The disappearances start piling up by the end of June.
“I’ve sent my parents away,” Hermione says flatly on the day she moves into Grimmauld Place, and no one asks her how, or where. The Weasleys disappearing would draw more attention than their presence at the Burrow, and they’re as pureblood as it gets, but Hermione is a target and her family would be utterly helpless.
Kreacher doesn’t even pretend to insult her anymore. Just shows her to her room where the sheets are already fresh and waiting.
Theo’s brief notes in the protean planners worry Harry: he seems to be getting more involved, possibly because Draco isn’t there now and Voldemort apparently has a thing for making teenagers do his dirty work. Pansy’s parents are more financial supporters than anything else though and she manages to sneak away to Grimmauld fairly often.
“It’s so stupid. He only recruits wizards. Except Bellatrix, and she’s kind of… not normal,” Pansy says. “I mean, I’m glad, ‘cause it means no one pays me any attention, but still. I think I’m offended that the Dark Lord doesn’t want to recruit me.”
“His loss,” Hermione says, nudging her shoulder into Pansy’s.
Ron snickers. “He has a blind spot shaped like, y’know.” He gestures vaguely in the direction of the girls’ chests.
Hermione groans.
***
Bill and Fleur’s wedding is beautiful. Fun, too, what with the flowers falling on everyone and the music and the dancing. They’ve a trip around the magical hotspots of the Mediterranean planned for after the war, studying different wards and curses, which is pretty perfect for two of the most badass people Harry knows. He doesn’t get why Molly seems so set against them as a couple: Fleur’s beautiful, brilliant, loyal, and every bit Bill’s match.
Hermione points out to him during a break from dancing that that’s Molly’s problem. “She would probably have liked a daughter-in-law who’d give Bill a reason to settle down instead of an accomplice in looking for dangerous magic.”
“But he doesn’t want to settle down,” says Harry, who can relate.
“She worries,” Hermione says with a shrug.
Harry can relate to that, too. He worries a lot. He worries all the time about Theo and Pansy and Narcissa’s slow healing in Andi and Ted’s house and Arthur working in the Ministry and Sirius making a spectacle of himself calling Voldemort names in public and the twins with their U-No-Poo posters and inflatable painted-canvas Voldemort figures with crossed eyes and ‘Hex Me’ on the chest.
Half a dozen silvery patroni interrupt the wedding. In the moment of stillness that follows, Harry has time to think, here we go, and then the reception erupts into chaos. He grabs Hermione. Hermione grabs Draco’s polyjuiced arm. A Death Eater looms at them out of nowhere, and Harry doesn’t bother lifting his wand, allowing the enchantment to let loose. The bloke goes up like a human torch and then Hermione’s dragging both boys away into nothingness.
As always, apparition makes Harry want to vomit. He wrestles his stomach under control and looks up, taking in their surroundings. Muggle street. Quiet. Decent place. Draco is clearly uncomfortable, which could be the body he’s wearing or the Muggle environment or both, but there isn’t time to coddle him along; Hermione just loops her arm through his and tows him down the sidewalk until they get to a cafe.
“This was always the plan,” Hermione reminds them once they’ve ordered pastries and sat down in a corner booth. “We’re prepared. We’ve talked about this. We had to move a bit sooner than expected, but the plan stays the same.”
“My mother,” Draco says, and then stops, maybe realizing neither Harry nor Hermione has a mother to say goodbye to.
Harry nudges Draco with his foot anyway. “She’s fine, she’s safe. She was at home, and Ted and Andi are smart, they’ll have got out alright.”
“Merlin, I hope Pansy can keep Ron out of trouble,” Hermione says, “he knows why he needs to stay, but…”
That’s Harry’s second least favorite part of this plan. Ron, with his Sacred Twenty-Eight name and impeccable lineage, will be safe in a way they aren’t. Ron can go back to Hogwarts under Voldemort’s regime and get shite done in a way that Hermione couldn’t. Draco and Harry, for different reasons, can’t go within a mile of the school, and there was no way Draco was going to sit in Grimmauld Place all year while half his friends were at Hogwarts and the other half were on the run.
Harry’s first least favorite part is the bit where he won’t see Theo until at least December.
Then some Death Eaters come in and Harry has to rifle through their heads while Draco obliviates the waitress, because other than Theo, Harry’s the only one who can do even a little legilimency. “Can’t even have ten bloody minutes to eat a bloody scone,” he grouses in between Goons One and Two. “Nooo, just getting food is too much to ask.”
“Shut up and finish that,” Draco snarls at him. “I think I’m going to get lice just looking at those two.”
“They do not have lice. That’s gross.”
Draco tosses some kind of charm at the one on the left, and Harry yells and skitters backwards as several dark specks jump out of his hair. The enchantment incinerates most of them before they can hit the floor. “Ew! What the fuck! Do me!”
To everyone’s relief, Harry appears to have escaped contagion. The enchantment is sending him an approximation of comfort that seems to translate into a promise that it’ll burn up any more bugs that come near him. Harry is only a little bit comforted: he’s not 100% sure the enchantment wouldn’t accidentally burn some of his hair in the process.
***
There is absolutely nothing about this situation that the enchantment likes. Information comes slowly to 12 Grimmauld Place—there’s a lag on the protean journals that Hermione and Draco are trying to work out—and Sirius has long since moved into another old Black property to leave the townhouse and its wards for the Order. They don’t come to the townhouse much because the Floo’s being watched and there’s a chance the neighborhood is too, and the communication mirrors have been fritzing out under the weight of all the secrecy charms on various houses and people. Not knowing what’s going on or who’s okay is slowly driving Harry insane. This enemy is not one the enchantment can fight.
At least, not directly. It draws on years spent observing the ways Hermione, Draco, and Theo keep their minds entertained. Harry doesn’t love books like they do, but with some trial and error, the enchantment encourages him to seek out the Blacks’ library, specifically the sections on warding and combat magics.
“Are you okay?” Draco demands the first time he finds Harry voluntarily reading and taking notes. “Are you ill? Hermione! Tell me you packed healing potions in that bag of yours—”
“Why, what’s wrong? Oh.” Hermione skids to a halt next to Draco in the library door.
“Both of you bugger off,” Harry says cheerfully.
Hermione steps forward. “No, I think I’ll—”
Face screwed up with concentration, Harry manages to shove her bodily back out of the room.
Hermione and Draco’s jaws unhinge in unison.
Harry smirks. “The first step to warding is learning to sense magic and once you’ve got that wandless magic’s another use of it. Turns out carrying this thing around in my head and training myself to listen to it is basically just really specific magic sensing.”
“Oh, he’s going to be insufferable,” Draco says to Hermione in horror.
“Just… don’t blow yourself up,” Hermione sighs.
Theo’s reaction is pretty much the exact opposite: You realize you’ll need to learn runes to cast wards, right?, followed by a list of books Harry should read, only a third of which are legal to buy.
***
Finding the picture in the Prophet is a relief. Hermione insists that they have to plan carefully and delicately, and she’s right, and the enchantment is pleased when Harry actually listens to her and helps her and Draco draw up a schedule of watch shifts. Draco gets to work on the polyjuice and Hermione on charming some old robes into finite-resistant Ministry uniforms.
***
The day the Hogwarts Express leaves, Harry and Draco crack a bottle of six-hundred-year-old whiskey. The enchantment weighs the harm done by alcohol against the benefits of a night in which Harry can unwind, and settles on summoning a sober-up potion into his pocket before he gets too drunk.
Then it goes back to wrestling with the thing for which it now has a label: horcrux.
Draco and Hermione crack the problem with the protean charm in mid-September, around the same time that Harry casts his first ward, using rune stones placed around his bed, a drop of blood from his thumb, and a lengthy incantation in a language he doesn’t speak. It’s primitive and pretty much just keeps out physical threats but he laughs himself nearly sick when Hermione smacks into it in her rush to tell him about the planners.
“See if I make you one to talk to Theo,” she threatens, and he immediately backs down. “That’s what I thought.”
***
[Written in a journal belonging to Harry Potter, October 3]
I’ve gotten a bit better. Managed to temporarily deafen myself today trying to cast a sound-block ward but that’s better than yesterday when Draco had to put drops in my eyes because I’d fucked up my corneas somehow.
[Written in a journal belonging to Theodore Nott, October 3]
You are a hazard to society.
Did you get the sound one to work? How in the seven seas did you damage your corneas?
[Written in a journal belonging to Harry Potter]
Okay, so this is the sequence for the sound-block: [a number of runes arranged in several concentric circles]
And the eyes thing was because there’s a ward that changes how people see what’s going on inside of it, but as you can probably guess fucking with how light hits someone’s eye is really complicated, so yeah. Didn’t go so well.
Hermione yelled at me for thirty minutes.
[Written in a journal belonging to Theodore Nott]
Sounds like you have things well in hand, then.
I’m glad you’re not here. I miss you, but this isn’t the Hogwarts you know.
Amycus is getting worse in Dark Arts. I had to demonstrate the os impacta today on Patil. Worst part was I picked her because I knew she and Weasley would rather it be them than anyone else. At least they’re pureblood and they don’t look at me like know I don’t mean it.
[Written in a journal belonging to Harry Potter]
Merlin, Theo. I wish I was there just to get the Carrows off your back.
[Written in a journal belonging to Theodore Nott]
Don’t worry about the Carrows. I have plans for them. Worry about your own heroic quest.
Although if you get any intel from the Order about who causes them the most problems, I can prioritize.
It’s amazing the kinds of things Death Eaters let you get away with when your Father is one. I have Rowle’s hair and blood from Crabbe and Goyle that’ll let me get at their fathers with a bit of work.
[Written in a journal belonging to Harry Potter]
Just don’t get caught, okay? And you’re a wanker, the heroic quest isn’t heroic. Or really a quest right now. Quests mean you get to move around and do things. I’m just sitting on my arse reading books when I’m not standing invisibly outside the Ministry.
I can feel you making a face. Yes, okay, I’ll admit the books are actually interesting, and some of these curses would probably be more helpful than a stupefy, but Merlin I just want a proper duel and Draco’s too afraid of getting hurt. I think he’d rather hire a brigade of bodyguards than ever actually fight.
[Written in a journal belonging to Theodore Nott]
HA. You’re not wrong. Draco’s the type to hire a hit wizard.
I suspect Hermione would be rather terrifying with a decent repertoire of curses. Have you shared any of this with her?
Are you keeping up with your occlumency?
[Written in a journal belonging to Harry Potter]
Yeah, I’ve been handing her the books and then running away so she and Draco can argue about ethics. He hexed my hair pink as payback but seriously I can’t keep up with her when she wants to debate stuff.
I’m meditating every night. Haven’t had any weird dreams in a while—I think he’s quit trying to feed me false information.
That plan we talked about, at the end of fifth year—drawing him out. Have you thought about it more?
[Written in a journal belonging to Theodore Nott]
Good—she needs to protect herself. Also good that you’ve been meditating and it helps.
If you want that plan to work, you need to start feeding him visions now. Preferably true ones—don’t fuck around trying to make up something fake that will tip him off. Innocuous but normal. Moments of high emotion and the like. If you can get Hermione to duel you and get thrown on your arse, show him that. Don’t show him the books you’re studying.
I guess dreams could also work, or nightmares. Could you open a one-way connection before you go to sleep? Drag him into your head for a change? One-way shields are advanced occlumency—don’t try if you're not sure it’ll last all night.
[Written in a journal belonging to Harry Potter]
I’ll work on it. Draco’s gotten okay at legilimency. I think Andi was teaching him. He’ll be able to look if it’s working or not at least.
[Written in a journal belonging to Theodore Nott]
Let me know how it goes.
I have to go—Pansy and I are meeting Ron and Patil and a few others. I think Longbottom noticed we’re all up to something.
Stay safe.
[Written in a journal belonging to Harry Potter]
You too.
***
Harry almost can’t stand sitting around while his friends muddle along at Hogwarts. It’s almost worse now that he and Theo can talk so often. He hears about everything almost as soon as it happens, every escalation in the Dark Arts class, every student who staggers back to their common room from a detention worse than Umbridge’s, every horrifying curse the third-years are told to learn. The day Theo tells him in overly precise handwriting about having to help amputate two fingers from Justin Finch-Fletchley’s left hand after a freezing curse killed the tissue, Harry’s newly volatile magic smashes six plates and his inkwell.
“Harry!” Hermione jumps up and waves her wand. The plates piece themselves together. Harry sighs and fixes the inkwell himself, India ink flowing up off the table and back into its confines a bit cloudier than before.
“You cannot let that kind of thing happen while we’re inside the Ministry,” she snaps.
“I know, okay? I’m working on it. It’s just…”
“I know. Pansy’s been telling me all about it. Good on Neville, though. Who knew he was such a general?”
Definitely not Ron, who has taken to organizing a guerrilla prank war as a lieutenant under Neville’s de facto command of the student resistance with surprising glee and humility. Harry reads about his first friend plotting booby traps and Pansy’s increasing finesse with eavesdropping charms and Padma Patil’s limb-saving healing charms. Reads about them while he’s just sitting around.
The enchantment is relieved when Draco finally determines they’re as ready as they’ll ever be to storm the Ministry. At least it’s something to do.
***
“Where are we?”
“The Forest of Dean,” Hermione says. “Draco, charms.”
Draco finishes vomiting from the barely-controlled apparition and obediently joins Hermione in casting a whole slew of Muggle-repelling, attention-deflecting, hex-blocking, and tracking-resistant wards around what’s apparently going to be their campsite. Harry narrows his eyes at them and starts fishing around on the ground for pebbles.
It was a disaster, sort of, but it also went brilliantly, in the sense that they got the locket, got some Muggleborns out, and sent a huge ‘Fuck You’ to Umbridge and Voldemort all at the same time. Probably they would all be dead if not for Draco’s intimate knowledge of the Ministry and specifically how to activate the lockdown protocols, which had shut down the lifts and bought them time to escape.
“What are you doing,” Draco says suspiciously.
Harry looks up; they’ve finished with the charms, and Hermione’s setting up what seems to be the Weasleys’ tent from the World Cup, for which he can only be grateful. “Carving rune stones. I’ll set a ward.”
“And will it, I don’t know, rip out all of our fingernails or turn our teeth into jelly?”
“It shouldn’t. Small chance I’ll go blind for a bit, but it’s fine.”
“That is not fine! Hermione!”
Harry finishes the last stone before Hermione can join in the argument and turns in a circle, hand outstretched, so the stones—mostly pebbles the size of his thumbnail—go flying. A handy charm Theo found for him at Hogwarts makes sure they fall in a perfect circle around where he’s standing. The order doesn’t matter so much for these runes since he’s using them to anchor and strengthen already-structured spells instead of creating a whole new piece of magic.
“Stop—!”
There’s no incantation for what he’s doing. Harry sinks into himself and dimly registers Draco pulling Hermione away. Draco at least knows not to disrupt someone in the middle of a half-cast ward.
Someone better than Harry could probably identify all Hermione and Draco’s charms by feel alone. For that matter, the enchantment in his head will probably be able to do that after it feels them be cast a few more times, which means Harry will learn too. But for now he just feels for all the magic that isn’t on their belongings or the tent and ties it in to the rune stones.
A quick tap of his left thumb on the meaty part of his right forearm opens up a half-inch-long cut. Blood wells to the surface and Harry dips his fingers in it, flicks droplets of it towards the north, east, south, and west, pulling as he does so on earth, air, fire, and water to seal the connection. His mum’s enchantment worms its way in while he works and some indefinable other thing enters the final ward-anchor as Harry finishes his spell. Something with a strong emotional aura. It makes the end result stronger and he figures it’s the same sort of thing the enchantment did to the Weasleys’ wards during that summer that feels a lifetime past.
“You idiot! Do you even know how badly that might have gone?” Draco demands. “Fuck, Harry. We kind of need you alive in case you hadn’t noticed.”
“Noticed,” Harry assures him. Oh, he’s slurring his words, that isn’t great.
When he wakes up, they’ve healed the cut on his arm and put him to bed in the tent. Or specifically Hermione has. “I wanted to just leave you on the ground. Teach you a lesson about meddling with magic you don’t understand,” Draco sniffs.
“Awww, there’s no need to worry, Drakey-poo.”
“Call me that again and they’ll never find your body.”
***
Being on the run with Draco is infinitely worse in a tent than it had been in a luxurious, if creepy, townhouse. He complains about the food and the plumbing and the drafts and the finicky water temperature until Hermione screams at him to fix the tent himself then.
Two hours later, the toilet’s not working and the shower yields exclusively blue sugar water while singing Ring Around a Rosy. “I blame you,” Harry tells Hermione, who shoots him a glare before going to help Draco fix it.
It only takes a week before Harry caves and uses the mirror the only way they’ve been able to make work under all the layers and layers of wards Sirius is under: he activates it and sets it in front of a note for an hour.
Sirius does the same that evening, having written only a time and a place. Harry and Hermione go in while Draco covers them on the Firebolt in midair, disillusioned and ready. Sirius turns out to have left them an enormous bag of food and several helpful books on household and construction magic plus a proper letter, the highlights of which are:
Sirius, Remus, the Tonkses, Narcissa, and the Weasleys are all safe.
The Order has been working overtime to smuggle Muggle relatives and Muggleborns out of the country or to heavily warded safe houses.
They should tune to a station called Potterwatch for information.
Sirius will leave them a date and time for a supply drop every two weeks, with letters if they promise to include nothing that could get them found.
They shouldn’t call Kreacher on the off chance Bellatrix can track him.
***
[Written in a journal belonging to Harry Potter]
Can you look up a containment spell for Dark objects?
[Written in a journal belonging to Theodore Nott]
Any particular kind of containment spell?
[Written in a journal belonging to Harry Potter]
A strong one. This thing’s driving us all mad.
It was Hermione’s turn to wear it. She told me I’ll just die and leave the rest of them to face the real problems, and then she told Draco he might as well fuck off back to Wiltshire for a nice tattoo for all the good he’s doing us, and then she started crying. I took it off her and sent Draco to take a walk—he knows she didn’t mean it but you know how he is.
[Written in a journal belonging to Theodore Nott]
I did share a dorm with him for six years, yes, I know exactly how unbearable he is when he feels insulted.
I’ll find you one.
[Written in a journal belonging to Harry Potter]
Distract me? Tell me how things are going there. Especially any good news if you’ve got it.
[Written in a journal belonging to Theodore Nott]
Well, I can confirm that the prank went off without a hitch—Alecto has been unable to write anything except swears for a few days now. Makes teaching Muggle Studies a bit hard as you might imagine.
[Written in a journal belonging to Harry Potter]
HA.
[Written in a journal belonging to Theodore Nott]
Let’s see. Hannah and Padma have a full-on hospital operation going. Pomfrey’s doing her best but she has to log every injury and every potion she requisitions from stores let alone dispenses to students, anyone who even comes into the hospital wing, and so on, so we treat anyone who doesn’t want the Carrows to know about it. Ron and Padma magicked up a whole system of coded messages and dead drops for us to let each other know what’s going on.
I recruited Daph and Tracy. Or, technically, Pansy did. Daph’s Head Girl, not sure if I mentioned, and she’s been getting high on calming draught just to get through it. Having a task helps her. Just knowing there’s any resistance helps like you wouldn’t believe.
Ginny’s bat-bogey hex has become the stuff of legend. Macmillan and Smith are actually being useful for once in their sorry lives by drawing fire and arranging to smuggle food out of the kitchens. Couple muggleborns have already gone to ground in the Room and Hogwarts can conjure anything except food.
[Written in a journal belonging to Harry Potter]
That last bit isn’t such good news.
[Written in a journal belonging to Theodore Nott]
Better than them being dead or tortured.
[Written in a journal belonging to Harry Potter]
Aren’t you just a cheering charm
[Written in a journal belonging to Theodore Nott]
Sorry.
It’s getting to me and we’re not even through November yet.
I could crucio Amycus into the new year.
[Written in a journal belonging to Harry Potter]
Any progress on that plan?
[Written in a journal belonging to Theodore Nott]
Some.
I’ve settled on a potion. Slow-acting. You found the base of it, actually, in one of those old books in GP. I modified it a bit. Just need some of their hair or blood or something.
[Written in a journal belonging to Harry Potter]
Would nail clippings work?. Hermione says there’s a charm for that. Ask Pansy if you don’t know it.
[Written in a journal belonging to Theodore Nott]
Tell Hermione she’s a genius.
[Written in a journal belonging to Harry Potter]
Yeah, I think she already knows that, but I’ll pass it on.
***
Surprisingly, Draco backs Harry up about going to Godric’s Hollow. “It’s family,” he says flatly to Hermione.
“FINE,” she says with a huff.
Thanks, Harry mouths to Draco.
Bathilda Bagshot confuses the enchantment. There’s something dark at work around her that it doesn’t recognize, has never encountered before but nevertheless feels is wrong. And something else, too, masked under the former…
It conveys its wariness to Harry, though it prefers not to do so without cause. He goes to ask her questions anyway. The enchantment suspects one day his curiosity will cause a real problem but the weight of past experience dictates that more information is generally a good thing so it doesn’t interfere.
Harry’s on alert, but there’s really no way to prepare yourself for a snake big enough to eat a lion explodes out of a human corpse, sending rank, dead blood and the stench of rotting flesh flying, and lunging for his face. The enchantment immediately categorizes its first impression as ‘necromancy’ and notes that some dark magics can apparently mask others even as it sets Nagini on fire.
She screams but she doesn’t burn.
Draco’s shouting spells, and Hermione’s pounding up the stairs. Harry throws himself flat on the floor. His scar is blazing with pain, distracting, almost crippling. Nagini’s enormous thrashing body punches holes in the walls and ceiling. A shattered armchair’s leg hits him across the shoulder when he tries to stand. Spells are ricocheting in the confined space, curses impacting the walls or dying harmlessly on Nagini’s scales; even in the middle of it all he notes that a living horcrux apparently can’t be mortally hurt by anything less than things that would destroy a horcrux itself, which means—
He has his hand up and avada kedavra on his lips when something hits him broadside. Right before he passes out he feels a scream from his faithful holly wand.
***
Hermione cries when she and Draco explain what happened.
To Harry, the story feels disjointed, emotionless. Something that happened to someone else. They tell him that one of the wild spells hit something Bagshot had lying around that must’ve been enchanted, because it blew up, taking out a good chunk of the house and throwing Nagini out the window. Harry had taken the full force of the physical and magical backlash. Draco had grabbed the other two and apparated away.
His holly wand was broken.
Harry looks at Draco and thinks Expelliarmus.
“Hey! Give it—wait. Wait. Harry. Harry what the fuck.”
“I can’t believe that worked,” Harry says, staring down at the length of what Draco’s told them is hawthorn and unicorn. It sits pretty happily in his hand.
“You wanker,” Draco says tiredly. “When did you learn silent and wandless spells?”
“Warding practice.”
Harry’s a little smug even though he grieves his wand.
In the end, the hawthorn works for him more happily than Hermione’s length of vine. Harry misses the holly wand with an acute ache that never quite fades.
***
“I think…” Hermione wets her lips. “I think we need Fiendfyre.”
Draco blanches, which is a terrible look on someone already so pale.
“Why?” Harry says slowly.
“It’s the only… look. The only things powerful enough to kill a horcrux, per these books, are Fiendfyre, basilisk venom—”
“Impossible to lay hands on,” Draco puts in.
“Chimera blood—”
“Almost as bad. We’ve been over this before, Hermione, there’s a reason—”
“Well, we can’t get our hands on any of the others, so Fiendfyre is the best shot!”
“What about the Killing Curse?”
Harry’s question silences both of the others. He waits a few seconds, then adds, “It’s designed to cut the soul from the body, right? What if it’s just designed to cut the soul from its vessel? It might not care if the soul’s tied to something that isn’t alive.”
“What kinds of books have you been reading?” Hermione says.
The kinds of books Theo recommends, but that wouldn’t be a helpful answer, so Harry just shrugs.
“A powerful enough one might work,” she says, when he doesn’t answer, “but, Harry… the kind of hate that takes…”
“You have to hate someone so much you’d sacrifice your own innocence to kill them,” Harry says with a painful smile. “Don’t you think I’ve got that part covered?”
Hermione takes his hand.
***
“Open,” Harry says, the sibilant soft consonants of Parseltongue rolling easily off his lips in the face of the locket’s serpentine design.
There is a faint click. It pops open.
The inside is empty for a split second before black smoke rushes out. Harry aims his wand, reaches for the emotion that never seems to run far below the surface lately, the bleak, black loathing he feels for Voldemort—
“You thought you were worthy of me?” Theo jeers.
Harry twitches. The smoke’s turned into Theo. Looks just like him, right down to the tiny freckle just to the left of his nose, the odd storm-tossed color of his eyes, the way his smile curls when he’s being cruel.
“You thought,” locket-Theo says, “that I meant it? I knew you were a fool but that you’re this stupid—that you really thought I cared—” He laughs, a high, cold sound. “As if I could ever care for such a pathetic excuse for a wizard. Savior? Chosen One? What have you done? You’re unworthy of their love, their hope. You’ll let them all down.” The apparition leans forward. “And I’ll clean up your mess, and they’ll love me for it. The world loves a good redemption arc, you know.”
“Harry,” Draco says. “Harry, it’s not real, kill it—”
“Why don’t you do it yourself?” sneers the apparition, turning on Draco. “Oh, yes—you can’t, can you? So selfish, so small, you couldn’t kill even to save your mother’s life! Do you think she doesn’t know that? Do you think she doesn’t lie awake in bed, hating you? Wishing for a better son? It was Snape who saved her life, because you failed.”
It’s a lie.
This is a lie.
Theo can be cruel, Harry knows that for a fact. Theo can be as vicious as any snake. But Theo is careful about who he spits his venom at. Theo would never unleash himself on his friends. On Harry. Not like this.
“Avada kedavra.”
Green light washes over the clearing.
***
The weather grows colder and things lapse into an uneasy lull. Death Eater strikes continue, but the obvious targets have either been hidden, killed, or disappeared by now, leaving Voldemort busy with consolidating his power in the Ministry and rooting out dissidents.
Azkaban’s reportedly getting pretty full.
Sirius manages to get them a few nights in Order safe houses. The tent is great, but it has nothing on a real shower and food cooked by someone who knows what they’re doing. Mostly they’re alone, hidden in false cellars or illegally expanded spaces under the eaves. They do what they can for their hosts: Harry bolsters the wards, Hermione creates hidden pockets of expansion charms, Draco shares what he knows of Death Eater tactics and countercurses and healing.
Sometimes they stay for a night or two in the same refuge as other fugitives. Harry treasures those nights: tragic they might be, but refreshing too. Galvanizing. These are good people mostly, annoying sometimes but that’s understandable in the face of fear and stress like this, who’ve had to go on the run for something stupid, something that should never put them in danger. Harry doesn’t even resent the way they cry when they see him or thank him for fighting. He doesn’t shrink away from their expectations the way he might have a year ago.
(He misses Theo more than anything, more than Sirius or his holly wand, misses the way Theo makes him feel normal. I miss you, he writes, and Theo says the same, and Harry would give his left foot just to see Theo in person for five minutes.)
***
Diary. Ring. Locket. Three down.
The snake will need to go, and Harry, but those are last-minute issues. The cup is their more solvable problem.
In the end it’s Narcissa and Sirius who figure it out. Bellatrix is a Black, and after Narcissa spends a few days taking a fine-toothed comb to Bellatrix’s marriage contract, she finds a loophole about progeny. Sirius goes to Gringotts, declares it null on a technicality, and immediately seizes all of Bellatrix’s assets as the property of House Black. He turns up in Harry, Hermione, and Draco’s latest safe house and plunks it down on the table.
And there it is: the goblet of Helga Hufflepuff.
Harry ignores it completely and runs to hug his godfather.
“Oh, pup,” Sirius says into his hair. “I missed you too.”
Sirius isn’t overjoyed to watch Harry cast the least forgivable Unforgivable at a horcrux, but then Draco pulls out some expensive vodka he’s been hiding God knows where and proposes a toast to Voldemort’s corpse, and who could resist that?
Definitely not Sirius.
***
The enchantment is getting close to being able to do something about the horcrux in Harry. Harry’s death is not an option. It has an idea of what will need to happen to avoid that.
It needs to act while it still can.
While Harry sleeps, it hurls its own existence at the horcrux, battering away at it until, for a crucial second, the horcrux’s autonomy subsides to the enchantment’s.
A connection is born.
Harry slips unnoticed into Voldemort’s mind, and he dreams, and when he wakes up he knows where the diadem is.
***
“I thought we said we were never using one of Ron’s plans again,” Hermione says.
Draco shrugs. “It’s a good plan.”
They’re clustered around Hermione’s master planner, which lies on the table in their tent open to the blank pages at the back, where Pansy, Ron, and Theo’s handwriting, along with one or two others Harry doesn’t recognize, details their proposed trap.
Step one is, pretty obviously, handling the remaining horcrux. Dumbledore destroyed two of them, the diary and the ring, but as far as the kids can tell he didn’t bother leaving a handy list of instructions around. Theo’s already killed the diadem, an event about which he and Pansy and Ron are being alarmingly tight-lipped, but if its defenses were anything like the locket’s Harry can imagine why. That just leaves the snake.
Hermione looks up from the pages and at Harry with a frown. “There’s also…”
“Yeah.” Harry shrugs. “But… it took him fourteen years and change to come back from the last time he died. We can destroy all his horcruxes and throw him out of a physical body so he can’t make any more, and then that’ll give us plenty of time to mop up the Death Eaters and figure out what to do with the one in my head.”
Hermione nods. Draco watches him with narrowed eyes, more aware of subtext and deceptions of omission than Hermione, but Harry ignores him. They’ve already done as much of the math as they can; there’s a chance that if he’s hit with an AK, it’ll only sever the horcrux and not Harry’s soul, but none of his friends were willing to take that chance, and they all agreed that defeating Voldemort most of the way is better than doing nothing at all.
Either way this plan is still their best bet.
And if Harry plans to walk in front of an AK if he has to, well, no one else has to know that.
***
Harry grins as he leads Draco and Hermione into the tunnel hidden in Aberforth’s pub. On the other side Hogwarts is waiting for him, and Theo.
He’s going home.
A cheer is the first thing he hears when he steps into the Room of Requirement, and immediately after that a body hits him like a cannonball. Harry staggers back a step but he’d know the shape of Theo’s body blind and his arms come up immediately to return the embrace. They only have time to cling to each other for a few seconds but when Harry lets go and turns to face the assembled students, the ragtag rebellious Hogwarts’ Army, Theo’s at his side and it’s the freest his lungs have been in a year.
“Okay,” he says, “here’s the plan,” and they listen.
Messages are dispatched to trusted professors: McGonagall, Flitwick, Sprout, Babbling, Vector, Sinistra. You can’t control who’s around to listen to a patronus message so the prefects give detailed instructions for the locations of the professors’ private quarters and a cadre of children in green ties slip off, only some of them Slytherins, to tell them it’s time. Meanwhile, Ron and his gang of twenty or so pranksters-in-training fan out to implement what Ron calls Operation Kill Box. “He’s been making me tell him as many James Bond stories as I can remember,” Justin Finch-Fletchley says with a sigh, “fancies himself Q now.”
The Professors show up in the Great Hall at the time they were told—nervous, wary, wands gripped in ready hands. McGonagall gasps when she sees Harry but Sprout just grimly trains her wand on him and demands that he verify his identity. Harry grins when he reminds her of the detention she set him once that involved wrestling with a baby Whomping Willow in the mud. “It’s him,” the Hufflepuff Head announces with an answering smile.
Harry jumps right in. “Okay, Professors, there’s not a lot of time, so please listen closely. Some of you might know Dumbledore left me with a mission. I can’t give you details but it was the reason Riddle won’t die and I’ve finished it.” Several of them gasp. Sinistra starts crying softly: Harry remembers Theo telling him once that she was a Slytherin and a Muggleborn who’d paid a lot of money to hide her past and remain on at Hogwarts to protect the students. “There’s no way we can ambush him in Malfoy Manor or wherever he’s set up, and a battle somewhere out in the open risks Muggle exposure and too many casualties. Instead, we’re going lure him here, to Hogwarts, where we control the battlefield.” He plows on before they can stop him. “The older students have already been working on an evacuation plan and training in secret. Everyone underage is gonna get out through a passage we’ve kept open all year. It’ll take them to the Hog’s Head pub and from there they can apparate or floo wherever’s safe. Aberforth has a list of safe houses if they need it.
“Some other students have been coming up with a plan for the battle. The school’s wards will keep them out, but not forever, not with Riddle being the descendant of a Founder, so we’ve got to put up a good showing early on, take out as many of ‘em as we can before they get to the walls. We’re setting up ambushes and kill boxes near some entry points and blocking up the ones we don’t want them to use. As far as we know, the vampires refused his alliance wholesale along with most of the werewolves, so odds are he’ll be bringing dementors, giants, and some werewolves by way of Dark creature attacks. We need anyone who can cast a patronus or impact spells strong enough to slow down a giant on the ramparts or by the windows.”
Hermione steps up. “The infirmary is vulnerable to attack, being in a tower with lots of windows, so we plan to use the Great Hall as a triage center and field hospital. A number of fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds have grown adept with healing spells and potions in the last year and have volunteered to stay behind and help in that way rather than fight. They’ve already gone to the medical wing with seventh-year support to subdue any Death Eater supporters, inform Madam Pomfrey of the situation, and help her transport all the necessary healing supplies here. You are the staff members we know we can trust. If there’s anyone else who’ll help, we leave that to your discretion; if there’s anyone untrustworthy but not Marked, they will be asked to surrender their wands and leave with the underage students. We are also aware the school likely has defenses of which we don’t know. If you know of them and can activate them, or have any other ideas for defense that we haven’t considered, we need to hear it now.”
“We’ve already sent out word through our channels—” Harry fingers the protean-charmed galleon in his pocket while he speaks— “to come to the Hog’s Head for a last stand. If you have any other way of getting messages out of the castle then please call for anyone who can and wants to join us. We need all the wands we can get.”
There’s a long moment of silence.
“It sounds as though you already have this well in hand, young man,” says Babbling with an approving nod. She turns on her other professors. “Minerva, the armor?”
“Yes. Yes, I can—I’ll need to seize the wards,” McGonagall says faintly. She shakes herself in a way reminiscent of her animagus form. “Severus.”
“Ignore him for now. We’re watching his quarters and the Headmaster’s suite,” Harry says flatly. “If he sticks his nose out of hiding we’ll have him trussed up like a Christmas turkey in a blink. We’ve only got a couple hours, probably, before someone somewhere catches on, so we need to do as much as we can before then. Organize whoever comes through the passage, get the underage students out, organize the field hospital—”
“Yes. Yes.” McGonagall claps her hands. “Very well. Filius, the mirror tree, if you would be so kind.” The diminutive professor hurries away. “Aurora, Septima, perhaps you might retrieve Horace? Pomona, you’re most familiar with the grounds, so it seems you might assist with the exterior defenses—”
“Neville’s already out by the greenhouses waiting,” Harry says. “He’s got some others with him who’ll help.”
“You are every bit the man your mother would’ve raised you to be,” Sprout says warmly.
“What will you be doing, Mr. Potter?” McGonagall asks him, and the other professors pause, turning back from their own tasks to listen.
Harry takes a breath. “I’m going to lure Riddle here. We need to make sure he shows up,” he says, holding up a hand to forestall their resistance. “He’s been hiding lately, letting his followers do the dirty work. We have to guarantee he comes or this won’t work. I’ve got to—I can do it but I need to prepare a fake, er, memory, I guess, and a way to pretend that he saw it on accident, so he believes it enough to show up. Oh, and one last thing. Tell everyone you can that it’s imperative we kill Riddle’s snake and it has to be done with the AK.”
McGonagall raises a trembling hand to her mouth. “Mr. Potter…”
“Aurors have wartime dispensation to use the Unforgivables and other Dark or lethal curses,” Hermione says crisply. “This is a war, Professor. It’s the only way short of Fiendfyre to kill the snake and we must kill the snake to defeat him.”
“Very well.” McGonagall recovers, paler than before, but determined. “Yes. Filius, please, spread the word—anyone capable of—of that spell is to deliver it upon the serpent if they can, without hesitation.”
Harry wishes them the best and leaves at a near run.
Already streams of first-year Ravenclaws and Gryffindors file silently through the corridor outside the Come and Go Room, trunks and owls in tow, some still in their pajamas. Justin and Ernie stand by the entrance to the Room checking names off a list; when Justin sees Harry dodging past the students, he raises a hand. “Oi, Ron sent someone up t’tell you they got Alecto. Still looking for Amycus but she didn’t get off a message in the Mark.”
“Thanks,” Harry calls back.
Theo waits for him in a quiet corner just down the hall. Harry shuts the door on what was probably a walk-in supply closet at one point and leans in to kiss his boyfriend.
They’re both panting by the time he pulls back. “Later,” Harry says hoarsely.
“Right. Later.” Theo hesitates. “Are you… are you sure?”
“Yes. I have to, Theo.”
“Okay. Legilimens.”
Theo falls into Harry’s mind.
***
The enchantment knows what they’re doing. It has watched every step of the planning, nudged Harry when it determined a certain question ought to be asked, but largely didn’t form opinions, as its experience is ill-suited to judging the quality of battle strategy. This, though, this lure, this it can and does choose to help.
The vision is relatively simple. They piece together the mental images of the horcruxes they have seen in person—locket, diary, cup, ring, diadem—into one room, one space. They use Harry and Theo’s experiences of the horcruxes’ defenses as the basis for a new sequence in which Harry first fails to cast the avada and then the locket and diadem combined manage to taunt Harry into being sick and running from the room, leaving the horcruxes untouched, unharmed. They tease out strands of emotions from other memories, reaching far back into both boys’ childhoods for terror, hate, self-loathing, insecurity, guilt, greed, and weaving all of them into the scene. It must be convincingly emotional enough to explain Harry’s occlumency faltering.
The whole process takes hours, but at last, it waits in Harry’s head, an exquisite trap, as realistic as the boys can make it, rough edges smoothed over and blurred in the manner of memory disrupted by strong emotion. They emerge from their sanctuary, Theo a dark shadow at Harry’s elbow, in time to help oversee the final preparations. It’s almost six in the morning.
***
At least three dozen people have turned up to bolster the defenses. Amycus Carrow was taken down with prejudice when he came upon a group of Hufflepuffs and Slytherins on the way to the evacuation point and found every single wand amongst the thirteen- and fourteen-year-old students turned on him. Ron’s in his element, standing with Shacklebolt and Tonks, the only trained Aurors among them, to direct people where they’re most needed: patronus-casters and heavy hitters to overwatch points; anyone who can heal in the Great Hall; anyone who can conjure pure silver working overtime to create werewolf-proof weapons. Teams of students armed to the teeth with Weasley pranks wait to lure Death Eaters down hallways, leaving booby traps as they go, right into kill boxes staffed by anyone who can cast a hex.
The Great Hall is a buzz of activity from the hospital beds being conjured and set up in the back to the people bustling around in the front. They all come to a dead halt when they see Harry. For a moment there’s silence, and then a ragged cheer goes up, building in volume until it shakes the enchanted roof.
Harry wants to run away. Merlin, the weight of their expectations, the way they look at him with fucking stars in their eyes, some sobbing, some reaching out to touch him like some kind of saint—but Theo presses his hand to Harry’s back, and whispers breathe, and Harry obeys on instinct, and it helps.
“Thank you all for coming,” he says loudly, “but c’mon, we gotta keep prepping, don’t let me distract you—”
That gets a laugh out of them, and thank fuck, everyone starts moving again.
Theo squeezes the back of Harry’s neck gently and then returns to holding his hand.
There’s a little kerfuffle when some of the Order members object to the number of older Slytherins manning the defenses. Harry puts that to rest, fast, and marks the ones he sees looking angry or resistant—Vance, McKinnon, Diggle. A quick word to Ron ensures they’ll be posted somewhere with few Slytherins around. Not that Harry really thinks they’d compromise the defenses for the sake of hexing a seventeen-year-old, but people can be kind of irrational about House loyalty, and it’s best not to take chances.
Finally, at about six, McGonagall gives Harry the nod that says they’re as ready as they’re going to get.
***
Harry sinks into his own mind and the enchantment goes with him. Harry wraps the vision up and holds it out like an offering. Here, he thinks, take this, and the enchantment uses every bit of its accumulated understanding of the connection between Harry and Voldemort to slip the poisoned chalice into it, as natural as breathing.
There must not be even a fragment of doubt as to its veracity.
Within seconds, they receive an answering jolt of rage so powerful Harry snaps out of his trance and vomits on the flagstones. “He’s coming,” he gasps. “He’s coming.”
McGonagall marches out the door of the Great Hall. “And now—Piertotum Locomotor!”
All around the entrance hall, and along the halls leading from it, the statues and suits of armor leapt from their niches and plinths. Echoing crashes and booms came from the stairs. “Hogwarts is threatened!” shouted Professor McGonagall in a voice that reverberated through the castle’s very stones. “Man the boundaries, protect us, do your duty to your school!”
Harry watches with his mouth half-open as they form up in lines and march in lockstep towards the doors. He’s always wondered why the school has so many giant statues and suits of armor everywhere, to the point that it has protective battle-gear from pretty much every continent and historical era displayed if you look around enough. This… this explains a lot.
“McGonagall’s scary,” Theo says in an undertone.
The Head of Gryffindor turns towards them with her nostrils flared. “Well. If that doesn’t rouse Severus from his lair—”
Wordlessly, Harry points.
Snape’s just come into view, striding down the main staircase as fast as he can without appearing to be running, and studiously ignoring the line of samurai armor marching down it next to him, which, notably, appears not to consider him a threat to the school. “Minerva! What is the meaning of this?” he snarls.
The entrance courtyard is their first and biggest kill box; people are still dashing to and fro, getting into position, from grey-haired Order members to acne-spotted teenagers in every House color. All of them stop to watch the impending crash.
“Precisely what it appears to be,” McGonagall snaps back.
Snape’s eyes slide over the crowd. They land on Harry, who, in a split second, thinks legilimens as hard as he can and throws his mind at Snape’s.
He’s completely lacking in finesse and doesn’t expect to do more at this distance than make contact. Hitting Snape’s shields is nothing like Theo’s—with Theo, the surface of his mind is blank, slippery and frictionless, but Snape’s surface consciousness is so empty it may as well be a black hole, a void you can fall into forever. Harry jerks himself back and doesn’t push. Snape’s eyes widen, and then Harry’s hurled back into his own head with such force that he gasps and staggers; but no one notices, too fixated on Snape, whose expression hasn’t changed an iota during this exchange; and Harry abruptly doesn’t care, because Snape sent something back with him.
Knowledge. Information. Wrapped up much like Harry had done to the false vision, but in this case for clarity rather than deception.
The whole legilimency thing must have only taken a second, maybe two, because clearly Harry hasn’t missed much—McGonagall’s asking a question, “Will you surrender your wand and depart, Severus?” and Snape’s saying, “Do you take me for a fool?”
“He’s not loyal,” Harry hisses to Theo.
“What?”
“He’s a spy, still—he gave me—c’mon!”
Harry ignores the sounds of dueling and then of smashing glass, too busy bolting with Theo in tow down the nearest hallway, where there’s a painting that you can climb into and then back out of down in the dungeons. “What’s going on,” demands Theo when they step out, streaks of yellow and green oil paint in his hair.
“Snape,” Harry says. “I legilimized him and he sent me back something—there’s a vial in Snape’s old office, we gotta get it. Chimera blood. He’s been trying to track me down to give it to us for months.”
“What the fuck,” Theo says. “So—”
“I don’t know, he couldn’t send much, not in such a short time, but seems like he and Dumbledore planned this? For him to stay loyal, I mean, to Voldemort, so he’d be here to help. Guess Dumbledore didn’t think we could dstroy the horcruxes on our own.”
“What do we need the blood for, though? They’re all gone, except—”
“Except the snake,” Harry finishes. “And not everyone can do an AK. If it comes down to it—”
“Yeah, alright.”
The door is warded, obviously, but Snape left Harry the password too, so he says “Chimera” with a sigh and it slides open, and the vial’s just sitting there in the middle of his desk.
For a moment both boys just stare at it.
“That’s one of the most toxic substances in the world,” Theo says.
“Yeah.”
“And he just left it out for a couple of teenagers.”
“Yep.”
“Dumbledore made shitty plans.”
Harry can’t argue with that.
They barely have time to take the vial back to the Great Hall and tell McGonagall what it is and what it’s for when the first hit thunders through the wards.
***
War is hell.
The enchantment is prepared for a duel, and can extrapolate many of those principles to apply here: monitor Harry’s surroundings, alert him of threats he hasn’t seen, incinerate threats he lacks time or ability to defeat. However, it has to husband its energy, guard its attention carefully. Much of its evaluatory capacity is still tied up in the horcrux, which trembles and pulses with every moment.
Voldemort himself has yet to enter the field but he is nearby. Proximity appears to strengthen the connection. The piece of soul in Harry’s scar sings out, calling, reaching for its master. The enchantment takes advantage of its distraction to worm further under the horcrux’s defenses, wrapping its own identity-existence-purpose around that of the horcrux, like nacre around a grain of sand. Harry can keep his own last-ditch self-sacrifice play secret from everyone except himself, and the enchantment absolutely will not let that happen.
***
Voldemort’s voice thunders through the castle, but Harry doesn’t stop, pressing on up the corridor with Zach Smith and Sue Li at his shoulders, the three of them dueling two white-masked figures. Harry’s not about to stop just ‘cause Voldemort said to.
A hex from Sue slips past a shield charm, and one of the Death Eaters screams as acid starts eating through his robes and into the skin of his chest. He turns and jumps for the window. The second one tries to follow, but Harry casts one of the strongest curses he knows, incremo ossis, and the Death Eater collapses on the floor, writhing in agony, as his bones start to burn inside of him.
“Merlin, Potter,” Smith breathes.
Harry counts to ten before ending the curse. The guy’s not dead but he won’t be moving anytime soon, that’s for certain. “C’mon, snap his wand and let’s get this fuck down to the Hall.”
They gather people up as they go, some injured who need help moving and one dead body, whose face Harry doesn’t know but makes him ache inside just the same. There’s a few more prisoners, too, but gratifyingly, he sees a lot of black-robed white-masked bodies that won’t be moving again. They’ve done better for themselves than the Death Eaters have.
The scene in the Great Hall is about the same. Rows upon rows of wounded, and precious few dead, which is still too many but better than it could be. Harry reminds himself of that as he walks along the line of bodies.
Pink hair brings him to a stumbling halt. “Tonks,” he rasps out, and she lifts her head, and the relief that follows dies almost instantly because it’s Remus lying still on the floor next to her, Remus whose face has gone grey with death.
“Harry,” Tonks chokes out. “Harry, oh, Merlin…”
“How?” Harry says, sinking to the floor against his will.
“Took a curse for me,” Tonks whispers, her eyes damp with tears. “I can’t… it doesn’t seem real.” She bursts into renewed sobs. Mechanically, Harry puts an arm around her shoulders. He feels curiously numb.
Theo finds them there not long after, with Andromeda in tow. Harry lets her take over comforting her daughter and follows Theo obediently away towards the rows of wounded. “Everyone who’s critical has been sent to St. Mungo’s but they have to ration the portkeys,” he explains. “It’s better than we planned for—Pomfrey’s impressed with how good we’ve all gotten at healing—but you should see—”
Harry’s heart contracts at the sight of another familiar face lying too still on a cot. He surges forward. Sirius is still here among the wounded, not the dead, which has to mean he’ll be okay, it has to—”
“He’s unconscious,” Theo says quietly. “Don’t jostle him, okay? I asked Pomfrey. She said he’ll probably be fine, but he, er. Greyback cursed him. Sirius killed him for it, but they had to—do an emergency amputation to keep the curse from reaching his heart. He lost most of his wand arm.”
“Fuck,” Harry breathes, hands hovering over the white sheets. Sirius looks peaceful and oddly small in sleep. “It’s not working.”
“What?”
“Theo. Our plan. It’s not working. He’s not coming. We have to kill the snake and him and he’s not coming out of hiding.”
“We can’t go to where he is. We just have to stay here and keep fighting and—”
“Theo, he’s not gonna come. You heard him. He wants me, alone, or me dead. He’s gonna keep throwing Death Eaters at us until there’s no more defense left, and you saw the state of things, the kill boxes are mostly spent and we don’t have the resources or the time to repair everything.”
“You are not dying,” Theo hisses, his eyes ablaze with so much emotion Harry’s sort of scared. “Do you hear me? I will stun you myself and apparate you to India before I let you go out there like some sacrificial lamb.”
“No… Theo.” Harry grabs his hand. “Theo, what if we fake my death?”
***
The enchantment doesn’t approve much of this plan, but it doesn’t control Harry, can only guide him, so instead it turns its attention to examining the plan for any point of opportunity.
It finds one.
It forms its own plan.
It waits.
***
In the chaos of the Great Hall, no one notices the Slytherins forming up on the dais where the head table usually sits. Not until it’s too late.
“ATTENTION EVERYONE!” Draco yells, his voice magically amplified so it echoes through the whole Hall.
Faces turn towards him. Incomprehension, then disbelief, then horror begin to leech through the room, at the sight of a knot of green-tied hard-faced young adults, wands to the necks of Kingsley Shacklebolt and Ginny Weasley, with the limp body of Harry Potter on the floor at their feet.
“HARRY!”
“No!”
The shouts grow in number and rage, picking up steam. Draco lifts his wand and sets off a bang that silences them all again. “You will let a messenger go unmolested,” he says icily. “You will put away your wands and form a line. You will approach the dais one at a time where we will spell your wrists together. Then you will be seated along the left side of the Hall with your legs out in front of you. If anyone tries to resist, if anyone hexes us, or if anyone speaks, we start cursing these two.” He gestures harshly towards Ginny and Kingsley. “We’re pretty good with curses. We can do a lot of damage without letting them die. Don’t push it.”
Hogwarts’ defenders are practically boiling with rage and betrayal by now, but they do as they’re told. One by one the able-bodied approach the dais where Daphne and Theo take turns sticking their hands to their shoulders, arms folded across their chests in an X, before sending them to sit along the wall. “Traitor,” Ron spits when it’s his turn, and Pansy sends a vicious jolt of pain into Ginny, letting the silencing spell drop long enough for the whole Hall to hear her scream.
After that there's no more resistance.
***
Voldemort enters the Great Hall at the head of what’s left of his supporters. Three or four dozen Death Eaters total, against about as many able-bodied defenders, or at least that’s how it would be if they didn’t come to claim the result of a silent, bloodless, and viciously effective coup.
“Mr. Malfoy,” Voldemort says cruelly. “Mr. Nott. And here I was under the impression you had both become rather corrupted.”
“I cannot control my mother’s decisions, but I can make my own,” Draco says. “Our offering, my Lord—Harry Potter, dead; and the last defenders of Hogwarts defeated, their wands ready for redistribution to whomsoever you deem appropriate.” He snaps his fingers, and Daphne steps forward, opening a bundle of cloth to reveal a pile of wands. She bows her head, lays them on the floor, and steps back into a deep curtsey.
“I am… mosssst pleased,” says Voldemort.
“My Lord.”
Voldemort stills. “Yes, Severus?”
“It could be a trap.” Snape’s dark eyes flick along the silent lines of Hogwarts’ defenders, who do indeed look tense and wary to a man. “It would perhaps be best to verify that the boy is dead.”
“Wise counsel, as alwayssss. Go.” Voldemort waves a hand. “If they speak true, the corpse is yours, for those potions which require a wizard’s body.”
“My Lord is most generous.”
Snape steps forward. None of the Slytherins on the dais so much as blink as he draws his wand and leans over Harry Potter’s body, with his back to the Death Eaters. A simple charm is all it takes to verify that his heart is still beating strong.
“You are a horcrux,” Snape breathes, so softly that it’s barely more than a breath.
“Not for long,” Harry whispers back. “Snake.”
Snape rises in an abrupt, fluid movement. “Indeed, my Lord. He is dead.”
The defenders cry out in grief, and the Death Eaters in victory. Even Voldemort throws back his head in a laugh. No one sees Snape lift his wand again until it’s too late to stop him from crying “Avada kedavra!”
“NOOOOO!” Voldemort howls, but the green light strikes true, shattering the bubble of protective wards around Nagini and dumping her on the floor.
Only Harry understands his next order, but the outcome is obvious—the serpent lunges forward, faster than any person can move, and sinks her fangs into Snape’s chest.
Several things happen at once. Theo and Daphne cancel every single sticking charm they’d cast, freeing the Order all at once to draw their real wands from their pockets. Pansy casts a charm courtesy of the Weasley twins that sets off the prank wands Daphne had laid at Voldemort’s feet, setting off an explosion of confetti in the heart of the knot of Death Eaters, many of whom immediately begin vomiting, fainting, staggering with dizziness, or bleeding from the nose. And Harry surges to his feet, wand out, screaming “Avada kedavra!” loud enough to be heard over the din, and Nagini falls dead without time to do more than remove her fangs from Snape’s flesh.
“HEALER! I NEED A HEALER!” Pansy’s screaming, bent over Snape and trying to stop the bleeding.
Harry falters. Goes down on one knee.
In his head, the enchantment, if it had a mouth, would be screaming.
With Voldemort this near, the horcrux is alive, twisting and expanding. If not for Lily’s enchantment it would have consumed Harry’s mind wholesale.
The backlash of Nagini’s death echoes through her bond to Voldemort and from Voldemort to Harry. The enchantment seized that moment to go on the attack, and in the span of seconds, has committed itself completely.
All spells have purpose. Even the most complex of enchantments have, at their core, one meaning, one mandate that defines what they are, what they grow to be. The enchantment and the horcrux’s core mandates are not quite diametrical opposites but they are so different as to be fundamentally incompatible.
The enchantment bears down on the horcrux with all the force of Lily Potter’s love. Overwrites the horcrux’s corrupt, violating nature with its own. The soul piece screams and the enchantment does too, or would, but it cannot, nor can it disengage; it continues, battering away at the horcrux’s core identity with all the implacable fury of a lightning strike.
(In the outside world, Harry trembles from the force of it. His heart races and he cannot stand. Theo and Daphne and Blaise and Draco, they’ve all formed up around him, and Ginny too, protecting him with their wands and bodies. Harry loves them so, so much.)
Love is the thing a horcrux will never, ever understand. Love is so far from the selfishness required for such an act that the two cannot exist in the same space. Love is a fire, burning.
The horcrux is on fire.
(Harry’s mouth gapes open in a scream. Voldemort echoes it, dueling McGonagall and Slughorn and Shacklebolt all at once, while all around them his Death Eaters fall to Hogwarts’ Army, Dolohov falling to Tonks, Wormtail to Ron and Padma.)
The enchantment knew how this would end when it began. It feels itself begin to slip away and is not surprised.
Fire is a notoriously indiscriminate tool.
In its last seconds, it presses outwards on Harry’s mind, imparting all his mother’s love to him with desperate force. It can’t protect him from here. It can do nothing but ensure he doesn’t have reason to throw himself in front of his enemy’s wand. Be safe, it tells him, you are loved, live well and love in return, be happy, be loved be loved be loved—
***
There are tears on Harry’s cheeks. Theo doesn’t know why, or how, but when Harry collapsed Theo lunged for him, Draco and Daphne closing the gap in their circle. Theo holds Harry’s shaking frame against him and tries not to be sick. They only ever meant to fake Harry’s death. Not—not whatever this is.
“Horcrux,” Harry whispers. “Gone.”
“What? Yours?”
“Gone. Enchantment—gone. Killed.” Harry shuts his eyes and turns to the side, curling up into a ball.
“Daph, watch him.”
Theo gets to his feet and steps away from Harry’s self-appointed guards.
The avada kedavra requires hate, pure and unfiltered, the kind of hate that means you would yourself die for the chance to kill your foe. Few wizards can sustain that level of hatred. Fewer still can do so while summoning enough magic to cast the spell.
Neither of those obstacles has ever been less of a problem for Theo than right now.
Bellatrix dies at Molly Weasley’s wand and Voldemort screams his fury for the whole castle to hear. His opponents are blasted back but Theo has eyes only for that snake-faced mockery of a man.
“Hey,” he calls out. “Riddle. How’s it feel knowing all your little trinkets are dead?”
“You lie,” Voldemort hisses.
A strange lull has fallen; Theo becomes aware of many eyes on him, Death Eaters and defenders alike falling still to watch. “Nope. Killed one of ‘em myself, actually. AK right to Rowena Ravenclaw’s diadem. Harry got most of the others. Which means,” Theo smiles cruelly, an expression he learned at his father’s knee, “that you’re exactly what you started out as, Riddle. Just a man. Just as weak as any of the rest of us.”
“I am not we—”
“Avada kedavra.”
***
***
A BRIEF COMPILATION OF POST-WAR DAILY PROPHET HEADLINES
Voldemort Dead! Death Eaters Captured!
Harry Potter & Theo Nott: Star-Crossed Lovers and Defeaters of Voldemort
The Students Who Resisted, Exclusive Interviews!
Hermione Granger Calls for Election Reform!
The False Betrayal: The Slytherins Who Trapped Voldemort
Kingsley Shacklebolt Appointed Interim Minister
Over 1,000 Collaborators Fired from Ministry Pending Trial
26 Death Eaters Sentenced to Life in Azkaban
The Exoneration of Severus Snape: Heroic Double Agent Reveals Plans to Open Apothecary
The Battle of Hogwarts 1-Year Anniversary Memorial Celebration to be held in Hogsmeade
Elopement of Hermione Granger & Pansy Parkinson Rocks Magical London
Sirius Black Nominated to Chief Auror’s Office
Calls for Wizengamot Reform Gaining Traction
Senior Auror N. Tonks Apprehends Rogue Death Eater Rodolphus Lestrange, sentenced to the Dementor’s Kiss
Houses Potter & Nott: What does this alliance mean for the shape of the Wizengamot?
Minister Shacklebolt Orders Audit of the Department of Education
Amendments to Decree for the Restriction of Underage Sorcery to be discussed by Wizengamot
Free Wolfsbane: The Costs, Implications, and Anticipated Effects of This Controversial New Policy
Landmark Legislation Forbids Abuse of House-elves
EXCLUSIVE: Lord Neville Longbottom Speaks Out Against Corruption
Magical Primary Education: The Debate
Padma Patil Appointed Youngest-Ever Head of Spell Damage Wing at St. Mungo’s Hospital
The Tutshill Tornadoes’ 3rd Season Championship under Captain Harry Potter & Manager Oliver Wood
Hogwarts Doubles Faculty Size
Flagship Magical Primary School To Be Opened in London for All Underage Witches and Wizards
5-Year Anniversary of Battle of Hogwarts Marked By Solemn Memorial, Waves of Donations to Hogwarts School
Lily Potter Foundation Calls for Loosening of Magical Experimentation License Requirements
Union of Ron Weasley and Padma Patil Society Wedding of the Year
ICW Investigation Concluded: Minister Shacklebolt Commended for Reconstruction Efforts
Diagon Alley Expansion! New Residential and Commercial Properties To Be Built!
What the Fight Over Muggleborn Property Ownership Means for You
War Heroes Lord Draco Malfoy and Justin Finch-Fletchley To Wed in Private Ceremony
Lord Theodore Nott Awarded Order of Merlin, Third Class for Work in Magical Prostheses
Weasleys’ Wizard Wheezes Opens New Branches in Dublin, Holyhead
War Hero & Quidditch Star Harry Potter Retires! Harry Potter to Pursue Warding & Cursebreaking Mastery!
Minister Shacklebolt on the New Wizengamot: “Adding elected seats to the hereditary will drive national progress and maintain our connection to our past”
Hermione Granger-Parkinson, Andromeda Tonks, & Other Newly Elected Wizengamot Reps Speak Out
Holyhead Harpies Star Gwenog Jones Suffers Career-Ending Injury
Battle of Hogwarts 10-Year Anniversary Memorial Unveils Summer Residential Program: “Students with unfit guardians or from financially stressed backgrounds will be eligible” according to Headmistress Minerva McGonagall
Wardmaster Harry Potter and Senior Auror N. Tonks to lead a DMLE task force charged with apprehending notorious mercenary, self-styled ‘Lady of Diamond’
Susan Bones Promoted to Undersecretary to the Minister for Magic
Revolutionary New Greenhouse Wards Increase Food Production: “The agricultural crisis is over,” declares Lord Neville Longbottom, co-creator of new system with Wardmaster Harry Potter
Nott-Potter Household Adopts! Lord Theodore Nott calls for public to respect the privacy of their daughter!
Nott-Potter Adoption Renews Debate About Blood-bound Adoption Rituals
Lily Potter Foundation to Increase Funding for The Sanctuary Home for Orphaned Magical Children
Weasleys’ Wizard Wheezes goes international! WWW now second-largest domestic private employer after Malfoy Enterprises!
Minister Shacklebolt Will Not Run for Reelection: “I’m grateful for the prolonged trust of the wizarding public, and hope I have discharged my duty well. It’s time for the next generation to step up.”
The Ministerial Candidates: An Overview
Shacklebolt’s Last Act as Minister Signing the Beneficial Blood Magics Legalization Bill
First Werewolf Elected to the Wizengamot
Celebrity Chef Ronald Weasley On the Last 15 Years: Exclusive Interview!
Hermione Granger, Catalina Burke Front-Runners for Minister of Magic
Harry Potter Endorses Longtime Friend & Fellow War Hero Hermione Granger
Lord Draco Malfoy Seen Volunteering for Granger Campaign
Lily Potter Foundation Embroiled in Lawsuit On Behalf of Orphaned Heiress Niala Avery
Granger Wins Landslide Election Victory! Burke’s Gracious Concession Speech!
Then and Now: What It Means to have Britain’s Second Muggleborn Minister for Magic
Lady Pansy Parkinson-Granger Refuses to Apologize for Assault on Photographer: “If you come near my wife and children with a camera I’ll break it and pay a fine for the privilege!”
Headmistress McGonagall Steps Down! First Postwar Headmaster, Professor of Potions Blaise Zabini, has her full support!
Wardmaster Harry Potter asks public to respect his daughter’s privacy as she attends Hogwarts: “We’ve had a peaceful nineteen years. Don’t make me break the streak because you harassed my underage child.”
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