Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It was a perfectly normal day in the Dursley household when the Letter arrived. Harry, who had woken early — after falling asleep late, but he wasn't tired — had already tidied and dusted the sitting room, weeded the gardens, and read the paper. He'd already been getting the iron out to do his and Uncle Vernon's shirts, so he'd ironed the creases out of it while he was reading it.

Dudley, Harry's cousin, thought it made him a pansy, wearing properly pressed shirts. Uncle Vernon wasn't, of course, but he was a grown-up. Harry was only ten — he'd be eleven in a week or so — but he saw no reason he shouldn't dress like a grown-up. And besides, next to the fact that he was tiny — just over four feet tall and about four and a half stone — and his face was too pretty, or that he did most of the cooking and housework around here, dressing like a grown-up was hardly the most nancy-boy thing about him. In fact, he wasn't really sure why it counted as sissy at all, since dressing like an adult man wasn't really girly...

In any case, he'd only said it once. Pansy or not, Harry was quicker than Dudley, and more than willing to risk a few minor burns himself if it meant Dudley would one day have to explain an iron-shaped scar on his arse to his wife.

Generally speaking, Harry didn't mind being called names, especially when they were accurate — Dudley called him "Freak" more than "Harry", for example — but he'd been jostling the ironing board trying to make Harry burn his fingers and when Harry had gone to the loo, he'd tipped the iron over and burnt a hole in one of Harry's shirts, and then, when Harry started yelling at him for it, said he didn't see what the big deal was, wearing shite like that made Harry look like a pansy, anyway. Obviously he'd had to do something to make the lesson that it was not okay to go around ruining Harry's things sink in a bit more than just shouting, so. Uncle Vernon's retaliatory belting had been worth it because Dudley hadn't dared touch any of Harry's things in almost two years now.

By the time Harry reached the last shirt, the sun had begun to come up, and Aunt Petunia had risen with it. She'd known he was awake and where he was before she reached the laundry, the scent of hot starch giving it away. She took a few minutes to inspect the rest of the house before she came to find him, a hint of fear in her eyes — well concealed, but she had been (nominally) responsible for him since he was about a year old, he was very familiar with the expression by now.

Harry didn't try to be a trial to his aunt, but he was a rather unusual boy in a number of ways, most of them apparently somewhat disturbing. Harry, for example, thought it was completely reasonable to scorch Dudley's stupid fat arse as a lesson, and he really hadn't meant to break his cousin's arm that one time — they'd just gotten in a bit of a tussle over their scores on their English tests, and Dudley had hit him first. Harry tried not to take advantage of the fact that Dudley was an idiot because that was just unfair, but he refused to hold back when their arguments became physical because while Dudley was an idiot, he was also almost twice as large as Harry and had a good eight inches on him — he'd always been bigger than Harry, though it had grown more noticeable in recent years — and he was almost always the one who took a swing first. And, not only had breaking his arm stopped him trying to hit Harry, but it also gave him an excellent excuse not to take any more English tests or do his homework for at least two months, Harry was pretty sure that counted as a win-win.

He almost always thought he was behaving reasonably, but he was aware by now that everyone else had some unspoken but mutually agreed-upon idea of lines that weren't to be crossed, which no one ever saw fit to tell him about until after he'd crossed them, playing a little too rough with the other children or retaliating a little too harshly, like with Dudley and the iron. He'd gotten in rather a lot of trouble for tripping Kevin Wilson, who was two years older than Harry, into the street on the way home from school, even though Kevin was being mean to Karen and Stacey and being polite to girls is What One Does (and it wasn't as though that car had actually hit him), and even more trouble when the school had threatened to expel him because Ella Carmichael broke an ankle in the one and only meeting of the (very unofficial) Little Whinging Primary Edificeering Club. (Harry was fairly certain that climbing school buildings hadn't been against the rules until he'd decided it sounded like fun.)

The words "authority problem" and "anger management issues" had been bandied about by the school counsellor in more than one meeting with Aunt Petunia. She'd also come out with "paranoid" and "delusional" after he'd killed the neighbour's cat (the way that thing watched Harry and followed him around was unnatural, it probably hadn't even really been a cat — he still maintained that killing it had been the only reasonable option), and the general consensus within the house (between Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon) was that there was something absolutely abnormal about a child who took his beatings for breaking the rules without a peep, or acknowledged that he would not be having supper for a week with a calm nod.

They didn't seem to understand that Harry knew the consequences of his actions almost all of the time. He wasn't going to try to escape them, he just didn't always consider them a prohibitive cost to whatever thing he wasn't allowed to do. Sometimes they were, and he decided it wasn't worth it and didn't do the thing.

Also, it was apparently weird that he'd admitted to killing the not-cat when Aunt Petunia had asked him, like he somehow should have known that was a bad thing without anyone ever telling him and that he was going to be punished for it, and should want to avoid said punishment. Which, he might have tried to hide his culpability if he'd realised he was going to have to write a letter of apology to Mrs. Figg for disposing of the demonic creature which had infiltrated her house disguised as a cat — he hated apologising when he knew he was in the right, just for the sake of politeness — but he honestly hadn't anticipated that anyone would have a problem with it. Since they apparently did, though, and Mrs. Figg had been cut up over the loss of her precious 'cat', he supposed it wasn't unreasonable to make him apologise for unintentionally upsetting her (even though he'd probably saved her life from whatever it actually was). He still wasn't certain why that would be the sort of punishment he would want to lie to avoid. He'd known he was going to get at least a few smacks for taking a kitchen knife outside and using it for something other than making food (Aunt Petunia was very particular about her knives), but he'd decided that would be worth it to get rid of the creepy thing following him around and he was absolutely right.

Afterward, he'd been informed that there was a new rule against killing living creatures (other than bugs), regardless of whether they were or were not actually cats, and he would be belted within an inch of his own life if he ever did it again, which, fine. If he was ever being followed by another creepy, arguably living thing, he would take that into account when he decided how to get rid of it, and maybe make some effort not to get caught if he did decide he had to kill it. (It only counted as breaking a rule if one was caught. Getting caught lying or trying not to get caught was also against the rules, and one of the most harshly punished offences, so he usually didn't bother unless he was sure he could get away with it.)

As long as Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon followed the rules about what happened when Harry didn't, he really couldn't object. Take the time he was five and almost burned the house down, for example: He'd known he was probably going to get his arse beaten bloody for using the stove by himself to make pie in the middle of the night, but he'd really wanted pie. A few days of physical pain were a small price to pay for the instant (two hours later) gratification of pie. Or, they would have been if he'd actually gotten the pie. (A towel had gotten caught in the oven door, and things had escalated when he'd tried to put it out. Fire liked Harry. It didn't like Harry trying to kill it any more than Mrs. Figg's 'cat'. And fire was a lot smarter than Mister Paws had been.) If he hadn't accidentally started a house fire and ruined the pie, and Aunt Petunia had decided that as an extra punishment on top of the beating he wasn't allowed to have any of the pie, then he would have objected.

But he only ever objected when they didn't follow their own rules about the consequences of Harry's actions (punishing Harry for not following rules they also weren't following was hypocritical) or changed the rules without telling him, which wasn't fair (how was he supposed to decide whether it was worth it to do a thing if he didn't know what the consequences would be?), and they hardly ever did that anymore. Uncle Vernon might be able to beat Harry into submission if he tried to fight back against an unfair thrashing or whatever, but he would definitely get a few scratches and bruises of his own (and possibly bites, because Uncle Vernon was about five times bigger than Harry, Harry had no compunction about fighting dirty), and Harry would find some way of getting back at them, even if he also got in trouble for dumping out Aunt Petunia's perfume and replacing it with water and just enough bleach to ruin her blouse or making Uncle Vernon's coffee with dirt.

The way Harry and the Dursleys went about negotiating more or less fair consequences for Harry's actions was one of those things which seemed perfectly reasonable to Harry, but everyone else — the Dursleys and Aunt Marge, a few of Dudley's closer friends, and a few of Aunt Petunia's closer friends, whom she trusted to sympathise with her position and the difficulties of trying to discipline an incorrigible little hellion like Harry — seemed to think was insane.

Over the past three or four years, they'd more or less come to an understanding about what was and was not acceptable punishment for various trespasses, as Harry decided to physically fight back or make his aunt and uncle's lives a living hell with pranks, or by just not being helpful around the house when he felt they'd gone too far. Yes, they could punish him for refusing to do his chores, but they couldn't actually make him do them, and since Harry did a fairly large proportion of the housework and cooking, labour strikes were a very effective negotiating tool.

Harry's relatives weren't very creative. All they ever did to punish him was hurt him or take away meals, and pain and hunger didn't bother him nearly as much as Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon seemed to think they should. They weren't actually going to beat him or starve him to death — he'd overheard Uncle Vernon telling Aunt Petunia after the Midnight Pie Incident that he wasn't comfortable beating Harry as thoroughly as he just had because he was afraid he might actually kill him — so they really had no power over him. Harry, on the other hand, could make his aunt and uncle's lives miserable in hundreds of ways. He could not think of a single occasion on which he hadn't been able to endure one of their little negotiating contests of will longer than they.

And on top of all that, there was the magic.

Harry would admit that this sounded insane, but ironically Aunt Petunia and even Uncle Vernon were more willing to admit that, yes, Harry clearly had supernatural powers, than they were to admit that it was reasonable to kill that stupid (not-)cat or make pie in the middle of the night. They certainly didn't like it, and it wasn't at all acceptable for him to talk about it, but they didn't deny it was real. Apparently it ran in Aunt Petunia's family — Harry's mother had been a witch, and since she'd met his father at her magic school, he'd probably been a wizard — and there was a shady government agency of some sort that sent evil wizards around to make normal people forget about magic when they thought Harry was being too obvious about it. (And Harry, but he always remembered the next time he discovered, oh hey, look at this thing I figured out I can do...wait a minute...)

One of his and Aunt Petunia's greatest areas of common ground was their shared hatred of the evil secret government wizards and their meddling. Aunt Petunia did blame Harry for getting their attention, a bit, but she knew he didn't do it on purpose, and they didn't make her forget about magic (because her sister had been a witch, she was allowed to know, apparently), so she'd actually told him about magic herself the last couple of times after they made him forget, because it stood to reason that he'd do a better job not doing (big, attention-catching) magic if he knew it existed than if he didn't. Harry thought this was smart and very reasonable, and it made the two of them allies of a sort, at least in this.

At the moment, though, she was giving him that particular look because Harry's good moods could be very good for his aunt — see: tidying the sitting room and weeding the gardens, and pressing Uncle Vernon's shirts as well as his own because he was bored and needed something to do — or they could be very, very bad — see: the time he'd tried to make pie and nearly burnt down the house. And it was sort of hard to predict if and when they would go from one to the other, since Harry was fantastically bad at judging whether his decisions were acceptable even when he wasn't in a particularly good mood and certain that he could do no wrong (even if he knew he was doing something which was against the rules and would have consequences).

The fact that Aunt Petunia found Harry a little terrifying, even when he hadn't done anything bad or broken any rules at all, did amuse him. He gave her a charming grin. "Good morning, Aunt Petunia."

"Good morning, Harry," she replied, a certain note of wariness in her tone. "How long have you been up?" (Translation: What have you been doing while I was asleep and couldn't keep an eye on you?)

Harry shrugged. "Since three thirty? four? Long enough to tidy the sitting room and weed the gardens."

Her eyes narrowed, as though there was something inherently suspicious in Harry doing chores. There wasn't. Harry did at least half the chores around here, even when he wasn't awake and bored in the middle of the night. If it were Dudley doing chores, that would be suspicious — Harry's cousin was entirely incapable of doing anything for himself.

How much of his general inability to be a productive member of the household was laziness, and how much the fact that he was obviously slow, and couldn't solve even the simplest problems for himself (or apparently remember which plants were herbs and flowers that hadn't flowered yet, and which were weeds), Harry couldn't really say. He suspected at least part of it was laziness, but he also suspected there was some truth in Aunt Petunia's implications (years ago now) that Harry had to take care of Dudley and do chores when he didn't because Dudley was...special and couldn't be expected to accomplish much of anything in his life or take care of himself. (Dudley couldn't be allowed to know this, because it would be very upsetting to him, and rough as they might occasionally play, Harry didn't hate his cousin. It wasn't his fault he was special any more than it was Harry's fault he was magic and freakishly good at everything, so Harry tried not to make him feel shite about it.)

"You're lucky the neighbours didn't call the police, seeing you skulking around outside with a torch in the middle of the night."

Well that was silly. He giggled. "I'm pretty sure they were asleep. It was the middle of the night. And besides, I didn't use a torch. It wasn't that dark out." There were streetlights, after all, and the moon was nearly full, and Harry was pretty sure he was better at seeing in the dark than most people, anyway. He did have perfect eyesight, and just sharper senses than most people in general (which he thought might be a magic thing), but he attributed his night vision specifically to spending so much time locked in the cupboard under the stairs when he was very small, before he'd learned how to use magic to unlock it and gotten big enough Uncle Vernon wasn't (too) worried about seriously injuring him if he smacked him around as a punishment instead.

He might have attributed it to the fact that he might actually have cat eyes — humans simply didn't have eyes that colour green — but his pupils weren't slitted. His mother's eyes had, apparently, been the same, and one of the evil wizards (an evil witch, actually) who periodically made him forget about magic had eyes that were purple, so he thought maybe it was just that normal humans didn't have eyes that colour. Magic freaks could, Harry suspected, have any colour eyes.

The look Aunt Petunia gave him said not needing a torch didn't make it better, so he changed the subject. "I was going to make waffles for breakfast, unless you had other plans."

"Fry the bacon too, before it goes off. And I couldn't find one of my blue shoes yesterday. You wouldn't happen to know anything about that, would you?" she asked, again with unwonted suspicion.

"The robin's egg ones, with the little heel?" He held his fingers up about half an inch apart.

"Yes, those."

"Aunt Marge's dog chewed it last time she was here. That's why you told me I could neuter him the next time he tried to bite me." Unfortunately she'd said it in front of Aunt Marge, who had ensured that Ripper, prize-winning bulldog and the star stud of her dog-breeding business, stayed well away from Harry for the rest of the visit. Not that Harry had particularly wanted to emasculate the poor animal and/or ruin Aunt Marge's livelihood — he wouldn't have done it — he just liked playing with him. Well, Harry was playing, Ripper was dead serious about proving himself the biggest, baddest dog in the room, which was just adorable, really. (Ripper might've outweighed Harry at the time, but Harry had thumbs, so.) Aunt Petunia was the one who was worried that the neighbours would see Harry rolling around on the ground fighting a dog like a bloody animal himself. (She said it was because she didn't want to have to take him to A&E when Ripper finally took a chunk out of him, but that was obviously a lie, taking Harry to A&E would be a great excuse for her to spend several hours away from her sister-in-law.)

Aunt Petunia scowled at the memory. "Oh, yes. Never mind, then. I'm taking Dudley to the shops to get his new school uniform after breakfast — and apparently to look for a new pair of blue flats. Bloody dog." That was muttered under her breath, despite the fact that Harry was well aware of her opinion of Aunt Marge and her dogs, and that she swore when she thought the boys weren't listening. "You can come if you lighten your hair."

"I was waiting until you and Uncle Vernon were awake to take a shower," Harry said, by way of explaining why his hair wasn't already a much lighter, reddish brown. (If he waited until Dudley woke up of his own accord as well he might have to wait until noon.)

Aunt Petunia did not, as a rule, like magic, or the fact that it existed. She wanted nothing more from life than to be financially secure and attract as little attention from the authorities as possible (and only admiration from the neighbours). She didn't like sticking out, and found it personally offensive that the world didn't always make sense, and there were parts of it she would never have access to, like magic and Buckingham Palace. Most of the problems in Aunt Petunia's life, Harry thought, came down to her desire to be normal (despite being stuck with an abnormal child like him, and before him a sister like Lily) being at odds with her desire to seem normal (even if that meant endorsing certain abnormalities to compensate for other abnormalities).

For example, one of the few bits of magic which Aunt Petunia had declared to be acceptable, and even encouraged, was changing his hair colour, because it meant strangers didn't look at her funny for having a child who so obviously didn't match her colouring or her husband's. Dudley's hair had grown darker over the past several years so it might almost be called brown rather than blond. It was still much lighter than his father's, but their faces were very similar, and they were both chunky blokes and tended toward ruddiness, so it was obvious he was related to Uncle Vernon, and he didn't look impossibly different from Aunt Petunia.

Harry, on the other hand, was short and thin, pretty and deceptively delicate-looking. (Approximately no one would expect Harry to be able to win a fight with Dudley, or anyone else for that matter.) He had cat-green eyes, hair so black it was almost blue, and skin pale enough he looked like a bloody vampire. (A sunburned vampire at the moment — he hated the oiliness of sunscreen, and overly-large hats could only do so much, which was why he preferred to weed the garden in the middle of the night.) Aunt Petunia was thin, but also tall — very tall, for a woman. She might be called willowy if she weren't so tense all the time, Harry thought. If Harry were Aunt Petunia's child, his father would have to have been a very striking midget, and snapping at random store clerks and passers-by that he was her nephew was not normal, unobtrusive behaviour, especially since he also didn't look much like a boy.

Unlike using magic to change his hair colour, they hadn't actually discussed it, but Harry suspected that Aunt Petunia was aware of this, and deliberately cut his hair longer than was fashionable for boys because he would stick out more if strangers thought he was a girl with a boy's bowl cut. On more than one occasion — thankfully when it was just the two of them, Dudley would never shut up about it if he knew — shopgirls had adoringly insisted that Harry would look just precious in some frock or other, and Aunt Petunia had been pressured into 'letting' Harry try them on. Not that he really objected to doing so — the shopgirls weren't wrong, he did make a cute girl, which made Aunt Petunia hilariously uncomfortable — but it was hardly as though he'd been begging to try them. He liked his slacks and button-up shirts.

He might look less girlish if he didn't make a point of wearing pressed shirts and trousers all the time, but on the other hand, he might just look like a girl Aunt Petunia didn't care enough about to dress properly. If he was going to look like a girl, he'd rather be a somewhat eccentric but undeniably well-dressed girl than a girl who looked dressed out of a charity bin, in denim shorts and vests. Not that his clothes weren't mostly from second-hand shops — it would be more work to take Dudley's cast-offs in enough not to fall off of Harry than it was worth to save a few pounds buying second-hand clothes — but in clothes like those the boys in Little Whinging favoured, it was very obvious that he was the smallest, skinniest boy in the neighbourhood. It hardly mattered that he could kick Dudley's arse, he still looked undeniably weedy and pathetic, more so the easier it was to compare them. Therefore, it was better to dress differently. Plus, Aunt Petunia had allowed Harry to pick his own clothes for the past couple of years, so long as they were cheap and serviceable, and since the poncy nancy-boy aesthetic wasn't exactly popular, he tended to find nicer, less worn things in his size going that direction.

Though Harry did also just like making people expect him to be completely different than he actually was. It was never not funny when they realised how badly they'd misjudged him, and there was a certain intimidation factor in portraying the image of a buttoned-down, handwringing sissy while actually having nerves of steel and somewhat notoriously having bitten a piece out of John Carson's ear when he first moved to the neighbourhood and thought pushing around the short, skinny, soft-looking weirdo whose company they obviously didn't much care for would endear him to the more rough-and-tumble looking boys. (Dudley had warned him, but apparently he'd thought Dudley was saying he would beat John up if John kicked Harry's arse. Hysterical.)

So, prissy little fusspot-looking Harry Potter had a reputation for being very well behaved, a perfect little angel...until he really, really wasn't. And in some circles (mostly boys his own age and Petunia's close friends) for being a dangerous psycho freak who once killed (something that he still didn't believe was) a cat for looking at him funny and threatened to cut Piers's balls off with a piece of glass from a broken pickle jar and make him eat them if he didn't take back that Harry's dead mother was a dirty cow. He'd gotten as far as pantsing the twat before Malcom had managed to knock him out with a cricket bat. (Harry had been in a particularly bad mood that day. He'd actually apologised after because that was...admittedly disproportionate for a bit of standard teasing.)

Besides, taking pride in one's appearance was classy.

In any case, Aunt Petunia approved of Harry having long hair and dressing like a very short adult because he looked more normal if people thought he was a girl, and she thought people would think she starved him if they saw him in shorts and tee-shirts. (Arguably she didn't even when he was denied meals for several days in a row, because if he would just do whatever she was trying to coerce him into he would be allowed to eat — clearly it was Harry's choice not to behave, and therefore not to eat.) Even though long-haired hoodlums were a symptom of the moral decay of society (per Uncle Vernon), and it was objectively not in keeping with fashion norms for a ten-year-old from Little Whinging to wear slacks and pressed shirts every day.

(The neighbours knew, of course, that Harry was a boy, but they assumed Aunt Petunia had to choose her battles with him. The neighbourhood, generally speaking, held a great deal of sympathy for Aunt Petunia, forced to do the best she could with the mad nephew she'd never asked to be saddled with. That didn't mean they didn't also expect her to fail, and Harry to end up in prison by the age of eighteen. Or possibly a mental ward.)

Similarly, she supported Harry lightening his hair a bit more every couple of months or so over the past few years — slowly enough that he was fairly certain none of the neighbours had noticed — to the point that it was very obvious when he hadn't done it, and when he was out in public with Aunt Petunia he might pass for her (eight- or nine-year-old) daughter with little notice from strangers. It didn't last all day, though, and he needed a mirror to get the colour right, so he usually did it after taking a shower in the morning, and again when he came home from school (or, since it was summer, just any time before he went out in the afternoon).

"Very thoughtful," Aunt Petunia said, in a vaguely approving tone. "If you're still bored after we return, the upstairs windows could use washing."

Harry nodded. Aunt Petunia hated washing the windows. "Noted. Can we stop at the library as well as the shops?" (Translation: I want a reward for doing your least-favourite chore.)

"I suppose, if you do the blinds as well." (Translation: Yes. Thank you, Harry.)

"MUM!" Dudley called, most likely from his bedroom. "Where are all my shorts?!"

Aunt Petunia raised an eyebrow at Harry.

"They were all dirty. I brought the laundry down, too." He grinned. "Tell him to man up and go commando."

"Don't be absurd, Harry. The uniforms will need to be fitted. It's summer. He can wear swim trunks until you finish a load of underclothes." (Translation: Please start a load of laundry, Harry — the annoyance in her tone was for Dudley delaying her plans, not Harry.)

"Yes, Ma'am."

She stalked back toward the stairs to solve her oversized offspring's wardrobe malfunction for him, muttering under her breath about the challenges of raising boys. Harry didn't entirely think that was fair. He, at least, was fairly self-sufficient when it came to things like making sure to put his dirty clothes in the laundry before he ran out of clean ones. He occasionally even did the laundry himself, as evidenced by the fact that he was currently ironing shirts. (Dudley, he was fairly certain, had no idea how to iron a shirt, and after that unfortunate run-in between his arse and the iron he had no interest in learning.) Really, most of the challenges of raising Dudley were related to the fact that he was actually a mentally retarded tub of lard than the fact that said lard tub was pretending to be a boy. (Though of course that was the sort of thing Harry wouldn't say to his face, because bullying one's own cousins for things they have no control over was not What One Does.)

Forty minutes later, Harry had taken a shower and fixed his stupid hair, bacon was frying, and the tub of lard, in his violently orange swim trunks and a Hawaiian-print shirt, was seated at the kitchen table with the waffles. When the letters flopped onto the mat, Aunt Petunia was dissecting a grapefruit and Uncle Vernon was eyeing his perfectly pressed newspaper with extreme suspicion. (Harry was pretty sure he wasn't insane, he'd definitely read somewhere that was a thing upper-class nobs used to have their servants do, though personally he'd found it a bit awkward, trying to read the oversized pages without creasing them again. He wasn't entirely certain what the point was meant to be...)

"Get the mail, Dudley," he ordered his son, as though the paper might explode if he took his eye off it for the thirty seconds it would take to fetch it himself.

"Get the mail, Harry!" the fat arse demanded through a mouthful of waffle and a gratuitous amount of butter and syrup.

("Don't talk with your mouth full, Darling," Aunt Petunia reprimanded him.)

"Fine, but if the bacon is burned, it's on you!" Harry said, with absolutely no intention of leaving the kitchen.

Dudley, outmanoeuvred, scowled through the doorway at Harry, but scooted his chair away from the table with a horrible scrape of wood on linoleum. A minute later he announced, "Oi! Freak! Some school wants to teach you how to be a witch! Ha!"

Uncle Vernon choked on his coffee. He, like Aunt Petunia, truly wanted nothing more from life than to be perfectly normal and boring. He liked going to his office and feeling important shouting at people, and watching football and rugby on telly (their shared appreciation of rugby was Harry's greatest area of common ground with Uncle Vernon), and going golfing with his boss and the owner of their company on weekends. He took a great deal of pride in the greenness of their front lawn and the shininess of his new company car, and spent too many hours and far too much money (in Harry's opinion) decorating Number Four for the holidays, in a mutually unacknowledged (but very real and very obvious) competition with Mister Billings at Number Seven.

For several years when Harry was younger, from perhaps the age of two or three to six or seven, Uncle Vernon had held some hope that, with enough corrective effort on his part, Harry could be trained not to do magic, at all, ever. Such corrective efforts generally consisted of locking Harry in the cupboard under the stairs — which was very boring, Harry had generally resorted to making annoying noises until he was let out, but that didn't really work when the Dursleys went out to dinner or something to avoid his annoying noise-making — or, later, thumping him, because doing magic was against the rules. Like with most rules, though, the punishment was hardly ever reason enough not to do a thing, and since Uncle Vernon, like Harry and everyone else besides Aunt Petunia, was periodically made to forget that magic existed (when Harry accidentally did a big magic, and the evil wizards showed up), his enforcement of that particular rule was inconsistent at best.

The general pattern had become: Harry discovers magic; Harry remembers having discovered magic several times already; Harry practises little magics he knows won't make the evil wizards show up; Uncle Vernon and/or Aunt Petunia notice the little magics; Harry is informed that magic is Not Allowed and punished for doing little magics; Harry ignores said rule, because he knows that Uncle Vernon is not actually going to kill him, and one of the little magics is healing really fast, so beatings aren't really that bad; Harry gets overconfident and/or accidentally does too big a magic; evil wizards pop out of nowhere and make everyone forget about magic.

When Harry was four and starting school, they'd been in the Harry ignores said rule part of the cycle, and Aunt Petunia had finally explained that normal people weren't supposed to know about magic, for reasons she said were stupid and political, and you'll understand when you're older. (Over six years later, Harry still didn't understand.) They made magic freaks born into normal families forget about magic every time they did it accidentally until the evil wizards thought the kids were old enough to keep it a secret on their own. Aunt Petunia knew about magic because Harry's mother had been a witch, and they let freaks' families remember about magic when the kid was old enough to be whisked off into their secret magic world (when they were eleven). But Harry was even more of a freak than most magic freaks, because most magic kids only did magic big enough for the evil wizards and their Ministry to notice accidentally. She knew Harry was doing magic on purpose, and she had begged him not to — it was against the rules because she didn't want the evil wizards to come and do something worse to both of them than just making him forget if they realised he was doing it on purpose — and especially not outside the house, because they'd be much angrier if he was doing magic on purpose in front of people who weren't eventually going to be allowed to know about it anyway.

If she'd told him that a year earlier, they could've avoided at least two visits from the evil wizards, but what had been done had been done.

It had made sense that Aunt Petunia was afraid of what the evil wizards might do to them, and Harry had absolutely agreed that he should avoid their attention if at all possible. Uncle Vernon smacking him around was one thing, but who knew what the evil wizards might be able to do to someone they really wanted to punish? (Harry could think of plenty of awful things he could do to someone with just little magics, and he didn't even have one of those neat magic wands to do real spells.) He'd promised not to do magic outside the house, but he hadn't stopped doing magic, and it had taken another three visits from the evil wizards before he figured out exactly how big a thing he could do before they noticed and/or cared.

And in the meanwhile Uncle Vernon had tried to stamp the magic out of him, because Uncle Vernon didn't understand that Harry truly couldn't stop doing magic. Asking him to try was like asking him not to breathe. He had eventually accepted that Harry was going to keep doing magic no matter what he did, and Aunt Petunia had agreed that certain little magics like changing his hair and using magic so he didn't have to break other rules or when he was being helpful were acceptable, as long as he didn't tip off the evil wizards. (She was much more scared of them than she was of magic in general.) And since Aunt Petunia made the rules, Uncle Vernon had stopped hitting him for using magic to get dishes from the cupboards without climbing on the counters and finding his keys when he lost them in the sofa and warning them that a telemarketer was going to ring during dinner so they could take the phone off the hook.

Not that he didn't get punished for disregarding plenty of other rules all the time, but Uncle Vernon now greatly preferred not to acknowledge that there was anything unnatural about Harry at all. Or at least nothing magical. Uncle Vernon was absolutely convinced that it was unnatural for a child to be so very unconcerned about pain and injury, and there was definitely something unnatural about a boy as pretty and sissified as Harry.

(Uncle Vernon expected this to become more obvious as Harry grew up, something about not liking girls, which was...kind of weird, because Harry liked girls just fine, and most of the girls (and women) he knew were friends with more other girls than boys, so it stood to reason that if he was a bit girly he'd probably end up around more girls than he would otherwise...right?)

So, letters announcing to all and sundry that Harry had been invited to a magical school were not at all the sort of thing Uncle Vernon cared to hear about over breakfast, and especially not to have sprung on him out of the blue. Aunt Petunia put on a face like her grapefruit had suddenly been replaced with a lemon, but otherwise didn't react. She didn't like to talk about her sister, but he had managed to tease quite a lot of information about the secret magical world in general from her, over the years. Enough that he knew she'd been expecting this sometime this summer, if not necessarily today.

Dudley, though...

Harry, bringing in the bacon, could not for the life of him say whether his cousin was joking. He...did know that Harry was magic...didn't he? He had to...right? "Er... Is the funny part supposed to be that I'm too girly to be a wizard?"

"No, doofus, the funny part is some scam thinks they can get people to pay them money to teach them magic. How stupid are you?"

Aunt Petunia's eyes darted from her son to her nephew and back again, clearly terrified, though Harry wasn't quite sure what she thought he was going to do. "Dudley, love..."

"Are you serious?" Harry interrupted, quite unable to stop himself. "Are you seriously telling me— Magic is real, Dudders. That school, Hogwarts?" He assumed it was Hogwarts, at least. He couldn't see the letter from this angle, but he was in their catchment area, and one of the evil wizards had mentioned the arseholes who ran the magical world thought it was perfectly acceptable not to tell anyone anything about magic until they were eleven, and then tell them, surprise, you're magic, come to our school. Or, surprise, you're not mad, Harry supposed — how anyone could not have noticed that they were magic by the age of eleven was entirely beyond him. He had to have re-discovered that fact at least half a dozen times after being made to forget it by said gits. (Aunt Petunia said some official from the school had come to tell Lily in person, but they probably knew she knew about magic and assumed she could tell him all the important things.) "It's real. My parents went there."

"The hell are you on about?"

"The hell are you on about? I'm a wizard, Dudley."

"What?"

"Oh, for the love of God," Harry muttered, snapping his fingers to break the magic on his hair, then pointing at his head. "Magic."

Dudley fell out of his chair, taking the letter with him. His father let out an outraged bellow. Aunt Petunia's fingers rose involuntarily to massage her temples. "Boys! Please! Vernon, calm down!"

Harry calmly took a seat, doing his part to encourage the return of normalcy (or at least a reasonable degree of regularly scheduled weirdness) to breakfast by spreading peanut butter on a waffle. "So, are you going to let me read the letter?" he asked his cousin, as he scrambled back to his chair.

Dudley tried to fling it at him. With his comprehensive understanding of basic aerodynamics, the thick sheet of paper made it all of two feet before wafting down to the table. Harry rolled his eyes, telekinetically snatching it to himself with a twitch of his fingers.

"So, you're... You're not kidding," his stupid cousin observed. "You're really... With the..." He pointed at his own head like a bloody moron. "Why would you...?"

Harry looked up from the shockingly brief note — no more than he expected from the magical authorities, honestly, but still an utterly horrible official introduction to their society — to raise an eyebrow at the other boy. "Well, you see, Dudley, looking like a girl is one thing. Looking like a bloody elf or some shite—" ("Language, Harry!" Aunt Petunia interjected, apparently by reflex, as she flushed when his eyes flicked over to her.) "Sorry, something, is a different thing entirely. And Aunt Petunia likes me to look like I'm actually related to you on occasion. Or at least like we're the same species."

"You're an elf?"

"No, Diddy-kins, he's not an elf. He just looks like one," Aunt Petunia assured him, glaring at Harry for confusing her poor son.

"He might be an elf," Uncle Vernon disagreed.

Aunt Petunia's glare shifted to him. "Vernon!"

"Well, I'm just saying, Pet. We never did figure out what that weird language was..."

"Weird language?" Harry repeated, for once just as lost as Dudley.

Uncle Vernon nodded. "Some fake-sounding nonsense we figured the freaks had been teaching you, along with French. And English, obviously."

Harry had no recollection of ever speaking French or some magical, possibly elven language. "Huh."

"So... Magic is real...and you use it to do your hair?" Good old Dudders. Focused on the important things, he was.

Harry rolled his eyes. "Yes, and yes. And I'm aware that you think I'm the girliest pansy who's ever lived. I continue not to care." The washer beeped, giving Harry an excuse to slip out for a few minutes, and his aunt a few minutes to try to explain to Dudley that yes, magic was real. He left the completely useless letter on the table.

You have a place at our school; here's a list of all the shite you'll need to buy at stores you have no access to; please send an owl by the end of the month.

Harry didn't have an owl, and he wasn't entirely certain what he was meant to send with one if he had, so he supposed he'd be waiting for the school to realise there was a logistical problem, here. Well, he could do some big magic, force the Ministry to send one of their evil teams of memory-erasing wizards and ask them to tell that Albus Dumbledore or Minerva McGonagall or whoever that he didn't have a bloody owl, and Aunt Petunia was probably going to want to talk to someone about fees and all the other nonsense she and Uncle Vernon had been concerned with when Dudders got into Smeltings. But he really preferred not to see those bastards ever again if he could help it.

He switched the load of underclothes to the dryer, minus one very large pair of shorts for his cousin. Since they were all talking about magic already, Harry figured it was probably okay to just use magic to dry them, and then they wouldn't have to wait until the laundry was done to go to the shops.

"I also use magic to do laundry," he informed his cousin as he re-entered the dining room, pulling the water out of the shorts with one hand and throwing them at Dudley's astonished face with the other. Dudley failed to catch them, staring at the little ball of water floating above Harry's left palm, so they very nearly fell onto his syrupy plate and defeated the entire purpose of washing them. "Go get dressed, I have things to do today."

Like see if the library had gotten the latest Terry Pratchett book back yet, and wash the bloody windows. Maybe spend a couple of hours laughing at Dudley in his Smeltings uniform...

(Harry had seen Uncle Vernon's old yearbook — orange knickerbockers and maroon tailcoats, with silly little straw hats, didn't even look good on blokes who were fit. Dudders was going to look ridiculous.)

"You are going to go," Petunia said, trying very hard not to make it sound like a question.

She took her eyes off the road long enough to take stock of her nephew's expression. His eyes flicked up to meet hers in the mirror, somewhat surprised to be addressed, but not negatively so. He set aside his book, one of those absurd fantasy novels of his. (Petunia didn't like Harry reading novels about magic — he didn't need help thinking of horrifying things he might try to do with it — but she couldn't really stop him reading them at school, and taking him to the library as a bribe required very little effort on her part.) They hadn't discussed the letter from the wizards since breakfast. Harry had, to all appearances, entirely dismissed it, and failed to notice Dudley's newfound (somewhat intimidated) fascination with him. He'd been watching him warily out of the corner of his eye all day, as though hoping to catch him doing something magical.

Petunia was quite certain Harry had noticed Dudley's interest, but their relationship dynamic had shifted over the years such that, while Petunia thought Dudley considered Harry more or less his equal, Harry seemed to see Dudley as a younger sibling whose taunting of Harry was expected, generally not annoying enough to acknowledge, and tolerated even when it was annoying enough to acknowledge, which was honestly for the best. They were the same age, of course, Dudley nearly two months older, in fact — looking at the two of them, anyone would think him two years older — but Harry was, much to Petunia's chagrin, by far the more intelligent of the two of them. She didn't know where he'd gotten the idea, but he seemed to think that Dudley was somewhat mentally impaired, simply because he wasn't a freak or an adult, and that Harry should go out of his way to excuse Dudley's attempts to antagonise him on that account. He'd once told her that he knew mocking "special" children for being "special" is inexcusably boorish, so.

Petunia, though she was quite certain Dudley was not stupid (even if he wasn't abnormally quick), had done nothing to disabuse Harry of the notion, because she would prefer her nephew not deride her son for being comparatively slow, even if the alternative was somewhat patronising. If Harry accepted the status quo — Dudley being perhaps a bit spoiled, routinely neglecting his chores (including bringing his laundry down to the wash), while Harry was expected to contribute significantly to the work of keeping up the house; not retaliating for the constant name-calling (Fairy-boy had already made an appearance in the rotation, as Dudley attempted to appear unintimidated by the fact that his freakish little cousin was actually a wizard); and refraining from using magic on his cousin or physically harming him regardless of the provocation (Petunia would admit that Harry was careful not to actually injure Dudley in their roughhousing, now that he realised yes, you freakishly resilient idiot, other people's arms break when you twist them like that! and that Dudley, despite appearances, was comparatively fragile) — for whatever reason, Petunia would do nothing to disturb it.

"I expect so. Assuming they follow up when they realise I haven't responded. I didn't see a return address, and I presume you don't want me to do something to get the Ministry's attention on purpose, so."

She grimaced. No, she would prefer he not bring down an Accidental Magic Reversal Squad on them yet again. It had been nearly five years now, since the last time, and she would be only too pleased if she never saw another Ministry of Magic 'Obliviator' again.

"Ministry?" Dudley asked.

Harry made an affirmative little hum. "We don't like them. They're high-handed tossers, worse than Doctor Knightly."

"Well, piss on that!"

Doctor Knightly, the boys' paediatrician, had recently told Dudley that he was horribly overweight for his height and age, and if he didn't drop at least two stone he was going to have a heart attack by the age of thirty. (Harry was both too thin and too short for his age, but the doctor hadn't been able to deny Harry's observation that he was at least proportionately short and scrawny.) They would not be going back to Doctor Knightly.

Petunia sighed. "Language, dear. And no, Harry, you presume correctly."

Though she also didn't have much faith in the wizards to follow up when Harry didn't respond. Wizards were, as a rule, horribly flakey. They had just left Harry on the bloody doorstep in November, for Christ's sake! She'd come outside to put out the milk bottles, and found an empty basket with a note — not even a proper letter, just a few paragraphs — telling her that Lily had been killed by a terrorist, and the child — who had not been in the basket under "sleeping and warming charms" as the note also claimed — was now her responsibility.

She'd nearly been at the point of calling the police to search for him, and damn the fact that she couldn't explain why her nephew had been left on her doorstep in the middle of the night, when she'd found him in the back garden, wrapped in a blanket and watching the birds, doodling in frost on the patio table. Not in the frost, making patterns of frost, which he had shown her proudly, like any other child with his crayon doodles, before asking who she was and where "Aunt Cissy" and "Drake" were — in French. He hadn't responded to the name "Harry" at all. If he hadn't had Lily's eyes, Petunia seriously would have wondered whether Albus bloody Dumbledore had somehow sent her the wrong child by mistake.

So far as she knew, that Potter bloke hadn't had any siblings — if he had, surely the child would have gone to them, so "Aunt Cissy" had to be a friend of the family or perhaps his nurse — though the thought had occurred to her several years down the line that Harry reminded her more of that would-be rock-star arse at their wedding reception — the best man, who'd told her to ditch "the muggle" and come have a ride on his flying motorbike. Potter hadn't exactly been ruggedly handsome, but whatever the arse's name was, he'd been much prettier, with the same delicate, heart-shaped face, too-dark hair, and too-pale complexion as the boy, and an easy feline grace in the way he moved. So perhaps there'd been a scandal, and the boy wasn't Potter's at all, and "Aunt Cissy" was actually the sister of horndog Whatshisface. (Petunia would admit, she did like the idea that her perfect baby sister had finally slipped up and gotten caught not acting like the perfect little magic princess everyone had thought she was, mean though it might be.)

Not that it mattered, the flakey arseholes wouldn't even answer her letters demanding more information. The note about Lily's death had included an address to contact the man who had dropped her nephew on her doorstep without so much as a by your leave, but the only thing she'd managed to get after nearly two dozen letters had been a copy of his birth certificate and NHS number, which at least seemed legitimate enough, though it had struck her as odd that Lily would have given birth in one of the muggle hospitals she so disparaged in comparison to their magical counterparts. She couldn't say she held any hope of getting a response if she were to write them about this (if the address was even still good, anyway). They'd certainly never told her anything more about the circumstances of her sister's death, and she'd learned precious little more from the periodic visits from Ministry wankers. She was positive it wasn't healthy, making children forget they were magic, to say nothing of making any witnesses forget they'd seen magic! She shuddered to think how many times they might have altered her memories over the course of Lily's childhood...

No, she would rather not summon those horrible people unless it became absolutely unavoidable.

She did want Harry to go, though. They had come to what she might characterise as an uneasy truce over the course of the past ten years, but she simply wasn't comfortable having him in the house. No, strike that, in her life.

The magic wasn't even the worst part of having him around, which, if she'd been asked before he was thrust upon her, she would have guessed it would be. He'd never used magic against her or Vernon, never showed off to Dudley like Lily had with Petunia when she was a child. (Associating his first experience of magic with such a mundane task as doing the laundry was probably the best way Dudley could have been introduced to it, from the perspective of avoiding any envy on his part. She had actually thanked Harry for that, while Dudley was in the fitting room earlier.) Petunia's sister had always been an entitled little bitch, taking it as her due that she was (un)naturally good at everything, and pretty and magical and special, and while the same could be said of Harry, Petunia had managed to drum it into him that he hadn't earned any of that. That the fact that he was freakishly gifted didn't mean he deserved to be, and he shouldn't be praised or admired for it any more than for the fact that he was born in Britain. (Her parents hadn't even tried to teach Lily that.)

Plus, being unusually pretty wasn't nearly as positive a trait for a little boy as it was for a little girl. Petunia was mature enough now to admit that she'd been jealous of Lily's looks as much if not more than her magic when they were small. Dudley might've resented the fact that he couldn't push his cousin around, despite being so much larger than him, but he was never going to wish he was pretty like Harry.

No, the worst part about Harry's presence in her life was that the little monster was certifiably insane.

It was the look of wide-eyed innocence asking why he shouldn't have killed Arabella Figg's cat, the genuine surprise that killing people's pets wasn't acceptable behaviour. It was the way he could turn into a snarling, feral little animal 'playing' with Marge's horrible dogs, and apparently had no sense of fear or self-preservation to speak of. It was the way he could be a perfect angel one minute, and attack Dudley with a hot iron the next; that he would let Vernon beat him half to death for scorching Dudley or breaking his arm (even though Petunia believed Harry when he said that was an accident) without the slightest complaint, as though this was simply the way of the world and a natural consequence of his actions, but go to bloody war over Petunia slapping him for using profanity, when the previous punishment of 'time out' hadn't made an impact. (Because "changing the rules without telling me isn't fair, Aunt Petunia!" he'd claimed, when she'd finally admitted defeat and negotiated a truce — it was impossible to truly discipline a child who would simply decide that any degree of pain and suffering was acceptable in order to make a point or keep to some bloody-minded principle.)

It was the way he never cried, not when she told him he couldn't go home to "Aunt Cissy" or that his mother and father had died, not when he was hurt or frustrated, never...except a few days before Christmas, every single year, when he was positively inconsolable — on the winter solstice, she had eventually realised. All he could tell Petunia when she asked what was wrong (afterward — he would try to hit or bite her to drive her away in the midst of whatever madness seized him) was that he failed the lady in his dreams, the one who wanted him to kill for her — who was starving and needed him to kill for her.

Not, he assured her, Petunia or Vernon or Dudley (She doesn't want me to kill my family, Aunt Petunia, that would be...counterproductive.) and he couldn't do it here — he didn't know where he was supposed to do it, which was part of the reason he couldn't do it, period. But every year "she" tried to make him understand what he "needed" to do. He had earnestly insisted that it was important, "she" was dying, and if he could help her, he would, but he couldn't — not because her nephew, who had been seven years old when he'd managed to explain that much, was unwilling to kill someone for this voice in his head, just because he didn't know how it wanted him to kill them — so the only thing he could do was suffer with "her" and feel her growing fear and desperation and disappointment in him.

(Petunia was not reassured. Not at all. It sounded unnervingly like one of the 'imaginary friends' that Lily claimed had taught her to do magic in her dreams, but instead of teaching him how to make flowers bloom out of season, it was trying to convince Harry to do some evil ritual or something he didn't actually know how to do. Yet. She didn't really doubt that he would figure it out eventually. She locked him in his room now on the winter solstice, and stayed up through the night to make sure he didn't somehow escape anyway.)

It was that he wholeheartedly considered Petunia and Dudley, and even Vernon and Marge, to be his family, interpreting even their worst-concealed scorn and fear and hatred of him in the best possible light, making himself helpful around the house in spite of their lack of thanks — Petunia did appreciate not having to wash the windows and weed the garden herself, but she found her nephew a little too unnerving on the whole to feel much honest gratitude for his help — and doing his best not to make a nuisance of himself with the magic and fit in, fixing his hair to look more normal, and so on.

And it was that he never quite did manage to fit in, despite having learned to control himself and the magic, always a little too mercurial, too graceful and quick, too smart, too well-spoken (what seven-year-old used words like counterproductive?) and well-dressed, but simultaneously too violent, always prepared to jump into an argument or a fist-fight at the slightest excuse, as though the polite young man he presented himself as was just a part he was playing to amuse himself until something more interesting happened.

It was impossible for Petunia to relax with Harry in her life. She would say when he was in the house, but when he wasn't in the house, he was usually at school or out playing with Dudley, and she worried about what he might get up to when she wasn't watching him even more than what he might do while she was. She didn't want to make him feel unwanted and risk breaking the familial delusion which, she suspected, was the only thing stopping him from murdering them all in their beds. But she also really didn't want him anywhere near herself or her son.

If she had to pay for him to go off to Hogwarts and learn magic to get him out of their lives without overtly rejecting him, she would absolutely do it. Yes, learning more magic would probably make him more dangerous (she couldn't help that uneasy certainty that it was only a matter of time until he did kill someone for whatever demon spoke to him in his dreams), but it would also give him a chance to decide for himself that he didn't want to stay with her. The best possible thing she could imagine, she thought, would be for him to go off into the magical world, just like Lily, and get caught up in the magic and wonder, just like Lily, and, again like Lily, grow bored with his boring, 'muggle' 'family' and eventually just...stop coming home.

So, no, she didn't want him to intentionally annoy the Ministry and force them to send their meddlers to act as carrier pigeons, but to give Harry an opportunity to make a life for himself outside of her home — hopefully well away from her for the rest of their lives — she would allow it. "But I suppose if they haven't sent someone by the Thirty-First, you may have to."

Harry gave her a bright grin in the mirror. "Don't sound so excited, Aunt Petunia. I'm sure Flo's just dying to catch up. It's been years."

Petunia scowled. With her luck, they would send Florence Brightnel and her team. There were several Accidental Magic Reversal Squads — Petunia had met three — but Ms Brightnel's was the one routinely dispatched to Little Whinging to deal with Harry. Annoying bint seemed to think it appropriate to act chummy with her, as though her repeatedly barging into Petunia's life to magic her son and husband back into blissful ignorance of the fact that Harry was a bloody freak every few months over the course of several years made them friends.

"Who's Flo?"

"Not important, Diddy-kins." If they did end up having to call the Ministry freaks, she'd make sure Dudley was well out of the way, first — maybe pay Wendy Polkiss to take him and her younger brother miniature golfing or something...

"She's an evil witch who thinks she's one of the good guys, and that she's helping people by making them forget magic exists."

"Sounds like a cow."

"The biggest."

(Normally, Petunia did not approve of the boys calling women cows, but in this case, she thought she would make an exception.)

Chapter Text

They didn't end up waiting until Harry's birthday to tip off the Ministry to the fact that there was a problem in Little Whinging, because someone was having fun, sending more letters every day as though they thought all sixty-three letters sent between Monday and Saturday had gone astray. Or, as Uncle Vernon not so privately thought, like they were intentionally trying to drive him up a wall.

When thirty-two letters came out of the chimney on Saturday morning — they couldn't just use normal royal post, either, the letters kept turning up in all sorts of weird places, like tucked in with the milk and egg delivery, or shoved through the window in the downstairs bathroom — Uncle Vernon announced that he and Dudley were going to a football match, and Harry and Aunt Petunia were to make whatever the hell was going on stop or, by God, he was taking his son and going to stay with Marge.

Dudley's pleas to stay and see whatever magic Harry was going to do to get their attention were flatly ignored. Dudley had been nagging Harry to show him something magic all week. Cool magic, not boring magic like drying his shorts or changing his hair colour (and not even to an unnatural colour, just a more boring one). Harry had obliged him by lighting a candle without a match, spending an entire morning telling him who was calling two seconds before the phone rang, and perking up a begonia Dudley accidentally stepped on, but he was still absolutely convinced (and correctly so) that there was more interesting magic, Harry just didn't want to admit it.

Really, Aunt Petunia didn't want him to admit it because she didn't want Dudley getting into all that "occult nonsense" that wasn't really magic anyway (Harry thought Dungeons and Dragons was some kind of game, actually?), and Harry could see the sense in not doing so, because the second he admitted he could do anything cool Dudley would want him to do it again, and again, like a bloody party trick, and demand that Harry teach him, and be an enormous brat when Harry couldn't, because Dudley wasn't magic.

He wasn't doing anything cool anyway, or at least, nothing that looked cool. To other people. Harry thought it looked cool, but he could see the way the magic in the air around him twisted and shifted in response to the energy he pushed out into it, forming a series of anemone-like snares to trap the Ministry wizards before they could get their stupid wands out and hit him with that red knock-out spell. He had started resisting after the first time he'd remembered that they'd made him forget about magic. Usually not very effectively, but enough they knew to be ready to try to sedate him immediately.

But he was much older, now — he'd been all of six last time — and since he was doing it on purpose, because he wanted to talk to them, it would kind of defeat the purpose if he just let them knock him out as soon as they popped in, and Aunt Petunia had asked him specifically to do something that would stop them doing magic if he could, because she didn't like it when they could just do whatever they wanted to her, and she couldn't even try to resist.

She also couldn't see anything he was doing, or even feel the tingling of magic building up all around her. "Have you done it yet?"

Before he could say yes, there were three pops in quick succession, and then a much louder, more crackling pop as his trap was triggered and the lightbulbs in the ceiling fixture exploded.

Aunt Petunia shrieked.

Harry made a ball of light appear over his hand, then sent it to hover about where the electric light had been. The trap had worked perfectly. All three of the wizards — it was Flo and her goons (Malcom and Blake) — were frozen in place in the middle of the sitting room. They did already have their wands out, but the magic was coiled around them down to their fingers, preventing them from so much as twitching.

Blake tried to do something to break the spell without using his wand, the same way Harry had made the magic trap them in the first place, but all the magic in the room already belonged to Harry. A quick gesture and a thought, and the man fell to the floor, not unconscious but reeling because Harry had pulled all the magic away from him, leaving him in a sad little bubble of magicless desert. (It was much easier now, doing big magic like this, than it had been last time he'd tried it.)

Malcom and Flo redoubled their efforts to regain control of their limbs, as Blake struggled to cast a spell to knock him out.

Harry grinned. "Well, that's rude, Mister Morris. Here I thought we were all friends, and you and Ms Brightnel and Mister Westin were only here to help us forget all about whatever disturbing little incident brought you here today," he reminded them, with the same annoying, sing-song tone Flo used talking to little kids and normal people. He twiddled his fingers at them. "Remember me? I remember you."

"Harry," Aunt Petunia said sternly, drawing their attention to her. "Taunting one's guests, even those who drop in uninvited, is rude. And they're here to do us a favour, too. Let them go, if you would."

He pushed the magic away from Flo and Malcolm too, giggling as Blake tried to reach out to the power just beyond his own to cast something — anything — keeping just the slightest bit of distance between his magic and the magic all around them that he needed to shape to actually make a spell happen with his (currently useless) little stick. "You're in my house, Mister Morris. You don't get to do magic here unless I let you. And since you're here to talk to my aunt—" They'd decided that Aunt Petunia should do the talking. "—not knock us out and play with our memories, I'm not letting you."

"How— What did you—?" Flo stuttered, as though she couldn't tell what he was doing, which...couldn't she? Harry sort of thought she should be able to. She was a witch, she should be able to see magic, right? Unless maybe pushing all the magic away from her was like pushing all the light away from himself and sort of blinded her, like eyes needed light to see. That might make sense, he guessed.

"Please, Ms Brightnel, Mister Westin, Mister Morris," Aunt Petunia said, far too casually (she was having fun, Harry could tell). "Have a seat." She gestured at the sofa, lowering herself onto the armchair opposite. Harry leaned against its arm, too excited to sit.

The evil Ministry wizards did as they were told, giving each other anxious looks as though they were children about to be scolded.

"I realise we haven't always seen eye to eye on the issue of magic, and whether my family ought to be allowed to know about it," Aunt Petunia said calmly, "but as you can see—" She waved at the coffee table, drawing their attention to the neat piles of letters stacked there. "—Harry has been invited to join your world — rejoin, I suppose I should say — and so the greatest part of our disagreement has, I believe, resolved itself. He, and my husband and son as well, should no longer be bound to suffer your meddling any time he should so much as sneeze wrong."

"Er. There are still laws, though," Malcom said. "The Reasonable Restriction of Underage—"

"Mister Westin, I was still speaking. I was simply pausing for effect."

Malcom shut up.

"We do, however, still have a problem with which we require your assistance. As you can see." She gestured at the letters again. "It seems no one has thought to inform the Deputy Headmistress of Hogwarts that Harry is currently living in a non-magical household, and therefore cannot be expected to respond to the school's profuse invitations 'by owl' — a duty which is, I believe, a function of your office?"

"Yes, Ma'am," Flo muttered, finally seeming to realise that Aunt Petunia was not her friend.

"Excellent. In that case, I would like one of you to go inform whoever needs to be informed that we require a representative from the school to come and explain the system. It has, after all, been twenty years since my sister was whisked off to your world, and even if I were to recall all the relevant details, I suspect it would be foolish to imagine there have been no changes in policy or procedure in the past two decades.

"I would also like one of you to carry a letter to the appropriate legal office to whom one should make a complaint of someone using magic to harass a non-magical household with this incredibly un-amusing campaign of useless letters sent to no apparent end other than to frustrate and humiliate us."

"Ah...I don't think you can—"

Aunt Petunia cut Malcom off with a sharp frown. "Oh, I realise sending obnoxious numbers of letters may not be against the law in and of itself, but surely you must see that every letter sent to a non-magical household is a letter which might go astray, fall into the hands of someone not meant to know of your little secret society — which is also a concern of your office, unless I am much mistaken." She wasn't, the Accidental Magic people were part of the Department of Law Enforcement, even Harry knew that. "And one apparently far less detectable than the occasional attempt to save oneself a concussion falling off the bed—" Actually, Dudley had bounced Harry off the bed intentionally, Harry felt that was an important detail. But yes, one of the times the Ministry meddlers had shown up had been because he'd instinctively stopped himself cracking his skull on the sharp corner of a toy chest, incidentally hovering in mid-air for about three seconds. Dudley hadn't even noticed. "—as evidenced by the fact that it was my son, not Harry, who opened the first one, technically before Harry was officially informed of the existence of your world. I do not know whether it is the Headmaster or Deputy Headmistress who is responsible for this reckless — and obnoxious — excess but I do wish to file a complaint, and I would advise your office to do the same!"

"But—"

"But me no buts, Mister Westin! As I do not have the resources to contact your government directly — despite, I might add, repeated requests to discuss your office's policies with the head of your department — you are the one point of contact I have with your world. And you will do this for me, today, if not because you owe me some restitution for your repeated invasions of my home and privacy, and violations of the sanctity of my husband and son's memories, then because whichever of you will not be delivering my messages will be remaining here until I receive confirmation from a Hogwarts representative that these letters will cease immediately, and from some official of your government confirming that they have received my complaint!"

"You can't just take us hostage, Missus Dursley!" Blake objected.

"Will you be taking the letter to Hogwarts, then, Mister Morris? Or the one to your superiors? Because I am certainly taking one of you hostage. If not you, then you must be volunteering to play courier."

Harry sniggered. It was always funny seeing Aunt Petunia put someone other than him in their place, for once. And the stunned expression on Blake's face was simply hilarious.

"Unless," she suggested, continuing with a very unimpressed look, "you are suggesting that I am not permitted to take you hostage, in which case I should like to speak to a solicitor regarding which laws I may have broken in detaining you, and possibly someone from the diplomatic corp regarding whether they actually apply to non-magical citizens of the United Kingdom. That might take some time, though, since I would want to speak to someone with expertise on my side of the treaties which I understand your governing body holds with the Crown, and I expect they'll be out of the office for the weekend.

"I would, however, be very surprised if that were what you were suggesting, because it would ultimately require you to explain to a great number of people how, exactly, a muggle housewife and an untrained ten-year-old wizard managed to get the drop on three supposedly competent, fully-qualified members of the Department of Law Enforcement!"

"You—!"

Florence cut Malcom off this time, speaking over him. "Just drop it, Malcolm. You go take her complaint to Bones. Blake, go see if you can find someone to come down from the school, and I'll explain the Restriction of Underage Sorcery and the Muggle Protection Statutes while we wait. I trust that will be acceptable, Missus Dursley?"

Aunt Petunia's eyes narrowed. "Can you do that teleporting thing without your wands?"

"Ah...no?" Malcom said, exchanging a confused look with his fellow wizards.

"Then I want your word that you'll do nothing other than teleport out of here when Harry lets you go. None of that stunning, memory-wiping nonsense, if you please!"

Ooh, good catch. Harry was pretty sure he could stop a spell the same way he was stopping the wizards doing magic right now, just push all the magic away from himself, but it wasn't as though he'd ever had an opportunity to test it, so.

"You have our word, Missus Dursley," Flo assured her, her tone implying that Aunt Petunia was being paranoid.

"I'll have your word individually — and precisely, Ms Brightnel, swearing on your magic, because I'm not certain unfeeling bureaucratic cogs such as yourselves have any honour by which to bind you."

The temperature in the room seemed to drop about three degrees as the wizards took offence to her mistrust. "I don't think you realise how insulting—" Malcolm began, but Aunt Petunia cut him off.

"I think I realise precisely how insulting I'm being, Mister Westin. And I think it not an unreasonable request, and one which you would easily agree to were you not planning to knock us out as soon as Harry allows you to do magic again. Your refusal to do so suggests that I am correct in my assessment of your utter lack of integrity, and so we are at an impasse," she informed them, with an entirely uncompromising glare.

"I can do this all day," Harry volunteered.

Surprisingly, it was Blake who cracked first, giving a disgusted huff. (Harry had been guessing it would be Flo.) "Fine. I swear upon my magic that, when your nephew allows me to do so, I will apparate out of your home and deliver your thrice-cursed letter, and not try to curse or otherwise incapacitate either of you."

"Blake!" Malcolm hissed, as though his colleague making the only reasonable choice here had somehow betrayed him, breaking ranks.

"Oh, just give her your word, Malcolm. Did you ever meet Lily Evans? Clearly stubborn bitch runs in the family!"

"I'll choose to take that as a compliment, Mister Morris," Aunt Petunia said smugly.

Malcolm, pouting, swore his own vow, Aunt Petunia gave them their letters, and Harry let the men leave with sullen, embarrassed pops.

"So, Ms Brightnel. Can I offer you tea while we wait?"

It was almost an hour and a half before Malcom returned with the head of his department, Director Amelia Bones. Not that Aunt Petunia knew her by sight or could confirm her identity or position, but she seemed to agree that the letters were at the very least unreasonable, and they were still arguing about whether the Department of Law Enforcement and Magical Britain as a whole owed the Dursleys — and every other normal family with magic kids — reparations for repeatedly modifying their memories to preserve their precious Statute of Secrecy when Blake returned as well, twenty minutes later.

The man he'd brought with him, Aunt Petunia did recognise. She paused in a the midst of a heated demand to see the actual language of the bloody treaty with Magical Britain, because she didn't believe they had the right to go around using magic indiscriminately on "muggles" and she, as a non-magical citizen of another bloody nation, refused to recognise the authority of Magical Britain's Department of Law Enforcement to simply claim that they did, to mutter, "I don't bloody well believe this," when he walked into the room.

The man, tall and sallow with lank, dark hair and a very prominent, hooked nose, took stock of the situation with a sardonic smirk. "I, on the other hand, find I'm not the least bit surprised to find Petunia Evans holding a member of the D.L.E. hostage in order to demand the presence of the fourth-most-powerful individual in our government, to give her a piece of her mind on the Statute of Secrecy. Indeed, I'm more surprised it's taken you ten years to do so."

Aunt Petunia huffed. "It's Dursley now, Severus. And it didn't take ten years for me to try, these people simply refuse to take any complaint seriously unless you have some magic to reinforce your point. Obviously I had to wait until Harry was capable enough to command some leverage against them. It is, after all, rather impossible for a 'muggle' to take a witch hostage on her own. What are you doing here?"

"I've been sent by the school to inform you that His Nibs is trapped in some interminable political meeting, and Minnie had a previous engagement with another muggleborn and her family. I dare say if she'd known it was you who so emphatically demanded her presence she would have been here in a matter of minutes, as she certainly would not miss the opportunity to fawn over your nephew and regale you with tales of your late sister's bravery and noble self-sacrifice—" Aunt Petunia snorted, trying not to laugh. "—but alas, Mister Morris failed to mention that it was Harry Potter who had managed to get the drop on him and his entire team. Speaking of which, I believe you incompetents may leave now."

Harry wasn't really sure what the man was doing, but his magic was somehow creeping through the room in spite of Harry's efforts to keep it out, through Harry's magic, disrupting his hold on the normal magic that didn't really belong to anyone. By the time the Accidental Magic Reversal Squad had looked to their boss and gotten the nod to leave, the newcomer had managed to break Harry's control enough that they actually could, just popping away without another word.

"How did you do that?" Harry demanded, scowling at him. "And who are you?"

"Harry! Manners!" Aunt Petunia snapped. "This is Severus Snape, a childhood friend of your mother's. Severus, Harry Potter."

"Apologies for my abruptness, Mister Snape," Harry grumbled. "How did you do that, sir?"

"The short answer is a freeform interference field disrupting and neutralising your influence on the ambient magic of the room, expressed through mind magic to circumvent your hold. The long answer would take several days to explain properly, given that you clearly have no background in magical theory to speak of. Madam Bones," he added, nodding to the Ministry witch, who was apparently much more important than Harry had realised.

"Mister Snape. Would you happen to know who is responsible for the preponderance of letters here?" she asked, gesturing at the pile on the table.

"While Minerva is nominally in charge of the recruitment process, this sort of juvenile harassment does seem beneath her, doesn't it? I suspect Albus has been having fun at Petunia's expense due to the number of letters she has sent him over the years, complaining about his high-handed decision to drop Mister Potter on her with very little explanation of anything that happened in the last few years of the war. Though of course I'm not in his confidence, and therefore I couldn't definitively confirm any such thing without using legilimency on our beloved Chief Warlock, and that would be illegal."

Madam Bones raised an eyebrow at him. "And I'm sure if I were to ask, you would have a perfectly reasonable chain of deductions to explain how you already suspect this without having legilimised him against his will."

"Of course. Everyone knows that Dumbledore was charged with assuring the safety and upbringing of the Boy Who Lived — and Bella's little brat, though that was hardly so widely publicised — by the Wizengamot at the end of the war; therefore, if Mister Potter is here, it stands to reason that Dumbledore placed him here. Knowing both Dumbledore and Petunia, and the state of her relationship with Lily in the late Nineteen Seventies, there is no chance that Dumbledore provided sufficient explanation for his actions to placate her or convince her to raise Lily's son voluntarily, and she did have an address to write to Hogwarts when we were children. If she has taken such measures as abducting your Obliviators to get your attention, I believe it is safe to assume that her previous attempts to contact him directly have gone unanswered. Dumbledore is a great fan of retaliatory actions which he finds in some way poetic and considers to be subtle, though they hardly ever actually are; therefore if Petunia has received a large number of annoying letters from someone associated with Hogwarts, I would consider it reasonable to speculate that Dumbledore is responsible for the reasons previously outlined, juvenile though they may be."

"Uh-huh," the witch said sceptically. "You're playing a dangerous game, you know, Snape."

His smirk broadened. "I couldn't possibly say what you might be referring to, Madam Bones. Though I second the notion of filing a formal complaint against the school for endangering the Statute and neglecting its treaty-obligations in failing to introduce Mister Potter to our society properly. If you choose to do so via howler during the Welcome Feast, I'll send you a copy of the memory."

"That will not be necessary, Mister Snape." She didn't even smile, though Harry was sure that was supposed to be funny. (He didn't get the joke, but he did still recognise that it was supposed to be one.) "Madam Dursley, you have my word that your complaint shall be addressed." The witch handed over a slip of paper. "This is the forwarding address for the Department of Law Enforcement. A letter addressed to the Director will find me there. I strongly encourage you to address any further questions or complaints to me directly, rather than attempt to contact Hogwarts. Unless you have a forwarding service, Snape?"

"Unfortunately, I do not. Madam Bones is far more influential than I, however," he informed Aunt Petunia. "I suspect a letter to her will be far more effective toward practically any end than a letter to myself."

Aunt Petunia sniffed. "Very well. Thank you for your time, Madam Bones."

"Of course, Madam Dursley. And thank you for bringing both the violation of reasonable precautions to preserve the Statute and the general incompetency of my Accidental Magic Reversal Squad to my attention. I assure you, both issues will be dealt with appropriately."

Harry suspected that Aunt Petunia might have just gotten Flo and her goons fired. He really couldn't bring himself to feel bad about that — even if they had just been doing their jobs, making him forget about magic like they had when he was little.

After a few more pleasantries on both sides, the witch popped away as well. Mister Snape immediately rounded on Aunt Petunia, his tone still pleasant but his smirk growing nasty. "Tuney, darling. You have ten seconds to give me one good reason not to report you for child abuse."

When Aunt Petunia did nothing but sputter in incoherent shock for about five seconds, Harry stepped in. "Child abuse? What are you talking about, Mister Snape?"

The man sighed. "I realise you are unaware of this, Mister Potter, but the way Petunia and her husband treat you is not normal. Beating children or depriving them of food, especially only one child in a household while favouring others, expecting one child to work for his keep while another doesn't — these are not considered acceptable child-rearing behaviours in muggle or magical society."

Harry frowned. Setting aside for the moment how the wizard knew about that, and why it should be any of his business... "I know it's not normal. I'm not normal. I don't like getting in trouble for breaking the rules, but I'm not stupid. I understand that's how rules work. If I followed the rules, I wouldn't be punished, I know that. Sometimes I just want to do a thing more than I want to avoid a thrashing. And Dudders is special. He can't earn his keep. We take care of him anyway because he's still part of the family."

Mister Snape's eyes narrowed disapprovingly, flicking back over to Aunt Petunia.

Before he could say whatever he was going to say, Harry added, "How do you know how Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon treat me, anyway?"

The man hesitated, which made Harry think however he knew he wasn't supposed to. And he'd said something about mind magic earlier, and legilimency, was that reading minds? It didn't sound quite right, but the meaning felt right. So, he'd read Harry's mind — or probably Aunt Petunia's, actually, because if he'd read Harry's mind he'd know Harry considered the rules to be fair, or at least fair enough. If he really didn't agree with them, he was more than capable of making the Dursleys' lives hell until they just let him do whatever he wanted. He could do magic, for God's sake! That was how the world worked, though. There were consequences for decisions and actions, to keep things — society, the universe, maybe — sort of...balanced.

"You can't accuse Aunt Petunia of anything," Harry said firmly, "because using legilimency on people against their will is illegal. You just said so. That's a good reason, even if you don't care what I think."

Mister Snape glowered at him, but didn't seem to have an argument against him.

Aunt Petunia's contribution was, "There's a difference between your worthless drunk of a father kicking the piss out of you for existing, Snape, and Vernon and myself attempting to teach Harry that he cannot cause harm to people and property without consequence. I for one, would prefer he not escalate from killing cats to killing humans, but." She sniffed.

Harry joined Mister Snape in his glaring. "It was one cat, and it probably wasn't even a cat, and it wasn't as though I was killing it for fun, it was following me!"

The adults ignored him. "Justify it however you like, Petunia. You know as well as I do that your mother would still be disappointed in you."

"Do not talk about my mother, Snape!"

"Don't talk about my father, then, Evans!"

"If you don't want me to talk about why you give a shite about my parenting, don't go sticking your enormous bloody nose into matters that are none of your business!"

"I don't give a shite about your parenting, and this has nothing to do with my father! I give a shite how you treat Lily's son! I think she would have wanted me to raise him before you! That makes it my business!"

"She probably would have wanted your bloody Dark Lord to raise him before me, Snape, that's not a high bar! I didn't ask for the job! I'm not qualified to raise a child like him, I've just been making it up as I go along and doing the best I bloody can, you self-righteous little shite! And now it's someone else's turn, so you go right back to that school and tell them to send someone who can actually explain what we're supposed to do to send him off! If the Head and his Deputy are too busy for the likes of us, find a bloody professor or something!"

"Why the hell do you think I'm here, Tuney? I'm the bloody professor who drew the short fucking straw!"

"Piss off!" Aunt Petunia scoffed. "You are not a professor!"

"Oh, I am. For my sins. Going on twelve years now." Harry was pretty sure he wasn't imagining that little note of disgust in the man's tone. And twelve years? If the professor was the same age as Harry's mother, he would have had to have started teaching when he was...nineteen? twenty?

Aunt Petunia snorted. "And whose damn fool idea was that?"

The (apparent) professor glowered into the middle distance. "A bloody idiot by the name of Lucius Malfoy, if you must know. The Dark Lord's Head of Intelligence. He wanted me in Hogwarts as a spy. The same crackpot old fool who stuck Lily's son with you for a foster mother has me over a barrel politically and prefers to keep me where he can see me, so won't let me resign."

Harry's aunt sniffed. "Serves you right, then. Why were you working for the Dark Lord in the first place? Lily wasn't, they told me he killed her."

The wizard glowered. "Because I was young and stupid and they threatened to kill her if I didn't join up, and then she went and put herself in the line of fire anyway, but it's like the bloody mob — once you're in, you can't leave. Why are we even talking about this?!"

"Because you're a fucking idiot?"

"Piss off, Petunia. Do you want me to tell you how to get Potter to Hogwarts or not?"

"Well, go on then, if you're going to!"

The wizard flipped her the bird, then turned to Harry, ignoring Aunt Petunia's expression of utter, speechless outrage. "Mister Potter. Please disregard everything you've heard up to this point."

Harry grinned. "Not a chance."

Mister Snape's — Professor Snape's, Harry supposed — only acknowledgement of his response was a tiny upward tilt of his eyes and a slightly exasperated frown. "I am Severus Snape, Potions Professor and Head of Slytherin House at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Introducing muggleborn students — magical children born to or raised in non-magical families — to magic and the idea of a Magical Britain, as well as inviting them to the school, is generally the job of the Deputy Headmistress. I've never been so unfortunate as to be tasked with said duty before, so please, by all means, ask questions if you have them, lest I leave some important aspect of the matter overlooked and unaddressed, and bear with me if I repeat some information you already know, since I've no idea how much Petunia has told you already. I presume we can dispense with the surprise, magic is real, you're a wizard part of this discussion?"

Harry nodded. "Yes, sir." Professor Snape, oddly, seemed somewhat surprised. Oddly because the fact that Harry had just taken an Accidental Magic Reversal Squad hostage did sort of argue that he knew he was magic, didn't it? He'd thought that was a joke... Aunt Petunia slipped away — if their visitor were anyone else, Harry would guess to make tea, but since he was apparently someone she'd known since they were children, and they clearly didn't much like each other, he was guessing just to take a few minutes to calm down after the excitement of the morning — so Harry offered the professor a seat with a silent gesture at the sofa.

He took it with equally little discussion. Harry, who could not count the number of times he had been told not to sit if he couldn't sit properly, and was far too excited to sit properly, continued to lean against the arm of the chair Aunt Petunia had arranged to face the sofa in planning for their encounter with the AMRS goons.

"Very well. Hogwarts is a general magical educational institution, meaning it offers a reasonable range of magical subjects through the Competency and Proficiency levels, but nothing at all in the way of traditional non-magical education — English, French, mundane maths, literature, natural sciences, non-magical history, and so on. For the most part, students are expected to be given a reasonable background in such subjects before beginning school — the majority of students are from Noble Houses, and are either tutored or home-schooled before entering Hogwarts." Honestly, Harry didn't really care whether there were normal classes or not. He was pretty good at school stuff — he tended to get top marks without really trying — but most of it was boring, and the things that weren't boring weren't interesting enough he thought he'd really miss them. Not if there were magic subjects to study instead. "The closest thing the school offers in that realm is an informal series of study groups and lectures arranged by Madam Pince, the school librarian, who attended Cambridge after graduating from Hogwarts and encourages students to at least attempt to round out their education with non-magical Competencies.

"Primary subjects include: Potions, Herbology, Charms, Transfiguration, Astronomy, History of Magic, and Defence Against the Dark Arts."

Harry had no idea what any of those subjects entailed. He could sort of guess for Potions and Herbology and Astronomy, but what was the difference between Charms and Transfiguration? and was History of Magic like History of Science, sort of how the discipline of magic developed? or just world history with secret magical countries included? Defence Against the Dark Arts sounded like the most interesting class to Harry, like some sort of self-defence class, learning how to fight with magic! It probably wouldn't be as awesome as he was imagining right now, but—

"To be perfectly frank, the last two are completely pointless. History is taught by a ghost — you need not attend if you are capable of reading the textbook — and the Defence position is cursed. No instructor has lasted longer than a single school year in the post since before I started school, and their quality tends to range from useless to presenting an active danger to the students, with perhaps one in five being halfway decent." Oh. That wasn't just you didn't really think you were going to be taught how to really fight in school, did you? disappointing, that was I already know I'm going to hate that class disappointing. Because it could be great, but... "Most students participate in study groups to learn the material required for the OWL and NEWT — the Competency and Proficiency exams — from the older students.

"Elective subjects, available beginning in third year, include: Arithmancy, Runes, Care of Magical Creatures, Muggle Studies, and Divination. Magical Theory is not explicitly taught as its own class, but rather integrated into Charms and Transfiguration lessons, as well as Potions beginning in third year." So History of Magic was probably normal, boring history, on top of being taught by a ghost. "Professor Flitwick, who teaches Charms, also attempts to include a fairly heavy focus on potential defensive uses of spells in his curriculum, to offset the invariably abysmal instruction in Defence. First years are also expected to take a one-term Flying class, which covers the basics of broom flight.

"Brooms are provided by the school — first-year students are not permitted to bring their own, for some unfathomable reason. First years are also not permitted to join the House Quidditch Teams—"

That apparently reminded him that he hadn't talked about the structure of the school, yet, since he abruptly changed the subject. "There are four school houses and/or dormitories. I am the head of Slytherin House. There are also Ravenclaw, Hufflepuff, and Gryffindor, all named after the four founders of the school. The Houses vary widely in the degree of discipline and involvement from the head of the House. I, for example, hold monthly meetings with new students, and keep a close eye on the prefects, who do much of the day-to-day work of running the House in accordance with its by-laws. At the other end of the spectrum, Professor McGonagall allows her Gryffindors to exist in an essentially unsupervised state of affairs, not unlike that portrayed in Lord of the Flies. You, undoubtedly, will end up in that House, which maintains a reputation for classical virtue and chivalry completely divorced from reality."

"What about the other two houses?" Harry asked. "And how are students divided up?" Surely they didn't just let people choose their house. If they did, probably everyone would be a Gryffindor, if they really didn't have any supervision. Also, "Not that Gryffindor doesn't sound fine from all two sentences you've told me about it, but why will I undoubtedly end up there?"

Professor Snape sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose. "Students are sorted by an ancient magical artefact which essentially matches a child's temperament, personality, and values to those the House supposedly exemplifies. Slytherin values ambition and self-reliance above all else. We have a reputation for ruthlessness and cunning, as well as selfishness and manipulativeness. Gryffindor values idealism and action, and as I said, its reputation is one of nobility and chivalry, but in this day and age the values of the house are expressed less with knightly valour, and more through bull-headed self-righteousness. Ravenclaw is centred on curiosity, creativity, and open-mindedness. Its students have a reputation for being the most academically inclined, though they are in fact often the poorest students, given as they tend to favour exploring and acquiring knowledge for its own sake rather than to fulfil a curriculum. Most of the artistic and musically-inclined students also end up in Ravenclaw. Hufflepuff values cooperation and hard work as the primary means to any end. They have a reputation for being very inclusive and welcoming, friendly and unambitious, but clannish and inclined toward gossip and social drama.

"Slytherin and Gryffindor are the two most competitive houses. Gryffindors tend to be less focused on a specific end-goal and more impulsive, and Slytherins more calculating and ambitious. There have been a relatively large number of students sorted into Gryffindor rather than Slytherin in recent decades who would technically be better suited to Slytherin, but who are not unsuited to Gryffindor and requested not to enter Slytherin for political reasons. I would expect most students who have been forced to become as self-sufficient as yourself to come to Slytherin, but you, rather perversely, seem to be otherwise unaffected by what I assure you anyone else would consider to be an abusive childhood — presumably because you clearly inherited some of the Blacks' psychological peculiarities along with your father's looks."

Wait...what?

The professor snorted. "Oh, yes, were it not for the fact that you do have Lily's eyes, I might suspect you of being the lost Black heir, rather than the lost Potter heir. As it is, I presume you are Lily's son, but sired by Sirius Black rather than James Potter."

Harry just blinked at him. He rather felt he should say something, here, he just...didn't really have anything to say. It wasn't as though he'd ever met any of these people. "Oh. Okay." He was still stuck more on the fact that, from the very little he'd been told so far, he didn't really think he sounded suited to any of the school houses, so if this "ancient magical artefact" didn't have a place for him would they roll a die, or something? flip a pair of coins? Well, that and that students could apparently request not to be put in one house or another, and he wasn't really sure why they would. "What political reasons?"

The professor raised an eyebrow in a silent question.

"You said some kids ask not to be in Slytherin because of political reasons. Why? What do school houses have to do with politics?"

Professor Snape heaved a heavy sigh. "The explanation is rather long and complicated, and unfortunately far too important not to discuss in depth, especially given your own role in the end of the war."

"O...kay?"

"...You may want to take notes."

...That was probably a good idea, especially since Aunt Petunia was probably going to want to know what happened back in Nineteen Eighty-One, and why she ended up being stuck with Harry, when she finally reappeared. He had a feeling it was all connected somehow, in the same way he had a feeling when a telemarketer was about to ring — completely irrational suspicion that almost always turned out to be right. He grabbed the little pad of paper normally used to take telephone messages and a pencil — Dudley (or possibly Uncle Vernon) had broken the lead and not sharpened it again, and Harry had no idea where the sharpener was, so he had to magic it back to a point — and finally actually sat down, plopping unceremoniously into the chair so he could write on the arm. "Okay, I'm ready. Go ahead."

The professor, staring at him with a positively inscrutable expression, seemed to shake himself out of a sort of reverie to say, "Very well. I believe the standard point at which the history books begin, when discussing the war and the rise of the Knights of Walpurgis which preceded it, is either the Nineteen Seventy Christmas attack on the Ministry Holiday Ball and subsequent retaliatory attack on the Bacchanalia in Nineteen Seventy-One, or the Festa Morgana Riot on Yule of Nineteen Seventy-Three, depending on the political sympathies of the author and whether they wish to portray the Death Eaters or the Ministry as the primary instigators of the war..."

(Yeah, Harry was going to say taking notes was a good idea...)

Chapter Text

On Saturday the third of August, there was, according to Professor Snape, a shopping excursion planned for all of the muggleborn and muggle-raised students who would be starting at Hogwarts in September. It would be chaperoned by the Deputy Headmistress (and Head of Gryffindor House) Professor McGonagall, which meant, to Aunt Petunia's immense relief, she did not need to participate. She could simply drop Harry off at Saint James's Square in the morning, spend the entire day shopping for herself, and pick him up again at half-past four.

Harry had assured her that he could find the pub where the wizards were supposed to meet on his own, and he had money to change at the wizards' bank — Professor Snape said he already had an account and Dumbledore would have the key (because apparently this Dumbledore bloke Harry had never met was technically his guardian as far as Magical Britain was concerned...as well as the Headmaster and the head of the bloody government), which he would presumably give to Professor McGonagall to give to Harry, but as Aunt Petunia said, wizards were notoriously flakey and couldn't be trusted to follow through on that, or anything else.

Honestly, Harry wasn't entirely sure he wanted to meet up with the group at all. He could just go get all his things by himself, he was sure, and if anything Snape had told him about the end of the war was true (and Harry had no reason to believe it wasn't), he suspected the professor and anyone she introduced him to would be really bloody annoying. See, apparently, Harry was famous in Magical Britain. For no good reason. Just...not dying, when he was a year old and his mother somehow killed (or mostly killed) the Dark Lord.

Snape was not annoyingly reverential, as he implied other people might be, because he firmly believed, like any sane person, that one-year-old Harry had absolutely nothing to do with the Dark Lord's downfall.

Well, he might've been used as bait.

The professor had pretty obviously been close to Lily until he'd been recruited into the Death Eaters, so presumably he had liked her, but his opinion of her seemed to line up with Aunt Petunia's pretty well — see: that sarcastic comment about Professor McGonagall regaling Aunt Petunia with tales of her nobility and self-sacrifice. Everything Harry knew about his mother pointed toward him getting his tendency to be a disturbing little monster from her. Of course, the only thing Harry knew about that Sirius Black bloke Snape thought was his father was that he was a dangerous madman in prison for murder, so maybe he got it from both sides. Whatever. Point was, Lily was definitely the sort of hard bitch who would use her one-year-old kid as bait to blow up an evil psycho bastard like the Dark Lord. Harry had had nothing to do with it, and the fact that people talked about him like bloody wizard Jesus was just...mad. Completely bloody mental.

Fortunately, they didn't really have a good idea what he looked like (there were a couple of pictures of him from when he was a baby that had been in the papers, but that was it), so if he was just walking around no one should be able to pick him out of the crowd, but if the Deputy Headmistress was introducing him to people as they shopped he was sure word would get around quickly.

Plus, it was always annoying shopping with other people. It was annoying shopping with Dudley, at least, and Harry had no reason to think that shopping with three or four other kids and their parents and a bloody teacher would be any less agonisingly slow. He could just go to the bank, change the money Aunt Petunia had given him, do his shopping, and then find the group (Harry never had trouble finding anyone or anything when he was looking for them/it, which was one of the cooler things about being magic), get his key from the professor sometime in the afternoon, and go withdraw money in pounds to give back to Aunt Petunia. Professor Snape had annotated his supply-list with reasonable price-ranges to expect things to cost, so it wasn't like he would get completely swindled, and he was betting he would see a lot more of what the magical world was really like if he wasn't with a bunch of other kids and parents playing tourists.

So when Harry reached the Leaky Cauldron, a pub maybe ten minutes' walk from the Square, he walked straight past the little knot of people he was clearly supposed to be meeting — the professor was talking to a very enthusiastic couple who looked to be about Aunt Petunia's age and didn't notice him, though Harry thought the girl who must be their daughter had, her eyes catching his as he slipped through the door.

From the outside, the pub looked very old and out of place. It was situated between a bookshop on one side and a record store on the other, both of which were obviously normal, modern businesses. Harry might actually go so far as to say the pub looked a bit shabby. The paint on the sign could use a touch-up, and the windows were positively grimy. It felt magical, though, energy flowing and twisting through the walls, tingling in the air as he passed through the door, sparking and alive in a way no other building he'd ever been in was.

And on the inside it was a bit dark, after the bright morning sun outside, but it was clean and cozy, all dark, heavy wooden furniture. There was a fire crackling merrily in the midst of a swirl of magic that was, Harry thought, keeping the heat from the rest of the room, and there was a pleasant smell of woodsmoke and roasting meat and muffins baking somewhere out of sight, and just a hint of old pipe-smoke, a few patrons chattering to each other at a table by a window which was, from this side, perfectly clear.

"Can I help you, Miss?" the man at the bar asked.

It took perhaps half a second for Harry to realise he'd been addressed, distracted by the way the magic moved in everything in here, bright glimmers condensed to do things shining clearly through the haze which generally made everything clearer and brighter than just seeing with his eyes. It sort of leaned toward the barman and his patrons and the witch outside, just like it did toward Harry himself, like it was paying attention to them, that was normal, but seeing magic — spells — working, on everything, that was just wild.

"Oh! No, I'm good, thanks," he said. Because he knew where he was going. He honestly couldn't say how he knew. Not the same way he knew that one thing was connected to another or where Uncle Vernon's lost keys were, just something about the way the magic was moving in the walls and the air was like a big flashing sign saying go this way.

He followed it through the main room and out the back door, ignoring the barman's doubtful expression. In the small back garden/courtyard area, there were two small, unoccupied tables under faded umbrellas, and a couple of small rubbish bins. The magic led him toward these, to a twisted little spot in the wall. The wall itself looked perfectly normal, just regular red bricks, but Harry...wasn't entirely certain they were real?

Because the bricks looked and even felt normal, when he reached out to brush his fingers across them, rough and warm from the sun, but the magic...sort of felt like someone had taken a pinch of space itself and sort of...twisted it up, drawing together a little bit of wall as though it was a flat piece of cloth, and sort of...painting reality back over the resulting ripples and ridges and irregularities in space. He could feel the magic of the pub flowing through a single point at the centre of the twisted little whatever it was, as though it was part of a circuit that continued on the other side of the wall, regardless of the fact that there seemed to be another perfectly normal building on the other side of it, too.

Curious, Harry poked at the odd spiral, not just with a finger, but with magic too, pushing just a little of his own power into the system.

For about half a second he thought he had broken it, the spiral uncoiling like the spring in the starter for the lawnmower that Harry had had to fix last week. A hole appeared in the brick he had touched, growing as the magic uncoiled further — as space went back to normal, irising out like the aperture on a camera lens, and the fake reality fell apart.

It was a doorway — an arch leading into a twisting, cobble-paved street which couldn't possibly exist here.

Harry squinted, peering through it, purely reflexively. He knew he didn't actually see magic, he could see it just fine with his eyes closed completely, but that didn't mean that his first instinct coming face to face with "Diagon Alley" (Professor Snape said the whole little magical settlement was called Charing, but the shopping area was Diagon Alley...because wizards liked puns, apparently.) was to squint and recoil slightly, like he might turning on the TV after Dudders left the volume all the way up. Just, holy crap!

The pub was definitely the most magical place Harry had ever been in his life (or the most magical place he remembered), filled with spells and enchantments, but compared to the hidden street the Leaky Cauldron might as well be Privet Drive. His eyes adjusted quickly (or whatever the magical equivalent of eyes might be), but he still hesitated long enough, taken aback by the sheer amount of magic harnessed to do things and the bewildering array of things it was doing — making signs flash with colours and lights; carrying shopkeepers' voices and the scent of something savoury through the air; woven into the clothes of nearly every person in sight, running through the walls of the buildings like blood in their veins, even glowing in the stones of the street, each footstep sending ripples through it; people casting spells to shrink their bags and keep their children close at hand; flexing wildly as someone disappeared (disapparated, that was what Professor Snape had called it) right in front of Harry — that the doorway started to spiral closed again on him. The fake wall was already back almost to his knees when he hopped over it.

From this side, when he turned back to see, the spiral aperture didn't close all the way. There was a sort of window in the middle of the wall (under a sign proclaiming this to be the Leaky Cauldron), surrounded by glowing symbols, through which Harry could see the courtyard he'd just come from, distorted as though by a fish-eye lens.

"Oi! Watch where you're going!" An old witch snapped at Harry, nearly tripping over him despite the fact that he hadn't actually moved — clearly she should watch where she was going — but it occurred to him that he should, actually. Move, that was. He didn't know how long Professor McGonagall and the rest of the group would take to make their way here, but he wanted to be well on his way by the time they did.

"Excuse me, would you be so kind as to point me toward the bank?" he asked another passer-by. This one was a mumsy-looking redheaded witch with a small gaggle of equally redheaded children — two a few years older than Harry, and two about his age. Harry had judged her as the sort who would likely be helpful and not give him shite directions just to have a bit of fun, what with having children of her own, and she also looked like she was sort of in a hurry, so probably wouldn't give him much of a hassle over whether he really ought to be shopping by himself. (That had happened several times in normal stores, it was always annoying.)

Unfortunately, she apparently wasn't in such a hurry that she didn't have time to give Harry the third degree.

"My goodness, dear! I didn't even see you there! What was it you asked? Where are your parents?" Asking those questions apparently gave his appearance (specifically the fact that he was wearing his usual non-magical shirt and trousers) time to sink in because she added, "How did you get here? Boys– Boys! Will you stop for one minute!" (The older boys, twins, were teasing their younger brother, something about a rat.) "Sorry about that, love. My name's Molly. Are you lost?"

"No, not as such." Harry was pretty sure one had to go somewhere before one could be lost. At this point, he would have no trouble at all finding his way back to the pub. "I'm looking for the bank."

"Ah...but where did you come from, exactly? And where are your parents?"

"The Leaky Cauldron, and what does it matter to you?" Harry asked, losing patience with this conversation very quickly. "Do you know where the bank is, or not?"

The witch huffed. "Well you can't just wander around on your own, Miss..."

"Harrison," Harry lied, giving his mother's mother's maiden name rather than Lily's, because according to Professor Snape Evans wasn't as common and unremarkable a name in the magical world as it was in the real world — Harry's mother had been a bit...notorious, even before (mostly) killing the bloody Dark Lord. Not enough that everyone knew who she was, or would put the name together with Harry's distinctively green eyes and figure out who he was, but with his luck this Molly would be someone who'd known her personally. He didn't bother informing her that he was a boy. Really didn't seem worth it to drag out the conversation. "I'm not on my own, I'm meeting someone at the bank. Where is it, please?"

She definitely didn't believe him, a concerned little furrow creasing her brow, but she gave a little sigh. "It's this way," she admitted, tipping her head in the direction she and her family had already been travelling. "We're going that way, I suppose we can walk you there and make sure you find whoever you're supposed to be meeting..."

"That's really not necessary, Ma'am."

"Nonsense, Miss Harrison. Come along, now."

And then, Harry wasn't really sure how, he was surrounded by her children, swept away with a flurry of introductions. He managed to catch that the twins were George and Fred, their brother was Ron, and their sister Ginny, before he let slip his own name, and opened himself up to a flood of teasing. Ron had slipped ahead a bit to pester his mother about something — Harry managed to make out something about an owl and that the family couldn't afford one (Harry still thought the idea of carrier-owls was absurd — in the best possible way, but absurd) — but the twins had a field day with the idea of Harry Harrison, engaging his attention so thoroughly with their teasing he barely had any to spare for the wonders of the magical shopping centre they were bustling through. (Harry really should've thought that one through a bit more... Oops.)

"Harry?"

"I thought it was Harrison."

"Harry Harrison?"

"Who names their kid Harry Harrison?"

"Is that short for Harriet?" Ginny asked. She looked like she was about the same age as Harry (which meant she was probably a year or two younger), and seemed much more interested in actually getting to know him than the boys, likely because they thought he was a nine-year-old girl with whom they expected to have nothing in common. (They had to be at least thirteen or fourteen.)

"Like Harriet Harrison's any better?"

"It's a family name," Harry said, as straight-faced as possible.

"Are you,"

"having us on?"

"No?"

"More than one generation thought it was a good idea,"

"to name their kid Harry Harrison?"

The girl glared at her brothers. "You're being rude! I think it's a fine name, Harriet."

"Just Harry is fine, Ginny," Harry assured her. "And I don't mind, really." Compared to the freak-out he imagined he would get being Harry Potter, this was fine.

"What are you doing on your own?" the girl asked, changing the subject anyway. "And why're you dressed like a muggle? Were you out in muggle London?" She and her brothers were wearing robes, of course.

"Er...yes, I was. I'm muggleborn, so—"

"Oh!"

"She's muggleborn!"

"That makes sense!"

"It must be,"

"a muggle thing!"

"Sandy Sanderson!"

"Erica Ericson!"

"Tammy Thomson!"

"Ignore them, Harry, they're always like this," Ginny said, rolling her eyes.

"Willa Wilson!"

"Bobbie Bobbison!"

"Alexa Alexanderson!"

"What's muggle London like?" the girl asked, trying not to laugh at Bobbie Bobbieson. "I've never been..."

"Oh, well...it's just a city, really? This area, outside the Leaky Cauldron, I mean, is sort of nice shopping and tourist things. There's not a lot of magic around — magic that's doing things, I mean. Obviously there's still ambient magic. But that was the biggest difference to me, coming in here, it was a little overwhelming at first, you know?" There were other differences too, like the way people were dressed (in long, flamboyant robes) and the things the shops were selling (cauldrons, dragon liver, telescopes, little machines made of magic and clockwork, owls, flying broomsticks) and the architecture (like something out of the Sixteenth Century, buildings of brick and cobble on the first floor and plaster and lathe above, but all a little too neat to actually be that old) and the size of the shops (there were no magical department stores, Harry was pretty sure — a lot of the "shops" were actually stalls people had set up in the street) and of course there were no cars. The air smelled different, more organic — sometimes more like the meat and fish department at the grocer's, and sometimes more herbal, but less like fumes from engines, anyway — and it was actually quieter and less crowded, despite Harry's initial impression of a lot going on at once (he was pretty sure that was just because of all the magic around, now that he'd had a little time to adjust).

"Um, no?" Oh, right, she was probably surrounded by magic like this all the time. Harry shrugged.

"Little Harry Harrison has magesight?" one of the twins said.

"Jealous!" The other added.

...Or not. "You mean you can't see magic? I thought that was just part of being magic..."

"Um, no."

"Well, kind of."

"Most people are at least a little aware of magic around them, or being used on them."

"But it's kind of rare to be able to see any active magic around yourself."

One of the boys grinned. "If you think this is overwhelming,"

"wait 'til you get to Hogwarts."

"Wait, Hogwarts?" That was Ginny, and she sounded awfully disappointed.

"Well, she said she's muggleborn, right?"

"So she wouldn't know about magic unless she was starting school,"

"and she has to be going to Hogwarts, right?"

"Yes, and yes. I'm here to do school shopping," Harry informed them. "I just need to change money, first."

"Oh. I thought you were my age...but I guess maybe we'll be friends when I get there, next year."

Harry really had no idea what to say to that. He couldn't remember the last time someone had wanted to be friends with him, especially when they'd only just met. It might never have happened before, actually. "Um, sure?"

The boys laughed. "Poor Ginny-kin's"

"not looking forward to spending a whole year at home,"

"alone,"

"with Mum."

"You wouldn't be, either," she snapped, glowering at them, but keeping her voice down enough that her mother might not have heard over Ron offering to forgo textbooks if his parents would buy him an owl instead.

"Don't be ridiculous, Ronald, you'll be using the same books Percy and the twins used!"

"But Mum, those books are ancient, people will laugh at me! I bet I'm the only person in the entire year who'll be using second-hand books..."

"I will be," Harry volunteered. "Professor Snape said they're a fraction of the price used, and who cares if someone already wrote notes in the margins, or whatever?" Harry was planning on buying as many things as possible second-hand, actually, to save as much money as he could for extra books or clothes beyond his school uniform — he didn't want to have to wear his school clothes on the weekends — or anything he happened to find that was just cool, and not necessary.

"See, Miss Harrison will be using secondhand books too, Ron."

"But Mum..."

"Professor Snape?"

"They sent the Dungeon Bat to tell you about magic?"

"What'd he do to prove it was real?"

"Make you sit there for an hour while he brewed a potion at you?"

Harry giggled. "No, we skipped that part of the conversation. I already knew I was magic, so." He shrugged. "And yes, he said he drew the short straw. But," he added, as inspiration struck, "he said he knew my mother when she was in school, so he'd help me with my shopping instead of going with the other muggleborns."

"Wait, if you're muggleborn, how did Professor Snape know your mother?" Ginny asked, more confused than shrewdly, though it did sort of come off like she was trying to trap him in a lie.

"My mother was muggleborn, but she died in the war. I was raised by her muggle sister, I'm pretty sure that counts as muggleborn, too?"

The twins shrugged and nodded.

Ginny said, "Oh, that makes sense."

"So you're meeting Professor Snape at the bank, then?" Molly didn't quite seem to believe him, but Harry pretended not to notice her scepticism.

"Yep," he chirped, pleased to have come up with a good excuse for Molly and her children to leave him there. "He might not be there yet, I left early in case it took some time to find it and change my money, but you can just leave me there, I'm sure he'll show up eventually. He really didn't seem like the type to make a promise and then blow it off, or even to be late."

"No, he's not," one of the twins agreed. (Harry had lost track of which was which almost immediately.)

"He's also not the type to help a student."

"Especially not outside of class."

Harry just shrugged. He actually had been very helpful, telling him loads of things about Magical Britain and how much things should cost, even if he hadn't offered to actually take Harry shopping.

"Maybe he thinks you're going to be a Slytherin."

"What time was Professor Snape supposed to meet you, love?" Molly asked, all annoyingly motherly concern.

Shite. Harry didn't know what time it was now. He'd been meant to meet the other muggleborns at nine, and he'd met these people pretty close to that time, he thought, so...probably not much later than nine-fifteen or nine-twenty? "Ten." Surely she wouldn't want to waste at least half an hour just sitting around with Harry waiting for a professor who definitely wasn't going to show up...

She sighed. "Well, we really should go, but the goblins won't like you loitering... I don't know. Maybe you should stay with us until ten. We're going to an apothecary just a few streets away..."

"No," Harry said firmly. "You've done more than enough. If the goblins tell me to bug off, I'll find a café or somewhere to wait."

She hesitated. "Are you sure, dear? I know everything must be very unfamiliar..."

Well, yes, obviously. But he wasn't an idiot, this wasn't brain surgery, it was just shopping. He'd been doing shopping on his own, just running down to the corner store to get a few things between grocery trips and trying on and paying for his own clothes while Aunt Petunia took Dudley to nicer shops (which had sections catering to "husky" lads), for years. It wasn't really a difficult concept.

"Molly, do you really think my aunt would have let me come here alone if she didn't think I could mind myself for an hour? I'll be fine. Thank you for showing me the way here." Harry could see the bank now, a massive white marble building with guards standing outside who were definitely not human. "I won't keep you any longer." Translation: piss off.

Molly got it, though she still didn't seem entirely comfortable leaving him, for some God-unknown reason. She thought he was meeting a professor in half an hour, for Christ's sake! And she didn't know him well enough to just assume that was plenty of time for him to get in trouble, either!

She and her children wasted another several minutes with "are you sure" -s and "nice to meet you" -s, and Harry had to promise to look for Ron and the twins on the train to school, but he did eventually manage to extract himself.

Next time, he vowed, I will ask the skeeziest, least trustworthy-looking person I see for directions. If they tried to kidnap or rob him...well, he'd take his chances. It wasn't rude to punch muggers in the face or run away from kidnappers, neither of which were (reasonable) options to end a conversation with a perfectly nice lady who was trying to be helpful, but had mistaken Harry for a Dudley-type character who couldn't find his own arse without help.

He would have liked to take a minute or two to compose himself before heading into the bank — he was a little annoyed, and he really did need the goblins to cooperate with him. Losing his temper because the bankers wanted to know where his parents were before they changed his money or some shite would not be conducive to getting the silly, un-decimalised magic currency he needed for his shopping.

But Molly was watching him, as though she thought he was going to run off and it was for some reason her responsibility to make sure he didn't — honestly! he'd barely met the woman, and she was acting like he was her kid to take care of! — so he headed straight up the steps.

The bank had two sets of doors. The first set, burnished bronze blinding in the morning sunlight, was flanked by a pair of goblins — short, humanoid beings (even shorter than Harry, though not by much) with an extra joint in their long fingers and neatly trimmed goatees, wearing a very formal-looking uniform and carrying equally formal-looking bronze spears. (They still looked sharp enough to cut someone, though, even if they were mostly ceremonial.) They took stock of Harry as well as he climbed toward them and nodded when he reached the top, ushering him through the first doors. They were much larger than he'd thought from the ground, enough that they'd only opened one leaf maybe a quarter of the way, and there was still plenty of room for Harry to walk through.

The second set of doors was similarly guarded and ajar, though these were smaller and both open about halfway, and covered in mirror-bright silver except where words had been elaborately carved into them. Those, Harry thought, had probably deliberately been left to tarnish so they were easier to read — a poem, in English on the right-hand leaf, threatening unspecified horrors against anyone who might attempt to steal anything from their vaults, and...Harry had no idea what the words on the left meant. He was pretty sure they were words, but not in any alphabet he'd ever seen before. Presumably they were in the goblins' own language. The second set of guards — these armed with very shiny swords instead of spears — nodded as he passed as well, entering a massive marble hall.

There were about two-dozen goblin tellers sitting behind a high counter, though one could be forgiven for thinking at first glance that there were far more than that: both ends of the room were covered in mirrors, reflecting infinite goblins. Most of them were weighing piles of coins or scribbling in ledgers, a few were evaluating loose gemstones or jewellery. There were very few humans around (Harry suspected the bank had just opened at nine), and most of those who were were being escorted by goblins into or out of the thirteen doors lining the side of the hall opposite the tellers' bench. There were three goblins, out of the two dozen, who seemed to be helping the handful of other customers who weren't already assigned to a goblin to attend to their business beyond one of the doors.

Harry had never really been to a bank on his own before, but he had been brought along when Aunt Petunia was running errands, and even if he hadn't the first step was pretty self-explanatory: he joined the short queue of wizards waiting for a teller. About ten seconds after he walked up, one of the tellers with a customer shouted at another goblin to...escort her to her vault, Harry was pretty sure. Why he thought that, he couldn't say, since he definitely didn't speak whatever language goblins spoke...unless that was the weird language Uncle Vernon said he spoke when he was dumped on the Dursleys, in which case... No, he was still surprised that he remembered enough of it to even get a vague sense of the meaning.

If 'seeing' magic wasn't normal for wizards, Harry realised, he probably should've asked the twins and Ginny if it was normal for wizards to just sort of know things sometimes, or be improbably good at practically everything. And, apparently, be able to understand languages they had no business knowing, though obviously he hadn't known that until just now... Still.

The man at the front of the queue waited until the witch and her escort cleared out, then approached the counter without waiting for the teller to wave him forward. He, it seemed, was making a deposit, dumping a small pile of gold and silver out of a bag it couldn't possibly have fit in onto the counter. The teller passed him a form and began counting the coins.

The man in front of Harry headed halfway down the room to the furthest teller who was dealing with customers — Harry hadn't noticed the wizard down there finish his business, but he was walking back toward the main doors now. The third goblin with a customer, this one a witch, seemed to be in a heated argument with her, one Harry sort of expected to be able to overhear, but the little dividers between teller-stations extended a few feet out into the hall with magic and seemed to be stopping their voices from carrying. He wasn't at all surprised that the bloke making a deposit finished up before her. He waited until the man passed him, heading back toward the street, then stepped forward himself.

He had to stop quite a way back from the counter to be sure the teller would see him, beyond the point where the magic dividers stopped, but when the goblin did finally look up from her paperwork — making a few notes related to the last customer, Harry thought — she waved him closer, leaning forward and staring down at him as though she'd never seen a human child before. For a long moment, Harry thought she was going to call for a guard to throw him out or something, and he was going to have to go find Professor McGonagall after all, but then she said something in her own language that Harry recognised as...a formal greeting to an enemy with whom one has a long-standing truce?

He parrotted it back, since he was pretty sure it implied they were equals, and if he was her former enemy she should be his too, right? tongue stumbling slightly on the unfamiliar sounds. "Ah, sorry. That wasn't quite right, was it? I don't actually speak...whatever your language is called."

"Humans call it Gobbledygook," she informed him. He got the impression that behind her little close-mouthed smile she was laughing at him, though he didn't quite know why. "My apologies, I mistook you for someone else."

"Who?"

She tipped her head to one side in an odd sort of shrug. "A child of the House of Black." Oh, right. Apparently there was a family resemblance between Harry and the bloke Snape thought was actually Harry's biological father. Harry found that somewhat hard to believe, since it suggested his biological father also looked like a girl, but he hadn't thought it important enough compared to finding out literally everything else he knew about the magical world to question it. "Though that you are not explains why you are dressed as a muggle. What brings you to Gringotts today, child?"

"I need to exchange muggle money for galleons. School shopping," he explained, handing a wad of notes up to her. After much consultation with Professor Snape on the expected prices, and negotiating with Aunt Petunia, Harry had secured three-hundred quid to use in the event that the wizards failed to give him the key to his bank vault. This was decidedly less than Professor Snape had recommended, and much less than Aunt Petunia had spent on Dudley's kit and school supplies (and Harry could almost guarantee that he wouldn't look nearly as ridiculous in his uniform), but still more money than Harry had ever had in his possession in his life.

"The exchange rate is five pounds sterling to one galleon, less a one-point-seven-five per cent exchange fee, for a total of fifty-eight galleons, sixteen sickles, four knuts." Harry nodded. That was about what Professor Snape had told him to expect. "One galleon for a purse with featherweight and expansion enchantments to hold it."

Harry made a face. If the bank was selling them for a galleon, there was probably someone a few blocks away selling them for half as much, but he didn't really think he was going to be able to fit that much change in his pockets to get a few blocks down the street. He knew wizards didn't use notes. He should've thought to borrow a purse from Aunt Petunia, but it was too late now. He nodded again. He'd also been told to ask, "Can I get the seven galleons in Morgens?"

Technically, there was no quarter-galleon coin, nor a quarter-sickle for that matter, but it was fairly common for traders to just...cut coins into pieces, to work around the fact that it was terribly awkward making change when the units of currency weren't just un-decimalised, they were actually prime numbers. A "Morgen" — also called a piece — was a quarter-galleon, worth four and a quarter sickles. A bit — a quarter sickle or "Mordred" — was seven and a quarter knuts. There actually was a quarter-knut coin, a little pewter thing called a clip, but according to Professor Snape no one ever used them. The magic the goblins worked into the metal of the coins to stop them being duplicated or counterfeited or melted down (though they weren't really gold and silver anyway, just gold and silver plated) didn't stop them being cut into pieces, so it was generally thought that the goblins didn't actually disapprove of the practice.

They still made a show of disapproving, though. The teller frowned down her long, pointed nose at Harry. "Next you're going to tell me you want half of the sickles in bits!"

He gave her his most charming smile. "If you've got them, sure."

She rolled her eyes, but began counting out coins, setting them on the counter in little stacks where Harry could see, and had him sign a receipt before sweeping them all into a little bag not unlike the one the man before Harry had had. She even included what had to be a handful of clips. "Anything else, mage-child?"

"No, thank you," he said, standing on tip-toe to take the bag. "Oh! Wait! Yes! Is there anywhere you'd recommend for robes? Preferably second-hand, though I'm going to need Hogwarts uniforms, too..."

The goblin laughed, but five minutes later Harry wandered out of the white marble bank into the sunlight with a little map drawn on the back of his copy of his receipt and directions to a few less expensive shops for various school supplies in the main Alley and a couple of second-hand shops that might have used clothes down a side-alley called Knockturn. His plan was to find something to wear so he wouldn't stand out quite so much, then go get a wand, because those were the two most expensive items on the list — the wand and then a new wardrobe, collectively — then a trunk to carry everything, and then everything except books. He wanted to save the bookstore for last, so he could spend any extra time and money there.

Well, last save finding the Muggleborn Shopping Group and withdrawing money to repay Aunt Petunia. He made it out of the bank just in time — he spotted the Deputy Headmistress and her party headed his way from the top of the stairs (probably coming to let the muggle parents change money too) and barely managed to slip away into the crowd before they spotted him.

Finding relatively cheap robes to throw on over his muggle shirt and trousers wasn't difficult at all, but it ended up taking much longer to replace his wardrobe as a whole than he'd expected — the first shop he stopped at had a couple of plain, unenchanted (apparently most clothes were enchanted in one way or another, some in ways that made them impossible to resell), and therefore cheap robes in his size. They didn't seem much different from the things he'd seen wizards on the street wearing in terms of cut and decoration — one was black, with a little white design embroidered on the cuffs and around the neck and hem, and one a shimmery sort of fabric that looked maroon in some lights and a dark purple in others — so he figured they'd be fine. But then there were clearly under-robes and things that went with them, and he realised pretty quickly he didn't actually know what all one was expected to wear at once, and there seemed to be a few different kinds of robes — some with two pieces: shorter, tunic-like tops and overly-full, knickerbocker-like trousers; some with long, paneled over-robes — so he figured he should probably go to one of the more reputable looking places out in the main alley to get an idea of how he should dress and then come back for the other stuff.

He bought his Hogwarts uniform over-robes and hat from a witch called Madam Malkin, because he thought he should give her some custom for teaching him how to dress himself — apparently the black robe was an apprentice owl-breeder's robe (that was what the white design meant), so he probably shouldn't wear that one in public until he had time to tear the embroidery out — which probably only took half an hour, but by the time he'd found underclothes and shoes and a couple more robes to wear outside of classes it was almost half past eleven. (Unfortunately time and money spent shopping were inversely related.)

It was worth it, though, since he only spent half what Professor Snape had told him to expect on clothes, which meant he could afford to get a fancier trunk than he'd expected to be able to. Well, technically it wasn't a trunk at all, it was an enormous carpet-bag with about a dozen different pockets and compartments. It was bigger on the inside and enchanted to weigh only a fraction of what it should, and shrank — it couldn't be opened while it was small and smelled vaguely of mothballs and cabbage (he found it at the same second-hand shop as most of his clothes), but it was still awesome, and came with a shoulder-strap to carry like a slightly-oversized duffle.

He decided to skip lunch for the sake of time, and was, all in all, in a very good mood when he reached the shop of a wandmaker called Ollivander — the only place to go for a first wand, according to the half-dozen people he asked between Madam Malkin's and Odd's Bodkins and Other Strange Notions (the second-hand shop, which didn't actually sell anything for sewing at all) — whereupon that good mood took a sudden nose-dive.

"Hello?" he called, over the silvery tinkle of a little bell somewhere in the depths of the shop, squinting again against the brightness of the enchantments all around him. This had to be the most strongly magical place he'd been yet, the air tingling with potential positively itching to do something, walls lined with hundreds of boxes — thousands, maybe — each glowing with barely-contained energy. The feeling of constraint, of being locked down and held back, was so great that Harry actually felt a little claustrophobic (which was weird, because he wasn't actually claustrophobic at all), and the overwhelming brightness of so much magic started giving him a headache almost instantly.

"Hello?" he called again, a little more loudly, and a little more annoyed. He didn't care if this was the best place for a wand according to every other bloody person in Britain, he'd only been here for about thirty seconds and he already wanted to leave.

"Good morning," a soft voice said, a man appearing out of the depths of the shop, surrounded by a purposeful cloud of magic so thick Harry was honestly having trouble making out the man himself. Old and thin and a little stooped, with bright silver eyes. "I am Garrick Ollivander, and you are..." He trailed off, coming closer, those odd eyes fixed on Harry's face.

"Er...Harry—"

"Harry Potter, yes, I'd know those eyes anywhere. It seems only yesterday your mother was in here buying her first wand — long, swishy...willow and phoenix, a unique combination. But there's something...untethered about you. Something...hmmm..." He frowned.

"Ah...untethered?" Harry repeated, perhaps a bit confrontationally. His voice sounded far too loud in the quiet little shop.

"Hmm, yes. From your destiny. Your place in the Tapestry. Removed from the line of your forefathers and ignorant of your place in history... Continuity has been broken. I think we shall have to approach you as though you were a stranger to our world..."

Harry, as far as he was concerned, was a stranger to Ollivander's world, and all this cryptic muttering was only making his headache worse. The shopkeeper — wand maker? — pulled a little silver measuring tape from his robes. "Which is your wand-hand, Mister Potter?"

"I don't know."

Ollivander gave him a smile that was probably meant to be kindly, but which struck Harry more as patronising. "Which hand do you write with, Mister Potter?"

Harry shrugged. He was pretty sure he'd been left-handed when he'd started school, but he'd been taught to write with his right and practised more with it, so now he could write with either hand pretty much equally well. He still used his left more for throwing things or chopping vegetables or whatever, but he did normally use his right for writing. Using his left smudged the words, since English was written left to right. "Right, I guess?"

"Ambidextrous? Interesting..." The old man hummed. "Though not unusual, I suppose, given..."

"Given what?"

"If you do not already know, it is not my place to tell you, Mister Potter," the infuriating old coot said firmly. "Perhaps you will find you excel at techniques which require two wands to master."

"No offence, but I'd like to just get one wand and get out of here, Mister Ollivander. I'm not used to being around this much magic," he added, in an attempt to soften what he immediately realised was a rather rude statement.

"Oh-ho, sensitive, are we?" he chuckled, which was not helping Harry's headache, or his mood. "Very well, hold out your right hand for me. Palm up, if you would."

Harry did as he was told. Ollivander flicked back the sleeve of his shimmery, maroon robe to reveal his wrist, measuring from the tip of his middle finger to the crease at the base of his palm, then to the crook of his elbow, and armpit to floor, around his head, and across his shoulders, muttering about proportions as though Harry's were somehow unusual. (He didn't think they were, aside from just being generally small. It wasn't like his head was freakishly large or something.)

"Somewhere in the range of eleven to twelve inches, I think," he announced at length. "And when is your birthday?"

"Thirty-first July."

The answer earned Harry a narrow-eyed look. "Are you sure?"

"Well, I don't actually remember it," he snapped, "but that's what my birth certificate says."

The old man chuckled again. "Apologies, Mister Potter, you simply do not strike me as a summer child. Is there any time of the year you particularly enjoy, or any time you feel particularly close to magic? Drawn to something, some force you can't name, perhaps?"

"Er...I like springtime," he admitted. "Around the end of April and beginning of May, you know, when things really start growing again? And..." Feeling drawn to something he couldn't name made him think of the Dark Night, the night every year when he was overcome by a need he couldn't explain, when his dreams were filled with a woman — though she wasn't really a woman. She might have seemed like a grown lady to Harry when he was a little kid, but these past few years he thought she didn't seem that much older than him, maybe fourteen or fifteen...though she was also ancient, and not so much a person at all as she was rage and cruelty and destruction given form (but that made her sound scary, and she wasn't really, she loved Harry, wanted to help and protect him and was almost as frustrated that she couldn't as he was that he couldn't help her, and he couldn't help loving her back) — starving and pleading with him, trying to make him understand that she needed him, that she needed him to help her, kill someone for her (just tell me who and where and how, I'll do it, I promise...) — she needed life, or she would die—

"And?"

And Harry probably shouldn't go around telling people that there was a voice in his head that wanted him to kill people. Aunt Petunia hadn't taken it well, and she knew him. She'd been scared of him, which was absurd — Harry had been all of seven when he'd finally managed to articulate what happened on Dark Nights, and physically and mentally exhausted from an entire night spent crying, completely defeated by his inability to do anything to help the woman in his dream and the lingering knowledge of the importance of doing so, by the wound in his very soul which grew a little deeper and sharper every year he failed the voice, which was actually a part of him, or maybe he was a little piece of it, of some dying magic he didn't understand. But he wouldn't hurt his family, no matter how little they understood him, or how scared they were of him. It would be counterproductive to kill any of them for the voice for one thing, like eating his own leg, and for another...

They were his family. He didn't know where or when he'd learned it — maybe before his own parents had died, even — but family meant he was one of them. He had to take care of them, and they had to take care of him, because they rose or fell together. Of course, since Harry was a child, taking care of him meant teaching him how to be a person, and since he was a questionably sane demon-child, teaching him meant a decade of beating the concept of consequences into his head (and his arse), and he might hate that, but that didn't mean he hated them. They had a place in each other's lives, and as much as they might hurt or scare each other, they weren't actually a danger to each other. Not really. They'd never really talked about it, but Aunt Petunia had to know that, or she wouldn't dare ask Uncle Vernon to hit him for breaking the rules or ever let him be anywhere alone with Dudley.

And she was horrified when Harry told her about Dark Nights. Ergo, it was not a thing he should tell anyone else.

"The winter solstice," he said shortly, leaving it at that.

The old man nodded. "Yes, yes...Walpurgis and Yule, two very powerful times of the year, indeed... But not associated with any particular wand-wood. How would you describe yourself, Mister Potter?"

"Er..." Generally speaking, he wouldn't?

"Loyal? Intelligent? Aggressive? Protective? Kind?"

"Er...yeah? I guess?" Honestly, he had no idea. "Well, not kind, probably, but..."

The wizard sighed at him. "You are not making this easy for me, Mister Potter."

"I'm sorry, I don't know what you want from me, here!"

"Let us try this another way. Are you particularly patient?"

"No."

"Quick-tempered?"

"Er...maybe?"

"Clever?"

"Yes."

"Arrogant?"

"Would I say yes even if I were?"

The old man chuckled. "Probably not, I suppose. Adventurous?"

"Yes."

"Self-sufficient?"

"I can take care of myself and work things out for myself, if that's what you mean." He didn't necessarily think he couldn't rely on other people, he just didn't need to very often, which he thought was the difference Professor Snape was talking about the other day, between Harry and a kid he would expect to go to Slytherin, even though he was pretty sure most people used self-sufficient and self-reliant interchangeably.

Ollivander nodded. "Trusting?"

"Er...I don't really think I'm untrusting, but I'm not an idiot..."

"Conformist?"

"Ah, no." Definitely not.

"Stubborn?"

"Aunt Petunia says I am..."

"Impulsive?"

"Sometimes, maybe, yes."

"Prone to melancholy?" There was something about his tone, there, that made it seem like that one might not be directly related to the wand thing, but Harry didn't know what it might actually mean.

"Um, no?" Other than Dark Nights, Harry couldn't actually remember ever being sad or down. He got angry sometimes, or bored, but not melancholy.

The old wizard, apparently satisfied, nodded. "I think that will be enough to be getting on with." He bustled off into the depths of the shop, stopping here or there to tug a box from a shelf, explaining the different wand cores he used as he did so. Harry was far more concerned with trying to relieve his growing headache than paying attention. Rubbing at his eyes and temples and massaging the back of his neck made very little difference, but it did relieve some of the tension which was a secondary cause of his feeling like shite, beyond the glare of the magic itself. He couldn't do anything about that.

A minute or two later, the wandmaker returned with half a dozen boxes. "We'll start with several wands of the same wood, to determine which core works best for you, then a selection of wands with similar cores to find the wood which best suits your personality, and your specific match. All of these are sycamore," he informed Harry.

Harry nodded, as though that meant something to him.

Ollivander obviously knew that it didn't. "Closely related to maple in its characteristics, but just a touch more adventurous. First, unicorn." He set his stack of boxes on the till counter, then selected one and opened it, presenting it to Harry. His fingers had barely grazed the wood when the wandmaker snatched it away again, snapping the box shut. "No. Most definitely not," he declared — bewilderingly, because Harry hadn't really noticed anything happen. He hadn't even picked the bloody thing up!

That was apparently enough to rule out all unicorn wands, though, as Ollivander removed two others from the pile to try as well. "Dragon will almost certainly be better."

This one, he actually let Harry pick up. It felt warm in his hand, almost alive, and when he gave it an experimental wave, the tip began to glow.

"Perhaps... Perhaps... Let's try the phoenix too, just to be sure."

The phoenix-feather wand did not like Harry. He could tell as soon as he picked it up, it was almost...disdainful toward him, for no reason he could imagine. Could wands be disdainful? The wandmaker obviously sensed it too, though, saying, "No, I think not," before Harry so much as gave it a flick.

"Dragon, then," the old man said, handing Harry the last of the six wands. This one felt more natural in Harry's hand than the first, quicker to react when he swirled it in the air before himself, not glowing, but sort of carving into the ambient magic all around them, giving it a little bit of order and purpose, a brilliant invisible trail left in its wake. "And it seems the female suits you slightly better than the male. Not surprising, female dragons do tend to be more volatile than males."

He gathered up the other five boxes and tottered back into the shelves, leaving Harry with the female dragon wand. (He definitely would not be telling Dudley that his wand was a girl wand.) With nothing to occupy himself other than listening to the old man's muffled babbling about maple and blackthorn and pine and oh, maybe...yes, we could try that one, he entertained himself drawing geometric patterns in the magic around himself.

After a few minutes, Ollivander returned with what had to be at least two dozen boxes — so many he could barely hold them all — which he carefully slid onto the counter.

What followed was a frankly bewilderingly fast paced appraisal of the suitability of a number of combinations of different woods and heart-strings from different dragons, most of which felt perfectly fine to Harry — at least as good as the one he'd been playing with while Ollivander hunted through the shelves — but which Ollivander said weren't quite right. He eventually narrowed it down to ebony as the best fit for Harry's personality — "resolutely individualistic and rigidly non-conformist, paradoxically suited to those destined to find their place in society is that of an outsider," whatever that meant (Harry privately suspected it was complete hogwash, the sort of shite he might expect a fortune-teller at a carnival to tell her victims to lure them in, making them feel special) — but insisted that none of the wands he'd already tried were "the one" (and Harry would know how the wandmaker could be so very sure of that when he did find "the one").

Harry was pretty sure he tried every single ebony and dragon-heartstring wand in the shop before the old man's eyes lit up.

"What?" Harry asked, as he strode determinedly back into the shelves yet again.

"Now, as I've said," the wizard explained excitedly, going even further this time, to the very back of the shop. "I myself work only with unicorn tail-hairs, dragon heart-strings, and phoenix feathers. We do still have several wands in stock, however, from my father and grandfather's days. Grandfather in particular fancied himself a bit of an explorer in his youth, travelling the world in search of exotic wand-making components. This!" he exclaimed, reappearing with a single, very old looking box. "This is the one!"

Like the last fifty wands Harry had tried, it was ebony, but unlike the last fifty wands, when he touched it something like an electric shock ran through him, his magic and that of the wand twining together in a way none of the others had done, a fountain of golden and silver sparks erupting spontaneously from the wand as the bond stabilised. Harry spontaneously erupted in giggles, in spite of his headache.

"Yeah, okay," he said, grinning almost too hard to speak, "I get it now."

Ollivander seemed almost as pleased. "Eleven and five-eighths, ebony and nundu!" Harry had never heard of a nundu. "Ha! Finally got you, you tricky blighter!" Harry was...pretty sure he was talking to the wand. "You will recall, Mister Potter, that I said dragon-wands are powerful, temperamental, and quick to bond to any new owner — provided they are well-suited, of course — reflecting the flocking nature of most dragons. The nundu is a much more independent beast, as one might expect of a feline creature, and far more adaptive than any dragon. Resilient — immune to disease, the worst part of their reputation comes from their propensity to become carriers for deadly plagues which seem not to harm them in the least — and impossible to subjugate — dragons can be trained, like those the goblins keep in their tunnels, broken by extreme abuse, but you will never find a tame nundu, and they are far too clever to keep in captivity. I will admit, I — and my father before me — thought Grandfather mad, to craft a wand from the heart of a nundu — this one was killed in Tanganyika in Twenty-Two, after attacking nearly a dozen native villages — but he swore we'd find a match for it eventually!"

His ranting was interrupted by the tinkle of the bell, as a redheaded witch with the same silvery eyes as the old man walked into the shop, taking in the scene with a single glance. "Grandfather? You did still want me to come by to help with the Hogwarts group this afternoon, didn't you?"

"Zoë! Zoë! I finally found a match for the nundu! Harry Potter! Look!" He pointed excitedly at the wand still in Harry's hand.

The witch raised an eyebrow at Harry. "Congratulations?"

"Damn right, congratulations, girl! Sixty-seven years, that wand's been sitting on a shelf, terrorising the rest of the stock! I should've offered it to Bellatrix in Fifty-Seven, but that black walnut and dragon took to her so quickly..."

"Yes, yes, I know, Grandfather. Here, why don't you go put on the kettle? I'll get the young gentleman rung up, and we can have a cup of tea while we wait for Minerva and her ducklings."

"Of course, dear. Mister Potter, it's been an honour!" the strange old man proclaimed, giving Harry a short bow and retreating into the depths of the shop yet again.

The woman shook her head watching him go, then tutted at the state of the till counter, littered with boxed wands that hadn't been quite right. "Have a cup of tea and put back half the stock," she muttered under her breath. "Alright, Mister Potter, let's see the box." He handed it over, and she copied a number from the end of it into a ledger, speaking as she wrote. "I don't suppose Grandfather explained the pricing system at any point in the past...however long he's had you trapped here."

"Er, no. Professor Snape said prices generally range from ten to twenty-five or thirty galleons for a first wand." More toward the higher end of the range, usually. That was most of the reason he'd wanted to get this first — he was willing to cut corners on the rest of his supplies if necessary, buying them second-hand and so on, but a wand was obviously the most important piece of equipment on the list, so.

Zoe nodded. "Based on the materials used to craft them, their availability and the cost of collecting them, yes. And while ebony is reasonably widely-available, the nundu-heartstring makes this particular wand even more unique than most. But we also take into account the likelihood that any given wand will be a suitable match for another mage. Matching wands to wizards is a bit like arranging a marriage. There might be five or ten wands in the shop you're compatible with, and one or two you really hit it off with, and similarly most wands here will find a wizard with whom they are willing to work within ten or twenty years of their crafting.

"Dragon-wands tend to be relatively expensive, both because dragon heart-strings are less widely available than unicorn hair and because they're less particular about their mates than unicorns or phoenixes. Phoenix feathers are very dear, but phoenix-wands are nearly as picky as your nundu, so when we find a match for one we generally let it go for less than you might expect just based on the cost of materials. If you don't take that one, it could very well sit on a shelf for another seventy years before another person it likes comes along. We'll let it go for twenty."

Harry gave her his best unimpressed stare, beginning the haggling process which seemed to be a feature of every transaction he'd witnessed in the magical shopping centre. "From what you're saying, it sounds like you should be paying me to take it off your hands. Ten."

She laughed. "Don't insult me, kid. I don't care if you're Merlin himself reincarnated, people died to get the core of that wand. It's worth at least eighty, and that's without considering the wood and the expertise that went into crafting it. Giving it to you for twenty is practically me paying you to take it off my hands."

Harry pouted, but he couldn't really argue with people died, and he wasn't leaving here without this wand. Usually he didn't mind just walking away if negotiations weren't going well, but he couldn't walk away from this one, and he was pretty sure the silver-eyed witch knew it. He attempted to twist his face into a look of contrition, lest she actually raise the price on him for insulting her.

"Sorry, I didn't mean to be insulting. I thought negotiating prices was just, you know, what people do here," he explained, pulling out his little coin-purse somewhat shame-facedly. He hadn't imagined that she was opening with an offer seventy-five or eighty per cent below the actual value of the wand.

"Well, it is, but I'm not going to take advantage of an eleven-year-old kid who doesn't know a damn thing about wands. We save that sort of thing for entitled old nobles who think they know everything about wands, see." She winked at him. "Tell you what, I'll throw in a holster for you, since you clearly don't have isolation enchantments on your pockets, gratis."

"Isolation enchantments?"

"Oooh, I guess Grandfather didn't mention anything about wand-care, either?" Harry shook his head. She sorted his coins into the till and started fishing around behind the counter for something, coming up with a leather tube a little longer than the shaft of the wand (not counting the handle) a few seconds later. "Right, well. The thing is, your wand is a very delicate, highly-enchanted instrument. Certain types of magic can be very disruptive to the enchantments and cause the wand to fail catastrophically — exploding or bursting into flame. The most common cause of wand-loss is taking them through the floo without ensuring they're properly shielded. Most mages buy robes with a specially enchanted pocket to shield their wands from floo-damage, as well as from accidental breakage — enchanted or not, it is still a piece of wood, accidents happen. A wand-holster does the same thing, though it's generally considered a bit less convenient for daily use than just being able to pocket your wand. Professional duellists, curse-breakers, aurors, and battle-mages almost always wear theirs on their off-arm, but that requires a special kind of holster with additional space-warping enchantments, since obviously your wand is longer than your forearm. This one you hang from your belt," she explained, threading leather laces through a couple of holes on the back to form loops and holding it up for him to see.

Harry didn't have a belt, but that didn't matter, because as soon as he left here he was going to see if he could find one of those arm holsters — that sounded awesome. Yes, he would probably have to pay something for it, even if they would take this holster as trade too, but he figured the difference probably wouldn't be more than he'd pay for a good belt anyway. For the moment, he just tucked the whole thing into the pockets he had thought were unusually deep when he'd first put this robe on. (It had barely registered at the time, honestly — pockets reaching down almost to his knees were a minor oddity compared to some of the features of various thrift-store clothes he'd seen over the years. It was sort of a pain to fish out his coin purse, but all of the one-piece robes he'd tried were like this, so he'd figured it was intended to foil pickpockets or something.) "Thanks! Is there anything else I should know?"

"About the wand? It should be fine for at least a year. If you start having any difficulties with it, bring it in and we'll see if the runes or varnishing need a touch-up, but ebony is a very stable wood and difficult to chip accidentally. If you do somehow manage to chip it, bring it in as soon as possible. Don't try to repair the chip yourself or get some cheap shop to do it — an inexpert repair will almost always lead to serious fracturing and irreparable damage down the line. Polishing isn't really necessary on a daily basis, but you may find that performance begins to suffer if the varnish starts getting too scratched up. That tends to be an issue more with kids who keep their wands unprotected in their pockets, along with the gods only know what else. Most people bring their wands in every two or three years to make sure it's still in good working order and still a good fit for them — it can be difficult to tell if you're approaching the extreme of the resonance range of your wand once you're already accustomed to working with it. Tends to happen gradually, like."

Harry nodded. "And...not about the wand?" Because about the wand implied there was something else, too.

She grinned. "Five doors down from Borgin and Burke's in Knockturn, on the other side of the alley, there's a storefront with a name you can't read painted on the window. It looks abandoned from outside, but the door's not locked. It's a bookshop. Owner's named Odysseus. Tell him I sent you, and ask him for an occlumency primer."

"Occlumency?"

The witch nodded. "Mind magic. Should help you learn how to sort of tone down your magical perception."

"Oh. Thanks. How did you...?"

She laughed. "I'm a Seer, I know all sorts of things. Like that if you don't get going, I'm not going to have time to tidy up before Minnie McGonagall gets here, so."

Well, then. Harry would have to do that. Both looking for that bookshop, and getting out of her way. "Oh. Okay. Thanks again! And tell your grandfather I said thanks, too." He couldn't remember if he had or not, what with how weird the old man was.

"Will do. Shoo." She waved him back out into the sun just in time to hear a bell ringing one.

Chapter Text

Crap. He was going to have to hurry now to find everything else on his list — not just school supplies, but things like toiletries that he would need for boarding, too — and still have time to find the professor and deal with the money, and still get back to Saint James's to meet Aunt Petunia when he'd agreed. He dug his list out of his pocket to have one more look at it, committing to memory all of the things that he still needed to get (and adding a cool wand holster to the list), then dove into the crowd like a man on a mission, heading for the nearest stationary shop.

Almost two hours later — his money-bag much lighter, but his enormous carpet bag much heavier — he had everything on his list except for the books, and he was sort of in a hurry, because he had given himself until three-thirty. Then he had to go find the Hogwarts group and get his bloody bank key, and go change money again. He was really hoping this bookshop Zoe had recommended would have everything he needed and would be willing to sell it to him for seven galleons and change, because even after haggling over literally everything that was all he had left. (He probably should have gotten his wand right after talking to Madam Malkin before going back to clothes shopping, saved clothes for last instead. He could've gotten by with a robe or two less...)

The nameless shop was almost as dark and dusty as Ollivander's, but unlike the wandmaker the bookseller was at the counter when Harry walked in, and the magic around the shop was much less obvious (though it felt more dangerous, somehow). He was also a little younger — old and crotchety rather than ancient and doddering. His expression, seeing Harry, was uncannily like that of the goblin bank-teller this morning.

"Good afternoon, Mister...?"

"Potter. Harry Potter," he answered without thinking, and immediately winced. He'd been trying not to tell people that, damn it.

Fortunately, the old man didn't even entirely seem to believe him. An eyebrow ticked upward a fraction. "Of course it is. I suppose you'd like to sign the book?"

Sign the book? "Er...Zoë, at Mister Ollivander's, told me I should ask you about an occlumency primer? And I have a list of things I need for school, I was hoping you might have some or all of them used, because I'm kind of on a budget and I need to go find the Hogwarts Muggleborn Shopping Trip group in about forty minutes."

The eyebrow rose a few millimetres more, and the man held out a hand, flicking his fingers like give it here, then — presumably for the list. While Harry dug it out of his pocket, the man heaved a heavy, leather-bound tome up from behind the counter, flipping it to the first page. "Read this."

"This" was a contract of sorts, Harry thought, written in language that was positively Shakespearean, to the effect that by signing he agreed to be bound not to reveal anything illegal he might witness here, or testify against the proprietor of the shop or anyone he met here about anything he might find out about them through the Shop, or generally betray Odysseus or the Shop to anyone who might wish harm to him or it.

"What happens if I sign, and then break my word?" he asked, not entirely comfortable with the idea. Not the idea of joining some sort of illegal bookshop club thing (obviously this was intended to make sure no one would get caught, and if he didn't get caught doing something illegal it was fine), but signing what was obviously a magical contract — cold, hard magic practically radiated from the thing — without knowing what it might do to him, in the worst case scenario.

"You can't," the man said gruffly, scribbling on Harry's list. "That's the point. Blood magic, very powerful. Try to speak out of turn or even write something incriminating, your body won't let you. Can't be compelled or coerced when the contract's in effect, closest thing you'll find to a fool-proof insurance policy. We do ask for a donation to join the membership rolls — whatever you can afford."

"Er...how much is all that going to cost? Approximately. Because I've only got about seven and a half galleons left, so..."

The wizard smirked. "About seven and a half galleons, I reckon. Prices are always negotiable. Give us a couple of clips, sign the book, and we can talk."

...Harry could do a couple of clips. He still had all eight of the ones he'd been given this morning, because no one else had charged him so little for anything all day. All eight of them had made their way all the way to the bottom of his money bag, of course, but after a few seconds he managed to retrieve two of them. The shopkeeper handed him a sharp-looking black quill-pen and flipped to the current page for Harry to add his name to the rust-coloured list. Signed in blood?

Well, he had said it was blood magic, Harry supposed. "How do I...?" he asked awkwardly. Did he have to cut his hand and dip the quill in blood, or...? He'd never written with a bloody feather before... (Heh, literally...)

"Just make your mark. Doesn't even have to be your own name. The quill will do the rest."

Harry did put down his own name, mostly because he didn't see why he shouldn't at this point, shivering as the magic of the quill cut into the back of his hand for 'ink' and the magic of the contract took root in his veins, cold and strong and... Well, he knew it was there to physically stop him from breaking his word, so it was sort of like being bound, and he'd generally expect that to be a bad thing, like all the wands locked up in their boxes at Ollivander's, but he didn't really have any intention to break his word, and the magic flowing through him, spreading through every inch of his body with every beat of his heart, actually felt good. Like...really good.

Good enough that his breath caught in his throat a little, taken by surprise.

Odysseus laughed at him, just sort of staring at the book in a daze. "Call yourself a Potter all you like, but blood will out, kid. So, here's the deal. I've got about half of this shite in stock, and substitutes for the rest. Well, except this Trimble bloke — never heard of him, but the Hogwarts Defence curriculum is generally a ton and a half of dragon dung, so I doubt it's any good. I can give you those for seven and four, total. Not a lot of folks down this way looking for introductory charms texts, if you catch my drift. On the other hand, occlumency primers are a bit harder to come by, and the school library will have at least a few copies of all your course books. Irma's a canny old gal, she won't let them out, but you can do your homework there most of the time. Professors might get a bit snippy with you over not having things at the start of lessons, but assuming you really are Harry Potter, get your finances sorted and you can owl order them from Flourish and Blotts or du Lac's, get them within a week or two."

Harry still didn't have an owl, but he knew the school did, and he'd stumbled into a little shop earlier where muggleborns could send normal letters — they had a storefront, like the Leaky Cauldron — with their actual letter and a couple of Morgens or pounds enclosed, and the shop would forward the enclosed letter to anyone by owl. Return post worked the same way, though the original sender on the muggle side had to include a return address for the forwarding service, since most mages were used to just putting down the name of the recipient and the name of the location they were at, like "Hogwarts" or "DLE Headquarters, MoM" or "MOPS" (Muggle-Owl Post Services), and the recipient on the muggle side was charged for return postage, too. People with personal owls didn't understand the concept, apparently. Aunt Petunia, he was positive, was going to be delighted to know that she could send a letter of complaint to anyone in Magical Britain if she knew where they worked, up to and including the Minister for Magic himself. She didn't even need to know his name, just his title.

"Hell, send me an owl and I'll sort it out. I'll be wanting a more substantial membership donation, though — House of Potter can stand to afford a lot more than half a knut, that's for damn sure."

Oh. Right. Harry sort of felt like an idiot for not realising that himself. He wouldn't really be able to read through the books over the next month, and he really would like to, but— Wait. "Is there a public library for wizards? Or, I don't know, some way I could get back here on my own? I live with my aunt and uncle, you see. They're muggles, and Aunt Petunia doesn't want to have to keep driving me up here, so..." He didn't even have to ask to know that. It hadn't been outright stated that Harry would have to get everything on this trip, but it had been heavily implied.

The man just sort of blinked at him for a long moment before shaking himself out of his reverie. "No, we don't have a public library. Where do you think you are, Miskatonic? First thing you're going to need to know about Britain, kid: it's run by a bunch of backward fuckwits who think they're safer not knowing what all might go bump in the night. Why do you think you have to sign a secrecy pact to shop for books?" Well, he'd kind of thought maybe the bookshop sold more than books, like drugs or something, but as far as he was concerned that was none of his business. "There's a bus, though, that can bring you here. Diagon'd be better to stop at, though — don't want a reputation for hanging out down here with the dark and degenerate, you know. Called the Knight Bus. Make sure there's no muggles around and you're not under anti-scrying wards, and stand at the edge of a road with your wand lit. Hold it up like hailing a cabbie. Usually doesn't take more'n a minute or two for them to home in on you. Can't say what their rates are. Probably less than a galleon." He shrugged.

Harry should probably try to keep a galleon, then, just in case he couldn't get the money figured out today and had to wait for the Headmaster to send his bank key to him in the mail, or whatever. Or, worst case, he guessed, in case he needed to go to Hogwarts and demand his key in person. Then he'd have to talk someone into bringing him back down here by magic, that was true, but Harry could be very convincing when necessary. "In that case, I have about six and a half galleons to spend."

"Heh. If you're serious about teaching yourself occlumency, I do have a primer I'll give you for that. Bit of a shite subject to try learning out of a book, but I suppose you're not like to find anyone who'd teach you at your age. Not on the up-and-up, and legilimency's one of those things, don't want some skeezy jackass doing who the fuck knows what in your mind."

"Probably also no one who'd teach me for six galleons."

"That too. If you really are Harry Potter, could just waltz up to the Old Goat and ask him to teach you, just in case the very-nearly-late Dark Lord Whatshisface shows up again. Dumbledore, that is. Or that Snape boy who turned out to be a spy — didn't put it together until she was in all the papers in black and white, but he used to turn up here with the Evans girl, back when she called herself Asphodel. Might be inclined to do her son a favour."

"I think I've exhausted my favours from him grilling him on general shite I needed to know before starting school," Harry informed the old wizard, whom he really couldn't help but like. He might be gruff and clearly doubt that Harry was who he said he was, but he was obviously trying to be helpful anyway. The information about the bus alone was worth six and a half galleons, in his opinion. "I'll take the primer, then, and like you said, if I need to I'll get books from the school library, or convince people to share with me. But hopefully I'll be back in a few days with more money. What are your hours?"

That (perfectly reasonable) question earned him another odd look. "Oh, we're always open for business, but this isn't the sort of neighbourhood for little kids to wander around after dark. Not particularly the sort of neighbourhood for a kid like you to be exploring alone in broad daylight, to be honest, even if there are still a few old-timers around who remember a little girl who looked an awful lot like you dismembering a viv-alchemist who tried to kidnap her when she was your age. Alley sees more auror patrols than it did back then, but still." Harry's confusion must've shown on his face, because the wizard added, "Little Bella Black, grew up to be the most dangerous witch in Britain. Probably still holds the title, even after ten years on the Rock — have to have a soul for the dementors to eat it, see, and rumour has it she sold hers."

Harry understood approximately none of that. "Er...right. I'll be careful, then? I do have to go, though. I still have to find the Hogwarts people and get to the bank, and then back out to muggle London by four-fifteen," he explained, dumping what was left of his gold on the counter, then taking back one whole galleon and one clip. (Dudley would think magic money was wicked cool, even if it was only worth a quarter of a penny, or thereabouts.)

Odysseus, in exchange, plucked a slim book bound in blue silk from a shelf in the next room, and slid it across the counter, sweeping the coins away without counting them. "Don't let any magical authorities see you with that," he warned Harry. "It's restricted to mages seventeen and older. Best case they'll confiscate it and fine you. Worst is a month out on the Rock with the soul-suckers."

"Er...right. Thanks! One last thing, what time is it?"

The man checked his watch. "Three thirty-eight."

"Shite. Gotta run!" He took enough time to shove the book into one of his ridiculously deep pockets (it barely fit), but then he suited action to words — or as best he could, at least, with his very large carpet-bag slung across his back. The old man's laughter followed him out into the street.

The Hogwarts group were, as luck would have it, at Ollivander's, a fact which Harry easily ascertained by asking several of the shopkeepers he'd met earlier in the day whether they'd seen a bunch of muggleborns and their parents wandering around anywhere. He didn't even have to try to get magic to tell him.

It was much more difficult to get his key from the obstinate witch in charge of them, since she was far more interested in yelling at him for preemptively ditching them, as was the bushy-haired girl Harry had locked eyes with on his way into the pub this morning.

"Ah!" Mister Ollivander said, as Harry, slightly out of breath, dragged the door of his (now very crowded) shop open again. "Mister Potter! Back so soon?"

"Er, yeah?" he panted, as the eight other people in the room — Zoë, three muggle adults, three children (two of the adults were with one child; one was on his own, like Harry), and Deputy Headmistress Minerva McGonagall — turned to stare at him as well.

The professor's lips narrowed almost immediately into a stern frown, but before she could say anything the girl trying wands let out a shocked, furious, "You!" Red sparks shot out of the wand she was holding — unintentionally, Harry was sure. They barely made it half-way to him before they sputtered out, but the room still erupted in various objections — "Hermione!" from the girl's mother; "Oh, dear me!" from the other mother; a yelp from the boy who didn't have a parent with him; and "Most certainly not, Miss Granger," from Ollivander, who gingerly plucked the wand out of her hand.

She didn't even seem to notice. "You! You insufferable, inconsiderate jerk! You're Harry Potter!? We waited almost half an hour for you!"

Harry blinked at her unexpected fury, then, quite unable to resist poking her a bit more, grinned. "Really? Why?"

She let out an inarticulate little shriek. "We thought you were late! We thought there was traffic! But you weren't! And there wasn't! I saw you!" ("I know you did," Harry inserted, very amused.) "You just sneaked right by and let us all wait! We've been rushing all day because of you! I barely got to look at any books at all!"

"If it makes you feel any better, I didn't either. Ran out of both time and money. Speaking of, Professor McGonagall, right?" he said, changing the subject and ignoring the girl's continued furious tirade. "Professor Snape said that the Headmaster would send my key with you?"

"Ooh, you have some nerve, lad!" she growled, stalking past him out the door, and grabbing his arm to drag him with her as she did. "Where have you been all day?!"

"Shopping?" he suggested innocently.

"Alone?!"

"Well, yes, obviously." Most of the shopkeepers and stall owners had been very helpful, directing him to friends of theirs who had the next thing on his list, but he pretty clearly wasn't dragging someone around with him.

"Are you out of your mind, boy? What on earth were you thinking?!"

"Er...mostly that it would be boring to stand around while a bunch of other kids got their wands and robes and things, and if you didn't bring my key and I had to get everything with the three-hundred quid Aunt Petunia gave me — which I very nearly did, I was about thirty short, so I'm going to have to owl-order some textbooks or come up here again — I wouldn't have time to find anything decent in my budget, if you even went to any second-hand shops at all. Did you?"

"Did we what? Go to second-hand shops? No, of course not!" she said, bold and condescending, as if only riff-raff stepped foot inside stores for poor people. (Aunt Petunia shared this view, which was half the reason Harry was allowed to buy his own clothes. She didn't want people to see her coming out of a place like that.) "And neither would you have had to if you'd simply joined us as you were meant to! If I could take points before you started school..."

"Well, I sort of assumed that. I meant, did you bring my key? Because I need to run back to the bank and get money to pay back my aunt if you did."

"Of course I did, but we haven't time to go back to Gringotts' now, I'm afraid your aunt will just have to bring you back some other day."

Harry blinked up at her, stunned. "What? It can't be later than three forty-five. I have plenty of time to get back to the bank. I'm not asking you to come with me, just to give me my bloody key!"

"You really think I'm going to let you wander off alone, again? Besides, I sincerely doubt the goblins will deign to deal with an eleven-year-old human, anyway."

"A, I've been on my own all day and I'm fine, and B, how do you think I got galleons to buy all of my things in the first place?" He wasn't going to try to explain the whole issue of mistaken identity because he didn't think it mattered, and he couldn't quite remember the word, just that it meant he was a member of a clan who were ancestral enemies of Gringotts' but with whom they'd reached a truce or something, which meant they held some respect for him, just by default. Even though he wasn't actually from the family they thought he was, it had been enough to get a foot in the door, so. (The few things Harry had heard here and there about the House of Black all day were generally pretty impressive — kind of made him wish he really were one of them. But even if his father was really that Sirius bloke, Harry didn't think it counted as being part of his family, since he'd never even met him.) "Give me my key!"

"I will do no such thing! You're lucky you weren't kidnapped or worse, wandering around Knockturn looking for second-hand shops!"

"Even if that were true," Harry snapped back, deliberately making it clear he didn't think it was, "Gringotts' isn't in Knockturn Alley, is it! It is my key, isn't it? So hand it over!"

"No! You are acting like a spoilt, petulant brat! I will give it to your aunt when she comes to pick you up," the witch said firmly. Which was going to be a problem, because Aunt Petunia had no intention of driving around looking for an invisible magic pub.

"No, you won't, because she's not coming to pick me up, I'm meeting her at Saint James's Square at half-past four, and I do not have time for your nonsense!"

The witch glared down her nose at him. "In that case, I will accompany you to the Square, because I'd like to have a word with this aunt of yours about your abominable behaviour today!"

"I'm sure she'll want to have a word with you too, about why I don't have three-hundred pounds to pay her back, and if you don't give me my key right bloody now, I swear to God, I will march right over there to that auror—" He pointed at one of the red-robed magic police who was very obviously patrolling the alley, maintaining the peace. "—and ask her whether the polite young man she's seen off and on all day, buying his things and bothering no one, or the adult he claims has stolen the key to his bank vault — and who does, by her own admission, have said key on her person, yet refuses to return it — is behaving more abominably, shall I?"

Apparently that was not a tactic she expected him to employ, as she just sort of gaped at him for several long seconds. Long enough that Harry scoffed at her, turned on his heel, and started making for the authority figure, because as Uncle Vernon had taught him while buying Aunt Petunia's car two summers ago (inadvertently — Harry had been standing next to Dudley, the intended recipient of his advice), the trick in negotiations was never to be afraid to walk away. It was a bit of advice which had served Harry well all day, and the same logic clearly applied to this situation too. If the witch thought she was going to lose everything (in this case, a good deal of face and Harry's key), she would cave to his demands in order to keep something (the embarrassment of being caught in a scene to a minimum).

Sure enough, he only got a few steps away before the professor called, "Wait!" fishing the key out of her own coin purse.

Harry stalked back and snatched it out of her fingers, glaring up at her. "Thank you!"

He turned and stalked away again, ignoring the resumption of her bleating protests against his going off alone. The action probably lost something to the fact that he was hauling around a bag almost half as big as he was, but he really didn't care. He needed to be back outside the pub by four-twenty. Preferably a little earlier, since it would presumably take slightly longer to walk back to the square with all of his newly acquired stuff. And it wasn't as though she would leave the other children to come after him. Yes, they did have adults with them, but they were muggle adults, and therefore no more capable of defending themselves from wizards than Harry, who hadn't learned a single spell yet.

Actually, probably much less capable of defending themselves than Harry. Most people didn't like hurting other people. Especially adults. Harry, on the other hand, wasn't afraid to get in a fight with Ripper, much less some random mage he could almost guarantee was not expecting a small child to throw themselves on them like a tiny berserker.

Plus, if that was an option — leaving the rest of the group, he meant — surely she wouldn't have so strongly protested against Harry going back to the bank if she could've just come with him. Er...probably. He guessed she might just be a stubborn, entitled old lady who didn't like having her authority questioned. But either way, he didn't really need her, he just needed the bloody key.

The clock was already striking four when he reached the marble stairs again. The same teller he'd spoken to earlier was still working. She was examining a bunch of rubies or garnets or something with one of those little tiny eye-sized magnifying things — a loupe? — but Harry went over to stand in front of her again anyway, because there was a bit of a line, and he wasn't entirely sure that she wasn't just there looking too busy and important to deal with the customers.

She noticed him immediately, giving him a sharp-toothed grin, more like baring her teeth at him, really. "My shift dealing with you people is over, child. Go wait in line with the other humans."

He gave her an equally (un-)pleasant smile. "Or — and just consider the option for a second — you could take a hundred galleons out of my account and change sixty-two of them to muggle pounds for me because — and hear me out, here — I could alternatively waste more of your time than it would actually take you to do that trying to convince you that you should."

She laughed, beckoning him closer. "Very good, but if you truly were a child of our respected enemies, you would have insulted me in—" presumably the name of the goblin language "—too. Why would an account-holder with a hundred galleons to his name have needed to convert sixty galleons worth of muggle pounds six hours ago?"

Harry pouted up at her. "Because I didn't have my key. See, it's sort of a long story, and I'm in a hurry — like, I need to be out of here in five minutes, hurry — but the short version is I've been raised by muggles, and Albus Dumbledore — the Headmaster of Hogwarts?"

"I am familiar with the man," the goblin said drily, probably because he was also the head of their parliament thing. Well, the wizards' — Harry hadn't asked whether the goblins had any lords in the Wizengamot, but he was guessing not.

"Yeah, well, he's apparently my guardian, for reasons that have not been clearly explained, but he had my key, and he sent it to me with Professor McGonagall so I could get my school things, but I didn't want to go shopping with her because shopping with other people is terrible, so I used the emergency money my muggle aunt gave me in case the wizards continued to be flakes, but now I have to go meet my aunt, so I went and got my key from the professor." He held it up for her to see. "Honestly, I don't know how much money is in the account, but Professor Snape said something snide about Lord Potter the other day and people giving me money because my mother died stopping the Dark Lord, so I'm guessing it's more than a hundred galleons."

The goblin lady took the key, leaning forward to stare at him, examined the number stamped on the key, and then stared at him a bit more. "You're Harry Potter."

"Er. Yes?" Had he forgotten to introduce himself earlier? ...Yes, he realised, he might have done, what with getting caught up in the weirdness of knowing a word he had no reason to know. He had had to sign his name, but he'd been trying to do it sideways with a heavy, unfamiliar fountain-pen, holding the thick magical paper against the side of the counter because he was too short to reach the desktop, so he supposed it might not have been very legible. "What's your name?"

She gave him a word that conjured a mental image of an explosion, a sudden flash of light in the complete darkness of a cave, deep underground. "Firebloom, in English," she added absently, still staring at him.

"That is not nearly a cool enough translation," he informed her, just rolling with the knowing words thing this time. "It sounds like a flower or something, not an explosion. But please, Firebloom? My aunt's going to be really angry with me if I'm late meeting her..."

This was one of those occasions where Harry would prefer not to break the rules, because taking a few extra minutes to get back to the square really wasn't worth missing dinner for three days. Especially if he was trying to do something Aunt Petunia would definitely want him to do, like get money to pay her back. (That was still no excuse for being late, since he should've left the bookshop earlier, but it did make the prospect of being punished for being late more annoying.) If she wouldn't help him, and quickly, he was going to have to ask for the key back and leave, and come back again some other day with that bus. Which, yes, obviously he was going to come back again anyway, but the optimal solution — the one which would provoke the least snide remarks about Harry spending the Dursleys' money — was to get the pounds back now.

The goblin gave him a very put-upon sigh, but scribbled something on a form, then dipped his key into an ink-bottle and pressed the tip of it against the paper, the ink sucked off to form — as Harry saw when she passed it to him — a complex, abstract design in a large box on the right-hand side of the page. This presumably identified his vault somehow, though the number from the key was written in beneath it as well. It authorised the withdrawal of a hundred galleons to be paid out in the form of three-hundred pounds and thirty-seven galleons, sixteen sickles, four knuts, with one galleon and twenty-five knuts retained as an exchange fee, just like this morning, and one galleon as a withdrawal fee. Harry wasn't sure whether that was a flat one galleon or one per cent of the money he was withdrawing, but he didn't really care — he had to go — so he just scribbled his name on the line with the 'X' and handed it back.

This time his copy of the receipt was stamped with a very official-looking stamp which said something Harry couldn't read in Gobbledygook and (he suspected) initialled by Firebloom — her real initials, obviously, not an English "F". She passed it to him along with his small pile of currency.

"Thank you, Firebloom," he said, giving her a much more genuine smile, and making what he thought was a pretty good attempt at saying her name? as he shoved the money into his bag.

Maybe not. She did roll her eyes at him. But she also gave him a less teeth-baring smile. "May you know beauty and prosperity in this time of peace between our clans."

...Yeah, Harry wasn't going to try to repeat that. Way too many weird clicky sounds. Instead he gave her a cheeky smirk. "Back atcha." Then, his eyes falling on the large clock behind the goblin, he added with a small yelp, "Sorry, I've got to go!"

He made it back to the yard behind the pub at four-eighteen — a.k.a., with just enough time to spare to yank off the shimmery, very eye-catching outer robe and shove it into his bag. The under-shirt and trousers looked a little weird, but like he might be taking some sort of ninja martial arts class, not like wizard-weird.

He didn't see the professor, which was just too bad for her, he wasn't planning on waiting around for her. If she wanted to talk to Aunt Petunia she could send a bloody letter — it wasn't, after all, as though the school didn't have their address. And he was glad he didn't, since he managed to reach Aunt Petunia and throw himself into the back seat of her car (with his enormous bag) just as a nearby clock started chiming the half-hour.

"Harry?"

"Yes, Aunt Petunia?" he panted.

"What the hell is that on your arm?"

...Shite. The wand-holster felt so natural there, he'd completely forgotten about it. "Er...weird fashion statement? I did get my key, hang on a second, I've got your money here," he added, changing the subject quickly, digging through the bag of wizarding money for the proper banknotes, and also swiftly untying the holster and dropping it in, out of sight and hopefully out of mind. "And if you get a letter from that Professor McGonagall about me being rude to her, it was only because she was rude first, and didn't want to give me my key because I sort of ditched the group because six hours is not enough time to get a whole new wardrobe and everything else on that list, especially not if I had to wait around for three other kids to get fitted and stuff too. No one got hurt, so it's fine, right?"

He quickly counted the notes to make sure he'd gotten them all before folding them over and handing them up to the front seat. Aunt Petunia tucked them into her handbag without a word.

"And it's not my fault they decided to wait for me when the letter said they wouldn't, and even if it were, half an hour is less time than I saved them by not going with them and making them wait while I got fitted for things." Honestly, with how long it had taken to find his wand he was pretty sure they would've had to leave him there and go on without him anyway, if they'd wanted to get done in any reasonable amount of time, even if they weren't going to little hole-in-the-wall shops hunting for bargains and haggling over every single thing.

He forced himself to stop talking, holding his breath as he waited for her response.

It was a sneer. "Oh, poor wizards, being slightly inconvenienced by their inability to follow through on their plans to leave promptly, regardless of whether you arrived on time. They've certainly inconvenienced me enough over the years. Serves the freakish flakes right, as far as I'm concerned. I hope she does write to me, I have a piece of my mind to give her over this whole bank-key business, anyway. I still think they should've mailed it to you with one of those dozens of letters, or better yet told us years ago you've a small bloody fortune hidden away under London. I can't believe they've been making us pay for your upkeep out of pocket all these years!" Harry let out the breath he was holding. Aunt Petunia ranting about the inconvenience of being stuck with Harry without so much as a by-your-leave was like Uncle Vernon ranting about people at work — safe, familiar ground. (She wasn't actually angry at Harry, she was angry at Dumbledore, and as far as Harry was concerned that was fine.) She huffed. "You got all your things? I'm not going to be asked to drive you up here again because you've forgotten magic socks, or some equally silly thing?"

"Well, magic socks seemed like a waste of money, but no. Er. No, I didn't get everything — I ran out of time and money before I got to textbooks. But," he added quickly, as her eyes narrowed at him in the mirror, "I got everything else, and also, no, I won't ask you to drive me up here again. I found out about public transportation, so I can come back for that stuff on my own, and I found out how you can write a letter to someone in their world, even if they don't have their own post forwarding set up. The only thing is, if you want them to send normal letters back you have to pay for the return postage, too."

"You have my attention," she said, shifting the car into gear, the danger of shrieking outrage apparently past.

Harry grinned. He'd just known she was going to like that.

Chapter Text

There was really very little reason for Harry to stay in Little Whinging after he officially found out about the magical world, especially since everyone — everyone who mattered, in this case just Harry and Aunt Petunia — agreed that he was perfectly capable of taking care of himself. Yes, the neighbours might talk if he just suddenly disappeared, and if he wasn't there Aunt Petunia would have to take care of the house all by herself, but they put it around that one of Harry's long-lost relatives on his father's side had recently made contact with them, and Harry would be staying with him from now on, and Aunt Petunia was going to have to take care of the house by herself when he went to school, anyway.

The neighbours were more than pleased to see him go, and since every day Harry and his Bag of Magic Shite were in the house was another day Dudley might stick his nose in something both Harry and Aunt Petunia would prefer he didn't (in his ongoing quest to prove that Harry was having him on about magic being very boring, really), losing his help around the house for a month was a small price to pay for his absence (and that of the Bag of Magic Shite). Harry, for his part, still couldn't practise magic at the Dursleys' house, which was definitely a thing he wanted to do now that he had a wand and spell books and stuff, so he was absolutely willing to rent a room in Charing for the rest of August. It took him a few days commuting in on the Knight Bus to figure out how to go about doing that, but by Wednesday he managed to find a boarding house tucked away between Diagon and the nicer end of Knockturn, on a side-street called Periwinkle Way which didn't seem too sketchy, and whose landlady was willing to overlook the fact that he was eleven so long as he paid each week in advance.

Freedom was, Harry found, rather a strange concept. Not having any responsibilities outside of taking care of himself was almost uncomfortable in the amount of free time it afforded him. The kitchenette in the room he was renting was really little more than the magic equivalent of a single ring burner and a sink with a single tap — he had to cast a fire-spell into a bowl beneath the little cooking grate, and a warming charm on the tap if he wanted hot water for washing up. Not that that was a problem. For one thing, simple little spells like that were well within his ability, once he found them in the book Odysseus found for him to go along with the Standard Book of Spells (Grade 1): Spelman's Comprehensive Compendium of Choice Charms — it was much older, but wasn't limited to just the things they'd be learning in lessons this year. And for another, there were enough restaurants in and around Diagon Alley that he could eat dinner at a different one every night the entire three and a half weeks he lived on Periwinkle Way.

He didn't, of course, he found a couple that were so good he just had to keep going back and trying different dishes, but the point was he didn't need to cook for himself. Or clean, really. He was a fairly tidy person when left to his own devices, without Dudders around to mess things up.

So the three weeks and three days before Harry was to take the train to Hogwarts passed in a happy blur of reading textbooks and history books; practising occlumency (though it was kind of hard to tell if he was doing it right without someone to test him) and simple spells; and hanging out around Diagon and Knockturn Alleys. Despite Odysseus's warnings, no one had given him any trouble in Knockturn. He'd remembered that he didn't want people to know he was the Harry Potter before he introduced himself to anyone else (given that everyone seemed to think he was a Black, he figured that was as good a pseudonym as any), and he didn't stand out as being too pretty or striking in the magical world, though he was pretty sure most of the witches and some of the wizards were using magic to make themselves look better. They definitely used magic to charm their hair different colours and make moving tattoos (which were wicked cool, Harry wanted one).

So Harry Black — presumed bastard son of Sirius Black and a muggle woman he'd had a one-night-stand with, who had just found out about magic (but was very obviously one of those Blacks, even if he was illegitimate and therefore didn't actually have access to more gold than Midas and hadn't been raised like a bloody toff) — had quickly become a familiar sight, poking around different shops — Borgin and Burke's was the best, they had some absolutely wicked cursed jewellery, and a hand of glory, and a reanimated budgie (like a zombie bird) — and chatting with proprietors and shop assistants who weren't busy and other shoppers and boarders at Missus Palmer's about the government and the fact that vampires existed and magic tattoos — just...whatever came up, really.

One of those things that just happened to come up, talking to a bloke who worked at a café, was possibly the coolest thing ever — magical duelling, fighting with magic, was a sport! There were other magical sports too, most of them played on brooms, which were also delightfully violent (they had these things called bludgers that flew around trying to knock people off their flying broomsticks), but compared to a sport where the entire point was fighting, quidditch sounded positively tame.

There were two big duelling gyms in Charing (big-ish — nothing in the magical world was really big, they had a couple dozen serious members each), affiliated with the International Duelling League. They held a major tournament in the last week of the summer, with League Standard kids' and adults' divisions, meaning they followed the IDL's rules, and a non-Standard, totally unofficial, no-holds-barred, after-hours tournament at a place in Knockturn called Morgenstern's. (Harry couldn't get in to watch, unfortunately, but he was sure it was even more awesome than just normal duelling.) The official tournament was open to anyone to participate, and people could pay to watch.

Harry wasn't stupid enough to try entering, since he only knew about thirty spells, which he'd learned from books over the week and a half between his first trip to Charing and finding out about the tournament, but he honestly couldn't think of anything that would keep him from going to watch. (Next year, though...) The last week of the summer, therefore, was split between watching the tournament with wide-eyed, childish glee (his favourite was a witch called Nymphadora Tonks who'd entered independently, meaning she wasn't a member of either of the Charing gyms — she lost in the official final to a grizzled old warlock, but Harry overheard her later daring him to meet her at Morgenstern's sometime and she'd kick his arse) and haunting various bookshops looking for the spells he'd seen used.

Not just Odysseus's — Odysseus wasn't actually a wizard, Harry didn't think, and he definitely wasn't a fighter. He couldn't help Harry find information on, say, a curse that caused massive slashing wounds but also cauterised them so the other guy wouldn't bleed out, and felt like rage and destruction and the triumphant screech of a predatory bird when it was cast, just based on Harry's description. He could show Harry books full of illegal curses he wouldn't find anywhere else, but since the tournament was official and followed IDL rules, everything they were throwing around had to be legal. There were a few other bookshops around, though — Flourish and Blott's and Inkheart's were the two big ones (again, big-ish) — that had shopkeepers and assistants with more experience with that sort of thing.

One of the witches at Inkheart's had recognised Harry from the tournament — apparently she'd seen him there, though he hadn't noticed her — and put it together pretty quickly that those were the curses he was looking for. She was the one who pointed out that there were official dictionaries of curses that Duelling League judges used as a reference, and showed him how to look up specific spells by their effects. He still had to find other books with those spells in them, but having names to reference made that much easier. All of them were well beyond the ability of a barely eleven-year-old wizard with no formal training at all, but that didn't stop Harry buying at least a dozen different books full of curses he definitely wanted to learn as soon as he actually could. (He had money now, he might as well spend some of it.)

All in all, those three and a half weeks were easily the most interesting Harry had ever had and, accordingly, they seemed to fly by. It seemed like no time at all before he woke up and it was the First of September, and he had to go catch a train.

The Hogwarts Express left from a magical platform at King's Cross. According to a bloke who didn't go to Hogwarts (he went to a day school somewhere in the Midlands) but returned trollies to the muggle side of the platform for pocket money over the summer and on weekends, the Hogwarts Express wasn't the only magical train. A lot of people who hated the way the Knight Bus lurched around and couldn't apparate, or had a lot of luggage that couldn't be shrunken for one reason or another, used trains. Especially if they were going to Ireland or Brittany, in France — apparently the floo (fire-travel) didn't work across water. Of course, trains traditionally wouldn't either (they actually ran under the water), but magic.

It was the only train running this morning, though, and according to Gary — who Harry had met a few days ago, scoping out the platform so he wouldn't be late today — this was one of the busiest days of the year. He'd warned Harry that he probably wouldn't have time to talk today if Harry managed to find him. Harry came in on foot through the muggle station and actually made it about fifteen minutes early — just enough time to find a seat, after most people had arrived...or so he had expected.

As it turned out, most people seemed to be apparating or using the floo or something called "port-keys" to get onto the platform. The port-key people had been coming in every few minutes for a while, he thought, but it seemed everyone else had also thought that fifteen minutes sounded like plenty of time to board the train. The fireplaces people were flooing to were a constant rush of green flames, one mage practically tripping over the last, and Harry actually saw a wizard apparate on top of a witch who was too slow getting out of the Arrival Box. (There was an area set aside specifically for apparating to, to prevent exactly that sort of accident.) Two more people — a mother and daughter — popped out of nowhere to trip over those two before they could get up, like some sort of slapstick routine.

Harry hung back, enjoying watching the chaos, but also waiting until most of them were already on board. He'd planned to get here after the rush so he would be able to choose who he sat with, rather than taking a compartment and then being stuck with whoever decided to sit with him. He didn't, for example, want to get stuck with that witch Molly's family for the entire trip.

They were one of the few clearly magical families who came in from the muggle station — just a few minutes after Harry, so he noticed them right away. There was an older boy with them this time, who wasted no time disappearing off to the loo to change into his robes, reappearing before the twins escaped their mother's smothering farewells and ran off to find their friends with a shiny prefect's badge pinned to his chest. Ron, the youngest boy, was not so lucky, and only escaped her clutching embrace when the warning whistle sounded.

Harry made sure to board several cars away. He wasn't in the mood for more teasing about Harry (or Harriet) Harrison, or to listen to Ron's whinging. It was, of course, possible that without his mother there the younger boy wouldn't bother complaining about shite none of them could change, but somehow Harry doubted it. He also ducked past a compartment with a bunch of girls who looked about his age when he saw the distinctive bushy hair of the girl who had been so furious with him for delaying the Muggleborn Shopping Trip. Not that he wasn't in the mood to argue with someone about nothing in particular (Harry was always up for a good shouting match), but he doubted it would make a good first impression on anyone else in the compartment.

After that, there were a few older boys and a very uncomfortable-looking firstie who hadn't been smart enough not to take a seat right away; a compartment of mixed age kids, some of whom were clearly siblings, chatting animatedly, Harry was betting they already knew each other; a bunch of girls who were maybe first- or second-years and gave off such an air of snootiness he almost wanted to join them just to ruin their day; and a bunch of older kids sharing photos, probably from their holidays. Finally he came to a compartment that was only half-full, with three other boys who were probably also firsties — from magical families, they were already wearing robes — and seemed to know each other, but weren't really talking. One of them was reading, and one seemed to be drawing the third, who was playing with a little black kitten. Or...something that looked like a kitten, at least. It didn't really feel like one, magically, though not in the same way as the not-cat Harry had disposed of for Mrs. Figg.

Harry found a loo to change into his own school robes, before coming back to knock lightly on the door and slide it open with a friendly little half-smile stuck firmly in place. "Mind if I join you?"

The boy with the sketchbook looked up, startled. "Um, Blaise?"

"It's fine, Danny. He's still on the leash. Otherwise he'd probably look like your mum burning your sketchbook or something." He smirked at the messy-haired artist, oblivious to Harry's confusion.

"Oh, piss off, do you want me to draw you or not?"

"You love drawing me, don't lie."

"You love the attention, don't lie."

"Come on in," the boy with the book said, giving his friends an exasperated glare. "I'm Theo Nott. These rude wankers are Danny Tonks—" He nodded at the artist. ("Hi.") "—and Blaise Zabini."

The not-kitten hopped up to the other boy's shoulder to stare at Harry. "Yeah, come in, have a seat. I could use some company, since these two might as well be on Mars most of the time."

Danny stuck his tongue out at him. Theo just rolled his eyes.

"Harry Black," Harry said, more out of habit than because he didn't want them to know who he was. He didn't imagine the professors would be willing to call him Black, they'd find out soon enough anyway.

When he turned back from heaving his bag up into the storage space and fell onto the bench beside Blaise, the dark-skinned boy was giving him an odd look. Were those orange flecks in his caramel-coloured eyes? (Harry knew he wasn't the only wizard with inhumanly-coloured eyes...) "Who the heck lies about their name?"

Danny laughed. "Didn't Dora tell you she didn't have a first name the first time you met? Besides, he looks like a Black to me. Didn't know I had another cousin, but." He shrugged.

"Yeah, well, you need to work on your legilimency, mate."

"Wait, you read my mind?" Shite. Harry hadn't even noticed. Maybe he wasn't doing the occlumency thing right at all. He'd thought he was getting the hang of it, being aware of his own mind and manipulating his own perception. Right now he was deliberately not paying attention to how every inch of the bloody train was glowing with magic, or he was sure he'd have a headache almost as bad as in Ollivander's shop. "Why don't you know who I am, then?"

"No, I just know what habitual deception feels like." Well, that was clear as mud. "So who are you really, and why are you in the habit of lying about it?"

"I'll tell you if you tell me what's up with the not-cat," he said, nodding at the thing still glaring at him from the boy's shoulder.

"Coco? He's a boggart. Shape-shifting minor demon. They feed on fear, change into whatever scares you the most to get you to emote." Right, that explained his comment earlier about Danny's mum... "They're not really sapient, though they can imitate people based on your memories. He's under a binding curse right now, because it'd be annoying if he kept turning into a giant spider or whatever as people walk through the corridor."

"Also, cats are on the list of approved familiars, fear demons aren't," Danny added drily.

"Yes, that too. Your turn, mystery boy."

"Okay, first, that is so freaking cool! Best pet ever!" Blaise grinned. Danny rolled his eyes. Theo had returned to his book and was apparently ignoring them all. "I've been lying about my name for the past few weeks because I've been staying in Charing — I was raised by muggles, I can't do magic at my aunt's house and she doesn't want my cousin exposed to it too much, so we agreed there was no reason for me not to move out — and every second person I've met just assumed I'm this bloke Sirius's bastard son, and I was warned that people might freak out if they knew I'm really Harry Potter, so I've just been going along with it."

All three of them just sort of blinked at Harry for a long second. Then Danny said, "Well, you might be Sirius's son. Supposedly he and James Potter were really close. It wouldn't be that weird if they and your mum were secretly a triad."

Harry wasn't sure whether the lack of reaction to the Harry Potter thing was because he'd just implied he didn't want people to make a big deal out of it or because Professor Snape had exaggerated the degree of completely absurd hero-worship people felt for him, but he was beginning to think it was the latter. Odysseus and the Ollivanders hadn't freaked out either, after all.

Also, he'd kind of been assuming that Lily had cheated on James. He hadn't missed the fact that Danny just made it sound like James and Sirius had been a thing. Which wasn't weird in the magical world, or not nearly as much as in the muggle world. Harry had met a couple of homos at Missus Palmer's, and they'd been perfectly nice, normal blokes, aside from living together instead of getting married to witches. He really didn't see what Uncle Vernon's problem with them was. (He was aware that he probably didn't get it because he was a sissy freak himself, but still...) But he was pretty sure that James and Sirius and Lily as a couple of three — that was presumably what a triad was — would be weird here, too.

"Weird, no," Blaise said, grining. "Scandalous, yes. Though it makes it even weirder that he supposedly betrayed them. I'll ask Mira next time I write her. Seems like the sort of thing she would know."

"Supposedly?" Harry repeated, because that was the first he'd heard anyone doubt that Sirius Black had betrayed his parents. As far as he'd managed to piece together, asking various people about the end of the war, all the Blacks except Sirius had openly been on the Dark Lord's side.

That Bella Black Odysseus had mentioned, the one who was probably still the most dangerous witch in Britain even after ten years sitting in prison with soul-sucking monsters — Magical Britain didn't screw around on punishments, Harry was being very careful not to get caught any time he did something he knew was illegal, like reading that occlumency book — had actually been the Dark Lady, and opinions on the attempted Dark Revolution were mixed among the common people who hadn't had much to do with it. The poorer people were, the better their opinion of the Death Eaters tended to be, but some of the really poor, non-human people sort of hated them for failing because they'd thought they'd be better off in a world run by the Dark Lord (they just hated the Light, who were currently in power, more), and the more comfortable people were the more it had bothered them that the Death Eaters had upset the status quo.

Plus there was that whole killing muggleborns thing they'd been sort of notorious for. The more sympathetic people basically said it had nothing to do with them — they didn't want all the muggleborns dead, but they had their own problems, so who gives a shite how the Death Eaters go about provoking the Ministry as long as they're not burning down our homes, we don't care. Besides, just because the Dark Lord lost his mind at the end didn't mean the cause was a bad one. The less sympathetic people — especially those who had had friends or family who were muggleborn, or who were muggleborn themselves — generally used the term "genocidal maniacs" to describe them.

As for what people knew about how the war ended, James and Lily had been fighting on the Light side. James was an auror and Lily sort of a notorious front-line, battlefield healer. "Notorious" because she had a habit, apparently, of losing her shite in the middle of battles and calling on bloody gods to slaughter people or raise the dead or all sorts of neat shite that really didn't fit with the way people talked about her in the Harry Potter Myth.

The Harry Potter Myth was sort of weird. Everyone agreed that Harry's parents had been in hiding in a magical enclave called Godric's Hollow, and the Dark Lord had managed to track them down (with intelligence provided by Sirius Black). According to a forensics report that had been leaked early in Nineteen Eighty-Two, he killed James first. Lily tried to run with Harry, and was killed in an upstairs bedroom. Then he had tried to kill Harry, but his spell backfired or was somehow blocked. It had completely destroyed the Dark Lord's body, and tore the roof off half the bloody house. Baby Harry and Lily's body were fine, though, because it wouldn't be nearly as good a story if they'd also been blown up.

According to random, normal, daylighter-type people (average shopkeepers and so on— the respectable Aunt Petunias and Uncle Vernons of the magical world who made up the majority of the Diagon Alley area, whose version of the story Professor Snape had told him, with much sarcasm) who didn't know much about the Potters or magical theory, Lily had supposedly sacrificed herself to save him, her motherly love somehow miraculously allowing him to survive being hit with the darkest of curses: the Unforgivable Killing Curse, avada kedavra. Either that or Harry, being completely pure and innocent and therefore inherently light, somehow managed to survive it all on his own. Obviously that was total bull. Harry was sure loads of babies had been killed with that curse, people would know if you could just, like, walk around with a baby strapped to your chest as a Killing Curse shield. Most of the people who had told him that were not-so-subtle anti-muggleborn racists, so he figured they just didn't want to give Lily credit.

The poorest of poor people — Starlighters, they called themselves — on the outskirts of society, who didn't have much use for newspapers and the official story and leaked reports, generally thought that Lily had done some crazy ritual magic to save Harry and destroy the Dark Lord, possibly killing herself in the process. They were the ones who'd told Harry that back in the war, when it was happening, she'd had sort of a bad reputation for being into high magic. (Magic where you just asked gods nicely to do things for you was apparently super illegal, even if you were one of the 'good' guys. Also, gods were apparently real.) People who read the papers and shite seemed to have forgotten, somehow, that she had once raised the bloody dead in the middle of a battle in Diagon Alley and ordered them to kill for her, but there were Starlighters who'd been there, who hadn't been able to get away before the fighting started, and they knew what they'd seen.

And the Underground — the community of dark mages and criminals who made up about half of the population of the Knockturn area of Charing, and knew a thing or two about using dark magic (Harry was fairly sure that was the group Professor Snape would belong to, if he weren't a professor) — was absolutely certain Lily had done some crazy ritual magic. According to Odysseus — who, as it turned out, was sort of the most respectable of the Underground mages, and their main connection to other "International Dark" enclaves outside of Britain — the Killing Curse was Unforgivable because it couldn't be blocked with magic (though it could be blocked by solid, conjured objects "of sufficient mass") or healed. It wasn't even that dark, according to Odysseus, not like the other two Unforgivable Curses. But it was soul magic, which apparently made it scarier. In any case, the Power of Love absolutely would not counter it. (An old-fashioned, fairy-tale style tynged cast with her last breath, dooming the Dark Lord to have the next spell he cast backfire, on the other hand...) And even the most racist of the dark wizards had to admit that Lily must have done something because, as Mister Burke from the cool little dark curiosities shop said, all that would happen if Harry Potter really was some miraculous embodiment of light magic at the age of one was that getting hit with something as dark and powerful as the Killing Curse would have hurt like hell and killed him.

In any case, rational people who knew anything about dark magic didn't think Harry had really had anything to do with the Dark Lord's disappearance, but there seemed to be a startling lack of awareness of that fact among the general public, who inexplicably thought that Lily was a saint and Harry Potter was like...wizard Jesus, or something. Or like a phoenix or a unicorn, some rare light creature too good and pure to really just be a normal human person. (Which was absolutely hilarious, because while Harry clearly was a freak, even among freaks, one of the things he had discovered over the course of the past few weeks was that he really liked dark magic. Like...a lot.)

Both James and Lily were part of some vigilante group run by Dumbledore (who was also the Headmaster of Hogwarts, the head of Magic Parliament, and their representative to the Magic UN, because there was apparently no hat he didn't wear). That was what Snape had been referring to when he said Lily put herself in the line of fire. Lily went into hiding a few months after she got pregnant, and stayed in hiding for some unknown reason after Harry was born, though James had apparated in to the Auror Office for work. Harry personally thought it was weird Lily hadn't handed him off to a friend or relative who wasn't fighting in the war and gotten back to it, especially since, from everything Aunt Petunia had said about Lily, Harry couldn't imagine she'd really been the maternal type, but most people seemed to think staying in hiding for fifteen months with a newborn, only seeing your spouse and a few very close friends, was perfectly reasonable behaviour.

One of those few very close friends had been Sirius Black.

The general public opinion of Sirius Black was that he was a bloody nut job. Some of them, thinking Harry was his son, had tried to soften that opinion a bit, but it was still bloody obvious. No one Harry had talked to knew him personally, but the papers had crucified him before any of the Death Eater Trials started, first just as having cracked under the pressures of war and killed all his friends for no reason at all and then because he was supposedly a spy for the Dark Lord all along. Harry sincerely doubted anyone as unstable as people seemed to think Sirius was would have been able to trick everyone into believing he'd been on the side of the Light if he really wasn't, but there were eye-witness accounts of him blowing up a street in Edinburgh to kill a bloke called Peter Pettigrew who accused him of betraying the Potters, and he hadn't denied it. (And even if he had, he was sort of caught red-handed killing Pettigrew and about a dozen bystanders, so he'd still be in prison for that anyway.)

Harry, knowing that he was (probably) Sirius's kid, figured maybe that had something to do with it — if this was a true-crimes show on telly, it definitely would. Lady's lover kills her and her husband because she refuses to leave said husband even after it comes out that her kid belongs to the lover, or something like that. Granted, if he were going to murder someone he thought he'd do it himself, not tell someone else who had it out for them where they were staying, but maybe that was just him. He'd also considered that if Lily had actually been trying to bait the Dark Lord into a trap, she might've told Sirius to tell him where they were staying. That seemed like something she would do, based on shite Aunt Petunia had told him about her. (Though Harry admittedly didn't know how Pettigrew would fit into that scenario.)

In any case, nothing Harry had heard up to this point suggested that Sirius hadn't really betrayed (or 'betrayed') the Potters by telling the Dark Lord where they were.

Danny sighed. "My mum and Lady Zabini were...sort of in a unique position in the war. My mum was the Blackheart's younger sister—" The Dark Lady's younger sister, that was — cool nicknames apparently went along with being the most dangerous witch in Britain. "—before she disowned the House of Black and ran away to marry Dad, and Lady Zabini..." His eyes flicked over to Blaise, who grinned.

"Mira and Bellatrix were adorable schoolgirl lesbians back in the day," he said, failing miserably as he tried not to laugh at the shocked expression on Harry's face. Homos (and presumably dykes) might be more accepted in the magical world, but Harry still didn't expect people to just come out and say things like that. Also, he'd been under the impression that Mira was Blaise's mother. If she fancied ladies, how did that work?

And adorable? The Dark Lady. Adorable. Not a word anyone else Harry had spoken to would use to describe her, but okay...

"Mira wasn't really involved in the war, but she was close to the Blacks, especially Bella's sisters and closest cousins. Including Sirius. He's about ten years younger than her, I think, and she didn't see much of him after he became a blood traitor and ran away to live with his godmother when he was...fifteen or sixteen? But anyway, she never believed he betrayed James and Lily. According to Mira, Sirius loved James. He loved James like Bella loved de Mort—" ("The Dark Lord," Theo inserted without looking up from his book.) "—and was about as likely to betray him."

"And if he had, he definitely would have killed them himself," Danny added. "Mum's theory is that Pettigrew bloke betrayed them, so Sirius hunted him down and executed him with a typical House of Black degree of restraint. Er— The whole House is a bit mental. They're kind of notorious for it." Harry snorted. He was aware. "He definitely wasn't a Death Eater, though. Theo's father was, and he's confirmed that."

Theo apparently had no comment on that — though perhaps compared to Blaise claiming that his mother had been schoolgirl lesbians with the Dark Lady, just having a parent in the organisation wasn't really shocking.

"And, if he had a kid with Lily there's absolutely no way he would've pointed Old Snakeface at them," Blaise added. "Family is sort of a big deal with the House of Black. They brainwashed all the kids to put their family before themselves. Sirius was estranged from the Family, sure, but you can tell talking to Missus Tonks the brainwashing sticks, even decades after disowning them. If he'd started a family with Lily and James, there's no way in hell he would have betrayed them. Mira wouldn't have been in a position to know who the father of Lily's kid was, but she probably would know if the three of them were a thing."

"Lady Zabini's sort of scarily good at people," Danny agreed. "And she takes an interest in Bella's kids — Bellatrix practically raised Mum, and Narcissa, Sirius, and Regulus — Sirius's brother, he died in the war — sort of treats them like her own younger siblings." He grinned. "It drives Draco bonkers."

"Draco?"

"Draco Malfoy," Blaise said, putting on an overly-affected posh tone. "Son of Lord Lucius Malfoy and Lady Narcissa Malfoy née Black, Heir to the Noble House of Malfoy...and all around spoilt brat," he added, reverting to his normal voice. "Cissa doesn't particularly like Mira sticking her nose in and offering opinions she doesn't want to hear, and Draco hates me. Can't imagine why... Oh! Call on the Dark!" he added, as a blond boy slid the compartment door open without knocking. "Draco, darling, we were just talking about you!"

He sneered. "Funny, Zabini, I never talk about you. I suppose I am more interesting than you, though, so perhaps your girlish gossiping is only to be expected."

Blaise put on a vapid smile and fluttered his eyelashes at the blond, who went very pink. "Oh, yes, Draco, darling, you know I find you just fascinating."

"Knock it off, Blaise," Danny said, though he was clearly trying not to laugh. Harry didn't really bother trying. "What's up, Draco?"

"I don't recall inviting you to be informal with me, Tonks," Draco said stiffly.

"Dora says no one stands on formality at school. If you do, you're going to come off as a prick. Her words."

"I can't believe mother didn't let me go to Durmstrang," the noble brat muttered. "I hear they don't let in the riff-raff over there."

Blaise nodded very seriously. "Yes, that's true. Though they have a somewhat different definition of 'riff-raff' — I suspect she used the Hogwarts treaty and the fact that Igor Karkaroff is an untrustworthy turncoat to spare you the embarrassment of failing their entrance exam. Besides, you don't speak Danish," he added, as the blond went even redder.

"They hold lessons in French," Theo informed them. "Did you want something, Malfoy?"

"I was coming to ask whether Tonks found someone to smuggle in that pathetic old Thunderbolt of his or whether he'd be riding the even more pathetic school brooms this year, but now I think I'll just advise you to find better friends, Nott. What on earth would your father think, associating with up-jumped common bastards and half-bloods, and— Well, honestly, I've no idea who this girl is," he drawled, turning to Harry, "but I've never seen you before, so you can't be anyone important."

"Nope," Harry said cheerfully, more than willing to let this kid be completely embarrassed when he finally realised who Harry was. "Harry Harrison. Just found out about this whole Magical Britain a few weeks ago, you know. So, your family's nobility? Is there a magical king to grant that sort of title, or...?" He knew there wasn't — it was a self-assumed title that meant their family had a seat in the Magic Parliament, like 'Lord' Potter. They were all hereditary seats, basically like the House of Lords, so it hadn't struck Harry as all that odd they just decided to call themselves lords and ladies.

Danny looked like he might hurt himself trying not to laugh at the horror and disgust on Draco's face. He turned back to Theo. "You're associating with mudbloods?!"

"Hey!" Danny snapped, all humour gone in an instant.

"You kiss your mother with that mouth?" Blaise added lightly.

"What sort of insult is 'mudblood'?" Harry wondered aloud. He'd heard it a few times from the more racist wizards around Charing when they realised he'd been raised by muggles, and after a few days, when he could carry on a conversation without giving that away immediately, directed against some hypothetical mages who were dragging society down, much like Uncle Vernon's "bloody hoodlums". Every time, it just sounded sort of...silly, honestly. Not unlike calling someone a dirty cow. Maybe not nice, but sort of...childish, really. It made sense that Draco would use it, but he knew adult wizards used it too, so he still found it a bit odd.

Danny explained, still glowering at Draco. "It means you're...polluted by your upbringing and being related to muggles. That being a mundane, mud-grubbing peasant is in your blood, you'll never be a real mage."

"Ah. In that case, I'll have you know that the Harrisons are a proud line of hard-working factory labourers and mechanics," he said pleasantly, one-hundred per cent just making shite up now. He honestly had no idea what Aunt Petunia's mother's father had done for a living. "Peasants, yes, but city peasants, not rural peasants. There's a distinction — I wouldn't expect you to get it." He put just the slightest hint of disdain behind you, as though all the Malfoys' wealth and influence and their fancy title meant nothing, because they'd never done a hard day of real work in their lives.

Draco absolutely could not tell if Harry was taking the piss, which was almost funnier than the piss-taking itself, and the fact that Danny started choking, trying to disguise a laugh as a cough. (Theo and Blaise were much better at keeping straight faces.) He just sort of gaped at Harry for almost five whole seconds, then stuttered, "I— You— What?! You're not supposed to—"

Theo cut off whatever protest Draco might have against Harry not being properly insulted. "Danny and Blaise have been familiarising Harry with some of the more important points of recent history, vis-à-vis the end of the War and the subsequent establishment of the Truce, of which I'm sure you're aware." Harry wasn't. He was going to have to ask about that after Draco left. "I have been doing my utmost to ignore all references to Lady Zabini's relationship with your beloved aunt and focus on my book, but the universe appears to be conspiring against me. Feel free to tell your father to tell my father I've committed the grievous crime of being caught in the same compartment as a muggleborn, if you must. Just know that running off to Daddy every time one of your peers acts in a way you don't approve of makes you look like even more of a prick than insisting on being called young Mister Malfoy by other eleven-year-olds."

Draco might have been annoyed to essentially be called out as a tattler, but Harry had the impression he wasn't really paying attention, as Blaise's 'kitten', which had been curled up in an adorable little ball of malevolence in the corner behind Blaise, yawned and stretched, hopping off the bench and padding toward the blond still standing in the doorway (and Harry, whose seat was closer to the door), growing larger and more threatening as it did so, a low growl trickling out of its throat. (That was so freaking cool!) Draco, despite his best efforts, was not able to conceal the way his hands were trembling, or the quaver in his voice when he snapped, "Damn it, Zabini! You brought your bloody boggart with you?! Call it off!"

"Of course I brought him. He gets lonely without me. And why would I do that? You've been very rude to my new friend, fratellino, and Theo is more than capable of deciding for himself whose company he wishes to keep. If Cadmus has a problem with his associating with an up-jumped commoner, I'm sure Mira will be willing to reveal his hypocrisy to everyone else who cares about such things. Her reputation certainly won't suffer."

Draco's eyes narrowed. "Are you saying...?"

"I"m not saying anything," Blaise said, with a very sharp smile. "And neither are you, are you? Run along now, and find some children who can actually be intimidated by your name and your blustering to bother. You've worn out your welcome here."

"Fine, I'm going! But I'm definitely telling Professor Snape you've brought a thrice-cursed boggart to school! You won't get away with it!"

Blaise snorted. "You do that." The boggart, now panther-sized and taking up most of the floor-space, lunged at the intruder, stopping short of actually touching him, but teeth close enough to his face to make him flinch back. "Bye, now."

Chapter Text

"Fine, I'm going! But I'm definitely telling Professor Snape you've brought a thrice-cursed boggart to school! You won't get away with it!"

Blaise snorted. "You do that." The boggart, now panther-sized and taking up most of the floor-space, lunged at the intruder, stopping short of actually touching him, but teeth close enough to his face to make him flinch back. "Bye, now."

Draco slammed the sliding door so hard that it bounced half-way open again, in time for Harry to see him stalking away down the corridor, presumably back to his own compartment. The boggart briefly turned into a little gremlin-like creature to latch it, before popping back into the form of a cat and, to all appearances, going back to sleep on the seat between Harry and Blaise. Harry surreptitiously tried to pet it, only to find that it wasn't entirely tangible — sort of like cold, dark magic condensed not just into a spell, but enough that it was partially solid. Rather...squishy, like Harry imagined a jellyfish might be. Not entirely unpleasant, but not the sort of creature one would generally stroke, in spite of appearances. It didn't seem to notice Harry's fingers, and probably couldn't have actually bitten Draco. Blaise, on the other hand, clearly did notice Harry attempting to bother his awesome pet demon, and was equally clearly amused.

He was about to say something, Harry thought, when Theo preemptively interrupted with a deliberately bland, bored-sounding drawl. "His hatred of you truly is a mystery, Blaise."

"He might hate Harry more, when he realises he's actually Harry Potter," Danny said, giggling like a madman. "He just— You can't be anyone important..."

"As far as I'm concerned, I'm not," Harry informed him. "Lily sounds kind of awesome, but I'm pretty freaking sure I didn't do anything to survive back in Eighty-One, so." He shrugged. "What's this Truce thing Theo oh-so-significantly mentioned?"

"Oh, well," Blaise said, grinning. "It's nothing official, because if it were that would be tantamount to acknowledging that Bellatrix and the Death Eaters were an autonomous power — they were, the actual government just can't admit it — but unofficially, after the Dark Lord was vanquished— You know he's not really dead, right?"

Harry nodded. He wasn't sure how people knew that, but the general consensus was that he'd be back sooner or later, somehow.

"Right, well, after Lily blew him up — and I'd like you two to take note, I'm not the only person who calls their mother by her given name—"

Danny rolled his eyes. "You're still a bloody weirdo. Lady Potter's dead, Harry doesn't know her, I'm pretty sure that makes a difference."

"Whatever. Anyway, after Lily blew up Old Snakeface, Bellatrix sort of had a mental breakdown. She tried to keep the war going for a couple of weeks, while most of the more sane and influential Death Eaters started preparing their defence and trying to distance themselves or literally getting the hell out of Britain and the ICW states entirely. She was eventually caught trying to torture information out of some of your parents' allies — trying to find out what Lily had done to the Dark Lord, because she knew he wasn't dead — but they didn't know anything. When the aurors showed up to take her in she went quietly, but she refused to cooperate with a trial — they really wanted a public trial for her, to delegitimise the Death Eaters as a whole and make it clear to anyone still resisting that it was bloody well over. Mira talked her into it, in exchange for certain terms.

"Every alleged Death Eater was guaranteed a trial and prisoners, including Bellatrix, couldn't be killed. In exchange, Bellatrix would stand trial and accept a life-sentence in Azkaban which, on the one hand, is generally considered a fate worse than death, but on the other hand means that if the Light doesn't abide by the Truce she can break out and pick the war up again. Mira visits her regularly to assure her that the Truce is being maintained. She likely wouldn't be allowed to visit and tell Bellatrix to break out, but that just means that keeping her from visiting is as good a signal that the Truce is dead as anything. The Light — the Ministry — agreed to the Truce because the ruling class of Magical Britain was completely decimated by the War, and would literally not be able to function if we didn't have some sort of agreement, and to letting Mira visit Bellatrix because they considered that a silly, sentimental request by a flighty girl in over her head with these negotiations, still holding out hope that her one-time lover's sanity was recoverable. They absolutely did not believe that Bellatrix would still be sane and therefore a credible potential threat almost ten years later — most people don't last two years in Azkaban before they're so miserable and apathetic they starve to death."

...Well that was horrifying. Harry resolved to be even more careful not to get caught breaking the law in Magical Britain. "So, what does that have to do with us, exactly? And Darling Draco?"

"We don't talk about things that happened in the War," Theo said abruptly. "At Hogwarts, kids from Death Eater families, like the Notts and the Malfoys, can't bully muggleborns for being muggleborn, including going around calling them mudbloods. Kids from Light families can't go around insisting that Death Eaters who were exonerated somehow faked evidence or bribed people to get off. People can't try to hold kids accountable for the crimes their parents and uncles and cousins committed. It's pretty generally recognised that the Death Eaters were in the wrong and started the whole war, and there are a lot of families who believe men like Malfoy's father and mine escaped justice for their actions in the war, claiming they were compelled to fight for the Dark Lord. If anyone breaks the Truce, everyone on both sides is supposed to come down against them, because the only way for us to move on as a society is to move on, not get caught up in decades- or centuries-long blood feuds over who killed whose uncle in the Seventies, and whether those deaths were justified under the circumstances."

"Your very existence is sort of a hot-button issue," Danny noted, in case Harry didn't realise that, presumably. He definitely did, though. "What with the whole Boy Who Lived thing. If I were you, I'd just try to avoid stating anything like an opinion on anything to do with the war. And probably also don't mention everyone thinking you're Sirius Black's kid? I mean, I can see how people would think so, especially since it'd be much more likely that he sired some bastard who's now running around Charing unsupervised than it would be to see Harry Potter, Boy Who Lived, living on his own. But James Potter and Sirius Black didn't really look that different from each other. If people are expecting to see a Potter looking at you, they'll probably see a Potter."

"A Potter who got phenomenally lucky in the hair department," Blaise noted. "If you ever see a picture of James Potter, his was even worse than Danny's, here." He grinned, leaning across the compartment to tousle the artist's dark, already-untidy hair.

Danny batted his hand away. "Piss off, wanker. My hair is fine."

"Yeah, if you're going for the absent-minded artist look." Blaise grinned at the annoyance on his friend's face, eyes scrunched into a glare behind his John Lennon-esque glasses, lips twisting into an entirely unthreatening pout.

"Professor Snape noticed right away," Harry said, heading off their impending squabble.

"Probably because your magic is already attuned to the Dark," Theo said. "That's something the Blacks were really known for, and Snape's a legilimens, he'd be more sensitive to it than most people, so he'd think to look a little harder and maybe ask himself if you might have a little more magic in your blood than the average person." In response to Harry's blank stare, he added, "You know, if you move a little quicker and more gracefully than most people, or you can see patterns in ambient magic and you're unnaturally quick picking up spells, or there's something a little off about you, like thinking a bloody boggart is a cool pet."

"Don't listen to him, Coco," Blaise cooed at the creature, now curled up again between Blaise's leg and the outer wall of the train, looking less like a cat and more like a small puddle of magic and darkness with cat ears and eyes glaring out of it. "You are the coolest of pets."

Theo rolled his eyes. "There's something wrong with you, Zabini..."

The artist in the room sniggered. "Yeah, he'd fit right in with Mum's family, from what I've heard. I really wouldn't worry about it, though, Harry. Like I said, people will be expecting a Potter when they look at you. Sirius was obviously closer to the heart of the Blacks than James Potter — in looks and temperament — but James's mother was a Black. He and Sirius looked enough alike to be close cousins, if not brothers. Stand you next to a portrait of James, and it wouldn't be unbelievable you're his son."

Harry sighed. "Noted. So, just to be clear, seeing ambient magic isn't normal? Because these blokes I ran into in Diagon Alley said that magesight is a thing. And what's a normal rate for picking up spells?" Not having any frame of reference for what the average eleven-year-old wizard was capable of made it awfully difficult to avoid drawing attention to the fact that he was clearly a freak. "What about just sort of knowing things sometimes, like when the telephone's going to ring and how things are connected, and understanding words in languages you don't speak?" He never had gotten around to asking anyone if that was normal for mages.

The other three boys exchanged a look that said it probably wasn't, even before Blaise said, "That sounds sort of like being a Seer, precognition and intuition. It wouldn't be surprising if you got that from Lily — ritualists almost always turn out to have some degree of Sight, even if it's relatively small."

"Would explain the Blacks' sense of timing, though," Danny noted. "And the understanding foreign languages thing could be latent legilimency or omniglottalism. More likely legilimency, omniglottalism is much more rare."

"I think I would have noticed if he were a latent legilimens," Blaise said...in...

"Is that Italian?" Harry blinked, surprised to hear the words come out of his mouth in...whatever language that was. (Probably Italian. Something about it felt Mediterranean, and Zabini was an Italian name.)

Blaise laughed. "It was, yes. I'm going to say omniglot. That didn't feel like legilimency."

"O...kay... So that means...what?"

"You'll find it really, really easy to pick up languages and their cultural context if you learn them from a native speaker. I don't think it helps you just learn languages out of a book?" Theo said.

Danny shrugged. "No idea. I can ask Mum — she had to learn five languages as a kid, could be the Blacks expected shite like that because it was supposed to be way easier than it sounds."

"Or it could have been Druella being insane," Blaise suggested.

Danny shrugged again, then explained, "Mum's mother is a bloody genius history professor who may or may not be human and also may or may not know literally everything. Her standards were always impossibly high, and she apparently insists that anyone who can't meet them because they're not a genius magical prodigy is just lazy and there's nothing at all freakish or inhuman about her abilities, thankyouverymuch. I've never met her because Mum disowned her, but Blaise has. He says she's terrifying."

Blaise nodded. "I still like her better than Mira's actual parents, but yeah. And Mira says she's mellowed a lot since going into academia. Making her kids learn a bunch of languages because she thinks it's easy is definitely the sort of thing she'd do."

Theo weighed in with a shrug. "Most nobles have to learn three or four languages. The House of Nott does English, French, Latin, and Gobbledygook. Five isn't that unusual. Though most people aren't fluent in Gobbledygook, if they speak it at all, and a lot of people who aren't serious scholars never use Latin after they learn it. Anyway, Harry, a few seconds' precognition and the occasional intuition about things is pretty normal. Omniglottalism is rare, but not something the Blacks or Potters are known for, so wouldn't necessarily sway people's assumptions either way. Magesight — kenning the magic of active spells and enchantments, and sometimes the properties of latent energy in unactivated wards, that sort of thing — is something practically all of the Blacks had, but it's also a talent found in almost ten per cent of the population at large.

"Seeing ambient magic, like, just a fog of magic around yourself that isn't particularly doing anything, just existing, is considered a hypersensitivity problem. About five per cent of mages with magesight have that, enough that there are corrective charms to help filter it out of their perception. Seeing patterns in ambient magic — how it moves around other people and the way currents flow through a landscape — is not a thing humans can do unless they're possessed or, rumour has it, Bellatrix."

"And Bellatrix might not be human," Danny put in. "She is Dru's daughter, so."

Right, so Harry should probably not mention that it was really easy to spot mages because ambient magic acted differently around them. (Though if he'd gotten that from Sirius, it suggested it wasn't anything to do with Druella.) "And picking up spells?"

The boys exchanged another look, and various shrugs. "It sort of depends," Danny said.

"On...?"

"The difficulty of the spell, both in shaping complexity and initialisation energy required." Theo began counting off points on his fingers — that was two. "How long the caster has been practising magic and how many relatively similar spells they already know; whether the caster has been able to see it demonstrated; and... I know I'm forgetting one..."

"Magical alignment or polarisation," Danny reminded him. "Dark magic is easier for mages whose magic is attuned to the dark. Light magic is much harder. Most of the charms and stuff we'll be doing at school aren't polarised, though."

"Yeah, okay, but for someone who just started learning formal magic and is pretty much just learning them out of a book—" Harry had only seen a few of the spells he'd learned cast by someone else first. "—and not necessarily the practically useless shite in the Standard Book of Spells Grade One — I picked up a copy of Spelman's Comprehensive at a used bookstore, and that has a lot more useful stuff for living on your own, like heating charms and magically-sustained fire, and minor hexes and jinxes and shite— Give me a number, here."

A smile twitched at the corner of Blaise's lips. "Or you could tell us how many spells you've learned in the past month and how long it takes, and judge from our reactions whether that's reasonable."

Harry was almost certain their consensus would be that it was not reasonable, and from the smirk on Blaise's face, he knew it, too. But fine. "How many I've learned, like I have them memorised and could do them without the book and the incantation right in front of me? About fifty." Yeah, that look was definitely not a sure, Harry, totally reasonable sort of expression. Which was expected, but he still had no idea how unreasonable it was. "It takes maybe an hour and a half or two hours to figure out a new spell the first time, and a couple of weeks until I might have a good enough idea what the magic feels like when I'm casting to not need the words if it's one I use a lot, but I'm not sure those really count as mastering a new spell with silent casting, since all the ones I can do silently now are charm effects I could already do without a wand at all — summoning and repulsion, levitation, changing the colour or temperature of something, lighting a candle with mundane fire and so on.

"I was learning two or three new ones every day, and practising old ones for a few hours so I wouldn't forget them, but then I got distracted watching the Summer Duelling Championship and started focusing on matching the starting and ending wand-motions and syllables like the duellists — are you related to Nymphadora Tonks, by the way?" he asked Danny, ignoring the very intimidated looks he was getting from all three of them. "She's bloody brilliant. That two-stage shield-breaker piercing hex at the end of her last match was a cheap shot."

"Uh...yeah," he said, shaking himself out of whatever reverie all three of the wizard-raised wizards seemed to have fallen into. "She's my sister."

Harry felt his eyes grow very wide. "That. Is. Awesome. Did she say if she ever got that rematch at Morgenstern's?" He wanted to ask if Danny would introduce him, but didn't, because he was pretty sure that would come off as unnervingly fan-boy-ish, and since he was pretty sure Nymphadora Tonks was out of school it would probably be months until he had an opportunity, anyway.

"Um...no? I don't know, she's got her own flat now, and if Mum knew she was at Morgenstern's, she'd go spare. Wait, they didn't let you in there, did they?"

"No," Harry pouted. "'Fighters only. No lookie-loos,'" he said, imitating the bloke at the door. "Just heard her say something to that Horowitz bloke who ended up beating her, after."

"Oh, well, no, I don't know. I do know her S.A. took her to task because not recognising that last hex was a rookie mistake, and the fact that she is a rookie is no excuse."

"S.A.?"

"Senior Auror — she just finished their Certification course over the summer, barely finished the Practical in time to—"

"Excuse me," Blaise interrupted. "Can we get back on topic, here?"

Danny raised an eyebrow at him. "The topic is now Dora's general awesomeness. Keep up, Blaise."

"No, the topic is, what the hell even are you, Potter?"

Harry blinked at him for several long seconds, trying to come up with a witty response. The best he could find was, "The Boy Who Lived, or so they tell me."

Blaise just continued to give him that same, I'm dead serious look. "Uh-huh. And next, you're going to tell me that you learned occlumency out of a book at some point in the last month too."

"Well, no, I've been advised that admitting to getting my hands on any book I could have learned occlumency from would be a bad idea, because restricted literature, actual prison time, soul-sucking monsters, blah, blah, blah. Though, hey! If you can do that legilimency thing, you can tell me if I'm doing it right, right?" He grinned, fairly certain that none of the others were going to spread it around that Harry had been reading illegal books. Even Danny, with his auror sister. (It stood to reason that if Dora Tonks was the sort of auror who would go to Morgenstern's for a rematch, she probably didn't care about trivial little laws like underage book-reading.) Besides, he hadn't actually admitted it. He'd specifically said he wasn't.

"Yes," Blaise said shortly. "You're not controlling your emotions very firmly, and I could probably get in if I were really trying, but you'd definitely notice—" There was an odd jolt at the edge of Harry's awareness. He shook his head, trying to rid himself of the dizzying sensation of his mind wobbling like a jello mould which had just been firmly poked. "—and, to be perfectly honest, I'm not sure I want to know what the hell is on your mind."

"Mostly the awesomeness of Nymphadora Tonks, at the moment," Harry informed him, trying not to laugh. "Also a bunch of curses I looked up after seeing people use them in the tournament, but definitely can't cast yet. And wondering if there's a duelling team or club or something at Hogwarts, and if not how difficult it would be to start one, and whether it's feasible to combine duelling and edificeering into the world's best sport ever. Also, jello."

All three of them were staring again. Theo cleared his throat. "The number you were looking for, earlier, is two or three new spells per week. Maybe four, if you have a good tutor. Learning fifteen to twenty new spells in a week, out of a book, some of which are almost certainly outside what any eleven-year-old should be capable of casting — Summoning is a fourth-year charm, for example, most people don't have the channelling capacity to manage it before the age of thirteen or so at the earliest — let alone silently, that's a sixth-year topic — is absurd. It's the sort of thing you'd expect to hear a lying braggart like Draco say—"

"I'm not lying," Harry assured him, slightly offended.

"I didn't think you were. I'm just saying, no, that is not a realistic number of spells for any normal mage to have learned in a month — and did you say you were intentionally doing charms before you found out about magic?"

"Well, no, obviously I knew I was magic. The Accidental Magic office kept making me forget, but I remembered everything every time I re-discovered magic, and I managed to figure out how big a spell I could do without tipping them off by the time I was about six. The bloody idiots at the Ministry just didn't know I knew I was magic. You should have seen the looks on their goon squad's faces when I got the drop on them, it was great."

"What?" Danny frowned.

"Oh, well, it's kind of a long story, but basically there was a logistical problem with me accepting my invitation to the school — namely, muggles don't use owl-post — and someone was having fun with Aunt Petunia, because she has a habit of writing letters of complaint to people who annoy her, and Dumbledore dropping me on her without so much as a by-your-leave is probably the biggest single annoyance of her life, so I did a spell to intentionally get Accidental Magic's attention and trap the Reversal Squad they sent to fix whatever I'd done, so that Aunt Petunia could make them carry letters for her. It was really funny, especially the look on their faces when I told them they wouldn't be able to do magic in my house unless I let them."

"You... But... How?" Blaise stuttered.

Harry blinked at him. "Well, first I just stopped them moving, but then Blake Morris, sarcastic arse extraordinaire, tried to do something to stop me without his wand, so I pulled all the ambient magic away from him. You can't do magic if there's no ambient magic to work with, so." He shrugged.

Theo and Danny were now giving him disturbed expressions to match Blaise's. "I second Blaise's sentiment," Danny said, sounding slightly horrified. "What are you?"

"Yeah, you know how I said humans can't see patterns in ambient magic? We can't just manipulate the entire magical environment to stop someone else touching the ambient magic, either."

Harry rolled his eyes. "Well I can't normally, that was part of the trap, just sort of— You know how you sort of pull magic into yourself and shape it to do a little spell? I just did that, but with all the magic in the room, pressing the idea of trapping intruders into it, but letting it go without shaping it, and, I mean, obviously I had to do it a little bit at a time, but claiming the magic in a space doesn't alert the Accidental Magic people until you do something with it, and if you claim it first it's much easier to do big spells outside of yourself, and you always have at least a couple of minutes before the Goon Squad shows up, which gives you plenty of time to shape the magic you laid a claim on however you like by sort of just extending your own magic out into it and making wave-patterns that you sculpt into the shape of the snares, and when the goon squad apparates in—" He clapped his hands, making all three of the boys jump. Tee hee. "—the trap snaps closed around them so they can't move so much as a finger. Which, that part worked perfectly, but then Morris was his usual charming self, so I had to improvise and change it to trapping him in an empty bubble of magicless sadness."

All three of them just sort of continued to stare at him.

After a long moment, Harry added, "I don't know why you're all so impressed, Professor Snape walked in and disrupted my hold on the room in about thirty seconds. I still don't know what he did, and I have been looking. He said it was a freeform interference field expressed through mind magic? Does that ring any bells?"

He didn't really hold much hope that it would. All Odysseus had had to say on the subject was that hardly anyone had written much of anything on freeform magic, and he'd definitely never seen anything like Harry described, but (cryptically) The Knights were into all sorts of esoteric fuckery back in the beginning, so who knows? I'll keep an eye out... And the assistants at the legal shops just told him that anything to do with mind magic was restricted, come back when you're of age.

"Well...I know not all magic is on exactly the same...frequency, you might say," Theo offered. "So you probably weren't controlling the frequency mind mages use, or something."

"Nah," Blaise said. "Snape's subtle enough he probably just got in your head and cast his interference field through you."

Okay, maybe Harry had underestimated his new year-mates, because that sounded...uncomfortably like exactly what had happened. Or rather, when Harry tried to imagine what it might feel like having someone else cast magic through him, what he imagined was uncannily similar to what it had felt like when Snape did...whatever he did.

"That's a thing legilimens can do?" Theo asked, his wide-eyed look of shock turning to Blaise instead of Harry.

Blaise nodded. "If you can possess someone to use their body, why shouldn't you be able to possess them to use their magic? Honestly, if he hadn't told Harry it was a disruption field I'd say he probably could've just distracted Harry and made him lose his hold by destroying his focus, but, yeah."

Harry shook his head. "Distracting me might have made me drop the isolation bubbles, but it wouldn't have made the ambient magic not mine anymore. I think you were right the first time. Still, he obviously recognised it and knew how to break it, so it has to be a thing other people do."

"Just because Snape figured it out and reversed it in about thirty seconds doesn't mean it's a thing people do," Danny informed him. "Dora says he's a bloody genius, and scary good at freeform magic, which is what it sounds like you were doing, sort of. Maybe cheating a little attuning the magic to yourself first, but basically. Rumour is he learned it from the Dark Lord, and he definitely learned what he knows about curse-breaking from the Death Eaters. He's Dumbledore's problem-solver now, he makes him fix all the really weird shite Hogwarts students manage to do by accident. When Saint Mungo's — that's the hospital, Dad's a Healer — has a weird case involving mind-magic or potions or even just general dark magic no one's seen before, Dad says they call Snape in, and he makes them all look like idiots. Walking into a completely unfamiliar magical situation and figuring out what's going on and how to stop it without killing anyone is probably par for the course for him."

Oh.

Well...still. Harry was pretty sure it was a thing other people could do. Maybe a thing they could only really do at home — it was way harder to lay claim to magic in his little rented flat than the house he'd lived in his entire life — but it still felt like a thing other people should be able to do. Though...thinking about it now, it sort of seemed like something he might've learned from the dying not-girl in his dreams, one of the Dark Nights she'd been trying to help him understand what he needed to do, so maybe it wasn't.

For about half a second, Harry entertained the idea of asking whether these boys had any idea what that was about, since they'd managed to solve one of his weird magical mysteries in about two minutes, but not seriously. He'd only known them for a few hours. He had no reason to trust they wouldn't turn right around and tell Snape or someone that Harry was going to sacrifice a random stranger to some demon that spoke to him in his sleep. Honestly, he had no reason to trust that they wouldn't start spreading rumours about him being some sort of freakish, inhuman magical prodigy as soon as they got to school, but if they did, judging by how little time it took for them to adjust to the idea and move on to discussing Snape in a relatively reasonable way without giving Harry terrified looks every few seconds, he figured the news would blow over in a few weeks. And it wasn't as though Aunt Petunia was here to get angry at him for not keeping a low profile. He'd just sort of wanted to avoid attention out of habit.

"Okay, whatever. So, I shouldn't tell people I've been doing magic intentionally since I was like three if I don't want them to flip out, and probably shouldn't tell them I can do anything silently, and definitely don't let on that I can absolutely see patterns in the way ambient magic moves around mages—" He figured it was fine to admit that now, since the shite he'd done to trap Flo and Friends was apparently even more 'impossible'. (Sure enough, none of them so much as blinked.) "—or that I probably could've learned well over a hundred spells in the last month if I'd been focusing on that rather than finding out everything I could about Magical Britain—"

Blaise snorted. "Spending, what, six to ten hours a day on something for weeks at a time doesn't count as focusing on it?"

"Um, no? I did also spend ten to fourteen hours a day doing other things." Mostly talking to people about random shite. He gave a light shrug in answer to the sceptical look the boy gave him. "I don't sleep much when I'm excited about something, and maybe you don't think magic is all that cool growing up with it, but the shiny hasn't worn off yet for me. Spending eighteen hours a day learning spells wasn't out of the question, but I've been trying to be responsible and learn more about this society I've been dropped in the middle of, too. Also, duelling is awesome."

"Ah, yeah...not sleeping much when you're a little up?" Danny said. "That's definitely a Black thing. Also, on the subject of duelling, don't tell people you've been working out spell-chains for yourself."

Harry frowned. "I didn't work the concept out for myself, I saw the duellists using it and realised that was sort of the obvious thing to do, if you want to cast as many spells as possible as quickly as possible."

"Yeah, well, it's still generally considered a more advanced technique kids our age don't have the focus to pull off."

Harry couldn't help letting out a little huff. "Fine, noted. Is it normal for mages to be able to see in the dark?"

Theo shook his head. "No, but the magesight might help you out, there."

"Right. What about being more...durable than non-mages? Not just healing fast, but like, one time I accidentally broke my cousin's arm wrenching it around in a way Uncle Vernon had definitely done to me before, and it didn't even really hurt me, let alone break anything. Also, Dudley's much bigger than I am, so it's not just like, that I was manhandling a five-year-old or something. Also, is it normal for wizards our age to be this short?" He hadn't really seen any of the others standing up yet, and most of the people he'd spoken to over the past month were adults, so.

Blaise snorted. "Yes, it's normal for wizards to be a little harder to break than muggles, and the more magic a person channels the slower they tend to age. So on the one hand, you have normal people who age almost muggle-fast, but then at the other extreme, I've seen pictures from Bellatrix's trial. She would've been at least thirty at the time, but she looked like she could still be in school. Danny's mum is thirty-seven, and most muggles think she looks about twenty-five. So, yeah, it is weird that you're so tiny, but most people will just think, oh, obviously the Boy Who Lived is going to grow up to be a crazy-powerful sorcerer. And on the plus side, you probably won't look old until you're like a hundred and fifty."

"They might write off picking up spells really easily and shite like that as expected for their little Dark Lord defeating Light idol too, actually," Theo noted. "Though the fact that your magic is obviously dark sort of screws up the Harry-Potter-is-actually-a-phoenix-in-human-form theory, for anyone who can sense that sort of thing."

"Thunderbird?" Danny suggested.

Harry gave them a sharp grin. "I hear nundu are hard to kill."

"Nundu," Blaise said flatly, "are bloody terrifying. That panther I was using to threaten Draco earlier? That's about the size of a six-week-old nundu kitten."

Harry giggled. "Right. Sold. I am now officially a nundu kitten in human form."

Theo was not amused. "Uh-huh. That's almost as disturbing a statement as your enthusiastic insistence that Blaise's stupid boggart is the coolest pet ever — and don't think I didn't see you trying to pet it earlier—"

"You tried to pet it?" Danny said. "Why?"

...Because it was there, mostly, and he was curious, and it was cool. He didn't say it, though, because Theo kept talking over Danny in the first place.

"—or the fact that you've known about Magical Britain for all of a month and you've already found your way to Knockturn Alley, or that you've spent the past month living on your own, actually."

"Why is that disturbing? All the secondhand shops are in Knockturn, and I'm perfectly capable of taking care of myself..."

Theo just gave him a don't be dense look. Danny was the one who said, "Um, because most eleven-year-olds aren't capable of taking care of themselves? I wouldn't want to spend a week in Charing by myself, let alone a month."

Blaise and Theo nodded, which meant it was Harry's turn to give all of them a don't be dense look. "I literally spent the entire time practising magic, reading history books, wandering around talking to people, and watching the duelling competition. I didn't even have to cook for myself. It was easier than spending a month at home, with cleaning and cooking and weeding the gardens to do, and my cousin pestering me to show him cool magic, not just boring, useful magic. I would've done all my shopping and gone to the bank and such by myself anyway, because Aunt Petunia doesn't like magic, and probably would've spent all day wandering around talking to people in Diagon and Knockturn and practising magic even if I had had to keep taking the bus in every day and going back to Little Whinging at night. I really, legitimately do not understand why it's so bloody problematic for me not to be supervised at all times. Professor McGonagall about hexed me when I demanded she give me my bank key and let me get on with my business rather than stand around while the other muggleborns got their wands, like it's inherently dangerous to just walk around and talk to goblins by myself."

"Well, it sort of is," Danny said, giving him a very earnest, concerned look. "What if someone tried to kidnap you and steal your life-force to make viv, or Imperiused you to have sex with sickos for money, or mugged you and stole your vault key — the goblins will let anyone clean every last knut out of a vault if they have the key — or realised you're Harry Potter and just straight-out murdered you, because you're Harry Potter?"

Harry shrugged. "Dunno. Didn't happen, so I can't really say what I would've done. Probably kick anyone trying to kill me in the nads and gouge out their eyes, and if I could make it to the bank before this hypothetical mugger I could probably sweet-talk Firebloom into freezing my account because someone stole my key. She's this sweet, mumsy goblin who works as a teller — we've spoken a few times, and I'm pretty sure she thinks I'm adorable. If I was ambushed and enslaved by some pimp — not likely, I don't think, I can tell when people are casting magic around me and most spells move slowly enough to dodge, but if — I suppose I'd just have had to wait until I didn't show up at school, and they sent someone to find me. Unless I found an opportunity to escape, in which case, nad-kicking, eye-gouging. Possibly dismembering, I hear that's the traditional response to arseholes attempting to kidnap children in Knockturn Alley. Granted, I don't actually know any curses to dismember someone, but human anatomy isn't that different from cats', and I do know a few good cutting spells now." He grinned at the shocked horror on their faces.

Theo recovered first. "That. All of that. Very House of Black. Especially the grinning. Stop that, it's creepy. And don't say that sort of shite unless you want people to think you're Sirius's kid."

"Or Bella's," Blaise said. "She had a kid who was our age. He was living with Narcissa and Draco at the end of the war, but the Wizengamot gave his guardianship to Dumbledore at the same time as yours, Harry, and no one knows what he did with either of you."

Danny snorted.

"What?"

"Nothing, just. If Harry Potter was raised by some random muggles, completely ignorant about magic, maybe it's actually the Black kid Dumbledore hid away with some secret cult of monks to be trained in esoteric light arts to defeat the Dark Lord once and for all if he dares show his snakey face in Britain again."

"Secret cult of monks?" Harry repeated absently, barely listening to the response, because he was remembering Aunt Petunia asking him once who Aunt Cissy and Drake were. He couldn't have been more than five or six at the time, and when he said he didn't know she'd just said never-you-mind, but...

No, he decided. It couldn't be. Everyone said he had his mother's eyes. He couldn't be the Dark Lady's missing son. Dumbledore had probably had him killed, or left in the Forest of Dean to die of exposure or be adopted by a kind-hearted woodcutter like a prince in a bloody fairy tale or something.

Danny nodded, very seriously. "In Nepal. According to a series of adventure novels that definitely didn't mention you're secretly Sirius Black's bastard son."

"Well, they wouldn't, would they?" Blaise said. "They're kids' books. For normal kids who haven't grown up around Mira and weren't intimately familiar with the term 'marital infidelity' at the age of six."

Theo snorted, trying not to laugh. "No, see, they don't mention Harry's Sirius's bastard son, because Harry — this Harry, I mean — is actually Bellatrix's son, and Dumbledore switched them, so it really is Harry who's off with the monks, see—"

"And this Harry's secretly Rigel Black! Or whatever he's called! Brilliant, Mister Nott! You've solved it!" Danny exclaimed, clapping.

"I think his name was Eridanus, actually," Blaise said, giving Harry a peculiar look that seemed to hold some significance beyond the moment, though Harry couldn't for the life of him imagine what it might be.

"That's even better," Danny declared, "Eri, Harry, easy to confuse — this theory, I like it!"

His silliness was interrupted by a rap on the door, a woman's voice calling, "Anything off the trolley, dears?" from the other side of it.

"Ooh! Me!" Danny jumped up from his seat, fishing a coin-purse out of his pocket, and leaving a half-finished sketch of Harry and Blaise on the other side of the compartment.

Theo held it up for them to see. "You know, I think he's really captured the complete insanity of this conversation," he said. "Something about the expression on Harry's face. Wouldn't you agree? That mad gleam in his eye..."

"Hey! That's not done, yet!" Danny objected, falling back into his seat with a double-handful of sweets he set between himself and Theo. "Help yourselves." He tossed Harry something called a Chocolate Frog. "Careful, they try to escape."

"You never think any of your sketches are done," Theo said, flipping back a few pages to several sketches of a messy-haired, bespectacled young man, drawn from multiple angles. "New self-portrait, aged up a few years?"

"Eh?" Danny said, clearly more interested in a little sponge-cake cauldron. "Oh, no. There was an article about the Potters in the Prophet last weekend, part of their Ten Year Anniversary thing? I was just copying the photos. Lily's a couple pages back..."

"Can I have a look?" Harry asked, tearing the chocolate open without really looking at it. He'd never actually seen a picture of his parents. It hadn't occurred to him to try to find back issues of the paper or something, from back in Eighty-One, and if Aunt Petunia had any pictures of Lily they were long forgotten, buried somewhere in the depths of the attic.

He set down the frog to take the book from Theo, and barely managed to catch it as it made a desperate leap toward the open window. He still did, of course, plucking it out of the air halfway through Danny's ooh, careful! He wasn't really sure how one was supposed to eat such a thing — maybe bite its head off, and it would stop squirming? — but he was really more interested in the sketches, struck by how much Danny really did look like James Potter. His face was a bit different around the eyes and chin, but Danny looked much more like a Potter than Harry. He even got the messy hair they were apparently known for. And Lily, a few pages back... Comparing her face to his own, he could almost see some similarities, in the high forehead and pointed little nose, but in black and white the feature they most notably had in common — their eyes — didn't look much the same at all. He might have gotten their colour, but...

"Didn't realise until I saw her in the papers in black and white..." Odysseus had said that, the first day Harry met him. Later, he'd gotten the old man to explain that Lily's bright red hair and shocking green eyes had sort of distracted people from her actual face. She used to charm her hair black and her eyes blue and lurk around the Underground in the summers calling herself Asphodel, and Odysseus swore he never would've realised she was the same girl if he hadn't seen her picture in black and white, without the green of her eyes and the red of her hair...

Harry definitely didn't have Lily's eyes.

The colour, yes, but the shape, the spacing of them, those were different, and his were set noticeably deeper. Lily's eyes...

Lily's eyes looked like Danny's, just light where his were dark. And he looked a hell of a lot like James Potter. If Harry was standing beside a portrait of James, it might not be out of the question that they were father and son, but if both Harry and Danny were standing beside it, anyone would have to be an idiot to think Harry was his son. Danny even wore glasses!

And he was the right age, and Harry was very obviously a Black, and there was that half-remembered mention of Aunt Cissy and Drake...

Harry was suddenly absolutely certain that he and Danny had been switched back in Nineteen Eighty-One, in the confusion following the Dark Lord's fall. Danny Tonks was really Harry Potter, and Harry was really Eridanus Black — Danny, not Eri — and—

There had to be ways to permanently change a kid's eye colour with magic.

Someone had definitely done this intentionally, though Harry couldn't imagine why. Had they wanted him to grow up with Lily's muggle sister (were the Dursleys still his family, if he was never actually related to them?) so he wouldn't know anything about magic specifically to sabotage a kid who might very well take after his parents (who the hell was his father? the bloody Dark Lord?) and turn out to be some sort of terrifying, dark magical prodigy? (If so, that had obviously been a legitimate concern, since he arguably had, even without the resources of a filthy rich magical noble house to exploit, but.)

Had they wanted to ensure that the real Harry Potter got the benefits of a normal, magical childhood, being raised pretty much anonymously by Bellatrix's estranged sister?

Was the anonymity intended to protect Danny — the real Harry Potter — in case anyone realised that he was supposedly with Lily's estranged sister and tracked her down to kill him?

Had whoever was responsible for this looked at two one-year-olds and decided that, out of the two of them, Harry would make a better icon for the Light, or that, when the Dark Lord returned — as practically everyone was sure he would — that Harry would stand a better chance of killing him for good? (Arguably he would. Not that Harry had any idea how good a mage Danny was, but just looking at him, having spoken with him for a few hours, Harry could already tell Danny didn't have the same potential to kill someone that he did. That was just...obvious.)

Some other reason, or all of the above?

"What do you think, Harry?" Blaise asked, drawing Harry's attention to the same peculiar look he'd worn earlier, telling them Bella's son's name.

I think you know, he thought. I think your mother, Bellatrix's friend and lover, the architect of this Truce we apparently live under, she was in on it somehow, and you know...and you wanted me to know.

Why?

Danny obviously didn't know. Did his mother? She had to. Growing up with Bellatrix, she had to realise soft, silly, artistic Danny wasn't her sister's son.

Who else knew? Dumbledore, almost certainly. Aunt Petunia didn't, Harry was positive. (And yes, he decided, she was still his family — she had raised him, after all, and God knew that was a thankless task.) Beyond that...

You and I are going to have to have a talk, Blaise Zabini...

"These are bloody brilliant, Danny. And you really do look a lot like James."

"Yeah, well, he was as closely related to Mum as he was to Sirius, so it's not that surprising." Wait. Did Danny not even know he was adopted? "About half of the purebloods look pretty much the same. And thanks. I'll show you some of the animated ones when we get to school. Er...maybe after classes tomorrow? They're in my trunk... Are you going to eat that frog or not?"

"Huh? Oh, yeah! Just got distracted. Seriously, those are great," he said, passing the book back and turning his attention to the bit of chocolate still wriggling between his fingers — rather half-heartedly as it started to melt where he was touching it. "How'm I supposed to eat this thing, exactly?"

Chapter Text

Well, well, well... What have we here?

A talking hat, apparently. A mind-reading talking hat? Harry didn't think he'd actually heard that last bit with his ears...

Indeed you did not. Now...where shall I put you?

Harry sincerely hoped that was a rhetorical question, because he still had no idea which House he was best suited for. He was sort of thinking Hufflepuff, maybe? At the very least he had nothing against cooperation and working to achieve his goals. But he wasn't really a joiner. He didn't know how to be part of a group, and whenever he was part of one he was invariably shuffled off to one side, or ended up leading, if it was for a school project or the like. He could be friendly and charismatic when he wanted to be — people in Charing had been more than willing to talk to him, and he'd never had any trouble convincing people to do things like join the Edificeering Club, but he didn't actually have friends, or a group of them like Dudley...or most of the other kids at school for that matter. People could sense that he was a freak, he suspected. They knew he wasn't one of them. And given the discussion he'd had on the train with Blaise, Danny, and Theo, Harry was pretty sure that wasn't just because he was magic and the other students at Little Whinging Primary weren't.

Somehow, he suspected that if he was sorted into Hufflepuff on the word of a magic hat, he wouldn't fit in, and it would be worse than not fitting in in any other House because that was sort of what Hufflepuff was all about. Either their attempts to include him despite his loner tendencies would drive him mad, or he would be shunned when he rejected their overtures of friendship on the grounds that he invariably had no interests in common with anyone his age, or the first time he had a bad day and attempted to strangle someone who wouldn't leave him alone.

The Hat chuckled. I think you would be surprised how many lonely children who think they will never fit in anywhere find their first friends in Hufflepuff. But no, I suspect you are correct. Individualists never do fare well in that House.

As for the other three Houses, Harry thought Professor Snape might have been right, that Gryffindor suited him the best. He would certainly describe himself as bold, daring, and impulsive before cool, calculating, and ambitious, or open-minded and artistic. Art required a sort of creativity and appreciation of like...beauty, and stuff, that he was fairly certain he didn't have, and he didn't just want to know things for the sake of knowing things. He wanted to know useful things, to make himself better...though better to what end he had no idea. Whatever seemed cool at the time? There wasn't anything he particularly wanted to do with his life, so he was pretty sure that ruled out Slytherin, even if being able to take care of himself and wanting to improve himself were otherwise very Slytherin traits.

But he didn't really care about honour and nobility and all that shite. Honestly, he thought it seemed a bit silly. And he suspected that being surrounded by people who were self-righteous and competitive and would likely get bent out of shape being shown up (and he didn't really doubt he would be showing nearly everyone up without trying — he always did, and had no intention of playing dumb and holding himself back to keep with his classmates as far as learning spells went), would probably be a pain in the butt. Also, he wasn't entirely certain it was possible to be 'brave' or 'courageous' if he wasn't actually afraid of anything. (Realistically, he knew that he'd probably run into something he was afraid of at some point in his life, but he didn't think he really had yet. There was absolutely nothing scary in Little Whinging. Maybe Blaise would let Coco turn into his greatest fear so he could find out what it was...)

Ravenclaw, the Hat 'said' firmly.

Really? Why?

You're a smart boy. You'll figure it out, it 'said' unhelpfully, then announced "Ravenclaw!" to the Great Hall at large.

Professor McGonagall lifted the Hat off his head by the point, once again revealing the magnificent Hogwarts dining hall, with its four long student tables full of children excited to see who their newest house members were going to be. The first table to the left belonged to Ravenclaw. Most of them looked as surprised that Harry had been sorted into their House as he was that the Hat thought this was an obvious decision. There was a susurration of murmurs from Gryffindor and Hufflepuff as they discussed the matter amongst themselves over scattered applause. Slytherin was quieter, their commentary not audible over their polite clapping. The Ravenclaws' was more enthusiastic. He made his way over to them and took a seat a few places from the end on the Slytherin (left) side — Hufflepuff was on the right, between Ravenclaw and Gryffindor — between a couple of older kids who might have been third- or fourth-years. The girl gave him an odd look, but didn't say anything before Professor McGonagall called the next name on her list ("Rivers, Oliver!"), and when Danny was sorted into Ravenclaw as well a few minutes later he sat between them, forestalling whatever question or comment she might have made.

"Hey, budge up, Potter," he muttered, squeezing onto the bench.

Harry scooted a few inches closer to the bloke on his right, though he thought it bore mentioning that, "There are other seats, Danny."

"Yeah, but I don't know anyone else..." And Theo had been sorted into Slytherin, and Blaise had seemed fairly certain that was where he was going, too.

Harry dearly wanted to ask how he planned on ever getting to know anyone if he only sat with people he already knew, or point out that he hadn't known Harry this morning, but he didn't really object to Danny's company. He wasn't trying to drive him away, just pointing out that he didn't have to try to squeeze into that particular spot. It was a bit surreal to sit here thinking I'm living this kid's life, but compared to the experience of reaching Hogwarts in general — crossing the lake in a little flotilla with the other first-years, following a veritable giant up to the castle, its gothic proliferation of towers gold in the setting sun (and also perfect for edificeering, he was so excited to go exploring...), across darkening lawns and into a grand formal entrance hall where they were received by Professor McGonagall and prepared for the Sorting Ceremony — it barely registered.

When the Sorting finally concluded — with Molly's redheaded Ron (Weasley) going to Gryffindor, and Blaise to Slytherin as predicted — the Headmaster — the infamous Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore, he of the many titles and excessive letters — stood to say a few words.

Honestly, it was all Harry could do to keep from laughing. There was a Forbidden Forest? and a Corridor of Very Painful Death? He was definitely going to explore both of those places, as soon as reasonably possible. Probably next weekend, he imagined he'd end up spending most of the week familiarising himself with the Castle and the routines of people whose job it was to keep him out of the fun places— Ooh, and the Library!

Odysseus had said he should try to befriend Irma Pince, the Head Librarian. She controlled access to the Restricted Books, which meant she was probably the most important adult in the Castle. It technically also made her one of the people whose job it was to keep him out of fun places, but in much the same way he figured an auror who practised fighting at Morgenstern's wouldn't care about breaking little laws in ways that didn't really hurt anyone, like reading restricted books when he was about six years too young — according to people who had never met Harry personally, and had no good reason to think he couldn't be trusted with healing spells or books about horrendous curses that killed people more interestingly than a Severing Charm to the neck, but no more effectively — he also figured that a librarian who was friends with Odysseus could probably be convinced to bend the rules now and again, for a charming, responsible young man like Harry.

And there would be classes and things of course. Now that he was actually here, he should probably go back and learn all of the spells he was supposed to be learning this year — the ones he'd skipped over on his own because they were a bit useless. Not for learning concepts and building theoretical understanding (the course textbooks for Charms and Transfiguration did say as much), but just from a using magic to do things perspective. He knew the first exercise in the second chapter of the Introductory Transfiguration book was meant to get him used to the idea of turning one small, inanimate object into another small, inanimate object with a similar mass, made of a material from a different class, but really. When would he ever need to turn a matchstick into a needle? Why would he even have a match when he could light fires with magic?

And then, after he satisfied his curiosity about the Corridor of Very Painful Death and learned exactly why the Forbidden Forest was Forbidden, there was a town down on the other side of the lake — Hogsmeade, their train had stopped there — which he definitely wanted to explore, and—

Oh, hey, where did the food come from?

It had just appeared in the heavy brass and pewter serving dishes, clearly by magic. It couldn't actually be magic, though. The books had been very clear that consuming more than the tiniest amount of conjured food could be catastrophically dangerous — enough conjured pepper to flavour a dish or something was okay, but when the conjuration vanished the, cells and organs it had become a part of after it was eaten would be damaged, so eating more than just a tiny bit of conjured flavouring was a Bad Idea. Transfigured food, too, if its mass had been supplemented, or one macro-nutrient transformed into another — using transfiguration to make a fatty steak leaner, for example, would not go well. Even transforming one kind of protein into another could have awful consequences, especially if you screwed it up. It was fine to eat something that had been shaped with transfiguration, but why would you bother transfiguring your food into a different shape when there were charms for that?

Maybe a Switching Spell? Those were okay to use on food, he thought.

And in any case, none of the older students seemed to think there was anything amiss. People up and down the table were serving themselves, using levitation charms to snag dishes that were too far away. It had seemed reasonable enough to draw his wand and do the same rather than leaning across two people and half of the table when Danny said, "Pass the mashed potatoes, Harry?"

Apparently it wasn't, a little bubble of quiet staring expanded outward from those nearest to him, as their neighbours looked to see what had gotten their attention: Harry, helping himself to a scoop of peas as the potato platter slowly floated toward him. (Slowly because he didn't want to hit any of the other floating serving dishes or lose the spoon someone had left balanced precariously on top of the food instead of digging into it.) Harry didn't notice for several seconds, helping Danny shift other dishes around so there was actually space for the potatoes on the table. When he did, he had no idea what he was supposed to do about it, so he just levitated a pork chop to himself as well and started eating, pretending he hadn't noticed at all.

"Er...Harry?"

"Hmm?"

Danny didn't seem to be able to bring himself to point out that everyone was staring at him, as though Harry really hadn't noticed and wasn't obviously intentionally ignoring them. "Nothing, never mind."

"Hover Charms are a first-year spell, I know they are," he muttered under his breath to the other boy, as people slowly returned to their own meals and conversations, watching Harry out of the corners of their eyes like Dudley hoping to catch him doing cool magic. They were one of the few spells in their textbook that looked useful, so consequently one of the few he'd actually bothered with.

"Not silent Hover Charms." Oh, right, oops. "And Hover Charms only have one directional force, directly opposing gravity. Adding directional forces to a Hover Charm to move something is a second-year spell, and omnidirectional variable acceleration is really bloody difficult. Speeding up or slowing down or dodging that turkey leg," Danny explained, when Harry just raised an eyebrow at him.

"I know what variable acceleration is, that's just the stupidest thing I've ever heard. Are you seriously telling me that the spell in the book was only supposed to hover in place?"

Danny looked at him like he was being dumb. "It's called a Hover Charm. What did you think it was supposed to do?"

Well, he'd thought it was supposed to be more or less the equivalent of his wandless telekinesis trick, but... "What good is that? Aren't wand spells supposed to be more versatile than wandless spells? I thought I was doing it wrong."

He'd actually gone and looked up a bunch of other flying and anti-gravity charms in Spelman's to see if he could figure out why he couldn't move his hovering object around. It had taken all afternoon to realise, oh, of course, he was thinking about it all wrong. He shouldn't be thinking like he was holding up the book he was practising on with a hand he could move around, like he did when he was taking dishes off too-high shelves or whatever. Clearly, he should be thinking about it as though he was changing its relationship with gravity, sort of putting it in a state of freefall. Obviously if he wanted to move it he needed to push it around from multiple angles, like putting booster rockets on a spaceship.

And then, if he was already pushing it around from multiple directions, he'd realised he didn't really need to do the freefall thing at all, he could just lift the book, balancing six forces on three different axes, and move it wherever he wanted, like a three-dimensional etch-a-sketch.

And at that point, he'd realised that the Hover Charm the way he'd been doing it at first was sort of like just having one booster-rocket on the bottom of his book that was equal and opposite to gravity (because true anti-gravity charms were really bloody complicated — he'd found a curse in one of the more advanced books that changed the direction gravity worked on an object by ninety degrees, which was just so cool, but he didn't have the slightest hope of casting it at the moment), and figured yes, he had been doing it wrong, because he'd just been thinking of it as lifting the book with a hand, obviously he was meant to be doing it like this, and just not using the x- and y-axis forces at first, because what was the point of just making an object hover and nothing else, that couldn't be right, and the Standard Book of Spells could do a better job of explaining all that, Jesus Christ... Though he supposed they didn't have space ships or booster rockets. They did have flying brooms, though, they had to work on the same principles.

And it turned out he'd just been overthinking it?!

"And if you're going to eventually teach people to move things around anyway, why wouldn't you start with a three-dimensional field and just not use the other axes? That's basically exactly what the Hover Charm does."

"...Because freely-variable, omni-directional fields of physical force are really bloody difficult — didn't I just say that?"

"So...learning how to do it wrong and then having to learn how to do it right in a few years makes more sense? And it's not omni-directional, just three-dimensional. Six forces pushing the thing around, that's it. I'm not doing any weird spinny shite."

Danny stared at him for a long moment, a bite of potatoes suspended on his fork, as though considering the problem in a way he never had before, and decided, "Yes."

"Bullcrap."

"I want to say 'no', but I also don't think I can do a multi-directional field, even if I'm just applying force to one axis, and besides, if you're maintaining it so you can adjust the force ratios on the fly, that makes it a completely different spell than just casting it and letting the magic go do its thing like with a normal Hover Charm. Freely variable charms are like taking a freeform spell and turning it into a wand spell, totally different."

Harry huffed, because...well, he might have a point. "I think the word you're looking for is better." Better than both the normal, useless Hover Charm and telekinesis, because he could do it at a much greater distance with a wand and had much finer control over the maneuvering. It was a little weird having to think of it as pushing the object around against gravity than just visualising how he wanted it to move and reaching out to do that, sort of like trying to pick something up in one of those stupid prize-grabbing claw games at the arcade — Dudley had wasted almost twenty pounds on one once, trying to get some stupid toy — versus just grabbing it by hand, but he'd gotten used to it pretty quickly. (He'd also gotten used to the claw game pretty quickly. Dudley had accused him of cheating, even though the only reason he'd even bothered trying was so Dudley could have his little alien toy and they could go do literally anything else.)

He also didn't think there was a reason he couldn't cast the charm to exert a constant upward force and let it go, just like the hover charm in their textbook, while still initially conceptualising it as one of six directional forces when he cast it, and leaving the option open to reach out and activate one or more of the other booster rockets to move the object around. Before he could say as much, though, the bloke on Harry's right sniggered, obviously eavesdropping.

"Something to add, Mister...?"

"Grey. Call me Luke. And no. Just...where have you been the last ten years, that they were teaching you NEWT-level shite and saying it was basic?"

NEWTs were Magic A-Levels. How can that possibly be an A-level charm? "Um, nowhere? I mean, I've been living with muggles — my mother's sister and her family. No one's taught me anything, really. I've just been messing around..."

"Uh-huh," Luke said, positively bleeding scepticism.

Harry glowered at him. "Believe me or don't, I don't care."

The boy on the other side of Luke said, "I believe you," then to the boy between them, "This is the Boy Who Lived we're talking about. He blocked a Killing Curse with accidental magic, you really think he couldn't figure out basic flight mechanics on his own?"

"I didn't block a Killing Curse," Harry objected. "Lily obviously did something — I was just a baby, I probably didn't even know what was happening." It wasn't like he actually remembered (or as though it had actually happened to him), but he was pretty sure one-year-olds weren't that aware of their surroundings, and definitely didn't recognise that people were being murdered when it happened right in front of them. (Which reminded him, when was his actual birthday? Maybe he looked like a midget because he was actually eight or nine months younger than he thought...)

"You did take an A.M.R.S. team hostage over the summer, though, didn't you?" said the girl on the other side of Danny. "My father was in a meeting with Madam Bones when they came to get her..."

And then Harry was under siege, a flood of questions coming at him from every direction, which was awful, because it was overwhelming, he couldn't possibly answer them all, but at the same time very much a good thing, because it meant he didn't have to explain how he could possibly have taken a Reversal Squad prisoner in the middle of muggle suburbia.

Since that was apparently "not the sort of thing humans could do", and all. Though if a Hover Charm that he could use to move things around was apparently A-level magic, maybe he had even less idea of what was 'normal' than he thought.

Looking around at the castle, he had to believe magic could do everything he thought it could, every inch of the place positively tingled with power — he absolutely realised what the Weasley twins had meant, now, when they said if he thought Diagon Alley was magical he should wait until he got here. It was positively dazzling, even after spending weeks practising ignoring the magic all around him. If he hadn't run into Zoë and taken her advice on the occlumency thing, he might have actually passed out walking into the entrance hall where the Deputy Head had met them — the magic holding it together was so bright it had taken his breath away. This room was only slightly less bright, and Harry was pretty sure that was just because there was more open space. The bloody ceiling was enchanted. He thought it was showing the sky above them, but he couldn't quite focus on it well enough through the magic to say for sure.

But...maybe modern wizards had forgotten how to do things like this? They did tend to talk about the Founders of Hogwarts as larger-than-life figures, almost as mythical as Merlin and Morgen (who had apparently actually been fae — Harry had been very disappointed to learn that there weren't Fair Folk around anymore, they'd picked up and moved to a different dimension centuries ago). The way magic moved around the Headmaster, and several of the other mages at the Professors' table — Professor Snape, and a woman maybe in her thirties (or fifties, he guessed, if what the boys had told him on the train about magical aging was true), and another witch who might've been the oldest at the table (out of the witches, Dumbledore was clearly the oldest period), and a tiny...half-goblin? wizard who was using magic to levitate his chair to reach the table, because he was apparently even shorter than Harry — leaning toward them even more than most people, like it was just waiting for them to do something, he couldn't imagine they couldn't do what he liked to think of as big magic. If they couldn't just...do things like he could, he was betting it was one-hundred per cent just because they thought they couldn't.

All the magic around was sort of starting to give him a headache, though, its natural currents completely lost in the waves created by all the people in here, and the enchantments and wards and other active magics, swirling and dancing between them in a way it would have been very relaxing to just...sit and watch, like a kaleidoscope, letting his mind drift into an almost-sleeping thoughtless trance, but was sort of overwhelming to try to pick one detail or another out of to interpret, like trying to pick a detail out of the blur of motion at the edge of the road when he was in the car, or a single voice out of the endless chorus of questions from the people surrounding him.

"No, I've never been to bloody Nepal, I've hardly ever left Surrey!" he snapped at another first-year who'd shouted the question at him from across the table and a few places down — away from the professors' table, he meant. "Okay, that's enough," he decided. He had a headache, and they were all being stupid, and he was done answering questions. He'd barely eaten anything and hadn't gotten to talk about anything other than himself at all between their constant interruptions, and he was tired of this shite. He just wanted to enjoy his pudding — an absolutely delicious custard with candied violets on top — and get up to his dorm room and...probably not actually sleep, it was still exciting to be here, but be away from people for a while, at least. If they didn't knock it off he was going to lose his temper, and that never ended well for anyone. "Shut up! Leave me alone! I'm done answering questions!"

"But what about—" the girl on the other side of Danny, whose question about the Reversal Squad he never had answered, began.

He cut her off with his most forbidding glare. Not very impressive, he knew, since he looked like a nine-year-old girl (all the more so in the very dress-like wizards' robes which were their uniform), but the firmness of his, "No," seemed to intimidate her into wary silence nevertheless.

"Thank you," he added, as the bombardment finally subsided. They were still staring at him, but that was fine, staring didn't require anything from him.

Still, a few minutes later, when Danny scrambled off the bench and asked, "Could someone tell me where the loo is?" Harry stood up as well and followed him out of the hall, as much because he needed a break from so many people as because he needed the toilet...though he could legitimately use a bathroom break.

The other boy didn't seem surprised to realise that he'd been followed. "Did you know your eyes flash when you're angry?" he asked, leading the way down the corridor which lay beyond "the first left" after taking a right out of the doors on the Slytherin side of the hall. It really was inconvenient having four very long tables, Harry thought. They'd had to walk up to the front of the room then all the way back down to the doors, because there were no breaks in the tables.

"I'm not angry," Harry said, almost automatically. "Just...out of patience for that little interrogation. But, no?" Honestly, he wasn't sure what Danny was talking about. "I can't say I spend a lot of time looking in mirrors while very seriously warning people to leave me alone."

Danny let out a little heh of laughter. "Well, what did you expect? You're mysterious. They're Ravenclaws. Ooh, found it!"

Danny (unlike Dudley) was not one of those heathens who liked to talk while relieving himself, so there was a conversational lull until they returned to the corridor. It gave Harry plenty of time to decide he actually did want to know, "What do you mean, my eyes flash?" enough to ask.

"Er...it's one of those external aura manifestation things, like soulfire." Harry had no idea what that was, either. "Basically just a little flare of magic lighting up your eyes when you're upset, sort of like the hair on a dog's back standing up. Some people can do it on purpose. Dora can. I think Mum can too, but she always tells Dora that it shows a severe lack of self-control to allow your magic to betray the state of your emotions — which is of course a thing that a young lady or gentleman never does — and I've never actually seen Mum deliberately trying to be scary. Yours is a sort of electric blue, so light it's almost white. Like this," he added, drawing his wand. He, like Harry, had one of the neat arm-holster things. "Imago."

A slightly translucent image appeared in the air before them — Harry, as he must have looked earlier, turning to face the girl behind Danny (and incidentally Danny himself) more quickly and suddenly than it felt like he had moved. His face looked like it could be carved from marble, stoney and uncompromising. His eyes, still obviously green, even narrowed in annoyance, briefly turned a colour Harry would probably call silver as the illusion mouthed the single word no. It happened so quickly that if he'd blinked he might have missed it, but it was undeniably intimidating.

Something in his gut knew, seeing it, that that was an expression of power, a threat, like go on, try me, which held weight even coming from a tiny, delicate-looking thing like him. (Weirdly, even though he knew this was just an illusion, and even if it were real it was Harry himself, there was still a part of him that wanted to respond to that go on, try me expression by throwing a hex at it or tackling it to the ground.) He did look, he would admit, pretty angry, even though he knew he hadn't been. Powerful, dangerous, and slightly more inhuman than usual — glowing, magical eyes were even more unnatural than cat eyes. (Like a challenge— Or, someone to play with? He needed to know which of them was better— What the hell, Harry? Stop acting like a crazy person and/or a dog that doesn't understand what a bloody mirror is, Christ...)

It had struck him as sort of weird that a bunch of grown men, presumably war-hardened warlocks, would have followed a witch who looked like she could still be in school into battle, but if the Dark Lady looked anything like Harry in that moment (and Odysseus said he did look like her — not surprising, he guessed, since she was his mother, apparently), he absolutely understood why they would. Harry looked like he might be about to kill someone, and he didn't have a reputation for murdering people at the drop of a hat.

"I was going to say that it makes you look even more like Sirius Black — his eyes were silver just normally — but then realised you might not have any idea what I was talking about, so." Danny shrugged, dropping the illusion. It dissolved into a thousand pin-pricks of light and faded away, which was probably for the best, as far as Harry's sanity was concerned. He still really wanted to curse the bastard who had the nerve to give him a look like that. Even if that bastard was himself, and the look had been aimed at someone else entirely. (There were moments when Harry was acutely aware that he was a little bit mad, and this was definitely one of them.)

He forced himself to focus on something completely different. "That is so cool— I mean, no, I wouldn't have, but how do you make the illusion move like that?"

"You actively sustain the spell and just...visualise the image moving? Like actually visualise it, how the different lines and colours need to shift to portray the motion, not just what you know it looks like when people move, or a vague impression of the memory. I have some animated sketches I can show you, it's the same idea..."

Chapter Text

They managed to miss the end of the Welcome Feast entirely. When they returned to the dining hall, students were already streaming out, about half headed downstairs and half upstairs by various staircases. (Hogwarts had an excessive number of stairs.) Harry wasn't entirely sure where they were going, but he presumed the dorms, and he knew that the Ravenclaw dorms were in a tower, so he started following one of the groups headed up. Gryffindor was also in a tower, but he'd heard people mention the Snake Pit and the Sett for Hufflepuff, so those two were probably down.

"Where're you going?" Danny asked, still fighting the crowd to get back into the Great Hall, presumably in the hopes of finding one of their prefects, or whoever was technically supposed to tell them where to go.

"The dorms? Where are you going?"

"How do you know where the dorms are? I don't..."

Harry gave him an unimpressed look. "Neither do I. I think at least some of these people have to, though."

He resumed following the older students, picking out a boy who had the knot of a blue and bronze striped tie peeking out over the neck of his uniform over-robes. He was fairly certain those were Ravenclaw's colours. Danny hesitated for a few seconds, but then hurried to catch up, as Harry had suspected he would. There probably was a group of firsties and someone who was meant to shepherd them around, but what if they'd already left the Hall? If he wasted time looking for them practically all of the older students would already be gone, and there would be no one to follow, either. (Of course, they might also be waiting for Harry and Danny to come join them, like the Muggleborn Shopping Group, but if they were that was their problem, as far as Harry was concerned.)

They followed the boy with the Ravenclaw tie and several of his friends up three staircases, down one, across what felt like half the castle, down another staircase, across what felt like half the castle in a different direction (past the Library, Harry noted), up a staircase that had to go directly to the fourth or fifth floor from...where were they? the first? and then, finally, around a corner, through a door with a bronze eagle statue built into it, which someone had propped open (to the annoyance of the statue), and into what had to be the Ravenclaw Common Room.

It was an open, airy space — the ceiling had to be thirty feet or more, with two tiers of balconies running all the way around the circular room. The outer wall of both balconies was lined with bookshelves, tall, thin, slit-like windows marking the spaces between them (staggered between the two levels rather than directly in line). The balconies were too narrow to have seating — it looked like they were actually reached by ladder, rather than a spiral stair like the one in the centre of the room. The lower level, where they were standing, was, in contrast, absolutely full of seating — mostly squashy-looking armchairs and sofas, but a fair number of oversized pillow-type things that he was fairly sure were for sitting too, and window-seats in the large, open arches which made the room feel even more open than it already was. The walls were more glass than stone, with perhaps one metre of wall for every two metres of window, but there was enough space between the arches for a few moving portraits or a nook containing a static statue or sculpture. Everything was decorated in shades of blue and bronze, a little more modern and less overly ornate than what he'd seen of the castle so far.

Opposite the door was a foot-high stage. It wasn't very large, Harry didn't imagine they did major theatrical productions on it, but maybe a couple of people at a time playing instruments or singing or dancing or doing a scene out of a play. At the moment, it was occupied by the half-goblin professor and a handful of students with prefects' badges. The rest of the students were sitting and chatting with each other, or just generally milling around. A boy was playing something up-beat and jazzy on a piano off to one side — that was neat. Harry had never had an opportunity to learn any instruments (other than the recorder in school, that barely counted), but if they just left a piano sitting around in the common room for anyone to use, maybe he'd try it.

He drifted around the edge of the room toward the stage, taking note of several bulletin boards — one with beginning of term announcements and time-tables for lessons (not just for Ravenclaw, the other houses' were there too, and someone had pinned a messy list of professors' office hours beside them); another with study group schedules and what had to be sign-up sheets for time slots using the stage or the piano; a third was clearly for non-academic, student-run events. It had a flyer advertising that Elia and Chris would be taking turns modelling for each other, if anyone was interested in joining them for drawing practice on Thursday evenings, and one notifying people that there would be a morning callisthenics and gymnastics thing in "the dinky little courtyard on the third floor". The Applied Arithmancy Club would be meeting at "the usual time" and next Saturday there would be a "Quibbler Brunch" to discuss the summer issues of what Harry was pretty sure was a conspiracy tabloid? (So, clearly that would be the place to put up an Edificeering Club flyer.)

"Hey, Danny, if I were to start like a rock-climbing club, but climbing buildings instead, would that be a thing you'd be interested in?" Because if he was, he could totally make a flyer. Harry could...sort of draw. Like diagrams, sure, but not actual art.

"Um, what?"

"Edificeering. It's totally a thing."

"I...don't think that's a thing, Harry."

"I swear it is, we had a club for it at my old school." Briefly, and only because Harry thought it sounded awesome to learn how to scale buildings like an assassin, but it had existed. "It's really cool, and Hogwarts would be perfect for it. Basically, the idea is—" He cut himself off as two prefects and about ten other first-years finally arrived, making their way toward the stage to get front-row seats on an unoccupied pile of cushions. Presumably, he and Danny were supposed to be with them. He also presumed something was about to happen, so he meandered over and claimed a squishy little pillow thing for himself, kneeling on it instead of trying to sit cross-legged in his robes. "I'll tell you about it later," he assured Danny, who didn't seem nearly excited enough to understand exactly what they would be doing.

"O...kay? Hey, um! Ms Prefect? We're here." He waved at a girl who was anxiously explaining...something Harry hadn't been paying attention to to the professor who was, presumably, their Head of House.

After a second of confusion, he realised that she was one of the prefects who had escorted the other firsties up here, and she was apologising for having misplaced two of the twelve children she'd been meant to accompany. Namely, Harry and Danny. Oops?

The prefect had a moment of confusion too, which was quickly replaced by a moment of annoyance. "Tonks? Potter? Where the hell have you been?"

Harry shrugged. "Around? We just followed everyone else, so..."

"Why didn't you meet us after the Feast like you were told to?"

"I must have missed the announcement," he said, trying not to sound too annoyed. "We got here just fine, so I'm not really sure what your problem is..."

"My problem is—"

"We went to find the bathroom, and when we came back everyone was already leaving the Great Hall," Danny explained. "I'm sorry. We weren't trying to worry you, we just didn't know we were supposed to meet you."

Harry shot Danny a sidelong look, wondering why the prefect would have been worried. Yes, if they'd really been lost they might've been late or something, but it was hardly as though they were likely to get hurt just wandering around the corridors until they found a ghost or an older student, or hell, even a portrait — the ones here not only moved like magic photos, but they could also talk — to give them directions. He didn't really doubt that it was a reasonable assumption — Harry might be bad at working out people's motives, but he was willing to take Danny's word for it here — he just didn't get it.

The professor sighed, patting the prefect on the arm. "It's fine, Miss Clearwater. They did get here just fine, after all, no harm done. You can go ahead and take a seat."

She joined the other prefects sitting behind the professor, glaring bloody murder at Harry, as though she somehow knew he was responsible for him and Danny having abandoned her and the rest of their class. He smirked at her. He really couldn't help it, it was just funny when people got annoyed with him for reasons that were one-hundred per cent their problem. The glare intensified.

He was seriously having trouble not laughing by the time the professor — Filius Flitwick, as he introduced himself — called them to order. He held a relatively short meeting — it was already sort of late, Harry supposed — basically just introducing the prefects and the new students and saying a few words about the beginning of the year and how he was so excited to see all these bright young minds refreshed by their break and ready to learn something new! Breakfast would be served at seven, and he'd have their time-tables for them then (presumably for everyone who didn't just copy down the schedule pinned to the bulletin board — Harry was going to, as soon as he was reunited with his luggage and could grab a notebook) and as he expected to see them all there, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed (Harry never had understood that phrase...), they'd do well to get off to bed, wouldn't they? Yes, that's right, everyone up the stairs, same rooms as last year but one floor up, the elves have already brought in your luggage, you know the drill...

Everyone didn't head up to their dorms, though most people did, including the prefects. The professor held the first-years back until the rest of them had cleared out up the spiral stair in the centre of the room, answering a couple of hesitant questions about borrowing a school owl to write home (which Harry should probably also do at some point, if only to reassure Aunt Petunia that he wasn't dead and had in fact made it to school, and oh, by the way, it turns out Lily didn't cheat on James, I'm not actually her kid at all, and tell Dudders that if he still wants to see cool magic I'll send him a chocolate frog to eat next time he's home, they try to escape, it's wicked) and what to do if they happened to have forgotten something important, like a hairbrush, the answer to which was, you're in luck, my dear, I happen to be the Charms professor, and there's a very simple spell for that...

After the impromptu lesson on the Hair-Brushing Charm — which mostly left Harry wondering why that girl didn't already know it, she wasn't the bushy-haired girl who had been on the Muggleborn Shopping Trip, so why wouldn't she use magic to do her hair at home? — Professor Flitwick bounded away up the stairs, stopping at the first landing. There were eight doors leading off the circular central room, which contained a few chairs and tables, presumably in case they wanted to hang out and do puzzles or play board games or something (he assumed they had actual desks in their rooms for homework). One of the doors was marked with an upward-pointing triangle, and one with a downward-pointing triangle — the standard symbol marking loos for boys and girls, respectively — and the other six were open to reveal two-person bedrooms, which were clearly meant to be theirs. Their luggage had already been moved in.

"So, we don't get to choose our roommates?" one of the girls — not the same one who'd forgotten her hairbrush, a different, taller one — asked, sounding very disappointed. She edged a bit closer to Hairbrush Girl.

The professor chortled. "No, no, Miss Brocklehurst. Rooms are assigned alphabetically. You may change rooms at term with the agreement of all roommates involved. Just let me know what you intend to do, and I will inform the elves. To start with, however, you will be sharing with Mister Boot; Mister Corner with Mister Cornfoot; Mister Entwhistle and Mister Goldstein; Miss Li and Miss MacDougal; Miss Patil and Mister Potter; and Mister Tonks with Miss Turpin," he informed them, pointing toward rooms as he listed their names.

"My mother said Ravenclaws have their own rooms," the girl who was probably Harry's roommate said, her tone clipped and accusing.

The tiny professor beamed. "Your mother is Healer Leda Patil, yes? I remember her... She would have started in, oh, let's see..."

"Nineteen Sixty-One, Professor."

"Yes, yes. And the Head of Ravenclaw at that time was Professor Ash-Crow. Brilliant man, but a bit laissez faire with his students. It was his philosophy that students are best suited to determine how they learn best, and in what environment. But what he didn't see was how easy it was for students with their own space to become entirely caught up in their own projects, neglecting food, sleep, lessons... When I became the Head of the House in Seventy-Seven, Madam Pomfrey petitioned me to change the system. I have found that insisting upon roommates for all Ravenclaws results in higher numbers of Hospital admissions for work-related stresses, but on the whole they are much less severe. Can anyone tell me why?"

Presumably the same reason that getting better helmets for a Hypothetical Lateral Thinking Exercise Army resulted in more head wounds — some of them otherwise would have been fatalities. In this case, people probably noticed if their roommate was...sort of acting like Harry did on a regular basis, and got worried and told Professor Flitwick that oh, by the way, my roommate's only been sleeping a few hours a night and practising magic about eight hours a day outside of lessons — judging from the boys' reactions on the train, Harry presumed normal people would consider that excessive, as opposed to just the obvious thing to do with his free time — and he's missed like four meals this week, and the Professor would probably insist that Harry go to the Hospital Wing and probably be sedated when he claimed he just wasn't tired, and he wasn't being weirdly obsessive, just normally obsessive, and shite, that was going to be annoying...

Students are best suited to determine how they learn best, and in what environment was much more Harry's speed...

One of the other boys answered the question while Harry was distracted. He started paying attention again as Flitwick said, "Quite so! If your roommate is becoming dangerously obsessed with any given project, I expect you to urge them to take a break, seek help, or failing this, bring the situation to the attention of one of the prefects or myself."

(It sounded like he hadn't really missed anything.)

Harry sighed. He was probably going to have to convince Patil not to report him for being 'dangerously' obsessed with whatever his project of the moment might be. Might be a bit difficult, since even if she wasn't worried about him she'd probably be annoyed trying to sleep while Harry was practising transfigurations, or whatever.

"Do I have to room with him?" Turpin (Hairbrush Girl) asked, quickly adding, "No offence, Tonks—" ("None taken," he murmured, clearly amused.) "—but... Why can't I share with Mandy or Patil?"

"Yes! I agree!" Patil said quickly. "I'll share with you, and the boys can share with each other!"

The animated, excitable professor frowned. "Why, Miss Turpin! You've hardly spoken to Mister Tonks yet! And while admittedly asking to change roommates without even getting to know him isn't likely to put the two of you on the best foot, it does seem rather premature to think you won't get along at this juncture!"

"But, he's a boy! It's just not right!"

"And why is that, Miss Turpin?" There was a grin playing around the corners of the professor's mouth again. "Anyone?"

Harry actually didn't know the answer to this one. He listened attentively as Patil explained, "It's not proper! My father wouldn't approve!" ...which didn't actually explain anything, but there were a great many things in Harry's life — rules and principles and so on — the justification for which ultimately came down to it being What One Does, like being polite to girls or not bullying Dudders for being an idiot. Propriety was sort of the same thing. There didn't really need to be a reason beyond everyone but Harry seems to agree that this is a thing, and it's really not that much work to play along, so why not?

"And why is that, Miss Patil?"

"Because, well..." the girl ducked her head in embarrassment.

Danny rather unexpectedly came to her defence. "Why do we wear robes, professor, or write with quills rather than pens? Why do we ride the Hogwarts Express to school? Why do the forks go on the left side of a dinner plate and the spoons on the right? Why is it déclassé to use mass-produced...anything, even when it's stuff you're not using magic on, like umbrella stands? It's a social convention, and yes, it's a bit silly, but I bet you're not planning to turn up for class tomorrow in pyjamas. If the girls want to room together, that's fine. I don't mind sharing with Harry?" he said, as though it was a question, his eyes flicking over to Harry.

He shrugged. "Fine with me." At least Danny already knew that Harry was a bit mad, probably not actually a Potter (definitely not actually a Potter...), and obviously a freak when it came to doing magic...though after the Potato Platter Incident, at least a handful of other people were obviously aware of that last one, too. And he could finish explaining the awesomeness of edificeering, and Danny had promised to show him some of his drawings, Harry couldn't wait to find out how moving art worked.

Besides, what was he going to say? Don't worry about it, Patil, I'm widely regarded as the sissiest of boys, and therefore it's probably not actually improper for us to share a room?

The Head of Ravenclaw hmmm'd at them. "And should conventions not, on occasion, be challenged? Their bases and biases questioned? In any case, we have an odd number of each sex, so at least one room will have one boy and one girl, unless there are three boys and three girls who wish to share...?"

"Mandy?" Turpin said hopefully.

She shrugged. "I don't mind sharing with Boot or with you two, I just want to figure this out and go to bed."

Meanwhile, Entwhistle and Goldstein had been having a conversation between themselves, quietly enough Harry could barely hear them. Apparently Boot and Entwhistle were cousins, and Entwhistle had promised his mother he would look out for Boot. Therefore, it wasn't entirely surprising that he offered, "Terry, you can stay with us," after a couple of seconds.

"Okay? I mean, I guess that's fine..."

The professor clearly hadn't expected them to agree to the more roommates option. He had, however, said unless, and so was sort of obligated to allow them to move. He gave them a deeply disappointed look before saying, "Very well, then. Pipat!"

A small, humanoid creature — he was only about two and a half feet tall — with very large ears and eyes, dressed in a sort of toga thing with the Hogwarts crest on one shoulder, popped into existence in their midst. He (Harry had no idea how he knew the creature was male, but he was pretty sure) clearly hadn't been expecting there to be students around when he popped in. His eyes went even wider, bugging out in a way that made Harry think of a chihuahua, and he let out a little squeak, muttering... "Elves are not supposed to be seen by wards of the Castle outside of elf-spaces! Is Goblin Teacher trying to get Phyp into trouble?" under his breath.

Harry was much more certain of this weird, non-human language than he had been about the gobbledygook the first time he heard it. Maybe this was the "weird, made-up language" he'd spoken when he was left with the Dursleys...

He switched to English to ask (clearly anxiously, darting looks at the students, most of whom were staring at him with some degree of shock and fascination), "How is Pip to be assisting Bird House Head?" with a little bow.

"There's been a change of plans, Pipat. I'm afraid we're going to need one of the dorm rooms split, with each half added to the rooms on either side."

The elf very clearly did not understand. "What does Bird House Head wish for Pip to do?"

"Please ask the Castle to divide one of these rooms — this one—" He pointed at the room on the east side of the circular central area. "—in half, and add half to each of the rooms on either side."

"...Pip is bringing Chief Elf here? She is being better at...talking with...humans."

Harry snorted, almost positive that hesitation was because the elf definitely considered Professor Flitwick to be a goblin. And he wasn't entirely sure of the context here, but he was pretty sure that wasn't a good thing. Like, the little elf might be a bit racist against goblins or something. Either that or he'd forgotten the word "English" and was trying to talk around it. Possibly both. The elf threw a somewhat betrayed look at him for laughing.

Professor Flitwick made an impatient clicking sound — the one Firebloom used as a stand-in for stop screwing around and wasting my time. "You don't need to fetch Rose, it's really very simple. I just need you to add a wall in the middle of this room, and—"

The elf interrupted, tugging anxiously at one of his ears. "Pip is sorry, Bird House Head, but Pip is not understanding. Please, Pip is bringing—"

"Phyp?" Harry interrupted, suddenly very tired of listening to this ridiculous, painfully awkward and repetitive conversation. "He wants two rooms with three beds in each, in place of those three rooms with two beds in each."

Every person in the room — human, (half-)goblin, and elf alike — turned to stare at Harry, variously confused and unnerved.

"What?"

"Who the hell speaks house elf?" asked one of the boys whose name Harry had yet to catch. Either Corner or Cornfoot. Hopefully rhetorically, because...obviously Harry?

Harry ignored them — ignoring people acting like he'd suddenly grown a second head doing something normal people couldn't was quickly becoming his go-to response, largely because he had no idea what he should do. "Understand?" he asked the elf.

Phyp nodded warily. He closed his eyes, the magic in the walls of the castle behind him suddenly and very dramatically shifting, in a way that made Harry feel uncomfortably as though he'd just realised he was standing in one of the little boats that had brought them across the lake rather than on solid ground. The door in the middle vanished, replaced almost instantly by the same plain stone as the rest of the walls. After a short, stomach-turning eternity, the magic stabilised again, flowing through the walls and floor in a way similar to, but not exactly the same as, before. "It is being so. Pip may go?" he asked, slightly desperately.

The professor stuck his head through one of the remaining doorways on that side of the tower, presumably to be sure that whatever Harry had asked the elf to do was correct. He was fairly certain the professor didn't speak Elvish, and so probably didn't realise that all he'd done was describe what they wanted. Trying to define every intermediate step — add a wall here, add this space to that — was both confusing and unnecessary. (How Harry knew that, he had no idea, but he was sort of getting used to not knowing how he knew things.)

"Yes, thank you. As you were." After the elf bowed and popped away, Flitwick added, "And thank you, Mister Potter." He shook his head, muttering under his breath in Goblin, "Damn grubs deliberately misunderstand me, I know it." (Apparently the half-goblin was also racist against the elves, which was, for some reason, sort of hilarious.) And then, "I'll leave you to move your trunks and get to bed. Remember, breakfast is at seven!"

It didn't take long at all for Harry to find his bag in one of the rooms which now had three beds and drag it back out into the centre area. It took substantially longer for everyone else to work out where they ought to sleep. Corner and Cornfoot didn't need to move, and just by chance Patil and Turpin's things had ended up in the same three-bed room, but everyone else had to play a slow, pathetic game of musical chairs trying to work it out.

Harry hated waiting for other people to solve what was really a very simple problem, especially when they were trying not to offend each other by giving orders. After about two minutes of oh, well, if you put your things over here for a second — oh, crap, sorry, I thought we were taking that room — here, let's move Mandy's things first — er, Tonks, right? D'you mind if we... he decided he'd had enough. He was thoroughly out of patience for dealing with other people and would very much like to be able to go to his room now and close the door and not have to think about their idiocy.

"Oh, for God's sake! MacDougal, move your shite to the room Li picked, it's closer to your bathroom. Danny, bring your trunk out here so Brocklehurst can move hers in, we're taking MacDougal's room."

"Mind giving me a hand? It's sort of heavy..." The fact that everyone else needed at least two people to move their stupid trunks was a contributing factor in the slowness of the reorganisation, as was the fact that most of the girls seemed disinclined to help with that part. Patil and Turpin were already unpacking while Li and MacDougal bickered over which of them should have to move their things again.

Harry hit Danny's trunk with a Hover Charm. "Problem solved, let's go," he demanded, stalking into what was now his room and throwing another spell at the luggage MacDougal was being slow to drag out.

"Oh! Thanks, Potter!" she said cheerfully, as though he hadn't done it specifically to get her to leave more quickly.

"You're welcome," he answered, trying not to sound too resentful of the fact that she was still here and making him be polite. "Please, get out."

That offended her, he could tell, but he really didn't care. As soon as Danny pushed his trunk into the room, Harry slammed the door — sort of, it must be enchanted not to actually slam, but shut it forcefully, anyway — and turned to lean against it, closing his eyes and letting out a deep sigh of relief. It had been a very long day, and Harry had spent practically all of it surrounded by people, most of whom were apparently dead set on interrogating him. The boys — Danny and Blaise and Theo — hadn't been so bad, on the train (Harry had learned plenty from his counter-interrogation of them), but dinner had just been tedious, and he was not impressed with his housemates so far.

For all Harry could be friendly and outgoing, especially if he needed information from someone, he honestly preferred his solitude most of the time. Dealing with other people for more than an hour or two at a stretch, forced to mind his words and his actions, being careful around them, always wore on him, making him tense and irritable. School was fine, because he could mostly ignore the teacher and read a book or something most of the day and no one would try to talk to him. Even the teachers didn't bother asking him questions anymore, trying to catch him out for not paying attention, since he always knew the answers. (He was usually at least somewhat aware of what was going on in the background.) But out in the real world actually interacting with people, that was harder, especially when they made him talk about himself rather than letting him ask questions about laws and history and magic. Yes, he'd probably spent at least six or eight hours talking to people every day over the past few weeks, but that was less than half of his day. He'd still spent most of his time alone, either practising magic or reading or going out for meals or just wandering around watching people, and he hadn't talked to anyone for more than a few hours at a stretch.

And today, he'd had to talk to people all day, without so much as a break. The train had left at eleven, and it had to be after ten-thirty by now...

Suffice it to say, finally reaching the privacy of his own room was an enormous relief.

Well, a certain measure of privacy, anyway. The tension was just starting to seep out of him as he relaxed into the magic all around himself, not really hot or cold but strong and alive in a way he hadn't really known a building could be, when Danny interrupted. "Tired? I swear I won't take too long, I just want to get a few things ready for tomorrow and set an alarm, and then we can go to bed..."

"Eh? What? No, I'm not sleepy, I was planning on staying up for a while, I just... Look, could you just leave me alone and, I don't know, not talk to me for a few hours? Pretend I don't exist or something."

Danny gave him a queer look, as though this was an odd request, though Harry really didn't think it was. It seemed very reasonable to him to let one's roommate at least pretend he had some privacy once in a while. "Um...sure? I'm planning on being unconscious for at least a few hours, so that shouldn't be a problem." Oh. Right. He had just said he was going to bed, hadn't he. Pay attention, Potter... (Harry was so tired of paying attention to people...) Danny grimaced. "Would you mind, um...closing your curtains and reading in bed or something? Just until I fall asleep. I get claustrophobic, and the light will probably keep me up."

"But the moonlight won't?" There were no curtains on the window between their beds, each of which was tucked into one of the corners between the outside wall and the walls dividing their room from the bathroom and the next bedroom. The light of the half-moon didn't fall directly on their pillows, but it was a clear night and still easily bright enough to read by, especially if Harry moved his pillow down to the foot of the bed.

Again with the weird looks... "No?"

...Well, it was bright enough for Harry to read by. Not that it would keep him up when he was finally ready to sleep, just...there wasn't that much difference between this and lighting a few candles, really. A Torch Charm was probably less bright. If that would bother Danny, he would expect the moonlight to be a problem, too...

Whatever. He just shrugged, moving his pillow and digging Ciardha Monroe and the Lord of the Silent out of his bag. He had been planning on unpacking and maybe practising spells for a while — it'd be sort of weird if going to a magic school meant he had less time to actually practise magic than when he wasn't at school — but he could wait until Danny fell asleep first (and maybe use a sleeping charm on him to make sure he stayed asleep, even if Harry was casting spells in the same room — that, unlike a little constant light, would actually wake Harry up, if it were him).

In the meanwhile, the travelling cursebreaker and adventurer extraordinaire — and his faithful companion and stenographer, Algernon Whitney — had just realised that something was amiss at the Egyptian project they'd been invited to for the Nineteen-Fifteen/Nineteen-Sixteen Excavation Season, and met a suspicious English (muggle) newlywed couple who were either somehow related to the shadowy figure responsible for half the crime in Muggle Egypt or investigating the wizard Ciardha believed to be responsible for his own expedition's misfortunes from another angle — or both — in which case this might be a far more complicated scheme than Ciardha and Algernon had originally supposed, a conspiracy of potentially Statute-shattering proportions... (Based on True Events)

Algernon Whitney might be tied with Terry Pratchett as Harry's favourite author at the moment, which was saying quite a lot. Monroe had also written about their adventures in their youth, but they were much drier, more technical books, sort of a cross between...exactly what you'd expect from an Early-Twentieth Century travelogue, crossed with a cursebreaker's manual, with a few very real journal-like entries throughout the decades-long series, talking about the horrors of war and colonialism and going through a crisis of conscience that ended with asking whether the Statute was really such a good idea if it meant the destruction of so many vibrant traditions in Sub-Saharan Africa and the Americas, and giving up tomb-raiding in favour of travelling around and using his cursebreaking skills to help people deal with tyngedau and dangerous beasts. They weren't exactly banned in Britain, but they certainly weren't nearly as popular as Whitney's turn-of-the-century murder mystery-adventures.

Those, including the one Harry was half-way through, focused more on the individual stories without really addressing why there was a 'rogue' Black Cloak running a muggle crime ring in Egypt and undermining an attempt by the local magical government to recover some of their Lost Territories — entire oases hidden away in pocket dimensions, containing who knew what ancient secrets and treasures. (Monroe went on a rant in his version of events where he stated with complete certainty that the Black Cloak in question hadn't gone rogue at all, they just didn't want the Egyptians recovering any powerful, ancient magics that could undermine the status quo between Britain and Egypt.) The mysteries weren't really that difficult to figure out, but the action and adventure and cursebreaking and vivid descriptions of exotic settings made them more than entertaining enough to read anyway. Plus, reading Monroe's account and then Whitney's made the kids' books sort of fascinatingly sinister, painting a veneer of innocence and excitement over really complex historical issues and events and ethical dilemmas and angst. (Harry loved them.)

"Kill the lights whenever you want, I don't need them."

Danny gave him yet another look that very clearly said, you're such a freak, Potter. "You're just going to...read. In the dark."

"No, I'm going to read by moonlight. Weren't you going to leave me alone and go to sleep?"

"Yeah, yeah, fine, whatever..." Harry was pretty sure he heard an unspoken bloody weirdo there, but he was so far beyond caring at this point...

Where were we...? Oh, right — dinner with the Emersons on the dahabeeyah...

Chapter Text

It didn't take very long at all for Harry to decide that Hogwarts was bloody great.

It did have its low points — Defence class was, as Harry had predicted, a wretched disappointment—

-v-

(Mon 2 Sept)

Professor Quirrell was a nervous looking man who would be in his late thirties if he were a muggle. His classroom smelled faintly of garlic, and he was thin and pale in the way of a person who had recently been ill. He certainly didn't look like he'd just spent a summer in Albania...unless Harry was completely mis-remembering where Albania was. He thought it was one of those Mediterranean countries, by Greece? Anyway, the professor spent the better part of their first 'lesson' stuttering at them about the trip he'd made during his sabbatical, first travelling up the Nile deep into Africa, then across to the Arabian peninsula. He took a ship to Bombay and came back to the Mediterranean the long way around — north through all the -stan countries and then west through the Ukraine and back into Europe.

Harry had the impression that the professor was trying to establish some credibility as an adventurous, outgoing, Monroe-like (or at least Whitney-like) figure, but he didn't really manage it, given the aforementioned bloody stuttering. When he'd said "W-W-Welcome to Defence Against the D-Dark Arts. My n-name is P-Professor Qu-Qu-Qu-irrell," any hopes Harry had had of liking the class plummeted. He wasn't sure even learning to fight other mages in lessons would make up for having to sit through an entire lecture of that.

And, he realised, letting his head fall to the desk as the professor finally ended his torturous recitation of his past year's adventures and got down to the business of what he would be teaching, they weren't even going to be learning to fight other mages. Not even in theory. Oh, no. They were going to spend the entire term learning how to deal with household pests and non-magical animals. And next term, they were going to discuss Emergency Situations, like getting lost in the muggle world (Oooh, scary... Not), and learn how to escape from non-magical humans who might want to hurt them. Not even fight back against people trying to hurt them, escape. As in, run away.

Harry was fairly certain he didn't need to spend an entire year learning how to deal with magical pest infestations and 'dangerous' non-magical animals like dogs or badgers — how often did anyone ever run into a bloody badger out in the wild?! — and explaining how to summon the Knight Bus (if he ever managed to get lost, he didn't think he'd ever been lost in his entire life) and read maps and shite would take maybe one lesson? and "kick 'em in the fork and run like hell" was even easier than summoning the bloody bus!

Nowhere on the itinerary was there even a hint of anything to do with any actual Dark Arts. Harry had probably learned more about defending himself from Dark Arts just hanging out in Borgin and Burke's over the past few weeks and figuring out how to recognise if something was cursed. (Almost everything was cursed.)

Harry wasn't the only one who was disappointed with the prospect of more 'lessons' from Quirrell. He didn't really think Flitwick would let them try to test out of the class when he suggested it, grousing about the stuttering professor on the way back to Ravenclaw Tower. He was pretty sure Danny didn't think he would, either. But the other boy took the suggestion a lot more seriously than Harry had expected.

"Can't hurt to ask, I guess. I'm telling you, that Quirrell, he's bad news."

"What, really? I didn't actually think he'd go for it. Or you, for that matter." Danny gave him a wan smile, rubbing at his forehead, smudging... "Do you have muggle makeup on your face?"

"Oh, shite, I didn't even think about that," he muttered, attempting to flatten his fringe over what looked like a nasty scar of some sort. It wasn't raised, Harry hadn't noticed it in relief when the makeup was intact, but it was a livid, not-entirely-healed colour. "Uh, yeah. It's... I'm not good enough at glamourie to hide this, yet." He gave an awkward shrug.

"You're also not good enough at hair-taming charms."

"Piss off," he muttered, trying to smudge the makeup back into place instead, which was completely futile without a mirror, just revealed more of the mark.

"Is that a sowilo?" When Danny sort of just shrugged awkwardly, Harry added, "Who the hell carved a rune into your face? And why?"

Danny sighed. "Can we get back to our room, first? It's sort of...private."

-ʌ-

Madam Pince resolutely refused to bend the rules for anyone—

-v-

(Fri 6 Sept)

Madam Pince gave him a narrow-eyed glare over her specs, making her look even more like a vulture than she usually did — Harry wasn't being mocking, something about the narrowness of her face and the sharpness of her nose, with her plain black robes and ruffled white collar, and how severely she pulled her silver hair into its bun made her look slightly...vulture-like (that was really the only thing Harry could think of with her looking at him like that).

He made an effort to keep eye contact and not fidget, his hopeful, expectant, not at all doing this because I'm specifically trying to get on your good side but because I actually want to keep up with my studies in muggle subjects -expression firmly in place. Though he was only signing up — or trying to sign up — for extra lessons because he'd overheard one of Corner's older cousins telling him in the Common Room that the only way to get on the librarian's good side was to join her muggle maths and literature lessons. And it would still probably take a few years for her to warm up to him.

Harry wasn't entirely certain it would end up being worth it to maybe, eventually get the old witch everyone agreed was the biggest stickler for rules in the entire school to bend them for him and let him into the Restricted Section — she was worse than Filch, the caretaker everyone hated, who hated everyone right back — but it couldn't hurt to try, he thought. Especially since the worst part about school had always been (and still was) the fact that Harry was trapped in lessons with other people and had to work at their pace. If there were different study-groups for different levels and participation was voluntary, it stood to reason that Harry could move to a more advanced group if (when) the pace of the first-years started to chafe. And, since participation was voluntary, everyone would actually want to be there. There wouldn't be anyone like Dudley, who considered having to learn things to be a horrible imposition on time spent palling around with their mates, which was clearly the entire point of school, as everyone knew.

After what seemed like a very long time, she let out an annoyed little huff, but pulled her wand and conjured a sheet of paper with a list of meeting times and books he would presumably need to read on it. Harry caught it out of the air and blinked at it, surprised. He hadn't realised that was possible, conjuring something as complex as written documents. Obviously, now that he'd seen it done, it made sense that it would be...if a person could concentrate on all the details of a thing at once, there was no reason they shouldn't be able to do something like that — Danny had been explaining conjuration the other day, since they had nothing better to do in Transfiguration — but Harry was pretty sure it was bloody impressive.

"Mind you copy that down before it unravels."

Harry nodded.

"And tell that old coot next time you see him that I'm not going to bend the rules for you or anyone else, and he has no business leading you to believe that I might."

"Er...excuse me?" Had she used legilimency on him? Damn it! He hadn't even noticed! He really needed to get Blaise to practise occlumency with him. Wait. Shite. Did that mean she knew he'd been studying occlumency? As in, he'd been reading books he shouldn't, in defiance of the rules she definitely wasn't going to bend? Bugger!

An expression that might have been a smirk pulled at her lips, for the briefest of moments. "What you do outside of school is none of my business or concern. I enforce the rules of Hogwarts and its Library, not the laws of Magical Britain. But yes, you could stand to practise that particular skill a bit more." She pointed at the conjured paper in his hand. "If you're not early, you're late. Now go away, I'm busy," she said, dismissing him with a bird-like quirk of her head toward the door, already shelving the next book on her cart.

Wait. Did that mean she'd heard him thinking about her resemblance to a vulture, earlier? Obviously he couldn't ask, in case she hadn't, but still... Sorry, I didn't mean anything insulting by it, he thought in her direction as loudly and clearly as he could. Aloud, he only said, "Yes, Ma'am," and booked it before he could offend her any more.

(When he arrived for the first literature lesson, though, he realised that she'd given him the reading list and meeting times for the third- and fourth-years' group, rather than put him with the handful of other first-years he knew had at least been talking about signing up for this, so he couldn't have offended her too badly.)

-ʌ-

And Harry hadn't been wrong about Gryffindors not appreciating getting shown up in lessons, but Ravenclaws didn't like it much better. About half of the students in his year were terribly impressed by the most basic of magics (only two other people in his first Transfiguration lesson managed to turn their bloody matchstick into a needle), and half of them called him a showoff or teacher's pet for already knowing...pretty much everything they were going to do in practical lessons for the entire year.

Honestly, Harry preferred the showoff/teacher's-pet option. It was sort of difficult to make him uncomfortable (or at least he thought so), but the way the other students went all awe-struck when he did something like come up with coloured variations on the basic light charm because he was bloody bored, sitting in class practising lumos and nox for hours, was definitely off-putting. In fact, the way everyone else sort of acted like magic was...complicated, was sort of off-putting in general. Sure it could be difficult, particularly when he was figuring out how to do a spell the first time, but it wasn't exactly rocket science, was it? Especially with a professor to show you what it should look like.

-v-

(Mon 9 Sept)

"Very well, then," Professor Flitwick chortled, floating across the front of the classroom on a little cushion thing he'd charmed to hover around like a tiny magic carpet or something. (Except, not actually a magic carpet, because apparently those were illegal. Because...reasons.) It rose a bit so that his head was about where they might expect a normal human professor's head to be and carried him over to his lectern (which was normal human height, because...reasons?). He liked to make it bob from one side of the classroom to the other while he talked, as though he was pacing. Harry thought learning how to do that seemed much more interesting than practising the very, very basic Torch Charm, creating a little ball of light at the end of their wands. "Now that we all have a decent grasp on the theory, let's take a few minutes to practise, and then we'll take turns demonstrating for the class, shall we?"

The class as a whole took this as permission to break into excited chatter, turning to talk to or practise with friends sitting nearby. Blaise, for example, turned around to continue the conversation they'd been having before the lesson began. "Anyway, if you really want, I can owl Mira for the ritual, but I'm not sure we could do it here without pinging the wards."

"Do I want to know what you two are planning?" Theo asked, with a sigh which said he didn't want to know, but tell him anyway.

"Harry still thinks Coco is the coolest pet ever," Danny explained, obviously exasperated. ("And Harry is still completely right about that," Harry inserted, smirking.) "And no, I don't think you could do it here. Not in the Castle for sure, and maybe not on the grounds at all. Can't you just...let it go? At least don't talk about it in class. Just...practise the stupid charm or something before Draco notices we're not and tattles. Lumos." A little white light flicked on at the end of his wand. "Nox."

Theo nodded. "Lumos. Summoning even something as minor as a boggart is a class-D offence. Nox."

Harry and Blaise followed their lead, letting the conversation drop for perhaps a minute, lights flickering on and off. Harry had only cast this one a couple of times before today, just to make sure he could. He could probably count on one hand the number of times he'd ever actually needed a torch, so he hadn't bothered with it until he was going through the spells they'd be doing in class, earlier in the week. It wasn't difficult, though. It was easy enough that Harry had already gotten bored with it, actually, and started to experiment with casting it slightly 'wrong' — a little twist on the pulse of magic that ignited it could make it appear a short distance in front of him; more or less magic made it brighter or dimmer; and with the right focus, he found he could fail to produce light of some wavelengths, making the spell-glow different colours.

"How are you doing that?" Danny asked, watching him cast a series of increasingly blue light charms.

Harry shrugged. He was doing it intentionally, but he didn't really have the words to describe exactly how he was doing it. "Er...sort of casting it like...higher pitched?"

As though summoned by his inability to explain, the professor floated over, clapping excitedly. "Very good, Mister Potter! Five points to Ravenclaw! Everyone, look here!" Everyone turned to stare at Harry, with his blue Torch Charm. "Mister Potter has worked out something we'll be experimenting with in a few years—" The stares took on a much more intimidated tone. Thanks, Professor... Harry thought sarcastically. Just what I needed... "—modifying charm effects through their casting, without altering the spell itself! Very good indeed! Though, hardly less than I would expect from Lily Evans's son!" Never mind that Harry wasn't actually Lily's son. He wondered, idly, what the little Charms professor might expect from Bellatrix Black's son. "Perhaps you'd like to be the first to demonstrate the standard casting...?"

Harry sighed. "Nox." He wasn't actually sure, he realised as he cancelled the blue version of the charm, whether he needed to do that before re-casting the white version. He'd have to try that later. When he wasn't surrounded by twenty other first-years. "Lumos."

"Of course, of course. And now you, Mister Tonks?"

The lesson moved on, with other students still sending the occasional impressed, jealous, resentful, or unnerved look at Harry, just for...fooling around. Honestly, there was nothing particularly advanced or difficult about anything he did just to entertain himself in lessons...

-ʌ-

Lessons, of course, moved at the pace of the slowest student in the class. In lessons with the Slytherins, that was usually Vincent Crabbe. Out of the Gryffindors, it was Ron Weasley (his secondhand books were decidedly not the reason most people were laughing at him), and out of the Hufflepuffs...maybe Sally Perks? Ravenclaw only had Potions with the Hufflepuffs (and, starting the second week, flying lessons), and Potions wasn't nearly as showy as Charms or Transfiguration. It was a lot harder to tell how other students were doing unless they actually blew something up. Perks was just the student who seemed the most lost when it came to preparing their ingredients and equipment, and who most regularly got questions wrong when Snape quizzed them or asked them to demonstrate a technique for the class.

Snape might have been Harry's favourite professor, if only because he had even less patience for teaching than Harry had for sitting around waiting for other people to learn, and therefore some sympathy for the fact that Harry was bored out of his skull. The first Potions lesson, Harry figured, had been meant to assess the students' abilities. The second was dead boring, discussing lab safety protocols (which were incredibly common sense, but maybe should've been mentioned before trying to brew anything, even as a test, since Perks and Leanne Malone had managed to let their Boil Cure boil over and panicked when they made their hands all warty trying to clean it up) and how to clean and maintain their equipment (which was all in the first chapter of their book, which only about half of the Ravenclaws and none of the Hufflepuffs seemed to have bothered to read). They didn't start discussing ingredient preparation and stirring techniques until the third lesson, and didn't so much as set another cauldron over a flame for weeks.

-v-

(Thurs 5 Sept)

"Stay behind, Potter," Snape said, almost idly, his soft voice somehow cutting through the sound of the students packing up their things without any apparent effort. He didn't even look up from organising his own notes and things up at the front of the room.

Shite.

Harry had thought, when the Professor hadn't said anything during the lesson, that he didn't mind Harry reading Whitney's account of his first glimpse of the ruins of Machu Picchu under the table rather than taking notes on the safety precautions they were meant to follow in the lab. He had been paying attention, enough to know that they were mostly common sense and he didn't have any enchanted clothes or jewellery, and he was pretty sure the spells he used to plait the top half of his hair out of his face and clean his teeth in the morning were instantaneous — some of the girls used hairstyling charms that worked like hairspray and pins and elastic bands and so on that were sort of constantly in effect, but Harry had to tie off the end of his plait with a bit of ribbon or an actual elastic, so he was pretty sure his wasn't — so he didn't think he had anything to worry about, as far as taking special precautions in the lab went. But it was possible the professor hadn't realised that Harry had been paying attention — that did happen sometimes — and had just been cleverer than the average teacher in not drawing attention to that fact in the middle of the lesson.

Harry couldn't count the number of times he'd been told off for 'disrupting the class' by 'not paying attention' when he wasn't doing anything disruptive, it was the teacher who decided to take several minutes away from their lecture or exercises or whatever to yell at him.

Danny, who had warned Harry that Snape wasn't going to like him reading under the table, gave him a half-sympathetic, half I told you so look as he filed out the door with everyone else. Harry, not entirely certain what he ought to be doing, but not inclined to hover indecisively around his seat looking anxious just because he didn't know how a dressing-down was expected to go here (he'd made it three whole days without being told off for anything), made his way up to stand politely before the professor's desk.

Snape exchanged one folder from his briefcase for another, altogether more interesting-looking one (thicker and somewhat tatty around the edges, stained with something a very poisonous-looking green on one corner), presumably notes for his next lecture. Professors spent far more hours in lessons than students. Harry had the rest of the morning and the first half of the afternoon free — or rather, he would be attending his first extracurricular biology lesson after lunch, but that wasn't actually required. Professor Snape would have another class in fifteen minutes. (Slytherin and Gryffindor firsties had their Potions lessons on Fridays, so it couldn't be them, but someone.) At long length, he looked up with a sigh and an exasperated glare.

Harry kept his peace, rather than make excuses for himself. Not that he didn't think it was a valid excuse that he had been paying attention, actually, he just knew most teachers didn't appreciate it when he started trying to explain himself before they (usually unnecessarily) told him why they were annoyed with him. (Sometimes he honestly didn't know what he'd done wrong, but most of the time he did now. There were only so many ways to annoy teachers while not really doing anything, so.)

And if he was being perfectly honest, he was a bit wary of Professor Snape. Yes, he'd thought they'd gotten on passably well when he'd come to tell Harry about Hogwarts and Magical Britain, but Harry had been on his own ground then, and Snape had been off-balance from his argument with Aunt Petunia about whether she was abusing Harry (which was ridiculous, of course she wasn't) and Snape's father and those couple of good jabs she'd gotten in about him joining the Dark Lord like a bloody idiot. Here, though, Snape was clearly in charge, and Harry hadn't realised back at Aunt Petunia's house that he was probably one of the most powerful, cleverest wizards around. Maybe he should have, since he'd managed to make Harry lose his grip on the ambient magic so easily, but because he had done it so easily and hadn't mentioned it after, Harry had sort of thought it wasn't that big a deal. Like, he'd clearly taken the Ministry Goons by surprise, and maybe Madam Bones hadn't bothered because she was trying to be political and not make the hostage situation worse, but they could have done the same thing? (Apparently not.)

He also hadn't realised before spending a couple of weeks hanging out around Knockturn exactly what it meant that Snape had been a Death Eater. Every single Marked Death Eater had killed someone to earn their Mark — a skull and viper tattoo on their left forearm. Murdered someone, in cold blood. And they'd all fought against the Ministry and various vigilante groups trying to stop them. Anyone who couldn't hold their own in a full-scale battle hadn't made it through the War. The slightly drunk warlock who'd told Harry that, talking about the duelling Competition and how none of those kids with their silly game and its rules knew a damn thing about really fighting, said all of the Death Eaters were trained as well as the Hit Wizards — Magical Britain's main government security force, not quite soldiers but not really just cops — and a lot of them as well as the Aurors, who were considered the most elite fighters in Britain — basically magical SWAT, as well as detectives. And Snape in particular had been a spy, a double agent, and managed to talk his way out of even a couple of years in prison after the war without claiming he'd been mind-controlled into it, like Theo's father and the Malfoys — and, as the boys had told him on the train, he was the person other very clever professionals turned to to solve problems that had them stumped, with a degree of ruthless efficiency that was apparently sort of legendary.

If there was one person in the school whose bad side Harry suspected he didn't want to see, it was Snape. The Headmaster might be more powerful, both magically and politically, but everything about the way he'd led his side of the war suggested he didn't really have the will to use his power, and he might be a genius alchemist — Mistle, the Knockturn tattooist who had been Harry's downstairs neighbour, had said as much, telling him about dragon's blood tattoos (which wasn't one of the Twelve Uses of Dragon's Blood Dumbledore and Flamel had published on, but probably more awesome than any of them) — but that didn't mean he was particularly good at solving problems or ferreting out plots against him or matching wits against someone who really wanted to defy his authority. Snape was the Head of Slytherin House. That was basically the entire job description.

Harry wouldn't really say he was afraid of Snape, but he knew the Potions Master was brilliant, calculating, cunning, ruthless, and willing to kill if necessary. Not that he thought the professor would kill him, but most people, as Harry was now aware, considered killing so much as a cat to be an inherently heinous act, so he couldn't imagine there were lesser punishments or manipulative pressures the former Death Eater would refrain from using, if he was willing to kill when he had to. Harry would have to be an idiot not to at least have enough wariness of him to be polite.

Accordingly, when Snape held out a hand and said, "Hand it over. Whatever book you found so much more engaging than my lecture," Harry dug it out of his bag without complaint. Or tried to , at least. Where the hell had it gone? He'd had it just a moment ago...

He did have to say, though, "It's not that your lectures aren't engaging, sir—" His welcome speech in their first lesson had been positively  riveting . "—just the topic."

"Why am I not surprised that you, of all children, have no regard for safety protocols, Mister Potter?" the man sneered.

Probably because Sirius Black had no regard for safety protocols. Which wasn't necessarily a good point, since Harry apparently wasn't his son, and even if he were it wasn't as though Black had raised him, but on the other hand, given what he knew about the Blacks in general, it was entirely possible that the "pathological disregard for our own safety" which Danny had mentioned was not great enough to make scaling the walls of the Castle seem like a good idea to him, was both literal and genetic, and Bellatrix almost certainly was his mother. (Danny wasn't actually a Black either, and all appearances aside James Potter had really been very distantly related to Sirius and Bellatrix, so perhaps it shouldn't be a surprise that he'd missed out on it.)

Harry left off digging through his bookbag to pout at him. "I have regard for safety protocols! I'm not going to do anything that might be dangerous to other students on purpose."

Despite Blaise's assurances about magical children being generally a bit more durable than non-magical children, Harry wasn't entirely convinced that, say, Sally Perks, would be able to walk away from an accident the same way he would, if only because most people (as evidenced by their first lesson) had a tendency to panic when something went wrong, and that almost always made things worse. (As evidenced by Perks and Malone having to go to the Hospital Wing after trying to mop up their mess with their bare hands, rather than take a couple of steps back and let it drip onto the floor to be cleaned up later, at the very least by someone with gloves.) And Harry was very accustomed to being careful around other children.

Snape, for some reason, seemed surprised about that. Harry didn't question it — he wasn't sure he was allowed to, or whether that would be considered back-talk. He just resumed digging through his bag. How the hell had his novel managed to get all the way to the bottom in the time it took to walk across the room? "Just, I'm not an idiot, everything you were going on about specifically logically followed on avoiding contamination by extraneous magic or other ingredients and being aware that we're doing something potentially dangerous, messing around with ingredients that might be explosive or poisonous in the wrong combinations, and also don't interrupt other people's rituals, because all sorts of horrible shite could happen, right?"

Ha! Found it!  Snape raised an eyebrow as Harry handed over the book, though he wasn't even looking at it. "I didn't mention that brewing a potion is ritual magic."

Hadn't he? It very obviously was. The specific proportion of different ingredients could be some sort of magical chemistry thing (alchemy? Harry still wasn't sure what the difference between Potions and Alchemy was...), like baking, but ingredients having to be gathered in a certain way or at certain times and the different stirring patterns used to combine them were obviously ritual-y. And besides, "You mentioned not to interrupt other people's brewing, and that we needed to maintain 'so serious a demeanour as undisciplined children such as yourselves are capable of maintaining, and refrain from excessive chatter, remaining attentive and keeping your minds focused on your work', and you definitely talk about the lab like it's a ritual space — 'I won't have you profaning this classroom with frivolity or extraneous magics'— I wasn't completely ignoring the lesson!"

Snape's expression remained absolutely inscrutable. "You do realise that it is perhaps inadvisable to tell a professor that you have been even partially ignoring them."

"You already know I was reading under the table," Harry pointed out. "So I'm really telling you I was partially paying attention." Really, this was one of those half-glass of water things — in this case one that should be considered half-full, since it had been empty. Seeing that the professor still didn't react, Harry decided to press his luck. "Look, I'm sorry, sir. If you don't want me to read in class, I won't. It's just, I get bored easily. My teachers at my old school preferred I read at the back of the room rather than do anything that might be distracting to anyone else while they explained really obvious, boring things for all the idiots in the class."

Snape's eyes tipped toward the ceiling as though he was trying very hard not to look amused or like he sympathised with that attitude, which Harry would bet good money he did. If he was half as clever as he seemed, he'd probably been bored to tears in lessons when he was Harry's age. He'd called them all dunderheads in his welcome speech himself! Harry waited patiently while the professor considered his response.

After a long moment, he sighed. "I suppose that is likely the least disruptive approach to managing your presence in this class. I won't have you reading entertaining drivel back there during lectures — if you think the other students will not notice your lack of attention and consider it favouritism, all the more so reading trash like this—" He sneered at the novel in his hand as though Whitney had personally offended him. "—you are sorely mistaken — but if you would rather read something topical  while I expound on the tedious, 'obvious' details of the concepts we will be covering in lectures for the dunderheads who compose the majority of your peers, I suppose I cannot reasonably object. I will ," he added quickly, "periodically ask you questions to ensure that you do pay some attention to the concepts in question, and if I find your participation and engagement to be lacking, that will be the end of this arrangement. Understood?" He gave Harry a narrow-eyed, challenging glare which left no question that objecting would be a fantastically bad idea.

Harry nodded, trying not to grin. "Yes, sir. Do you have any suggestions of 'topical' books that would be more acceptable?"

Snape, yet again, looked slightly surprised. One of these days (probably next term, after they knew each other a bit better and he wasn't concerned that the professor might decide the question was grossly impertinent) Harry was going to ask why the heck it was so surprising when Harry was just...polite. Not even extra polite, just...normal, run-of-the-mill polite. "On Craft-Magicks, perhaps," he suggested, handing Harry's book back, "or Grey's Guide to Magical Creatures." He scribbled a note on a scrap of paper. His penmanship was atrocious — not that Harry could talk, he could barely read his own writing with a quill — so it wasn't until the professor flicked it across the desk with a little pulse of wandless magic that he could make out: Let Potter check out Grey's. It was signed with an ornate 'S'. "Give that to Madam Pince."

"Wait, what? This isn't a Restricted book, is it?"

"There are enough pictures I imagine you'll be able to follow it, but if you find it too advanced you needn't keep it," the professor said, a raised eyebrow and the tiniest of smirks making it clear that his dry, mocking tone was a joke. It was a very Slytherin expression — Harry had only been here half a week, and he already recognised it from Theo and Blaise.

"Um. Thanks," he said, somewhat taken aback.

This time the professor very clearly rolled his eyes. "The Headmaster, in his infinite wisdom, considers some of the illustrations unsuitable for the eyes of innocent underclassmen such as yourself," he explained, sarcasm positively dripping from the phrase "innocent underclassmen". "As such, if you are inspired to begin dissecting animals for your own edification, you would be well advised to do so out in the Forest with all the other little monsters, lest I inform my colleagues you cannot be trusted with such knowledge."

Translation: I can be a very good friend, or a very bad enemy. Don't make me regret this. Also, maybe slightly oddly, I don't care if you kill things, I care if you get caught and people blame me for giving you ideas.

This time, Harry didn't even try not to grin. "Understood, sir. Thank you, sir."

"Don't mention it, Potter. Ever."

Translation: You're welcome, Potter. Now go away, I'm a busy man and just because I did something nice for you doesn't mean I like you.

Harry went.

Chapter Text

If Snape was Harry's favourite professor, McGonagall was his least favourite. He wasn't really a fan of Flitwick, either, mostly because he insisted on enthusiastically drawing attention to whatever 'advanced' thing Harry was doing to entertain himself while everyone else took forever figuring out how to light a bloody candle, or whatever. Harry really didn't appreciate being made to be the centre of attention, especially since everyone watching him instead of figuring out the most basic of charms meant they would take even longer to get to the next spell.

Quirrell stuttered, which made his lectures almost physically painful to sit through — Harry couldn't even read under his desk with that going on in the background — and...it was sort of hard to explain, really, but Harry got the impression that their Defence Professor was...not necessarily completely harmless, but like some sort of scared, injured animal that would only fight back when cornered, and then probably ineffectively, because he very clearly didn't know how to go for the throat any more than Danny (or, to be fair, most of Harry's yearmates) and didn't have the balls to really try even if he did know how to hurt someone. He was about the last professor Harry thought should be teaching Defence. Only Binns, the History Ghost, would be worse.

But McGonagall never warmed to Harry after their first meeting, and unlike Snape, who was cold and sharp but at least sympathetic to the fact that Harry was so freaking bored, or Quirrell, whose lectures were probably not intended to be torturous, he was pretty sure she had been trying to drive him insane the first couple of weeks. Not only would she not let him read at the back of the classroom — which was far less distracting to his peers than insisting he participate, he made sure of it, asking questions about the differences between witchcraft and wizardry that had been pointed out in the theory book Snape had recommended, which he knew would take half the lesson to answer — but she took points when she caught him working ahead or using techniques that he'd found reading outside of class. She'd about blown a bloody gasket when he decided to try deconstructing the little transformations they were practising in class. Which was bloody stupid, Harry wasn't hurting anyone trying to work out how the matchstick-to-needle transformation spell was related to the basic wand movements in the appendix of their textbook.

-v-

(Thurs 12 Sept)

"Mister Potter, what on earth do you think you're doing?!"

Harry startled rather badly, focused as he was on his transfiguration. The magic unravelled immediately, his half-transformed needle instantly reverting to a matchstick with a little foof as the energy dispersed, ripples quickly fading back into the ambient magic. "Transfiguring my matchstick, ma'am?"

"How many times must I tell you, Mister Potter!" the professor snapped, swooping down on him. "I will not stand for any fooling around or reckless experimentation in my classroom! Five points from Ravenclaw!"

Harry glared up at her, now seriously annoyed, and completely unconcerned about the fact that literally everyone else in the classroom was staring at them. "I'm not being reckless! We've been doing the same bloody thing, in every single lesson since the beginning of the year! It's been two weeks!"

"Another five points for cheek, Mister Potter! And we will continue to work on this concept until everyone in the class has mastered it!"

"Good! Fine! Let them work on it, then! I've got it down! How many bloody needles do I need to make to prove it to you?!"

The professor's nostrils flared, her lips thinning into a tightly compressed line as she leaned in, looming over him. She really didn't like her authority and teaching methods questioned, but Harry really didn't care. He stood to make her take a step back, though if anyone asked it was because he was just trying to be respectful, standing when he was addressed by a figure of authority.

"Unlike some professors, Mister Potter, I do not condone special treatment for one child over another!" That was a bloody lie. It had only been two weeks — this was their second Thursday of lessons — and the entire first-year class already knew who the professors' favourites were. McGonagall in particular favoured all of her Gryffindors over practically everyone else, and especially Hermione Granger, the muggleborn girl who taken such a complete and instant dislike of Harry in Ollivander's shop.

"Then stop holding the rest of us back on Weasley and Longbottom's behalf, and stop picking on me! I'm not the only one who's dying of boredom! Patil and Brown over there have been talking about cosmetic charms for two lessons now! Li, Corner, and Entwhistle have been reading under their desks and you haven't yelled at any of them! Danny's been conjuring matchsticks for us to transfigure because we ran out twenty minutes ago!" He pointed at the pile of transfigured needles he and his roommate had produced before Harry decided to try his hand at deconstructing the spell they were supposed to be working on — there had to be over two hundred, they'd spent the first fifteen minutes of the lesson (after being briefly informed that they were still practising this stupid spell) having a quiet series of contests to see who could do the transformation faster, make the most needles in a minute. (Danny had won five out of seven, but he'd been doing transfiguration for years.)

Harry, on the other hand, was not allowed to read under the table or work ahead or, apparently, try to work out how the Basic Wand Movements in the appendix of their textbook that the professor had said they needn't bother with came together to form the spell they were actually supposed to be working on.

"Detention, Mister Potter!"

"Fine! Give me detention! I don't care! Just tell me what the hell I'm supposed to do while I wait for everyone else to catch up, if I'm not allowed to do anything not related to the lesson or things that are related to the lesson, why am I even here?! Clearly not to actually learn anything!"

"If you are bored, Mister Potter, I expect you to help your neighbours figure out the day's lesson, like Miss Granger! Not disrupt the class with tangential questions or ignore the lesson entirely, or experiment with dangerous exercises like spell deconstruction and more complex transformations you are not yet prepared to attempt!"

No mention of the inconsistency of not yelling at half the bloody class for the exact same things she was yelling at Harry over, he noted. And he would like to make the argument that if he could do a more complex transformation he clearly was prepared to attempt it, but he was more struck by the audacity of suggesting that he should "help his neighbours" "like Miss Granger" — honestly?! Everyone around him had already worked it out for one thing — did she expect all of them to crowd around Weasley and Longbottom trying to 'help' them? They didn't even want Granger's help!

Secondly, Harry might not be the best with people, but even he knew that other kids didn't like him rubbing it in their faces that he was better than they were. Granger, with her overly-pushy 'helpfulness' and her annoyingly bossy attitude, had already become the least popular person in their year doing that sort of shite.

And she said it like he was a rude, self-centred jerk for not realising this himself, despite the fact that, "Isn't helping my neighbours figure out the day's lesson your job, Professor?"

The professor's lips thinned even further, which Harry hadn't thought possible, glaring down her nose at him. "Keep up this attitude with me, young man, and I will have you removed from this classroom!"

Harry blinked. Well...okay, then? He knew that kicking him out was supposed to be a negative consequence, but he sort of thought it should be obvious that he had no interest in being here, so...it really wasn't? He honestly didn't care if he failed the course just because he'd been kicked out — it wasn't like he was learning anything here anyway, and what was she going to do? refuse to advance him at the end of the year, thereby forcing them to go through this all again next year? Sprout had all but told them in their first lesson that the only marks that really mattered were OWLs and NEWTs (but they should consider their marks in class and on the end-of-term exams as they progressed through their Hogwarts careers to be a sort of gauge of how well they were likely to do on the big, important exams), so as far as Harry was concerned, McGonagall really had no power over him to speak of. Hell, she could get him expelled if she wanted to, he'd just go back to living in Charing. It wasn't like he didn't have money to live on, now that he had his bloody bank key — no thanks to her...

His lips twitched into an involuntary smirk in expectation of her reaction to his response, even as he flipped his textbook closed and snatched up his bag.

"You wipe that smirk off your face, young man! And where precisely do you think you're going?"

The smirk only grew broader as he turned on his heel and explained over his shoulder, "It was my understanding I'm not welcome in your classroom, Professor, so I think I'm going literally anywhere else." There was still an hour and a half before dinner, so probably back to his room. He couldn't practise magic in the Library, and doing so in the Commons only earned him more odd looks.

He firmly and deliberately shut the door behind himself rather than giving it a careless slam, mostly just to have an excuse to turn around and see the absolutely shocked expression of pure outrage  on her face.

He was still grinning when Danny caught up with him two minutes later, giggling nervously. "Mum's going to be furious. But she started laying into me for conjuring shite as soon as you left, so. Solidarity, right?"

-ʌ-

Harry couldn't exactly refuse to help people after McGonagall said he should in front of the entire class, because it would look like he thought himself too good to help them or something, but he didn't want to be that smug arsehole pouncing on the nearest person who was slower than himself and critiquing everything about their casting with a smug bossiness to rival a fifth-year prefect. (Miss Clearwater hadn't warmed to Harry either, after he'd decided to find the Common Room without her help and dragged Danny along with him.) He'd compromised by helping anyone who actually asked for his help, which wasn't many of them, because Granger seemed to think she was winning some sort of contest by barging in and 'helping' them before Harry or Danny could offer.

Danny was actually better at Transfiguration than Harry or Granger, because Nymphadora was apparently a shapeshifter (that was why Blaise called them Doriel, sometimes she was a girl and sometimes he was a boy), and had been teaching Danny transfiguration since he was eight (because she was the single most awesome person Harry had ever even almost met in real life — he was so making Danny introduce him over Christmas or something). His mother had sent him something called a howler — a letter that shouted at the intended recipient and then burst into flame — telling him that no matter how stubborn a bitch Minerva McGonagall might be about holding students back from reaching their full potential, the Board hadn't yet seen fit to demand her job for it, so Madam Tonks still expected him to attend every one of her completely pointless lessons, and he knew better than to follow Dora's example in telling his professors to piss off, she'd raised him to have more respect for his elders, regardless of whether they'd actually earned or deserved his respect, what the hell was he thinking, if she got another letter from that straight-laced twat before the end of the month, she'd be marching right up to Hogwarts and they'd be having an altogether more pointed version of this conversation in person, so he'd damn well better be in his Transfiguration lesson on Wednesday, or else.

Harry had gone back to class on Wednesday too, in solidarity. Also because Madam Tonks actually used the phrases "stubborn bitch" and "straight-laced twat" to describe the professor, and Danny said she knew the letter would be screaming at him in the Great Hall at breakfast, so it was at least equally directed at McGonagall, intended to embarrass her probably more than Danny. He assured Harry that if McGonagall didn't shape up, she'd be having a Very Pointed Conversation with his mum, too — they had a longstanding enmity, going back to Dora's first year at Hogwarts.

Danny's "mum", though not quite as insane as her notorious older sister, was apparently also a very scary lady — Very Pointed Conversation almost certainly meant threatening to have McGonagall sacked, and possibly blackmail. Not that Danny actually knew whether his mum had some sort of blackmail material on the professor, but he wouldn't be surprised. And it was really seven or eight members of the Board of Governors she'd have to pressure into threatening to replace Dumbledore if he didn't find a new Transfiguration Mistress, anyway. Honestly, more like two or three — about half the Board already wanted to get rid of him. Technically, Danny sort of thought she'd already threatened to have McGonagall sacked, but she'd probably give the Transfiguration professor one more chance, just in case she hadn't caught it.

Harry was pretty sure she had, though. She had let them sit at the back of the classroom and do whatever the hell they liked after that, sending them the occasional poisonous glare, but otherwise ignoring them as much as possible, not even calling on them to answer questions. (Though, that might have been because Granger, her favourite, always practically jumped out of her seat, waving her hand in the air to answer before anyone else.)

As for the other professors, Binns the History Ghost was...a ghost, and didn't seem to notice or care whether his students were paying attention to his droning lectures at all. Most people used his lessons as a study-hall. Double History was the only class the first-year Ravenclaws had on Fridays, so basically they had the whole day free.

And Sprout... Sprout adored him — apparently vanishingly few first-year wizards had ever so much as weeded a garden before, let alone knew how to tease apart the root ball of a plant to be re-potted — but Harry found her unnervingly...squishy. Sort of mumsy, but in a Molly Weasley way that made him want to avoid her, rather than a Firebloom way that made him want to ask her for advice on anything outside of lessons. Or in lessons, for that matter.

-v-

(Mon 16 Sept)

"I hope you don't mind me asking," Professor Sprout said delicately, puttering over to the table where Harry was the last student left, taking the time to clean up his bench and wipe off his trowel before chucking it back into the bucket. The trowels they'd been using to re-pot various herbs today were probably enchanted not to rust, but it was force of habit, honestly. Aunt Petunia would go spare if she caught him not taking care of her tools like pretty much everyone else in his class. Well, everyone except Blaise's friend Daphne. The Slytherin girl everyone was already calling an ice princess behind her back pretty obviously hated getting messy and went out of her way to make sure everything was neat and tidy when she left, too — she was a couple of tables away, packing up her own things. "But...are you quite well, Mister Potter?"

"Ah...yes? Why?"

The short, plump witch hemmed and hawed for a few moments, obviously not certain whether she wanted to say, "Well, that is, it's just...I can't help noticing, certain things about your demeanour... Is everything quite well at home, dear?"

Harry blinked at her, completely lost. "I expect so. My cousin's off at school, too. I don't imagine Aunt Petunia's having trouble taking care of just herself and Uncle Vernon..." He was fairly certain he was missing something, here, because he had no idea what whatever was going on at home might have to do with his "demeanour", but he couldn't imagine what. "Er...I hope you don't mind me asking, but what exactly are we talking about?"

"Oh, well, that is... It's just... You know you can come talk to me any time, about anything. My door's always open to everyone, not just Hufflepuffs."

"O...kay?" He was aware that the professors had office hours. "Is there, I don't know, something you think I need help with? Because if I've been doing something wrong, I don't know what it is, so...I can't really ask about it, if you see what I mean..."

"Oh, no! No, no, no, my dear!" she exclaimed, taking his hand and patting it, which...was odd. "Your performance has been absolutely exemplary! If half my students were as careful and thorough as you, well! No, you haven't done anything wrong, not at all!"

"Um. Okay, then?" He tried to pull his hand away from her without making it too obvious that he found this whole conversation just...weird. Weird and uncomfortable. "I'm...going to just...go, then?"

She still looked unmistakably troubled , but she didn't try to stop him shouldering his bag and getting the hell out of there.

Daphne was outside waiting for him to walk her to Charms, as she had every time they were the last two out of the greenhouse. Ravenclaw had that one next too, and she seemed more comfortable around him than most people in his year, so he didn't mind walking with her rather than walking to the same place at the same time, but separately, with both of them ignoring each other and the fact that they were doing exactly that.

"Come on," he muttered, catching up. "Let's go." When they were safely out of ear-shot of the greenhouses, he added, "That was weird, right? The way Sprout was acting. It's not just me?"

Daphne tittered. "Well, no, it's not just you, but also not weird. She probably thinks you're too quiet and careful because you get in trouble at home if you're not."

"Well, she's not wrong, but still. What the hell was that about? I mean, I'm not more quiet and careful than you or Theo or Bulstrode. Crabbe. Goyle. Davis. Even Blaise, a lot of the time. And what business is it of hers, anyway, what my homelife is like?"

"Mmm..." She took a few seconds to consider, as though she wasn't sure she wanted to tell him, but eventually she did. "It's not really a secret that Theo's, Tracey's, and Millie's families are deliberately cruel to them. Gregory has some issue or other with his elder brother — Vincent and Draco know, but they won't say what. Blaise says I overcompensate for my family's reputation, trying too hard to play the young lady — though I'd rather be considered an ice princess than a jumped-up mistwalker pretending to be nobility. And he awakened as a legilimens really early — if there's one thing that will make you grow up quickly, it's got to be knowing what all the adults around you are thinking. Plus his relationship with Mira is in no way normal.

"Which isn't to say that your family are particularly cruel or treat you badly — Vincent's parents are very strict, but he's also just a quiet boy, I think, and it's hardly my parents' fault that the family holds the position we do, or that I'm probably going to be Lady Greengrass and need to learn to act the part — but I'm sure you couldn't say just watching us in lessons whether my father is as cruel to me as Theo's is to him. And some adults have this crazy notion that if a child is caught in a home where they're being tortured in the name of 'raising them properly', maybe someone ought to do something about that."

Harry scowled at the ground in front of them. "I shouldn't have to justify the way Aunt Petunia raised me just because some people are bloody nosey." Not that he thought he couldn't , but he didn't really like cluing in people who weren't already aware to the fact that he was a crazy freak. And that was sort of necessary to explain why Aunt Petunia felt it was necessary to make rules for him that didn't really apply to anyone else — not because she was trying to be particularly cruel to him, just because Dudley wouldn't think it was a good idea to kill a cat or push another child into traffic, or even make pie in the middle of the night (and not using the oven without supervision had applied to him too, anyway), and he wasn't magic, so obviously he couldn't do magic that might bring Flo and Friends popping out of nowhere to mess with their memories. "If I thought something needed to be done about it, I'd do it myself. And I don't see her being all weird at any of you."

Daphne gave him a very practised smile, which could mean anything, but more likely meant nothing at all. "No, but we're Slytherins. Professor Snape makes a point of doing that sort of thing himself. Everyone knows McGonagall and Flitwick are terrible Heads of House. My guess would be she's just trying to make sure you don't fall through the cracks, as it were. She's just concerned about you, that's all."

Harry rolled his eyes. "I'm so glad I'm not a Hufflepuff..."

-ʌ-

Aurora Sinistra, on the other hand, was great. She was tied as his favourite professor with Snape. He didn't find her subject nearly as interesting — so far Astronomy had just been a lot of star-gazing, trying to identify constellations and planets and discussing the shape of the solar system, for all the kids in Harry's year who neither knew nor cared whether the earth went around the sun or the other way around, or why the moon had phases. But she was snarky and a good speaker and told them the stories behind the constellations while they were trying to pick them out of the random expanse of sparks in the night sky — and when she caught him exploring the Castle in the middle of the night the second week of term, she'd invited him to join her for tea rather than giving him detention.

-v-

(Fri 13 Sept)

Shite!

Harry ducked into a stairwell he hadn't intended to take as he heard the fake farting sounds of the school poltergeist coming from around the next corner. It didn't really matter who or what was waiting on the other side of the tapestry of Saint Bridget, unless it was Filch himself. The ghosts barely noticed where they were most of the time, let alone what time it was (sometime well after two in the morning, Harry was actually considering going back to the Tower soon), and there was something uncanny about Missus Norris, the caretaker's cat — not unlike the not-cat Harry had killed in Little Whinging — but Harry could easily get far enough away while she was running to Filch that they'd never be able to find him.

Of course, he hadn't expected there to be an actual professor on the other side of the tapestry. Luckily, it was an up staircase, because if he'd run into Professor Sinistra like that going down, they probably wouldn't have stopped tumbling until they hit the next landing. As it was, the Astronomy professor only let out a startled eep and sat down very quickly and not entirely purposefully on the stairs behind herself. Harry fell on top of her, hitting his funny bone on something in an effort to avoid putting his hands (or his face) somewhere unfortunate. Which, when falling all over one's pretty young Astronomy professor in a secluded stairwell, was pretty much anywhere.

"Sorry! Sorry!" he exclaimed, pushing himself back to his feet and taking two quick steps back. "Ah. Good morning, Professor."

"Potter?! What the fuck are you doing?! Running around down here at half past two, tackling people on the bloody stairs! You almost gave me a heart attack, you little shite!"

Harry started giggling uncontrollably at the professor's irate swearing — if he'd had to guess which professor was most likely to call him a little shite (to his face), Sinistra would not have been at the top of the list — which was probably not the best  response. He bit his lip trying to stop, but that little glare she pinned him with was just too funny. Like she was trying to look like McGonagall, but she was about forty years too young. Also, shorter than him, since she was still sitting on the stairs. "Sorry!" he repeated. "I was— Well, I was trying to avoid Peeves. I didn't expect anyone to be in here."

"That much," the witch said firmly, attempting to recover some degree of dignity, "was obvious. Why the hell are you even out here? Aren't you supposed to be locked up in a tower somewhere?" Like a fairy-tale princess? Harry bit his lip to stop himself losing what composure he'd managed to regain. "Curfew was about four hours ago, you know!"

"Ah, yes. Yes, I'm aware. That's why I was trying to avoid Peeves. He likes trying to get students caught out of bed. I didn't want him to go find a professor and..." He sighed, realising that he was currently talking to a professor. "I'm going to get a detention, aren't I?" He'd managed to avoid official disciplinary action for almost two whole weeks, which was probably a record, at least in recent years — he couldn't remember the last time he'd gone more than a week without being sent to the Headmaster's or Counselor's office at Little Whinging Primary at least once — but that didn't mean he wanted a(nother) detention. (He supposed he had broken his streak earlier, in Transfiguration, but he was inclined to say that detentions for things he had absolutely no control over weren't actually his fault, and didn't count.)

"What? No, of course not." She sniffed, pushing herself back to her feet. "I don't give detentions for breaking curfew, the entire concept is asinine. I do want to know what the hell you're doing down here, though. You know, since anyone else would give you a detention."

Oh. Okay, then...

Harry shrugged. "Exploring? I wasn't tired or in the mood to just sit around the Commons reading or playing the piano or practising spells." He'd needed to do something new. Something active. If it weren't raining, he might've tried exploring the roofs, or working his way down to the Dinky Third-Floor Courtyard from his bedroom window, but the slate tiles would be slick and there wasn't really enough light, even for Harry. So he'd just been sneaking around inside, looking for hidden passages and cool statues for the past hour and a half or so — he'd waited until it was long enough after curfew the prefects had stopped patrolling, trying to enforce the most annoying rule. "The chance of spending an hour being bored later in detention if I get caught isn't really enough incentive to definitely spend an hour being bored now."

The professor snorted, trying not to laugh, even though Harry wasn't really trying to be funny, there. "Septima's going to love you when you get to Arithmancy. Come on." She brushed past him, flicking the tapestry out of the way.

"Er...where are we going?" Harry asked, following her back out into the corridor he'd so abruptly fled only minutes ago. Peeves and his farting noises were nowhere to be seen (or heard).

"Well, I was going down to the kitchens for lunch. I presume you have nowhere in particular to be, so you're going to come have a cup of tea and keep me company. Small talk, you know — tell me how you're liking Hogwarts and how the hell you know how to speak House Elf. Whatever comes to mind. This way." She turned left, leading Harry down a corridor he'd never noticed before. "I note you didn't deny speaking House Elf, which I suppose means I owe Severus a galleon. Bugger. I could have sworn Filius was having us on..."

-ʌ-

She was the youngest of the professors, and probably the only one he'd want to talk to about how he was finding the magical world so far. She'd mentioned she was muggle-raised herself and, unlike most of the other adult mages he'd met, didn't seem to think that ignoring all the things people said about how magic was supposed to work was a bad idea. She also thought the concept of curfew was, in her words, pointless aside from giving professors an arbitrary excuse to exercise their equally arbitrary 'authority', and the idea of trying to force the students to keep a regular sleep schedule while also expecting them to attend lessons at midnight once a week was asinine. Harry thought she was bored, being the only (other) (living) person in the Castle awake at two in the morning. She had mentioned that Snape was usually up late too, but he was almost always busy and kind of a git, so not great company. Harry was pretty sure he would never get over a professor acting like a real person, calling other professors gits and talking about betting on whether rumours about students were true.

Chapter Text

According to Sinistra (whom Harry had probably talked to more than any single older Ravenclaw — she was the only other person awake at two in the morning, or four, when he went to bed at a reasonable hour and got up unreasonably early), there used to be a duelling club, but they hadn't been able to find a professor to sponsor it this year. Quirrell (who used to be the Muggle Studies professor and supervise the Gobstones and Muggle Studies Clubs) had gone on sabbatical last year, and his replacement (Pierce, who was still the Muggle Studies professor) hadn't wanted to take on his club-supervising duties, so Professor Flitwick had been supervising those as well as Charms Club — and still was, because Quirrell had caught some sexually transmitted disease from a vampire in Romania (which was probably not a thing students were supposed to know so, like many things Sinistra mentioned in passing, Harry should keep it to himself) and was clearly unwell — and that was fine when Professor Mathieu was teaching Defence, but she'd gotten pregnant halfway through last year and decided not to renew her contract. As Snape had told Harry when he'd first come to Little Whinging, no Defence professor had served more than one full school year for about thirty years now, which was absurd, but it did explain why Quirrell was teaching the subject — there probably weren't any qualified instructors left to apply for it. So Flitwick was too busy.

Snape was probably the most likely option to take it over — he had covered the occasional meeting here or there over the years, supervising and sometimes giving an exhibition match with Flitwick or the Defence Professor of the day — but he already had too many commitments to take it on full time and, just between Sinistra and Harry, had learned pretty much everything he knew about fighting from the Blackheart (who had trained most of the Death Eaters) and so probably wouldn't be a great choice to actually teach duelling, even if he was more than capable of refereeing matches and making sure no one actually killed each other.

Professor Sprout and Madam Pomfrey (the school's healer) were against the idea of fighting for fun, McGonagall was too busy with her own Transfiguration Club and half the Headmaster's duties (since Dumbledore had managed to acquire all of the hats, but still only had one head, he ended up delegating to his deputy kind of a lot, apparently — he was only in the Castle about half the time), and Harry suspected that he wouldn't enjoy any club she was supervising anyway, and as far as anyone knew none of the other professors had any experience duelling. (Maybe Binns, with a sword, like a hundred and fifty years ago, or something? But clearly that didn't count.) When Harry had suggested that Sinistra could do it, she just laughed for almost a whole minute, because, "No. You have no idea how bad I am at duelling. If I want someone dead, I'll set a trap for them like a good Slytherin, thank you very much."

She wasn't willing to sponsor a Duelling Club, but she had said she'd sponsor an Edificeering Club, if he could get at least two other people to join.

One of those people was obviously going to be Danny. He was still a little wary of the idea, but having a professor supervising them to cast a Cushioning Charm or something if anyone fell off the bloody building had gone a long way toward assuring him that Harry wasn't completely mental. Harry was having trouble finding a second person, though, because the only other people he'd spoken to much were Theo and Blaise, and both of them would rather spend their free time indoors, or at the very least on a broom. Not "hauling ourselves around a vertical surface with our arms like monkeys, you heathen." (Blaise's characterisation.) He'd put up fliers saying to come talk to him if anyone was interested, but so far no one had.

Hardly anyone had tried to talk to him at all, actually. He caught people watching him out of the corners of their eyes and there were endless rumours about him, but most people seemed a little too intimidated to actually talk to him. Which...Harry was honestly fine with. (Difficulties in finding a third Edificeering Club member aside.)

-v-

(Mon 2 Sept)

"Is that him?" someone muttered just a little too loudly to their friend, as Harry and Danny wandered down to the Great Hall for breakfast on their first day at Hogwarts.

"Which one? With the glasses?"

"No, next to him, the short one that looks like a girl."

"Titchy little thing! Hard to believe he bested You Know Who..."

Harry rolled his eyes, murmuring to Danny, "Hard to believe a bloody infant bested a Dark Lord in the first place. I hear they're even smaller than I am, on average."

Danny burst into helpless laughter, unable to maintain his very serious first day of school, must-try-to-make-a-good-impression attitude or the growing air of annoyance directed at the too-loud rumour-mongers when faced with the idea of a giant, Dark Lord killing baby.

-ʌ-

He quickly gained a reputation for being a crazy magical prodigy, exactly as they'd expected from the Harry Potter—

-v-

(Tues 17 Sept)

Danny skipped into their room, throwing his bag on his bed and kicking off his shoes before following it, grinning. "So, want to take a guess as to the latest accomplishment of the Boy Who Lived?"

Harry rolled his eyes. "It can't be more ridiculous than phoenix animagus," which was the last completely absurd thing the Hogwarts Rumour Mill had just...made up about him, out of whole cloth — that he could turn into a phoenix at will. After all, no one had ever seen Harry and Fawkes, Dumbledore's phoenix companion, in the same place at the same time. So obviously they were the same being.

"No, it's not. Well...maybe? Apparently you do all your spells silently and wandlessly. You also already know everything we're doing in lessons, and probably already have your OWLs. The only reason you're here is— Well, I must have heard at least twenty reasons you're here in the past week. None of which is to learn magic."

Harry sniggered. "Well, to be fair, I don't need to be here to learn magic, and I do already know everything we're doing in lessons. But at least a few people have to have noticed I do use a wand..."

"Ah, well, I hear that little stick is just for show. It's probably not even real, just, you know, a prop to help you keep your normal wizard cover as best you can. Which isn't very well, in case you were wondering."

"No, see, it's all part of my plan. If people think I'm this completely absurd magical prodigy, no one will question whether I'm actually the Dark Lord reincarnated." That had been going around before the phoenix thing.

"Don't be ridiculous, Harry. Everyone knows you can't be reincarnated before you die — you were already a year old when the Dark Lord found you. Obviously you're just possessed by him. Or possibly by your own mum."

"Oh, I hadn't heard that one... I'll have to tell Uncle Vernon next time I see him. Great excuse to be a sissy-boy, being possessed by the spirit of your own mum..."

-ʌ-

—as well as a prodigy at everything else—

-v-

(Fri 13 Sept)

"How long have you been playing?" a girl asked shyly, interrupting Harry's attempt to pick out the melody of that Love Shack song that had been on the radio all last year on the piano in the Common Room.

"Oh! Sorry, it has been a while, hasn't it? Did you want a turn?"

"What? No, I don't—" The girl went a bit pink. "I was just wondering how long you've been playing. In general, I mean, not just today."

Oh. Harry blinked at her. "Er...a couple of days? I've just been messing around..."

"Seriously?"

"Um...yes? I'd never touched a piano before this past week." He'd learned to read music and play the recorder in primary, but only the teacher had been allowed to play the school's piano.

The girl frowned at him. "I'm positive I heard you playing Beethoven earlier."

He had been, or trying to, at least. Someone had left the music for a song called "Sonatina in G" on the bench, and it hadn't looked too complicated. Harry shrugged. "Sort of. Someone left their sheet music, so I thought I'd give it a shot." It was a bit harder than he'd expected, getting used to playing different parts with his left and right hands. He'd started to pick it up, but it'd given him a headache in the same way trying to speak Gobbledygook for too long gave him a headache — like he needed to take a nap before he'd be able to remember any more new vocabulary — so he'd decided to try playing something he already knew by ear instead.

"Uh-huh," the girl said, as though she didn't really believe him, which was sort of annoying. It wasn't as though he'd been playing the more complicated song perfectly. He could tell his tempo kept shifting as he got distracted trying to focus on two things at once. "Well, I didn't want to interrupt, but I was the dummy who forgot her music, so if you're done 'giving it a shot', could I have it back?"

-ʌ-

—somewhat standoffish, like he thought he was better than the rest of them (which he clearly was, but he wasn't intentionally snubbing people most of the time, he just needed a break from people every so often)—

-v-

(Sun 15 Sept)

"I'm going out," Harry announced, digging his cloak out of his wardrobe.

Danny looked up from whatever he was writing to give Harry an okay, lunatic look. "It's raining."

"Yes." That was why Harry was up here fetching his cloak (and renewing the Waterproofing Charm on it with a quick, "Impervius!") rather than outside already.

"Also, dinner starts in half an hour. I was going to go down as soon as I finish this letter."

"So?"

"So, aren't you hungry?"

"Not enough to spend any more time today surrounded by people."

"But—"

"Look. Danny. I'm having a bad day. Not because of you or anyone in particular or anything that's happened, but I might try to claw someone's eyes out if I don't just...get out of here for a while." Usually he made a point of taking a break before it got this bad, the low-simmering, irrational rage that made him want to lash out, start a fight, but it had come on quickly today, every little noise or movement anywhere in the Common Room suddenly intolerable, infuriating—

"Oh." Danny froze, staring at him, except for his right hand, which very deliberately set down his quill, ready to take up the wand on the desk beside him if Harry made any sudden moves toward clawing his (wide, delightfully terrified) eyes out.

Harry took a deep, slightly shuddering breath, closing his eyes and running his fingers through his hair, trying to be patient with his roommate and remember that most of the time he enjoyed the other boy's company, and he shouldn't keep pushing him just to see him grow more and more fearful — or better, until he snapped, hexed Harry to make him stop (or tried to), gave him an excuse to get into a real fight for the first time in over a week, since that giant spider tried to kill him, the first time he went out in the Forest—

He could still feel the crunch  of the stick as he drove it through the exoskeleton, feel the ichor on his hands, shockingly blue, hear its dying scream, life fading from its many eyes, his own blood pounding in his veins, breathing too loud, the exhilaration of being inches from death, grinning so hard it hurt, claws slicing into his arms as it leaped at him, poison dripping from the tips of its fangs—

No, stop it! Focus! On Danny! Not spiders!

But Danny wouldn't try to kill me...unless he was defending himself, he could probably defend himself really well... H is sister had taught him transfiguration, she'd probably taught him self-defence, too—

Damn it, Potter, you're being  insane ! You don't need to go find something to try to kill you, you need to get out of here and be alone and cool the hell off...

"It's fine. I'm fine. I'm not going to hurt you, Danny. I'm not. I promise. I just— I've got to get out of here. Don't tell anyone. I'm fine, I just can't be around people right now. Just– Just for a few hours. If I'm not back for Herbology in the morning, I'm either dead or I've gone native and decided to join the giant talking spiders, okay?"

He didn't stick around to answer his roommate's stuttering, "Wait— What ?" or to exchange greetings with Patil and Turpin, passing them in the little parlour area around the stairs.

He might've been a bit rude, actually, brushing past them with a curt, "I don't want to talk to you," but he didn't care, they could call him a jerk all they liked, he needed to get out of the Castle. Half an hour ago, if possible.

-ʌ-

—and questionably human at best. Apparently it had gotten around that Harry Potter could speak to house elves, so a good number of young mages now supported Uncle Vernon's theory that Harry Potter was actually an elf. Not a house elf, obviously, but one of the Greater Fae — a changeling child.

-v-

(Thurs 12 Sept)

"I still want to know what my greatest fear is, though," Harry insisted, scratching the ectoplasmic ears of the furious demonic creature hiding in the moon-cast shadow between Blaise's arm and his body. It glared impotently at him, helpless to transform into anything less adorable than the kitten-shaped embodiment of malevolent resentment until Blaise relaxed the enslavement curse which kept it bound to his will.

"That's still not how boggarts work. They change into the first thing they find in your mind associated with a feeling of fear. Most people think of the thing that scares them most when they're told they're facing a boggart, or the thing they think scares them the most. People don't really tend to think about that sort of thing a lot. They shy away from actually recognising their actual greatest fears."

"So? I still want to know. Go on, let him loose." It wasn't as though anyone was going to walk in and see Harry being attacked by a giant spider or whatever, which was the first thing he thought of when he thought of being scared. He didn't know what it was or where it had come from, but being jumped by that monster out in the Forest, a week ago today, was probably the most terrifying, exhilarating thing that had ever happened to him. He'd actually thought he was going to die for a few seconds there. (It was amazing!)

In any case, no one was going to interrupt. They were in Harry's room — Blaise sprawled across his bed, Harry sitting cross-legged on his pillow. (Anyone could come into Ravenclaw Tower if they could answer the Door-Eagle's riddle, whereas Blaise would get in trouble for telling Harry and Danny the password to get into the Slytherin dorms.) Danny was at the figure-drawing, modelling thing Chris and Elia had been advertising on the Student Activities Board. Apparently it was a nude modelling thing, which Danny had gone awfully pink admitting, when Harry asked how the first week had been. His sketches of Elia had been notably less detailed from the shoulders down, which was sort of hilarious. And no one else was likely to come in here without Harry's explicit permission, even if he and Blaise were both screaming bloody murder. He'd been very clear the first time Tony and Mike barged in without asking that this was his space and they would respect his privacy, or else.

Blaise sighed. "You're not going to let this go, are you?"

"Nope."

"Fine. Don't say I didn't warn you, though."

The kitten disappeared, slinking to the centre of the room as an invisible smudge of ectoplasm and vicious magic, and then, with a crack  like a bad apparation...

It was the dying not-girl from his dreams, emaciated and exhausted, barely able to raise a hand toward him in supplication, her eyes catching his, her voice so weak he didn't know whether he actually heard her say please... one last time before she collapsed. He'd failed her. He'd failed, and she was dead, and...and...

"I'm sorry..." he whispered, falling to his knees beside her — beside the boggart. He knew it wasn't really her, he could feel the real her (not very well, it would still be months until the Dark Night, but enough he'd know if she died), but it was still a chilling reminder — it was only a matter of time, he had to figure out what he was meant to do, he couldn't let her die, not for real— No. No. He wouldn't let it happen. He just wouldn't!

"Harry?" Blaise said, more curious than concerned, dragging him back to the present, to reality, where he was kneeling in the middle of his bedroom next to a boggart pretending very convincingly to be his worst nightmare come to life — he hadn't even considered that this would be what he feared most, but he did, actually, on a visceral, stomach-knotting level entirely unlike the exhilarating fear of not-quite-dying out in the Forest — rather than leagues and centuries away, wherever she was, really, wherever he was supposed to be to help her. "What is that?"

"Huh?" He turned to look at the boy, still sitting on the bed, staring at the false horror in front of them, which did, Harry supposed, look more alien than he usually considered the dream girl to be. She did look like she always did (except more wasted and dead), he just...didn't really think how odd she would look to someone else until Blaise said something.

Their colouring was the same, unnaturally white skin contrasting with long blue-black hair tangled into elflocks and equally dark feathers. Her eyes (more obviously too large for her face than Harry's) were all-black (no sclera, he meant — there were little white, star-like flecks in them), and it was sort of obvious from this angle that the cloak of feathers around her shoulders was actually just layers of long feathers growing from her neck and shoulders and the dorsal side of her arms. The ones in her hair, though, he didn't think were attached, just knotted in place for decoration. She did have hands, but with claws instead of fingernails, and there were dark, shifting patterns inked across her skin where she wasn't feathered. They stopped moving when she died, but that might've been the boggart improvising, since Harry didn't have any idea if they were actually anything like the magic tattoos he'd learned about over the summer. She wore a skirt of feathers, too, maybe her own, held in place by a thick, blue, woven belt. It was barely long enough to cover her bum, and when she wasn't lying there dead but actually moving there were occasional flashes of white skin between the feathers. He doubted it was really intended for modesty, since she didn't wear anything that might be considered a shirt, but he didn't know enough about her or where she came from to say what its purpose might be. Her legs gradually grew dark and scaly from the knee down, ending in talons, rather than feet.

"It's... She's... I don't know. My sister, maybe. Or maybe part of my soul? I don't know," he repeated. "I just know she's important to me, and she's dying, and I can save her, but I don't know how." He sighed, brushing dark hair away from her eyes. It felt thin and ephemeral, like the boggart always did. "And I don't know what happens if I fail, but...it's not good. I...don't think I'll live to see her dead," he said, realising it as he spoke. "I... I think — I don't know, I don't know anything about her, really, but I think — the way she's a part of me, and I'm a part of her, if she dies, I won't just have failed her, I'll already be dead."

When he looked up again, Blaise was giving him an awfully peculiar look.

"What?"

"Huh? Oh, nothing. Just...I had sort of discounted the rumour that you might be a changeling. I mean, part-fae, sure, maybe. I've met Dru, and she's about as good an argument for the existence of changelings as you're likely to find in this day and age, and everyone knows the Blacks have too much magic in their blood, they could easily have fae or demonic ancestors hidden away in their family tree — integrated with blood magic, whatever. But I didn't actually think that you might be a baby harpy or something."

That startled a little snort of laughter out of Harry, despite the circumstances. "I don't think I'm a harpy. Or that she is, for that matter."

"And you would know this, how, exactly?"

Harry shrugged, retreating to the bed. "I don't know. It just doesn't seem to fit. Don't give me that look," he added, in response to Blaise's blatantly sceptical expression. "I don't know how I know a lot of things."

"Uh-huh."

The boggart turned back into a cat with a resentful pop and hopped up on the bed with them, giving Harry a good excuse to change the subject. "Still much cooler than an owl. Maybe I can do the ritual to summon one over hols."

Blaise rolled his eyes. "You're such a bloody weirdo, Potter."

"Says the bloke who brought a fear demon to school as his familiar?"

"Yeah, well, I didn't say I'm not. Takes one to know one, doesn't it?"

-ʌ-

Blaise and Harry had actually talked a fair bit. Harry wasn't sure, but he thought Blaise might be the first person he would legitimately call a friend. Danny was a nice enough bloke, Harry didn't mind spending time with him, but he sort of obviously found Harry to be a little too unnervingly intense to really be comfortable around him. Blaise was, Harry thought, the first person he'd ever met who wasn't slightly afraid of him, after realising that Harry was a bit mad and also far too good at everything. After their conversation on the train with Danny and Theo, Blaise hadn't given any sign at all that he found Harry the least bit odd or disturbing, which left Harry wondering exactly how much of that conversation had been an act for the other boys' benefit.

-v-

(Thurs 5 Sept)

What with the excitement of starting lessons and getting to know their new housemates and generally adjusting to the Castle, it was several days before Harry managed to track Blaise down, cornering him after dinner and dragging him outside for a conversation which was, in Harry's opinion, well overdue. This was complicated by the fact that Danny was better friends with Blaise than Harry was, and generally seemed to have attached himself to Harry, as though being roommates meant that they ought to be each-other's default companion when they were just hanging out. He didn't manage to ditch the boy whose life he was living until Danny announced that he was going to check out that art-modelling thing the older Ravenclaws were doing on Thursday. Obviously Harry had no interest in such a thing, given that his drawing skills were practically non-existent, and Danny knew that. He didn't even bother inviting him, just skipped off after dinner with his sketchbook and pencils, more excited than Harry had seen him yet.

"So," the Slytherin drawled, meandering across the lawn toward the lake with Harry. "This is...romantic." Harry let out a snort of surprised laughter. "Seriously, what's up, Potter?"

Well, if that wasn't the perfect segue... "You know that's not my name. And you wanted me to know it too, on the train, didn't you? So really, I think you should be the one telling me what's up."

Blaise gave a positively laconic shrug. "You know what I know, now. More or less."

"Mostly less. Danny doesn't know?"

Harry knew his roommate knew he was adopted. He'd admitted it after their first Defence lesson, when Harry had seen the mark on his forehead. Some sort of dark protection ritual thing his mother had done, or at least that was what his foster parents figured. Exactly how it worked or what it might be meant to do, Danny didn't know, but whatever else people might say about Bellatrix they would admit that she'd taken care of her family. It wasn't unreasonable to believe she would've used some esoteric dark arts to give her son some protection she wasn't in a position to offer herself. (Bella Black, unlike Lily Potter, had just handed her son off to a family member who wasn't actually fighting in a war and gone right back to it, like any sensible Dark Lady.)

Of course, Danny was really Lily Potter's kid, but that didn't really change anything, Harry didn't think? There was no reason to believe that Lily wouldn't have done some esoteric dark protection ritual either, or at least not as far as Harry was concerned. Maybe people who'd grown up hearing the party line Harry Potter Myth would find it hard to swallow, but the Starlighters would believe it, and Aunt Petunia, and probably anyone who was close to the main players in the war. Blaise's mother, for instance, and Dumbledore.

So it was possible that Danny knew Lily was his mother, and he was just keeping it a secret for whatever reasons they'd been switched in the first place, but Harry really didn't think he was. And it was equally possible — probably more plausible — that Danny's 'mum' (Bellatrix's sister) had told him at some point after she realised he was definitely not Bella's kid but before he could be trusted to keep a secret that "his mother" had done it — meaning Lily, but letting him think Bellatrix.

Blaise laughed. "No, of course not. He thinks Bella's his birth mother. Which is sort of ridiculous in itself, since Mira says she used a surrogate — no one in their right mind would think Bella would stay out of the war long enough to bear a child."

"But he is the real Harry Potter."

The other boy hesitated. "He's definitely the son of Lily and James Potter, by blood, but... I dunno, if you're not planning on telling him and switching back, I think that makes you the 'real' Harry Potter."

Harry pondered this for a long moment. He didn't really care much either way, he supposed. It was just a name. What would it change if he started calling himself Danny Black, and Danny started calling himself Harry Potter? He wouldn't expect Danny to leave the family he'd lived with as long as Harry had lived with the Dursleys. And Harry himself would probably just keep going back to Charing in the summers, but draw money from the Blacks' bank vault rather than the Potters'.

People's expectations would be different. More for Danny than himself. Somehow, he sort of doubted that the silly artist would fancy suddenly becoming the Boy Who Lived. Not that Harry wanted the sort of absurd notoriety Snape definitely hadn't been overselling (dinner that first night had made that unfortunately clear) either, but he suspected he lived up to the idea people had for what the Boy Who Lived ought to be like a bit better than Danny. And given that Danny was using the surname Tonks — most people didn't know he was Bella's kid, they thought he was actually the Tonkses' son — there would probably be some trouble explaining exactly how Harry was Bella's son if they'd just been switched, and he still didn't know why they'd been switched in the first place. He presumed there was a reason...

"Was Mira in on switching us?" he asked, as a prelude to asking why. After all, if she hadn't been she might not know.

"Er...sort of? Back at the end of the war, you were with Cissa and Danny was with Lily and James in hiding. As far as we know, Dumbledore had someone from the Order of the Phoenix get Baby Potter out of the house before the aurors arrived on the scene — he had to answer for that in an emergency Wizengamot session the next day, and in that same session they voted to give him custody of both Danny and you. You got dragged in by Cassie Nott née Black, Theo's grandmother, either in a genuine effort to get you out of the way of anyone gunning for Bellatrix or, more likely, trying to make it look more like the Notts hadn't been voluntarily wrapped up in the Death Eaters since the Fifties. Cissa argued against it, but too many people thought if she raised you you'd turn out like the Blacks. The aurors took you from Narcissa and handed you over to Dumbledore. She gave you up without a fight on the condition that you would be raised with the full knowledge of who you were."

"Yeah, obviously that didn't happen..."

"Obviously. Dumbledore presumably used blood alchemy to change your eye-colour and Danny's. There's really no telling whether he did anything else, like so the goblins' blood magic would recognise you as a Potter and him as a Black, but Mira thinks he probably didn't, because if the nobility found out he was messing with the inheritance structures of two noble houses like that — one of which is literally the oldest magical family in Britain — he might actually be lynched. Doesn't matter that they all want to see the House of Black fall and fade away, it'd be the principle of the thing. Which also means he has to be planning on switching you back eventually, and I know Andi isn't going to play along forever. There's going to be a point where the shite she's teaching Danny about being a young gentleman and one day becoming the head of his House no longer apply equally to the Potter and Black heirs, and if Dumbledore hasn't told him by that point she will."

"So she knows. Was she in on it?"

"No. Definitely not. She was still living in Canada in Eighty-One. Mira tried to claim custody of you as soon as Narcissa told her that you'd been taken from her — she's your godmother, she has more right than even Narcissa to do so. She and Bella gave you to Cissa because she could actually teach you all the shite little nobles are supposed to learn, and had house elves to help out with you and Draco. I think the plan was for you to come live with us when you left the nursery? Not entirely sure, but it doesn't really matter, anyway.

"The thing you have to understand about Mira is she's sort of reformed her image in the past ten years. Back in Eighty-One, she was basically seen as an irresponsible party-girl. Pretty and shallow and promiscuous — she'd already been widowed twice by the age of twenty-seven, so sad—" Blaise didn't look the least bit sympathetic. Harry bit his tongue on the urge to ask more about that, because he really wanted to know more about this whole getting-switched-with-Harry-Potter-as-a-baby thing. "—and was on Husband Number Three, and she'd still managed to have a kid out of wedlock. Not exactly the sort of woman an upstanding prude like the Old Goat would want to give custody of a potential hostage for the Light to use against a Dark Lady still on the loose, despite Mira's assurances that Bella would not have allowed you to be used as leverage over her. So Dumbledore told her hell no, he'd already placed you with a good light family to be brainwashed into his way of thinking and kept as far from the House of Black as he could possibly get you. Paraphrasing, but.

"The thing about irresponsible party-girls with two dearly departed husbands worth of money at their disposal and a well-established, highly glamourous, gallivanting gadabout lifestyle is, they're uniquely well-placed to have friends all over the world at all levels of society — people who know people, if you know what I mean. And a lot of men are all too willing to spill secrets they shouldn't to a pretty young thing they'd like to impress. She already had her friends looking for the Tonkses, so she put the word out that she needed to know what the fuck those bastards had done with her godson too. And then Bella attacked the Longbottoms and basically let herself be taken into custody, I told you this part on the train—"

Harry nodded.

"Right, but by the time she got the truce more or less hammered out, she'd also gotten word that the Tonkses were living in Canada in the middle of nowhere, and that Clio Miller née Urquhart and her husband — McGonagall's late husband's youngest niece, she married a muggleborn, they're basically still Urquharts — had recently taken custody of a distant cousin orphaned in the final days before the Dark Lord's fall, who coincidentally looked absolutely nothing like any of the Urquharts. She made it a condition of the Truce that you would be raised by Andromeda rather than some light family, dropped a few hints she knew exactly where at least one of the two boys he'd been responsible for fostering was, and if she knew it obviously wasn't that well-kept a secret. Obviously there was some negotiation, but he did eventually agree. It took a couple of months to get the Tonkses back over here, and Mira had to keep her distance for a while, just in case anyone tried to follow her to you — Bella made a lot of enemies, and they were known associates.

"Then in Eighty...Four, I want to say — right after Number Four's funeral—"

"Okay, wait. How many times has your mum been widowed?" Harry asked, unable to prevent a snort of laughter despite the overall humourlessness of the greater story.

"Six. She doesn't believe in the institution of divorce, you see." Wait. What? Harry knew he shouldn't laugh at morbid jokes like that, but it was funny. "Jack died just last year — fell asleep behind the wheel. Tragic. She's talking about focusing on her investments in the muggle world for a while, though, and getting serious about educational reform now that I'm in school — she secured the position of Director of the Department of Education almost two years ago now — so it will probably be a couple of years until she starts hunting for the next late Mister Zabini."

"Are you serious?" Harry really couldn't tell. "You're not actually telling me your mum's like...some sort of gold-digging serial killer."

Blaise winked at him. "That would be telling. And your mum's a bloody war criminal, you have no room to judge." Harry laughed again, but it was fine. There was no one in earshot anyway to know he was laughing at the idea of his and Blaise's mothers actually murdering people. "Anyway. In Eighty-Four, we visited the Tonkses for the first time, and of course Mira realised immediately that Danny wasn't you — godparents and godchildren have a magical bond between them, or at least they do when it's the House of Black we're talking about. And once you know he's not you and Dumbledore only had two kids to dispose of, it's pretty bloody obvious he's the Potter heir.

"She didn't tell Andi immediately — wanted to work through the political implications and fall-out if she were to publicise it first, I think — but within a year or two it was becoming pretty fucking obvious that Danny has vanishingly little in common with Bellatrix — too little for it to be down to upbringing alone, and even if she screwed up the blood alchemy somehow, Sirius was no angel, either—"

"Wait, what?" It sounded like he'd just implied that Harry's father actually was Sirius Black, and Bella was his mother. What the hell?

Blaise smirked, anticipating Harry's reaction to whatever he was about to say, presumably. "Mira says that Bella had an epiphany when Regulus died, realised that the House of Black was probably going to die out in that generation unless she did something to secure their future herself. So, being the incredibly sane, stable individual she is, she decided to have a child. Specifically, she decided to clone herself, because if you want something done right you do generally have to do it yourself, but obviously it would be easier for a male heir to re-populate the House, so she stole a bit of blood from Sirius to splice in his Y-chromosome. He was the obvious choice. They were shockingly similar in personality and temperament, so if she screwed it up and you ended up with more of his traits than just being a 'him', there still probably wouldn't be too much deviation. She waited until you'd already been born to tell Mira so Mira couldn't tell her that was completely mad, don't do it."

Thinking about it, though, was it really that mad? If you could casually clone yourself instead of having a baby the hard way, why wouldn't you? Presumably there were reasons, if a male heir would be able to re-populate the House more easily. Harry knew how reproduction worked, if witches could just go sticking babies in other women as easily as men obviously his sex wouldn't be an issue. But they couldn't be overwhelmingly important reasons. Bella had done it, after all. Of course, given the things he'd heard about Bella, and knowing that he was unreasonably good at pretty much everything, maybe she'd thought it was worth the hassle or whatever to give the House the best possible shot at reviving itself. The fact that Harry knew nothing about the House of Black and had no interest in children might be problematic, but they would have mothers. It would be fine. He'd figure it out.

"I dunno, sounds reasonable to me. I mean, yeah, maybe in the normal way of things, shagging your cousin isn't a great idea, but if you're doing magic genetics shite anyway, does that really matter?"

"Of course it sounds reasonable to you, you wouldn't exist if she hadn't done it." Well, yes, that was a point, too. "And no, it doesn't. Which is what Bella told Mira, along with the fact that it was incredibly unlikely you'd turn out as blatantly destructive and rebellious as she was, or even Sirius, since you'd be raised mostly by Cissa and Mira, not the abusive twats who raised them. But having a kid specifically so they can do the job of reviving the House seems a little...dark, even for the Blacks. Selfish. Especially since Bella chose to put it off on you rather than take over as the Head of the House and turn it around herself. I mean, what if you wanted to do something else with your life? She obviously did."

Harry shrugged. "I don't really have any other plans, though. Maybe if I were already in the middle of a war, I'd just do the bare minimum too, and let my kid take care of it. But since I'm not..." He shrugged again. Actually, the more he thought about it the more he liked it, the idea of having a big goal like reviving an ancient magical Noble House to work toward. It seemed somehow...better than just...doing whatever seemed the most interesting at any given moment, working on turning himself into the biggest magical badass he could, just because it was cool and he wanted to. Obviously he was still going to become an awesome magical badass, but he liked the idea of having some reason to work on improving himself (beyond warlocks are cool). He grinned. "You know, if you'd told me this on the train, I might have ended up in Slytherin with you. Ambitions, and all that."

Harry could hear the wry smirk in Blaise's voice without even looking up. "Yeah, well, anyway. Back when we were five or six, Andi started to have her doubts that Danny was Bella's kid — not that she was complaining, he's always been a sweet boy, but still. Not really the sort of kid you can see trying to take over the House of Black.

"They had no idea where you actually were — Andi did some necromantic ritual to make sure you weren't already dead, and I guess whoever she summoned said no, but also wouldn't tell her anything more than that — and some of the political fall-out if it came out Dumbledore had spirited Bella's kid away to be raised essentially anonymously — by muggles makes it even worse — would include the Truce completely falling apart, so they decided not to tell people, at least not until they located you. Right now, you and I know, and Mira, and Andi and Ted — her husband — and Dumbledore, of course. Dumbledore doesn't know that we know. We doubt he's told anyone else."

"And you wanted me to know...why, exactly? I mean, don't get me wrong, I'd definitely rather know than not, but... Why did they tell you, for that matter?"

Blaise shrugged. "Mira tells me everything. She has since I was nine. She trusts my judgement and my ability to keep a secret. And as for why I'm telling you... Is it so hard to believe I find you intriguing? You are my godbrother, you know. We would have grown up together if you hadn't been taken from Cissa. Everything I know about Bellatrix and everything I've seen of you in the past five days says you'd figure it out, and sooner rather than later, and I think it's better to tell you now and earn your trust as an ally rather than wait until you work it out on your own and leave you guessing who knows what and who you can trust, and end up on your bad side because we didn't tell you." He grinned. "Call me crazy, but I'm sort of betting I'd rather not be on your bad side."

...Probably smart. He'd already had his suspicions, and it probably still hadn't entirely sunk in how much he'd missed out on not being raised around magic yet, but he was already a little angry at Dumbledore.

"Besides," Blaise continued. "It's your life. I mean, it's Danny's life too, but he likes being Danny Tonks. He clearly got the better end of the deal, growing up with Andi. You're the injured party, here. If you want to march right up to the Headmaster's office and demand to know what the hell he was thinking and that he come clean and tell everyone who you really are, you have every right to do that. I might tell you to wait until Andi can get up here and go with you — she's a solicitor, and you might need one, since you don't actually know any of the relevant legal precedents — but I won't tell you not to do it..."

The way he trailed off there... "You don't think I should, though."

"No. On the one hand, I think you should let this go on as long as possible, so it's an even bigger scandal for Dumbles when he finally gets his head out of his arse and/or his hand is forced and he has to switch you back. But on the other hand...Danny likes being Danny Tonks. If you force Dumbles to out him as Harry Potter, it's going to ruin his life. I mean, he'll be incredibly relieved that he's not related to Bellatrix, but he wants to be a portrait artist. He'd hate being the Boy Who Lived and all the shite that goes along with being famous for no real reason. And you might not like being Harry Potter, but you're not going to get nearly as much shite as him as you would if people knew you're Bella's son. The Truce might not be enough to protect you, and you'd be starting from behind even more than you already are — because on top of not knowing anything about Magical Britain, you'd have everyone watching you, waiting for the first sign you're just as mad as she is, and looking for excuses to have you locked up in a mental ward or even in Azkaban before you start really going off the deep end and/or grow up and become too powerful for them to do something like that."

Right. So, like everyone in Little Whinging, but with actual incentive to see him locked up, not just expecting that he would  be. Much as he hated to admit it, that seemed like...sort of a reasonable prediction for how people would react, given what he'd heard about Bella Black in the few short weeks he'd been in Charing. Some of them, the people on the outskirts of society, might consider him potentially a good thing, like, if he picked up the Dark Revolution and found a way to actually make it happen, but those people didn't exactly have a lot of power in society — that was kind of the problem. So they wouldn't be able to help him if the good, upstanding people of Magical Britain decided he needed to be locked up. And unlike his neighbours in Little Whinging, Magical Britain, from what he'd seen, was a little more likely to actually arrest a kid for having the potential to grow up to be a dangerous madman. Odysseus had, after all, informed him in no uncertain terms that if Harry were caught with restricted books he would be subject to the same legal consequences as an adult.

Plus, there were still plenty of people around who'd been actively fighting in a war that was basically just vigilantes on both sides — hundreds of people deciding to take the law and/or the future of the country into their own hands, and kill anyone who got in the way. It would really only take one of them deciding that Bella's son was a threat that needed to be eliminated to kill him. Of course, the same could be said for Harry Potter (which was also a good reason to learn to be a crazy-awesome warlock, come to think of it), but people wanting revenge for their revolution failing were probably less serious a threat than people wanting revenge for Bella starting a war wherein people they loved died (or for personally killing or torturing said people) and afraid that he might eventually hurt or kill them, or undermine their way of life if they didn't kill him first.

"But you said it yourself: Dumbledore isn't going to be able to keep us switched forever. He's going to have to tell people the truth eventually."

Blaise shrugged sort of awkwardly, peering down at Harry in the fading light. "Yeah. And we still don't know what he's planning there — or if he even has a plan. Mira said if she were him, now you've been introduced to Hogwarts as Harry Potter, she'd probably try to keep it going until you're sixteen, give people as long as possible to form a positive opinion of you and you as long as possible to start thinking of yourself as a tool for the Light, your parents murdered by the Dark, and basically get as much brainwashing in as possible before admitting that you're Bella's kid.

"Since you're not an idiot and would almost certainly have put it together yourself even if we'd never met, obviously he's not going to be able to brainwash you into thinking you ought to be a good little Light puppet or have some sort of vendetta against the Dark, but we're inclined to let him stew in his obliviousness for a while."

So, Mira (and by extension, Blaise) and Andromeda obviously didn't want him to tell Dumbledore that he knew. Which, Harry was fine with that, Dumbledore had never told Harry or Aunt Petunia anything, and it was apparently his fault Harry had been raised away from magic. Not that he didn't appreciate everything the Dursleys had done for him — they were still his family, he'd decided — but if he'd had the choice of being raised by Aunt Petunia without magic or "Aunt Cissy" with magic, he would have chosen magic, obviously. So as far as Harry was concerned, Dumbledore could go die in a fire. But... "What about Danny?"

"Well, I can't stop you from telling him, if you want to, but Mira decided to let Andi do it when she thought he was ready to know. Probably when he turns thirteen. Well, when he thinks he's turning thirteen. See, there's this thing called the Age of Recognition, noble kids are supposed to start taking an interest in politics and the business of the House after their thirteenth birthdays and sort of start to be considered real people by adults."

Oh, that reminded him... "When is that, by the way? My birthday."

"Oh!" Blaise exclaimed, sounding awfully surprised, though Harry couldn't imagine how he might possibly think Harry already knew that. "Walpurgis. Danny's is May second for legal shite, but it's really the night between the first and the second. Andi says Bella almost certainly did that on purpose — it's the holiday that celebrates chaos and conflict, among other things, and Bella is even more a child of chaos in her way than Doriel. Nymphadora," he added, at Harry's questioning look, which didn't at all explain why he would call her Doriel instead of Dora, but before he could ask Blaise also added, "Anyway, your birthday's at the beginning of May. If nothing happens to force her hand before then, Andi will probably tell Danny the summer after second year. Maybe Yule or Easter, but she knows his real birthday is over Lammas, so she'll probably wait, get as close as she reasonably can," which reminded Harry that they had been talking about something sort of important.

He pulled a face. "So I'm actually three months older than I thought?" If he and Danny were both in the same year, he guessed it would be sort of hard for Danny to be younger than him, but he'd still sort of hoped it would turn out he was actually much younger than he thought and that was at least part of the reason he was so tiny. He just hadn't really thought it through enough to realise that he was already one of the youngest people in their class. If Danny had been younger, it could only have been by a month at most for them to both be starting school this year.

"Er, yes? Is this a bad thing?"

"No, not really, just I'm beginning to think you weren't kidding about me looking like a kid until I'm thirty."

Blaise snorted. "So, I confirm that you're actually not the person you thought you were and you've been lied to your entire life, and your concern is you're even shorter for your age than you thought?"

"Well, it doesn't make that much of a difference if I'm not telling anyone, does it?" That got a startled laugh from the other boy. "Seriously, though? It's...sort of a lot to think about. Thanks for telling me. Just...I need some time to—" What was the phrase? Oh, right... "Work through the implications for myself. I'm going to keep walking for a while." They'd already wandered most of the way to the other side of the lake, and were coming dangerously close to the place where the trees met the water and they'd be straying into the Forbidden Forest.

They might already be outside of where students were technically allowed to be, but Harry had no intention of turning back. Of course, he also had no intention of thinking about what it might mean to him, having his suspicions about his identity confirmed. Not now , at least. He strongly suspected that he wasn't going to be doing much thinking at all for at least a few hours, instead just revelling in being .

He didn't know what might be waiting for him out there, under the trees, but the wildness and danger of the Forest was practically calling to him, in the same way seeing his own eyes flashing with magic in Danny's illusion had made him want to punch it in the face — some instinct that had never been triggered before because there was nothing like this in Little Whinging, but which came with an undeniable sense of  certainty and absolute confidence in his own ability to meet whatever unknown challenge might be lurking in the dark.

The night breeze was chilly, but not too cold, and the air smelled of autumn. There was only the tiniest sliver of moon and it would be even darker under the trees, but there was magic in every living thing, and the Forest was so alive it positively sang, a siren song urging him onward — come, be one with the Night, be free... He didn't need light.

Blaise was tactful enough to realise he was saying please leave me alone , but he apparently still felt the need to point out, "You do realise that there are all sorts of dangerous things in the Forest, especially after dark."

Harry grinned — a feral, toothy expression. You do realise that I'm one of them...? "I'll see you at breakfast, Blaise."

-ʌ-

Harry also had enemies for the first time, now, which was a bit of a novel experience. The boys in Little Whinging might not have liked him, but they were far too scared of him to try crossing him. Either Draco and Ron — who hated each other, but found common ground in their hatred for Harry having 'tricked them' into believing he was a girl named Harry Harrison — were too stupid to be afraid of angering him, or seriously overestimated their own abilities. He was betting on the former, at least in Draco's case.

-v-

(Mon 2 Sept)

"You tricked me!" Draco Malfoy spat, interrupting Danny by smacking a book onto the table he, Blaise, and Theo were sharing with Harry. They were in the library after their first two lessons — Herbology and Charms — killing time until lunch.

Blaise shushed him. "Keep your voice down, Draco, darling. You'll get us all thrown out."

"You tricked me!" he repeated, somewhat more quietly, a strained, almost-shouting whisper, glaring furiously at Harry. "You're not a nobody! You're not even a girl!"

"Well, to be fair, I never said I was a girl, and as far as I'm concerned I am no one special."

Danny sniggered. Theo gave him a look of blatant disbelief, but it was true. The whole Harry Potter Myth was just absurd (not to mention, Harry wasn't even really the real Harry Potter, anyway), and being a freak wasn't anything to be proud of. It wasn't as though he'd worked to be as good at magic as he was. He had spent a lot of time practising since he'd gotten his wand, but he wasn't really trying to learn as many spells as possible or whatever. Literally most of the time he was just fooling around. He was pretty sure that didn't count.

"You said your name was Harry Harrison!"

"So? You'd already decided I was a nobody."

The blond's hand snaked toward his face as though he intended to slap Harry. Harry batted it away, which only seemed to make him angrier. " I demand satisfaction from you, Potter !"

"Erm. Maybe not the best idea, Draco," Danny warned him.

"What, like a duel?"

"No," Theo said firmly. "Trust me, Malfoy, you don't want to do this."

"Oh, I really think I do, Nott, and what business is it of yours, anyway? Yes, Potter, 'like a duel'!"

"Yes, sure, I'm in!" Harry grinned. This was going to be fun. He didn't even know many spells that were good for fighting yet — a couple of cutting charms and a knockback jinx — but there were dozens of spells intended to disarm someone or stop them from moving or being able to speak. He'd learned a body-binding hex and a couple different silencing jinxes he hadn't been able to test on an actual person yet. If Draco wanted to volunteer, Harry was more than willing to try them on him. "When and where?"

"Harry, no. If you hurt him, his mother will have it out for you," Danny insisted.

"And you're definitely going to hurt him," Theo said, giving Draco a disparaging look. "Even if it's just his pride."

"Shut up! No one asked you two! Friday," he decided. "At midnight, in the trophy room—"

Blaise interrupted, then. "Draco. Fratellino. I'm not going to tell you not to do it, because you clearly haven't learned your lesson about underestimating people you think are nobodies, and getting your arse kicked might be good for you. But if you insist on demonstrating your inferiority to Harry, I'm going to have to insist that you do so with a healer in attendance, at the very least. I'll ask the prefects how these things usually work and we can go from there."

"Piss off, Zabini! This is none of your business, either!"

"Mira asked me to look out for you, which includes not letting you do something stupid like get into an honour duel you're definitely going to lose, with someone who has even less idea how to heal a serious injury than you, or even stupider, trying to set Harry up to get caught out of bounds and giving him cause to challenge you to a duel for real."

Draco went scarlet.

Harry frowned at him. "Wait. You were just trying to get me in trouble?"

"No! I said I'd be there, I'll be there! You and me! One on one! Third blood!"

"Yes, he was, and no, he won't— Yes, I know you have every intention of trying to beat the snot out of Harry for real now, but if you don't agree to do so behind proper duelling wards with a healer in attendance — and the customary witnesses — I will be writing to your mother."

"Go ahead!" Draco snapped, scowling. "Mother wouldn't want me to withdraw a challenge like a coward!"

"She also wouldn't want you to embarrass the House of Malfoy publically losing a duel to a boy who's been practising magic for all of a month, and she especially wouldn't want either of you to be seriously injured in doing so."

Draco hesitated.

"Shut up, Blaise," Harry hissed. "You're going to talk him out of it!"

"What exactly do you think he's been trying to do?" Danny wondered aloud, which was fair, Harry did realise that was what Blaise was trying to do, he just hadn't thought he'd actually manage it.

"Even if he were to win, there's not exactly a lot of honour in beating someone who's only known about magic for a month, either," Theo observed, apparently giving the blond the excuse he needed to back off without feeling like he'd lost face.

He sneered, somewhat more weakly than usual. "I suppose Nott does have a point. It would hardly be a fair fight, given that Potter barely knows anything."

"That's fine," Harry assured him. "I know that, and I still said yes. I'm not going to hold it against you or go whining about it being unfair if you beat me."

The sneer grew a bit more confident. "Keep up that attitude, and you'll go the same way as your parents, Potter. No, they're right, it'd look bad, me rubbing your nose in your pathetic ignorance. I'll give you...let's say until Samhain to learn some decent spells, and then we'll see who's the better wizard!"

Harry pouted. "Fine. But I'll hold you to that. Samhain."

Draco nodded, spinning on his heel and stalking away as abruptly as he'd appeared, without so much as a see you later.

Jerk.

Chapter Text

But even if Harry hadn't had potential friends and enemies and teachers and clubs and new hobbies to entertain himself (though those would be enough to make the school far more appealing than Little Whinging all on their own) and an enormous bloody castle to explore—

-v-

(Weds 4 Sept)

"I swear it was this way!" Danny muttered. "Behind the tapestry right after the portrait of Gylmyne MacAbhra, down to the third landing, take the door on the left, then turn right..."

"Oi, you there, with the sheep!" Harry said, waving at a boy in a nearby painting. "Could you tell us where we are, exactly?"

The boy laughed at them. "Not where you're trying to go, that's for sure!" Right. That was exactly as helpful as Harry had expected it to be. He was half convinced that every portrait and ghost they'd asked for directions since they'd left the stairwell was screwing with them.

"This is the fourth floor," a witch in another portrait kindly informed them. "The Axial Corridor is that way." She pointed to her left, Harry's right. Exactly the direction they'd just come from. Plus, they'd expected to be on the second floor. At least they could still see the lake from the exterior windows (the ones not overlooking lower roofs and towers and making Harry want to go climbing instead of to dinner), so they were definitely still on the north side of the Castle, but on the west side, instead of the east.

"See, I told you we got turned around somewhere. Do you still have the list?" They'd been given lists of directions to most of the places they'd need to go in the Castle. Not maps, because the Castle wasn't really amenable to mapping — stairs or doors might lead to different places at different days or times or just whenever they felt like it, and even when they didn't Harry was positive there was some weird space-warping thing going on, letting some secret passages go straight through spaces where there were definitely other corridors without actually intersecting them — but directions, like the ones Danny had been muttering to himself. He'd left his copy in their room, since they'd been to the Great Hall half a dozen times now, he'd figured they'd be fine. But at this rate, they weren't just going to miss dinner, they were going to be late for Astronomy afterward too.

Danny dug the list out of his bag, eyes skimming over the directions.

Harry peered over his shoulder at it. "See, there, what's that asterisk?"

The asterisk directed them to the back of the second page, and a note which neither of them had previously noticed. "Except on Wednesdays and Fridays, when the staircase merges with its equivalent in the west-north-west tower. On Wednesdays, the first landing down will lead to the fifth floor on the west side of the Castle, alternating down; on Fridays, the first landing will lead to the fourth floor on the west side of the Castle, alternating down. To reach the second floor on the east side of the building, go down to the sixth landing, instead of the third." Danny glowered at the page. "Well...crap. How do we get back to the staircase?"

Harry rolled his eyes, grabbing his roommate by the elbow and pulling him back toward the stairs. "It's this way."

"Are you sure? Maybe we should ask one of the portraits. We have been wandering around in circles for—"

He cut himself off as Harry dragged him around a corner, through a short passage that was really more like an abandoned classroom with doors on both sides, and back to the west-north-west tower stair, which was itself indistinguishable from the east-north-east tower stair, but the view of the lake outside the windows was  completely  different. Yes, they had been wandering around for at least twenty minutes, but they'd ended up almost back to where they'd started, backtracking and trying different directions. "Yes, I'm sure. Let's go..."

-ʌ-

—Hogwarts would still be bloody great because at Hogwarts, there was magic.

He didn't mean that he could learn magic here, he could learn magic on his own in Charing — probably a lot faster than he would in lessons. (He did have less time to practise spells here, but there were enough interesting things and people around that he didn't really mind...much.) He meant there was magic. More magic than he'd ever imagined, surrounding him, all the time.

Not just magic like there was magic everywhere, just existing as part of the world, or even like in Diagon or Knockturn, harnessed to do things, but magic that was a living, feeling being. The Castle was alive, Harry was sure of it, and it knew he was there and it loved him unconditionally, as it loved all of its students — they were its reason for being, after all — like the dying, ancient not-girl in his dreams loved him. He belonged at Hogwarts. It really didn't matter if the other students or teachers didn't think so, the school itself thought so.

It wasn't just that though. It had taken a while for Harry to notice, caught up with the magic of the wards and the living magic of the Castle, but there wasn't just more magic doing things here, there was more magic period.

-v-

(Fri 20 Sept)

The footsteps drew closer. Harry pressed himself back further into the nook he'd decided to hide in, waiting to see who it was. He'd been  looking  for Professor Sinistra, mostly because he'd woken up early and was bored and figured she'd probably be awake, even if he'd missed having tea and/or lunch at two. (It was almost four-thirty.)

Unfortunately, he hadn't realised that the sword being held by the suit of armour he was lurking behind wasn't actually  attached  to anything. Sinking another inch or two back, he accidentally jostled the display. The sword tipped forward before he realised what was happening, falling to the floor with an almighty clatter.

The person responsible for the footsteps shrieked.

Oh, it  was  Sinistra. Good. "Ah. Morning, professor," he greeted her, stepping out of hiding and putting the ancient weapon back.

"Circe's saggy tits, Potter! What the fuck! You scared the shite out of me! I thought you were Peeves! We have got to stop meeting like this!"

"Sorry! I wasn't trying to scare you! I just heard your footsteps and was hiding in case it wasn't you!"

"Oh, for God's sake! It's always going to be me! Or, well. It might be one of the NEWT Astronomy students — I have a lesson at five — but Argus and most of the other professors aren't awake yet, and Severus makes about as much noise as a ghost."

"Okay, noted. Sorry. I didn't realise there were NEWT Astronomy students." Their Astronomy lessons weren't on the course schedules in the Common Room, just written in at the bottom of the time tables Professor Flitwick had given them at breakfast on the first day.

"Oh, yes, there are always a few who find the subject fascinating enough to continue on, despite their complaints about the schedule. There are ten this year. Six seventh-years, and four sixth-years. If you're just looking to chat, you're going to have to walk and talk. I have a couple of things to grab from my office before the lesson." She started walking away before she even stopped talking.

Harry grinned, skipping to catch up. "That's fine. And yes, I was just exploring. Can I sit in?"

The professor snorted. "What, on the seventh-years' lesson?"

He nodded. "Yeah. Sounds like fun." Well, more fun than wandering aimlessly around the corridors. He was in one of those weird moods where he wanted to do something, but also didn't really want to do anything, so he was just sort of killing time until other people woke up.

She stopped to look down at him, with her back to a window so she could see his face. "You do realise you're not going to understand a bloody thing. We're talking about the influence of celestial movements on the initial development of terrestrial magical environments — heavily theoretical fundamentals of geomancy and geology — and impacts on the ebb and flow of established ambient magical currents. We spent an hour on a tangent about the magical resistance of quartz versus feldspar yesterday."

Harry gave the professor his best begging puppy-dog eyes. "Please? I promise I won't be distracting or ask questions or anything. I'll just sit in the back and take notes, and look things up later. I don't have anything to do at  all  today. Well, History, but that doesn't count."

The ghost professor had spent the past three weeks droning about some Dark Lord called Emeric the Evil who'd lived in the Southwest in the Twelve Hundreds. Harry felt very much as though he'd just sat down in the middle of a story, attempting to actually pay attention in class, because as far as he could tell there was no rhyme or reason to starting their studies of magical history with this particular bloke and his attempts to conquer London. It...might have had something to do with the Second Barons' War? maybe?

In any case, he was sure Sinistra's lecture would be more interesting than that, especially since he was actually curious about ambient magic and where it came from and how it worked, and this was the first anyone had really mentioned it outside of Theo telling him normal (human) people couldn't see patterns in it.

She gave an exasperated little  tch . "Fine. Come on, then..."

The seventh-years weren't nearly as awake at five in the morning as Harry. It took several minutes before anyone noticed or asked why there was a firstie in the corner. Sinistra's answer was a snarky, "I didn't have the heart to kick it out. I know you all definitely did the reading this time, so who wants to summarise the Messier article for those who are just having a bit of trouble recalling any of the details of his observations and conclusions at this ungodly hour of the morning? Courtney, I see you at least  have  a copy of the article, so..."

They did wake up and become more animated over the course of the lesson, though, which was much more like a discussion than a lecture, and sort of fascinating to listen to. Not because he actually understood a bloody thing (Sinistra had been right, he barely followed any of it), but because he'd never really had a teacher who asked their students to think about things and form their own conclusions, and especially not one who encouraged their students to disagree with her and each other and try to defend their positions, like that Messier was a bloody lunatic (because further research had shown that ninety-nine point eight per cent of all the variation he detected could be explained by factors  other  than astrological phenomena, and the other point two per cent weren't statistically significant) or that he was a lunatic who'd been on to something (because when his analytical method was applied to the relative position of stars within a certain distance of earth, rather than the movements of planets, asteroids, and comets, it predicted the location of major and minor geomantic reservoirs within a few degrees, and that couldn't possibly be a coincidence).

"All right, all right! I want everyone to read the Macsutov and Baily articles for next week. Oh, and Dobson! Rosier has some interesting commentary as well, if you want to get into multiversal interpretations of Messier and why that point two per cent actually is significant. I listed the relevant citations on the syllabus for those who are interested, but I'm not cruel enough to require the rest of you to read temporospatial arithmancy articles. You're welcome. Now let's move on to the Rowen Document. Atlas, please remind your peers what we're talking about...?"

"Oh! Well. Er. I did read it, I swear!" The older boy said defensively, shuffling through his notes. "Er. Right. Rowen Document. Rumoured to have been written by Ravenclaw herself, though it almost certainly wasn't — there are clues suggesting that it's actually from the Thirteenth Century, and the earliest extant copy is from the Fifteenth Century. But it's still the oldest surviving geomantic survey of any location in the British Isles, and focuses on the Hogsmeade Valley Reservoir, so, um...that's neat. But it doesn't really explain why the three ley lines converge at the hot spot here. And I'm not sure I buy this trans-dimensional shite. I mean, ambient magic is a part of this plane, clearly, so..."

"It makes sense if you just replace 'metaphysical plane' with 'magical landscape', though," a boy called Dane said. "I don't think they used 'plane' the same way we do."

"The metaphysical plane refers to the Void or the Beyond," Sinistra informed them, "the extraplanar well of magical energy from which we draw when we conjure objects and to which the excess energy is sent when an object is vanished. Septima can explain it better than I can, she wrote her mastery paper on it. The important part of the Rowan Document, for our purposes, was the geomantic mapping of the region, which I believe I asked you to compare to the Seventeen Twenty-Five and Nineteen Fifty European Geomantic Survey Maps? And five points for anyone who took the next logical step and located corresponding star charts..."

-ʌ-

Whatever the reason those three magical currents came together in the valley (Sinistra had made a convincing argument for stars having something to do with it, though Harry still didn't understand exactly how, despite spending the rest of the day in the library trying to figure it out), what it meant was there was far more ambient magic here than practically anywhere else in Britain. There were maybe a couple dozen or so places where two ley lines crossed, but three was rare.

For Harry what it meant was...

It was like...like he could breathe, here. He could relax in a way he'd never really realised he wasn't relaxed before, out in the world where there was less magic. He could almost feel himself perking up, like a plant half-dead from not being watered coming back to life after the rain. It was just... He felt better here. Healthier. Not that he could remember actually being ill, but he felt more...present, more in tune with and a part of the world around him. Especially out in the Forest, where the magic was so thick he could practically taste it.

The idea of leaving Hogwarts, going back to Little Whinging — not just to visit, but actually trying to live there again — was... Well, he sort of hated it. He wouldn't be, if he could help it, which Aunt Petunia said was fine, especially since he wasn't even really her nephew.

-v-

(Wed 11 Sept)

9 September 1991

Dear Harry,

Well, I really don't know what to say.

(From your signature, I presume you still intend to go by Harry, even with those in the know.)

Perhaps that I'm not entirely surprised, especially given that Albus Dumbledore is still responsible for your presence in my life. I will admit that I thought that first morning, when I found you in the back garden babbling in French and that bloody note on the step, that if you hadn't had Lily's eyes I would have wondered whether he'd sent the right child. Perhaps I might also say that you might have opened with what I suspect we both consider the most important bit of news, rather than hiding it halfway through your letter.

I did not doubt that you would arrive safely at that absurd institution. Indeed I would be shocked had you not.

Do not send Dudley any magical chocolates — I do not want him thinking magic is anything other than perfectly boring, a fact of which you are well aware. I was under the impression we were in agreement on that point. That you no longer live with him and therefore would not be subject to his begging for more "cool magic tricks" does not change the fact that I do not want him exposed to it any more than absolutely necessary.

I did not need to know that the magic world has giant talking spiders. "Don't worry, I killed it" is hardly reassuring. Where there is one spider, there are always more. I'm not advising you to burn an entire forest to the ground, but I would not hold you accountable if you were to do so. Provided you found some way to ensure the spiders did not escape, obviously.

Now that's out of the way, thank you for informing me of "Danny's" existence. If he wishes to meet me after he learns of our relationship, I suppose I could, but I cannot say I'm particularly eager to do so. As you know, Lily and I had not so much as exchanged letters for over a year at the time of her death. As far as I am concerned any familial obligations between us were terminated when she refused to attend our parents' funeral. I have no particular interest in getting to know her son solely on the basis of our shared blood.

For now in any case, from what you've written, he is happy, healthy, and well taken care of, and I see no reason to trouble him by revealing your respective birth identities. Your new friend and his mother seem to have a good handle on the situation. I would trust their judgement if I were you, and allow "Danny's" foster-mother to tell him when she believes the time is right.

Similarly, I support the idea of concealing your awareness of the situation from "His Nibs" and will make no mention of it should I have further reason to contact him. I suggest you speak to these women directly, especially the one who is a solicitor, and prepare a legal case against him to be brought immediately upon his admitting the truth to you. Regardless of whether what passes for the government of that wretched collection of freaks thought it a good idea to terminate your birth-mother's parental rights in favour of giving custody of you to the least responsible wizard they could find, they cannot possibly have endorsed the idea of concealing from two children their true identities, and spiriting one off to be raised by the "muggles" of whom they are so disparaging when there were clearly other options.

I have, of course, informed Vernon of the situation. The part where the wizards placed you with us in place of our actual nephew for reasons unknown, not the part where your birth mother is a madwoman and convicted war criminal ultimately responsible for thousands of deaths in my world and yours, and your biological father is her equally mad first cousin. Keep that to yourself in polite company. (Though I do suppose you come by being a questionably sane demon-child honestly after all.) I will tell Dudley and Marge in person, when next I see them.

While it seems cold-hearted to entirely disown a boy I have raised as my nephew for his entire life, I cannot pretend that the offer to repay us for the financial burdens we suffered to raise you is not appreciated. I personally am of a mind not to ask such a thing of you, given that the true fault here lies with that unscrupulous man who lied to us both, but Vernon has made a spreadsheet accounting for said costs, if you truly wish to do so. I have enclosed a copy of the spreadsheet more with the thought that it may be helpful to have an accounting on record should you bring a case against the party responsible than because we require repayment, and certainly not before you come of age and/or win said case. (I would contact a solicitor myself, but as a citizen of their backward nation I expect they will take you more seriously despite your age.)

If "Will you still be expecting me to come home for the holidays?" was a subtle attempt to seek my permission to make your own plans, you have it. Truth be told, I was not expecting you to come home for the holidays even before this revelation. I was rather under the impression, given your decision to stay in London throughout August, that you would prefer to spend your school holidays somewhere you can indulge in practising your unnaturalness without fear of official repercussions, regardless of whether you are or are not actually my nephew. As such, I would not have expected you to return for any length of time regardless of that same fact.

Honestly I anticipated you finding alternative accommodations in future, and have therefore taken the opportunity to begin transforming your former bedroom into an in-house studio, with the thought that I might take up ceramic sculpture now that I have the resources to do so and there are no other demands on my time. I've already gotten rid of the bed, but I believe we still have a cot or two packed away from Vernon and Dudley's ill-fated tenting excursion. You may visit over Christmas if you wish to do so, though I understand if you would rather stay with one of your friends and experience the culture you ought to have been raised in, especially given the circumstances.

If you do decide to visit, please write ahead. And all jokes about burning the forest aside, do behave yourself, Harry.

Yours sincerely,

Petunia Dursley

-ʌ-

Even going back to Periwinkle Way would be...stressful. Maybe he'd change his mind after he'd been here a few months and wasn't so...parched. Magic-deprived. Whatever. Maybe in a few months, it wouldn't seem so bad spending a couple of weeks away for the winter holiday, or even months over summer hols, but at the moment Harry couldn't imagine doing so voluntarily. So of course when Prefect "Call Me Chris" Harcourt asked Harry and Danny whether they were coming to the Mabon ritual (and Danny had explained how traditional holiday rituals were a thing, though they probably wouldn't sacrifice an animal here — there were loads of different holiday rituals), Harry had said yes.

Honestly, he wasn't sure how that was even a question...

Chapter Text

(Mon 23 Sept)

It was like being dropped into the middle of a dream. Maybe a nightmare. Not like one of the 'nightmares' that plagued him on Dark Nights, though the sense of desperate urgency was the same. Dark Nights felt like being awake, almost, but buried alive, unable to move or speak, unable to entirely comprehend exactly what was happening, but with the awareness that it was real, the problem wasn't that it was only a dream, unrelated elements hazily connected by Harry's sleep-addled mind. The problem was that there was something between them, something making it impossible for Harry to understand her clearly, or even really hear her, holding him back from helping her, going to her, and keeping her away from him, no matter how she threw herself at the invisible barrier between them.

This, though...

This did feel like a dream — just conscious enough to be aware of the unreality of the forest he was fighting through. The sleet — cold, plastering his hair to his head, trickling down his spine — and mud squishing beneath his feet, briars and rose-thorns digging into his skin as he pushed blindly through the underbrush — those were all real enough.

Frigid wind cutting through his coat, chilling him to the bone.

Hot lines where unexpected branches had lashed his face with twigs.

His breathing loud in his ears and cold air burning his throat.

Heart pounding, every muscle tense, pushing him onward.

But looking around himself, the lack of detail, just knowing what was there rather than truly seeing it — he couldn't say what the details were that were missing, they were things he didn't consciously pay attention to, but he could tell they were missing — that gave it away. This wasn't real, it was bits and pieces of different memories, and the missing pieces were unimportant things he never remembered. Time was strange because the important things he did remember the details of were all smeared together to form an impression of a dreamscape, and time was one of the things he did notice.

If he looked at any of it too closely, poked at it too much, it would all fall apart.

He relaxed into it, the idea that he was fighting his way through a dark forest in the middle of a winter storm, letting the story his unconscious mind was telling carry him onward, struggling through the thick brush — which had something in common with the privet hedges of Little Whinging as well as the wild undergrowth of the Forbidden Forest — and slick terrain.

The scene was short, shifting quickly but without a proper transition — perhaps how an animated wizard in a portrait might feel stepping from frame to another — to a clearing, a tower keep like a giant chess rook looming over yet more trees, illuminated by a flash of lightning — Harry couldn't place the image at the moment, but he thought it was static, a picture in a book, the lightning out of place both because it should be caught in mid-strike, and also because winter storms didn't tend to have lightning.

That didn't stop a roll of thunder following it, though, or another flash, closer, simultaneously showing him the clearing and blinding him, allowing him an instant to perceive that he was no longer alone in this dream — the dying girl was here too, much more alive than Coco's version of her. In the next flash she was right in front of him, close enough he should be able to see her without the lightning but, of course, this was a dream, so it wasn't too surprising that it was inconsistent like that.

And then...then there was another flash, but not of lightning. Knowledge, bursting across his mind, brilliant and electric and entirely foreign — a memory.

Someone else's memory.

Harry wasn't sure exactly whose memory it was. There was an old man there, and a young girl. She looked enough like Harry, he had to assume this was Bellatrix, and probably closer to seven years old than five. They were standing in the middle of an altar of black stone, the Bellatrix directly in the centre with the man to her north, looking down on her with a forbidding glare. She didn't seem intimidated, though her eyes kept darting to the trio of crows circling the pair of them, magic growing thick in the air around them.

"Very well," the man said. "Then the Magic and I are of an accord. I hereby designate you as my chosen successor."

The crows circled closer to each other, until they met in a cloud of feathers and transformed into the dying girl, not yet dying (and perhaps not actually a girl? Harry wasn't sure anymore, and he wasn't sure how or why he wasn't sure), but happy, almost ecstatic, meeting this child individually and personally. They were, of course, already bound to each other, they knew each other, but they'd never spoken directly like this.

"Magic?" the old man said.

The crow-child didn't like him. They had, when he was younger, before he had fallen into madness and despair, back when he was rage and destruction incarnate. His vengeance against the foul human who murdered his children, who stole his love from him, had been a thing of beauty. Violent, deadly beauty. And before that, when he was younger yet, he had been clever and cruel, he'd had fire. Passion. Ambitions.

But that was long ago, and now he cared nothing for the crow-child or their Family. He did his duty by them, but that was all it was. Duty. Going through the motions. His beautiful vengeance had burned him out, leaving a hollow shell of a wizard at the head of their House — and worse yet, one still not weak enough to be usurped by any of his cousins. Or perhaps the problem was the cousins, weaker even than this burned-out man. The human children of the House had grown small and mean and petty over the centuries, as they sought to win a place among the humans on their own terms, their fire stifled rather than encouraged, each generation breaking the most promising children of the next, making them less than, by design.

This one, though...

They made a mistake with this one.

They made a mistake even earlier, bringing the thrice-blessed, still-sleeping fae-child into the House, duty and her freely given word binding her to them despite her fear and disgust, the nature of her being compelling her to give them the children she'd promised them — the children she had promised not to her husband or the shell of a wizard who led them, but to the House. She had fought them over the second child, her idea of perfection warring with theirs, but the first had been theirs to do with as they would.

And what they wanted, what they had conspired with the dreaming fae-child to create, was this one.

The small, mean humans, cruel but artless, had attempted to break her as they would any other unruly child. But the girl would not break.

When she could no longer resist, she turned to Magic in a way no one had done for a hundred years and more, giving herself over to it completely as only a desperate child could, reaching out to it and allowing it to transform her into something other than a desperate (half-)human child. Something with the potential to remake the House as the crow-spirit — the soul of the Family, Harry suddenly realised — remembered it, as they knew it ought to be. Something strong and powerful and fearless, like no human born to the House had been for far too long.

"Go, Arcturus. We would speak with her directly."

The old man hesitated, but after a moment, he obeyed with a small bow, his questions unspoken.

The crow-spirit turned to the younger girl, and the scene changed with another blinding flash of not-light.

Bellatrix was sitting on a bench-like sofa with a boy who looked uncannily like she had in the previous memory sleeping on her lap, a wand held loosely in her right hand, her left laid protectively on his head. She looked like she was maybe fourteen or fifteen (which probably meant she was sixteen or seventeen). There was another woman in the room too, who was clearly related to both of them. The Magic — the memories were those of the crow-spirit, Harry was almost sure — recognised her as the boy's mother. They were not, however, inclined to allow her to take him.

They had just come so close to losing him, they needed to stay with him. They needed Bella to stay with him. They would be with him anywhere, they were in his blood and his soul as they were in hers and his mother's, but they could not have saved him as she had, would not have known what was wrong, how to fix it — how to save his soul. They were watching his father now. They would be watching him now even if Arcturus had not asked them to, but they still wanted to stay near the child they had so nearly lost, physically. In a physical body. With hands to hold him.

"Piss off, Wally."

"He's my son, Bellatrix! At least let me see he's alright..."

The Magic bristled as the younger witch did, more of its power surging through her, starry blackness overtaking her eyes, though Harry was still fairly certain Bellatrix was the one in control, the one who said, "No. He's mine, and he's sleeping."

"Bella...please. Be– Be reasonable."

"Reasonable? You want me to be reasonable? I just put my bloody soul on the line for this boy, Walburga. The Family Magic is still riding me because we're not ready to let him out of our sight. Reasonable is you turning right back around and going back to Grimmauld and telling Orion that he's lucky he got the fuck out of here before I was done with Sirius, because if he hadn't I very well might have burned his soul completely out. Reasonable is leaving us alone until we're damn well ready to let him go. Reasonable is accepting the fact that Sirius is no longer your son without a fight."

She took two anxious, near panicked steps forward, only stopping when the tip of Bella's wand began to glow an ominous orange. "What the hell do you mean, he's no longer my son? What have you done to him?"

"I've saved his life and his soul. He's still a wizard. Beyond that, there's really no telling how much scarring there will be, or what the consequences of that scarring might be. And what I mean is, Archie begged me to save him. To salvage his heir, if there is any hope of doing so. I can't take custody of him at the moment, given that I'm still in school, but Arcturus has granted me veto power over every aspect of Siri's raising. As far as the House is concerned, he's my son now, you're just fostering him."

"What— I— You—!"

She wasn't leaving. If she didn't leave, if she tried to take him... The Magic gathered more energy, preparing to take control of Bella's body, if necessary.

It won't be necessary, she thought at it, very sharply. Why would it possibly be necessary?

You betrayed us, the Magic said back, silently. We do not trust you as we once did.

I  betrayed  you? The fuck I did... I won't let her take him, and what would you even  do ? You don't use magic like humans...

"Go. Away. Walburga," Bellatrix repeated, cold fury in every syllable — more directed at the accusation of betrayal from the Magic in her head than at Walburga. She had been annoyed with the older witch already, but now she wanted her to leave so she could direct her full attention to discussing that accusation. "I've directly channelled the Dark Itself twice in the past eight hours. As I'm sure you can imagine, my self-control is damn near shot, and I'm currently under partial active possession by a facet of the Family Magic which only grows more jealous and clingy the more you threaten to remove Sirius from our immediate presence. If you're not out that door in three seconds, I will force you out. And we both know you don't want me to do that."

Walburga was apparently very aware that Bellatrix was not screwing around. She stepped backward out of the room with a somewhat fearful look at the pair on the sofa. "Just... Just tell me, please— When can I come back? When can I see him?"

"Not before sunrise." The door slammed shut between them with a pulse of magic...from the crow-spirit? cutting off her response.

"What the fuck are you talking about, Little Crow?" Bella immediately asked the voice in her head aloud. "I didn't betray you!"

"You did." The magic forced itself to be seen and heard outside of her, drawing on her life and soul to let her see their hurt, furious glare. "You broke your promises!"

Bellatrix glared right back. "I did not."

"You swore to put the Family before all others! You promised that you would hold no external loyalties! And then you gave yourself to him!" They pointed accusingly at the intricate skull and serpent tattoo on her left forearm, at the brand anchored in her very soul. "The Heir to the House cannot swear fealty to an outsider!"

Bellatrix rolled her eyes. "That's what this is about? I'm not the Heir anymore. Siri is." She pointed at the boy still unconscious on her lap. "You know that."

Little Crow pouted at her. "We didn't see Sirius making the sacrifice earlier this evening."

"Well, no, he's seven. Can you imagine how undignified he would look, trying to kill an adult human? In case you've forgotten, Cygnus performed the ritual nearly the entire time I was officially the Heir."

"You are still officially the Heir," the Magic insisted.

"No, I'm not. Arcturus released me from my vows as the Heir and designated Sirius four years ago."

"We never agreed to that! You are ours. We did not agree to give you up! The hollow old man cannot make us invest ourselves in the boy."

"Little Crow. We both know having a black mage at the head of this Family is a terrible idea. Sirius will be a better leader for the House than I ever would have been, and every indication suggests that he will be perfectly capable of supporting you when he comes into his power."

The Magic shook its head stubbornly. "But he's not now. We would hurt him like the Dark did tonight if we invested ourselves in him now. And he's not you! We wanted you! When the old man dies, we will come to you no matter what he wants!"

Bellatrix sighed. "Come here." She patted the sofa beside herself, on the other side from Sirius's curled up legs. The Magic did, stalking over and perching on the edge of the seat, still glaring at her. "I know you wanted me. I know you did something to Dru to get me, that I'm special to you. But I swore my vows to my Lady before I ever spoke to you directly. I was never fit to be your Heir."

"Yes, you were! You are! We will forgive you for him if you forsake him."

"I'm not going to forsake my Lord, Little Crow — he has been more family to me than any of the human Blacks. I will help you as best I can. I will do all I can to shape this one into a good replacement. If Arcturus dies before Sirius is strong enough to support you, I won't turn you away. But I'm not going to forsake my Lord and his Cause to come home and lead the House instead. If you choose to invest yourself in an unsuitable potential like me, rather than in the place-magics and the blood of the House while you wait for a true Heir to mature, that's your choice, not mine."

The Magic knew she was right, Harry could tell. They didn't want to admit it, though. "If you keep on as you have been, there will be no blood of the House left."

Bella grinned. "The Dark approves of my actions. It's not going to let the House die on us. And grumble all you like, but I know you do not like the direction the Family has grown these past generations. The only way to fix that is to prune it back and redirect future growth."

"I don't like pruning either," the crow-spirit pouted. "It hurts." They leaned into her, though, forcing her to raise her right arm and drape it over their shoulders, snuggling in closer as though they could physically hold her here, with them.

The teenaged Dark Lady looked down at them, bemused, but holstered her wand so she could lay a hand on their head, as though they were another younger cousin for whom she was responsible. "I know. But it's necessary."

Another flash, not of memory this time, but of pain.

Something was different, this time. Less stable. Dream-like.

They were alone, and hurt. Wounded to the core.

Someone had attacked their heir, attacked his mind so subtly and insidiously they hadn't seen it coming, made him betray the Dark, and the Dark tear itself away from them.

It had tried to help him, tried to stop it, but the magic he called in his madness was too strong.

The storm tore into them, breaking them, burning out and destroying the pact which had over the past five centuries become so integral to them, to their place in the world, leaving them...untethered.

Weak and vulnerable.

Fearful, in a way they had not been for five-hundred years, since the Two gave themselves and the future of their bloodline over to vengeance, defining the Dark and calling on it for aid.

The Darkness that had grown in them was still there, but the promises binding the Dark Itself to assure their future, those were so much shattered will, cutting them apart from the inside, and it hurt.

It hurt unlike anything they had ever known.

For all the House had been reduced to near-extinction many times, no one had ever attacked the Magic before. Not like this.

And the Dark...it laughed at them, mocking and cruel, as they fell into a timeless, unconscious state, hiding from the pain.

Another flash — lightning, this time.

It was springtime, a night of power, they were distantly aware of that. It had been some time since they were injured, they were aware of that, too.

Years, four of them. Three and some, anyway — four sacrifices.

They were not fully recovered — still weak, still limited, it was hard to remember, hard to think, hard to be a conscious thing, and every year there were fewer humans supporting it as they all died, one after the next, the grace of the Dark lost to them — but enough to know that their favourite was doing something, had been for some time. Enough to waken when they felt her leave Ancient House and slip through the wards of the Keep like a shadow, dragging a struggling, pregnant witch along with her.

Enough to manifest when she came to the Altar, calling out to them, laughing, "Little Crow, I've brought you a gift!"

She stripped herself and the pregnant witch, purifying the Circle and their bodies with spells of death and vanishing, rain quickly washing away the traces of the spells themselves.

It washed away the witch's tears too, but not her fear, sweet and sharp, growing stronger as they pulled themselves together, first as birds, then with a half-human face to speak aloud, as they dared not come too close to her, now, despite desperately wishing to do so. They had not been strong enough to fight the corruption which spread from him, infecting her mind and magic — not when she chose him over them, when she didn't want to be saved. They could not risk it spreading to them, if they should reach out to speak through her soul.

"What gift?"

"A life," she said, grinning, power flowing through her freely, almost too attractive to resist. Almost. "And a death."

"Wh– What's going on? What is that thing? Why am I— Why are you—" the pregnant witch stuttered, in the language the fae-child favoured. She even looked a bit like the fae-child's human host they realised. "You said I could go when the baby was born! You said you'd let me live — that you'd let me go free! You promised, Bellatrix!"

"I think you'll find I didn't, Auntie. I recall telling you that your debt to magic would be repaid if you did this for me. I might even have said that I would free you. I certainly didn't tell you I'd let you live, though. You killed a Seer. Not generally a punishment worthy of death, to be human and oblivious, especially since most people don't have the resources to save a Seer like little Adelaide anyway. But you did. In some universes, you saved her. In the rest, you're fucked, because Magic doesn't understand just lucking into saving someone's life. It sees that you could have, and you didn't. So you can see how you came to mind when I was considering potential surrogates."

The pregnant witch, who had already been backing away, shaking her head, slipped on the wet stones. "No. No! I— You're insane, Bellatrix! Adelaide—" Her voice caught, clearly distraught. "Addie wasn't a Seer! She was– She was ill! She couldn't keep food down— She couldn't even keep water down, by the end! We tried everything we could! There was nothing the Healers could do!" She continued to scuttle away on her hands as Bella advanced, still speaking. There was a scalpel in her hand, Harry noticed.

"She was a Seer, any half-competent legilimens could have told you as much. And you didn't try everything. You didn't ask me for help, when you knew I know people who can do all sorts of things law-abiding Healers won't. You didn't ask Dru, who really should have been your first resort, you didn't tell Uncle Luc and beg him to ask the rest of the Rosiers if anyone had ever heard of anything like Adelaide's mysterious so-called illness, you didn't even light a candle and pray for guidance. If you had, when I lit a candle and asked Magic whether it had an opinion on my little plan here, it wouldn't have suggested you. You owe it a child and a life, and I'm here to collect them."

"A child?" the crow-spirit repeated.

Bella threw a careless grin over her shoulder. Harry could almost have sworn her eyes caught his for a moment before flicking back to them. "The Dark will no longer guarantee the survival of the House, Little Crow. That doesn't mean we're done for. I told you, I brought you a gift."

They leapt into the air, circling excitedly, hope welling up in them as it had not for years now, watching closely as she advanced on the pregnant witch, ignoring her pleas, her struggles, her attempts to push Bella's hands away.

They were futile.

Lightning flashed, catching on the blade in her hand, and thunder rolled.

Blood spattered, the stones of the altar drinking it in faster than the rain could wash it away.

They held themselves back from the life they could feel beating in the witch's heart. They could not tear it from her yet, they must not — the child was still attached to her body, they had to wait—

But not for long. Bella was quick, cutting the babe from the witch's belly, and then the cord between them. The newborn's cry split the air, and their control failed, hot, sweet life pulled out of the woman into the circle, into them — strengthening them enough to hold the rain away, enough to make a body for themselves again, force enough will into it to let them reach out and touch the bloody child in Bella's arms when she looked up, surprised at the sudden lack of rain.

"It's...so small." They had forgotten that, in the many, many decades since they had been physically present for a human birth. It was hard to remember when their souls were so bright, more than any of the adults — choices, making choices, limited their potential throughout their lives, no matter how bright they started and what new potential they developed with new skills and alliances. Even Bella was less bright, now, than the child in her arms.

She laughed at them. "Yes, babies do tend to be. Especially in the first few weeks. Can you feel him?"

They nodded, kneeling beside her to stare at the tiny thing, fascinated. He was theirs, their blood, they knew it. They felt its spark take hold, a new star in the endless night, its flame reflected in the sea of the Dark. They reached out to it carefully, drawing it into the web of people and magic they were the face of, making a place for it in the pattern. "He needs a name."

"Eridanus," she said absently, most of her attention focused on feeding the child, with blood and magic like the fae — letting him suckle soulfire from fingertips still stained by the life of the witch who bore him. (In some ways, this one was far more a child of the Otherworld than her still-sleeping mother.)

"Eridanus," they repeated, the first ties — beyond the one to Bellatrix, of course, born of her role in its conception and delivery, and the magic she was feeding into it — growing between this spark and the others who once shared its name, binding it more securely into the fabric of the House.

"Mmm. Do you know I've relocated Narcissa to Ancient House with her son?"

"No. Most of the time we...sleep." There was no human word for the less-than-conscious state they existed in most of the time. "We are...still weak. We..." They hesitated, then decided they needed to know what she knew of the corruption which was spreading slowly but surely from the soul of her sworn Lord to her own, changing her. "We are surprised to see you, and more surprised to see him." They indicated the child, which seemed to be falling asleep. "We thought you were lost to us."

Now it was Bella's turn to hesitate. "I may be. Soon. There are...moments of clarity, when the Madness gives me enough distance to see the effects, to remember I have other priorities. But then the tynged overwhelms me again and I forget. I'm still motivated to find a way to break it, because I still serve my Lord under its thrall and I can see its effects on him, but little else. And the moments of clarity are becoming fewer and farther between. If we don't find a way out soon... I'll be trapped under it until it's broken, too. This, giving you a new heir, may be all I can do to save you. If the tynged takes me over entirely, it may be too late for me to do anything for you by the time I escape. Understand?"

They did. It was only a matter of time until she truly was lost, as they had already thought she was. But she had given them hope. When Arcturus died — and it would not be long now, they thought — they would hold on until the new child was old enough to support them, take refuge in the wards and the blood of the House and wait. They nodded, choosing to focus on the hope, rather than the slowly-but-surely-unfolding tragedy which would make that hope their last.

"I've relocated Narcissa to Ancient House to care for little Danny. The elves will help too, no doubt, and Zee will find a way to train him without breaking him. I have faith in her. But Cissy will have to actually teach him what he needs to know to take over the House, if I...can't. And that is a very real possibility. Her son is only eight months old, so she'll be able to nurse him properly, and I can't imagine she'll have much incentive to go elsewhere now that poor Lucy's manor has been razed to the ground." They giggled at the vicious smirk that accompanied that little fact. "If all goes according to plan, there's no reason he shouldn't be raised under your wards. And since my only part was to set it in motion, it shouldn't be affected by the tynged or any unanticipated chaotic influences. So it should be fine..."

Lightning flashed again and they were falling, the soul which had anchored them for decades now slipping across the veil. They reached out blindly, terrified and uncertain, seeking another human to invest themselves in, purely instinctively — they knew there was no one.

Bellatrix was still alive, and Sirius, but the worst had come to pass when her Lord failed. What little resistance she'd still had had faltered, and she had fallen entirely under the thrall of that insidious corruption. And Sirius had rejected them, under the influence of an even more insidious corruption of Light ideas. And in any case, they were both too far away, buried under a thick, numbing blanket of grey — perhaps for the best, they might have tried to seize onto Bella if she weren't, and then they would be infected too, and all would be lost.

Walburga was still alive, but she was weak — not in will, but in magic. She would not survive an attempt to invest themselves in her, she never would have. And little Eridanus, he had been taken, not to the same place as Bellatrix and Sirius but somewhere perhaps worse, surrounded by hateful light magic — their enemies could not sever the bond of Family entirely, but they could stifle it, hide him away where they could not reach.

He was beyond their reach, and even if they could reach him, they could not touch him, not yet. They would not risk harming him, no. They would wait.

They had to wait.

They clung desperately to the place-magics and blood wards that defined them, sinking into them and falling into an uneasy sleep.

That uneasy sleep didn't last. They woke not a handful of years later, startled back to consciousness as the last life sustaining them guttered out.

It did not take long for them to realise what had happened — they had been drawing on her too strongly in their unconscious need. They were dying, starving — Where were the sacrifices? Why had Walburga not—? — and their survival, the survival of the House, was paramount. Far more important than the life of any single human member of the House. With no other recourse — with the last children of the bloodline buried under the influence of the Soul Eaters and cut off from them by hateful light magic — they had unconsciously slowly subsumed the mind and soul of the weakest of them, the only one they could reach. She had died in pain, old before her time, and now there was no one, nothing to sustain them—

They were going to die.

The wards they could deactivate were long-since deactivated, even the elf-wards faltering — most of the elves had already moved on, they let those go too — but it wasn't enough. The wards had never been intended to support themselves. There were place-wards, of course, but many of them — far too many — were based in blood, living things, now starving and withering as they were cut off from magic, from life.

They had already grown too weak to do anything to save themselves, they realised, cold horror setting in with the realisation.

Bella had given them a last hope — he had been taken from them, but he would find his way back to them eventually, he must — but he was still far too young for them to dare draw on, even if he managed to find his way to them today, still a child in the nursery.

Fifteen years, they had thought — they could hold on for fifteen years. Thirteen, by the time Arcturus had died. Maybe less, if he came into his power early. The House had survived without a Head for longer.

But they could not survive without blood, without the strength of their children to draw upon, or the lives of the sacrifices—

Maybe seven years.

They might be able to hold on that long, without family or sacrifices. Maybe.

Not long enough.

It wouldn't be long enough for the boy to come into his power. It just wouldn't.

But it might be long enough to get through to him, to make him understand that he needed to come to them, that he needed to kill for them — somehow, find someone, lure them to the Keep, to the circle.

Come to me! they screamed at him, willing the sentiment to carry their meaning through the hateful, smothering light power through the blood and the magic they shared. Help me! Please! I will die without you!

You MUST come to me!

PLEASE!

He couldn't hear them.

Even on the night they were strongest, when the sacrifice should be made, the most he ever understood was that they were in pain, that they were starving, dying.

They tried so hard to make him understand what they needed, how to help them, every year. They could feel him trying to reach them too, trying to understand, they could feel his willingness, his desire to help them, to give them whatever they needed, but the light magic was too strong to teach him how, to show him the way—

The show ended there, with another flash, this one of darkness, like a door slammed in his face, returning him to the muddy, rain-soaked, trackless dream-forest, alone again.

"You could tell me now!" Harry shouted into the darkness, to no effect whatsoever. He hadn't entirely expected there to be any. It had been a memory, like all the others, the Dying Girl, the Little Crow, she — they — weren't really here, something else was showing him this, showing him everything, except the one thing he really, truly needed to know. "Where do I go?! Where is the tower?!"

He could make up the rest, he was sure of it. Hell, from the memory of his birth, all he really needed to do was get someone out to the black circle and spill their blood — maybe give them a mortal wound, but as desperate as the magic was, it could probably make do with a bloody paper cut if it had to, just— anything! He didn't even think it mattered who! If he understood everything he'd just seen, he actually could kill Aunt Petunia for it. He'd managed to pick up that the dying crow-spirit didn't want him to kill his family, but they weren't family the way the magic understood it. They didn't share blood. He wasn't sure he could bring himself to actually kill Aunt Petunia, not if he had any other alternative, but that was fine, because he did have alternatives. He could sacrifice Minerva bloody McGonagall to it, if he could get her to the Altar. Or anyone else, she was just the first person I wouldn't miss who came to mind.

"Aren't you supposed to tell me where to go, now?!" he tried. That was what the ritual was meant to do. Show you where you came from and where you're going, if you stay on your current path.

Listen to the little speech about knowledge and the impact knowing a thing could have on one's life, drink the potion, take a nap, have some revelation about yourself and your most likely future, wake up and go to Defence. Very straightforward. A little bit Christmas Carol-y, except he didn't even get a Ghost of Christmas Future to grill over what exactly the hell was going on here.

He didn't even seem to have a path, damn it! Earlier, when he'd been slogging through the mud and the dream-underbrush, he'd just been making it up as he went along — he had to keep moving, but he certainly hadn't been following a trail.

"Hello?! Anyone out there?"

There was another flash, not knowledge or darkness or lightning or pain, but like a jolt of adrenaline straight to the heart, and pure, blind, you're-under-attack panic.

He woke flailing for his wand purely on instinct, very nearly rolling off an all-white bed in a room made of all-white curtains, with a very anxious witch he didn't know, a very guilty-looking seventh-year Slytherin — the one who'd given the speech beforehand, Harry hadn't caught her name — and a very annoyed Professor Snape staring at him.

He was screaming, he realised. He should stop that. "What the hell?" he panted, heart racing, slightly out of breath from his sudden, startling awakening.

"Reviving Charm," Snape said shortly. "Poppy, please do try the obvious solution before dragging me up here in future, even if it isn't strictly medically advisable. Especially with Potter. And when I have a spare moment, I will be back to ascertain exactly how a peacefully sedated child with perfectly normal vitals constitutes an emergency. Sterling, I distinctly recall giving you the recipe for a neutralising antidote to be used in the event of an adverse reaction to the nightshade draught. For future reference, such antidotes neutralise all effects of the targeted potion, including, in this case, the sedative effect — a fact of which I presume you were unaware because I also recall approving your ritual only on the condition that you find a competent potions student to brew the antidote for you and keep it on hand to deal with exactly such an eventuality as this.

"Potter..." He hesitated, glaring at Harry as though trying to think of anything Harry might have done wrong in this situation (which he hadn't, as far as he knew). "My office, Potter, after dinner. And shore up your occlumency barrier before you leave this room, you're projecting half-articulated dream images and frustration all over the place. Now if you'll excuse me, I left the third-years under the supervision of the most responsible among them. I'll be pleasantly surprised if they haven't managed to set anything on fire in my absence."

He flicked the curtains back and stalked away without giving any of them a chance to respond. Harry, in any case, was busy trying to pull his thoughts back into some kind of order anyway — shite, Snape probably knows now... — but the matron — she must be the Healer in charge of the Hospital Wing, Harry thought (Sinistra had mentioned her. Comfrey, maybe? No, Pomfrey, that was it.) — muttered "Well, I never!" at his retreating back.

"Alright, Potter?" Sterling asked, somehow managing to seem both embarrassed and concerned.

"Er. Yeah? I mean, aside from that wake-up. Holy crap... Why am I in hospital? Did something happen in the ritual?"

"Well, no, everyone else woke up like they were supposed to. You weren't responding even when we tried to shake you or ennervate you — same charm Snape used— I swear, we tried it and it didn't work, Madam Pomfrey—"

"Oh, I believe you, love. Severus uses a dark variation with a touch of mind-magic to reinforce the physical reaction with visceral panic. Which is several steps beyond not medically advisable — smug lunatic thinks he's the one who wants to have a word with me..." She huffed. "In any case, that is why you're here, Mister Potter. In the general way of things, a student taking slightly too strong a sedative would not be considered an emergency or even a medical concern until several hours had passed, but in the context of a ritual which ought to have released you but for some reason didn't..."

"Um. Yeah. No idea what happened there. I got through the first half alright, you know, the where you came from," he told them — mostly Sterling, he didn't think Madam Pomfrey really knew what they'd been up to, but he was sort of hoping the seventh-year would know what the hell went wrong. "But then...nothing. I was just stuck in this weird dream-like place."

She shrugged. "Don't look at me, I don't know how the ritual works. Maybe Snape can tell you after dinner. He made my father send him a bunch of notes on the potion and what it does before he would approve it. But if you're okay, and there's nothing else you need from me?" Madam Pomfrey shook her head. "Ah, right. Then, I'm supposed to be in Runes right now..."

"Yes, dear, you can go." Harry tried to sit up and excuse himself as well, but apparently he wasn't allowed to go. "Where on Earth do you think you're going, Mister Potter?" she said, preventing him from standing with a firm hand on his shoulder.

Do not kick the Healer in the knee, Harry...

"Ah... It's still the first period after lunch, right?" he asked, shrugging off her hand. It didn't feel that late. "So, Defence?" Not that he really wanted to go to Defence and listen to Quirrell stutter at them, but he didn't want to stay here, either. Maybe the library, actually. Somewhere quiet he could be alone and think about what, exactly, Snape might already know from the memories that had been at the front of Harry's mind and what he wanted to tell him, when he got down to his office later.

"I think not, Mister Potter," Pomfrey said sternly. "You will be staying here through dinner, and possibly overnight if Professor Snape deems it necessary."

"Er...why? Now the shock of that wake-up's worn off, I'm fine..."

She huffed at him. "Because, Mister Potter, something went other than expected in that ritual, and since we don't know what it was, we must assume that your state was the result of an external force attempting to use the ritual to gain access to your mind. You will remain here, under observation, until he is free to examine your mind more thoroughly. I will escort you down to his office after dinner."

"So...you think I'm possessed or something?" Harry asked, trying to sound sceptical despite thinking that an external force — like the Little Crow, for example — trying to use the ritual to reach him sounded awfully plausible. He was sure it hadn't managed to get to him, though. If it had, he would know where the bloody tower was, and the altar, and he'd be coming up with some way to convince the witch in front of him to accompany him there, because the pain and fear and rage was right there, and they were actually dying, and he wasn't surprised Snape said he'd been projecting frustration — he'd never been this frustrated in his entire life. (He was actually frustrated enough he was a little bit surprised he was able to sit still and hadn't reflexively slapped the Healer's hand away. He might still be slightly drugged, he thought, because moving seemed to be taking significantly more effort than usual.)

Pomfrey sighed. "I don't believe it to be likely, but we can't take any chances in a situation like this. This is why I hate these traditional holiday rituals. There's still so much opportunity for something to go wrong, even when the actual purpose of the ritual is entirely benign..."

"I don't think Professor Snape thinks I'm possessed," Harry pointed out. "He said to come down to his office like he thought I was going back to lessons. And he obviously knows this happened during the ritual..."

Her eyes narrowed into a sharp glare, directed at the absent Potions professor, Harry suspected. "Severus may be an extraordinarily competent legilimens, but he is a young man, and like so many young men can be equally extraordinarily blasé about risks they consider to be insignificant, and neglectful of security protocols they consider pointless."

Snape didn't really strike Harry as the blasé or neglectful-of-security type, but he wasn't going to argue about it. Pomfrey had presumably known him much longer than Harry. And the idea of just making a run for it wasn't terribly appealing at the moment. And it wasn't as though he really had any other plans this afternoon. He could sit and think with a book in front of him as easily in her office or something as he could in the library. "Okay, fine, but I don't even have any books or anything. Can I at least borrow something to read?"

The witch considered this for a moment, but apparently could not think of a reason he shouldn't be allowed to read while he was stuck here for the next four or five hours. "Oh, very well. I'm sure I have something appropriate in my office. Let's go have a look..."

Chapter Text

The third-years, miraculously, had not managed to set anything on fire in the roughly ten minutes it took for Severus to make his way to Poppy's domain, wake Potter, and return. The vast majority of them hadn't managed to do anything else, either — he'd left them preparing ingredients for the day's potion — and so did not have sufficient time to complete their assignment, but that would hardly result in anyone else making their way up to the Hospital Wing or destroying hundreds of galleons worth of supplies and lab equipment so, all in all, probably the best possible outcome. He had awarded both Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw five points for avoiding causing some actual emergency while he was otherwise occupied dealing with the paranoid Healer's non-emergency. (After they had filed out of the classroom, of course — it wouldn't do to let them think they would regularly be rewarded for something as simple as not harming themselves.)

That wasn't entirely fair to Poppy, he knew. Nor had it been entirely fair to throw that barb about not trying the obvious solution at her. Her background was that of a children's healer. She had decades of experience with various student ailments and accidents by now, but the vast majority of accidents and even emergencies could be corrected or at the very least stabilised with a few charms, giving her plenty of time to figure out exactly how two students had managed to acquire each other's left arms in an otherwise routine Transfiguration lesson, or get rid of the gills a fourth-year Hufflepuff had accidentally given herself with a deliberately-incorrectly-brewed animal transformation potion. (She had, thankfully, retained her lungs, but had not managed to transform her lower half into a "mermaid" as muggles envisioned them). She was careful and thorough, and cared deeply about the wellbeing of her patients. She would only ever attempt a cure which might itself have negative side-effects or complications after having exhausted all other options and preparing to deal with any such complications should they occur — and of course she considered scaring the shite out of a child to be a detrimental side-effect, as opposed to a vaguely amusing one.

Severus's training as a healer, such as it was, had been conducted in field-hospitals so overwhelmed that they had pressed into service any Death Eater who wasn't in need of medical attention themselves and was capable of keeping a cool head under pressure. The first time he'd seen Saint Mungo's A&E intake, he'd been shocked. He'd been there to tear one of their cursebreaker-healers a new arsehole for half-breaking a particular curse the week before — which had only superficially solved the problem, and had made the cause of the related symptoms which had turned up several days later unrecognisable to the twats up in Spell Damage — and one of the Assistants had gotten short with him because couldn't he see they were busy?

There had been half a dozen cursebreaker-healers on shift, each of whom had been working on only one patient, and there had only been four lower-priority patients awaiting their attention. That was a lull for the Death Eaters' healers. And only one of the patients receiving treatment was actually in a critical state. Sure, the others' conditions would have worsened if they weren't tended to as soon as possible, and obviously civilians didn't have the same expertise in stabilising their own condition and those of other less-urgent wounded as even the least competent Death Eaters, but it was hardly as though they had a dozen patients on the brink of death because some bright spark thought he'd try a curse he'd found in an ancient grimoire in his grandfather's library in the middle of a training exercise, on top of the usual parade of stupid warlocks doing stupid shite.

Severus, who, at the age of twenty-three, had only been treated by healers at Hogwarts and Ancient House, had been under the impression that Emergency Intake was for actual emergencies, and anyone who couldn't juggle multiple critical cases at once — often sharing patients and so having to pick up where someone else had left off in breaking a particular curse — had no business calling themselves a cursebreaker-healer or being in the emergency side of the hospital at all, because they'd just be getting in the way. Bellatrix hadn't been the only Lieutenant with insanely high standards and expectations. He'd only ever met one official healer who believed him when he said he'd seen a team of five healers coordinate to cover eighteen critical cases simultaneously in the wake of the Glastonbury battle, and they'd only lost four — she'd been a veteran of Grindelwald's war and had known Chief Healer Pulaski personally, before his (British) Healer's credentials had been revoked.

Suffice to say, taking a few moments to consider whether there were kinder ways to wake a sedated child than with a Move Or You're Dead wasn't something he'd been trained to do. On the other hand, he very much had been trained to see that the more time he spent trying less extreme options was more time the bloody third-years would be left unattended, in a potions lab (which so far as he was concerned held the potential to constitute an actual emergency), and therefore start with the least-extreme remedy which he considered very likely to work. If he had somehow made the situation worse, he likely would have ended up spending much more time on Potter, but Nora Sterling's presence had been a fairly obvious clue that this was a problem related to the ritual the majority of the Slytherin and Ravenclaw students had participated in over lunch, which he was familiar with due to having approved its use in the holiday celebration and was aware involved a mildly hallucinogenic sleeping draught, which might ameliorate or entirely prevent an attempt to activate the physical mechanisms involved in the standard Reviving Charm from taking effect (and had almost certainly resisted simply shaking him, or poking him with a stick), and Potter was young and healthy. The odds of the shock of a Move Or You're Dead giving him a heart attack were negligible, even with potentially unknown magics in effect. It had been a calculated risk.

Plus, as a side-benefit, he had been able to evaluate the boy's psychic and metaphysical response to the spell, which had been entirely consistent with Severus's expectations. If he were possessed, the sudden awakening would almost certainly have elicited some obvious response from the possessing entity. In the event that he were possessed by something which managed to keep itself from reacting to such an unexpected attack (the probability of which was very small), it would most likely have the skill to avoid notice until after dinner, whereupon he would almost certainly detect it with legilimency — unless the hypothetical possessing entity were to force Potter to avoid him, which would itself be something of a red flag. But he really didn't think the boy was possessed.

Judging by the scraps of memory Potter had let slip in the wake of awakening, if an external influence had been attempting to exploit the ritual, it was most likely the Black Family Magic — he couldn't imagine what else had projected the image of a harpy-like creature to argue with a teenage Bellatrix (it had just been a flash, but it had been clear from their body-language that it had been a confrontation, at least on the harpy's side) or kneel beside her as she 'nursed' what he could only assume had been her newborn son with bloody soulfire (the depths of Bellatrix's madness would never cease to astound him), with the corpse of the woman who had actually borne the child cooling in the background.

Why the Black Family Magic needed to attempt to break into a Mabon ritual to speak to Potter, Severus could not possibly guess. One would think it could at the very least send him dreams without resorting to such measures. He was very clearly a Black by blood, and since the Blacks used more blood magic than a bloody vampire clan, he'd be shocked if their family magic wasn't invested in the bloodline at least to some degree. Probably to a degree that most other longstanding Houses would consider completely mad. And Potter was intuitive enough, he ought to be able to pull whatever information it was attempting to communicate out of even the most muddled dreams after a few repetitions.

Indeed, the greatest part of the reason Severus had demanded the boy come down to his office after dinner was to ascertain exactly what Potter knew about the memories. Certainly not as much as he wanted to know — Severus expected he would have been far less frustrated if he actually understood what was going on — but equally certainly more than Severus did at the moment. And while it wasn't exactly Severus's business what the Black Family Magic was doing with or to one of its children, he hadn't been lying when he told Petunia Evans that he cared about the wellbeing of Lily's child. It was the very least he could do to ensure that he wasn't being tortured at home or psychically traumatised by his sire's Family Magic.

And Severus could be mature enough to admit that he did rather like the boy, despite absolutely despising his sire. (And his father, for that matter.)

Petunia's approach to raising him had been undeniably abusive, favouring her own son in an obvious effort to degrade Potter's sense of self-worth — especially when he was very young — and setting entirely unreasonable consequences — harsh corporal punishment and deprivation of basic needs like food — for minor offences and even accidents, but the boy didn't seem to be any the worse for it. Pomona had voiced her concerns about his too-serious, too-quiet demeanour, his perfectionism and preoccupation with the consequences which would result if he (or anyone) should do something wrong in her class, which Severus too would consider troubling signs...in any other child. But he would much rather have a quiet, serious, respectful Black who took the likely consequences into account when deciding whether to do something he knew was against the rules, like wander the corridors at two in the morning — Aurora, much to her bemusement, had made a friend — or skive off History, and did his best to be unobtrusive while not paying attention in lessons, than an obnoxious, egotistical clown who would break rules simply because they were there, and did his best to prevent any learning from taking place in any of his lessons.

Having spoken to the boy at length that first day and observed his interactions with Petunia (both in real-time and in Petunia's memories), as well as his behaviour in lessons and (through Blaise Zabini's memories, in his weekly legilimency lessons) when he was entirely outside adult supervision, he couldn't say that Potter seemed to be particularly cowed by the presence of adults in general or even his abuser specifically. He clearly didn't know how to relax and have fun with other children — that Blaise Zabini had quickly become his best friend spoke volumes — but he wasn't incapable of interacting socially with older students and adults, and he had no trouble asking questions or making even unreasonable requests he had to know were not likely to be granted (like sitting in on the seventh-year astronomy lessons), wasn't prone to acting out (Severus was aware now that Black's obnoxious attention-seeking was likely due in part to his own home-life, but that didn't make it any less obnoxious) or particularly untrusting of or unwilling to rely on others despite his apparent self-sufficiency, and his magical development clearly hadn't been stunted by Petunia's treatment of him (despite displaying any evidence of magic being one of the accidents for which he had been repeatedly and unreasonably punished when he was small).

He had gotten a detention from Minerva for talking back and refusing to practise the assigned transformation in lessons, but given that Severus recalled getting several similarly-worded detentions himself, he strongly suspected that "talking back" meant "complaining about being bored", and "refusing to practise" meant "refusing to make ten-thousand bloody needles". And he probably spent more time out of bounds — either out after curfew or exploring the Forbidden Forest — than he did in lessons, but as long as he didn't drag any other students into danger along with him, Severus didn't have a problem with that.

The boy wasn't stupid enough to wander further into acromantula territory after coming across one giant spider, and a single scout-spider (generally no more than three or four feet in diameter) could be driven away with fire or killed relatively easily. The acromantula colony was the biggest reason the Forest was Forbidden these days, and most likely the most serious danger he might encounter out there. Technically, most of the Forest was centaur territory, and it had originally been easier to forbid students access to the entire Forest than to mark out the edges of the treaty line, but the centaurs would just escort the children out and be miffed with Dumbledore for failing to keep his humans on human land. They wouldn't try to eat them.

Given that had anyone asked him to consider such a horrific possibility ahead of time, he would have expected any child of Lily Evans and Sirius Black to be a narcissistic little psychopath with Attention Deficit Disorder, the Potter they'd actually gotten was a welcome surprise, abuse or no abuse. Severus would certainly oppose any attempt to force the boy to stay at the Dursleys' home over the summer holiday, but that would likely only become an issue if Dumbledore were to realise that his "Boy Who Lived" had flown the coop and decided to live independently in Charing in August. He should probably oppose the boy's decision to live on his own as well, but had Severus had the resources to move out of his father's house at the age of eleven he was quite certain he would have been capable of looking after himself for a few months at a time, and told anyone who thought otherwise to go to hell. Potter was more confident than Severus had been at eleven — more like Lily — and far more competent at wizardry, if Filius's raving was to be believed. (Which it was — excitable he might be, but the Charms professor was hardly prone to exaggeration.) He would be fine on his own.

He was slightly surprised that Potter had apparently willingly spent the past five hours in the Hospital Wing. Severus certainly hadn't expected him to. He had to have been bored out of his mind. But he didn't appear to be put out when he finally appeared — accompanied by the Healer, who must have insisted on keeping him under observation until she could hand him off to Severus directly. Mildly exasperated, perhaps. Less so than Severus himself.

"He's not possessed, Poppy," he snapped. "I would have mentioned it if I thought he needed to be observed or quarantined. I am aware of the dangers of extraplanar ritual interference."

Poppy huffed at him, because of course she did. "You are also aware that using dark arts on schoolchildren is incredibly unacceptable, up to and including your bloody Wake the Dead charm! That variant has not been thoroughly tested, and especially not on children! And I am aware that it takes far longer than your thirty-second appearance on the ward to fully verify that a mind has not been tampered with!"

Severus snorted. "It's Move Or You're Dead, Poppy, and it only takes about five seconds to ascertain whether a mind hit unexpectedly with it is under possession. Even if the possessing entity is not itself affected, it will be forced to react to the sudden return to consciousness and the sudden emotional shift in the host-mind, thus making it very obvious to a legilimens, if only for a moment. The external shape of his mind is unchanged, there is no evidence of a forcible intrusion, and asking me to sift through all of his memories is a far more flagrant ethical violation than using fear-inducing spells for diagnostic purposes."

"Fine, then! Don't check him for mental tampering!" ("I already did," Severus inserted, though he didn't really expect her not to talk over him.) "But don't you dare go using dark magic on my patients without my say-so, young man!"

He felt his eyes tip involuntarily toward the ceiling. "My apologies, Poppy. I was under the impression that it was an emergency situation which needed to be resolved with all possible haste, due to the fact that you sent an elf to fetch me out of a lesson. I'll be sure to wait and ask whether your summons is an overreaction next time."

Perhaps he should have realised that it wasn't a truly urgent case from the fact that she had clearly told the elf to tell Severus he was needed in the Hospital Wing immediately rather than bring him to her immediately — the elf hadn't stayed long enough for him to demand it pop him upstairs, save five minutes of walking — but that could easily have been a case of an elf being overly literal. That had been known to happen.

"You smug little— So you turn around and use a dark spell on a student to punish me for overreacting, instead of telling Miss Sterling to try the bloody antidote or any number of other, less violent methods of waking him up?! I don't believe you!"

"No, I turned around and used a dark spell on a student because I was reasonably concerned that my unattended third-year class might create an actual emergency, and if less extreme measures had failed they would have wasted more time, since I presumed you would demand I stay until Potter was conscious. Plus, as I just explained, it provided diagnostically relevant data."

"A Cheering Charm would have provided the same data, Severus!"

"It wouldn't have woken him up, though. And you probably shouldn't use Cheering Charms on him anyway — in fact, make a note in his file that he's allergic to euphoria-inducing charms," he added. Just in case.

"He's not— You can't be allergic to a charm, Severus!"

"No, and I have no evidence that he inherited the Black Madness either, but I'd rather err on the side of caution rather than see someone spark off an easily-avoided manic episode by exposing a child who is genetically predisposed to the condition to euphoria-inducing charms."

Poppy gave him an almost patronising frown. "I realise James Potter's mother was a Black, Severus, but I hardly think that's reason enough to suspect —"

"Poppy. Look at the child and ask yourself: does he look more like Potter's son, or Sirius Black's?"

In the brief moment of silence which followed, as Poppy attempted to decide whether Potter's overwhelming resemblance to Black or her certainty that Prefect Evans would never have cheated on her husband was stronger (she'd known Lily better than most of their professors, but not that well), Potter offered, "It's fine, Madam Pomfrey. Really. Er. The Move Or You're Dead spell. It didn't hurt me, it was just...startling. Like if someone sneaked up on me while I was asleep. And Professor Snape may have a point about me being a Black, really. I mean, I don't know anything about the Black Madness, but everyone knows I'm a questionably sane demon-child, and I really don't look that much like James Potter, so just in case? I mean, when would I ever need a medical Cheering Charm, anyway?"

Poppy's eyes narrowed at questionably sane demon-child, most likely thinking that children shouldn't refer to themselves in such terms, that his muggle family had conditioned him to think of his magic as some sort of curse, but Severus suspected it was more to do with the boy's personality than his magic. It was not a secret, after all, that he was trying to recruit other students to form a Castle-Climbing Club.

"And, was there something we needed to talk about, Professor? Because if you two are just going to argue, I should go back up to Ravenclaw. Danny's probably worried about me. I mean, he came up after Defence, but I don't think he believed me when I said I was fine and just waiting to make sure I wasn't possessed, and studying healing charms is a lot more useful than going to Quirrell's lessons so I didn't mind hanging out for a few more hours."

"Studying healing charms?" Severus raised an eyebrow at Poppy.

"Don't give me that look!" she snapped, going slightly pink. "It was a book on Healing Theory, not a practical guide. Perfectly legal."

"Oh, yes, because giving a student just enough information about how healing works to start experimenting with developing their own biological charms is a much better idea than letting them read about the Five Fundamentals and practise Sterilising Charms for a couple of hours," he scoffed. He couldn't help it, he'd always thought that law one of the most absurd. Yes, healing charms could be horribly abused — suffocating due to your skin having been 'healed' to seal your nose and mouth was an objectively awful way to die — but Severus could probably find a way to weaponise any charm given a moment or two to think about it. (The real danger a rogue healer posed in a fight was in their knowledge of human anatomy and every way the human body could fail, not their charms.)

Poppy actually agreed with him that information on basic healing spells should be much more widely available, primarily because students learned what they knew of healing from their parents — who were rarely competent healers themselves — or worse, other students, often without consideration of basic principles like the importance of washing wounds or the limitations and any discussion of situations in which it might be inadvisable to use a particular charm. Which of course resulted in students thinking it a perfectly fine idea to re-grow the skin of a scraped knee or use a numbing charm on a sore wrist, and ending up in hospital a week later with a nasty subcutaneous infection or a highly exacerbated tendon injury. She was, however, far more particular about following laws, such as those restricting access to texts describing charms classified as 'medical' to mages who were of age and had an OWL in Charms.

Any mention of any topic even tangentially related to this always annoyed and distracted her, in this case long enough for Severus to add, "Yes, Potter, I would like to discuss exactly what happened in the ritual, and how, exactly, it might have gone wrong, to rule out possibilities other than external interruption." He had been planning to tell the boy to tell people that Severus had been checking to make sure he wasn't possessed, but since Poppy now knew that he already knew Potter wasn't possessed that wouldn't work.

"Okay."

Poppy huffed, yet again. It was her go-to expression, much as his was an inscrutable raised eyebrow, into which the person he was speaking to was welcome to read anything they liked. "Very well, then. I'll leave you to it."

As soon as the door closed behind her, Potter said, "Pretty much as soon as I closed my eyes, I was in this dreamscape. Um. It was a forest, and there was freezing rain, and there wasn't any path at all, which I didn't really realise or think about until right before you woke me up, but—"

Severus let him rattle on for several seconds, activating the privacy wards and throwing isolating charms at the listening spells Dumbledore thought he'd been so sneaky in placing. (Paranoia died hard. For both of them.) "You do realise that was just an excuse for Poppy, Potter. We both know that it was the Black Family Magic attempting to interfere which derailed the ritual."

The boy scrutinised his face for a long moment, very obviously attempting to suss out how much Severus had seen when he'd been "startled" (a term Severus was definitely going to use if Poppy went to Dumbledore telling tales) into projecting recent memories, earlier.

Of course, there was no way for him to know, and after a few seconds he very clearly decided that there was no way he could possibly guess, and apparently that it would be the path of least suspicion to simply come clean, rather than attempt to offer an explanation which might adequately excuse the things Severus had seen without admitting, "So, you know I'm actually Bella's son now."

...What?

No.

No, he had most certainly not known that! He'd thought the Black Family Magic had been affecting the ritual, somehow affecting the recounting of the Path Behind to communicate that Potter was actually a Black and should come renew his bond with the Family Magic or something. Maybe come claim his place as the Black Family Heir in the absence of any other option, or go find Bella's son so he could do it. He certainly hadn't thought Potter was Bella's son!

Potter, still scrutinising his face, despite leaning against the back of one of the student chairs in what could be termed a casual pose if it weren't for the obvious tension in his shoulders, swore. "Shite! You didn't know that. Er. I don't suppose I could convince you to pretend I didn't tell you?"

Severus threw his words from the first day they met back in his face, almost without thinking. "Not a chance."

Setting aside for the moment that Severus had been so easily drawn into believing that Potter was Lily's son — that all the traits he had attributed to Lily over the past three weeks were actually traits Lily apparently shared with Bellatrix bloody Black — if Potter was really Bella's son, then where the hell was Lily's son?!

The boy scowled at him. "Well, can you at least not tell Dumbledore? Mira and Madam Tonks have been keeping it a secret they know — and Blaise, and me — because they want to see if he actually has a plan to switch Danny and me back somehow, or if it's all going to just explode in his face when one of us turns seventeen and tries to claim to be the heir of a Noble House we actually have no connection to."

Danny? Danny Tonks?

Danny Tonks was Lily's son?

Now that it had been pointed out he could definitely see it, the younger Tonks did bear a striking resemblance to James Potter, it was just...

Just a relief, really.

Severus had seen very little of Danny Tonks in the past three weeks that might suggest he was related to Lily or James Potter. Even thinking about it now, he couldn't think of anything which reminded him of Lily in any particular way. There had been artistry in her rituals and, from Zabini's memories, Danny Tonks was a very talented graphic animator, but the similarities were hardly immediately obvious, given the difference in their disciplines. The younger Tonks (Severus was still in the habit of thinking of Doriel Tonks as "Tonks") was far more grounded than Lily had ever been, and simultaneously less driven. Not lazy — Severus didn't imagine Ted Tonks, Stereotypical Hufflepuff, would approve of either of his children developing a habit of half-arsing anything — but Lily had been every bit as determined as Severus to make a better life for herself, get the hell out of Cokeworth and never look back.

He also didn't remind Severus particularly of James Potter (aside from his looks). He had probably taken after Potter in temperament, given that he seemed so different from his mother at that age — he had to look for similarities to see even a hint of them — but...Severus couldn't actually say that was a bad thing, necessarily. Danny Tonks had not been an only child, doted upon by parents with the wealth to give him whatever his spoilt little heart desired. He had not been raised to believe that "no" meant "yes, if you beg long enough", or that all the world was a stage and he was the star of the show. He was a bit more confident than most first-years, presumably because Andromeda had given both of her children a much more thorough pre-Hogwarts education than even most noble children received these days, but hardly conceited.

Quite frankly, Danny Tonks was...very normal.

More clever and level-headed than the average first-year, perhaps, but that was hardly a high bar. Slightly more mature, too — students with older siblings did tend to be a bit more aware of the world outside of their own homes, even when they weren't sent to muggle primary schools. More talented with wizardry than most of his year, if Filius and Minerva were to be believed (Transfiguration especially — it had been gratifying to hear that Minerva's relationship with Andromeda Tonks remained unchanged, despite the two-year howler-hiatus granted by the elder Tonks's refusal to suffer Minerva's NEWT-level lessons), and to be perfectly honest, there was little opportunity for those more talented with witchcraft to distinguish themselves before third year — Severus did not encourage experimentation at the elementary level (despite having been somewhat notorious for playing around in lessons himself), and the potions he had chosen for the elementary curriculum were rarely complex enough to hold much opportunity for deviation or artistry.

But Danny Tonks was sane in a way that Lily hadn't been — preoccupied with the goal of developing a portraiture technique that could capture his elder sibling's transformative nature, with making friends and engaging in life, rather than wandering around with his head in the clouds, never entirely focused on the mundane world around himself and speaking to gods in his dreams. And he was sane in a way Potter — Bella's son, the one everyone thought was Potter — wasn't either. Which, given that Severus had sworn to protect Lily's son, and the Dark Lord almost certainly would claw his way back to life someday, was definitely a good thing. Yes, he would most likely come after the Boy Who Lived, both as a means of reasserting his own abilities and as a means of posthumous triumph over Lily, as well as with the motivation of the Prophecy, but even if it did come out that Danny Tonks was the true Boy Who Lived he would still be safer than Potter in that role.

Danny Tonks was a reasonable, level-headed young man — prone to silliness as boys tended to be, but sensible enough to take precautions against being summarily murdered. Harry Potter would probably go looking for the Dark Lord because he was bored and/or intended to deal with the looming threat as thoroughly and efficiently as possible. Severus had expected as much when he'd thought the boy Sirius Black's son, and knowing that he was in fact Bellatrix Black's son made approximately zero difference. Were he her son, and had he inherited it, Lily's own insanity would not have been any sort of ameliorating factor. She'd been absolutely ruthless when it suited her, and shared the Blacks' utter lack of concern for her own life. (Necromancers did tend to fear death significantly less than sane people. Especially when they'd been flirting with Persephone their entire lives.)

No, he had no idea who he was — or at least Severus presumed he didn't, since Potter hadn't listed him along with Zabini and himself — but he was safe and well cared for, and had been raised by people who were stable and loving and most importantly, not Petunia, and—

Oh.

Oh, good God...

He began sniggering, entirely unable to help himself because — on top of the overwhelming relief that it was to hear that Danny Tonks was the boy Severus had sworn to protect, and the lunatic in front of him was actually the spawn of a woman who could go die in a fire — the Old Goat had given Bellatrix's son, product of two-thousand years of inbreeding conceived specifically to save the oldest family of purebloods in Britain...to Petunia.

That might be the funniest thing Severus had ever heard of.

It could only possibly be better if Bellatrix knew — the look on her face, he could see it now...

"Er... Professor?"

He shoved the hilarious revelation away, clearing his throat. "No, Potter, I will not tell Dumbledore that his oh-so-crafty scheme has been uncovered. One does have to wonder how he possibly thought that Andromeda Tonks wouldn't notice that she's not actually raising her sister's son—" She had done a damn good job keeping it quiet, though, that her younger child was adopted. Severus hadn't known. "—to say nothing of Mirabella." Speaking of whom, had Potter said Zabini knew as well? Apparently he was significantly better at occlumency than Severus had been led to believe, because he hadn't noticed so much as a hint of the secret in the younger legilimens's mind. Not that he'd been looking, but. "She is your godmother, I believe."

"So I've been told. And also that it's really obvious to her that Danny's not me because of some magic godparent bond. So, yes. From what Blaise told me, Dumbledore didn't actually want to give Danny to the Tonkses, he was supposed to go to some light family, but Mira sort of strong-armed him into it, because at least Andromeda was raised a Black, right? Bella would have wanted me raised by her before some light family even if she did disown them. Actually, Blaise said Mira said Bella said that I should be raised by Bella's mother, if Narcissa couldn't do it for some reason, but Mira vetoed that on the grounds that Druella would probably murder me before agreeing to raise a clone of Bellatrix, and Dumbledore wouldn't let Mira have me — or, definitely Danny, by the time this was going on, Aunt Petunia found me on the front step the morning after Bonfire Night — so Andromeda was, I don't know, the fourth choice, but." He shrugged.

"Clone of Bellatrix?" Severus repeated, because that was the only part of that little ramble which was actually surprising — mostly because he was fairly certain that the child before him was male. He supposed it was possible Dumbledore had used bioalchemy to change his sex as well as his eye colour, though that seemed like the sort of unnatural application of the art the Headmaster would refuse to touch.

Said child obviously understood the basis of his scepticism. "Yes, sir. Well, clone with a few very minor changes, I guess. The Family Magic wanted Bella to exist to take over the House, but she couldn't do it, so she made it a new Bella, but male, because it would be easier for a male heir to repopulate the House."

There was something deeply disturbing about the completely matter-of-fact tone the boy used in discussing the incredibly mercenary reasoning behind his own existence. (He couldn't really bring himself to be surprised that the boy would characterise being the opposite sex as a "very minor" difference.)

"But, um. Since you didn't know I'm Bella's son, that can't be what you wanted to talk about, so...what was?"

Severus pinched the bridge of his nose in a futile effort to ward off a tension headache. "I had intended to ask if you were aware of your Family Magic's attempts to reach you, why it would be unable to do so without resorting to external measures, and whether its attempts to communicate trouble you."

"Oh. Of course I know, I've been dreaming about it for years...though I didn't know it was the Black Family Magic until today; I don't know, it sees me as being buried under light magic, but I don't see anything when I look at myself; and mostly no? More the fact that it can't reach me troubles me. And that it's dying, and I know how to save it now, or at least how to start, but I don't know where I need to go to do it. It's this big altar of black stone, somewhere on one of the Black properties. It's round and not very high, but big, like twenty feet across or something. There might be a tower, too. I don't know, that was in the more dream-like part of the ritual. Do you know where it is? Because that would be really convenient."

No, he didn't. But he suspected the boy would be much more likely to answer, "What do you need to do?" if he asked that first.

The boy hesitated long enough that Severus knew his words would be a lie even before he answered. "I just need to get there."

Severus raised an eyebrow at him.

"It's really better for both of us if I don't tell you," Potter offered instead.

Which meant that it was almost certainly something illegal, something he suspected that Severus would be obligated to report to other authorities. An altar implied a ritual, and Potter was well aware from their conversation at Petunia's house that Severus found the fact that ritual magic was banned simply because it was powerful and potentially dangerous absurd. (It had come up in conjunction with Lily.) He also had to know that Severus deliberately turned a blind eye to the breaking of laws he considered ridiculous — he'd let Zabini keep his bloody boggart, after all. Ergo, the fact that it was a ritual was not the thing Potter was reluctant to tell him. He could not possibly think that Severus would object to self-sacrifice or animal sacrifices, given that he'd simply encouraged the boy to keep any gratuitous killing of animals well out of sight when directing him to Grey's rather than warning him against killing (more) small animals at all.

It had seemed wise, given Petunia's mention of a certain cat, to direct any proclivity the boy might have toward torture and killing in a minimally destructive direction. Taking out any sadistic urges he might have on animals in the forest was infinitely preferable to the boy developing a habit of terrorising his peers.

Severus was well aware that his fellow staff members (and most actual mind healers he'd ever spoken to) would absolutely not agree with his strategy of encouraging less destructive behaviours rather than discouraging all destructive behaviours, but one of the most valuable lessons Severus had learned in his decade of herding snakes — and the decade before spent fending for himself among them, and an entire childhood spent managing Lily — was that attempting to force a child to suppress certain inclinations, demonising and forbidding the associated behaviours, was not conducive to said child learning to control those urges. On the other hand, acknowledging the non-optimal situation(s) caused by those inclinations and providing a (comparatively) acceptable outlet for them made it possible to steer children to develop less destructive habits than they otherwise might — keeping a boggart to play with, for instance, rather than attempting to surreptitiously enthral one's more annoying yearmates — and in the long run led them to be more willing to consider the motivations behind the behaviour in question and change it than if they were simply told constantly you're a sick freak, this is wrong, don't do it.

And perhaps even more important than opening the door to future modifications of anti-social behaviours, offering compromises and alternatives rather than unequivocally condemning dark inclinations and the students themselves for holding them — or worse, trying to make them talk about their feelings like a bloody mind healer — tended to encourage even the least trusting of his students to consider him an ally of sorts, rather than an enemy. (A depressing proportion of his students were wont to consider any adult or figure of authority an enemy, no matter how kind and well-meaning they were. The better part of his duties as the Head of Slytherin came down to just...managing troubled children, and the better part of that was just getting them to trust him.) Most of them weren't truly dark-minded, just ill-raised and taking out their pain and frustrations on the world around them. Treating them like monsters would only encourage them to act like it, which simple fact none of the non-Slytherin staff seemed to be capable of comprehending. (Despite the fact that it certainly had with his generation, and nearly all of them had been here to see it.) And even most of the more genuinely dark-minded students were rational enough to not want to indulge their least socially-acceptable fantasies for various reasons, such as the ever-present threat of Azkaban if they were to get caught.

In any case, Severus was quite certain he'd made it clear that he would hardly be so appalled by the idea of an animal sacrifice or two that it would be better for both of them not to tell him. And if their Family Magic were supported by human sacrifice, that would be entirely in keeping with the reputation of the House of Black. Regulus had never admitted as much, but Severus had had his suspicions when they were in school. And looking down at the wary, calculating expression on the face of Bellatrix's eleven-year-old (male) clone, Severus was absolutely certain that he was not one of those dark-minded students who would ask Severus to help him stop himself from hurting someone, but rather more like one of the young ritualists who were absolutely convinced that it was necessary to murder someone for the voices in their head. And in this case it actually might be.

He honestly had very little idea how Family Magics worked in general, but from a few things Regulus had told him over the years (half a lifetime ago) it was an integral part of the individual Blacks' own magic, in much the same way the Dark Mark was anchored in the Death Eaters' souls. And much like the Dark Mark had drawn on the magic of all of the Death Eaters to help anchor the Dark Lord when his body was destroyed, the Family Magic would likely syphon energy away from its peripheral members to support the primary in times of crisis. It seemed a reasonable assumption that it might be attempting to contact Potter through external means to limit their connection and slow the inevitable draining of his life. If he didn't make the sacrifices it required of him, he would die with it. (In Severus's under-informed estimation — he would add it to his endless list of topics which required further research.) It might be possible to break the family bond — Andromeda Tonks had — but Severus knew a good deal more about soul-wounds than the Family Magics of ancient Houses, and the shock of such an extreme measure as amputating part of his soul would probably also kill an immature mage. At the very least, he would almost certainly become a squib, which most mages considered a fate worse than death.

Severus truly hated endorsing his students killing people (murder was a terrible habit to get into), but in matters of self-defence, life-or-death situations — which this likely was, despite the lack of a definite and immediate threat — he could hardly tell them not to. In this case, it would be as unreasonable to ask the boy not to kill anyone as it would be to ask a tiger to become a vegetarian. The only reasonable thing to do was advise him on how not to get caught if and when he finally found his way home.

Damn it.

Today, however, was not that day.

"It doesn't count as plausible deniability if there's only one reasonable explanation for your blatant attempt to offer it," he said waspishly. "The Blacks used to hold their family rituals at a property they referred to as the Keep. I don't know where it is or how to get there — the family kept the locations of their major estates a closely guarded secret." Severus still didn't know exactly where Ancient House was physically located. He certainly could have figured it out when he had access to the property, and it was almost certainly recorded in a Ministry file somewhere now, but he'd never needed to know its geographical location to apparate to it, only the place itself. "They won't be on any maps — there are very complex wards which prevent them from being mapped, hide them from aerial surveillance and so on — and while some of their long-standing enemies might have a descriptive account of some locations, they are hardly likely to share it with anyone who might be able to revive the House."

Most of the Sherwins and Wellingtons and Carmichaels, off the top of his head, would think it bloody hilarious that the last heir of the House of Black couldn't find his own estates. The Boneses and Longbottoms would probably have some idea — they were similarly old Houses — but Augusta Longbottom would sooner curse Bellatrix's son into a coma than help him after what she'd done to Frank and Alice, and Amelia Bones would certainly ask enough questions to reveal why Potter so urgently needed to get to the Keep. The Director of the Department of Law Enforcement could hardly turn a blind eye to an impending human sacrifice. She'd probably order him arrested 'for his own safety,' and they'd end up being forced to attempt the soul-amputation option. Andromeda and Narcissa...might know. Possibly. But then, they'd likely only ever apparated or floo'd there, so Severus honestly doubted it. Regulus had once told him that he hadn't known where in London his parents' home — the one he'd physically lived in for his entire life — was until he was thirteen, and then only because these were things the Heir had to know in order to manage the properties.

Potter frowned. "Well...shite. Still, it helps to know what it's called, so thank you. Also...if there's only one reason for plausible deniability... You don't seem like you're planning on telling anyone."

"Was that a question?"

"Ah... Are you planning on telling anyone, sir?"

"Tell them what?"

"Is that a no?" Severus raised an eyebrow at him. Obviously. "Er...why not, exactly? I mean, thank you, I would prefer you didn't—" That understatement startled a little puff of laughter out of Severus, all the funnier for the boy's apparently genuine inability to recognise his deflections (and indeed his initial refusal to explicitly recognise that reason) as a subtle, No, I'm not going to tell anyone. "—but I'd trust that's the truth a lot more if you have a reason. Especially since I suspect you were only being nice to me because you were friends with Lily, and she's not actually my mother."

Severus very nearly let out another puff of laughter at Potter assuming that Severus could be lying about whether he was going to tell, but that he wouldn't lie to come up with a reason to suggest that he wasn't lying, but managed to contain himself. "You may not be a Slytherin, Potter, but you are a student, regardless of who your mother is, and since none of the other senior staff are prepared to acknowledge that there are questionably sane demon-children outside of my House, let alone try to teach you how to be a functional and indeed successful member of society, that job invariably falls to me. Dying or being permanently institutionalised before you leave school are not outcomes I would deem functional or successful, and it is not my job to teach you to behave altruistically or follow the law." That would be extraordinarily hypocritical of him. "It's my job to teach you not to get caught behaving antisocially or breaking the law. Granted, convincing you that it is far easier to simply behave pro-socially and follow the...less stupid laws—" He couldn't quite bring himself to endorse following the law in general. "—is the most straightforward way to ensure that you are not caught doing the opposite and assure your successful integration into the world outside of this school, and therefore the strategy I most often and most strongly recommend.

"Sometimes, however, there are no so-called 'good choices'. I cannot reasonably fault you for considering your own life a higher priority than that of anyone else. In much the same way, I cannot hold your life to be inherently more important than any other student, because you are all equally my responsibility, but I can and do consider your life, future, and general wellbeing more valuable, and therefore a higher priority to preserve, than that of any non-student, and particularly any adult, out there in the wider world."

"...Oh." After a moment, the boy seemed to realise that he was just sort of staring, stunned, at Severus, and added, "Okay. Yeah, I get it. No killing Hogwarts students or kids in general. I assume the consequence if I do is that you turn me in — murder charges, soul-sucking monsters, et cetera?" Severus gave him a solemn nod. "Yeah, okay, noted. But I was just thinking...is there...I don't know, some sort of list for that, or something? Of like, students are more important than non-students, and children are more important than adults, I mean. And, I don't know, is it better — or, well, less bad, you know what I mean — to hurt a child than to kill an adult or like, kid versus a lot of adults? Because that could be...really useful."

Severus pinched the bridge of his nose again. He probably should have realised that Potter hadn't been indoctrinated into the decision-making paradigm the Dark Houses used — if he had been, he likely wouldn't have needed Severus to give him a reason he had no intention of turning him in for planning to murder someone (who Severus was not responsible for), and in any case, who would have taught him? His excuse was that he'd been too distracted by considering the ethical position he'd been put in to consider whether and how Potter had evaluated the rightness or wrongness of killing someone (likely a whole string of someones, in the future) to save his own life. "There is, yes."

"I knew it!"

Severus raised an eyebrow at the sudden exclamation, complete with glaring into the middle distance and clapping of fist into hand in an unmistakable ah-ha! gesture.

"I knew there was some sort of agreement about what's right and wrong no one ever bothered to tell me about! Aunt Petunia said there wasn't, just use some bloody common sense and don't kill any non-insects unless I wanted my arse whipped halfway back to hell, but she thinks it's good for problem solving skills to make me figure things out myself, no matter how long it takes. But I am fully prepared to admit that I don't get it and I'm giving up on this one, Dudders can lord it over me forever that I had to ask for the answers, I don't care, because not knowing what other people are going to do just because it's the right thing to do bloody well sucks and I hate not knowing the rules, because how'm I supposed to decide if it's worth breaking them if I don't even know what they are?!" He was forced to pause for air, at which point he apparently realised he was ranting at a professor. "Anyway," he went on, much more calmly, "I don't think I have any common sense, sir, so could I please have a copy of the list? Please."

"Sorry to disappoint you," he drawled, trying not to laugh at I don't think I have any common sense, which might be the single most self-aware thing any member of the House of Black had ever said, "but I don't have an actual, explicit list. Most people don't." He was positive most (if not all) of the Dark Noble Houses explicitly taught their children their priorities, but he rather doubted they all had a nicely enumerated, four-foot long scroll like the one Narcissa had given Lily to memorise in their first year. They hadn't been sure at the time whether Narcissa was just taking the piss because she didn't want to teach Lily how to fit in, but Regulus had confirmed several years later that the list was legitimate, because if you're in battle and you have to make a split-second decision about who lives and who dies, you're not going to have time to think about it. "The House of Black did, though. I expect Andromeda Tonks will write it down for you."

Honestly, he expected that Andromeda would be appalled that no one had ever written it down for him before, along with an overview of the points where the scheme varied significantly from the virtue ethics which the Light Noble Houses espoused; a list of hard rules like don't escalate conflicts with your peers and don't let anyone use euphoria-inducing charms on you; an order of precedence for the entire bloody Wizengamot; and a seven-generation family tree. Severus had only exchanged a handful of letters with Andromeda over the course of her elder child's Hogwarts career, but that was more than enough to gather the impression that she was still every bit the lady she'd been raised, regardless of whether she was also the biggest class traitor in Britain.

Potter huffed. "Well...fine. I mean, thank you, sir. If that's all, I need to go write a letter explaining, yes, hi, I'm secretly the son of the sister you disowned twenty years ago, I realise this is sort of out of the blue, but could you please send me a list of people it's wrong to hurt and/or kill, in order, because you might have been able to guess this about me from Danny's letters, but I have no common sense. Also, anything else people haven't told me because they assume I already know, but which I am completely oblivious to. Cheers, Not Actually Harry Potter," the boy declaimed, with overly-dramatic sarcasm and eye-rolling which an hour ago he would have called worthy of Lily. "P.S., Danny says hi, no one has told him or Dumbledore, but Professor Snape figured it out because of wacky Mabon hijinks, and on a completely unrelated note, where is the Black property known as the Keep?"

"I recommend you put it exactly like that," Severus drawled, smirking. "Though you should be aware she — and Narcissa — likely won't know the physical location of the Keep or be able to apparate freely through its wards anymore."

"Why— Oh, right. Everyone just apparates or uses the floo, don't they?" That question was apparently rhetorical, because he fell into a pout and immediately added, "You know, a month ago I thought magic was so incredibly convenient..."

"Who knows your true identity? Just to be clear."

"Blaise, Mira, Mister and Madam Tonks, and me. And now you. And I wrote to Aunt Petunia and she told Uncle Vernon, and will probably tell Dudley and Marge — my cousin and Uncle Vernon's sister — but not the part about who exactly Bellatrix is, just that I'm not really their nephew."

Very well. Petunia and her family hardly counted, given that they had no interaction to speak of with the magical world. And the other four had apparently been keeping at least part of this conspiracy a secret for years.

"Er...come to think of it, I don't know if anyone's told Missus Tonks that I'm Bella's son. Aunt Petunia said I should, and ask her to start a legal case, but Blaise says she's had one ready to slap on Dumbledore's desk the second he announces the truth for about five years now. So I haven't." Severus suspected that neither of the Zabinis had either, given that Andromeda hadn't written to Potter. "But she definitely knows Danny's Lily's son."

"But you're certain you haven't mentioned it to anyone else?"

The boy pouted at him. "Sir, I think I would remember telling literally any student other than Blaise that I'm actually Bella's son, not their precious Boy Who Lived. I think it would be memorable." ...That was fair. "Theo Nott might know about Danny, but I think he worked it out himself and was just fishing to see if anyone else knew — he made some comment on the train about a sketch of James Potter looking like a self-portrait — and... I don't know, if Blaise were going to tell anyone I'd think Daphne Greengrass, but it's none of her business, so he probably wouldn't... Oh! And Dumbledore, obviously! And anyone he's told, I guess."

Obviously. "Very well. I shouldn't need to advise you not to tell anyone else, but I invariably find that when I think that and don't issue such a warning, I apparently should have."

"I'm not that bad at people! And besides, Aunt Petunia already told me, so no, you didn't need to say it."

"I prefer to err on the side of caution. When you discover the location of the Keep, I expect you to inform me. I have no interest in being directly involved with any of the affairs of the House of Black—" If Potter was capable of fending for himself for several weeks at a time, Severus certainly wasn't going to insist that he only kill people under adult supervision and hold his hand through the whole thing. "—but I do, as I mentioned, have an interest in ensuring you aren't caught attempting to abduct a potential sacrifice, or after the fact. We will therefore discuss the precautions which one might hypothetically take to avoid drawing the attention of magical or muggle authorities while practising magic outside of school, as you no doubt intend to do over the holidays, as well as strategies for selecting victims no one will miss before you make any such attempt, by which I of course mean things you certainly should not do while living alone in Knockturn Alley lest you be abducted by some unscrupulous dark wizard because you look like an easy target no one will miss."

In order to cover his own arse, at least to some degree, Severus would also be using that opportunity to isolate the memory of this conversation from every other memory aside from the temporal stream, so that in the event the boy was caught red-handed and his memories inspected the DLE mind mages would have to trawl back through weeks or months if not years of memories to find Severus saying anything explicitly incriminating of anything more than facilitating a breach of the (Un-)Reasonable Restriction for Underage Sorcery, and the DLE interrogators had never been incredibly thorough.

The boy grinned — a disturbingly Bellatrix-like expression. "Yes, sir."

Severus nodded. "You may go."

(God, Severus needed a drink...)

Chapter Text

Cerberi were, in Harry's estimation, even more fun than bulldogs. He danced away from the left head with the football he had found in one of the lower troughs of Hogwarts's massively complicated roof-scape and ducked under a bite from the middle one, grinning. It had taken several visits before the massive dog had let Harry get close enough to pet him without snapping, but after nearly a month of daily (or more often, nightly) visits they got on well enough to play fetch or ride-the-dog without Harry being seriously injured. He had gotten a few nips, but nothing that had actually stopped him leaving the (Misnamed) Corridor of Very Painful Death by the same window he used to enter. Honestly, the cerberus was hardly even dangerous, let alone deadly. Yes, he was big, and clearly not friendly to strangers, but he wasn't mean. And he was smart, and clearly bored, locked up here all alone. Harry had started training him to sit using fetch as a reward.

The right head barked at him, an excited little throw it again yip, but sort of loud because the dog was bloody enormous, much bigger than any other dog Harry had ever seen — at least six feet tall at the shoulders, he had hit his middle head on a chandelier jumping around the first time Harry had unstuck his chain from the floor and let him run around the corridor. He was pretty sure he wasn't done growing yet, either — his paws were still disproportionately large.

"No! Bad Righty! Quiet!"

Lefty used his distraction to make a second attempt to grab the ball out of his hands, which earned him a smack on the nose, which earned Harry a growl and a near-miss at getting his right hand bitten off, which earned Lefty a nip on the ear from Central. (The middle head liked Harry the best out of the three of them.)

Harry backed away and gave a sharp whistle before the heads could start really getting into it. "Want the ball?" he asked, holding it up. Lefty lunged at him, but the dog was really very uncoordinated when the heads didn't quite agree on what they wanted, and the other two knew they had to sit before he would kick it. (Harry was pretty sure each head had its own mind, and all three had some degree of influence over the entire body, which seemed like a terrible design for an animal that someone had to have used magic to create. Aunt Marge would be appalled.) "No! Sit, Lefty!" he demanded, skipping a few more steps back.

They tried, at least, still scooting forward slightly with their tail whipping wildly across the floor and whining, too excited to really sit still, which...Harry could sympathise. "Close enough."

He kicked the ball, sending it between Righty and Central because Lefty had tried to steal it. Watching two-thirds of a cerberus try to turn around to its right and one-third try to turn around to its left had to be one of the funniest things Harry had ever seen. All of them wanted to move, but indecision on which direction often made the entire dog lose his balance while simultaneously bounding and/or scrabbling forward, trying to get traction on the smooth stone floor. (They were getting better at it, but still went sprawling more often than not, which gave the ball time to get a few bounces away, so they actually had to scramble after it.)

Harry had no idea who had trapped the poor dog up here with no one to play with or why, but he was inclined to say it was bloody criminal of them. Not only was he going to get mean if he was never around people, he wasn't going to learn how to be a functionally coordinated adult if he was chained up all the time. He suspected the gamekeeper — an oddly proportioned man Harry suspected might actually be a giant or a troll or something — agreed with him, because he always took an hour or so to play with the dog when he brought it food and cleaned up the corner it used as a toilet. He was only about the same height as the cerberus, and the dog probably weighed at least twice what the gamekeeper did (he was still puppy-gangly, but he was also the size of a bloody elephant), but he was much closer to a match for it than Harry, so he could actually wrestle with it and play tug-of-war with what Harry strongly suspected had once been a bed curtain. He also had the leverage to man-handle the giant puppy back to his chain when he had to go — it was normally stuck to the floor just out of reach of a door that led back toward the centre of the Castle, near a trap door Harry was pretty sure didn't just lead to the second floor, because the gamekeeper shovelled all the poo- and pee-soaked sawdust down there — so he could also let him completely off his chain.

Harry would stand approximately no chance of getting an unruly puppy that probably outweighed him by a factor of fifty back onto a leash, so he just let him drag the chain around and charmed it to the floor again in more or less the same area before he left. It wasn't like there was anything for it to get stuck on, and he could use it to climb up to the dog's back and get in on the three-way fight for the ball which pretty much always ensued when they reached it.

The dog, though, was getting wise to his trick of scrambling up to an adjacent head — fingers and bare toes digging into shaggy, wiry fur — and leaping at the head with the ball in a sort of flying muzzle-tackle that usually dragged the head with the ball down to the ground, where Harry could grab the ball and twist and roll away with it, avoiding playful chomps from all three sets of teeth. They had begun coordinating against him — this time, Central ducked and Lefty tried to grab Harry in the middle of Harry's attempt to steal the ball from Righty. Harry fell flat on his back in a slobber puddle, knocking the wind out of him (not his finest moment — eugh), and the dog bounded off triumphantly down the corridor, chain clinking merrily behind him, as though he wouldn't be back daring Harry to try to take the ball so he could kick it again in a minute or two.

Of course, before he did someone unlocked the door the cerberus was generally chained near, opening it with a very distinctive creak that brought the enormous dog running to confront the intruder, all three heads barking their stupid snouts off, the ball forgotten somewhere down the corridor.

"No! Stop! Bad dog! Get out!" That last one was directed at whoever had just come in, but they didn't listen to him, bright red spell-light knocking out Central even as he spoke. The other two heads obviously took this as provocation, snapping at the intruder and pinning her in a corner, whereupon she turned into a cat with a small pop, darted across the corridor, popped back to her human form and used some sort of spell to shrink the furious three-headed dog to the size of an actual puppy while he was still struggling to turn around. (Which was really bloody impressive, he was going to have to tell Danny about this later...)

The tiny cerberus was adorable, but also obviously terrified, now cowering in the corner himself behind his harness, the two side-heads nuzzling and licking the middle one, trying to wake it up. "Er...hi, Professor McGonagall," Harry offered, ignoring the puppy's yapping, growling attempts to bite him and picking him up to check on the middle head. It didn't respond to him pushing one eyelid open, but it did still seem to be breathing. But then...Harry was pretty sure the whole dog only had one set of lungs, so maybe that didn't mean anything. "Um. You didn't kill one-third of him, did you?"

"Potter! I should have known it would be you in here! What on Earth were you thinking?! And how did you get in?! The door was still charmed shut from the outside!"

"There's a window in the third classroom on the left that's not locked," Harry admitted, nodding down the corridor.

"Through a window?!"

"And I was mostly thinking that a dog like this needs exercise, and someone chained the poor thing up in here for no reason I can see, so as long as I stick his chain back where I found it why shouldn't I play with him for a while? Seriously, did you kill Central? What do you even do with a cerberus that's only one-third dead? We're not going to have to put him down, are we?"

"No, I didn't kill the stupid dog! It's only stunned. And were you not paying attention at the Welcome Feast, when the Headmaster said that a very painful death awaited anyone who thought they'd break in here?!"

"Of course I was, why do you think I was exploring over here in the first place?" he asked, scritching the ears of the central head, which was just starting to come around and seemed every bit as panicked about being tiny as the other two had been at first, whimpering and tucking itself closer to his chest. "And I'm not the only one who's been poking around." He still wasn't sure what the consequences of being in here might be (since they clearly didn't include dying), so he'd been trying to stay out of sight when students got curious and stuck their heads in. Most of them had tried it before he'd gotten to the point of letting the dog run around (the cerberus hadn't been able to reach the doorway, chained to the floor as he was), but even after anyone with half a brain ducked right back out and slammed the door when they saw an eight-foot-tall, three-headed dog barrelling down the corridor at them. Which so far had been everyone except Professor McGonagall.

Not that he was saying Professor McGonagall didn't have half a brain — he was in here, after all — but stunning one-third of a cerberus and shrinking him down to a shaking foot-tall puppy was sort of cruel. She was going to give the poor thing a complex about cats, or something.

"Ooh, that is it! We are going to the Headmaster's office! Right now, young man! Where is the broom?"

"Er...broom?"

"Don't try to play dumb, Mister Potter! You said you came in through a window, which means you have to have borrowed a broom from someone, and you won't be coming back for it, so bring it here, now!"

"I did come in through a window, but I didn't use a broom."

"Oh, I suppose you just flew up here unaided, then?"

"Um, no? I climbed. It's not that hard..."

"You climbed. Up to a third-floor window. To break into a corridor you were expressly forbidden to enter."

Well...sort of? Honestly, he'd been exploring over here to see what was in the mysterious forbidden Corridor of Lies and No Very Painful Death at All, not specifically to break in (at least the first time). Breaking in had been a sort of spur-of-the-moment decision when he'd realised there was a giant puppy in here. But somehow he suspected she wouldn't appreciate that distinction, especially since after that he had come here to do exactly that. (Also, he usually climbed down from the fifth floor, but that was an even more trivial point.) "Yes, ma'am."

She just stared at him for a long moment, as though she didn't actually think he was lying but couldn't quite believe he was telling the truth. "Unbelievable! In all my days teaching I have never—! Let's go!"

Harry followed her out of the corridor, still carrying the dog.

"I thought Hagrid was imagining things when he told me that the dog was being moved between his visits!" she muttered, locking the door behind them again. "How long has this been— Why do you still have the dog?!" she demanded, as she turned to lead him up to the Headmaster's office and realised Harry was still holding the tiny cerberus. One of the heads growled at her (adorably).

"I think the Headmaster should see what you've done to this poor animal," Harry said, completely straight-faced. He didn't really think Dumbledore would care that McGonagall had shrunk his dog, he'd really just felt sorry for the poor puppy. He was a good dog, he didn't deserve to be miniaturised — or worse, miniaturised and abandoned.

Professor McGonagall resumed her furious muttering with another ooh! but she apparently didn't want to unlock and relock the door again, which meant that when they finally reached the Headmaster's office — a circular room at the top of a tower, filled with light and light magic (too warm and slightly stifling) and an actual phoenix (the illustration he'd seen in Grey's hadn't done them justice), and little sculptures enchanted to move or make chiming sounds (which made Harry sort of jumpy, moving in his peripheral vision like that) — after Professor McGonagall explained that Harry had been caught out of bounds for the fifth time in three weeks, "recklessly endangering himself" by playing with the cerberus, Harry was able to say, "Good afternoon, sir. I thought you should be aware that your cerberus doesn't get nearly enough exercise chained up in that corridor, and also that your Deputy Headmistress attacked said cerberus with an unreasonable degree of force while she was trespassing in the Corridor of Very Painful Death."

If Uncle Vernon had taught Harry everything he knew about negotiating, Aunt Petunia had taught him everything he knew about dealing with authority figures. One of her favourite tactics when she was actually in the wrong and she absolutely knew it was to find some way the other person was in the wrong (even if it was a completely trivial thing, or entirely made up), and pretend that was what the entire argument was about when the situation eventually escalated to finding a manager. If some poor stockboy at Tesco told her she couldn't let Dudley eat a package of cookies they hadn't yet paid for while walking around the store, he would end up in trouble for ignoring a non-existent request for assistance, or "embarrassing a customer" by "shouting rudely" at her from "halfway down the aisle" rather than addressing the issue calmly and reasonably. Harry was fairly certain that most of the time the manager and the stockboy shared a good eye-roll as soon as Aunt Petunia left, but the important thing was that Aunt Petunia didn't get in trouble.

Accordingly, he had every intention of making the problem the fact that Professor McGonagall hated dogs, rather than that he had been out of bounds yet again (or at least try to). He set the tiny cerberus on the Headmaster's desk. He had stopped shaking while Harry was holding him, but he began trembling again as he realised that he was now trapped on a small island, high off the ground (relatively speaking) and surrounded by too much space. He crouched down, tail tucked beneath him, whining up at Harry as though to say don't leave me here. "Look! He's terrified! And she stunned one of the heads!"

She took the bait. Her lips were already about as thin as they could go, but her nostrils flared on top of that as she snapped, "You little—! The dog will be fine! If you hadn't let it loose, I wouldn't have had to stop it from biting my head off!"

"First off, you didn't have to come in! Everyone else who's tried to break in while I'm there has just closed the door again when they realise there's a giant bloody dog charging at them. And secondly, you got away from him just fine as a cat, cursing him in the back on top of that wasn't necessary. I think you overreacted because you're prejudiced against dogs," he declared, taking custody of the puppy again, as it seemed to be contemplating trying to escape by jumping to a chair. Given that the cerberus was not a coordinated animal at the best of times, he'd probably miss and break a leg or something.

"I am not prejudiced against dogs, Mister Potter! I am prejudiced against smart-mouthed little troublemakers who think themselves above the rules!"

"Were you listening, sir? Professor McGonagall just admitted that she has an unfair bias against me."

The Headmaster chortled. "I'm afraid that claiming to be a smart-mouthed troublemaker who thinks himself above the rules does not, in fact, help your case, Mister Potter."

Harry rolled his eyes as dramatically as he could. "Literally every instance of so-called 'trouble' I've caused for Professor McGonagall involves her taking an unreasonable degree of offence to me doing or not doing something that harmed absolutely no one. Why is it a bad thing if I decide to go play with a dog that desperately needs exercise? I guess maybe someone could get hurt if they come in when he's off the leash, but the entire school was warned that that corridor contains the possibility of a very painful death, so anyone who sees an elephant-sized puppy running toward them barking its heads off and doesn't just close the door and walk away and maybe tell people the warning was legitimate has no excuse if they're 'attacked'. I mean, complaining that there was a giant dog loose on the other side of that door is like complaining that you walked out into the middle of the M.-Twenty-Five and almost got hit by a car."

The Headmaster was clearly trying not to smile, but the Deputy Head was only growing more furious. "That is not the point, Mister Potter! And it's a bad thing because you might have gotten hurt!"

Harry scoffed. Not only was it somewhat ridiculous to think McGonagall actually cared if he got hurt — about half of their interactions had been her yelling at him for something stupid or telling him he couldn't do something he very clearly could, and the rest had been her ignoring him, there was no love lost, there — but he was clearly fine.

The witch turned to the Headmaster. "Not only was he in the Forbidden Corridor, he claims to have gotten in by climbing through a window! Rules exist for a reason, Mister Potter!"

"Professor Sinistra says there's no rule against scaling the walls of the castle unless I'm planning on sacking it," he informed the Deputy Head. "And I'm not sure there's actually a rule against being in that corridor either. I mean, the Headmaster said it was off limits to anyone who doesn't want to die a very painful death, not that it was off limits period."

Harry seemed to have pushed McGonagall to new depths of rage, coming back around to red-faced from pale with fury. "You see, Albus? He's completely incorrigible! It's hardly fair to the other Ravenclaws to continue taking points from him, and repeated detentions have had no impact on him whatsoever! I am at my wits' end!"

Pretty short on wits, then, eh, Minnie? It's only been six weeks... He didn't say it, because mocking the professor would make him look like a jerk instead of the reasonable person in this argument. "A, that's not true, I think you'll agree my handwriting is improving; and B, what impact are detentions supposed to have on me? Sure, they're boring, but as far as consequences for breaking rules go they're barely even inconvenient."

Harry had between a hundred and a hundred and twenty hours of free time to fill every single week, depending on how much he slept. He did have homework, of course, and he'd joined a few of Madam Pince's muggle subjects study groups and the Ravenclaw History study group, but that only ended up being a few hours a day (on average). Even getting five or six hours of detention over the course of a week and spending all of Saturday morning writing lines barely cut into the time which would otherwise be spent on spell practice and/or exploring and/or hanging out with people.

"Albus!" McGonagall was apparently out of arguments, since she just turned back to the Headmaster, gesturing dramatically.

Harry turned to him as well, and gave a little shrug to indicate his complete lack of understanding of the problem. Which was only a little faking, honestly. He knew adults worried about kids doing dangerous things, like in general, and that yes, teachers, especially at a boarding school like Hogwarts, were sort of responsible for the students' safety in general — he would get it if she had a problem with him endangering other students (like Snape just out and telling him not to murder other students, which was still...slightly mind-boggling, honestly). But he wasn't. Not other students who were smart enough to see an angry cerberus and bloody well leave it alone, anyway. And he was pretty sure that when the (potential) danger of doing a thing only applied to Harry himself, he should have every right to decide whether or not to do it and take that chance.

Dumbledore gave him a very serious look, peering over steepled fingers and half-moon spectacles enchanted to...do something. Harry could see the magic in them, but he couldn't tell what it was for. Almost certainly not to correct his vision. Danny said that wizards had ways of fixing poor eyesight (after your eyes stopped getting worse, which...Harry hadn't realised was a thing?), so pretty much any adult wizard wearing glasses was only wearing them because they had enchantments on them to let them see wards or through glamours or various other neat tricks.

"Perhaps, Minerva, it would be best if I speak to young Harry one-on-one," he said, at length.

"Please!" she huffed, as though to imply it's about time, damn it! Not that he disagreed. Dumbledore had supposedly been legally responsible for him for nearly a decade now, and they'd never actually had a conversation before. "And when you have a moment, do look over the proposal Zabini is planning to put before the Governors at the November meeting. I have some serious concerns about the—" She cut herself off, eyes flicking over to Harry as though she didn't want to discuss whatever it was in front of him. "Well, you'll see it, I've annotated your copy. We can discuss it at dinner."

She was out the door before he finished nodding.

Chapter Text

Dumbledore sighed, his head tipping toward one of his guest chairs on the student side of the desk. "Please, my dear boy, take a seat."

Harry did, taking the other one just to be contrary. Being called my dear boy just rubbed him the wrong way somehow.

The old man continued to stare at him, keeping his expression very solemn and impassive even as magic twisted around him, a silent, wandless charm that ghosted across the space between them and settled delicately around Harry's mind, seeking any weaknesses in his defences that it might exploit to establish contact between himself and the Headmaster. Not actually legilimency like Blaise and Snape did — when they did legilimency, it was just sort of a part of how their auras interacted with those of people around them, not an actual, shaped spell — but something designed to copy the effect, he was pretty sure.

"I'm not going to let you into my mind," he said, firming up his sense of where Harry ended and outside Harry began to resist the spell. He was pretty sure that if Dumbledore wanted to get in he could throw enough magic into the spell it would just crush his efforts to keep it out, but he wasn't going to just let him without a fight.

"I beg your pardon?" the Headmaster said, faking innocence.

"This spell, it's some mind-reading thing, right?" He pushed a little magic of his own into the pattern of the spell experimentally, not really sure how else to indicate it. He couldn't just point at it in physical space. Well, he could, but it wouldn't really be very specific, there were at least a dozen spells going on around them, shite to keep the air circulating and the right temperature and a handful to stop certain kinds of magic working through them — maybe whatever stopped people apparating here? — and half a dozen others he didn't have the slightest clue about. Trying to 'point out' the spell with magic did send a little pulse of energy through it, made it very clear what he was talking about...but also made it go sort of...wonky. It destabilised and fell apart almost immediately, some of the magic involved snapping back on Dumbledore. Pain flashed across his face. "Oops?" Maybe Dumbledore wouldn't just be able to break into Harry's head, if the spell was that easy to disrupt. "You can just ask me whatever you want to know, though."

The old man still didn't acknowledge that he'd been trying to read Harry's mind, but he didn't try again either. Instead, he gave a heavy sigh. "Tell me about yourself, my boy," he suggested, which wasn't very specific. It reminded him of Ollivander asking him to describe himself.

"Er... What do you want to know about me?"

Dumbledore gave him a kindly, lying smile. "Why, anything you'd like to share, dear boy. It is perhaps long overdue, but I feel I should get to know you."

Harry frowned at him. "Well, for one thing, sir, I don't like being called my dear boy. 'Harry' is fine. And I really don't know what you want me to say. I don't think I've ever deliberately gotten to know anyone, and I honestly don't know where to start."

The lying smile faltered briefly, but he recovered quickly. "Of course, Harry. My apologies. I am simply accustomed to— Well, never you mind. Hmmm... Where to start... How are you finding Hogwarts? And Magical Britain, generally? I understand it can be a bit overwhelming, especially when one has been raised outside the magical world."

"Oh. Well...I wouldn't say overwhelming. The wards, yes. The wards are overwhelming." Harry had been getting better at ignoring the magic going on in the background all the time, but there were still days when it gave him a headache. "Very pretty," he added quickly, "don't get me wrong, just...bright. And complicated. Loud."

"You can see magic?"

Harry shrugged. Wasn't that obvious from what he'd just said? Not to mention pointing out the mind-reading spell as he had. He nodded. "And...being around so many people, all the time. That's sort of overwhelming. That's half the reason I keep going off on my own, out in the Forest or playing with Tiny, here." The cerberus, exhausted by playing earlier and all the excitement of being miniaturised, had curled up on Harry's lap and two of the heads had closed their eyes. Righty was still awake, keeping watch over the others. He made a quick swipe at Harry's fingers with his tongue when he indicated the dog with a scratch on that head.

"What's the other half?" the old man asked, gentle amusement in his tone and every line of his face, which Harry found inexplicably off-putting.

"Oh, well...I get bored," he admitted. Not that it was really a secret. "I have way more free time here than I ever did at home." When Dumbledore's eyebrows twitched, he explained, "Muggle schools run from half past eight to half past three, with lessons all day and then homework after—" Harry usually finished everything that would be homework in lessons, but he usually spent at least an hour or two helping Dudley with his in the evening. "—and there was always something to do around the house with Dudley there making messes, or making dinner or breakfast or whatever. Weeding the gardens, you know."

Dumbledore nodded. "It can be difficult for students to adjust to entertaining themselves rather than having their days fully scheduled by parents and teachers — believe me, I'm well aware of that!" A smile tugged at his lips. A patronising smile that said he was not in fact aware of that, and very much wished his day weren't fully scheduled, silly boy, enjoy this freedom while it lasts! "Tell me, what do you do for fun at home?"

"Er..." Harry was sort of bad at having fun, or rather the things he thought were fun — exciting things like climbing buildings and racing bikes down the big hill at the end of Wisteria Walk and getting into scraps with the other boys (and playing with giant dogs) — were not the sort of things sane people did for fun. There was a group of older boys who sometimes played footie or rugby in the park, but they always said Harry was too small to join them when they were playing rugby, and they almost always had an even number already anyway. "Read novels and watch telly, mostly. But I can only sit around not doing something for so long. I spend a lot of time exploring on my own there, too. And here, I've been practising magic and working ahead a bit." He was most of the way through the first-year spells they'd be doing in class already, and even though he knew it would only make him more bored in the long run, he was seriously considering asking some of the older Ravenclaws for their second- and third-year notes. "I tried starting an Edificeering Club, but no one was interested, and I guess none of the professors have time to sponsor a Duelling Club."

"Edificeering?"

Harry nodded. "It's like mountaineering, but instead you climb buildings. It's definitely a thing."

"I...see. Have you been making many friends?"

Harry shrugged again. "I guess? I mean, not many, I think a lot of people were expecting something...different, from their precious Boy Who Lived. I'm sure you've read the Harry Potter novels where I'm like this ten-year-old magical M.I. Six agent raised in Nepal solving murder mysteries and also being super nice and friendly and helping little old squibs cross the road, and just...no. And sort of a lot of people act like I betrayed them by not being Saint Harry, Bane of the Dark. And also for telling them that my surname was Harrison and letting them think I was a girl when we first met. Mostly Draco and the Weasleys, I guess, but they're sort of...gossipy, I'm pretty sure everyone knows about that by now and most people think it makes me a jerk I just went along with it." And a lot of people were pretty clearly intimidated seeing Harry do...the most basic magic? Which, if they were going to expect him to be this great noble light law-enforcing do-gooder, he didn't know why they wouldn't expect him to be as 'absurdly' good at magic as a character in a kids' book. That was the most true-to-life aspect of the stupid Boy Who Lived character. "But I hang out with Blaise and Danny and their friends."

Dumbledore's face crumpled into a troubled frown, though Harry couldn't possibly guess why. "And how are you finding your lessons? Do you feel you've been keeping up with your peers? I realise it can be difficult, for those who are completely unfamiliar with magic..."

...

Harry just sort of blinked at the old man for a long few seconds, wondering if Dumbledore had never bothered to ask the professors or the accidental magic people about one of the two kids he was theoretically responsible for, or if he was screwing with him for some reason, or trying to... Harry didn't know. Judge something about his personality from how he responded, or whatever?

It didn't really matter, Harry didn't know what the Old Goat expected him to say, or how to make a good impression here, or whatever. It was just...really weird.

"Er...honestly?"

The old man nodded, his expression smoothing back into unreadable serenity. "Of course, my dear— Harry."

Well...fine, then. "I'm finding lessons boring. History is a joke. Defence is almost as much of a joke, and listening to Professor Quirrell talk makes me want to stab my own eardrums out with a quill or something. I don't even think that's a real stutter, it's completely inconsistent! All of the stuff we're doing in Charms and Transfiguration is so basic it barely even makes sense — I spend most of my time in lessons working ahead or fooling around altering charms and trying to work out how transfiguration spells are derived from the Basics, which Professor Flitwick keeps making a huge bloody deal out of, and Professor McGonagall hates but can't say anything else about unless she wants Danny's mum to come yell at her in person and maybe try to get her fired—"

"I will not be firing Professor McGonagall," Dumbledore assured him.

"Danny thinks you would if his mum convinced enough of the board to fire you if you didn't." Dumbledore scowled in a way that made Harry think Danny was absolutely right about that. "And we think Professor McGonagall must think so too, because she just ignores us now. Professor Snape lets me read other things in lessons as long as I pay enough attention to the lesson to answer questions when he calls on me, because explaining things to other people takes so long." Professor Sprout always gave them something to do with their hands while she lectured, re-potting or trimming dead leaves off a plant or dissecting and drawing flowers and fruits, and Sinistra actually made it interesting, listening to stories about constellations and the history of astronomy and how people discovered how the solar system worked, even though Harry already knew most of the basic facts, like that the earth went around the sun, so he actually didn't mind the pace of their lessons.

Dumbledore continued to frown. "Be that as it may, Harry, I'm sure you must understand how important it is that you thoroughly master the basics of a subject before moving on, no matter how 'boring' they might be."

Harry scowled right back. "You're not listening to me, sir. I'm telling you the 'basics' are so bloody obvious it's physically painful to sit there 'learning' them for hours and hours on end when I already get them. Maybe if they talked about how magic worked and why they're important to focus on it would be more interesting, but they don't, they just say, here, practise turning a matchstick into a needle for eight bloody hours. Or a few grams of copper into an equal mass of bronze. Don't try to figure out how to increase or decrease the mass, though, because supplemental integrated conjuration is an OWL topic and ickle firsties couldn't possibly manage it, except it's built into the spells, and really not that hard, Danny taught me in one double-period—" The increasing part, at least — integrated banishment to decrease the mass of an object was much more difficult, which was why shrinking a living cerberus to one or two thousandths of its usual size was really impressive. "—and practically exactly the same as the duplication charm, except with conjuration instead of illusion, which is really cool, and—"

"Unfortunately the pace of lessons cannot be adjusted to accommodate the desires of exceptional or gifted students without sacrificing the education of the majority," Dumbledore interrupted, with an aura of grave seriousness which Harry really didn't think was warranted.

He pouted at the old man. "I know that. I did spend six years going to school with Dudders. I didn't ask to be freakishly good at everything, or even for lessons to go faster. You asked me how I'm finding them and told me to be honest, and honestly I'm bored out of my mind."

"Would you prefer not to attend lessons?" the Headmaster asked...almost cautiously? which suggested that wasn't nearly as good an offer as it immediately sounded to Harry. Like, maybe not go to lessons and just teach himself everything he needed or wanted to know, or sit in on one of the older years' lessons? Obviously the seventh-years' astronomy course was well over his head, but if he could go to the third-years' lessons, like Madam Pince had put him in the 'intermediate' level muggle subjects study groups, that might be a lot better. (It had been suggested before that Aunt Petunia should have Harry tested to move ahead a year or two, and she always said no because it was important that Harry learn to socialise with children his own age — which, yes, he was admittedly very bad at that — but he lived with children his own age here — loads of them — so that shouldn't be a problem, right?)

Or, some of the noble kids had mentioned at one point or another that they had tutors before they started school. Draco, for example, claimed that he wasn't making it up that he'd almost hit a helicopter out flying once, and that he knew about helicopters not because he was a fan of muggle cinema (Shut up, Tonks!) but because his tutor had been muggleborn and identified the strange flying machine for him. According to Blaise, Draco and pureblood-supremacist nobles in general didn't tend to want to kill all the muggleborns, they just wanted to keep them 'in their place' — well away from the reins of government and positions of direct political influence. And that was more of a class thing than a blood thing. They hated Mira and Dumbledore (who were both up-jumped commoners) almost as much as they hated muggleborns who made it too far in the Ministry.

If Harry could have a tutor to teach him at his pace... Well, that was probably too much to hope for. Still, it wouldn't hurt to ask. "You mean like just do self-study, or get a tutor? I could probably afford a private tutor, couldn't I?"

He hadn't managed to convince Firebloom to give him an account summary for the Potter Estate without confirming his identity with a blood test — which she'd very frankly advised him not to try. Since the Potters hadn't actually submitted a blood sample to identify him (just as well they hadn't, since he wasn't actually the original Harry Potter, but they'd been assuming that he was Lily and Sirius's kid at the time and that was the usual thing to do with bastards who were being claimed by a House), they'd have to compare him to James Potter — or even Charlus, James's father — and if Harry wasn't James's son by blood (which even over the summer he'd known he probably wasn't) he'd be opening himself up to accusations of impersonating Harry Potter. It was really much better to just use the key to access the Trust Vault it was associated with, and quietly ignore that that was just a small fraction of the Potter Fortune. It was still more money than he could imagine ever needing for anything, he'd gotten her to at least admit that much, because he hadn't wanted to waste too much on books and stuff without knowing how much money he actually had. Though, that reminded him...

"Speaking of which, Firebloom — she's this nice, mumsy goblin I talked to over the summer — said that I should ask you for a copy of my account history, since you're my guardian and they just owled you an update at the solstice. Or, well, I guess you probably got another update at the equinox? She said quarterly... Also, Aunt Petunia is still angry with you for making her pay for my upkeep out of pocket all these years. I mean, she's probably never going to not be angry at you about that, but apologising and offering to pay her back would probably help."

Dumbledore gave him a kindly smile. "I assure you, my– Harry, I am not concerned about any potential retribution from Petunia Dursley."

...Probably not the smartest position to take on the issue, especially since Aunt Petunia now knew how to contact other wizards. She might not be able to actually hurt Dumbledore, politically or whatever, but Harry was betting she could find ways to become a major annoyance for him, even without mentioning that she knew Harry wasn't her nephew. Even if he were the real Harry Potter, Dumbledore hadn't exactly done right by him, leaving him to be raised in complete ignorance by a muggle, and he had political enemies who would definitely use that against him if Aunt Petunia somehow managed to get in touch with them and Tell All. Which Harry suspected she definitely would, if only because harassing arsehole politicians she felt had wronged her repeatedly over the course of the past decade was exactly the sort of thing she would find entertaining, and taking up sculpting couldn't possibly occupy all of her newly Dudley-free hours.

"Your parents left that money to you," Well, no, they'd left it to Danny, actually... "not to her. If you choose to offer her financial compensation for fulfilling her familial duty when you come of age that is, of course, up to you, but I could not in good conscience choose to do so on your behalf." Harry very narrowly avoided snorting at 'familial duty'. "And children are not expected to deal with the burden of political and financial decisions until the age of thirteen, at the very earliest. You needn't concern yourself. I assure you, your inheritance has been preserved as it was when your parents..."

"...were murdered?"

"Er...quite. Your withdrawal for school supplies was the only outgoing transaction which has been authorised since October of Nineteen Eighty-One."

"Um. Good to know, I guess, but I'd really like to know how much money is in my trust vault. It is enough to hire a tutor, isn't it? I mean, I get probably no one gave me any options other than coming to school here because you're my guardian, but honestly, attending lessons is sort of a waste of time? I mean, I'm not complaining, I'm used to it, I wouldn't have brought it up if you hadn't asked because I know there's nothing to be done about lessons being painfully slow, I just have to find ways to entertain and educate myself that don't interfere with other students' learning. Which is fine, I've been doing that for years. I wish Professor Flitwick wouldn't draw attention to it so much, but now that Professor McGonagall has stopped torturing me trying to force me to learn at Neville Longbottom's pace, and I found a charm to temporarily deafen myself so I can actually stand to be in Professor Quirrell's presence without wanting to murder him every time he opens his mouth, I don't have a problem with any of the other classes. They're just...sort of a boring waste of time. But I'm bored almost all the time anyway, so I don't mind being bored in lessons rather than anywhere else, if you see what I mean.

"But if not attending lessons is an option, I'd definitely take it. And don't get me wrong, it's not that I'm being lazy or I don't want to learn magic — I definitely do! I like learning things, and learning magic is the most right thing I've ever done in my life — I'm just...not. Because the things we're supposed to learn in lessons are things I figured out for myself when I was about eight," he added frankly. "I can do literally every charm effect we've studied in class so far with totally not accidental magic, and people act like that's completely shocking, but none of the professors have thought maybe they should give me something to work on that's not a complete waste of my time."

Well, Snape, but he wasn't so much giving Harry direction on working ahead as pointing him at books that were tangentially related to what they were working on so he wouldn't get too far ahead. So now Harry knew a bit about how ingredients were sourced and the ritual elements of potion-brewing and the theoretical basis of witchcraft and elementary Alchemy that was sort of complementary to Potions, but that they were never going to cover in class at all, ever. (Which was actually really cool, even if it wasn't specifically useful in the sense of advancing a linear academic pathway, so Harry didn't consider it a waste of time to learn.) If the other professors would give him shite like that to study while everyone else was being slow and boring, he'd take it in a heartbeat. But they wouldn't. He'd asked Flitwick, who seemed like the most likely to be willing to, and he'd just encouraged Harry to keep experimenting with the spells they were doing in class and push the boundaries of what he could do with them.

"They just want me to sit there quietly and not be distracting, or even teach other kids, which is the most frustrating thing ever—" He could teach them, he'd had a lot of practice helping Dudders, and none of his yearmates were as bad at magic as his cousin was at maths, but he hated explaining things for other people. Especially so slowly, and again and again in slightly different ways until they got it. He really didn't have the patience for that shite, especially when he was tutoring people he didn't have any actual incentive to help (beyond not coming off as a complete wanker, obviously). Dudley was family, Harry had had to help him. Weasley, Longbottom, and Crabbe could all go die in a fire for all he cared. "—and that sucks. Going to lessons is just...completely pointless."

He would say it was holding him back, actually, but not going to lessons would just give him more free time to fill. It would be less frustrating, but he was already studying magic by himself for several hours a day. Yes, he could spend more time on it, if he had a concrete goal he was working toward, but he wasn't refraining from doing so simply because he didn't have time. It hadn't taken him that long to realise that he simply couldn't channel enough magic to keep progressing in the areas that most interested him (duelling and battlemagic) as quickly as he had been, and it was pretty difficult to practise more advanced combat and defence spells without a partner, and a lot of other areas he wanted to study, like healing charms and spycraft — and even things he'd just like to know more about theoretically, like high ritual or actual time travel — were restricted, so he couldn't study them here. He wasn't nearly as enthusiastic about spending ten or twelve hours a day on spells that just made daily life easier, or were completely useless for anything practical. He'd probably end up just spending more time out in the Forest or with the (still tiny) cerberus drooling on his knee or reading magical fiction and history books (which were basically fantasy novels, and no one could possibly convince him otherwise).

"I don't not want lessons, though. Attending more advanced lessons or having a tutor would be even better than just studying magic by myself."

And wasn't going to happen. Harry could tell just by the heavy sigh Dumbledore gave him, peering intensely over his specs. "I know how you feel, Harry, believe me—" Harry didn't believe him. If he knew how Harry felt, he wouldn't be warming up for a but, here... "—but—" Called it. "—a Hogwarts student cannot contract a personal tutor — I presume you would prefer to stay here, rather than return to your aunt's home...?"

"Well, yes, but—"

"Ah, ah, but me no buts, young man! I may be your guardian, but I cannot be seen to favour you personally above any other student — and believe me, there have been many talented students who have passed through these halls who might have benefitted from more personal instruction — which means I cannot allow you to live here as a student while studying magic with a tutor not affiliated with the school. Nor can I allow you to be advanced to the second-year class ahead of your peers. However..." He steepled his fingers and fell into a long, contemplative silence, staring into the middle distance. Though, to be fair, the silence probably felt longer than it was, since he'd dropped it on such a cliff-hanger...

Harry didn't dare interrupt, despite his rabid curiosity about where, exactly, the Headmaster was going with this.

At long length, he resumed on what seemed a different note. "It seems to me that you have far too much free time on your hands, Harry." You don't say? "That your penchant for wandering into dangerous situations stems primarily from a lack of other outlets for an energetic young man such as yourself."

Harry shrugged, nodded, still uncertain where he was going with this. But he did have to note, "I don't wander into dangerous situations, though. I know it might seem like it. Playing with the dog or exploring out in the Forest or shopping in Knockturn alone might be dangerous for most kids, but I can take care of myself."

"I'm sure you can," the old man said, with another annoyingly patronising smile. "And from Minerva's earlier frustration, I presume there is nothing I can say or do to dissuade you from continuing to climb the Castle walls or seeking out the company of Fluffy, there—" He nodded at the cerberus, eyes twinkling.

"His name is Fluffy?" Harry said, trying not to laugh. The dog perked up, all three heads blinking blearily at the sound of his name. It wasn't a bad name, he guessed. He was a shaggy dog — though far less so when he was this small. Inch-long hairs on a foot-tall dog somehow looked a lot shorter than eight-inch hairs on an eight-foot dog. Though if he'd ever been this small as an actual puppy, with eight-inch-long fur, he would have been a little brindled dandelion puff.

"Indeed."

"Huh. Okay. But, no. There's really not. I mean, detention and taking points are barely consequences, and if you expel me I guess that means I will be free to get a tutor, won't I? And I guess you could try to make me stay with Aunt Petunia and keep me from practising magic at all, but you'd have to literally kill me or lock me up with magic to stop me from running away and going somewhere I can do magic," he informed his so-called guardian. "Probably kill me, since if I just disappeared Blaise and Danny would wonder what happened to me, and their families would make your life hell until you let me go. So...no, you can't force me to stay away from your so-called dangerous situations like a good little boy. And to be completely honest, I don't think you actually want to see me when I've been trying to be good and unable to blow off steam for too long."

He grinned at the Headmaster's unease. Harry couldn't read minds, but he would be willing to bet that the old man was wondering exactly how much of Bellatrix's insanity was heritable right about now. After a moment, though, he shook it off. "Yes, well. With that being the case, it seems that the best solution to the problem before us is to find some more productive, less risky activity to occupy your spare time. Would you agree?"

Harry nodded, now even more curious where he was going with this.

"Tell me, Harry. I can see you're obviously fond of Fluffy, and you clearly have some talent with animals — I dare say you've won the beast over more thoroughly than I have, at the very least..." Probably not difficult, since Harry had never seen the Headmaster up in the Corridor of Very Painful Death. He probably didn't visit the dog very often at all, if ever. He was, after all, a very busy man. He gave a noncommittal shrug, waiting to hear the rest of what the Headmaster intended to say. Dumbledore, clearly encouraged, went on. "Tell me, how would you feel about...learning more about the Forest and the creatures which live there?"

"Cautiously enthusiastic," Harry decided promptly. "What's the catch?"

Dumbledore grinned. "No catch, my dear boy— Pardon me, Harry. Force of habit. In that case, I think I know just the thing to keep you more fully occupied. Come!"

He rose abruptly, striding to the door and leading Harry down the stairs, completely ignoring Harry's questions about what he was talking about and where they were going, chortling as though he was planning a great surprise.

Where they were going turned out to be the gamekeeper's cottage, a simple little hut built on the same scale as the gamekeeper himself, out by the edge of the Forest. Harry had avoided it every time he'd come out to explore because he hadn't wanted to get caught and dragged back inside.

"Hagrid!" the Headmaster called as they approached.

"'Round back, Professor!" the large man called from (presumably) the patch of giant pumpkins behind the house. Sure enough, when they reached him he was puttering around the garden, carefully rotating the gourds so they wouldn't have any ugly flat spots when they were finally picked. "Since you're here, sir, I've been thinking, what would you think of doing bigger pumpkins next year?" Harry felt his eyes go involuntarily wide at the idea of bigger pumpkins. The smallest one from this year's crop had to be at least two feet tall. "Got a friend in France, says he can get me a handful of Carriage Pumpkin seeds from this year's crop, if we want— Oh." The gamekeeper cut himself off with a scowl, noticing Harry. "What's he doing here?"

"Ah, Hagrid! This is Harry Potter, he—"

"I know who he is," the giant muttered gruffly. "He killed one of Aragog's children, whole Forest's talking about it. And what have you done to Fluffy?!" he demanded, stomping over and falling to his knees to examine the tiny cerberus. The dog clearly recognised him, but was equally clearly a bit intimidated by how very large he was at the moment, all three heads warily pressing back against Harry's chest.

"Nothing!" Harry snapped, glaring up at the man, who was still a good two feet taller than Harry kneeling. "I was just playing with him, and Professor McGonagall came in and stunned the middle head and shrank him! I wasn't going to leave him! And I haven't killed anyone!"

The gamekeeper's small, dark eyes, already nearly lost in the narrow space between his wild hair and equally unkempt beard, narrowed further yet, his scowl becoming even more pronounced. "You did so, you lying little git! One of the wilderfolk saw you do it! Stabbed 'im right through the thorax with a stick and then stood there laughing over the body like your thrice-cursed traitor father!"

Wait. Thorax? "This is about the bloody spider?! It tried to kill me first!" It had jumped him out of bloody nowhere, knocking him to the ground and nearly biting him with what Harry now knew were highly poisonous fangs before he managed to throw it off. "I'm pretty sure it was going to eat me!"

The book he'd found afterward did say that acromantulae were creatures of being-level intelligence, but their resolute determination to consider all other creatures and beings (including humans) as potential food meant they would never be considered beings in the same way as humans or goblins or even house elves. That had to be what it had been, there weren't that many giant talking spiders around. Most of them looked like oversized cellar spiders or wolf spiders, and were completely harmless (to humans — obviously they hunted smaller animals). Acromantulae were more like tarantulae. They never stopped growing and grew more intelligent as they aged and their brains increased in size and complexity, reaching a degree of sentience comparable to a young human child when the body (not counting the legs) was about two feet wide. The one Harry had killed had been relatively small, and probably only about as smart as a clever dog, but vicious. He had no doubt it had intended to kill and eat him.

"Well, you shouldn't've been in the Forest if you didn't want to be eaten! Everyone knows there's dangerous creatures in there! And they can't be expected not to act according to their nature if some stupid kid wanders into their territory!"

"Well, it shouldn't have been attacking unfamiliar kids in the Forest if it didn't want to be killed!" Harry shot back, only slightly mockingly. "Everyone knows there's dangerous creatures in there, and they can't be expected not to defend themselves from attempted murder!"

"You're the murderer!" the giant retorted. "Standing there laughing!"

"I'm sorry, have you ever been in a fight for your life before? Because I hadn't, and let me tell you, not dying is a hell of a rush!" It might actually have been the best feeling Harry had ever felt. Whenever he remembered it, that same slightly-feral, rage-filled part of himself that sometimes wanted to kill people for no reason or start fights with a bloody illusion — of himself, no less — for looking at him wrong, and felt more at home with Fluffy or Ripper or (he suspected) the Little Crow, was decidedly distracted by wanting to do it again.

Hagrid apparently had no response to that. He pushed himself to his feet to glare at Dumbledore rather than continue to loom over Harry and Tiny Fluffy (who did not like the shouting and was trying to bury all three of his noses in the crook of Harry's arm). "What's he doing here?" he demanded again.

"Yeah, I'd like to know that, too," Harry added, since he was pretty sure the half-bemused, half-concerned looking old man hadn't brought him out here to be accused of murdering a giant man-eating spider.

The Headmaster gave them another condescending smile. (Harry was really starting to hate that expression — the feral, instinctive part of him, so close to the surface talking about his fight with the spider, wanted to claw it off his face with his bare hands.) It shifted from Hagrid to Harry and back again before he said, "Well, Hagrid, I was hoping you might be willing to do me a favour. You see, Harry here has been getting into trouble sneaking out of bounds and befriending creatures best left alone—" Harry literally bit his tongue to avoid saying that Fluffy was most certainly not best left alone. "—and it occurred to me that what he really needs is a good influence in his life. One who could, perhaps, teach him more about the creatures of the Forest and the grounds as well as keeping him occupied doing useful work, rather than leaving him to his own devices for far too many hours a day. And I know your workload has been growing heavier as Silvanus has become more reliant on your assistance to corral the more excitable creatures. So it occurs to me that you might be able to find enough work to occupy an assistant of your own, say...twenty hours a week?"

"No," Hagrid said firmly.

Dumbledore obviously hadn't been expecting that. "No?"

"No. You know I have nothing but the greatest respect for you, Professor — you're a great man, and I owe you everything I have today. But please don't– don't make me look at him every day. He— I can't stand it— Poor little Jamie Potter, being betrayed like he was, and by Lily, too!"

The Headmaster gave his gamekeeper a disappointed sigh. "Hagrid," he chided him, "You cannot mean to hold this poor boy responsible for the sins of his parents."

"No, I don't... It's just... He's the spitting image of that traitor! You have to see it, too! And no, I know that's not his fault, but I can't help thinking on it when I look at him! And he's a vicious little monster in his own right, just like all the rest of them! I don't care if the spider attacked him first — a normal human child wouldn't've been able to fight him off, much less kill him!"

"So I'm a monster because I'm capable of defending myself?" What a load of rubbish.

"No, you're a monster because you're not even sorry! You enjoyed it, just like the rest of your twisted family!"

"Well, of course I'm not sorry!" Harry scoffed. "The stupid thing tried to kill me first! And I'm not going to apologise for that, or for liking how good it feels to not die! Why was the bloody spider even in the Forest in the first place? Acromantulae aren't native to Britain! They're tropical spiders!"

"They're...immigrants," Hagrid said defensively, throwing a shifty look at the Headmaster. "Refugees, like. Aragog's colony was murdered and he got kidnapped by a 'travelling cursebreaker' and sold to some wizard who kept him locked up, milking him for venom until he was big enough to escape. I found him near dead in the countryside days later, hurt and starving. I didn't have the heart to turn him in, the Ministry bastards would've killed him! And he don't deserve that! He never hurt nobody! So I brought him here with me, and when Riddle found out about him and tried to get him executed for killing that girl — he didn't, Riddle probably did it himself, lying shite — Dumbledore was good enough to give him asylum in the Forest!"

"Indeed." Dumbledore sighed. "I did not authorise the acquisition of a mate for him, but I allow them to remain on the condition that he and his family remain within their own territory. So long as they do, they harm no one. If I were to order the execution of every last one of them simply because of their species, I would be no better than them."

He sounded a little defensive about that, Harry thought. Maybe because the spiders, according to the centaurs — Harry had met two in the weeks since his encounter with the now-dead arachnid — claimed the acromantulae weren't staying in their territory, but trying to push outward, at the expense of something called wilderfolk (they were shy, he hadn't met one yet) and the centaurs themselves. Honestly, Harry didn't really blame the spiders — not being allowed to leave one particular area in the Forest was sort of like being trapped in a really big prison cell, or a zoo, or something. But saying they harmed no one was sort of underselling the effect they were having on the ecosystem, according to Ronan and Bianca. They would gladly see every last spider killed, Harry suspected. But Harry hadn't said anything about killing them all, so he wasn't entirely sure why Dumbledore had brought it up.

"O...kay? I wasn't trying to commit spider genocide, or whatever, I didn't kill it because it was a spider, I killed it because it tried to kill me first! I'm not going to apologise for defending myself. If anyone tries to kill me, I'm going to kill them first. And yes, I'm probably going to enjoy it, but who doesn't enjoy winning?"

"It's not a game! The poor little scamp was just acting according to his nature, and now he's dead!"

Harry really didn't get why someone dying would make a competition not a game, but he suspected that was one of those questionably sane demon-child questions he shouldn't ask about. And besides, "I don't suppose it occurred to you that I was acting according to my nature? Oh, wait, no, it did, but I'm a monster. But not the giant, venomous spider."

"You're human! You should know better! Killing people is wrong!" the giant bellowed, glaring down at him.

"Acromantulae are beings, too! Why shouldn't it have known better? Even if it had never seen a human before and had no idea I was a sapient being, it shouldn't have been hunting something as big as me on its own anyway! And—"

"Harry," the Headmaster intervened before Harry could point out that he certainly hadn't known what the spider was at the time. Obviously if he'd realised it was a person trying to kill him, he still would've killed it first, but saying he should know better because Killing People is Wrong was bloody stupid. "Hagrid. Please, calm down."

"But Professor—"

"Hagrid. I know that you are very upset on behalf of your friend. But surely Harry had a right to defend himself. And as for his obvious lack of remorse... I think it is clear that he desperately needs more good, moral influences in his life. That's one of the reasons I want you to take him on as an assistant. Teach him about the Forest and the peoples who live there. Teach him to care for them. People can change, Hagrid, and I've never seen you back down from befriending and taming even the most vicious of creatures out in the Forest." The enormous man was wavering, Harry could tell. So could Dumbledore. He gave him one of those lying, grandfatherly smiles. "Please, Hagrid. Give him a chance. For me."

The giant groaned. "Fine. I'll do it. But if he says or does one thing out of line, if he hurts anyone else, I'm done."

"Is anyone going to ask if I want to spend loads of time with someone who obviously hates me because he assumes that my mother cheated on her husband with his best mate, and said best mate turned around and got them murdered? Both of which are stupid assumptions, by the way. If I were Sirius's son, d'you think he would've set me up to get killed? And you don't know what went on in their bedroom. Maybe James and Sirius really did share everything. Did you ever think of that?"

Harry was guessing neither of them had. They exchanged a look over his head, both of them going rather red behind their whiskers. After a long, awkward pause (for them, Harry refused to find it awkward, especially since none of the people in question were actually his parents), the Headmaster cleared his throat. "Be that as it may—"

He was interrupted by the spell on Fluffy finally wearing off, the dog nearly as confused and terrified to suddenly be growing out of control as it had been to shrink. He gained weight quickly enough Harry barely had time to set him down before he could no longer hold him, and then he had to back away very quickly to avoid getting squished as the puppy danced uncomfortably in place, whining in distress. When it was done, though, he quickly regained the confidence which came from being probably the biggest creature on the grounds (...except maybe the giant squid, Harry guessed), bouncing and barking excitedly like he wanted to play.

"You left the ball, dummy," Harry reminded the dog, drawing its attention and earning him three very large noses poking at him, snuffling as though he might be hiding the football somewhere on his person, and one very large lick, right across the face. "Eugh! Damn it, Central!" he sputtered, trying to fight off the giant tongue. This did nothing but convince the dog that Lick Harry was an excellent new game, the object of which was to pin Harry to the ground and suffocate him with slobber. "No! Stop it! Damn you—"

After several long seconds wherein Harry tried to fight off a giant three-headed dog intent on smothering him with love and Dumbledore and Hagrid just sort of watched, he managed to kick all three heads away long enough to conjure a ball (it wasn't one of his best attempts, distracted as he was, so it wouldn't last long, but it didn't really need to) and hit it with a banishing charm, sending it flying and the dog bounding after it.

Watched and laughed, he realised, finally regaining his feet. "You could have helped me." He glared up at them, trying to regain some shred of dignity. (It was hopeless — his robes and hands and face were sticky with dog drool, and he was sure his hair was messed up worse than Danny's.)

The Headmaster's excuse was, "I find it instructive to see how young people handle problems for themselves, and it didn't seem as though the dog was hurting you..."

Hagrid didn't even bother trying to come up with one. "Well, at least Fluffy likes you," he said, with a judgmental harrumph. "Come back down after dinner, and we'll work out a schedule for you, talk a bit about what you'll be doing, and so on." Then he stumped off to capture the dog without waiting for a response.

So, apparently it didn't matter whether Harry wanted to be an apprentice groundskeeper or not. "Brill. If that's all, Headmaster, I'm going to take a shower."

"Yes, yes, my boy, you may go," the old man said, still chortling.

Harry barely managed to avoid rolling his eyes. He hadn't been so much asking permission to go get cleaned up as taking his leave, but whatever. "Cheers. Good talk..."

Chapter Text

"I would like to put it on the record, Harry, that this is a very bad idea," Danny said, following his roommate up the nearest stair, toward the sound of a terrified, high-pitched shriek and a polluted river stench which had to belong to the troll.

Harry looked back over his shoulder, grinning, said "Noted," and continued on without so much as breaking stride, with the same degree of concern for the fact that he was probably going to get himself killed as he'd had when Quirrell came tearing into the Great Hall shouting about a troll in the dungeons, and the entire Feast had erupted into pandemonium, and they were ordered back to their dorms. Which was to say, none.

He had perked up like a dog scenting a gnome, his entire demeanour taking on a new level of intensity, magic practically crackling in the air around him. "Troll? I want to see a troll! Danny, don't you want to see the troll?"

"What? No, I don't want to— Do you have any idea how dangerous trolls are, Harry? They're huge, like Hagrid-sized, and— Where are you going? Harry? No! We are not going to—"

"Well, you might not be going to try to get a look, but I definitely am," Harry had declared, laughing and slipping away into the crowd toward the nearest side-door out of the Hall.

Danny had wavered for several long seconds, long enough for Prefect Morningstar to shout at him to catch up as they herded everyone toward the main door, torn between trying to catch up with Harry and drag him back up to the Tower and just evacuating himself like a sane person.

Long enough that he saw Professor Quirrell— Who everyone seemed to have forgotten in the chaos, which...what the hell? He'd just fainted, in the middle of the Great Hall! Danny didn't like him, but he still thought maybe the Headmaster or Madam Pomfrey or someone should've checked on him. —crawl out from under a table (so, had he just faked fainting? again, what the hell?) and creep toward the same side-door Harry had taken, looking around furtively in a way that couldn't possibly have been more suspicious if he'd tried, but— Was he using an attention-diverting charm or something? Because no one else seemed to notice. Danny had only noticed because of the little twinge from the Mysterious Sowilo carved into his forehead (because apparently carving runes into the head of her infant son was the sort of lunatic thing Bellatrix had done when she was trying to be nice and protect him) that always happened whenever Quirrell was around (even though Harry insisted that Quirrell was about as threatening as a wet noodle). It was consistent enough Danny had started to look for him reflexively when that happened.

Honestly, that — Quirrell acting all suspicious — decided Danny more than anything. He might not want to get anywhere near a bloody troll, but he did want to know what Quirrell was up to.

He'd run into Harry trying to figure out which way the Defence Professor had gone after he left the Great Hall — apparently the other boy had headed downstairs, but changed his mind because it had "felt wrong" and the troll definitely wasn't in the dungeons. (No, he didn't know how he knew that, because in addition to being bloody mad, Danny's roommate was just sort of weird and...eerie like that.) After Danny explained that he still wasn't looking for the bloody troll, he was following Quirrell because he was being weird, Harry had agreed that investigating the Defence Professor was more important than chasing down a troll, because he definitely believed there was something mysterious and suspicious about the stuttering professor, even if he "clearly" had the killing instincts of a particularly pathetic rabbit or squirrel or something. According to Harry. (Danny thought the fact that he seemed so un-threatening was actually more threatening, somehow, than if he were just a normal Defence Professor...insofar as "normal Defence Professors" existed. Whatever.)

Before they could catch up, though — assuming Harry wasn't just striking off very confidently in a completely random direction, and actually had some way of knowing which way Quirrell had gone — they'd run into Snape, who had told them in no uncertain terms to stop running around like idiots and go back to their Tower, and if he found out they hadn't he was going to revoke Harry's permission to read other shite in Potions for two weeks. Since Harry actually respected Snape, this was apparently a good enough threat to convince Harry that it was better to go back to the Tower than continue hunting for the troll (and/or Quirrel). Danny had thanked the professor profusely and begun dragging Harry back toward Ravenclaw.

But then they'd heard a terrified, blood-curdling shriek from the top of a nearby staircase, and a frustrated bellow, and the thud of very heavy footfalls over their heads, and Harry had apparently decided that he really should have been in Gryffindor — come on, Danny, we have to at least see who that was, they might need help! (Honestly, Danny was pretty sure "they might need help" actually meant "I still want to see a troll, and if I have an excuse that I was helping someone, I might not get in trouble for it.")

"HELP! Oh, God! HELP!" the girl the troll had cornered screamed. Danny hadn't recognised her voice, terrified as she was, but it only took one glimpse of her bushy hair in complete disarray to identify Hermione Granger. She had her wand out, but she clearly didn't know any spells that would help her escape. "Lumax!"

Oh, he took that back, that was actually a good try. An absolutely blinding flash of light appeared between the girl and the troll. The enormous creature — stooping to avoid hitting its small, round head on the ten-foot ceiling, wide enough that it seemed to fill half the corridor, with long arms and short, stumpy legs like a grotesque, hairless gorilla, its lumpy grey skin covered only by a ragged loin-cloth, a large club in one hand — bellowed in pain, thrashing blindly at Granger, who seemed little better off than the troll. Probably hadn't realised quite how bright that charm would be. Closing her eyes definitely wouldn't have been enough to stop her seeing spots through her eyelids — the only reason Danny and Harry weren't as blind as the troll was that it had been in the way, shielding them from the painfully bright spell. She tried to sidle around, get out of the corner it had her backed into, but lost her nerve as a wild swing of the club missed her by inches and scrabbled back, pressing herself into a nook behind a statue of a faun instead.

So basically, she just made it angry, on top of frustrated or hungry or whyever it was chasing her in the first place.

Harry obviously agreed, and equally obviously thought that the thing to do when faced with an enraged troll was to pick a fight with it, because of course he did, he was completely insane!

Honestly, Danny wasn't entirely sure how he felt about his roommate. He wasn't very much like Danny (and everyone else) had expected the Boy Who Lived to be, aside from being sort of terrifyingly good at magic.

Danny was very good at magic — charms came easy to him and metamorphs could explain transfiguration like nobody's business. Dora had taught him so much about her favourite subject that he suspected he could pass an OWL in that subject today, if he had to (at least the written part — some of the OWL transfigurations had a higher initialisation threshold than he could manage) — and Mum had been teaching him since he was seven, so he knew much more than practically everyone else in their year, but Harry had been teaching himself magic — wandless magic — since he was three or four, and had picked up literally everything Danny had shown him within a couple of tries.

Well, everything except sketch animation and light illusions, but that was because he was one of those people who was really bad at seeing things as they were in terms of what's visible right now and how that changed as an object moved, not because he couldn't do the magic. He could do sound illusions just fine.

Danny didn't really know what he had expected from the Boy Who Lived. Maybe for him to be an outgoing, popular bloke? Maybe for him to be a little conceited, fame gone to his head? Probably not the ten-year-old saint from some of the worse Boy Who Lived novels, but he definitely hadn't expected him to be nearly as dark as he was — his magic was colder and sharper than Mum's — or for him to be so hyper all the time. He usually stayed up later than Danny (reading in the dark, because he was also just creepy) and woke up before him.

And he was always doing something. Usually a serious, productive, work-like something. Reading textbooks or practising spells or going to the scary librarian's muggle subjects lessons or exploring or helping the groundskeeper (because Dumbledore had apparently decided that Harry had too much free time on his hands, he basically had twenty hours of non-punishment detention every week just to keep him busy) or writing to Danny's mother and studying all that boring Society shite Mum thought was so important for Danny to know, and Danny bloody well hated. Voluntarily. The closest Danny had seen him come to actually relaxing was reading the Ciardha Monroe novels, and even then, he went and compared them to the Ciardha Monroe journals, because it's sort of an important thing about a society, isn't it, how history is represented for kids, versus what actually happened? And also, how cool was Monroe!

He definitely hadn't expected the Boy Who Lived to have been raised by muggles and basically have known nothing about Magical Britain until a month before he started school, and if he'd known that, he probably wouldn't have expected Harry to go about learning everything he could about their country like it was his job, living alone in Knockturn Alley for that month and interviewing perfect strangers about their work and the government and the best places to go for coffee and if there were magical trains other than the Hogwarts Express, and why.

He hadn't expected Harry to be a pushover, but he really hadn't expected him to be as aggressive as he was. Most of the time he was nice enough. Sort of stand-offish and awkward, sometimes, but not a bully or anything. But Danny had absolutely believed him when he'd said he needed to get out of the Castle before he clawed someone's eyes out, and his reaction when Danny had shown him an illusion of himself unconsciously flaring his aura had been...disturbing, putting him very obviously on edge — tense, like he was ready to jump into a fight at any second. But not anxious about it, excited.

The tiny madman very obviously liked doing dangerous shite just for the thrill of it, and he'd been positively upset there wasn't a Duelling Club anymore because he really, really wanted to learn how to fight with magic. Danny honestly wasn't sure whether he had no sense of self-preservation to speak of, or if he was just that confident that he wasn't really going to be hurt doing whatever stupidly dangerous thing he was doing now. Danny might have expected him to go looking for trouble, but in the sense of ferreting out any mysteries or plots going on around the school (like with Quirrell), not in the sense of spending entire nights out in the Forbidden Forest or playing fetch with a thrice-cursed cerberus, even if it was "just a puppy...a really big puppy" or climbing the walls of the Castle.

Or picking a fight with a half-blind, fully enraged bull mountain troll when he obviously didn't know anything about trolls.

How did Danny know that Harry knew nothing about trolls? Because he threw a chain of cutting curses at its back like a suicidal idiot.

Not only were trolls highly resistant to magic, but they healed stupidly quickly. And since cutting their heads off was one of the few ways to actually kill them, they responded to cutting attacks much more violently than they would to blunt force or fire or even explosions. Everyone who knew anything about trolls knew that.

The troll, still half blinded by Granger's charm, wheeled around, roaring a challenge, making it impossible for Danny to hear himself shouting, "Great job, moron!"

Harry, the madman, let out a little giggle. "You should probably get Granger out of here. Diffindo!"

He had good aim, Danny would give him that. The Severing Charm caught the troll right across the face, purple spell light slicing across its nose between its eyes and taking a chunk out of its right cheek, blood spattering across the nearest wall, to the horror of the few portraits which hadn't already fled. And to get an unpolarised spell to do that much damage to a troll, Harry had probably put enough power into it to cut a human's head in half, which was absolutely ridiculous, especially for a bloody first-year. (Had Danny mentioned lately that his roommate was terrifying?)

It didn't last, though. In the three seconds it took for the troll to identify the tiny, stick-wielding human as the threat and charge, the wound was already closed.

"Go left!" Harry snapped, pushing Danny toward the troll's off side and charging toward the monstrous creature himself, screaming like a banshee, which did serve as a distraction, he guessed. The troll wasn't even looking at him, swinging its club at the tiny, fast-moving target which was Harry Potter.

He ducked around a swipe that would have taken his head off if it had connected and dove between the monster's legs, twisting and rolling into a backward somersault, coming back to his knees with another curse already on his lips, aiming at the spot where he'd just been standing and the club the troll brought down nearly a full second too slowly to catch him, cracking the marble of the floor with the force of the impact. "Thrymmátise!"

The club exploded, foot-long splinters flying in every direction. As with Granger's light charm, the troll caught the worst of it, and about half of the shrapnel flew harmlessly down the empty corridor (or rather, puncturing canvases, toppling suits of armour, and breaking windows, but not directed at any of the three students, at least), but Danny had to cast quickly to shield himself from losing an eye, and he didn't even know what Harry had done to make the deadly wave break around him, rather than turning him into a human pincushion. One of his weird wandless spells, maybe? He followed up by transfiguring a few of the impromptu stakes the troll's healing hadn't already pushed out of its body by the time it stumbled around to face him again into freaking spears, increasing their size by a factor of ten and then banishing them, which was surprisingly effective — two of them punched straight through the beast, staggering it. The third dug deep into its gut, forcing it to pull it out before it could resume its attack.

It slumped to its knees, breathing hard and bleeding freely, but Danny was sure it wasn't done for.

He dragged Granger to her feet and out of her nook. "Come on, let's get out of here before it heals!" She nodded frantically, clinging to his arm, unable to take her eyes off the monster. "Harry! Let's go!"

Harry grinned. "You go. I'll stay and distract it."

"Don't be a bloody idiot!"

"I'm not. If we all go, it will follow us. If I stick around for round two, you can get Granger out of here."

Danny, who had sort of been expecting him to say something like that, came back immediately with, "Or, just throwing it out there, all three of us could head upstairs through one of the little narrow secret passages your new friend there wouldn't fit in if he laid down on his side, and—"

Granger interrupted with a terrified little scream, pointing at the troll hauling itself back to its feet behind Harry, still angry, but now much warier of the tiny wizard. "It's moving! Potter, watch out, it's moving!"

He spun on his heel to throw a Bludgeoning Curse at its face, knocking it back off balance like a sucker-punch to the nose, its tiny skull hitting the wall with a very wooden-sounding crack.

The troll retaliated by throwing a nearby bust at him, which he ducked, sniggering. "So, obviously trolls are resistant to magic, and poking holes in it doesn't seem to stick. Any idea how you kill these things, Danny?"

"Er. Cut its head off?"

"Yeah, okay, that kills most things, I think," Harry scoffed. "But what are its weaknesses? Silver? Cold iron? Probably not wooden stakes, since it's already moving again. Cude!"

The troll bellowed at effectively being punched in the face again, sitting down hard in a puddle of its own blood, obviously a little disoriented.

"Iron," Granger said, nearly automatically, Danny thought. She didn't even really seem to be paying attention to what she was saying (most of her attention was clearly on the blood-covered troll, still reeling from the second Bludgeoning Curse) until he and Harry turned to look at her, somewhat surprised. Then she elaborated, "Bodrik the Trollslayer survived a gladiatorial execution by troll armed with an unenchanted iron short-sword before going on to become one of the leaders of the Twelfth Goblin Rebellion." When both boys continued to stare, she grew red. "Professor Binns just talked about him two lessons ago!"

"You actually listen when Binns talks?" Danny said, completely thrown. That was even weirder than her randomly knowing how to kill a troll.

"Of course I do! He's a professor!"

"Yeah, a dead professor..."

"Don't be such a corporealist, Danny. Ghosts are ex-people, too," Harry snarked, in a fairly passable impression of Blaise, which this was so incredibly not the time for. "So, swords are good, then?"

Granger nodded. "I think so? But..."

"Cude! Yes?" Harry asked, hunting through the wreckage of a suit of armour and coming up with a sword that was approximately as long as he was tall.

"But that sword's bigger than you are, and it's for display," Danny pointed out. "It's not sharp. Please, I'm begging you, let's just run?"

"That's what Featherweight Charms are for, and it is now," Harry shot back, casting the charm in question, then running a hand down the length of the blade, edges growing razor sharp in the wake of a silent, wandless charm, as though this was no more difficult than sharpening his quill. (Maybe it wasn't. A lot of the time, watching Harry do magic, Danny had to wonder how much magic really followed the rules everyone thought it did, and how much was just that they thought some things should be harder than others, so they were. Maybe it really wasn't any harder to levitate an X-wing than it was a rock, they all just needed a tiny weirdo who did magic like he breathed and might actually be an elf of some sort to point that out to them.) "You can run, but I'm staying. This is fun."

(Of course, the Yoda comparison broke down as soon as Harry opened his mouth and made it impossibly clear that he wasn't a wise spiritualist sage who had come to understand the fundamental truths of magic through the Power of Zen, but in fact an impulsive, danger-addicted lunatic who rushed headlong into fights with trolls and managed ridiculous feats of magic through the Power of Ignoring the Rules.)

"Fun?!" Granger echoed shrilly. "Are you completely mad?!"

"Yes, he is. You're insane, Harry."

The madman grinned, categorically not denying it. "That may be a significant factor in why it's fun. Doesn't mean it's not."

"Do you even know how to use a sword?" Danny was pretty sure he didn't.

"Er. I think it's pretty self-explanatory, really? I'm not exactly fighting Inigo Montoya here. Now, if you'll excuse me..."

The troll had shaken off the effects of the Bludgeoning Curse more quickly that time, and rather than immediately attacking, it ripped the nearest door off its hinges to use as a shield. And/or flyswatter.

It clearly realised that the sucker-punch that kept hitting it in the face was related to that bolt of blue energy, catching the next one on the door, which was not resistant to magic, but constructed of solid hardwood planks which took no more damage from the curse than the troll's small, rock-like head had.

Harry, accordingly, gave up on the Bludgeoning Curses, instead throwing an illusion of fire behind the troll to drive it out into the middle of the corridor where Harry would have more room to dance around it.

And dance was the only word to describe the fight which ensued, the boy ducking and spinning and sliding around the bloody marble, laughing and throwing the occasional slice or stab at the poor troll's hamstrings and arse.

Poor troll was also accurate, because the troll was very clearly outmatched — slow and clumsy and injured (it had lost a lot of blood, even if the actual wounds had healed, and healing like that had to be tiring, too). Harry was far more mobile. The match-up reminded Danny a bit of a grown man attempting to swat a little yappy, ankle-biting dog with a cricket bat. Not that he'd ever actually seen a grown man try to swat a yappy-dog with a cricket bat, but.

Danny didn't know about Granger, but he was suddenly finding it a bit difficult to be scared of the troll, now that it was a good way down the corridor, its attention fully occupied by Harry. Somehow, neither of them pulled the other away to safety, both transfixed by the sheer absurdity of the fight. Which was why they were still standing there when the Headmaster, along with Professors Flitwick and McGonagall came charging out of a nearby passage, guided by a furious portrait of a mounted knight, galloping through the now-empty frames with his lance in hand. All three of them had their wands out, but all three of them were (at least briefly) as shocked by the scene as Danny.

Then Professor McGonagall shouted, "Potter! What on Earth do you think you're doing?!"

The troll capitalised on Harry's distraction at hearing his name shouted by a very familiar, very disapproving voice, finally managing to make contact and whacking him halfway across the corridor. He hit the wall hard, crumpling to the floor, hopefully unconscious and not dead.

Then the professors sent a trio of stunning spells at the troll, the three spells together enough to overwhelm its resistance and knock it out.

Danny didn't really consciously decide to run to his roommate's side, he just sort of found himself kneeling there, desperately searching for a pulse.

Before he found one, Harry groaned, his eyes fluttering open, their pupils different sizes (not good...). "Ow. Wha'append?"

"You got batted across the corridor by the troll, what do you think happened, you lunatic?"

The other boy just blinked at him, as though his words made no sense (also not good...). Before he could come up with a response, Professor Flitwick bounded over to check on him as well.

"Oh, dear! Oh, dear! Mister Potter, what in Godric Gryffindor's name were you thinking?" he exclaimed, casting a bevy of healing analysis charms Danny recognised, but couldn't cast or interpret himself.

It was probably a rhetorical question, but Harry apparently didn't realise that. "'Ooh, fun?' Now 'm thinking I should lie down..."

"You are lying down," Danny reminded him. Well, he was crumpled into a pile of limbs on the floor, at least. Trying to move him hadn't seemed like the best idea, just in case he hadn't been dead but his back was broken or something.

"Bed. Sleep," he groaned, straightening out his legs and back to actually lie down, fingers fluttering over his torso, poking at his ribs and occasionally wincing.

"My goodness, Mister Potter, don't move!" their Head of House exclaimed. "Just lie still, I'll levitate you to the Hospital Wing as soon as Albus and Minerva get that nasty thing out of the way!"

"Hospital? Don'eed an hospital, 'm fine, really..." He waved the professor away and attempted to sit up to prove it, only to be immobilised for his trouble. Danny could tell he really wasn't okay because he just seemed confused about why his arms and legs suddenly wouldn't move, rather than seriously annoyed.

"You have a concussion, Mister Potter! I'm afraid you will need to spend the night in Madam Pomfrey's care so she can monitor your condition while you recover."

"But what about the Revel?" he asked plaintively. "I said I would go, and—"

"Mate, that's only about five hours from now," Danny reminded him. He wouldn't be in any state to go even if they would let him just go back to their room, rather than having Madam Pomfrey watch him all night.

"I know. Plenty of time for a nap. An' my ribs are only cracked, back's not hurt, I can walk, get off me..."

"How is he, Filius?" the Headmaster asked, vanishing the blood from the floor and repairing the marble slab the troll had broken as he made his way over to them.

"I'm fine," Harry insisted, before Professor Flitwick could answer. "A few cracked ribs, bump on the head. Bruises. Can't move, but that's magic. Lemme up, Professor."

"He has a concussion. I'm taking him to Poppy."

"Nooo... I'm fine, really, I don't need— Just let me take a nap and I can still go to the Revel, just—"

"Hush, my boy," Dumbledore said, in what was probably supposed to be a reassuring way.

Danny thought it sounded a bit patronising, and Harry obviously agreed, glaring at him. "Not your boy, Sir."

The old wizard ignored him. "I'm sorry, Harry, but I'm afraid you will not be fit to attend the Revel tonight."

"Fit enough! I wanna go!"

"Out of the question."

"But—"

"No, Harry, they're right. I'll tell Blaise and Theo what happened. They'll understand. We'll tell you all about it when Pomfrey lets you out."

"You don't understand! I said I would go, and I can, so I have to. Let me up!" he demanded, eyes flashing with frustration, the flare of magic breaking whatever charm Flitwick had used to immobilise him.

"Mister Potter!" their Head of House objected.

"I'm sorry, dear boy, but we really cannot allow you to run off unsupervised in your current state," Dumbledore said, not sounding very sorry at all. Almost before the words were out of his mouth, a Sleeping Charm settled over Harry, forcing him into unconsciousness.

Chapter Text

Hermione Granger was an odd duck, in Harry's opinion.

He was aware that it might seem, on the surface, to be a bit hypocritical, him calling anyone else an odd duck, but honestly, that he was a bloody freak himself obviously meant he knew weird when he saw it.

And Granger was weird, so obsessed with following the rules and paying attention in lessons and volunteering to answer questions like she wanted everyone to know how smart she was, but also getting offended when her dormmates called her a know-it-all. In different circumstances, he thought they might actually be friends — she was definitely one of the cleverest kids in their class, and pretty much the only other person who really seemed to appreciate how freaking cool magic was and wanted to learn as much as she possibly could — but in their actual circumstances, he mostly found her annoying as hell.

Again, not something he really had any room to complain about, he annoyed people all the time, sometimes just because it was funny, but more often just by being too awake or asking questions they didn't know how to answer or being too good at shite without having to work at it like they did. But he was pretty sure he was as entitled to find certain things annoying as anyone else, and at the top of his list of annoyances was people who insisted that he was wrong about something he definitely wasn't wrong about, because they had read a book and thought that made them the bloody expert in the room.

Well, at the top of the list was people who accused him of lying when he wasn't, but people who were loudly wrong about objective reality, and insisted that demonstrably true and correct things weren't, were a close second.

He and Granger had gotten off on a bad foot, what with Harry preemptively ditching her and the rest of the Muggleborn Shopping Group, and then she'd been so smug about being Professor McGonagall's favourite, he'd decided he really didn't like her much, either. The thing that really decided it was her going so far as to attempt to lecture Harry and Danny about the importance of participating in lessons and respecting their teachers in the library after they walked out of their fourth Transfiguration lesson.

She hadn't taken it well when Harry informed her that lessons were for people who could actually learn something from them, and that he didn't think getting a specific job made one automatically worthy of respect, and especially not when they weren't even very good at that job. McGonagall hadn't actually taught anything in three quarters of their lessons to that point, and had just that day admitted that she was exploiting Hermione's desire to show off to get out of helping their peers figure out the lesson she clearly hadn't taught very well. She also hadn't appreciated him warning her that she was exactly the sort of person who would be one of Uncle Vernon's favourite employees — the reliable sort who would work their arses off for the occasional gruff good job, Granger, keep that up and you'll go far around here and a pat on the back, rather than a raise or a promotion or any actual respect.

("You'll go far around here" was middle-management-speak for you're going to die in a dead-end job you hate, doing three other people's work for less money than the bloke in the next cube and thinking that being valuable to the company means the company values you as a person. Dudders was under strict orders to immediately demand a promotion if he was ever told "you'll go far around here," and tender his resignation if they didn't give it to him. Harry really didn't think Dudley was really in any danger of becoming useful enough that someone could take advantage of him like that, but it had seemed worth remembering for himself.)

That had gone over almost as poorly as pointing out that he'd actually saved the Shopping Group two hours they otherwise would have spent waiting for him to be fitted for clothes and find his wand, even taking into account that they'd waited half an hour for him when they'd said they wouldn't. It wasn't his fault Hermione's new favourite professor was an unreliable flake who apparently couldn't follow through on her own plans.

After that, before Samhain, Harry had been fairly certain that Granger hated him. He didn't mind, it wasn't as though she could really do anything to him or even challenge him in any meaningful way. But he certainly hadn't expected her to start trying to talk to him after two months of disapproving glares and unsubtle attempts to show him up in Transfiguration and Defence (which were their only shared lessons other than History), which were sort of ridiculous, since Professor McGonagall hated him and Professor Quirrel never asked them questions or taught them spells or anything, just made them read the textbook one paragraph at a time, going around the room or lectured at them (which Harry refused to listen to, but he wrote all the important shite on the slate anyway, so it was fine), so all she could do there was try to look smart asking questions, annoying the professor as much as anyone else.

And honestly, if all she was going to do was tell him that he couldn't do a thing she'd literally seen him do, like sharpen a sword with the same totally-not-accidental magic he'd been using to sharpen pencils since he was eight and quills since he'd come here, he'd rather go back to not talking to her at all.

"That's not how anything works, Harry! That sword was made of steel, and it's much larger than a pencil, and it's been a week and it's still sharp so it can't have been a transfiguration, but the actions you would need to sharpen them are different!"

"So?"

"So, it's not a simple charm, either!"

He knew that, actually. Charms were pretty much all energy transformations when it came down to it, turning magic into heat or light or whatever. Even telekinesis was sort of the same, with physical force or kinetic energy or something. The sharpening spell felt different to cast. He probably could do it with telekinesis, shaping the metal deliberately step by step, but that would be slower and more complicated and easier to mess up than just...wanting the end product, and making the sword want it, too, and letting magic take care of exactly how to make it happen. "I was eight when I came up with that spell! I didn't know what charms or transfigurations were!"

"That doesn't mean you can just ignore— It has to have been one or the other! All wizardry can be broadly categorised as one or the other! It's in Magical Theory!"

"I didn't know what wizardry was, either."

"Well, I didn't see you brewing a potion at it! It had to be some kind of wizardry!"

"There are complex charms, Granger," Blaise volunteered, far too amused. "And spells which have both charm and transfiguration elements."

"I really don't think Harry managed to come up with an advanced spell like that, on his own, wandlessly, when he was eight, Zabini!"

"Look, I don't know what to tell you, Granger. Obviously it's possible, you saw me do it!"

"But how did you do it?"

"I already told you! I just reminded the sword that it was meant to be sharp! Look, have you read So You Want to Be a Wizard? It's sort of like that."

"No, I've never heard of it. What is it? It sounds like an introductory theory text. Does the library have a copy?"

"Probably not." Harry shrugged. "It's muggle fiction, so." The Hogwarts library did have a pretty solid muggle literature section, but it was mostly classics, things Madam Pince would have her study groups read, and similar stuff, not fantasy novels.

The girl looked absolutely outraged. "Fiction? You got a spell out of a storybook? And it worked?!"

"Er, no. The magic in the story is more like runes. I got the idea from the book, defining a thing and convincing it that it's something else or that there's something different about it, and made it work with...normal magic."

"Swords. aren't. sentient," Granger snapped, scowling. Harry would be shocked if there weren't sentient swords out there in the world somewhere — Hogwarts had a sentient, mind-reading Hat, after all — but that particular sword hadn't been, so he didn't bother making a point of it. "How can you possibly have convinced it or reminded it of anything?"

"Er...magic?"

Granger made a frustrated little growl under her breath. "Of course it's magic! Are you being dense on purpose?"

Harry glared at her. "I'm not being dense, you're the one who keeps asking stupid questions!"

"They aren't stupid questions, if you'd just answer them—"

"Hi, sorry to interrupt, Granger," Danny drawled, dropping into the empty chair beside Harry. They were supposed to be working on their Transfiguration essay for the week. Blaise didn't normally do homework with them, but McGonagall had marked them down for putting in shite that wasn't in the textbook last week, so he was here to stop Danny from putting in anything too advanced. "But I could hear you all the way down at the end of the history section, so maybe be annoyed with Harry a little more quietly if you don't want to get kicked out."

The girl looked around as though Madam Pince might jump out of the stacks or something — which was silly, if she were anywhere near here, she already would have told them off for being too loud. "Well, I'm sorry," she sort of...whisper-yelled. "But your friend is being ridiculous and trying to annoy me on purpose—" He wasn't, actually. "If you don't want to tell me, just say so!"

"I have told you! Multiple times, now! It's not my fault you refuse to believe me!"

"It's not my fault your answer makes no sense!"

"It probably is, actually," Blaise offered. "You've known about formal magic for what, three and a half months? And you've only read a couple of theory books — introductory theory books aimed at school kids. I bet you anything they're super over-simplified. Just because Harry doesn't have the words to describe the magic in technical terms doesn't mean that he's not answering your question."

"Er. What exactly are we talking about?" Danny asked, eyes flitting around the table.

"How Harry used a pencil-sharpening spell to sharpen that sword," Blaise explained. "He says he just convinced it that it should be sharp, but Granger insists that makes no sense because it's not a charm or a transfiguration, and all wizardry is one or the other. Or both, sometimes, but that's probably too complicated for even Harry to have figured out on his own, without a wand, at the age of eight."

"Oh." Danny blinked at Granger for a moment. "I've been thinking about that, too. I wrote to my mum, and she says it probably wasn't wizardry. It was...well, a transformation ritual, basically. But without all the usual ritual window-dressing."

"Oh, right," Blaise said. "That makes sense." Harry...didn't think he was being sarcastic.

"I don't think it is..." The only ritual magic Harry knew much about was potions, and it hadn't felt like that at all. "I didn't think you cast ritual magic like that."

Danny shrugged. "I think whatever you cast was basically just you communicating your intent to Magic — technically speaking, altering the fundamental identity of the sword to define it as sharp. And the energetic cost of making that little alteration, I guess — ritual magic does still have some cost. But Magic followed through on that intent without you channelling the energy involved in...resolving the universal inconsistency, was the phrase Mum used, sort of like a transfiguration reverts on its own. Actually, pretty much exactly how a transfiguration reverts on its own: you just changed what it should be to make the unsharpened state it was in technically the altered state, and it reverted to being sharp. The energy of the spell, meaning the realisation of your intent — the reversion to sharpness, not the intermediate step of redefining the sword's identity — came from outside of yourself, which makes it witchcraft, not wizardry. Definitely the sort of thing an eight-year-old could discover accidentally, and from your perspective it would be practically exactly the same focusing it on a pencil or a sword."

"Oh. Well, there you go, then, Granger." Though that did raise the question of why people didn't just do that all the time instead of bothering with transfiguration. It seemed much more efficient, and didn't revert (re-revert?), so...

"But... But that's absurd!"

Danny scoffed. Blaise giggled. Harry glared at them, but that didn't stop his roommate pointing out, "Yes, this is Harry Potter, I could have sworn you'd met..." or his best friend drawling, "And here I thought you were clever, Granger — haven't you noticed, yet? Harry's always absurd."

"Oh, piss off, you wankers. I am not always absurd."

"Yes, you are."

"The fact that you actually believe that is only more evidence for your inherent absurdity," Blaise agreed.

"I hate you both," Harry informed them.

"If that were really a thing, I think we would just do that instead of transfiguring things," Granger said, somehow managing to sound superior and condescending basically asking a question Harry had just been wondering about himself.

"Oh, it's a thing," Blaise assured her. "It's just not a thing you can really teach. Look up wish-magic." Granger actually whipped out her day-planner and jotted down a note. "It's also called performative magic, blood magic, or a pre-Merlinean ritualistic expression of will. You won't find anything associated with those names, but there are probably some non-restricted books on childhood magical development that talk about it, because a lot of little kids stumble across it, but grow out of it the same way they grow out of imaginary friends. People who don't usually fall into communicating with a few particular aspects their souls resonate with — gods, basically — and end up being instinctive ritualists, or turn out to be Seers and develop personal aspects — more developed imaginary friends, essentially — to mediate between their perception and literally the entire universe."

"Yeah, okay, but I didn't really ask any sort of consciousness or aspect or whatever to do it, I just...willed it to happen."

"Well, the other option is that you actually invented a spell which somehow directly and permanently alters the fundamental identity of an object, and quite frankly, that's terrifying, so I'd go with the wish-magic explanation if I were you," Danny advised him. "Not that wish-magic isn't sort of potentially scary powerful, but it's much less likely to go wrong than explicitly fiddling around with fundamental identities yourself."

"Er..." Honestly, Harry wasn't really sure what the difference would be, but willing a sword (or pencil or quill) to be sharp, reminding it of a quality which it used to have but had lost over time, didn't seem like it had that much potential to go wrong, even if he had done it 'directly' and 'explicitly' rather than asking Magic to do it for him...which he really didn't think he had? Maybe if he were trying to will it to have a quality that it didn't already 'know' or if he were trying to do it on an animate object, or like a person, or— Well, another person would probably resist it, like it was way harder to cast a transfiguration on another person, but on himself... "Is that how metamorphy works?"

Danny and Blaise exchanged a somewhat disturbed look.

"What's metamorphy?" Granger asked.

"Super awesome shapeshifting talent thing," Harry explained. "Danny's older sibling is a metamorph. What is that look? Am I right? Do you think I could will myself to be taller?"

"Probably not," Danny said, a little too quickly.

"How much you want to bet that's how Dru hasn't aged in like three decades, though?" Blaise sounded positively unnerved.

"Who?"

"Danny's estranged grandmother. So we have one vote I hope not, but probably yes, and one that definitely sounds like a thing people can do, is what I'm hearing?"

"Um, no, you're hearing one oh, gods, my roommate's going to kill himself trying to do something terminally absurd, and one that is definitely not a thing normal people can do. If Druella can, it's probably because she's actually a metamorph — she does have a grandchild who's a metamorph, it's not out of the question."

That didn't actually make it less likely that Harry could do it, though. Technically, Dora was his first cousin — if there really was a gene for metamorphy, he could have it too. Danny just didn't know that. "Okay, but setting the whole Druella thing aside, there theoretically isn't a reason I can't try to convince my body I'm not a midget, is there? Because being the shortest person in our year sucks."

Danny groaned. "Please don't fuck around with your own fundamental identity, Harry. You'll probably end up vanishing your femurs or something."

"Don't be ridiculous, trying to make my femurs longer would just make me oddly proportioned. I'd probably have to..." Well, he'd probably have to make all of his leg bones longer, and if he didn't want his torso to be weirdly short, all of his vertebrae, too, and then that would probably affect all of the muscles that were attached to those bones, and he didn't know nearly enough about human anatomy to try it, especially since tallness wasn't a thing his body was already familiar with. Like, not ageing, just reminding every part of himself of what it was yesterday, that would be easy — well, not easy, it'd probably be horribly complicated, there were probably billions, maybe trillions of cells in a body, but sort of the same as with the sword, it had been sharp — but trying to make himself taller would be adding something new...or maybe re-defining a lot of different things like lengths of specific bones instead of just one...or maybe trying to write in more cells where there weren't any already? or maybe they'd just appear like his current state was a transfiguration with integrated banishing? or would that end up like an integrated conjuration? Clearly this was why metamorphy was so cool, they just did this without thinking about it (they had to, Harry was pretty sure). "Actually, worst case scenario, I might accidentally disintegrate myself. I'll practise on squirrels or something first."

Granger just sort of stared at him like he was taking the piss. Blaise started sniggering uncontrollably.

"I'm serious, Blaise." ("I know, that's why it's funny...") "Danny, can you write to Dora and ask what happens to her mass when she grows or shrinks? Like, do individual cells vanish, or— Oh! Do they all just get smaller, like proportionally, increasing in density?"

Danny groaned again, letting his head fall to the table. "Can we just write that essay for McGonagall and pretend we didn't have this conversation?"

"If you promise to write to Dora for me."

"You could just write to Dora yourself," Blaise suggested.

"Yes, because it would be so very normal to write someone I've never even met out of the blue with twenty questions about their awesome shapeshifting superpower and how that actually works on a technical level, because I'd prefer not to look like a child until I'm thirty, thanks very much."

"Oh, don't tell me you'd leave out asking whether they actually got that rematch at Morgenstern's and at least three pages of gleeful fanboy-ing over their general awesomeness," Blaise smirked. "Harry has a crush on Danny's older sister," he told Granger, which wasn't true, he hadn't even met her and she was an adult, and his first cousin...she was just also quite possibly the most awesome person he'd ever heard of.

"Piss off, I do not," Harry snapped, feeling his face growing red. "Don't tell people that."

"You do so. And being adorable when you're embarrassed is really not giving me any incentive to not tell everyone that."

Harry compromised on not dignifying that with a response and telling Blaise to do something anatomically unfeasible by flipping him off.

"I'm...just going to go," Granger said awkwardly, shouldering the enormous bookbag she'd let fall to her feet to take notes on wish-magic, and also probably because it was going to give her scoliosis if she kept carrying it. Honestly, he knew there were a lot of stairs between Gryffindor Tower and...practically anything, he got bringing all her books down with her, but learn a bloody Featherweight Charm, Granger...

"No, stay!" Danny offered, apparently impulsively.

The Gryffindor know-it-all paused, unwontedly surprised. "But you obviously don't need my help with your essay, so...why?"

"Well, see, I'm a selfish jerk. I just don't want to be left alone with these lunatics." That managed to tease a small, reluctant smile from the girl. "Unless you had other plans, I guess."

"Oh, well...I already wrote my essay, but I was just going to read until dinner. I guess I could do that here..." she suggested hesitantly.

"Or you could learn a Featherweight Charm. Well, I guess you can't do that here, but we can go find a classroom or something. But seriously, my back is hurting just looking at you."

"Isn't that a second-year charm?" she asked disapprovingly, though she did sit down, pulling a heavy-looking leather-bound tome out of her bag. "Professor Flitwick told us not to work ahead."

Yeah, well, he hadn't seen her complaining when he used it on the recently sharpened sword to make it easier to swing, had he? "Is it?"

Danny nodded.

Harry shrugged. "I found it in Spelman's over the summer. And Professor Flitwick advised us not to work ahead. I considered that advice and decided that the advantages of not being bored to tears and learning useful magic outweigh...honestly, practically any other factors."

"But what if you flub a spell and it blows up in your face? Or worse — magical backlash sounds terrible. I read that you can become a squib if you mess something up too badly!"

"Magical backlash sort of feels like getting a migraine and being slightly electrocuted," Danny informed them. "It's not fun, but it won't kill you. And burnout is a thing, but you'd have to be doing geomantic tapping or trying to harness lightning or something to accidentally overchannel that badly."

"And honestly? You'll probably literally immolate yourself first," Blaise added, making Granger's eyes go hilariously wide. "Flitwick just doesn't want us getting into bad habits we have to un-learn later."

"Well, that's a good reason, too."

"No, it's not," Harry scoffed. "The entire curriculum is learning bad habits and then un-learning them."

"What!"

"Volume, Granger," Danny reminded her. "Harry thinks it makes more sense to conceptualise the most advanced form of a spell even if you don't want to activate all of the functions at this point, rather than building up to the most complicated version of, for example, a Hover Charm."

"Why would anyone want a spell that only makes an object hover in place? It's completely useless."

"No it's not!" Granger insisted, before he could add that six directional forces was not the most complicated version of a Hover Charm by a long shot. "Understanding how a single physical force works on an object is a key first step in developing more complex motion charms! It was in Chapter Four."

"Exactly! Making people think there's only one force at work is going to make it really bloody hard to figure out how to move things around when we eventually get that far, because really we should be thinking of it as two forces — the spell energy and gravity working together to keep the object at whatever point — and since we exist in three dimensions, there's really no reason not to at least keep it in mind that there are potential directions we could apply force from all around it."

Danny glowered at him. "You are literally the only person who thinks that making things six times more complicated off the mark is easier than building up to it, Harry. Literally."

"I literally do not see how you can possibly think it's easier to learn how to do something in a series of successively less-wrong ways before finally having it explained what you're really trying to do. How can you try to do something without understanding it and how it relates to...everything else? I mean, I know how you physically do it, just follow the directions and a thing happens, but how does it not drive you insane just blindly following the directions and not really knowing what you're doing?"

Blaise sniggered. "I don't think you can blame the fact that you're insane on people expecting you to learn how to do basic, first-year charms without explaining NEWT-level magical theory first."

"It's a contributing factor," Harry groused.

"I hope you appreciate the irony of insisting on knowing how charms work, and not being able to explain how your sword sharpening spell works," Granger noted.

"It's not the same. I know what I want to happen, I don't need to know all the intermediate details. Not for that kind of magic, at least. The real problem with lessons is... It's that it's all supposed to be building up to bigger things, but they don't explain things with that in mind, or what specifically it's doing, and knowing what you want to happen isn't enough if what you want to happen is an intermediate step in something else."

The girl sniffed. "Well, that still isn't a good reason to go off learning spells on your own. You're only more likely to be thinking about them wrong if you don't even let Professor Flitwick explain them first."

"But if I'm learning spells that are useful enough to be an end in and of themselves, it doesn't matter if I'm doing them 'right' for some other purpose down the line, it just matters that I'm not going to grow up deformed because I dragged all my books down here too, but my bag doesn't actually weigh half as much as I do." Granger glowered at him, sort of hilariously. "If I have to learn how to think about it differently to build into another spell down the line, this wasn't a complete waste of time. Whereas learning a Hover Charm to start thinking about magic in the right way to do more complicated motion charms is the entire point, so oversimplifying it like that is a complete waste of time."

Granger was clearly tempted, and why wouldn't she be? There was no good reason not to learn the spell, and books were heavy. "I'll think about it."

Harry smirked. "The incantation is pondus plumae ad huic attribuo. That's just being poetic, it only halves the weight of the object, but you can cast it three or four times on the same thing without any interference. And you can drop the ad huic attribuo after you get it down."

"Great. Can we actually write our essay, now?" Blaise asked. "Because Daphne wanted to do something this afternoon."

Danny, who had been scribbling away for some minutes, looked up long enough to see and smirk at Harry's response to, "The trick to doing homework with Harry is to ignore everything he says. Otherwise you'll end up spending two hours talking about the bloody Philosopher's Stone or breeding habits of nifflers or something else that has nothing to do with astronomy," which was to stick his tongue out at him. That had only happened...okay, four times, now. With astronomy.

"I can focus! Look, this is me, focusing! Un-transfiguration. Two methods. Reminding the needle that it is in fact a matchstick—" Because even though they had eventually moved on to other spells, Harry still found it funny to refer to all pre-transfiguration objects as "matchsticks" and all post-transfiguration objects as "needles" in his essays. "—which causes the spell to revert faster, and— We are allowed to admit that the Basic Wand Movements are a thing now, right?"

"I think we sort of have to if we're going to talk about two distinct methods."

"Yes," Blaise confirmed. "But the two methods are supposed to be controlled reversion with the Basics, and re-transfiguring the object to the original form."

Danny glared at him. "That's not un-transfiguration, that's re-transfiguration. It's completely different and only works if you know what the object was originally. The second one is stimulating the fundamental identity of the object with a Reversion Spell, which creates destructive interference and causes the transfiguration to become unbalanced and revert immediately, rather than waiting for it to destabilise on its own."

"Hey, I'm just telling you what McGonagall said in lessons."

"Fine. Gods, I hate that woman." He crossed out most of what he'd already written.

Harry just sliced the inch he'd already written off his scroll. Yes, he would have to re-copy it anyway, trying to make it legible, but he might as well start from scratch, since he hadn't written anything correct yet. When he felt he'd answered the question (and now just needed to fluff out the compare-and-contrast part of the essay, which was honestly the bulk of the foot and a half, it didn't take that much page-space to define the two methods, even with handwriting as messy as his), he decided to take a break.

"So, what are you reading?" he asked Granger.

"It's been five minutes, Harry," Blaise groaned, as though that wasn't plenty of time to work on a bloody transfiguration essay before doing something less boring.

Danny, even as annoyed as he still very clearly was with McGonagall, let out a little puff of laughter. "See what I mean?"

(Harry flipped him off.)

Chapter Text

After that, Granger started hanging around them more often, despite, Harry was pretty sure, not actually liking any of them very much. He sort of suspected that she was hanging around for the same reasons he hung out with people — boredom, and adults were less likely to make concerned noises about you maybe one day blowing up the school if you appeared to have friends — though Blaise said it was because everyone else found her completely insufferable and she liked that they didn't only talk to her when they wanted her help with their homework...though that was really just because none of them wanted her help with homework. It wasn't like she ever had anything new and interesting to contribute, like Danny, Blaise, and Theo. Even Harry had learned a lot of stuff that was tangentially related to Potions and Herbology from books Snape had recommended, and Astronomy (and Geomancy) from looking up random stuff he heard about in the NEWT lessons he'd kept sitting in on because what else was he going to do at five in the morning? (And Sinistra still didn't have the heart to kick him out.)

Granger only ever put the things they learned in lessons in her homework, which was, as far as Harry was concerned, boring. In his opinion, her biggest contribution to their little friend-group was that she spoke French. Danny, Blaise, and Theo also spoke French, obviously, because it was the big international magical language, but it was a second language for all of them (third for Blaise, he'd learned Italian first). Theo's accent was terrible (he could read it much better than he spoke it), and the Tonkses barely ever spoke French at home, since Mister Tonks preferred English. Granger's father's mother was French and her father had grown up in France, so her parents had decided to raise her bilingually, which was really cool, and she was bossy enough to correct every little mistake he made trying to practise (which was annoying, but useful), while the boys generally wouldn't bother if they could tell what he meant to say.

Well, that and it annoyed Draco that they let her hang out with them. (For some god-unknown reason even Blaise couldn't satisfactorily explain.) Since Draco kept coming up with excuses to put off their duel (Harry being recently and unnecessarily hospitalised after his encounter with the troll; attending school quidditch matches; their upcoming Potions exam, which he claimed to really need to study for; and most recently, having a head cold), anything that annoyed him was, in Harry's opinion, a good thing. Turnabout was fair play, after all, and his continued teasing was really annoying Harry. If he was going to chicken out, he should just say so and be done with it!

He hadn't really realised, though, that Draco being annoyed that Hermione was associating with them translated to Draco picking on Hermione when she wasn't hanging out with them. Yes, he knew the pointy blond jerk was giving her shite when he saw her sitting with them in the Library — less often, now that they'd commandeered an empty storeroom to use as a private study area, entirely so they could practise magic as well as doing their reading and writing essays — and Blaise had mentioned he tried to make digs at her in the corridor before and after Potions (which was the only lesson Gryffindor and Slytherin had together), but he hadn't known his least favourite cousin was going out of his way to corner the bookish muggleborn, for example, after dinner, on the third floor, where she'd clearly been minding her own business (that did occasionally happen), heading back up to Gryffindor. (Or possibly Ravenclaw — Danny had told her about the door-riddle system, and she didn't get on with her roommates any better than she did with anyone else, so she liked to hang out in their Common Room sometimes.)

And he definitely hadn't realised that Draco, who generally struck Harry as a cowardly little tit who wouldn't dare actually throw a hex at him and clearly didn't want to have that duel at all because Harry would definitely beat him like a drum, they both knew it, would actually throw a hex at Granger, either. Maybe it should have — Granger had about the same level of aggressive killer instinct about her as Professor Quirrell, even a mediocre coward like Draco was probably safe from any retaliation beyond her running to tell a teacher — but Harry just had a hard time seeing him as any sort of a threat. (He did still want to have that duel, but more because Draco was being an annoying little shit about it than because he thought it would be a good fight.)

He would probably have a hard time seeing him as a threat if he were in Granger's position, actually. Draco, Vinnie, and Greg had blocked her in with her back to the wall of a corridor, Draco holding her at wandpoint. Greg had taken her bookbag and was throwing shite on the floor while Draco nattered on about how dirty mudbloods like her shouldn't go trying to show up real wizards in lessons and being bloody know-it-alls when they didn't know anything, really.

Her eyes were red, her hands swollen from a stinging jinx — Theo had shown Harry that one, it felt like sticking your hand in a nest of fire ants (which Harry had actually done once, on a dare) and made it pretty impossible to use your wand, if she could even get it out of her pocket with sausage-fingers. Wouldn't stop him from whaling on Draco if he were her, but again, Granger was about as threatening as a frizzy-haired pudding.

"Pretty sure she doesn't have to try to show you up in lessons, Malfoy," he drawled, thumbs tucked casually into the pockets of his robes. "But maybe you're not a real wizard. I was under the impression that real wizards keep their word, and you keep ducking that duel you owe me."

He spun around on his heel, falling into a defensive position, like he thought Harry was going to hex him in the back. (He wouldn't, it wouldn't be sporting.) "Potter! Piss off, this has nothing to do with you!"

"I'm sure I could come up with an excuse for it to have something to do with me. Probably something about dicklicks who go around calling muggleborns 'mudbloods' are breaking the Truce, and it's everyone's responsibility to help them get back to licking dicks instead. Though I guess I could claim you're harassing my muggleborn client. That's better grounds for a duel than you making an arse out of yourself assuming I was some nobody muggleborn girl on the train."

"Oh, client is she — your little mudblooded know-it-all girlfriend, more like! Just like your father, aren't you? Think it runs in the family, fancying mudbloods?"

"I don't fancy Granger, but if I did, it'd be better than fancying Pug-Face," Harry sniggered. He let the comment about his 'mum' being a mudblood slide, because, well...so what? For one thing, Lily Evans wasn't actually his mum, and for another, what did it matter if she'd been muggleborn? She'd also been a crazy dangerous battlefield ritualist and a hard bitch who would definitely use her kid as bait to blow up a dark lord, and also very pretty. Harry would question James Potter's priorities if he didn't think she was fanciable.

"I don't fancy Pansy!" Draco snapped, over Vinnie braying with laughter and taunting Granger — "Hear that, Granger? Potter thinks you're just as insufferable as everyone else!" (As with Dudders and Piers, Harry suspected that Vinnie might actually be the better bully, despite clearly taking his lead from Draco.)

"She's not nearly as insufferable as that laugh, Crabbe. Is your father an actual jackass? Piss off before I decide to take exception to your treatment of my client. That goes for you too, Goyle, Malfoy. We all know you're too big of cowards to actually fight me."

"Big words for a little boy," Greg said, with a stupid little heh. He was the tallest bloke in their year and, like Dudley, probably weighed twice as much as Harry, but, unlike Dudders, Greg actually had some muscle on him. If Harry didn't know better, he'd say he was at least thirteen or fourteen.

"Everyone's bigger than me, Goyle. But even you aren't as big as a troll, and I'll bet galleons to knuts you don't heal as well, either. If you don't piss off, I'll shove your wand so far up your arse you'll be coughing up sparks for a week."

"I heard that troll put you in hospital, Potter. You don't get bragging rights for losing a fight! But then, you were stupid enough to pick a fight with a troll over this mudblood you definitely don't fancy, so maybe I shouldn't be surprised you don't know that."

"Stop calling my client a mudblood, Malfoy, before I demand public satisfaction for the insult to my House and because the more you talk the more I want to see you bleed."

They were progressing nicely, Harry thought, to a three-on-one scrap (which would really be a much fairer fight than just him versus Malfoy) when Granger — who had scrambled to pick up her things while the shite-brained Slytherins were distracted, and was clearly ready to make a run for it (leaving the broken quills and ink bottles, but with all of her books and folders safely retrieved, and the empty bag itself looped over one shoulder) — interrupted. "Stop calling me your client, Potter! What does that even mean?"

"Er...sort of like looking out for someone, in exchange for favours and loyalty, or whatever. Houses do it, too. Like, for example, Draco's mum kept Crabbe and Goyle's fathers out of Azkaban at the end of the War, and in exchange, these mooks keep anyone and everyone from kicking Draco's arse for being a poncy little dicklicking bully."

"What?!" both Draco and Hermione shrieked, outraged — Draco slightly more shrilly.

He seemed to realise that because he flushed and cleared his throat, letting Hermione say, "Well, stop it, then! I don't need your help, and I don't want to owe you a favour! That's not why you saved me from the troll, is it?!" before he chimed in with, "Now who's violating the Truce, Potter?" clearly annoyed to be ignored even for a couple of seconds.

"It's not violating the Truce to say House Malfoy saved the arses of every marked Death Eater currently not in Azkaban, everyone knows that's why your mum's got the Allied Dark by the balls. It's not like I said your parents somehow faked an Imperius Defence — or that that's a bad thing, and not just really bloody impressive and I want to know how they did it. Also, I didn't fight the troll for you, Granger, I fought it because it was fun."

Professor Snape, at least, knew that. He'd been completely unswayed by Harry's argument that he'd been saving a helpless Gryffindor in distress, just gave Harry a sort of you don't really think I believe you sort of look before repeating that Harry wouldn't be allowed to read outside materials in Potions for the next two weeks. Harry had pouted at him, but honestly...he sort of really appreciated that Snape couldn't be swayed by silly shite like whether Harry incidentally saved someone else's life while he was breaking the rules. Danny had clearly thought he was being unreasonable when Harry told him about it, but it was...reassuring, sort of, that Snape's rules didn't change based on circumstances Harry may or may not be able to predict.

Snape, more than maybe anyone Harry had ever met, seemed to understand that Harry needed him to be very, very clear what would happen if he broke the rules (like telling Harry up front that, if he ignored the no-reading-in-lessons punishment, he'd confiscate whatever Harry was reading and stop letting him check out Restricted books from the library), and actually enforce those rules when Harry broke them. Not that Harry liked being punished, he just...liked knowing where, exactly, they stood. Like with that list of priorities Danny's mum had sent him, sort of. Snape might not follow exactly the same list, but as long as he was honest and actually followed through on his word, they were still on the same page. Which was sort of a first for Harry, and he really, really appreciated it, even if it did mean there were consequences he'd had to suffer for his decisions and actions, regardless of whether those actions were taken under circumstances other adults might have considered mitigating.

It wasn't like Snape had been angry at Harry, or anything. He had given Harry ten points for saving Hermione, because ensuring that one of the other students didn't get killed by the troll was helpful to Snape (who was partially responsible for all the students' wellbeing, even if they weren't Slytherins or demon-children no one else was willing to take responsibility for), which was a Good Thing and should be rewarded and encouraged. But Harry had still ignored Snape telling him to go back to Ravenclaw, even though he'd been very clear about the consequences of doing so. Enforcing those consequences didn't make him a jerk, it made him...reliable. Trustworthy. And it was absolutely worth it, anyway, having to spend a few hours being mostly-bored in lessons (practising occlumency rather than reading other things) as the cost of fighting a bloody troll.

Honestly, Harry sort of always wanted to fight something. That had been the most serious fight he'd ever been in, and it had been great, thinking of ways to attack the thing with magic on the fly and then fooling around with the sword — he was sure he would've managed to slay the monster eventually, if Professor McGonagall hadn't distracted him and gotten him incarcerated in hospital for the next eighteen hours. (Which was completely ridiculous, he hadn't been hurt that badly. If Pomfrey had just let him sleep it off instead of waking him up every half hour with that stupid charm to check on him and interrupting his healing, he would've been well enough to go to the Revel. Even though she had, he still could have left in the morning.)

"There's something wrong with you, Potter, if you think getting your arse handed to you is fun," Vinnie said, with another jackass bray of laughter, monopolising his attention again as Hermione turned on her heel with a huff and stalked away.

"If you want to start a fight," she threw back over her shoulder, "go ahead, but don't say it's about me!"

Harry shrugged, turning back to Malfoy. "You're a coward who's afraid to fight me one-on-one because you're a mediocre wizard and you know I'll beat you like a drum. If you want your friends to help you, that's fine, but Big and Stupid—" He nodded at Greg and Vinnie, respectively. "—aren't going to be much help in a duel because they're even worse at magic than you are. Clearly being a pureblood isn't all it's cracked up to be, if you three are supposedly the pinnacle of magical breeding. But then, maybe you're not, really — I mean, we already know Vinnie's mum shagged a jackass, and Greg's father is probably a troll. What about you, Draco? Think that dirty cow you call 'Mum' actually—"

He broke off laughing to duck as Greg took a great lumbering swing at his head. Vinnie, on the other hand, went for a flying tackle, screeching, "Don't talk about my mother like that!"

Harry dodged him, too, but took his eyes off Draco long enough for the blond ponce to step in closer and pop him one, firmly in the nose. Not firmly enough to break it, and he seemed even more surprised to have actually hit Harry than Harry was to have been hit, but enough that Harry's eyes started watering immediately, and a trickle of blood escaped his left nostril.

He wiped it away with the back of his hand, which he then licked clean, mostly reflexively. Greg made a disgusted face at him, and Vinnie said something about his father clearly being a vampire, though Draco didn't seem to notice, too busy crowing over having gotten in a single lucky jab and making Harry's eyes tear up.

"Oh! That's right! Not such a big man, now, are you, Potter! Going to start crying like a little girl? Going to run back to your Tower now you know I'm not scared of you?"

Harry giggled, positively delighted to have finally gotten a rise out of the overconfident idiot. This was apparently unnerving — Draco's newfound confidence in his ability to kick Harry's arse clearly wavered a bit, there — so before he could lose his nerve completely, Harry tossed his bag aside, making a beckoning little bring it on gesture with his fingers. "Come on, then, if you think you're hard enough!"

What followed was nearly ten minutes of reasonably entertaining scuffling. It wasn't really a fight, as far as Harry was concerned — he'd been roughed up worse on the rare occasions the older boys had let him play rugby with them in Little Whinging, and he was being careful not to actually hurt the Slytherins, none of whom actually knew what they were doing in a fistfight any more than they would in a magical duel — but it was still three on one and all three of them were bigger than he was, and much more interested in kicking his teeth in for insulting their mothers. He did have to keep on his toes to avoid letting them, especially without taking them down hard enough they'd probably be in hospital for a week.

Mages could fix shattered joints, so if he broke Greg's knee to get him to lay off, it wouldn't be nearly as disproportionate as if he broke Malcom's knee, but still a bit much, and probably enough they'd never play with him again. (He raised his aim at the last second so his kick seriously bruised Greg's quadricep, but didn't dislocate his kneecap.)

Though that ship might have already sailed when he twisted Draco's arm the same way he had Dudley's that one time, thinking that Draco, like Harry himself, was magic, and therefore wouldn't just break if Harry was a bit rough with him. He knew immediately he was wrong — he felt the taller boy's left humerus snap under his hand as he wrenched his wrist around behind his back — even before he fell back, crying. Vinnie and Greg, clearly aware that Harry had (accidentally) crossed a line, started whaling on him with more vicious abandon, actually managing to knock the wind out of him and tackle him to the ground.

He'd just regained his feet — tripped Vinnie in front of Greg and got up while they were trying not to fall all over each other — and kicked Vinnie (still on the floor) in the stomach, causing him to retch and Greg to attempt to put Harry in a headlock from behind while Draco held his arm and snivelled over by the wall — when Professor McGonagall arrived, trailed by Hermione, who looked absolutely appalled, though not quite as furious as her Head of House.

"What is the meaning of this!" she demanded, magic settling around Harry and Greg as she did, forcing them apart and immobilising them, including preventing Harry from speaking.

Well, shite.

Draco was still preoccupied by his broken arm, apparently incapable of opening his mouth without crying, so it fell on Vinnie to say, "Potter attacked us, Ma'am. He's crazy! He broke Draco's arm, Greg and I were just trying to stop him—"

"That's not true!" Hermione objected heatedly. "They were picking on me and Harry came up and told them to stop!"

"And then, after we stopped, and you ran off to tattle like a baby—" ("Mister Crabbe!") "—he started saying things about our mothers and when we told him where he could shove it, he started laying into us! I swear, Professor! He started it!" Vinnie claimed, pointing very dramatically at Harry.

"Ooh, Potter... Miss Granger, please escort Mister Malfoy to the Hospital Wing. Mister Crabbe, Mister Goyle, Mister Potter, come with me!" Professor McGonagall snapped. Her spell faded enough for Harry to (reluctantly) follow along with the other boys.

"Where are we going, Professor?" Greg asked, as she led them down the nearest staircase.

"Fighting is not tolerated at Hogwarts, Mister Goyle! Regardless of the provocation! We are going to speak to your Head of House, to see whether Professor Snape has any recommendations on your punishment for this egregious violation of school policy!"

"But Potter started it!" Vinnie objected again.

Harry didn't deny it, he had been trying to pick a fight, even if he hadn't taken the first actual swing. He did have to mention, though, "I'm not a Slytherin. Are we going to talk to Professor Flitwick, too?"

McGonagall ignored him, as she was wont to do whenever possible.

Vinnie apparently thought this was funny, like Snape would definitely take their side and no one would defend Harry (which was probably true, since he knew Harry was a questionably sane demon-child), leering triumphantly at him behind the professor's back. Since Harry was already going to be in trouble no matter what, he took the opportunity of Vinnie not looking where he was going, still heading down the stairs, to use magic (not a spell, just normal magic) to grab his right ankle, holding his foot in place just long enough for him to lose his balance and stumble into the professor before tumbling down the four remaining steps with a girlish yelp.

McGonagall might not like Harry, but she didn't like the Slytherins much more. "Get up, Mister Crabbe!" she snapped, somewhat shaken by the way he'd nearly pulled her down with him. "I am quite certain that Mister Potter did not force the three of you to remain in that corridor to fight him rather than walking away as Miss Granger did! He may bear the greatest part of the blame for Mister Malfoy's injury — I will be writing to Lady Malfoy about this incident, Mister Potter! — but you two, and Mister Malfoy as well, are certainly also at fault! If Professor Snape does not assign all of you at least three hours of detention, I will certainly do so! But it is school policy to allow Heads of House to attend to conflicts between their own students—"

"Potter's not a Slytherin!" Vinnie objected.

McGonagall ignored him, too, continuing her march down to the dungeons. "—and quite frankly, I expect him to be even more concerned about you boys fighting than I am!"

Was she...just going to pretend that Harry was a Slytherin, then? Not that he really minded, but...

Professor Snape also objected when they finally reached his office, and Professor McGonagall explained the situation. As she understood it, of course, which wasn't entirely accurate, but close enough — Harry somehow doubted Snape would be less annoyed with him for just picking a fight than if he'd actually thrown the first punch.

And he was annoyed, pinching the bridge of his nose and glaring at McGonagall. "Inter-house disciplinary matters are the responsibility of the Deputy Headmistress to address, Minerva. Why are you bothering me about this?"

"Because, Severus, you are the only professor in this school for whom Potter actually seems to hold any degree of respect. Therefore, he is your problem!" she declared, turning on her heel and storming back out into the corridor.

Snape's glare shifted to Harry. Harry rolled his eyes. "It's not like I wouldn't show up for detention if she assigned it—" He had, actually, for the one she'd assigned him over his refusal to transfigure any more bloody needles. And every time he'd been caught out of bounds, for that matter! "—she just hates me for no reason."

Snape graduated from pinching his nose to rubbing his forehead. "Mister Crabbe, Mister Goyle, you and Mister Malfoy will serve three hours of detention next Saturday for engaging in fisticuffs with another student, and an additional hour for bullying Miss Granger. If Mister Malfoy objects, you may inform him that he should consider the broken arm a lesson on the wisdom of picking his battles poorly. It doesn't excuse him from the consequences of fighting in the corridors."

"We didn't pick the fight, though!" Vinnie insisted. "Potter started it!"

"No, Mister Potter may have escalated this particular incident to the point of physical violence, for which you will serve six hours of detention, Potter—" Harry nodded. "—but Mister Malfoy 'started it' when he unwisely challenged Mister Potter to a duel back in September," Snape corrected him. When Greg's eyes went wide with surprise, he added, "There are very few conflicts involving my students which I am not aware of, Mister Goyle. This will, however, be the end of it, Mister Potter." His glare shifted back to Harry. "I refuse to believe that you are unaware that Mister Malfoy has no intention of ever fulfilling his rash threat of meeting you in the duelling ring. Nor, quite frankly, is he capable of putting up a decent fight if he were to do so."

Harry scowled at him. "No, I know that. If he'd just admit it and withdraw the challenge, I'd let it go. But he won't, he just keeps leading me on!"

Snape's eyes flicked up, in the direction of the hospital wing. Harry fancied he was glaring at the absent Draco. "Be that as it may, if you keep pursuing a duel with Mister Malfoy, I will have no choice but to interpret it as a deliberate attempt to endanger another student, given that you know you will hurt him more severely than you did today if he is ever so foolish as to allow himself to be goaded into such a fight."

The unspoken or else there was that Snape would take steps to neutralise Harry as a threat to Draco, if he didn't drop it. Probably not by killing him, but quite possibly by getting him expelled, or something. The specifics didn't really matter, since the prospect of a shitty fight with a pansy-arse like Draco wasn't worth so much as a detention, but it was still annoying. "Fine. But I would like to put it on the record that I was being careful! I didn't think twisting his arm like that would break it. Blaise said mages are harder to hurt than muggles!"

"We are," Snape confirmed drily. "One's magic will react instinctively to prevent a bludger hit from breaking one's back, for example," he noted, referencing a particularly nasty foul in the Gryffindor-Slytherin Quidditch match a few weeks ago. "That doesn't mean that we're all as difficult to hurt as you. Mister Malfoy in particular has very little experience consciously resisting the effects of physical trauma. Your fellow students, by and large, share the same degree of fragility in the face of non-lethal trauma as comparably sized muggles."

Harry had no response to that other than an annoyed huff. "Fine. Now I know. I won't accidentally break anyone else's arms, promise," he offered, slouching sullenly in his seat. It wasn't his fault he'd overestimated other people's ability to not break when he wasn't even trying to break them.

Snape gave him a very unimpressed look. "If you harm any of your fellow students extensively enough that they must report to the Hospital Wing for care, whether intentionally or accidentally while engaging in activities which could reasonably be predicted to result in bodily harm, I will personally revisit the effects of their injuries upon you threefold."

Vinnie and Greg goggled at him, like this was a completely unreasonable thing to say, though Harry couldn't honestly say he found it surprising. Paying someone back in kind, or in kind times three, was sort of a traditional way of deciding punishments, wasn't it? What goes around, comes around, and all that?

Harry continued to pout. "I said fine, didn't I?"

"Yes, but I'm not certain you can be trusted to realise that this applies equally to, say, deliberately tripping your classmates down the stairs as it does to any damage you inflict in an actual fight without being explicitly informed of that fact."

Harry winced. Had Snape read his mind without him noticing? "Noted. Thank you. I will be sure to take your warning into account the next time I trip someone down the stairs." Then a thought occurred: "Wait, you mean I'll be in trouble even if they hit me first?"

Snape sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose again. "If you make a sincere effort to extract yourself from the situation without resorting to violence, I will not hold you accountable for any actions you take in order to resolve the threat you might hypothetically, in some universe, be subjected to. However, as that is not what happened here, nor is there anyone in the entire school so blind to their own self-interest as to attack you without extensive provocation, I sincerely doubt there is any cause for legitimate concern over such an eventuality occurring. Also, bear in mind that I will still hold you accountable for any injuries you inflict beyond those necessary to escape your hypothetical tormentors."

Harry nodded. Fine. It was better than being in trouble if he fought back against people trying to kick the shite out of him, which was a rule Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon had tried to enforce the first time Dudley and his friends tried to beat Harry up at school over lunch. They'd been about seven at the time. Harry had ended up seriously bruised with a bloody nose, but Piers's nose had been broken, and Dylan had gotten kicked in the nads badly enough the school nurse had called his mum to pick him up. Dudley had enough blubber he hadn't been seriously hurt by most of Harry's retaliatory punches, but he had gotten a black eye trying to sneak up on Harry from behind.

Uncle Vernon had beaten the piss out of him for blacking Dudders's eye and beating up his friends; Harry had fought back and nearly managed to scratch out his left eye; Aunt Petunia had decreed that he wasn't to eat dinner for two weeks; Harry had decided that if he wasn't getting fed, he wasn't going to work to earn his keep; Uncle Vernon had been forced to smack him around for neglecting his chores; Harry had escalated by actually causing messes; Piers and Dylan had attempted to ambush Harry in revenge and gotten their arses soundly handed to them again; Uncle Vernon had beaten Harry for defending himself again; Harry had decided that no one got to sleep at Number Four until Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon agreed to drop the rule against fighting back against Dudley's friends; Uncle Vernon had very nearly gotten into a smashup on his third very sleep-deprived drive in to work; and Aunt Petunia had ungracefully conceded that if someone hit Harry first, he was allowed to hit them back, and it wasn't his fault if he was better at it than they were.

Score: Harry — 1; Dursleys — 0

(How Snape could possibly think Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon had abused him, Harry didn't know. If he didn't think their rules were fair, he was more than capable of making them change them.)

"If you simply must commit violence against another being, you have my permission to kill acromantulae," Snape offered magnanimously — so much so that he was almost certainly joking. Not that Harry thought Snape would care if he did kill a few giant spiders, but he was pretty sure Snape didn't think Harry needed his permission to do so. Hagrid would, though, and Harry liked meeting new creatures and people out in the Forest, so he would resist the impulse to start fights with said giant spiders, at least until he was pretty sure that he'd learned everything he could from Hagrid and been introduced to everyone he knew.

He rolled his eyes. "Yeah, Aunt Petunia hates spiders, too." Greg made a strangled little noise off to Harry's left, drawing his attention. Both he and Vinnie looked inexplicably terrified. "What?"

"Oh, yes, it's terribly unexpected that your classmates find it shocking that I need to warn you that you will be held accountable for indulging in gratuitous violence at the expense of your fellow students," Snape said, in an absolutely scathing tone which made it clear that he was being sarcastic, even though it sort of was. They had been attending lessons together for over two months now, and everyone knew about the troll, and he'd obviously been actively attempting to pick a fight with all three of them...

"Oh, don't be such pansies. I wasn't trying to hurt you, or Malfoy for that matter. Well, much. And now I know wizards and muggles are basically the same when it comes to arm-breakability, I won't accidentally put you in hospital, either," Harry assured them. (They didn't seem very reassured.) "May I go, then, sir?"

Snape nodded. "You will be notified of the details of your detention as soon as I find out when Minerva thinks she has a free evening."

Harry smirked. Possibly the best part of attending a boarding school was the opportunity to see teachers acting like real people. Snape setting his detention with McGonagall, presumably in protest against Harry being made his problem, was frankly hilarious. "Yes, sir."

Chapter Text

"You didn't sign the list," Danny said accusingly, as he stalked through the doorway of his and Harry's room.

With absolutely no context, it took a moment for Harry to realise what he was talking about. "Well, no, I'm not planning on staying here over the holiday, so."

"So where are you going to go? Not back to Knockturn?"

"Yeah, probably." Danny was well aware that Harry had no intention of returning to Little Whinging for any extended period of time. He didn't seem to understand what Harry meant when he said there wasn't enough magic there, but then, Harry didn't really expect him to. His family lived in Hogsmeade, so he practically never left the Valley. Honestly, Harry wasn't even particularly keen on going back to Knockturn for the three week holiday, but he couldn't stay here over Yule, and it was at least better than Little Whinging, even if it wasn't quite as magical as Hogwarts. "I mean, I might visit the Dursleys on Boxing Day and take Dudders some Every Flavour Beans or something, but honestly the holidays are always awkward enough, even without me."

Aunt Petunia hated Aunt Marge, Dudders always got stroppy when he broke his first Christmas present of the year, and Uncle Vernon tended to be in a mood because his mother routinely tried to guilt him into coming over for Christmas Tea. He routinely refused because his parents didn't approve of Aunt Marge's "lifestyle choices" — and while Uncle Vernon generally had nothing but scorn for dykes and homos, Aunt Marge was his baby sister, and if she was, it was hardly as though she'd admitted it, much less went around flaunting it, and if she wasn't welcome — which she wasn't — he wasn't going either, and his parents should be ashamed of themselves for maligning their own daughter's reputation like that.

Technically, Uncle Vernon didn't support Aunt Marge being a lesbian any more than their parents or Aunt Petunia (who only complained about Aunt Marge's dogs in front of Uncle Vernon and Aunt Marge herself, but complained about her "ways" to her friends when she didn't realise Harry was listening, and definitely knew that she was). He just refused to believe that she was one. No, she'd never had a serious suitor, but she'd always been married to her work, made a successful businesswoman of herself and all, and yes, she had had that lady tenant who'd let her spare room for a few years, but he'd visited while she'd lived there and they had had two bedrooms. Until she actually told him that yes, she did fancy ladies, he would continue to deny it, up to and including defending her from their parents' hurtful insinuations.

Harry, for his part, hadn't told any of the Dursleys about the time three years ago when he and Aunt Marge were the only people still awake — Aunt Marge getting steadily more drunk by the fire, and Harry tidying up — and Aunt Marge had drunkenly expressed a certain degree of...not quite sympathy, exactly, but sort of sympathetic advice he was fairly certain was well-meaning, about trying to fit in better, and it was a hard life for "people like us, boy," and if he was smart he'd find a lady friend who wasn't interested in him either, and marry her so they could both live their own lives...discreetly. She'd passed out shortly afterward and had never mentioned it again. Harry wasn't even sure she remembered it, and hadn't really understood what she was talking about at the time, but in hindsight he was pretty sure she'd at least strongly implied that she was a lesbian.

"Blaise invited me to Mira's New Year's Bash, but I wasn't planning on doing anything special for Yule or Christmas."

"No," Danny said firmly.

"No?"

"No, you're not going to go stay in some flat by yourself over the holiday. You're coming to ours. I've already asked Mum, she says it's fine."

...Well, shite. Harry didn't really want to offend his roommate and he did want to stay here in the Valley, but, "Danny, mate? I was sort of looking forward to having some privacy for a few weeks." Really, constantly being around people was slowly driving him (more) insane. But more importantly...

Yule was always the night Harry felt his connection to the Little Crow most strongly. The night he was closest to being able to reach them, and the night it hurt the most not to be able to. He didn't want to have to explain to Danny why he locked himself in his bedroom crying all night. Especially since if he were to spend the holiday with Danny, he wouldn't have his own bedroom. It would be impossible for Danny not to notice Harry having a breakdown in the loo or something.

"Fine, then sign the list so you can stay here and just visit us for a few days. Like, Yule through Christmas. Mum and Dad live five miles from here. You can walk back up and have this room all to yourself for the rest of the holiday."

That did absolutely nothing to solve Harry's problem. Even if he skipped out on Yule and just visited them for Christmas, he didn't want to have a Dark Night here, either.

Unfortunately, Danny didn't know about the Little Crow or the Black Family Magic slowly starving to death, and Harry really didn't want to try to explain, given that Danny currently believed himself to be Bella's kid. If Harry told him that the Black Family Magic was trying to contact him to tell him how to kill someone to save its life, and if he didn't he would die with it, he'd have to explain that he was actually Bella's kid or imply that he was Sirius's kid and leave Danny thinking he was in the line of fire, too (as "Bella's" son).

He settled on, "I'd really rather not." He shouldn't have to justify himself, he thought.

"Pleeeeease? Just come down for Yule, at least. Mum wants to meet you in person, and if you spend the night, you'll get to meet Dora, too."

"No, Danny. I don't want to—"

"Please, Harry. Why don't you want to come?"

"Why do you want me to come so badly?"

Danny pouted at him. "I asked you first." But when Harry just raised an eyebrow at him, he caved. "I don't want to do Mum's Yule ritual with just the two of us," he admitted. "Dad will be at work — the Hospital doesn't get holidays and he drew a short straw — and Dora's on call, so even if she doesn't end up going in she can't be in the circle, just in case, you know?"

"Why don't you want to do it?" Sure, Mabon hadn't gone great for Harry, and he'd completely missed Samhain, but he couldn't imagine why Danny would be uncomfortable with his mum's Yule ritual. He very clearly was, but...

His roommate huffed out an exasperated, slightly embarrassed little sigh. "Wehavetokillthedog," he muttered, quickly and quietly enough it took a second for Harry to make out what he'd actually said.

"You have to kill a dog?"

Danny nodded. "Every spring, Mum gets a puppy, and no matter how much I try not to care about it, I always do, and then every year we have to kill it, and it's awful, and it wouldn't be a sacrifice if it were easy, but I hate it, and I don't want to have to do it alone. With just Mum, I mean. It doesn't bother her like it does me, and I don't know how, because she's always the one who loves the dog the most, and most of the time she's pretty much the best, but on Yule she's just so cold, and I hate everything about it!"

"...And you want me to come along...why? I mean, why don't you just tell her that you don't want to do it?"

"I can't tell her I don't want to do it. She already knows I don't like it, and Dad doesn't like it, and Dora...doesn't dislike it as much as Dad and I do, but she's not really into it either, but this is the only thing Mum ever asks of us, and she'd let me skip it if I told her I didn't want to, but it's like... It's super important to her, and refusing to do it wouldn't just be rejecting Yule, it'd be like rejecting Mum. I want you to come because I don't want it to be just the two of us."

"Yeah, okay, but you don't really think I'm going to hold your hand and, I dunno, sympathise with how awful this is, or whatever, do you? Because I can tell you right now, nothing about that is really likely to bother me." In fact, depending on how powerful the magic was that they called, and how dark, he'd probably enjoy it. A lot. Maybe even enough to make the prospect of yet another Dark Night less terrible.

Danny scowled at him. "I have met you, Harry. I expect you to be unnervingly enthusiastic about the whole ritual, calling the Dark thing, and probably get high on dark magic, and not find the idea of partaking in the lifeblood of the sacrifice — a.k.a., murdering and drinking the blood of the family pet — the least bit horrifying. I just...don't want all Mum's attention on me. Not when she's...like that. All cold and dark and just...Andromeda Black."

...Right. Sometimes Harry really was an idiot. How had it not clicked until just now that Danny's mum was (had been, she wasn't anymore) a Black, and might have some idea of how to help the Little Crow, even if she didn't know where the Keep was to get there through normal travel? He hadn't written to her about the Family Magic specifically because he hadn't wanted to put anything in a letter that might be intercepted, but...

"You being a dark, creepy little psycho is sort of like, just, Tuesday? But Mum is supposed to be...Mum, not this scary dark witch I barely even recognise."

Harry rolled his eyes at that, but he couldn't really argue with it. "Fine, I'll come."

"You will?" Danny said, sounding weirdly surprised.

"Well, obviously — I'm a dark, creepy little psycho. You had me at 'Yule ritual'."

"Great! Excellent!"

"Just don't get jealous if your mum likes me better than you," Harry teased him, genuinely amused by how very relieved his roommate clearly was.

Danny pulled a face, sticking his tongue out at him. "You actually asked for etiquette books. I'm pretty sure she already likes you better than me."

"Probably," Harry agreed, more cheerful than he had been in days, with the prospect of the upcoming Dark Night looming ever larger.

"Oh, piss off."

"Mum!" Danny shouted, throwing open the door of his parents' house and leading Harry inside. "We're here!"

"Mum had to run into the office!" Nymphadora shouted back, coming to meet them in the entryway. "Said she had to write up a something or other to file first thing tomorrow, because...reasons? I dunno, I got the impression Ned Turner is a crafty cunt for trying to sneak something past her over the holiday, but that's not exactly news, is it?" She (Harry assumed he was supposed to refer to her as a girl even when she didn't really obviously look like one) skipped across the room to ruffle Danny's already-messy hair. "How's it going, Shaggy?"

"Alright. This is Harry. Harry, Dora."

Well, obviously, no one else would be calling Danny's mother "Mum". She didn't look much like she had over the summer, at the duelling tournament, but then he wouldn't really expect a shape-shifter to. She actually looked like she could be a third- or fourth-year, and it was sort of hard to tell if she was supposed to be a boy or a girl at the moment. Her hair — a tinsel-like silver, with threads of blue and pink and yellow running through it — was shoulder-length, which could go either way, and she was wearing one of those weird magical outfits Harry hadn't seen enough to know whether it was for boys or girls — skin-tight golden trousers and a floofy white shirt, with a sleeveless, open over-robe that slowly shifted from green to blue, and then a pastel purple as he watched.

"Harry...Potter?" Both Danny and Harry nodded. "Huh. I sort of thought the Boy Who Lived would be taller," she said, managing to keep a straight face long enough for Harry's to fall into a scowl. The fact that she was the coolest person he'd ever heard of did not mean he liked being called the Boy Who Lived. Also, easy for her to say, she could be taller whenever she wanted.

She smirked. "Just fucking with you, kid. I was sort of expecting you to look like a Potter, but hey, I'm all for more baby cousins. Especially since I hear you're more fun than Blondie. My condolences on the lack of interest in the Castle Climbing Club. If it's any consolation, if I were still in school, I'd definitely join."

"Of course you would." Danny rolled his eyes. "You're insane, and falling off the damn castle probably wouldn't actually kill you."

"I'm pretty sure falling off the Castle wouldn't kill me, either," Harry pointed out. "I mean, I walked away from my broom going on the fritz in flying class just fine, and that had to be, what, fifty, sixty feet?"

Madam Hooch had been horrified, flying class had been cancelled for the past two weeks so she and Professor Flitwick could go over all the brooms and make sure none of them were cursed and they were all in good working order, because a broom trying to buck off a student and then just stopping in mid-air could easily have killed someone. Or so she claimed. Harry had managed to pull off sort of just crumpling as he hit the ground feet-first, like a parachuter coming in a little too hard (apparently landing those things was harder than it looked, there had been a special on telly last summer), and rolling to bleed off some of his momentum, and had gotten away with just a few bruises and the air knocked out of him. He hadn't even broken an ankle. She'd made him go to the Hospital Wing anyway, because she refused to believe he was fine, and then declared it to be some sort of miracle that he actually was, even though people took worse falls playing quidditch every day.

(Yes, the Quidditch Pitch did have enchantments to slow falls, and the ref normally kept an eye out to further arrest momentum and/or soften the ground when they did, but still. It wasn't like he'd been knocked out by a bludger first, or something.)

Danny gave him a very unimpressed look. "I'm not worried about you, lunatic. I'm worried about me. Since, you know, I'm not a metamorph and didn't inherit whatever the hell it is that makes the Blacks bloody well indestructible."

"Er...getting the piss beaten out of you on the daily for a few years?" Dora suggested.

Harry shrugged and nodded at the concerned look Danny threw him. That did line up with what Snape had said about Malfoy's magic not being trained to resist physical harm.

Dora didn't seem to notice. "I mean, not saying the House of Black didn't get into some sketchy blood magic over the centuries, but Mad-Eye says that kind of resilience is mostly a matter of conditioning. And also that recruits these days are too damn soft because no one 'toughens up' their kiddies before letting them out to face the real world anymore. Bloody madman. Have I mentioned lately that my S.A. is insane?" she asked, probably rhetorically. "Because he absolutely still is."

"Yeah?" Harry said, before Danny could say anything about Uncle Vernon smacking him around as a kid. "That's Auror Moody, right? Is it true he once deputised an entire pub full of drunken warlocks to burn a vampire nest to the ground?"

"Where the hell did you hear that?"

"In Knockturn, last summer. Is it true?"

"Er, sort of. 'Vampire nest' is sort of a racist thing to call upyri squatting in muggle flats. Mad-Eye recruited a bunch of travelling cursebreakers — unofficially, Aurors can't actually deputise civilians — to make a frontal assault on a cabal of dark necromancers and actual vampire vampires while he and a couple of other others broke into a neighbouring building and burned through the wards on the adjoining walls with fiendfyre to take them by surprise. They did lose control of the fire when one of the casters was cut down with an Avada, but as far as collateral damage goes, burning down a few abandoned buildings to take out an entire vampire cult, with only two casualties on the side of the angels? Totally worth it. Why was Harry fucking Potter hanging out in Knockturn last summer? I thought Danny said you were raised by muggles."

"I was. That's why I was in Knockturn. I wasn't going to stay in Little Whinging after I had a wand and was actually allowed to do magic without Ministry Goons popping out of nowhere to obliviate everyone and their mum. And for some reason, people in the nicer parts of Charing weren't willing to let a room to an eleven-year-old for a few weeks, even when I promised to pay in advance."

"Uh-huh."

"Also, I got to watch the Duelling Tournament, which was the coolest thing ever! I can't wait until next summer! I'm so going to enter! And you were amazing! Did you ever get that rematch with whatshisface?"

Dora, clearly flattered, went pink, the colour creeping into her hair more than her face, which Harry found really funny for some reason. "I can neither confirm nor deny that, but if I did, I would have taken him out with a nasty little twist on the Wound Sealing Charm that makes skin grow over your mouth and nose, which," she added, turning to Danny, "you'd better not tell Dad about, or else."

Danny smirked. "Or else what?"

"I don't know yet, but I'll think of something, brat."

"Yeah, okay, whatever. I'm going to dump my shite in my room. Have fun being fawned over by your number one fan."

"Piss off, wanker!" Harry snapped, feeling his face grow brighter than Dora's hair.

"Fan? Harry Potter, Boy Who Definitely Has His Own Fan Club, is a fan of me? Well, I mean, of course you are, I'm amazing, but— This is so flattering! I don't even know what to say!" she said in a high, vapid tone, and giggled, the laugh becoming decidedly more of a cackle as she watched Harry try to figure out how to respond to what was clearly some kind of mockery. He wasn't entirely sure if he was the butt of it or not. "Lighten up, kid. I'm just fucking with you again."

"She does that sort of a lot," Danny called over his shoulder as he moved farther into the house. "Be nice to Harry, he's not used to people who literally only speak sarcasm."

"Hey! Give me a little credit! I also speak hyperbole and profanity! Ooh, speaking of hyperbolic profanity, I hear McGonagall's still the world's biggest twat. If you're open to pranking suggestions, I never got around to breaking into her rooms and transfiguring all of her clothes and books and shite into cat toys, but I bet she doesn't lock her windows. You know, something to keep in mind if you just so happen to be in the area of the little jug-handle tower that sticks off Gryffindor Tower on one of your castle climbing expeditions. And if she asks you if you know anything about it, you have to tell her maybe Peeves did it, so she knows I put you up to it."

"Er, one problem: I don't know how to transfigure a book into a toy mouse or whatever."

Dora grinned, a vicious, toothy expression Harry really couldn't help matching. Her malicious glee was just infectious. "No, no, no, young prankster, we're talking about the world's biggest twat, here. Transfigure her knickers or something into toy mice. Transfigure the books into scratching posts, so if her instincts get the best of her, she'll shred her own library."

Harry sniggered. "Okay, but I don't know how to do that, either, and won't they just un-shred themselves when they revert?"

"Not if you do it right," she murmured in what could only be described as a conspiratorial tone, wrapping an arm around his shoulders and turning him toward a doorway on his left and what, from here, looked like a sitting room. "I mean, she'll still be able to use a Repairing Charm on them, but she'll have to sort out all the scraps first. Step into my office, and let's discuss the wonders of free transfiguration..."

Free transfiguration was probably the most difficult magic anyone had shown Harry yet. He got the general concept, but trying to understand exactly what a thing was and what he wanted it to become, with enough clarity that he could actually cast the spell (and incidentally clearly enough that physical effects would carry over from the needle when it reverted back to a matchstick), was frustratingly difficult.

Dora assured him that there was no rush, it wasn't as though he couldn't prank McGonagall in a few years, and that free transfiguration was probably the most difficult wizardry period (for normal, non-metamorph people) — even harder than free conjuration from a visualisation and intent perspective, because he'd need to know and understand the matchstick just as thoroughly as the needle, instead of just knowing the needle he wanted to conjure. (Half of the Free Transfiguration Spell was sort of scrying the matchstick to understand what it actually was.) She did show him free conjuration, too, but that was much harder from an initialisation energy perspective, so he only managed to conjure a needle about the size of a staple before Danny's dad got home.

The sketches Danny did in the meanwhile, of him practising while Dora watched and offered advice and let Socks (the dog they would be sacrificing in a few hours) drool on her lap, were much more impressive in Harry's opinion. Danny obviously didn't agree, staring at him all wide-eyed like conjuring a single bloody staple — that wasn't even staple-shaped — was a big deal. Dora didn't act like it was. She was obviously a little surprised, but Harry figured that was just because he tended to pick up spells quicker than most people.

Ted, who insisted he didn't stand on formality like those noble types and didn't need to be called Healer Tonks, was only home for his mid-shift break (though it was closer to one than noon, because obviously the Healers had to take lunch in turns). Healers, apparently, worked twelve-hour shifts when they were shorthanded, which they were because it was a holiday. No one said as much, but Harry suspected Ted might have volunteered to work from eight in the morning until eight in the evening today specifically so he wouldn't have to be here when they killed the dog. It was something about the way his eyes kept drifting over to her as he made polite small-talk, asking Harry and Danny about their lessons, and promising to make breakfast, since he was going to miss dinner as well as the ritual. He had to go back to the hospital before his wife came home, but assured Danny (and Harry) that he'd be home at eight-o-three, if they wanted to talk to someone after the ritual.

After he left, Danny, somewhat bitterly, noted that that would still be about four hours after the end of the ritual, which occurred at sunset. Dora tried to cheer him up, or at least spin it so it didn't seem quite so much like he was leaving Danny to suffer while he got out of this thing neither of them really wanted to do — he was a Healer, he did have a legitimate obligation elsewhere — and she would be here— But that fell flat when their mother returned from her errand, because apparently neither of them really wanted to talk about how uncomfortable Danny was with her ritual when she was right there. And then Dora was called in to work about ten minutes later, so she actually wouldn't be there, anyway.

Andi, as Danny's mum said Harry could call her, was nice enough. From the few letters they'd exchanged, he'd expected her to be a very proud, formal sort of person, but in person she was much more relaxed and friendly. There wasn't much time between her return and beginning preparations for the ritual. Just long enough, really, for greetings and to confirm that Danny had told Harry all the important things about the ritual, and yes, he did actually want to join them.

Danny shot him a rather resentful scowl behind his mother's back, apparently annoyed that Harry was given the choice, even though he was the one who had asked Harry to join them in the first place. Harry, meanwhile, was finding it very surreal that Andi clearly knew who he really was — which, yes, he'd known she did, it had been referred to in their letters — and was sort of...treating him like family, he thought, not even questioning whether she ought to allow some boy she'd never met in person, who was really just her son's roommate to her, participate in what Harry gathered was a very private family celebration.

Ted knew, too, Blaise had told him he did, and Dora...might know? Harry honestly wasn't sure. She had called him her cousin, but Danny and Theo thought he was Sirius's son, so it was possible that was what she thought, too. If she did know he was Bella's son, she hadn't given any sign of it. Neither had Ted, aside from a wary glance or two, and that hadn't been until after Harry had said that he was actually looking forward to the ritual, and expressed his confusion about why they might want to talk to someone who hadn't been involved afterward. He suspected that the fact that he'd been petting Socks (who was a Good Dog, it was sort of sad she was going to be sacrificed) while they were talking about it had something to do with it.

But neither of them had been going out of their way to include him in what he just knew was a family activity, and one which was clearly very important to Andi, like he actually belonged here.

And it was even weirder because Danny didn't know. Maybe he hadn't really thought about it, just glad to have someone else here to take the pressure off of him, or maybe he thought it was okay and his mum had said yes because Harry was Sirius's son, but he had no idea that, in another life, Harry would have been doing this for years, and Danny would've grown up with the Dursleys. (Harry imagined Aunt Petunia would like Danny much better than she liked Harry. Danny was really very normal for a magic freak.)

Chapter Text

They moved to the back garden for the ritual, to a little gazebo which wasn't obviously a ritual circle, but definitely actually was when Andi levitated the wooden part and moved it aside. She also did something to the wards, Harry thought, so the neighbours wouldn't notice anything amiss — they suddenly became much more solid, in terms of not letting the ambient magic flow in or out of the garden — and cast a sleeping spell on the dog. Danny, being a big softie, tried to pretend he wasn't crying, petting her as she drifted off, curled up in the centre of the circle.

Harry took his cue from Andi, pretending not to notice as she directed them to their places, sitting in a little triangular formation around the sacrifice, close enough to hold hands, though they didn't actually do so. She laid a wicked sharp looking knife beside her right knee, and set a small silver bowl between herself and Harry, on her left.

"For most magical rituals," she explained, fingers playing absently with the sleeping dog's ear, "the participants, which would be all three of us in this case, and the sacrifice and the ritual tools are expected to undergo a purification ritual first. This extends to low ritual such as brewing potions as well as major workings like the Hogwarts Samhain ritual. I imagine Professor Snape has warned you against bringing extraneous magics into his laboratories. It's very much the same concept. For high ritual, it's generally considered a sign of respect, like washing your face before visiting your Head of House, and also serves to put one in the proper mindset, focused on the ritual.

"This particular case is somewhat different, as we are invoking the Dark, which is strongly aligned with the profane. Entering the circle as we are, coming straight from work or school or our daily lives in general without drawing a sharp metaphysical distinction, breaking one of the most fundamental ritual conventions, is therefore acceptable."

"Yes, one must break the rules properly," Danny drawled, putting words to exactly why that sounded so funny to Harry. "Because when the Dark is good, everything is backward and inside out and worshipping it is sort of like making fun of the normal way things are supposed to go."

Andi nodded, apparently unbothered by the interruption. "The phrase we used to use was 'embodying a contradiction'. To worship the Dark is to love a thing that one hates. It is to live for death, to find joy and pleasure in pain and suffering, to see beauty in desecration and ruin. It is to prosper at the expense of others, and to constantly undermine the foundations of one's own power. It is to rise spectacularly and fall even more spectacularly, to find opportunity in chaos and build one's greatest achievements around a tragic flaw, one's inevitable undoing shaped by one's own hand. It is to deceive and to be deceived, to transcend reality by questioning the very existence of truth and find clarity in madness.

"It is a fundamental aspect of human nature, one which we are taught that we must reject in order for society to function, but one which underlies and motivates much of the order of that very society. Certainly society would not function if everyone were to fully embrace the Dark, but everyone does harbour some degree of darkness in their souls, regardless of whether they choose to indulge it."

And it was listening, or at least Harry thought it was. There was definitely a sense of...something in the magic around them that hadn't been there before Andi started talking about it, at least. An expectant sort of something.

"When we celebrate the Dark, as we have gathered to do tonight, we recognise it within ourselves. We acknowledge it, that we have it in us to cause pain and suffering for our own benefit; to choose selfishly; to kill not only as we must to survive, but willingly, that we may flourish. We also recognise the Light within ourselves, our capacity for love and our willingness to care for others; to forgo our own wants in favour of meeting another's needs; to accept an outsider as one of our own and care for them as we would our own Family, asking nothing more than for our affection to be repaid with affection in turn.

"And we choose the Dark."

Danny, sitting on Harry's left, grew noticeably tense as his mother continued to speak, calmly and precisely, and the expectant something grew almost painfully excited. Harry was finding it very difficult to keep from fidgeting, feeling the energy building around them.

"We choose to reject unconditional affection and the love we hold for this innocent creature, who walked blindly to her death — trusting in her apparent safety, that we who have housed and fed her these many months, who have played with her and are fond of her company, would not betray her loyalty with pain. Socks is a good dog. A beloved companion. But we choose greater power and strength for ourselves and our Family over her companionship and our love for her. And with this sacrifice, we demonstrate that choice."

The knife was in her hand faster than blinking, blood spilling into the bowl and over the stones, spreading quickly to soak the knees of Harry's robes, hot and wet, though it cooled quickly in the chill December air. It smelled like life. Not like the life he needed, that the Little Crow needed, but close enough to make sitting here, resisting the entirely barbaric urge to lick it off the rough, grey pavers, almost painful.

The dog, still sleeping under Andi's spell, didn't so much as flinch as its life flooded out of it.

Danny, on the other hand, did, violently, even though he had to have known as well as Harry what was coming. Better, probably. He had done this before after all.

And the heavy, anticipatory magic in the air practically crackled around them as Andi raised the bowl to the centre of the circle.

"As we partake of the blood of the sacrifice, her life and its potential becoming one with our souls, raising us higher and binding us together, so too let the Dark partake of our pain, growing stronger with the affirmation of our continued allegiance.

"By the grace of the Dark, so shall it be," she finished firmly.

The magic descended on them with an almost-audible whumph, tingling through Harry's veins as he waited impatiently for Andi to take a sip from the bowl and Danny to raise it to his lips and not take a sip — Harry was watching (impatiently), he didn't swallow — cold and strong, rushing through him and– and then something very peculiar happened. What it was, exactly, Harry didn't know, but it felt like something breaking — some magic, stressed beyond the breaking point, splitting at the seams, shattering and falling away.

The magic that had been keeping him from the Dying Lady all these years, the invisible wall the Little Crow had been trying to reach him through as long as he could remember. It cracked under the pressure of trying to contain the Dark on Harry's side as well as the Little Crow on theirs, the tattered remnants washed away in the flood of magic which was the Little Crow finally, finally making contact with him, finally!

In the few seconds between Andi passing the bowl to Danny, and Danny passing the bowl to Harry, Harry managed to comprehensively lose track of what was going on, his conscious, rational mind drowned out by the presence of the Dark and the Little Crow and their triumph and—

He did take the bowl, moving entirely on instinct. Blood was life, and they needed it, and they weren't at home, so spilling it on the stones wasn't enough, and even draining the bowl wasn't enough — not nearly, the Little Crow almost wanted to cry, because they were so close, but that was a dog and not what they needed.

What they needed was a human. Or a goblin. Or a house elf, even. Something sapient, preferably several. Not that one, it was the more powerful of the two humans within arm's reach, but it was theirs...or should be, there was something wrong with it — it smelled like theirs, their blood, but they couldn't feel it, which was wrong and no, it wouldn't do them any good. The little one, though—

It yelped as they leapt upon it, a delightful sound, made them laugh, even though it was flailing at them, making it hard to bite it, to reach the sweet life hiding beneath its skin — why didn't they have talons? or claws? They should have claws, that would make this much easier.

But then they were flailing, as the bigger one, the one that was half theirs but not helping them, grabbed them from behind, by the shoulders, pulling them away from their yelping prey. They snarled at it trying to twist and scratch at its face with their little human nails, biting at it when it pinned them to the ground, helpless against its size. Why?! We were so close! And this one is supposed to be ours! Why isn't it helping us?!

It said something to the little one, still holding them down, hands on arms and legs on legs, too heavy to move even when they pushed at it with magic. It must be using some magic of its own to hold them, too. They flailed even more desperately — they'd just gotten away from awful human magic keeping them trapped, keeping one half of them trapped away from the other!

The little one said something back — English, new English, too fast, didn't catch it. Had to focus.

"Harry!" the big one said, its face too close to theirs, and yet not close enough to bite it — they were quickly coming to hate this traitor human. "Harry, can you hear me?"

"Oh, he can hear you," a laughing voice said. They knew that voice. It belonged to the magic in the air around them, the magic that had broken the wall and before that had broken them, tearing itself away from them and laughing as they fell. They froze, uncertain whether the Dark was friend or foe tonight. "He just doesn't know that you're talking to him, at the moment. He's a tiny bit possessed, you see. Do you remember me, Crow Child?" she asked, in much more familiar words.

"Yes. Are you here to help us, or to hurt us again?"

"Shite!" the human still pinning them to the ground said. "Is that the Black Family Magic?"

The Dark laughed at them all, kneeling beside them. "Yes. It's dying. Starving to death, slowly and painfully." She drew a line on her wrist with a finger, blackness welling forth, offered it to them. "Peace offering. I want to talk to Harry, so drink your fill and let him go."

Ichor wasn't blood, and the Dark wasn't alive, but it was magic — powerful magic, younger than they were, they remembered its birth, the shaping of its character, but stronger, part of the magic of the world, not just their Family — and it could save them, if it wanted to.

Or it could kill them, slowly and painfully, and laugh as they faded away into nothingness.

"Are you here to help us?" they asked again, resisting the temptation to lunge forward and take it.

"That depends entirely on Harry. If he helps me, I'll help you. If not, feeding you tonight will just mean I get to watch you struggle on for a few more years, I suppose."

It would help, then. They knew it would, because their boy, the gift of hope that Bella had given them, would do anything to save them. Anything he could. That much had been clear, even through the wall between them. They could feel it in him now, even. They were one, to save them would be to save himself.

They took the peace offering, drawing sharp, frigid magic through Harry and into themselves, as much as the Dark would give them. They barely noticed when the human let them go, or when the darkness of the magic numbed their existential fear, or that it was enough to quell their panic, letting them relax and subside enough within Harry's soul to let him begin thinking again.

It felt like waking up slowly, the Little Crow's fear and pain fading away enough for him to focus on the magic, and then the fact that he was drinking the not-blood of...something that at least looked like a girl, like an actual bloody vampire, both hands clamped tightly around her forearm to hold her in place. Not that she seemed very intent on getting away. He was sort of sitting in her lap, awkwardly, on the ground, while she talked to Andi, who clearly wasn't comfortable with whatever the hell was going on here, but not nearly as terrified as Danny, who was on his feet by the back door, his wand out, pointing defensively at Harry. Which Harry supposed was fair — he (and/or the Family Magic) had sort of tried to eat him.

He would apologise for that, but he'd have to stop vampiring the Dark's...whatever she was — maybe like a magical construct or something? The Little Crow had sort of thought of her as an extension of the Dark, or something, he hadn't really understood. And while he maybe should stop vampiring her arm like a bloody nut job, he really didn't want to. And it wasn't like Danny or Andi would believe he wasn't completely insane if he did stop now, instead of continuing to take the icy, electric magic she was offering him as long as she would let him.

Which, as it turned out, wasn't that much longer, anyway. "Alright, kid, that's enough," she said, still laughing, or maybe laughing again. "You're just bleeding it off, now." She didn't wait for him to process her words and try to understand what she was talking about, but somehow made her arm intangible, slipping through his fingers and shaking him off.

"Huh?" he asked, very intelligently. Great first impression, Potter. "Er. Hi? I'm Harry," he offered, turning to get a better look at the not-girl. He'd seen her when she first arrived, of course, but Little Crow hadn't really been paying attention to what she looked like. She was younger than the impression he'd gotten before, maybe seventeen or eighteen, and freckled, with auburn hair and a knowing smirk. He wasn't entirely certain whether introductions were necessary at this point, but he didn't know what to call her, so.

"I know. I'm Angie. I'm your great-aunt seventeen and/or nineteen times over, and an Avatar of the Dark."

"...I really don't know what that means. Avatar of the Dark, I mean." Obviously he knew what a great-aunt was (though not how she was still alive, if she was like five-hundred years old or something — mages didn't live that long).

"Hmmm...I used to be human, but I dedicated myself to serving the Dark, and my soul has grown close enough to it over the years that I am, for all intents and purposes, part of the Dark, now."

Harry still wasn't entirely certain what that meant, but he thought that might just be because there was a lot of magic buzzing around his head still, making it hard to focus. "Oh, okay. Er. Thank you. For, um." He gestured awkwardly at her arm, not entirely certain how one went about thanking someone for letting one drink their blood. "Thank you" seemed a bit insignificant, but it seemed like too intimate an exchange to discuss in more depth, with Andi's disapproving frown hovering over them and— "Danny? You can relax, I'm not going to kill you now."

Danny, being a really very normal bloke, despite also being magic, clearly did not find this reassuring. Whatever. Harry had tried. (Blaise would have found it reassuring, he was almost certain.) "What the hell are you, Potter? What's going on here?"

"Er..." That first part was a surprisingly difficult question, especially since Harry still wasn't sure it was his place to explain to Danny that he was actually Harry Potter, and Harry was (had been) Danny Black.

Angie giggled. "Naughty girl, Andromeda, keeping secrets from your ward."

Andromeda sighed. "Danny, come here. Sit down. There are some things I need to tell you."

He moved toward the hand she held out to him, apparently out of force of habit, since he clearly didn't want to come closer to them. "Um. Can we not... With Socks, I mean?"

Harry didn't see what the big deal was, it wasn't like the corpse was old enough to start getting smelly yet, but Andromeda seemed to think it was a reasonable request, rising and leading him to a patio table instead (though neither of them actually sat, just hovering tense and awkward around it. Harry and Angie followed them, Angie complaining, "You know, if you would actually do the sacrifice properly, you wouldn't care about your precious pup dying anymore. That's how it works: as you partake of the sacrifice of life, I partake of the sacrifice of your love and the pain of your loss.

"You take the energy of the life of the dog and give up a little of your innocence, your willingness to make yourself vulnerable in the future, harden your heart a bit in emulation of me. I take your pain and your explicit recognition and acknowledgment of our relationship — not a big deal from a mortal perspective, but the influence of gods stems from the thoughts and actions and feelings of mortals — and give you what aid I may in the coming year, putting a finger on the scale, metaphorically speaking, when it happens to be in your interests. It's a win-win.

"Oh, and I also help with the subsumption, in the event that your sacrifice isn't stolen by a starving cuckoo chick," she added, ruffling Harry's hair in a way which suggested she thought the Family Magic possessing him was a little adorable. She didn't seem to begrudge them what he suspected had been a lot of energy. He felt a bit weird from channelling it, actually, oddly floaty and hollowed-out. "For someone who's been doing subsumption rituals since she was seven, your mum's not really very good at it. Free subsumption, I mean."

"Few humans are," Andi noted. "Danny, why didn't you say something? If you didn't want to participate, there was never any need for you to do so. I simply thought it would be easier for you to cope with me sacrificing the dogs if you did. It was for Dora..."

"I— Er— Can we talk about this later?" he begged his mum. "I really want to know why my roommate just tried to kill me and it feels like I'm the only one here who doesn't know what's going on."

Andromeda sighed. "Of course, sweetheart."

When she hesitated, clearly trying to decide how to break the news, Angie jumped in, clearly barely able to contain her amusement. "Ooh, I'll do the honours! Eridanus Matar of House Black, commonly known as Harry Potter, meet Henry James of House Potter — no relation — commonly known as Danny Tonks."

"What?!"

"I really do enjoy Albus Dumbledore, you know. He tries so hard to walk in the Light, but he just can't help serving me."

"You mean I'm— He's— Bellatrix isn't my mother?"

"Nope. Dumbles switched us. Bella's my mother." ("Oh, thank God!") "Lily Potter sounds like she was pretty awesome, too, though," Harry offered.

"You knew! You— Why didn't you tell me? Either of you?" Danny demanded, his glare shifting from Harry to Andi and back. "Wait, no, what the hell was that?! I actually thought you were going to kill me for a second there!"

"I was, there's this whole thing with the Family Magic starving to death because all the really good mages in the House died or got sent to Azkaban and it can't reach them through the dementors and no one was making the sacrifices it needed—"

"Oh, seven bloody hells," Andi muttered.

Angie laughed. "Yeah. Someone tried to use a light ritual to cut him off from the Family Magic when they took him from Cissy. Not entirely successfully, obviously. Your ritual tonight bringing my power to focus on little Harry undermined the barrier keeping the Family Magic from reaching him. And incidentally kept the Family Magic from burning him out when it broke through, which would have been amusing, but far less entertaining in the long run than keeping him around. Especially after I went to the trouble of arranging his birth."

"Why?" Andi asked immediately.

"What, how is he going to be entertaining? That would be telling, obviously. But I mean, have you met this kid?"

"No, why did you arrange his birth? Mira told me that Sirius broke the Covenant, you weren't bound to save the House—"

"I'm also not bound to ensure its destruction. Perhaps I was feeling somewhat sentimental. Perhaps the world is simply a more interesting place when the House of Black exists. Perhaps it's really none of your business. What part of 'that would be telling' did you not understand, Andromeda Tatiana?"

"Forgive me, my Lady," Andi said, holding her hands up in a clear gesture of surrender. "I understood you to be referring to future events when you said you wouldn't say, not decisions long past."

"The past decision in question and the reasoning behind it is predicated on those future events and the relative likelihood of their unfolding with or without Harry's existence. Time is weird like that from the outside. Ask your mother when you make up with her. Now, I have places to be tonight, and while raw darkness may sate the Family Magic's desperation and halt its further dissolution, it is a living thing. It requires life to recover coherency and proper sapience. I mean, yeah, it was always a little inhuman, but it used to be more like wilderfolk than a desperate feral child or a starving vampire. So, Harry."

"Yes?"

"How far are you willing to go to save the Black Family Magic?"

"As far as I have to," he said. He didn't even have to stop and think about it. He'd known it for years: "I'll do anything."

Angie grinned, a sharp, dangerous expression, grey-green eyes sparkling with triumph, though he wasn't entirely certain why. "Good answer."

And then she bloody well disappeared!

For a few seconds, Harry had been all but certain she was about to tell him how to get to the Keep and what he needed to do, but then she'd just vanished, stepping sort of backward into the darkness around them, and— "What the hell?! Come back, damn it! I don't know what to do!"

"Don't you?" Andi asked, raising an eyebrow at him. "You seemed to twenty minutes ago."

"Well, yes, I know I have to kill people for them, because we're starving to death, but I don't know how to get to the Keep. Unless you do?"

The witch made a face. "Not overland. And as I told you in response to your letter, I haven't been able to safely apparate to any of the Black properties since I cut ties with the House. Whether Narcissa might be able to, I'm not certain. Her connection to the Family Magic was not so completely severed when she married out, but she never did share blood with the House..."

"Yeah, that's what Snape figured." Well, that neither of them would be able to help him, at least.

"Snape knows about this?!" Danny exclaimed.

Harry nodded. "Due to wacky Mabon hijinks. I didn't tell him."

"Why didn't you tell me? Who told you, for that matter?"

"Er. We'd only just met? I figured it out on the train — you know, you were drawing James Potter, and Theo asked you if it was a self-portrait? And I don't actually have Lily's eyes, like the shape, just the colour. And then Blaise confirmed it when I asked."

"Blaise knows? Why the hell does Blaise know?"

"Presumably because Mirabella confided in him. Her understanding of what is or is not an appropriate burden of knowledge to place on a child has always been somewhat...off."

"Is that why you didn't tell me?" Danny demanded, tears in his eyes, his face twisted into an expression of rage? betrayal? relief? "Because you think I'm not– that it's not appropriate for me to know that I'm not related to that– that monster? That I'm not going to just wake up crazy one morning?!"

Andi blinked at him, clearly taken aback. "Oh, honey... I'm so sorry." She moved to give him a hug, but he pushed her away. "I shouldn't have— It never occurred to me that you would think— I was waiting until you turned thirteen because, quite frankly, Mira and I have no idea what Dumbledore was thinking when he switched you and Harry, and until we start discussing the details of House management, it really makes very little difference, so— But I didn't realise you wouldn't know—"

She was cut off by a crack of apparation — a curvy, dark-haired witch a few inches shorter than Andi, wearing a cocktail dress and a scowl, appearing a few feet away. "Meda!"

Andi flinched. "Mira? What are you—"

"You tell me! Angelos Black just crashed my Yule party and told me I needed to come here right now. What the hell is going on over here?"

"Ah... How much did Bella tell you about the Blacks' Yule Ritual?"

"Enough to help her pick sacrifices the Dark would like," she said drily, taking in the scene. "I'm not entirely sure how the Black Family Magic and the Dark are related, but I understand they are to a significant degree. Hello, Danny, dear. Having a good holiday so far?"

Danny, momentarily lost for words, simply stared for a solid three seconds before saying, "Pretty good, yeah. Just found out Bellatrix isn't my mother. Sacrifices?"

"Yes, sacrifices. Humans. Muggles. Usually young, good-looking, smooth-talking rapacious arseholes. Corporate executives and ad-men, you know the type," she said with a knowing smile, sort of like they were sharing a private joke. "And of course Bella's not your mother, love. Even disregarding the fact that I met Eridanus enough times to recognise the godparent bond between us, it was obvious before you turned four that you are far too stable to be Bella's child." She turned to Harry with a grin, looking absolutely delighted to meet him — so genuinely so that he instantly mistrusted her. "You must be Harry. Blaise has told me so much about you. Call me Mira."

He hadn't really told Harry all that much about his mother, just enough that he knew his instant mistrust was probably unfounded. (Blaise obviously trusted her, and Harry trusted Blaise's judgement better than his own on matters of people.) "Er. Hi?"

Apparently that was an acceptable greeting. She nodded before turning back to Andi. "So, why am I here, exactly?"

"Ah...probably because I can't safely apparate to any of the Black properties anymore, and the Keep hasn't had a floo connection in years, I'm sure."

"Back up a bit, love?"

"How much do you know about the Black Family Magic?"

"Ehm...I know that it's oddly sentient, because it's built on..." She trailed off. Harry could almost see her connecting the dots between what she knew about the Family Magic and the situation she'd just walked into. She let loose with what he had a feeling was a slew of absolutely filthy Italian, followed by, "How long has it been since the last sacrifice?"

"It could have been before Bella went to Azkaban for all I know."

"And when did Walburga die, again? She was the last remaining active member of the House, I believe?"

"Nineteen Eighty-Five," Harry provided, when Andi hesitated. He'd been five on the first Dark Night, and he knew now that they had started when the Family Magic realised that Walburga was gone and unless they could get through to him, they were doomed.

Mirabella rewarded him with more Italian profanities. "How are you still alive?"

"Er. The Little Crow couldn't reach me until now, and then Angie gave them magic through me so we could stop panicking and trying to eat Danny. But she's the Dark. She's not alive. We need life to live. So I still need to do the ritual right, but I can't, because no one will tell me where the Keep is!"

She turned back to the other witch. "So, I'm here because you don't want to help your nephew kidnap a suitable sacrifice yourself, and explaining the situation to Narcissa will take too long?"

Andi flushed. "Well— I gave up that life a long time ago, Mirabella!"

"Meda. We both know you never stop being a daughter of the House of Black."

"You can cut yourself off from the Family Magic and be purged from the wards, though. I can't apparate to the Keep anyway."

Mira gave an exasperated little huff. "Fine, I'll take him."

"Yes! Good! Thank you!" Harry was supposed to talk to Snape about how to not get caught kidnapping and murdering people before he actually did it, but he was pretty sure it didn't count if he was with another adult who knew what she was doing. If it did, he would apologise profusely when he got back to school, because he had no intention of missing this opportunity by going to talk to Snape first.

"Thank you, Zee," Andi muttered, sounding oddly ashamed of herself.

Danny, on the other hand, was clearly appalled. (It must really suck being the only sane person in the room right now. Garden, whatever.) "Are– Are you serious? Mum? You– You really want Harry to just— You want him to just go murder someone? Harry, you can't... Please tell me you don't want to do this."

...What sort of stupid question was that? "Do I want to kill someone? I will admit, I'm sort of curious. Not enough to just do it for fun, but." He shrugged. "Do I want to help the Dying Lady — the Black Family Magic, whatever? Yes. Absolutely. I said I would do anything, and I meant it. Killing a stranger to save the Family Magic isn't even a question."

"I... I don't think I can be part of this."

Harry rolled his eyes, quickly growing annoyed now that Mira had agreed to help, and they were still standing around not doing anything. "No one's asking you to, Danny. It's not your problem. Just forget you heard anything about it."

"Like I'll be able to just forget my best mate is out murdering someone?" Danny scoffed.

The witches exchanged a look over the boys' heads. One of those mum-looks he never knew how to interpret, but which all mums seemed to understand.

"Danny, love..." Andi sighed. "I don't like it either. I did leave the House of Black for a reason. But it is a matter of life or death. If Harry doesn't feed the Family Magic, it will kill him — perhaps after slowly driving him mad. It won't want to, but it won't be able to help it. It's like a starving vampire, and Harry is the only source of life it can reach."

Mira, meanwhile, possibly sensing his increasing need to do something, offered him a hand, apparating them away before Danny managed to come up with a response.

Chapter Text

They reappeared somewhere that was definitely not the Keep, or wherever they were going to kidnap someone to murder.

"Er..."

"Costume change," Mira explained shortly. "I can't wear something like this out in Muggle London without attracting too much attention, and I can only imagine how you managed to get that much blood on you in the course of Andromeda's ritual. Blaise's rooms are that way—" She nodded to the left. "Turn right at the end of the corridor, second door on the right. I expect he's still there, since he's not expected to attend the pre-dinner party. Get cleaned up and see if he has anything muggle that will fit you." Harry sincerely doubted that he would, since Blaise was a good eight inches taller than Harry. "I'll come find you when I'm ready to go. Fifteen minutes, perhaps."

He liked slightly-annoyed, impatient, businesslike Mira better than overly-sincere, happy-to-meet-you Mira, Harry decided.

And it took all of two seconds for Blaise to remind him why he was Harry's best mate, even if Harry was Danny's. (Which was...sort of weird? Danny had to have other, better friends than Harry. Just because they lived together...) When he knocked on Blaise's door, and the taller boy opened it to find Harry standing there, covered in blood, he just raised an eyebrow, asked deadpan whether he'd changed his mind on the invite to stay with the Zabinis over the holiday, then, and demanded a "quick quotes recap" of the night's (afternoon's — it wasn't even five, yet) events.

After which, his only comment had been, "So, that's a yes, then, on staying with us? After you go commit your first murder, obviously."

"Er...probably?" Honestly, Harry hadn't thought that far ahead. "Not the whole three weeks, probably. I'm supposed to be at school. Andi sent a note to Flitwick that I would be back on Christmas, or maybe Boxing Day."

"Brill. Though I was sort of hoping we could use your sudden company as an excuse not to attend Mira's family's Christmas party. Christmas in Milan? Beautiful. Mira's family? Awful, regardless of the season... Here, try these." He threw a pair of trousers at Harry, which he had to have outgrown years ago, since they actually fit reasonably well. "I don't think I have any shirts small enough to fit you, but I do have an old coat here," he added, digging it out of the depths of his closet after a few more seconds.

"Cheers. Er. You do know I'm probably going to ruin these, right?" There had been a lot of blood in Socks, and she'd been a relatively small dog. He could only imagine killing a human would be messier.

Blaise blinked at him. "Harry. Look around yourself. Does it really look like I'll suffer from losing a single muggle outfit?"

...That was fair. The Zabinis' home was very nice, probably actually a manor or something — Harry had the impression on the way here that the two corridors he'd seen weren't even most of it — all heavy wood and thick carpets and drapes and fancy textured wallpaper and shite. Actual paintings on the walls, even here in Blaise's room (still-lifes, not portraits, Blaise didn't like the walls having eyes), and no clutter or books and toys strewn about. (Harry wasn't entirely certain Blaise had toys. It was sort of hard to imagine him playing with action figures or a model racetrack or something like that...) The sort of place Aunt Petunia wanted Number Four to be like, but would never manage.

"If I were you, I'd be more concerned about whether Danny's going to want a new roommate than whether I'm going to want a pair of trousers back that are five inches too short."

Harry felt uncomfortably as though he'd suddenly lost the plot. "Why would Danny want a new roommate?"

Blaise sniggered. "You did try to eat him. I mean, he already thought you were sort of creepy, but attempting to tear a bloke's throat out with your teeth is sort of its own level of disturbing."

Harry huffed at him. "I didn't do it on purpose."

"That doesn't really make it better," Blaise said, laughing even harder. "I can't wait to see Danny's memory of you trying to fight off Andromeda."

"Shut up, I wasn't in my right mind. I'm sure I would have done better if I'd really known what was going on. Or if I'd had claws. Humans are really not good predators..."

"Now, Harry, there's no shame in losing a wrestling match to a witch who's almost forty and hasn't been in a serious fight in decades," he giggled, grinning like a loon.

"Piss. Off."

"Seriously though, about Danny."

"I was possessed. I'm sure he'll understand."

"I'm not sure he will. I mean, I can let Coco sneak up on him to find out, but I'm guessing his roommate going feral and trying to kill him is a little scarier than Andi burning his sketchbooks. Maybe just...think about it. What you're going to tell Flitwick if he wants to switch, when we all go back to school."

Well, if he really did, that would be a problem, because none of the other Ravenclaws would want to share with him, and Harry somehow doubted that Corner and Cornfoot were going to let Danny triple up with them so Harry could have his own room. That just wouldn't be fair, especially since their room wasn't as big as Entwhistle, Goldstein, and Boot's.

"If he cares enough to actually say something, I'll just move my shite down to your room, how's that? I mean, McGonagall's already practically decided that I'm a Slytherin anyway."

Blaise shrugged. "I snuggle in my sleep, and you'll have to convince Snape or one of the prefects to let you have our password, but sure? Does that mean I don't need to air out a guest room?"

"Do I need to air out a guest room?" Harry repeated, in a deliberately overly-posh tone. "Christ, Blaise, I don't care — unless murdering people is really exhausting, I'm probably not going to sleep tonight at all..."

Mira, wearing a significantly higher-cut, less-formal looking dress and a long muggle coat, reappeared halfway through Harry's mockery, though he didn't actually notice until she spoke from the doorway: "Yes, Blaise, you should air out a guest room. It's only polite to offer your guests a space of their own, even if neither of you anticipate a need for separate beds." ("Yes, Mira.") "Ready to go?"

Harry nodded eagerly. "Don't wait up, Blaise."

"Wake me when you get back, I want to know how it goes..."

"I sincerely hope it doesn't take that long. Ideally, I would like to be back before dinner. I am in the midst of hostessing an event, at the moment..."

Oh, right. "Thank you, by the way. Did I say thank you? Because I really appreciate this," Harry said, giving her his most winning smile.

"It's really not fair for you to look so much like Bella."

How it went was shockingly smoothly. They walked around Muggle London for an hour or so, with Mira explaining the finer points of choosing a good victim and a good location from which to apparate with him, pointing out different types of muggle security cameras and so on. They scouted out a nice hotel with the intention of convincing their victim to invite Mira up to his room, where she could knock him out with a potion, and then apparate him to the Keep. (Being able to apparate was clearly the most useful magical skill for the purposes of kidnapping someone — Harry made a mental note to learn as soon as possible, since he didn't want to have to keep asking people to help him kidnap victims.)

She brought Harry there first, to a heavily-overgrown outbuilding at the edge of a small wood, and left him to explore while she fetched a suitable sacrifice. As she flatly informed him, bringing along a child tended to be a turn-off to unsuspecting arseholes trying to pick up women in hotel bars. (Clearly, Harry would also have to develop his own strategy for luring appropriate sacrifices to out of the way spots in order to apparate away with them.)

It felt like it took a very long time for her to come back — long enough for Harry to find his way out to the circle of black stone in the middle of the wood and, bearing in mind Andi's advice from earlier, make a stab at a purification ritual. Since he really had no idea how to do that, properly speaking, he decided that getting rid of any extraneous magic or enchanted objects, like he would for Potions class, and washing up a bit more thoroughly than he had in Blaise's bathroom would have to be good enough.

Which was why he was starkers when Mira reappeared with an unconscious man in a suit, his tie half-undone and her lipstick on his mouth.

He went back to the spot where she had left him, because he didn't want her to come back and find him missing, then faffed about for a while trying to decide whether he ought to have his wand with him for the ritual (he had a suspicion that no, he shouldn't bring it into the circle, even if he would probably need it to get the sacrifice to the circle in the first place), and then whether he ought to bring his wand holster. He decided to leave his boots, which were the only other enchanted thing he was wearing, but if he was going to leave his wand outside the circle, he didn't want to just leave it lying out, so he'd eventually decided yes, he ought to bring the holster, too.

Then he'd realised that he didn't have a weapon with which to kill the sacrifice. He had nearly resigned himself to just bashing the poor sap's head in with a rock, when he realised that he could probably transfigure a downed branch or something into a knife. Wood to steel was a transformation he did, after all, have plenty of experience with, now. And focusing a little differently than usual, like Dora had been trying to teach him earlier for free transfiguration, but while also using the matchstick-to-needle transformation spell, he managed to transform a stick into a reasonably blade-shaped shard of metal he judged was probably sharp enough to stab someone to death.

After that, though, he'd realised that transfigurations were ongoing magic, and he was trying not to bring extraneous magic into the ritual. Faced with the choice of rock-bashing or using the transfigured knife, he'd sort of...done the same thing he did to sharpen a pencil or that sword. Except...instead of reminding a sword that it ought to be sharp, he just sort of...convinced the knife that it was, in fact, actually supposed to be a knife. Which might be breaking one or more laws of magic, but...seemed to work? It sort of made Harry feel a little weird, like being dizzy from doing too many corkscrew spirals in a row in flying class, and there was a burst of not-light behind his eyes, like hitting his head too hard (it didn't hurt, it was just really disorienting), and a humming like the telly being on in the other room with nothing playing for a few seconds, but that faded quickly, and it...seemed to work?

At least, when the ringing in his ears and the flash of non-light faded and he looked at the knife again, it wasn't being held in its current shape with a transfiguration. Stimulating its fundamental identity like Danny had taught him as a general un-transfiguration spell didn't do anything, either. So that was cool.

And then, because Mira still hadn't been back — when Harry checked the time, it had only been about twenty minutes, which wasn't that long, it just seemed like it when he was waiting for something to happen — he'd decided that he might as well wash up a bit better and try to get in the right mindset, or whatever it was Andi had said exactly. It was a bit chilly, but he'd spent several rainier, colder nights out in the Forbidden Forest over the past two months just because, well. It was there, and he didn't want to be inside, even if the weather outside was sort of terrible.

He'd gotten used to the cold relatively quickly, to the point he honestly wasn't sure whether he was using magic to keep himself (relatively) warm somehow, or if he was just ignoring the cold somehow (Blaise said that was a thing people could do with occlumency, like mind over matter shite), but either way, it didn't bother him to spend a few hours creeping around under the trees, soaked to the skin, seeing whatever there was to see when the rain killed his scent and the sound of his footsteps, and it bothered him even less to strip off his borrowed trousers and coat out here under the moon, washing himself with a leaf transfigured into a small cloth and water from the aguamenti charm.

Because Mira was a good sport, and probably expected Harry to just do stupid and/or crazy things for reasons he couldn't really explain after knowing Bella for years, her response to apparating back to find Harry outside, naked, in the middle of winter, washing himself under the full moon, was: "I'm fairly certain the ritual doesn't require participants to be skyclad, but to each their own, I suppose."

"I didn't think it did. Andi mentioned a ritual purification thing... Whatever, it's not important," he said, pulling the trousers he'd borrowed from Blaise back on.

"Okay," she said, clearly trying not to laugh at him. "Do you...know what you're doing from here?"

"Yeah, I think so. I mean, most of the ritual — the old ritual, I mean — was to include the whole House and like, decorative, sort of? Aesthetic, that's the word. The only important part is that I have to kill him in the circle, and I have to do it for the Family Magic." Harry wasn't entirely certain how he knew that, but then, what else was new? "You don't have to wait," he added. "I don't know how long it will take — well, I know it won't take that long for him to die, but I think afterward I'm probably going to just stay and...be with the Family Magic for a while — and I know you have a dinner party. You could just come pick me up in a couple of hours. I'll come back here after."

"You're sure you don't want me to come with you?"

He shook his head. "I think I have to do it alone. Thank you, though."

"Oh, thank God. I thought I should offer, but I hate seeing people bleed." She sounded so relieved, Harry couldn't help giggling just a little. "Alright, I'll come check on you in an hour, and if you're not here, I'll just assume you're not done yet, and try again an hour after that, yes?"

"Yes. Thank you," he repeated, probably sounding no less relieved than she did. He hadn't realised he was a little concerned that she might try to...butt in on what was really supposed to be just him and the Little Crow, just because he'd had to ask her to get the sacrifice for him.

"Think nothing of it. Good luck." She gave him an encouraging smile, and then she was gone, leaving him alone with the unconscious man.

Harry cast a Hover Charm on him, pulling him through the dark trees by one arm and reflecting that if Danny wasn't still freaking out about Harry trying to eat him in a few days, Harry would have to admit that perhaps this spell wasn't entirely useless.

There should probably be more...ceremony to this whole ritual than simply dragging the sacrifice to the centre of the circle — his Hover Charm failed as soon as the body came to the edge of the black stone — and finishing removing his tie so it was easier to see the pulse in his throat, but Harry and the Family Magic had been waiting far too long to delay it even a second longer for such a stupid reason as that.

He set the knife against the man's throat, leaned into it, and pulled, opening an ugly gash, much as Andi had done earlier, with Socks. Unlike the dog, though, this man — Harry hadn't thought to ask his name, if Mira had even bothered to get it — didn't sleep peacefully through his death. His eyes shot open, wide with pain, and he tried to scream, to move, hands scrabbling up to his throat as though he could stop the blood from flowing.

It was already too late. Harry felt it as soon as the first drop fell on the black stone beneath his knees, the magic — not so desperate as it was before the Dark had interceded earlier, but still hungry for that warmth, for life — seising onto it and ripping it away, the light fading from the man's eyes before the blood stopped flowing.

It spread through the magic in the air and through Harry himself in a way he couldn't quite describe, allowing him to relax in a way that he hadn't realised he was tense, almost like...almost like being at Hogwarts, surrounded by enough magic to really breathe for the first time.

The Little Crow, by contrast, had definitely known they were tense and anxious, scared that this miracle might be somehow snatched away from them at the last moment, not daring to truly believe in their salvation until they felt that warmth flooding through them again. They pulled a body together for themselves — younger and smaller than Harry — just to cry tears of relief and throw themselves on Harry, clinging to him so tightly that he was certain their claws were drawing blood.

But that was fine. He didn't mind. They were together, finally, that was what mattered.

Harry didn't know how long they stayed like that, kneeling beside the cooling corpse in the middle of the circle. It seemed like a very long time and also (weirdly) like no time at all before they were interrupted by a now-familiar chuckle, Angie stepping out of nowhere with a wry smirk. "How very touching."

Harry wasn't exactly sure what the Little Crow said back (he was...pretty sure that was Welsh?), but he suspected it wasn't entirely friendly. More like a wary, what do you want?

Angie grinned. "Someone offered anything to save you," she told the Little Crow. "I'm here to find out whether he meant it."

"Of course I did," Harry said immediately. And she had saved the Little Crow, feeding them...however much magic she had, restoring their strength, even if Harry had still had to find a sacrifice to anchor them to life. He didn't know how he knew it, but he was certain that a single human life wouldn't have been enough to have brought them back from the edge without that extra magic. It would have stopped them from dying, but they would still be craving more. He'd probably have needed to make at least half a dozen more sacrifices before they would have felt as safe and secure as they did now. "What do you want me to do?"

"Oh, nothing much." Harry strongly suspected that was a lie. "You're just going to join me in serving the Dark."

The Little Crow interrupted immediately, scared and possessive, their claws digging more deeply into his back, and not at all happy with that price. No! He's ours, you can't have him!

"Oh, relax, we're not going to take him from you. His soul is certainly open to our influence, but he's a little too...innocent to be Avatar material." The Little Crow relaxed significantly, though Harry wasn't certain in what world he could be considered innocent. He had just killed someone... "We simply require his service."

"Which means...what, exactly?"

"You formally devote your life to worshipping the Dark and promoting its interests in the mortal world; we'll continue to support your Family Magic as long as you do so. When you die, or if you leave our service, the House of Black is on its own again — but if you play your cards right, you could have centuries to revive the Family so it can sustain itself."

...That sounded suspiciously good. There had to be a catch... "But what does that mean, exactly — worshipping the Dark and promoting its interests? What do you want me to do?"

Angie's grin stretched wider, predatory and exciting. "Nothing you won't enjoy. Torturing a few people to death for us now and then. Living your life in such a way as to be a destructive and/or corrupting force on the mortal plane. Giving in to the urge to act like the little monster we all know you are on occasion, and revelling in the pain you cause."

O...kay? Still sounded too good to be true, but. "Just to be clear, I don't have to torture and kill anyone specific, or, I don't know, go on a rampage at Hogwarts the next time I just hate everything and can't stand the world existing, do I? Just someone, sometimes?"

"Well, no, if you go on a rampage at Hogwarts, a certain self-righteous prick will snuff you out, and that would be no fun at all. Clearly it's preferable that you not be caught doing our bidding. And generally speaking, no, there isn't anyone in particular we want you to kill, like, I don't know, little Blaise Zabini or Doriel Tonks. People you like or who are likely to kill you if you try. You can choose your own victims. That's fine, except..."

"Except?" Harry repeated suspiciously.

Angie sighed. "Except, we've decided that we want you to put Tom out of his misery. We do enjoy watching him suffer, but removing him from the board affords greater opportunities in the long run."

"...Who's Tom?" She said that like Harry ought to know who he was, but...

The Avatar of the Dark pouted. "The Dark Lord Voldemort. Silly name, but he was a delightfully overly-dramatic child. If you kill him, the tynged that Evans bitch rooted in his soul will stop affecting Bella through him, and then she can stop being boring."

Oh, right. Harry remembered the memory of her talking to the Little Crow about that, how it was spreading to her through him. And he was pretty sure that if the tynged wasn't an issue, the Family Magic would be able to root itself in Bella, which would be better than waiting until Harry was old enough and could channel enough magic to support it himself. He could tell the Little Crow agreed, tensing excitedly and saying something like, You would save Bella for us?

"Not for you, because leaving her in Azkaban is a waste. Sort of funny, because the dementors think she's creepy, but she's not actually doing anything there."

The Little Crow nodded eagerly. "Yes! We agree! Tell her yes! Please," they begged, clinging to one of his hands with both of theirs and giving him wide, desperate eyes, feeling hope spark to life in them, almost painful, even now that they weren't in danger of starving to death. Maybe more so because they felt safe — they were afraid that this chance, especially on top of the miracle of their reprieve, was too good to be true.

Most people, Harry supposed, would find the little crow-child alien and even more disturbing than they found him, but he couldn't say no to them when they were being deliberately adorable. (He probably wouldn't be able to tell them no anyway, even if they looked like they were fifteen or so instead of five, but still.)

"Alright. I still kind of feel like I have to be missing something, but yes, I'll do it. Serve the Dark, or whatever. I mean, I did say anything, so... I just need to kill the Dark Lord who's already mostly dead anyway?"

Angie sniggered. "I'm sure we'll find other things for you to do too, but yes, killing Tom so Bella will stop being boring is a good start. Oh! While you're getting Bella out of Azkaban, you could get Sirius out, too. He is an annoying little shite, going and rejecting us, but honestly, breaking the Covenant as a fuck you to the House is the most House of Black thing any of them had done in decades. And he never did get a trial for Pettigrew's murder. Which kind of sucks, because Pettigrew's not even dead. Again, I can't tell you where he is, or exactly what happened — I really shouldn't even mention that he's still alive. But that's like, the most basic necromancy, it's barely a secret."

Now Harry was sure he'd missed something. "Er...again?"

The witch paused, apparently confused. "What?"

"You said, again, I can't tell you, but—"

"Oh! Right. I didn't actually tell you — we can't tell you how to kill Tom, or where he is, or anything like that, because that would be telling. I was going to, but then the conversation went in a different direction and that didn't actually happen in this timeline. Oops. Aspects of Magic can't just give mortals all the answers to their problems. Well, we could, but it would make the story much less interesting, and we can't have that. We can, however, advise you to visit your grandmother. It's not telling if mortals ask each other the right questions. Even if one of those mortals is Druella bloody Rosier, which is practically cheating, but she's not an Aspect of Magic Itself so she doesn't have to follow the same rules. And we have nothing against cheating, so."

Harry really didn't know what to make of any of that. "Okay, so: Ask Druella for advice on killing the undead Dark Lord; kill him so Bella will...be herself again; find Peter Pettigrew; get Sirius a trial and clear him of murdering said traitor. And maybe occasionally kill someone with you in mind, if it strikes my fancy."

Angie nodded. "Yep, that's it. For now." She leaned forward to kiss him on the forehead, magic jumping between them like an electric shock to his soul, agonising and exhilarating, leaving him gasping for breath, and popped to her feet. "Also, I'll take this," she added, gesturing to the corpse. It proceeded to startle Harry rather badly by sitting up and clumsily climbing to its feet — clearly still dead, but...animated? Was that the right term? Like a zombie or something. He scrambled to his own feet, pulling the Little Crow with him and causing Angie to giggle hysterically. "I'm headed to a party with a bunch of sirens," she explained. "It's only polite to bring snacks." (Which really wasn't much of an explanation at all, honestly...)

And then she was gone, leaving the two of them in the circle to simply be together until dawn.

Chapter Text

Blaise followed Mira out of the floo after only a few seconds. She'd only gotten as far as taking Druella's hands and kissing her cheeks with the usual pleasantries. Dru found this somewhat annoying — the pleasantries, not Mira's presence, she actually liked Mira (and Blaise) — but she gave no external sign of it. Mira, similarly, gave no external indication of the envy she was attempting unsuccessfully to quash: Druella still looked exactly the same as she had when Mira was Blaise's age, which meant Mira now looked substantially older than her. It was all the more frustrating because she knew there was no trick to it that she could learn for herself — she'd asked Bella what cosmetic charms and figure-maintaining potions her mother used when they were teenagers. Bella's response had been I think Cassie taught her how metamorphs avoid ageing, which was impossible, but so was a non-legilimens learning how to do true legilimency — attuning part of their mind to another person's to make contact directly, not with a charm — and Dru could definitely do legilimency. Super weird, overly-precise legilimency, but literally everything about Dru was super weird and overly precise.

I heard that, Blaise. She slipped the thought into the front of his mind almost as smoothly as Snape would have. He only noticed the contact because his mind's base-frequency had changed a little since the first time he'd visited — that was normal, it tended to happen as kids grew up — and Dru was still using the impression she'd made the first time he legilimised her. It had been an accident, he wouldn't have dared try to get into her mind on purpose, but he'd just been coming into the talent and he'd still been in the mind-wandering phase. Mira had warned her, but Druella apparently didn't mind if he practised on her, because it meant she could practise on him too, after she followed his initial probe back and formed an impression of the natural frequency of his mind. She claimed she couldn't do this on her own, find the proper resonance frequency of another person's mind, though Blaise wasn't sure why she shouldn't be able to. He'd asked Snape if theoretically a non-legilimens could learn legilimency, and the really impossible part was that she could make part of her mind adopt a different resonance frequency in the first place. That was, as far as Blaise could tell, pretty much the definition of being a legilimens.

Dru didn't respond, aside from a shiver of emotion Blaise interpreted as the mental equivalent of an exasperated shrug, because she had no idea why other people couldn't control their minds (or bodies, for that matter) the way she could, but she was positive that it was something she did consciously and deliberately, not an instinctive talent like it was for Blaise. I stand by everything about you being super weird.

That time, she didn't respond because she was distracted by Harry following Blaise out of the fire.

Mira hadn't told her why she wanted to stop by on their way to Protio Amedeo's home in Milan. Personally, Blaise didn't really feel they needed a reason. He would much rather visit Dru than Mira's parents and their extended family (most of whom were not very good at keeping their disapproving thoughts about Mira's lifestyle and Blaise's existence to themselves), but Mira was trying to be a mature adult and develop a stronger relationship with Alessandro and Constanza (again — she did this every other year or so, and it always went poorly; Blaise was giving it about thirty-six hours until she remembered that she hated practically everything about her parents and didn't actually want a stronger relationship with them), so she had RSVP'd yes to the Family Christmas Party.

Trying to follow Dru's thoughts was bloody impossible, Blaise just couldn't keep up.

He caught the impression of Harry's magic that the wards gave her, a flash of curiosity about who he was — obviously he was with Mira and Blaise, but Mira hadn't mentioned bringing anyone else, which was inherently suspicious, especially since it was clearly a young mage (Blaise didn't know how she could tell) and so far as Dru was aware, the only child Mira routinely associated with who Dru didn't know was Danny — she hadn't thought Mira was here for a favour, but she couldn't imagine why she would be bringing Danny (or any other child) here if there weren't a problem he needed her help with. (Which was absolutely accurate.)

He caught that Harry really looked a lot like Bellatrix — more than he'd picked up from Mira, whose later memories of Bella as an adult were much clearer than those from when they were firsties themselves — which led into a complicated tangle of memories tied together with frustration and fear, and a sense of kinship Dru didn't really feel with anyone else, even Narcissa. Andromeda, maybe, but she shut that train of thought down before Blaise could catch more than the sense of betrayal and...admiration? surrounding her middle daughter's decision to run away, still as sharp and poignant today as it had been twenty years ago. He got the feeling that Bella was more like Dru, though. She'd liked Andromeda better, but she had seen more of herself in Bellatrix (despite always having insisted that Bella was Cygnus's daughter).

That was followed by a whole slew of memories from the end of the war and inferences about exactly how Harry had come to exist — that Bella had used blood alchemy to make a (male) clone of herself — and why — what Dru knew of the state of the House of Black at the end of the war and today (all too quick for Blaise to follow, other than that she was pleased most of the Blacks were dead now) — and a quick comparison of Bellatrix and Sirius (because their similarities made him the obvious choice for a source of a male chromosome).

He caught that something in the way Harry stood, something in the way his eyes flicked to Blaise, gave away that he was Harry, not Danny — i.e., not the boy raised by Andromeda — and...somehow that he had been raised by Lily Potter's family in Surrey? (He had no idea how she'd put that together, Harry hadn't even told Blaise where his Aunt lived, it just hadn't come up, so...) which was apparently infuriating, but not because they were muggles, so Blaise didn't know what was going on there, and sparked a surprisingly strong sense of empathy and protectiveness — not that she wanted to have raised him herself, but the foster family Dumbledore had chosen was absolutely unacceptable, especially for her grandson.

And then there were a few...

Well, he didn't really know what those were, they didn't feel quite like memories or imagined scenes. Comparisons between Bellatrix as Dru remembered her and...sort of a half-imagined what-if version of her not raised by the Blacks, anyway. Probably trying to predict what Harry would be like? (More like an obscenely energetic version of Dru herself, she suspected. Probably still dark-minded and inclined toward Madness, but not a black mage, so...)

Bellatrix is a black mage?!

What? Yes, of course she is. She dedicated herself to Eris and sacrificed her 'humanity' to the Dark in exchange for a dramatically increased channelling capacity under a covenant which has since been broken. I suspect it physically remodelled some part of her brain to accomplish the latter, which required the former—

That train of thought spiralled off into a maze of information on neurology and magical development Blaise didn't have a hope of comprehending.

I honestly have no idea what she might have been like if she hadn't made the Choice. I never interacted with her when she was that young if I could help it, she admitted without a hint of shame. (Why would I be ashamed? I never wanted children. I couldn't stand them even when I was a child... — Blaise exercised every ounce of self-control to avoid following that thought into memories of Dru as a child, which was just the weirdest concept, honestly.) The elves insisted that she was a sweet little girl before making the Choice, but they were Black elves, so their standards for such things were almost certainly questionable.

Aloud she asked, "Mira, you are aware that there are easier, far more accurate methods of locating a person with whom you share blood than resorting to predictive arithmancy, are you not?" which seemed completely unrelated to anything else she'd just been thinking.

"Ehm...no?" Mira very obviously lied. "Well, yes, of course, but I suspect the Old Goat knows that too, and would have taken precautions against those methods, so I thought it was probably irrelevant, and, well...I hadn't told Andromeda yet, so..." She visibly wilted under Dru's disapproving stare, fidgeting and looking away, apparently legitimately uncomfortable, which was weird. Mira was never uncomfortable. Yes, Dru could make anyone feel inadequate, according to her daughters, but Blaise had never seen her do it to Mira before. "I'm sorry, Auntie," she muttered, switching to Italian. "I should have told you."

"Yes, you should have. But don't apologise to me, I'm not the one who consequently spent six years which might have otherwise been avoided in the middle of a magical cold-spot," she noted, maintaining her disapproval.

Mira sighed. "I'm sorry, Harry. If I had told Dru that Dumbledore switched you and Danny when I realised he had done so and asked her where you most likely ended up, we might have been able to retrieve you years earlier. The consequences of not doing so simply didn't occur to me at the time, and so I most humbly beg your pardon for my thoughtlessness and any unnecessary suffering it may have caused you. I promise to do everything in my power to aid you from now on in order to make amends for the harm caused by my earlier inaction."

"Er...thanks? I mean, it's fine, really. What's done is done, I wasn't going to hold it against you or anything..." Harry said, far more awkwardly than Mira once she began her formal apology. "Magical cold-spot?" he asked, both out of genuine curiosity and an obvious desire to change the subject.

Introducing yourself would have been a better option, Blaise thought at him. Now we're going to get caught up in a completely incomprehensible magic theory ramble.

But I like magical theory... Harry thought back, as Dru...

Oh, that was really weird. He hadn't noticed her making an impression of him, since he'd been legilimising her as well at the time (and had also just come into the talent himself), but he could definitely feel her following his probe to make contact with Harry's mind as well, that extension of her mind taking on the frequency of Blaise's where it passed through his, and then Harry's, which Blaise didn't think he could do, legilimising someone through someone else.

I'm sure you can. Serial legilimency is not substantially different from legilimising multiple other minds simultaneously in parallel.

I suspect that learning legilimency from the Dark Lord gave you unreasonably high expectations for what legilimens can do...

...Possibly. Ask your teacher, Dru suggested. He would certainly have a better idea what the average mind mage can do than I. "The Guildford-Woking-Farnborough triangle has an unusually low density of ambient magic. Still enough to perform wizardry, of course — even Albus Dumbledore would have noticed if he were leaving you in an actual vortex — but certainly noticeable enough to make a particularly sensitive mage feel perpetually under the weather."

I'm pretty sure humans aren't affected by a lack of magic like that... Blaise would definitely notice, but he was part demon, and he was pretty sure it wouldn't actually make him feel ill.

Dru didn't respond to that, because she still insisted that she was in fact human, but was starting to doubt it herself.

Well, either that or because she was distracted legilimising Harry. He was still really bad at not looking very obviously preoccupied when he was focusing on a mental conversation. Mira noticed, too.

"I suspect introductions are unnecessary?" she said, rather than point out that they were being rude leaving her out. Blaise caught an impression of uncertainty and anxiety, as though she wasn't entirely sure whether she was forgiven for not telling Dru about Harry. Since he clearly didn't think it was as big an issue as Dru, his acceptance of her apology might not count.

Dru gave her a small smile. (Apparently she was forgiven.) "Obviously. Please, do come in, sit," she offered, ushering them out of the floo vestibule and into the small front room of her Paris flat. "Something to drink?"

"Coffee, please, if it isn't too much trouble," Mira murmured, settling on the very edge of a sofa which was probably only ever used when they visited, her posture very correct — because she was still acutely aware that Dru was aware that she had screwed up, not telling her about Harry, even if Dru wasn't making a point of it. He joined her, leaving the armchairs which completed the little seating arrangement for Dru and Harry.

Blaise was pretty sure Dru didn't have guests very often. He didn't think she spent much time in here at all, actually. The sitting room was impeccably decorated in Dru's elegant, minimalist style — everything from the upholstery to the vertically striped wallpaper was shades of silver and grey, the coffee table frosted glass enchanted to hover at the proper height, the brightest point in the room a landscape depicting a heather moor in full bloom — and spotless, of course, and there were enchantments to refresh the air and so on, but there was still an un-lived-in feeling to it, like so many of the rooms at home that no one ever used.

"You know it's not," Dru noted drily. She wouldn't have offered if it were. As an independent academic, she wasn't really expected to provide the same degree of hospitality as she would as Lady Druella (of the House of Black or Rosier). It wasn't like she had house elves or human staff around to actually make coffee anymore, so not offering was a reasonable option. But it also meant that it wasn't horribly offensive to give them glamoured water instead of actual coffee, and providing that was hardly an imposition.

Granted, most people would just not offer, rather than give them obviously fake drinks (which was sort of declassé), watery or not cooling at a natural rate or just...noticeably glamoured (especially to Blaise — legilimens were harder to trick than normal people), but Dru's coffee glamour was only obviously fake insofar as it was too perfect. (In much the same way Dru herself was obviously faking being human.) She even did something to make it seem caffeinated, and Blaise had no idea how that worked. Supposedly an Invigorating Charm...worked into the water like a cantrip somehow? (He was going to have to ask Snape if that was a thing people could do too, and if so, why they didn't just do that instead of potions.) He was half-convinced it was actually just conjured, like the idea of coffee made manifest. She insisted that it was a glamour, and based on a cup of coffee she'd really had once, but Blaise was pretty sure no real coffee had ever actually tasted quite that good.

Well, the fact that it was too perfect, and the fact that she always did it right in front of them, with a few casual waves and flicks of her wand and the same easy grace she did everything else. Blaise watched through Harry's eyes this time, to see what it looked like with magesight. The answer was just...sort of blinding, the magic that swirled and condensed to form conjured cups not really fading before the other spells involved were cast. They looked very similar, though Blaise wasn't sure whether that was because the water was condensed from the air and then charmed and glamoured too quickly and smoothly to pick out the separate spells, or because it was just conjured coffee.

Harry couldn't tell, either. "I didn't think you could eat or drink conjured food!" he exclaimed.

Dru was in the middle of taking a sip to verify that it had turned out as perfectly as always, so Blaise managed to inform him that, "Food Druella conjures is fine," before she could answer.

She rolled her eyes at them. "I don't conjure food, and constituting food one can safely eat from base elements is hardly worth the effort, especially if one wishes said food to contain any nutrients to speak of. Glamouring water condensed from the air to resemble coffee is, on the other hand, child's play." Literally. I've been doing non-'caffeinated' versions of this spell since I was eight, she added, shooing away Blaise's attempt to determine whether she was telling the truth with legilimency.

Mira let out a little huff. "You haven't really managed to conjure food, have you? Make edible food out of air and dirt, or whatever, I mean," she corrected herself immediately.

"I have, yes," Dru admitted with a small shrug and an air of unconcern, despite this being completely impossible, so far as Blaise was aware. There were ways to make food with alchemy, but... "One of my colleagues did the difficult part, analysing the necessary molecular structures. Designing and reifying a charm to construct them was comparatively simple. Casting it, on the other hand, is rather too difficult both in terms of magical energy and intensity of concentration necessary to make it practical for widespread everyday use. We published on it two years ago in half a dozen journals, outlining the theory and reporting our initial success. It made a bit of a splash in certain circles. I understand a team at the University is working on refining the methodology to something the average mage can cast, but I was only assisting with the initial development as a favour to a colleague. My involvement ended at the proof-of-concept stage."

Blaise caught a flash of memory — Dru breaking herself out of the meditative state she entered to cast the spell which was absurdly complex and magic-intensive (orders of magnitude more than any other charm Blaise had ever heard of) to find that the several grams of foodlike molecules produced over the course of what felt to Blaise like hours had formed a small blob of unappetising goo she had no interest in presenting as food to anyone. Since Jonathan (the colleague) had seemed similarly unenthusiastic about sampling it, she'd transfigured its structure to resemble that of marshmallow foam and used a nifty little spell Thom (the Dark Lord) had invented to translate an emotional experience into a physical sensation to give it a flavour: standing on the cusp of the sublime, the beautiful, tragic awe inspired by witnessing a transient and unreplicable moment of perfection — complex but light; sweet, slightly smoky, and vaguely fruity, with just a hint of underlying bitterness (which brought out the sweetness all the more). It had seemed appropriate for the occasion of tasting the first charm-constructed foodstuff ever produced (so far as they were aware). It was, after all, a once-in-the-lifetime-of-a-people experience.

And she...regretted it, for some reason. Why?

She pushed the mental equivalent of an exasperated shrug at him. Because, if you must know—

I must. I didn't think you regretted things. Generally, the things people regretted were mistakes, and Dru didn't make mistakes.

I wouldn't consider it a  mistake , precisely, since I couldn't have known how Jonathan would react in the long term, but if I had, I certainly wouldn't have used that particular inspiration to flavour the thing. He insisted that it was an absolutely transcendent experience, akin to witnessing the face of God, and he's been very awkward about the whole thing.

He had, in fact, been stalking her, Blaise realised, poking at the related memories. Following her around and begging her to let him have another taste — just one more glimpse of the very idea of perfection itself. (Yes, clearly he completely missed the point of the feeling behind the flavour.) She was avoiding the Alchemy Department as a whole, most of whom were now firmly convinced that Dru was, in fact, one of the Greater Fae and had enthralled their Department Head with a bite of faerie food. (Bloody idiots.)

I'm not sure the thing you should be concerned with here is your reputation or whether he missed the point, Blaise hazarded. I'm getting definite deteriorating sanity, probably going to escalate and try to murder you vibes from that guy. You've reported him stalking you, right?

Your concern is sweet, Blaise, but entirely unwarranted. You're not wrong that he did begin to escalate his attentions, but well. I'm sure you can imagine the effects of a harsh and unequivocal dismissal of the importance of one's existence by a person one is deluded into believing speaks on behalf of one's god. He attempted suicide over a year ago, and has been in hospital since, she assured him, with absolutely no emotional overtones at all. Just...cold. As I mentioned, very awkward.

Blaise shivered, just a little. Sometimes he forgot that Dru wasn't just scary-smart and impossibly good at magic, may-or-may-not-be-human scary, but actually scary in a friends with the Dark Lord, spent twenty years living with the Blacks, has probably intentionally murdered people way.

Her eyes flicked over to catch his over her cup. Thom and I hadn't been friends for quite some time even before Nineteen Eighty-One. She didn't comment on whether she'd murdered someone, which Blaise suspected meant she had. Not that he had any room to judge.

"That's so cool, though!" Harry exclaimed obliviously. "How does it work? I mean...you'd have to make the magic follow a pattern sort of continuously, right? and draw in stuff from outside, which I guess kind of sounds like some of the healing charms Madam Pomfrey was letting me read about when she thought I might be possessed—"

Mira shot Blaise a look, because he hadn't mentioned that Harry had been suspected of being under possession, because Snape had apparently known that he wasn't actually, the school healer had just been being paranoid. He wasn't sure how much of a difference it might have made if he had, either. Maybe Mira would've thought to warn Andi and she wouldn't have let him in on her Yule ritual, but Blaise sort of thought it was a good thing she hadn't?

Harry, at least, seemed happier now that he wasn't cut off from his Family Magic anymore and it was stable again, even if he had been a bit ill the past two days — Andi said he'd be fine after his body adjusted to...whatever it did to a person to ingest the ichor of a creature like Angelos — and he hadn't actually murdered Danny, so Blaise thought it was fine. (Very privately, avoiding letting the thought anywhere near Dru, because Harry might actually murder Blaise if he undermined his attempt to ask Dru for a favour by spilling the beans on everything that had happened over the past few days.)

"—but those just direct cells to do things they do anyway, and I thought one of the reasons they're so tricky is the cells are so small, but at least it's not like you have to actually control them all. Actual atoms are way smaller, and not alive, so you'd have to actually make them move around and stuff, right? But how do you even target a spell like that?"

Dru really couldn't help but smile at Harry's enthusiasm, which she clearly found slightly adorable, despite claiming to hate children. Granted, Harry didn't really count as a child any more than Blaise himself, and she really did like magical theory, but it was still a little surprising she actually explained. "Alchemic charms really have very little in common with healing charms. Crafting charms, particularly those involved in fabric production, are a far better parallel — spinning thread from raw fibres, weaving and knitting and so on. And atoms are hardly autonomous actors — they react perfectly predictably, assuming all relevant factors are taken into account in one's predictions. One of the fundamental principles of bioalchemy is that the interactions of the elements of life and non-life are a difference of scale and complexity, not of type.

"It's not necessary to target individual atoms if the framework created by the charm is correctly tuned to attract the desired elements — there are various ways to define the target components, I used the same O.H.E. derived definitions I would to conjure them — bringing them into a specific orientation relative to each other, after which mundane forces can be allowed to govern the reactive processes involved to achieve the intended result.

"Given that the molecules we intended to construct were relatively complex, the framing schemata are correspondingly specific, and the replication pattern uses multiple layers to ensure the correct proportions are produced. The forces involved are small, of course, but the individual 'actions' required to execute a single complete iteration of the pattern number in the thousands, making it both magically intensive and prone to slippage if the caster's concentration falters. The latter problem is exacerbated by the necessity of slowing the repetition rate to accommodate the limitations of the caster's channelling capacity, which of course extends the casting period considerably."

"Can anyone else actually cast this spell at all?" Mira asked, amused suspicion suggesting she anticipated the answer would be no.

"Two Charms Masters I know of have learned it. Independently of each other, it seems — both of them wrote to me afterward complaining about the slippage issue. Also a Brazilian craftswitch who weaves ghost tapestries. She was delighted by the concept, and wanted permission to adapt it to produce the spider-silk they use for weaving. Apparently it's in the same realm of technical difficulty as some of her more complicated pieces, though of course those require far more artistry. She mentioned that constructing super-fine strands of silk out of raw elements would be an excellent practice exercise for her apprentices, however, so I presume there are at least a few others who have managed it by now."

"Ah, I see," Mira said, nodding.

Dru raised an eyebrow at her. "Do you really?"

"Well, that this is a ridiculously difficult spell, yes. As far as how it works, you lost me at 'alchemical charms'," she admitted cheerfully. "I don't believe I've heard the term before."

The older witch gave her an exasperated sigh. "It's exactly what it sounds like, Mira. Using charms — magically motivated physical and metaphysical effects — to produce alchemical products, rather than traditional alchemical processes. You haven't heard of it because it's hardly been used for anything outside of academic circles. I doubt there were a dozen researchers in the world exploring the concept when you were a NEWT student. Producing alchemical foodstuffs directly rather than through resource-intensive traditional processes is one of the areas in which it may actually prove to be a superior methodology with real-world applications, rather than merely an academic curiosity."

"It's still really cool, though, even if it's not useful yet," Harry insisted. "And even if I only understood about a third of everything you just said."

Mira finished her coffee and set the cup aside with a disappointed little sigh. (Neither Blaise nor Harry had her self-control — both of their cups were long-since empty.) "'The perfect type of a perfect pleasure'," she quoted. Oscar Wilde, Blaise was fairly certain. "'Exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied.'"

Dru laughed. "Oh dear, you'll just have to come back and visit again. Perhaps even without whatever excuse brought you here on such short notice today. What a shame."

"You know I don't need an excuse to come visit you, Tia."

"I do. But I also know you have one, or you would not have brought Harry with you today. So. What's wrong?"

Mira pouted at her. "Oh, nothing urgent. Blaise and I are expected in Milan within the hour, so we can't stay, but I offered to bring Harry here and introduce him on the way. He has a favour to ask."

Harry's grandmother raised an eyebrow at him. "Well?"

"Well, it's kind of a long story, but I sort of told the Dark that I would do anything to save the Family Magic at Yule, so it did — the Family Magic isn't starving to death anymore — and in exchange I dedicated myself to serving it like Angie," Harry explained, with a positively absurd degree of casual unselfconsciousness. Maybe it would have been better for Blaise to clue Dru in ahead of time, if just springing it on her like that had been his plan all along. "Um. Angelos. Do you know her?"

"We've met," Dru admitted, sounding very unhappy about that fact. I am unhappy, yes, because if you recall several minutes ago, I was thinking about how much of a difference it would have made if Bellatrix hadn't dedicated herself to Eris.

Oh, right. I don't think he sacrificed his humanity, though? I mean, he hasn't been channelling more magic, and his personality doesn't seem any different. Maybe a little less stressed, but...

Hmmm..."Go on."

"Right, well, anyway. One of the things it asked me to do is kill Tom Riddle — the Dark Lord, I guess that's his real name — so the corruption ritual Lily turned back on him at Mabon back in Seventy-Eight will stop affecting Bella through their soul-bond thing and she'll leave Azkaban and stop being boring. And Angel said she couldn't tell me anything about how to do that because that would be telling — I guess gods aren't allowed to just give mortals all the answers to all their problems? — but I should ask you, because it's not telling if mortals ask each other questions, and yes, asking you is sort of cheating, but the Dark likes cheating cheaters who cheat, so. Is there anything you can tell me about why he didn't die completely and how I can fix that?"

Druella gave him a very unimpressed look. "You do realise you're essentially asking me to facilitate the resumption of a very bloody war which I was under the impression no one wanted to do."

"Please?"

Dru turned her glare on the younger witch. "Mira?"

"Well, no, I don't want the war to start up again, but I do want Bella back— You know she was less and less herself those last couple of years, and I feel terrible, I thought it was just...a natural decline, you know?" Dru nodded, her glare faltering as she briefly looked rather guilty herself. "And she did used to be reasonable, I'm sure I could reason with her, and you're right, really, no one wants to go back to fighting. And without Thom to coerce them into it with the Mark, I'm sure most of the surviving Death Eaters won't agree to rejoin the Cause — you know almost all of them wanted out by the end. And she would have practically no resources without them — not to mention, I'm sure it will take her some time to recover from Azkaban, I would have time to work on her. Without Thom, she won't have any incentive to continue the New Avalon project at all. Lily Potter is already dead, so she won't be able to go after her for revenge, and I think after so long, and with the tynged lifted, the impetus to lash out over his loss will have faded anyway. You know how she was about Cygnus. I honestly think I might be able to convince her to just travel for a while, or go join the University, or something."

"Or, without Thom holding her leash, she might decide it sounds like a good idea to set the sky on fire," Dru suggested. "I don't know, I can't predict anything when it comes to her!"

"So you'd rather leave her rotting in Azkaban under the influence of some corruption curse until she dies of old age or malnutrition or whatever people die of in Azkaban if they don't feel misery? And Thom out there in the world somewhere, half dead, completely mad, and trying desperately to claw his way back to power from now until forever?"

Dru sighed, closing her eyes and rubbing at her forehead. "No, of course not, but... I'll think about it. Run some numbers."

"But—" Harry objected.

His grandmother cut him off with a sharp glare. "I said I'd think about it, Harry. If the Dark wants me to help you, and by extension it, it will simply have to wait until I decide how best to do so. It's been ten years already, a few more hours or days are hardly likely to make a substantial difference."

Harry shut up, making a very obvious effort to look respectful, and not like he was severely annoyed she hadn't just said "yes." This was just as obvious to Dru and Mira as it was to Blaise, but Dru didn't care as long as he wasn't going to nag her about it. "Yes, Ma'am."

"Good. In the meanwhile, I'd like to have a word with Albus Dumbledore; and Mira, I believe you have a family function to attend?"

"Ah, yes. Yes, I do. You'll...let me know? Please?"

Dru sighed. "Yes, Mira. Give Alessandro and Constanza my regards — and when you come back the day after tomorrow to get drunk and cry over their continued inability to accept you for who you are, I'll tell you what we're going to do."

Mira bit her lower lip anxiously. "You really think it's going to go poorly?"

"Of course it's going to go poorly. It always goes poorly. And though I doubt you'll remember it in the moment, it's never your fault. They poisoned the well when they had those obscene compulsions forced on you as a child. Quite frankly, I'm shocked Bella and Thom didn't simply kill them and put them out of your misery decades ago."

Mira gave her a weak smile. "Bella offered when we were fifteen. I told her not to, for Gio's sake. He deserves to have a family, even if I can't make it work."

"You've got me," Blaise reminded her. "And Dru and Harry and Nicky." Blaise was almost certain Dominic Prieto was his sire. They had the same eyes, and Nicky was the only person other than Bella whom Mira truly considered a friend. Harry seemed surprised to be included, but he was her godson, so. Andromeda and Narcissa and their children probably counted too, though the only one of them who really appreciated Mira's presence in their lives was Doriel.

Dora, he corrected himself — he still wasn't used to thinking of the metamorph as female. They'd only decided to present themselves as female most of the time when they'd graduated and joined the Aurors, because constantly explaining to new people that yes, this person who looks very much like a bloke today is actually Nymphadora Tonks, and yes, they're a metamorph, was sort of a pain. Mira had won them over in about ten seconds flat calling the androgynous teenage shapeshifter Doriel, rather than Dora or Dorian.

Also, he was pretty sure Dora had a crush on Mira. Not particularly unusual, Mira was very fanciable, but it did mean the metamorph appreciated her coming around a bit more than Andi and Cissa.

"Yes, and maybe Bella. Hopefully," she added, giving Dru a pointed look.

"Maybe. Go — being late is hardly likely to get the impending train-wreck off to a good start." That startled a laugh out of Harry, who was the only person present who hadn't already seen this show multiple times. "I'll see you in two days."

Blaise was fairly certain that Mira drew out the farewells as long as possible because she really didn't want to get to Milan any more than he did, but they did eventually make their way back to the floo, leaving Harry and Dru giving each other sidelong looks when they thought the other wasn't watching, and Blaise rabidly curious about what, exactly, Dru wanted to say to Dumbledore.

He was guessing it wasn't "Happy Christmas".

Chapter Text

Harry wasn't sure, but he suspected that Druella might be the single most freakish person he'd ever met. That wasn't a bad thing, just... Like he was a freak among magic freaks for being able to do magic on purpose before getting a wand, or learning spells six or seven times faster than everyone else by himself, or being unnaturally pretty and graceful, she was too. Except more.

That had been his first impression of her, stepping out of the fire — an instantaneous sort of recognition. (Oh, she's like me!) He couldn't say exactly why he felt that way. She didn't look especially like him. She was tall, though not as tall as Aunt Petunia — maybe five foot six or seven — and blonde, her hair swept up with magic, not a strand out of place. Her complexion was darker than his (enough to suggest that she had at some point in her life seen the sun, at least), her nose and chin sharper (more reminiscent of Draco's generally pointy face, but it looked better on her), her eyes less deeply set.

But her face was perfectly symmetrical and he could tell she wasn't using the charms witches normally used to look like real-life airbrushed magazine photos, and she looked much younger than she actually was, even accounting for mages ageing slowly. He would've guessed she was in her early thirties at most, if he hadn't known that she was really in her mid-sixties. She definitely looked younger than Mira, rather than twenty-plus years older. And the way she moved, returning Mira's greeting with the fluid precision of a ballerina, probably without even trying — that was familiar.

He could see why people didn't think she was entirely human. There was just something slightly...unreal about her. Like she was in the world, sure...but only mostly. And in other ways much more a part of it than most people, her every motion choreographed to some music no one could hear — to magic — surrounded by a strange sense of order and certainty, almost as though anything she did was fated to happen.

Harry didn't really believe in Fate, like everything was all planned out and even when you thought you were making a choice you were really just doing what you were always destined to do, but standing in the same room as Dru, catching her eye for the first time, he wondered just for a second if maybe Fate was just as real as gods.

And then she'd been so upset about him being left in Little Whinging, not because the Dursleys were muggles — zipping through his memories, forming an impression of who he was, she'd said Aunt Petunia did an admirable job raising him, which he suspected was high praise, coming from Druella — but because she knew what it felt like to be deprived of magic, and exactly why he never wanted to go back to Little Whinging, even if it hadn't been as bad as she probably thought, growing up there before he'd ever known how much better life was with enough magic around to let him breathe properly.

He wasn't sure, she didn't say when he'd been thinking about it at the time, but he didn't think that was a problem other people had. Everyone he'd tried to explain it to since he'd first realised how much better Hogwarts was than Little Whinging seemed to think he meant that he could use magic at Hogwarts, which, no, he could use magic at Aunt Petunia's house just fine — and had, pretty much all the time, even if he was just absentmindedly playing with the ambient magic, attuning it to himself but not really doing anything with it. He knew Druella was listening because she'd said something about that being a coping strategy to make up for the low density of ambient magic, consciously and continuously drawing it to himself, making a little field of artificially higher density, but she still hadn't said anything about whether it was a normal thing or not.

He was guessing it wasn't.

And maybe it was weird, but the fact that Dru got it sort of made him feel like he'd found someone who got him, someone he belonged with in a way he didn't belong with anyone else. And the fact that she cared, that she was upset, on Harry's behalf over him being left out to dry in Little Whinging, sort of made him like her. Sort of a lot. Even if it really hadn't been as bad as she thought (he hadn't really known anything else, before) and she would hate it on principle if any magically sensitive child were forced to grow up in a place like that... Harry wasn't really sure anyone had ever cared about him like that before. Well, probably Narcissa when he was a baby, and like...the house elves — his understanding was that his nurse would've been an elf — but no one he could actually remember.

(Between being invited to Andi's Yule ritual, meeting Dru, and finally making contact with the Family Magic again, Harry was actually starting to feel like he had a real family for once, instead of just...trying to make the Dursleys fit into that role. Not that he didn't still appreciate Aunt Petunia undertaking the thankless task of raising him, but comparing his feelings for her to the sense of belonging he felt with Dru and the Little Crow, it was sort of obvious he'd been trying to convince himself for years that the Dursleys were his family when he didn't even know what that meant.)

It didn't hurt either that she was scary smart and had a reputation for being terrifyingly good at magic.

Harry had already known that, of course — he'd even tried to read one of her papers, the one Sinistra had recommended, about geomancy and the influence of intra-system objects and other planes where magic itself worked differently. (He'd understood...some of the words. In his defence, it was both over his head and written in French. And he'd only just started learning French then.) But knowing that someone was good at magic and seeing them casually spell coffee into existence (even if it wasn't conjured, it was still really impressive to see it charmed and glamoured so quickly and smoothly) including suspending a charm in water?! (Harry definitely wanted to learn how to do that!) to mimic caffeine were two very different things.

And designing a spell to build specific, edible molecules — which she'd apparently done as a side project, her actual research was mostly on time and the nature of the multiverse, like the paper he'd (tried to) read — might be the single most impressive feat of magic he'd heard of yet. Though, the fact that literally everything he saw in her flat (except that painting in the sitting room and the built-in cupboards and flooring and stuff) was conjured was also impressive as hell. (No, he wasn't sure how he knew it was all conjured, it wasn't as though it felt magical like a transfiguration — conjured things were the thing, until they unravelled and went back to being magic; transfigurations were only temporarily being held in a different form by the spell — it was all just...cleaner, somehow, than real furniture and clothes and stuff. Unreal almost in the same way as Druella herself.)

Overall, he'd gotten the impression that Druella used magic for practically everything, which was sort of great, because why wouldn't you, if you could? He was aware that most people (inexplicably) thought that using magic all the time for everything was weird, but those people were simply wrong. Legendary mages like Merlin and Morgen and the Founders of Hogwarts, Harry thought, would have been like Dru, living and breathing magic. In many ways, she was exactly the sort of mage he hoped he would grow up to be.

So, not only did Harry like her and need a favour from her, but he also found he had a good deal of respect for her. Knowing that she didn't like kids or anyone who was loud and messy and chaotic — Andromeda had warned him when Mira had taken him to her office to fill her in on the situation with the Family Magic and assure her that he wasn't in any danger of being possessed and trying to eat Danny again, seemingly genuinely concerned that Druella might make Harry feel bad or something, like he'd never been told off for being unintentionally annoying — Harry had been trying to be on his best behaviour. And up to this point, it had been going pretty well, he thought. Yes, he had been sort of...overly enthusiastic earlier, asking about the alchemic charm, and he had been entirely unable to sit without fidgeting even before drinking whatever magic had been in that 'coffee', but she hadn't seemed annoyed, even if he hadn't been quite polite enough to be considered a young gentleman by Aunt Petunia's standards.

Now, though, he was having serious trouble not interrupting, because Druella had decided that they were going back to Hogwarts to talk to Dumbledore — the idiotic confusion surrounding Harry and Danny's identities was a much easier problem to solve than how to kill Tom Riddle and thereby almost certainly ensure Bella would leave Azkaban without starting the war back up again, and unless Dumbledore had a very good reason for having done it in the first place this little charade ended now — but they weren't apparating or taking a portkey like Harry and the Zabinis had to get to Brittany earlier. (The floo network didn't cross the Channel, so they'd had to portkey over here first, which was fun, in a merry-go-round ride from hell sort of way.) Instead, she was casting a spell by carving dozens of runes into the ambient magic, sort of like Harry had when he'd been waiting for Master Ollivander to find wands for him, but much more purposefully. He could feel the spell building around them, taking shape, and he had to physically bite his tongue to keep himself from begging her to explain what she was doing.

Finally, after several minutes of building suspense, there was a sort of ripple. A hole appeared in the space defined by her runes — a hole in reality, leading to an absolutely blinding well of magic.

Harry yelped, wincing — he couldn't help it, it was just suddenly and overwhelmingly there, and far too bright to ignore, like he could mostly not pay attention to wards and such now. It blotted out his perception of every other piece of magic in the room — Harry was a little surprised it wasn't physically (metaphysically, whatever) spilling through the hole and drowning them. Turning away from it physically didn't help, obviously, but that didn't stop him from doing so, purely on reflex.

Dru turned to him, almost as startled by his reaction as he was by the sudden appearance of a hole in the bloody universe. "Oh. Too bright?"

"Yes, Jesus Christ! What is that?"

She reached out to his mind, seeking out his perception of magic and... It felt like clamping down on something, like kinking a hosepipe somewhere between whatever part of him actually sensed the magic and his brain, drastically reducing his awareness of it. Of course, it reduced his awareness across the board — he couldn't sense any of the other magic around them at all now — but at least the Hole wasn't completely monopolising his attention anymore. Not Jesus Christ, though I suppose an argument could be made for the Holy Spirit... Hold that.

Hold what? he wondered, though it became obvious as Dru began to withdraw and whatever she'd done eased slightly. Oh, shite! He sort of mentally flailed at it, trying to flatten his perception again. After a few seconds he...mostly got it. Sort of. His control over it didn't feel very secure or precise, but he...more or less had it. "Thanks. But seriously...what is that?"

Druella gave him a slightly absent smile, most of her attention still on the Hole. "Magic. Most transport spells — apparation, portkeys, gate spells, even shadow-walking and other elemental magics — involve moving from this plane to an adjacent plane, through which it is considerably faster and easier to travel, or which does not correspond to physical space in this plane at all, then back to the Mundane Plane in a different physical location. This isn't a plane. It's...just magic. The Beyond, the Void — what lies Outside all other, physical planes, separating them from each other, and connecting them to each other."

Harry wasn't exactly sure how that was different from it being another plane, but he also wasn't sure this was the time to ask. That seemed like a big question. "...So we're going to go through there to get back to Hogwarts? How?"

The witch gave a little hum. "Not really, actually. This—" She gestured at the Hole. "—is what I call a Floating Gate. It opens a portal directly to the Outside through which physical materials may pass. Magic not tethered to a physical vessel cannot. Physical materials cannot, however, exist Outside, with no reference to a physical plane." She conjured what appeared to be a billiard ball and reached through the Hole. When she let it go, it vanished immediately. "Theoretically, this includes conscious beings. We might last a little longer, since we have our own magic maintaining the integrity of our bodies — that's what allows us to cross to and from Apparation Space, for example, without simply vanishing — but there's no ethical way to test that hypothesis. Therefore, in order to use the Beyond as a physical short-cut, one must first open a Floating Gate to the Outside, then open a second Floating Gate from the Outside to one's destination without losing contact with the physical plane.

"Space has no meaning Outside — nor does time, for that matter — which means the second Gate can be opened directly adjacent to the first. The process is somewhat complicated, however, because the second Gate must be opened using a freeform or wandless expression of will. Traditional wizardry simply doesn't work Outside. Once your Gates are aligned, you simply step from one physical point to the other physical point, making very sure to always keep at least one foot firmly Inside, ensuring that you have a physical reference and don't vanish yourself. We won't be entering the Beyond itself, so much as...stepping from the deck of one ship to another — the point, in fact, being not to fall into the ocean."

She grinned at the expression of awe on Harry's face. "That is so cool! Will you teach me?"

"No, I most certainly will not."

"But— Why?"

"Because I don't trust you to use the power to go anywhere responsibly, or even without falling into the Beyond or becoming horribly lost," she answered absently, reaching out into the Void again with her eyes closed, clearly focusing on what Harry assumed was the Second Gate.

How lost could you get if you just opened a doorway straight to wherever you were going? he wondered. He waited until Dumbledore's office appeared on the other side of the portal, with just a thin, brilliant curtain of magic separating here and there before asking, "Okay, but if I prove I can be responsible and promise not to vanish myself, could you teach me?"

She shrugged. "Honestly, I have no idea. Possibly? Certainly not before you come into your power, and I spent years spirit-walking Outside before I learned how to shape magic out there." She held out a hand for his. "I'd like to say so, but I really have no idea. And theoretically, if you don't define your destination properly, you could end up anywhere, any when, in any timeline or plane in the infinite multiverse. Knowing that you've dedicated yourself to the everloving Dark, I think it a near-certainty that you would stumble into trouble at the earliest opportunity. Come," she said, stepping into Dumbledore's office and tugging him after her.

Harry would like to say he could be trusted not to stumble into trouble, but he was aware that simply defining any mishap as a "fun adventure" rather than "trouble" did not actually change the fact that it was still getting into trouble, and basically saying that stumbling into trouble was fun probably wasn't a very convincing argument to teach him anyway.

He was thoroughly distracted from his attempt to come up with an argument she might accept as he stepped through the portal — specifically, as he stepped through the thin veil of magic separating the two halves of the gate.

It was brief, a split-second impression of infinity washing over him, but it sparked an almost painful, longing certainty that he was meant to be out there, floating in an endless sea of magic, not in this cold, dark, terribly mundane world. It very nearly brought tears to his eyes. If Dru hadn't been holding his hand, pulling him onward, he might have stopped, let himself fall, because he knew it would feel right. He didn't need a physical body, he didn't want it, he could just stay out there forever...

Dru very clearly knew what he was thinking, closing the portal behind them before she let him go. "Could you keep a promise not to vanish yourself?" she asked, genuine curiosity on her face and in her voice, both of which suddenly seemed very foreign and...wrong.

"Ah...I...don't know," he managed to say, after several seconds spent attempting to recall how lips and tongue and breath coordinated to form words. "You said something about spirit-walking?" If that was what he thought it was — it sounded like going out into the Beyond as like an astral projection or something — he didn't just want to learn it, he needed to, as soon as possible.

"Mmm. Later," she told him, as Dumbledore's phoenix appeared (with Dumbledore) in a burst of brilliant golden flames and painfully light magic, which instantly gave Harry a headache, but did do a very good job of bringing him crashing back to earth.

Right. Dumbledore. They were here to talk to him. Focus, Potter!

He looked furious, wand out and wary, as though he was under attack, hot magic roiling in the air around him almost as strongly as around the phoenix, which was saying kind of a lot. Harry was about ninety per cent certain that he would have cursed them if the bird hadn't immediately fluttered over to perch on Druella's arm, trilling and whistling at her, meaning projected across magic to convey that he was glad to see her, but not glad to see Harry.

She made a trilling, twittering response which Harry figured was probably a greeting, with a soft little pulse of magic conveying a flare of light as the setting sun sunk below the horizon. The phoenix's name, maybe? She switched back to English to add, "Be nice to Harry, please."

The bird gave a more hostile sounding warble, glaring at him over Dru's shoulder with a single beady eye.

"Yes, I know, but he's only a fledgling, and he knows to behave himself."

Harry got the distinct impression that the response to that was the phoenix equivalent of a grudging fine, but I'm watching you, boy... The sense of light magic on the air lessened dramatically, though. Had the bird been doing that on purpose? What the hell?

It fluttered back to its perch, behind the Headmaster, who was apparently tired of being ignored in favour of talking to a bloody bird. He had relaxed substantially when he realised that the light creature was welcoming them (or at least Dru) — he put his wand away — but he was still clearly on guard. "Druella? Forgive my abruptness, but what on earth are you doing here? How did you get here? And how do you know Fawkes?"

"You call—" that same twittering sunset flash, which Harry was going to say was definitely the bird's name, "—Fawkes? As in Guy?"

"I do, yes. He seems not to mind. But—"

"They've been keeping you as a companion for well over three decades, now. How on earth have you not managed to learn their proper name?"

"Truly, my dear, I think the better question is how you have managed to learn his proper name. I'm sure you're aware that Phoenix is a notoriously difficult language to master."

"Well, I hardly speak it fluently, but I do recall them introducing themself the first time you asked me here to discuss Bellatrix's lack of engagement in her lessons, and I did pay enough attention to pick up the usual greeting and farewell." Dru glared at him. "Why are we talking about this? I'm not here to discuss 'Fawkes' or myself, I'm here because you appear to have deliberately misplaced my grandson." She pointed at Harry.

"Er. Happy Christmas, Headmaster," Harry offered.

"Harry. Happy Christmas." Dumbledore barely glanced in his direction, returning his greeting. "And yet I truly feel, Druella, that we simply must discuss how, precisely, you managed to so thoroughly circumvent the school's wards."

Dru raised an eyebrow at him. "Magic." When Dumbledore glared as though that answer was insufficient, she added, "We traversed the Void, Albus. Not even Salazar Slytherin could ward against the very existence of magic."

"You what?"

"I opened a gate out of any and all physical planes, then one back into this particular place and time," she explained patiently, smirking slightly at his astonishment. "It's really a very simple concept, and extremely convenient. Why no one else ever bothers, I have no idea." Harry was almost positive that was a joke, despite the slightly annoyed tone in which she said it. "But as they don't, you really needn't worry about anyone else exploiting it."

Harry nodded. "She said she wouldn't teach me because I couldn't be trusted to use it responsibly and not get lost."

Druella nodded too. Dumbledore just sort of stared at her, his astonishment slowly morphing into edgy fear, like she'd done something terrifying and impossible, making him even more certain that that had been a joke. Yes, that was a joke. It's possible that I have on occasion been known to do things other people consider somewhat extreme simply because they are more convenient or comfortable than conventional alternatives, Dru thought at Harry, which he took to mean that it actually was terrifying and impossible, and other people didn't do it because they couldn't. "Now, can you please tell me what you were thinking, leaving my grandson with Harry Potter's muggle family in Surrey of all places, under the impression that he was Harry Potter? I say 'can' rather than 'will' because I remain unconvinced that you were in fact thinking anything at all, and not acting on a purely chaotic whim."

Dumbledore's beard twitched, brow furrowing. If Harry didn't know better, he'd say the old man looked slightly ashamed of himself. "If this is about Harry having been raised by muggles..."

"It's not. I happen to believe that allowing young mages to discover and explore magic independently before burdening them with artificial limits and expectations is beneficial to their magical development. It's not even about you leaving him to grow up in a magical wasteland, regardless of how horrifying I find the very idea. I know you likely didn't realise that you were doing so and would have no reason to expect it to matter if you did, and I'm sure Harry will recover from the trauma of being raised in a low-magic environment perfectly well. In fact, he will likely benefit from it in some way — develop a greater sensitivity to magical subtleties or a stronger gift for the Sight, perhaps. Which is not to say that I approve — that you have likely caused no long-term damage in your ignorance is a matter of chance, and a comparatively slim one at that. Any other magically sensitive child growing up in such an environment would likely have simply failed to thrive. Bellatrix, however, always was perversely resilient, and I have no reason to suspect that her little clone isn't the same."

"Her clone?"

Druella shrugged. "Essentially. Most likely using Sirius as the source of a male chromosome, but no other substitutions. Not only would both she and the Black Family Magic have considered Bellatrix herself to be the epitome of perfection and the most likely candidate to revive the House, but so far as I am aware she only ever dabbled in blood alchemy. It is, in any case, irrelevant for the reasons you are concerned about. Certain traits have, of course, been preserved, but their very different childhoods would have rendered them different people even if he were an exact clone. Harry, for example, is much better behaved than Bellatrix at the age of twelve. The muggles did an excellent job with him.

"No. This is about you not only having Harry and Danny raised as each other, but allowing them to be introduced to society under the wrong identities. Why did you do it? What is your plan to reverse the switch when they come of age? Is there a reason I shouldn't simply print an announcement in the Prophet tomorrow? Because it's only going to become more difficult to straighten this out the longer you allow it to go on."

Dumbledore stiffened, clearly offended to have his decisions questioned. "I don't believe the matter is any of your business, Druella. The Wizengamot granted me the authority to—"

"Albus," Druella interrupted calmly. "I realise you have difficulty accepting that other people — especially other people who are younger than you, female, self-educated, and whom you consider morally inferior — may in fact know more about a given situation than you, but remember who you're talking to." Harry snorted.

Dumbledore wasn't nearly as amused. He fixed her with a patronising...almost sneer. Definitely a sneer-adjacent expression. "Oh, believe me, dear girl, I'm well aware of who you are. Forgive me if I find the judgement and advice of a witch who raised a monster like Bellatrix to be questionable, regardless of your own academic notoriety."

Dru raised an eyebrow at his blatant, patronising disapproval, but refused to be distracted by his dig at her parenting skills. (Everyone knows I'm rubbish at parenting. I've never claimed otherwise.) "The Wizengamot didn't have the authority to grant you custody of the boys, and you know it. The fact that the current arrangement has passed unchallenged until now due to the political difficulties in doing so in the immediate wake of Thom's fall does not render the action legitimate. I have no interest in returning to politics, but I will if I must. My circumstances are very different from Narcissa's and Mirabella's, and if I choose to make it my business, you certainly have no authority to stop me."

"You had no interest in making it your business ten years ago, or at any point since," Dumbledore snapped.

"No, for the past ten years, I've thought that my grandson was living with Andromeda — who is a perfectly acceptable guardian, by all accounts much more qualified to raise a small child than I ever was — and that Thom's grandson was living with his muggle relatives in Surrey."

"Thom's grandson?" Dumbledore repeated, apparently stunned. As was Harry, honestly. Thom was Tom Riddle, right? As in, the Dark Lord? Harry hadn't heard anything about him having a kid...

Dru raised an eyebrow in false surprise. "Oh, but of course you were already aware of that detail, were you not? Or perhaps your own failure to direct Bellatrix onto a lighter path in the years she spent primarily under your supervision somehow impedes your ability to observe the blatantly obvious patterns developing around particular individuals. I will admit that I myself cannot see how those two abilities are connected, but presumably that stems from my own inability to control her, since you clearly believe them to be so — and of course your expertise in the field of temporal and historical development far exceeds my own."

Dumbledore went very red, magic flaring around him for a brief moment, before he regained control of himself and bit out, "I take your point, Druella. What do you mean by Thom's grandson?"

"There's no such thing as coincidence, Albus," the witch said, as though this was the most obvious thing in the world. "You'd have to do a lineage test to confirm, but the patterns surrounding Thom and Danny are clear, albeit somewhat muddled by your interference with Danny and Harry, and Lily's role is easily deduced from them, at least in hindsight. I doubt either she or Thom knew about their relationship at any point in her life." Dumbledore sat down in one of the visitor chairs, a bit too quickly, with an unmistakable that explains so much expression plastered across his dumbstruck face. "In any case, the point is tangential to our purpose here today. You've made a mess of Harry and Danny's futures, tangling their identities up as you have. Mira and Andromeda, in their infinite wisdom, decided to wait and see how deep a hole you're planning on digging for yourself—"

"They know? How long...?"

"Of course they know, Albus. Mira realised what you must have done the first time she met Danny — I believe he was four. Andromeda supposedly realised that he wasn't Bella's son several months later, though I can't imagine she hadn't had her doubts for quite some time. I haven't met the boy, but I presume his magic is nowhere near as naturally dark as would be expected for a child of the House of Black. Believe me, I will be speaking to both of them about the wisdom of allowing you to perpetuate this confusion as long as you have. What other actions I take depend entirely on your reasons for having done so — and the boys' opinions on the matter, of course — but you must see that they cannot continue to live each other's lives indefinitely. They will eventually be expected to step into their roles at the heads of their respective Houses, and must accordingly be prepared to do so. And if you will forgive my stating the obvious, the longer this goes on the worse you will look when you are eventually forced to come clean. So. What did you hope to accomplish here?"

When Dumbledore didn't immediately answer, his eyes darting toward Harry with something like guilt lurking in their depths, she added, "I'm not angry with you, Albus. I'm disappointed. Granted, I can count on one hand the individuals who haven't disappointed me in some way or another over the years. You fell off the list with your complete failure to handle your role in Gellert's revolution with any degree of maturity to speak of — and allowing Bellatrix and that idiot Crouch to escalate their conflict to the level of open warfare rather than swallowing your pride and negotiating with Thom did nothing to redeem you — but such personality flaws as cowardice and an excess of self-righteous hubris are somehow less glaringly offensive than blatant idiocy from a man I know to be more intelligent than the extraordinary lack of foresight you appear to have displayed by adopting this strategy suggests.

"I require an explanation. If you refuse to provide one, I will feel no regret for upsetting any plans or goals you may have in mind by simply publicising the fact that you switched the boys for some ineffable reason, and leave you to attempt to salvage your own political career. You are not in a position to negotiate, and I am quickly running out of patience with your reticence."

The old man, suddenly looking even older than he usually did, winced slightly. "I— Harry, please, you must understand, I did not intend to harm you or disadvantage you in some way when I did what I did. I simply..." He looked down, apparently unable to meet Harry's eyes. "It seemed like providence. I could place you, who would be in no real danger from retaliation from Death Eaters still on the loose, with Harry Potter's muggle relatives, protecting you from any light mages who might wish to kill you as revenge against Bellatrix, and well... I didn't think it likely that she would be able to track 'Harry' to Lily's muggle sister, but if she did, it seemed preferable that she find her own son there rather than Lily's. And 'Eridanus' could simply disappear, the true Harry hidden away in the heart of a Light family, to be raised as his father would have wanted. I was confident that the family I chose would not allow their hatred of Bellatrix to prejudice their treatment of the boy they believed to be her son, but raise him as their own, keeping his 'true' identity a secret even from the boy himself. They might have taken unnecessary efforts to preserve him from any dark influences lest he be influenced to take after her, but certainly not to his detriment.

"And you Harry, raised by muggles, would be similarly protected, insulated from our world entirely — rather than forced to grow up faced with your mother's legacy, pressured to reject her and your House, while perhaps being tempted by the dark arts which come so naturally to the Blacks. You might be at a disadvantage in terms of your pre-Hogwarts education, but no more than any muggleborn student, and I judged that a small price to pay to allow you an uncomplicated childhood, uninfluenced by the traditions and political propaganda of the Dark, but, as I had promised certain factions, equally uninfluenced by the Light."

Harry couldn't help but smile a bit at that. It was just sort of funny, because, "You weren't worried about Danny feeling pressured to reject Bella and the Blacks? I mean, either he would have, or I could have been raised with the same ignorance you thought he was being raised in, so...yeah, that's kind of ridiculous. Also, I don't know about anyone else, but my only interaction with Magical Britain being repeated obliviations didn't really give me a great impression of the Light."

Druella closed her eyes, fingertips massaging her temples. "How many times were you obliviated, Harry?"

"Er...at least nine, that I remember. I know I rediscovered magic on my own seven times, and Aunt Petunia just told me the last couple, so I could avoid doing anything too big accidentally, you know? But the first few times remembering I'd already discovered magic was sort of like maybe I dreamed it? So there might've been a couple times before I remember, like when discovering magic again didn't entirely break the spell."

"Very likely — it generally takes several exposures of magically hidden memories before the mind begins to instinctively resist obliviation. Before the age of...?"

"Six. It took a while to figure out exactly how big a spell I could do before I tipped off the Goon Squad." He shrugged. It's not that big a deal, really. Annoying, I bloody well hate them, but I can defend myself from them now, and I'm allowed to know about magic anyway, so it's fine.

No, it isn't. Druella opened her eyes to glare at Dumbledore. "You are aware that obliviating a child under the age of seven more than three times in any two consecutive years — especially of a major, life-altering event such as discovering magic — is considered highly abusive behaviour under the Child Protection Statute of Nineteen Fifty-Two? It's one of the few grounds on which the custody of even a Noble House can be disputed."

"There is an exception for obliviations necessary to the preservation of the Statute of Secrecy," the Headmaster said defensively.

"There is an exception to the Statute of Secrecy for muggleborn children under the age of eleven who are known to be using magic consciously, Albus! Section Five, Sub-section Two: Inclusion of non-magical households of magical minors whose nature cannot be reasonably concealed from their own household. Magical minors whose nature cannot be reasonably concealed from their household may be removed from the household. Alternatively, in cases where the household is judged to be capable of concealing the minor's nature from the non-magical community outside of the household, the household may be included in Secrecy regardless of the age of the minor in question. Case One is muggle children bitten by werewolves. Case Two is muggleborn children under the local age of inclusion who use magic consciously and intentionally.

"Obliviating a small child as many as twelve times in the space of five years is absolutely unreasonable, Albus! Not just unreasonable like I think it should be considered torture to raise my grandson in Surrey and everyone who isn't me thinks I'm insane, but objectively unreasonable! There's research showing detrimental effects on children's long-term memory function which is directly linked to excessive obliviation early in life — have you even had him evaluated by a mind-healer for potential side-effects?"

He hadn't, of course, but Harry didn't want to be evaluated by a mind-healer. It seemed like a bad idea, what with having recently murdered someone... And he was pretty sure there was nothing wrong with his memory.

There's not, and you're not going to be legilimised. Not only would it reveal his duplicity, but it would also reveal the conditions under which the child believed to be the Boy Who Lived was raised, which would not be considered acceptable to anyone lacking the example of the childrearing strategies of the House of Black to compare them to. That's not the point. The point is that Albus Dumbledore has utterly failed to perform even the most basic functions of a legal guardian. Leaving you with muggles — which most mages would consider reprehensible — in a magical wasteland like Little Whinging — which I consider reprehensible — was bad enough, but ignoring blatant mind magic abuse of his charge by the DLE — with whom I will also be discussing this issue — proves him unequivocally unqualified to hold that position. He will be officially remanding you into my custody before we leave this office.

What? I thought you hated children...

I hate  small  children who are unable to control themselves and so completely undeveloped I can't even teach them anything, much less hold a conversation with them — which is the vast majority of them. Children who are capable of behaving like rational creatures and intelligent enough to ask good questions or at the very least quietly observe and learn from adult interactions are perfectly acceptable. I like Blaise. Mira has always been charming — though to be fair, she was rather precocious in developing adult interests, and I didn't meet her until she was twelve. Andromeda and Narcissa were reasonably tolerable even when they were just out of the nursery. I did hate Bellatrix at your age, but you are far less deliberately obnoxious than she was, and I am much better equipped to deal with a certain degree of chaos in my life now than I was thirty years ago.

...Harry had no idea what to say to that.

"Severus Snape, while not a mind-healing specialist, is widely recognised as a qualified general practitioner of mind magic, and assures me that there is nothing seriously amiss with young Harry's mind, aside from his natural inclinations toward dark-mindedness and thrill-seeking, which I think you will agree he comes by honestly," Dumbledore said, somewhat pompously. "And this is no more pertinent to the topic at hand than Lily Evans's heritage."

"I beg to differ, but if you would rather attempt to justify your decision not to switch the boys back after Bellatrix allowed herself to be arrested and the threat of a Death Eater attack on Little Whinging had become insignificant — when Mira insisted that Danny be raised by Andromeda rather than the Millers would have been an opportune moment — please feel free to do so." She gave him an overly-sweet smile, as though daring him to refuse.

The old man stiffened defensively. "As I've already said, I felt it was in Harry's best interests — this Harry's — to be raised with no preconceived notions regarding the Light or the Dark, or anything to do with our world. It would have benefitted no one to exile Danny from magic in his place!"

"You needn't have done so, you realise. You could simply have left him where he was, explained to the Millers that he was really Harry Potter, and placed thisHarry with Andromeda, as you explicitly agreed to do as a condition of Mirabella's truce. Since I doubt you share my opinions on early childhood magical experimentation, I can only presume you intended not only to give the original Harry Potter the advantages of being raised by a daughter of the House of Black, but to inhibit this Harry's magical development — albeit no more than any child 'unfortunate' enough to be born into a muggle home."

The old man went somewhat pink, giving Druella a narrow-eyed glare from behind his gold-rimmed spectacles. "What do you want me to say, Druella? That I feared Bellatrix's son would follow in his mother's footsteps? I would be a fool not to have! That I suspected Andromeda would be better able to prepare Danny for—" He cut himself off abruptly. "I had no intention of deliberately disadvantaging Harry."

"No...you simply considered Danny's education a greater priority...why? To prepare him for what?" She paused.

Dumbledore refused to say, but that didn't really matter, because apparently Fawkes thought Druella deserved to know...whatever the reason was. His cooing warble was accompanied by a heavy sense of certainty, not unlike Harry had felt on first seeing Druella, but much bigger, wider-reaching and...more significant, maybe.

Chapter Text

"No...you simply considered Danny's education a greater priority...why? To prepare him for what?" She paused.

Dumbledore refused to say, but that didn't really matter, because apparently Fawkes thought Druella deserved to know...whatever the reason was. His cooing warble was accompanied by a heavy sense of  certainty , not unlike Harry had felt on first seeing Druella, but much  bigger , wider-reaching and...more significant, maybe.

The witch's head snapped around to fix on the bird. "There was a prophecy?"

"Fawkes!" Dumbledore complained, earning him glares from both the phoenix and the witch.

The bird chittered at him for a moment, in a way Harry thought sounded disapproving, though he couldn't make out anything more than that — phoenix was really different from any other language he'd ever heard. Druella and Dumbledore clearly understood it, though. And Fawkes equally obviously understood English, which was weird. Before today, Harry hadn't realised that phoenixes were that smart, let alone that they had their own language.

Oh, yes, they're intelligent beings, and of course exceptionally long-lived, on the order of thousands of years. Most people consider them to be lesser fae, though truthfully the distinction between greater and lesser fae is completely arbitrary. The population here is most likely colonial in origin — there are only about three-hundred in any given timeline of this universe, and they reproduce only about once every hundred renewal-cycles, which is to say every three-hundred to nine-hundred years. The natural progress of the renewal cycle slows as they age. They can be killed if the renewal cycle is interrupted enough times before it is able to complete naturally or if they are consumed, though I believe humans and goblins, various groups of whom have been known to hunt them for their feathers, are their only predators in this plane.

They feed on magic, heat, and sunlight, and so tend to settle in highly magical, equatorial regions, or occasionally attach themselves to extremely powerful individual mages to explore other climates. There is a myth that they associate only with the pure of heart, like unicorns, or those naturally inclined to light magic — and it is true they find truly dark magic uncomfortable to associate with, much as you find the lightness of  Sunset Flare's  magic to be discomfiting — but truly they prefer "fire" personalities as companions — highly reactive, self-righteous individuals. They also often associate with veela, whose history is kept almost religiously from outsiders, but their magics and their languages are so similar one does have to wonder exactly how much influence phoenixes had on the development of the younger species.

And you? Harry asked, somewhat amused.

What about me?

Do they also associate with you? Because you clearly speak their language and know a lot about them...

I don't speak their language. I know just enough to mimic certain phrases, like hello, Sunset Flare, lovely to see you again. I do speak the Aquitanian and Cretan dialects of the Speech — the veela language — passably well, however, and they — phoenixes are hermaphroditic — switched to that language immediately after I greeted them. I also wouldn't say phoenixes in general are particularly fond of me. I've only spoken to one at any length, a relatively young individual known as Desert at High Noon, who hadn't yet been outside of the Sahara, but most people are willing to hold a conversation or two with a curious visitor so long as they are polite, and Desert at High Noon was equally curious about humans.

Oh. So what's Fawkes saying to Dumbledore?

That I have no ill intent toward him, and if I'm offering to help him Albus would be a fool not to accept, because he's in over his head and Sunset Flare doesn't want to see him hurt trying to disentangle this situation himself. Sunset Flare also thinks that the prophecy in question has been fulfilled, though Albus clearly doesn't.

"What exactly were the contents of this prophecy which demanded the original Harry Potter be raised with all possible advantages?" she asked aloud, addressing (Harry thought) the phoenix. "What event or challenge did you intend Andromeda to prepare him to face? And did you inform Andromeda that she was to do so?" Oh, maybe addressing Dumbledore, then. "Or did you simply assume she would raise him as the Blacks raised her — that he would arrive here fully qualified to take his OWLs, debate politics and history with sitting members of the Wizengamot, and defend his own life with deadly force if necessary? Because that was the product of a training regimen I have since been informed was absolutely psychotic. As such, I assure you, the only one of my daughters who would be inclined to pressure a child to achieve the same standards they were held to as children themselves is Bellatrix. Andromeda considered their lessons excessive in hindsight as soon as she realised the standard to which other children were held — she was rather upset about it, actually — and Narcissa once opined that it doesn't matter if Draco is prepared to take over House Malfoy by the age of fifteen as long as he knows that he's loved and has some inherent value as a person."

Draco has some inherent value as a person? This was the first Harry had heard any such thing. He could understand if Narcissa loved him like Aunt Petunia loved Dudley, in spite of his general uselessness, but...

No — Draco may  theoretically  have some inherent value as a person if and when he develops into an actual person, which I have serious doubts about his ability to do.

Harry was completely unable to stop himself laughing at that, and trying only led to a very loud, very obvious snort. Both adults and the bird turned to stare at him. "Um, sorry. Just...nothing. Funny thought. Please, carry on."

Fawkes cocked his — their — head to one side in what Harry read as a suspicious way, before turning to Druella and apparently answering her question with a long series of trills and whistles and subtle, complex pulses of magic Harry really couldn't follow at all. When the bird finished, Dumbledore looked positively grim, and Druella looked annoyed.

"I will grant that the events surrounding Samhain of Nineteen Eighty-One would fulfil the core points of the prophecy in question, suggesting that Lily's son being the subject is a valid interpretation — though I would lean toward identifying Lily herself as the proximal saviour with the boy's existence as a motivating factor, rather than considering the boy the primary agent of Thom's downfall. Which part of this, exactly, do you believe remains unfulfilled?"

"The part where neither can live while the other survives, Druella! Those were the words, I heard them myself! Harry — Danny — is not safe while Lord Voldemort yet lives, and as he is not truly dead — as I'm sure you are aware, knowing that despicable man — when he manages to return to power he will stop at nothing to ensure that the boy with the power to vanquish him is eliminated! Danny must be prepared to defend himself, yes, but also to hone the power the Dark Lord has never held — the power of love, which motivated Lily's sacrifice and protects him to this day—"

This time it was a snort from Druella which interrupted. "Oh, he needs to hone the Power of Love, does he? Well, in that case, you ought to have had him raised by Mirabella."

"This is not a laughing matter!" Dumbledore snapped. "And Mirabella Zabini is a cold-hearted snake who knows nothing of love!"

"Mirabella is a complicated young woman who is far more emotional than the face she shows the world as Director Zabini, but that was a sex joke, Albus. Because this is a laughing matter. Sunset Flare is correct: Thom has already been effectively vanquished. All that remains is to mop up the pieces — and now that his power has been broken there is no reason that cannot be accomplished by any number of others. You yourself could have done so well before now, I suspect, if you had bothered to try."

"Sadly, Druella, I am certain that is not the case. I spoke to the Seer who made the prophecy after she came out of her trance, showed her the memory, and her interpretation was—"

"You did what?" Dumbledore froze at Druella's astonished interruption. "Why? What on earth were you thinking?"

"I was thinking, Druella, that as a prophecy is interpreted and expressed through the mind of the Seer who communicates it, that Seer might have some insight into the way their words ought to be interpreted — associations, assumptions, and biases of their own which might have influenced the words they chose, and what was actually meant by them."

Druella blinked at him. "Okay, that's actually...reasonably logical. If I had communicated the prophecy in question, it would be a perfectly valid method to attempt to find the most likely interpretation. Unfortunately, I'm the exception, not the rule: Seers tend not to be the most logical, self-aware individuals."

Wait, does that mean you're a Seer? Harry asked.

Yes. Technically. So are you — that's how you could tell my furniture and clothing are conjured, and why my actions seem  fated  to you. I prefer to minimise the peripheral fuzziness and uncertainty which surround me as much as possible, which means acting as decisively and consistently as possible. I'm also an arithmancer and diviner, however — I've never been one to make intuitive claims; all of my predictions are backed by divination and arithmancy which require no special talent to achieve or verify — so no one suggested that most of my peculiarities would be explained if I were in fact a Seer until I took my current post at the College in Nineteen Eighty-One. Despite having already been treated as an oracle for the better part of thirty years by then.

"Prophecies made in a trance state are exclusively the realm of Seers who personify magic because they can't comprehend the things they See without doing so — and moreover can't consciously comprehend even what their personal reflections of Magic attempt to communicate without being possessed by said imaginary friends."

How does  that  work? And what's the difference between an oracle and a Seer?

"Seer" is a less precise term, referring to anyone who intuitively gathers information about things and people through magic. Psychometry, legilimency, the various types of instinctive clairvoyance, and arguably magesight are considered to be related traits. People tend to think of "the Sight" specifically as some combination of psychometry and clairvoyance, ultimately stemming from a degree of disalignment between the Seer's soul and the plane they are born into, which gives them a slightly different perspective on time than most people native to a given plane.

So, Harry was going to go ahead and say that his earlier thought about Dru not being entirely a part of this world was absolutely accurate. Though, apparently he wasn't, either? Trippy...

Oracles are better thought of as members of a vocation than individuals sharing a specific magical talent. They're  generally  clairvoyants who have a conscious or semiconscious ability to access their talent at a time-scale useful for answering petitioners' questions and giving advice, but ritualists who have an established relationship with a particular Aspect of Magic which has an interest in sharing knowledge can also act as oracles. We could spend hours on the differences between Seers and ritualists, and characterising their relationships with magic, psychological and magical traits which make it more likely for an oracle become a medium — to be involuntarily possessed by or voluntarily channel an Aspect to allow it to communicate with others directly — and why, but suffice to say, most oracles answer questions by relaying them to some Aspect — either personal or autonomous — and interpreting its response for the petitioner.

But that's not what you do.