Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

To Whom it May Concern:

This letter is charmed to deliver itself to the head of the DMLE in the event of Lord Voldemort's death. Congratulations are in order. If all has gone according to plan, Voldemort's six horcruxes: his diary, the Gaunt family ring, Slytherin's locket, Hufflepuff's cup, Ravenclaw's diadem, and his serpent, Nagini, have been destroyed. In that order, no less, which incidentally is also the order in which they were made. However, Nagini was not made into a horcrux following the diadem. I have kept this secret from all except Severus Snape, whom I expect to have deceased by the sending of this letter, for reasons that I am sure will be immediately clear. Nagini did not follow the diadem, Harry Potter did, though neither he nor Lord Voldemort were aware of this. 

Harry Potter was Lord Voldemort's sixth horcrux. Nagini was his seventh. If Harry Potter did not die in the battle that ended Voldemort's regime of terror, Voldemort is not truly gone.

In sincere hope,

Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore

Supreme Warlock, Chief Mugwump, Order of Merlin First Class, Headmaster

"This is ridiculous!" Hermione scoffed. 

Harry rolled his eyes, of course it was ridiculous, it was also par for the course, so he had no idea why she expected anything different. The aurors had surrounded them and Neville where they searched through the battlefield for any survivors. He'd already broken and burned the Elder Wand and chucked the dumb ass pebble into the lake. He was pretty sure they weren't going to find any more survivors, as they'd been at it for hours, and most of the other searchers had quit the field. Harry just wasn't ready to give up yet. Ron and the rest of the Weasleys were gathered in the Great Hall around Fred's shrouded body as they waited for clearance to take him for their funeral traditions, and Harry was loath to disrupt their justified mourning.

"I don't get it," Neville frowned, "Voldemort tried to kill Harry just about every year since we started."

"At least twice that we know of in First year alone," Hermione put in.

"And he wouldn't have if Harry was his Horcrux, so this can't be right," Neville nodded firmly.

God, this was going to suck. Harry could already feel a headache coming on.

"The letter says neither of them knew, which removes that argument," the auror in charge, someone Harry had never met before, asserted. "I must ask the two of you to stand aside from the Horcrux."

They didn't. They stood even closer, subtly gripping wands tighter. Harry wished they wouldn't, even if it did fill him with warmth. Enough people had died already.

"I did die, though," Harry sighed, knowing it wasn't actually going to help. They'd already made up their minds. Harry just wasn't ready to give up yet. "I just didn't stay dead because the Horcrux died in my stead."

"What Voldemort's Horcrux would say," scoffed someone from behind the trio. The aurors all shifted, lifting their wands aggressively.

"One way to be sure," the lead auror grinned cruelly. "Avada Kedavra!"

"No!"

At least he wasn't alone, right?

***

So, this was… unexpected.  You weren’t slated to be here again for a good while.

“Eh, it happens.”

You gave up the wand and the stone.

“The wand was nothing but trouble and the stone… gave me what I needed but it’s not going to be helpful like that to anyone else.”

You realize this means my debts are repaid, and I have no Master now.

“Good.  Nobody needs a Master.  Glad I could help.”

You did.  For which I thank you.

"Wait, then why did you even have them?"

Well, there's a half dozen of us Aspects of Existence, and we're all immortal and not really connected to the lives of mortals. We get bored. Unbelievably bored. 

"Okay? So were the Hallows a prank one of the other Aspects played on you or one you played on one of Them?"

The Hallows are merely further evidence of Fate being a complete bitch, which you already knew.

"I did know that, yes. Happy to help screw Fate's plans over. Anytime."

Death laughed. It was disturbing.

So you did, Henry James Antioch Potter.  And so you shall continue.

“Huh?”

***

He woke up alone. 

“Ouch, bloody he-” Harry cursed, rubbing his head.  He’d woken up in a dark box, filled with still, stagnant air.  A particularly small box with an uneven ceiling on which he had hit his head as he sat up.  Dread filled him as the smell of dust itched his nose and he fumbled in the dark for his wand.  He couldn’t find it, so he switched to fumbling for a door.  He found that. Right where it was on his cupboard. Which he hadn't slept in since he was ten. Oh no. Nope nope nope.

Number Four Privet Drive didn’t ever change much.  The Dursleys were Respectable, and did not follow Fads, thank you very much.  It made the house very boring.

There were a few exceptions.  The wallpaper by the stairs, for instance, had been changed during his second year at Hogwarts, due to exploding pudding stains.

This was the old wallpaper.

He slipped silently through the house to the kitchen, where a daily calendar sat on the table by the phone, and checked the date.  It was the summer solstice.  Of the year he turned eleven.  The trip to the Zoo was tomorrow. A month before he got his own room and met Coldshorts. Two before Hogwarts and Fumblemore's shenanigans.

“Nope,” he said softly to himself. "Not. Doing. It. Again."

Chapter Text

Harry – or, apparently, Henry which was news to him – James Antioch (also News) Potter was not stupid. Let it never be said that he cannot think on his feet. The sad fact of his Very Gryffindor life was that he simply had the most practice thinking and planning while high on adrenaline. He wasn’t sure if he should blame Dudley, Bumblemore, or Moldywarts for that. No, actually, he was blaming all of them. If any one of them was just a bit less of a dick, he'd have more practice at planning without adrenaline to fuel his brain.

That said, being surrounded by a dozen flashes of green light and shouts of Avada Kedavra and then waking up in one of his least favorite parts of his past definitely gets the adrenaline running.  Thirty seconds after staring in horror at the calendar, he had his half-demolished trainers on, and his oversized jacket in hand as he rifled through Aunt Petunia's purse for the money he knew she had already pulled out for the Zoo trip. A hundred sterling would get him just about anywhere in the country and have some left over for food on the way. 

He may have been an adult, if barely, but he was no longer legally an adult, and even if he had been, this definitely needed an adultier adult.  The primary problem with this fact is that, in his experience, all adults suck. He ran through the list of adults who could help with his problem, as he slipped quietly out the back door and down the street. Sirius being in Azkaban, and Remus being God-knows-where, that list was predominantly Hogwarts teachers, who should be home now, the term having ended. It was a sucky list. Particularly given the displayed incapability of that list to ever believe him over whether or not there was an ascertainable danger, let alone asking them to believe he'd time traveled. On accident. After dying. 

There is one, though.  One who would be able to tell that he's being honest.  They hate each other, but he's the only one who ever bothered to do literally anything to save Harry's life, and he did so a couple of times a year, every year. Harry can deal with him being a berk, it's not like Harry isn't more used to dealing with assholes than nice people anyway. He's the only one Harry knows who would provide Actual, beneficial Help to Harry even if he's a complete dick about it. He was also the only one Harry had half a chance of finding outside of the school year.

Plan set, Harry slipped quietly down the stairs to the train station. 

***

Okay, so, turns out, maintaining a wandless Notice-me-not long term, without practice, and while being ten, was really fucking difficult. Fortunately, it was the middle of the night, and the trains and stations were all empty. Thank the Aspects automated ticket machines were a thing that existed, even if there was only one per station. He took a few minutes at the Route Map to decide on an itinerary.  Fifty minutes to London/Vauxhall, ten minutes over to London/Euston, then a bit over two hours to Piccadilly, left him with plenty of time to plan things. Except he hadn't grabbed a notebook and pen on the way out of the house. He stopped by the quick-mart in the station to grab one and a pre-packaged sandwich and drink, relieved when the four items still came to less than 10£, and barely caught the train to London in time. 

When he got off at Vauxhall, his notebook had four pages of "planning." He may plan very well while high on adrenaline, but the adrenaline had faded quickly, and it was one AM. The pages were an utter mess of questions and ideas that at least he didn't have to worry about encoding as no one would be able to make sense of them anyway.

By the time his train was pulling into Piccadilly, he was exhausted, and had quite given up planning anything beyond finding Professor Snape, as he'd found he had more questions than answers, an at best vague understanding of how anything works in Wizarding Great Britain, and no energy left for long term planning.  When he couldn't remember if there was a way to pull memories when the remember-er doesn't have a wand, much less know whether or not Snape had his own pensieve, he gave up and aimed at the simplest possible plan. He figured he could always just badger Snape into using legilimency on him, stuff his face and take a nap while the spy took care of planning for the long term.

Aspects know, Snape was probably better at that than anyone else currently living.

Including Dumblesnore.

And Harry could really, really use a nap.  It had been a long… eight years.  Let someone else be the adult for once.  

Fuck time travel anyway.

***

Severus Snape was not best pleased to receive visitors normally.  For one, he did not so much “keep house” as “maintained a structure in which to sleep and eat”, which visitors normally objected to.  To which his thought was that they should consider that before deciding to visit.  For another, visitors tended to show up at about three in the afternoon, which was the time of day he was at peak function and wanted to be focused on his projects, not nattering about the weather.

Although, unlike normally it was not three in the afternoon when he heard an insistent pounding at his door on this particular hot June night.  It was four thirty in the morning, and he wasn’t sure he liked that better, having only had two hours sleep so far.  In his opinion the best thing about teaching at Hogwarts was the summer break, when he worked on his curriculum development at home, and could set his schedule to his preferences rather than to the class schedule.

He decided he was not best pleased by visitors at this hour either.

Especially as they would not take the hint from his failure to answer, and only knocked all the more determinedly.

With a heaving sigh, Severus Snape rose from his bed, snatched up a dressing gown from the chair of the old vanity set that had been his mother’s one indulgence, and stormed out to the front room of his home, to yank open the door.

“What in the name of all that is -” he cut off before he could finish what he felt would have been a cathartically scathing indictment of their manners, parentage, and personal moral fibre.

“My name is Harry Potter,” said the tiny green-eyed clone of the man Snape liked third-least in all of time and space.  “I need your help but you're not gonna wanna do it without an explanation and there's waaay too much for that, so if you would, I need you to Legilimense me, but you have to promise to be patient.  There’s… a lot of memories to go through and all of it is important, well, most of it, you can probably just skim the first ten years, but after that too much is important to skip. Um. Please. Sir.” Dear Lord, he motor-mouthed like Lily when she was nervous, leaving the niceties to the end as the afterthoughts they really were. It was not fair to hear Lily pouring out of James' face.

"How can not even one year have all that much in it and have it all too important to skip?" Severus wondered. It came out of his mouth, quite without his permission. It was 4:30 in the morning and he hadn't had coffee yet, sue him.

The boy, Harry, shifted guiltily, scratching behind his ear.  "It's, um, rather more than a year?  More like nearly eight."

“What?” Severus asked, one brow arching in the way that quailed full-grown adults.  The child before him looked less than impressed.  More… exhausted, really, if he had to put a name to the casual resignation paired to stubborn determination painted on the boy’s face and frame.

“Eh, it’s hard to explain.  Hence the Legilimency.”

“That’s a terribly invasive spell,” Severus started.

“It’s not the worst,” Potter interrupted.  “If it were all that bad it’d be an Unforgivable, of which… yeah gotta say my least favorite was actually Imperius… feeling that calm and happy was freaking weird.   Crucio wasn't fun, either, but Imperius was way worse.  And it’s far better than trying to explain and not being believed, or being believed but then everything is my job.  Again.  So… Legilimense, if you please.”

Severus boggled at the implications slowly trickling into his brain from that entire speech. Rather than try and process anything without caffeine, he simply opened the door wider and stepped back to allow the boy in, closing the door behind him and locking it back up. Only once he had coffee, and had placed an herbal tea in front of the boy, did he speak again. "I would very much like to know how you, specifically, or even a boy your age in general, know enough of the Unforgivables to have a least favorite.  Anything that leads to discovering what they feel like is horrifically reckless. This, this plan of yours is a horrifically, terribly reckless plan. Not that I know why I'm surprised.  It's exactly what I would expect from Potter’s son."

Harry glared. It was disturbing seeing Lily's glare on Potter's face. "Actually I’m a lot more like Lily.  I got three things from James, my last name, my hair, and some decent broom skills.  Literally everything else pretty much had to have been Mum."

Severus's eyebrow rose again. "Oh? Like what, exactly?"

Harry shrugged and sipped at his tea, "My general hatred for bullies, for one.  Quite a few other things that don't line up at all with what people told me about dad." He glared slightly and his jaw tightened in determination.  "Including my total willingness to use charms offensively that weren’t designed for that, now make with the mindfucks or have every inch of this place magically scrubbed clean… forever."

Severus found himself forcibly reminded, very clearly, and in vivid detail of the time a third-year Lily got fed up with a particular four of the nine Gryffindor boys of their year and set every household charm she knew – which was quite a bit more than most third years – to scrubbing every inch of the entrance hall and the four teenagers in it, in January. For three hours. Even Professor Flitwick couldn't get the scrub brushes and buckets and mops immediately around the boys to stop.  She hadn't even been upset about the points loss, just glared Professor McGonagall in the eye and announced, "Worth it."

Severus groaned, drank the rest of his coffee as quickly as he dared and refilled his cup. "I will concede you are clearly your mother's son, as she not only threatened to do such things, she actually did it. To your father, in the entrance hall of Hogwarts, in January. I will also concede that your mother had many reckless plans that were usually actually beneficial. Most of the time. I, however, am not doing Legilimency on an eleven year old at 4:45 AM without significantly more coffee. And breakfast. We will eat and be fully awake and functioning before engaging in extremely hazardous Mental Arts."

"Given that I'm currently ten, I'd agree to that. But um," Harry didn't make eye contact and squirmed in his seat rather nervously. "I'm not generally allowed to eat much. Just one or two meals a day, usually just dry toast and milk or a sandwich with a single slice of bologna. If I haven't had any accidental magic recently or mouthed off or looked surly or… generally existed in any manner that drew any attention to that fact whatsoever. So. Um, I have no idea how much I can eat, since I had a train station sandwich four hours ago."

Severus closed his eyes and breathed deeply for a moment. Just a moment of allowing himself to fantasize about murdering Dumbledore, then he shoved the fantasy back in the occlumency box he kept it in for when he needed calming thoughts. When he opened his eyes again, he was perfectly calm and awake. "Drink your tea. I will cast a diagnostic and get whatever potions you need out of my stores. Then I will make breakfast, you will eat only what you can, and then we will revisit the idea of Legilimency with all information that applies accounted for. If you are not healthy enough for it, it will wait until you are."

***

So, more things learned on this summer solstice: diagnostic charms write on parchment in color coded ink. Green for illnesses, blue for "internal malfunctions" whether degenerative, genetic, or malformations, red for external causes, which, turns out, includes both starvation and being hit with a frying pan and also living in a cupboard and the issues that causes, and yellow for complications from any of the other three. Black ink was, apparently, for denoting that things had been fixed. There was no blue – well, almost no blue, apparently his eyesight was a complicated mess of blue, red and yellow – and not much black ink. Also, turns out, when you get pneumonia from being locked outside all Christmas it gets written – in an almost ironic level of appropriateness – in both green and red ink. Which Harry most certainly did not know, and wasn't sure he would ever have needed to know. It was certainly working out to be a very educational day. 

His parchment… Harry couldn't decide if it was bleeding or on fire. It was also... lengthy.  Professor Snape was also looking at it like he couldn't decide if it was bleeding, on fire, or needed to be used as a bludgeoning tool. Just who he was planning to bludgeon with it was open for debate.

"Just who, exactly, have you been living with for the past decade?" Snape growled.

Oh. Oh this was not going to be good. Harry cringed as he answered, "My cousin, Dudley, and his parents Vernon and… Petunia Dursley."

Snape did not explode, like Harry had been expecting him to. Instead, he paled and went very, very still. "Petunia?" The question was barely more than a whisper. "He...Dumbledore left you with Petunia?"  

Harry nodded cautiously.

"Was he trying to kill you? That was rhetorical. Dumbledore knew, he knew Petunia tried to kill Lily when we were fourteen. She pushed her down the stairs. Lily never hid it when she showed up to Hogwarts on crutches. He had to have known."

Much as Harry was loath to bring it up, or interrupt the Professor's thoughts, it was pertinent. "Um, actually?" Snape looked up at him with a look of dawning horror, and Harry had to force the rest out in a rush. "He may have been. Trying. Look, it's part of the whole thing where I need you to do legilimency in my general direction."

"Unfortunately," Snape drawled, "we will not be doing that any time soon." He held up the formidable roll of fire-colored parchment, "This is rather more than can be fixed in a day."

Harry went to protest, he needed Snape to know, to believe what happened, what would happen, but Snape held a hand up to forestall him. "What we can and will do is get your potions, eat breakfast, and then at a reasonable hour, I will write to Amelia Bones and ask her to come by with a pensieve. We will guide you through the process and she and I both will view all memories you wish me to see, which I strongly recommend include several examples of what lead to your diagnostic results bleeding ink. She will deal with what has already occurred in the here and now appropriately. We will make a plan for everything else. And you will go to bed."

...What?

Chapter Text

Professor Snape had returned from somewhere deeper in the house with no less than six vials of potions, which he placed in front of Harry, moving three of them towards the middle of the table. "Those three are best taken with food," he said shortly at Harry's questioning look, "you will take them after you've eaten." 

Harry nodded and took the potions in front of him, left to right, without question. Which seemed to fluster Professor Snape even further. What? Like he was going to barge into a man's house and not only offer, but demand they take a stroll through his brain but then act like he doesn't trust the man when asked to take potions? Besides, this Snape might not know it, but he devoted seven years to keeping Harry alive; Harry had zero doubts that every potion on the table was both beneficial and necessary.

Snape didn't say anything though. Harry supposed there was enough answer in everything they'd said so far for whatever questions Snape had at the moment. Instead, he moved to make breakfast. Harry boggled. 

He was aware that the Dursleys' kitchen was not an average kitchen for a British family. Little Whinging was a relatively newly constructed town, Privet Drive especially, and had followed American trends in the kitchen, building it large with plenty of granite counters. The Dursleys had even started a trend of getting large American fridges instead of the small ones most of Europe preferred, though none was as big as the Dursley fridge, and the kitchen was partially open to the dining room. They even had a large American dishwasher, though it was never used while Harry was there as Petunia preferred to make Harry do them all by hand.

The average Brit home had the dining room entirely separate from the kitchen, which was small, with little counter space, usually laminate, a small, if any, dishwasher, and a fridge that fit under the countertop. Some even had a clothes washer/dryer under the counter.

Professor Snape's kitchen was neither of these things. 

It seemed the house was too small to have a dedicated dining room, if they had put a wall in, there wouldn't have even been enough space for a two person table and still have room to move around it. Instead, they simply took an awkward corner made by the mudroom's incursion on the floorspace of the kitchen, and built two benches and a table into it, just big enough to seat four people, if they were comfortable with each other. 

Even still, the far kitchen counters were only about six feet away. The counters were made of wood, the sink tiny. There was a small, relatively new fridge in an open space beneath the pantry next to the table, and a positively ancient clothes washer under the counter nearest the mudroom. The real boggler, though, was the stove. Which wasn't anything like any stove he had ever seen. At Privet Drive, stoves were a range of four hobs, with a single large oven underneath, either gas or electric powered, with various dials and knobs and buttons to adjust the temperature. At the Burrow and Grimmauld Place, stoves were the same old wood-burning stoves Benjamin Franklin invented in the 1700s, simply charmed to burn magically, with the temperature controlled by the same means. This was neither, a beast of a thing that looked straight out of a Dickens novel and had no controls whatsoever. It also seemed to always be on, doubling as the primary heat source for the house in winter.

"Professor Snape? What is that?" He asked.

Snape was opening the silver domes up top of the beast and putting pans on the two iron plates on top, he looked at Harry and back to the beast. "Ah, no, I imagine you haven't seen one before have you? I doubt Petunia would keep one even though her mother was a maestro with theirs. This is an AGA cooker. Invented in the 1920s and produced for public purchase in 1930. My grandfather spent all his savings getting this one for my grandmother in 1937. It ran on coal, but when the local mine went under and my father took to drinking enough that he wouldn't notice, my mother charmed it to run on magic."

Without Harry saying anything, what followed was a rather thorough science lecture on heat and conductivity, followed by one on the uses and functions of the AGA, drawing comparisons between learning to cook on one and learning to play an instrument. An ode to cooking not unlike the ode to potions Harry remembered from his first Potions class. It occurred to Harry that, when all his students had to do was listen, Snape wasn't a bad teacher. It was when the students had to start doing things and he had to keep an eye on twenty people and ten cauldrons or someone would get maimed that his teaching broke down.

Snape startled him out of his thoughts, "Have you ever cooked before?"

"Oh, uhm, yes. I've cooked all the Dursleys' meals since I was five and tall enough to see over the stove with only a small stool. But that was a gas powered range, nothing at all like what you said cooking with an AGA is."

Snape raised an eyebrow at him, one eye twitched slightly, like he was constraining himself from something, probably killing Petunia. "Would you like to learn?"

Harry stared at him a moment, shocked that he'd offer, shocked that he'd let Harry anywhere near a family heirloom. "Yes, I think I would." Look at him, making changes already. Maybe he could do this.

***

Breakfast passed surprisingly amicably. Snape handled the stove, talking the whole time about what he was doing and why, how you could control the temperature of the pan by moving it closer to or away from the center of the plate, how and why each of the four ovens below had a different temperature that you didn't have to do anything to control because good engineering took care of that for you, where in each oven was hottest or coldest. Harry managed the prep and handing things to Snape, mostly focusing on learning to play the mystical beast of a stove.

If he was staying here for a while as Snape had implied, he wanted to be able to repay the favour, and a house as small as this one wouldn't take much time to clean. Cooking he could do, if he knew how the stove worked.

After breakfast, small and healthy but still bigger than he could manage much of, Harry took the remaining three potions and Snape led him upstairs.

There were three doors. Snape pointed to the center one, "the bathroom, shared, so do try and keep clutter to a minimum. The door on the right is the master bed, my room, knock if you need something, but otherwise stay out of it. The door on the left was my room growing up, you may sleep there. One of the bunks is still set up for studying, so sleep on the other. It is six thirty, I will write to Madame Bones, sending the letter at seven. I suggest you take a nap until she arrives, which won't likely be before eight."

Harry nodded silently as Snape turned and went back downstairs, leaving Harry alone on the landing.

The room was also, well, not what Harry thought of as normal. He supposed it was bigger than it seemed, but couldn't be even as big as Dudley's second bedroom. Two of the walls had beds built into them, with drawers beneath and along one side, and cabinets above, removing the need for extra furniture in the form of dressers or shelves. The window wall appeared to have bookshelves facing the foot of the beds, while a nightstand was built into the head of the beds behind the drawers. Under the small window between the beds sat an old trunk, with the initials EMP on the latch, half open, with a Hogwarts robe sleeve hanging out of it with Slytherin green trim. 

Both bookshelves were full of books of very different types. The right bed's bookshelf appeared to hold all seven years' books and quite a bit of supplemental reading. There was also an old wooden lap desk, the kind with drawers for paper and pens and ink, set haphazardly on the foot of the bed, a pile of notebooks on the nightstand, and a few more scattered by the lap desk. A giant pile of a motley assortment of cushions in absurdly bright colors took up at least a third of the bed. He somehow doubted that even teenaged-Snape bought himself lime green and raspberry pink pillows for his study bed. He smiled, certain they were his mother's infliction.

The left bed, which had a black and green comforter and grey sheets, only had two black and grey pillows, confirming his thoughts on the pillows of the other bed. Its bookshelf was loaded with everything from Shakespeare to Dickens to Poe to science fiction, with the last shelf appearing to be muggle text books for history and science. 

He could take a nap, as instructed, or... he could learn more about the man he'd come to rely on and maybe his mother, too.

He never did sleep much, anyway.

***

Amelia Bones had just sat down at her desk, cup of strong Darjeeling tea in hand, when the Spinner's End Owl flew in and settled onto her desk. She sighed deeply. It didn't matter the year or even the decade, any day when that owl showed up was bound to be long, tedious, and overflowing with horror.

The Spinner's End Owl, called such because he once belonged to both wizarding children of Spinner's End, Severus Snape and Lily Evans, was an irascible old bugger who hated everything. It was well known that anything he carried was guaranteed to not have been tampered with as he was both capable and vicious about his duty. Most people blamed Severus for this, his surly disposition even as a child matching the owl's perfectly, but Amelia knew it was actually Lily's fault the bird knew how best to disable humans while still holding his letters in his claws. What she didn't know was how the hell the feathered bastard was still alive, having been an adult when Mrs. Evans purchased him for the children twenty years ago.

"Hello, Edgar, what trouble is Severus dropping on my desk today?" She asked the bird as she dug a treat out for him. Politeness being the only way to get his letters from him even when they were addressed to you – also Lily's fault – Amelia had long since developed the habit of speaking to him as if he were Moody, which suited the Greater Sooty Owl just fine.

Edgar inspected the treat like he was checking for poison – the only bit of the bird besides color and attitude that was all Severus – before taking it daintily and stepping off of the scroll-tube he carried.

She left Edgar to his food, as he preferred, and opened the tube, finding a scroll of some length and a smaller letter inside.

Amelia,

The letter began, which was unfortunate, if he was calling her by her first name, it was sensitive and also likely involved their yearmates. Bugger.

I strongly request you visit me at Spinner's End with one of your office pensieves in tow at your soonest convenience. While it is not an emergency, it is rather urgent. See attached diagnosis for the reason. 

I cast it myself this morning at 5:00AM, when Lily's Son appeared on my doorstep demanding I "simply Legilimense" him. 

Floo is open.

S.S.

Bugger it all. Severus was adamantly not a morning person, having rather more in common with Edgar The Owl than most humans had with their owls, she did not relish anything that would have him up and capable of casting complex diagnostics at five of the morning.

Then she unrolled the scroll, and was immediately fully awake herself.

Damn Dumbledore to a special level of hell reserved just for him. This was going to take weeks to sort out, she just knew it.

"Selwyn," she called out the door to her assistant, "better cancel all my appointments for the week. The Spinner's End Owl brought us Problems again."

Amelia dashed a quick reply onto a scrap parchment and slid it into Edgar's carry tube. "Straight back home, then, Sir Edgar. I'll be along as soon as I can. Look after Lily's boy, would you?"

Edgar nodded gravely as only he could, picked up his tube and was gone.

"Damn," Amelia swore again, pocketing the letter and the scroll of Gryffindorish ink. She hoped it was early enough in the day to get the best pensieve the office had, she had a feeling that anything less wouldn't be good enough.

***

Chapter Text

When Amelia arrived by Floo, Severus greeted her and went up to fetch Harry, expecting him to be asleep in the bed used for such.

That was not what he found.

Instead, Harry was passed out in the study bed, hugging that atrocious sequined flower power monstrosity Lily gave him for his twelfth birthday, with his first and second year notebooks beside him and his third year one open on his face. Edgar, for some reason, stood guard in a nest of pillows by the boy's head.

Edgar popped one eye open to glare at the interloper, only settling down again with both eyes open calmly when he realized it was Severus.

"Kreeeet?"

"Edgar. Good morning to you. Why are you up here?"

Edgar looked down at the boy and shuffled his feet before looking back up at Sev. "Chree." He glared derisively.

Severus sighed. Intransigent bird. "Yes, he's Lily's hatchling. Yes, he's hurt. I am attempting to help him with that, but in order to do that, I need to wake him up."

"Chiiititit."

"No, I need to wake him up, now, Amelia's downstairs with the pensieve we need to get started."

Edgar tilted his head for a moment and clacked his beak at him. "Chichichi."  

Severus rolled his eyes, "Yes, you may stay with him and bite anyone harming him. But I need to wake him up."

Edgar shuffled over to Harry, nudged the notebook off his face, and proceeded to nuzzle and chirrup at him until he blearily rubbed his eyes and sat up.

"Wha-?" Harry looked about hurriedly before looking up at Severus with the defiant-guilt he'd seen on so many first-year faces. "Uhm, sorry?"

Severus only raised an eyebrow and elected to ignore the understandable urge to investigate him, and probably also his mother, given the pillow-hugging. "Harry, this is Edgar. Your mother insisted we share him, and he has apparently decided to be your guard-owl. Also, he thinks manners are important, so I suggest you be polite. Also, Madame Bones is here, waiting in the living room."

When they got downstairs, after brief introductions and greetings with Edgar settled firmly on Harry's shoulder, Severus handed Harry a notebook and pencil. "I find it helps to write yourself a list, short words or phrases that help you call up the exact memory you want us to see. I will be selecting a few events off of your diagnostics that we need to see."

Amelia readied the pensieve on the coffee table while they selected their lists. When Harry finally put down the pencil, Severus's eyebrow rose of its own accord, as the page was quite full. "How many memories do you need?"

"Fifty-seven, I think, I'm not sure if some of them will come out as one memory or not," Harry groaned, "and I'm not sure that will have all the context necessary. There's a reason Legilimency was my first choice."

"And there's a reason I cleared my schedule for the week as soon as Edgar landed on my desk this morning," Amelia returned with a chuckle. "Sev never fails to bring me interesting problems, and interesting problems always take a while to sort out and recover from. If you don't mind, I'd like to begin with only Sev's list, as I'll then need to bottle those to take back to the ministry as evidence to sort out appropriate custody and charges against the people you've been living with. Once that is out of the way, we can do your formidable list. Possibly after some tea to calm ourselves back down. Alright?"

Harry nodded silently.

"If context is truly missing from your list, we can start on the main things and revisit Legilimency later, when you're in better physical condition," Severus put in, laying out the diagnostic parchment and readying his wand. "Now, I'm going to point to a result and it's date, and I want you to try and remember the event as clearly as you can while I cast the incantation to pull a copy of the memory and settle it into the bowl. I've selected four. Then I will ask you to remember an average day with the Dursleys, and then a day on which accidental magic occurred. Any questions?"

On the one hand, there should be many questions in this situation, "Will it hurt?" being the most commonly asked. On the other, if the boy was willing to do Legilimency for this, Severus didn't expect he would ask much, least of all if it was going to hurt. Especially with as lengthy a parchment as the medical history charm produced, he likely didn't even care much about pain anymore, so long as it got what he wanted done. "Will I get in trouble for anything?" was second most common, but also unlikely to come from a boy who'd professed to have a least favorite Unforgivable Curse in the Imperius.

Harry had no questions, just nodded and said, "Let's do this, then."

One by one, Severus pointed and pulled a silver string from the boy's temple. 

1985/8/1 Second Degree Burn to left anterior ulna, no medical treatment, recovered. Complications: minor nerve damage.

1986/12/25 Pneumonia, insufficient medical treatment, recovered. Complications: 10% reduced lung capacity.

1987/9/15 Concussion, damage to optical nerve, no medical treatment, partially recovered.

1989/6/21 Spiral fracture left ulna, Spiral fracture left radian, no medical treatment, partially recovered, misaligned. Complications: reduced hand strength, nerve damage.

It was a good thing Amelia had already suggested a break for tea. All three of them needed calming after the six memories. The only thing preventing Severus from running off to bombarda that fucking house to oblivion, was that Harry was currently shaking half the house himself. Severus walked them both through breathing exercises and Amelia passed them each a cup of hot tea and asked them questions about their current surroundings.

It took three cups of tea and several stories of Lily getting one over on the Marauders before they were calm enough to continue. Edgar worried the whole time and seemed quite distressed by the difficulty of preening two different heads at once.

***

Later, Severus would look at the list of key words Harry had written down and snort wryly. Later, he would bury his head in his hands and pull back out the fantasy of murdering Dumbledore and add several new features to it. Later, he'd devote several minutes to it instead of the seconds he usually took. He didn't know that was on the schedule yet, but he would.

The fact that Harry had joined them in the pensieve for the memories Sev had asked for to answer any questions, but had been unwilling to join them for this set, should have been a rather large clue. They missed it, and were quite taken by surprise instead.

"Does Hogwarts commonly send more than one letter to potential students?"

"They send three. Maximum."

"Hagrid? He sent Hagrid?!?"

"Oh for fuck's sake, Hagrid." 

"Hagrid, look at the boy dammit, he has anxiety."

"You're huge, Hagrid, stop letting them swarm him. Goddammit, Quirrel, he's a child not a basilisk."

"That is not protocol and I WILL be having words with the goblins about that."

"Get. In. Line."

"Draconis Lucius Malfoy, you are so grounded."

"You can't ground him for things he has not yet done, Sev. Besides, you know he's just parroting what Lucius says."

"He should try listening more to his mother. She's the smart one in that relationship."

"Molybdenum Prewett Weasley, if Dumbledore sent you to get him to the train, just bloody well ask the boy, rather than shouting about it!"

"Molly was a Gryffindor, 'Lia, subtlety isn't in her genetics."

"Grounded. Completely and utterly grounded."

"He still hasn't done it yet."

"Entirely beside the point."

"You could be great, you know."

"He doesn't want to be great, he wants to be happy."

"I'm not sure the Hat is aware that being happy is ambitious for him."

"Don't remind me, or I will follow through on my desire to fiendfyre that house."

"Not Slytherin, please, not Slytherin."

"See? I'm definitely grounding Draco."

"I don't care what he says, Harry is keeping his feet on the ground."

"It's no wonder she hasn't got any friends."

"Ronald Weasley!"

"That's not going to end well."

"Troll in the dungeon! Troll in the dungeon! . . . Thought you ought to know."

"Oh for fuck's sake."

"THAT is this year's defense professor?"

"Half the school lives in the dungeon!"

". . . I did not need that heart attack."

"Excellent use of Leviosa, though. Especially since they just learned it that day."

"I. Did. Not. Need. That heart attack."

"A Cerberus? A Cerberus. Why is there a Cerberus?"

"Goddammit, Hagrid."

"Do I want to know why this seemingly innocent memory of Erised and Dumbledore is in here?"

"Minerva! That is not how you...augh!"

"First years. They are fucking first years."

"Oh, of course the Dark Lord is involved."

"Nope. I did not want to know why Erised was included."

"Love? Love. That's what he's going with?"

"Oh come on, Sev, obviously he was trying to keep the first year from asking too much about sacrificial magics. Not well, mind you. But trying."

"Oh for fuck's sake. A house elf. Stealing mail, exploding puddings, and generally being a disturbance. Why?"

"Making a note to ignore any notices of underage magic in Harry's vicinity next summer. House elves. Honestly, what next?"

"The barrier doesn't just go down! How did no one notice they weren't on the platform?"

"Stealing a flying car is not the obvious solution to this!"

"Right. First report of a flying car, send someone to collect them and apparate them to Hogsmeade. Noted."

". . ."

"No, Sev, you cannot preemptively assign detentions to the entire school, nor can you set them on fire."

"But-"

"No."

"Oh for fuck's sake, Hagrid!"

"Alright, Arthur can keep the car."

". . ."

"If I can't set the school on fire, you can't set Lockhart on fire."

"Why not?"

"Because it isn't fair. You can see if you can independently prove it and arrest him before he even gets asked to teach that year."

"Fiiiine. Spoilsport."

"Basilisk? Basilisk. A twelve year old killed a basilisk."

"With the sword of Gryffindor."

"I take it back, Harry is, in fact, more terrifying than a basilisk. How many heart attacks am I going to have before we get through this?"

"A lot more than is healthy, certainly. I should have brought a bottle of whiskey."

"I'm going to strangle Fudge."

"Blow up. She said blow up, and she did. I am going to treasure the memory of that woman bobbing along on the ceiling like a parade blimp for the rest of my life. Blow up. Hehehehe."

"Focus, Sev, Sirius Black escaped and Fudge is an imbecile."

"Neither of those are surprising facts, 'Melia."

"Dementors. On the train."

"I am going to strangle Fudge."

"That utter imbecile."

"I never thought I would say this, and I'll deny it if you tell anyone, but at least Lupin is reasonably competent."

"Wouldn't dream of it."

"Dementors. On the quidditch pitch."

"I am not going to strangle Fudge. I'm going to feed him to a dementor."

"We're lucky there wasn't fourteen hospitalizations."

"He's lucky there weren't any deaths."

"Oh look, we made it through most of the year with no heart attacks. That's about to change, isn't it?"

"Big dog. Big black dog."

"Oh, animagi, of course they are."

"Peter." "Peter?" "Peter."

"Fucking Peter."

"More things to investigate as soon as possible. Yay."

"Why with the fucking dementors?"

"Because Fucking Fudge is a fucking idiot."

"... You could have solved the problem entirely by just opening your fucking mouth at any point in thirteen years, but nooooo, why do that when you can just order thirteen year olds to abuse a Time Turner?"

"Now can I set him on fire?"

"No, because then I have to do that paperwork too."

“Do… do they actually think a house elf is going to be casting a Dark Mark unprompted?”

“Oh.  That’s how he has a least favorite.”

“IT’S NOT DUMBLEDORE’S CALL!  The DMLE sets the limits on curricula about Unforgivables!”

“HaRrY, DiD yOu PuT yOuR NaMe… No, of course he didn’t!”

“How is nobody realizing what’s happening here?  Harassment, multiple counts, and that woman is an adult, why is she being allowed to corner a child in a closet?”

“What was that about not preemptively giving the whole school detention?”

“Shut it.”

“Dragons!  DRAGONS?”

"...should have brought a calming draught with me."

“Fucking dragons, Severus.”

“No, I refuse to experience a school dance one more time.”

“Someone needs to teach him how to not be an arse to his date.”

"He's fourteen. I'm pretty sure no one manages to not be an arse at that age. I'll put it on the list and find someone else to hand that task to. Maybe Lupin?"

"Good plan."

"None of their friends signed waivers for this, I'm sure."

"Make that several calming draughts."

"I'm actually impressed Digory and Krum didn't just burn the maze for defiling the pitch."

“Peter Xanthurus Pettigrew, don’t you dare!”

"Every calming draught I have."

“Well, that explains things.”

“Nobody noticed he wasn’t Moody?”

"Right. So. Find a rat, get Sirius free and into St. Mungo's, arrest Lockhart, send Moody to cover second year, arrest Rita Skeeter for illegal animagus, invasion of privacy, and espionage, raid Crouch's residence and arrest both of them. Anything else I have to do this week?"

"The Dursleys, clearing Hagrid's name, and getting that damned book from Lucius. I can take care of Harry's medical issues, the Goblins, getting Hagrid sent off elsewhere to finish his education, move my entire store of boomslang skin off campus, and deal with that stupid rock and Quirrel." 

"What about the basilisk?"

"...I'll find a rooster."

"Dementors. Why is it always dementors?"

"A full wizengamot trial. For underage magic. The Fuck?"

"...... Adding raiding Umbridge for dark artifacts to the list. As if it isn't long enough already."

"I have no idea what the Fuck is up with Dumbledore and these dreams, but I'm quite sure I'm going to hate it."

"Right, make sure there are clear lines of communication that include both Harry and Sirius at all times, no matter how much I want to set Black on fire, make sure Harry knows he's allowed to retake any tests that are interrupted by medical or external concerns."

"Yep, I hate it. Adding teaching Harry occlumency properly to the list. Not whatever nonsense Bumbles orders."

"Now can I set Dumbledore on fire?"

"Only if you're planning on doing the paperwork in advance."

"Slughorn? Fucking Slughorn? The man never had a year without a permanent maiming in at least one of his potions classes, stole work from his students and claimed it as his own, and thinks it's appropriate to teach sixteen year olds how to brew rape drugs!"

"All that going on for five years and he still scraped five owls. With an EE in Potions even. He could probably get solid Os given a chance to learn without running for his life half of every year."

"Except Divination. No one passes that one."  

"Blame Dumbledore. He's the one who won't replace that two-prophecy hack with someone capable of teaching."

"You still can't ground Draco for things he hasn't done. You can be harder on him when he does things early in the hopes he'll avoid what comes later."

"Horcruxes?" "Horcruxes." "Fucking horcruxes."

"Could this get any worse?"

"That wasn't permission, Dumbledore!"

"What do you want to bet you had similar orders from at least two different people?"

"It's not a bet if it is a certainty. Also, I can guarantee at least three people gave me marching orders."

"Dumbledore, Voldemort, and?"

"Narcissa."

"The Fuck are you doing, Dumbledore?"

"Oh look, inferi! How. Delightful."

"Is that what that potion was for? Ugh. Now I have to figure out how to brew an antidote for something I burned the majority of my notes on."

"Oh, look, I do get to kill the asshole. But only because he ordered me to. Asshole."

"Oh, Hedwig, baby."

"Buy a bird. Stick every protection charm on her possible, get Edgar to teach her to be an unholy terror with wings. Got it."

"... I'm adopting Hermione Granger and dragging her into the DMLE. Final decision. Also, remind me to make several tiny, cute purses that can contain everything one might need on the run from dark wizards."

"I'm annoyed I didn't think of it first. Also, make sure one of those has a better tent than that one. And weapons. And disguises. All of them. And a first aid kit and thorough potions supply. ...And a year's supply of food for six people."

"Lessons. So many lessons. Including how to deal with Goblins. Also, we are not telling the goblins about this part."

"Dragons. Because we needed more fucking dragons in this."

"At least it's not more dementors?"

"If you get Granger, I get Longbottom. Even if he sorts Gryffindor. I want him. He outwitted full grown Death Eaters for months."

"Decent grasp of planning, given that they have a justified history of not trusting adults to do shit."

"I'm still trying to figure out why he showed up at my door, when clearly all of the adults in his life should not be trusted in so much as successfully making a toasted cheese sandwich."

"Clear and thorough instruction on fiendfyre. Especially for the nitwits."

"Did you know Molly is terrifying?"

"Yes. Have you met her children? They didn't get it from Arthur."

"I know you're dying, but it needs to be said, Sev. Melodrama much?"

"Oh shut up, it gets us answers."

"I hate the answers."

"Even now that you know why he came to you?"

"Especially now that I know why he came to me."

"Harry James Potter, you keep your tuchus right in that castle!"

"Did you really think he was going to?"

"No, or I wouldn't have yelled it."

"Do we have to watch this part?"

"You mean you haven't closed your eyes yet?"

"Asshole."

"Dumbledore, you manipulative little shit!"

"Is it possible to strangle a dead man? Asking for a friend."

"Good to have proof Narcissa is the smart one in that relationship."

"Kinda want to stab Lucius, though. I'm not sure seven years is enough time to get his head out of his ass."

"YES! SIXTY POINTS TO GRYFFINDOR FOR BEHEADING THAT STUPID SNAKE!"

"Sev, you can't give points out in advance either."

"I DON'T CARE, I'M DOING IT ANYWAY, IF I HAVE TO GIVE HIM POINTS FOR HAVING HIS SHOES TIED EVERY DAY TO ACCOMPLISH IT."

"Well, I'm glad he got his head out of his ass eventually, but he couldn't have done it while I was alive to see it?"

"Jesus, the death toll."

"Even the first war didn't have this many corpses at any one time."

"For fuck's sake, is anyone going to make those three sit the Fuck down before they keel over and add to the corpses?"

"No one's paying attention to them, Sev, that's the whole theme of this mess: Dumbledore, Voldemort, idiots, and no one pays any attention to the damn kids."

"What? Fucking what?"

"No. We are NOT killing Dumbledore. We are going to break him. We are going to make him cry. He's not allowed to die until he has suffered sufficiently. THEN you can kill him."

"You're firing those aurors, right?"

"I haven't hired any of them yet, and you'd better believe I'm not going to."

"I'm not crying."

"I don't know what you're talking about, I certainly am. But I won't tell on you."

"Definitely keeping those two."

"Greedy."

"Death. That's Death. Themself. Holy shit."

"He… he was the Master of Death."

"And gave it up. And Death… does Death owe him for that?"

"Probably not anymore, since he's here now."

"They do definitely like him, though."

"Which is moderately terrifying."

"Only moderately?"

"We'll definitely need to fix this ‘can only plan on adrenaline’ problem."

"True, but you have seven years to do it, since he's finally learned how to delegate to adults."

"What?"

"He's right. Of all the adults he had last time around, you're the only one who ever stepped up for him. I'll let Remus and Sirius, once he's healthy, have partial custody and visitation, but I'm giving legal, physical and magical custody to you. Besides, you're the only one he knows who knows what's going on."

"You can't be serious."

"No, I'm Amelia. But I am absolutely not joking."

Chapter Text

Harry had no idea how long they'd be in the pensieve. He'd never got the chance to check the time before and after his trips in one, and Bumblesnore never gave him the opportunity to ask about such minor details. Nonetheless, he put the kettle on, and readied Snape's coffee press. When they came out looking more than a little mentally fried, he had a pot of tea for himself already, and a full coffee service just waiting for hot water. By the time he pressed coffee into their hands, they seemed to be coming out of it. 

Professor Snape took a sip, shook himself and gathered parchment and quills and a pot of ink for both of them. While he handed Madame Bones black ink, he dipped his quill into red.

"There's running bets on how many gallons of red ink you keep in stock, you know," Harry said, just to see what the reaction was. Madame Bones laughed.

"I do know, what's it up to, now, ten galleons?" Snape answered drily.

"Twelve by Christmas. Crabbe and Goyle's essays were actually dripping red ink a few times."

"I'll need to get extra, then. Four gallons won't cut it for the year. In this case, however, it's so I can pretend it's the blood of a few particular imbeciles so that I don't just run off and commit murder Amelia would have to do paperwork for." At the top of his parchment he wrote Do not murder anyone until they have sufficiently suffered.

"That sounds like an excellent plan," Madame Bones agreed, "I want red ink, too. Something needs to bleed, and I can’t run off and make them bleed right this instant, the to-do list will have to suffice. For now.."

Snape smirked and pushed the inkpot between them. Madame Bones copied his first line. Apparently, they were a bit annoyed with people. Harry hoped it wasn't him. 

Snape stared off into space for a moment then announced, "Narcissa first, I believe."

"Huh?"

Mme. Bones pointed her thumb at Harry, "I agree with him, huh?"

Snape sighed gustily, "I, a marked Death Eater, can hardly walk into St Mungo's with Harry Potter in the condition he's in, and if Poppy had her hands on him for seven years and never caught on to anything, I'm not sure she can be trusted in this. Cissa is a licensed healer who has helped me with other abused students, and I think she showed sufficiently that her head is not completely up her ass. Furthermore, if we get her onside early, she might be able to take care of the problem of Lucius for us."

"Point. I'll drop by for a spot of Lady Malfoy's excellent tea before heading back to the office and let her have a gander at my copy of the diagnosis, then, shall I?"

"If you would, please. If I write or floo call, Draco and Lucius will whine about me not writing or visiting them. And I haven't the time this week."

Narcissa went on both sheets. Gringott's was next on Snape's.

"Uh, Severus, he'll need clothes before then," Bones pointed out.

"I'm aware. However, there are multiple points to consider. First, not knowing what Cissa will want to do to fix that extensive of a list, we don't know how drastically his size will change. Second, he is not in the condition to handle an extended shopping trip. Third, my mother was vehemently against throwing away anything short of rags and I was not a rambunctious child, I still have most of my things, and can easily transfigure them to the correct size and even to better condition. Fourth, if something more formal is needed, we can borrow from Draco and adjust the size. Fifth, it will be at most a week before I can purchase for him his own clothes, with his own input, fit to his tastes and whatever size he is after healing."

Harry was… confused. Just being given Snape's things was understandable. They were already on hand and guaranteed to be better than anything he ever got from Dudley. But it sounded like not only would it be short term, but… Snape would be buying new ones for him? Like out of his own pocket? And also letting Harry pick them? "Huh?"

"What are you confused on, Harry? If you don't want to borrow Sev's old clothes for a bit, you can say so, and I'll arrange for someone to pick some up for you until you two can go shopping," Mme. Bones said kindly. Was she a Hufflepuff like Susan? She probably was.

Harry shook his head, "No, that makes sense, and I've never had my own clothes besides school robes anyway. The professor's things are probably better than any of what Aunt Petunia gave me of Dudley's, and guaranteed to fit if he transfigures them, which is a huge step up, Dudley is a whale. And also a slob. Nothing I got came without stains. Or tears. Or both."

"Then I don't understand," Mme. Bones frowned.

"I get a choice in what I wear? And it sounded like Professor Snape is paying for it?"

Snape added a line to his sheet, Don't kill Petunia until after she's sentenced by the Wizengamot.

Followed by Clothes and decor shopping.

"Potter, Harry, I'm taking custody of you. Part of that job is providing for you, which, yes, includes paying for you to have a full and proper wardrobe that fits you, keeps you adequately warm, and is in good condition. And why should you not get a say in what you wear? You're the one who has to wear it. If you want to wear lime green and coral pink, that's your business and I won't stop you. Even if it is atrocious. Narcissa will be horribly offended, though."

"I thought mum inflicted those pillows on you."

"She did. Said I needed more color in my life. I'll tell you what I told her, black is a color."

They went back to filling in their lists quietly, before Bones, without looking up, put in, "Didn't Lily dye your hair that shade of pink once?"

Harry broke into giggles as Snape looked affronted. "Never tick off the redhead," Snape warned direly, "it never ends well."

"Oh, I know, Ginny got on the train first year having already mastered the Bat Bogey hex, her brothers had extensive experience getting hit with it. I made a point of never deserving it."

"Bat Bogey hex?"

"Turns your snot and boogers into bats that fly out your nose and attack you. Surprisingly useful in combat."

Snape shuddered and Madame Bones looked scarily speculative. "I don't know that one, could you teach me?"

Yep, scarily speculative. "I think the twins may have invented it, but they used it maybe all of once before she mastered it and set it on them. I could teach it, since Ginny taught us all fifth year, but she's still going to be better at it."

Leash the Weasley twins to something useful and Do not tick off Ginevra Weasely appeared on Snape's parchment. Those were good things to add, Harry thought.

***

Severus's To-Do List:

• Do not murder anyone until they have sufficiently suffered.

• Narcissa

• Gringott's

• Don't kill Petunia until after she's sentenced by the Wizengamot.

• Clothes and decor shopping.

• Buy a snowy owl, give her every protection charm.

• Get Edgar to teach Hedwig to be a menace.

• Buy extra red ink, the dunderheads are coming in force.

• Start brewing wolfsbane

• Find a werewolf and sit on him

• Don't kill Pettigrew.

• Move boomslang skin off campus.

• Leash Weasley twins to something useful

• Do not tick off Ginevra Weasely

• Get Hagrid to finish his education elsewhere. Beauxbatons?

• Steal a rock and return it to its owner.

• Deal with Quirrel.

• Don't forget the troll.

• Find a rooster

• Deal with a basilisk

• Potions parts! And armor for Harry from the hide. Keep spare fangs everywhere possible.

• Get Lupin to teach Harry date etiquette.

• Ensure clear lines of communication at all times that include Harry and Sirius, no matter what Dumbledore says.

• Do not set Black on fire, Harry likes the mutt

• Do not set Dumbledore on fire, Amelia doesn't like the paperwork.

• Ensure Harry knows that he can retake tests interrupted by migraines and Dark Lords and the procedure for doing so.

• Occlumency lessons. Properly this time.

• Lessons on Dealing with Goblins

• Lessons on Etiquette

• Lessons on Law and the Wizengamot

• Write a manual on how not to cast fiendfyre

• Refrain from beating Crabbe and Goyle with it.

• Do not piss off Molly Weasley

• Do not stab Lucius

• Do not strangle Fudge

• Do not set Dumbledore's robes on fire.

• Convince Draco that his mother is the better role model.

• Apply forceps if need be.

• Don't fuck up

• Find a way to give Neville Longbottom sixty points for beheading that stupid snake, even if he hasn't done it yet.

• And another 100 for outwitting full grown Death Eaters for months.

• Don't kill idiot children or their even stupider parents.

• Keep Harry on the ground.

• Rules: No trolls, no cerberi, no basilisks, no dragons, no dark Lords, no blast ended skrewts, no following Dumbledore on half cocked crusa

Harry caught what Snape was writing, and snatched up a quill to cross it out. Then he crossed out the previous one for good measure and added his own.

• Avoid rules Harry already knows are bad ideas.

"Your handwriting is atrocious," Snape grumbled, adding another to the list.

• Penmanship lessons

Amelia's To-Do List:

• Do not murder anyone until they have sufficiently suffered.

• Narcissa.

• Arrest Dursleys, do not kill Dursleys

• A hex or two wouldn't go amiss. Probably.

• Give Sev custody

• Catch a rat, put the rat in a box

• Do not kill the rat

• Get the dog from the pound and take him to a vet

• Get a book from Lucius

• Do not beat Lucius to death with Book.

• Talk to Myrtle and clear Hagrid's name

• Investigate Lockhart

• Arrest Lockhart

• Do not set Lockhart on fire.

• Make Moody cover second year.

• Arrest Rita Skeeter

• Do not squish the bug.

• Raid Crouch's residence, arrest both of them

• Do not crucio them where anyone can see.

• Adopt Winky

• Raid Umbridge for Dark Artifacts

• Arrest Umbridge

• Do not feed Umbridge to Vampires, it'll give them indigestion

• Blame Dumbledore

• Adopt Hermione Granger

• Beat Severus to adopting Neville Longbottom.

• Make several tiny, cute purses to go with every outfit, filled with everything one needs for a year of running from dark wizards

• Don't forget the first aid kits

• Potions supplies

• Double the food expected for a year.

• DO NOT HIRE THOSE AURORS.

• Don't set them on fire, either.

• Mandate time teaching Defense at Hogwarts for qualified Aurors.

When they seemed to have run out of things to write, Harry picked them up to read them over. The quantity of anti-murder reminders on Professor Snape's list was not surprising, though the number of them that involved fire was. He'd have thought there'd be more poisonings and turning persons into potions ingredients. Maybe he saved that for students. The fact that it was very nearly mirrored on Madame Bones' list was rather... more. Especially as she used such terms as "do not kill the rat" and "do not squish the bug".

As Harry stared at the lists and their disturbing quantity of murder and cheerful ideas of getting away with torture and maiming, Snape cleared his throat.

"Anything we've forgotten?" He asked, for once devoid of sarcasm.

Harry quickly re-read the lists and cringed. "Um, horcruxes?"

"Damn," Snape grunted, adding, Figure out how to get a Horcrux out of a human without killing them to his list, Mme. Bones copying it.

At Snape's raised eyebrow, she glared at him, "Two sets of eyes research better."

Snape sighed and allowed it, turning instead to Harry. "Your homework, while we wait for Narcissa to arrive, will be to list the horcruxes, their locations and protections as you know of them, and attempt to draw their appearance as accurately as possible, at the current point in time. I can figure out how to deal with them from there."

Chapter Text

Narcissa Malfoy was many things, but what many people forgot was that she was, first, foremost, and always, a Black and that with that comes certain truths. Specifically: the female of the species is far more deadly; blood, family is important above all else; and a genetic tendency to madness carries with it a genetic tendency to genius. Her sister, unfortunately, got a double dose of the former. People forgot, because Narcissa wasn't insane, that she was still Bella's sister, and that meant she was very much a genius. Just because she acted a proper Lady where people could see did not render her genius void.

So when Blinky informed her that Amelia Bones, head of the DMLE, had dropped by at eleven in the morning on a weekday, Narcissa immediately knew three things. It wasn't for her imported teas, no matter what she said. It also wasn't directly related to any ongoing cases or raids the DMLE was running. And Lucius needed to stay in his study.

Toward that end, she sent Minky in with tea for Lucius and an inquiry about how their French holdings were doing. That'd buy her three hours while he hunted down the information. Draco, fortunately, was at the Notts' for the day and wouldn't be back until dinner.

Narcissa's solar was her domain. Lucius gave over control of the wards for that room even before Abraxas died, and Narcissa had built them up even higher than Blacks normally did. Which meant that she could, and often did, take tea with a friend there and be absolutely certain there would be no ears. And fewer questions asked. Furthermore, while of the men of their society, only Lucius, Severus, and Draco knew of her private fortress, all the Ladies were aware that Tea in Narcissa's solar was the most secure place in the country to have discussions their spouses might not approve of. Only the offices of Account Managers at Gringott's could compare, and one just didn't have social calls and gossip sessions with one's account manager.

As Blinky led Madame Bones into the solar, and Minky returned with finger foods and a selection of her finest teas, Narcissa brought her secrecy wards up firmly. "Amelia, darling, I wasn't expecting to see you until the Fall! I know how hard you work, and how you relish your time off with your niece. How is she, by the way?"

"Narcissa, it's always a pleasure. Susan is chomping at the bit to get to Hogwarts, naturally, and planning all her courses out years in advance." Amelia returned warmly.

"Of course. Draco is doing much the same, but with the addition of quidditch."

"Still trying to get Lucius to let him sneak a broom in, I take it?"

"Naturally. This week's excuse is that he might run into Unforeseen Dangers From Gryffindors and need a quick escape. He was not impressed with the answer that he should try running that one by Severus. So what brings you by?"

"Nothing much really, I simply had a very long morning out of the office and needed a moment of respite before returning to the office. I simply couldn't resist the opportunity to stop by for a chat and some truly excellent tea."

"Oh dear, nothing too dangerous, I hope?"

"Not dangerous at all. We simply received a visit from Edgar this morning, the instant I'd sat down at my desk. Apparently, a wizarding child has been recovered from abusive muggle relatives. His aunt made the mistake of allowing him to find out where she had lived as a child and that his mother's best friend still lived there. The boy hopped on a muggle train at midnight and was pounding on Master Snape's door at 4:30 this morning."

Narcissa didn't doubt Amelia had needed a respite after that. The Boy Who Lived living with muggles all this time, abused, and escaping to find succor in Severus of all people? Narcissa needed a respite just hearing about it. Severus was a good man and very capable, but no one would describe him as cuddly or comforting. And if Sev had immediately sent for Amelia, they'd probably spent a portion of the morning in a pensieve, walking through Harry Potter's memories, which if Severus was a relief instead of a terror before he'd had his coffee, could only be deeply horrific. Bugger, she was being called in as a healer. Severus couldn't take him to the hospital without it becoming national news by noon.

"Oh my! The poor dear. Master Snape's temper is formidable at any hour of the morning, I could only imagine the child was terrified. Is there anything I can do?"

"Confused more than terrified. Edgar has taken a rather proprietary interest in the boy, and when I left, he was hugging one of Master Snape's atrocious cushions and staring about in bafflement. He did not expect his abuse to be taken seriously. I have all the evidence I need to get the boy justice, and Master Snape has agreed to take custody, so there's little left to be done… Actually, Master Snape tells me you're a licensed healer?"

Oh hell. There was a lot to unpack in that. That Edgar the Owl had claimed Lily's Son was to be expected, really, and was, in many ways, a relief, as the child could find no better protector. That he was hugging one of the god awful pillows Lily inflicted upon Severus implied that rather more had happened than the usual beginnings of an investigation into abuse, as Narcissa was well aware of where those pillows lived. That Harry Potter had run away, but didn't expect anyone to care about why, indicated several rather long term problems going well beyond what happened in the house he lived in. Confused indeed.

"I am. I made Lucius wait to get married until I had finished my certifications. What do you need?"

"Master Snape ran a medical history charm on the boy as soon as he was awake enough to realize the problem and gave me a copy. I can't let it out of my hands, as it's evidence now, obviously. But could you take a look and give me your opinion?"

"Of course! Anything to help our children."

Narcissa steeled herself. If Severus had sent Amelia to ask for her as a healer, it was beyond his own formidable capabilities, and he wasn't comfortable moving the child nor leaving him alone, and didn't want Lucius to know just yet, which is why he didn't firecall or write. She still wasn't expecting the meters long length of parchment covered in red and yellow ink.

Her vision greyed momentarily. "This… you're arresting them, right?"

Amelia nodded gravely, "I'll be sending a full squad of Aurors to collect the family as soon as I get back to the office, and filing the custody papers while they're out. How severe should the charges and sentencing be? Master Snape couldn't say."

"Amelia," Narcissa swallowed heavily and picked up her tea to steady her hands, "I'm not sure how the child is still alive except that he must have a large magical core fueling his body and keeping him upright, and a deeply stubborn will to survive. I'll be surprised if he doesn't sort Slytherin on that alone. This… I see what amounts to multiple counts of attempted murder on this parchment. Not simple abuse or neglect, Amelia, murder."

Amelia froze and stared at her a moment before removing her monocle and pinching the bridge of her nose. "Damn. We will need Lucius' assistance, after all."

What?

"I'm sorry, for what?"

"The child in question was specifically and purposefully left with these relatives, and other claimants barred from him, by none other than Albus Dumbledore. Who has publicly claimed, in the Wizengamot, no less, that he was in contact and ensuring the proper education and training of the child. He had to have known, or he lied in court, and everyone on the Wizengamot will know it the moment I bring the family in. I was hoping to deal with it quietly, but attempted murder several times over… If I push for the full sentence these monsters deserve, Dumbledore will get involved or there will be an uproar. Lucius is the best placed to stand against him."

Bugger. Everything. Narcissa nodded and took another fortifying sip of tea. "I'll get him on board and go assist Severus. You take care of the arrests and paperwork. Leave Dumbledore until just before their court date. That'll give us time to maneuver."

"Of course, Narcissa. Thank you. I'd better get back to the grind then. Arrests to make and society to upend. I'll be here for Sunday Tea, I think. I'm sure I'll need it."

"And you'll be welcome if you do. Keep me updated. I'd like to know if there's anything else I can do."

"Of course. I think Severus would appreciate your help in getting the boy clothes appropriate to his station. The poor dear has only the clothes on his back, which are more rags than anything and Severus has never been one for fashion."

"I'll be in touch with him, then. We'll make a day of it with the boys."

Narcissa waited until she was sure Amelia had left the property, taking the time it took for an adult to make the long walk to the front door and the gates beyond it to settle her mind and finish her tea. Then, and only then, she slowly, calmly, rose from her seat and went to her cabinet. Unlike many other wives, after the war she had never stopped keeping the fullest possible first aid supplies in every wing of the manor. It was useful today. She emptied the entire contents into an expanding bag and grabbed her spare healing rituals set from under the couch. Better to be prepared for every possibility than find herself unprepared for the injuries she faced.

Bag in hand, she sedately strolled down to Lucius' private study and opened the door. "Lucius, I'm heading out."

"Cissa, my dear, I was just about to come find you with what you requested."

No, no he wasn't. He was maybe halfway through the books and paperwork.

He stood and approached her, looking down at the bag in her hand. He knew that bag, and what it meant. He also knew she didn't usually bother to stop and let him know where she was going when that bag was in evidence. "What's happened?"

"Amelia was just by, stopping for tea after a morning at Spinner's End. She's off now to arrest the muggle family Dumbledore left Harry Potter with. On multiple counts of child endangerment, abuse, and attempted murder. Severus will be getting custody," she trailed off as her husband and friend, if personal idiot, hugged her.

"I'll make the rounds then, leave Lord Nott till late and gather Draco up while I'm there. And I'll hold Draco off of asking for his godfather until Severus's new ward has some time to settle. Let me know when you'll be home."

He may be an idiot some days, but he loved his family, which was all Narcissa had ever asked for.

***

"He's asleep with Edgar watching him, at the moment." Severus looked haggard, but then he'd apparently been up since before the sun this morning, if he'd slept at all. Narcissa could forgive the lack of proper greeting. 

She hugged him anyway and set her bag on the couch, "Alright Sev, hand me the diagnostic and tell me what you've done."

"For the moment, nutritional supplement, appetite stimulant and anti-nausea before meals, general healing, nerve tonic, and a digestive stimulant after meals. I didn't want to get too specific without a solid plan, and he confessed to being unsure how much he'd be able to eat as Petunia bloody well starved him."

"Good. Let him sleep for now. I want to do a more general diagnostic first and then decide from there how we go about this. We can do both without disturbing him, and I very much doubt he doesn’t need every bit of rest he can get."

"He's in my old bed, upstairs," Severus nodded, gesturing to the stairs. 

Narcissa's more general diagnostic charm gave results that were no more cheerful than Severus's medical history charm, but it was at least less overwhelming in data quantity.

"On the one hand, it's not as bad as I feared from what Amelia said," she started, as they sat back in the living room. They'd both been quiet as Severus made and served them tea, and for the first three sips after, a tradition they both favored when there were unpleasant things to be spoken of. "He's not dying. We have options. Option one: we go through the problems one by one, most critical to least, and deal with them the normal way. We would have more control over the results and can change tactics at any point as needed. It would also be as painless as any healing can be, but it would take the rest of the summer, and he'll never be as healthy as he should have been, nor will he attain his full height and weight." 

She paused to sip at the tea Severus kept in stock for her, a Masala blend of his own making, before continuing. "Option two: reversing time bubble ritual. Deage him to about a month before the Potters died, when he was at his absolute healthiest, and then reage him from there back up to his current age. It'd be intensive and painful, but could be done by sunset, especially given the extra boost from the Solstice, giving him the rest of the summer to learn what he needs to, and would ensure his… previous accommodation will have no further effects on his life going forward. Though he will need to sleep most of the next few days, and eat well both before the ritual and for the next week." 

"Option two. Please," came a small voice from behind her.

Narcissa turned back to the stairs where a bleary-eyed Harry peaked from around the corner. He really did look like an exceptionally tiny James, physically, but his eyes and his facial expressions were all Lily. What struck Narcissa the most, though, was the way he moved. He moved like Severus, with bits of Regulus thrown in, not that she thought either of them had noticed that yet.

"I have a feeling I'm going to need every advantage I can get," Harry continued nervously. Her perusal was probably making him uncomfortable, as it often did Severus.

"Are you sure?" She asked instead, "once we start we won't be able to stop, and it can be quite painful, shrinking and growing that rapidly. Even if we put you to sleep first, you won't avoid all of it."

"That's alright, pain isn't new, and it won't hurt for weeks, will it?" 

"No, I don't imagine pain is new for you at all," Narcissa agreed sadly. "You may be sore for a few days, possibly up to a week, and feel very weak, as your body settles into its new size, but it shouldn't last longer than that, no."

"Then that's the best option," he announced firmly.

Narcissa looked Severus in the eye and pushed the last consideration to the front of her shields for him to read there. If they did this, with only the two of them and not a full community, it would have the same effects, and be very nearly as binding, as a magical adoption, though not as much as a blood adoption. Dumbledore would not be able to take Harry away, but Harry would get far more of them. There would be no going back if the Dark Lord returned.

Severus nodded, "I am willing, if you are."

She watched the boy for a moment, as he came around to sit on the chair across from her, seeing her favorite cousin in his walk, her best friend in his hands. She looked back to Severus and nodded, she'd do it, but for Sev, for Reggie, today she was not Narcissa Malfoy.

Today, she was Narcissa Black. And she'd defy anyone who threatened her family.

***

OMAKE:

Sunday, June 23rd, 8:00PM

Gideon Godet was finishing the final touches on an order to be sent out the next morning before closing up shop when two women he’d never expected to see together nearly ran into his atelier. By which he meant they strode with purpose, something one of them managed to avoid appearing to do under any circumstances whatsoever. “Madame Malfoy! Madame Bones! Two of ze finest ladies in Britain! What brings you to my shoppe in such a hurry today?”

“We have a Project for you,” Madam Bones began, the capital letter clear in her voice, “one which requires the utmost discretion --”

“And absolute skill,” Lady Malfoy continued, “Both of which we know you are best at.”

Gideon’s eyebrows attempted to escape his face, despite his best efforts to control them. Most intriguing. “You have my silence, ov course, dear ladies, and I vill certainly do my best. What iz zis project?”

“Potions Master Severus Snape has been given custody of a boy, nearly eleven years old, heir to at least one House, who was, through some idiocy of the War’s end, left with muggles,” Lady Malfoy said.

“He was appallingly abused and escaped to wind up on the Potions Master’s doorstep,” Madam Bones added.

“With only the clothes on his back.”

“Which were rags at least six sizes too big. He took being given Severus’ old things to hold him over in stride, but became horrifically confused when Snape said they would be purchasing the boy his own clothes, made to fit him, to his own tastes. Everything from the concept of being allowed to choose what he wore, to being given new things when old ones are available, to Severus paying for them from his own pocket, entirely baffled the boy,” Madam Bones wrung her hands in distress.

“He has no idea what is fashionable, what looks good, not even what he likes in clothing or what clothes that fit feel like because he’s never been allowed anything but cast-offs!” Lady Malfoy hissed in a voice that clearly would have been shouting in outrage were she any less dignified.

“Oh my,” Gideon said faintly. He didn’t know what to say to that. It certainly was a Project, capital letter absolutely necessary. He pulled his notebook over and began taking notes of what he would need. “What sort of budget are we looking at?” he asked, enunciating carefully to help himself focus. “The Potions Master does not make a great deal at zhat- that school.”

“Budget is not an issue,” Lady Malfoy waved off, “Severus may have promised to buy him clothes, but I have a new nephew to spoil in dire need of spoiling. I’ll let him cover some of the cost, if he insists and can negotiate me down, but I’m not sparing any expense.”

“You’re not alone in that,” Madam Bones near-growled, “Half the office is putting in to buy him whatever he wants for his room, as he’s never had one of those before either.”

“What?” Lady Malfoy gasped in sync with Gideon’s own horror.

“Those monsters made him live in the boot cupboard like the lowest of house elves. He’s never had a bed. Let alone space of his own to decorate however he chooses,” Amelia nearly whined. “When we arrested them, the squad I sent out found his cupboard, carefully decorated in his own drawings, where they wouldn’t be seen by someone standing outside his door. The fund is the only way I could keep the office from rioting outright.”

Gideon wanted to cry. “When will he be available for an appointment?” he asked instead.

“He will be fully healed by next week,” Lady Malfoy answered, reminding Gideon that she was a fully licensed healer. “They’ll be getting paperwork sorted at the Bank the morning of the first. Perhaps after lunch that day?”

“I have an appointment at 12:30, but will be available by 2:00pm, and have nothing further scheduled. How about I just block out the entirety of the rest of the afternoon for you?”

“Perfect. Maybe I’ll even manage to get Sev to stand for you,” Lady Malfoy smiled. Gideon smiled back, touched. This was why she was one of his favorite customers, she always gives the best presents.

He frowned slightly, speaking of, “I vill acquire art supplies and instruction books for the boy. If he iz decorating his own space vith his own work, he should have ze best materials to vork vith, no?”

“Gideon, darling, you are a dear, and I adore you.”

Chapter Text

Lady Malfoy hadn't been underestimating the pain and fatigue any. Harry spent three days entirely abed. What little time he was awake was spent eating whatever Snape put in front of him, taking potions, and working his way through books and notebooks from Snape's school days. And even that was slow going.

Having Snape help him in and out of the bath was awkward, but unavoidable. It was better than getting a sponge bath, at least, which was the other option, and no.  

It took five days to get properly back on his feet and even then just moving around the small house was exhausting. He was taller, though, having shot up six inches and finally past the four foot mark, something he hadn't accomplished until second year last time around. Further, between the healing, the enforced idleness, and the six small meals and nutrition potions a day that Snape had been bringing up to him, he had filled out more than he ever had in his first life. Frankly, by the time Lady Malfoy showed back up to check on him after a week, he was bored. He'd never been so idle for so long in his life unless he was locked in his cupboard or Dudley's Second Bedroom. That wasn't to say he did nothing, but he wasn't allowed to clean, or run outside, or anything but eat, rest, and study the books Snape handed him, and it was starting to itch.

Lady Malfoy's diagnostic charm glowed with greens and golds over him and she sighed with relief. "All clear," she announced with a smile, "you may now get out of bed. Remember to take it easy and work your way slowly back to activity. If you get tired or dizzy, sit down and rest. You are allowed to take care of yourself first, and I expect you to do so. Any questions?"

Harry had a lot of questions, a whole notebook full of them, but none that pertained to his medical condition, so he shook his head and answered with a quiet "No, ma'am." He expected her to make her excuses and retreat from the room. He was well aware she was only here because he'd been in such poor condition and she was a healer. Doctors usually left as soon as you told them you didn't have questions about their orders, didn't they? Besides, she was Lady Malfoy and he was a halfblood enemy of Dork Lord Runs Away.

She surprised him, though. She didn't leave, she knelt down beside the bed he sat on, in her probably absurdly expensive gown, and caught his eyes where he'd lowered them to the baseboards of the floor. "Aunt Cissa, please, not ma'am. Severus is rather like my little brother, and as he is your new guardian, or will be by the time Madame Bones finishes the paperwork, that makes you my nephew, and I don't believe in formality among family. Nor debts, but that's an issue I have to broach with your guardian frequently, silly man that he is." She smiled as his posture loosened some, some of the tension running out of him. "When I ask if you have questions, I do not simply mean about your physical status, but any questions at all. You can ask. I may not always answer, and outright rudeness in how you phrase a question will result in a lecture, but asking will never be punished by me. How else are you to learn?"

Harry stomped on the urge to fidget uncomfortably. Lady - Aunt Cissa being nice was...strange. "I have rather too many questions, actually. And they're all running on top of each other so I can't even figure out what they are, much less how to word them," he answered haltingly.

"That's quite alright," she replied with a soft smile (seriously, weird. ) "When you do figure out what to ask, let me know and I'll do my best to help you find the answers. For now, I'll let you get changed. You and Severus have a meeting at the bank today, I understand."

At his nod, she rose gracefully – how does one even do that in those skirts? Harry tripped on his robe when it was open half the time. – and left.

Harry got out of bed and went looking for clothes. The drawers of the sleeping bed held clothes much too big, probably from Snape's last year of school, and the study bed drawers held, unsurprisingly, study materials, and gifts of various sorts. But the cabinets above the beds held crates of old clothes, labeled by the age Snape was when he wore them. Harry was bewildered to find onesies, dressing gowns and toddler things. He supposed Mrs. Snape really was against throwing anything out. The first cabinet over the study bed held a crate labeled 11, and Harry figured he should start there and work his way down until he figured out what fit best.

To his utter shock, the clothes from Snape's first year of Hogwarts were actually an inch too short, but he must have had a major growth spurt with the largess of Hogwarts, too, because the crate labeled 12 was three inches too long. 

He took a set of each and went to find Snape, figuring Snape would know better which would transfigure more easily.

***

Lady-Aunt Cissa joined them for breakfast of loaded scrambled eggs and toast before heading home. She said something vague about seeing them later and ruffled Harry's hair as she went. Harry firmly decided that Lady-Aunt Cissa was what he'd call her. She was nothing like Aunt Petunia, after all, and very much a Lady with the capital L. Also, possibly more importantly to Harry – not that he'd be telling anyone that, ever – it was not what she'd told him to call her while still being close enough that she wouldn't get mad at him for it.

Snape started to get up to walk her out, but she pushed him back down and ruffled his hair as she saw herself out the floo. It took everything Harry had not to boggle at the sight of the Terror Of Potions sulkily straightening his hair out and glaring after Lady-Aunt Cissa. After a moment and the flare of green light of the floo, Snape sighed, gave up on his hair, and finished his tea.

"We have two hours before we're due at Gringott's," he said, "plenty of time to have a talk."

Harry gulped and shrank in his seat, already dreading what was to come, despite not having the faintest clue which of the many possible talks the professor wanted to have. None of them were pleasant concepts. The professor pinned him with a stare Harry refused to meet and raised an eyebrow.

"While I am aware you'd prefer to avoid complex conversation, before we delve into finances and legalities, there are a few things I need to know," he began.

"You already know everything!" Harry interrupted, "I showed you! What more do you need to know?"

The eyebrow rose higher, disappointment clear on his face as Harry sunk lower in his seat. "If you would avoid interrupting, you would find out. First and foremost, Harry, I need to know what you want. Not now or in the next five minutes, not this week or this school year, not Dumbledore or the war, or what anyone else wants. What you want, out of life."

Harry laughed a little hysterically and laid his head on the table, staring at his shoes. "What I want?  Out of life?   What I want out of life," he repeated quietly, finally looking up at his professor. "I haven't the foggiest. I used to say that I only ever wanted to be ‘Just Harry’ but I know that’s never going to be possible. Almost from the moment I first set foot in Diagon Alley, the first time, everyone knew my name, ‘knew all about me’ they said, but not one of them knew me. It’s always been the war and Mumblesnore and Goldiemort and what they wanted. It’s never been about what I needed nevermind what I wanted. So no, I have no idea what I want, it’s never been an option for me to want anything.” Harry rolled his head back against the back or the bench and stared at the ceiling. “The Boy Who Lived. What tripe. I’m just the Boy Who Won’t Bloody Well Die. Never did get to do the whole living thing, just a long series of successfully Not Dying when I should have.” 

He stared at the ceiling a moment longer before suddenly straightening and looking the professor in the eye. “That’s what I want. I want to try living on for size.”

The professor met his gaze, searchingly, but without the expected pity. He nodded once, “Let’s see what we can do about that then. Go get dressed and meet me at the Floo in twenty minutes.”

Snape was almost out the door when Harry thought of something else. “Professor?” he steeled himself while Snape turned slowly back. “Death… Death said my name was Henry. I never knew that before. Everyone knows everything about Harry Potter. No one knows Henry Potter. Could I? Could I be Henry?”

Snape inclined his head, “Of course, Henry.” and was gone. 

Maybe he should think about calling Snape something other than Snape or The Professor. After he got dressed. He put his dishes in the sink and ran for his room. Twenty minutes is not much time to get ready to live, after all.

***

“First things first,” Severus said, deciding to start on the lessons part of his list immediately, as he dug an old, oversized for the boy, hoodie out of a closet. “Goblins value five things more than property. Honesty, Secrecy, Competence, Courage, and Manners. And for them, those things are all tied into each other. Cowardice, dishonesty, incompetence, and sharing another’s secrets are deeply rude. And liable to start wars. Look them in the eye, nod, but do not bow, and never, ever, lie. Once behind closed doors, one can say any truth one needs to and know it will never be told to another being except in the event of an Account Manager retiring, which almost never actually happens.” Satisfied that Henry’s scar was sufficiently covered, and without those glasses he was unrecognizable, he picked up the jar of floo powder and held it out for Henry. “Grinner has been my family accountant for at least four generations, and looks like he intends to die in office as his predecessor did. Any questions?”

Henry looked at the jar and back up to Severus. “Are we flooing to the Leaky? And can I just let you do the majority of the talking?” He asked drily.

Severus sighed, he supposed those were fair and valid questions from what he’d seen in the pensieve. “Yes. And yes, so long as you answer any question posed directly to you, promptly, without looking to me, and as honestly as you are able, even if that means saying you don’t know.”

Henry nodded, seriously, “I think I can do that. And we’re not mentioning the dragon thing, right?”

“Under no circumstances whatsoever is your most recent trip to the bank to be mentioned or even implied.”

Henry smirked, taking a pinch of floo powder. “Yes, sir, professor.”

“Impertinent brat,” Severus muttered as Henry stepped into the grate with a clear “Leaky Cauldron.” He took his own pinch and placed the jar back in its home before following.

***

OMAKE 2:

Generally, Garrick Ollivander made uncomplicated wands in uncomplicated ways. He simply picked up a wand core, let his magic find the wood that went with it, and put the two together into a wand. Sometimes it wanted to be styled particularly, most times it didn't. Simple, uncomplicated wands for the simple, uncomplicated eleven year olds that frequented his shop. Sometimes though, he liked to sit and stretch his Mastery of Wandlore, working with more uncommon cores and woods and complicated combinations. These times, he let his magic guide him.

He cleared away all the detritus of simple wands from his workshop, opened up the cabinets and drawers and let his magic do it's thing. He stared down at the wand in front of him and wondered whether or not that was a good idea. The mere fact of it requiring three woods was bad enough on its own. The actual contents of the wand were utterly terrifying. 

Blackthorn, bark intact and thorns broken off like an Irish shillelagh, a wood best suited to a warrior, bonding to it’s wizard through adversity, was usually used with only the wood, but this one demanded on keeping its unrelentingly black bark, and the thorn nubs made places for the fingers to fit in the hilt, and would most assuredly poke out between them like some sort of punching weapon. Brutal. Spiraled around it were cedar and aspen. The ivory-white aspen, like all poplar woods, likes wielders of clear moral vision, but unlike the steady and uniformly consistent poplar, was suited to charms and particularly martial spells. It preferred strong-minded and determined duelists. Revolutionaries. Throw in the brilliant red slash of cedar, preferential to choosing wixen of uncommon strength of character, loyalty, and perception, wixen with the potential to be truly frightening adversaries when the people they care for have been harmed… Well, he couldn’t say he was looking forward to meeting its owner. Especially not since it had a core of sphinx hair.

He placed it carefully in a box and labeled it, hoping it wouldn’t be matched until it was his granddaughter’s turn at the head of the shop, and stretched out his magic again. He hoped this one would be a bit less terrifying.

An hour later, he looked down at a wand that was a bit less terrifying. Except… No, no, it was still terrifying, just in a different way. 

English oak, indicative of strength, courage, fidelity, and powerful intuition, wand and wixen both attuned to natural magics and the plants and creatures within it, would be quite calming after the last wand. This wasn’t English Oak. It was American Iron Oak, an old one that had laughed in the face of many wildfires that destroyed all around it but failed to so much as slow it down, as shown in the many grey to black rings within the white wood. The oak took up the bottom-right of the wand, the majority of the hilt and trailing up at a sharp angle along the shaft. The tip of the shaft, and trailing down into the hilt was Black Walnut. Like all walnuts, it preferred intelligence. Black walnut, with its particular flair for charmswork of all sorts, however, would not work at all for one who made a habit of self-deception, which said nothing about deceiving others. A wielder of black walnut was generally possessed of good instincts and powerful insight, sincere and self-aware. And there, in between the light and dark woods, was a brilliant slash of red: cedar, cut from the same block the first wand had used.

He honestly had no idea what a core of Erumpent horn would do. He didn’t think anyone had ever actually used one before, but he could make a guess as to what it meant for the owner. The erumpent was a powerful creature, with a thick hide capable of repelling most curses and charms, a single long horn, and a thick tail. It did not attack unless provoked, but the results were usually fatal, as the horn could pierce skin and metal, and contained a deadly fluid that caused whatever was injected with it to bloody well explode. Paired with the other wand, as the shared cedar wood suggested it should be, Garrick wanted to cry.

One more try. Third time’s the charm, after all, right? This one would surely make sense and calm him down as life returned to normal. 

Three hours later, as he watched his hands finish piecing the third wand together and carefully did not throw anything, much less the wand, Garrick firmly decided that he was done stretching his mastery ThankYouVeryMuch.

For some reason he had felt compelled to cut the woods like puzzle pieces and then fit them together, curls like “marbled” cake batter weaving into each other, leaving holes that perfectly fit the leftover shards from that same block of cedar. He wanted to cry. When he’d started the wand, it had seemed to make sense, well enough. All the hundreds of species of ash wood had the bulk of attributes in common. Wand and wixen both would be stubborn and tenacious, not easily swayed from their purposes and beliefs, but never brash or over-confident. The ash that made the hilt and lower shaft of this wand though, was tamo wood. An Asian ash tree that had had vines or ropes strangling it such that would have killed a lesser plant, and simply grown around it, eventually absorbing what strangled it until nothing remained but strangely three-dimensional looking shapes in the rings of the wood. A stubborn will to live no matter what. Strength deeper than minor problems like something trying to kill you repeatedly.  

Interwoven around the cedar and with the tamo ash, making up the top third of the wand and bits down to the bottom third, was ebony. Ebony excelled at combative and transfiguration magics. It was happiest in the hand of those with the courage to be themselves, usually non-conformist, highly individual people comfortable with the status of Outsider, who hold fast to their beliefs regardless of external pressure. People who could not be swayed lightly from their purpose. 

He would have said it was a perfectly Gryffindor wand, all told. Except for the minor detail that it’s core was Egyptian Chaimera beard. Greek Chimeras had the body of a goat, head of a lion, and a dragon tail. Some ancient Egyptian apparently thought they were not deadly enough and made their own breed: Head of a goat, except for the venomous lion fangs, mane and body of a lion, with three venomous vipers where a tail should be. Egyptian Chaimeras were also far more wickedly cunning and intelligent than Greek chimeras, if possessed of a somewhat shorter natural lifespan.

At least it wasn’t the Persian Manticore claw he had stashed away. Greek Manticores were bad enough without the ability to bloody fly. Leave it to the Persians and Egyptians to decide the Greeks weren’t creative enough with their monster-making. He still didn’t want to know why he’d felt the need to acquire that future wand-core. After these three, he sorely hoped it would be the problem of a far-future descendant.

Garrick put the third wand away, gave himself time for a good stress-induced cry, and firmly and happily went back to his simpler wands for simpler children, hoping to forget the terrors he’d just made.

Chapter Text

Snape kept a hand on Henry's shoulder the whole way through the Leaky and down to Gringott's. Henry would have been torn between the need to move and being intimidated by it if it weren't for the fact that everyone else was also so intimidated by Snape and his eternal glare that they hardly dared to look at Henry much less crowd him the way they'd been so willing to do last time. As it was, he stuck close to the brooding bat and the space that automatically cleared for him in the crowds of bodies. He definitely needed to sort Slytherin this time, if only so he could learn to do that himself.

As they approached the bank, he took to watching Snape out of the corner of his eye, so he could better copy what Snape did with the Goblins. Snape nodded to both of the guards, so Henry did too. This time Henry did not gawp and gape at the bank, nor ignore it as he had previous times. Instead he watched the teller in front of them as they got into the shortest line and how the teller reacted to each of the customers and their words and actions.

The first was an elderly lady who insisted on engaging in small talk with the teller, as everyone behind her sighed and settled in for a wait. She became visibly upset when the teller would not tell her about his family and day to day business, nor would he engage in gossip about who else had been to the bank that day, nor would he agree that her grandson is the most precious thing. She finally completed her business and went on her way, grumbling about how rude Goblins were under her breath. Henry took one look at the teller's face and made a note to only ever address his business with them, not that he had any capacity for small talk in him.

The second sniffed disdainfully, in a crude mimicry of Lucius Malfoy at his snobbiest, and wouldn't even look at the teller. He was also apparently incapable of counting accurately as his deposit was twenty galleons short of what he said it was and had the gall to be mad at the teller about it. Good grief, no wonder the Goblins were always cranky.

The third got a good look at the teller’s face before he’d had a chance to smooth it back into the Customer Service Face used by bank tellers everywhere, it seemed, and proceeded to tremble and stumble through his announcement that he was there to pay his fine. The Goblin rolled his eyes but quickly looked up the account and relayed the fee amount, the man paid him and quickly fled the bank. The only thing not painful for all involved was that it was over quickly.

It was their turn next, so Henry stepped slightly to the side so he could better see both Snape and the Goblin, who’s nameplate declared him Grimthorn. He nodded to Grimthorn, trying to make eye contact, despite being below the height of the counter, still, and turned his attention to Snape, hoping it was enough. Snape nodded, “Good morning, Grimthorn, May your gold flow. We have an appointment with Manager Grinner.”

Grimthorn grinned, “Master Snape, May your enemies tremble. Good to see you, as always. Runner Gladclaw will take you back.”

“My thanks, as always, Grimthorn,” Snape nodded again and turned Henry, who hastily copied his nod, to follow the goblin that must be Gladclaw.

They followed Gladclaw through the same door he had once followed Griphook, but rather than going straight at the intersection, where he knew the carts and tunnels to be, they turned left and followed that hall around rather too many bends as it slowly but steadily sloped downwards. Finally, Gladclaw stopped and gestured to a door, rapping sharply on it. “Account Manager Grinner’s Office,” he announced, opening the door. Henry caught his eye and nodded, offering a quiet, “Thank you, Gladclaw,” and was relieved when Gladclaw nodded back before leaving them.

"Ah, Potions Master Snape, may your gold increase. How can I assist you today?"  Henry turned to find a well-dressed Goblin standing beside a large, ornate desk. The goblin in question appeared to be as natively grim and sour as the professor he addressed. 

Harry quickly closed the door quietly as Snape replied, "Account Manager Grinner, May your enemies tremble." He nodded and waved Henry towards one of the chairs facing the desk. "This is Henry James Antioch Potter. We recently discovered a great deal of gross mismanagement of his person, and I have reason to believe that includes mismanagement of his accounts."

The grim Goblin, improbably named Grinner, somehow managed to become even more grim. "Those are harsh accusations, Severus. May I ask your reasons?"

Snape nodded, “Henry lived his life to seventeen, when he was killed. Lord Death sent him back to this past summer solstice. When he woke in the cupboard his relatives made him live in, he immediately sought me out. We spent much of that morning in a pensieve with Madame Bones. In the pensieved memories of his first trip to Diagon Alley, roughly a month from now, I witnessed his first trip to Gringotts, ever, and there were several instances wherein protocol was not followed.” 

“I see,” Grinner grimaced. He opened a drawer of his desk and pulled out a pensieve, placing it in the middle of the desktop. “I request a viewing of the memory in question, Mr. Potter, if you don’t mind.”

“I don’t have a wand yet,” Harry answered, cautiously. 

“That is not a problem, Mr. Potter. Either I, or if you prefer, Potions Master Snape, can do the spell casting for you. I do, however, require your consent verbally, in explicit terms.” Grinner said easily, though his face dropped from grim down into casualty-lists territory.

“Do you need to keep a copy of it for records or investigative purposes?” Harry asked slowly.

“If you consent to that and the evidence bears it out, yes, that would be helpful.”

Henry nodded, “Alright then. I, Henry James Antioch Potter, give my consent for the viewing of the memory of my first trip to Gringotts Bank and for a copy of that memory to be kept as needed for investigative and recording purposes.”

Grinner grinned. It was somehow more disturbing than the sour scowl had been. “Very good, Mr. Potter.”

Snape pulled the memory from him again and placed it in the bowl. Grinner nodded, "if you'll excuse me for a moment," and dipped his head into the pensieve.

He came back out with a thunderous scowl. "Well then," Grinner growled. "Mr. Potter, at any point, before or after this event, was your key in your possession?"

"No, sir, I have never even held my key," Henry answered, struggling not to panic at the anger radiating off of the Goblin.

"Did you, at any point, meet with your Account Manager?"

"I don't even know who that is, sir."

Grinner snarled something in Gobbledegook. "Have you ever had an inheritance test done, or given any blood to the bank for identification purposes?"

Harry blinked, "Those are things you do?"

Snape sighed next to him, "Yes, Henry, those are things they do, and by protocol, should have been done on your first trip here, before giving you access to your accounts."

Harry blinked at Snape now, he raised a finger in question. "You keep saying accounts. As in more than one."

Grinner whimpered and Snape groaned.

Grinner collected himself and tugged on his perfectly neat waistcoat, as if to straighten it. "Well then. First things first, identification and inheritance. Then, with your permission, we will begin an audit and take appropriate action. You will, of course, be notified at each step."

Harry nodded, licking his lips nervously, "As you say, sir. What do I need to do?"

Grinner placed a long parchment and quill in front of him. "Simply sign your full legal name at the top," he instructed.

Harry grimaced, "Sir, that's a blood quill."

"It is," Grinner agreed, question in his voice but not his words.

Fortunately, Snape stepped in, "In his previous life, an instructor at Hogwarts, assigned by the ministry, used writing lines with a blood quill as punishment, often with no set number of repetitions, and Henry was a … favored victim. Madame Bones is dealing with it, but I imagine Henry has some… reasonable concerns regarding blood quills."

Grinner's eyes narrowed. "I will have Logistics inventory quills to ensure it was not one of ours. If Madame Bones has not succeeded in dealing with it by September 1st, please let us know so that we may take our own steps. In the meantime, while it is less preferred by most of our clients," he opened his desk and pulled out a simple but elegant glass pen and a knife, "you may cut your finger, let five drops fall onto the top of the parchment, and use that to sign your name with this pen. I will make a note in your file for accommodations to be made."

Harry didn't wait to second guess it, he picked up the knife and pricked his left ring finger. On impulse, he dropped the required five drops evenly across the top of the page spaced out by his usual handwriting. He used the first drop to write "Henry," the second for James. He paused as he scooped up the third with the pen. "Actually," he commented as he began writing the other New name, "I don't think I would have been able to do this last go around. I didn't know my full legal name until Death told me in the space Between. I always thought my name was Harry James Potter." He crossed the t's in Potter with a single stroke and set the pen down.

Snape had his face in his hand. Had he said something wrong? He looked to Grimmer Grinner, and found the goblin staring at him in horror. "I'm sorry?" Harry apologized, not actually sure what he was apologizing for.

Grinner closed his mouth and huffed out his nose, "Gross mismanagement of your person indeed. Potions Master Snape?"

"Amelia Bones is on it," Snape said clearly despite the hand pinching his nose, "which is the only thing preventing me from blasting that house and its residents to oblivion. I have custody papers to file with the bank when we've finished with Henry's accounts."

“Very well. Mr. Potter, if I could see the parchment, please?”

Ha-enry looked down to find words just finishing shimmering into existence on the page. There…weren’t many.

Henry James Antioch Potter

Born 1980/7/31 

Died 1997/6/21 

Reborn 1991/6/21

Mother: Lily Jane Evans Potter

Father: James Charlus Cadmus Potter

Oathbound Godfather: Sirius Orion Black III

Oathbound Godmother: Alice Marienne Max Longbottom

Ownership:

Potter Trust Vault: #687: 2,572 G, 76 S, 84 K, secured, uninvested.

Named in wills:
James Charlus Cadmus Potter (pending, unread)

Lily Jane Evans Potter (pending, unread)

Regulus Arcturus Black (pending, unread)

Heirships:
Potter (pending will reading, eleventh birthday)

Peverell (unacknowledged, pending eleventh birthday)

Slytherin (Granted by Lady Magic and Salazar Slytherin)

. . .What?

Snape, leaning over to read as Ha -- Henry, my name is Henry -- Henry passed it to Grinner, echoed his thoughts. “What?”

Grinner hummed thoughtfully as he looked it over. “From the top, congratulations, you are who you say you are,” he said drily. “Further congratulations on your second life. As you are physically eleven, with all the biological limitations thereof, you are still legally eleven, the time you have lived and experienced doesn’t actually affect the law or banking policy. However, it will inform how individuals of the Goblin Nation interact with you. While you are physically and legally a child, you are not one, and should, therefore, be addressed as an adult. Muggles were once in the habit of conferring lordships on just about anyone so long as they were alive and the title-holding parent was not. Wizarding Britain does not, rather, the title is conferred on or after the fifteenth birthday, with the Wizengamut seat becoming available on the 17th birthday. Any heirships will remain heirships until you reach the required ages.”

“Physically,” Henry clarified, grateful to have another seven years to figure things out before having to make decisions affecting others.

“From the date of your birth, yes,” Grinner agreed, shooting Henry a knowing look over the top of the parchment. He returned his gaze to the words and scowled ferociously. “And we have several more pieces of evidence of mismanagement of multiple accounts. Most importantly, at the moment, three unread wills. With your permission, I will summon the wills of James Potter, Lily Evans Potter, and Regulus Black for a private reading now, after which we will begin the audit of all accounts due you and schedule a formal, public reading of all three on July 25th. A private reading allows legal and bank action to be taken on any information within them, while the properties addressed cannot be transferred until a public reading.”

Henry looked over at Snape, who was pinching his lower lip in thought. He glanced over at Henry and nodded, speaking to Grinner, “Would it be possible to send the announcements without specifying whose wills are to be read? It occurs to me that there may be a wixen participant to the mismanagement, who may seek to prevent the readings further if they knew of it.”

“Do you have a name for this wixen?” Grinner asked sharply.

The professor shook his head, “Many I could suspect, none I have proof of.”

Henry snorted, “My bet’s on Rhymes-With-Mumblesnore with any number of associates within the Ministry helping him. He is the one who has my key.”

***

It wasn't a long wait before three wooden boxes containing three crystal globes sat on Grinner's desk.

Grinner set up a quill to transcribe, noting the date and time, his name, Henry's and Snape's, and that it was a private reading initiated by an inheritance test. "We will proceed in order of death, beginning with the will of Regulus Black," he announced grimly, pressing a gem on the leftmost box, made of a dark wood, Harry couldn’t tell if it was mahogany or walnut, honestly. 

A ghostly image of a young man rose from the globe, rather like the images in the globes in the Hall of Prophecy, but with just enough color to them to see what the person really looked like. Regulus looked rather like Draco, actually, but with silky, jet black hair long enough that Henry wondered if it had ever seen a pair of scissors at all. He was young, though, younger than they had imagined him in that tent in the woods. He couldn’t have been older than Fred…was. Regulus smiled sadly and Harry promptly stopped paying attention to most of the words, it was hard to focus on anything. What words made it through the fog didn’t help matters much.

Severus, my dearest friend. My only friend, if I’m being honest, which I know you deplore, but you can deal with it, just this once…

Narcissa, my favorite cousin, the older sister I am honestly grateful I never had. Cygnus and Druella were prats who didn’t deserve you, but you never deserved Walburga. We didn’t either, but I’m glad to not share that with you…

Draco, my tiny nephew, you won’t remember me, and I won’t get to be your favorite uncle, like I always swore to be…

Sirius, my brother. You were right, the figure paused and rolled his eyes, not about everything, you prat, those trousers still look hideous on you no matter how you prance. But about the important things. You were right. Mother… Mother was never going to love us, not even if we’d gotten ourselves killed serving her stupid cause. So, naturally, in true Black fashion, I’ve gone and gotten myself killed serving another cause. I only wish I could have told you…

Henry, the boy in question sat up quickly, wrestling his attention to the figure that smiled softly at him. My…godnephew? Is that how it works? Whatever. Sirius is never going to have kids of his own, and even Walburga knows it, no matter how she rants about ‘no son of hers’, she got two gay sons who won’t be producing little heirs of our own loins. You have been Sirius’ heir since you were born, which makes you my nephew. Black Family Tree be damned. That said, your father and godfather have as much sense of fashion as they have brains in their skulls, which is to say, none at all. Your mother is the smart one, but even she can’t do everything. Therefore, I leave every bit of clothing, haberdashery and jewelry I own to you, as well as whatever I still have on my accounts with Twilfitt and Tatting’s, Maison Capenoir and any other clothiers. I also leave you my personal library, minus the books left to others. Show your dad and uncles how it’s done.

Henry honestly didn’t pay much attention to the other wills. There weren’t any surprises hidden in them, really. James left gifts to Sirius, Remus, a couple of members of the Order of the Phoenix, and left everything else to Lily, or, if she preceded him from life, to Harry. He did mention that Peter Pettigrew was their Secret Keeper and thus, if they died violently within their home, whether by death eaters or by Voldemort himself, Peter got nothing as he was at fault. Which was a relief, as it provided half the evidence Amelia needed. Lily’s was much the same, except she included Snape (more probably-atrocious pillows and also a long list of books) and offered violent hopes of retribution to Peter. Unlike James, she also included a list of who should have custody of Harry in which order. Said list was… extensive. James first, of course, then Frank and Alice Longbottom, then Sirius with the recommendation that Remus keep an eye on them, then Professor Snape, to the man’s surprise. McGonagall, Amelia Bones, Andromeda Tonks, someone named McKinnon, Shacklebolt, and the Weasleys rounded out the list. There were even cousins in America listed! 

James says I worry too much, but I provide a list as extensive as this so that there is no excuse whatsoever for my son to go into the care of my biological sister, Petunia Evans Dursley. The Malfoys would be better. In fact, if the list above has been exhausted, Henry is to go to Narcissa Malfoy nee Black. 

Henry snorted a watery laugh and looked up to catch Snape’s equally wet eyes. “Should we get a copy of that to show Lady-Aunt Cissa, or just wait till the public reading and sit where we can get a good look at her face?”

Snape actually laughed, well, chuckled (still an entirely weird concept.) “While the second would be funnier, no doubt,” he answered, “Cissa would probably kill us both if we let her go into that without warning. It’s best to get a good view of her face privately. Less damage to her dignity is less damage to our hides.”

***

Chapter Text

It didn’t take much longer for Henry and Snape to finish at the bank.  After the wills, the only things left were quick, short things. Henry’s three heirship rings were easily acquired and on his fingers, Grinner passed him a money bag of fifty galleons to cover his needs until the audit was finished, the audit request merely required signing a form, and Snape simply handed the custody paperwork from Madame Bones to Grinner. They were finished before lunch.

Snape led them to a quiet cafe down one of the side streets Henry had never been down before.

They were well into their tea and waiting for their food when Lady-Aunt Cissa sat down at their table, gesturing Draco into the fourth chair.

"So, when you said you'd see us later," Henry said slowly, recovering from the startle of someone ignoring Snape's aura of intimidation to sit with them, "you meant later today."

Lady-Aunt Cissa smiled, "Of course. You need clothes and Sev has no sense of fashion."

Harry, remembering Regulus' rant about Sirius' trousers and what he had willed to Harry and why, snorted. "Apparently, neither did Dad, Sirius, or Remus so I don't think anyone would be surprised if I didn't either."

Draco looked mortally offended and Lady-Aunt Cissa tilted her head quizzically. "That is true, James and Sirius did have the worst sense of fashion in their year," she said slowly, with the smallest tone of surprise, "but how did you learn of it?"

Severus smirked at such an opportune moment and pulled out his copy of the transcription of the private wills reading. "Henry was named in three wills that hadn't been read yet. With his permission, we did a private reading and scheduled the public ones for the 25th. You'll be getting a notice later. Reggie was one of the three. He had much to say on the subject of fashion," he told her as he passed the packet of parchment. "You'll also want to look at the last page." 

Narcissa's face did several complicated motions, like she was trying not to cry and laugh at the same time as she read through the two pages containing Regulus' will, then she flipped to the back page. One delicately shaped eyebrow twitched ever so slightly higher at several points as she read the last gifts of Lily's will and the list of names. Henry knew when she'd gotten to the best part when both eyebrows distinctly went up and stayed up for a solid three seconds as her eyes traced and retraced the same three lines. Twice. 

Lady-Aunt Cissa shuffled the pages back in order, neatened the edges, and set the stack down in front of her, blinking at nothing for a moment. "Well, then," she said finally, looking at Harry. "I suppose you're my nephew four different ways, now."

“Mother?” Draco inquired over his tea cup. A year ago, or six years in the future, whatever, Harry would have been hesitant to call the look currently on Malfoy’s face “worried,” convinced as he had been that Draco Malfoy knew no such emotion. But after the events of the last month, Harry knew better, not that this Draco was aware of that. 

Lady-Aunt Cissa smiled at her son and explained. “To begin, Sirius Black is not what people say he is. He didn’t betray the Potters, and if he did kill Peter Pettigrew, it was probably justified, as if Sirius didn’t betray them, it must have been Peter. We can know this as fact because Sirius was sworn godfather to Henry and also made him his heir. As Sirius is still alive…”

“He couldn’t have betrayed those oaths,” Draco finished, nodding in understanding, though he still looked rather confused.

“Sirius and Regulus were my cousins, but we grew up much like siblings, for all we lived in different houses. Regulus named Henry his godnephew in his will. As I consider Reggie my baby brother, any nephew of his must also be…”

“Your nephew,” Henry smiled, recognizing the argument. 

Narcissa nodded agreeably. “Secondly, Severus is my little brother, he considers Lily his sister, and has custody of Henry, and was named in Lily’s will granting him custody. Fourth on the list, all three people before him being incapacitated at the end of the War. If Severus is your uncle, then his nephew of whom he has custody is…”

“Your nephew,” Draco nodded.

“Thirdly, while my parents may have disowned her for contractual reasons, Andromeda Tonks is still my sister, however infrequently we speak of late. As she is also on the list for Henry, that makes Henry…”

“Your nephew,” Snape smirked, joining in on the game.

“Finally,” Cissa smiled, “Lily instructed that if her list was exhausted and it appeared necessary to send him to his biological aunt Petunia, he was to go into my custody instead, in place of his biological aunt, which makes him…”

“Your nephew,” Harry said, smiling. Lady-Aunt Cissa was already better than Petunia, and he’d only seen her twice before this. He was more than happy to let her take Petunia’s place on his family tree.

“Four times over,” Snape drawled.

Draco blinked and looked at Harry. “Well then. Welcome to the family, cousin.” He turned to his mother. “Apparently we have shopping to do?” he asked.

Cissa smiled and nodded, waving the Server over, “After lunch.” 

Their food arrived quickly.

“Can we do something about this first?” Harry asked, pointing to his hair, “I keep hearing about how much I look like James, and I’d rather not. It’s also getting too hot to keep this jumper on, and the scar is rather noticeable.”

Lady-Aunt Cissa cast a quick tempus and nodded. “If we eat quickly, we should have enough time to stop at the salon, yes. We have an appointment at two with Gideon Godet.”

“Cissa,” Snape …Harry couldn’t quite call it whining, but it certainly sounded closer to it than he’d have ever imagined Snape could get. “I do not have the budget for designer wear.”

“Who said you’d be paying?” Narcissa rejoined lightly. “I have a nephew to spoil. You can cover the basic blocks, underwear and socks, if you insist.” Her tone made it clear that she didn’t think he should insist at all, and that insisting wouldn’t get him much leeway anyway.

“I suppose I should content myself with underwear and decor for his room, then?” Snape asked, sighing.

“No,” Aunt Cissa smiled sweetly, “you will have to content yourself with underwear. Amelia nearly had a riot on her hands after they arrested that family, she could only quell it by letting the Aurors’ Office start a fund to cover decorating his room.” The smile took on a distinctly mischievous air. “I suppose I could let you handle all his school things, if,” Snape groaned, “you stand for Gideon and let me buy you three outfits, two of which must contain something other than black, one of which must only have black as accents.”

Snape muttered direly under his breath, but Lady-Aunt Cissa only smirked victoriously.

***

Snape disappeared into Obscurus Books while Lady-Aunt Cissa took the boys into the hairstylist's shop. 

"Lady Malfoy! And Draco, too! How delightful!" the stylist greeted warmly. "And who's this?"

"This is Henry, he's just moved in with Potions Master Snape and requested a makeover of his hair," Lady-Aunt Cissa said with fondness.

"My aunt tried shaving it off once, to control it. It just grew back overnight," Harry said glumly, pulling the hood off of his head. He could feel the way it bounced back out every which way.

The hairstylist's eyes flickered briefly over to his scar before locking on the hair on his head. "Oh, my. Yes, I see the problem. Why don't you come sit right here and we'll see what we can do about that?"

A hair growing potion and fifteen minutes had his hair long enough to sit on and he snickered at how much it looked like a cross between Regulus' never-cut hair and Sirius' wild mane. "I don't think I want it quite this long," Henry decided, "I'm not sure I could take care of it well enough, but perhaps still long- ish?"

The hairstylist nodded, "I know just the thing."

They left twenty minutes later with a bag of hair products, just in time to walk to Carkitt Market and their appointment. Henry’s hair was cut in chunky layers with thick long bangs swept to the side over his scar, just long enough to weigh them down, the rest just long enough to match the tips of his shoulder blades at the longest and brush against his neck at the shortest, easy to put up in a pony, as he did now, pull into a bun, or leave it down. 

Lady-Aunt Cissa and the Professor were making complicated faces again. Snape had come in halfway through the shortest and least difficult haircut Harry had ever had and looked like someone had smacked him with a crowbar. Or rather, he paused momentarily and blinked before moving to join Lady-Aunt Cissa on the waiting area’s couch. Same thing, really. They’d been making polite, complicated faces and whispering since.

Draco, prancing peacock that he was, had nothing but good things to say about it, so either he was being a disingenuous arse or… it itched up his spine. Henry sighed. He didn’t want to go Gryff again, really he didn’t, but sometimes the Gryffindor way got things done. He rolled his eyes and turned around, walking backwards next to Draco to glare at the adults following them. “Alright,” he demanded, “what’s wrong with my hair?”

"What?" Snape asked, stopping where he was.

Lady-Aunt Cissa blinked down at him, "Henry, why would something be wrong with your hair?"

"I don't know!" He threw his hands in the air, "that's why I asked. You've both been staring, making complicated faces, and whispering since before she even got done with it!"

"Henry," Draco said, confused, "they weren't staring?"

"They were staring like Slytherins do, which very carefully doesn't look like staring but very much is." Henry answered while continuing to glare at the Slytherins in question.

Snape blinked. "Nothing is wrong with your hair, Henry," he answered firmly. "It is simply very Black."

"Yes, it's always been this color, good of you to notice," Harry deadpanned before he could stop himself.

The corners of Lady-Aunt Cissa's mouth twitched. "Capital B, Henry. Your hair is, in fact, exactly halfway between Sirius' and Regulus' hair when they were your age, in both length and texture, while being the same color as both."

"Oh," Henry blinked, he hadn't thought of that, or how it'd hit them on the day they first saw their friend-slash-brother's will. "Should I --"

"Absolutely not," they both answered, cutting him off.

"We will get over it," Snape said, resting a hand on Henry's shoulder and leaning down to look him in the eye. "There is nothing wrong with your hair."

Narcissa smiled down at him, "It's perfectly lovely hair. But what's most important is that it's what you want. There is absolutely no need to change any part of yourself just to make other people comfortable."

***

Draco was… confused. A week ago Father had picked him up from the Notts' manor and told him that The Boy Who Lived had been sent to live with muggles who abused him, and was now living with Uncle Sev. None of which made any sense, especially not when everyone knew Harry Potter lived with some pureblood family in seclusion being trained by Dumbledore. And everyone knew Uncle Sev hated James Potter and would have nothing to do with his son.

This morning, Mother had pulled him aside and told him he couldn’t go to the Zabinis’ because they had an appointment at two with Gideon to help his new cousin discover the concept of proper clothing. He liked Gideon and did quite enjoy shopping, but had no idea who this “new cousin” was. Then Mother explained what she, Uncle Sev and Madam Bones had found out, and he was horrified, for sure, but that didn’t explain why Lady Malfoy, a scion of House Black, was calling Harry bloody Potter his new cousin. Or why The Boy Who Lived, everyone’s supposed hero, was in that situation to begin with.

Lunch was…revelatory.

First off, his name wasn’t Harry, it was Henry. Everyone was wrong.

Secondly, he wasn’t bold and brash and well-trained in defense against the dark arts, he was skittish and cunning. Everyone was wrong.

Thirdly, he wasn’t well off and spoiled, he was wearing Uncle Sev’s old things like they were the nicest clothes he’d ever worn. Everyone was wrong.

Then, Sirius Black wasn’t a traitor to his friends and either wasn’t a mass murderer or was but it was entirely fair because the person he was trying to kill was the one who did betray them. Everyone? Was wrong.

Mother explained how Harry was his cousin four times over, in ways that made it clear that. Everyone. Was. Wrong. Eight times over.

He didn’t even like being compared to his father! Everyone was wrong!

He didn’t revere Dumbledore, he called him ridiculous names. On purpose. Everyone was wrong.

And now, just when he was starting to get his balance back, Henry is offering to cut his hair back off, to the shape he hated because it made him look like his father, just because his new hairstyle made Mother and Uncle Sev sad. Like a Hufflepuff. WHILE catching them doing sneaky things Draco himself hadn’t caught. Like a Slytherin. AND acting like a Gryffindor and just dealing with the problem head on. What was next? Spouting riddles like they make him sage like a Ravenclaw?

He breathed a sigh of relief as they reached Gideon Godet's Atelier and Uncle Sev opened the door for them. This he knew, this he could do. Get Henry, who was definitely not Harry Potter, into nice, new, good-looking clothes. Easy as pie, right?

***

Gideon smiled as they came in. “Madame Malfoy, a delight as alvays! Potions Master Snape, gud to see you. And young master Draco! And zis must be zhe young man you told me of, Milady? Come let me see you, young sir.”

“This is Henry Potter,” Lady-Aunt Cissa introduced as Henry stepped out from behind her, looking very uncertain.

“A pleasure, young master Potter,” Gideon smiled reassuringly.

“Severus has graciously volunteered to stand for you first, so Henry knows what to expect,” Cissa smiled with demure vicious glee.

“Did you now?” Gideon grinned at Snape. Something else was going on here, behind the polite talk.

The Professor scowled and sighed, “She goes in for extortion.”

“I’m buying three outfits for Severus, if you’d consent to making them, of course.” Lady-Aunt practically radiated her glee. Ah, Harry nodded to himself, watching Mr. Godet’s face and the carefully hidden mooncalf eyes he was making at Snape, Mrs. Malfoy was matchmaking. He hoped he never got a turn for that.  “Draco, darling, would you show Henry around?”

The boys wandered away. Lady-Aunt Cissa was probably detailing the terms of Professor Snape’s three outfits for Mr. Godet. Which could be funny, for the faces Snape would make, but was most likely quite boring as it wouldn’t require their input.

Draco was quiet, seeming to struggle to find something to say. Which was odd, because in seven years, Harry had never seen him so devoid of words. Not even in Myrtle's bathroom.

“What do you like?” Draco finally asked.

“I don’t know,” Harry answered easily, “I never had a chance to like much of anything. I like sports, well enough, but I haven’t been allowed to play much. The worst part of being locked in my cupboard for days at a time, aside from the hunger, was always the enforced idleness. The last week was the longest I’ve ever been so still without it being a punishment. I was just waiting for your mum to clear me before I start running laps around the park.”

Draco stared at him wide-eyed for a moment before visibly putting it aside and plowing on, leading him over to the wall of fabrics. “Let’s start simple, then. What’s your favorite color?”

Henry almost laughed. “All of them or none of them, depending on your point of view. Every color has its uses and benefits.” He thought a moment then added, “I like black, I suppose, even Dudley can’t really stain it much, so I get fewer people insisting I’m a slob when I wear it. I didn’t have much of it, though. Aunt Petunia didn’t buy what she called freakish mourning clothes for her Precious Dudders, so there was only a couple pair of trousers that were black.”

Draco sighed. “Pick a dozen,” he waved at the wall, “whatever catches your eye most, Gideon will help narrow it down, or expand if need be, from there.”

Henry laughed and ran his hand over the bolts of cloth. They were all so…nice. Soft. Some silky-smooth, some nubbly, some fuzzy, but none of them were rough to his hand the way Dudley’s old jeans, joggers, and shirts were. None were scratchy like Dudley’s old suits either. He spent a few moments just reveling in the feel of them. Finally he blinked, and began doing as Draco instructed, taking the cards hung below the bolts with scraps of the fabric below them. He started with some of the heavy, soft wool in charcoal and black, picking up a light weight crimson, another of burgundy, a satiny emerald, royal blue and sapphire, a brilliant teal and a darker one, aubergine, and a true, royal purple. He did a quick count and picked up a soft wool in grey about halfway between heather and gunmetal to round it out.

“Good instincts,” Mr. Godet commented as they rejoined the adults, scrap fabric cards in hand. “Olive skin tones like yours and ze Potions Master’s do best in rich, dark colors and jewel tones.”

“Mr. Godet, where is Professor Snape?” Henry asked, suddenly realizing the man was nowhere to be seen.

“ ‘E iz changing into ze fitting garments.” Gideon waved towards the back, opposite the wall of fabric and a door there. “Ze are auto-adjusting size breeches and shirts zat cover everyzing important, but let me get accurate measurements wizout so much fabric in ze way.”

“Why do you call Uncle Sev that, anyway?” Draco asked.

“I haven’t figured out what else to call him, yet,” Henry answered honestly, “Uncle means Vernon, and even if the professor is fairly…acidic, he’s nothing like Uncle Vernon. It’s why I call your mum Lady-Aunt instead of Aunt. Aunt is Petunia and Lady-Aunt Cissa is not Petunia. And is very much a Lady, with a capital L.”

“You could just try my name,” Snape drawled behind Henry.

Henry cringed. He hadn’t meant to say that in front of Snape, and had somehow lapsed his Constant Vigilance enough for him to come up behind Henry unheard. Moody would be so disappointed. “No, I couldn’t. Not calling adults by their titles gets you in trouble.”

Snape seemed to think about that for a moment. “Not calling adults by their titles without their permission to do so,” he began slowly,  “or in professional environs, where their title is actively in use, would be rude, yes. However, in private or casual circumstances when you have permission to do so, the first name is the better option. Especially when the personal title that applies, like Aunt or Uncle, has such negative connotations. You have my permission, outside of when I am acting as your professor, to call me by my name.”

“And I am Gideon, not zis Mr. Godet nonsense, unless you are a reporter,” Mr. Go- Gideon insisted. “You’re not a reporter, are you?” he winked jovially. “Now zhen, if Severus will come stand up here, ve can begin.”

The boys both blinked and looked away, feeling remarkably like they were seeing Sn-Severus in his underwear, as he wore only a vest and what looked like long boxer-briefs that fit snug to his legs and highlighted just how much muscle the duelist and potioneer generally hid under voluminous robes.

Two hours later, Severus had three finished outfits, and had been badgered into wearing one immediately by Lady-Aunt Cissa. Thus he was wearing black dragon-hide trousers that fit nearly to his skin but somehow didn’t hinder his movement at all (Gideon had explained the use of gussets at strategic places to provide the extra mobility, but it still seemed like straight magic to Henry) with a rich, brilliant emerald shirt. Over the top was a robe of black and deeper-emerald brocade acromantula silk that fit very close to his torso, shoulders and arms, with black satin ribbon laces up the back and silver buttons, but flared out around his legs to show off the trousers while still achieving the iconic-Snape batlike flaring while he walked. Somehow, the boots that Henry strongly suspected were ordinary, muggle Doc Martens’ fit perfectly with the look.

They then spent the next hour going over muggle clothes and shoes that Gideon had sent a runner for sometime since Lady-Aunt Cissa contacted him, and the differences between them and wizard fashion. It included a rant about some tosser named Beau Brummel and how he did muggle men no favors. Henry did get some muggle clothes, adjusted to fit by Gideon, out of the lot, but only a couple T-shirts and jeans and a single set of exercise clothes and shoes. Then it was his turn to change into the “fitting garments” and get up on the stool for Gideon. 

Lady-Aunt Cissa and Draco made comments and suggestions, which Gideon took in stride, Severus mostly just looked bored. The only thing Henry asked for was that his trousers be cut like the ones Severus was wearing, under the excuse of not actually knowing how to sit still (which was true) but mostly so that if he had to go chasing after Golden-warts again, he wouldn’t be hobbled by his clothes. Severus sighed gustily and gave him a look that said they’d be Talking Later. Henry still had no regrets. 

They had tea in the shop while Gideon worked feverishly.  By the time they left, just in time for supper, Henry had more clothes than he knew what to do with, and Gideon was promising another four sets within a week.

Chapter Text

Living with Severus was weird. Henry was used to getting up at 5:30 to make breakfast before Uncle Vernon left for work and then immediately getting to work cleaning and gardening. Severus, given his druthers, was never up before ten, and generally did not sleep before 2am. If then. Henry spent his mornings in peace. Sort of. He had no idea what to do with four hours in which he didn't ha ve to do anything. 

He took to running laps around the park, like he'd told Draco he would, cleaning everything he could physically reach for a couple hours, and then reading and taking notes on the books Severus had got for him until he heard the man start to move around upstairs. Then he made breakfast for both of them, usually to Severus scowling and reminding him that he was capable of feeding himself and did not require Henry either to wait to eat or to cook for them.

Then they went over several subjects, Severus quizzing Henry on his knowledge and filling in gaps for two hours and then had a light lunch. After lunch Henry was at loose ends again as Severus took over the AGA for potion making.

Sometimes Henry stayed to watch, and Severus would talk the whole time he was working about what he was doing and why. And also how brewing with an AGA was different than in the classroom, easier in many ways, and why. Sometimes Henry sat at the kitchen table with the books Severus presented him with after their bank and shopping trip. Sometimes Henry got bored and went and cleaned inadvisable things, to Severus' frustration. 

After a week, Severus found him on the roof cleaning the gutters. Severus sent a patronus, and the next thing Henry knew, they were at Malfoy Manor, doing Dance Lessons with Lady-Aunt Cissa and Draco.

***

It had been a week. A week of daily visits from an increasingly flustered and anxious Edgar, carrying notes from Severus complaining of what Henry was up to this time. Tuesday, it was Henry waking up at 5:30 to go run laps around the park, clean the kitchen, and cook breakfast. Wednesday, it was the living room. Thursday was the windows. Friday, Severus had rejoiced that her nephew had stayed in the kitchen to learn potions making on his strange stove. Saturday had been the upstairs windows, inside and out. Sunday apparently involved attempting to read and memorize twelve books at once. Yesterday he had taken all the doors off their hinges to attempt to fix their refusal to hang quite right. 

Narcissa had had quite enough. Consequently, she was in the kitchens, asking Pippy, their head House Elf, if anyone needed extra work and could be sent over to Spinner’s End to get to the hazardous cleaning and repairs before the ten year old could. She had just finished explaining Henry’s history and Severus’ letters when the familiar doe patronus bounded through the wall.

“Cissa. Cissa. He’s on the roof cleaning the gutters. He doesn’t even have a ladder up, Cissa. I have no idea how he got up there. I have less idea how to get him down safely. I’m getting him a clean change of clothing, something from Gideon’s, and then apparating us both directly from the roof to the Manor. He needs something to do in the afternoons, Cissa, and has a great many things he needs to learn given that he’s apparently heir to three Houses and Sirius’ heir. Surely some of that will be so physically or mentally exhausting he can’t possibly need to be on the bloody roof? Right?”

One of the elves fainted. Minky moaned and Blinky looked horrified.

"Pippy be sending four elveses, mistress," Pippy said grimly. "There will be no more younglings handling repairs or beings on roofs."

***

When dance lessons, which had somehow wound up involving Lucius, finished, Henry had been pulled into the kitchen by a House Elf, where he was handed a large bowl of boiled and peeled potatoes and a masher. The elves were strangely solicitous while also keeping a sharp eye on him. Mashing potatoes was easy though, and he didn't mind when there was also conversation and snacks. They stayed through dinner, getting to eat the potatoes he'd mashed was unexpectedly delightful. Draco made that face again when he tried to explain his happiness, that he wasn't used to being allowed to eat what he cooked, at the table, with the Normal People. Henry still had no idea what was up with Draco and his faces, but he wasn't willing to put the effort in to figure it out right now either.

When Henry and Severus got home, he found that the house had been cleaned, and all the repairs he'd made note of to do later had already been done. "Severus?"

"Cissa sent her house elves so there would be no more need for you to spend your time cleaning and attempting repairs you are too small to do safely," Severus responded, not even needing to hear the question.

Henry sighed, "What else am I supposed to do with six hours a day?"

Things changed, again. 

Edgar took to sleeping on Henry, so he couldn't get up until seven, and then following him on his laps around the park, and then glaring, nipping, and nudging him until he ate something. And also fed Edgar some bacon. 

Severus took Henry down to the Y and got him signed up for a martial arts class two days a week for six weeks. He was also doing dance lessons with Lady-Aunt Cissa once a week, fencing with Lucius and Severus once a week, helping Severus prep ingredients for potions twice a week, practicing calligraphy twice a week, and helping Cissa in her garden twice a week.

His mornings were still his own, and he managed to get quite a bit done on the various books, including the muggle history, math, chemistry and physics books in that time, and he still had his two hours with Severus before lunch. But after lunch was penmanship (and discovering that half of his problem had been damage to his hands), potions (and discovering that he had to completely relearn prepping now that he didn't have damage to his hands), or gardening (and discovering that it was a joy when he wasn't doing it alone, and also had magic plants to work with) followed by Judo, fencing or dancing. 

After dinner, he’d get out the box Gideon had snuck into his bags of clothes, and spend some time quietly trying to draw his favorite people and memories at the kitchen table while Severus worked on more potions. Severus teared up when he looked over Henry’s shoulder. Henry didn’t think he was very good. Especially if it made Severus of all people want to weep. Actually, he had to be pretty awful. Just Not being very good would only get snide comments from the man. Harry had sat in his potions class, he would know.

He liked the colors though, the way the soft pastels blended, the richness of the colored pencils Gideon had gotten, he even liked playing with the paints, though he didn’t feel like he had enough control with the brushes for details.

He was wondering what to do with his one full day and three afternoons off, when Draco snagged him after they'd finished in the gardens and pulled him off towards the pitch he'd heard the Malfoy's had.  

Apparently, Lady-Aunt Cissa had outsourced the problem. Madame Bones had gone with two of the Malfoy elves, including Dobby, and two of the Ministry elves down to the London SWAT offices to look at their obstacle course  and watch the officers running it. The Ministry now had a duplicate obstacle course, modified for spell fire rather than gunfire, and the Malfoys had one downsized for child-sized bodies, parked right next to the quidditch pitch.

A small shed between the two stored enough brooms for two full quidditch teams.

Henry was in heaven. He knew what he'd be doing in his free time. 

As they were already in clothes they could muss without a fuss, and nicely warmed up from gardening and walking across the extensive grounds, Henry dropped into the stretches he’d learned in Judo.

Draco looked at him in confusion for a moment, and then haltingly copied him. Henry took pity on him and corrected his stretches, helping him extend them fully. He explained as they went why stretching was important.

When they’d done a full set, Henry pulled Draco to the obstacle course, much to Draco’s protestations. 

Henry smirked. “Race you across, three times,” he offered, “If you can beat me even once, we’ll go flying. If you can’t, we run it ten times every day I have available before flying until you can beat me.”

“You’re on!” Draco agreed, glint of challenge in his eyes.

Draco did not win.

Draco did lay on the ground panting and calling Henry a madman.

Henry laughed. He had to get his amusement somewhere. And besides, he needed a way to pull Draco’s head out of his arse, or living with him for the next seven years would be unbearable.

***

On one Sunday, Henry decided to skip his usual run around the park to explore the town instead. 

On one hand, it wasn’t very interesting. Rather like small towns everywhere, Henry thought. There was a tiny library, a coffee shop, three schools, a half dozen churches, grocery stores and the like. 

On the other hand, it was an informative walk. The town had history in a way Little Whinging did not. It was old, founded on account of the coal mine it got its name from in the 1800s. Spinner’s End was considered the bad part of town because it was originally owned by the mine to house the miners. Which was why the houses there were all so small and “economically built.” People with jobs that paid better before a death certificate lived on the next street over. People with jobs that meant they could leave something to their kids lived clear across town.

The best thing, in Henry’s opinion, was that with its coal history and relative proximity to the foundry in Coalbrookdale, it had an AGA store that had somehow survived the coal mine going under.

Acting on a whim, Henry walked in, looking in awe at the new display cookers on the floor.

“Be with you in a moment!” someone shouted from further back in the store.

“No worries,” Henry replied, running his fingers over a beautiful green range. It was truly massive, with seven ovens and two extra hobs, silver and black accenting a very Slytherin looking “Racing Green”. It was gorgeous. Severus needed it. But it wouldn’t fit in the kitchen even if they took out all the counters. He didn’t think Severus would be okay with replacing his heirloom anyway. The beginnings of an idea itched at the back of his brain as the shop lady came out.

“Sorry about that,” she said, behind Henry. “How can I help you?”

Henry turned and watched her eyes flicker over him, landing briefly on the scar on his forehead. What? He was in a muggle shop in a muggle town! Was it really that distractingly obvious? He brushed his bangs back over that side of his head and plowed onwards. “I just moved in with my sort-of uncle. He has an heirloom AGA, and I wanted to know more about them when I saw your store. He told me his AGA was bought in 1937 by his grandfather, and when the coalmine went under, his mum modified it herself to run on cheaper things than the coal her husband didn’t sometimes get paid in anymore. What are the new ones like? What do they run on?”

“And where is your uncle?” the lady asked with a raised eyebrow. 

Dammit, stupid ten year old body!

Henry kept his sigh internal and pasted on his biggest, innocent eyed look. “Asleep still. He’s a secondary school chemistry professor up north a ways, so he doesn’t get much time to do his own studies and experiments. Which means he tends to stay up late in the summers and not wake up before ten. And I don’t actually know how to sleep in, even when I tried to stay up with him. I fell asleep during his lecture on the differences in cooking with gas stoves, electric stoves, old wood stoves and AGAs, which I think he did on purpose. He was giving me a look before he started.”

The young woman, maybe in her early twenties, wasn’t buying his innocent look. Her eyebrow stayed up. “And what is your uncle’s name?” she asked. 

Henry sighed, feeling like she was about to call Severus to pick him up. He really didn’t want to get in trouble when things were going well. “Severus Snape,” he mumbled at his feet.

“I didn’t know Professor Snape lived in town, or that he had an AGA. Suddenly many of the differences between his and Slughorn’s lectures make so much more sense. I’ll have to reread my old school books to try and see what brewing with an AGA is like.”

Harry jerked his head back up to stare at her. “He and my mum grew up here,” his mouth said as he looked at her thoughtful expression. “Apparently near everyone on Spinner’s End had an AGA.”

“I’m a muggleborn,” the lady answered the question he’d apparently left on his face, “There’s not a lot of work on that side for someone like me. But if the Professor uses an AGA by preference, perhaps there’s a way to cross my job back into that side. The old coal ones are probably easier to charm to run on magic, but any of them should be doable, especially if I can get a look at the charms Mrs. Snape did on hers.”

Henry shook his head, “I don’t think he’d be alright with replacing the heirloom one, and the kitchen wouldn’t fit it anyway, but he talks so much about how much easier, especially the long brews, are on an AGA, I know  he’d love this one. It’s got so many options and it’s huge and…”

“Very Slytherin looking, just right for the head of that house,” the shopkeep nodded, smiling. “Have you any ideas then?”

Henry’s face twisted in thought. “One, maybe. Lucius and Lady-Aunt Cissa. If anyone can get it into H…the school, it would be them. But I’d have to talk them into it. Have you got any brochures?”

“Good lad, I do not have brochures. I have catalogues.”

Chapter Text

The morning of July 24th, Severus did not sleep in till 10 am. He was awake and glowering at a cup of coffee that looked remarkably like tar when Henry came in from his morning run. As the glower was remarkably similar to the one Harry was used to seeing at school, he wasn’t sure how to react. He hadn’t done something wrong, had he? 

“Professor Snape?” He asked, mentally running through the last few days, trying to find what was wrong.

“Severus. Not Professor Snape. We are not at school,” Sn-Severus reminded him, without looking up from the depths of his mug.

“Sorry, sir. I just -- Is something wrong?”

“It’s morning. I am not a morning person,” the last two words were sneered with every ounce of disgust usually aimed at a first-year’s particularly foul potions attempt. 

Oh. Henry breathed a sigh of relief, at least he hadn’t done something. “Why don’t you go back to bed, then?” he offered.

“Can’t. Too much to do today. Just… give me a bit.”

Henry nodded and moved to make them both breakfast, thinking quickly about what would be quickest and quietest that they had in store. Cereal with milk would be both, but they didn’t have any. Instead, he simply sliced a pair of bagels and set them on the simmering plate of the AGA to toast, getting out the butter, cream cheese, and jams and placing them on the table. They could have a proper breakfast after Severus was awake enough to handle the concept of noise. Maybe a good scramble up with some bacon and sausage.

Come to think of it, most of the first year potions classes were in the morning. Someone should fix that. First years should be after lunch, when Severus was less likely to murder people for breathing and first years had had a chance to run off any energy built up.

He waited till Severus had most of the sludge in him, and half a bagel as well before speaking up. “Severus, who makes the schedules at Hogwarts?”

“It’s supposed to be the Headmaster’s job, but many years he hands it off to Professor McGonagall if he’s ‘too busy’ with the Wizengamot or ICW. Why?”

“Because you often have first years first thing in the morning, and that doesn’t seem like a good idea for anyone. And I doubt having to smell  the catastrophes we little dunderheads come up with at this hour is something you decided to do. Ever.”

Severus made a face like one of Seamus’ miraculously un-exploded, but terrifyingly rancid potions was under his nose. “You are correct. I would much prefer to have slightly less incapable students before noon. It was useful for maintaining my cover, so I never protested. However, that cover will be well and truly blown by the trial for Petunia and Vernon. And I’m sure the Headmaster will be…busy again this year. Perhaps I’ll put a request in with Minerva.”

Henry was about to ask why Severus had to be up so early when there weren't classes yet but was interrupted by a tapping at the window. He paused and went to let the owl in. Edgar grumbled but obligingly shifted over on his perch to give their feathered visitor room to sit (like any halfway decent host, regardless of the unseemly hour).

The Owl dropped an envelope on the table in front of Henry and flapped over to sit with Edgar, gratefully accepting the mouse Severus offered it.

Henry looked at the envelope in front of him.

Mr. H. Potter

The West Bedroom

12 ½ Spinners End

Cokeworth, Manchester, UK

Oh. It's that letter, Harry thought. At least it contains no mention of any cupboards this time.

"The first reason I cannot sleep in til a saner hour," Severus said, gesturing at the letter, "should be obvious."

Henry looked up at his uncle-ish guardian. "First reason?"

A knock resounded on the front door.

Severus nodded, "and there's the second reason, now. Open your letter so the Owl can take your response back when he's done with his mouse. I'll be back momentarily."

Henry was unsurprised to find the letter exactly as he remembered it. But then he found there was a whole second page of "supplemental reading" that hadn't been in his first letter. He wasn't sure if he was surprised or not about that. On the one hand, it was an entirely new bit of information that he hadn't been expecting. On the other hand, him, specifically, not being given all the information was very much not new. He was pleased to note, though, that many of the books were ones Severus had gotten him when they went shopping with the Malfoys and thus he'd already read them. Or were like the ubiquitous Hogwarts: A History that he was pretty sure he could recite in his sleep despite having never read it himself.

Hearing Severus begin returning to the kitchen with another man, by their voices, Henry hurriedly pulled out the response form and filled it out, strangely pleased to be able to sign it legibly, with an elegant Henry J. A. Potter.

Henry knew damned well if he didn't say anything about the second list now, he wouldn't remember to later, but how to impart the message in front of someone who definitely did not know about the whole time-travel-because-Dumbledore thing?

"Everything in order, then, Henry?" Severus asked with a raised eyebrow.

Damn, he was showing his emotions on his face again, wasn't he? Giving up, he looked Severus in the eye and said, "Yeah, there's a whole second list of books to get, but you already got me most of them, so I was just going to take it up to my room and cross off what I already have. Can I use older editions for the class books? If we don't have to buy all new ones, I'd rather use the ones with notes from you and mum in them."

"As the ministry and Board of Governors approve mostly old books and your potions textbook in particular hasn't had more than spelling and grammar updates in decades, the annotated one you have is the superior copy, yes. We will check your lists against what books you already have momentarily. First," Severus gestured behind him, "Auror Kingsley Shacklebolt is here on behalf of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement."

"You should really write your own textbook." Henry said. "Good morning, Auror Shacklebolt. Are you here about the Dursleys?"

"Just Kingsley, if you don't mind. In a manner of speaking, I am, though not about their court case. You'll be getting an official letter about that soon," Kingsley answered. Henry was glad of the permission to use his given name, remembering to use the last name of one of the few genuinely helpful adults from Last Time would have been difficult. "The Department as a whole was… deeply disturbed by what they found when we arrested your aunt and uncle. With Madame Bones' permission, we started a fund to help you with decorating your new room, and I have been voted the representative to help with the shopping and decorating."

Harry blinked rapidly for a moment. "Oh," he said, like an intelligent person. He would have rolled his eyes at himself if he wasn't sure it would be misinterpreted. "But why? The room is fine as it is, I don't need anything else, and there's not much space for anything extra anyway."

Severus sighed. "It does have everything necessary," he agreed. "But it isn't really you. It was only ever as much me as my mother could afford without using magic. You deserve a space that is wholly your own and finances are not an issue, neither is my late, unlamented father's ban on magic. Besides, a few unnecessary things are an important part of childhood, as is getting to make your own choices in your own spaces, possessions, and clothing." 

***

All three of them had trooped up to Henry's room.

Henry took his lists and happily set about crossing off book titles already on his shelves or in the trunk under the window left from Severus's last year of Hogwarts. Severus went  through the cabinets and drawers, taking all of his old clothes and boxing them up to move elsewhere later, and going through the trunk to get rid of all the old parchment, ink, and tools where new ones really would be better.

Kingsley observed the pair moving around the cramped space for a few minutes before stepping in and waving his wand, muttering a slough of enchantments. Space grew up where none had been before. The beds suddenly went from four feet apart to eight feet apart, and five feet of space grew in between the ends of the beds and the wall the door was in, while the small window opposite the door gained half again its size. One side of the new space by the door gained rods and racks to become a proper closet, despite the lack of doors, the other side Kingsley looked at thoughtfully before waving his wand again. 

A few minutes later, Henry was staring at a whole other room off of his with nothing but some ends of pipes in it, poking out of the floors and walls.

"What's this?" He asked, "if the other side is a closet, what's this room for?"

"A bathroom," Kingsley said, cheerfully. "Obviously it's not yet, we'll have to get you a tub, sink and toilet first, but that's what it will be by the time we're done."

They returned to the main room where Severus was shrinking and pocketing boxes while looking around at the much bigger room. "You have space for a desk in here now, maybe some simple seating, even," he said, eying the study bed and window. "I can take my, and my mother's, trunk out," he said, gesturing to it and turning to the study bed, "Would you like me to take out the–"

"No!" Harry shouted, quite a bit louder than intended. "I mean, I want to keep the study bed and the pillows mom inflicted on you, if that's alright with you."

"It's your room," Severus pointed out drily, "if you want the neon rainbow offenses, you may have them." He paused with a horrified look suddenly crawling across his face, "We're not painting your room chartreuse and puce, are we?"

"Of course not!" Henry hastened to assure him, a matching disgusted look crossing his face as he pictured it.

"I don't know why not," Kingsley put in with a sly grin. "I know many people quite fond of those colors. No?"  He put on a faux moue for a moment before grinning again. "So what are we doing then?"

Harry didn't know. He stared around the room for a moment, just taking it in and hoping for ideas. His eye caught on the study bed, in particular on two particularly lurid pillows, one in a green that glowed in the dark, and the other in a vibrant, eye watering pink that as good as glowed.

"Black and grey." Henry announced suddenly. He clarified when the other two sat in stunned silence, "Have you ever seen the Aurora Borealis? I haven't, but muggles have photos and videos of it and the public library by the Dursley's house had a bunch of books and tapes about it. The Aurora Borealis and Aurora Australis are like… rivers of rainbow light, mostly green and pink like these pillows, in the night skies in winter around the polar regions caused by the way the sun's radiation hits the magnetic field around the earth."

***

Perhaps it wasn't as surprising as it should have been that the three of them consequently spent the next two hours at the library researching polar light storms before going shopping. Severus would always vote for a library trip over shopping, and Kindsley was of the opinion one should always have a plan before any engagement. Henry wasn't exactly likely to disagree with either point of view.

By the time they'd actually gotten to Diagon Alley, Henry had sketches of what he had in mind and Severus and Kingsley were cheerfully debating charms to use on everything from animating the painted Aurora to making it glow. Kingsley had managed to convince Henry to paint the walls and ceiling blue with white clouds and then paint the black, stars, and Aurora over it so the last they could charm it to change according to the time of day, and then animate the clouds and sky rivers after. So Harry had twice as many sketches as actually needed.

It turned out the entire argument was entirely unnecessary. Wizarding home improvement stores had paint that already glowed well, and paint that animated itself upon drying based on what the painter was thinking while painting. It took very little to get the clerk to make up paint that did both.

They hired contractors to do the bathroom at the same store. The head of the company took Henry's sketches to their warehouse to find the right features for it before being escorted back to Spinners End along with the paint cans and hardware to get started while they finished their shopping.

At the home goods store, Severus insisted he get new mattresses, pillows, and linens for both beds. Kingsley insisted he lay on every mattress, sit in every chair, and walk on every rug before buying anything, and wouldn't let him see the prices.

Henry had never thought sitting and laying could be exhausting, but it was. Finally, he'd picked two mattresses, pillows, bedspreads, and four sets of sheets, two complete towel sets, two chairs, a desk, and a school trunk with extra compartments, security, and shrinking and featherlight charms, all of which was shipped home for them. 

They stopped for lunch, and Henry revelled in the break from the dreaded shopping, even if the conversation somehow managed to stay on furniture and color preferences the whole time, even though they'd already bought everything. At least they weren't still asking his opinions on them any more, but rather comparing their own.

He found himself drawing the pair in the middle of an argument about slightly different shades of blue while they waited for dessert when the table suddenly went quiet around him.

"I like it," Kingsley said, leaning across the table to look at Henry's sketchbook. "Very true to life."

"Nonsense, Kingsley," Severus argued, "Calling it true to life would be an insult to Henry's abilities. I, for one, have never looked that good a day in my life. Henry's just managed to accomplish the impossible and make me look passably decent."

…What?

"That doesn't even make sense, Severus," Henry protested. "I'm drawing what I see, and I'm not very good, so it doesn't look anywhere near as good as real life, much less improve upon it. You don't have to say things you don't mean." Henry scowled, "especially not if you have to put someone else, even yourself, down to do it."

Kingsley looked between them a moment and muttered something about the possibility of murdering already dead people. "We have delicious desserts to eat and shopping to finish before we go check on the contractors and finish getting your rooms sorted, so we don't have time to sort out you two and your unfounded insecurities just now," he announced firmly as their desserts appeared on the table. "This conversation is hereby tabled with intent to return to it later. Eat your cake."

Kingsley was clearly mistaken, and Henry didn't have a problem with letting him know he thought so with his face. Not about the cake though. That was delicious.

Chapter Text

Remembering how his first trip to Diagon Alley had gone, Harry suggested they get his wand first, hoping to be home before midnight with how long he was sure it would take.

The bell over the door rang as all three of them entered, and Harry was glad to have them at his back. Ollivander was fully capable of being creepy, and if he was going to do the same speech about Terrible Greatness again, Harry wanted someone else to know about it.

He took some time to breathe, looking at the room and grounding himself in the now. It wasn't his birthday yet, the store was whole and not smashed in, Ollivander would be here . Voldemort hadn't risen yet to kidnap him. It hadn't happened yet, and it wouldn't, if he had any say in it.

Harry put his back to what appeared to be a genuine Tiffany lamp. He hadn't smashed it last time, and he wasn't going to smash it this time, and the Death Eaters wouldn't either.

He didn't jump when Ollivander appeared out of nowhere, but only because he was facing the door to the back of the shop, this time. Even though he remembered Ollivander's habit of surprising his customers, remembering alone wouldn't have helped.

"Harry Potter," the man stated, and Harry still didn't know how he knew. "I was wondering when I'd see you in here. I remember when your parents came here for their first wands."

Ollivander bustled around behind the counter looking for his tape measure and somehow avoiding looking at any of them. Was it just Harry or was Ollivander twitchier than usual?

Ollivander turned with the tape measure, mouth opening to continue his speech about James Potter and Lily Evans's wands, his gaze met Harry's sharply and he paled suddenly.

"Oh bugger," the wand maker swore, completely off the script Harry had been expecting. "I know which wand is yours. Wait here."

Harry shared confused looks with Severus and Kingsley as Ollivander disappeared out the back again.

Last time, Ollivander had returned with a giant pile of wands in boxes. This time, he returned with just two. One box was a light wood with black streaks in it, the other wood seemed to be made up of optical illusions, shapes in the wood that looked lumpy but were perfectly flat.

"If it's not one of these two, I'll eat my shoes," Ollivander grumbled. " Don't touch them," he ordered, again completely different from last time. "Just hold your hand over the boxes, see if one calls to you."

Once again, Harry shared an utterly baffled look with his—with Severus, before he did as he was told. He closed his eyes and held out his hand, hovering over the boxes.

The first box felt familiar, like he knew it but couldn't name it. Like a song from early childhood, not heard in years. It wasn't his, but he knew it, somehow.

The second box though…the second box felt like mischief and fire, like solid ground and flying on his broom. It felt like tiny Steve Rogers in Dudley's comic books fighting and fighting and getting knocked down, but saying "I can do this all day," and "No, you move" while you plant your feet like the Tree by the river of Truth. It felt like walking down to the Chamber of Secrets and like standing up to Umbridge, with "I must not tell lies" on his hand and uncomfortable truths in his mouth.

It felt like home.

It felt like him.

He licked his lips and opened the box. The wand inside was beautiful, wood the same as the box made up the hilt and lower shaft, inlays of the black wood from the tip of the wand wove down into the lighter wood in a pattern that reminded him of marbled cake. The marbling effect was broken only by several golden-red jagged pieces in the shape of Sowilo. He breathed deep and picked it up, suddenly feeling like he'd been dropped into the ocean.

He couldn't hear Ollivander over the rushing of blood in his ears, sounding rather like the roaring of the waves the only time he'd been to the ocean himself, when Grumblebore took him out to find the locket horcrux. Ollivander, though, didn't seem to care how out of it he was, just shoved the box, a holster and a small, handwritten leaflet into his hands, refused payment and damned near shoved them out the door.

***

The rest of the shopping trip passed uneventfully, aside from an unexpected detour to Gideon Godet's shop.

Gideon wasn't with a client at the moment, unfortunately, so Henry's sketchbook got thrust at the fashion designer by Severus while Kingsley related the entire argument (including the bit about shades of blue) from lunch.

Gideon obligingly paged through the sketchbook, making all manner of faces at each page. Henry struggled not to snatch the book back in embarrassment.

"I am glad hyu put my gifts to such good use, Young Henry," Gideon said, finally. "But why do you say you are not good?"

"Because I'm not!" burst from Henry's mouth. "No matter how hard I try, nothing comes out right! Or it comes out without any feeling to it, or it's just bad. Unless it's a doodle, but even then, I can't take the doodle and make it into art without ruining it."

Gideon nodded sagely, "ah, yez, the woes of artistry. Nozzing will ever look quite right to you, but to others… well, none of the flaws hyu perceive are visible to the eyes of anyone else. In fact, I vould like to buy one from hyu."

While Harry's brain stuttered to a halt and attempted to reboot, Gideon turned to Severus.

"Und hyu, vat iz dis about making hyu look passably decent taking a miracle?" He demanded sharply, accent becoming harsher in his anger. "Passably decent hyu manage every morning hyu roll out of bed and trow on whatever clothes hyu hev zat are clean. Hyu are no miracle worker. I do not make you look passably decent, I make hyu look gorgeous, and I am no miracle worker either. I might forgive hyu the insult to my craft if this is some ploy to get me to make hyu more clothes."

Severus's eyes widened and he nearly hid behind Kingsley, who sidestepped him entirely. "Oh no you don't," Kingsley said, shoving Severus back in front. "I'm on his side in this. Idiot Gryffindor boys have determined how you view yourself for far too long."

"Somevun lied to hyu," Gideon snarled, "and I will know who so zhat I cin have zheir heads." He turned back to a much confused Henry, still holding Henry's sketchbook open to a page where Henry had drawn Severus reading in one of the old wingback chairs by their fireplace, a cup of tea in his other hand. "I vant zhis vun," he announced, "I will pay hyu sixty galleons for it." He got a look in his eye as both Harry and Severus tried to protest the price or the chosen subject. "And anozher seventy for the vun with these two arguing." 

***

By the time they’d gotten home, well into the evening, Henry was exhausted and his pockets were 210 galleons heavier. It had taken a third sketch at 80 galleons, this one of Severus’ face when brewing, before they’d stopped trying to argue how Gideon spends his money. Gideon had already picked his fourth one, a colored drawing of Severus in one of the outfits Lady-Aunt Cissa had bought for him, this one a rich, deep ocean blue with silver accents, before they’d backed down and let him pay exorbitant sums for three of a ten year old’s doodles of Severus.

Harry stopped suddenly, causing both men behind him to stumble into him. There was a pair of aurors sitting on the front step. They were in plain clothes, but they clearly should never attempt undercover work. They sat like aurors, which Harry would have thought wasn’t actually possible, and yet, it was a very distinctive seat. 

Henry was so exhausted he almost didn’t want to know. Almost. Curiosity had always been, and probably always would be, his personal bane.

“Um, why are there aurors here? Also, please tell me they don’t work undercover, they can’t pass as not aurors.”

Kingsley chucked, a warm rumble behind Henry. “They don’t. Though I’ll be sure to point out at their next review how quickly you made them, to keep it that way. They’re here because they were keeping an eye on the contractors for us while we were shopping. Shall we go see how it looks?”

Henry started walking again, lugging his trunk of books, tools and school robes up the front step and into the living room as Kingsley stopped to chat with his coworkers.

He left the trunk in front of the bookcases. There was no point in lugging it upstairs when he’d have to lug it back down again when they painted his room, probably tomorrow given how exhausted he was.

When he turned around, Severus, Kingsley and the aurors were waiting for him by the stairs. Severus gestured for him to lead them up and kept a warm hand on his back the whole way, soothing Harry’s sudden bout of nerves. Nothing looked different on the landing at the top of the stairs. Maybe the doors hung a little straighter in their frames? Harry didn’t know, but it felt different, for all it looked the same.

He wiped suddenly sweaty palms on his trousers and reached for the knob of his door.

Oh. they wouldn’t need to paint anything after all. The glow of the Aurora Borealis already rippled and flashed across his ceiling, and stars twinkled behind the flows of color. The beds were painted a soft, matte charcoal with slightly shiny silver trim on the edges of the cupboard doors and drawers and already made up with his new sheets and bedspreads and pillows. His mother’s pile of cushions sat neatly arranged across the length of the study bed’s wall, turning the twin-sized bed into a couch. His new desk, a heather grey behemoth with all sorts of drawers and a section that raised and lowered like an easel, sat beneath his window. His silver-grey rug reflected the light from the ceiling in soft pink and green shimmers. A camera flashed and he didn’t even care as his cheeks felt suddenly damp. A rich black wingback chair with faint charcoal grey accents in its brocade and white ashwood feet and ends on the arms sat next to the head of his bed, angled away from the newly-made closet space behind it, a tiny matching white ash lampstand table between it and the bed, perfect for holding a book and a cup of tea with the black and silver oil lamp beside. 

He turned away from the chair, lest he sink into it and never again get up and headed down the other hall. A tributary of the river of light in the main room lit the way to the watercloset, and a soft runner rug in charcoal ran down the way. Shelves had been installed, ready for knickknacks and space left for paintings or posters.

In the bathroom, they hadn’t continued the same theme, but had clearly drawn inspiration from it. Black granite tiled the floor and made up the counter and sink, the cupboards below which were a soft silver-grey. The tub, a behemoth of a thing with jacuzzi jets and three shower heads, was jet black with silver faucets and pristine glass doors. The walls though were a plain, featureless white, out of step with the luxury of the rest of the room. The reason became obvious as he turned on the lights, causing rainbows to spill through strategically placed crystals and cascade across the white expanse. It was perfect. Too much. He didn't even want to know how bloody much money had been dropped making it, when it looked like it belonged in Malfoy manor or some other obscenely rich person's house.

He turned back and almost ran to hug Kingsley, ignoring another flash of a camera. "Thank you," he whispered.

Severus excused himself to go visit his own bathroom. He'd been gone barely seconds when he shouted in surprise and the three aurors snickered. Raising an eyebrow at the snickering agents, Henry went to see what the fuss was about.

Severus was standing in the old bathroom. Except that it looked nothing like the old bathroom. Gone were the cracked, beige painted plaster, the old, cracked mint green tile floors, and the old claw foot tub.

In their place, smooth walls and ceiling had been painted the blue of the night sky just after sunset. The floors and walls up to about Severus's waist were covered in white and grey marble, as were the counter above the black sink cabinet, and the walls of the new stand-alone shower with far too many silver shower heads and knobs, and the bathtub even bigger than the one in his bathroom. The floor rugs and towels, though, were a deep green like the Forbidden Forest after dark. The old, bare lightbulb affixed to the ceiling had been replaced with a light charmed to look like the moon, and the ceiling was dotted by those first few, brightest stars.

"We may have had some funds leftover after doing Henry's rooms," said Kingsley's dry voice behind them. "And no one was particularly interested in money being returned to them."

Severus looked at the door to his room for a moment, then shook his head and shooed the lot of them out of the bathroom.

Henry had a feeling Severus's bedroom wouldn't be exactly the way he'd left it either.

***

Chapter Text

July 25th, the morning of the wills reading dawned bright and far too early for the residents of Spinner's End. Having had a long and exhausting day of shopping, and then the reveal of an entirely redone upstairs and the required socializing with the people responsible for it, even Henry did not want to get up at seven so they could be at Gringotts by eight.

Nonetheless, he did get up. He skipped the shower, feeling like if he got in, he'd accidentally wind up spending the entire hour luxuriating under the flow of the three shower heads with massage settings. Instead, Henry spent fifteen minutes picking out his clothes. He didn't want to throw on random clothes and risk people saying Severus wasn't taking care of him, but he didn't want to dress too nice for what was supposed to be a sad or somber occasion, either. He finally settled on the least elaborate clothes from Gideon's and went to the bathroom to wrestle his hair into order.

Even with the shortcuts he’d taken in getting ready, he was not the first downstairs. Severus was already in the kitchen, making eggie in a basket and bacon for breakfast.

"Sit," Severus said, waving a spatula vaguely in the direction of the table behind him. "We don't have much time."

Before he knew it, breakfast was over and they were stepping out the front door to apparate directly to the alley behind the Leaky Cauldron, a much more subtle way of arriving than flooing into it or having to walk through it from the front door. The street was much more crowded than yesterday, probably due to all the school shopping taking place now that the letters had gone out. Severus once again cleared the way, glaring at everyone nearby and keeping one hand on Henry's shoulder. Henry was grateful, as it'd be impossible to get through the throngs on his own. 

In the bank, they were led into a waiting room that was already rather full of people. While Harry recognized most of them, from the Malfoys to McGonagall to Madeye Moody and Amelia, to Remus and Mr. Weasley, there were some he had no idea about. He assumed they were here for Regulus' will. The clock on the wall struck eight as Augusta Longbottom, sans Neville, strode in and the door shut behind her.

"This way please," said a goblin, standing in a doorway that hadn't been there before.

The room they all filed into held a preposterously long table; each seat had a name tag in front of it.

Remus sat at one end, with an empty chair labeled Sirius Black next to him. Harry looked around the room and saw maybe another half dozen empty chairs. Augusta Longbottom sat in the middle of three of them, and he winced at how that had to feel. Professor McGonagall beat him to saying anything, though, which was just as well. 

"Augusta," the professor smiled, "where is Neville? You shouldn't be here alone."

Augusta sighed, looking anywhere but the empty chairs around her. "Minnie," she greeted with a nod, "Neville is at home. He's not yet eleven, and I'll not have him at an unspecified will reading with who-knows-which people that he may not even remember the person whose will is to be read since no one we know has died in the last several years. Especially when he doesn't have to be. He'd much rather grub about with his plants in the dirt like a muggle, anyway."

It took everything Harry had not to yell at the cantankerous old hag. Which was then made easier by remembering that Hags were real and people, even if the Ministry insisted on calling them Dark Creatures, and they didn't deserve to be used as an insult. While he struggled to find an applicable insult that didn't also denigrate anyone but Augusta Longbottom, McGonagall had gotten one of the goblins to switch Neville's and Augusta's chairs, so Augusta could sit by her. 

Finally, everyone was settled in, with a cup of tea provided by the goblins that smelled of lavender and had a faint tingling of peppermint, reminding Harry strongly of calming draughts. He wondered if lavender and peppermint tea was as effective without the crocodile heart to make it a proper potion, but figured it was a good precaution for how emotional people were likely to get over the wills. Actually, he wondered if they had crocodile hearts nearby or some hellebore syrup. Just in case.

What was he saying? He was sitting next to Severus Snape. If he didn't have the full potions on him in large enough quantities for everyone in the room, Harry would be deeply surprised.

"Good morning," Manager Grinner began, sounding very grim indeed, even for him. "There are three wills to be read today. We ask that all persons present remain seated and respectful for all three wills, regardless of whether or not one is named in any particular will. I am Prince Account Manager Grinner. While the estates in question are not of House Prince, as the Manager overseeing the private will reading, and without a legitimate Manager of the accounts in question available, I will be overseeing this reading and the appropriate dispersal of the estates. Due to mismanagement of the estates of these wills and crimes against the Goblin Nation, the Managers of the Black and Potter accounts have been terminated."

The room's other occupants shifted uncomfortably. Grinner's lack of specification left an unpleasant feeling that "termination" was more appropriately named "execution" than "recently unemployed."

"We will proceed in order of time of death, beginning with the last will and testament of Regulus Arcturus Black II," Grinner announced, as if he hadn't just set one of Eris' Apples loose amongst the Greeks. 

There were several sharp intakes of breath around the table, a mood Harry could definitely understand, having been just as confused when he discovered that will had never been read either. Surely the Black family would have gone running when Regulus died? But no, if Henry had to guess, from the … termination of the Black Account Manager, the Goblin in question had never bothered to tell them there was a will to be read. Lady-Aunt Cissa in particular was fuming, leaving Henry grateful he'd been sat with Severus well down and across the table from her. Mad-Eye, sitting directly across from her, looked like he was ready to duck and cast a few dozen protegos at any moment. Lucius rested a calming hand lightly on her arm as Grinner set that same dark wooden box on the table and pressed the gem.

Madame Bones settled in to take notes and Henry reached for his meager occlumency in hopes of paying better attention this time, as that silvery recording of Regulus emerged.

Having already heard the wills once, Henry was able to actually pay attention this time, not just to what was being said, but to the reactions of the people around him. 

Augusta Longbottom scoffed and rolled her eyes at Regulus' form, and Narcissa smiled sadly, but the rest of the room was still shocked. Mad-Eye even turned to whisper to Amelia. Lucius leaned forward to stare intently at the wispy form. Muttering in the quarter of the room Henry didn't recognize arose and quickly quieted as the younger Black brother began to speak. 

And oh. Oh. That was why his will was never read. Who blocked it was still an open question, but the reasons… Regulus named Sirius his heir in all Black Family titles, heirlooms, and monies, just to spite Walburga. And also left all his research into the Dark Lord Voldemort as well as a Locket in his house elf's possession, in case Kreacher could not destroy it, to Mad-Eye Moody. Complete with the information that the locket was a horcrux and the lake guards being hundreds of inferi. Both facts were well buried in the nonsense of an eighteen year old's will, but maybe not buried deep enough.

Even Augusta was wiping tears by the end of it, though many of Regulus' friends looked more disturbed by the short speech about  Moldy's insanity, caused, no doubt, by the creation of at least one horcrux.

Then another box came out and someone else scoffed and rolled their eyes at the name attached, and they carried on. 

James' will elicited several separate shouts of anger, and Remus was outright sobbing. Henry really wanted to go comfort the man, but he wasn't supposed to know him yet. He was a stranger to Remus. 

After James was done speaking, Amelia requested a moment before moving on to Lily's will. Looking around the room, at the large number of enraged wizards baying for blood – whose blood exactly, they couldn't agree on, there seemed to be a list going – Manager Grinner approved her request.

"We are having these wills read now because young Mr. Potter's arrival at the bank earlier this month revealed they had not already been read. A private reading was done and transcripts were sent to me. The processes necessary to free Lord Black have already begun with the evidence of these wills. We are, however, on the look out for an uncommonly long-lived rat missing a toe. Pettigrew's capture will go a long way to greasing the wheels of properly reopening the case."

Oh, Henry realized, dad did mention their animagi forms, didn't he? Around when he'd mentioned giving the book they'd used for it to Neville, assuming, probably that I would be with Sirius and Remus and have their copy.

Mr. Weasley — present to receive a collection of muggle records and players as well as all of James' tools from working on the pair of flying motorcycles James, Sirius, and Arthur had put together — blanched. "Un…uncommonly long-lived, you said?" He gulped, "any idea as to the color and size?"

“Lord Black informed us that Pettigrew’s form was a Common Brown Rat, and that he’d cut off his own finger, sent a blasting hex at the gas main, and then transformed and escaped into the sewers,” Amelia answered. Clever that, saying Sirius told her when she’d seen  Wormtail herself in Harry’s memories, though maybe she did  interview him and get him to say things she already knew. It’d be the best cover for how she knew.

Mr. Weasley closed his eyes. When he reopened them, the look in them was intense and angry, despite the rest of his face looking perfectly calm. “Nearly ten years ago, my son Percy found an adult rat missing a toe in the garden. A common brown. He’s been living as my son’s pet for a decade. He sleeps in my children’s beds.”

Madame Bones paled as Lady Longbottom whimpered and covered her mouth. Moody growled, “We’ll meet with you after this to arrange his arrest, Arthur. He won’t have one more night to be in their beds.”

“It will certainly be added to the charges against him,” Amelia agreed. 

“Do you need a healer to check on your children?” Severus asked, passing the calming draughts he absolutely did have in his pockets around the table.

“There are several of us at the table,” Lady-Aunt Cissa put forward, “You wouldn’t have to read anyone in, and for something like this, I wouldn’t even think of charging, nor, I think, would anyone else.”

“I — I think that might be best,” Arthur nodded, “after the rat’s been caught. No sense letting on before he is.”

“Of course.”

Grinner nodded. “Is there anything else, or may we proceed with the final will?”

“That is all, for now, Account Manager Grinner,” Amelia said, returning to her seat. “Thank you for allowing us to settle this matter.”

“Very well then,” He nodded, placing the third box on the table. “The last will and testament of Lady Lily Jade Potter nee Evans.”

***

Henry's mum’s will had been… much smoother than the other two, as it had almost no surprises in it. Almost everyone at the table was named for something by Lily, even several of the ones who had clearly thought they were only there for Regulus’ will. Even if it was only “a book on insults from around the world.” Henry wasn’t sure if his mum was taking a last opportunity to get in her digs, prone to giving near-random people near-random things, or both. His bet was on both, honestly, judging by the looks on Severus’ face at some of them. Though the fellow who got the book of insults looked deeply pleased by it, and even Lucius  seemed vaguely amused by the very large collection of muggle hair care products she’d left to him.

“To Lu-Lu, I leave... Volumizing Conditioner and some Mousse.  I may be dead, but your hair doesn't have to be. Actually, I leave my entire collection of hair care products to Lucius Malfoy. May they serve him well.” was definitely an entire argument in favor of “Both”.

Of course, everyone turned to stare at Severus when he was named one of Harry’s guardians. He simply raised an eyebrow at them. Narcissa was excessively smug when she got the same treatment. “Remind me, dear,” she said with vicious glee to Lucius, “I need to make a family tree for Lily’s family. Just so I can scratch that harridan out and put myself in. Maybe a whole tapestry.” Half the room inched quietly away from her smile.

And finally, they were done, and free and back out into Diagon.

Severus settled in next to Henry, strolling beside him with his hands in his pockets. “Well, now that that’s over,” Severus said brightly, “What did you want to do for your birthday?”

“What?” Henry squawked 

“What what?”

“What do you mean, birthday?”

Omake 3:

It had been nearly a decade since Dark Lord Voldemort had blasted himself to smithereens. And he had done it to himself. Nine years and nine months stuck in the head of the boy he'd meant to kill was plenty of time to review what he knew. Had he any control of the body, he'd have kicked himself. But he didn't, he couldn't even manipulate the boy. The contract he signed with Lily Potter by killing her after she made three offers of her life instead of her son's kept him firmly to himself. The glowing gold magics were a better prison than even he could have devised.

He raged. It was supposed to be his final security, his piece de resistance, as it were, and instead he was stuck in the head of a mewling infant he couldn't even control. And he did it to himself. 

That was the worst of it, really. He did it to his damned self.

Ten years, almost. Ten years of living in a cupboard, serving that hag and her husband and being beaten, starved, and called old, cruel names like "boy" and "freak" and not even being able to answer back or make them hurt the way he had in Wool's was the worst sort of hell he could imagine. 

In some ways, it was better than Wool's: Petunia knew what magic was and thus didn't bother trying to exorcise them, there was only the one other child tormenting them, and the building was sound so even though they slept in a bloody cupboard with only one, threadbare blanket, it was still much warmer than Wool's had ever been.

On the other hand, it was worse. There was only one other child, and two adults, so they had ever so much more attention to spend on tormenting the boy and his hitchhiker themselves. Mrs. Cole had never taken after him with a frying pan, a switch, yes, sometimes till he had welts and bruises and even bled just a little, but never a frying pan. Mr. Flannigan had taken a belt to him, but never belted him into a hot stove with just-used cook pans on it. No one had ever twisted his arm and thrown him so that both bones broke. He'd been locked in his room or the coal shed, but he'd never been locked outside while a snowstorm was on, on Christmas even. And this time, this time he knew he had magic, he could do something about it, he could hurt them back and make it stop if it weren't for the fact he was nothing more than a mutually unwanted passenger of their real target. His know-how meant nothing when he could neither do nor tell anyone about it.

And then, suddenly, his prison got ever so much smaller, the golden lights caging him in, away from the boy and his thoughts, buckled and scrunched and pressed in like what was on the other side had gotten so much bigger. Like the time Dudley sat on the birdcage and squashed it.

New lights, silver and black, joined the gold and something cut off with a shriek. It took him almost to the train station to realize he wasn't feeling the boy's emotions any more. For ten years, he'd felt what the boy felt as if it was his own, not thoughts, never thoughts, but feelings, physical and emotional, oh yes, and suddenly he was not. It was … disorienting.

He watched as the boy purchased food and writing supplies with his stolen money. (100£ was nowhere near enough to make up for what the horse-faced bint had done to them, but it was a start, he supposed.) And then he watched as the boy settled into his seat on the train and started writing. And oh, those were some good questions. Mostly questions Voldemort knew the answers to, but he hadn't started asking them until near the end of first year, and yesterday there had been no sign of anything that would prompt such questions. How did the boy even know to ask? Was he a seer?

And then. Then he saw the names used and realized that was his name being mocked in ten different ways on one sheet of paper. He was livid. How dare this boy mock him! Several different times in less than an hour! And he couldn't even do anything about it! He read more intently, seeking what the boy Saw that would lead to such crude names as Moldyshorts being levied against him and realized something. Something that made his mind skitter and his rage take a sharp left turn into horror. 

Dumbledore's name was getting the same treatment.

What the blasted hell was his free-self doing to be rendered equivalently low to Dumbledore? Obviously, he had lost his damned mind. For that matter, what was Dumbledore doing that his own supposed champion treated him the same as his enemy?

For that matter, he could see names for Lucius and Severus in several places as well, though those seemed to be more codes than derision, he even used the name Severus gave himself as a teenager more than once. What had those two been up to while he was locked away? And who were all these other names running around the page?

He sat brooding on the endless questions Harry's questions sparked until he quite suddenly found himself in front of a door, knocking, only to be rather shocked out of his wits when the door was jerked open by a scowling, thunderous looking Severus. That boy never had handled mornings well, being up all night brewing as he usually was, Voldemort had quickly decided to never call him before noon unless necessary. It wasn't worth the hassle.

He stopped staring at his young…associate and tuned in to what Harry was saying halfway through a rant that left them breathless. Legilimency? Why?

"How can not even one year have all that much in it and have it all too important to skip?" Severus asked, somehow managing to both look completely baffled and also sneer down at them. He really was too adorable.

"It's, um, rather more than a year?  More like nearly eight." 

“What?”

What? Indeed. Nearly eight,  the boy said. He wasn't a seer, he was a time traveler. Well that made sense, the shard supposed, it certainly explained why his soul was suddenly big enough to squish the shard's prison. No, actually, it didn't make any bloody sense, what the fuck was the rest of him even fucking doing?

He was relieved when their mutual confusion kept Severus from going looking just yet. Yes, let Severus get some coffee in his system, and some food in both their bellies. He needed time to recover from the hits that just kept coming.

He didn't get the time. No sooner had he swallowed the potions and sensed them starting to work than they were up in Severus's childhood bedroom and the boy was reading through journals full of two sets of handwriting. He cooed fondly at his favorite's snark and genius even as an ickle firstie, adorable, really, and wondered who the other tiny genius was, for he certainly hadn't seen it on either side of the war.

"Mum," Harry whispered, running his fingers gently over the second set of handwriting, a line snarking about Gryffindor boys, and hugged an appalling pillow to his chest and oh. Oh. That explained… not everything, but ever so much.

Severus had said he'd loved the girl, when he'd begged for her life. Voldemort had assumed the same crude cruelties MacNair and Mulciber were known for but… Voldemort was struck by another memory, Amycus begging very nearly the same way when Alecto had failed a mission he'd assigned her. Severus had loved her, but it had nothing to do with getting his wick wet. She was his sister. Which would make Harry his nephew.

How complicated. Mind, Severus had been his favorite because he was so very capable of complexity, but this was… rather much. Put some of that complication back, Severus. Things can be simple sometimes! Look at Lucius! Complicated and yet so very simple.

No matter, Voldemort wouldn't punish him for taking care of his host. Not that he could do anything to prevent other pieces of him from doing so, but he wouldn't. He just had to find a way to let the others know.

The boy fell asleep and the shard continued plotting. Someone would need to keep other versions of him from trying to hurt the boy he'd signed a magical contract protecting, until he could find a way to tell them all about the contract. And himself, he supposed. Severus was capable of it, and would keep his host out of Dumbledore's clutches. And away from the damned Hag and Walrus. Good enough.

He was distracted from his plotting as a wisp of silver shot through him and his prison on its way to Severus's wand at their temple. Ugh, the first time they'd had to make Dudley's blasted bacon, and they'd spilled the grease down their arm when the stool unbalanced as they reached too far. And then had to clean the spill up while the Hag shrieked at them.

Another shot of silver and he relived the time the Walrus locked them out for tripping over one of Dudley's Christmas presents left in the hall and spilling the pot of tea in the Hag's favorite china tea set.

Shot after shot of memory left him gasping and aching in remembered pain. He'd barely got himself back under control when the three physical beings – he loosely recognized Amelia Bones from her time as an auror, a useful connection in this case – set tea cups back down and Severus lifted his wand again.

He braced himself for more remembered pain, but that wasn't what he got…quite.

Oh, silver wisps of memory streaked through him, alright, and there was plenty of pain, but it was memories of things that hadn't happened. And mother of God, what the ever lasting fuck?

What the fuck even? The fuck was Mumblesnore (he was keeping that one, thanks Harry) doing? What the fuck was Other Voldemort smoking? Had the rest of him not managed to add two and two and realize the contract they'd signed in Lily's blood? Each memory only made him swear more profusely. Especially as it became clear the rest of him really had lost the plot and was just settling for mayhem instead of cunning like a proper Slytherin. Buggeration. Did he have to fix everything himself? Yes. Yes, he clearly did, he decided as he watched a noseless, corpse like version of himself kill … himself. Moron.

Then he spent several minutes cursing Dumbledore for a fool as dozens of Avadas went flying at three disgustingly noble children. He relaxed, thinking at least with Older-Harry's death the memories were over and he could get to plotting. 

He shouldn't have.

They weren't.

The next memory was… different. Oh, it passed the same, felt the same, as he watched Older Harry converse with Death. (He staunchly ignored the way his mind gibbered in terror.) But it wasn't the same. Not at all. Because while they were remembering Harry talking to Death, and the shard hadn't been there for that, having been destroyed three memories ago, Death turned away from Harry to look Voldemort – suddenly aware of having his own person, separate from his host – dead in the eye. 

Harry faded from view, but the memory didn't stop, and the shard, feeling the smallness of the piece he'd torn himself into, didn't follow. He stayed, Death's eyes boring into him.

"So," Death whispered, "you've seen."

The shard couldn't speak, he merely nodded his head, he wasn't sure he had a head, but it felt like Death knew the attempt was made anyway.

"And what, prey, tell, do you plan to do with it?"

It was odd how Voldemort knew the words weren't the more common 'pray tell,' but specifically 'prey, tell.' He really hated feeling like prey, and he was sure Death knew that. He found his voice, barely, what came out was a faintly squeaky whisper, but at least he could speak. 

"Plan is too strong a word. I am trapped within the boy, I can't even whisper manipulations to him, can't contact anyone, not even myself. What I'd like to do is immaterial when I can do nothing."

"And if you could?" The shard felt like he was being weighed, tested. His next answer would doom or save him and he hadn't the foggiest notion which would be which. 

Finally he shrugged and went with the honest answer, a new thing for him, but Death could probably tell when he was lying anyway. "I signed a contract. I figured that out before all this. The boy is safe from me, the other pieces of myself…not so much. They all seem to have lost their marbles somewhere. Severus is safe as well, he's keeping me alive and away from that horrid bitch and her brute of a husband. Whether the other pieces will feel the same way, when they clearly don't know I exist… beyond that, I haven't decided yet."

The not-memory faded away and he looked with a new fear on the silver and black lights that had joined the golden cage when Death had sent Harry back in time. 

Death was watching him. 

He'd have to tread carefully.

***

The shard took the time to review everything he knew and had learned. Oh, he caught bits of lists about making people suffer, dire retribution, and not setting Dumbledore on fire until he'd earned the privilege, but mostly he kept himself to himself and turned everything over in his mind. While the boy took a much needed nap after having been up all night, he came to a few, relatively small but earthshaking conclusions and a couple of decisions. First and foremost "Fuck over Fate's plans" and "Screw over everything Dumbledore has ever held dear" went to the top of his list, right below "Don't Piss Death Off." The fact that all three goals involved keeping his host alive and healthy and also getting the rest of himself doing something more useful than running around attempting suicide both simplified and massively complicated matters.

"What would he do with it" Death asked, as if he could do something with it, but the only entity who could hear him was… Death. Who apparently could send souls back in time, and surely wouldn't have a problem with a smaller request. But what to ask? And did he really want to ask Death anything?

Magic drew his attention back outside himself as it curled around him, testing, prodding, reaching within an poking around their body before drawing away and fading.

The door clicked closed and Harry opened their eyes. 

By the time Harry had rubbed the sleep from their eyes, fumbled his glasses onto their face and stumbled out the door, voices were coming up the stairs.

Narcissa, Voldemort identified, and hoped the boy proceeded with caution. Startling a Black was never a good idea. Even the healers. 

Listening carefully, he identified the magic he'd felt as a diagnostic. Why was Narcissa helping the Potter boy when she didn't know he was in here with him? Was Lucius false? Or only his wife? Or was something else going on here?

The boy peeked around the corner and Narcissa called him out, watching them closely. Which gave the shard an opportunity. One Harry did not have. He Looked, into her, into her thoughts and memories. He Saw her seeing the boy's hands overlaid with Severus's. The tilt of their head in deference that had nothing to do with respect and everything to do with the ability to see a blow coming and dodge in time, overlaid with Severus doing the same. Their shoulders and hips and feet tilted to charge or run with no notice as needed; mirroring the way Regulus Black, the sweet baby of Voldemort's followers, entered a room. And oh. 

Voldemort, unlike many, never forgot that Narcissa was a Malfoy only by marriage. Her blood flowed with genius, madness, hunger for knowledge and power, but most importantly, for family. Predators all, the Blacks were, and like so many predators, they lived and died by the pack. Family was all. Narcissa's mind reflected back her once great and numerous family, fading away, cut back from sixty to twenty to four, two of whom were in Azkaban and unlikely to ever be seen again. She hungered now more for the pack than for power. And Severus, the closest to family she had left outside her son, whom she had named godfather of her son over Abraxus' protestations because of that, had called her to help his nephew. A nephew that looked so very much like her favorite family had. 

Of course she was helping. Name never had any meaning when a Black hungered like that. What did it matter that the boy was Harry Potter when he could be what she needed?

Then the plans she had building filtered through. The deaging ritual and it's consequences.  The question of whether or not they were willing to risk their Lord's ire for this. He almost hoped they were. It'd be nice to not ache constantly, maybe be a bit less abominably short. She looked away, back to Severus and he watched her let him see the question. He watched the answer.

Well.

Whenever, whatever, he asked of Death,  keeping all of his new family clear of less-sane parts of himself would have to be a priority.

He found he quite liked them as they were, actually.

***

The ritual was… not pleasant. It was every bit as painful as Narcissa had said it would be, but he had to agree with Harry’s choice anyway. They were already taller and had much better eyesight, and while they ached, it was a completely different ache than it had been, one that he knew would heal and disappear. What was far more distracting was the sense of riding a snake who hissed sweet nothings to him while some minion researched something, the feel of solid leather pressing against his sides, the mutterings of an old, mad house elf with rough, angry hands, and the quiet quiet quiet that pervaded everything.

Oh. OH.

What? Wwhhaaat? What? What? The Fuck?  

Ah, he was such a charmer at sixteen. He’d forgotten. “Shut up, Diary,” he muttered and relished in the sixteen year old’s squawking offense.

Blithely ignoring the outraged confusion of his other selves, he pressed on, “We have a problem. Several of them, actually. Lord Death has, apparently decided to solve the problem of me knowing more than the rest of you but being unable to do anything with it by allowing us to converse and I have no idea how long it will last, so shut up and listen. We blew ourself to pieces because we didn’t pay attention. Neither Lily or Harry Potter had anything to do with it. We offered Lily, sister of our favorite, Severus, an out three times, and three times she offered herself in trade for her son.”

“Shit,” Locket grumbled, “We signed a contract, didn’t we?”

“The fuck did you morons do?” Diary demanded.

“Killed her and then tried to kill her son, obviously,” Cup rolled his eyes.

“It gets even better,” the shard in the boy continued loudly.

“How?” Ring asked acerbically. 

“I’m in Lily’s son. And I do not have control, the magic of the contract keeps me firmly to myself. I merely experience the same hellishness Dumbledore” someone hissed at the name “dumped his so-called champion into.”

“Hellishness?” the chunk running free asked.

“Worse than Wool’s." All six of them shuddered in horror. "Despite the lack of exorcisms and hordes of vile children. Severus has me now, Amelia Bones is arresting people, Narcissa is putting my host back together, and Lucius is leveraging it all into knocking Mumblesnore out of politics. Do not kill them.”

“Mumblesnore?”

“We need them alive, functional, and doing what they do best," the sliver in the boy continued brightly, "Giving other people headaches. Also, my host is a time traveler now, favored by Death Himself, and has a delightful quantity of ridiculous names for the Old Meddler. He went six hours without ever using his real name or the same nickname twice. And he has at least as many for ourselves. Do try not to earn the ones he calls you this time, Moldyshorts. Stop doing Bumblebore’s work for him, won’t you? ”

“MOLDYSHORTS?”

The shard in the boy snickered at the outrage all five other pieces exuded. “Would you rather Moldywarts, Lord Bravely-Runs-Away, Lord No-Nose? You really did misplace your nose when you got your body back last time.”

This… This could work.

“At some point you stopped being a proper Slytherin and settled for pure mayhem, instead. I humbly recommend you stop that.”

Chapter Text

July 30th was awful and Henry breathed in almost-relief at it. 

The week leading up to his birthday had been too good. The thought of having a birthday be acknowledged by other people was too good, and it ratcheted his nerves far beyond tolerable. Nevermind having to think of something to do specifically for his birthday when he had eighteen years of expecting his birthday to mean extra chores and no food but what  the Weasleys and Hermione sent him by owl, never mind the concept of presents. But the day before his birthday, everything went wrong and he sighed in relief.

Breakfast with Severus was alright, but then a flock of owls came with notices for the Dursley's court dates and court dates for Pettigrew and Sirius. And then not half an hour later Fumbledork sent a summons for Severus to join Mumbles in his office, probably having received the same notices, so Severus sent him to the Malfoys, except Lucius was preparing for the court dates, Lady-Aunt Cissa was redecorating so he wasn't allowed in most of the public rooms, not even to peek, and Draco was at the Zabini's for the day.

He went to the kitchen to see if he could help the elves, but they were all working on foods that looked very complicated – some kind of laminated bread, a very finicky custard-like thing, and some kind of syrup that needed constant attention – and wouldn't let Henry help. So he sat and drew the elves at their work until he physically could not sit still anymore and went to run the obstacle course instead.

Even that got boring after the fifth or sixth time through it alone. So eventually, he just sat at the top, thinking.

He thought about coat hangers and old socks and fifty pence pieces. He thought about candles drawn in dust and blown away. He thought about books from Hermione and quidditch supplies from Ron and fudge from Mrs. Weasley.

He thought about how he wasn't likely to ever get those things again.

Henry was Sorting Slytherin this time. He couldn't fix things from Gryffindor, and couldn't just be Henry and live there either. A Gryffindor Henry would be the same as a Gryffindor Harry: stuck in between Tommy and Albie, always fighting just to survive. He wanted more than that this time.  But he knew how Ron felt about the Snakes, and knew how Slytherins felt about Hermione.

The sun was setting when he wiped his eyes and looked down to find Dobby at the bottom of the obstacle course, staring up at him with a worried look and Henry's coat in his hands.

He ate dinner alone in the kitchen while the Malfoy elves continued to scramble to make… something. Honestly, Henry wasn't paying any attention, wallowing in a miserable July 30th as he was.

When Lucius gathered him up to send home with a harried pat on the back, Harry was relieved it was still early. He could get a nap in before waking up to wish himself a happy birthday at midnight.

Severus either wasn’t home yet, or was hiding in his room, which suited Henry just fine at the moment. He wasn’t fit company today either. So he scrounged up a candle stub from the storm supplies Eileen Snape had kept in the cupboard the builders had industriously filled an awkward nook with and a book of matches kept in the same box, set his alarm for 11:50 and went to bed.

Henry woke at 11:45 and shut off the alarm to keep from making noise that clearly wasn’t necessary.

The house was dark and silent, so it wasn’t Severus just getting home. It was odd, though. He’d gotten quite used to the sounds of potions-making in the kitchen all night long. Their absence echoed and made the night all the more miserable. He wondered, for a moment, how something so small yet so utterly different to anything he had Before could become so important to him that its absence would hurt. But it did, and Henry wasn’t much in the habit of questioning what was.  

The small clock on his desk ticked. 11:55 PM. Henry sighed deeply, rolled out of bed and gathered up the candle and matches.

Sitting on an excessively plush rug, hugging one of Lily’s Pillows -- a mustard yellow, faux fur monstrosity, this time -- staring at a real candle lit beneath painted stars and rainbow Aurora, he wondered at the discongruity. For more than a month he’d had not just one actual bed, but two, things that had belonged to his mum, all the food he could eat, and clothes that fit. For a week, he’d had unimaginable luxury, with rugs so soft Aunt Petunia would weep with envy, furniture all his own, a room designed for him with all he could ever have dreamed of. And here he was, waiting alone for midnight, to wish himself a happy birthday, just like always. 

He didn’t even know what he’d wish for, this time. Everything he used to wish for seemed empty now. He’d had family, and lost them, or wouldn’t gain them again this time. He had a full stomach long enough to know how little it really meant, how small an ask that was, really. He had all the things he could ever have wanted but never could have asked for.

“What do you want out of life?” Severus had asked a month ago and Harry found he still hadn’t the faintest idea. He looked up at the false stars and the flowing lights streaking across his ceiling and found his answer the same.

To live, to matter, just for being Henry James Antioch Potter. The clock struck 12 and Henry blew out the candle.

“Happy birthday, Henry,” Severus said behind him. The dour man smirked in the shadows of the door as Harry whirled to gape at him. “Did you think I had forgotten?”

***

The day that had begun with strangeness at midnight continued to be just as strange.

Henry woke, late, tucked into a bed he didn't remember getting into, the awful yellow pillow next to him. He luxuriated in a long shower beneath rainbow lights and more shower heads than strictly necessary, with soaps that smelled of sandalwood and coconut instead of smelling like the cheapest thing money could buy. He combed his hair with his own hairbrush and rubbed the softly-scented oils the hairdresser had given him into it before tying it back, dressed in new, soft silk and linen clothes in colors Uncle Vernon would have had a fit over, and admired the person in the mirror, heather grey trousers, lavender shirt, charcoal and aubergine robe with heather trim in hand.

He felt…good. He looked good. And he had no idea what to do with either of those things on a day that happened to be July 31st. 

Downstairs, the feeling of having fallen into an alternate universe intensified. 

Severus was awake before him, was dressed in the green and black outfit Gideon had made him, the matching robe tossed on one of the bench seats at the table, and was cooking a breakfast of crepes and fruit while drinking a cup of coffee. Edgar was on his perch by the back door, awake, and sharing his own breakfast of mice with another Owl.

A white owl, who cooed at Henry as he walked into the room.

“Hedwig?” Harry asked tentatively, approaching the birds. They both chirruped and nuzzled him. Hedwig seemed confused when she went to preen his hair and found it difficult to preen as it was long and tied back. She even scolded him for it, and he couldn’t help but laugh.

“Good morning, Henry,” Severus said as he brought loaded plates to the table. “I went to purchase her this morning, and walked into the Menagerie to find she’d escaped her cage. She all but flung herself at me and refused to leave my shoulder. There’s no way to prove it, of course, but given the way she’s behaved ever since, I suspect she may have been sent Back with you. She’s been waiting for you to walk through the door since we returned.”

The man may well have been an imposter of Snape, but in that moment, Henry couldn’t care less. He turned and flung his arms around the startled potions master’s waist. “Thank you. I -- thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” Severus said seriously. “After all she did with and for you Last Time, I could hardly pass up the opportunity to ensure she joined you again this time.” Severus tugged on Henry’s ponytail and directed him to the table. “Now, breakfast and one present. We have a long day ahead of us and had best get to it. Cissa won’t be pleased if we’re late.”

“Late?” Henry asked as he slid onto the bench not already holding Severus’s robe.

“For your birthday party. She’s been planning it for weeks and only got more vehement about it when she found out you weren’t expecting one. Draco joined her when I explained what your previous birthdays were like.”

“Oh,” Harry said weakly, swallowing a sudden lump in his throat. Oh dear.

***

Henry wanted to cry. 

All that moping about everyone being too busy yesterday and this… Not only was there a Party, capital P absolutely necessary, but Lady-Aunt Cissa had completely redone several rooms, clearly with him in mind.

The ballroom had been turned into an ice skating rink with the ceiling charmed to show the Aurora Australis as it was at that moment somewhere in Antarctica. The dining room had black carpet, white ash furniture with black velvet upholstery, and a rainbow of bright jewel tone drapes down the white walls, with a buffet filled with danish, souffles, croissants, flan, a dozen different cheeses wrapped around all sorts of things from spicy peppers to fruits. Some were cheese-stuffed-in-peppers-wrapped-in-bacon, or dates-wrapped-in-cheese-wrapped-in-prosciutto. There was some kind of pie that looked complicated and tasted delicious. He’d have to thank the elves later.

Draco had decided that if Henry was going to sort Slytherin, he should meet some Slytherins and what better opportunity than for his birthday? Even better, most of the Slytherins present were ones he had never spoken to Before. Or even heard speak, for that matter. The Slytherins Harry knew were…notably not present. Considering how many of them had died with a Dark Mark on their arms, that wasn’t particularly surprising. Some of those present had parents Harry knew to be Death Eaters, and said parents were there, but they hovered around Lucius’ elbows as Henry’s newest Uncle spun protecting Henry into a benefit for the Dark Lord. Or, at least, a detriment to Grumblecore. Henry made sure those adults could hear him refer to the Headmaster by ridiculous names at least a few times, but otherwise let Severus, Lady-Aunt Cissa, and Lucius deal with them. They were better at talking in circles than Harry had ever learned to be when he was a Gryffindor. Maybe this time…

The party was fleshed out with people who had been at the wills reading, aurors from the ministry, and their kids. Harry was stunned to find…he had no idea how to talk to these kids. Sure, he went to school with most of them for five or more years, but he never actually made friends. Ron made friends with him, Hermione just melded in after the Troll Incident. The Dursleys killed any ability to make friends he had, and he never did manage to recover it. Fortunately, he had a Draco, who was determinedly dragging Henry all over the manor to introduce him to people. He spent a bit of time on the ice rink, learning to skate with Lady-Aunt Cissa’s help, and some time running his obstacle course, but most of his time was spent being herded around to Meet People. Even more fortunately, most of them seemed to understand him having no clue how to People, and knew Draco well enough to not be offended by Henry constantly being dragged off.

It was strange. It was good, but it was strange.  

Finally, people wandered out, and Henry sat exhausted next to a pile of presents that were a mixed bag of generic and surprisingly personal. Gideon had stopped by and given him a new school bag with formidable featherlight and expansion charms on it, pre-loaded with portable art kits, in black leather with silver lining and ornate silver clasps. Lady-Aunt Cissa had given him a new herbology kit. Lucius had given him hair products and various ties and clasps, with a smirk and a “just passing on your mother’s gifts.” Draco had given him a very fine writing set, with nary a quill to break or need to sharpen, but rather steel nib dip pens in an assortment of colors and materials. The Notts had given him a book on runes. The Zabinis had given him a cloak lined with lambswool. Mad-Eye had given him a heavy, black dragonhide waistcoat that managed to look formal, but would also double as armor in a pinch. Especially as many of the scales were still attached, only enough space for some embroidered trim and the clasps was descaled. He was, naturally, already wearing it, along with the silver hair clasp Severus had given him.

Severus had wandered off with Lady-Aunt Cissa and Amelia, Draco was walking his friends out to the front gate, and Lucius sat beside him, looking calm and poised and yet also exhausted, and Henry remembered his plan. He wouldn’t get a better opportunity than this.

“Lucius,” he began tentatively, immediately netting the man’s attention.

“Yes, Henry?”

“I wanted to do something for Severus,” Henry said, pulling the AGA catalogue from his old school bag, where it had lived since he got it for just this chance. “But I can’t do it on my own. Could you help me?”

Lucius looked at the page Henry held it open to, with the seven-oven green monstrosity, and a hand-written note from the lady at the store and smiled.

“Gladly.”

***

Chapter Text

The court dates had gone… well they went. Henry hadn’t actually been required to be there for anything but his own testimony for any of them, so after the first interminable day of sitting still and quiet while other people talked endlessly about him, he mostly hadn’t. People wanted to argue endlessly about just about everything and he simply hadn’t the patience. He spent the days with Draco and Lady-Aunt Cissa studying culture and the basics of Wizengamot law, standing straight and speaking clearly, and running over the obstacle course like a bat out of hell. Severus and Lucius gave them a summary at the end of each day, and that was enough. Sirius was free and in St. Mungos, Petunia, Vernon, and Peter weren’t, and Dudley was in the foster care system as Marge had been deemed unfit for so much as raising dogs. (No, really, they took all her dogs away. It was great.)

Jumblebore lost face and his ICW position for lying to the courts about how involved he had been in making sure Henry had what he needed. Henry was satisfied.

But now he stood at King’s Cross early in the morning, as Severus had to be at the school by sunrise, staring at the train, frozen with indecision. No one was here, he could sit anywhere he wanted. He could sit in the same compartment as last time and wait for Ron, Hermione, and Neville to come by in their own time and begin again. Except they wouldn’t be Ron, Hermione and Neville, not the ones Henry had left behind when he came back, not the ones who’d stood beside him as the world struggled and failed to make up its mind whether he was a hero or a villain. They wouldn’t know him. It hurt.  

Henry thought he’d dealt with it, that he’d gotten used to the knowing that what was Before wouldn’t, couldn’t be again. And maybe he had, to some extent, but the sight of the train where they all met Once stabbed. And he couldn’t. He just couldn’t.

He didn’t sit in the same compartment. He sat on the opposite side of the train, instead, up towards the front and on the side away from the platform. He didn’t want to watch people who looked like friends, but would never be, stare in wonder at the beginning of everything. He put his trunk on the rack, Hedwig settled, without a cage, up next to his trunk and dozed off and Henry settled himself into the corner by the window, pulling out his sketchbook.

He drew his friends as he’d last seen them. Ron dodging spellfire as he battled Death Eaters in front of Hogwarts, the Weasleys gathered around the shrouded form of Fred in the Great Hall. Luna and Ginny back to back as they fought adult witches and wizards to a standstill. Hermione and Neville standing with him over the corpses on the battlefield, teeth grit and eyes narrowed, spines straight and firm, wands raised in his defence as green light surrounded them.

These were his friends, not the eleven year olds out there with wide-eyed innocence and wonder for all the magic in the world.

The train jolted into motion and Henry looked up, realizing he had been drawing for hours. Theodore Nott sat next to him with his nose in a book, and Draco lounged across the other bench, playing chess with Blaise. 

“Good morning, Henry,” Draco drawled. “You planning on joining the world of the living today?”

Henry thought about it and looked down at his sketchbook at Hermione and Neville fighting, dying, for his right to live. “Yeah, I guess I am.”

***

The rest of the train ride passed uneventfully. Severus had packed a lunch for Henry, as had the other boys’ parents, or elves, and they managed to get them eaten before the Trolly Lady came through. Henry kept waiting to hear Neville's stuttering or Hermione's firm voices asking after a lost toad, but they never came. Perhaps there was a prefect who'd helped them? He hoped there was. He didn't like thinking of Neville not being able to find the escape artist Trevor was. Nonetheless, with chess and candy and books, the time passed quickly and they pulled into the gloom of the Hogsmeade station far more quickly than he realized.

It was strange, standing in Hogsmeade, Hedwig on his shoulder instead of still in the train, waiting for Hagrid to start calling for First Years, knowing that for all he felt about Hagrid, there wouldn't be anymore "Y'allright, there, Harry?"s coming. He had to remind himself that Harry's first friend or not, this Hagrid had never met him.

Hagrid walked by, calling for the first years, and looked at Henry no more than he did at everyone else not even waist high on the giant. He didn't look any less either, not even with Henry standing so close to Draco. Henry felt a great swell of warmth for the man who didn't know him. Hagrid never did look at the scar on his forehead, only at his eyes, and he never did care much about who anyone's parents were, only how they treated those around them. He gave all the first years the same care and consideration, checking them all over to be sure they were all safe, accounted for, and not stepped on. Even Draco, whose father had most definitely been a pain in Hagrid 's backside. He didn't treat Henry special this time, but only because he didn't know Henry this time.

It never was the scar, or the fame, or even his mother's eyes that Hagrid of Before had treated differently. It was the scared, too-small kid in need of someone kind. 

Henry had no way to repay that kindness. Not really. He never could have. He'd just have to find some other way to befriend the friendly, too-big man who needed someone kind. Hedwig would probably help. She was fond of Hagrid, too.

Hedwig cooed softly in his ear and preened his bangs before taking off and flying for the castle as they reached the lake.

The boat didn't have Ron, Hermione, or Neville in it, and he direly wanted to look around to find them, and make sure they were alright and not falling into the lake. 

He didn't. Instead, he looked ahead, as they cleared the bluff and Hogwarts soared high above them, her magic rolling out and folding around him in welcome. He did not cry.

But it might have been a near thing.

Neville didn't trip and almost fall in as they climbed out of the boats, and Hagrid didn't call out with Trevor in his hand to ask about the owner, and Harry's mind swirled uncomfortably at the differences, but Hagrid was knocking, as before and introducing them to McGonagall with the same words and they all trailed into the hall to listen to the same speech. The ghosts came, as before, and as before, several people screeched, and Henry quite forgot about little changes.

Susan Bones helped an absurdly tiny Ron get the smudge on his nose, and Draco didn't start any nonsense about blood, propriety or Weasleys. But talk about how they were to be sorted started just the same. Ron insisted his brothers said there would be a troll, but Neville said he thought there was a test of some sort.

And then they were trundling through the Great Hall, looking in awe at the stars above them, floating candles, and gilded plates. He could even hear Hermione murmuring about the charms on the ceiling. The Hat sang his song just the same and the Sorting began.

Henry straightened and paid attention. He wasn't Sorting Gryffindor this time, and it would benefit him to actually be aware of who was where this time, instead of knowing only the Gryffindors, his students in the DA, and four Slytherins. He applauded for everyone, regardless of Name or House, but was struck dumb when Hermione and then Neville were Sorted. 

And not into Gryffindor.

The fuck???

***

“Potter, Harry!”

Harry stepped forward, and the whispers broke out like little hissing fires all over the hall, just as they’d done the first time.

“ Potter, did she say?” and “ The Harry Potter?” and “I thought he’d be… I dunno.”

It was so familiar it made his heart hurt even if he hated it.  At least this time he wasn’t suffering stage fright as he picked up the Hat and put it on, and the last thing he saw before it covered his eyes was not a hall full of gawkers but the eyes of his friends as he picked them out at their scattered tables.

Hmm, said a small, familiar voice in his ear, you’re going to be Difficult. Very… Difficult.

“I’m going to be the easiest one you sort,” Harry thought vindictively.   “I know where I’m going.”

Do you? the Hat asked.  You’re brave, you’re clever, you’ve got that self-sacrifice streak a mile wide when it comes to your friends.  You could go anywhere.

“You didn’t mention cunning or ambition,” Harry pointed out.  “You also know where I’m going or you wouldn’t be trying to change my mind.”

Yes, Difficult indeed, the Hat huffed.  Dumbledore told me to expect we’d have to nudge you.

“You were made by the Founders, not Fumblesmore. What he wants isn't actually any part of your job. You can see everything in my head,” Harry sighed.  “Take a look.  See where Dumblesnore’s nudges lead.  ‘We must unite inside her, or we'll crumble from within…’”

Oh, you… you’re ruthless aren’t you? the Hat whispered.

Harry just smiled, “As ruthless as I need to be.”

“SLYTHERIN!!”

The Great Hall was silent.  No cheer, no Weasley Twins shouting “we got Potter!”, no warm welcome from Percy, no seat by Ron.  Instead, he walked calmly to the table farthest from the one he used to know so well, swallowing back any outward sign of his roiling emotions.  The whispers sounded like Parseltongue and Acromantula legs and the scurrying of a Rat’s claws where they oughtn’t be. They were, mercifully, punctuated by the staccato percussion of Professor Snape applauding, which slowly bled into a wary applause from Slytherin even as the other houses fell even more silent.

“Congratulations,” a girl in a well tailored green robe that almost but not quite completely defied the uniform code said sincerely but softly.  “I'm Prefect Gemma Farley.  Don’t worry, you’re safe here.”

“Do you often have to reassure people they’re safe in your house?” Harry asked.  “Aren’t most of you in line for a Lordship?”

“Ambition doesn’t come from nowhere, and cunning is a learned survival skill,” the other Prefect, a boy with dark hair already starting to turn steely, said with an edge to his tone that spoke of understanding what he was saying on a personal level.  “We get a lot of purebloods and nobles, that doesn’t mean we take any old soft-handed, blue-blooded git who wants to coast through life.”

“Don’t mind Scorp,” Gemma said with a grin that was very nearly bloody.  “He’s the nice one.  But he’s not wrong.  And Draco here warned us you’d probably be coming to our table.  Which wasn’t expected, and thus has got to have you off kilter.”

“Hence the reassurance.”

“Hence.”

Harry hummed thoughtfully as he turned back to watch the rest of the sorting. "It was expected, though. Premeditated, even."

“Oh I’m going to like you, aren’t I?” Scorp grumbled with a smirk that only read as good-natured from a very specific point of view.  One Harry had 18 years experience of standing in.

***

Chapter Text

Fuck. This. Shit.

No, Hermione didn't usually swear. Unlike what most people thought, it wasn't because she was actually against swearing, far from it. It was because when the situation really called for swearing, she wanted it to have the maximum possible impact, which could be achieved by avoiding it whenever it wasn't absolutely necessary.

This? This was definitely a time when it was absolutely fucking necessary. 

She was inordinately pleased at getting off one really good bombarda before one of the dozen or so acid-green lights from hell caught her in the fucking face. She saw just enough to know it caught that thrice-cursed, fucking asshole Auror Sergeant in the head before the world went dark. 

She died delighted to know she took that fucker out with her. 

She'd like to say the war made her more bloodthirsty, but she'd be lying, and she hated lying, even to herself. She'd always been vicious.

She opened her eyes to find herself in a room that looked an awful lot like the waiting room in her parents’ dental office, except that the secretary at the desk, answering calls and typing on a top-of-the-line computer, was a particularly active skeleton.

Ah, there you are. Sorry about the wait, busy day.

“Not actually a problem, Your Eminence,” Hermione answered as politely as she could.

That’s a new title for me, Death chuckled.

“I don’t imagine you have a gender, when you’re responsible for everyone and probably every thing that dies, so I simply grabbed the most neutral one from the top of the list,” Hermione shrugged. “Would you prefer Majesty? Grace? Holiness? Radiance? Most Reverend? My Liege? Supreme Overlord?”

Oh, I do think I like you. You may call me whatever you wish, though I appreciate the thought.

Hermione nodded with as serious an expression as she could manage, “As you wish, Your Most Radiant and Supreme Majesty. What can I do for you?”

It's more what I can do for you, actually. You were not scheduled to be here just yet. And I have more than enough to do with those who were scheduled today. Or who justly deserved a bombarda to the face. Death smiled fondly, causing Hermione to blush. So. Forward or back?

"I'm sorry, what?" Hermione asked.

You get a choice, Hermione Jean Granger: forward to rest, or back to try again.

"Oh," she said, biting her lip in thought. "Any caveats or tasks, rules I need to follow?"

No. Death's smile was disturbing. Just keep being you.

Well, she supposed that might make things easier. Or harder, actually. 

A lot harder. 

What the hell, it's not like she'd ever been afraid of hard work, and if she could make things better… 

***

She woke up to her room at her parents’ house, fairly certain she hadn’t actually given an answer. She supposed it didn’t actually matter, as she’d been going to say “Back” anyway, and she hardly believed Death Themself could not read minds when They so chose.

When, exactly, was "Back" anyway? She was in her parent's house in London, but had MUDBLOOD clearly written on her arms, though they had nicely scarred over, a feat they had assuredly not accomplished when she'd died.

Curses mark the soul, Ms. Granger, simply undoing time doesn't leave the soul unmarked.

Right, and apparently Death was still watching. She'd better give her new, Most Radiant and Supreme Overlord a good show, then, hadn't she?

She reached for her wand on her nightstand to cast a quick tempus charm, and found it missing. Damn. Fortunately, her parents were long used to her waking up in the middle of the night for a sudden research binge. She hadn't been able to quell her need to know since she was three and waking her parents up at four in the morning to ask how planes stayed up. They'd taught her to find the answers she needed herself as quickly as they could and left her to it.

She turned on her bedside lamp and checked her clock and calendar. 

12:01 AM, the 21st of June, 1991, they proudly declared. Her books for Hogwarts, both the listed required and suggested reading, and the half-dozen extra books she'd picked up, were on her desk but her parents wouldn't be taking her to get her wand until late next week. 

Best get to work, then, she thought, climbing out of bed and stumbling as she'd forgotten how much shorter her legs were.

"Oh, fuck," she whispered in sudden horror. "I'm going to have to go through puberty all over again, aren't I?"

***

Getting to Gringotts’ the next day was… not hard. School was out, so all she had to do was announce her intention to go to the library. Her parents had long since arrived at the conclusion she would live there if she could, and only expected her home in time for dinner. They made sure she had bus fare and money for lunch and sent her on her way. 

Their first floor flat on Dean Street was only a few blocks from Charing Cross Road and a couple more from there to Diagon Alley. She didn’t even really need the bus fare. She would need it if she was actually headed to the closest public library, a fair bit south and on the far side of Charing Cross Road, so she simply pocketed it. After a thought, she tossed her school bag over one arm and a light sweater over the other on her way out the door.

Ten minutes later, she was in The Leaky Cauldron giving Tom the Bartender her biggest, most innocent eyes asking if he could please open the Alley for her. A few minutes after that she was giving the same eyes to a Gringotts’ teller.

"I'd like to speak to an account manager, please," she said as politely as she could.

"Name?"

"Hermione Granger, sir. It was suggested I might be of a squibbed Dagworth-Granger line, but I have no idea if that's true or not. I'd like to find out."

"Follow Copperclaw. Next."

She thanked him and followed the goblin that appeared by her side.

Down and around long curving hallways until the goblin finally stopped and rapped sharply on a door. 

"Ms. Hermione Granger," the young goblin announced, as they opened the door.

"Come."

Hermione stepped in and closed the door behind her, reading the name on the desk plaque quickly.

“Ah, Ms. Granger. How can I help you today?”

“Account Manager Gladdok. I am given to understand that the goblin nation prizes honesty and secrecy. Is that true?”

Gladdok’s face was grim, “It is. Do you require it?”

“I do,” Hermione nodded, setting her sweater and bag in one chair as she sat in the other. “I died. I was eighteen and the year was 1998. I had a short but lovely chat with Death and woke up in my childhood bed at midnight. This morning.” She held out her arms, “I got these some weeks before my death and they hadn’t healed yet.” 

“I see. The weapon that carved them was cursed, which leaves marks on the soul.”

“It was,” she agreed.

“What can we do for you, Ms. Granger?” Gladdok asked after a moment.

“I intend to avoid the war that is coming,” Hermione began, “to do that I may need to do things that will eventually require proof of my circumstances. If anyone can provide such documents without the Ministry getting involved until I need to use them, it’s Gringotts.”

“You told the teller you wished to know if you were of the Dagworth-Granger line,” the account manager inquired, just this side of accusing.

“Truth. Just not all of it,” Hermione defended, “I hardly wanted to announce dying in a war that consumed all of Magical Britain in public.”

“All of Magical Britain, you say? Goblins do not, as a rule, involve themselves in the affairs of wizards.”

“The Dork Lord Moldyshorts,” Hermione said seriously, “will not respect your neutrality. He will not respect the sanctity of your halls nor the sanctity of Hogwarts.”

“What evidence can you give of this?” Gladdok demanded.

“There is or will be a horcrux in one of your vaults.” Hermione said, pulling her back as straight as it could go and firming her jaw.  “A vault to which Bellatrix Black-Lestrange has or will have access to. The horcrux is in a golden goblet with a badger impression on it that once belonged to Helga Hufflepuff. The Vault is seven one one, belonging to the Lestrange Family. It is not his only horcrux,” she cautioned, “simply the one in Gringotts. Further, though it will take longer to verify,  at the end of July, the Dork Lord will attempt to steal something from vault seven one three. He will be difficult to stop as he will be a wraith, having lost his body in killing James and Lily Potter. He doesn’t get what he was after, entirely because the item was withdrawn earlier on the same day he came.”

Gladdok thought for a moment and then made a note on a pad beside her. “It will be checked. If what you say is true, Gringotts will owe you a debt. Tell me, what is in vault Seven One Three, if you know.”

“The Philosopher’s Stone. Made and owned by Nicholas Flamel. Dumbledore will have Rubeus Hagrid bring a letter to withdraw it.”

Gladdok made another note. “Very well, let us begin with a Lineage test, it will answer the official question that brings you here. Then we shall do an Inheritance test. Cost will be discussed after, when your evidence has been verified.”

A few minutes later, Hermione fought down the urge to laugh hysterically. Turns out, her twice-great grandmother was a Dagworth-Granger, a squib who married a Selwyn squib. The couple chose Dagworth as their married name and had three children. Her mother was the grandchild of their youngest, a girl who married a black man who, it turned out, was also a squib, newly emigrated from Palestine. The Granger name came from Hermione’s father, who had no magical antecedents within the ten generations the Test was able to check. Everyone who had speculated, herself included, had assumed it was her father’s side that had the squib line.

The laughter died in her throat as her Inheritance test glowed with words.

Hermione Jean Granger

Born 1979/9/22 

Died 1998/6/21 

Reborn 1991/6/21

Mother: Debora Amani Abbas Granger

Father: John Michael Granger

Ownership:

Vault 2031: 47G, 7S, 32K (uninvested)

Heirships:
Dagworth-Granger (unacknowledged, pending  acceptance)

Selwyn (unacknowledged, pending acceptance)

Hufflepuff (Granted by Lady Magic and Helga Hufflepuff)

What??? 

Gladdok grinned. It was a particularly vicious thing. “I’ll send for the rings, then. And see about your property in other people’s vaults.”

Oh, well, in that case, Hermione fully approved of the viciousness.

***

The audit to locate all her property took a couple of weeks. She remembered that her parents had only taken her to get her wand when they did because she had begged them to, so she put it off for another week, hoping to make as few trips as possible.

On Saturday, the 6th of July, early in the morning, Hermione walked back into the bank, with her parents in tow. “Hello again,” she said to the teller, who she was happy to note was the same one she’d spoken to last time. “I’d like to make a withdrawal, and there should be some documents for me?”

“Sign here, Ms. Granger,” the Teller instructed, pushing a ledger and quill towards her. The counter was as high as her eyes, so she stood on tiptoe to sign, certain it would be an unholy mess, and glad they used magic to verify identity rather than rely on matching signatures.

“I’m sorry, but I didn’t get your name, last time,” She said as she fell back to standing normally.

“Teller Grimthorn, Ms. Granger. How much are you wanting to withdraw?”

“Forty Galleons, please, Teller Grimthorn.”

“Hermione! That’s most of what we put in your account,” her father scolded.

“I know, Papa,” she sighed. Then she explained, “but I’m not planning to withdraw any more until next year. I don’t know how expensive my wand will be, and we still have to get my robes. I’d rather have it on hand and not need it, than not have it and find we need it.”

“That’s fair,” Mama sighed, “as long as you spend it wisely and re-deposit any galleons remaining when we’re done.”

Teller Grimthorn looked like he was trying not to laugh. “Perhaps a compromise?” he offered. “For twenty pounds sterling, or seven knuts, I can give you a purse linked to your accounts, so that you may withdraw as you need, and leave the Galleons where they are until you need them.”

“Oh! Yes,” Hermione agreed, “That’d be much better.”  Especially since it didn’t involve her parents knowing about the other accounts.

Papa handed a 20£ bill across the counter. "How much to get her a ledger to keep track of her account in?" He asked.

"15£ for a basic ledger, 25 for an automatically updating one."

Papa considered and then handed the 25£ over.

Grimthorn passed the bag, ledger, and a manilla envelope to Hermione. "May your gold ever flow, Ms. Granger," he smiled.

"And may your enemies tremble, Teller Grimthorn," she returned with a nod.

"What was that?" Mama asked as they left the bank, a hint of censure in her voice. Mama didn't like violence, even verbally.

"Traditional goblin greetings and farewells, the extra-reading book I got on wizarding banking mentioned it. I only wanted to give him the same politeness he gave me, Mama," Hermione answered.

Mama frowned slightly but let it go. Politeness trumped personal beliefs, after all.

They went straight to Ollivander's, given that they didn't know what a wand would cost, and didn't want to accidentally go over budget on clothes and find they didn't have enough for her wand.

It was hard to see Mr. Ollivander for the first time since the Malfoy's dungeon. Hermione couldn't help wondering what he'd see this time.

She tracked his eyes as he peered at her face, caught sight of her rings and then peered at her parents.

"Hello," she said nervously. "I'm Hermione Granger."

"First year at Hogwarts, of course," he said, reaching for his measuring tape. "Which is your dominant hand?"

Hermione held out her right hand, and he set the measuring tape to its job as he examined her hand. He paled, ever more with each second as his eyes trailed up from her fingertips, across the scars on her arm, carefully hidden with makeup as they were, to her eyes. What did he see?

His lips quivered a moment before his jaw firmed. "Yes, I have just the wand for you."

He snapped and the measuring tape fell to the countertop. He bustled to the back and returned with three boxes.

"It'll be one of these three, no doubt."

Hermione watched as he kept his hands well clear of the boxes and simply gestured for her to open them. He was afraid of them. Why?

Her hand went, as if pulled, to the box on the right, lifting the lid. She looked inside and saw a beautiful spiral of white, black, and red. Not her first wand of Vine at all, but somehow even more alluring to her than it had been. She lifted it out and felt the ground move beneath her as the wand fountained with a veritable rainbow of color.

Mr. Ollivander swept the other two boxes away quickly. "It is rare that a witch or wizard matches to a wand so quickly, Ms. Granger. Blackthorn, Aspen, and Cedar, with a Sphinx hair core.” Oh, that was why he was afraid. What were the other two wands, then?  “A wand for those of sure and determined purpose, strong morals, and a keen mind, who will, most assuredly, turn our world on its head. I suppose you'll be wanting a sheath for it? Wrist or belt?"

“Yes, please, and wrist, if you have them,” Hermione answered. Somehow she was not surprised when he returned with a black and yellow auror-model wrist-sheath. It just seemed like the sort of thing he’d know.

***

Honestly, the rest of the summer break was rather boring, really. There wasn’t much she could do to prepare for what was coming until she was at Hogwarts again besides studying everything she could get her hands on and plot. Both of which she did quite a lot of. 

She’d quickly given up on attempting to cover her scars with makeup and had switched to wearing lightweight, long-sleeved blouses at all times. Getting used to the looks her parents gave her each morning took longer. She wasn’t looking forward to living in a dorm with other girls, who would very much question why they never saw her arms below the elbow, but once she was on school grounds she could get away with casting glamours on them. Assuming nothing occurred to neutralize that magic. 

Which it absolutely would, because between her, Ron, and Harry, their luck was just like that. Bugger. Maybe she should look into enchanting a bracelet to hold the glamour? She’d have to look that up in the school library, though, as she didn’t have the books necessary.

In mid-August, her parents took her out for her birthday, as she wouldn't be home next month when her birthday actually occurred. As usual, they'd insisted she invite friends from school, but she didn't actually have those, yet. Her mother braced for the tears that had come every year since she started school when none of the people she had invited showed up. There were no tears. Hermione knew she'd have friends soon enough, and no reason to talk to the people from the old school soon anyway.

Honestly, she was just revelling in getting another six years with her parents. More, if she didn't have to send them off to Australia, having forgotten they'd ever had a daughter, again.

As always, Mama took her shopping for a few new outfits the day before, including one nice dress, which had a full circle skirt with a dozen layers of chiffon in three shades of green, silver vines and leaves embroidered on the bodice, hem and cuffs, and sheer, long sleeves with a slight tie dyed pattern. The variations in the color of the sleeves and the top layer of the dress meant that even though you could see her arms clearly, there was no sign of the scars. It was beautiful. And she was absolutely taking it with her to Hogwarts, even if all she did was flounce around the castle in it on weekends. It was a pity there'd be no dances till fourth year and she would outgrow it by then. Maybe she could ask one of the girls for a wizarding seamstress who could duplicate it for that dance.  

At her request, after thinking back on the frustration of using quills and ink pots, her birthday gift was a pair of fine fountain pens. She hadn't expected Papa to have gone out and found ones made of actual silver and gold, rather than simply getting a few cheaper sets from the local craft supply store, and to include a polishing kit with them. Papa said nothing as her eyes welled up and she hugged the pens close. "Fine pens for writing fine thoughts," Papa said simply as he hugged her. Papa was never much of one for words, that was Mama, but he gave the best hugs.

The day of her early birthday celebration, she put the nice dress on, and they spent the whole day at the theater. Just like always. This year was a matinee performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream, and a nice dinner followed by an evening performance of Macbeth.

If she spent that evening accidentally writing a thesis on the role Shakespeare's depiction of fae, magic, and witches may have played in the events leading up to the Statute of Secrecy… Well, who would know?

***

September first rolled around and she found herself staring at the familiar train with slowly growing dread. The part of her that had been excited to see her friends again, Harry, Ron, Ginny, Neville, George, Fred, was suddenly realizing that they wouldn't know her. And certainly wouldn't react well to a strange eleven year old crying all over them. And she would, she wasn't even going to try to claim she'd processed the grief of three of them dying. She was going to see them, and she was going to start bawling. Especially Fred. Harry and Neville had been standing beside her when she had died, and while a part of her knew they'd died too, she hadn't seen it, hadn't had even thirty seconds in a world in which they did not exist. Fred though. She'd seen Fred fall, had had several hours to know, in her soul, he was gone. And now he wasn't. None of them were. George would even have both ears here, which was suddenly odd to think about.

She took a deep breath and reminded herself she'd signed on for the hard work of making it better. They were alive and they were damned well going to stay that way. She hugged her parents one more time and pretended the tears were for missing them, and got on the damned train. She had work to do, dammit.

Avoiding all the carriages she sat in last time, and hoping to begin making changes here, now, by making new connections she hadn't last time, she wound up in a carriage already inhabited by several first year girls. It was a strange mix of pure blood girls of all houses, girls she'd never seen together in seven years. Pansy Parkinson and Daphne Greengrass, Hannah Abbott and Susan Bones, both Patil twins and Lavender Brown all sat together.

She was resigned to an entirely dull affair, and possibly having to move carriages, when introductions turned to half the carriage discussing the boys they could see out of the window, and the other half was incredibly interested in Hermione's Heritage.

"I was raised muggle," Hermione said, deciding rather more truth than she'd have given last time was necessary. "But the professor who came with my letter asked if we'd any relation to the Dagworth-Grangers. My parents honestly didn't know, so I had a lineage test done at Gringotts. Technically, I suppose I count as a half blood. It's really quite funny. You see, the Granger name comes from my father, who's all muggle going back ten generations at least, but my mother's side is mostly pure blood squibs marrying pure blood squibs, or half-blood second or third generation squibs who didn't know they were anything but muggle. And that line does include the Dagworth-Grangers, Selwyns, and families from all over the world, including the Abbas family from Palestine." Hermione paused, hoping it looked thoughtful rather than premeditated. "I wonder if all muggleborns aren't actually descended from squibs who've simply forgotten who their ancestors were." There, that should make the Slytherins think about the rhetoric their parents shill out.

Susan nodded thoughtfully, and Pansy and Daphne at least stopped talking while their brains rebooted under the new information, the looks of shocked confusion lingering on their faces. Daphne recovered first and offered to teach Hermione how the upper society worked. Hermione accepted, there's only so much one can learn from books, after all, and happily added Daphne to her mental list of possible allies.

Finally, they pulled away from the station, and with boys no longer in view, conversation shifted away from them. Hermione perked up when it shifted to what Houses they expected to be Sorted into. Here, too, was something she could change, she just had to do it right.

"What about you, Hermione?" Daphne asked. "Where do you think you'll be Sorted?"

"It doesn't really matter, does it?" Hermione asked airily.

"Of course it matters!" Pansy scoffed. "Much of Wixen Society perceives certain values in a person based on where they sorted! Our whole lives depend on the Sorting! Many jobs and prospective spouses only really look at certain House graduates! Everyone knows Hufflepuffs work hard, Ravenclaws know how to research, Slytherins are resourceful, and Gryffindors aren’t scared of anything! How people perceive you determines what you can do, and how you sort affects how people perceive you!"

"Pansy, you're definitely sorting into Slytherin," Susan said wryly, "you can relax."

"I still think Sorting is rather silly." Hermione said. "Hear me out.," She implored, raising a hand to calm the outraged interjections. "Just because people perceive things doesn't make them true. In any event where the traits of the Houses matters, be it a catastrophic accident, a natural disaster, an attack by evil people, an oppressive government, or a war, no one House's traits will ever be enough. You need all of them. Cunning and resourcefulness, creativity and knowledge, courage and honor, justice, loyalty, and an awful lot of willingness to do hard, dirty work. You won't survive much less keep any of the people you love alive without all of them. It doesn't matter if people, the whole of society even, perceive value in the hard working and humble or in the cunning and resourceful, one is not inherently more or less valuable than the other."

The carriage was silent as she took a breath. Good. They were listening. "Valuing, training, any one House's traits above the others, or worse, neglecting the value of those other traits altogether, is just plain silly." Hermione smirked wryly, "Besides, why should anyone get to dictate how you live your life and who you're friends with? Let alone based on something as ridiculous as where your assigned dorm is or what colors you're wearing. Unless you wear nothing but bright pink in your forties,” She added, enjoying her own inside joke, even if no one else would appreciate it for five years, if ever. “I reserve the right to stop being friends with you, then." She got serious again, "but that's my choice, and no one is allowed to make it for me."

Lavender whimpered, “I can’t tell! That’s so Slytherin! But Also Gryffindor? And very Hufflepuff, but all presented like a Ravenclaw!”

And that was how the girls divided again into two conversations. One set arguing over where Hermione would sort, the other betting on how long it would take to sort her. No one betting thought she wouldn’t be a Hat Stall, they just disagreed on how long the Hat would stall. Just to shake things up, Hermione bet on less than three minutes.

Satisfied with her work for the day, Hermione sat back and let the conversation go. The Trolley lady came and went and Neville never showed up looking for his toad. She tried not to be sad but wound up staring out the window, wondering what changed.

***

Of all of her friends last time around, Hermione was the first to be Sorted.

Neville had never come looking for Trevor. The boat ride across the lake had been shared with Susan, Pansy, and Daphne instead of Harry, Ron, and Neville. She had avoided them on the train for fear of the grief of seeing them not know her, and now she hadn’t seen them at all and wouldn’t until after she was sitting at a table they may not be at. The new and entirely different grief distracted her and she startled when Professor McGonnagall called her name. She hadn’t even heard the other names being called, much less noticed the time it took for a dozen people to be sorted.

Oooo, an Aspects-sent time traveler! That may actually be a first, for me. 

Hermione rolled her eyes, she wasn’t here to be entertainment for sartorial relics, she was here to be Sorted into a House.

It’s been a thousand years and a hundred thousand heads, forgive me for a moment of enjoying seeing something unique for once. The Hat said grumpily.

And that would be why Hermione has never been so daft as to long for immortality as many people seemed to. (People were morons.)

No, of course not, you’re much too practical for that, aren’t you? But practicality isn’t actually a Sortable trait. So, Time Traveler, where do I put you? Hmmm, I’d say you’ve learned about all there is about bravery and chivalry, and you certainly don’t need help with either research habits, knowledge or creativity; nor resourcefulness, cunning or ambition. Do you Ms. Convinces-Goblins-She’s-Bellatrix-Black?

“I don’t need help with loyalty, honesty or fairness either, but I still have to be sorted into one of them.”

The Hat laughed. Very true. Very true, indeed, Ms. Granger. Very well then, what would you say is your best trait?

Hermione thought about it, thought through all of her previous life and death and life, knowing full well the Hat would see all of it. In all of the Hat's songs she had heard him sing, spite was never listed as a sortable trait.

Indeed, not, I'm afraid. All four of them operated almost entirely on spite, so it doesn't help differentiate.

She nodded and set it aside, looking for something else. Something equally defining her as spite.

No. Death's smile was disturbing. Just keep being you.

The memory rang in her head with Truth and a depth she hadn’t considered when it happened.

Well, she supposed that might make things easier. Or harder, actually. 

A lot harder. 

What the hell, it's not like she'd ever been afraid of hard work, and if she could make things better…

Ha, that is a good one. I know just where to put you then. Better be…

“HUFFLEPUFF!”

Chapter Text

Neville Longbottom was not stupid, though it was often convenient when people thought he was. He knew. When a dozen Aurors came marching across the battlefield, stepping over and on corpses of Death Eaters, Order members, and students alike, with that stupid letter in hand, he knew exactly how it was going to play out.  So he fumbled in his pockets and stuttered over oblivious questions and scrunched up his brow and played Poor Dumb Longbottom, stalling for time as the seeds he spilled out of his pockets soaked up the blood and magic of a battlefield.

The Aurors casually walked around them, forming a nice tight circle, surrounding them with no room to escape. 

That was fine, really. 

It meant none of them would escape either.

They were still, the ground undisturbed, as Harry explained that he did die, the horcrux was destroyed. 

Neville smiled grimly and raised his wand, but didn't aim at the Aurors. If Harry died and came back once, maybe he could do it again, and if not… well, they'd all go down together. 

All fifteen of them.

He aimed a mild stinging hex at the Willow behind the Aurors and died with a smile on his face as the Willow struck the ground and his experimental plants sprang to life, growing and devouring the wizards around them as acid-green lights struck and three barely-adults fell dead.

He only wished he could see Professor Sprout's face when she found the thicket later, given he'd managed to crossbreed the vampiric glass roses, venomous tentacula, and most importantly, magic-imbued kudzu. Waving vines and white roses steadily turning red filled his vision and he smiled, turning to follow the tug in his soul going Elsewhere.

***

He opened his eyes in a forest. Of sorts. If a forest was made mostly of bones and dead things.

With nothing better to do, he wandered. (He was dead, it's not like getting lost in a strange forest was going to kill him.) While he wandered, he curiously poked at branches of the bone trees, fallen logs of indeterminate origin, prying up stones to look underneath them, smiling to himself. 

Fabulous things, forests. Full of all sorts of things. More than half of which subsisted entirely on dead and dying things. Which meant that this forest, whatever it looked like, whatever it was made of, wasn't really dead. The trees most definitely were, and most definitely were made of bone instead of wood. The bushes and shrubs and vines were likewise dead, and either made of appropriate plant matter or… maybe dried sinew? And there did not appear to be any living animals. But if you looked closely, mosses, mushrooms, bacteria and insects still lived here, growing and thriving on the wood and blood and bone of the larger dead things. Neville very much wanted to take samples of a few but he didn't want to disturb the careful balance of the ecosystem here and also, he was dead, it wasn't like he had a lab to take the samples to. So instead, he observed and walked and kept poking at things to see what else he could discover.

Finally he came to something like a stream, except what was flowing in it was most definitely Not Water. It looked rather like descriptions of the River Styx, actually, except for the fact that he could probably have stood with a foot on either bank and not worried about getting wet.

The creatures in it all had rather large, sharp teeth and looked quite deadly, if it weren't for the fact that they were tiny.  

He stopped to observe them, poking a bone-stick into the water to see what they would do.

You know, they aren't at all tame.

"No, I didn't expect they would be."

Then it is very foolhardy to disturb them.  Styx-nymphs are notoriously dangerous, even to the dead.

"But then I wouldn't know how they react!" Neville shot back at the disembodied voice.  "You never learn anything if you aren't willing to push yourself.  Besides, I wasn't poking them, I was poking the water.  I wouldn't have poked them.  They've done nothing wrong."

They consume the very souls of those deceased who cross their banks.

"And?  Nature has a balance.  The dead are a part of that.  There is nothing wrong with keeping that balance, and an awful lot wrong with selfishly upsetting it for no good reason."

The silence felt heavy, and a bit… embarrassed?

And what if there is a good reason?

Neville thought.  

"It'd have to be pretty good and I don't think mortals have the right sort of perspective to decide that."

And what of Death?  Does Death have the right perspective?

"If not Death, then who?"

And if Death offered you that chance?

Neville went quiet.  He knew he wasn't the impressive one.  He was the Prophecy's Spare, the quiet one, the foolish one, the one everyone knew had Exceptions Made, not for his merit but his lack. The one very specifically Not Chosen, the Unchosen One, as it were.

He also knew that there were things in the world far beyond the understanding of Wixen.  Old Gods and Aspects of Reality unbound by the basic laws that governed the universe, and that deals with them came at a cost they wouldn't risk not being paid back.  He knew he was not an idiot, and he had every reason to think Death knew that too.

He knew what his skills were.

He wasn’t Harry, the Boy Who Lived.

He wasn’t Hermione, the Brightest Witch of her Generation.

He wasn’t Ron, with his enviable lack of Destiny, and the courage to stand beside those Fate had sunk wicked claws into.

He was The Boy Who Stayed.  The Spy.  The Rebel.  The one who did dark things to defend his charges, who nicked his skin over scars made with blood magic in the dead of night under a moonless sky and invoked old pacts.  He was the one who twisted Nature into a tool, who created living death in floral form and smiled as it did its job.  The one who learned, and learned, and learned, and who knew how well wisdom and silence worked as a weapon.

He knew what sort of thing he could offer as payment.

"What would it cost? Me and the world?"

You? Nothing that isn't already paid. The world? Depends largely on your point of view. Fate's a bitch and I aim to ruin her plans. You are very good at that, without anyone directing you, even. You don't need excessive supervision.

Neville smiled, and it was a sickle's blade in the dead forest.

"What's the mission?"

***

He woke up, the frescoes on the nursery ceiling greeting him in the dim light. The moon hung low on the horizon, which…didn't actually tell him anything. The nursery bed he was in was a little too small, but not as small as it would have been had he laid down in it yesterday. Back in time, then, but how far back was a question. And Death had given him a mission, which would fuck up Fate’s plans as well as everyone else’s.  

That's fine, they were crappy plans anyway.

Neville thought back over the letter and the last seven-and-change years and couldn't help but agree. Every one of Dumbledore's and Voldemort's plans had been… just bad. Honestly, when a handful of first years can trash your plan, you should probably let planning be someone else's job. But of course, when you're trashing everyone else's rubbish plans for the world, you'd better have your own plan ready to put into place instead, or the weeds would just grow back. Good plans depended upon sound information. Information Neville didn't have just then. 

Step 1 would have to be the same as it always was, then: Research, research, research.

Neville nodded and climbed out of bed, blinking in dismay at how short he was. Casting a quick, wandless Tempus, he breathed a sigh of relief. Midsummer's day before Hogwarts was just beginning. Grandmother was gone Visiting for the week, and while everyone was waiting on tenterhooks to see if he was Magical enough to get a Letter, the near-fatal attempts to prove his magic were already over. He had time, and better yet, a complete lack of supervision on his side. Plenty in which to do what needed to be done.

Grandmother had long since removed any restrictions on the Library, as he only ever looked at his assigned books and books on plants (which she never did see as useful or dangerous) anyway, and no one but him and the House Elves would be on the grounds for five whole days. It was the best opportunity he'd get.

But first… there were more important things to take care of.

With the traditional ways of celebrating the Olde holidays deemed "dark" and banned, four times a year Grandmother spent seven days visiting the homes of several family members, and four times a year she spent three days visiting the homes of various friends. Neville figured it was her way of handling her grief, avoiding the house devoid of anyone who mattered on the days that meant more. It was fine, the Elves ensured he had everything he needed while she was away, and it meant there was no one there to care how he celebrated those days. The House Elves approved of tradition, and he found it comforting.

Celebrating seemed much more important this time. He couldn't do a full and proper Midsummer, but he didn't need to, not really. He needed to celebrate being alive...and mourn old friends before he saw them again when they wouldn't know him.

The traditions were a comfort he needed now, with so many people to grieve, and an Aspect to honor.

He gathered up supplies from around his room, pulling plain, unbleached linen trews and shirt from a chest he kept buried in the back of his closet, herbs and dried flowers from his dresser, beeswax candles from sconces around the room, and slipped out into the main nursery, trailing a hand over chairs and rocking pegasus used and loved by three generations of his family as he made his way to the nursery bathing room.

He drew the bath himself, stirring herbs and flowers into the water. A small flex of magic and the candles he placed around the room lit.

Normally, he wasn't allowed to do any of this himself, but whatever he looked like at the moment, he wasn't ten years old, and he was also not waking the Elves up in the middle of the night. Today of all days, they'd have twenty four hours off. The joy of being the heir and the only human present, he could set the rules. And if he ruled that no one worked today, it would be adhered to.

Stripping out of his pyjamas, he settled in to scrub yesterday away with salt instead of soap before laying back and soaking in the warm, scented water. 

Salt couldn't scrub the soul. It couldn't take away the last year of suffering and doing terrible things to protect others, or the lingering layers of lies that might no longer be visible in his own handwriting but which ached anyway. It could scrub away the lingering magic of battlefield spells, the smell of blood and mud and ichor, the tingle of standing next to Hermione when she cast an exceedingly overpowered bombarda. Even though those things weren't attached to his current body.

All in all, by the time Neville was dried, dressed, the tub drained and candles extinguished, it was 3 am. If he took his time, he could pack up a portable breakfast and lunch into a basket he'd be sure to get from somewhere in the opposite direction as the kitchen, he could order the Elves to take the day to do no work at all at their usual time rising and be out in the wandwood on the grounds in time to greet the sunrise. 

Which is, of course, exactly what he did. Almost. The Elves insisted, on the grounds that Midsummer Day didn't begin until sunrise, on working just enough to take his basket out to the glen for him, leaving him with more food than he had packed, a pot of tea, an old blanket laid out on the ground, and several bottles of butterbeer.

Neville sighed and settled onto the edge of the blanket facing east, digging his bare feet into the grass and loam.

He drank the tea as he waited  for the sun, using it to ground him in his newly-small body while he meditated on the last eight years, friends gained and lost, lessons learned and unlearned. Enemies earned. 

The pot emptied as the first glimmerings of grey appeared on the horizon. Neville set it aside, opened a bottle of butterbeer and stood facing the coming sun. He opened his mouth, but his words died. (Heh. Like I did.) He took a sip and reached instead for the words of others, pulling on old songs like a cloak as he greeted the sun and trees.

Of all the trees that grow so fair, old England to adorn

Greater are none beneath the sun than Oak, and Ash, and Thorn

Do not tell the priest our plight

For he would call it a sin

But we've been out in the woods all night, a-conjuring summer in.

He swayed and danced through his family's wand wood grove, stopping to offer butterbeer to each of the trees the song named, patting each trunk and letting his magic settle into each for their few lines before moving on. If the trees seemed to lean into his touch, he paid it little mind as he followed the words and let them connect him back into a wood that wasn't made of bones and dead things.

When he'd greeted each tree and the song ran out of words, he returned to the center of the grove for another bottle as memories pressed close again and another song came to his lips.

Let us drink and be merry all grief to refrain

For we may or might never all meet here again

Song after song fell from his lips as the sun worked his way across the sky and Neville wept and spilled drink out for people who, Aspects willing, would never come to be, much less die in a war they should never have had to fight.

As the souls of the dead fill the space of my mind

I’ll search without sleeping till peace I can find

I fear not the weather, I fear not the sea

I remember the fallen, do they think of me?

When their bones in the ocean forever will be

• ••

Grief in the snow, the winter of woe

Has come here to judge and bereave me

Lock up the rage, it rattles the cage

The fury it never leaves me

• ••

There were heroes and angels all fated to die

Over 2000 souls laid to rest by-and-by

We will always remember and lift a glass high

To the e’ening when Hogwarts she burned

• ••

Watch that old fire as it flickers and dies

That once blessed the household and lit up our lives

It shone for the friends and the clinking of glasses

I'll tend to the flame; you can worship the ashes

• ••

Fires are rising and the bells are ringing

Glory take us into Odin's halls

Golden glimmer and the sound of singing

Asgard's call

• ••

Hoist the flags, hold the lines

Lessons ever lost to time

Now we sing for you, departed pawns of war

• ••

All my friends are dead and gone

I'll join them soon, it won't be long

Whether lost at sea or far ashore

To the ocean return forevermore

We're down, downed and drowned

Downed and drowned and never found

• ••

There's a man on high

With the Devil in his eye

And a golden hand, I'm told

It can hurt you, it can hold you

He can kick you or console you

When you're sleeping in the cold below

Neville sang and poured and wept, grieved and raged, back and forth across the grove until finally, he lay beneath the noon-high sun, emotionless and empty. He wiped his eyes with his sleeve (Gran wasn't here to scold and didn't know about this shirt to care if it was ruined anyway) and sat up. He ate far more than he had expected he would of the food the Elves sent with him, tossing what crumbs were left behind into the bushes to feed birds and squirrels and insects. Grieving is hard work when you squish years of it into a few hours. 

Taking a long drink from a cool bottle, he looked around the glade with eyes clearer than they had ever been before. (Crying does that. One should always take the time to cry on occasion.)

Neville stood and picked up a suspiciously straight branch that had fallen beneath the Alder tree, roughly the length and thickness of a quarter staff. Gifts given, and all that.

He closed his eyes and lined up the memories of Carrows and Lestranges, Malfoys, snakes, and noseless wonders. He gave himself to the rage as thoroughly as he had given himself to the grief, pacing through katas learned on the sly after the disastrous end of fifth year to strike down illusory foes he wouldn't get a chance at for years to come.

Finally, he sat, just sat, and leaned into the feeling of Death as he celebrated the pulse racing in his chest and breath ragged in his throat and sweat dripping down his back, the wind on his face and grass on his toes, trees at his back, and flowers beneath his nose.  Death leaned back, and it was far more reassuring, steadying, than it had any right to be.

The sun set and he bid it farewell, trudging back into the house, basket and blanket in one hand, new staff in the other, humming under his breath. Tomorrow, the work would begin.

A curse upon you! Sorrow fall thick and fast!

Your days have been numbered, each hour your last!

May the land, sea or sky turn to swallow you whole

And fore'er ne'er forget what you stole.

***

A month passed with Neville mostly in the library reading, researching and drafting plans. The four days Gran was elsewhere following the Solstice, he spent researching everything he could get his hands on about everything the Golden Trio had ever mentioned in passing: cerberi, devil's snare, philosophers stones, basilisks, parseltongue, dementors, dragons, mermaids, magical water plants, sphinxes, portkey spells, confundus charms, obliviation spells, legilimency, the Wizengamut and laws regarding the handling of broken laws —especially pertaining to minors,— apparition, defensive spells and wards, gringotts and goblins. When Gran returned, he focused on healing spells, gardening spells, and the defensive use of plants. All of which she expected, even if he wasn't using them the way she would expect if she thought at all about them being used in the first place.

Look, anything can be used offensively if you're creative enough. Even delousing spells. He may have accidentally written an essay or three on the subject of battlefield misuse of "harmless" spells. 

Which was fine, Gran would never read them, anyway, and no one else would care. The Elves assigned to assist him grinned vicious, sharp-toothed, little grins when they read the essays over his shoulder, and even offered helpful advice on other Perfectly Harmless weapons. Aspects, he loved his Elves. 

He also thought he could love Goblins, too, as he read more about their culture, values, and skills. He had a soft spot in his heart for vicious, clever, undervalued underdogs, and Goblins and Elves both fit into it quite nicely.

The Goblins, as they had last time, had sent a letter two weeks before his birthday, bidding him to come to his Account Manager for an inheritance test before his birthday. Last time, Gran had scoffed and refused, on the grounds that they already knew his inheritance, and it wouldn't matter until he got his Hogwarts letter, anyway. This time, he'd simply neglected to inform her.

On July 25th, Gran announced at breakfast that she would be at the bank all day for multiple will readings, and Neville stuttered something about the greenhouses while trying not to dance in glee.

He waited quietly as Gran finished eating, donned her favorite hat, and left. The instant she was gone, he burst into motion, running up the stairs two at a time to hurriedly change into Public Clothes in shades of grey and black, gathered up the staff he had kept hidden and his piles of notes and plots in their Expanded bag, and bolted back down to the greenhouse, where he did, in fact, set foot inside … immediately before calling Whisp to apparate him to Diagon Alley. 

It's important to tell the truth, after all.

At 8:15, he presented himself and the letter to a teller at Gringott's, and was promptly shown to his Manager's office.

Manager Redtooth was relatively young for an Account Manager, not yet middle-aged, but she was wily and vicious. She had one canine that was slightly longer than the other and poked just a bit out under her upper lip. In pure spite, she had painted it blue. (Neville adored her, honestly.)

Neville waited patiently through the lineage test and the frankly shocking inheritance test. (What do you mean Lily and James Potter's wills were never read? What do you mean I get both Longbottom and LeStrange? No, I have no idea how I could have "defeated" both Lord and Heir LeStrange and Bellatrix. Ravenclaw what???) 

And when Redtooth got around to asking about the death and rebirth noted on his inheritance test, and what he wanted to do, he smiled viciously, picked up his bag, and poured the giant mound of parchment onto her desk.

She read through three of them and smiled viciously right back.

He left the bank an hour later with several books from the Longbottom and LeStrange vaults, a pouch full of galleons, and a new godparent. 

No staff, though, Redtooth had taken it down to the weaponsmiths to get it turned into…something. She wouldn't say what, only asked how tall he had been when he died.

His first stop was Ollivander's. Gran would, actually, take care of everything else he needed for school later this week, but he knew already she'd want Neville to use his father's wand, and he knew it neither fit him nor had relinquished Frank as its wielder.

He walked in the door and he swore Ollivander looked like he was going to cry.

Garrick Ollivander looked at the rings on Neville's hand, looked him in the eye, and crumpled. His lips quivered and he sighed and said "I know the wand for you," and disappeared down the back.

He came back with a beautiful white and grey wooden box, a pamphlet, and an auror-model wrist sheath in black and blue. He set them on the counter and backed warily away.

Confused and mildly concerned, Neville approached with equal wariness, and gently lifted the lid from the box.

The wand inside was a masterpiece. It was gorgeous, made of black walnut, cedar, and a white iron oak that had survived many fires. And it sang to Neville, like wind in the trees and like a little stream that should have been a river flowing through a forest made of bone. He picked it up and lost his breath as thoroughly as if he had been facing upwind during a storm. It felt like a pile of books and like standing between children and nothing-so-kind-as-Death. It felt like waving vines and white roses and tall mountains that could not be moved and feathered wings and a sword in his hand. It felt like watchful silence and seeds deep in the earth growing quietly, steadily up no matter how you pushed them down. It felt like white roses turning themselves red. It felt like falling, it felt like flying. It felt like Freedom. It felt like Death.

When he looked up, Ollivander was gone, leaving only a blue and black auror wrist sheath and a note refusing payment. Neville left the usual price on the counter anyway and took himself off to a bookstore. He had more research to do, after all.

***

Erumpent Horn

As this core has never before, to my knowledge, been used in wandmaking, I can only speculate as to its uses. However, given the attributes of the Creature and part from which it came, some reasonable assumptions may be made.

Its wielder will likely have far more power than they generally see any need to use. They will most likely be calm and peaceable unless attacked. When attacked, however, their response is likely to be explosive, relentless, and final.

I would not care to tangle with the wielder of an Erumpent horn wand.

Huh. Neville had to sit on that for a bit, reading the pamphlet that came with his new wand in his room. Black walnut was well known, as was cedar. The iron oak was largely the same as English oak, but had a distinct flavor to it, of spite and stubbornness and survival. Those were relatively easy to read and acknowledge their suitability for him, even if they weren't what he ended up with last time. The Erumpent horn was a little harder. He could see how it was accurate, but he wasn't sure how comfortable he was with it. No one had ever said he was powerful. Mostly they said the opposite.

And, honestly, he liked it that way. It meant no one looked too long or thought too hard at Neville Longbottom and what he was up to. He wasn't sure he liked his wand loudly declaring he had more power than he let on. 

Oh well, at least he could be vague about it. He wasn't entering the Tournament, willingly or otherwise, so there was no reason for his wand core to be announced to all and sundry.

***

On Wednesdays, Gran had Tea, sometimes at the manor, sometimes at a friend's,  but always, Neville was shooed out onto the grounds to entertain himself somewhere away from Respectable People. He gleefully took advantage. He spent the whole of every Wednesday between Gran's return after Midsummer and his birthday in the greenhouse he'd been given, working on recreating various plant-based inventions he'd made.

His birthday, a Tuesday, was spent doing the school shopping, and he slipped bits and pieces of his Plan into the baskets and boxes of supplies. But on Wednesday, Harry's birthday, Gran left for an early Tea before running off to friend's houses for the three day holiday she usually took around Llammastide, leaving him to "entertain himself." What he found particularly entertaining this holiday was having Whisp apparate him to various sites, particularly two graveyards in specific, one in Godric's Hollow, and one in Little Hangleton, planting seeds on various graves. His still-unnamed hybrid liked the magic of graveyards and battlefields best. They wouldn't grow for someone simply walking by the graves, but should anyone start digging… well, the bones of the father weren't all that would be found. It was while he seeded James and Lily's graves on August 1st, that the rook found him.

It landed on the headstone James and Lily shared, tilted its head to the side as it looked at Neville, looked back and forth between Neville and the ground where he was poking seeds into the ground, and tilted its head the other way. "Kah." It flapped its wings, arched its back and jutted its head at Neville. "Kah."

"What's that look for?" Neville defended. "I'm planting flowers on graves, a perfectly respectable thing to do."

"Kah."

"Okay, so the flowers won't grow unless someone does something stupid like try to dig them up or have a battle in a graveyard, and then the flowers will eat the stupid person, but that's just reasonable defense of the dead! You're a psychopomp, supposedly, you understand."

The rook hopped closer and looked at the seed in his hand. "Kah."

"No, you can't eat it, I have no idea if it'll be poisonous or not to you, or what else it would do to you. The plant's a magical carrion eater. Capable of making carrion if it needs to. Do you want to be carrion?"

"Kah," the rook said before looking decisively away from the seed.

"Didn't think so." Neville sighed, planted the last seed, and dug into a different pocket for a different packet of seeds, pouring some at least non-poisonous seeds onto the headstone for the daft bird as he stood.

"Well, I'm done here," he told the bird, "enjoy your snack."  He turned to rejoin Whisp at the graveyard gate, planning to head to the bank to see Redtooth, and stumbled as something hit his back. 

Specifically, something large, black, and feathered that was now sitting, prim as you please, on his shoulder.

Neville sighed. "You know, rooks are supposed to guide the virtuous dead to the afterlife. I've already been. Well at least as far as the River Styx that was really more of a brook. I don't need a guide, as I am not, currently, dead, and I don't think I count as particularly virtuous. Surely you have someone else to bother?"

"Kah."

"Fine, but I'm apparating to the bank, and if you don't appreciate that method of travel, that's a you problem not a me problem."

***

Redtooth thought the rook was delightful. 

Of course she did, they were both feral, sarcastic entities.

She also had, by digging through auror records, discovered how Neville had acquired the LeStrange lordship. Apparently, he had Accidental Magicked all the plants on the grounds close to and in the manor to life and set them against the DeathEaters, which, since he hadn’t even been two yet, had temporarily burned out his magic. Neville fumed. All those times Uncle Alfie had endangered his life when he knew Neville had been born with magic strong enough to defeat four full grown wixen, and a simple trip to the healers could have cleared up whether his core had recovered yet or not! 

When he expressed as much, Redtooth (see: Feral Entity) grinned viciously and asked if Neville would like a lawyer to take care of the problem. 

Of course, Neville didn’t survive a year of Death Eater-run Hogwarts without also becoming a feral entity.  Naturally, he agreed, and set an appointment for the next day. Redtooth presented him with a charmed pair of fucking chess Rooks to act as a message delivery method with her. (Fold, roll, and shrink any papers needing to be sent, and stick them inside the rook by the removable base, close it, and say “Castle Kingside,” and it would portkey anything inside it to the inside of the matching Rook. Apparently, she had a similar arrangement with a friend who happened to be a lawyer, except theirs were Bishops from the same set. Neville badly wanted a complete set of them, perhaps with duplication spells. Hermione’s coins were genius, and excellent for short messages that needed immediate attention, but having the ability to send more detailed messages on occasion would have been helpful, dammit.) 

***

The rook, as yet unnamed but determinedly inhabiting Neville's space, did not like Uncle Alfie. Which was a point in its favor, even if it did nearly get Neville in trouble. Fortunately, poor, dumb, stuttering Neville would obviously never sic a wild bird on his doting uncle. (He would, absolutely sic a wild lawyer on him, but they didn't know that yet as the courts were absolutely bogged down with other cases until nearly September.) So all he really has to do was look innocently confused and stutter something about rooks in mythology to get out of it. 

Alfie still got him a random, non-magical toad, probably fished out of a pond rather than bought, when his Letter came as a not-even-half hearted pretense at an apology.

The rook ate it. 

Neville was surprisingly unbothered by Trevor's fate this time around. Last time, he'd released Trevor into the pond after first year and never really looked back. As dependent on Trevor for assurance of his place in his family as he had been when the year started, by the summer, he had known full well that Trevor hadn't meant anything at all. It took longer, but by Fifth year, he'd known that his family would never really approve of him no matter what he did, so really, they didn't matter all that much either.

Supposing he should name the bird something other than a chess piece or its species, he returned to the library and headed for the mythology section.

An hour spent reading through the entries of Death gods  from around the world, with the rook seated on his shoulder looking for all the world like it was reading along, and Neville stopped to cackle. One book by two authors had an entire chapter that was nothing but the two arguing back and forth over whether the wizarding canine Grimm was named after the muggle human-shaped Grim Reaper or vice versa. The two different handwritings even switched which they were arguing for a couple times, with a side argument about potentially being the same entity who happened to be an animagus. They discarded the idea and concluded that there was, ultimately, no knowing unless one died and had the opportunity to ask. 

Honestly, that was enough reason for Neville. For Harry, for Sirius, and for the hilarity of a near-skeletal man in dark robes who also happened to be a big, terrifying, black dog. "Right, Grimm you are, then," Neville announced to the bird sitting on the desk in front of another book, pecking gently at a picture of Baron Samedi. It kahed in offense.

"Nope, nothing doing, Grimm. It suits you, clearly states what you are, and honors someone I actually liked. Also, there's probably going to be a big to-do about dog-grimms, grim reapers, skeletal men, and dementors in a few years, and if I name you Grimm now,   I'll get to pretend to be confused about why everyone's talking about my bird then, and it'll be just too funny to pass up. Besides, I'll get you a top hat. Would you rather be named after Baron Samedi, or look like Baron Samedi?" 

Grimm huffed and waddled over to hop back onto Neville's shoulder.

 "That's what I thought."

***

The month of August flew by in a flurry of Gran squawking like the vulture of her favorite hat and Neville passing notes to his solicitor and godmother through his rook while quietly laughing with Grimm when no one was looking. Something had Gran in a tizzy and it was delightful. Especially when she squawked about the gumption and gall of people who abused children and Neville took the opportunity to look up at her innocently and ask what Uncle Algie did that had her so put out. Her stunned silence as she stared at him before falling into a chair was delightful. Made Neville's month, or maybe decade.

She took him to a healer at St. Mungo's, and after twelve minutes examining and talking to him, the healer spent a good hour yelling at Gran.

Gran was a good bit quieter when she took him home. She asked the elves to make his favorite foods for supper and paid attention to what they put on the table, this time. His school trunk was replaced last minute with one that had a greenhouse compartment, half full of plants for healing, with space for whatever he wanted to grow left for him, and his old brown-so-they-can't-be-ruined clothes vanished and were replaced with nicer ones in a bevy of colors. She even asked if the wand he had worked for him and offered to take him to get a new one. He said only that his wand was fine and they didn't need to go back to Diagon. She frowned slightly, but nodded and left him to pack.

September first dawned, and Neville was overwhelmed with a sudden spate of anxiety. Gran thought it was about the children he'd soon be surrounded by, he wasn't a well-socialized child, after all, and insisted he'd make plenty of friends, some of whom would come and go, and some of whom would last a lifetime. He let her.

She wasn't exactly wrong, anyway. Not on any part of it. It was about the children he'd see today, and some of them had literally been friends for a lifetime. His lifetime. And theirs. Many of them had died, after all. Despite his best efforts. Himself included.

Grimm bit his ear and he forced himself to breathe.

Here they were all very much alive, and he was planning, plotting even, to make sure they stayed that way. Here he had several years in which to Change Things. And he would.

He had a mission.

All he had to do was get on the train.

One foot in front of the other. And plenty of research in his bag to support each step.

He got on the train. He sat in his compartment. The same one he sat in last time. But he didn't go looking for friends. They wouldn't know him, and he couldn't handle seeing the blankness in their eyes where recognition should be. Not today.

Instead, he pulled out his chess set and used it as a metaphor for his plotting, even if its binary setup was sadly lacking in tools for ruining the plans of three different sides.

An older Ravenclaw came in, whom Neville faintly recognized as the Keeper for Ravenclaw's Quidditch team, and Neville grinned as an idea occurred to him.

The rest of the train ride was spent with the two dragging every passing Ravenclaw and Slytherin into the discussion on how to make a chess game with a variable number of sides.

In 22 rides of the Hogwarts Express, this was the most content Neville had ever been.

***

Neville honestly didn't pay any attention to who he rode in the boat with. The wave of welcoming magic from Hogwarts wrapping around and through him like the warmest windstorm in existence distracted him enough that he didn't even really notice Grimm playing with his hair and grumbling in his ear. Never mind the eleven year old humans sitting quietly next to him as all four stared in awe as the lights of the castle came into view.

The trip up to the doors of the castle was just the same as Before. Professor McGonagall's speech was unchanged. The smudge on Ron's nose identical. He deliberately made sure his cloak was twisted and the clasp under his left ear, just for the fun of it. When the conversation on how they'd be sorted came up, he couldn't help it. "I think there's some sort of test," he joked. Someone had to say it. Too many people panicked delightfully at the absurd thought.

And then the ghosts came in, having the same conversation about Peeves, someone shrieked, just like Before, and it was all Neville could do not to laugh. So what if he was the only one who'd get his jokes? He thought it was funny, and that was enough for him. He wondered faintly if this was how Luna had felt, knowing more of what was really going on than everyone around her.

When they went into the Great Hall, he stopped just inside the door to stare in renewed wonder at the stars of the ceiling as the feeling of home, at last, settled into his chest. The person behind him ran into him and cursed him for a bumbling oaf, and that, too, made him want to laugh.

The hat sang, and Neville stifled the urge to sing along with what was supposed to be a new song, and forced himself sober by the time the Sorting began. 

Back to Planning, he tracked who was sorted where, and froze as Hermione Granger sorted Hufflepuff. He knew, for a fact, that he didn't have anything to do with Granger's Sorting. Not Before, and not this time either. The next was Sorted, and the one after, and no, those were right, and the third one too. It was just Granger that changed. Neville shook himself out of his stupor just in time to be called. 

Sort of. He stumbled on the stairs as he forced his brain back into operating his body, but he was fully functional again before the hat came down over his head.

The hat was silent.

Mother. Of. God, the hat swore just as Neville started to get antsy. Was one of you not enough???

"Oh," Neville thought back at the Hat, "Hermione's back, too, then? I may have to adjust some of my plans. Or not. It might be more effective to let her carry on her plans while I do mine. If only for the chaos. I'll have to talk to her tomorrow, somehow."

Why do you need so many plans? Even Rowena never had so many completely different plots going at any one time!

"Because if I want to live and keep everyone else alive, I have to out think, out research, and out plan Albus Dumbledore, Tom Riddle, Lestranges, Blacks, Carrows, The Ministry, and assorted other intelligent beings who all have their own plans. Which means I need at least two plans for every plan each and every one of them has."

You're eleven.

"Eighteen."

A child.

"A man with a mission. Sent by Death,” Neville said, Remembering as pointedly as he could.

A forest of bone, a river of destruction, a smile like a Reaper’s blade. 

 "What's the mission?"

Wrenches and Shoes, Little Spy.  Fuck up Fate's plans and everyone else's plans, too.

“Do you really want to be in my way?"

I should sort you Slytherin. Are you sure you have enough notebooks to keep all your plans straight with?

"Can I interest you in a rook feather for your band?"

Ugh. Fine, better be…

"RAVENCLAW!"

I will take that feather, please, the raven feather Rowena gave me dusted ages ago, and I miss it.