted accordingly towards what Muggles today might call ‘activism’ that, over time, grew ever more violent. The all-out rapine and pillage of some accounts of the war is a gross exaggeration but to claim they were a bastion of morality would be equally false.” Snape’s tone was as even and flat as if he was lecturing on cauldron thickness regulations. He wouldn’t quite meet Harry’s eyes. “The Knights, rebranded the Death Eaters, gained traction and notoriety. They were popular among many of the children of Britain’s powerful elites as well as among children like me.”
“You saw the Death Eaters as an opening to advance,” said Harry.
Snape inclined his head. “I did. I will not deny that I was also seduced by their promises of a world in which no magical child should ever have to grow up in the care of a Muggle who misunderstood and mistreated them.”
Harry might have thought Snape meant him, if not for the singular: a Muggle.
Snape meant himself.
“It was the first source of pride I had ever found,” Snape said. Was he trying to justify it to Harry? He must really think Harry was still on the fence, here. Or maybe he thought otherwise but was covering his bases in case he was wrong. “Over the years I rather uncritically fell in with the students others called junior Death Eaters. I was also engaged in a years-long rivalry with a gang of Gryffindor students who took personal offense to Slytherins in general.”
“You mean Sirius, James, Remus, and Peter,” said Harry, and when Snape appeared startled, added, “I did listen to Sirius’ stories, you know. He regretted how they treated you.”
“Did he,” said Snape with enormous disdain. “Fifteen years too late, but better late than never, I suppose.”
“Am I to conclude you and… and Lily fought because of your ties to the Death Eater movement?”
“There was an incident.” Snape’s lips hardly moved. “In a moment of shame and humiliation I erred badly and publicly called her a Mudblood. There were—several of my House observing. I feared what they would do if I needed a Muggleborn to come to my aid. I apologized. She never forgave me. I do not… seek to make excuses. It was a cruel and unfair thing to do to my longest and best friend. I’m only trying to explain my conduct.”
Harry rather thought she could’ve been more understanding on that front. He nodded. “I understand. Go on.”
Surely there was a point in all this aside from shaking the foundations of what Harry believed about his Potions professor.
“I had no reason, then, not to join the group she so loathed. Among them, I was respected for my talent and mind, not mocked like others did for my poverty, or lack of upper-class etiquette, or social graces. Within a year of graduation I was one of the brightest and most promising of the Death Eaters. I had earned the Dark Lord’s personal attention and praise. I was making a difference. Or so I thought.”
“And then he began targeting the Potters,” Harry said softly.
“The prophecy.” Snape’s hands flexed as though for a wand. He left them where they were, on the table. Unthreatening. “I went to Albus Dumbledore. I told him I would give him whatever he wanted if only he could keep them safe.”
Holy fucking Merlin. So that was how Snape became a spy.
“I told the Dark Lord,” Snape said hoarsely, “that I had a way in with Dumbledore. Both of them believed me their loyal servant. I had not—the Dark Lord was by then a… pale shadow of the man my school friends had spoken of. Erratic, cruel, unpredictably violent, his attention revolved increasingly around his mad obsessions. The war began to go badly. All the progress of two decades of work began to vanish. And then, overnight, he was gone.”
“And Dumbledore kept you out of Azkaban, in exchange for… what?” said Harry slowly. Internally he was trying to figure out what to do with all of this. The right of sanctuary was an ancient custom. It wasn’t an oath, per se, but it wouldn’t be pleasant for Harry to violate it either, unless Snape did so first by attacking or betraying a member of the House. Voldemort would be likely to respect it: those sorts of social protocols were a cornerstone of his campaigns about reform. But he would also undoubtedly view it as a betrayal if Harry did not immediately tell him all of this.
Fuck. What a nightmare.
“I spent years at Hogwarts, teaching, under his eye. He wanted a pet Potions master,” Snape’s lip curled, and okay, that was good, Harry could work with his disdain, “and he wanted me present to spy on the Dark Lord when he returned, as I and most of the Death Eaters were certain he would. Most of all, Albus wanted me to protect the Boy Who Lived. He asked me to swear an oath.”
Oh fuck. “Tell me the terms.”
“I swore on my life to protect the Boy-Who-Lived, by sacrificing myself if necessary.”
“He didn’t make you swear to oppose the Dark Lord, or keep his secrets, or be loyal to the Order, or help Jules defeat the Dark Lord?” Harry said. How fucking arrogant…
“No. He has spent the last fifteen years playing to my—my guilt—”
“Why guilt?”
Snape almost flinched. “I could not save her.”
“He asked her to stand aside,” Harry said slowly. “You… asked him to spare her life? And he agreed?”
“He—what?” Snape had gone ashen.
“It’s one of the memories I endure when I’m near dementors. You didn’t know?”
Snape shook his head. “No, I—it doesn’t matter. I couldn’t save her. I blamed myself.”
Harry’s eyes narrowed. There was more to it than that. If Dumbledore really thought Snape’s guilt would be powerful enough to keep him loyal, then it couldn’t just be a nebulous sort of survivor’s guilt. It had to be bigger. Personal. But if Snape didn’t want to share, Harry wouldn’t pry; it didn’t seem particularly relevant right now. “He was truly so arrogant?”
“He was.”
More fool him. “Alright. And you’re telling me all of this… why?”
“Because…” Snape took a deep breath. “I know a secret. Albus entrusted me with the knowledge… no one else knows. Not a soul. It could make the difference in this war.”
Harry wanted to scream. “And you’re planning to share it with me?”
Snape looked up and finally met Harry’s eyes. “I believe you would do anything to keep him safe. Just as I would.”
“So it’s about Jules.”
“Do you know,” Snape said, and hesitated, as if on the edge of a great cliff. Then his face hardened abruptly. “Do you know what a Horcrux is?”
Harry sat bolt upright. “The Dark Lord has made a horcrux?”
“Several. Albus believed seven, one of them unintentional,” said Snape. “The diary from your second year was one. He is… greatly displeased with Lucius for its loss, though Lucius knew not what it was. As for the other seven…”
“Jules,” Harry said softly. Horror rocked through him in unrelenting waves. “Merlin. Jules is a horcrux.”
“Yes. Albus only told me this year, when we knew that the curse on his arm would eventually kill him.”
What? If that was so—
Snape’s black eyes burned with rage and something very like hurt. “For years he asked me to protect Lily’s son. To help and protect him. Only to tell me that all along he has been raising Julian Potter like a pig for slaughter.”
Harry wanted to resurrect Dumbledore and engage in a spot of recreational torture. Theo would help. Barty too, even if he had no personal problems with Dumbledore. “The prophecy—”
“Only states that Potter can defeat the Dark Lord, not that he will. I don’t know the details of it,” well wasn’t it just so helpful that Harry did, “but it was Albus’ belief that Jules must die at the Dark Lord’s wand in order for him to be defeated.”
“This is why they wouldn’t let him sign the contract,” Harry said, as though he hadn’t already known as much. “Because if he doesn’t face Voldemort, he’ll never die, and Voldemort will never be defeated. And he doesn’t even know the truth of it because Albus Dumbledore was too busy playing puppetmaster to look for another way.”
Snape nodded once. “Lord Black, I have a question.”
“Yeah, go ahead,” Harry said, wanting one of Blaise’s drinks rather badly.
“Did you have anything to do with the contract the Dark Lord offered to Potter?”
Harry looked at Snape carefully. Pieces were still falling into place, but he thought he finally saw the final picture’s broad strokes. Snape had joined the Death Eaters because of ideological compatibility. He had only begun to doubt when Voldemort’s insanity—apparently induced by making multiple horcruxes, Merlin, the man was supposed to be smart—drove him to senseless violence separate from their original purposes. And then, when Voldemort had targeted Lily Potter, Snape had turned coat. Now here he was: betrayed on a profoundly personal level by Albus Dumbledore, bound by an oath to protect the Dark Lord’s prophesied enemy, and, if Harry was right, interested in negotiating a future wherein he could fulfill the oath and remain with the Death Eaters under a newly sane Voldemort.
“What makes you think I did?” Harry said.
“The Dark Lord offering such a compromise is… nothing I had ever dreamed possible. Even Albus was entirely taken aback. I do not want him to die. I do not know if my oath will kill me should I allow Albus’ plan to go on.” Snape looked down at the table again. “You are the only person I can think of whose support might tempt the Dark Lord into such an overture. If you had anything to do with the offer—if you have any leverage that might produce another, no matter how stringent, that would ensure Potter lives—I am asking you to try.”
It was as close as Harry had ever seen Snape come to begging.
He made a snap decision. “Professor?”
When Snape looked up, Harry neatly unbuttoned his left cuff. Snape’s eyes followed the motion. Calmly, with no more fanfare than someone pushing their sleeves up on a hot day, Harry folded back his robe until the Dark Mark and the runes written across its surface were visible.
Snape appeared to have stopped breathing.
“I had everything to do with that contract. The Dark Lord offered it in exchange for… well, something immensely valuable, let’s say. It was the initial foundation of what has become a remarkably fruitful alliance.” Harry smiled like the shark Andromeda Tonks once called him.
“You… when?”
“Litha.” Harry had never seen Snape this unguarded. Naked shock was writ large across the Potions Master’s harsh features. “You had to have suspected something.”
“Not… I thought at most you were financially and politically backing…”
“I’m not going to turn you in for treason,” Harry said. “Though it may interest you to hear that the Dark Lord knows the full prophecy and swore to me that he would do his utmost to fulfill it without bringing harm to Jules Potter.”
“Why? Just… to get Lord Black?”
“Well, yes, and I’m also courting his de facto son.”
Snape’s eyes bugged.
“You still have sanctuary within the House of Black,” Harry reminded him. “The terms of our allegiance are very particular. Theo likens it to the arrangement between an emperor and an autonomous city-state absorbed into the empire but retaining internal sovereignty. My House and my people are mine to steer as I see fit.”
“He may execute us both,” Snape said. “He is not kind to traitors.”
“He never has to know,” Harry said softly. “You and I are both adequately skilled at occlumency to ensure as much. Here is what you are going to do, Snape.” He waited until Snape was looking at him again. “You are going to continue spying on the Order for the Dark Lord. You are going to do nothing to draw His suspicion towards you. You will leave the problem of Jules Potter to me and I swear to you I will not let him come to harm. You will be from now on a loyal Death Eater. Don’t tell Him the Order know of the horcruxes—he will want to know why you have kept it to yourself for so long.”
“I believe he has reabsorbed several of them,” Snape said. “There have been rumors… it would explain his, ah.”
“Return to the world of the sane?” Harry supplied. “It doesn’t matter. If the Three Stooges can hunt any of them down I’ll be shocked and if they can destroy one even more so.”
“Albus intended for me to supply them with the Sword of Gryffindor. It’s imbued with basilisk venom.”
“So we’re obviously not going to do that,” Harry said. “Just… stay out of it. Watch Tonks and Thorne; they’re up to something, harassing Death Eaters and the like.”
“You wouldn’t happen to have personal knowledge of two Order members felled by a curse cast with parselmagic?” Snape said.
Harry smiled sunnily. “I’ve no idea why you would think that.”
“Foolish of me.” Snape rolled his eyes. He seemed to have recovered rather admirably from the mortal terror of just a few moments ago. Probably that was why he was such a good spy.
Which reminded him. Harry let the cheerful demeanor drop. “Just one more thing. I’m going to need you to make a vow.”
Barty was astounded by the conversation with Snape. Only the vow Harry made Snape take and the risk that Harry would be considered traitorous by association convinced him not to take it all straight to Voldemort. That and Harry’s conviction that Team Potter would be utterly unable to destroy any of them.
“Do you have a plan to neutralize them?” Barty asked.
Harry thought about Parvati Patil’s mysterious absence and the friendly rapport he and the Vipers had maintained with Padma. “The beginnings of one.”
He had to tell Theo by way of a heavily warded letter. The odds of anyone in the Order managing to intercept it were slim to nil, and the odds of anyone from the Death Eaters trying to read one of their Marked fellows’ private mail even smaller, but it still left him anxious and out of sorts for the two days it took to get a reply. When it came, though, he was reassured: Theo had used an innocuous pass phrase halfway through his letter that indicated all was well and it hadn’t been tampered with.
The autumn slipped by almost without Harry’s notice. He kept busy, even with Theo gone—maybe because Theo was gone—with Wizengamot duties and managing his investments and coordinating the operation of half the Ministry with several other Death Eaters. Scrimgeour was on the way out. The only question now was if the vote of no confidence would be called before or after Yule. When it passed—and it would; the enclavers were furious with him for resisting their attempts at reform in the Wizengamot—Hazel Laurens was already lined up as a strong alternative candidate. Her only real opposition would come from what was left of Dumbledore’s political alliance and even that would be weak and easily overcome. They didn’t have a single candidate with enough broad popular appeal to best Hazel.
Harry took personal pride as the enclaves grew. Something like eleven percent of the British wizarding population now lived in one, a figure up from about six percent last year, according to the figures Daphne bullied out of the Ministry’s Archives for Hermione. Harry kept up his regular visits and personal investments and grew to be a familiar face in the burgeoning shopping streets of Avrinium, Sax-Lindsey, Abney-on-the-Wold, and Loch Bulig.
As the winter holidays approached, he pointedly did most of his Yule shopping amongst the enclaves, and at Riasmoore. It was an excellent break from his latest project—helping draft a bill to create and fund a primary school for underage magical children.
The only exception to his shopping was the gift he was working on for Barty, which was of a rather more intangible nature.
Harry looked forward to the holidays, and Theo’s return from Hogwarts, with the most excitement he had felt about Yule in years.
-----
Jules had never been this hungry before. It wasn’t like the cramping hunger after a long workout or a hard dueling practice. It was a constant gnawing ache, sometimes burning low but never sated.
Their food stores were low. They’d done their best to pack, but feeding four people through the winter was hard. They couldn’t even really go shop for more: the polyjuice Parvati had made before they left had gone funny, none of them had any Muggle coins, and the one time Parvati tried to confundus a Muggle into giving them food from a store called Tesco, it went so badly the poor bloke wound up on the floor with a nosebleed. After that they couldn’t risk stealing in the Muggle world.
As for magical shops, there was even less of a chance. All four of them had their names up on wanted posters now. Neville had gone very grim when he first saw one but that was all.
Jules was so grateful to Neville for having shown up. He was the only thing keeping them together—sharing the locket amongst all four of them meant its effects were limited, but more than that, Neville’s quiet humor and easygoing nature were the difference between an argument heating up or fading into nothing. It seemed like he could defuse any of the sniping matches between Parvati and Ron, or the arguments Parvati and Jules got into about what to do with the Snatchers.
They hadn’t found a single horcrux yet or even come up with any leads. Trapping and dealing with Snatchers had started out as a way to do something, anything, productive. It wasn’t even that hard. Parvati and Jules could put up trap-wards, Ron would stand in the middle and shout “Voldemort!” and then apparate, and when the Snatchers popped in they’d stun them, snap their wands, and apparate out with the Snatchers in tow.
But then they came up on the inevitable problem of what to do with said Snatchers. The first few times Parvati had just hit them with her overpowered confundus and dumped them somewhere, but the effects of the confundus charm were reversible, and as Ron pointed out, did they really want to keep turning their enemies loose to go hurt more people? What was the point in trapping them if they were just going to go free?
Keeping them prisoner was impossible. They didn’t have enough food, for one thing, or a place to keep human prisoners for another.
In the end Neville had said what Jules hadn’t wanted to even think. “We kill them.”
“No,” Jules said automatically.
“Then we stop this completely. It’s not worth the risks if we’re just going to keep turning them free again!”
“Nev’s right,” said Ron unexpectedly. Jules stared at him, betrayed. “If they’re dead they can’t hurt anyone else.”
Parvati hadn’t resisted. Since then, they had captured and—and killed just over a dozen Snatchers. Neville and Ron usually did it, just simple cutting curses to the head, fast and hopefully painless.
Neville had thrown up the first time, actually, but then he kept on doing it, face grim and jaw set. Jules couldn’t fathom how he ever thought Neville was less than one of the bravest people he knew.
Today’s trap was set up the same way as usual. Jules and Parvati stood to the north and south of their circle, wands raised and wards ready. Neville waited to the west and Ron would apparate east as soon as he’d summoned the Snatchers.
The forest around them was quiet and still.
“VOLDEMORT!” Ron bellowed, followed by the crack of apparition.
Several more cracks followed instantly on its heels but something was wrong. It cost Jules a precious second to realize why: these cracks had come from behind them.
“TO YOUR BACKS!” he shouted, already ducking. Just in time, too: a jet of red light streaked over his head and splashed harmlessly off a tree.
Jules came up casting. Moody would’ve killed him for that slip. There were two or three Snatchers trying to curse him, but they all had bad angles blocked by the trees, and Jules knew the area, had scouted it in advance with the others. He ducked behind a giant old stump and then scrambled along to one side where a dried-up creekbed made a dip you couldn’t really see from a distance. The Snatchers were still cautiously homing in on the stump when Jules popped up thirty feet left of them and aimed. He brought two of them down before the third got a shield up, and then they were dueling, properly.
A scream ripped the air. High-pitched, feminine. Parvati. Jules cast a desperate wide-effect blasting curse and apparated before he could see if it worked.
He landed where Parvati had started and saw the problem right away: one of the Snatchers had her wand, and another held her under what had to be crucio. She screamed again and Jules saw red.
“Stupefy horribilis!” he roared, slashing his wand through the air. Most full-fledged Aurors couldn’t handle that curse. It took a lot out of him and Jules flagged immediately, but the two who’d been looming over Parvati and two more behind them were all on the ground, unconscious, so he counted it as a win. He stumbled over and grabbed Parvati’s wand and shoved it in her hand.
“C’mon,” he said, tugging at her. His muscles felt weak and jellyish. Magical exhaustion. He’d need to sleep for, like, a day when this was over.
If they got out of it.
Parvati staggered to her feet. Tremors wracked her body and Jules reminded himself she’d never been under the Cruciatus before, had no experience handling its effects. He tugged her over to a big tree and, teeth gritted, levitated her by her robe up into its branches, where she’d be pretty hidden. “Stay there,” he said, and then he was running again.
Ron or Neville? Ron or—
Harry had trained Neville. Jules went for his best friend.
Ron had gone east, on foot. Jules tracked the sounds of the chase and did two short-burst apparitions to catch up. It cost him energy but he couldn’t afford to wait around.
When he landed the second time, he knew why Ron had been running; there were five Snatchers on his tail. They’d never had more than six in one squad before. This had been planned.
Merlin, Jules was an idiot.
He got two of them with stupefy before the others caught on, but by then, Ron had heard Jules and turned back to help, and within a few minutes the two of them had won. Jules was limping thanks to a curse that he thought had broken all the toes on his right foot—weirdly specific—and Ron was bleeding from a few gashes, one of which glowed an ominous purple.
All of them had some basic healing skills by now. Jules ran through the usual bevy of countercurses until the purple glow went away and then cast two more charms to sanitize Ron’s wounds and stop the bleeding. Parvati or Neville would have to do the actual healing part; they were both better at episkey than Jules was.
Jules took two steps back towards the clearing. “Wait,” Ron hissed, “we can’t just leave them!”
Oh. Right. Of course not.
Ron held his wand to the forehead of the nearest unconscious Snatcher and cast the charm. It barely did any external damage at that distance, but in an instant he slumped, alive and then dead.
It wasn’t fair to make Ron and Neville do this every time.
Before he knew what he was doing, Jules had stepped forward and pushed his wand against another forehead. “Jules?” said Ron, but then Jules had cast it, it was over, he’d killed someone. This dead body on the forest floor had been alive seconds ago and Jules had been the one to take that away.
No wonder Neville had thrown up. Jules very much wanted to.
Ron’s voice snapped him out of it. Ron had done a third and was moving on to the fourth. Jules shook his head and killed the fifth Snatcher from a distance. Maybe it was cowardly but he didn’t want to look too closely at the face this time.
“It gets better,” Ron said lowly. “C’mon. Let’s go back.”
Neville had been cornered by three and taken them down much like Jules had, using terrain to outsmart them. He, Jules saw, hadn’t bothered with stunners to begin with. “Everyone alright?” he said when he saw them. “Where’s Parvati?”
“Up a tree,” Jules said, “they crucio’d her.”
Neville’s face darkened. “Bastards. Right. Let’s get going before more of ‘em come.”
“We can’t do this anymore,” Parvati said that night. She hadn’t stopped shivering since they got back to their tent from the ambush site even though nearly every warm cloak they had was wrapped around her shoulders. “Th-they clearly know what’s… what’s going on. Next time there’ll be more of them.”
“We did alright today,” said Ron, but not like he expected them to cave.
Neville shook his head glumly. “Parvati’s right. Sure, we survived today, but when this lot doesn’t come back, next time they’ll just send more. We’re only four people.”
“Could Harry have taken down this many?” Jules said abruptly.
“Er… probably. Well. Not alone. But Harry and… one or two of the others in his group?” Neville still wouldn’t tell them the group’s name. “Yeah, they could probably swing an ambush that would trap the Snatchers.”
“Then we should be able to,” said Jules.
Neville shook his head. “Look, Jules… I’ve told you before. Harry has been up to his eyeballs in Dark magic for years. A lot if isn’t, you know, evil, I do think the Ministry bans way too much, but—my point is he’s been totally into really powerful magic for ages. I don’t even know what all he can do.” A bitter look crosses his face. “He keeps a lot of stuff to himself. But without the books he’s had, and the time to study? You can’t just do that sort of shite on power alone.”
Jules swore. Then he swore again, stood up, and stormed out of the tent—unevenly because they were rationing the Skele-Gro and his foot was still healing.
He knew Neville was right. It just fucking sucked. Everything about this sucked.
Parvati followed him out into the night awhile later, still wrapped up in cloaks but looking a bit better. “You feeling alright?” Jules asked her.
“So-so.” She leaned on a tree next to the one he’d sat down against. “You?”
“Almost all better,” Jules said, wiggling his foot.
“I didn’t mean that.”
He knew.
Jules tipped his head back against the bark and sighed. “I hate that Harry’s… that he’s…”
“I know. I think if my sister…” Parvati’s lips twisted and she looked away. “Well, it doesn’t matter now.”
“What is it? You can tell me,” Jules said.
She shrugged. “Padma wasn’t very happy with me for wanting to leave. Said I’d just get myself killed.”
Jules bit back a comment about people who thought the war would just leave them alone if they sat it out and pretended everything was normal.
“She’s… she cares,” Parvati insisted, like she’d heard what Jules was thinking. “She does. She just doesn’t want to die. I guess I can’t… fault her for that.”
I can. Jules didn’t say that either. “Hey, it’ll be fine. At least she’s not, you know. An actual Death Eater.” Harry wasn’t Marked, as far as Neville knew, but Jules didn’t care. Harry had helped the Death Eaters in the Ministry. He was courting one of them, one of the worst of them; Crouch was ruthless, the type to torture and kill on a whim, a monster, and Harry was—
And Neville was probably right that the whole political shift likely turned on the Blacks’ money and influence, wielded by Harry’s too-clever fingers.
Harry was as good as a Death Eater. He wasn’t just passively staying neutral. He was helping them. He was proving Dad right and Jules hated him for it.
“Yeah, there’s that,” said Parvati, again with that odd, twisted expression that was almost a smile.
“If he lives… I’m going to have to… he’ll wind up in Azkaban,” Jules said. “I hate that. I hate him for that. Why couldn’t he just… why did he have to… I’m going to have to tell my kids their uncle’s a terrorist and a criminal. Fuck.”
“Maybe he’s under Imperius.”
Jules shook his head. “We can both fight it off… maybe something else, a mind-control potion, I dunno. Neville’s whole—that’s damning, don’t you think? It’s not like this is a sudden change in behavior. It’s where he’s been going for years. Dad was… Dad was right to think… but maybe if Dad hadn’t sent Harry away, Harry never would’ve gone down that path in the first place! Fuck!”
“Oi, quiet down!” Ron’s voice came distantly from the tent.
“Muffliato,” Parvati said.
“Thanks.” Jules wrapped his arms around his knees. “I just can’t believe how fast everything is changing. All these new enclaves… the Wizengamot… the Prophet won’t say anything about any attacks…”
“Maybe there haven’t been any.”
Jules blinked at her. “What? Of course there have, it’s the Death Eaters, that’s what they do.”
Parvati’s face was carefully blank. “And you’re so sure they can’t have… changed strategies?”
“It’s Vol—sorry. You-Know-Who giving them orders. I don’t really see him suddenly changing his mind and deciding Muggles are alright after all,” Jules said sarcastically.
“No, I guess not.” Parvati peered up through the winter-bare branches at the moon. “It’s almost Yule.”
“What?”
“Yule,” she repeated, as if Jules hadn’t heard her. “Did you forget?”
He had.
“I’ve never not been with Padma for Yule. I miss her,” Parvati whispered.
Shame burned in Jules’ stomach. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s not your fault. I volunteered. I knew this would take a long time.” She smiled down at him, gently, and lips Jules had kissed in the past made his cock warm and start to fill, but it wasn’t time for that.
Maybe, after the war…
But not right now.
“I miss him too,” Jules confessed. “I hate it. I shouldn’t.”
“He’s your brother. It’s alright to miss him, even if you hate what he’s doing.”
A silent tear slipped down Jules’ cheek. He scraped it roughly away and levered himself upright. “Come on. It’s cold, and you need rest.”
-----
The Yule rite was held at Malfoy Manor, in their ancient, twisted woods. It was a somber and gentle affair. Altogether different from the wildness of Litha. Harry carried that peace with him back to Grimmauld Place, where he retreated to the ritual room in the dungeons and went through the Blacks’ private family rites. The Old English words rolled off his tongue, thick like honey, invoking Magic and calling on her to grant protection and a fruitful rest through the dark of the year. Harry’s family magic swirled around him and into him. It was cold, quiet, and still, the essence of the rune isa drawn on his forehead and the backs of his hands: wait, it whispered, wait, gather your strength for the battles to come.
Harry could do that.
He was still half-meditating and as relaxed as he had been in months when he came upstairs. It was almost midnight. The wards informed him Barty and Theo, finished with their own private rites, were in the drawing room, so that’s where Harry went.
The burning brands they’d brought back from the Yule bonfire still smouldered in their rack by the fireplace, which was itself full of fire topped by an enormous section of log. Harry went to Barty and kissed him, his fingers seeking Theo’s, and when he pulled away they were all smiling. “Let’s light it?”
“To the new year,” said Theo, reaching for the burning brands.
In unison, they pressed the burning ends to the kindling at the bottom of the fireplace, Barty on Harry’s left and Theo to his right. Harry was warm for reasons totally unrelated to the fire they were starting. Both Barty and Theo had chosen to bring their Yule brands here. Not to another hearth, in another home. Here, in Grimmauld Place, where they lived, with him.
The kindling caught. Flames bloomed, warm and bright; still they did not take their brands away, they couldn’t until the Yule log itself began to burn. The fire grew and so did a bright, warm frisson of magic that ran through the air, binding Harry to his lovers. It wasn’t loud, or strict like an oath. It was the soft and quiet touch of hearth-magic.
Harry had read about it but never thought to feel it for himself.
Barty’s eyes were damp when the Yule log finally darkened and then at last began burning.
“Happy Yule,” Harry said softly.
“Happy Yule,” they both echoed back.
Somehow all three of them stacked their brands in the fire and then shifted back to the sofa without really letting go of each other.
Theo was the first to produce a pair of wrapped gifts. Harry took his with a bemused smile: it was much heavier than it appeared, and oddly lumpy inside the thick burnt-silver paper.
He started carefully peeling the paper aside. Barty had no such compunctions and ripped into it like a child on a sugar high. Harry hadn’t even uncovered more than a few inches of his gift when Barty froze: in his hands, amidst the remains of the wrapping paper, was a very old book, well-maintained and bound in leather.
“Is this a first-edition Masquerade?” Barty breathed, and Harry whistled; that was one of very few works of fiction written by wixen to survive the book burnings of the years just before the Statute. Uncountable hundreds of books, plays, research treatises, and grimoires had gone up in smoke. A first edition of the French novel would be… Harry couldn’t even guess how much that would cost. Let alone for one so well preserved.
“It went up for auction in an estate sale last summer,” Theo said. “I saw it and…”
Barty reached for him, their fingers wrapping together. “It was my mother’s favorite.”
“I know.” Theo looked smug. “I—well, this is a bit creepy, but I did research, when you…”
“Started courting your best friend?”
“I can protect myself just fine,” Harry protested.
Theo kicked him in the ankle. “Sure you can, but that doesn’t mean I was just going to let any old Death Eater close to you without knowing them. Your mother mentioned it in an interview she did with your father back when he was preparing to run for Minister.”
“Merlin, you’re thorough,” Barty said. He leaned over and kissed Theo lightly on the backs of his knuckles like he often did Harry’s and let go of Theo’s hand. “Thank you. This is… I’ll treasure it.”
Theo smiled, and then nudged Harry. “Come on, hurry up.”
Right, he had a gift too. Harry set about peeling the paper the rest of the way away and then blinked, slightly baffled. No wonder the gift was so heavy and lumpy. In his lap sat an absurdly dense metal creation, an incomprehensible tangle of brass.
“Like this,” Theo said, and then whistled as if calling a dog, low and rising sharply before cutting off.
The brass moved. Harry snatched his hands away as it unfolded itself on his lap. Limbs that shouldn’t be that long reached out to stabilize it, one clamping delicately to the coffee table and two more on either side of his legs, pressing into the upholstery. Its ‘body’ was just a particularly dense tangle of limbs, gripping implements, and—Harry squinted—little containers of some kind built into the center, like an enormous brass spider with no head. “It’s incredible,” he said. “What is it for?”
“You can name it,” Theo said. “It’ll respond to the name. I had a smithmage help me with the casting but I did all the runework and enchanting. It can help you around the laboratory. It’ll remember where ingredients are, and as long as they’re labeled clearly it can grab things for you, hold them, and handle basic commands like turning off a cauldron-fire, moving a cauldron as long as you clearly state where you want it to go, and passing you the right tools. I can show you how to add tools to the spell matrix but I already taught it to recognize all the ones currently in your lab.”
“Theo, this is fucking incredible,” Harry said, gently trailing his fingers along one of the irregular extended legs. It arched up into his hand almost like a cat.
“It really is. You could submit that as a Rune Casting Mastery project,” Barty said.
Theo smiled with half of his mouth. “I hope to, someday. It’s far too labor-intensive to make more than maybe three or four a year, but…”
“Potions masters would kill for something like this.” Harry gently wrapped his hands around the tangle of folded-up limbs and implements that sat at the center of the device’s mass and lifted: it obligingly retracted its legs and then, in a dizzyingly complex movement, shifted and spread out so that Harry could see almost all of it, like a mostly flat lattice of metal.
Barty snorted. “It’s showing off.”
“Daedalus,” Harry said. “That’s your name.”
A five-pronged metallic imitation of a human hand, but with extra joints, clicked at him excitedly.
“I think it likes that,” Theo said.
Harry leaned over into his side. “Thank you. I love it.”
Daedalus, on the floor, skittered around and explored the room. Harry was content to watch it while Barty peppered Theo with questions about the runework on it. He listened with half an ear, enough to know Daedalus was more than complex enough to develop a personality over time. Theo had made the magic version of the robots in Muggle science fiction films.
Harry wanted to let his brain run away with the concept. There were so many implications for this: more enchanted devices like Daedalus could assist at Hogwarts, maybe, perform dangerous jobs, potentially explore areas inhabited by hostile creatures for reconnaissance. And in the event of an antagonistic exposure to Muggles, Harry knew this was something at least twenty or so years ahead of what the Muggles had.
But that was a later problem. Right now he had things to give—Theo’s gift was fairly heavy, while Barty’s was essentially just a really fancy envelope.
“Did you brew this?” Theo demanded, staring at his gift: he’d torn off the top of the paper and found what was inside.
“Yes,” Harry said. “Do you…”
“Fuck, are you kidding? Most Masters don’t try brewing this.” Theo picked up one of the twenty-four identical vials with reverent fingers.
“I know. I actually fucked up the first batch, and it’s been a long time since I had a potions mistake that obnoxious.”
“It was pretty bad,” Barty agreed with a grin that made Harry step on his foot.
“Thank you,” Theo said. “Wait, can I take a dose now?”
“Don’t you dare,” Harry said threateningly. “One on each new and full moon for a year, that’s the rule, and you have to start studying your new language within an hour of the first dose, and go at it for a while. That’ll lock the potion’s influence onto that language in your mind. You can’t really study any other new languages for that year, is the thing—it’ll speed up learning and help retention, but you risk confusing it if you start a new one.”
“I so do not care,” Theo said. “Merlin, okay, I’ll think what to use this for… Harry, really, thank you.”
Harry grinned at him. “Anything for you.”
Theo started to smile back, and then his eyes focused on something over Harry’s shoulder, and it transformed into confusion. “Barty? What’s wrong?”
Harry turned: Barty had opened his envelope and was staring fixedly at the parchment folded inside. That was—not the reaction he’d been expecting, really.
“...Barty?” Theo tried again.
“How,” Barty said hoarsely.
“Some string pulling,” Harry said, which in no way captured the sheer amount of palm-greasing, rumor-sharing, secret-finding, and evidence-faking he and Vanessa had had to do to get Barty’s sentence reduced and a formal pardon issued for his escape from Azkaban. The Ministry refused to recognize his impersonation of Alastor Moody during fourth year and no charges had ever been brought forth; it had been easy to sweep that aside, and convince the classified Wizengamot trial panel that Barty had been a child caught up with a bad crowd, way out of his depth and helpless to stop the torture of the Longbottoms without himself getting tortured or worse. “There’s a media campaign set to kick off after January first. Within a month or two I expect public opinion about you will shift from hostile to sympathetic. Everyone loves a redemption story and Merlin knows there’s plenty of wixen who got mixed up in something they regretted as a teen. You were barely of age. They’ll buy it.”
“Fuck,” Theo said, grinning. “Barty, you’re free. You—”
Harry didn’t hear whatever else he was going to say, because Barty set the formal decision of the Wizengamot aside and yanked Harry straight into his lap. Harry was still laughing when Barty kissed him with a depth of emotion that took Harry aback. Barty’s hands came up to cup his face and slide around the back of his head into Harry’s hair.
Barty pulled away, breathing hard, and rested their foreheads together. “You are… you are something else.”
“Yes,” Harry agreed, smirking slightly. “This isn’t entirely selfless of me. I would like to be able to take both of you on a public date without any polyjuice or glamours involved.”
“We’ll scandalize all of wizarding society,” Theo said with a slightly wicked grin.
Harry affected a dreamy look. “If it gives someone a heart attack, I will consider my life goals achieved.”
“That’s sad, you should aim higher,” Theo said seriously.
Harry slid off Barty’s lap so he could poke Theo in the ribs, right where he was ticklish. Theo yelped and leaned away, smacking at Harry’s hands. “Off! Bastard!”
“I’ll have you know I was legitimate,” Harry said loftily.
“Legitimately annoying,” Theo sniped.
“You are children,” Barty said. “Seventeen-year-old children.”
“Like you’re one to talk,” Harry said, finally leaving Theo alone and settling back into the sofa.
Barty grinned. “Fair enough. Here, my turn.”
These gifts weren’t wrapped—they couldn’t really be—so Harry’s jaw dropped as soon as Barty pulled out two faintly pulsing crystals from a pocket that shouldn’t be able to hold them, one burning with inner fire and one surrounded by a mist of water vapour.
“Where in the crispy fried fuck did you get elemental crystals,” Theo demanded.
“I captured them myself.”
Harry blinked several times. “How? Those spells have been lost for, I don’t know, centuries?”
“The Dark Lord recovered them,” Barty said smugly. “It’s how he flies without a broom. I wasn’t able to pin down air or earth—one’s flighty and the other’s stubborn—but water and fire are more cooperative. You can pick.”
Harry and Theo looked at each other. “Water,” said Harry.
“Good, because I wanted fire,” said Theo, with an expression that said he might not need help from smithmages on future projects that involved a forge.
Carefully, Barty transferred the crystals into their hands. Each one sat on a base of solid… Harry squinted. “Is that a contained alchemical reaction?”
“Xenon held solid,” Barty said. “The magic won’t run out for a few months. You’re best off doing water under a full moon by a body of water, and Theo, fire is best absorbed at high noon sometime between Imbolc and Litha, when the light is rising, so you’ll have to wait.”
“That is not even a little bit of a problem.” Theo put it on the table. “Does it hurt?”
“Reportedly,” Barty said, “and you might take on… I don’t know, certain physical traits. My lord tells me he met a wizard who internalized a fire elemental who tended to go up like a veela whenever he got too angry.”
Theo snorted. “Good thing I’m an occlumens, then.”
Harry set his crystal on the table next to Theo’s. The next full moon was… in just a few days, actually, December twenty-fourth. That might actually be best. If there was any recovery time he’d like to get it over with during the holidays when no one particularly expected much of him. Or at least when expectations of him were less than usual.
Hearth-magic twined around them, still, as they all settled in to poke at their gifts, Theo reading up on the theory of the language potion while Harry sat on the floor talking to Daedalus and Barty dived right in to reading Masquerade while hunched over the book as if it were the Crown Jewels. They all wound down sometime around one, and Daedalus clicked along at their heels as they trooped upstairs to go to bed.
Harry fell asleep with his feet tangled in Theo’s and Barty’s, warm and content and safe.
He never wanted this feeling to end.
Losing Theo back to Hogwarts sucked, but Harry didn’t let it get to him. Theo would come back. Yes, Harry missed him, but missing someone wasn’t the same as losing them, and the desperate need to clutch his friends close that had driven Harry when he was younger had lost its hold on him. That was probably a sign of healthy adult emotions, or something. Harry was not an expert on those so he couldn’t say for sure.
The vote of no confidence, as he’d expected, booted Scrimgeour from the Minister’s seat by a wide margin in the beginning of January. The Wizengamot appointed Amelia Bones the interim Minister, a decision Harry rather approved of even though she was on the opposite side of the tentatively reforming party lines, and a special election was called to be held on Ostara.
Hazel’s campaign kicked off immediately. Hermione, Justin, and Pansy all worked on the staff, along with several younger Death Eaters and a host of people who sent in letters of interest that Hazel, Vanessa, and Hermione pored over in search of the best ones. The opposition chose to run Emmaline Vance. It wasn’t the worst call they could have made, she knew a lot of people and was generally well-respected within the Ministry, but literally no one outside of Ministry and Auror circles had ever heard of her, and with the sudden boost in enclave representation, being able to speak and appeal to non-Ministry-employed wixen was critical.
Harry personally had almost nothing to do with either campaign. He did involve himself in the Ministerial Election Office, which operated under the Wizengamot and was tasked with running poll stations and verifying the anonymous voting amulets carried by adult wixen. The staff there got very used to Harry hanging around, asking lots of questions, helping where he was needed, and hounding everyone about making sure the election was fair. The best part was he actually meant it.
Two separate voter suppression bills came through the Wizengamot—one put forth by what was left of Dumbledore’s bloc, and one by some of the radical blood purists who thought the Dark Lord had gone soft and tolerant. Harry rallied the moderate noble seats and as many of the enclave seats as he could to keep either one from passing; arguments and “evidence” for both bills ate up most of February and March, as Ostara, and the election, rapidly approached.
Voting amulets could be issued to any of-age wixen. The spells, which were the intellectual property of the Wizengamot and protected by extremely stringent oaths, made sure each amulet would bond to the first person to touch it after the enchantments set, and ensure that barring its destruction, that person would not be able to bond with a second amulet. Names weren’t recorded but the anonymous log of amulet signatures was checked against the results that came in from every polling station, where wixen pressed the amulet to a sheet of Gringotts parchment and then indicated on the parchment who they wanted as Minister.
Despite the election preparations eating up his time, Harry made a point of practicing with the water magic that now hummed in his veins. He didn’t fear swimming anymore: the water responded to his will, almost without conscious thought, helping him along and keeping him afloat. He could manipulate water vapour, albeit clumsily, and spells that affected or summoned water came to him as easily as breathing. Eventually, Harry suspected, he would be able to breathe underwater, or at least would have a very easy time casting or creating a spell that would allow him to do so, like he’d hypothesized was possible back in fourth year.
The one problem was that the subconscious manifestation of his magic as ice when he was angry had gotten much worse. Harry got very good at breathing slowly and counting to ten after Rookwood said something idiotic at a meeting and he accidentally turned the Dark Lord’s table into a raised ice-skating rink.
Theo had integrated his fire elemental at Hogwarts, with help and supervision from Blaise and Pansy. Pansy had written Harry the next day to assure him that Theo was sleeping it off and the burns would heal in a day or two with potions, which made Harry so concerned Barty had to hex him long enough to talk him out of apparating straight to Hogwarts and checking on Theo himself.
Needless to say, Harry was eager to see Theo when Hogwarts let out for the Ostara holiday.
He noticed something different as soon as he saw Theo from across the platform: something more forceful to his walk, maybe, or—yeah, it was also the eyes. Theo’s eyes hadn’t changed color but somehow they still looked constantly like they were reflecting the light of a fire.
Harry took his hand and felt the warmth of it immediately. Almost like a fever but it didn’t feel sick or wrong the way someone with a fever did. Theo smirked at him and held on the whole time Harry was greeting those of his Vipers who had come home for the holidays. Pansy in particular leered at the two of them and told Harry in all seriousness that she expected to stand with him at the handfasting.
As soon as they got home, Theo turned to face Harry. “I can’t explain it but your eyes look like… pools of water now. Green… water.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“He’s right though,” said Barty, who was busy with a time-sensitive charms research project and so had stayed at home while Harry met Theo on the platform, even though he was now a free wizard and had gone out in public multiple times without incident. “They do. You should see him summon water, Theo, it’s incredible.”
“Are you going to bind an elemental?” Harry asked.
Barty shrugged. “I don’t think so. Maybe water or air, but I’m not that attached to the benefits of any of them, not enough to outweigh how much harder it is to control your subconscious magical reactions.”
“Fair enough. I’ve set so many things on fire by accident. Luckily whenever it happens in public people automatically blame Finnegan,” Theo said. “And the Slytherins know better than to comment as long as any damage gets fixed, which it does.”
“Ready for the election?” Barty said. “I have never actually voted in one before.”
“Is it going to be a fair one?” Theo teased Harry, whose personal crusade against rigged elections was by now well known in Wizengamot-adjacent circles.
Harry shoved one of Kreacher’s honey-glazed spring cakes at Theo with a mock scowl. “We are going to have a fair election if I have to kill people to make it happen.”
“I’m not sure that’s how that usually works,” Theo said, laughing, and dodged when Harry tried to nail him with a static-hair hex.
The election was held on the day after Ostara. Harry, along with as many Wizengamot members as he could convince or coerce into joining him, queued up at the Diagon Alley polling station and let the press snap photographs of him stepping up to one of six curtained and privacy-spelled voting stalls. Barty and Theo did so immediately after and Harry pointedly waited for both of them to walk with him out of the polling station: that would draw cameras, and therefore attention, to the voting generally.
All over the country, he knew, another two dozen or so polling stations had popped up in Hogsmeade, incorporated enclaves, and near dispersed wizarding communities, as well as in the main shopping centers of Edinburgh, Holyhead, Dublin, and Cardiff. There had been a rush on the Ministry for voting amulets in the last few weeks and Harry fully expected this election to be the most attended one in decades.
Standard policy used to be announcing the results after three days. Harry and a few others had pushed that back to a week so the oathbound staff of the Elections Office could double- and triple-check the counts. The results would come out right after Hogwarts reopened at the end of the Ostara break. Harry resolved to spend the rest of the break doing absolutely nothing political unless it was an actual threats-to-the-entire-government-level emergency and instead stay at Grimmauld Place with Barty and Theo. They worked with Daedalus, Theo tinkering on some of the runework that had left the little device occasionally mixing up ingredients whose names started with G, and Harry and Theo had a blast in the overgrown backyard testing their fire and water against one another while Barty sat back and scored them on who had done the most dramatic and/or stupid thing.
Then, two days before Theo would return to school, Harry bolted upright out of a dead sleep in the middle of the night with the wards absolutely howling in his mind.
Theo and Barty came awake almost as quickly. “What is it?” Theo said, reaching for his wand; Barty’s was already in his hand and he was halfway to his feet.
“Wards,” Harry said tersely. He hit the ground in his pyjamas and ran for the stairs with Eriss racing along at his feet. The house flexed around him and carried them down far faster than should have been possible based on physics alone; Harry hit the floor of the entrance hall within seconds. Barty and Theo weren’t far behind.
The front door obligingly faded to one-way transparency as Harry approached it and he checked himself with shock. Padma Patil of all people was there on his front stoop, one hand pressed to the door and a look of intense concentration on her face.
Her other arm was wrapped tightly around the shoulders of a shaking, dirty, and visibly underweight Parvati Patil.
Harry felt for the wards again, ignoring Theo and Barty, who had come to a quiet and ready halt just behind him, and Eriss, who had paused just to the right of the door in a pool of shadow, where no one coming into the house would see her until too late. Now that he could take a moment he felt the desperate plea Padma was sending into the wards. Connecting one’s intent to sentient wards like that took impressive magical finesse, and usefully informed him that either her intent was sincere or she was a disguised occlumens on par with Harry or maybe Snape.
“Can you confirm it’s them?” Barty said.
Harry and Theo exchanged a glance. “Yeah, we’ve been doing potions review together,” Theo said.
“Good enough for me.” Harry stepped back and tugged on the wards: the door opened softly and the wards sucked both Patil twins through. Parvati stumbled on the threshold and Padma kept her upright.
“Hello, Padma, well met,” Theo said pleasantly. “Mind telling me what ingredient you nearly forgot to add to the potion we brewed together after Snape’s last class?”
“We didn’t,” Padma said, “that was the day before his last class, and I forgot to add the lacewings, and you don’t need to rub it in my face.”
Theo grinned. “It’s her.”
Eriss was sending recognition and positive-sense down the familiar bond in agreement; she’d scented Padma before, and knew what someone under polyjuice smelled like to compare. If there was trickery here it was at least not of the impersonation variety.
“Well met,” Harry said, wandlessly shoving at the door so it closed again. Another tug at the wards and they shuddered with the force of the house’s war wards activating. He immediately felt the strain—they didn’t use his magic for power but they required an active connection to the Lord of the House in order to work.
But with the war wards active, nothing short of Merlin and Morgana themselves was getting into this house against Harry’s will.
“Well met, Lord Black,” Padma said, putting her hands forward with palms up. A heartbeat later, Parvati did the same, though unlike her sister she kept her eyes down. “I claim sanctuary in the House of Black on behalf of myself and my sister of the House of Patil.”
A/N: A note about the Death Eaters and the political situation I’ve set up in this story. It’s long so don’t read this if you don’t want to, I just like political stuff, it’s not necessary to understand the story.
Personally I find the Death Eater movement much more interesting when considered as a combination of cult, political party, and guerrilla revolutionary force than as racist terrorists. I also do not interpret the primary political divide (in this story) to map easily onto IRL political parties. It is not a disagreement between people who want progress and people who do not; it is also not, or not entirely, a conflict between inclusion & exclusion, justice & corruption, equality & oppression.
In this world, the Ministry is run by a class of career bureaucrats who themselves form a sort-of political party whose primary goals are “control” and “order” at the expense of change, risk, & progress. Both Voldemort’s and Dumbledore’s ideologies oppose the Ministry because both want to enact changes the Ministry is ignoring. Dumbledore, in his grudge against Tom Riddle, closed off opportunities for Tom to go into the Ministry out of Hogwarts, and then spent decades systematically stymying Tom’s friends’ efforts as well. In modern Muggle democracies, people pushed outside the political process can and have successfully managed to sway public opinion through grassroots activism and protests such that elected representatives are forced to take action. Usually imperfect and incomplete action, but progress nonetheless. That pressure doesn’t exist in the wizarding world I imagine in this fic because the only elected position that matters is the Minister’s and elections are so corrupt as to be mostly pointless. As a result, the Knights of Walpurgis had three choices: give up, wait fifty-plus years for all their parents and grandparents to die so they could inherit familial access to the Wizengamot, or turn to extralegal vigilante action to get what they wanted.
The line between a terrorist and a revolutionary is a thin one. I think of Voldemort as both. His use of violence, when in his right mind, is calculated for specific goals. He has a vision for the future of the wizarding world and he’s doing what is necessary to bring it about. He is not a rampaging serial killer.
Nor did he and his early followers organize themselves primarily around bigotry. Their distrust and dislike towards Muggles stems, in this interpretation, from a long history of violence, marginalization, suspicion, fear, and hatred directed from (largely christian) Muggles towards wixen in Europe; and, further, by the increasing (and literal) marginalization of wizards after the Statute of Secrecy. By literal I mean they quite literally live in the margins of the Muggle world, in hidden spaces and behind concealment charms. They have an entirely separate culture whose government was founded for the express and primary purpose of keeping them hidden, systematically. In the minds of many wixen, Muggles drove wixen into hiding, and now wixen have to pretend they don’t exist, to spend their lives constantly avoiding and fearing Muggles because if a witch or wizard violates the Statute, it’s them who’ll get in legal trouble for it. Individual wixen can do a lot of damage to an unarmed Muggle, true, and I’m not saying Muggles had no reason to be wary, or that wixen are entirely being fair. However, I do think that there is very likely a pervasive and broad-ranging resentment felt in the wizarding world towards Muggles. Muggleborns, by extension, pose a risk to the Statute; spending time with a Muggleborn friend puts (clueless) magic-raised people at risk of violating the Statute and getting slapped with a fine or worse; and worse, for each Muggleborn, there’s 2+ Muggles who learn the secret of magic. All of that creates danger. There’s also the assimilation-inclusivity tension; any culture that intermixes with another faces the question of how much assimilation or at the very least respect for the native culture they can demand. In this AU, I interpret the Ministry as having spent about two centuries systematically dodging that problem by slowly weakening/banning a lot of traditional magical & social practices. (They do so for a variety of reasons, control being one and allaying Muggleborn/wixenborn tension being another; I won’t get into that here but I can elaborate on what I think of it on Discord if people ask.)
I am NOT saying that Muggle culture is inherently worse; that immigrants to a new culture have a responsibility to cast aside their own ways; that widespread disdain for another group of human beings is acceptable as a political philosophy, etc. This is a fanfiction and a spinoff of a bigger fanfiction. I am also not presenting this as the only possible interpretation of Voldemort as we see him in canon.
In this AU, what’s happening is:
1. Voldemort is reabsorbing his horcruxes and is there no longer insane. He’s by no means a normal or psychologically well-adjusted specimen of humanity, but he’s not a rampant and irrational murderer either.
2. Harry threw his weight in with the Death Eaters and then used his outsized influence as Lord Black to drag them in the direction he wanted. By dint of generational wealth, personal political acumen, blackmail, and what amounts to a network of informants, he has paved the way for a law-breaking but relatively bloodless coup from the inside out.
In this chapter, Harry commits himself entirely to things like expanding people’s representation in government, free & fair elections, power to local governments (there’s such a thing as too much localization but the problem here was excessive centralization of power), etc. He is not particularly doing so for moral reasons. Nor is Voldemort agreeing with Harry out of morality. I personally find it really annoying when people assume that morality and calculated political expediency must always be at odds. From a philosophical & ethical standpoint I think elections must be free and fair to be valid. From a calculatedly practical standpoint I think that a civically active populace who believes their elections matter are going to produce a more stable and tolerant society, a more effective government, and a healthier economy.
I will now climb down off my soapbox.
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