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The Known World Into Thirds

Summary:

The trio is: a war orphan in Slytherin who's survival means nothing if it's not with his friends; a muggleborn in Ravenclaw who's shaping up to the brightest wix of her generation; and a sixth son in Hufflepuff who's willing to face his fears for his crew.

And Theo is paranoid and Sue is angry and Susan is Susan, which is to say terrifying.

And of all the people Harry had to pick to help him with this, he had to pick Snape?

Or: Second year means more friends, more enemies, and a gigantic goddamn snake.

Chapter 1: Prologue: Pay No Attention To The Man Behind The Curtain

Chapter Text

Minerva spends her summer at Hogwarts, almost completely alone, except for the ghosts. The snow has finally melted, even in the shadows of the trees, and the halls are quiet and warm in the sunlight. Good for sleeping, and in her Animagus form, the hollows from years of student’s footfalls are comfort enough on her old bones, the castle’s magic a heavy pool against hers. There was a time when she would have spent the summer trying to publish papers and attend conferences, certain that she could match or even exceed Albus as the premier Transfigurationist of Britain, but now she just writes up her conclusions in long hand and spells them to be only readable after she passes. The last war, she fought Death Eaters who used magic she’d invented against her. Not again. 

Years ago, when she had a different steady lover at every major transfiguration conference and wrote them romantic missives in the margins of the journals she sent to them, she would have balked at the thought of spending the summer almost completely alone, ensconced in magic. Coming of age with the war with Grindelwald had fractured something inside her, and she’d been determined to fill it by becoming something— she still remembers the long talks with Albus late into the night, when she was still in her thirties and the years held nothing but knowledge, and when she got back to her rooms there would be letters from her loves in different cities, and who was she, Minerva McGonagall to, limit herself? She let affections spool around her like the magic did, and even when the romance ran out, there was almost always a friendship still. Those had been good years, heavy and perfect.

Was it because she was older, that the second war took so much from her? Or did she simply have that much more to loose? Gone were the carefree publications; gone were the conferences; gone were the lovers. What a thing, to find yourself in a thicket of woods on a moonless night, fighting for a world where blood didn’t matter, and a women you had met in a Paris lounge and kissed between breathless talk of yet-unproven theorems shot the killing curse at a man you’d loved for a quarter a century, on the orders of a maniac, but there had been a time when you would have taken the green jet for the both of them. What a thing, to come into the safe houses and find sheets laid out over the small still bodies of students you had taught, students you had mentored, students you had loved. 

There had been nights in those years, and nights in the years afterwards, when she’d wondered if it wouldn’t have been such a bad thing, to take a flash of green for the vague idea of a better world. Leave the part where you wring it into existence to someone else. 

But of course it hadn’t gone like that. She came back, year after year, and taught children who might one day shoot the killing curse at her. That had happened last time, too, except this time she won’t give them the benefit of the doubt. 

(She wonders, sometimes, if this time, she’ll be able to say the words back them. To shout Avada Kedavra at the Death Eater who was also once the Hufflepuff Chaser who grinned at her every lesson, the Ravenclaw girl who came to office hours because she was so worried about her OWL in Transfiguration, the Gryffindor who she didn’t realize believed the blood purity nonsense until it was too late. What will it make her, if she can?)

But. It is still summer, the Scottish sun high in the sky. She redoes the wards at the base of the castle. She speaks with the ghosts and toys with the complex magic of the Come-and-Go Room (Helena and Rowena, she’s pretty sure at this point, and she always forgets how brilliant they were until she’s in there, the net of it like a tapestry). She proves theorems and then hides the books and the notes.

She mourns the dead, while the sun is high and she has space to do so, transfiguring twigs into wreaths for the grave in Godric’s Hollow and then walking back from the Apparition Boundary, dreaming of whiskey. She thinks of the living, when she can stomach it, but when she sees Severus as he makes his appearances to brew for the hospital wing, she doesn’t ask him about Potter. She sleeps in the sunbeams in her office as her Animagus, and feels the heat seep into her cold bones, and thinks of how she would like to go, in the next war. He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, personally, is what her status at this point demands; but she would like to think she is still Gryffindor enough to take a bolt of AK for any one of her charges. 

(Severus, being Severus, comes to find her in the lull of brewing Blood-Replenishers, and sits down next to her where she lays curled in the slot of sunlight in the disused eight-floor corridor she favors. Wearing only a dark shirt and pants in the summer, hair up, he looks more like he did when he was sixteen and she could not reach him before He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named burned the mark into his arm. But, while she is the cat, he tells her what she does secretly want to know, as much as it hurts: Potter playing Quidditch at the Burrow, Potter visiting the Oxford Wizarding library and studying Defense and Potions at the Grangers’s very muggle kitchen table, Potter eating ice-cream in Diagon and laughing.)

Days like that, with the sun laying bright prisms over her colleague’s face, his hands stained with the effort of brewing instead of blood and the magic of the castle building up her own reserves and stories of the son of her protégée, she dares to hope there will be no war. That the remnants of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named will implode inwards and Potter will grow up into a brilliant heartbreaker of a Quidditch player like his father, and Severus will never have to go back to that monster, and she will be able to publish her innovations. They will break the curse on the DADA position and when Albus retires, she will be Headmistress and find another brilliant lover, who will revolve around her like a planet and take her face in their soft hands. 

They’ll live, the both of them, and all the children, and all they have already lost will have earned them more than a scant decade and a half reprieve from bloodshed. 

________________

Filius spends the summer in Switzerland, at his daughter’s house on a glacial tarn, constructing international portkeys with the ease of a master when he needs to go to Tokyo or Berlin or Lima for conferences or meetings with colleagues. Quick, painless, always back before dinner to walk down to the village and see his great-grandchildren playing rec league Quidditch in the dusky twilight. 

The summer wastes in a lacuna of days. Philomena and her husband Jacque remind Filius of him and Fey, all those years ago, before the sickness and the post at Hogwarts, when there was only this remote Swiss village his family had lived in for generations, where no one really minded if there was Goblin blood in there. They are always leaning into each other, moving without having to say anything to each other; you can feel the love hang like a good ward. Jacque is a muggle sheepherder, who spends his days out in the hills with the most recent of a long line of loyal dogs at his heels; Philomena learned how to make magical artifacts so he would always have her magic with him. Their three children— two magical, one not, not that it truly matters out here— moved down into the village and now have children of their own. A master stone mason, a healer, a baker. 

There is always a moment, in the middle of the summer, when he thinks of resigning from Hogwarts. There is a small school in the village, for children of all ages, muggle and magical alike, and they always seem to need another teacher. He would write papers, go to conferences. There would be no faculty meetings where Severus picked fights with the DADA teacher, no Valentine’s Day Hogsmeade visits to supervise, no Quidditch matches to attend because his Ravenclaws begged and pleaded. 

There would be no war. 

(Or, well— there would be a war, and it would not be his. He would see the names of the dead in the newspapers and feel nothing, because he did not teach them and does not know their bright faces. The Death Eaters and the Order alike would learn their charms from someone else.)

And what about when Voldemort comes to Switzerland, Philomena had said last war, her eyes cool and even. She had children in her skirts and held her wand with the same brutality her mother had, all those years ago, and he had nothing to say to her. Still doesn’t. Of course You-Know-Who would not be able to abide the concept of this village where blood meant nothing and even magic itself was just a thing you could do or not do. If he won the war in Britain, he would conclude the circle of his quest for immortality and then come for the continent, and the Death Eaters would descend on the village and want to kill his son-in-law because he could not cast a lumos.

But who am I, to do anything about that, Filius thinks, dipping his quill again and starting on the next paragraph of his paper on hyper-colloidal charm theory. He is sitting in the garden of his grandson’s house, while two of his great-grandchildren chase a light-footed dog in circles, magic in their tiny fists. There is only knowledge, and his ability to give it to those who ask for it. 

(In a bookshop in Geneva, he finds the obscure book on Hinther Wards he knows Miss Granger has been trying desperately to get her hands on, but no British Wizarding library has a copy to ILL. At a conference in Bern, he talks to a Charms Master who he thinks Severus’s Miss Finkley would get on splendidly with. In Tokyo, he befriends the new librarian at the Imperial Magic Library and knows Miss Clearwater will be in touch, once he tells her. Student favors fall through his hands like water, and before he knows it, he has stacks of articles he’s found for them, books he bought because they lined up with their specialties, contacts and job placements and Philomena is leaning on the door jam with a knowing look in her mother’s eyes: Dad, you do this every summer, don’t act shocked again.)

In the blushing twilight, they split a bottle of elderflower gin in honor of Fey, who died when Philomena was fourteen and still leaves aches in her wake like great arêtes across the landscape, but beneath them the village sprawls, and look at what else they have built: Philomena, with her mother’s eyes and her father’s magic and that great love all her own. 

I think there is going to be another war, he tells her, slowly, once the bottle is three-fourths empty. He tells her about You-Know-Who back in the school and Albus so blatant with his trap, and saying all of that under the golden Swiss twilight, with the glaciers hanging from the peaks feels almost like sacrilege, but Philomena reaches out to take his hand in hers. 

Then you really do have to go back, she says. 

Fat load of good that did last time, he says, thinking of his Ravenclaws who came to extra tutoring and then knelt at the feet of the Dark Lord.

But they need you, she says, and his heart twists at the thought. And who else is there? 

No one, Flitwick knows in his bones. To leave without spending at least five years carefully finding and teaching his replacement feels like a grievous oversight, despite how he flits with it at times. And if there is to be a war, who is he to leave them without the ability to cast  basic charms, when You-Know-Who is so much, already?

He is not Minerva, who will take up her wand and fight in the Order, when the time comes. He is not Pomona, who will die to save her children if need be. He is certainly not Severus, who’s spent the last ten years never bothering to un-shroud his loyalties and might go back. Hopefully for the Order, as a spy, but perhaps—

He is a teacher. Even if the war is knocking on the gate, he will teach them how to cast levitation charms, and protection wards, and navigation spells. He will grade them fairly and make them sit their OWLs. If they go out to fight, they will know how to heal and how to charm and how to ward. And if You-Know-Who sets foot in his school again—

Well, Filius isn’t a Master for nothing. He knows magic that would make the most powerful wizard of their time quake. It will slow him down, at least. 

But not yet. Now, there is only his family and the summer and the rest of the bottle of elderflower gin.

________________

Pomona spends the summer everywhere. Trekking through jungles after rare plant specimens, only to tumble back through to London to tell a muggleborn they were to come to Hogwarts, only to head to the Rare Plant Fair in America for a weekend, trying to outbid Jasper fucking Burns, the Ivermony Herbology professor, on an excellent example of Celebrun cerebrumn. Anywhere, really, but the quaint cottage in Hogsmeade she still hasn’t brought herself to sell, even though it’s coming on five years. 

(Anywhere, really, but Isle of Sky, where she last heard Marsha was, researching runic circles.)

Sometimes, the other life she could have feels so close she can taste it, like salt in the teeth. She and Marsha would have rented out the Hogsmeade house and travelled the world together. They would have adopted a new dog and gone to little cafes in the magical districts of all the cities they visited. Hogwarts would have been a chapter of her life, not her career, and the weight of the war would have vanished off her shoulders and Marsha would have worn that black dress that even now Pomona can’t get out of her mind and everything would have been alright. 

(Everything would have been alright, except in the moments on the edge of sleep, when she would have longed for Hogwarts, and dirt on her hands in the teaching greenhouses, and her twice-monthly teas with Severus, and Ros’s friendly chatter in Hogs Head and the way the village was all done up in lights at Christmas, and it would have hurt— maybe more, maybe less, who’s to say— but what cruel irony, that Pomona is so acutely aware nothing could have ever fit right, between the two halves of her lives.)

She and Marsha had met in Glasgow, when she was twenty-seven. She had been finishing a Mastery in Herbology and Marsha had gotten a Phd from a muggle university in history, just to compliment her research. It had been a sudden, hungry sort of love— Pomona had had her share of long-term girlfriends through her twenties, but they all had been loose, soft things, not all-consuming. There was something electric in not being coddled, like beating your way up from deep water. 

When Pomona had been offered the Hogwarts job, the first war was just a building of pressure in the temples, and they’d done long distance for a year and a half, until a blustery February day when a shadow had unhooked itself from the castle wall and Marsha had been there, with her truck and traveling cases and a ring. 

All through the war, it had been a good thing, coming back to the house in Hogsmeade and staying up late, talking. They both had their careers, and Marsha travelled often for hers, and Pomona worked late hours. But—

Even now, she is not sure what went wrong. What caused such a beautiful love to wilt and wither. Was it Marsha, who seemed to keep wanting more and more, wanting things she had always been alright with not having, in the before? Had she thought the reason Pomona could not give them was simply the war, and not the way she was made? Or was it her fault— when after three years of rows, Marsha laid the me or Hogwarts card on the table, Pomona had said Hogwarts without even hesitating and what a cardinal sin, even if no true love would have asked her to leave the job she was built for? 

Either way, the house is empty and the ring is gone. What a thing, to survive a war and then to have the woman you loved walk away from you. Or you, walk away from her because you could not give her what she’d demanded if she was to stay. No fault? Equal fault? 

(Three years, it took her, before she stopped packing up her office on the monthly, as if to tenure her resignation and run back, run back to a woman who had demanded her to burn her career because she seemed to feel it meant there was less love for her.)

The past is dead, she knows, and now there is only the coming storm of another war. Owls come to her in the glens and forests and she hears her news of the world: Minerva writes her about class schedules and budget propositions; Albus, who probably should have been writing her about those things, simply sends little off-the-cuff notes (the man is one of the most powerful wizards of the age, but Headmaster? Really?); and Severus writes her dense missives in his sharp scrawl, the kind of thing that one would expect a potioneer to send to a herbologist, but buried deep in there is what he knows she’ll want to know: Harry’s safe, spending his summer with Ron playing Quidditch in the glades and with Hermione studying at the kitchen table. Sitting against an ancient cypress tree deep in the wilderness of northern Russia, snow still underfoot in the shadows, she reads the letter and wonders how much of their next six years will be consumed by the trio’s exploits. 

The trio’s exploits, or the war. She folds the letter neatly and sets it ablaze without a word, just a flash of heat from her crevassed palm. How long do they have? 

She is at a seed bank in Kansas. She is at a muggle conference on rare orchids in Jakarta. She is back at Hogwarts for the night, getting drunk with Severus (well, she is drinking, and Severus is stepping out at intervals even she can match to the steps of brewing Sober-Up), asking that very question, and he doesn’t answer, just looks at her, cold and even. 

Pomona believes that Marsha had come to think that she couldn’t love her and love her students, and what kind of horseshit was that? Pomona’s love had never been anything close-fisted, or finite. Perhaps it will cost her more than she has to give, to stay. Perhaps it will end for her how it has ended for so many others in this war: blaze of green, unmarked grave. But there are worse ends, are there not? 

There would be something, she thinks, to dying on her feet, taking the killing curse meant for a muggleborn. To meeting the Dark Lord at the gates of Hogwarts and saying if you want to hurt them, you will have to go through me. 

These are things about her Marsha never understood, but it is just her, now. She lets the summer gallop by, and thinks of things she can have Neville do in the greenhouse, and the likely composition of her newest NEWT class, and how when the time comes and she raises her wand to fight, she will not think of Marsha. 

She will think of what she chose to stay for. 

________________

Severus spends the summer solving the myriad of problems that have somehow all become his. There’s brewing for the infirmary, brewing for commission, and brewing because he’s a spy and thus paranoid to the point where all of his safe houses have full stocks of countless healing potions. There’s the conferences he’s been invited to speak at, there’s the tea with his former associates (the best is when Lucius has an engagement and he and Narcissa can just talk in the dappled sunlight by the koi pond; the worst are the dinner parties where Avery and Rosier and the rest get deep in their cups and want to tell stories about the muggles they’d tortured like it was some heroic accomplishment. Though, as he finds out halfway through the summer, that is somehow preferable to being asked what Harry Potter is like, and having to play up the sneer in his voice and pretend all he’s been doing for the boy is just a front.) And the Dark Lord is somewhere— no better way to spend a summer evening than tramping over the hideous fens of Europe looking for a wraith, right— and Albus is bloody cryptic and unhelpful about what exactly he intends to do about that problem. 

And then Harry, of course— making sure the net of charms he’d crafted for the Private Drive house held up, and he got weekly letters from the Grangers and then the Weasleys, and he wrote Harry but received no replies, which he supposed to be expected from an eleven-year-old, almost twelve-year-old. 

And was it no wonder he was exhausted? Looking for the Dark Lord had set some of the old paranoia loose in his bones, and he apparated excessively to shake tails. He slept on the couch in Cokeworth, the miasma infecting his dreams; dressed up for the Death Eater’s dinner parties in robes with flowing sleeves and schooled his face to keep the disgust and discomfort off when Nott or Rowle insisted on seeing— on touching— the infernal mark (say what you would for Lucius, but the man knew exactly what he needed to do to keep Severus’s favor and he never appreciated it more than when he didn’t fucking touch him—)

And yet, he’d still find himself drawn back to Hogwarts. He’d never wanted the job, though several years into it, he can admit that he can’t quite see himself doing anything else, not with the war clouding the future. He won’t pretend to be good at it, but he has kept everyone alive, and produced a few top notch potioneers (probably in spite of his methods.) But—

There is something about it that soothes a part of him he won’t dream of putting a name to. There have been no James Potters and Sirius Blacks, since he began; there have been far fewer Slytherins going back to abusive homes (and Pomona and Flitwick have begun to delegate to him as well). His students stand taller in the hallways, like their house is not just the house of the Dark Lord, of genocidal maniacs, of children of Death Eaters. The wards hold, because he checks them, and the potions in the infirmary are perfect, because he brews them (did Slughorn even fucking bother?), and everyone goes back home at the end of the year. 

And— well, he won’t pretend to be a very pleasant or social person; there are kinds of love he’s never wanted, and kinds of love that he had to let go of wanting when he ruined things with Lily, when he took the Mark and decided to spy, when Reg vanished into the dark wastes of the war. But trying to coax himself to sleep even with the rattle of traffic outside Spinner’s End, he finds his mind circling back to the night in April, when he’d handed Sprout his house ring and she’d backed his play; how Flitwick had come down to his quarters and worked through alcohol with him. How Minerva had taken to plopping down next to him in the staff lounge and getting into it. Even some of the more distant colleagues—Sinistra, Vector, Babbage— had begun to listen to his points at staff meetings. 

Like they wanted him there. Like they trusted him. 

The Mark aches, when he gets deep into the fens, but not in any way he can follow. Nott Sr. has this hungry look to him sometimes, and Severus remembers how much he’d enjoyed getting to take him apart, all those years ago. How he’d always wanted to be thanked after crucio, like he was doing a fucking service. Narcissa’s eyes when he comes down the stairs from the upstairs lounge, before she schools herself, and how they look like what he will see in his own, when he finally lets his guard down back at home— it was a mistake, but we’re in too deep now, aren’t we? 

He tells them Harry is just like his father. He tells them Harry is arrogant and spoiled and too-good for school, an easy bid for when the Dark Lord returns, but not worth getting into it with now— Dumbledore is powerful, Severus will sneer, the fumes of cigars hanging around him and the Death Eater’s hungry eyes, not worth making any enemy out of needlessly. 

But the boy thinks you are trustworthy, Lucius says, and Severus—

(Severus thinks of Harry’s face when he’d bought him an ice-cream cone in Diagon. Of how he’d turned back to him, in the doorway at the Grangers’s and said thank you with such absolute faith, and of how small he’d looked, on top of the ward tower after Easter. He is too much of a spy not to think of how easily such a trust could be twisted, warped, used, but he pushes it away.)

Yes, says Snape. Which may be useful, once the Dark Lord rises again. Even saying such a thing makes his chest tighten, and maybe it’s the vow but maybe—

Already, he is dreading the time when he will have to repay Albus’s favors of protection with going back and continuing to weave his web of lies. 

But when he goes back to Hogwarts, the tension slips off his shoulders a bit, and in the dungeons he always brews so well— not innovative, but solid, like a foundation. Sprout drops by and drinks, and when did he become someone people wanted to get drunk with? When did he become the kind of person who would sit next to McGonagall-as-cat and tell her the things about Harry he figured she should know? 

When did he become the kind of person who poured over owl order catalogs, trying to find just the right thing for the child, trying not to think of what Lily would have bought, because then he would have to think about how he was the reason it wasn’t Lily doing the shopping and his day would spiral into a mess of alcohol and regret. 

He has no illusions about the war to come. But watching the Hogwarts owl wing away with his order, leaning on the wall of the owlery and the sunset like falling water all around him, he dares to think of what he would do, if he did not have to do this, and aside from getting to give the Death Eaters a piece of their own medicine (he has a vision of Tiberius Nott crumbled under the weight of his crucio, as imperfect as it is), he finds he doesn’t mind what he has as much as he once did.  

And what more could a man with as much blood on his hands as he has ask for? 

________________

(Albus spends the summer plotting. Voldemort’s rise to power is shrouded in mystery, but he criss-crosses the continent, searching for clues. There are whispers of hideous dark magics that can cup life and stretch and warp the very fragments of humanity, and he knows he should be looking into them, but the books and the shiver of power they exude bring back memories of another summer, when everything had seemed possible and then he’d lost it all in a single blow.)

(He is no fool, not at his age. He knows what he and Gellert could have done together, if it hadn’t been still-birthed. He would have let the rhetoric slide until it was too late to do anything about it; he would have tapped into great wells and glades of darkness, drawing out power. There would have been no Dark Lord because there would have been him, instead. When he walks into the ancient dark libraries, he can feel the books calling to him, their hideous magic recognizing him as one who once sought the darkest of arts.)

(And so many the books are relegated to the corners of his office, stifled in wards. Maybe he goes to the North Sea instead and lets his silver phoenix spare him from having to relieve that August afternoon while he interrogates the Lestranges for the umpteenth time, trying to glean some kernel about Voldemort he didn’t have before, walking past Black’s cell without a look in his direction— he should have seen it coming, really; what kind of fifteen-year-old turns a school rivalry into a murder attempt but also at the time he would have bet his life that Black would have died under crucio before even raising a hand to James Potter—)

(The wards are holding at Private Drive, according to the delicate instruments in his office, and the one turned to Harry’s magical signature reports him alive, so all is well. In long hand, he makes lists of what Harry will need to know, and barters it off against borrowed time.)

(At what point will Severus’s loyalties to Harry impact his ability to spy for the Order? He has half a dozen plans he could use to slowly separate them— so far, it seems Severus’s care for him is half real and half manufactured,  but if it becomes a problem, things can be arranged.)

(Things can always be arranged.)

(Albus sees the war in long lines, in grids and furrows. He thinks of the prophecy, and the past. Admits to himself, alone in his office, Hogwarts as silent as it ever gets, that he is worried what Harry in Slytherin might mean for things. Would he be the one to tug a generation of Death Eater children to his side? Or would he be swayed from his duty by a desire to survive?)

(Time. Albus will only hope they will be able to have time, before it all comes to a head and they’d have to wage a war. Time for Harry to grow into a man, time for him to discover the threads tying Voldemort to the world, time for his Heads to hopefully cultivate the next generation of warriors in the long fight against evil.)

(Hogwarts settles around him, and Fawkes comes to perch on his shoulder, and in between research trips he finally decides on Lockhart— not much substance, to the man, but certainly not being possessed by Voldemort, not with that ego— and Harry is alive and happy with the wards holding steady, and when the war comes, they will be standing there, shoulder to shoulder, and go out to meet it.)