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Chapter Text

It rained almost the entire fall of 1980, and Lily went to six funerals and two of those awful Order of the Phoenix vigils because they hadn’t even found a body, and tried very hard not to think about how Marley would never get to meet the tiny, green-eyed baby asleep against her chest.

It didn’t work. But she tried.

(She had been eleven, so very alone in a very big castle, Petunia’s upset and disgust trailing her up to the tower, the tower she’d hadn’t even wanted— she’d told the hat Slytherin and it had just been silent, before going, child, the things you want are not things they can give you, and would Sev even want to talk to her now? But in the first-year dorm, she’d been there— Marlene McKinnon, the girl had said, sticking out her hand. But you can call me Marley. And it had been easy, from there. Just two red-haired Gryffindor girls against the world, taking every opportunity they could to knock the smug smile off James Potter’s face.)

(Marley had been the one to take the train down to Cokeworth, just to stand in the blustery summer rain at her mum’s funeral, a constant weight at her shoulder. Marley had been the one to give James a shovel talk so severe she’s still not sure he’s over it, her face like a bank of thunderheads and her magic crackling everywhere. Marley had been the one to race down to the muggle chemist to get a pregnancy test for her, last November, and then screamed with glee in the Godric’s Hollow living room, war and You-Know-Who be damned.)

The rain slicked down the window in Godric’s Hollow. In front of her on the table were a dense thicket of Order charms problems about deflection and negation, and Harry was asleep against her, and the tea had gone cold long ago. It had felt like a herculean effort to brew it in the first place, and then she hadn’t even wanted to drink it. There’s a patch of dried spit-up on the shoulder of her jumper, and the last time Harry had woken up and started sobbing, she hadn’t been able to keep from sobbing either. James was out on Order business, and when he’d done that during the pregnancy, she’d been frantic, pacing the house and working on magic at all hours, but now everything felt muted and distant, like she was screaming underwater. 

(Marley, murdered in her own house by Travers, who had been two years above them in school. Lily had had a crush on him when she was thirteen and he’d caught the snitch for Gryffindor. She kept dreaming about the way the clay at the graveyard had stuck on her boots.)

She stared at the charms equations, letting the coefficients go fuzzy and weightless in her brain, and felt the cracks yawn wide open. In the quiet places, the doubt comes back, that lingering feeling that she’s useless at all of this— fighting a war, being a mother, being a witch. She hadn’t figured out how to tell James yet that when he was out for a few days, she could hardly bring herself to put Harry down. Because if she couldn’t feel him breathing, she couldn’t seem to breathe herself.

(She had an Avada for Travers, crackling in her bones. James was rubbish at them, no matter how much he had practiced out back of the crumbling manor house that was the Order Headquarters. You need to stop thinking about them as people, Potter, Moody had snapped at him, but James couldn’t and would never and that’s why she loved him.)

Harry shifted, and she unbuttoned her blouse to let him nurse. She knew she should probably just go lie down— James had left with Sirius for some complex raid last night, and then Harry hadn’t slept much, so she hadn’t either— but the charms taunted her. Someone high up in the Order had reached out, presumably knowing she’d had offers to do a Mastery, asking for help with some theory, and it was the least she could do, wasn’t it, when she’d been unable to fight for nine months now?

(Marley hadn’t seen it like that—you’re not useless, Lils, you’re making a whole human, we can’t let the war consume everything— but Lily wasn’t an idiot. James and Sirius might have been training to be Aurors, but she had been the one out there on the frontlines when she was nineteen, making the night blaze green.)

She shut her eyes, trying to focus on the warmth of Harry against her chest. He was here, he was alive, he was fine. (She has had so many dreams where he’s dead.) Everyone she wanted was out of reach, and the ache was so big it seemed to drown out everything else. 

Dorcas was out on the frontlines, getting to put her grief for their friend into curses. James was in-and-out on Order missions, and when he wasn’t here she wanted him, but when he was sometimes it felt like something cool and glassy had been built between them: all his friends were still alive. Never mind that two of the funerals had been for his parents, and that the smug prankster he’d been at Hogwarts had been totally subsumed into something different, into a man who carried two wands and came back from battles with new scars and curled up into her arms and sobbed for everyone he could not save. Petunia—

Petunia’s son had been born three weeks before Harry, which she had found out through an old friend of her parents. Petunia had not responded to any of her letters in two years. 

(She had been ten, and she and Petunia had been in the garden, planning their futures together— they’d buy a big country house that had been split in two, so they had two houses but one garden, and all their children would be best friends, and Petunia would be in the House of Commons and then Prime Minister and she would study maths or engineering or architecture at university and they’d both become something.) 

And Sev—

What she hadn’t told anyone, not even James or Marley, was that about a year ago, she had seen him out there. The Death Eaters had raided a suburb of Hammersmith, and the Order had showed up to intervene. Her and Caradoc and Frank and Devin, and the night ablaze with flame. Frank and Caradoc had gotten muggles out of houses, gone with healing charms; she and Devin had gotten into it with the Death Eaters, had them fleeing. And when she cornered the Death Eater in an alley way, her anti-apparation charms snapping into place, there had been nowhere for him to go, and her stunner had hit the figure straight in the chest.

She had been nineteen. All edges and hunger and a seething kind of ruin. Of course the Hat had suggested Ravenclaw to her: she wanted knowledge, and she wanted power, and she wanted to find the Dark Lord and tear out his throat with her bare hands. Her parents were dead and her sister was a ghost and she was never sure if she’d see James again and she had Avada in every line of her being, waiting to be used, but she wanted to know who—

There had been rumors. But she hadn’t believed them, not really, until she was kneeling in an alley in Hammersmith with the light from the streetlights casting his face in shadows, and what did it say about her, that even though she hadn’t seen him in a year and a half, and hadn’t talked to him in nearly four, that she could tell he was unwell? His hair was too greasy, his face was too thin, and even stunned one of his hands was still twitching. 

What did it say about her, Lily Evans Potter, one of the best fighters in the Order, ruthless, powerful, that when she’d ended up in an alleyway with a stunned Severus Snape, confirmed Death Eater, there had been no thought of Avada? 

She’d just fled, leaving him to come to his senses, and go free.

The rain. The grief. The coefficients on the charms equations. Harry, falling back asleep against her. What house did that shite belong too, she wondered, as she stared unseeing into the gloom. The fact that she hated him and loved him, all in the same breath, and probably always would? He was out there, murdering people she cared about and she— 

You’re brave, to be here, the Hat had told her. And you’d be good in Gryffindor— not at first, maybe, but they’ll make you fit. Ravenclaw, though— you’ve got a slipperiness to you, you know. Gryffindors break the rules, but Ravenclaws just don’t put any stock in them. You’d learn to make your own rules. 

(What did Slytherins do? What was Sev doing, even now, out there in the wind?)

She wanted to talk to him. She wanted him here, across from her, with his sharp and ruthless eyes, and she wanted him to do the thing he used to do, when they were children, where he knew what she wanted before she knew it herself. And she hadn’t killed him, hadn’t brought him in, because as long as he was alive there was still that opportunity. For him to darken her door and when he apologized, mean it this time. And that doesn’t make her good, to leave a killer on the streets, but when has she ever been good? 

She dragged the paper closer, but she stared right through the equations, to Sev, stunned in the alley. To the clay landing in heavy thumps on Marley’s coffin. To James, sobbing in her arms, blood still in his hair. To Harry. She wanted to reach for the anger, for the hunger, but there was only fog and a crackling kind of anxiety gnawing up in her chest. A year ago, she would have said that it was only a matter of time before You-Know-Who fell to one of their spells, but now— 

The coefficients blurred before her eyes as she began to sob, but in her mind, they’re shining. Rearranging themselves. Changing. I would have been so good in Ravenclaw, she thought, and outside the downpour thickened along with the war, and Harry went on sleeping, blissfully unaware of it all.

Slowly, arduously, she began to solve.

________________

The November night was cold, and James wrapped his coat tighter around himself. Back at the pub, Sirius and some of the Auror corp were still drinking, but Crouch gave him the creeps and nothing about the night seemed worth celebrating.

It had taken so much power to coax his patronus in the bathroom, to tell Lily he was alright. Finishing up some Order business, he’d said, leaning his head against the cool metal and trying not to be sick. I’ll be home soon, love. 

Snow was coming down in soft flurries as he walked to Waterloo, mentally thanking Lily for making sure he knew how muggle trains worked. Maybe he could have managed the apparation back to Godric’s Hollow, but he needed the time most of all. Just— time.

He had been a father for four joyous, terrifying months. He had been an orphan for six. He didn’t think the strutting, cocky Head Boy he’d been would recognize himself now. There was grey in his hair, and a thin scar on his cheek (a cutting curse from Avery), but really it was all in his eyes. Compared to pictures from seventh year, he looked like he’d aged several decades in two years and change. 

(Sirius looked the same, of course, but Sirius grew up in that house and could lie better than any Slytherin, so that was no surprise. Remus, what with his condition, had always seemed a little haggard, and Peter’s never been that open about his past, but James knew he never got along with his mother and had always looked out for himself.)

In seventh year, he’d had everything. Three best friends; the smartest, prettiest girl in school; captain of the winning Quidditch team; Head Boy. Sure, the war might have been going on, but he was a pureblood, untouchable by virtue of being James Potter. When the recruits for the Aurors had come round, asking for powerful wizards to join the fight, he’d stuck out his chest and signed his name with a flourish, never mind the transfiguration mastery waiting for him. In his naivety, it had all seemed so black-and-white, then— the good guys were him and Sirius and Remus and Peter, and the bad guys were slimy Slytherin gits like Snape, and it would be a splendid little war, and then they’d get drunk and he’d snog Lily some more. 

(The good guys were Crouch, demonstrating crucio on a hooded, begging man in the labyrinthine depths beneath the DLME. Looking like he enjoyed it, too. The bad guys were Regulus, and Jacoby Macnair, who’d been in Ravenclaw and had been the only one in the castle who could keep pace in Transfig with him and Sirius; and Travers, who had helped them win the House Cup his fifth year and then had murdered Lily’s best friend. He’d seen Lily master a perfect Avada when they were only eighteen, and her and Sirius and Remus alike had killed people in this war, and maybe they deserved it but maybe they didn’t and he couldn’t stop thinking about how a few months ago, they’d stunned a Death Eater only to find he’d been under imperius for months.)

Waterloo was blissfully empty at two am. He watched the snow slough down on the girders and carefully wrapped himself in Notice-me-not. Very quickly, the war had revealed itself to be nothing little, or splendid, or simple. And he’d never been Gryffindor in that bloodied, searing way, like Scrimgeour and Crouch and Dumbledore, that let them shove aside lives if it got them closer to the final product.

Honestly, these days he felt most like the Hufflepuff the Hat said he could have been. This whole war wasn’t for some vague concepts of greater good, or preventing damage, or even something as simple as revenge. No, it was just the fact that right now he loved five people, and he didn’t want them to live in a world with You-Know-Who. 

The train was nearly empty, and he slunk into a seat neat the back, put his head against the cool glass. He wondered how long it would be before Dumbledore realized that Lily was far more useful out in the field than he was. It wasn’t that he was bad at it— maybe he would have quite enjoyed a career as an auror in peace time— but he could feel it chipping away at him. The fights. The spells. The dead. Lily was made of steel, at heart; she had this grit and fortitude to just go on through. Marley had been murdered in early July and she was distraught, but she was still functioning. And all James knew was that if he had to bury Sirius, he might just have ended up in the ground himself. 

Tonight had been successful, as far as the Auror corp defined those things. Moody had managed to incapacitate a Death Eater and haul them back to the Ministry for questioning, and James could still hear the screaming, the way the man had insisted between rounds that his Master would come for him. Bellatrix had only killed six muggles. Sirius had been fine, coming away from the fire-fight with that almost-mad look he got sometimes, which scared James more than he liked to admit. There was a part of him that kept expecting to see Snape at one of these damned things, though what that encounter would look like, he doesn’t know. Two years ago, it would have been an easy choice, but now all he can think about is how Crouch always seems to set in on the younger ones the most, because they’re the easiest to break, and the things he’d done to Snape at school, on whims, because Sirius had been bored. And how many times in the last two years has he seen some Death Eater approach a muggle village with that same lazy intent, wanting to hurt someone because they were there? 

(If he’d been in Slytherin, with his bloodline and his smug grin and how easily he’d hurt Snape for just fucking standing there, would they have tried to recruit him?)

Snape was a Death Eater now, they’d been able to confirm. He’d killed people, James knew. He’d made his choice. But maybe if he and Sirius hadn’t been so— so hideously awful— Sirius and Peter had nearly gotten him killed, for Merlin’s sake— 

The lights of London flicked past, the muggle world a dull comfort after the battle. He let out a long sigh. At heart, he knew what he’d do, if he cornered Severus Snape in some fight— stun him, and then take him somewhere where he could talk some sense into him. Where Crouch or Moody or Scrimgeour wouldn’t be waiting with a torture curse. 

(Apologize, maybe.)

He let the battle bleed out from him, piece by piece, so that by the time he got back to the cottage he’d be less wrong. So he’d be in a state to kiss Lily and take Harry in his arms. Harry.  The very thought of him, even with the night he’d had, was enough to tug his lips into a grin.

He loved Lily; he loved Sirius and Remus and Peter. But Harry. Even drained of power and sickened from seeing all the torture, he’d just had to shut his eyes and think of the tiny hand wrapped around his finger, the green eyes set in the brown face, the little freckles across the nose, and the patronus had consented to come to him.

And it wasn’t a stag anymore. The Marauders had laughed at him for it— you’re nothing if not predictable, Prongs, Sirius had said, but when the midwife had handed him Harry for the first time, still red and screaming like his life depended on it, and he’d stared down at the tiny, perfect face, he’d felt it in his bones, all the way down to the soul: when he cast expecto patronum again, it would be no stag. 

It was a fawn now, and he was proud of it beyond measure. 

He shut his eyes as the train chugged north. The blood was drying tacky on his forehead. Harry, Lily, Sirius, Remus, Peter. That’s all that matters, now. He tried to summon visions of the future— he and Sirius coaching Harry’s little league Quidditch team (Harry would be a Chaser, obviously). Remus patiently helping Harry through elemental magic theory; Peter, teaching Harry how to pick-pocket and play Exploding Snap; all of them going out to dinner to celebrate Lily publishing papers on charm theory. They could give the map and the cloak to Harry, when he went off to Hogwarts, tell him to form his own little crew, add to the Marauder’s lore. Harry’s friends over for summer hols, laughing in their tiny kitchen, talking Quidditch and magic with Peter and Sirius and Remus while James washes the dishes like a muggle, just to extend the moment. Harry’s a Gryffindor, with crime-lord mania and an echoing laugh; Harry’s a Hufflepuff, making friends with anyone that moves; Harry’s a Ravenclaw, devouring information; Harry’s a Slytherin, slick and ambitious and powerful; Harry’s Harry and it doesn’t matter where the Hat thinks he should go. 

Five people. He wanted You-Know-Who defeated, but he won’t lie to himself, not after all this: he won’t trade them for the world. I would have been so good in Hufflepuff, he thought, even as the train carried him back towards Godric’s Hollow, and the snow comes down all around. 

________________

Grimmauld Place was cold, and the Christmas of 1980 passed with only ghosts to keep him company. Regulus tried not to mind; he had a lot to do anyway. 

Despite what Sev had said, back when he’d still come over, Regulus had never felt like the row house was haunted (except perhaps by his mother and father), but now that he was alone with it, it was easier to believe. Nothing dark or evil, really, but just an ache. Which he understood, because that was a thing he felt in his bones. 

It had all seem so simple a few summers ago, when Sev would come over and they’d lie on the floor of his room and talk about the Dark Lord. He hadn’t gotten the Mark yet, but he was in deep on the rhetoric and the idea of remaking the world, and it sounded like every line Regulus had grown up on, so he fell for it hook, line, and sinker.

(Regulus was no fool, and even less so after some crucio had been directed at him— if the Dark Lord wanted to conquer the wizarding world, it was his for the taking. The Ministry would fall before his cunning hand; Lucius alone was slick enough to spin for the papers. Piece by piece, they could implement the laws about blood purity that his parents had talked about wistfully over breakfast, and then, once they secured the wizarding world, they could turn to subjugating the muggle one.)

(But the Dark Lord wasn’t a blood purist, building a faction to make him Minister of Magic. The Dark Lord was a sadistic murderer, who liked seeing the light leave people’s eyes. And Regulus, despite all his intelligence, had been the one to take his slave brand.)

But it wasn’t like he could do anything with the information he now had. His parents were dead, and even if they hadn’t been, what was one half-crazed Pureblood house against a monster? Everyone knew the Ministry wasn’t holding back on torture, and it wasn’t like he hadn’t accrued enough blood on his hands over the past year to get himself a lifetime in Azkaban. Assuming they let him live after an interrogation. Dumbledore was out there, he supposed, but Dumbledore wasn’t known for mercy. If he wasn’t useful to the bastard, he wouldn’t survive the encounter, not with his name and his record, but at least it would probably be quick. Maybe that’s why he’s been working so damn hard on all these side projects, so that if he caved and went to grovel, he’d have something to offer. 

Severus? 

Lying on the floor in front of the largest fireplace in the house, Kreacher muttering as he “tidied up” in the periphery (the house was spotless, but Regulus figured both of them needed the company), Regulus tried and failed to pick at the threads of Severus Snape, who had, in another life, been his best friend. 

(Severus Snape, who had been the one in his first year to make sure he got to all the classes on time. Severus Snape, who was best friends with Lily Evans until he wasn’t anymore. Severus Snape, who was wicked smart and so, so Slytherin Regulus wouldn’t have been surprised if he bleed green, but not with ambition or cunning, not really. Slytherin like a survivalist. Loving nothing, nobody.)

(Except Lily. Except him.)

(Severus Snape, who’d been the one to come to him with tales of power and glory, when he was sixteen and Snape was seventeen and the Dark Mark was burning bright on his forearm. Severus Snape, who hadn’t looked his way twice since Regulus had fallen in with a coterie of the young, Pureblooded Death Eaters since taking the damn thing. Severus Snape, who sometimes when they passed in the hallways of Creighton Manor, almost looked like Sev again. Sev exhausted and in pain and worn-through, but Sev.)

Maybe he’d be lucky. He’d go to Spinner’s and knock on the door and suffer through Sev’s biting comments and disgust, and when he saidit was a mistake, do you think we’re in too deep? Sev would put his head in his shaking hands and nod, and they would figure it out, together, like they’d done when they were second-and-third years and the older boys from Gryffindor locked them in a broom closet.

Or maybe Severus Snape, Death Eater, who loved nothing and no one, would stun him and bring him to the Dark Lord to suffer like traitors suffered.

The fire crackled. In front of his eyes danced formulas for spells, the vague pieces of the various mechanisms he was slowly trying to slot together, but his mind was elsewhere. On the missions the Dark Lord was handing down to the lesser Death Eaters, about killing and torture and terror. On the rumors filtering out from the inner circle, about a Prophecy and the Potters. On the lake Kreacher had described, and how the Dark Lord hadn’t shut the fuck up the whole time. 

Like an idiot, Regulus thought, and the voice in his head was Sirius’s. 

Sirius. 

He had spent his tenth year alone in Grimmauld, teaching himself how not to exist and counting down the days until he too would get to take the train somewhere else. His father had been brokering business deals and exploiting loopholes in the Ministry tax codes; his mother had been letting her obsession with dark artifacts worm its way up through the floorboards. She’d taken Sirius being sorted into Gryffindor as some personal slight, even though Regulus could name ten famous evil wizards that had come out of that house, the house of crime lords, and martyrs, and idealists. 

She didn’t remember he was there often. But when she did—

He tried to sleep off the twitches, and Kreacher got blood out of his shirts for him, and tried to understand why Sirius would want to stay at Hogwarts for Christmas and Easter Hols. Tried to understand why he spent most of the summer in his room, writing letters to his friends, who had so quickly eclipsed him: Remus, James, Peter. 

(But there had been good moments, too. Some of the last of them. When their mother had started screaming at Regulus, Sirius had screamed right back. When both of their parents had been too busy to go for school supplies, Sirius had been the one to suggest they sneak out of the house, the one to figure out how the intimidating muggle transports worked, clutching his hand tight the whole way. And one rainy July afternoon, when the house had been empty except for them and Kreacher, they’d attempted to make him a birthday cake, which had been awful but had made the old elf grin anyway.)

And then the Hat had said Slytherin, and everything had been over, this time forever. 

He stared into the fire, running his thin hand up and down the Dark Mark where it curled around his forearm. The truth of the matter was that he, Regulus Arcturus Black, was alone in the world aside from a house elf, and the Dark Lord had done his damndest to kill said house elf. And gall of the Dark Lord, trying to murder his friend, was more infuriating than any of the rest of it. Other than Kreacher, all he had to his name are half-finished spells, a haunted house, blood on his hands, and a friend and a brother who won’t talk to him. 

Other than Kreacher, all he had was information. About a cave, and a boat, and a locket. About a way to tunnel through whatever hideous magic the Dark Lord has done to keep himself tied to the mortal plane. 

As it has for the last fortnight, the basal instinct of survival fight a war against a long-deadened impulse bedded down in his bones. Flashes of massacres rear up before his eyes; he felt again the Dark Lord’s cold, possessive hand on his face; saw again the dead, crumbled thing in Sev’s eyes before he turned away from him again. 

Because the thing was: the Hat had offered him the choice. He’d been there in the hall, tiny and shaking, and his eyes had met Sirius’s at the Gryffindor table for just a moment before the brim had come down over his eyes. Oh, said the Hat, look at all of this. Wicked smart, and a survivalist, so you’d obviously do well in Slytherin, but underneath all that, you’ve got this spark. Some part of you just wants to rip things wide open. You’d do well in Gryffindor, you know. They’d help you figure out how to take up space again. Up to you, really, child.

He hadn’t been brave enough then. And was the thing driving him forward now, towards the edge of the cliff, bravery, really? Or was it the cold, and the loneliness, and the fear, and how crucio never got easier to stomach? 

He stared at the fire, composing letters he would never send to Sirius, all variations of so what if I told you the Dark Lord has a secret weapon and only Kreacher knows where it is, I promise it’s not a trap, the bastard’s just that much of an idiot. He envisioned himself walking down the worn pathway to Spinner’s, Sev’s eyes almost glowing in the gloom, and telling him I think I’ve got a way we can get out of this mess.

(And then what? From what Kreacher had said, he’s not sure it’s the kind of magic you’re meant to survive. And if someone’s dying—)

(The love he’d told himself time and time again he was over flared to life in his chest, creaking and indigent with age, but there. Sirius, buying in ice-cream in Diagon, slinging his arm around his shoulders, like was proud to be his brother. Sev, lying on his floor, introducing him to muggle rock, and always stepping in front of him when the bullies came. Kreacher, sneaking out at night to acquire nerve regenerator.)

If they got to live, it would be worth it. I would have been so good in Gryffindor, he thought, with not a little bitterness, and then he propped himself on his elbows and raised his voice. 

“Kreacher?” he said. “I need you to take me to the lake the Dark Lord showed you.”

Chapter Text

“Oi!” says Harry, as light cascades into the broom shed. Ron breaks apart from Susan, blinking in the sudden light, to find the doorway filled with his two best mates (Harry’s got the Firebolt slung over his shoulder; Hermione’s got a bit of “light reading” the size of Crookshanks tucked under her arm), three of his siblings (Ginny, in her gauntlets and with her hair back, looks exasperated; Fred and George look like they’re about to start a hideous sing-song rhyme that he will likely never live down), and Millicent Bulstrode, who just goes, “Fucking finally.”

Next to him, Susan, despite blushing a furious shade of red, lets out a little cackle. Harry, despite having spent large portions of summer making out with Ginny when he thought other people wouldn’t notice, seems the most embarrassed by this whole affair. “I was going to ask you to be Chaser with Millie, but I can ask Hermione—“

“Don’t worry,” says Ron, scrambling to find a broom, any broom. “I’ll play.” George snickers, and Ginny flicks him in the shoulder. 

“Suze is basically already a Weasley at this point,” she says. “It’s just more official now.” Fred gags exaggeratedly, and this time Hermione raises the huge bulk of Subverting Grawp’s Elemental Laws: Grey Areas of Magic threateningly before he backs off. 

“Have fun with Quidditch,” says Susan, stepping out of the broom shed, trying to be nonchalant but also completely unable to stop grinning. “Bill said he’d help me with my stunner.” 

“Right,” says Ron, still very lost in the daze of dark broom shed and Susan. Hermione takes the opportunity to wack him with the tome. 

“Come on,” she says, and then Fred and George take both his arms and frog-march him away from a still beaming Susan, and Millie starts talking about Chaser tactics, and above them the sky is a deep, perfect blue, and for a moment, it’s like there isn’t a war on. 

But even up on a broom, the taste of Susan’s chapstick still on his lips, the timer in his head won’t turn off. Harry is seventeen in as many days; Fleur and Bill’s wedding is in twenty. Every day is another day closer to You-Know-Who infiltrating the Ministry, to the start of the Hogwarts term, to the Burrow shifting from safe-house to target. 

In spite of that, or maybe because of it, all of their friends havw decided to spend the vast majority of their summers at the Burrow. Right now, even as he ducks and swerves around Fred, Luna and Neville and Sue are coming up the hill to join the match, and he’d bet all the money in Harry’s vault that Anthony’s at the kitchen table, pouring over papers, probably with Ernie by his side. Hannah would be over after her intern shift at St. Mungo’s, and Justin had gone home to have lunch with his mum, but he had spent all morning trying to explain the geography of muggle Britain to him and Daphne, who’d slipped off to do the vague Daphne things she did whenever she wasn’t here.

Theo had been here every day too. But a week and a half ago, he had gone home and found that his father had been broken out of Azkaban, and they hadn’t seen him since. The only reason they knew that much was because Hedwig had turned up at breakfast the next day, clutching a note from him.

Harry is worried about that, but Ron’s trying not to. Theo’s one of the smartest, slickest blokes they know. Hell, he met the Dark Lord and lied to his face. Theo’ll be fine.

Theo will have to be fine, because Ron’s not sure Harry will be okay if they loose someone else they care about, and also, Theo’s Ron’s friend too. Somewhere over the past six years Ron’s grown used to the heavy stares and the way he’d pushed through his paranoia and caution to stand beside them, and it would never be as extravagant or demonstrative as someone like Susan or Hannah, but it’s still love. 

(Ron tries not to think about how he’d been so, so sure Snape had been offering that too. Fails, because Snape is a bloody ghost looming over the whole summer, but tries.)

After Quidditch (with the addition of Sue to their team, they manage to thrash Ginny and Neville and Fred and George and Luna) and dinner (which only involved two explosions, Moody turning up scowling, and Fleur, Hermione, and Sue circling up to do spell-work, before his mum harassed them to actually eat), he finds his way out through the slowly falling twilight to the war room, which used to be the garage. Ginny, ever hyper-aware of Harry’s moods in a way Ron used to think only he and Hermione were, had taken his hand and dragged him to the living room to listen to Ipswich and Krum thrash Nottingham, much to Sue and Susan’s distress. Anthony and Ernie had gone back to work at the kitchen table, and Hannah had taken Hermione out to the garden, determined to impart to her every healing spell she could before they left.

Before they left. Ron curls his hands around the edge of the table and tries to focus on the countdown, on the things to do, not on the overwhelming maw of their quest. 

The three of them, on the lam, hunting horcruxes. Piece by piece over the past few weeks he’s been trying to get their plans for living off the grid off the ground, but it all still feels so impossible. 

(And Susan. Susan, who knows he’ll have to leave at the end of the summer, Susan who knows exactly what wars do to people, Susan taking his face in her hands and kissing him senseless, and he loves Harry and Hermione more than he loves anyone else but also Susan, in a completely different and yet equally immense way, and he can’t—)

“You good, Ron?” comes Millie’s voice from the doorway, and he raises his head to see her standing there, leaning against the doorframe.

“Thought you were listening to the match?” he says, as she steps into the garage. The yellow light from the bulb above them casts her brown skin in warm tones, and the moths flutter in from the open door. 

“Nah,” says Millie, her eyes flickering around the detritus of the garage, before she hoists herself up to sit on the table. “Sort of a boring game. Thought you might need some more help.”

Ron looks around at the walls— maps of Britain, floor plans Millie had drawn of her parents’s manor house they kept only for tax purposes, Hermione’s very long, very detailed list of wards she thought they might need to protect a safe house. Notes on camping, and commons land in Britain, and their best guesses as to where Hogwarts might actually be, geographically. His mind free-wheels through plans like water cascading from a dam spillway— Moody’s patch-up work at Grimmauld, trying to keep Snape out; the fact that since the man had taught them for the past six years, he probably could at least detect the subtle ways Hermione’s ward package would alter a landscape; the pushpins on the map indicating major magical communities in Britain, and was it safer to be closer in or further away? His nightmares of late have been just blood, and he’s not sure where the future begins or ends. 

“I just can’t figure out how far we should go, I guess,” he says slowly, pulling himself up to sit next to Millie. “Like, we’ve got Grimmauld. And then our tent back-up plan. But then— Snape.” He threads his hand through his hair, and Millie swallows heavily beside him. “He knows so much. Basically everything we’ve come up with about setting up safe houses comes from him.”

Millie kicks her legs and blows a breath out. A moth bumps into the overhead light and Ron lets his magic follow the threads of the ring to Harry and Hermione, an action that used to take conscious focus and now is as simple as falling asleep. “Fucking Snape,” say Millie, starring at the board for a long moment. “We’ve still got to build safe houses, though. Just— using different wards, or in the kind of places he wouldn’t think to look. If not for you, than for anyone who needs them.”

There really is no way around the need, but it grounds him a bit to hear it from Millie. “I don’t really know what I’m doing,” he admits. Millie props an elbow on his shoulder and hmms in affirmation, which bolsters his resolve. It feels safer to do this with Millie, somehow, Millie with her dense curls and unflinching curiosity and the way she’d looked at him in the bathroom with Draco. She hadn’t expected him to have a solution, but just to help. 

Just to be on her team.

“I’m just making it all up,” he says softly. Outside, a wind that probably portends a storm sends the trees rattling. “I mean some of it’s logical, some of it’s tactical, but really it’s just—“

“You’re doing your best,” she says. “Dark Lord’s sure as hell not.”

Ron has to laugh at that. “It’s probably the best he can manage, being an idiot and all.”

They lapse into silence for a moment. Ron thinks about towns in Northern Britain, and wards Snape doesn’t know Hermione knows, and the locket left in the basin of stone, and how if he were trying to become immortal and also subjugate Britain, the only people he’d want for the job would be Harry and Hermione. 

“Ron,” Millie says after a moment, and he turns slightly towards her. “I don’t know what the— the whole quest thing is about— probably don’t need to know, honestly— but if anyone can do it, it’s the three of you.” Ron swallows heavily, emotions warring in his chest. “Like maybe it shouldn’t have to be, but you’ll cover it.”

Ron tries and fails to hide his scoff at that. Sure, they have Hermione, who’s pretty much as good as they come with wards and just magic, and sure they have Harry, who’s nothing to sneeze at when it comes to both sheer grit and defensive magic, but then there’s him. Sixth son. Didn’t choose Gryffindor. Surely McGonagall and Sprout and Flitwick could have handled this affair far better, right?

Millie punches him lightly in the shoulder. “Don’t think like that, you idiot. You’re smart as hell and actually care about the people around you. The Dark Lord could never.” Ron flushes a bit at that. Millie pulls one of her legs up to her chest, curling around herself in the gloom. “But also, it’s the way you guys move, you know. Like it’s the three of you against the world. The Dark Lord doesn’t stand a chance.”
Ron breathes in and out, his chest trembling. Outside, a distant roll of thunder; inside, the point of Millie’s elbow back on his shoulder, grounding. Some nights he can believe that, but tonight isn’t one of them. “You really think?”

If Millie’s scared too, she doesn’t show it, propping her chin on her knee and giving him a burning look. “Yeah,” she says. “Yeah I do.”

In the dreams, Harry and Hermione die, and in seventeen days Harry is seventeen and the dread of the horcruxes burns even from a distance and Susan, but maybe— 

How he wants to believe it, with all he has. 

In his mind, he begins to sketch out safe houses, and exit routes, and battle plans. 

______________

It’s raining in Cromwell, but Dean Thomas offers to walk him to the train station anyway. Dean fishes a massive black umbrella out of the closet and they walk out into the street, their rubbers splashing through the puddles on the asphalt. Ernie feels a bit grateful for how loud the downpour is on the fabric— this has been his first real conversation with Dean ever, and outside of logistics and forged documents he’s not really sure what they would talk about. Dean is one of the star Chasers on the Gryffindor team, spends most of his free time at Hogwarts playing various sports or practicing obscure and slightly impractical hexes. And Ernie is—

Well, currently Ernie is a freshly-legal disinherited wizard, alternating between kipping at Ron’s house and Justin’s house, who spends his free time grossly forging the kind of documents most wizards hold sacred. So perhaps he himself is having a rather Gryffindor summer. 

Dean is now, for all legal purposes within the wizarding world, a distant Rowle cousin, with a father who’d died mysteriously near the tail-end of the last war, neither side quite willing to claim him as their own. In his kitchen, Dean had stared down at the obituary clipping and the moving picture of his “father,” and informed Ernie that he’d never actually known his father. Walked out on me and mum when I was a baby, he’d said, his voice dull, and something about it made all the Hufflepuff in Ernie want to scream, Might as well make him useful for something. 

It’s a good paper trail. It’ll hold, if the Ministry comes looking. Anthony and his grandmother had been sneaking into libraries all over the country and spelling his little birth announcements into the back issues of the Prophet (not including the one at Hogwarts, which will have to be altered after the term begins, there are only eleven major depositories in all of Britain, and they’re all public access); it had been easy enough to slip into the special collections wing at Oxford to find the Rowle codex, and add a name where there had been none before, especially if you were Sue Li and Hermione Granger. Easy enough to layer a forged birth certificate with charms that made it seem real, and what Ministry notary had enough power to burn through one of Hermione’s wards? When the term came, Dean would make up a story about a letter in an old box of his mother’s, and a name he recognized, and if anyone looked further into it, they’d find records that seemed legitimate. 

And they won’t go further than that, Ernie knows, because the Purebloods play the same games too.

Dean is kind enough to help him buy a ticket back to Reading, and talks him through the transfers as they stand on the platform. Once the logistics are over, they again descend into an awkward sort of silence, Ernie’s eyes fixed on the gleaming steal of the track and the cinders dark with the rain. He tries to remember what he can of the list he and Daphne and Theo have put together, which feels too dangerous to have on hand and so just lives in their minds. The easiest ones were cases like this, with an absent parent who might as well have been a wizard. The difficult ones were cases like Penelope Clearwater, who had talked at length about her parents and her muggle upbringing. He and Anthony had spent three days pouring over genealogies from the eighteen hundreds, muggle and wizarding, before they’d found someone who could have conceivably had an affair with her great grandmother.

So on paper, there’s progress. But the sheer scale of what they’re trying to do is daunting, and if he thinks about it too hard, he’ll forget how to breathe. Every single job has to be perfect too— one loose thread could doom the whole project, and if this goes how he thinks it’s going to go, then the blood will be on his hands.

Dean awkwardly clears his throat. “Um. I know we’re not mates or anything. But thank you for doing all this. You didn’t have to.”

Ernie thinks of all those awful parties he went to third and forth year, when he was still trying to buy his parents’s affection; thinks of the whispers that have followed him ever since he’s been disinherited; thinks of the bills he’d read from the archives of the Wizengmont. Thinks of what he knows of Dean from Hogwarts— windswept hair, laughing at the Gryffindor table, coaxing his fox patronus in the Come-and-Go Room fifth year. Thinks of how his parents would have told him to never give him the time of day, but he’s not a Hufflepuff for nothing. 

He ends up just shrugging. “You’re a wizard, no matter what. If this is what they want for proof, we’ll give it to them.”

Dean shifts his jaw, his eyes staring out into the rain. In the distant, a whistle, the squeal of breaks as the train comes in. “You really think this’ll work, if— if the Ministry falls? What’s to stop them from doing blood tests and shit?”

“Because the Purebloods are lying too,” Ernie says, as the train slides into the station. He thinks Dean won’t have a response to that, but as he steps on the train there’s a clasped hand to the shoulder. 

“Have a good summer, mate,” he says, and his eyes are hard but the smile is real, like Harry and Justin sometimes. “I’ll see you back at school.”

“Yeah,” says Ernie. “I will.”

Back in Reading, the rain is lighter, and Justin’s mum makes rechta and he has yet to win a game of Trivial Pursuit because all the cards are about muggle things, but they always explain everything until he understands. Hedwig appears just after dark with a letter from Theo, and Ernie had long stopped wonder about how exactly Harry’s owl seems to prioritize the mail order, or why exactly she seems able to weave through the wards at Nott Manor when the post owls Daphne hired can’t. She’s just good like that. 

Theo, ever paranoid, has hid the key bit of information in a matrix of drivel, about History of Magic and complex blood magic and notations of genealogies of the Sacred Twenty-Eight— to a bystander, this letter would look like the Nott heir generously corresponding with the disinherited MacMillian one. Or perhaps a recruitment pitch. 

The emotions swirl in his chest, even as he curls up in the spare room (his room) at Justin’s house to pick apart the letter. The Prophet, not reporting a mass breakout— propaganda, Daphne had said. Theo, away from them, having to deal with his father and possibly the rest of Death Eaters and the Dark Lord. His father, who Ernie doesn’t think ever laid a hand on him, but he too comes from places like that, where people would ask you to bleed yourself dry and then declare it inadequate, and he doesn’t know what kind of person he’d been, if he hadn’t been in Hufflepuff, if he hadn’t run when he did. 

But Theo is different. Theo is a born liar, and a slick charmer, and a survivalist who would only use the portkey (Hermione’s work, so he’s doubtful even the Dark Lord’s wards would keep it in) if he was actively being tortured by the Dark Lord. 

(He’s afraid, but he also just misses his friend. The letters aren’t enough. Somewhere over his Hogwarts career he’s gotten used to Theo’s presence by his side in the library, his acrid comments over poor wording in books, his encyclopedic mind, the way he’d always listen to even the most obscure facts with that hungry, fascinated gleam in his eyes. Even as he builds lies and manufactures covers, he longs for Theo’s advice— Theo, who’d know how to fine-tune it to be more believable; Theo, who’d relish beating the Purebloods at their own game.)

Ernie slips downstairs to get a leftover piece of pork for Hedwig, who takes it gladly, and then flops out on the bed as she wings her way off to the Burrow, swallowed up quickly by the immensity of the night. It’s a twin bed, in the small room of a rundown house just off the train-tracks in Reading, and yet it feels more like home than MacMillian Manor ever did. When he focuses, he can feel burning envelope of magic surrounding the house, petrichor and charcoal, and then under that, the years of Justin’s magic, like cinnamon and smoke. Maybe in a few years, after enough nights here, it will have some of his too, rust and leather. That thought warms something in his bones. 

In his mind, he hears Dean’s question again, and thinks of what he’d learned the summer before he went to Hogwarts, the Heir ring new on his finger. In the airless afternoon, he’d been alone at the house, and the ward on the library had recognized the ring, and so when he’d pulled the book of MacMillian family genealogy from the shelf, it hadn’t shown him lies. 

He’d still believed in blood purity, then. And so it had been a shock to see the unedited MacMillian family tree, both sides studded with affairs, and adoptions, and bastards, and muggles. 

His parents had tried to explain, about tradition, and mistakes, and heritage, and how Pureblood had always meant this— we can trace our linage back to Merlin, Ernest, darling, his mother had said— but it had been over for him, all the parts that the Hat would later nudge towards Hufflepuff in open rebellion. And so when Justin had sat across from him at the table after the sorting and said he was from Reading, and that he hadn’t known about any of this before, instead of turning up his nose like his parents would have wanted, he stuck out his hand. 

He turns over on his side, watching the lights from the cars on the road slide over the wall through the blinds. He can fight, if it comes to it; he wasn’t completely useless at the Ministry. But there is something so viscerally satisfying to fighting the war like this: playing the games the Purebloods play right back to them, under their noses. 

Maybe it goes to shit. Maybe in six months, some Death Eater (fucking Snape, it would be, with their luck), puts the pieces together and unravels his maze of deceptions. But maybe if he plays it right, he’ll figure out how to make the lies hold, and he’ll beat them at their own game.

_______________

St. Mungo’s is always busy, and as much as she appreciates Smethwyck and his clear enthusiasm at having her as a trainee, it’s also overwhelming, and it’s a relief to floo to the Burrow after work gets off. Her father is working almost all the time now— on what, she doesn’t know, and she isn’t sure she wants to know— and despite what she told Daphne last year, she’s starting to think he does know where her loyalty actually lies. They eat breakfast each morning at the table in the kitchen, talking about her NEWT level classes and healing magic, and then they part ways, and he says nothing about how she comes back late, and she says nothing about the Ministry and the creeping fingers of the Dark Lord’s influence, and then the next morning they do their little charade again.

(Daphne would have never let anything slip. Ernie or Susan would have put their cards on the table already, declared their loyalty openly and hotly and then walked out. But Hannah—)

(All she knows is that she doesn’t want to loose this, not yet. She just wants to hold both truths in her mind, for the time being: her father is a blood-purist passing information to the Dark Lord, and her father packs her lunches every morning, and pulls her into a hug before they floo to their separate work places, kissing her on the head and murmuring that he loves her, and that doesn’t make him good, but he’s her father. Maybe Sue with all her logic could just lop off the feelings like snapping a wand in half; maybe Ginny with all her brashness could dictate terms and delineate boundaries. But she’s just Hannah Abbott, and her love is like tendrils of ivy, impossible to untangle, and her father was a Hufflepuff too. So they play their little games, moving in shadows, and the Cardiff house reeks of half-truths and deflections.)

The Burrow is quiet for once, and when she steps into the kitchen, she understands why: Anthony is asleep on the table, his face buried in a book, and Hermione and Sue and Ernie and even Mrs. Weasley have coated the room with silencing wards to keep him that way. A small smile tugs on the corners of her lips, the rush of affection for all of them like standing knee-deep in a river. Mrs. Weasley is standing in the kitchen, cooking, but waves her hand to levitate a plate of scones towards her, which she takes a few of gladly.

Hermione stands smoothly from the table and jerks her head towards the door into the garden; Hannah follows her. She’s wearing one of Ron’s Cannons jumpers, the sleeves shoved up above the elbows to show her wand holster, and her hair is up and there’s ink all over her fingers. Over the last two weeks, they’ve worked relentlessly together, Hannah trying her best to help her master basic healing charms. She’s never going to be good at the Art, but the brightest wix of the age should be able to do an Episky well enough to stop someone from bleeding out in the field. 

(It had taken them a week to figure out why she couldn’t seem to master them, when Hermione had thrown her hands up in a fit of rage: why the fuck can’t I get this, the theory is so simple, and it had all clicked for Hannah. It’s not about the theory, Hermione, she’d told her friend, who had warded the Burrow so thoroughly she could feel them in her teeth. It’s about intent. It’s about love.)

(Oh, Hermione had said softly, and then looked down at the ring on her finger, which, for reasons Hannah still can’t understand, is somehow the Black Heir ring. And then she’d shut her eyes and when she’d cast it again— Hannah had brought one of the training bones the apprentice healers practiced on— it had bound back together, as cleanly as if had never been broken, and for a moment it seemed like the air reeked of bread and stone and ozone and burning sugar.)

“What did you learn about today?” Hermione asks, as they step out into the garden. In the distance, she can see Neville and Ron squaring off in what looks like a mock duel, with Luna and Millie watching. She squints— usually Harry is involved in those. 

“Poisons,” she says, taking a bite of the scone. “I can teach you basic detections over the weekend. You’ll like them, they’re a lot of theory.” Hermione grins, and then takes a step closer, until she’s in her space, her forearm on her shoulder, leaning into her. There’s a warm comfort to her weight, to her vulnerability. Hannah shuts her eyes and lets the summer wind cool her face. 

“Justin and Susan are in Hammersmith, doing scouting for a safe house,” Hermione says softly, after a long moment. “Ginny and Daphne are out doing— well, probably crime. I didn’t ask.” Hannah grins, despite herself. 

“And Harry?”

Hermione sighs. “It’s a rough day, I think. He dueled a bit, but he needed some space. He’s up by Sirius’s memorial.”

Hannah opens her eyes, just in time to see Neville manage to disarm Ron, which makes something in her chest swell with pride and a bit of something else that she’s not sure she wants to examine right now. He crosses the field to help Ron up, clasped hands and an echo of laughter, and for just a moment Hannah allows her heart to expand in all directions, a eldritch monster of want— there’s no war on; they’re all going back to Hogwarts come the start of term; she’ll go to Pomfrey with her questions and Susan and Ernie and Ron and Justin with her crushes and they’ll throw little parties in the Come-and-Go room for everyone’s birthdays. Harry will be Captain of the Slytherin quidditch team and put together a squad to rival Ginny’s, and she and Neville will go on long walks by the lake, and she and Hermione and Theo and Daphne and Harry and Ron will bicker over complex potions nonsense for Snape—

Snape. 

“I’ll go see him,” she says softly, and it’s in the way Hermione slumps slightly that she knows that was what she wanted, but didn’t quite know how to ask. 

“Thank you,” she says, and it’s only when she wraps her arms around her that Hannah realizes how tired she really is. It’s easy to forget sometimes that the persona she has, of Hermione Fucking Granger, is just that, and underneath she’s a seventeen-year-old who misses her parents and wants to pursue a Mastery in Charms or Wards or Spell Creation, instead of trying to save the world. She wraps her arms around her in return, brings her hand up to cradle the back of Hermione’s head where it’s buried in the crook of her neck and shoulder. “Fuck,” mutters Hermione. “Sorry.”

“It’s alright,” says Hannah, watching Ron adjust Luna’s stance in the duel. She doesn’t know much about the Trio’s quest, but she did know that Hermione was entitled to more than a few moments of freaking out this summer. “You’re alright.” 

They hold each other for a few more minutes before Hermione breaks apart from her, rubbing at her eyes and giving her a nod. Hannah watches her go back inside the house, and then follows the path beaten through the field to the place where the shrine sits against the back wall of the garden. 

As Hermione said, Harry is here, sitting with his knees drawn up to his chest and his arms wrapped around them, his wand clutched in his hand. He glances over his shoulder at the sound of her approach with a harsh focus that Hannah knows would have him on his feet, ready to throw a curse, if he thought she was a threat. “Want company?” she asks, looking down at his face; she can see the redness of his eyes and the salt tracked down his face. He stares at her for a moment, and then nods. She sits down next to him in the tall grass and waits; after a few moments, he shifts closer, so his shoulder is against hers. 

Small candles burn on the stone of the alcove, where a picture of Sirius sits, next to a little pile of dog biscuits and a defaced Black family crest, with Toujours Par crossed out to say snog as many muggle as possible in Sirius’s handwriting. A little Ipswich flag is drapped across a figurine of an ominous black dog, and Hannah finds Harry’s hand in the grass and laces her fingers with his. 

After a long moment, Harry says, “You know he hated Snape, right? He tried to play nice because I liked the bastard, but you could tell he just wanted to hex him into the next room.” His voice is dull and raspy, and it undoes something in her to hear it. She squeezes his hand, and he slumps a bit further into her shoulder, like Hermione did earlier, like Ron does all the time.

“He would be so pissed about the whole thing,” he says softly. “Snape, and Dumbledore giving us a quest— he never really wanted us involved in this shit.” Hannah swallows, thinking of the man— she only met him once, on family day before the third task, but he’d been grinning the whole time, and had shook her hand when Harry introduced them, looking at her like she mattered, because Harry cared about her. “I miss him,” he say, soft and weak against her shoulder, and she brings her arm up around him, just to hold him. 

“I know,” she says, and they sit there, in the weeds, until Fleur’s voice carries across the fields, calling them in for dinner. 

Chapter Text

Twice a week, she and Susan and Sue take a train to a town they’ve never been to before, and then Hermione dials the number Hedwig delivered to her at the beginning of the summer from a phone booth, while Susan and Sue keep watch, her wards sticky in the humid summer twilight. If she calls late enough, she can catch her parents in Perth before they leave for work. The paranoia— did she pick it up from Harry or from Ron or from the part where a person they trusted with so much turned out to be a traitor the whole time— is screaming at her be more more careful, but every time her detection charms have them running clear, and what Death Eater would tap the lines or even think to ambush two half-bloods and a muggleborn?

(Snape. Because Snape knows everything and understands how people work and knows exactly where to push to hurt Harry the most.)

(Maybe the paranoia’s hers. Maybe it’s always been there, from the moment she stepped into the train carriage where Draco was making fun of Ron and Harry and then he turned on her and she learned there were parts of her that were wrong in this world too. She remembers being twelve, with all the magic in the entire world at her fingertips, and she went with wards. Not because they were more interesting than anything else, but because she knew they’d need them.)

She talks to her parents for ten, maybe fifteen minutes. Quick, essential updates. Her mum tells her about the weather in Perth, and her dad tells her about bow Crookshanks and Socks are doing, and she tells them about Ron and Susan finally getting together (I knew it! her mum crows) and about how Harry’s holding up (not well) and about the things she’s been reading, trying to make them sound less scary. 

But the fear is everywhere, like being held down in deep water, and she says I love you at the end of the call with a desperate urgency, and then the three of them walk back to the train station in silence. 

They’re fine. They’ll be in Perth for the year, maybe two or three, on a quickly arranged charity work visa. While she’s fighting the Dark Lord, they’ll be helping underserved communities in the Outback, far away from the fighting and the fact that Snape knows who they are, what they mean to her and Ron and Harry. She’ll call when she can. It’s fine. 

(It’s not.)

Days bleed into weeks, the countdown to Harry’s birthday and Fleur’s wedding like a bomb in her mind. Sixteen, fifteen, fourteen— she entwines her fingers with Justin and he apparates them to a town he’d been to the day prior, and she wards something with enough magic to leave her woozy, and then he takes them back, and he’s no warrior but he’s got that burning core of Hufflepuff loyalty that always guides him unerringly back home. She reads tomes Mundungus lifted for them about dark magic and warding, skimming volumes and then passing them off to her crew after determining their usefulness, Sue chewing on a quill as she derives complex transfigurations, Daphne scrawling out potions recipes in long hand with a manic fervor, Hannah willing to trawl through the citations at the backs of healing codexes. She duplicates their research and then takes trains north, straphanging with Millie or Neville keeping her company, as she explains in low voices how the ticketing kiosks work and how to read the maps. Once they get up there, to some branch-end station with the letters peeling, the kind of places the Death Eaters would never dream of frequenting, she rents a station locker and expunges all traces of their presence— even her simplest wards could be picked up by Snape— and when she gets back to the Burrow, collects the blood and draws the circle and sends the key into the ether.

(Ron had been the one to pose the question, at the very beginning of the summer, when they were sitting in a circle in his attic room— What happens if we don’t make it? Because I reckon someone else should know about these bloody things, besides just us and Anthony. He would have sounded like a Gryffindor except for the crack in his voice and the grief in his eyes.)

(So contingencies. There are spells, to have items appear to people after certain conditions are met. Her magic is a fortress, and with enough twists and knots she knows it will hold shapes and textures even if that condition is her own death. It’s difficult, morbid magic, keeping her up night after night, but she manages it, because of course she does. Three keys, to three lockers in distant cities; three stacks of paper with everything they know, about the Death Eaters and the Dark Lord and the Horcruxes; three successors to their secrets.)

(He would expects us to tell powerful people in the Order, Ron says quietly, one night when they’re alone in the garage, the three of them just watching the moths bump and tap. Silence, and then Harry goes, and he— they all know from the venom dripping from the word who it is— would expect us to pick our best mates.)

(So it’s Luna, and Millie, and Justin, the ghosts and the unnoticed. Three people who would never have to be involved in the war if they didn’t want to be, and yet here they are, Luna practice dueling with a wand borrowed from Neville, Millie building out strategies, and Justin laying lines of communication.)

(It’s not about saving the world, or the greater good, for them. They’re here because You-Know-Who killed Cedric for standing there; because Sirius didn’t make it out of the Ministry; because Harry had to grow up without his parents. Because to the three of them, it matters if they suffer or not.)

(Maybe all of that makes it into the magic she casts, drawing runes into the floor of Ron’s attic room with the knife Sirius gave Harry, the rite burning and burning with her sheer need for it to never be undone. Her? Fine. Harry or Ron? Not on her life.)

Thirteen days before Harry’s birthday, Susan spends the day with her aunt, and so she and Sue take the train alone. Every shadow seems to hold a Death Eater, but Sue grips her hand tightly, and she feels the vine wand on her wrist warm in response, in understanding.

She calls her parents from a payphone near the station, leaning her head against the glass and letting her breath fog, trying to gloss over how little she’s slept and how much magic she’s using and how fucking terrified she is. She hadn’t quite figured out how to tell the boys, but casting a spell that literally hinged on their deaths had undone something within her too deep to name, and now it felt like there was a piece of bone rattling around behind her sternum. 

Somehow, they end up in the corner booth of a decaying muggle cafe. Outside, it’s beginning to rain, and Sue can’t do the standard wards with the effortlessness she can, but when they come in they’re strong, ink and coal. “Talk to me,” says Sue, and Hermione looks up at her friend to find her dark eyes serious. Her straight hair is pulled back into a braid, but the bangs she’s had ever since they met still hang low over her forehead, and she’s wearing her Nottingham sweater. Hermione is reminded of another summer, when she would take the train to Liverpool on the weekends and she and Sue would do transfiguration in the humid afternoons while Quidditch went on and on in the background, and the biggest problem seemed to be getting Harry to pass second-year transfig. 

“About what?” asks Hermione, dully staring at the steaming mug of tea Sue has already poured for her. 

Sue looks at her a bit incredulously. “Whatever it is you need to talk about. Not logistics shit, either. Just— you.”

Hermione blinks, and then blinks again. “What?” 

Sue rolls her eyes but reaches across the table, takes her hand in hers, interlacing their fingers. “Shit’s hit the fan really quickly, and you and Ron and Harry are gearing up to go on this epic quest, and your parents are in Australia and I’m just—“ Her thumbs strokes the back of Hermione’s hand and she feels herself slump to her forearms on the table, at just the deliberate softness. “I know you and the boys have got this. But it’s not just the three of you against the world, you know. We’re here too.”

She doesn’t mean to, really, but the next thing she knows she’s got her face buried in her other hand and she’s just sobbing. There aren’t words, really— there’s just Snape loving Harry only for the color of his eyes, and watching her parents take the pictures of the three of them out of their frames in the hall and fold them into their wallets, for safe keeping, and how Ron’s mum is trying so hard to get Harry to eat and her to sleep and neither of them are letting her— can’t, maybe— and she wants to go back to Hogwarts. She wants there to be no war, and she wants to go back and sit for all her NEWTs and pull all-nighters where she and Sue do transfiguration in long hand and she finally figures out what it’s like to be a bit buzzed and maybe she has another go at snogging someone, maybe someone who could kiss a little better than Terry Boot. 

“It’s alright,” says Sue, gripping her hand. “I’ve got you.”

She falls asleep on Sue on the way back, her head tucked in her collarbone, Sue’s hand in her hair. It’s a shallow sleep, tinged with flitting, uneasy dreams, but it’s still sleep. “I can’t live without them,” she murmurs to her, as the rain lashes down on the train. “But if I can’t— if I can’t keep them alive— what good is any of this shit if it won’t do that?”

“No good,” says Sue, soft, as the train rattles and the world feels like it’s coming apart at the seams. “No good at all.”

______________

It’s foggy in Hampstead, and Daphne draws the muggle coat Susan leant her tighter around her shoulders. A few feet in front of her, Ginny is weaving in and out of pedestrians, her steps sure. The fog has a bit of a ragged, acrid edge to it that brings to mind third year, and in her mind she marshals her best weapons: last summer in Glasgow with Astoria, going to the muggle grocery and buying cereal; lying with her head in Theo’s lap in the Come-and-Go room last winter Hols, drunk to shit and his hand a warm constant in her hair; breakfast at Slytherin, straightening Harry’s tie and raising her eyebrows at the sheer volume of information Hermione’s managed to cram in her latest essay and fighting with Ron over the last rasher. Second year, when Susan had dragged her and Millie up to the kitchens and it be safe and nothing like it had ever been with Pansy. 

This summer. The missions with Ginny, moving through the cities with deliberate, careful steps, putting down gold from the Potter fortune on bars and counters and saying we’ll take the lot, and how none of the back-alley dealers or up-tight salesmen know what to do with a Greenglass and a Weasley, except to give them exactly what they want. Daphne’s got the obliviate down pat, a light touch and the faint scent of pewter and snow, and then they’re back in the city with no tracks left behind. Maybe the Dark Lord could tear it out of someone, but why would he think to? To him, they’re nothing, just two girls he can never have, even if he doesn’t know it yet. 

The summer is all logistics, and Daphne can do logistics. Hannah is learning everything she can about healing, and then turning right around and teaching the Trio; Anthony and Ernie are building false family trees and she’s pitching in when she can— turns out all those stupid heraldry lessons were good for something after all. Sue, and Theo, when he can (her heart twists at the thought of Theo, and she shoves it away— she can feel the Avada burning underneath her sternum, his father better hope he runs into an Auror first— ) are supporting Hermione, deriving magic and building theory behind new wards. Justin and Millie have been helping Ron figure out safe-houses and methods of communication; Neville and Susan are practicing spells for war and trying to get the bloody Order to talk to them; Luna’s working with her father on the Quibbler. Harry’s—

Harry. Even in London, as Ginny heads unerringly towards the back way into Knockturn, Daphne can’t get Harry’s face the morning after the tower out of her head. The way he’d looked up at her and Theo and Millie once they’d finally gotten into the hospital wing, like something had been ripped out from his very soul. Ron, sitting at his shoulder, had explained in a dull, clipped tone about Snape and Dumbledore, and Millie had wrapped Harry in an embrace, and even Theo had caught Harry’s hands in his, but it was all she could do to stay on her feet. Snape being a Death Eater after all had never seemed that outlandish, but loyalties were slippery, multi-faceted sorts of things, and she could have sworn he’d meant the things he’d offered to Harry.

And maybe he had. But maybe he’d only ever offered them because Harry’s eyes were the same color as his dead mother’s eyes, and just the thought of that makes Daphne itch for her wand, and not even Avada. Crucio, that’s what it would be, and a fucking brutal one. How dare anyone look at Harry James Potter and not see him? Not see him as a survivalist who still melts into every embrace; not see him as a powerful wizard who can’t keep the dopey grin off his face every time Ginny walks into the room; not see him as a loyal friend who wanted to end the Dark Lord, sure, but in that spiteful, sticky way Slytherins do things. Maybe Harry has his mother’s eyes and his father’s hair and the scar of the Chosen One, but he’s Harry, at heart— still a bit weak at transfiguration; a damn good seeker who’d go harder in a friendly than he ever would in a match; the kind of person who’d notice you weren’t at dinner and then come to find you, with that map of his in his hand and a thing to his continence that said we can talk, or we can not, it’s fine either way. 

She doesn’t want to meet Death Eaters out here, but if Severus Snape had the misfortune of stumbling upon her and Ginny Weasley in muggle London, her fully legal and Ginny with the wand Mundungus Fletcher stole from a grave for her—

Well, let’s just say it wouldn’t go well for him.

Ginny moves like a revolutionary, and it’s a look she loves on her. She’s no strategist, not like Ron, but in Sirius’s stuff had been books on guerrilla warfare and how to build bombs and start fires, and Ginny had snapped them up with a light in her eyes, handing over cash to buy accelerants at muggle shops. If the Ministry falls to the Dark Lord, Ginny’s going to give his shoddy excuse for a government a hell of a time, Daphne can already tell, and the thought of it brings a grin to her face even in the depths of war. 

(You alright with Harry going on this insane quest? Daphne had asked her a week ago, when they’d been too tired to apparate for a fifth time and had managed to secure tickets on the train back from Norwich. Ginny had shrugged, as the country side flashed by. Somewhere in the clamor of the day— they’d tracked down an elusive rare books dealer, spread out their easily traceable potions purchases across three lesser-traveled magical districts, and broken into Daphne’s house so she could steal a couple of books Hermione wanted and add a few names to the Greenglass family tree for Ernie— her braid had come undone, and she’d shed her coat, so the thin snakes of scars that littered her arms, courtesy of the Ministry fight, were showing.)

(I want to go with them, still, she’d said, after a long moment. Obviously it doesn’t make sense, but I want to. I know they’re good but it’s the fucking Dark Lord, you know?)

(And how Daphne knows.)

(You and Harry— Daphne began, but then trailed off; she clearly had been around Ginny too much, to almost ask it so up front, but she really did want to know. There was a kind of clarity to the way Harry and Ginny moved around each other— to Ginny, Harry was and always would be Harry, with unremarkable green eyes and messy hair and a scar from an unfortunate encounter. And to Harry, Ginny was and always would be Ginny— slick and smart, chaotic and brutal, none of this nonsense talk about top prospect or Gryffindor badass.) 

(Ginny, luckily, just laughed. Dunno, she said after a minute. I love him— and Daphne marvels at the freeness of the statement— but like— I don’t know if it’s enough, you know?)

(There are a thousand ways Daphne could have chosen to respond to that, but with thunderheads building over central England and every shadow a potential Death Eater, she had just gone, you know you make him happy in a way even Ron and Hermione don’t, and Ginny’s grin had been a thing of beauty in the gloom.)

In Knockturn, the mist is deeper and almost all the streetlights are out, but the wizards foolish enough to try to approach them are met with stunners that spark like blood in the fog. She hands over gold for potions ingredients in bulk— Harry stole high quality polyjuice and veritaserum and nerve regenerator from Snape, but they’re not going to go on this quest without a hell of a lot of standard healing potions and blood replenishers, not if she has anything to say about it. Diagon is full of hurried people, intent on doing their shopping and slipping out, but there are new releases Hermione needs from Flourish and Blots.

Somewhere far away, is Astoria sitting down to dinner at the Creevys’s sprawling country estate, warded with Hermione’s wards now? Are her parents getting home from work, and instead of remembering her confrontation with them last summer, believe she’s off on a little tour of the continent, Astoria along for the ride?

There are moments, when she lies awake on the transfigured cot in Susan’s room, or on the spare bed at Millie’s, or just on the couch at the Burrow, when it all feels hopeless. Sure, Ron’s a chess master and Hermione’s the brightest wix of the age and Harry’s a Slytherin who wants to win out of sheer spite, but they’re still children, even if it doesn’t feel like it. She’s felt the traces of the Dark Lord’s magic, and spent her whole childhood hearing stories about the sheer power of it. What are the lot of them, really, against a monster and his thralls? If she was smart— if she was a real, through-and-through Slytherin— she would cut and run.

But she’s not, anymore; maybe she never was. Maybe there is no such thing; even Severus fucking Snape got hung up on the color of Harry’s eyes and didn’t deliver him to the Dark Lord. 

She’s here because she wants Theo to not have to play the game anymore. Because she wants Astoria to grow up in a world where people won’t hear her last name and try to recruit her. Because she wants Hermione to be able to study whatever Mastery she wants, because she wants Ginny to be able to say yes to the Quidditch teams asking her to come up for summer workouts. Because she wants Harry to look at her with that sparkle in his eyes, like he did when they danced at the Yule Ball and nothing hurt like this. 

And where would the Hat sort this sort of love, manic and platonic and blooming from every crevasse in the burnt-out ruin in the center of her chest? Does it matter?

They go back to the Burrow, and Mrs. Weasley makes a roast, and after dinner there’s transfiguration to help with, and Fleur takes time away from wedding planning to puzzle out a devilishly tricky little charm with her and Hermione, and when Ginny leans into the kitchen and yells for people to come help fill out the Quidditch teams, she give in, the summer twilight coming down in great strokes. 

The ache is in her bones, the fear is around her throat. But her wand would adapt to torture curses just as seamlessly as it adapts to the tailoring charms she learned to help Fleur with the bridesmaids dress, and Susan’s aunt makes them waffles for breakfast even in the depths of war, and Theo writes her coded missives that always end with I love you and they’re doing this, aren’t they? 

They’re fucking doing this. 

______________

They meet with the Order of the Phoenix leadership in the garage of the Burrow. The light is like liquid gold, and Harry is wearing a Hufflepuff jumper that Justin’s pretty sure was his at one point, leaning against the wall with the faux slouch Justin’s seen a thousand time before. It projects disinterest and arrogance and confidence, but really it just means he’s on edge and wants to be able to run. 

Justin doesn’t blame him. 

There are seven days until Harry turns seventeen and everything splits open. He’s been home for three nights over the past three weeks, and has spent an ungodly amount of money on train fare— apparation was one thing, once you knew the location, but the places the crew had him off to weren’t those sorts of places. Sometimes, up in Oxford or down in central London for the afternoon, he’ll be tempted to go to the colleges, slip into one of the tour groups and here the pitches. That’s what his mum and him had planned to do this summer— faking transcripts and touring unis, sipping tea in distant British towns and his mum spinning yarn after yarn about the immense amount of family connections the Finch-Fletchleys possessed.

All of this still feels like a fever dream, sometimes. He grew up in that little house in Reading, and went to a normal primary school, and now there’s Ernie, walking beside him in long loping strides like a brother. There’s Hannah, sleeping on the floor over the Hols and checking his homework and transfiguring up spare ties when he forgets. There’s Susan, with her wicked grin and split-knuckle care, throwing him parties and always the first to step up when someone calls him a slur— oi, you want to say that one again? There’s Ron, stealing his jumpers and going to the trouble to teach him wizarding chess and listening to his ideas with a taunt focus, like it matters. 

There’s Millie, always dragging him into trouble and then getting out of it with the slick focus of a true Slytherin. There’s Neville, so solid, so normal that it’s grounding. There’s Luna, who still wants him to come see the Thestrals with her, even if he can’t see them (and how long will that last?) There’s Hermione, who understands what it is to come from another world and trying to make it yours; there’s Harry, who trusts him enough to talk to him. 

And so now he’s here, seventeen, a wizard who’s probably destined for a lifetime of producing smoke as a muggle party trick, sitting in on the long-awaited meeting between the Trio and the Order brass, like it’s all his. 

In attendance for the Order are McGonagall, who is all in black but, for the first time Justin can remember, is wearing her wand openly on her wrist; the real Mad-eye Moody, leaning against a wall with his arms crossed and his eye whizzing (he alone hadn’t protested the idea of this meeting, apparently—it’s their bloody war too, Minnie); and Kingsley, who’s sporting a vest and an earring and looks cool, but also like he could kill you without lifting a finger. 

Harry (slouched against the wall, in his sweater) and Hermione (arms crossed, and wearing a wand on each wrist) and Ron (hands on the table, taking point), are backed by Neville, in a faded Gryffindor jumper; Ginny, still wearing her flying gear; Susan, with her hair up in a sloppy bun, standing in a way that Justin can tell means she wants to be closer to Ron, but is holding back; and him. As Ron had said last night, when they were swapping notes and briefing each other for this meeting— we’re only bringing people who they’ve already got on a list somewhere.

“Well,” says McGonagall, glancing around the room. “I see you have brought your associates.” Harry, for reasons unknown to Justin, flinches at that, but he doesn’t have to understand to be protective and proactive, and he files it away for the future. “What is it that you wished to discuss with us?”

Ron, being Ron, takes the lead, though Justin doesn’t miss how McGonagall has to peal her eyes away from Harry. “Well, we just wanted to get some things in order, before we leave on our— quest. We’re on the same side, figured we should bloody well act like it, right?”

McGonagall looks a hair away from berating Ron for language, but Moody barks out a laugh. “Well said, Weasley! Going to let us in on what the quest is then, laddie?”

Hermione is the one to shake her head. “We— we’ve thought it over quite a bit, and we think Dumbledore was right. The more secret we can keep it, the better chance we have of keeping You-Know-Who in the dark. But we have come up with some contingencies, if we— if we don’t make it.” 

Moody cackles at that, bellowing out a hardy, “That’s the spirt, lass— always prepared. Anyone could off you at any time, you know,” but McGonagall visibly pales at the mention of Dumbledore, and as Hermione’s voice had cracked over the idea of the Trio not making it out, Susan had given in and taken a step closer to Ron, Ginny and Neville had tensed up, and Harry had pushed off the wall slightly, like he was rearing for a fight. 

Ron, resolute, went on. “But obviously we’re going to be more effective if we have a secure way to communicate with you. Especially if he does take the Ministry.” Kingsley grimaces at that. 

“What exactly are you suggesting in terms of communication, Mr. Weasley?” asks McGonagall. “Post is unreliable, and there is only so much that can be conveyed with a patronus, especially given the risk of it being overheard.” He feels the nerves rise in his throat, and indeed, Ron’s next move is to turn to him and go, “Justin?”

The reason he had only been back home for three nights this summer was his project, which had come to him on the train ride back to London, after the funeral. He’d been sitting with a subdued Susan, and Hannah had fallen asleep on his lap, Ernie reading a tome at his shoulder, and in an attempt to do anything but think of Snape, he had engaged Ernie in a discussion about technology in the wizarding world. The wireless, for example, which Ernie had explained had been “invented” in 1921 by an enterprising half-blood who’d basically ported it over whole-sale from the muggle world. This side-trail had caused Susan to remember Ron’s stories about the flying car, and Justin hadn’t been able to stop thinking about it. The next morning, when he’d apparated to the Burrow, Ron’s dad had been very eager to take off the cover to the wireless and show him the magic thrumming through the guts, replacing what had been wires.

Justin had thanked him, apparated back to Reading, and then gone back to the house, pealed off a few fifty-pound notes from his mum’s stash, and made a bee-line for the audio/visual store, not sure exactly what he was looking for, but dimly aware that if some crack-pot from the 1920s had managed to make a wizarding version of the radio, surely his crew could do the same with some pagers or cellphones. 

In the end, Ron’s dad had been the most helpful, but Sue’s transfiguration had been crucial, and in lieu of radio waves, Hermione had perfected a liquid net of gemino charms that slid over the whole bundle. Justin had been surprised how much help he’d actually been the process— given a year or two, he might have actually been able to get the project off the ground on his own. That feeling, of usefulness, was a bit uncommon, but it had warmed him to the core. 

With all the eyes on him, and slightly shaky hands, Justin explains the concept of the pagers, and then demonstrates. How you have to memorize the number, how you can leave a brief audio message, which the recipient can choose to listen to. How it can’t be tracked. How it will work within Hogwarts. How unlike a patronus, you don’t need to scrape together a lot of power and hope— even disarmed and concussed and magically exhausted, you could still page someone. 

Kingsley, who Justin blearily remembers is also a muggleborn, is the first to react, letting out an astonished chuckle and scooping up one of the pagers in his hand, turning it over in his long fingers and then letting out an astonished laugh. “Shit, kid.”

McGonagall picks up another, pressing the buttons gently and examining the blinking lights with thinly veiled derision. “Mr. Finch-Fletchley, while this is no doubt ingenious, I hardly think—“

Kingsley cuts her off. “Minerva, this is how we’re going to win the war,” and such a unilateral statement from one of the top Aurors in the department sends shivers of pride through Justin. “This is magic You-Know-Who would never think of. Hell, I’m muggleborn and I never thought of this.” He weighs the plastic of the device and turns to Justin. “You think you could make more?”

It’s all he can do to nod. 

The meeting moves on— Ron alludes to the fact that they’re forging papers for muggleborns, suggests that the Order make moves to do so for the wider population. They talk safe-houses, known Death Eaters, deaths, disappearances. Moody mentions Snape with a sneer that Harry matches. McGonagall manages to draw herself together enough to answer some of Hermione’s more obscure transfiguration questions. Moody gets a manic light in his eyes when Ginny asks about arson— hypothetically, of course— and Kingsley alludes to precautions the Order has in place, so that they continue the fight from underground if the Ministry falls. 

“Well, that went alright, didn’t it?” says Ron, after the three of the Order members have walked out to the ward boundary and apparated away, the pagers with them. 

“They could have met with us at the beginning of the summer,” scowls Ginny, but Neville says, “At least they talked to us like adults.”

“I should have killed him,” says Harry lowly, standing against the sunset with his hands in his pockets, and there is only one him for Harry right now, the ghost that haunts all their discussions. “I was right there.”

“Mate—“ says Ron, reaching out a hand, and Harry throws it off. 

“He’s out there, hurting people, and I—“
Justin surprises everyone, maybe most of all himself, when he speaks. “I don’t think it would have worked.” He finds himself caught in the laser focus of Harry’s stare, and swallows, but finishes the thought. “You have to want it, right? That’s the whole point of Avada.” He sees, in the shadows of Harry’s eyes, the truth, and understands— Harry knows this, and resents it. Resents the part of him that maybe will never be able to do it. 

The part that’s too Slytherin to ever fully sever ties. 

“And it’s alright if you don’t,” he says, soft in the sunset, like it’s just him and Harry in the garage. “Even now.”

Silence for a moment, as Harry stares at him, as the rest of their friends stare at him, and then Harry’s in his arms, wearing his twice-stolen sweater, not crying but just shaking. Justin feels like that too, on a level too deep to put words to. Just the sunset, and the shakes, and how one by one, the rest of their crew comes forward to join the embrace, until they’re all holding each other. 

Chapter Text

Despite his desire to be almost anywhere else, Harry ends up spending the day after his birthday sitting across from Scrimgeour in the Burrow living room, Ron on one side and Hermione on the other, and, if he knows his friends at all, Ginny and Neville and Susan and Millie (at a minimum) listening in, waiting for any sign of things going wrong. The only slight satisfaction is that Scrimgeour looks haggard, and though he’d asked Harry if the rumors Rita Skeeter had been spreading, about Dumbledore training him to be the savior of the wizarding world held any merit, he hadn’t looked at all surprised to receive a curt sod off. 

He’s legal. They’re packed. The wedding, which is rapidly turning into the wedding of the century, mainly because Harry’s pretty sure thinking about cake toppers beats thinking about if the unrecovered bodies have been turned into inferni any day, is in two more days. After that, they’re free and clear, though the three of them have privately decided to hang on to the corner of comfort of the Burrow, prepping logistics and doing research with their friends, for as long as the Ministry manages to stay intact. 

But from what Kingsley is passing them, and from how haggard Scrimgeour looks, the whole enterprise seems like it could collapse any day now. 

The month has slid by like trying to pour crystalized honey, but also he can’t believe it’s been a month already. He knows Ron and Hermione have been working their tails off, and it’s not like he hasn’t contributed, but he also feels like he’s misplaced great blocks of time. Despite what certain parties probably think, the times he slips off to be with Ginny very seldom involve snogging, and mainly involves him just sitting next to her, trying to figure out how to breathe, which is an exercise he often repeats with Ron and Hermione, though for different feelings. Ron and Hermione have a steadying, solidifying effect; Ginny can always make him laugh, forcing him to search for the speak of hope in the distance, as spectral as a snitch. 

It’s just— everything aches, all the way down to his bones. A quest, just him and Ron and Hermione out looking for Voldemort’s weird cursed objects, he could handle. And he could handle Dumbledore’s death— by the end, he may have been something like a mentor, trusting him with secrets in a way Harry could tell took a lot out of him, but he’d also been the one who’d never seemed concerned by the fact that things were clearly not all above board at Privet Drive. The one who’d brought the stone into the school their first year, maybe just to see what Harry would do. They’ve never been able to work that one out, and now maybe they never will.

It’s the dead that are haunting him, the dead and fucking Snape. 

There had been a moment there, he thinks, between the custody hearing and the third task, where everything had felt stable. Sure, he’d had a shit childhood, but then he’d come to Hogwarts and there Ron and Hermione had been, and looking back now he wonders how he’d managed to scrape together eleven years without them. And it had been rough, sometimes, those first years at the castle, but slowly it had begun to steady. The four-poster in the room under the lake; the bolthole crackling with magic; the attic room at the Burrow; the spare room in Birmingham with his name proudly on the door. And, as much as he didn’t want to admit it now, Chelsea. 

Had he really thought he’d get something like parents, back then? He thinks of meeting Sirius in the back room of Hogshead, with a wicked ache in his chest; he thinks of how Snape had shown up after the World Cup fiasco; knowing what he knows now, Harry doesn’t know where to place the gesture, except as some cross between disgusting, slavish loyalty and sadism. 

He thinks of his picture up on the wall in Birmingham, and all the hands on the Weasley clock pointing towards home, and it’s a living thing, the want; a living thing and a taunt all at once.

The Grangers, in Australia. The Weasleys, forming the core of what remained of the Order. Sirius, no body to even bury. Snape—

It’s taken all summer so far to admit it to himself, but he finally did last night, watching the clock flip over to midnight on his birthday like he was still a child with nothing. He had let himself believe it, and that was why it hurt so much. Somewhere along the way, it had crossed from wanting it to a confidence that he had it, and then Snape had reveled that he’d never meant any of it at all. Staring at his clock, he’d heard his mocking, oil-slick voice again, ringing out across the castle lawn— you’re as dense as your father, to actually believe any of it. 

Sirius had been his godfather, no question about it. But given that he couldn’t actually remember his father, and given the way Snape had been acting, maybe he’d—

(Justin’s right, as much as it hurts to admit it. He doesn’t have Avada in him, not for Snape. Crucio, sure, but to cast the killing curse he’d have to mean it, and how can he mean it? How can he mean it, when at the core of his being he’s still a first-year sitting in Snape’s office, clutching that first picture of his parents like a life-line, and even if it had only been about his eyes, it had been more than the Dursleys had ever done.)

He wants his Snape back, who had never been real, but he’d come to rely on all the same. There are things he needs to ask, problems he has that he knows Snape could solve. And as embarrassingly juvenile as it is, he also just wants to be held, like Snape held him in the infirmary after Sirius. Like he mattered, like even if he was about to go on a quest to take down the most evil wizard of the era, he wasn’t alone. 

But instead, he’s seventeen, and the watch that was once Fabian Prewett’s (the one Hermione had received for her birthday had been Gideon’s) clasped around his wrist, as the Minister of Magic informs him that in his will, Dumbledore left him the invisibility cloak he’d borrowed from James, a lifetime ago. Which will probably help them on their quest, but at the same time feels so pitiful it almost makes Harry laugh. Ron has received a strange device called a deluminator, which Dumbledore apparently invented, and Hermione has received a book of children’s fairy tales. Would it have killed the bastard to leave, say, a letter, detailing Order of Phoenix assets, useful spells for combat situations, and maybe some Phoenix tears? 

He tries to be interested in Scrimgeour’s interrogation of them, he really does. But his mind keeps flicking back to the horcruxes list, and how Anthony thinks the last one is the diadem of Ravenclaw. Apparently, Dumbledore left them the sword of bloody Gryffindor, which also forces Harry to stifle a laugh, just thinking of the rage on Millie’s face when she finds out he was so flippant with a priceless Hogwarts artifact like that.

Scrimgeour is still talking, trying to goad Harry into a response, and all at once the emotion Harry feels for him is pity. He’s doing a pretty shitty job running the Ministry, from what Harry can tell, and still holds himself like an auror, not a politician, choosing to lie often and poorly. The cloak in his hand feels like spun sliver.

“Look, we want Voldemort dead, just like you,” says Harry, rising to his feet; Ron and Hermione rise with him, like they always do. “And if Dumbledore had some secret insight into how to kill him, we don’t have it, and we’re not going to pry it out of some book of children’s stories.” A vein in Scrimgeour’s temple bulges, and Harry resists the urge to roll his eyes. “I don’t like how you’re handling this, but I didn’t really like how Dumbledore ran the Order of the Phoenix either.” This seems to appease Scrimgeour, somehow.

They watch him walk out to the ward boundary through a thick, cold summer rain, shoulder to shoulder in the Burrow kitchen. Ron fiddles with the deluminator so the lights flick on and off, on and off, like lightning. The cloak is hanging silver in Harry’s hand— To Harry James Potter, I leave his father’s invisibility cloak, which was left in my care before he died— and he feels the rage rear up like a breaking wave. All this time, Dumbledore had had something of his father’s, tucked away in some secret drawer, and he has had nothing. He thinks of the ease with which Fred and George handed over the map, not even knowing how important it was; he thinks of Mrs. Weasley knocking on doors across the country to get photos for a child she did not know; of Snape, who probably would have left him to rot at the Dursleys if he’d gotten his father’s eyes—

“I bet he would have given it to you first year if you’d been in Gryffindor,” says Ron, flicking the lights. Scrimgeour is out of sight now, subsumed by the rain, and Harry is morbid enough to wonder if they’ll ever see him alive again. “He always was a bit too into that Slytherin’s the dark house bull.”

Harry feels his shoulders shaking, too small to contain all his emotions. Upstairs, he can hear faint snatches of Fleur conversing rapidly in French with her parents, and in the yard, under enchantments against the rain, Luna and Ernie are helping Mrs. Weasley place the streamers just-so. Watching her work, with such care, even in the dead center of the war, almost makes him more angry, in a way he only usually gets when he’s up after a bad nightmare of the Dursleys— why couldn’t he have gotten something like this, right from the start? 

“Maybe I should learn necromancy,” says Hermione. “Then I can summon up his shade and we can yell at him.”

Despite himself, Harry laughs at that, his cracking cackle an echoing phantom in the empty kitchen of the Burrow.

After dinner, trying to slip off before anyone asks him to have an opinion on something related to the wedding, he manages to skirt around Hermione deep in talks with Anthony, and Ron and Ginny arguing with Sue about Quidditch, but when he makes it out to the garden— dusk is setting in, air is muggy with damp— he turns around to find he hasn’t managed to shake Susan, who gives him a soft smile. 

“Hi,” says Harry weakly, who has found it much weirder to talk to Susan since he found Ron snogging her a few weeks ago, despite knowing it was going to happen for ages. 

“Can it,” says Susan, narrowing her eyes at him, like she knows exactly how he feels, which, since it’s Susan, she probably does. “You and Gin is bloody weird too, if I stop to think about it.” 

“I like you and Ron together,” Harry amends, just to make sure she doesn’t get the wrong idea. This is true— Susan isn’t Trio, but she fits into their matrix in the same way Ginny seems to, caring about Harry and Hermione with her fierce protectiveness, unthreatened by the way they orbit each other. “Better than Lavender.” That makes Susan both blush and grin. 

For a long moment, they stand side-by-side in the grass, the lights from the kitchen casting rectangles of glow into the garden. The first stars have started to come out. 

“You know I’d come with you if you asked,” says Susan, finally, without looking at him, and Harry feels his heart constrict in his chest. “Not because of me and Ron, and not because I’m mates with Hermione. Because you asked me to.”

He’s cried so much this summer— with grief and rage and want— but these are different, dripping down his face without his consent. Susan steps over, and puts an arm around his shoulders, and he remembers being eleven, and how easily she would slip into his space, even though at the beginning she was more Ron’s friend than his. How the weight of her care has always been like a hand pulling him up from deep water. How maybe there was nothing for him in that suburban house, and how maybe Dumbledore hadn’t ever done it right, and how maybe Snape had been shit all along, but here she is. Here they all are. 

Her arms come up around him, and he sobs into her shoulder. “I love you, you know that, right?” he finally manages, and she lets out something like a laugh, something like a sob. 

“Of course I do, you idiot,” she says. “You wear it around with you, in the way you move. I love you too.”

He feels the magic burning in his veins, ready for what they have to do. The list is a looped mantra in his mind; the invisibility cloak is already bundled up inside the foldspace linked to Hermione’s watch. The damp wind is cool on his wet face, and Susan is warm and powerful— not with theory, like Hermione, but with sheer force. He’s not going to marvel at the fact that he made it to seventeen, and wonder if he’ll make it to eighteen, if his crew will make it to eighteen. He’s going to lean into her embrace and focus on what she said, on how he thinks he could build a patronus with just that the core of it. 

“I know,” he says. “I know.”

_______________

Anthony wakes from a deep, dreamless sleep to a crack of thunder, glances at his watch, and grounds out a low expletive. It’s now four am on August second, and he had not intended to sleep for five whole hours when he’d given in to Millie and settled down on the couch in the garage for a nap. Wake me after one and a half, he’d said, and Millie had said three, and then left all together, apparently. 

The night is inky black with the rain, which must have set in again in earnest while he was asleep. Dinner last night had been a smaller affair than normal— the Hufflepuffs, sans Ron, had all been having dinner with their families (Ernie with the Finch-Fletchleys, obviously); Daphne had gone up to see Astoria and the Creevys, and Neville and Ginny had been dragged into some Quibbler-related project by Luna, which had stretched through dinner and into the evening. And honestly, Anthony probably also would have worked through dinner, had Mrs. Wesley not come out to the garage and given him the look, which after a month basically camping out at her house, he knew better than to disrespect. 

The wet wind wings into the garage, making the papers tacked to his bulletin boards shiver and rustle, and he rises from the couch to go look at them. It’s technically now Day +3— three more days than the earliest the Trio realistically could have gone on the run, without a fair amount of hassle with Harry not being legal. Every additional hour he has to provide them information without a filter or courier feels like a godsend, and he doesn’t want to waste any of it, especially not on something as pointless as sleep. 

He stands in front of his boards, rubbing sleep from his eyes, wishing for Mavis and her platter of tea, but knowing he’ll crack soon and just head into the kitchen to make his own. But first, to reorient.

He stares up at the map of the British Isles, which has the locations the Dark Lord cares about circled, and once again tries to derive a pattern. The cave; the hut in Little Hangleton. The snake is always by his side, of course, but where would he hide the cup, and the final artifact, which, based on his recent deep-dive into Ravenclaw history (Luna’s father had been very helpful, actually), is probably the diadem. The common consensus is that each Founder left behind a ring, which was passed from Head of House to Head of House, and an artifact; there’s talk of some piece that all of them contributed to, possibly meant for the headmaster, but that has never turned up. Subtracting from that equation the locket and the cup leaves the sword, which Dumbledore was confident was not a horcrux (though, if it’s left in the clutches of the teetering Ministry, he’s not sure how long that will last), and the long-lost diadem. 

“But where?” asks Anthony to the map, watching as the wind ruffles the corners. Hogwarts is the obvious answer, especially since they know he was back there for that DADA interview, right around the time he was deep in the process of creating the damn things, but where? Millie knows the castle backwards and forwards, and she’s never come back with reports of a strange object that warps things around it. 

Though— the curse on the DADA position. Maybe he’d used the horcrux as some kind of anchor and feeder for it? Anthony snatches up a stray pad of paper and jots down look into curse propagation. 

Maybe it’s in the Come-and-Go room somewhere, some variation only You-Know-Who could get to. He scrawls that down on the list too, gnawing on the tip of the quill. What other location would someone who loves nothing, and no one choose to hide something? 

At least there is a bright spot on the locket front— he’s fairly sure he knows who R.A.B. is. It had taken him a while— he’d gotten too caught up in old family trees and census lists when the answer had been in front of him the whole time. The threat had come from inside the house, because who could R.A.B. have really been but Regulus Arcturus Black, who had taken the Mark (allegedly) at sixteen, and gone missing in the winter of ’80-’81, probably drowned in that cave Harry had told him about. 

But what did that mean for the locket? The Trio were planning on working that one out once they actually absconded to Grimmauld, but Anthony had had more than a few nightmares about the lake filled with Inferni, and he hoped to Merlin that the damn thing wasn’t at the bottom somewhere. Regulus had been a Slytherin; surely he’d thought the heist through. 

Also, it did bode well for their quest if the Dark Lord hadn’t checked on his horcruxes since 1980, even with the whole resurrection thing. Another reason he was an idiot, sure, but helpful for them. 

He slides off the table and heads into the house, flicking out his wand to cast a charm to ward off the downpour between the house and the garage. The kitchen is dark, still, but surely Mrs. Weasley will be up soon, and the house will be filled with the clamor of planning a wedding (a task Anthony had gotten out of when he’d responded to the theme colors for the wedding question with khaki’s practical, khaki or black, and been told to spend the entire summer reading, please and thank you.) He taps his wand twice on the kettle to start it boiling, like his grandmother would do, and staring at the cheery purple flames, wonders if she’s up yet in Bath, puttering around the house, kneading dough so it will be ready by breakfast. 

The twins are supposed to be at Hogwarts next year, and Anthony can only find fear at that thought, as much as he’s always wanted to show them the library. Sue and Theo and Daphne and Ron, the most political of them, are seeing the cracks echoing through the Ministry, and Anthony feels like even now they’re living on borrowed time. Even for Purebloods, a Hogwarts run by the Dark Lord’s administration will be no place for his sisters.

The twins, small and still full of wonder, at Hogwarts. His grandmother, slipping through the glades and into libraries and fighting the war in any way necessary— early on, he and Ernie had brought her into their side project of falsifying muggleborns’s family trees, and she’d taken it up with gusto. His parents, who were not and had never been warriors, keeping their heads down and trying to prevent anyone thinking about the Goldsteins at all. 

Him, underwater in information. Helping Ernie backstop his family trees; helping Sue and Theo and Hermione find the books they needed; helping Justin and Ron and Millie plot their safe-house locations; helping Harry and Neville and Hannah scrape up resources so they could share information about their fields; tracking down answers to the niche questions Ginny and Daphne and Luna put to him, about guerrilla warfare and subterfuge and accelerants. 

Is it enough? Surely, they’ve gotten farther than they would without him, but in the grand scheme of things, it feels like nothing. In the dark, waiting for the kettle to boil, all he can think about is the dead.

“Alright, mate?” comes Ron’s voice; he can’t help but jump, even in the cozy kitchen of the Burrow. Ron emerges out of the darkness; he’s wearing Cannons pajamas and his hair is sticking up in every direction. “Enough in there for both of us?”

Anthony nods. “You alright?” 

“Nightmare,” says Ron, coming around to stand beside him.

“The future?” Ron had dropped that bombshell on them at the beginning of the summer, and Anthony was still reeling. Apparently it was never clear— most of the time Ron only realized the connections after the fact— but it’s still wild.

Ron shrugs. “Dunno. There’s this pool with a sword in it, and then Harry’s dead in the forest.” Anthony shivers. “I’ve had both of them before.”

“But that’s your boggart,” Anthony feels compelled to remind him. “So maybe it’s just sort of where your mind goes.” 

Ron shrugs again, slumping slightly so the point of his shoulder is against his. He stares into the dark, at the flame. “I don’t know what the hell we’re going to do without you,” he says, quietly. “Like— more than research, even. I think you— you get him. How he works.”

That makes a flush of pride slither through Anthony’s sternum. “Not really,” he says. “I mean— I’m trying, but—“

“I think you do, though,” says Ron. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but— I mean, he’s a lot like you, I think, sometimes. The obsessiveness of him.” 

Anthony, logical to the core, turns this over in his mind for a long moment, and finds it not to be wrong. “He probably would have been good in Ravenclaw,” he says finally. “He doesn’t know when to stop.”

The kettle begins to whistle, and Ron hastily snatches it off the hob, pouring the tea in the dark. Outside, the rain. In the low light from the hall sconces, Ron’s face is a maze of shadows, and Anthony wishes, not for the first time, that he could promise the Trio that they could do this. He’s an idiot, and a fool, and loves nothing and no one. We can take him. 

“In mine, it’s Sue,” he offers, after Ron pushes his cup towards him and makes no move to return upstairs. Ron jerks his eyes up to him. “I’m in the library at Hogwarts and I find her body. It’s that— that sectumsempra thing.” Ron flinches; one of the things they’ve learned over the summer, from that annotated potions book Harry swiped from Snape’s quarters, is that the bastard invented the spell for the Dark Lord.

Ron heaves out a breath, slumping forward onto the counter on his elbows, his face in his hands. “Shit, Anthony.”

Anthony feels that in his very bones. He watches the steam rise from his tea, the kitchen illuminated by distant flashes of lightning. “I think we can do it,” he says, after a long moment. “He’s powerful, but he’s stupid.”

Ron stares out at the rain. “It’s not him, really,” he says. “It’s Snape. Snape’s smart as hell.”

Anthony smears at his face with his hand, a bit reluctant to dive again into the fetid pool of Severus Snape. It really all comes back to one central point: if Snape was really the Dark Lord’s, hook, line, and sinker— and, after killing Dumbledore, Anthony’s not sure how he could be anything else— why had he not tried harder to abduct Harry from the grounds in the aftermath of the murder? He had backup, according to Harry; hell, he’d still had a sheen of Harry’s trust. A stunner probably would have gone undeflected. 

Or had it all come down to the fucked-up entanglement Snape still seemed to have with Harry’s mum and her run-of-the-mill green eyes? And if so, how far did such a loyalty stretch? Would he lift a finger to save Harry if someone else dragged him before the Dark Lord? Was he content to let the world burn, killing to his heart’s desire (the records from the DLME certainly showed no reluctance on that front), but if he found Harry in a wood, he’d keep him alive? 

(Did he understand that he shouldn’t bother with Harry if he wasn’t going to bother with Ron and Hermione?)

“The Dark Lord doesn’t trust anyone, though,” says Anthony. “Even if he tells him every single thing he knows, the bastard probably won’t do anything with it.” Ron lets out another sigh, slumping into his elbows; Anthony has vague inklings of the fact that as a strategist, Ron has to consider the worst-case outcomes anyway. “And— Ron, even if they know everything, I don’t think either of them could get it.”

“Get what?” Ron asks. 

“You and Harry and Hermione. Snape was always on and on about associates, like Slytherins didn’t have friends, wasn’t he?”

Ron’s mouth, for the first time that evening, curls into a slight smile. “He was, wasn’t he.”

The tea is just the right temperature. He shuts his eyes, and feels the deep urge to just go back to sleep instead of delving into another project at four am, and when Ron suggests that, he doesn’t argue. When he wakes at ten am, well-rested for maybe the first time this summer, the sun is dazzling down on the Burrow, Mrs. Weasley has saved him scones and rashers, and Ernie’s got a new family tree for him to work on. 

Maybe if he’d been in Ravenclaw, he would have learned how to not be afraid of the unknown, Anthony thinks, as ink flecks and the dew burns off. Maybe he would have figured out how to walk along side it, instead of trying to build a wall against it. 

And as the morning wastes into afternoon, piece by piece, report by report, lie by lie, Anthony explores where the Dark Lord would never dare tread. 

_______________

The day of the wedding dawns blue and cool, and Luna walks over the hill towards the Burrow in her yellow dress, humming snatches of the songs from her dreams. She is aware that in the grand scheme of things, the wedding is not that important, but she does love a good party, ever since she’d started going to things with Harry. He doesn’t let anyone make fun of her, and always wants to dance. 

She sees Hermione first, wearing a Slytherin jumper she probably stole from Harry, standing in the tall grass casting, a monument against the blue of the sky. Her and Ron were the least thrilled at the idea of having the wedding at the Burrow, consumed with worry about who might show up, and what the Death Eaters might do with such a target rich environment. But the wards around the place are a labyrinth now, and Luna doubts the Dark Lord could untangle them in a timely manor. As she passes through the ward boundary, she feels the familiar weight of Hermione’s magic, petrichor and charcoal, and Mrs. Weasley’s, like blood and cloves, and beneath that, fainter but still thrumming into the landscape, dozens and dozens of others, who came before.

“Hi, Luna,” says Hermione, pausing her casting to give her a smile, strained as it is. Luna can tell she barely slept last night. Luna pulls out a small package wrapped in parchment paper and hands it over; Hermione takes it gingerly, eying her name scrawled across it in her dad’s messy scrawl.

“Me and Dad figured everyone would be too worried about the wedding to cook, so we made breakfast rolls for everyone,” Luna explains, as Hermione gingerly unwrapped the packet to reveal the egg, cheese, and bacon she and her father had carefully crammed onto a roll this morning. Hermione takes a bite of the sandwich and sags in relief. 

“The wards will hold,” Luna tells her, because it will reassure her, because somewhere underneath all her power and prowess Hermione is still a ten-year-old girl from Birmingham with no friends and no angles. “Yours are talking to the ancient ones. It’s like they’re becoming friends.” 

Hermione grins at that, and Luna heads down the hill towards the Burrow, humming still, letting her magic sprawl around her like a cat in a sunbeam. It’s been a long summer, and it’s not even close to over yet, but for one day, she feels a bit like she can relax. Like the problems she’s solving are simple ones— Weasleys and friends won’t eat on day of massive event, thus, breakfast and nagging— and not how can we defeat the most evil, least-nosed wizard in history?

July had been spent helping out however she could, while the more practical of her friends moved massive set-pieces and taught her how to duel. The others— Ernie with his immense project to forge family trees; Ginny with her bloody-mouthed criminal swagger; Neville with his sure and steady mastery of DADA, enough to maybe lead a remade underground Defense league at the castle come term— were doing important things, things that would impact the fabric of the war. The Trio were gearing up for their quest— of course Voldemort had tied his power to objects he’d hidden in places that were significant to him, melodramatic idiot that he was.

Fred and George are in the yard, finishing setting up chairs and cajoling Millie into detailing which of the French cousins are the hottest, and they all catch the rolls lobbed at them with calls of thanks. Daphne and Susan are in a whispered conference out by the broom shed, and Luna can tell by the way they’re holding each other it’s about Ron, and how Susan’s quite torn up by the prospect of him leaving, considering they’ve only been going steady for a month now. “Don’t worry,” Luna says brightly, handing over the rolls. “It’s not like he’s going to meet someone cooler than you on their quest,” which makes Susan smile, just a little bit. 

Ernie and Anthony and Sue are exactly where they always are, in the garage working on projects; Sue eats with a ravenous focus and details her new transfiguration insights to her. Justin is asleep on the couch, but she leaves his next to it. Hannah and Theo are never here for breakfast— Hannah’s at St. Mungo’s, and Theo is stuck at his house, pretending to be a monster-in-training— but she made one for them in spirit. Just how they’d like it. 

Fleur’s parents, lovely beyond measure, are in the kitchen with Gabrielle, Charlie, and an exhausted-looking Ron and Harry, along with the Weasleys, who look about start in on breakfast. “Don’t worry!” she says, opening her bag. “I brought breakfast for everyone. Least we could do, we figured.”

“Brilliant,” says Ron, his eyes lighting up as he unwraps his rolls, which is the largest of them all. “Luna, you’re a saint.”

“Thank you dear,” says Mrs. Weasley, looking at all the food with a deep gratefulness, and Luna feels her chest swell. It’s not much, maybe, but it’s something. 

After passing Bill and Fleur theirs, she ends up at her final destination— Ginny’s room, where Neville is flopped on the bed reading one of Harry’s heavy defense books and Ginny is trying and failing to curl her hair. “Thank Merlin, Lune,” says Ginny, turning towards her, the curling iron crackling menacingly. “I can’t get it to look remotely decent.”

“I brought breakfast,” says Luna, holding up the bag. Neville sits up and grins. 

“Excellent, as always,” he says, scarfing down the roll, a few stray bits of egg dropping into the open pages. “So, Luna, what would you do if your opponent on a battle field cloaked the whole thing in magical darkness?”

Luna glances over at Ginny, who waves her hand over the curling iron to cancel the spell and then sits on the bed next to Neville. “They cast it, so they can see through it,” says Ginny, turning the pages back a bit. “And the counter’s rough. I think Hermione could do it—“ 

“Don’t sell yourself short,” says Neville; Ginny scoffs. 

“Not power complicated, theory complicated. But anyway, let’s say dispelling it is out. What do you do?”

Luna looks back and forth between the two of them. Neville’s hair has gotten shaggy over the summer, and he’s almost got a tan to him, from how much he’s been out in the sun. Ginny is wearing one of Harry’s shirts, which was originally Hermione’s, and the thin scars that liter her arms stand out in the dazzle of morning light. She can read them cleanly, like line from a book— Ginny is jittery with wedding nerves but also so, so giddy; Neville is relaxed because it’s the two of them but underneath is an ocean of deep-seated fear about the war. She thinks of earlier in the summer: sitting in the tall grass out by the pitch, Neville leaning back into the heels of his hands and telling her about the teary conversation he’d had with his grandmother, about how proud and terrified she was in the same moment; Ginny, in her bedroom late at night, pacing small circles and talking about how she knows she has to let Harry go on his quest, but is so, so scared he might not come back— and even if he does, even if everything works out and we win, is this even going to last? Will it be the same after?— and how she can feel power crackling in her hands, some latent desire she has to make the world bristle and burn. 

(She’d told them hers, too.About the hole in her chest as she looks into the future, wondering how the hell they’ll survive the year. About how pitiful she feels, about not seeing through Snape. About the holes she sees— Anthony not sleeping; Theo trying to survive; Sue’s conflict with her family in America; Susan worried about Ron and what the future holds for them; Harry.)

Luna joins them on the bed; it creaks slightly. Beneath them, there’s the sound of chatter as wedding prep kicks into high gear. The page of Defense Against The Darkest of Arts is underlined and the margins are crammed with notes— Harry’s scrawl, Ron’s lopped print, Hermione’s chicken-scratch, and Neville’s new, neater cursive. Luna catches a glimpse of a place where the name of someone who’d given pointers had been defaced, and Luna can only assume it was Snape’s. 

She trails her finger down the page, thinking of the Ministry and the orbs shattering in the gloom. “Well, you’d just have to change what you’re casting, right? Something with intent, that knows where it’s going.”

Neville squints at her, but Ginny sits up straight, her eyes alight. “What do you mean?” asks Neville. 

Luna runs her tongue over her teeth and tries to gather the words to explain. “Well, a stunner is just a bolt. You have to aim. But a good hex— you have to want to hex someone. If you just put in a little more of that in there—“

“It’ll know where it’s going,” says Ginny, breathless.

“Exactly,” says Luna, flipping the pages, letting her friends’s comments blink up at her. Hermione always seemed to have questions, or references to other texts; Ron noted ideas for combat or use; Harry was bitingly sarcastic, and occasionally offered corrections. She can feel Neville looking at her, and looks back up at him.

“Nothing,” he says in response to her unasked question, but he can’t keep the smile off his face. In the end he slides a bit closer and slings an arm over her thin shoulders. “Just glad you’re on our side.”

Ginny gets up on her knees to drape her arms around the two of them, and then it turns into a messy group hug. They stay there for a moment, basking in the sunlight and listening to the uproar beneath, for a long moment, like if maybe they wait long enough all of this will turn out to have been a dream. 

It doesn’t, of course. Luna does Ginny’s hair, and then Neville helps her decide which vegetable earrings would go best with the yellow dress (they decide on onions). She sits with him in the third row, while Ginny stands up front and Fleur looks radiant, floating up the aisle.

It’s a lovely wedding, while it lasts. Neville doesn’t partner dance well, but he does consent to a bit of freestyle with her during one of the jazzier numbers. Viktor Krum asks her to dance, and they twirl on the floor while she asks him if he’s been guerrilla quidditched yet, and his laughter is like a small fall of stones. Fred and George have a special packet of fireworks for the occasion; Ginny has a flask of something strong that she doesn’t like the taste of very much. Fleur overhears Hermione’s spiel to Harry about ward work, and then she’s pulling up a chair and transfiguring a napkin out nowhere to derive in longhand. Luna has a very pleasant conversation with Charlie and Hagrid about dragons; Millie and Susan are trying to teach Gabrielle how to waltz; and Bill is chatting to Ron by the bar, and for the first time this summer he looks relaxed. 

She catches Harry, fleeing the charms conversation, at the bar. “Alright, Harry?”

He looks at her, shocked. “How did you know?” 

She supposes technically he is disguised as a distant Weasley cousin, but it’s Harry. “I’d know you anywhere,” she says simply, and his face breaks into an illuminated grin. “Want to dance? Neville’s a bit rubbish, and Ginny is too excited by the idea of mixing gunpowder and magic.” 

Harry gives a fond smile. “Of course she is. And yeah.” 

They make their way out to the dance floor— right now, the band is playing a rock number by a signer Luna’s mother loved. Harry’s hands are not his own, but he moves like Harry does. Nervous, but always know where he needs to go. 

“You’re going to be alright, you know,” she says, as she holds up her hand for him to spin; he obliges. “Out there.”
He doesn’t answer for a long moment, as they step in time to the beat. “How do you know?” he says finally, letting her spin. The night is closing in, like a great bowl of navy and purple, and Luna thinks she could dance all night. 

“Because you’ve got them,” she says, running a thumb over the Prewett ring on his hand; this close, she can feel the magic within it, all webbed and threaded. “And they’ve got you. Power the Dark Lord knows not, right?”

In just a minute, Kingsley’s lynx will materialize in the pavilion, and Death Eaters will storm the ward boundary (it will hold, for quite a long time, because Hermione is better than the Dark Lord could ever hope to be), but for now, it’s just the two of them, dancing.

“And the rest of you, too,” says Harry, raising his arm. She twirls, her yellow dress swirling. “We’re not alone.”
And she and Harry both understand what a revelatory thing that is, don’t they? For one more moment, they just dance, alone no longer, even as the world implodes.

Chapter Text

Perth is beautiful, sprawling, and wreathed in mid-winter sunlight. The flat they managed to rent on short notice looks out over the city, and very far away to the sea, and is furnished in a modern style. Crookshanks and Socks both try to fit in the windowsill, just to bask in the light. The story they’ve told to their neighbors, who are all very lovely,  is that they’re here for a sabbatical year of sorts, to volunteer their skills as dentists in underserved communities in the Outback. Six weeks out in the desert, two weeks back in the city, starting in September, once all the paper work is finalized. 

The only pictures in their apartment, creased deeply from the journey, tell a different story. On a brilliant July morning, with the cold wind whistling through the skyscrapers in the distance, Cindy sits at their coffee table with a mug of tea and stares at them, like she’s trying to lead them support from a distance. Hermione, eleven, wearing her Hogwarts robes for the first time and beaming nervously for the camera. Harry, in the back garden, maybe fourteen, with rolled-up jumper sleeves and a colander full of raspberries. Ron, in the kitchen of the row house, thirteen and posing with the muffins he’d baked. Harry and Ron and Hermione at the football match last summer, grinning in the twilight, like they were just teenagers. 

All yours? One of their neighbors had asked, when they’d had her over for tea the other week, and Cindy had said yes before she could think about it, and then Pete had explained, about Hermione finding two friends at boarding school and how they were thick as thieves, but Cindy hadn’t really wanted him to. She’d almost wanted to let the claim hang bold and powerful in the kitchen of the seventh-floor flat: we have three children. 

And they’re all alone, fighting a war. 

Hermione calls them twice a week, from pay-phones in the corners of Britain. Usually, she’s accompanied by Sue and Susan, who are nice enough, but so much of her wants to talk to Harry and Ron as well. At least if they were all at the Burrow, Molly was there. 

She goes to stand at the window, looking out over the city. The most isolated city in the world, people say— once you get outside the sprawl, it’s a thousand kilometers to any other major populated area.

The last conversation with Hermione is burned into her mind, where she supposes it will remain for all time. June had just been winding down, and though the war was clearly heating up in the Wizarding World, all was well in the muggle one. In a week, Hermione would be home from Hogwarts, and they’d planned a week-long vacation to the seaside (with Ron and Harry of course) for late July, planning to return just in time to celebrate Harry’s birthday at the Burrow. There were wards on the house, and on both their dental practices, and Hermione had given them both charmed rings to wear, but neither of them were worried, not really.

And then Hermione and Sue, who should have been at school, knocking on the door. 

“Snape killed Dumbledore,” Hermione told them, pacing in the garden. She was in robes that looked like she’d slept in them, and seemed to be carrying two wands, and Cindy had known that her daughter could move like this, with a liquid, shivering confidence, but it was a bit unnerving, to have it used against her. “He’s been on You-Know-Who’s side this whole time.”

Piece by piece, she’d unlatched the story to them— the betrayal; the fact that since Snape knew where they lived, so did Voldemort; the quest the Trio had inherited. 

“And it has to be you?” Pete had asked. “Aren’t there— these Order of the Phoenix blokes seem pretty qualified—“

Hermione had let out a mirthless laugh, and Cindy had seen the ghost of herself in her daughter’s eyes. Seen herself at nineteen, standing on her mother’s graveside; seen herself swallowing her anger in the face of sexist remarks in dental school; seen herself pinning on cool disregard at the wizards’s disgust for muggles. Of course it wasn’t okay, but what else was there to do but go on through. 

Hermione had insisted on them leaving the country, and then she had, out of nowhere, suggested one of the most horrifying things Cindy had ever heard. “I could just do a memory charm,” she’d said, twisting her wand in her hand. “Make you forget about me and the whole idea of magic, and then if I die, you won’t—“

It had come out angry, and brutal, but it had been fear like Cindy had never known at the root of that statement. “Don’t you dare,” she’d snarled, and Pete had stepped forward, wrapping Hermy in his arms, murmuring reassurances. She wanted Hermione to live more than she wanted anything else, really, but to not know her? To have her memories of her daughter ripped from her, so that when she saw the obituary she wouldn’t feel as if her heart had been torn out? 

Even now, in the Perth sun, the fear follows her, like a serpent. Loosing Hermione would be unthinkable— worse even than loosing Pete, she thinks— but the idea of not feeling any of it? The idea of not knowing she had a daughter, who she loves more than anything? 

So they’re in Perth, with the hard-fought privilege of worrying. Hedwig has somehow appeared three times this summer, landing on their balcony, and the first time she didn’t even have a letter, just a mission. Cindy had scrawled their new phone numbers on a piece of paper and given it to her to take back. Even for a magical owl, she seems oddly competent sometimes. 

They’re in Perth, and a world away, their children are about to fight a war. She wonders how long it will be before the regular phone calls stop, and she and Pete will come home from the Outback to find messages on their machine, Hermy going we’re safe, just wanted to let you know, love you. 

And what if the unthinkable happens, and there simply are no more messages after a point? What then?

She shuts her eyes, and leans her forehead into the cool glass. The fear is a familiar companion, like a stray dog that follows you all the way home. But when Hedwig returns (as she surely will), she has letters for Harry and Ron and Hermione, as well as for Molly. Harry won’t be coping with what Snape has done, she knows— apparently it had all come back to something to do with his mother, and the color of his eyes— and if she were in Britain it would have been as simple as an embrace and sitting with him out for a spot of tea, but she’ll have to do the best she can with letter. It won’t be enough, but maybe it’s not about enough. Maybe it never has been.

She thinks of that first summer— how small Harry had been, sitting at her table, answering her questions. No, they didn’t really feed me. No, I didn’t really have a proper room. And she’d felt it then, the way the love had hit her like a tidal wave. None of that will happen here, she’d said, taking his hand in hers, and she was no witch but goddamn had she kept that promise with everything in her. She has a memory of pulling out roadmaps of Survey, and tracing the blocks until she came to Privet Drive, so that if anything ever happened, they could just go get him. And then another memory, from last summer— coming home late at work to find the kitchen roaring with laughter, as Ron moved pots and pans around and cussing like a sailor at Harry and Hermione, who were “supervising,” sitting on the counter and the table with their long legs swinging. Even in grief, Harry’s checks had been full, and that night he slept in a room with his name on the door. 

Perth rises like a palisade. Hermione and Harry and Ron, a world away, fighting a fight that was only theirs because they’d chosen to stay. What she’s done hasn’t been enough— not for Harry, not for Ron, not for Hermione, even, probably, and certainly not enough to save the world— but it’s something. Imperfect, like all mothers, but still an attempt.

Within her, the love rises and foams, as deep and endless as the sea. 

_______________

Molly carefully refolds the letter from Cindy Granger and slips upstairs, lifting the bottom of her jewelry box to place it in the magically extended compartment where she keeps all her correspondence. At this point, it’s most Ron’s— she can’t bear to throw out any of his letters, even the ones that are mainly Hogwarts gossip (she remembers fondly a letter from last year that was entirely MUM HERMIONE SNOGED TERRY BOOT). 

She feels slightly steadied by it, as she always has by Cindy. She’s a practical, down-to-earth women, and she loves Ron and Harry like her own, and over tea that first summer had leaned across the table and said I think Harry’s guardians hurt him, and Molly had seen in her eyes a glittering resolve that she now sees on the daily from Hermione, and she’d had a feeling that Cindy Granger would not be swayed by Albus Dumbledore’s talks of blood wards or the greater good.

But Albus is dead now, and the Grangers are in Australia, and out in the garage her children are planning for war, and in her bedroom, with the July sun streaming in, Molly allows herself just a moment, to cast a silencing ward and then just scream. 

She’s going to kill Severus Snape. 

All of her children are taking the war hard, in their own ways. Bill is running himself ragged, falling asleep at dinner and his hands covered in small reopened wounds; Fleur is out on the battlefield, coming back singed and then sitting down to help Hermione with charm work without even letting her heal things. Charlie’s burning through portkey after portkey; Percy— well, if she thinks about Percy too long, she’ll start weeping, but maybe if he’s at the Ministry keeping his nose clean he’ll live through this thing; Fred and George have packed up their labs at the joke shop in Diagon and are working underground, out of some safe-house Ron coordinated for them; Ginny turned down summer workout invites with two professional Quidditch teams to be here this summer, and she’s pretty sure the thing with Harry is serious, but the war—

And then there’s the Trio. Who came back from the school year looking small and thin and haunted, like they’d been through the wringer in every way. Like something fundamental in their spirts had been snapped in two. 

Severus. Fucking. Snape.

She’d taught Hermione the Prewett wards, which she was fairly sure had never been spread outside the bloodline before, but she was a blood traitor, might as well act like it. Wards for protection, for defense; wards against betrayals. Wards that she hoped to Merlin were keeping Severus Snape from telling You-Know-Who what he’d learned in this house, about Harry and Ron and Hermione and how they moved as one. Hermione, being Hermione, had mastered them quickly, and then started altering them on the fly, bleeding power into the cool dawn air. 

“Sorry,” she’d said, looking back at her; her brown face drawn with exhaustion and nerves both. “I just— it’s a natural hole there, it wasn’t too hard to patch—“ 

“It’s bothered me as long as I’ve known them, dear,” Molly had said, Molly who would have let Hermione write herself into the family tree if she thought it would keep her safe. “They’re for you to use as you need, modifications included.”

She’d taught Hermione the wards, and she’d sat Ron down and just listened. So much had happened between his last letter home and now, and she felt a burning need to understand. So she listened as he told her, in quite tones over a late night cuppa, as an early July thunderstorm sent the house shaking and his and Hermione and Harry’s hands on the clock all pointed towards home. About the lake Dumbledore had taken Harry too, to help with the quest (by being murdered, Albus had avoided the dressing down she would have given him about that). About the Mark over the tower, and about Severus Snape, and the bolt of green. About the chase across the lawn, and what Snape had said. About quest he couldn’t elaborate on, because their success depended on You-Know-Who not knowing they’d figured out his secrets. About how they weren’t returning to Hogwarts.

“I know you feel you need to do it,” Molly had said, after Ron had run out of words, and was staring into his tea. “And we’re— we’re going to support you in all of it, of course, however we can. But— you do know we would handle it if you let us, right?”

Ron, who looked like he hadn’t slept in a week, with his hair shaggy and fresh acne breaking out on his nose, had just buried his head in his hands. “I do, Mum. But Harry—“

Harry had grown up in that house, where no one had fed him. Harry had watched his only competent legal guardian be murdered in front of him. Harry had just been betrayed by Severus fucking Snape, and as much as Molly wanted to say he has me and your dad, doesn’t he, she knows it’s not that easy. Harry’s a skittish Slytherin who’s used to no one being on his team, even after all these years, and maybe at the end of the day he wants to kill the bastard who killed his parents and his friends’s parents and his godfather and his friends. He’s not going to hand over a quest and spend the war sitting in a safe house, studying for his NEWTs. Maybe if Lily and James had lived, and Harry had grown up playing Little League Quidditch and being fed, they could have talked them into it, but in this timeline? Not a chance.

She’d taught Hermione the wards, and listened to Ron, and tried to coax Harry to eat. She hasn’t been that successful— he’ll make an effort for the home-cooked meals, the things she knows he really likes— but there’s a deadened, rotting ache at the core of his being, and there’s a part of her, the part that shut down in the aftermath of Fabian and Gideon’s murder, that understands. Sometimes, after the clamor of the meal is over and everyone’s dispersed, he’ll come sit up at the counter and continue to slowly pick his way through his meal as she washes the dishes by hand, stretching out the task just to have an excuse to be there if he needs her. 

Once the house is quiet, he’ll start talking. Just small things at first, but if she passes the test with her response to it, she’ll get more. Piece by piece, she’s heard about the lawn fight, and what Snape told him, and each insult he relays is another brick in the Avada she’s building.

“Harry,” she says one evening, when they’re the last ones left in the kitchen, and the sunset is smearing red and pink light over the ward boundary in the distance. Harry is slumped over the counter, his plate at last picked clean; he had just told her, in agonizing detail, about what Snape had said about his eyes, how he would have rather had Lily. “You know you’re a part of this family, right?” His eyes jerk up to her, and in the low light they could be brown or grey or black or any color, really. “Not because you’re Ron’s friend, or because you’re dating Ginny, or because of who your parents are. Because we love you.” 

Harry stares at her for a minute, and then another, and then buries his face in his hands and begins to sob, like he’s a child still, and not a seasoned warrior about to go on a quest to save the world. Except he is just a child, a few days short of seventeen, and none of the war should have been his. She lets the plate fall back into the sink and crosses over, to take him in her arms; he slumps into the embrace with that same hunger he’s had since he was eleven. 

“I thought he was like that,” Harry finally gets out, and her embrace tightens reflexively, but with anger this time. She won’t pretend to understand any of it, all the slick angles the bastard had cooked up, but all she knows is that he had no right to leave Harry like this. He’d better hope he doesn’t run into her out there, in the glades and dales of the war. 

“I know,” Molly says, thinking of all the teas, and the way Snape had stumbled through the floo last summer, covered in blood and with eyes only for Harry— only for Harry’s eyes, apparently, and the ghost of Lily Evans-Potter behind them— and how he’d fooled them all. “I know.”

She would go on the quest if they asked her to. She would stand from this kitchen and track down the bastard and make him suffer. Hell, if Harry wanted her too, she would go to Surrey or wherever those awful muggles were living now and pay them back in kind. 

But he doesn’t. They have their quest, and she’s running day-to-day logistics for the Order, and they’ll fight the war in their own ways. 

She wonders what Lily would have written her, if the Potters had lived. In any universe, she thinks the Trio would have found each other, and then the Potters would have slipped into their orbit the way the Grangers have. Would she have had the right words, to encourage Harry to off-load the burden of a quest to save the world onto the competent adults? Or, at the end of the day, would Lily be like her and Cindy— exhausted, terrified, out of her depth, and simply trying her best?

Lily’s dead. Cindy is in Australia. Molly’s pulling triple duty. And it’s not much, really, just solid food and a safe place to sleep, but it’s more than before. Maybe, if she’s lucky, it will be enough to fuel the core of a patronus some day. 

In the waning twilight of July, she teaches Hermione the family wards, and listens to Ron, and holds Harry. Imperfect, sure, but hopefully something to carry with them, as they go out to fight a war.

_______________

They have a ritual, her and Viktor, when he comes over the Burrow for dinners. They spend the evening chatting with their friends and family— Viktor and Bill get along like a house on fire, trading gruesome stories from their various careers; Ginny and Harry always try to get him to join a friendly; and though Hermione’s crush on him seems to have cooled into a friendship, they still go on walks in the twilight— and then as the sun comes down, they slip away from the Burrow and walk the track to the Otterey-St.-Catchpole graveyard. 

It’s the newest headstone, stacked with little mementos and trinkets— Reading City flags; Support Cedric Diggory buttons, little Hufflepuff pins. They sit on the grass in front of it— Viktor in his tailored suits and cloaks, bought with Quidditch money; her in the shimmery, floating dresses she adores— and pour one out to their friend, before passing the flask back and forth, until the stars have all come out. 

She hadn’t been as close to Cedric as Viktor and Harry had been, but Cedric had been Cedric— he’d drawn everyone into his orbit. He’d plop down next to her when she was reading alone in the library; he’d ask her for tips on his charms work; hell, she has a vivid memory of him asking her for advice on how to ask Cho Chang to the ball with him, Cho Chang who Fleur could tell from a mile away was head-over-heels for the boy. 

And then he was dead— murdered by Lord Voldemort, as Dumbledore had put it, at the end-of-term feast— and Fleur had sat there, at the Slytherin table, Krum on one side and Millie on the other, her heart pounding in her chest and her eyes fixed, along with the rest of the hall, on the dark-haired boy who had lived, yet again, to tell the tale. 

A year later, it would be Bill, in a run-down pub outside of Exeter— she was doing her Mastery, and he would apparate up from London, and she would try to tell herself that they were just friends, that it wasn’t that serious, but when she mentioned texts she was reading he knew their names, and wanted to talk theory, and she couldn’t seem to catch her breath— who would tell her the truth. How they’d taken the cup together— because of course they had, because Cedric was kind and fair and Harry had never had anything, and wanted to share what he did— and it had been a portkey. How waiting at the other end had been a graveyard, and the Dark Lord, and a bolt of green: kill the spare. How the Dark Lord had been an idiot, and how Harry had been lucky— lucky, and a survivor, Fleur had thought, thinking about the kid she’d gotten to know, who’d brush off a hex on the way to class; who’d pull himself together after a bad essay or exam; who’d never once talked about his biological family, but moved towards Ron and Hermione like a three-bodied system. 

He would have fought his way back for them, Fleur knows.

Kill the spare, she thinks now, sitting in the graveyard shoulder to shoulder with Viktor, as she has thought every day since Bill told her. The next week, she’d told him she wanted to join the Order; two weeks later she’d gone out to drinks with Viktor after one of his practice matches and told him, and his eyes had glittered and his errant magic had shattered all the glasses in the place. 

She’s French; Viktor’s Bulgarian; neither of them are full-bloods, not in the fussy inane way the British seemed to want things, but no one would expect them to takes sides. Viktor was the top-ranked Seeker in the League (won’t last once Ginny gets in, he’d told her once); she was slowly but surely specializing in esoteric charms research, trying to figure out the complex interplay of Vanished things. Even marrying into the most notorious family of blood-traitors wouldn’t change much, if she didn’t want it too. 

Kill the spare.

She leans her head on Viktor’s shoulder, thinking of the morning after the Leaving Feast at Hogwarts, when she’d been waiting for the flying carriage to be ready and had seen Krum’s tall, thin figure at the edge the lawn, seen him flinch away from some hand laid on his shoulder. Remembered how he had had no parents to come meet him at the tournament; remembered how Harry had seen it, invited him forward, understanding. 

But Harry hadn’t been there, and Cedric was dead. She would have to do. 

In thirteen days, she’ll be marrying the love of her life— Bill is wicked smart, and clever, and always wants to hear what she’s working on, like she’s worth more than just her perfect face. The wedding, which she had originally envisioned as a small ceremony in the back garden the Burrow, has ballooned into the wedding of the century, but in the depths of war, she’s not sure she can blame anyone for wanting a distraction. She’s started using it on herself, too— when she needs to calm herself enough to apparate back to the Burrow after a duel, she’ll just think about the composition of the table centerpieces or the detailing on the bridesmaid’s dresses. 

Thirteen days. Memories scatter and flock at the edges of her vision like birds flushing from a copse— stray equations she’s helping Hermione with, bleeding the power the girl packs. Millie, at fourteen, introducing her to Harry, and how beforehand she’d whispered I know it’s Harry Potter, but don’t be weird, he’s just Harry, really. Kissing Bill furiously after he’d missed his portkey back from a mission and turned up bloodied and shaken but alive. Viktor, on the edge of the lake, and how when he’d said he didn’t know where he was staying that summer, she’d said come home with me before she could think twice about it. Ron, giving her a run for her money in a chess game, calling her his sister, even though she and Bill weren’t married yet. The new hand Molly had enchanted for the clock in her kitchen, after she and Bill had gotten engaged. The green light of Avada, and how Cedric had laughed at the Yule Ball, when they’d danced together. 

Kill the spare. 

She and Viktor watch the candles burn. That’s what it all comes back to, doesn’t it? None of this has to be theirs, but the Dark Lord killed him, for standing there. And Cedric Diggory was many, many things, but he was no spare. 

One by one, the stars come out. Viktor is a warm constant against her shoulder, and she thinks of that summer in France, when her parents had thought they were dating and in reality they just sat like this, trying to breathe. 

In the grass, her hand finds his, and he clutches it tightly in his thin fingers. “No spares,” he says gruffly, a little slurred. Their code, their pact, which they’re both living out in their own ways— her, on the front lines; him, laying the seeds of a resistance in the British League.

“No spares,” she says, and they trade the flask back and forth one more time, the stars dazzling in the summer sky. 

_______________

Lavender sits outside at the cafe in north London, watching the muggle foot traffic and trying to remember what Harry had taught them about casting a patronus. The Prophet is reporting more and more attacks, and though she’s got her wand up her sleeve and a memory on the tip of her tongue, it’s always been a difficult spell for her. She thinks back to the mirrored room, and the thrill of subterfuge, and recalls what he said— after actually getting to know him last year, she knows he would blush furiously if she told him he’s far and away the best defense teacher they’ve had, but it’s true— about need. About love. 

Her tea is growing cold, and she can feel Kellah’s eyes on her from the pub across the street. She still feels a bit bad about the lies to her mums— they thought she was at Kellah’s in Donegal the whole week, and would not have been impressed to find out the two of them had apparated to London and were crashing with the twins in their London row house for most of it instead. 

But though she might still be under-age according to the muggles, to the wizards, anything is fair game. And they had shit to do. 

Things have seemed to clarify the last few months, as the fun of dating Ron slowly faded as spring term came to a close. By the end, she couldn’t lie to herself any more about her own eyes wandering, and Ron had owned up to the torch he was holding for Susan, and there hadn’t been any hard feelings, really, just the strangeness of going from spending long hours snogging to barely seeing each other. Ron was proper fit, and funny, and smart, but in the end it hadn’t felt like love— or, maybe it was love, just not the snogging sort of love. As she’d told Kellah, she could almost see them being friends in a few years, once they were out of school and both of them had settled down with other people. And being friends with Ron would come with being friends with Harry and Hermione, which she had to admit is pretty great. 

But without the distraction of a boyfriend, there had only been the war. Plastered across every headline; brought up in every conversation; and then, when Snape had murdered Dumbledore at the castle, right on their doorstep. 

For six years, she’d been hearing the slurs in the hallways, but Padma had pulled the proposed legislation from the back logs of the restricted section, and the six girls had sat in a circle on the floor of the Gryffindor dorm and just stared at them, until Kellah had finally gotten so angry she’d set them all ablaze. This is feckin’ bullshit, she’d said, getting to her feet, and Lavender had been reminded of the spark in her eyes when she’d stepped up to the sixth-year Gryffindor boys making lewd comments about them when they were only thirteen and fourteen, ready to break teeth (she had, and more), and the terrible thing in her face when the names had come back from her blood test and she’d said, seriously, I could kill him for you, as if he wasn’t a full Death Eater. 

Sitting there on the floor, Lavender had heard a voice in her head asking what are you lot really going to do about it? and Lavender had shoved it down with all she had in her. Yes, they were six teenage girls. 

But they’re six teenage girls. 

Just little things, they’ve been doing, like throwing stones at windows. Graffiti, in Diagon and the other districts— Leanne was unfairly good at coming up with unflattering puns about Voldemort, and Kellah’s magic was that sticky, unfailingly Gryffindor sort, which loved a good piece of crime, and so they were still there, burned into the walls. Padma and Parvati had tagged along with their parents to work a few times over the summer, and left handprints of magic all over the Ministry— they ask visitors to hand over your wand, and don’t even check if you’ve got another on you, Parvati had said, when they’d planned out this shit in the twins’s bedroom, her eyes glittering with crime lord mania. Kellah’s wand worked just fine for Parv, and Padma swore she was better at some charms with Lavender’s. Maybe it wasn’t much, in the grand scheme of things, but they were clever sixth years who could charm the rubbish bins and incinerating shredders in a few departments to actually report everything placed in them to a charmed file-folder of Padma’s. What they would do with it was anyone’s guess, but Anthony Goldstien seemed to thrive on that kind of stuff. Intel was intel. 

And when Ernie MacMillian showed up at her door in muggle clothes and his hair free of gel and a folder under his arm, making polite conversation with her mums and attempting to pet her cat, she’d heard him out, because inside his folder had been lies upon lies— an elaborate maze of family trees and enough evidence to convince anyone who came knocking that actually, she was a half-blood. Adopted by muggles, but a half-blood. 

“This is Slytherin shit,” she’d told him, rifling through the papers— hell, he’d forged fucking newspaper clippings, and a birth certificate— and looking up at him she’d seen him blush. And then, the idea: “Could you do this for anyone?”

Emma is a gossip hound, and comes from a blended family of wizards who also always have their noses in everyone’s business. Conversations with various aunts, cousins, and grandparents have given then two of them a very good idea of who, exactly, in the last seventy or so years, had graduated from Hogwarts without proof their parents were wizards. And Ernie might have had some reservations about knocking on random people’s doors, but Lavender and Emma do not. 

And so now she’s here, waiting at a cafe for the most important muggleborn of all. 

Amanda Pryor. Originally from York, now lives in London. Teaches in a small primary school in Knockturn Alley; was in Gryffindor too. 

Is her biological mother. 

Lavender makes her the minute she walks into the cafe; she has her hair, falling in long ringlets. She walks how she walks, with a purpose. Lavender raises one slightly trembling hand, beckoning her over. Will she see it too, or is Lavender just primed to notice it, having more information on hand? She can feel the weight of Kellah’s gaze on her from across the street, and overhead the grey clouds swirl, restless. 

She has a family tree Ernie faked. She also has an international portkey, bought with her and Kellah’s pooled savings. She’s not sure which route her bio mum will take out, but she wants to offer both. She wants to offer the right thing.

Her hands are shaking.

“Hello?” says Amanda Pryor, pulling out the chair across from her and sitting down. “Lavender, is it? You said you had something to discuss?”

Their eyes are not the same color, but there’s something in their nature that’s familiar, which Lavender doesn’t think she used to have, when she was a third-year doodling hearts next to boys’s names instead of taking charms notes, but she has now, with the war like a sword over the head. 

Lavender knows she and her crew aren’t much— six teenage girls with a healthy disregard for rules, and a bunch of spite to back it up. When push comes to shove, she’s not sure they’ll really be able to do much, especially in an open war— none of them are that good at what was taught in the DA, despite their best efforts, and she still hasn’t managed to cast a corporal patronus (it would be a wood duck, Kellah had said confidently, in the way only a best friend could, and Lavender thinks she’s right). They’re not much, but what else are they supposed to do? Stay home and let the world burn around them? 

“Hello,” says Lavender, standing to shake her biological mother’s hand. “I’m Lavender. Lavender Brown.”

_______________

The wedding is lovely, to the point where there’s a moment Tonks actually forgets there’s a whole war on, laughing with Fleur and Bill and wishing she could drink and just forget for real, just for a little while. 

But forgetting is not a privilege she’s really afforded, not now. Constant vigilance, Moody would say, and these days, she feels it keenly, in the teeth.

The basic fact is that they are loosing the war. Two years ago, when she’d joined up, taking the oath in the dimly lit dining room at Grimmauld, it had all seemed simpler, somehow. You-Know-Who was evil, and he would be a bitch to beat, but they could do it, because of course they could. Because they had Dumbledore and Moody and half the Auror office. Prophecies and Chosen Ones had nothing to do with it; Harry Potter was just another cousin in Slytherin, and if she tried hard enough she could make him laugh. The whole thing had seemed like high adventure, and she’d never thought that it might hurt to do Avada, that she’d still be dreaming of green. 

None of them had been quick enough in the room in the Ministry, with the veil. She’d just gotten her cousin back, the other famous black sheep of the family, and then he’d been gone. The part of her that had made the Hat go oh, there’s something brutal here— you’re afraid of it right now, but you could learn to work with it, that never quite learned the Hufflepuff’s inability to make sacrifices, has done the math and accepted that Sirius instead of Ron and Hermione really was the best option (hell, it was a deal she herself would have made, if she’d been closer); the rest of her is still screaming, bemoaning what could have been. 

Had it been the grief that had lead her into the thicket of poor choices that have dominated the past year? Or had it been the war itself, the metallic taste of blood when she’d bitten clean through her lip to keep from screaming under a torture curse, and the slick of it on her hands after one of her fellow trainees had bleed out in front of her? She has nightmares about Dumbledore’s funeral, only it’s her mum. Her dad. Moody. Herself. 

There were only so many times you could find a body in a burned-out house before going a bit crazy, maybe. Look at Scrimgeour. 

So she’d gone out to the muggle clubs with Kingsley, short skirts and the burn of alcohol and flirting with pretty girls; maybe too much, but coping was coping. Though when hot muggle girls had turned into Remus Lupin, she couldn’t tell you. Especially because it certainly wasn’t anything like love for either of them, and Remus was far too old for her, and when she woke up in some cute muggle’s flat in the morning, she could lie back and listen to the kettle whistle, and pretend that the war was just some nightmare. 

Maybe it was about Sirius— Remus had loved him in some capacity, romantically maybe, even. And maybe it was about the war— it was cutting deep scars in both of them, and there was a lot of pain that was easier to work off than face. 

But maybe it went deeper, in a messed-up way. After they were done, and he was buttoning up his shirt over his scars, she’d feel like she could breathe again, and he’d look over at her with something that was the antithesis of relief, some deep mixture of self-loathing and disgust. 

It was hideous, and terrifying. But the war was fucking her up too, alright, and that look on his face kept her coming back. Something about power, maybe, and needing to feel better off than someone. 

(She thinks they’d said maybe twenty words to each other over the last year; they don’t meet up to talk. Though, now, with everything, she supposes they’ll have to sit down and at least figure out something.)

She presses her hand into the heel of her eye, surveying the wedding with her Auror-trained eyes, unable to turn it off, just like Moody had taught her. She wants to go out on the dance floor— Kingsley, who’s her favorite person in the world to dance with, might not be here, but surely she could find someone. Some of Fleur’s cousins were hotter than sin, with that silk-edged Beauxbatons magic and clever little grins. 

Ron, chatting to Charlie. Hermione, working on magic with Fleur, even at her own wedding. Harry, disguised as a Weasley, sitting with Millie. Tonks clocks, yet again, the unnatural awareness the three of them seem to have of the others. The emotion that comes with the realization is one of jealously— at school, she probably would have said she had good, solid friends, but these days, it’s just Kingsley and Moody and a few old dorm-mates she sees once in a while and lies to.

When did it all go so wrong? Two years ago, it seemed like they had it all in hand, and now Dumbledore is dead, and three teenagers are about to embark on the secret quest he left them to defeat the Dark Lord, and there are four Death Eaters and Death Eater lackeys dead by her hand, and she still has to figure out how the hell to tell her mother that she’s pregnant, and that the father can’t be anyone other than Remus fucking Lupin. And the problem with that isn’t that he’s a werewolf, it’s that he’s a degenerate coward who Tonks is pretty sure doesn’t intend to make it out of the war alive. 

Can she blame Snape for this whole mess? It certainly would be simpler. He did kill Dumbledore, after all. And she’s pretty sure it’s his betrayal, and not Dumbledore’s death, that’s had Harry a nervous mess this whole summer. 

Her eyes find the Trio once again, and she wishes, not for the first time, that they would just let the rest of the Order in on the whole quest thing. They could get all their best minds it, and Harry and Ron and Hermione wouldn’t have to be at the thick of it, and then she and Kingsley and Moody could get back to busting dealers of Dark artifacts and looking the other way when Mundungus robbed muggles because they all sort of liked him. 

But those days are over, gone forever, and she’s twenty-four and has scars on her hands and is going to be a mother. Which, when she finds time to think about it, is equal parts terrifying and exhilarating (and she didn’t expect to feel that, not in a million years), but right now is just deeply infuriating, because she cannot in fact get drunk. 

She knows what her parents will say, when she figures out how to tell them. Her dad will be delighted, taking her hands and spinning her around the room, ecstatic about a grandchild to spoil; her mum, who even after all these years in exile is still a Black on some level, will purse her lips and then stand to make the wards better, and then start in on the healer check-ups and the potions and suggesting ridiculous names.

The thing is, as long as she doesn’t tell them, they’ll have no reason to pull her back from the frontlines. And while she wants to live— while she wants her child to live— when she shuts her eyes, she just sees burned-out muggle cottages, and the sickly green of the Dark Mark, and small bodies. Seven years, she spent in the halls of the castle wearing yellow-and-black, and now that she’s out in the real world, she’s started to think the Hat was right and she could have done damn well in red-and-gold. The voices she hears in her head when she’s out on the battlefield are Moody’s, and Scrimgeour’s, and Dumbledore’s, ever the ruthless general under his twinkling eyes. 

She shuts her eyes, opens them again, blinking away images of war and death and refocusing on the giggling French cousins. Fred and George are flirting with them, but she can tell from here some of them don’t swing that way. Changes the color of her hair just for the hell of it, and tries to shed some of the paranoia like Kingsley can, when he’s dancing in the strobe lights. The party is packed with Order members and Hermione’s wards could keep You-Know-Who entertained for a long while. 

She’s fighting the war like a Gryffindor, and she’s coping like one too, self-destructive and a bit fucked up. 

But really, what else is there to do? She swipes a glass of the sparkling grape juice from a caterer, and saunters over to the French cousins and the twins, ready to forget, if only for a little while. 

_______________

She has felt it coming for a while now, but when the red light flickers on over her desk as she’s working late in the Auror department, she feels nothing but a strange sense of calm. Calm, and a great rush of love for Rufus Scrimgeour, a ruthless killer and an awful coworker and a paranoid bastard who’d thought to install a panic button in his office. 

She stands from her desk, leaning out the door slightly to survey the bullpen. As expected for a Friday night at eleven pm, it’s deserted— half the department is at the wedding of the century, Kingsley’s either out clubbing or with the muggle Prime Minister, and surely some of them are off with the other side. She and Greer have tried to weed out the bad apples the best they can, but the Dark Lord is a slippery, charismatic son of a bitch when he wants to be, even without a nose.

When she reaches out with her magic, she can feel the net of unfamiliar anti-apparation wards. They’re already here, then. The wards are solid, but with enough focus, maybe she could dig through them; maybe she could craft a portkey that would let her through. But her skills have never been in that direction, and now is not the time to flee. Sure, maybe some of the spies in the division have been passing memos to the Dark Lord for years, but there are things in this office that will be essential to running a government, which she will not let him have.

She moves with unerring precision. A patronus, in triplicate, to Kingsley and Greer and Kovac. They probably already know, but just in case. The files she needs to burn in her office are dealt with a complex fire-charm Kovac taught her, years ago; Amelia’s pretty sure the KGB invented it, because it prevent papers destroyed with it from being reconstructed. She torches memos in her employees’s inboxes; she burns case-files waiting in Moody and Greer and Kingsley’s offices. Memories of Alastor, drinking tea she poured him in the kitchen in Woking; of Kingsley throwing her a surprise birthday party; of Greer coming over last fall and getting drunk to shit on her couch and saying you know I don’t actually hate you, right, and how can I help with the war? rise and fall before her eyes. 

How long, before the Death Eaters come down here, looking for Aurors who’ve stayed behind? How long, before they realize there is no one to stop them, and they converge to the Burrow? That Granger girl’s wards are like nothing I’ve ever seen before, she remembers Rufus saying, when he’d come back from doing the shit with the will and called her up to his office— he’d just wanted someone to be around to have his back while he got drunk. Hermione’s wards are solid like a wall, and Ron’s got to have exit plans, and Harry’s got a damn quick draw for a teenager, from what she’s seen— 

Have they done enough, Amelia wonders, as she moves through the department towards the archives, burning anything that looks like it might be remotely useful to conquerers. She and the old crowd finally did convince Rufus to see some sense about Azkaban, after the last breakout— they’ll use it against you, you have to see that, Kovac had said, nursing a gin-and-tonic; if we’re already suppressing the media, surely we can cover this up, Kingsley, ever the Slytherin, had said. The dementors had slipped away and the cells in the Ministry were already their primary holding grounds. He’ll have to build his own prison, Amelia thinks, with a grim sort of satisfaction, thinking about the way Minerva’s Fiendfyre had curled around the dark brick, effervescent even through the driving rain and the pounding surf, burning until there was nothing left to burn.

They’ve destroyed Azkaban. They’ve done their fair share of thinning the ranks (and taken their fair share of casualties— Amelia’s been to five funerals this summer). Anthony Goldstien has a copy of every file they’ve ever produced. She sees, as she has seen every day since the news about the murder reached them, Severus Snape’s mugshot, where he is so inhumanly still that it might as well have been a muggle photograph. Most wanted, screams the headline beneath it, and she remembers sitting across from him in another summer, and how subtle he’d been as he’d implied that Dumbledore was to blame for Harry’s home life. What had been fact, and what had been fiction, and what had been him being the slickest bastard she’d ever encountered?

The archive door, humming with wards, which know her as a friend. Which will keep her destruction contained. She stands in the threshold, looking to the rows and rows and rows of records— her career’s work, and centuries more— before raising her wand, the incantation on her lips. She’s not as rawly powerful as Minerva, of course, but she’s got a fierce conviction and a desperate need, and her magic understands. 

The wards will hold it in for a while, at least, she thinks, as she watches the chimeras and dragons and serpents billow out, cruel and hungry, before slamming the the vault door. And will it outlive her? 

She hopes it does. She hopes the first Death Eaters in to salvage the ruins of the department get a nasty, nasty surprise. 

She takes a deep breath, and then another, and then heads back towards the bullpen. Her muttered hominem revelio spell lights up with four dots, and she wonders if the Dark Lord sent his best, to sack the empty department. Merlin, she hopes so. She hasn’t used Avada, not since the last war, but she’d always been good at it. How could she not have been, when every time it was like a scream for Emily and Devin, a desperate plea for her to make it back home to Susan?

Susan. 

She shuts her eyes, even though she can’t afford to, leaning against the wall of her department as the grief and fear finally catch up to her. She has known, for nigh on a year now— ever since the botched assassination attempt— how this would all end. She’s the Head of the DLME, for Merlin’s sake. Of course they would come for her. 

There are letters, in the vault with the will— read when you graduate Hogwarts. Read on your wedding day. Read when you have your first child. Read when you miss me so terribly you don’t know how to breathe. There is money, and the flat, and Susan’s seventeen now. Susan’s seventeen, with bloody-knuckled loyalty and the finally realized crush on Ron and the gall to try and fight a war with the Dark Lord.

I hope I did right by you, Em, she thinks, clutching her wand and tracking the bright spots of the Death Eaters in her mind. I hope I did right by you, Suze.

Susan is at the wedding right now, dancing and probably snogging Ron. He would have made a good son-in-law, Amelia thinks. Before she left, Amelia had wrapped her in a hug and kissed her on the head and told her that she loved her, which was truer than maybe anything else in the entire universe. It’s the thing that’s driven her forward through these dark years of the war, and it’s going to illuminate the cores of her Avadas— if I kill you here, Susan won’t have to face you later. 

She’s not ready. There’s one last thing. She incants her patronus again, and the wandering albatross appears before her, hovering in midair like there’s a tailwind behind it. “The Ministry has fallen,” she tells it; it needs no instruction on where to go, not when it knows. “I’m so, so proud of you, Suze, and the women you’ve become. I love you. I always have, and I always will.”

The patronus goes. The four dots move closer. She gathers herself. Wonders, for just a moment, what it would be like to see her sister again— it’s been seventeen years, now. 

She hopes it’s Gibbon and Yaxley, who killed her sister. Hopes it’s Rockwood, who killed her brother-in-law. Hopes it’s Severus fucking Snape, who played them all. 

When she rounds the corner, to face the Death Eaters, Avada is already on her lips, and it’s not about hate. It’s never been about hate. 

All of it, this whole time, has been about love.

Chapter Text

Despite all the contingencies they’ve built, and the fact that they’ve spent the last years beset by catastrophe after catastrophe, he never stops to consider that the Ministry could fall while they’re at the wedding, Kingsley’s lynx pushing to the center of the dance floor where he and Luna have been doing an awkward combination of a shag and a jig. He and Luna break apart, and he can see in her eyes that he needs no words, no explanation. “Go,” she says. “We love you.” 

Hermione is on her feet, from where she and Fleur were deriving something. Ron has turned towards them, from where he was at the bar, talking with Bill. As the venue erupts into chaos, Harry moves unerringly towards them. In the distance, he can hear the pops of apparation, but the beams of light spark against Hermione’s wards. Ron’s hand grabs his wrist, and then Hermione’s there, and in the distance, someone’s screaming, and he can smell the dark magic— is Snape out there, he wonders—

Hermione apparates them away, and they’re standing on a London road, the night quiet except for the distant sound of traffic and the distant sound of what was probably a bar fight in one of the pubs up the road. “Fuck,” says Ron, staggering slightly; his checks are flushed red from the mead and he’s in his dress robes still, though he’s got his wand in hand. Hermione has her fingers pressed to the band of the watch, muttering things under her breath; Harry takes it upon himself to do the basic warding package, though his hands are shaking. He can still feel the weight of Luna’s hands on his shoulders, see the bright lights of the wedding. 

A stack of clothes falls into Hermione’s hands. “Come on. We need to find somewhere to change.”

“I thought we were going to Grimmauld?” Harry asks, following Hermione as she moves towards one of the pubs. 

“We need to talk to Kreacher,” says Ron. “In case— you know.” Harry does know, and his stomach roils at the thought. 

The pub is noisy, light spilling out onto the street. They change in the single-stalled loo, swapping out their dress clothes for the assortment of jeans and sweaters Hermione summoned from foldspace. They’re fine, he tries to tell himself, but even as he pulls on an old Weasley sweater with an R on the front, he can’t stop the rolling waves of fear. Hermione’s wards are good, but he sees green light arcing towards Ginny, and Susan, and Luna, and the Weasleys, and he’s nearly sick. There’s only one question that will be put to everyone at the party tonight, and if he’d just stayed away— 

We’d be even more alone than we already are, he reminds himself, as Hermione puts up her hair and Ron re-does the straps on his wand holster. Dumbledore and Voldemort both fought like they trusted no one, loved no one, and if they’re going to stand a chance they need to be different. But still, the fear is like a living thing.

“Half-blood called?” says Kreacher, when Harry summons him, looking over the three of them with something that might have been disdain, or possibly concern (it was difficult to tell with Kreacher, most of the time). He confirms that no one is at Grimmauld, and certainly not Snape. “He has no right to set foot in the ancestral House of Black,” Kreacher says, and the snarling disgust in his voice shouldn’t be so comforting, but it exactly matches Harry’s emotions for the last month. 

Kreacher apparates them directly from the pub bathroom to the entryway of the house, which is now warded both with Moody’s traps and the sheer weight Hermione’s best work. It still smells like Dark magic, and Harry slumps against the wall, overcome with memories all of a sudden. He hasn’t been back here since Christmas fifth year, when Ron’s dad had nearly died and Sirius had taken him for takeout and told him none of it was his fault. You-Know-Who, and whoever told him the Prophecy, he remember Sirius saying, as the house had slide apart, and Harry puts his hand on the bare planks of the front hall and wants Sirius with all he has in him. 

“Thanks, Kreacher,” says Ron, and Kreacher glances at him oddly, before scurrying off. Hermione is adding more wards to the door, so the front hall smells like charcoal and petrichor. Ron slides down the wall until he’s shoulder to shoulder with Harry, and takes his hand.

Would he be able to feel if something happened to Ginny, like he would be able to feel if something happened to Ron or Hermione? He leans his head back against the wall, and remembers the crackling fury in her eyes when he’d suggested they break up. No, she’d said, and in the end he hadn’t been able to argue, not with her looking like that, and he supposed his reasons had probably sounded shallow and Gryffindor-like.

He hasn’t felt this scared since the lake in the second task, he thinks, when he’d gotten to the bottom and seen Ron and Hermione just floating there and had thought— for just one moment— 

Hermione finishes with the door and flops down on his other side, her fingers interlacing with his 

It could have been minutes; it could have been hours. But then the headache building in his temples flares with a spike of pain, and a distinctly other anger, and then the patronuses arrive. Ron’s dad’s, a shimmering silver weasel— family okay, we’re just being watched; a practical update from Ginny’s coyote: the Ministry’s in tatters, they interrogated everyone here, we love you but don’t reply; and Luna’s hare: the wards were excellent, Hermione, thank you. See you on the other side. 

All three of them slump in relief. And then pain in Harry’s scar reaches a new height, and he shoves Ron aside— oi, mate, you okay— and then vomits in the middle of the hallway, before stumbling forward into the vision. 

When he comes back up for air, crucio on his lips and the writhing forms of Death Eaters imprinted on the back of his eyelids— of course Rowle and Dolohov were unable to break through the wards around the Burrow in any reasonable amount of time— he finds himself curled up on the sofa in the drawing room, his head in Hermione’s lap and Ron holding a cloth to his head.

“Vision?” asks Hermione, as if it can be anything else, and he shrugs off Ron’s hand and pushes himself to sitting, cradling his aching head in his hands. The threads are still tangled, and he forgot how much he hated the things fifth year, the way it felt like he was Voldemort. The way the emotions bled through. He focuses on the threads of the ring, trying to distance himself from the monster.

Once he gets past the sheer disgust of the torture, and manages to remember the actual facts of the dream, he lets out an honest-to-God laugh, looking up at Hermione through his fingers. “He’s pissed they couldn’t get through to the Burrow before we got out of there.”

“What’s funny about that?” says Ron.

“He thinks I did the wards,” says Harry, suddenly overcome with laughter. “With The Power the Dark Lord Knows Not.”

“Honestly,” says Hermione, while Ron lets out a howl of laughter. “Does he know nothing about magical theory?”

“He went ahead with the Horcruxes, probably not,” says Ron, between cackles. “Merlin, he’s such an idiot. Imagine Harry, good at wards.”

“Hey,” says Harry, with no heat, rubbing at his forehead and then looking at the blood going tacking on his fingers. Hermione looks torn between disgust and amusement. 

“If he didn’t have these stupid Horcruxes, he’d be so dead,” she says, and then rises to her feet to summon a wad of gauze for his forehead. 

They sleep in the attic room that night, Ron’s arm slung over his and Hermione’s shoulders and Hermione’s hair in his face. Harry lies awake for a long time though, until the dregs of the vision have burned off and there’s only the magic of Grimmauld and Ron and Hermione’s warm weight. The Ministry has fallen. 

Voldemort’s an idiot, they all know that— hopefully he’ll think he can subjugate Magical Britain with fear, rather than murder. But at heart, he’s a killer. Harry thinks of watching Rowle and Dolohov writhe on the marble floor, the phantom sense of pleasure, and shivers. It’s all on the three of them now, isn’t it? To find the Horcruxes, and defeat the Dark Lord, and save the world. 

Lying awake in the dark, in the ancestral House of the Blacks, Harry wonders yet again if they should be playing this game by Dumbledore’s rules. He allows himself to imagine, just for a minute, sending Kreacher over to the Burrow to get Mrs. Weasley, and the way the horror over the Horcruxes would resolve into a cool mask of focus. How maybe if they divided and conquered, they could end the war sooner. 

But what if you’re wrong, asks the voice that sounds like Dumbledore, asks the voice from the cupboard, asks the voice from the lawn when Snape had finally shown his hand. What if she’s a traitor too, what if she doesn’t believe you, what if she dies because you brought her into this—

Ron is snoring softly next to him; on the other side, Hermione mutters about ward formulas in her dreams. Harry thinks about the way Dumbledore had seemed surprised that he wanted to tell Ron and Hermione about the Horcruxes, like it wasn’t a given. Like he didn’t understand that the three of them were a packaged deal. 

Did he want me to do this alone? Harry thinks, and recoils in horror from the idea. He’s good in a duel and knows how to survive— he thinks he could have done his best to evade Voldemort, live on the run in the muggle world for quite a while— but defeating the fucker? Without Ron and Hermione, the wizarding world would be screwed. 

In the dreams, he’s dancing with Luna at the wedding, but then Luna’s face becomes his mother’s, becomes Voldemort’s, and then he’s the one standing in the marble hall, his own brown fingers around the wand, and Snape is screaming in pain, and when he wakes the pleasure and satisfaction are all his own. Ron has his elbow in his gut and it muttering about swords and cups, and Hermione has left a small puddle of droll on the pillow. 

Does that make him evil, the desire, the satisfaction he knows he would find in it? He thinks about what Dumbledore would have said— what the front Dumbledore had put up had said, because he’d played the gentle and good headmaster, but Harry had watched him duel Voldemort at the Ministry, had heard him say your death alone wouldn’t satisfy me, I must admit— and he thinks about what Voldemort would have said, about the offer that was made to him in the graveyard. 

But this isn’t about good and evil. This is about a man who’s hurt him a way he didn’t think he could be hurt. This is about Voldemort killing Cedric for being there. This is about Dumbledore, not thinking Ron and Hermione mattered, just like Tom Riddle in the Chamber. 

He turns his face into Ron’s shoulder, and tries to just breathe. The rain on the roof almost sounds like it’s Lake District, but the two of them weren’t there. 

They’re here now. 

August melts past them slowly, like a candle burning low. They follow the R.A.B. lead to the conclusion, and Kreacher tells them a tearful tale about the scion letting the inferni drag him down into the dark of the lake, which leaves Harry with more questions than answers: about the Mark on his arm, and his relationship with Sirius, and having enough love left for a betrayal. They put out feelers for Mundungus, who eventually manages to peal away from his various jobs in the Order, and tells them all about how it was Umbridge, of all people, who took the locket off him. “I wouldn’t have nicked it, if I’d known you wanted it, honest,” he says, knocking back a glass of fire-whiskey at the kitchen table, and Harry doesn’t doubt him, not after all this time. He updates them about the casualties— Scrimgeour, who died under torture, and Susan’s aunt— and they light candles in the gloom, trying to scrape together words, but there’s nothing. Just how Ron wants to hold Susan, and the fact that they all saw this coming.

They explore the house, clearing out cobwebs Sirius and McGonagall never quite got to, and when they find the boggart in the upstairs drawing room, they stare down at it for a long moment, like they’d stared at the Mirror. In third year, had his worst fear really been a dementor? Staring down at the lifeless visages of himself and Ron and Hermione, he can’t remember a time when it wasn’t this. It’s not scary, in the way the dementor is— it’s scary in the way you carry with you. 

“Riddiklus,” they say together, and the sheer force of their magic ends the damn thing.

They listen to Be Here Now over and over again on Sirius’s stereo, and there are days when Hermione can even get them to dance to it. Hermione delves into Regulus’s papers, and Ron helps Kreacher with the cooking, and Harry finds old letters his parents sent to Sirius, squirreled away in corners of his room, and every single one of them leaves him on the verge of tears, with the way they can pack such love for him into every line. 

Guess what, his favorite one starts. Mine’s changed too! Obviously James’s changed about the minute we had him, but I finally managed to cast one again today and it’s the littlest fawn.

The night of September first, they put their work aside for an evening, and take a bottle of high-proof stuff some ancient Black stashed away up to the roof, and take turns drinking straight from the bottle. The headline came out just a few days ago, that it would be Snape as Headmaster, and Harry is torn between bitter disgust and a desire to laugh at the irony, the idioticy of such a decision: Voldemort’s keeping him off the battlefield, and trapping him in a building with the likes of Neville Longbottom and Ginny Weasley and and Millicent Bulstrode. 

“Not sure we would have survived another year there, honestly,” Ron says, passing the bottle to Hermione and wiping off his mouth with the back of his hand. Harry thinks of mazes, and gigantic snakes, and defense teachers, and shivers. 

“Not sure how we survived any of them,” says Harry. Beneath them, muggle London glitters like the stars used to do in the Scottish night. He finds himself thinking, as he often does these days, of Regulus Arcturus Black, and how he had put aside all of his survivalist instincts— Sirius had alluded to his parents enough to understand that what they’d received in the halls of this house hadn’t been love— in an attempt to defeat the Dark Lord. In an attempt that would have worked, probably, if Voldemort hadn’t been so unfathomably fucked-up he decided to make six of the damn things. Harry wants to end Voldemort as much as anyone, and even he’s not sure he could bring himself to do that. Taking an Avada in a combat, or for someone else? Sure. But walking into it, without putting up a fight?

He’s just too Slytherin for that. 

The liquor leaves a heady buzz. He hopes Ginny or Neville ruin Snape’s opening speech. Tomorrow, they’ll have to get back into it— research, and planning, and coordination— but tonight, there’s only the wind, and the lights, and the fact that they’re all here, facing it together.

____________________

For a week in September, as London writhes under an unending downpour and every issue of the Prophet comes with yet another story about how Harry murdered Dumbledore (he wouldn’t have gotten caught, Ron says, and Hermione agrees, not if the two of them had anything to say about it), Hermione seriously considers getting into necromancy. Because holy shit would she love a chance to talk with Regulus Arcturus Black. 

Theo and Hannah talk her out of it, over a series of messages in their joined notebooks— it’s addictive, and corruptive, in a way other Dark Arts aren’t, Theo tells her curtly; Hannah has stories from her childhood that send shivers through Hermione’s bones. 

But Regulus. 

They spend most of August on the locket, and trying to track down Mundungus, and wards, and helping out with Order of the Phoenix business (Fred and George, at least, aren’t shy about reaching out through their pager for help, and after Hermione sends Kreacher to them with a tailored ward package, more requests roll in. About damn time they realized we were in this with them, Harry says, with a root of real bitterness in his voice.) Ron and Kreacher cook; Harry practices defense spells out in the heat of the back garden, coming back in looking a bit better; and she scours the Black library and breaks through the wards holding ancient doors closed, and finally, finally, one impossibly muggy day in August, succeeds in taking that infernal portrait off the wall. She carries Walburga screaming all the way to the basement and then crouches in front of the irate woman, flashing her the Black crest on her hand. “Harry gave this to me, you know,” she tells her. “How does it to feel that it’s a blood-traitor and a half-blood and a muggleborn, taking hold of your ancestral house?”

Kreacher shoots her a slightly dirty look at dinner, but Ron made waffles, and Harry eats an entire dinner, so it’s all worth it. 

The whole idea of Regulus Arcturus Black is still infecting her dreams. True believer enough to join the Death Eaters, but how long before he’d looked like Draco, pale and ghostlike?How long before he’d realized what it was the Dark Lord did to people?

Or had he known, all along, and only when it had become about his house elf did it matter, like another Slytherin they knew, who would have kept kneeling at the Dark Lord’s feet if he’d picked Neville instead of Harry?

In September, with the rain coming down all around, she paces the house in the mid afternoon. After enough coaxing from her and Ron and Kreacher, Harry agreed to play a one-on-one against Ron in the warded back garden— mate, I think we just need to let off some steam, Ron had said, and the part of Harry that could have been in Gryffindor put up a good fight, for a moment, but they were out there now, Ron on a broom that used to be Regulus’s. In the quiet, Hermione follows old threads of magic through the house, cracking open old wards and opening doors, until she finds herself back in Regulus’s room.

There is a tangle of wards knotted up behind the Slytherin pennant about the bed, and when she reaches for it she finds the magic old but still supple, like a tree in a high wind. Sap, and dark water, and a trickle of blood curling down the reopened tear on her lip, and then a packet of papers falls into her hands, as if from mid-air. Even on a cursory glimpse, she can see that they’re thickets of magical equations and spell theory, and she feels her heart skip several beats. 

By the time Harry and Ron come back in from their match, soaked through and covered in mud and bickering about the Cannons, Hermione’s so deep in the muddle of the papers that she almost feels like they’re back at school— just three seventeen-year-olds with their side-quests, laughing like they don’t hold little candlelit vigils to the war dead in the living room twice a week. 

“Alright, ‘Mione?” Ron asks, when they come back from showering, sitting down next to her and picking up a piece of paper, before wrinkling his nose and then making a decent effort of understanding it anyway. “What’s all this?”

Harry sits down on the other side, taking in the papers, which are now splayed in multiple directions over the table. Hermione’s been writing so fast she’s got ink splattered up to her elbow, and as much as she loves the boys, she would kill to have Sue and Theo right now. “Found it in Regulus’s room— he hid it behind this really old ward.” Ron frowns, even as Harry reaches for more papers— most are in Regulus’s spiky hand, but there are several more penned in various hands she’s never seen before. At her shoulder, Ron is still in a way that means he’s focused, and she feels a bubble of pride at how he’s following her notes.

“This is my mum’s handwriting,” says Harry suddenly, pulling a sheet closer to her. Hermione jerks her head up, as Harry holds a pair of sheets up. “Flitwick did say she was good at charms—“
“Bloody hell,” says Ron, glancing between Harry’s mum’s sheets and Hermione’s notes. “Am I reading this right?”

Harry sets the sheets of his mum’s charm work down gently next to Hermione and peers over her shoulder with Ron, before scoffing at the conclusion. “No way.”

“He was making a go at it,” Hermione says quietly, looking over the stacks and stacks of papers on the table, her mind already beginning to trace lines between them. “It’s— it’s some of the most complex magic I’ve ever seen. But even he had to out source the charms, and a lot of the transfiguration—“

Harry’s already reaching for the stack of papers Hermione gestured to when she mentioned transfiguration, and his face cracks into a pained smile when he sees them, and Hermione realizes why she thought that hand was so familiar. “Sirius,” Harry breathes, trailing his fingers down the equations. 

“Mate,” says Ron, peering over his shoulder. “Should have asked him for help on our homework, if he was that good.”

Harry jabs an elbow at him, with no real heat, and then his face goes even more pinched and floaty. “Dad,” he says softly, and turns the sheet towards the two of them: in the middle of the sheet, whole lines have been crossed out, and new deviations inserted, with the skilled quill of someone who’d grown up in the wizarding world. To the side, Sirius had written James thought he could do it better, he was right. 

Ron tears his eyes away from the magic to Hermione. “Is it— did he do it?”

“I don’t know,” she says, staring at the pile before her. “It— I mean, it feels more coherent than anything I’ve seen. I looked it into it, you know, after you asked—“ Ron blushes at that— “And no one had come that close— but a lot of them seemed very awed by the mythos of it. Blocking the unblockable.”

Kreacher, being Kreacher, chooses that exact moment to appear with a fresh tea service, and brings up the light in the dining room. Ron holds out his hand to Hermione. “Hand over the linked notebook, and I’ll start copying this stuff down for Sue and Theo.” 

Harry nods. “I can get books if you need them. Or take notes. Whatever.”

Hermione finds herself grinning.

It’s long past midnight, by the time Kreacher and Harry return from their scouring of the row house with more notes, by the time Sue and Theo finally stop sending pager messages full of nerd babble and go to sleep, by the time she finally gets a grasp on the true dimensions of what Regulus was attempting to build, and a liquid smile curls over her face.

“So it is, then?” says Ron. 

“It’s not done,” she cautions. “But what he’s got is brilliant. The foundation’s simple, but then he got caught up in complications, so he reached out for help—“ Harry had found a stack of letters, forged, asking for help on an Order of the Phoenix problem, solving difficult pieces of magic. “And then did his best to introduce them back in. But the method of it is—“

“Don’t keep us waiting forever, ‘Mione,” says Ron, who’s got his head propped on his elbow and is eating a muffin Kreacher made, with a recipe Hermione’s pretty sure he got from Mrs. Weasley at some point. 

“So Avada works by drawing on your desire to kill someone,” says Hermione. “You have to have power, and you have to want it. Regulus— what he’s trying to do in the counter is basically give the caster a chance to fight back. Set their will to live against the assailant’s desire to kill them. He called it volo vivere.” She’s met with blank stares and shakes her head. Honestly. If they make it out of this, she’ll be tearing apart the Hogwarts curriculum brick-by-brick. “It’s Latin for I wish to live. You have to prove you want to live more than they want to kill you.”

It’s Ron who lets out a laugh at that. “That’s the most Slytherin shit I’ve ever heard. Just deciding you want to live more than the Dark Lord wants to kill you?”

And then Harry’s laughing, and then she’s laughing, and all around them she can feel the magic of the house humming, Regulus’s magnificent beast of a spell not finished, but right here, waiting. 

She wants to talk to him so badly, she thinks, as she lies awake next to Harry and Ron a week later, the rain rattling at the roof of the row house, like it used to do in Birmingham. To look him in the eyes and ask him how much of it was real. If he worked on the counter as an exit route, or a way to redeem himself. If he turned on the Dark Lord because he was done with the insanity of the platform, or because he’d been personally hurt for once in his life. 

Coefficients blur before her eyes, stalk her dreams. Harry’s mum’s work was a thing of beauty, better than her’s and better than Fleur’s, even, and Hermione wonders, with a pang of longing that goes deeper than the bones, what all of this would have looked like if they’d lived. If in the summers, she and Ron would have flooed over to the Godric’s Hollow house, and she and Harry’s mum would have talked theoretical charms magic, and Harry’s dad would have gone out to play Quidditch with the boys, and the two of them would have slept as easily on Harry’s floor as Harry slept on theirs. And if she wants it this much, how much more must Harry want it?

It all comes back to You-Know-Who— is it time to call him what he is now? Voldemort. It all comes back to Voldemort. 

There are countless holes in the spell that need patching, theory that needs to be reworked, power that needs to be redirected. But the idea of it is so immense, so astute, so bold that it leaves Hermione almost breathless with hope.

I wish to live, she thinks, feeling the warmth of Ron’s shoulder, Harry’s breathing even in sleep. She feels the power hum and slosh in her chest— she’s had enough for an Avada for a long while now, just never anything approaching want, except for Voldemort. And maybe Snape, if Harry said that was what he wanted. But for Volo? 

Ron mutters about marble and basilisk venom in his sleep, and Harry turns his face into the soft corner between her chin and collarbone. 

She’s not in the house of martyrs. She wants to live. Oh, how she wants to live.

____________________

Ron clutches his wand tightly, standing just a few steps behind Harry on the stairs in the entry hall. Hermione is in the shadows, but her magic is hanging all around them, angry and hot, waiting to be used. The late September afternoon has curdled in a muggy, disgusting evening, crackling with thunder but not rain. They’re closing in on their goal, piece by piece— a few more weeks, Ron thinks, and they’ll be ready to make their move, on the Ministry and Umbridge. Two birds with one stone, and better to have You-Know— Voldemort— think they’re fighting back publicly by striking the Ministry than stalking a locket.

They were having a quiet afternoon, taking just a little bit of space away from research to play a game of Exploding Snap, leave a few pager messages for their friends at Hogwarts, and listen to the Cannons loose spectacularly over wireless— of course they were still at the bottom of the league, despite the general desertion of players in the wake of Krum declaring he was against the new regime (he’d joined the Order, according to a recent update Dung had provided them)— only for the wards to alert that someone was trying to get into the house.

And now, they’re standing on the staircase, wands drawn, as someone who appears to be Remus J. Lupin steps into the foyer. 

The last two months have been difficult— not more so than Hogwarts had been, but still a bit rough. They’re pinned down in a house in Central London, slipping out past the Death Eaters camped out on the stoop (as if both them and Hedwig didn’t come in through the back garden); everything reeks of dark magic; and when someone dies, there’s not much more to do than light a candle and say a few quiet words. Most recently, they were for Moody, who Kingsley informed them didn’t make it out of a duel with several Death Eaters. Killed three of them, he’d said, his voice cracking over the pager, and Ron had watched Harry’s face contort through a roulette of emotions while they waited for the names. Selwyn and Macnair and Davies, names from Anthony’s mugshots and the battle at the Ministry, and he hadn’t missed Harry’s slight slump, in a relief he didn’t quite want to admit to. 

Snape was the enemy now, on a more bitter and sharper level than Voldemort might even be, but Ron wasn’t a fool. Snape had, for whatever twisted or sadistic reasons, given Harry things no one else had ever offered, not even Sirius, and some debts couldn’t be shaken off lightly. He remembered the way Harry had talked about first Chelsea and then Lake District, the softness at the core of his voice— is this what you lot feel when it’s just you at home with your parents? And maybe a through-and-through Gryffindor could have scrapped all of that, mined it for parts and rebuilt it as hatred, but Harry didn’t work like that. Even now, Ron knew there was a part of him, as much as it might scare him, that still loved Snape. 

None of them had known Moody that well, but Susan had. Just the thought of Susan makes Ron’s chest tighten, the ache like a living thing. Lying up at night, his thoughts turn circles around her— the grin when she pulled back from a kiss in the broom shed; the sureness with which she moved; the smell of her magic, like peat and gauze. The way she’d sit next to him, so casually in his space; the feel of her hand in his as she pulled him over to talk to someone else; how easily she always knew what he was thinking, feeling, in a way sometimes even Harry and Hermione couldn’t get to. 

When did everything get blurry, that line between romance and friendship that he’d never had trouble with before? Harry and Hermione were tighter than blood, and he’d rather make out with Cormac or Draco than one of them, but Suze— 

There are parts of him that don’t think they’re going to make it out of this alive. But they have to, because he thinks he wants to maybe build something with Susan, wake up in the morning with her soft collarbone under his hand and go on a long walk along the canal, and if he shuts his eyes he can see the future Christmases— the Burrow decked out in lights, and Hermione talking with his dad and Fleur; Harry and Ginny bickering about British League with Fred and George; Susan chatting with Charlie and Luna but looking back to him with a light in her eyes that says you, it’s always you and— 

They’re trying to save the world, Ron knows, which comes with sacrifices. Harry sneaks out into London, slipping under the invisibility cloak that was once his father’s, coming back with intel like a spy. Hermione works on pieces of magic for their break-in, while also trying to fill in the pieces of the Avada counter; it’s taking a toll on her, in a way her homework hasn’t for a while. She’s pushing the limits of her skills, just to give them an edge.

Ron plans for the heist, testing out the potions Harry stole from Snape, timing how long the polyjuice will hold, learning floor plans, memorizing employee lists. Probing weak points in security, reading the Prophet cover to cover to peer between the lines of their propaganda, deciphering the scraps of intelligence the Order deigns to pass to them. They’d originally thought to ambush Umbridge at her manor out in Sheffield, but if they went to the Ministry, they could strike at the heart of the enterprise, and further muddy the waters about what they were really after. 

They’re trying to save the world, and some days, it feels like it’s just them. Stuck in this house that reeks of dark magic and Sirius’s ghost. The Order communicates with them sporadically at best; their friends at Hogwarts are doing their best to support them, but they’ve got their own battles to fight. 

And now here is Remus Lupin— the real deal, from the security questions and the patronus Hermione demanded of him— sitting at their kitchen table, two months after the Ministry has fallen. 

“You know we have communication methods set up,” Ron says, as Kreacher pours tea. “Dead drops, pagers, Hedwig—“

“Don’t tell me you’re still using her,” says Remus, and Harry bristles a bit, and Ron and Hermione mirror him instinctively. “She’s very distinctive. The Death Eaters—“

Ron nearly launches into his how stupid do you think we are rant— where have you been all this time, to turn up and start lecturing us— but Harry clamps down on his own rage in a way that would have made Theo proud. “We have contingencies,” he says. “Why are you here, Remus?”

Since he was their Defense teacher, they’ve seen Remus in only pieces. He was most present the summer they spent at Grimmauld, but there was always a sense of distance he maintained, like a sheet of glass. It’s always reminded Ron of McGonagall, actually— like looking at them brought a bit of physical pain, and he couldn’t quite separate them from who had come before. 

Remus gives them a tired smile. “News. A bit of— in person communication from the Order. I know Kingsley’s been doing his best to provide you updates, but— we’re always worried things are being traced.”

Harry narrows his eyes slightly; Mundungus has been filling them in where Kingsley isn’t, but it’s clear he’s curious enough acquiesce. The tea goes cold as Remus fills them in on the state of the Wizarding World— the way the Muggleborns are either fleeing or being arrested; the attacks on the muggle world; the building of the resistance movement. “We’re doing our best,” Lupin says, and the exhaustion is evident in the root of his voice. “With Azkaban off the table, the holding cells are more in reach— we’ve broken a lot of Muggleborns out. And the forgeries that your friend has done seem to be holding up.” Ron feels a swell of pride, for Ernie’s work— though Hogwarts might be scary, it’s got to leagues better than a prison. “Your brothers, Ron, have been instrumental in helping us with supplies, and Xenophilius Lovegood has basically turned the Quibbler into the mouthpiece of the resistance. He’s printing it from one of our safe-houses.”

Harry swirls his untouched tea. “Why are you here, Remus?” he asks again. “None of that was anything that couldn’t be left in a dead-drop.”

Remus gave a sheepish, strained smile, and cupped his scared hands around the mug. “Well. It occured to me that perhaps you could use some help with the task Dumbledore left you. I understand the desire for secrecy, of course, but— you know what I am. I could be of use to you, I think.” Ron chances a glance over at Harry, who is as still as a statue. On his other side, Hermione has her wand drawn under the table. Ron doesn’t like this any more than they do— why now? What could Remus possibly do to help them here, which he couldn’t do fighting for the Order?

Remus takes a sip of the tea, and then looks at Harry, and makes a series of missteps. “Will three become four, then? We’ll be up against magic beyond anything we’ve seen or imagined, and I’m sure James would have wanted me to stick with you, Harry.”
Even Kreacher, who has been listening in, looks shocked at Remus’s audacity, and has enough sense to pop out of the dining room. Harry jerks to his feet, and Ron and Hermione follow. “So that’s what it’s about?” he says, his eyes burning, and Remus takes a step back at the acridness of his voice. “What my dad would want you to do? You sound like Snape.”

The hurt that washes over Remus’s face is unmistakable, and Ron would feel sorry for him if he didn’t agree with Harry. Harry, for his part, leans across the table, until he’s in Remus’s face. “And you know what? I sort of think my dad might have wanted you to check on me when I was growing up in the suburbs and didn’t know magic existed, and maybe written me one letter fourth year while we were trying to get Sirius exonerated. And he’d probably want to know why this is only the third time I’ve seen you since Sirius died.” Remus takes a step back, and then another, his face going all ashen, but Harry isn’t done. “I don’t know why you’re here, Remus, but I don’t think it’s for me, or my dad. I think it’s for you.”

Ron can feel the room buzzing with magic; he gets the sense that this is cathartic to the part of him that wants so badly to scream at Snape right now. “I think,” says Harry, low but like a dagger. “That you’re a sniveling coward, who’s tired of fighting and wants to hang out in a warm house and hide from the Death Eaters.”

Ron has never seen Remus loose his cool before, but that does it. He draws his wand in a blur, and it’s only because Hermione’s probably had a protego ready to go for the entire conversation that she makes it time to protect Harry from his blasting hex. The rebound shatters a mirror; Remus turns tail, and Ron doesn’t have the energy to fling something after him. Harry slumps back down in his chair; the door slams and the sound seems to swell to fill the house. 

“Did I fuck that up?” Harry asks after a long moment. 

Ron thinks about his mother in the kitchen, who so clearly wanted to help but didn’t want to overstep Harry’s boundaries, and how a week ago they’d all crammed into a muggle phone booth and talked to Hermione’s parents for an hour and a half, notice-me-not charms on the booth and Hermione transfiguring pieces of lint and buttons into more muggle coins. Thinks about the occasional patronuses his father will send, in the dead of night, and how the weasel will just say we’re all fine, we’re here if you need us, we love you. Thinks about Susan’s aunt dying on her feet to give them a fighting chance, and their friends back at Hogwarts, pulling all-nighters just to back their play. 

“You were right,” Ron says. “He wasn’t here for you.”

September dies in a fit of heat and light. They build plans inside of plans to lay the working heart of Voldemort’s new world order to waste. They dance in the kitchen to Be Here Now. Harry has visions of Voldemort on the Continent, stalking a wand-maker. 

In the dreams, it’s Harry dead and Hermione dead and blood slicking down his hands and he follows the golden threads back up to the surface, where Harry has his shoulder into his collarbone and Hermione’s got her arm thrown over both of them, and then he lies awake thinking about Regulus Arcturus Black, who played the Dark Lord and walked to his death in order to do so. It’s impossible to know, of course, why he did it, why he turned, but Ron wonders if it was simply the fact that the Dark Lord tried to murder Kreacher. If he’d taken the snake and skull on his arm and done the killings in the glades and then remembered that despite his best efforts, he did have love left in him. 

In the lacunas between planning, there are a few moments to breathe, and they sit in the living room, Hermione reading something “for fun” (a nine-hundred page tome on wards), and Harry passed out on the carpet, drooling a bit. It turns out that Regulus had also attempted to teach Kreacher how to play chess, and he didn’t do a bad job.

Maybe there is magic beyond anything they’ve ever seen, like Lupin said. Maybe it would have helped, to have someone that powerful on their side. 

But it’s not about power, he thinks, as Kreacher accepts his gambit and Hermione lets out a soft chuckle at something she finds funny in the tome and Harry mumbles their names in his dream. It’s about love.

Chapter Text

It takes them three days to confirm it, from the moment at the wedding where Kingsley’s patronus bursts through the revelry, shortly followed by her aunt’s, to Monday evening, when an exhausted and bloodied Moody stumps through the front door of the Burrow and his face reveals the news before he tells her. 

“She’s dead, lass,” he tells her, and somewhere inside Susan had known that ever since the patronus appeared, but still, she staggers in the Burrow kitchen. Ernie, who Susan doesn’t think has slept since the wedding, is the one to catch her, and help her to a kitchen chair. Outside, the late summer night beats at the windows, and Hannah reaches over to grab her hand. 

Moody sighs, and then glances over the room as if to count, and then transfigures glasses, before pulling a different, but no less battered flask from his cloak. Susan watches him pour amber liquid into twelve tumblers, for everyone who’d sat vigil with her.

Moody passes the snifters out, the glass sliding down the long table, and everyone takes one, Luna sniffing curiously at the alcohol, and Justin grimacing— he doesn’t care much for hard stuff, Susan remembers dimly— before taking his own in hand. “She took three of ‘em with her, Am did,” he tells her, staring into the middle distance. “Straight AKs, too.” He raises his glass. “To Amelia Bones,” he says, and the rest of them echo it, though Susan can feel her hand shaking. “One hell of a witch.”

“And one hell of an aunt,” says Millie, before she takes a sip of the liquor and gags. Beside her, Ginny has pounded the shot like a true Gryffindor, and Ernie has taken the smallest of quaffs, and she buries her head into Hannah’s shoulder and lets the fuzz come up to meet her, drowning out everything. 

That night, Ernie and Justin and Hannah all trail her up to Ginny’s room, and the four of them sleep in a tangle of limbs on Hannah’s best attempt at a transfiguration of a mattress. She wakes up with Justin’s hair in her mouth, and Hannah’s elbow in her gut, but it’s a creature comfort that she doesn’t want to deny, all of them so casually in her space. 

She wants her aunt. She wants Ron. Both of those longings are too big to put a name to, and so she just curls up closer to Ernie and lets her tears stream down her face. 

The days pass slowly, the Prophets that come in filled with headlines that make Daphne’s face go pinchy— apparently, You-Know-Who isn’t a complete and total idiot, and hasn’t installed himself as Minister of Magic, preferring to move behind the scenes. “He’s got someone slick on propaganda,” says Daphne, as Susan stares at the bowl of cereal and tries to wrap her mind around the idea of just never seeing her aunt again. “We’ll be better.” She hears pieces of news disjointedly, as it filters around her— Hannah’s dad is a key figure in the new administration, apparently; Ernie’s parents have openly declared their loyalty to the new regime; there are posters going up in Diagon with Harry as Undesirable Number One. 

“But not Ron and Hermione,” says Sue, with a flare of something like satisfaction, folding the newspaper and sneaking a bagel. Sue is knee-deep in legislation and transfiguration research both, but every time she appears she fixes something for Susan, like the bad transfiguration of the bed and the fact that she can’t seem to go back to the Woking flat to get clothes and school supplies. “Which means he doesn’t get it.”

Justin returns from Reading with baked goods his mum has made for her, and they eat them sitting in the garden, Justin telling her about his projects, his plans for the communication network, and the petty drama in the muggle world. Sitting next to him, shoulder to shoulder in the tall grass, she catches flashes of another world that will always be out of reach to her: is this what they would have done if they’d been muggles? If her aunt had died in a car-crash the summer she was seventeen, and Justin’s mum had taken her in (because of course she would have), and the most important thing could have been the grief?

Pager messages from Ron, awkward and cutting off but there. There’s nothing to say, of course, but it’s Ron and so it’s what she wants. She listens to one over and over again, thirty-three seconds, until she can recite it word for word: do you remember the summer we were fourteen and we took the train to London and then got lost and she had to come find us? and as he tells it, she’s transported back to the muggy heat, before the World Cup and the Dark Mark and the war, and the way her aunt had looked, when she’d found them on the verge of tears in a run-down muggle park in central London. 

She didn’t expect Hannah to be demanding, to drag her out into the gardens and make her practice the healing spells over and over again, but it’s exactly what she needs, to do something with her magic, to remind herself that she’s alive. As August fails, she spins up perfect Episkys, and can do a stabilization ward without even a wand. “Again,” Hannah will say, and it will feel almost normal, like they’re back at school studying or training for the DA, and not—

Hogwarts attendance is mandatory. Severus fucking Snape is named headmaster, and Susan watches Ginny pace with rage outlined in every step, and wonders if he’ll know what’s coming for him. Neville is angry, but in his quiet, bristling Neville way, which is to say you’ll never see it coming until it hits. For the first time, she wants to go back: she wants to set something ablaze. Ginny seems to understand that— Ginny’s always been good like that— and comes to find her one night, dressed in dark clothes and with her wand from a grave in her sheath. “Want to fuck shit up?” she says, and the lethargy recedes just a bit, at the sight of the thing burning in Ginny’s eyes, and recedes a bit more when she apparates them to the magical district of York and they burn insults into a wall, Ginny not hesitating to spell out the full name. Before you were Voldemort, you were Tom, she writes, and you’re still a disowned dipshit. 

“Fucker gave so much away when he was trying to possess me,” says Ginny, her eyes bright in the cool night, and Susan remembers hearing this story, a lifetime ago, when she was maybe thirteen. “Time to cash it in.”

Their work doesn’t make the Prophet, but Daphne and Luna make sure it makes the Quibbler. Theo makes Head Boy— everyone saw that coming from a mile away— but it’s Hannah who opens her letter at the Burrow kitchen table and then stares, slack-jawed, at the badge declaring HG. 

“What did you expect?” asks Ernie, crunching through cereal while scrawling notes for his next forgery project— as the summer’s gone on, they’ve only gotten more elaborate. “Unlike everyone else smart in our year, you actually turn assignments in.” 

“Weird choices for Snape, though,” says Millie, who’s doing her best Hermione impression by not only reading Hogwarts: A History, but taking notes on the sources. “I mean, he’s got to know you and Theo are actually on our side, right?” 

It’s all Susan can do to shrug, and watch Hannah pin her badge to her robes, trying to act nonchalant about it. She never was anything, in all her years at Hogwarts— not Prefect, not on the Quidditch rooster, and certainly never Head Girl. What would her aunt have said, if she’d brought home a badge? 

“Congrats,” she tells Hannah, and she means it— Snape’s not going to know what’s hit him— and then she slips off to go find somewhere to just sob. 

After the memorial— no body to bury, despite Moody’s best efforts— Luna comes to find her as she sits on the Burrow roof and just starts talking, her voice like a river, even as tears slip down her face. It had been a shitty memorial, really— the survivors from the fall of the Ministry, and the Order, and her friends but not Ron and Harry and Hermione, and where was everyone from Woking, all their neighbors and friends who just so happened to be muggles? And it had been over in about fifteen minutes flat, and then everyone had scattered to get drunk, and Moody had offered her plenty of alcohol, but Susan didn’t want to get drunk. 

“I understand,” Luna says, her shoulder against hers, as they stare out at the rainy countryside. “It feels indecent to get drunk. You need to feel it all.” Susan nods, burying her head between her knees. Luna puts a hand on her shoulder blade, feather-light and absurdly comforting. “Want to just scream?”

And she does. And so they do.

“This is utter rubbish,” says Anthony a few days later, tossing aside their new DADA book; it lands against the wall with a thunk, and is followed in rapid succession by Luna, Ginny, and Neville’s. “What’s the point of having a Death Eater as an instructor if you’re not going to actually teach us dark magic?” which is perhaps the most Ravenclaw statement Susan has ever heard. She’s slumped to her elbows on the table, watching the rain slick down the glass and trying not to think about how much she misses Ron. She doesn’t want messages; she wants his shoulder against hers.

“Tell us about the Carrows again,” says Neville, standing up to pace. “Snape’s going to difficult, but at least he’s a known. Are they not teaching us Dark Arts because they don’t know, or because Snape’s smart enough not to teach it across the board?”

Strategy, and leadership, are good looks on Neville, she decides, and she doesn’t miss the way Hannah’s eyes follow him as he paces the kitchen, and catches the corner of Ernie’s eye to share a smirk. 

“What was it like, the after?” she asks Luna, as they sit on the roof and watch the rain come down, but only at a distance. Luna laces her fingers with hers and leans into her shoulder. 

“Awful,” says Luna, and Susan loves Luna for the honesty of it, so much and so suddenly that it hurts. A long beat of silence, as Susan feels tears wind down her cheeks, hot in the cold wind from the approaching storm. “But it was just me and my dad. I didn’t have— I didn’t have all of this.”

And that makes her cry, for real, loud gasping sobs as the thunderheads crackle in the distance, and Luna takes her in her bony arms and just holds her, her magic like gasoline and rosemary, like a fortress. 

“You’ll always be welcome here,” Mrs. Weasley tells her, as she does up her tie to go back to school on the morning of September first. The house has emptied out, over the past few days, and so it’s just her and Ginny and Luna, waiting to be dropped off at King’s Cross. The newest Daily Prophet has a picture of Harry on the front page like he’s the enemy and Susan wants to hold him, be held by him, like they did after Sirius was killed. “No matter what happens with you and Ron. You’re ours.”

Susan’s not Harry, with intrinsic doubts about adults; she’s known she’s belonged at the Burrow since she was probably fourteen. But to be seventeen, and an orphan twice over, about to head off into a war zone, and to hear it again? 

All she’s done this summer is cry, it feels like, but when Mrs. Weasley takes her in her arms, she digs her fingers into her jumper and lets it all out, yet again, and wonders if it will ever feel less like drowning. 

It’s pouring in London. Small first and second years run past, and Susan wonders how many of them have faked papers from Ernie. How many of them Hannah will step in front of, wand drawn and ready to fight. Neville is here alone, considering his grandmother is now a wanted fugitive herself, standing tall and handsome in the rain; Anthony is trailed by two tiny first-years who cannot be anyone but his sisters, and he looks grim and powerful, despite being a nerd at heart. 

She wants Ron. She wants Harry. She wants Hermione. She wants her aunt, more than anything. She wants the war to be one long nightmare, and to wake up and be twelve again, and the only thing on the agenda is rugby with Anika and Fatima in the hazy Woking twilight. 

“Suze?” Ernie asks, stepping up beside her, putting his forearm up on her shoulder. His hair is long and unkempt, now, and he carries his wand in a wrist holster and is wearing muggle jeans under his robes, and he lies like a Slytherin and studies like a Ravenclaw and fights like a Gryffindor but loves her— loves everyone— like a fucking Hufflepuff. She thinks of the night after the memorial, when she’d spent the night sitting up in the bathroom, throwing up bile, and how he’d sat with her the whole time, long legs stretched out and hand on her back, like a brother. 

“I’m alright,” she says, distantly aware that people are staring at her, and she wonders how exactly Harry made it through six years without murdering anyone. “I’m alright.”

Rain pours down the glass; the compartment is crowded, since the Goldstein twins refuse to leave Anthony’s side (though eventually Sue and Luna and Millie manage to get them talking, about their corgi and what Houses they’re hoping for), and none of them can quite stand the thought of being apart, given that they’re already down three. Ernie and Hannah duck in and out between Prefect meetings, and Daphne eventually slips off to make some polite conversation with some of the old crowd of Purebloods. Susan, sitting between Justin and Luna, assumes she’ll see Theo when they get back to school, and he finds a moment to slip away without scrutiny, so the last thing she expects is for the boy himself to slide open the glass of their compartment. 

“Theo!” crows Millie, leaping to her feet and embracing him; Susan, even exhausted and fuzzy, doesn’t miss the way he slumps into it, or how thin and pinched his face is. Over Millie’s shoulder, his dark eyes rove the compartment, like he’s assessing them for damage. Whatever he sees when he gets to her face must look bad, because he steps fully inside the room and crosses to her, and initiates the hug. 

His robes smell of dark magic, and he’s thinner than he should be. But his grip is solid, and the tendrils of his magic smell like salt and lavender, and the Head Boy badge is shining on his lapel, and she thinks of all those winters ago, when he kept his distance from her and didn’t expect her loyalty. 

Her love.

“Suze,” he says, holding her tightly. “I’m so sorry,” and outside the rain and the steam of the train and somewhere far away Ron and Harry and Hermione.

“I’m sorry too, Theo,” she whispers, and she can feel him shaking too, too light in her grip. What she would give, to not have it look like this, but at the end of the day, this is what they have. And what is there to do but to get up, spit blood, and keep going?

The train chugs towards Hogwarts, and she holds Theo, and she feels everything inside her clarify, for the first time since. 

They’re going to make it all burn. 

______________

Theo’s disillusionment crackles with a summer’s worth of unspent power and love, and instead of the normal cracked-egg feeling, it feels like a blanket right out of the dryer. It holds together like a brick wall, but the castle isn’t fooled, of course, and she can feel the magic reaching out to her as she crosses the threshold. One more time, she thinks, and maybe if any of her education had been normal, there would have been a kind of grief associated with that, but right now all she can think of is passageways and corners and how to wrest the castle from the grip of one Severus Snape.

Once over the threshold, she slips into a side hallway and then breaks out into a run. The torches flare up brighter as she moves, her wand on her wrist and the Map jammed into her breast pocket— fuck, it’s good to be back. War or not, Severus fucking Snape or not, the castle is hers. 

She ducks through three passageways, takes a moving staircase so quickly that it doesn’t even think to move, and then bolts through a side-corridor that widens out into a disused portico between two towers, the late summer night like ink out here in the highlands, and she can feel it everywhere. The whole castle, humming. Over the summer, in between the missions for Harry and Hermione and Ron, she’d dug deeper into the lore of the place, and now that she’s back she feels like an idiot for not seeing it before. 

All these years, she’s been treating the castle like a puzzle, like a maze, like something to be solved; the magical aspects were just fun little quirks the founders had added, with the Room their masterpiece. But even as she move through it, reaching out with her magic like Hermione taught her, she can feel it reaching back. 

She skids to a stop in front of the Come-and-Go Room, and lets the disillusionment drop. Have anyone, her friends aside, noticed she’s not at the feast? Of all the Slytherins in their year, she’s the most unremarkable. Even Snape, who used to call her to his office for meetings every term, won’t miss her. That’s the Bulstrode brand, and she doesn’t intend to squander the gift.

She puts her hand to the nondescript wall and reaches. 

“Hello,” she says, and feelsit, reaching back to her. “I’m Millie. But you already know that.” She swallows, trying to gather herself. She has spent the summer sketching out the shape she’ll want the Come-and-Go Room to be, when it serves as their main headquarters for their resistance movement, but she knows the Room— the castle— well enough now to know it will give her whatever she asks for, and more. This is about something deeper, like an alliance. “You know— the Dark— Tom Riddle—Vol—“ and that seems to get across to the castle, so she keeps up with that thread, forcing it out for the first time ever—“Voldemort— he’ll come here. In the end. He can’t— he can’t abide power that’s not his. And he wants to burn things just for the hell of it.” 

It knows. She can feel that it knows. “I’m not asking for loyalty to me,” she says, and has she ever sounded less like a Slytherin? “But can you protect the students, at least? From a genocidal maniac?”

In front of her blooms a door: heavy wood, brass handle. Millie takes a deep breath, and then opens it, only to pause on the threshold in shock, barely remembering to pull the door closed behind her. 

It’s the Come-and-Go Room, of course, but it’s also an answer, because the castle is offering up to her with open hands everything she’d dreamed of. It’s command center and staging ground and fortress all in one. There’s a spilt, curving staircase with banners from all the Houses hanging down from it, and in front of it a table that looks like something out of the war room she’d conjured last year. There’s dueling pads and mirrored walls and what looks to be a small library squirreled into one of the corners, and knowing the Room, it will be books they didn’t know they needed. Off to the side there’s a bunk room, with inset beds three tiers tall, and the duvets have the Hogwarts crest on them. She takes the steps two at a time, and once she reaches the balcony at the top and actually sees the walls, goes still.

At the top of the room, the balcony circles the war table, and on the wall, spread out side by side, are the panels of the Map currently tucked in her breast pocket. She watches Mrs. Norris prowl the third floor, and Ollie and Polly move about the Slytherin Common Room, and sees the dots of all of her classmates and professors congregated in the hall. 

And in a few places, little red lines. Crossing out her walls and adding passages.She ghosts her hands over the new lines, trying to understand the magnitude of the offering, and then moves down until she’s at the fifth floor.

The Come-and-Go Room is almost glowing on the map, and she sees her dot pacing inside it. Headquarters, reads the label beneath the room itself, and Millie slumps forward against the map, so her forehead is resting against it, and she’s grinning and also sobbing, just a bit.

The elves will have taken her trunk to Slytherin, but all the essentials are crammed into the knapsack that’s slung over her shoulder, and it’s quick work to pick a bunk in the far corner, toss her robes into the drawers and tack up her photographs— her and Daphne and Susan; her and Fleur dancing at the wedding; her and Theo bickering in the library; and one of her and the Trio, taken by Ron’s mum some summers ago at the Burrow. And then, in the war room, she starts pinning up the sheets and lists she’d smuggled in— they’d split up all their plans (coded, of course), and hidden them muggle-style in their coat-linings and beneath the tongues of their shoes, and no one had even searched them. How like the Dark Lord to underestimate children, but be very fixated on the death of one just because he was named in a Prophecy. 

As if we aren’t all coming after you, she thinks, pinning up maps of wizarding districts, flicking her wrist to conjure pins to indicate their safe houses like Sue had taught her. As if you could ever get us on your side.

Not after Cedric. Not after Sirius. Not after Susan’s aunt— Millie thinks of the long desolateness of August, where she had done her best to just sit next to Susan between errands, and how every word had seemed hollow and pointless, all her comfort empty against the howling vortex of death.

As she pins up their list of emergency contacts in the Order, she thinks of the Harry she met at eleven— too small for his age, which fit with the whispered tidbits he’d confided in her, about that house and what they had never bothered to do— and how he’d been so nervous, but so full of loyalty and love when push came to shove. She thinks of him coming down the common room with the Map in his hands third year, his eyes alight— I think the twins wanted me to sneak out, but you’ve got to see it. She thinks of the way he’d asked her to dance at the Yule Ball; how he’d go out with her on the pitch on weekends and toss the quaffle around, and how well they played together as Chasers, with a solid, sophisticated understanding. 

Even if Cedric and Sirius and Susan’s aunt had made it; even if the Ministry hadn’t fallen; even if Snape hadn’t been a traitor; even if there had been no Prophecy, Millie knows deep down she’d still be doing this. Because the Dark Lord had hurt her friend, had made him an orphan, and that could not be allowed to stand. There’s something comforting in that, she decides, as the night wastes and she takes in the corners of their headquarters, fortifying loose elements and teasing out the complexities of the configuration (with enough prodding, a dumbwaiter to the kitchens appears, and the elves send her up a plate). Like they’ve got their agency back. 

One by one, the crew trickles in— Justin and Luna first, who are also skilled at being invisible; Daphne (who looks impassive, but underneath, is clearly pissed) and Susan (who’s been crying, but underneath, looks ready for a fight); Anthony and Sue, who between them seem to have brought half of the Hogwarts library; Ginny, who already looks moments away from trying to set Snape’s robes on fire; and finally, Neville, Ernie, and their Head Boy and Girl, who apparently had to attend the beginning of term staff meeting. 

“That fucker,” says Hannah, who’s braids are down and who looks incensed. Theo is a few steps behind her, and Millie watches his dark eyes take in every facet of the variation before he slumps down in a chair at the war table, and puts his head in his hands. 

“That bad?” asks Ginny, who is leaning against the wall by the cork-boards; Neville just nods. Susan, who has been sitting between Daphne and Justin, takes one look at Theo and then stands up to go over to the dumbwaiter, and returns with a bowl.

“You have to eat, dumbass,” says Susan, setting it down in front of him and then sitting down next to him, in a way Theo tolerates only from them, Millie knows. Theo knows when he’s beat, and begins to spoon soup into his mouth. In the library corner, Anthony and Sue pause on pinning up their research and head over; Ernie is unpacking his books and is already making notes for another family tree— some bloke in the Ministry named Dirk Cresswell. Ginny sits down and puts her head on Luna’s shoulder, letting the facade of hyper-competent Gryffindor badass fall for just a moment to reveal a slice of anguish (she misses Harry too, Millie thinks, but I guess in a different way), and Millie feels a swell of tremendous love for everyone in the room. It’s a hard-earned, carefully-kept love, but it’s burning everywhere. 

Hannah rubs at her face and leans into Justin’s shoulder, clearly trying to get a handle on her rage. “The Carrows might be rubbish at magic, but they’re full Death Eaters, alright.” 

Sue cocks her head, preparing to ask the question, but Theo beats her too it, swallowing a spoonful of soup. “They’re sadists. Both of them. They seemed particularly taken with the idea of being allowed to torture school children.”

The temperature in the room drops, and Ginny sits up fully, her eyes blazing. Neville steps forward from the wall, reaching for his wand. But Susan’s the one who speaks up, her voice like a dagger. “What the fuck is the Dark Lord trying to accomplish with that? Say what you want for Snape, but at least he’s got subtly.”

“Fear,” says Luna, looking up from where she’s been toying with her wand on the table. “He’s never had anything, and he doesn’t understand love, so.”

“He’s also probably trying to undermine Snape,” says Daphne, her voice dull and hollow. “Avoid giving him the opportunity to build a stronghold of power, like Dumbledore did.”

Millie rubs at her eye with the heel of her hand, and wishes, not for the first time, that the Dark Lord was more interested in actually ruling the wizarding world than he was in murder and torture. A charismatic motherfucker would have been more difficult to deal with, sure, but at least he wouldn’t be sending his cronies to torture schoolchildren.

“We could just kill them,” says Ginny. “And maybe Snape, while we’re at it.”

“Harry wants Snape alive,” says Sue, a bit morosely. Harry had informed them, and the Order of the Phoenix of this fact in late July, and Millie went back and forth on if the thing at the root of his voice had been I need to make him explain or I’d like to torture and kill him myself. Six of one, half a dozen of the other, really. “But the Carrows—“

“What is killing them going to accomplish, really?” says Neville, pragmatic like a true Gryffindor. “Won’t he just send someone worse?”

“Yes,” says Theo, staring into his soup until Susan nudges him until he takes another bite. “And we’d bring his wrath on the student body.” Millie shivers, imagining what the Dark Lord might do, if he was summoned to the castle in a rage. 

“So what?” asks Ernie, staring down at his pale hands. “We just— let them run the castle?”

Now this, this is a question Millie knows the answer to. Standing in the middle of their Headquarters, the Map burning in her pocket and the very magic of the castle a feather-light presence against hers, she lets out a chuckle. “No,” she says. “We’re not. We’re going to run a resistance.” They turn towards her, and when she reaches out to the castle, it reaches back. “And the castle’s going to help.”

______________

Neville gingerly prods at the long cut down the side of his face, and then hisses as the pain flares. This late at night, everyone else in the tower is asleep, and so he has the bathroom all to himself. In the soft torchlight, he looks worse than he thought— the cut is bad, of course, but nothing he or Hannah or Madame Pomfrey can’t patch up quickly. It’s the cut combined with the greasy hair, and the sleep deprivation, and the still festering-black eye from two weeks ago. And he probably does need to go to the infirmary about the wrist, which Amycus had shattered with a well-placed bonebreaking curse in a demonstration last week in Dark Arts (which, as Anthony had predicted, has been Dark Arts only in the most boring sense possible— and considering Amycus certainly adored the Dark Arts, clearly someone had gotten into the curriculum. Probably Snape), and still throbbed.

Halloween might be a month away, but they’ve already got plans. Which is good, because Ginny’s getting restless.

He tries an Episky on the cut, before remember that it doesn’t tend to work on Dark wounds. He knows he should give up and go to sleep— Hannah will sort it in the morning, he knows, and there’s an absurd comfort in his chest at the thought of how warm her hand will be on his check, the concern in her brown eyes as she takes his chin in her hand— but he’s been sleeping shallow or not at all, and waking up everyone with nightmares. And Dean’s had it rough this year— Ernie’s work has held up, so no one’s accused him of not being a wizard— but there’s still the taunts about being raised by filthy muggles that have landed him in more than a few fist-fights. Which have ended in the dungeons. 

He looks like shit. He feels like shit too. Physically, but also emotionally. Hogwarts feels like a war zone, and every day he wonders who else will be reported dead in the Prophet, as if it’s a thing to be celebrated. He knows his grandmother is out there somewhere, fighting on the frontlines, and his heart twists even just thinking of her. And somewhere out there too are Harry and Ron and Hermione— we’re hunkering down, Hermione’s last message had said, and then she’d copied out some spell work into their two-way journal that was so fascinating that Sue and Theo were spending all their spare time on it, and had dragged in Daphne and Anthony for good measure. 

It’s good to know they’re safe, but what Neville would give to have them here. To have Hermione’s sheer power, and Ron’s cool-headed strategy, and Harry’s slickness and bravado. Neville’s trying, but he’s not them. He’s good at defense, and he’s got the mouthing-off part down after all these years in Gryffindor, and he can read the rooms well enough to understand how to hit them where it hurts, but he’s still the spare, the boy-who-wasn’t-enough.

He summons gauze and tape like Hannah taught him, and gently starts cleaning the wound. Wonders, for not the first time, why exactly You-Know-Who— Voldemort, he’s started trying to say, because the taboo doesn’t seem to hold in Hogwarts— had picked Harry instead of him. Power the Dark Lord knows not, which neither of them have, he knows that much. Or, if they do, it’s the nebulous sort of power of friendship, and love, and facing down the enemy with nothing but a wicked grin and a rude hand gesture. 

He wonders, if things had been reversed, if he and Ginny and Luna would have been any good at a quest. If Harry and Ron and Hermione really would have been that good at a resistance,  when they would have made a hell of a Gryffindor trifecta of unsubtle crime lords. Hermione probably would have transfigured the Carrows in to insects and trapped them in a jar by now.

He smiles at the thought, even as he tapes up the wound. Merlin, he wished it could be so easy. But killing the Carrows— or even Snape— won’t do them any good if it bring Voldemort’s attention to them. In his dreams, Neville sees small, unmoving bodies, and preventing that, more than anything, has become their goal.

He splashes water on his face, shoving his hair out of his eyes, and tries to dwell on their victories, at least. The professors, have done everything in their power to protect the students from the Carrows’s wrath. And despite Snape being a traitor and a bastard, Neville can admit that he at least seems to understand who the threats are, and hasn’t wasted his time threatening firsties with crucio. They’ve got the elves, they’ve got the staff, and Neville hadn’t ever thought that the very castle itself could take sides, but there have been stuck doors and mis-functioning staircases galore and he thinks Millie might be right.

He thinks of the scene he made, to get two terrified students out of Alecto’s line of sight last week. He thinks of Daphne making excuses for the second-years who can’t preform curses to Amycus, lying through her teeth— you’re just such a powerful wizard, of course they can’t follow; we can arrange some tutoring, and I’m sure by the end of the year everyone will be caught up, no need to waste your time on stupid Hufflepuff. He thinks of Hannah, sleep-deprived after breakfast because she’s been up half the night with the kids who have nightmares.

They’ve done their best, to start fires, because if the Carrows are trying to confiscate the Quibbler (Hedwig brings the latest issues to the forked tree outside of Hogsmeade, and there’s a printing press in the Come-and-Go room, now), and get graffiti off walls, and put out the actual fires Ginny had set in their quarters, they weren’t terrorizing the students. And the lot of them could take a few blows— Neville thinks of his childhood and grimaces— but the firsties? 

He slips back into the dorm room, remembering to ward his bunk before coaxing himself to sleep, cradled between Dean and Seamus’s snores. In the dreams, he wanders the castle, drawing his wand against shadows, but when he wakes up the late September light is filtering through the blinds and the Prophet still reports Harry as Undesirable Number One, so at least he’s still out there. Snape is sitting in the center of the Head Table, his sharp eyes taking apart the hall and putting it back together, and when he eyes fall on Neville he looks straight back, refusing to be cowed. 

He understands Harry’s disgust for Snape, completely apart from sides or Dumbledore’s death, thinking about airless corridors in the Longbottom Manor and the wrongness of his father’s wand in his hand and his relatives who’d called him Frank by accident, over and over again. He might be Headmaster on paper, but when all is said and done he’s just another dog licking Voldemort’s boots.

Snape blinks first, making a smooth pivot away from Neville that doesn’t feel like a capitulation, but fuels the fire burning in Neville’s chest. Next to him at Gryffindor (Educational Degree Number 37: All students must sit with their House at all meals), Ginny is reading a copy of the Anarchist’s Cookbook Sue charmed to always look like a Dark Arts text, muttering about something called a Molotov Cocktail, and on the other side, Dean and Seamus are conversing under the cover of a silencing ward about how exactly they’re going to help Neville and Luna and Ginny steal the sword. 

Voldemort can’t have it, Harry had told them, static crackling in his last message over the pagers, and it had hurt, the distance between them, but Neville had embraced the mission.

He feels old, in a way he never thought he’d feel, when he was eleven, running after an errant Trevor and struggling to cast basic spells with a wand that wasn’t right. But now he’s a head taller than most of the student body, and there’s soft pink skin on his arms and collar bones from where Hannah’s had to heal cutting curses, and his magic is as well-formed as a knife, and in the warded classrooms where they teach Defense, he watches over the kids with a pacing brutality he saw in flashes from Dumbledore himself. In another timeline, is he spending every spare minute in the greenhouse with Sprout, working on their side projects and trying to figure out who he’s doing his Mastery with, and plucking up the courage to ask Hannah out for a butterbeer at the Three Broomsticks? 

(In another timeline, when he goes home for winter Hols, will his parents be there, laughing and asking about his courses and his friends?)

Might-have-beens are a fool’s errand. They’re building a resistance, fighting a war, and when he goes down to the greenhouse, Sprout slips him potions she’s smuggled from the infirmary. He doesn’t think he’s read a single Herbology text this entire year, too busy starting fights and getting his wounds patched up. 

You’re pureblood, they’ll want to break you, Theo had said, when they were sitting in Headquarters and Neville’s hands had been shaking from his first crucio, and he looked sympathetic, and not for the first time Neville wondered how the hell he’d made it out of the audience with Voldemort alive. It was just him and Ginny and Daphne and Theo in the lowlights of the Come-and-Go Room at four in the morning, and the thing the Hat had never explained was that there was a point where Gryffindor and Slytherin weren’t that different anymore. If push came to shove, all four of them would do anything to save the world, and they knew it, standing together, all teeth and claws. 

Sitting in their NEWT-level Dark Arts class, his eyes find all of them in turn, his chief co-conspirators. Theo, who has quickly endeared himself to the Carrows with talk of blood magic and a drive to doll out punishments himself (which really just involved some faked screaming and some very clever memory modification charms), is playing Head Boy again, answering a question about torture curses with a pitch-perfect blend of pureblood entitlement and the nervous hunger of future Death Eater. Daphne is playing with her hair in poised boredom, her sharp eyes taking in every aspect of the room; behind the scenes, she’s running their propaganda, and collecting information, and turning up to distract the Carrows with incisive little questions before they can think to hurt children. And Ginny, with her flaming red hair and crime-lord mania, who isn’t content with them building a resistance at the school, and so has been sneaking out, taking the passages to Hogsmeade and vanishing into the folds of the country, Luna or Justin or Millie tagging along, and coming back hours later reeking of lighter fluid and spray paint and grinning. 

And he’s running the resistance. Covering for Anthony and Sue when they need to skiv off classes to do research; listening to Susan and Luna when they tell him who to recruit and who to avoid; helping Ernie’s lies and fabrications sink in; trusting that Hannah will be able to heal his wounds and Sprout or Ginny will have stolen a potion when he needs it. Backing the Trio’s play from afar.

It doesn’t feel like much, some days, just triage, but that’s more than what Voldemort is doing. So when Amycus starts picking on Lisa Turpin, who has spent most of this year trying to make herself as small as possible (but at the meeting last week showed them all how to do a runic circle of protection, after Megan Jones hyped her up), he waits for Theo to try and misdirect, waits for Daphne to give him the subtle signal that an intervention might be needed. Goes to stand, knowing that Ginny’s in the wings, ready with some distraction that would put the twins to shame. 

At the end of the day, the houses are just colors on a tie, aren’t they? And what good are they, if not together? 

Chapter Text

Three days after Scrimgeour “resigns,” and the first Harry Potter, wanted for questioning about the death of Albus Dumbledore headline appears in the Prophet, Narcissa leaves Manchester early, and apparates to the quaint cottage in Stroke-on-Trent where Andi and Ted have lived for the past two decades. In the quiet years between the wars, she’d come here sometimes, and pace in the street and try to work up the courage to knock. 

She’d never found it. Maybe somewhere along the way she’d bought into the lies she’d built for herself to hide behind— pureblood trophy wife who lived for the parties and the afternoon teas and redoing the koi ponds. But all of that is over now, and she doesn’t even need to draw her wand as she begins to undo the wards layering the house, her magic cascading around her like a shower of sparks.

She’d had plans inside of plans, last year, as she’d played host to the Dark Lord at Wiltshire, preparing for an attack on her mind that simply never came— the Dark Lord had bought her facade as cleanly as the rest of them. But the truth of the matter was that Draco had stepped up to take the Mark willingly, drunk on ideas of empire and power, and then he’d been sent off to Hogwarts, and Lucius had been in Azkaban, out of reach, and she was powerful, but she wasn’t that powerful. Draco hadn’t come home for Christmas, and she couldn’t risk a letter to Severus, and she worried that if she practiced blood magic too much in the Manor, the Dark Lord would pick up on it and she would loose her one advantage.

And then the message from Pomfrey. She’d been at a long, long dinner, in celebration of some raid or something, and had been dismissed when the Dark Lord’s mind turned back to business, only to come back to a summons. She’d gone at once, her heart pounding— injured in a fight with another student, he’s stable now— and the hospital wing had been dark, and Draco had been lying there, wrapped in gauze—

Weasley, Potter? Something gone wrong in an attack against Dumbledore? She had been prepared for almost anything, but not for Draco to sit up and start talking about running, and then for a witch who turned out to be Hermione Granger— Hermione Granger, who she had been hearing stories about for years— to start offering escape routes. 

She remembers it like a fever dream, the way the girl had lead them through the castle to a room that shivered and then she apparated them out of, landing in a distant city with smog curdling the sky. The decaying townhouse, and the way she’d bleed power into the filthy air. The second wand— had this muggleborn been doing illegal magic all along— and Granger incanting the kinds of wards that would have made the Blacks in Grimmauld envious (was that the Black crest on her hand?), and by the time they were inside, Narcissa was sure of one thing, and one thing only: if she was still loyal to the Dark Lord, she would bend all the rules and convince her to take the Mark. 

Narcissa, loving only two people and having just fled the Dark Lord with the clothes on her back, wanted nothing of the sort. She took note of the ring (it was the Black Heir ring, in fact, which Sirius had surely given to Potter, and she was good enough with blood magic to feel the way it thrummed with threads of power— what had the three of them done?) and accepted the fact that she owed a life-debt to a Weasley and a Potter and Hermione Granger, a muggleborn and more powerful at seventeen than she had any right to be, and fixed up the row house. The story had come out from Draco in bits and pieces, and she’d added Millicent Bulstrode, of all people, to the list. She’d never thought much of the house— Damocles had married some French girl, and hadn’t shown his face in Britain since— but she’s clearly a Slytherin, through and through. You’re a prat but you’re our prat, Draco had repeated, with a core of astonishment in his voice. 

The Malfoy elves were only too happy to abandon the Wiltshire and take up residence somewhere without blood on the floor and bodies to bury, and they brought the essentials with them— namely, Narcissa’s collection of books on blood magic. It took her the better part of two months to work out how to lift the Dark Mark from Draco’s skin, two months and almost more magic that she had to give, but she’d done it. At present, Draco was asleep still, and she’d left a note— her absences had grown more frequent over the summer, with Lucius broken out from Azkaban. She imagined he had payed dearly for her and Draco’s escape, but he was alive, at least, and he wouldn’t begrudge it. Merlin, she misses him. 

And that’s why she’s here, as the August heat shimmers in the Stroke-on-Trent air. Reading past the headlines revealed a decided shift in the agenda for the Wizengmont, and it’s only a matter of time before the laws the Blacks spent so long championing are dusted off and put into practice. And she’s not sure, exactly, where she stands on blood purity these days— she owes her and Draco’s life to a muggleborn, but the idea of Draco marrying anyone less than a Pureblood still makes her stomach turn— but she understands love, at least. The wards fold open with enough fiddling— Andi has become a women she does not know, but there is a core to her magic that is still deeply familiar— and she knocks three times.

It is a long moment before the door is jerked open, and she finds herself staring down the shaft of her oldest sister’s wand. She holds up her open hands. “Narcissa,” Andi says icily, lowering her wand slightly, seeming to be more confused than anything else. Her brown hair is pulled back in a functional braid, and she’s wearing muggle clothes— jeans, and a blouse with flowing sleeves. Her face is creased with wrinkles, but her eyes are the same: intelligent, and burning.

“Andromeda,” says Narcissa. “May I come in?”

Inside, the house is airy and beautiful, filled with light in a way that Narcissa can tell is a refutation of Grimmauld and the stuffy manor they grew up in. Vines climb banisters; leaves spill out of elegant vases. She hands over her wand when asked; the both of them know she is still dangerous without it, and Narcissa appreciates the small offer of trust. Andromeda puts the kettle on the hob, which the muggle sort, but summons the mugs from the cabinets. The chai smell envelopes the kitchen, like it did in their childhood.

“Word on the street,” says Andromeda finally, leaning against the far counter with her arms crossed. “Is that you took Draco and ran.”

“The Dark Lord Marked him,” Narcissa admits, and Andromeda’s eyes widen. “Sent him back to Hogwarts on a suicide mission to kill Dumbledore.”

“Snape did that,” says Andromeda. “Wasn’t that— wasn’t that always the plan?”

“Probably,” says Narcissa. “He just wanted to make a point to Lucius first, I suppose. About his failure at the Ministry.”

“But you— but you got him out,” says Andromeda, slowly. 

“With help,” Narcissa admits, begrudgingly. “Potter, and the youngest Weasley boy. And— Hermione Granger.”

Andromeda nods, her eyes narrowing slightly. “I’ve met her. The brightest wix of the age, from what Nymphadora tells me.” 

Nymphadora. The niece Narcissa has never met. She feels a rush of affection for Andi— even disowned, she still named her child something completely off-the-handle. 

“She really is,” says Narcissa, hoping Andi will read is as the peace offering it is. “She— she organized our escape, warded our safe house. I doubt the Dark Lord could get in.”

“So you’re safe, then? You and Draco?” Andi asks.

Narcissa nods. “Yes. Draco’s a little stir-crazy at times, but I am home schooling him through his NEWT-level classes.”

Andi stirs her tea for a long moment, and then looks at her, and it’s like being under veritaserum. “So if you are safe— and you have been for months— why come here?”
Narcissa draws herself up, like she used to draw herself up at Hogwarts, all those years ago, when she was wasn’t pretending. “I can read between the lines of transfer of power. The Dark Lord has the Ministry in his grasp, does he not?” Andromeda gives a slight, pained nod. “They’ll put the laws into affect. About muggleborns. Ted—“

She doesn’t think she’s ever said her brother-in-law’s name out loud before. Andromeda bristles at it. 

“We have contingency plans,” she says, curtly. 

“What?” asks Narcissa, sharp right back. “Hide him here, where you have lived for twenty years? Let him go on the lam and try to evade the Death Eaters?”

Andi’s face colors, bright splotches appearing on her checks. “I should have known— after all these years, and you come back to gloat—“

“I come back to offer a solution!” yells Narcissa, surprised by the loudness of her voice. Andi opens her mouth and then shuts it again, staring at her. Narcissa leans across the kitchen island, tea forgotten. “I have a warded house in the muggle suburbs. I have a son who would dearly love to see a face other than mine, and would benefit greatly from learning with someone as skilled as Ted. And I— “ Andi’s mouth has fallen open again, and something about seeing her unflappable, enterally smirking older sister rattled enables her to go on. “I suppose it’s about high time I got to know my brother-in-law, isn’t it?”

The kitchen is as quiet as a tomb, for a long moment. Narcissa is shaking, and her magic feels close to the surface, like condensation on a window pane. 

“You hate him,” Andi says, with the bitterness of thirty years in her. “You’ve always hated him, and everyone like him. Don’t pretend things are different now, just because the Dark Lord hurt someone you love.”

Narcissa swallows, feeling her own checks flush. She thinks of last summer, sitting in the living room with Severus and turning away from anything that might have been friendship because she couldn’t afford it. She thinks of that last year at Hogwarts, when she’d received a terse letter from her mother informing her of what Andi had done, and how she had enchanted the Howler with her own two hands. She thinks of them as children, down in the fields in Bristol, frogspawn and accidental magic, and how as much as she’s tried to deny it, shrink from it, the love has lasted all this way.

“You love him,” says Narcissa. “And I love you.” Andi recoils from this as if she has been struck. “Does it have to be more complicated than that?”

They stare at each other for a long moment, and then Andi reaches up and wipes at her face. “After all this time?” she asks.

“Always,” says Narcissa, like an oath.

And then, for the first time since she was seventeen, she has her sister in her arms. 

______________

August is sticky, unyielding, and George supposes he always figured being on the run would be far more exciting than brewing potions in the decaying muggle motel Ron picked out and Hermione warded to the gills back in July. So now they’re in Islington, and the shop is boarded up (or maybe burned to the ground— they haven’t been back to check) and somehow, George has become the go-to brewer for the Order. 

And all that brewing is being done in three bathtubs in a condemned motel, with the walls in between the bathrooms knocked out, and Fred’s best attempts at interior decorating to keep him company (he’d done several pictures of You-Know-Who, in gilded frames, with the worst noses possible.) Right now, he’s tending to a carefully steeping cauldron of polyjuice, one of nerve replenisher, and a few more specialized ones— Peruvian Instant Darkness powder, but possibly as a liquid sort of grenade; a kind of liquid protego, which George has been perfecting for the past six months; and an invisibility potion, which is fairly standard, but he hasn’t attempted before. 

“Going alright?” asks Fred, when he turns up from his evening walk around the neighborhood, takeaway from the fish-and-chips place in hand. They eat it at the table they transfigured last week— it’s a bit rickety, but it works. Outside, the twilight is falling in golden waves, and even as he slathers his chips in vinegar (Fred swiped a whole bottle from the shop), George feels a longing for the Burrow. Last summer, they’d popped in after dinner a couple times a week, just in time for a Quidditch scrimmage, and now—

Well, they don’t have their pictures in the Wanted section of the Prophet yet, but it’s probably only a matter of time. 

“Business as usual,” George tells him. Outside, the sound of the traffic. On the table is the letter Hedwig delivered at midnight yesterday, Hermione’s reply to their questions about improving the wards. From across the table, Fred just gives him the look, which is part their mum and part their dad and part all Fred— that I know you’re lying but I also know what you really feel, so you don’t have to spell it out to me look that George has managed to receive at least once a week for the past nineteen or so years.  

Fred pops a chip in his mouth and then stands, taking the letter with him. “Bloody hell, ‘Mione,” he mutters, like they both did when they opened it for the first time. “This is a full textbook.”

“You know it’ll hold up, though,” George says; Fred nods absentmindedly, already tracing the spells with his wand. George reaches across the table and drags Fred’s tray of chips over, watching his twin begin to cast and trying to remember when Hermione Granger just became a fixture of their lives, as good as another sister. It couldn’t have taken that long— Ron was Ron. There’s still a part of George that’s shocked he actually went to Hufflepuff— Bill and Charlie and Percy could have certainly fit better in the other houses, but they chose Gryffindor like all the Weasleys before them.

But maybe he shouldn’t be. Ron has always been, in his own way, the most enigmatic and quicksilver of the lot of them, lost in the noise until he wasn’t. Until he emerged with two best mates thicker than thieves and a whole host of friends and strategy for winning the war. George finds himself grinning at the thought, before it slips into a well of melancholy. Who would have thought, when they were third-years and Ron had just met Harry and Hermione, that the three of them would be on a quest to defeat the Dark Lord?

Who would have thought they’d be here at all, with war to fight and potions brewing in bathtubs in the periphery of the muggle world?

George slumps over the table and eats the rest of Fred’s chips as his brother wards the motel like Hermione instructed, and lets the wave of exhaustion crash over him. Everything since the Ministry fell— since the news came through that Snape killed Dumbledore, really— is one long blur of moving, running, hiding. Trying to secure their suppliers and manufacture powerful items to help the Order out, while trying to stay alive, and hope their family was holding their own. Their mum is running logistics for the Order, George knows; their dad is going back into the office, keeping his head down about the new regime; Fleur’s on the frontlines, with the Order, and Bill is solving their problems— tricky wards, cursed items. Charlie’s still working on their over-seas connections; he wouldn’t put it past Ginny to be sneaking out of Hogwarts to set shit on fire; Ron is on a quest to end the Dark Lord; Perce—

Just the thought of Percy is like a physical blow. Despite all the teasing, and the natural tension that comes when one party is a Prefect and then Head Boy, and the other party are crime lords, George had always thought he was quite close to Percy. The little interludes when he’d need help on an essay; the bashing of the exes; the fact that all three of them supported Stevenage in British League and used to sit around the wireless in the high parts of summer; how Percy would come watch their matches, even if he had studying to do. 

How deep does his loyalty go, George wonders, like picking at a scab. Is it just to the institution, or does he believe all the pureblood nonsense? 

Would he kneel at You-Know-Who’s feet, kiss the robes, put the Mark on his arm? 

Despite the warmth of the motel, George shivers. 

Fred wards with a tight, controlled focus, and George watches him with the soft awe he’s always held for his brother’s spell-work. Despite their appearances, from the beginning, it was apparent their magics were spilling in different directions: Fred was inventing spells before they were even out of third-year; George found brewing effortless, especially when it wasn’t being taught by Snape. He thinks of the best moments in the new shop— early in the morning, or late at night, when they’d been working on new things, Lee sketching up an advertising campaign in the corner, Quidditch on the wireless. But even then, the war had been beating at the window panes, and Lee had been the one who’d pointed out how badly something like Peruvian Instant Darkness powder could go, in the wrong hands, and so they’d pulled it from the shelves. 

George remembers Harry, fourteen and still shaking from whatever had happened after the maze, handing over the sack filled with a fortune, something dark and burning in his eyes. If you don’t want it, I’m going to pitch it in the lake, he’d said, and George had believed him. 

They’d taken it. And now they’re here, fighting a war from the shadows. Innovating, inventing, equipping. The pager Ron’s friend Justin made will buzz with a message from Kingsley or one of their other points of contact in the Order, and they’ll apparate out to the moors and help raid a manor house, or come up to a solution to a thorny problem, or provide supplies for an infiltration. The motel won’t last forever, George knows— they’ll have to keep moving. Try to meet up with Lee, or Bill; keep their options open in case the Trio needs them.

Fred finishes the warding, and opens the door— outside, it’s begun to rain, a sticky late summer rain that seems to cling to every surface like oil. The air reeks of asphalt and petrichor and smog, and George stands to join him, staring out across the cracking asphalt to the chain-link fence. 

“Alright?” George asks, putting his elbow up on his brother’s shoulder. 

“Yeah,” says Fred. George can tell by his stance that he’s plotting— there’s the restlessness to it. Ginny has it to, George has noticed, while him and Ron both have a kind of reserve, stepping up to the plate once the gambit has been set in motion, ready to fill in the cracks. “Just— what do you suppose happened to Ollivander’s stock of wands after the Death Eaters nabbed him?”

George can already tell they’ll be ending the night with bloody knuckles and either a bag full of wands or a bunch of Death Eaters on their tail, and he finds he doesn’t mind much either way. He’s gotten good at waiting, over the years— you need a bit of patience to pull off a coup of a prank— but the itching in his blood to get out and do something is building, ready to fight. He thinks about their small reserve of polyjuice, and the brooms they have stowed away, and the fireworks that are powerful enough now to work as explosives (Ginny had recommended some excellent literature about home-made bombs), and how they could probably get away on the Tube. 

“Didn’t the Prophet this morning say something about a new patrol force headquartered in Diagon?” George says. “Maybe we could get two birds with one stone.”

Fred turns back to him, and he’s got his crime lord grin licking up his lips, and George feels like they’re fourteen again, up late figuring out how to enchant the banners in the Great Hall to turn from Slytherin green to Gryffindor red at just the right moment to give Snape a conniption (bastard deserved it, even more so knowing what they know now). And he knows, he knows war is no time for games, but sometimes it’s easier this way.

They’re young. They’re powerful. They’re lucky. Why not?

“Let’s do it,” George says, and around them, the rain sets in in earnest.

______________

A year ago, if you had told Mundungus that Albus Dumbledore would be dead, and there would be no one in the Order holding his leash, he would have sworn he’d be off in America right now. After all, the nebulous web of favors he owed the bastard were the only reason he, a master thief, was in the Order to begin with— who cared about blood or power or You-Know-Who?

And yet here he was, apparating with a thief’s precision to the top step of Grimmauld— the Death Eaters on watch today were hulking, disinterested brutes, and didn’t even stir— and knocking on the door of Headquarters, with news and parcels and the spoils of war.

When had it slipped, Mundungus wonders, as Kreacher lets him in and then shuts the door to the brilliant September light. Somewhere in there, the three of them had stopped looking at him with disgust and started looking at him with appreciation: you can do thing we don’t. Want to help us out? Back then— when Sirius had been alive, and the house had been full of laughter and Molly Weasley’s cooking— he’d done it mostly out of self-serving interest: all the errands were funded by the Potter vaults, Granger was terrifying, and the Weasleys had that slick crime-lord mania that warmed his cold heart. Now—

“Master Fletcher is here,” calls Kreacher, and there’s the sound of chairs scrapping, and the three teenagers’s heads pop out from the kitchen. Mundungus doesn’t think he’s ever had a scrap of anything remotely paternal in his entire life, but for the three of them— something like an uncle? A stand-in godfather? Harry seems to have gotten at least a little bit of sleep, though his hair is wild; Ron’s all long limbs and he’s got creases on his face from a nap on the table; Hermione has ink on her mouth from where she’s been chewing on her quill. 

“Dung!” says Ron, with a grin. “We were wondering when you’d be back. Stay for dinner?” 

Considering that Kreacher has clearly adopted some of Molly’s recipes, and any food is better than dodgy street fare, Mundungus acquiesces without argument. Ron clears away stacks of paper from the table, and Mundungus still feels a bit bad about filching the locket— if he’d known they wanted it, he wouldn’t have— but Harry didn’t get mad. “It was in the discard pile,” he’d said. “How could you have known?” It’s the Slytherin in him, Mundungus reckons.

“Sure you don’t want to break into her manor?” Mundungus asks them, halfway through dinner. Hermione had let out a squeal of delight at the stack of books he’d procured for her (she hadn’t asked, and he hadn’t told her, about how some of them had come from libraries); Ron appreciated the blueprints to the Ministry (a bitch to lift, but in the end he’d set the whole archive on fire to cover his tracks); and Harry had snapped up the correspondence from the Order with a glint in his eyes. “No matter how much security those people think they dump into them, it’s never really enough.”

“Two birds, one stone, if we hit the Ministry though,” says Ron, through a spoonful of potatoes. “Cover our tracks better.”

Mundungus has picked up a few stray pieces of information about this locket— he remembers the coldness of it, how it always kept reaching out to him, like there was something alive in there (he’d batted it away with his magic, uninterested in being bloody possessed, thank you very much); he knew the Trio had been given some secret quest to defeat the Dark Lord; he had recognized Slytherin’s mark on the damn thing. However, he was no Ravenclaw, and curiosity got thieves killed day in and day out. If there was something the Trio thought he should know, they would tell him, and then he’d run the errand or do the job they needed him to do. 

There was still money involved— my usual rate, he said, when Hermione handed him a list of titles, or Ron asked him if maybe he could slip into a few manors around the country and add names to family trees in codexes. But it wasn’t about the money, hadn’t been for some time now.

He’d been a scumbag loner for as long as he could remember, Gryffindor only as crime lords were— no chivalry, no bravery to speak of. Loving nothing, and no one, except himself. But—

With Dumbledore dead, it had been like a chain had been lifted off some door inside his mind. There was no debt, no bond, keeping him here. He could flee in the dead of night, and remake himself as the principle thief of some American city, robbing muggle manor houses blind. 

But with an exit lined up, he’d looked around. 

Tonks, an excellent drinking buddy with gossip in spades. Flitwick, who’d never given up on him. Arthur Weasley, who treated him with far more civility and politeness than a man like him deserved. Moody, who hadn’t like him, but respected him, like they were equals. 

The twins, who reminded him so much of Molly’s brothers, who looked up to him as a kind of mentor. Ginny, who was scarier than most Death Eaters he’d met, who’d asked for a new wand and now was probably using it to terrorize the Dark Lord’s forces. 

The Trio.

He had overheard, once, from a very drunk McGonagall, that apparently all of them had been offered Gryffindor, and all of them had said no. And looking around at them now, he sees the places where those tracks could have gone— Hermione’s ability to discard rules at a moment’s notice; Ron’s keen strategic mind; Harry’s indignation and sense of justice. But three Gryffindors would have looked at him the way Dumbledore had looked at him: like an asset. Like a thing to be used. And the three of them, he thinks, look at him like he’s a friend.

Like if he didn’t make it back one of these cooling fall nights, they would mourn him. 

He steals and smuggles and lies for them, wards bending under his sure fingers. He brings them the fat of Order messages, the things they talk about and then don’t decide to tell the Trio, like they forget who’s going to win them the war. He answers all their questions about heists, and teaches Hermione a suite of lock-picking charms that took him years to master and only take her an afternoon. He breaks into ancient manors and gets muggleborns out, and the portkeys are sometimes Flitwick’s and sometimes McGonagall’s and sometimes Hermione’s. He steals wands from graves for the escapees, helps set them up in distant cities with aliases and new lives, funded by the gold Harry is paying him for other jobs, and the Order might not think much of him, but the Trio always lights up when he walked into Grimmauld, and maybe that’s enough.

He’s a scumbag, and a bastard, and a thief, and a crime lord. He’s never really loved anyone more than he loves himself. A little too much like Dumbledore for comfort sometimes, really; he just didn’t have those infernal twinkling eyes to hide it behind. But as he sits around the table, laughing at one of Ron’s jokes and accepting Harry’s offer to stay the night— we have plenty of rooms (does he know he’s been crashing in muggle motels and inns, living out of a locker at Waterloo station)— he feels a great swell of affection for all of them, for these children leading the war effort. He could leave, of course he could, but Harry needs him. Cares about him, in a way Dumbledore never did. 

And sure, there’s a war on. But for the first time, it feels like it’s his war too. 

______________

Three weeks into the term, Flitwick sits up in his office, the newest charms journals unread, and contemplates, quite seriously, murder. 

Alecto and Amycus are easy. He taught both of them; they were bumbling, dull, slightly sadistic idiots then, and they’re not much better now. Amycus’s spin on Dark Arts is a farce— Flitwick’s pretty sure he could do a better job (and certainly, he thinks, Severus could do much better, but when is teaching a ever priority at Hogwarts)— and Alecto’s babble about muggles is more drivel than Binns’s sludge. Even the youngest, most impressionable students would be bored to death long before they started believing muggles were little more than animals. 

He’s never needed Avada, but it’s always been on the table, for someone like him, and frankly the twins aren’t worthy of anything more interesting. If he hadn’t taught Tom Riddle, he might be surprised, with his choice of placement— even he could tell you that Rockwood would have managed to seduce countless souls to the allure of the Dark Arts, and someone charismatic and subtle like Lucius or Rosier would have at least managed to keep students awake in muggle studies. 

But all of those people are smart, cunning, and powerful— the sort of people someone like Severus Snape, given a school year and a set mind, could have made into allies. And if there was one thing You-Know-Who couldn’t possibly abide, it was the idea that someone might be building a power base to undermine him.

The Carrows would be easy. The problem would be Severus. 

Flitwick buries his face in his hands, and thinks, with great longing, of Switzerland— Philomena’s house, and the great-grandchildren, and the dark, star-studded nights. He had given himself a month, and had, in the end, only been there a week, the press of the war too great. With Albus dead, he and Minerva had been the most powerful casters on the rotation, and he had spent long nights warding muggle structures, protecting graveyards from being distributed, and helping Minerva retool the castle wards. 

Of course, Severus had come back anyway, as Headmaster. Installed directly by You-Know-Who.

Filius feels old, in a way he hasn’t felt in years. He is old, he knows— older than Albus was, even— but he seldom feels it. There’s always something new to learn, some new problem to solve, some piece of theory to unravel, some student to help.

All of that is still happening, he supposes. It’s just that the problems are Miss Li, asking for help with a warding equation they both know is Miss Granger’s work; or a first-year who was only recently made aware of her wizarding relations (someone is forging family trees, Filius has ascertained, but the less he knows about that, the better) breaking down in tears in his office, homesick and afraid; or Miss Lovegood with a black eye and a split-lip, claiming it’s from a fight, but Filius knows curse damage when he sees it.

His students are hurting, and being hurt, and Hogwarts has never exactly been safe, despite how much he’s wanted it to be, but this— this is unacceptable. 

And so he’s back again, at murder. 

And Severus.

If they made the move, they would have to commit to it, of course. They would have to trust in their own tremendous power (his and Minerva’s and Pomona’s; no one was trusting Slughorn with anything) to hold the castle against the onslaught You-Know-Who would surely set upon them. But the walls are ancient, and the wards are good, and Filius has always bought a bit too much into the stories about Hogwarts having her own sense of self, and surely if she did, she wouldn’t appreciate someone like the Dark Lord, right? 

But then the war would be here. And he is not Albus, who would rant and rave about the greater good, but even he can admit that a few rounds of the cutting curse and an awful year at the castle is far superior to not surviving the affair. 

(He has nightmares about small bodies strewn in the foyer, and it hurts in ways nothing has hurt since Fey died.)

His eyes rove over the clutter of his office— Miss Granger has his best books, and so it feels a little empty, but anything for her— and admits to himself that if the positions were reversed, and if it had been Slughorn who had turned out all along to have a Mark on his arm and a dog-like loyalty to a monster, reaping the position of Headmaster for his loyalty, and Severus was still Head of Slytherin, he might take the gambit. 

Because Minerva was rawly, brutally powerful; Pomona was emotionally savvy and truly connected with the students; and he himself was clever, and brilliant, and skilled. But if they had Severus too—

He had known, what Severus was. About the Mark on his arm and the blood on his hands. But the man had been a wreak, flinching from sudden movements and bone-thin and clearly grief-stricken, and then—

Filius still remembers, with bracing clarity, the night midway through the spring of that first year, when Severus Snape had slipped into his office like a shadow and told him that he had some concerns about the home life of one of his students. A fifth-year, Miss Obryk, who was at the top of her class and a Prefect to boot. He’d blinked, stunned, but then Severus had laid it all out in detail, standing like a statute with his arms pulled in close, like he thought it wouldn’t be taken seriously. 

But evidence was evidence. They filed a case with DLME, with Filius’s name on all the paperwork, and Miss Obryk went home with her best friend from Slytherin for the summer, who’s parents later adopted her. 

The first case, but not the last, and after the first one Severus hadn’t doubted he would take it seriously. Somewhere in there, had it become a friendship? The occasionally late-night stop-in to share a unhinged piece of gossip (by the time it got to Filius, the whole castle probably already knew it, but Severus was always accommodating) or offer praise to one of his best, or rant about whichever moron was filling the post this year. Severus had a dark, ruthless sense of humor that Flitwick was both delighted and scandalized by, and he was brilliant, and ruthlessly curious. Too much of a survivalist to be a true Ravenclaw in this timeline, but in another life—

The thing with Avada is that it requires need. The caster has to want the target dead, like they would want a patronus: soul magic, tapping into the very core of yourself. And the flaw in the plan, of murdering the Death Eaters and fortifying Hogwarts, is that despite everything, he doesn’t want Severus Snape dead. 

Where that leaves them, he doesn’t know.

The term ticks on, and Filius finds himself observing, acquiring facts with nowhere to put them. Miss Li and Mr. Goldstien and Miss Lovegood are most certainly involved in Mr. Longbottom and Miss Weasley’s underground syndicate, but he keeps that information to himself. He is no Pomona or Mr. Nott or Miss Greenglass, who can cause the Carrows to sidestep their original intentions with a casual ease, but he is a Charms Master, and he uses his tricks to his fullest advantage. It is a work of six weeks, to weave a web of notice-me-not charms tailored specifically to the Carrows over the first-and-second years; it is a slightly more complex piece of magic, to engender in them a deep dislike for the fifth floor of the castle, which contains the Room and the assumed headquarters of the resistance, but he manages it. He can manage quite a good wandless obliviate or cheering charm, and what of it if he spends an afternoon teaching Miss Li and Mr. Nott how exactly one might cast a charm over a piece of print media so only those friendly to the cause can read it? It is purely academic in nature. 

And what of it, if he finds himself watching Severus closely, as fall turns over into winter? He is what he is; he did in fact murder Albus. And yet—

Underneath the billowing robes, and the speeches lauding the Dark Lord, and the overt favoritism towards those from Pureblood families, Filius sees glimpses of the man he thought of as a friend. Because how could Severus Snape be so naive as to think Mr. Nott was loyal to the Dark Lord, when he’d been fast friends with Mr. Potter for the last six years? Because how could Severus Snape be so foolish as to continue to employ someone like Minerva, who he had to know was running the Order of the Phoenix still? 

And it’s hard to believe, really, that the man— barely a man, really, then— who’d come to his office expecting not to be believed had spent six years stringing along Mr. Potter in an elaborate ruse of affection, no matter what Minerva had told him after one-too-many in her quarters. 

What do with any of it, Filius isn’t really sure. But he watches. He uses his power when he can, when he needs to. When Miss Li passes him an equation from Miss Granger, he spends weeks and weeks on it until it’s solved, no questions asked. When Minerva talks about coups at the Head of House meetings (well, three-quarters of the Heads of Houses— they weren’t going to invite bloody Slughorn, now were they), Filius sides with Pomona, who is advocating for subterfuge, and who also doesn’t seem to think Severus is evil incarnate for murdering Albus. 

(They’d all wanted to do it at some point.)

Fall deepens into winter, and occasionally he catches glimpses of Severus walking back up to the castle late at night, as if he’s come back from a Death Eater meeting, unsteady on his feet. The equations capitulate under his power, and Mr. Potter and Mr. Weasley and Miss Granger seem to be successfully staying under the radar.

He is no frontline fighter; he is no hero. But he offers what he can, in the gloom of the dying fall and the bleakness of the castle, and it is taken up with open arms. 

______________

The seventh-year dorm in Ravenclaw feels like a ghost town, but maybe that’s only right. After all, to have it any different would imply there wasn’t a war going on. 

Stephen is gone— he left before the funeral, and had sent him a curt note informing him he wouldn’t be back next year, and probably it would be best if he didn’t write. He and Stephen and Oliver had grown apart as they’d grown up— in first year, they’d been inseparable, a trio of their own, but Stephen had started studying muggle subjects alongside his Hogwarts ones, preparing for a pivot, and Oliver had started sucking up to the Purebloods with more money than care, and Terry had been a Prefect, always off on rounds or in the library. Maybe it had never been meant to last, but he still finds himself looking for the flash of gold of Stephen’s hair at the breakfast table, or expect to hear Oliver’s scoffing laugh a few steps behind him. 

Oliver, too, is gone, but that story has the ending Terry feels like he should have seen coming. It’s the same sort of story they tell about Snape, isn’t it— half-blood with too much brilliance and not enough morality sees the way the world is going, and decides to go with it. Does he have the Mark now, Terry wonders sometimes, with a morbid fascination (two years ago he would have called the boy a brother), or is he just waiting in the wings, fashioning curses and impressing the Dark Lord with his bag of tricks?

And so the seventh-years are him, a half-blood who’s greatest achievement thus far is a literature review published in Magical Water and Wastewater, and Anthony Goldstien, who Terry doesn’t think he’s seen more than a handful of times this term— he’s certainly not attending classes— and Micheal Corner, who is a bit skittish, probably because up until three months ago, everyone is sure he was a muggleborn. Parkinson and her posse have gone as far to openly dispute it— who faked your family tree, mudblood— but it must have held up if he’s here. 

His parents hadn’t wanted him to come back, and he almost let them talk him into it. His older siblings were off abroad, in places where they made less strict divisions between squibs and wizards— they might not have been accepted to Hogwarts, but his older sisters had pursued runes and potions, and his older brother was a magizoologist. His dad, an Arithmancy specialist, had a colleague in Japan who’d offered to host the family until they could find a place of their own in Tokyo, and Flitwick had ins at Mahoutokoro. Terry had written the letter in his mind so many times over the summer— Dear Professor, I regret to inform you… your help would be most appreciated… I have vastly enjoyed my time at Hogwarts… — and yet he had never actually put quill to parchment. 

No one in his house had thought he’d actually get a Hogwarts letter— he’d been ravenously curious about magic as child, like his older siblings— but actually being to cast was on a whole other level. Ravenclaw, his dad had said, when they’d dropped him off at the station, with an air of authority, and here he was, but he’d never told his dad that it hadn’t been that clear cut. How could it had been, when he’d almost agreed to being homeschooled along with the rest of his siblings countless times over the summer; when two or three times a week first year (and less frequently, but still regularly, the later years), he’d thought about going to Flitwick, begging to be sent home. When deep down he’d never thought the wizarding world made any sense— other than maybe Defense, every subject was deeply rooted in theory, which didn’t require magic, just study. And yet, he was here, and his brilliant siblings weren’t, all because they couldn’t make things fly? 

When even now, he’s still going back through the years, pacing corridors in his mind, wondering if there’s something he could have said, done, differently, to have Oliver and Stephen beside him still. 

You’ve got a ravenous curiosity, child, the Hat had said. But all this loyalty— the eagles will never know what to do with that, you know. It’s a House of individualists, of obsessives. Hufflepuff, though—

The bias had gotten to him, he’ll admit it. His dad had always talked fondly about his years at Hogwarts, in Ravenclaw, and so when the Hat had offered him the choice, it had been easy. But he wonders now, sometimes. Flitwick would have still been his mentor, of course, and Hermione could have still been his academic rival, and could he have had everything? 

Probably not; it doesn’t work like that. But he can feel the ghostly fingers of what could have been digging deep, back here despite all the opportunities for exits. Somewhere inside him, pounding on the doors, is a loyalist who wants to make the world better, and it might be a little bit shit, but here he is. 

Luna Lovegood slid into the seat next to him at dinner at the tail-end of the first week back, with a print copy of the Quibbler— banned, but far superior to the Prophet— and a new fake coin. “We’re back,” she’d said, her pale face serious. “See you there.”

The abandoned classroom was bristling with wards already, but he added a few more, just for good measure, tricky academic ones he’d only learned in fifth year, to one-up Hermione (it hadn’t worked, but he had tried). Inside, he saw a sea of faces, from his fellow seventh-year Prefects all the way down to Anthony’s twin younger sisters— one was in Slytherin, one was in Gryffindor— who already apparently had a small knot of friends. Nott had done something brutal with blood magic— the quill bit his signature into the back of his hand— but when he so much as thought about betraying the re-formed society, his tongue locked up. Someone had crossed out Dumbledore’s Army from the top of the list and written Trio’s Army, and there was no denying it. They weren’t fighting this war for a dead Headmaster who had routinely failed to hire anyone useful. It was about Potter, and Weasley, and Hermione. 

His crush on her had petered out over the summer, but she was still his rival (his friend?) and he missed the feeling of smirking at her from the other side of the library. The war, you understand, she’d said, when she’d told him they couldn’t go out; he hadn’t understood— sure, it was in the headlines, and sure the Trio had gone to the Ministry, but weren’t they at school now? Wasn’t it safe?

With the castle seething around them, and the Prophet printing Potter’s face on the front page as Undesirable Number One, he thinks he might be starting to understand. There was no running from it for them, was there? Potter’s entire life is entwined with it; Hermione is as muggleborn as they come; and Weasley—

Hufflepuff loyalty. Once you were in, you were in.

It’s Daphne Greenglass, with her glittering eyes and sheet of blonde hair, who pulls in all the Prefects in the TA and lays out her agenda, pacing in the center of the classroom, every step deliberate. “You realize that we’re in a position of power here, right? We have got three known enemies in the school, but almost all of the Professors are on our side, and we’ve got almost all of the Prefects. Not to mention the Head Boy and Girl. And we’ve only got a few known enemies.”

“And Pansy doesn’t even really count as a proper enemy,” says Lavender, which elicits a few chuckles, but even Daphne can’t deny it— Parkinson is a bully who’s grown up on stories of conquest, much like Malfoy had.

(What stories had Oliver listened to, been swayed by, Terry wonders, as Daphne primes them with talking points, and deflection strategies, and ideas to subvert the Carrows’s and Snape’s reign over the castle.)

There are moments, sometimes, when Hogwarts still feels like Hogwarts. On late-night patrols with Lisa, deep in esoteric conversations about Runes or Charms, their only company the ghosts. Replying to letters from his hopeful contact for a Mastery, a wastewater specialist in Montreal. Eating an early breakfast the Ravenclaw table, accompanied by Luna and a book. Deep in the stacks, digging and digging for some source; talking to Flitwick about technicalities. But then everything will snap into focus at the lightest touch— the swirl of Snape’s robes out of the corner of his eye; the delivery of the Prophet with headlines implying Potter had been the one to kill Dumbledore; the sheaf of papers Sue Li passes him one evening after a TA meeting— Hermione thought you might be able to help with this? Stabilization charm work? — and even as he picks his way towards a solution for the fiendishly complex equation she’s handed over, the twin feelings mingle in this chest: pride at being asked, and the sheer terror of working on something so clearly for the war. 

Because there’s no hedging now, is there? No running, no ducking behind the facade of an obsessive, emotionally distant Ravenclaw. He came back, even if he didn’t admit it to himself, to fight, in the best way he knew how. 

He thinks about Stephen, asking him not to write, in the long nights in the tower, with only Micheal’s snores to keep him company. He thinks about Oliver, kneeling at the Dark Lord’s feet. Did they think they were clever, slipping the trap, back to the muggle world or siding with the enemy? 

Did it mean nothing, the hours studying, the castle walls, the bond they had? Did it mean nothing, how the new world order the Dark Lord wanted to build was built on bullshit and blood?

Is he the best pick for this? Of course not. He’s Terry Boot, a Ravenclaw who could have been a Hufflepuff in another timeline, but in every one is a nervous academic. He’s smart, but he’s never been powerful— there will be no avadas, no imperios from him. 

But he’s here. And that’s something, isn’t it?

The castle buckles and seethes, and they fight their own tiny mirror of the war in the hallways and corridors and classrooms. Once he solves the first equation for Hermione, Nott— call me Theo, he says, eventually— and Sue draw him into their small circle, where they do work for her. Terry doesn’t know what it’s for, and doesn’t ask. If he were a through-and-through Ravenclaw he would have obsessed over it, but he’s not. There’s a war on and he’s not. 

A nerd, and an intellectual obsessive, but also a loyalist who wants to make things better. Who wants to save the world, just a little, maybe. Triage a bite of the damage.

In the failing fall light, Terry Boot cracks his knuckles, sets his jaw, and goes to work the best he knows how. 

______________

He wakes up from the bender with one of the worst hangovers of his life— he’s not sure he’d drunk like this even after Lily and James were murdered— on the couch in Kingsley’s apartment. It’s pouring rain, a thick, oil-like deluge, and Kingsley had left a bucket and a muggle electrolyte drink for him, like an asshole who didn’t keep sober-up potions around.

(Like a friend, Lupin thinks, chugging the drink and then lying back down on the cushions. He can feel the weight of the wards around him.)

The darkness drags him back down.

In the dreams, Harry’s face becomes James’s, and they’re at Hogwarts but Weasley and Granger are there, sitting beneath the branches of the Whomping Willow, and when he looks up he swears he can see Lily, and Sirius, and Peter in the distance, but then it’s just the wind, and then the cold. He turns back to James— who is Harry, but is not Harry— and it’s like standing in the kitchen at Grimmauld all over again. Harry with James’s face and Lily’s eyes and the way Snape had always held himself, angry but also so, so scared. I don’t know why you’re here, Remus, but I don’t think it’s for either of us. I think it’s for you.

The dream changes. He’s back in the hovels in the north, the cold rain soaking through to his bones, and the werewolves snarling and snapping. But there, in the middle of them, sitting cross-legged and eating beans out of a can, is Sirius.

I did what I needed to do, Sirius says. Why couldn’t you?

Rain. The smell of toast, and eggs, and the crackle of the wireless. Ipswich, Remus deduces, after a long moment, after the announcers mention the lack of Krum one too many times. A clattering, and then Kingsley cussing like a muggle. Remus pushes himself upright to greet the tiny studio apartment— a sixth-floor place in very muggle SoHo, which Kingsley has had for years and no Death Eater would be caught dead near. He’d been here a few times, in that year between the exoneration and the end, when Sirius would drag him along to parties. 

Kingsley dumps a plate of toast and slightly burned eggs on the coffee table, along with a glass of orange juice, and then sits down on the floor opposite, propping his elbow up on the wood. He’s wearing a muggle collared shirt, but has his wand holstered on his arm, and he looks about as serious as Remus has ever seen him. He’d been a few years above them at Hogwarts, but has always felt younger, to Remus— maybe because he went off to do his Mastery, and didn’t spend the last years of his adolescence watching his friends die. 

Remus has always been jealous of him, and also a bit attracted to him. “Eat up,” he says, nudging the plate closer. “Can’t have Tonk’s baby-daddy dying on my watch.”

He picks up the toast and takes a nibble, despite the protest of his stomach. He resists the desire to piece together the string of events that transpired between fleeing Grimmauld and waking up here— a shit ton of alcohol and some very bad choices— and tries to go for a grimace at Kingsley, which surely looks pitiful coming from him in his state. “So she told you?”

“I’ve known since she did.” He reaches over and takes a crust of toast from Lupin’s plate. “If it’s any consolation, she thought you might go a bit mad once she told you.”

A bit mad was perhaps an understatement. They’d been seeing each other, in a very shady backroom sort of way, since about last November. He’s honestly not sure what was in it for her, only that one night after a very demoralizing Order meeting she’d grabbed his arm before he could apparate away, and whispered something flirty and hot in his ear. He’d thought it would have been a one-time thing— both of them swung the other way more often than not, and in every corner there was Sirius’s ghost, and he was certainly a bit too old for her— but then she was there, again and again. 

It’s not healthy, but both of them had lost too much in the last year to do healthy things. The idea that she could be pregnant had never occured to him until she’d sat him down and told him. 

No easy way to say this, she’d said, and in the pub lights her face had seemed old, and exhausted, like she hadn’t bothered to morph her real emotions away. But I’m pregnant, and considering you’re the only man I’ve been with in the past year, it’s yours.

The last time he’d learned about a pregnancy had been Lily’s. They’d had all the Marauders over for dinner and announced it breathlessly before the pasta was even done, too excited to keep it in. Sirius had been beyond ecstatic, hugging James and pulling Lily into a waltz in the kitchen; Peter had been happy, but in a way that looking back feels cheap and fake. Remus remembers feeling shock, and joy, but also fear. A bone deep terror, over what kind of world this child would inherit. 

I know we’re not— well, whatever we’re doing, it doesn’t scream family unit, but I thought you should know. 

What would James think of all this, Remus wonders, sitting on Kingsley’s couch eating toast. What would Sirius? 

(What would Peter, because despite everything there is still a part of him that misses his friend, the one who failed his electives to study up on the transformation methods, and showed him around the castle, and always knew where he would be hiding when he was sulking. There is a part of him— traitorous, to James and Lily and Harry, but there— that is glad he’s alive, even though he’s a sell-out. Sirius was ready to kill him on sight, had him written off the moment all truths were laid bare, but Remus didn’t have those parts of him.)

You sound like Snape, Harry had yelled at him, and it was a low blow, but maybe it’s true. Harry was important because he was James’s son, not because he was Harry. And that was Snape’s whole motivation for the obsession and inability to deliver Harry straight to You-Know-Who for the past six years, wasn’t it— the fact he had Lily’s eyes. 

How can the wound still feel as new as it did when it was fresh sometimes? I knocked someone up, James, he’d have said, and James would have done a double-take and then dragged him into the house, poured out a measure of fire-whiskey and then they would have talked it all through, figured it out. 

Instead, he’d spent a week tracking down Harry, like he was some kind of stand-in, and showed up at his door, begging to be invited on a quest, like he was seventeen again. Like they were going to recreate the Marauders, as if Harry and Weasley and Granger weren’t closer than he and James and Sirius and Peter had ever hoped to be. 

And then he’d gone out to some muggle dive and had more than enough to drink, with a war on. Like he was inviting death upon himself. 

Which— it wouldn’t be the first time.

“I suppose I did go a little mad,” he says, staring at the toast. He doesn’t know how Kingsley managed to find him— or why he bothered— and isn’t sure he wants to know. 

“Happens to the best of us,” says Kingsley, as Remus does his best to mop up the rest of the plate of food. He takes the plate into the kitchen to wash up, and Remus puts his head in his hands. Maybe so, but Remus doubts Kingsley would have gotten himself into a situation like this in the first place.

“Why did you even come and get me?” he finds himself asking out loud. “It’s not like I’m cut out to be a father. If anything, I’ve just passed down my affliction.”

Kingsley puts the plate down and crosses back over, sitting down on the coffee table this time. His gaze is heavy. Remus is already imaging what Dumbledore would have said in response to such a self-pitying, self-loathing statement, and find the words ring hollow. He owes the man, immensely, but with a bit of distance can admit that he had his own agenda, and wouldn’t have picked Remus over the war. 

(And James would have, every fucking time.)

“Tonks asked me to,” says Kingsley, softly, with a measured cadence, and Remus looks up at him. “I think she feels a bit sorry for your pathetic ass.” Remus lets out a long sigh. “And I— It’s selfish, really. You really could be one of our best in the Order, if you were out on the frontlines. But I think we both know Albus gave you the spy role because of your death wish, not because you were in any shape to sway the werewolves to our side.”

Kingsley’s too smart for his own good. Remus stares down at the cuts on his hand, the scars from a lifetime of transformations. “We’re probably not going to make it out of the shit alive,” says Kingsley, and there’s a hard edge underneath his voice. “I’ve— I’ve come to terms with that. But walking into it isn’t going to help anyone. Aren’t you Gryffindors supposed to be about bravery and justice and doing what’s right?”

“Hat said I could have done well in Ravenclaw,” mumbles Remus, in lieu of any real answer. 

“Yeah, well fuck that Hat,” says Kingsley, after a long moment. “You’re a sad coward, and I’m a Slytherin who’s ready to die for this shit just because my friends are.” Kingsley reaches inside his coat and pulls out a flask, takes a long swig before handing it over. “Tell it to me straight, Remus: do you actually want to die, or do you want to do some good in the world?” There’s a cold hard edge to his continence, and Remus, even exhausted and still a bit hung-over, thinks that if he said he wanted to die, Kingsley might just end it all here, rather than let him continue to drag down the war effort. 

The allure of the green is like a trade wind. Maybe it has been ever since that Halloween, when everything came apart at the seams. 

I think, Harry had said, that you’re a sniveling coward. So that was one child he’d failed, and now there’s another, not even fully in the world yet, but already in danger.

He thinks of James, who’d faced down the Dark Lord on his feet. He thinks of Lily, refusing to stand aside. He thinks of Sirius, taking an AK for two kids who weren’t his, just because they were Harry’s friends. 

He thinks of Harry, looking like James and glaring like Lily and standing like Snape. Harry’s not running, even though he could be— he could have handed the entire quest over to the Order and hunkered down in a safe-house, and here he is, trying to save the world. Maybe the most he could manage is a little reciprocity. 

“I want do some good in the world,” he rasps out, and even hung-over and exhausted, he thinks, for once, that he actually means it. 

Chapter Text

It’s a good plan, Ron reminds himself, as he watches a polyjuiced Harry and a polyjuiced Hermione split from him in the halls of the Ministry. At this point, with the rings and everything, their magic is so densely woven that the illusion won’t completely hold for him— Hermione’s face will shift back into Richard Tennyson’s, and Harry’s will bleed out of Mariah Calloway’s. Divide and conquer is the only way to really pull this off, especially if they want to cover their tracks regarding why they came here at all, and they have the rings for a reason, but even still he hates watching his crew walk away from him.

Like Dung had said: if they’d really just wanted the infernal locket, the easiest thing would have been to break into Umbridge’s manor home. But the Ministry— 

If you think you can pull it off, there’s things we could use, Sue had written. And there’s things they can’t live without, if you could set them on fire. Chief their minds is the office Umbridge was running: Muggleborn Registration. Largely due to Ernie and Anthony’s work, there were far less muggleborns than anyone had thought, but there were still some. According to Dung, they mainly ended up in the basements of the Ministry or manor houses, which were serving as makeshift prisons, since apparently McGonagall had burned Azkaban to the ground before the Ministry had even fallen. 

Good to know they’ve got someone competent over there, he thinks, focusing on the feeling of the threads of the rings and his wand warm against his wrist— Hermione had said wand concealment charm like it was nothing, when they were planning the heist; surely it was magic beyond anything most people could do, but with Hermione on their side, anything was possible. The lift rises as people he knows mainly from Susan and Anthony’s notes and his dad’s stories filter in and out— he sees Daphne’s father, and Ernie’s mother, and tries to squash the well of Hufflepuff loyalty burning behind his sternum, which desperately wants to punch them in the face. But there are bigger fish to fry. 

It’s a three-pronged mission. Hermione, disguised as a legal secretary, will slip down to the holding cells underneath the Ministry and extradite anyone there. I mean, they’ll have wards, Susan had written, but you guys will have Hermione, so. Harry, disguised as Umbridge’s personal assistant, will shadow her through the courtroom and find a convenient opening to take the locket off her. And Ron, disguised as the deputy head of the Muggleborn Registration Commission, will destroy everything he can get his hands on. 

Plastered on the wall of the lift is a poster of Harry, with the words Undesirable Number One printed underneath it (he and Hermione are a little offended they aren’t Undesirables Number Two and Three, but whatever). Ron smirks slightly at it, and then freezes as his father gets on the lift.

His dad looks thinner and more worn than he had over the summer, with a few streaks of grey in his red hair and a slightly unhealthy pallor to his skin. Overworked, and under suspicion, Ron thinks grimly, while also just being deeply, deeply relieved he’s alive, before his dad turns to him and shoots him a look of pure loathing. “Runcorn,” he says, with a sheen of disgust underneath, and Ron feels his stomach turn over. He knows the man he’s impersonating is a piece of shit who’s felt the need to turn people in for falsifying their family trees, but never in his entire life has his dad looked at him with anything that’s not had at least some love in there. It takes everything Ron has to ignore him, as the lift descends into the heart of the Ministry. 

It’s taken them months to get here, and Ron still feels laughably out of his depth as the lift doors open on the floor that now houses the restructured DLME and the Muggleborn Registration Commission and the offices of the Minister. Thanks to some subterfuge by Padma and Parvati over the summer, Anthony has had access to the internal restricting of the Ministry, and he and Susan and Daphne had helped them pick targets, build profiles.

The evidence locker is the main target. Followed by the whole floor. He had tried to dial into the Gryffindor part of himself when he was planning this, not think about casualties, or who could get hurt if they made a big play at the Ministry— it’s enemy territory, they’re evil people— but even as he steps out of the lift with his father staring daggers at his back, he knows he wouldn’t be able to use some of the spells Hermione offered, with the academic amorality of a Ravenclaw. Fiendfyre? Not with his dad in the building. 

He strolls through the floor with a forced sense of easy confidence, even though his hands are shaking, ignoring people he recognizes from dossiers Anthony sent. And then, as he’s passing the Minister’s office, he catches a flash of red as a man ducks inside. 

Not just any man. Percy.

His name had been all over the documents— memos filed by him, letters sent. He was direct aide of to the Minister of Magic, and every time it had taken more than Ron thought he had to give to sever the name from his brother, who might have been a stuck-up prat at times, but is still fundamentally someone he loved. 

He moves, as if summoned, into the Minister’s office, after Percy. There’s no one at the front desk, and the door opens easily under his confident hand. The silencing charm comes with barely a motion, and the disillusionment follows. He stands in the doorway, watching his brother— he, too, looks thinner than the last time he saw him, but with nicer robes. He jams down the Gryffindor part of him now, and focuses on the part he’s been building in Hufflepuff for six years: his brother’s alive.

He squints, refocusing on the situation. Percy is bustling around the office, copying memos, and Ron swears he can see him slipping some of them into his coat. His breath catches, everything about the mission forgotten, as Percy works. Skimming the memos, sorting them, and then, if something seems to pique his interest, he’ll copy it. It’s a subtle, careful motion, like he’s done this over and over again. 

“Perce?” Ron asks, dropping the wards and stepping out from the door frame. Percy whirls on him, and then visibly pales. “Mr. Runcorn. Ah— need something? I believe the Minister’s out—“

“Percy,” Ron says, and it’s Runcorn’s nasally voice but it’s his tone, bleeding through. “When I was seven, the twins took my teddy bear and turned it into a spider, and you swiped mum’s wand to fix it because I was crying so hard, and you made me promise not to tell anyone ever. And I haven’t. Not even Harry or ‘Mione.”

Percy’s eyes widen until they’re saucers. “Ron?” he whispers incredulously. 

“Yeah,” says Ron, and then he takes three quick steps across the office and pulls Percy into a hug. Percy is stiff, but then melts into it in a way that reminds Ron of Harry. Like he’s not used to being touched. “Good to know you’re our source in the Ministry, mate,” he breathes into his brother’s ear. “We miss you.”

“I miss you all too,” breathes Percy back. 

He can’t afford long, and he takes more than he probably should, withdrawing from the hug after a long moment. “See you on the other side,” he says, straightening his robes. “Love you.”

“Yeah,” says Percy, who looks like he’s been hit by a train. “I— you too.”

Ron leaves him with a clasped hand on the shoulder, and when he steps back out into the main office, his hands aren’t shaking anymore. Sure, he’s still in the heart of enemy territory, but he’s got his brother back. 

He moves through the department with a causal focus, until he’s in front of the evidence locker.  “Albert?” asks the man clerking the front desk. “Need something?” and the imperio isn’t good, exactly, not like Hermione would have done it, but it’s enough, fueled by his new knowledge. The wards unspool under his steady hand, and then he’s setting the fire, locking the door behind it. “Forget you ever saw this,” Ron murmurs to the man; he gives a slack-jawed nod. “And in ten minutes, raise an alarm about the fire.” 

He strides out into the hallway, and then makes a detour to cut through the Muggleborn Registration Commission bullpen, where twenty or thirty unimpressive wizards are filling out paperwork or chatting quietly, though they all snap to focus when his shadow crosses their desks. Ron reaches out his magic, towards Harry and Hermione— Hermione is still in the dungeons, but Harry is a few stories above him. Other than tests in Hermione’s back garden, they’ve never actually used the rings for what she designed them for, but he trusts her like he’s never trusted anyone else. He curls his hand around his wand, and starts setting fires, stunning anyone who seems to notice. 

“Something’s wrong with Runcorn!” yells one of the employees, once half the office is ablaze. About time, Ron thinks, firing off a few final spells and then spinning on his heal to parry a stunner. His thumb goes down to his ring, and he feels the power bloom within him, like ink across a page. Harry, he thinks, and the thread becomes a doorway.

He appears half a step behind Harry, who is currently in the process of gemino’ing the locket. They’re in some kind of a court room, and Ron can feel the ghostly chill of dementors. Umbridge is unconscious on the floor, next to someone Ron distantly places as Yaxley, and the courtroom looks like it was vacated in a hurry. “She was running a sham trial for a muggleborn,” Harry hisses to him, as he places the fake necklace around her neck and pockets the real one. “I sort of went off script.”

“Where’s the muggleborn now?” Ron asks. 

“Sent her and her husband to our Hammersmith safe house with a Portkey,” says Harry in a low whisper. “We can get Dung or the twins to help her with an ID.” He wipes off his face with his hand. “Come on. There’s more outside, and dementors. We’ll have to be quick.”

“Right,” says Ron, giving Umbridge a kick for good measure— he’s still not over the audacity the women had to leave his best mate with a scar he’ll carry for the rest of his life— and  follows Harry in the direction of the cold.

“Expecto Patronum!” Harry yells, as they come out of the courtroom, into a chamber with hard wood benches and dementors prowling like cats. Half a dozen muggleborns and their families sit hunched between them, looking dejected, only to raise their heads in surprise as the room fills with silver light. Prong trots out blazing with power, scatting the dementors with ease.

“Right,” says Ron, stepping forward. “All of you need to leave. Go into hiding, abroad, if possible.” From his breast pocked he extracts a small handful of bottle caps, all of which shimmer with Hermione’s magic. “These will get you out of here, password’s Ipswich—“

Some of them look a bit uncertain, but the sheer amount of power Harry just displayed, mixed with a desire to get as far away from dementors as possible, takes hold. One by one, they pick one from his hand and then vanish. A moment later, Ron feels his ring flare with magic, and then Hermione appears in front of them, forming the other point of their triangle. She’s breathing heavily, and has blood on her face and hands. “It’s done,” she says, panting. “Everyone’s out. You got it, Harry?”

Harry nods. Hermione glances over at Ron, who also nods. “It’s burning up there. We should leave before they put two and two together.” Around them, Prong circles closer, radiating warmth and power. 

“Alright,” says Hermione, yanking the necklace off her neck and wrapping it around her fist, before taking Ron’s hand in hers. “Ready?”

In the distance, he swears he can hear the sounds of the Ministry breaking out into turmoil, and the smell of smoke, but Harry’s patronus is keeping them safe, and they’re all here, together, like they should be.

“Ready,” says Ron, and then they’re gone. 

________________

They’re gone for less than an hour, in the end, and they leave the Ministry burning, and with the locket in his pocket. The portkey takes them to the living room, and they sprawl on the carpet, panting for breath, as the polyjuice wears off. Harry feels like he’s been hollowed out, and the scars on the back of his hand burn with phantom pain. He rolls over; next to him, Ron is laying back against the carpet, his red hair spilling everywhere; next to him, Hermione is wiping blood off her face but grinning. 

“Did we just go,” she pants, staring up at the ceiling. “Three for fucking three against the Ministry of Magic?”

“Yeah,” says Ron, drawing his wand and sealing closed the cut on her hairline. “I think we did.”

Harry shuts his eyes and finds himself breaking out into laughter; after a moment, Ron and Hermione join him. 

Kreacher’s steak and kidney pie is as good as expected, and they make the unilateral decision to relegate the locket to the foldspace and deal with it later. Harry can feel Voldemort’s anger pulsing against his temples, but it feels far off, and satisfying. “We still need to do more research,” says Hermione, who has cleared two helpings and is working on a third, to Kreacher’s obvious delight. “There’s some literature on destroying them, but obviously we’ve got to be sure. And I’m still not confident he can’t feel it when they’re destroyed.”

“Shop talk tomorrow,” Harry says, reaching across the table for the mashed potatoes. He feels almost dizzy with relief— they actually have one now, and their gamble of staging the attack at the Ministry payed off. For the the first time since— since he’d seen the truth in Dumbledore’s pensive, honestly probably— Harry feels like he can breathe, as the early October night feathers in on the house. The reports coming out of Hogwarts are good— it’s not fun, there, but their crew is protecting people and giving Snape hell— and apparently Percy has been their inside man in the Ministry all along. He envisions a calm, low-stakes October— he and Ron can follow leads on Horcruxes, Hermione can work on Volo Vivere, and Kreacher can continue to make them excellent meals. 

He knows they’re fighting a war, but there are moments, playing chess with Ron in the living room, the London sunlight falling through the windows, or sitting next to Hermione at the kitchen table, where he can forget. Where it just feels like home, the three of them as a small unit against the world. They curl up in the bed in the attic room together, too exhausted to scatter, and sleep is like a deep fen, without dreams. 

He wakes up to Hermione sitting next to him in bed, shaking him. On his other side, Ron is muttering about vault doors and dragons, and Harry elbows him as he sits up, reaching for his glasses. “‘Mione?”

“Someone’s messing with the wards,” she says. Next to Harry, Ron is rubbing at his eyes, but jerks to attention when she says that. “They’re trying to be subtle but—“

“Can they get through?” Ron asks, swinging out of bed and drawing his wand. 

Hermione bites her lip, and Harry feels something roll in his stomach. “Snape probably could,” she says, softly. “He’s taught us for the last six years.”

“Fuck,” says Ron softly, and then turns to Harry. “You want to run, or you want to fight?”

Harry takes a deep breath, and then another. The sound of rain on the skylight, and the soft fizz of Hermione and Ron’s magic. There was a time when he thought Grimmauld might be home— when he had begun to try to think of it that way, writing letters to Sirius and daydreaming about the summer. Some of that has come back in flashes, these last months, with Ron and Hermione steady in his shadow, and he— maybe it’s a weakness, to want it this much, but it’s the weakness of a kid who’s never had anything before. Who spend a childhood as a ghost and most of his adolescence dreaming of building something like this, and for Severus fucking Snape to try and take it from him, after everything?

Harry swallows. “The house is on our side because I’m Heir,” he says softly. “And if we— if can stun him— capture him—“

Ron nods slightly. “Don’t go throwing crucio around just because you want to, though. Be tactical.” 

“Kreacher?” Harry calls, and the elf pops into the bedroom, rubbing his eyes. “I need you to go to Hogwarts. Lay low. Talk to Luna Lovegood and Vityok. I’ll— I’ll call you when it’s safe.”

Kreacher tilts his head. “Half-blood does not want help defending the House?”

Harry shuts his eyes for a moment, seeing Dumbledore flying backwards off the parapet, and in one moment understands Regulus Black more than he ever has before. “I want you to survive,” he says. “And Snape will kill you.”

Kreacher looks at him for a long moment, and then bows his head slightly. “You are a credit to the House, half-blood,” he says, and then he’s gone. 

Harry looks over at Ron and Hermione. “If it gets bad,” he says. “Get out. We’ll meet—“

“The woods at the World Cup,” Ron supplies. “They won’t ever think to look there. And we’ve got the camping gear packed.”

Harry nods, and Hermione winces as one of her wards snaps. He licks his lips. “I don’t— if you can avoid it—“

Ron clasps a hand on his shoulder, a faint trace of warmth. “He’s yours. We know.”

They creep down the stairs in the dark, the faint traces of Hermione’s wards clinging to them, covering their footsteps. Ron remembers the invisibility cloak and Hermione takes it rather than hold a disillusionment; Harry remembers abruptly that they already used quite a lot of power today. “If it’s competent people with him, run,” Harry whispers to them, and around them the House creaks, indignant. The wards, older and more soaked in blood that any of Hermione’s, are still intact, but Snape’s inside of the burst bubble of Fidelus and so it doesn’t matter. In the creepy, pouring dark, they take up positions on the second story of the front hall, the only light the occasional flash of magic from the outside. 

“Should I patch them up?” Hermione hisses. 

“They’ll expect us to be sleeping,” Ron says. “Don’t give away our element of surprise.”

The rain. Ron’s heavy breathing on one side; Hermione, bristling with power and exhaustion both on the other. 

“Harry—“ she begins, and then winces. “They’re through.”

The door creaks open, letting in a long rectangle of diluted streetlight. Harry is reminded, forcefully, of a winter night two years ago, when he and Sirius had come back from getting curry and the dark of the house hadn’t felt like a threat. The emotion is so prickly, so twitchy that he can’t put a name to it but also knows it will form the core of any crucio he does tonight. 

Two figures step into the house, and from the build and the way they hold themselves, Harry knows they’re not Snape. “Hold,” he breathes to his friends. 

“Goyle,” murmurs Hermione. 

“Rockwood,” hisses Ron. 

Behind them, the hulking figure that can only be Travers. And then, bringing the door closed behind him, is the thin silhouette of the man he knows too well, who Harry once wanted to be his parent and is now here, hunting him down. 

“Go,” breathes Harry, and then he reaches out to the house itself, and bathes the foyer in crisp magical light. 

After all this time, they don’t even really need to talk anymore. Ron’s stunner hits Travers square in the chest; Hermione sends a spell festering with necromantic energy at Rockwood, who barely has the wherewithal to construct a shield capable of withstanding it. Goyle shrieks and ducks for cover; Ron’s follow up stunner barely misses him. 

Harry has eyes only for Snape. 

“Potter,” snarls the man, his dark eyes glittering, and he deflects Harry’s expelliarmus with barely a flick of his wrist. He looks like shit, with the lights up— bloodshot eyes, sallow skin, hair greasier than normal and his cheek bones like knives. Harry finds a visceral satisfaction in it, while knowing that right now, he probably doesn’t look much better. 

“Call the Dark Lord!” yells Rockwood, even as he duels Hermione. Ron is at Harry’s shoulder, as he descends the stairs towards Snape. 

“No,” says Snape, as the foyer bursts and burns with magic. “He’s mine.”

They fight quick, and dirty, Hermione covering Rockwood while Ron keeps Travers and Goyle down while backing up Harry. Snape is good, but Harry is angry, like he doesn’t think he’s been since the Ministry, fighting Bellatrix. Rockwood is clever, and keeps trying to revive Goyle and Travers, and all Harry wants, with all he has in him, is Snape out cold on the floor of his foyer, so he can get answers.

Everything comes apart at once. Rockwood, with too much power for a worn-through Hermione to subdue. Travers, revived and not caring where his spells landed. Harry has heard of the spell, when Ron told them about the bathroom; he’s seen it scrawled in the margins of the potions book desecrated with Snape’s spiky hand. From what research I’ve done, I think he invented it, Hermione had said, and Harry doesn’t doubt it, not with how brutal it is. 

“Sectumsempra!” roars Travers. Snape’s eyes widen, and then he’s being tackled out of the way. There’s a cracking sound as he lands hard at the base of the stairs, and the smell of blood, and sulphur, and Hermione’s screaming and he can feel something like panic through the thread tying the three of them together— he looks and Ron’s next to him, slumped over the stairs, gashes— 

“Go!” screams Hermione, throwing up a protego so powerful it bursts several of the lights, slamming Snape back up against the front door of the house. “Take him and go!” Harry sees, for one moment, Snape staring back at him, hand raised slightly, like he wants to cast something. 

Harry doesn’t give him a chance. He throws his arm over Ron’s bleeding torso, and drags them sideways, through the squeezing darkness and into the woods at the World Cup. 

Between one second and the next, the grimy, dark magic smell of Grimmauld vanishes, and there’s the clean crisp scent of the night, and the trees. He’s not sure where his wand is, and it doesn’t matter; he flings orbs of light into the sky with just a hand, with just need, and feels the blood leave his face at the sight of Ron, spread-eagled on the ground, blood pouring. 

The crack of apparation as Hermione appears, panting, and he looks up at her wordlessly as she falls to her knees beside him. “I don’t— do you know the counter—“

“No,” she says, tearing open Ron’s shirt to reveal thick gashes across his torso. “Just— just trying anything.”
“My wand—“

“Use his, dammit, Harry!”

He plucks Ron’s wand from his limp fingers. “Episky!” bellows Hermione, like Hannah taught them, and Harry follows suit. Ron is still and pale in the conjured lights, and Harry wills his wounds to close with everything he has in him, in a way he’s never wanted anything in his entire life. “Episky!” 

Hermione is bleeding freely from her nose and mouth and forehead. Harry feels his own magic protest, and he pushes it farther. How much blood can someone stand to loose? They have blood replenishers, but it won’t help if the wounds wouldn’t fucking close—

Inch by inch, with the sheer force of their being, he and Hermione force the gashes shut, and tip blood replenishers down his throat, but he’s unmoving in the dirt, the magical light making the blood in his hair shine. Harry throws aside his wand and crawls forward to him. Hermione is on her knees, unmoving, sobbing. Harry thinks he’s sobbing too. “Ron,” he says, his fingers slick with blood from the reopened scar on the back of his hand, and he can’t remember enough of what he learned in The Before to remember how to find a pulse. He puts his head down on Ron’s sternum, his sobs like punches. “Ron.”

Distantly, as if it is not his own, he feels the ring on his hand begin to burn.

How long he lays there, in the cold night, him and Hermione sobbing, he doesn’t know. But then, there’s a hand, pushing at his shoulder, and motion underneath him. “Oi, mate, you’re suffocating me,” comes Ron’s voice, and Harry raises his head to see Ron’s blood-streaked but very alive face blinking up at him. 

“Ron,” he says, with a strangled sort of sob, and then Hermione’s there, and they’re holding each other tightly, in a knot in the forest, all blood splatter and tangled arms and sobbing. 

He and Hermione burned so much power they can’t even string together a lumos, so Ron erects the wards and the tent. Harry’s wand got snapped in the fray, the twinned core he shares with Voldemort hanging by a thread, but he can’t find it in him to care, not when Ron’s alive. 

“It’s my fault,” Harry says softly, as Ron showers and Hermione dabs blood off her face. His mind feels like a broken mirror, interposing images of Sirius diving front of Ron and Hermione in the Ministry with Cedric being flung back dead in the graveyard with Ron, cold and lifeless on the ground. “I shouldn’t have— I wanted it—“ He looks down at his hand, noting idly that the Prewett ring has left behind a burn mark.

“We both wanted it, Harry,” says Hermione softly, her voice raw from screaming. “I didn’t realize how— how much power I’d used at the Ministry.”

“It’s my fault too,” says Ron, coming out of the shower. “I wanted to keep the house and stick to Snape as much as the rest of you.” He’s got the blood of his face, and he’s wearing a Weasley sweater with an H on it that Harry can’t honestly remember is his or Hermione’s. He sits down on the floor next to Harry, pulls him into his shoulder.

“You didn’t— you didn’t have to—“

“Yeah, I did,” says Ron. “Don’t tell me you wouldn’t have done the exact same thing.”

Neither he or Hermione can say anything to that, not when they know it’s true. Hermione scoots closer, until she’s wrapping her trembling arms around Ron and Harry both. 

“It’s alright,” Ron says softly, knocking his forehead against their foreheads, and Harry has the feeling it’s for himself as much as for them. “It’s alright.”

They stay like that until the sun rises.

________________

They spend the rest of the fall and the beginning of winter on the run, in the truest sense of the word. Mundungus, using a dead-drop they prefer, confirms that the Death Eaters have full access to Grimmauld, and Hermione never thought she’s miss the house, but she does— the ancient library, and the way the rain sounded on the roof of Harry’s room, and how with enough fiddling one long August afternoon they’d managed to get Sirius’s stereo to reverberate throughout the house. 

It’s a week, after the event, before she or Harry can even coax a lumos, and she has to talk Ron through all the warding. It takes him a few gos to master the theory sometimes, if it’s something she’s never shown him before, but he has power for it. “Always the tone of surprise,” he says, and the gash across his face is healing nicely but it hurts to look at it. 

(The question, which none of them have dared to ask: did he die for a minute, there? Did she and Harry pull off some kind of magical CPR, with their sheer force of being?)

Their research over the summer payed off, at least. Every morning, they apparate to a new campsite, marked with Justin’s precise hand on their map of Britain— middle of the moors; a misty wood; an ancient, slightly magical grove. The further away from civilization the better, though they take turns going into towns, under the invisibility cloak, and stealing from muggle shops.

But despite their best efforts, the hunger lingers— there’s only so much you can carry, only so many campsites reasonably close enough to a muggle settlement. And the kind of magic they’re doing— wards, apparation— requires more energy. Not for the first time, Hermione longs for Kreacher, but she’s long since build anti-elf wards into their standard package, and Voldemort wouldn’t think to set some elf off to try and find them, but Snape would—

Snape. She shuts her eyes, buries her face in her knees from where she sits at the root of the great oak just outside their tent. Inside, Ron and Harry are (hopefully) deep in sleep, and outside the ward boundary, a late November snow is falling. The fire underneath the cauldron is burning low— between them, she and Harry and Ron had managed what she hopes is a decent Nutrient Potion. It won’t stave off the hunger, but it will keep them alive. 

Her thoughts graze along the night in question, and she drags them forcibly away. It’s been nearly two months and she still can’t think of it without wanting to weep, or vomit, or both. How stupid of her, to agree to a fight when she was well aware she was on the verge of magical exhaustion? She knew the signs well enough by now, knew when she needed to take a few days off to just focus on theory and let her reserves refill. But faced with an invasion of what had become a makeshift home and drunk on their success at the Ministry, she’d agreed.

And Voldemort might be an idiot, but that didn’t mean Snape was. In retrospect, it was a perfectly balanced assault party, and they’d been lucky to make it out at all.

(Potter’s mine, he’d snarled, with something chilling and possessive, and she shivers just thinking about it.)

Out in the cold, with nothing to distract her from the hunger, she gently prods at the fabric holding the foldspace enchantment together. The locket is stowed in there, until they can settle on a way to kill it— the sword, tinged with basilisk venom, would do quite nicely, but unfortunately it’s out of reach. And though she’d sent Millie down to check to see if there were any salvageable fangs left on the skeleton of the basilisk in the Chamber, the lake water had gotten in there sometime since second year, and though there were a few stray bones, the fangs were probably sitting at the bottom of the Black Lake. 

Harry had suggested they take turns wearing it, which had stunned her and Ron senseless for a long moment. You remember what it did to Ginny, right mate? said Ron. I think we should rent another train locker and go back and get it when we need it. 

Foldspace is a compromise. She can feel the barest edges of a foreign magic sometimes, grating against the wards, like a spider scrabbling at the glass, but for the time being, the piece of the Dark Lord remains firmly trapped, despite a clear desire otherwise. 

Eight weeks, they’ve been in the wind, sleeping shallow or not at all— she’s going to be dreaming of Ron bleeding out in a glade for the rest of her life. Harry keeps having visions of Voldemort, who’s still searching for some ultra-powerful wand. Which Hermione supposes is good, because he hasn’t had the time to check on his Horcruxes.  

Not that it matters, because they have no leads, not really. No one’s turned up anything at Hogwarts, and of course he wouldn’t leave it at the orphanage, or in the graveyard of the Riddle House, or in the ruins of one of the key fortresses of the First War. He would go for grandeur and symbolism— except he loved nothing, and no one.

Her thoughts turn again, as they have so often these days, to her parents. She’d told them in August that from this point on, no news was good news— but she just misses them. Christmas is approaching, and she longs for their row house, and the sparkling ornaments and her mum making sugar-free cider that at least smelled like the real thing. She longs for the Burrow, where Mrs. Weasley would be baking constantly, and there would always be noise and clatter and someone would eventually beg her to come out and play Quidditch, just to even out the teams, and she’ll never be anything like good, but there’s a joy in being asked. 

They’ve been doing their best, out here in the weeds, but there are nights when everyone is hungry and Harry’s scar is burning and tempers are short, when faced with the enormity of what they have to do. How it feels like they’ve burned all their leads and the news coming back from the Order and Hogwarts both is just death, and too many of the villages they’ve camped near lately have had dementors impinging on them. 

Three nights ago, when the mood was especially bleak— Theo had paged in with the weekly state-of-the-union from Hogwarts, and his voice had been raspy, like he’d been screaming— things had escalated, until for the first time Hermione could remember they’d been on their feet, yelling at each other. They were all hungry, and exhausted, and terrified out of their minds, and Ron had finally turned on his heel, shoving aside the curtains at the door and storming off into the night. Harry had followed him, only to stop inside the ward boundary, breathing hard. Hermione, as mad as she’d been, had her finger pressed to the band of the ring, like it was the only thing keeping her upright, and she felt him go a few hundred yards past the wards before halting, and she breathed a sigh of relief. 

She looked over at Harry, who was making the same gesture, his hand clenched around the wood of her vine wand, which he was using for the time being. 

“I know we have the rings,” he breathed raggedly. “But I can’t deal with not being able to see him sometimes.”

Hermione couldn’t agree more, sagging to the ground outside the tent, argument forgotten— it had been about coefficients in equations for volo, and then it had just turned into an excuse to yell at each other because they were exhausted and tired of keeping it in— and feels her face growing damp. 

It was maybe ten minutes before she felt Ron returning, and then he stepped out of the brush with split knuckles, like he’d been working over a tree. “Alright,” he’d said, breathing hard. “If we’re so hungry we’re yelling at each other, that’s worth cracking into polyjuice for. Let’s go find a pub.”

It was a testament to how hungry and exhausted both she and Harry had been that they hadn’t even argued. 

There was in fact a pub in the tiny coastal hamlet they were camping near. Ginny’s efforts at lifting hairs from random muggles over the summer payed off, and they were in short order nursing pints and greasy plates of fish and chips in the back corner of a noisy local spot, Hermione working off their small stash of muggle money to approximate transfigurations for more. Ron had been right: after a full meal, they no longer felt like yelling at each other, and Hermione had enough energy to apparate them all back to the tent, everything back to normal.

But it had been scary, how quickly they’d devolved into that state. Just some hunger and no clear direction, and they were already turning on each other?

“Don’t think about it like that, ‘Mione,” Ron had said softly to her, yesterday, while Harry had been out on watch and she’d been whispering to him in the dark. “Everyone rows— I mean, you’ve seen my parents, haven’t you? It’s about how you make up.”

He was right. But the fear was still there, liquid and burning. When she closes her eyes, she still sees Ron, bleeding out in the dirt. 

They hear, from Hogwarts, that Ginny and Neville and Luna tried and failed to steal the sword from Snape, and that he sent it to Gringotts for safekeeping. Detention with Hagrid in the Forbidden Forest, Theo reports, which seems like a slight punishment, compared to what they might have received, even if there were giant spiders in there. But Ernie’s work is holding, and they’ve seen no sign of anyone else on the run. Millie, in an effort to provide them some levity, has taken to copying out the best passages from The Life and Lies of Albus Dumbledore for them, which is indeed a welcome break: I’m willing to accept that he never wanted to run Hogwarts, but the idea that he and Aberforth were attempting to replace the Minister of Magic with a goat? Ron had wheezed, in the wake of one of her more absurd assertions. And piece by piece, volo is coming together— there are still gaping holes, but she can see the paths forward. The places where the roads could go.

December goes the way of October and November, and it’s part curiosity, and part hunger, and maybe a dash of Christmas spirit, that leads them to Godric’s Hollow, on the twenty-fourth. The snow is falling deep and thick, and Hermione thinks it was the twins who first taught her the clever little charm to erase footprints. I’ve never seen the grave, Harry had said, a few nights ago, when they were staring up at the tent ceiling after not-dinner— no shop talk when we’re hungry had been a new rule after the fight, and so they’ve taken to dissecting their Hogwarts years and The Before— and she and Ron had looked at each other in abject horror. 

So here they are, in the gloom, in a graveyard she and Ron should have brought Harry to a thousand times over. Godric’s Hollow is a quiet, cozy hamlet, and Hermione can’t help but wonder if in another life, they’d know it the way they know Birmingham, and Ottery-St-Catchpole. If in another life, they’re three NEWT-level students home for the Hols, and Harry’s family won the draw on who would get them for Christmas itself (a package deal in any timeline, surely), and they’re just out for an evening walk, like three teenagers would be. 

The last enemy to be destroyed is death, the headstone reads, and Harry slumps to the snow in front of is, his brown hand outstretched towards the letters, trembling. Ron pulls out his wand and summons a wreath of bright yellow flowers, almost seeming to glow in the gloom, and Hermione knows they’re only so perfect because his love for Harry is just like that. Harry’s hot tears burn holes in the snow, and she and Ron put their hands on his shoulders, in unison. Harry’s sobs are quiet, like he taught himself to cry when he was a child living in a house without love. Hermione’s spent the last several months thinking of the war in abstracts— equations on a page, the weave of foldspace, the next camping spot— but in the graveyard on Christmas Eve it all comes rushing back in, like a tide. 

The quest is omnipresent, a driving force. But they’re not doing it for academic reasons, are they? Maybe they’re not even doing it for good, just reasons. On a basal level, she thinks, for her and Ron both, it comes back to this: Voldemort killed their best mate’s parents, and left him an orphan, to grow up in a house where no one hugged him until they did. And so now they’re going to kill him. 

They stand there in the graveyard, snow falling softly on their shoulders and Hermione’s wards burning all around them, for a very long time. 

Chapter Text

Theo takes a deep breath, tying his tie in the mirror, green and silver and the Head Boy pin prominently on his lapel. He’s spent months trying to guess what the hell Snape was playing at, but has gotten nowhere. There’s only the pin, and the castle, and the humming pulse of the portkey Hermione made him at the end of last term. When he couldn’t sleep over the summer, in the dry heat of his father’s house, he’d focused on it, on the magic emanating from it: Hermione’s charcoal and petrichor, but also strains of Ron’s stone and bread, and Harry’s ozone and burning sugar. He knows the trails of it like he knows his own name, close enough to bruise.

They hadn’t let him leave without it. Two choices, Hermione had said, Ron standing next to her and Harry on the other side, his eyes bloodshot. Either you come with us to the Burrow, or we build you a way out. And the minute he asks for you, you take it.

There’s wards against things, Theo had said, like a fool, to the greatest wix of the age, eyes darting between the tryptic of them. 

Tell me, Hermione had said, and in the flash of her face and the set of her eyes Theo had seen the Gryffindor she could have been, but also the Death Eater, and also the Dark Lord, what the fuck he’s going to do against me. 

She had built the damn thing into his Heir ring. He’d never make you take that off, Ron had said, and he was right. The nest of magic around it hummed and buzzed, like it had since his father had forced it onto his finger when he was six, right after the burial, but it no longer felt oppressive. It’ll take you to the kitchen in the Burrow, she’d said, and the power in it had been an anchor over the summer. 

The last thing he’d expected, when he came back from a long day of planning with the crew at the Burrow, was to find his father, emaciated and furious, in the house. And after the shock came fear, and then disgust— how the hell, after all this time, could he still be afraid of his father, when he’d never laid a hand on him? And yet there he was, cowering before the skeleton of the man, like he was a child still. 

He’d drawn a hundred, a thousand lines in the sand that summer. I’ll leave if he takes me to the Dark Lord. I’ll leave if Death Eaters come to the house. I’ll leave if he puts a hand on me. I’ll leave if he puts my face in the pensive.

(I’ll leave tomorrow. I’ll leave if I can’t catch my breath after a nightmare. I’ll leave if Harry asks me to.)

Lies, the lot of them. He’d been in Wiltshire, blood sticky on his shoes, and had knelt at the Dark Lord’s feet, let the monster run a hand through his hair, skim the edge of his mind, which he’d plumped out with a burning hunger and hatred and a little bit of fear and awe. I think someone of your caliber could do with another year of education, before I make you mine, the Dark Lord had whispered, pale finger tipping his chin up to meet his eyes. If we’re going to rule, we’ll need brilliance.

He’d caught a glimpse of Snape’s impassive visage as he’d stumbled to his feet, and that was the closest he’d come to using the ring all summer, as the man’s dark eyes bored into him. He was pretty sure he hadn’t managed to conceal a snarl of hatred, but anyone who saw it would have taken it for disgust at a half-blood, not rage for betraying one of his friends. 

The ring would have worked. The Dark Lord’s wards were child’s play compared to Hermione’s force of being. But Snape hadn’t said anything, sweeping by him with barely a look, and then the Head Boy badge had come in the mail along with the announcement about who exactly would be Headmaster at Hogwarts this year, and Theo had no idea what to think. 

Still doesn’t. 

Because the bastard has to know, doesn’t he? Theo might have fooled most of the castle with his true allegiances, and certainly his father has no idea what’s going on, but Snape knew Slytherin backwards and forwards, and more than that, knew Harry.

Sitting with his back straight at the Slytherin table, listening to Pansy talk about blood purity at his elbow, missing Millie something fierce (missing the days when the whole Trio would slouch at Slytherin, laughing and trading essays), he chances another glance at the man himself, sitting in the center of the Head Table like he owns the place. Outside, a freezing late October rain is pitching itself against the windows, and Theo takes no small satisfaction in the fact that Snape looks thinner and paler than he did last year. 

Snape’s an enigma, and no matter how hard he tears at it, it doesn’t get any easier. The Carrows are simple: sadists who want to hurt anyone in their path. The solution is equally simple: keep the kids away from them. Theo is playing dirty, but from behind the scenes. Let me handle this one, he’ll say, with the fervor and hunger of a budding Death Eater, and then he’ll take the kid into an empty classroom and tell them they needed to scream, and he’d sit there with his wand still holstered, eyes on the door.

The Carrows are simple. Snape is the problem, mainly because Theo doesn’t understand what the hell he’s playing at. 

He can’t be a fully loyal Death Eater, because he’s not running this school like one. Theo can clearly see the places he could have hewn closer to the Dark Lord’s lines: he could have picked Pansy and Smith, let them hurt people. Let the whole place bleed and burn. Probably fired Pomfrey too. And he had to know that the papers on so many of the students were fake, right? Surely the Dark Lord wouldn’t demand proof of their heritage when there was the vast expanse of the Forbidden Forest to just disappear them into.

Theo shakes thoughts of domination from his head, and glances back up at Snape again. He can’t possibly be loyal. But he suspects Harry’s only told him pieces of what was yelled at him on that lawn, in the final fight, and from even that—

The audacity of the fucker, to only care about Harry because he had his dead mother’s eyes, instead of the parts that counted. Instead of because of the way his loyalty nested and festered around people, instead of the way he ignored traditions when they meant people got hurt, instead of the way he drew himself up with that blazing light in his eyes. Instead of how much he cared, even about people who didn’t deserve it. 

People like Severus Snape, and Theodore Nott. 

He lies well, to the Carrows, moving through the halls with the fluid brutality of a Death Eater in the making. He doesn’t know what games Snape is playing, and some nights, when he’s doing rounds of the castle alone, he runs into the man, moving through the hallways like a wraith, and they just look at each other. The ring is a warm burn against his finger, and Snape rakes his dark eyes over him but never says anything, and Theo thinks of spells that would make the Dark Lord proud if he used, but wants to use all the same. 

He knows he’s not doing this right, or enough, but when has he ever done anything like that? When his mother had died, her hand going slack and slipping off his face, everything in his had narrowed to survival, intermingled only occasionally with the luxury of revenge fantasies. He just had to make it to seventeen, and then he could cut and run.

But here he is, with a way out even the Dark Lord couldn’t prevent, shadowboxing with monsters in the hallways of a haunted institution, because somewhere along the way it’s stopping being about survival, and started being about Harry. 

About Harry, and how he’d never doubted his loyalty. About Hermione and how every time he’d asked for help, she hadn’t held it over him, had just stepped up to the plate. About Ron and how he’d made space for him, at his table and in his house. About Susan and the way she sees right through him; about Daphne and her complete faith him him; about Millie and her open hands and burning curiosity; about Sue and her brilliance; about Hannah and how much she cared, despite what his last name meant. About the whole lot of them, with their power and gall and how he didn’t want them dead, if had anything to say about it.

“What kind of Slytherin gets it all mangled up?” he asks Hannah one night, deep in November, when they’re making their rounds. His silencing wards are like snow-drifts, and her magic, like mint and mildew, is curling around them. She healed the small cuts their Dark Arts lesson had left him with at the start of their round, snatching up his hand and putting them to rights, like it mattered. At eleven, he would have laughed at the suggestion that one his closest friends would ever be a Hufflepuff, but somewhere along the way— fifth year, when they stayed over for Christmas together, maybe?— he’s started relaxing when she’s got his back, and that, too, feels antithetical to the code of conduct he invented as a child.

“All of them,” says Hannah seriously— maybe this is why he likes her; she takes his concerns seriously. “All of the real ones.”

“Survival, though,” says Theo, weakly, and Hannah just looks over at him.

“And what kind of survival would it be, without the people we love, Theo?” and Theo has to shut his eyes at that, because she’s right and it hurts. “Honestly, the older we get, the more I think the Houses don’t actually matter at all.” Theo glances over at her; she shrugs. “Think about it. If I was in Gryffindor and you were in Ravenclaw, we’d still be here, wouldn’t we?”

They’ve stopped walking now, and are just standing in the dimly lit hallway, face-to-face. Theo is about a head taller than Hannah, but she’s got the subtle, unassuming power of a healer. This term, he’s seen her step between the Carrows and children, arms crossed and eyes up, ready to cause problems; he’s seen small first and second years come running up to her, asking for a hug; he’s seen her knit skin back together and mend bones with only a deft touch. She’s not going to fight, but triage is a battle all it’s own. 

If his mother had lived, he could see a future where he would have been a Ravenclaw, knowledge always lurking in the eves. In Ravenclaw, he meets Hermione Granger, and in every future Hermione is thick-as-thieves with Ron and Harry, and then here they are. If things had been slightly different, by the time Hannah had sat down to be Sorted, the Hat would have gone Gryffindor and then Neville, small and friendless, and Hannah, with a blooming warmth. 

Him, slick and charming and smart. Hannah, hardworking and driven and kind. Back here, at the center of the damn thing, Head Boy and Head Girl, fighting a war the best they could from the inside. 

“I mean, we’re here because we love them,” Hannah says softly, and when he looks closer he can see the exhaustion etched into her face, and the tears shining on her cheeks. “And isn’t that always true?” 

“Yes,” says Theo, without hesitation. Maybe he’s lying to the Dark Lord and the Carrows and Snape, but he won’t lie to his friends, won’t lie to himself. Hannah opens her arms, and he goes, thin and shaky and full of power. 

He won’t lie to himself: if Pansy Parkinson was the Chosen One and it was her the Dark Lord was after, he wouldn’t give two shits about the war, or if Pansy survived. He’s never been that kind of good, in the way that people like Neville and Susan are.

But the Dark Lord made it their problem when he made it about Harry, and as the term closes in towards Christmas, and they spin lies like spider-silk out into the gloom, their fifth-floor classroom filled with students wearing ties of every color, Theo starts to think Hannah’s right.

I love the Trio, Theo thinks, as he wards and spell and lies in the dead of winter. And I love my friends. And I’m not sure there’s anything I wouldn’t do. 

On his hand, the Heir ring burns with their magic, but instead of a brand like the Dark Mark would have been, it’s an anchor. It’s a door.

________________

Sue has not been to a single class all year, moving between the library and the Come-and-Go room like a shadow. The Carrows aren’t smart enough to notice her absence, the elves bring up food for her, and Snape—

Well, whatever the fuck Snape is doing as headmaster, it’s not interfering with her. And Sue, Sue has work to do.

The morning after the Ministry fell, she had sat down at Ron’s kitchen table and written the letter of a lifetime to her mother. Her parents were still in America, along with her sister, and they were cordial, if a little annoyed that she hadn’t given up the ghost on the whole war effort. Mainly, she’d written about transfiguration and petty Ravenclaw drama, and Alexis had replied about math and the boys she was flirting with at uni, and her dad had written back asking after her friends, and her mom had just wanted her to transfer to Ilvermorny. 

But Sue had stood her ground, through the attempted murder, and the slow trickle of information Anthony was adding to the boards about the Dark Lord’s past, and Snape murdering Dumbledore. And sitting at the table, not sure if Hermione and Harry and Ron were dead or alive, she was tired of pulling the punches. 

Mum, she’d written, ink splattering everywhere. Either you’re with me, or against me. And I’m not asking you to come fight the Dark Lord with me, but you’re a prosecutor, for Merlin’s sake. Help me figure out how to cripple him, now that he’s bound himself up in governments. I’m not going to stop, but if you help me stop him, I’ll stand a better chance. 

Hedwig had landed on the back of the chair across from her as she’d finished, tilting her head slightly, clearly up for the challenge. Harry really did have the smartest owl in the world. And when she’d returned, just a few days later, it had been with a letter like a book, her mother’s immaculate handwriting filling page after page. I’m sorry I can’t do it like you’re doing it, sweetheart, she’d written. But I want you to be safe more than anything. Here’s what I know. 

And so now Sue is up late in Headquarters, scrawling out letters, and doing her best to play at politics. She remembers, a lifetime ago, signing her name Creighton on those letters to the Board of Governors, trying to get funding for mandrakes, and she does it now, but with a flourish. As a calling card, as an insult. Others, she sends anonymously, letting the fear of the unknown carry more weight than that of a seventeen-year-old. You’re not going to get them to change, her mum had written. But you’re trying to rattle them. Create a smoke-screen, sow contention in the ranks. 

Anthony knew the Death Eaters, forwards and backwards, but from court records. From DLME reports, and rap sheets, and breakdowns of their power. Her mother knows the Death Eaters because she’d sat at tables with them, and worked in the Ministry with them, and gone to school with them. Because she was a socialite lawyer with a shimmering grin and an exacting ability to take people apart. 

“Holy shit,” Daphne had said, leaning over her shoulder in the kitchen of the Burrow, and now in Headquarters. “How does your mum know all this?” Sue had just looked up, at Daphne with her eyes like cut glass and perfect hair, and been unable to hide the smirk. 

“How do you know everything that you know, Daph? This is you, in thirty years after you’ve worked Ministry for three decades.”

She had seen the realization, and then the pride hit Daphne, and then her jaw had tightened and they’d leaned back over the letter together, Augustus Rockwood coming apart in their hands. What were the Death Eaters, really, against three teenagers and a lawyer who’d run from the whole enterprise but had never stopped being a Slytherin?

The letters came easily, between them, Anthony with information, Daphne with honed language, Sue’s mum with gossip, and Sue with ambition. No play was too big, no target too high value. Every Death Eater was another mask standing between Hermione and Harry and Ron and their quest; every Death Eater was a monster out killing children. She was going to rattle them, alright: she was going to rattle them, and unnerve them, and scare the hell out of them. 

In between the letters, there’s the transfiguration Hermione’s got them working on. She doesn’t exactly know that the end goal of it is, but whatever it is, it’s a massive, tantalizing piece of magic. Hanging chards of equations, stray stacks of coefficients, cunning and clever substitutions. She’s never tried to do transfiguration quite like this: taking energy, power— need, one could call it, if she’s reading this right— and trying to spin it into something else. Where the hell did you find this, she’d written back to Hermione, when she’d dumped it all in their linked journal; Hermione hadn’t given them much, only that it had been in some corner of Grimmauld. “You need to actually eat,” Daphne says, one frigid evening in early December, sliding in next to her in the library. She’s got a plate, but Sue ignores it in favor of the equation scrawled out in front of her.

“Eat,” says Daphne again, putting the plate down and taking the notes from in front of her. Sue scowls, but after five or so years of playing the same trick on Anthony, decides to capitulate to the sheer force that is Daphne Greenglass. Outside, a thick snow is coming down; the papers this morning announced that not only had the bounty on Harry gone up, there was also a bounty on such notable figures as Neville’s grandmother (who was out on the lam killing Death Eaters) and Luna’s father (who was publishing the Quibbler from an Order safe-house) and Anthony’s grandmother (who had been accused of breaking into libraries and falsifying family trees, which was absolutely true) and yet somehow still none on Ron and Hermione. Idiots, the lot of them. “You’ve made some progress,” says Daphne, as she paces, flipping notes as Sue eats. “Dropped a coeff here— wait, no you’ve got it. Clever. Pick up that transform from McGonagall?”

“James Potter, actually,” says Sue, and Daphne jerks her eyes up. “Wherever Hermione got this shit from, some of it’s Harry’s dad’s. And he’s a genius at it. You’ll be in the middle of what you think is some normal little equivalence, and then he’ll spring some little trick on you and it’s—“

“Transcendent,” says Daphne, putting the notes back down on the table and taking the four steps towards the window. Her hair is white gold in the low lights, and Sue thinks, not for the first time, about how it might feel in her fingers, before shaking the thought resolutely away with basic transfiguration formulas. Daphne levers herself up on the window sill, her thin legs swinging in the gloom, and her sharp grey eyes studying Sue. “What do you think it would be like, if there hadn’t been a war. If they’d lived.”

Sue glances up at Daphne, and tries to wrap her head around the question, as well as whatever Daphne might really mean by it— with her, there’s always layers. In the end, she can only come up with the fact that she sure does have a lot of questions about transfiguration she would like to ask James Potter. “I don’t know, Daph. If there’s something you want to ask me, just fucking ask it, because I don’t know what you’re getting at.”

Silence, for a long moment, except the soft sound of snow hitting the window. Daphne lets out a long breath. “Here’s how I figure it, right. They live. Harry has a happy childhood and ends up on Gryffindor. Maybe all of them do. And then— what the fuck do we do? We’re just— I’m a politician with nothing to play for, and you’re a nerd with no one to remind you to eat— and—“

“And what?” says Sue. “That didn’t happen. The war happened, and they’re dead, and we’re here, doing this. Nothing we can do about it except go through.” She polishes off her plate, wipes her fingers on her robes, and reaches back over for her stacks of notes. “You didn’t see anything I actually dropped, did you?”

“You’re so infuriatingly practical, you know that, right?” says Daphne, slipping off the window sill. Sue looks up at her, moving like a shadow, liquid and dangerous. She doesn’t know the whole picture, but she knows enough to understand that Daphne is a major piece of the resistance, organizing plays and pulling off elaborate pieces of magic to undermine the Carrows. “I just— I just want all this shit to fucking matter.”

Sue blinks and then blinks again. “Why wouldn’t it matter, Daph? We’re here, we’re doing this. And— maybe it goes better, if something different happened, but we don’t know that. It’s just this. Now, sit down and help me with this letter.”

Silence, for a long moment, except for the sleet. Daphne’s face shifts several times, through emotions Sue couldn’t name at wandpoint, and then she deflates, pulling up a chair on Sue’s other side. “Who are we writing this time?”

“I was kind of thinking we should go straight to the top,” Sue says, dipping her quill in the inkwell and scrawling out Dear Tom Marvolo Riddle, feeling gratified when Daphne’s jaw drops open. 

“No fucking way you are,” breathes Daphnes. 

“Why not?”

It’s a brutal letter, informed by Anthony’s deductions and sharpened with Daphne and Luna and Susan’s insights. What kind of idiot can’t even manage to kill an infant, she writes, and then can’t kill a teenager in a show duel? Outside, snow, and the encroaching scythe of the Hols, and somewhere in the wind, Hermione and Ron and Harry. They don’t give them updates, just we’re safe, and then pieces of research or questions they want answered, and their pagers messages are always questions: someone’s making sure Anthony and Theo are eating, right? Ron will ask, and Harry will say Luna, tell me how the thestrals are, and Hermione will ask after the library, and how Flitwick’s doing. 

She misses them something fierce, and pours all of into the letter: all her loneliness, and her fear, transmuting it to rage and taunts like she really had been sorted into Slytherin. How does it feel, to be completely alone in the world? To know that when you die, no one will really care, not even the Death Eaters? 

Flitwick, for purely academic purposes, shows her how to make a Howler. Hedwig, when she asks can you get this to— to Voldemort— the owl takes the letter from her hand and wings off into the sky, like a phantom. Since she comes back unscathed, Sue figures it must have worked, and hopes to Merlin somewhere the Dark Lord has ordered Death Eaters on a hit for a snowy owl that’s smarter than them and their wards. 

She looks around the Room sometimes, late at night or early in the morning (everything blurs together these days), and sees her friends, and sometimes she can’t remember what House they’re even in. What does it matter, about what a semi-sentient Hat thought when they were eleven— they’re all here, they’re all on Harry’s side. 

In another life, she could have been a Slytherin: political, cunning, ambitious. In another life, Daphne could have been a Gryffindor: brave, sharp, powerful. Neville could have been a Hufflepuff, leading the resistance from a place of care and love instead of spite and crime lord mania; Theo could have been a Ravenclaw, leaning into his curiosity and hunger. Infinitely many other futures lurk in the corners— where Harry’s parents lived; where it’s Neville and Luna and Ginny out on a quest to save the world; where Snape’s actually good at running a school; where it’s her mother on the other side, with the Mark on her arm and evil in her stride. Anything, anything at all.

But they’re here, now, living this one. At the back tables of the library, in the center of Headquarters in the Come-and-Go room, in the very sinews of her dreams, Sue puts aside all else, and solves. 

________________

Turns out, most wizards don’t think to ward against Molotov Cocktails. In the dead center of the Christmas Hols, Ginny kneels in the bushes outside a manor house, pulling out the muggle lighter and the bottle. She’s got three more in the slots of the bandolier Sue enchanted for her a few weeks ago, several additional incendiary devices tucked in the satchel with Theo’s undetectable extension charm on it, and a burning desire to actually maybe try using that Fiendfyre spell Amycus keeps prattling on about in Dark Arts. It’s supposed to be devilishly hard to control, but hey. Yew likes power. 

“Got a handle on the wards?” she hisses to Neville and Luna, who are flanking her in the bushes. Both of them are in dark clothes, smothered in some of Theo and Hannah’s best wards.

“Yeah,” says Neville softly. “Whoever did this was sloppy. Hermione would be having a field day.”

Ginny looks over at Luna, who’s hair is pulled back in an elaborate hair clip and who looks odd in all black, Justin’s borrowed wand on her wrist. She gives a slight nod. “Intel’s good. He wasn’t lying.” The he in question is a Ravenclaw fourth year who Astoria had brought into the fold of the TA, who didn’t want anything to do with the family business, which turned out to be following Voldemort.

Looking back now, Ginny thinks maybe they all had avoided bringing up the sensible, logical thing: sending the Order a message about a nest of evil in the Cotswolds. They’ll be out at the Parkinson’s holiday party, Jasper Selwyn had told them, his voice low but his eyes burning, and I don’t know what they’re hiding in there, but I know they’re pieces of shit. 

But maybe all of them had just wanted something to do, some piece of the war they could actually contribute to, and acting on a tip about a Death Eater lair felt as good of a place to start as any. This wasn’t an infiltration mission, like they’d run over the summer; this wasn’t a strategic hit, like she had gone on throughout the fall term, sneaking out through Hogsmeade with various crews and firebombing printing presses and checkpoints and muggleborn registration offices. This was just— a breather. In their own fucked-up, crime lord sort of way. 

In the back of her mind, Ginny knows she’s not making the best choices. But everything in her being feels frayed open, like an infected wound. How can she be expected to make good choices at a time like this, when her boyfriend is on a top-secret quest with her brother and one of her best friends, and one of the people she hates most in the world is running her school, and there’s a monster murdering innocent people? 

And maybe there’s no good choices, only less-bad choices. Which sounds like something Theo or Daphne would say, but hey, the Hat had said she would have been good in Slytherin. 

She’s got new scars curling up her arms now, overlaying the ones from the Ministry. A badge of honor for the term, maybe. The Carrows like cutting curses, and crucio, but none of it had been anything Hannah hadn’t been able to patch up. Pain was pain, in many ways, and Ginny hasn’t really been scared of it since the diary, and the way the possession had felt like being eaten alive. She knew what crucio could do, what with Neville’s parents and all, and it left her hands shaking and hurt like nothing she’d ever experienced before, but she’d take it over Tom fucking Riddle in her head any day. 

Besides, if the Carrows are crucio’ing her that means their plans are working, and after five years and change in the house of martyrs everywhere, she won’t pretend there’s not a kind of pleasure in wiping blood off your face and walking past everyone who’s unhurt because of your efforts. 

Trio’s Army, they renamed it, her and Neville and Daphne and Theo, when they’d formed the hot core of their resistance in the storm-chocked days of September. They’d been standing in the Headquarters, siting around the table deep at two in the morning, their only weapons Theo’s Head Boy badge and their utter loathing of Severus Snape. “This isn’t about fighting the war openly,” Neville had said, standing up to pace; looking at him now, Ginny could hardly recognize the pudgy-face boy who might have been a Hufflepuff in another life. “We’ve got to figure out how to protect the kids.” 

They hadn’t slept that night, pacing in the low light, pitching strategies back and forth. “Snape’s a wildcard,” Theo had said, at one point, his tie abandoned and his footsteps sharp as he paced. “He— I don’t get it. What he wants, what he’s after.”

Ginny doesn’t either, and still doesn’t, four months later. The facts are the facts: he killed Dumbledore; he’s a confirmed Death Eater; he hurt Harry tremendously. Sure, he could be running Hogwarts better, but Voldemort could be running the war better and he isn’t doing it, so maybe the Mark fucked with the part of your brain that made good decisions. She doesn’t have time for things like motives and divided loyalties and what color Harry’s mum’s eyes had been (she loves Harry’s eyes, but she would love them if they were any color, because they were his)— there’s only for or against. 

“But the Carrows are easy,” Daphne had said, sitting at the table with cool poise and just a hint of the Gryffindor she could have been showing, primed for a good fight. “They just want someone to hurt. Doesn’t matter who.”

“Well,” Neville had said, with a cool surety that made something inside Ginny’s chest swell, like she was looking at yet another brother, “Better us than the first-years, right?”

Winning is a strong term for what they were doing at Hogwarts this term, Ginny thinks, but they were ameliorating the damage, at least. Building distractions. The more fights she and Neville picked, the more openings Daphne and Theo had to lay ground work for distractions, to build in protection spells, to get children out of scary situations. The more damage the two of them took, the less anyone thought to look at Millie and Justin and Luna, who were opening doors and working with the elves and backing the Trio from afar. The more detentions they were in, the more time Sue and Anthony and Ernie had for research, solving problems for the Trio or faking genealogies. And the more noise the two of them made, the more openings Hannah and Susan had to recruit for the actual resistance, teach them spells in an abandoned classrooms in the eves. Greater good, she thought sometimes, when Hannah cupped her bleeding forearm in her hand and closed up the cuts with persuasion— she’d overheard Dumbledore talking like that at some of those Order Meetings they’d eavesdropped on, that oppressive summer at Grimmauld. 

But had Dumbledore understood the part where the first person you put on the front lines was yourself? Lying in the bushes as the night closes in, waiting for Neville and Luna to unhitch wards, she’s not sure.

Winning’s a strong word. But they’re all alive, and no children have been tortured. Can that be a victory, in these thin, narrow days?

“Alright,” says Neville, and Ginny can feel the outline of the hole in the wards, sticky with magic like chlorophyll, molten steel, gasoline, rosemary. She rises out of the bushes, the disillusionment like a second skin. 

“We need to check to make sure no one’s here,” Luna says, as they walk across the wide front lawn, the manor house looming up above them. The moon is tucked behind a haze of clouds and the cold is wide and deep.

Neville nods. “They might have prisoners.”

“They might have friends,” says Luna, a few steps ahead. Ginny looks over at Neville; neither of them have killed anyone, not in their missions over the summer and not in their guerrilla warfare campaigns, but the both of them know it’s not off the table. There are worse things you can do to a person than Avada. 

The grass sways softly in the wind, and as Jasper instructed, they wind around the house to a disused service entrance. The turrets cut daggers against the sky, and even as she scans the landscape for potential threats, Ginny finds herself thinking about Harry, and Ron, and Hermione. It’s nearly Christmas— are they alright, wherever they are, saving the world? If she stops to think about it, she misses the three of them almost more than she can breathe. The way Hermione would always listen to whatever complex feelings she had, even though she never had any idea how to deal with them. Ron’s focus, how he could always tell from across a room if she wanted company or wanted space. Harry. 

First the Burrow, and then the castle, felt unspeakably empty without him. Without the careful way he moved through rooms, without his hungry grin, without how he was always up for a quick game of one-on-one or something dangerous and possibly illegal. You could have been so good in Gryffindor, she’d told him once— they’d been both fourteen, then, before the Voldemort came back— and he’d just looked over and gone you could have been so good in Slytherin and maybe that’s when she stopped thinking it mattered. It was just colors on a hem or a tie, and the both of them were a little like crime lords, and a little like survivalists. 

If you change you mind about Snape, let me know, she’d told him in September, curled up with the pager Justin had developed. There was a black eye blooming across her face from Zacharias Smith’s vicious right hook and Snape had watched it happen and had just stood there, smirking slightly. Harry had made it very clear to the Order over the summer that he didn’t want the fucker dead— maybe they’d read it a variety of ways, but Ginny had read it as a desire for answers, above all else, but if he ever changed his mind—

Is disgust, and hatred, and rage a form of need? Tom Riddle probably would be very proud of her sometimes, she thinks on occasion, as she finds herself deeply intrigued by the Dark Arts discussions in class, as she sabotages structures of power, as she leans into the mania blooming within the core of herself. They share the same type of wand, do they not: yew, and phoenix feather. Terrible things, but great. 

I have what he never did, she thinks, kneeling in front of the servants’s door, casting lock-picking spells the twins and Mundungus imparted to her. Behind her in the dark, Luna and Neville keep watch, constants at her shoulder. Neville has that thread of true-blue morality, lines he wouldn’t cross, not even for the two of them; Luna has vision, and clarity, understanding how people work and then caring about them, in a way Ginny still struggles with sometimes.

Is that why you were so obsessed with me, Tom, she thinks, as they cross the threshold; the manor smells like mold and dark magic and the wards around them are still as a tomb. Because I’m everything you wanted to be?

Luna’s Revelio has Hermione’s flourishes and subtle tweaks, but bleeds a power all her own. “Nothing,” she says. “Not even elves. Just— just evil.”

“Alright,” says Ginny, reaching into her satchel to check on their supplies— cold necks of butterbeer bottles stuffed with rags, lighter fluid and petrol Millie had talked Flich into picking up for them. “We’ll loot the library, and then start at the top and work our way down. Things get weird, use the Portkey.”

Books, crackling with power. Gasoline and the crackle of firelight as she hinges open the lighters. The shatter of glass as Neville throws a Molotov Cocktail at the mirror in the foyer, and the flames rear up everywhere, hungry. The flame suppression wards are useless, and by the time they’re walking back across the grounds, the entire night is ablaze, and Ginny can’t keep the grin off her face. The Prophet doesn’t report it, obviously, but the Quibbler does, in classic snarky style: Purebloods Facing Real Estate Crisis. At breakfast she can feel Snape staring at her, and she raises her eyes to him and dares him to make a move. Neville’s at her shoulder, nursing a newly healed wrist, and Luna’s on her other side, wearing one of her ties and placing a lot of faith (justifiably) in the fact that no one at this school has ever been successful in telling Luna Lovegood what she can and can’t do. They, like a lot of the upper-years, are here for Christmas, because there’s no where really to go, is there? At least here, they only have to contend with three Death Eaters, two of which are idiots and one of which is a coward. 

Her eyes alight around the hall— on Hannah with her arm around a Hufflepuff first-year, curled up into her side; at Susan talking with Zacharias Smith of all people in a low voice, her eyes burning; at Justin and Ernie with their heads bowed, working on something. At Theo making polite conversation with Pansy; at Daphne sitting with Astoria. On their shadow army— Colin Creevy and his posse; Lavender Brown and Kellah with their tricks and pyromania; Terry Boot and Lisa Turpin, willing to pitch in to solve problems for Hermione; Astoria with her gleaming eyes and web of connections; Megan Jones with her soft smile and complete intolerance for the Carrows. 

You should have never made this our fight, Tom, she thinks, and her hands still smell like lighter fluid, and her rage and power are as clear and as clean as a match to light. 

Chapter Text

The summer had been tolerable, in that there had been moments when he hadn’t felt like he was being held down in deep water. The Dark Lord wanted complicated potions of pure evil, and for the first time since he was nineteen, he was glad for the ask. When he was brewing, he didn’t have to think about betrayals, or green light, or the fact that the Cokeworth house, which Harry had never been to and now never would, felt empty without him. It was just tinctures, and obtaining rare ingredients, and testing small batches, and if he didn’t sleep for about three days, he could then manage something approaching a normal night, where the nightmares were tolerable. Dumbledore being flung off the tower, and crucio, and the Dark Lord’s hand on his face, he could handle. Harry dead? 

Not a fucking chance.

(In the dark, narrow bedroom of the Cokeworth house, the smell of alcohol still clinging to the firmaments, he’d woken from those sorts of dreams— Harry, flying back from his Avada on top of the tower; Harry, with his neck snapped like the muggle at the raid last night; Harry, throat torn open by Nagini while the Dark Lord laughed in the slaughter house Wiltshire had become— and instead of waking up screaming, he’d just wake up sobbing. Like he wasn’t thirty-seven and didn’t see death every fucking day. But here he was, Severus Snape, curling his arms around his legs and burying his face in his knees at the mere prospect of the Dark Lord getting everything he wanted.)

The summer had been tolerable, because there had still been the sheen of the Ministry to protect Harry. He’d lied through his teeth, and took the crucios for failing to produce information, just to give it legs through the thirty-first. Hermione and Ron would have contingency plans, he knew, but the best chance he could give Harry was to get out from under the shadow of the Trace. When the Ministry did fall, his hands were still twitching, and he fell in at the Dark Lord’s side and roved the ward boundary burning around the Burrow, and maybe he pretended like he hadn’t taught Hermione Granger for six years and knew how she worked. Maybe, when the Dark Lord ranted and raved about Potter and his magical prowess, he let him.

Tell me about Potter, Severus, the Dark Lord had asked him, in early July, and his fingers had been cold as they cupped his chin and raised it to meet the burning red eyes. The facade he’d built had been loathing— a tiny, uncouth Gryffindor wrongly placed in their House, who looked like his father and moved like his father, an arrogant, loudmouth bully. He’d never thought he’d been grateful to James Potter for seven years of merciless bullying, but it was keeping him alive now— he’d let the emotion cotton on to Harry in all his memories, let it drown out all the care and pride like the sea pouring through a levee. An unremarkable wizard, my Lord, he’d said, and when the Dark Lord had asked about the red-head and the mudblood girl who always seemed to appear on either side of him, he’d told him cronies, nothing more— they have no talent or imagination of their own, living only to worship the ground on which their savior walks. As if Ron Weasley wasn’t ruthlessly loyal and endlessly strategic; as if Hermione Granger wasn’t the greatest wix of the age. As if Harry could live without them.

The Dark Lord, having never had anything even approaching a friend, had not questioned him.

Dumbledore had thought it might happen, but it had still been a shock, to receive the appointment. I’m making you Headmaster, Severus, the Dark Lord had told him, in mid-August; Snape had been kneeling at his feet, trying in vain to keep his hands from twitching. Last night, he’d barely managed to apparate back to Cokeworth, and had spent most of the night vomiting up blood before he found the correct balance of nerve-replenisher and stomach-soother to keep it down. No one knew where Harry was, and the Dark Lord had tortured them like they knew and weren’t telling him.

(Snape assumes they’re at Grimmauld— known location though it is, Harry being the Heir and the sheer power of Hermione’s wards gives them a distinct advantage, but maybe he sold the Dark Lord a slick tale about Potter’s disgust for the house bristling with Dark Magic, and how he’d probably gone into hiding with his muggle relatives.)

(Maybe, if push came to shove, he was more than willing to die under crucio to keep that secret safe.)

Thank you, my Lord, Snape had muttered, as the Dark Lord rested a pale, cold hand in his hair, like a spider. 

The school is… an opportunity, the Dark Lord had murmured to him, stroking through his hair like petting a dog. To guide, to shape… to fortify. You will have enemies there, assuredly, but I trust you can weed out who is loyal to us. He shifted his grip, trailing the hand down the side of the face, and it took so much resolve to avoid flinching away. This is a prestige position, you understand? I am gifting you the domain of the man you killed for me.

Back in Cokeworth, he turned the water up as hot as it would go, and scrubbed at his skin until he was beginning to draw blood. The Dark Lord had always been like this, with his inner circle, and until now he’d handled it just fine— he had a job to do, and if this was what it involved, he’d deal with it. Just like he’d dealt with killing the muggles, and killing Dumbledore. 

It’s different, now, he thinks, leaning his head against the wall of the shower and shivering despite the steam. On his arm, the Mark writhes and pulses. Before, if the Dark Lord had been possessive and creepy, he could have gone to Pomona, Poppy, Filius, Minerva. Sat on their loveseats and had a stiff drink and relaxed a bit, in close quarters with someone he felt safe with, someone he didn’t mind touching him. Someone he would have called a friend.

But now he’s got nothing. And the only person who’s touched him in two months is the Dark Lord. 

In the steam, he allows himself to daydream about Hogwarts. It’s going to be awful— Minerva will probably actively be trying to kill him, and everyone else will be thinking about it, (not that he blames them), and around every corner he’ll see a shock of black hair and think Harry?— but it will also be safe. Other than Lake District, it’s the place most like home. 

And it might be awful, but he’ll have a job to do. Pretty much any other Death Eater the Dark Lord could have picked would have used the position as a leverage point for their own futures— Slughorn, but with more sadism. More torture. And even if no one else in the school knows it— even if no one else in the school can know it— he won’t do that. 

He expects a chilly reception, when he arrives a week before the start of term, but the wards curl out to greet him without malice. No welcome, not yet, but when he stands in front of the gargoyle up to the Headmaster’s office and suite, it moves seamlessly for him, and he can’t help but sag slightly against the wall as it curls up, thinking about Umbridge, and how she could not take it when she tried.

(Though, Godric and Salazar probably would have agreed that murdering the previous Headmaster guaranteed the killer a seat at the table, maniacs that they were.)

The Headmaster’s office is cool and dark, with the last traces of the sunset spilling blood-red through the windows. Someone— Aberforth, or the elves— had cleared away all traces that Dumbledore had ever been here, and there was only the portraits, and the books, and the sword of bloody Gryffindor. 

He eyes it for a moment, unable to avoid thinking about how small Harry had been, standing in the office lying to Dumbledore that it had been him alone who’d pulled it from the Hat. How the idiot hadn’t wanted to go to the infirmary after being bit by a legendary monster. 

Ron stabilized Draco in the bathroom last year, and Abbott probably refused to let them leave without imparting all her knowledge from her internship, he tells himself forcefully, flexing his hand like he’s preparing to draw his wand. They’re fine. 

He puts his hand on the desk and rakes his eyes across the portrait gallery— thank Christ no Dumbledore tonight, he does not want to talk to that bastard about greater good and plans and how exactly he needs to hand off the sword to Harry at just the right moment— and then turns to the quarters, which are equally barren of personal effects. He trails a hand down the post of the bed and is reminded of being shown to the dungeon quarters— it had been midway through winter term, and he’d still be gaunt from the stint in Azkaban, and the only thing he’d brought had been liquor. 

Which Minerva had taken from him. He shuts his eyes at that thought, inhaling in a long hiss. 

This is no time for emotions. He has a job to do. 

The elves are skeptical, but amenable, once they realize he has no intention of treating them with the party line of the new regime. This will have to stay between us, he tells Vityok and the Union board, but there are things he’s willing to give them that even Dumbledore was not, in order to prevent them from turning on him. Money, power, prestige. 

You’re not truly working for him, are you? asks Vityok, eying him with a shrewdness even the Dark Lord doesn’t bother with. You understand that end, there will be no place for you either in the new order. 

Snape bows his head slightly, acquiesces. If he has Hogwarts, he controls the future. If we have Hogwarts—

If we have Hogwarts, we have a seat of power from which to fight a war, Vityok says, and extends one tiny, bony hand across the bargaining table, to shake. Snape takes it, feels the bloom of magic. 

You’re nothing without us, he says, as Severus turns to go. Albus forgot that, more than a few times, and there’s a thing in his fact that says he would still be here if he hadn’t. 

I know, says Snape, hand on the frame of the door, his fingers still fucking shaking from all the torture. Believe me, I know. He swallows, and then turns back to the Union board, trying to keep the nerves out of his voice. If I asked you, could you make sure Minerva doesn’t have more than two drinks while she here? 

Vityok regards him seriously for a moment, and then gives a nod, and Severus walks away feeling slightly steadier, for the first time in a long time.

The wards on his quarters in the dungeons have been shattered, like someone took a hammer to them. His first thought is Minerva, followed by the irrational thought that it might have been Slughorn, but a slightly more thorough investigation reveals that ozone and burning sugar touch of magic he knows all too well, and he almost sags with relief. There are books torn from the shelves, pictures flung to the ground, dishes shattered, and Snape’s steps crunch on glass and all he can think is that he’s surprised Harry managed to be this restrained, after all that he’d said. 

The wards around his private stock are burned through as well, and he opens the cupboards to bare shelves and empty ingredient bins. In his mind, he rebuilds the stores as he had them, and potion by potion ticks off what he would have told Harry to take, if all of this had gone another way (but how could it have?). Blood replenisher, nerve restorative, long-lasting polyjuice, veritaserum. Dittany, general healing potions, dreamless— he should have brewed liquid luck, despite the risks and the potential for abuse, just in case Harry had needed it. 

He slumps against the wall in what used to be his store room. All three of them were quite solid brewers, probably despite him, and now they have his choice ingredients and his annotated texts.

They’re fine. They’re fine.

(No matter how many times he tells the lie, it never lands better.)

Someone’s forging family trees; MacMillian has the audacity and Goldstien has the talent, but there’s no reason for the Dark Lord to know that. As the students file into the Great Hall and he scrutinizes them with a fabricated disgust (no Millicent— what trouble is she off brewing on the Trio’s behalf), he breathes sighs of relief at the sight of the muggleborns, sitting proud at the tables like they belong there. You do, he thinks— as if they’d believe him, when he’s standing up here, offering a toast to the fucking Dark Lord while Minerva burns holes in his back with her gaze. You do. 

He barely touches his dinner, his eyes roving over the hall. Longbottom and the last remaining Weasley at Hogwarts are murmuring to each other— they’ll make themselves problems, he’s willing to bet. He’ll have to figure out how to scare two Gryffindors without actually hurting them, which— he already knows how poorly that will go. At Slytherin, Theo is acting every part the Head Boy, with his perfectly straight tie and carefully combed hair, and if he’s accomplished nothing else, he has managed to place one of Harry’s trusted associates in a position of power, well away from the Dark Lord and the Mark. It had been a bit of a tough sell, to the Dark Lord— Smith seems like he has potential, and what of Parkinson— but with enough half-trues and groveling he’d gotten what he’d wanted. Theo would maneuver, and lie, and tear apart the system from the inside, and Abbott would be a a bulwark for the first and second years.

He’s won that fight. He hadn’t tried to fight the appointment of the Carrows— of course the Dark Lord would want a leash on him. Two sadistic, blindly loyal old-guard Death Eaters, who the Dark Lord loved because on a basal level, that’s what he was. 

How he’ll win that one, he doesn’t know. The both of them take great pleasure in hurting people, and there is precious little here he’s willing to let be hurt. It was one thing, to be out in the glades unable to stop the Corp from torturing and murdering muggles, but this— this is different. He knows these kids, sniveling idiots that they are. He can hear Pomona’s voice now— found a heart after all, Severus?— and maybe, but maybe it’s just the fact that he wasn’t safe here and all the Slytherin in him so violently wants to build something different. 

He sees the places the Trio would have sat— Harry a shadow at Daphne’s shoulder; Ron between Bones and Finch-Fletchley; Hermione in talks with Li. All of them looking up at him now with pure loathing, some of it the sort that could flesh out a killing curse, but in sight. Alive enough to hate him.

It’s. Fine.

He manages to go nearly a week without the impending confrontation, but then he’s staggering in from the night with a newly broken hand and blood in the mouth and she is waiting, standing like a monolith in the front hall with her arms crossed and her eyes burning. He feels like he’s a first-year again, trying without success to explain that James Potter started it. 

Of course she waited until he was coming back from a meeting, off-balance and in pain. She’d been, long, long ago, a hat stall, and had always had a bit of everything.

(If Dumbledore had just fucking told her, could they be in her office already, her pulling out healing potions and putting her hand over his shoulder, just to let him know he wasn’t alone? Fifteen years, she’s put up with his shit— the grief at the beginning; the torture at the end; the ineptitude and sullenness throughout— and somewhere along the way she’s become—)

(An ally. A partner-in-crime. A mentor. A friend.)

“Is something you would like to say, Professor?” he says icily, wiping blood from his mouth with the knuckles of his unbroken hand and flicking it onto the floor. She doesn’t move a muscle, and there’s a crackling to the air, kerosene and limestone, that unnerves him. She really could simply put an end to him here and now, and he would be powerless to stop it. 

(There is no world where he raises a wand against Minerva McGonagall, in self-defense or otherwise, not now.)

“You have no right to that office,” she says, cold and terrible. “No right to stand where he stood.”

“The Dark Lord—“

“Voldemort,” says McGonagall, and Severus can feel the wards burn against the weight of the Taboo (have the Trio thought of that? Has Hermione warded against it— she’s good enough for it, if someone’s told them— he’ll need to slip a message to the Order though one of the dead drops—) and he flinches, despite himself. “Voldemort, Snape.” The reversion to his last name is almost worse than the Dark Lord’s name, somehow, and he has to fight to hold his ground in the hall. Her eyes are cold and bitter, and she’s holding her violence like a knife, waiting for the right moment to use it, and he hates that more than he can put words to. Somehow this would hurt less if he was being held at wand point, or let up to breathe between rounds of crucio, but she’s just looking at him like he’s worthless. A fly to be killed off when it suits her. 

“You have no friends here, Snape,” she says, bleeding disgust from every line of her, and there’s no arguing with a statement like that, not since it’s true. “No allies. Nothing but a stolen seat of power and a slave brand.” Neither of them have moved, but he feels like she’s lit something inside him on fire— he had been the one to roll up his sleeve and call it that to her, years ago, drunk to hell in her quarters. “You’d do well to remember that.”

He know he should say something— something cool and brutal, like a spy would— but he can’t seem to move. His hand is on fire and his mouth is full of coppery blood and sometimes all this still feels like a scene out of a nightmare, because his Minerva would be striding towards him, mouth set in a firm line, furious over him being hurt. 

She looks at him for one more long moment, with searing eyes, and then turns and walks out of the foyer, her footsteps echoing. It takes everything Snape has to remain upright, his hands shaking as if from crucio. 

“James should have left you to die in the Shack,” she calls back, like throwing a grenade. How, exactly, he makes it up through the castle and to the Headmaster’s quarters, he doesn’t know, but he doesn’t even light the sconces, just curls up in the cold stone corner of the bed chambers and puts his head between his knees, like he’s fifteen again, with nothing. 

(And it’s true, isn't it?)

The bones in his hand heal wrong. It’s nothing he doesn’t deserve. 

Days bleed into weeks, into months, like being held down in deep water. Occlumency only goes so far, and he can’t afford to develop an addiction to Dreamless, so he just lets the nights blur into smears of light and blood and exhaustion. He hasn’t smoked since he was sixteen— the summer when Lily wasn’t talking to him, but the Mark wasn’t on his arm yet, and he and Reg would go down to the corner store in muggle London and try to lift them with wandless magic— but he picks up a pack one night, after a raid, and chain-smokes his way through the night sitting in the window of the Headmaster’s office, the cold October night lazing in fingers through the open window. He’d like to drink, but he has no friends in this castle, and he can’t afford to give that much away. 

Does he miss Albus? His spectral figure in the portrait only appears to nag him about phantom quests and oaths that have long been superseded by actual emotion— a faint, magical replica of the person, caged by strange archaic magics to provide some semblance of personality. They’ve always reminded him a bit of muggle phone trees— as long as you stick to the script, it feels like the real thing. 

He wants to ask Albus the questions he never got to in real life, the ones no portrait version would be able to answer, because in no world would Dumbledore have believed he’d ask them. How much of it was real, and how much of it was about cultivating loyalty, in a way you knew the Dark Lord wouldn’t match? If it hadn’t been about Lily, and had instead been about defeating the Dark Lord, would you have accepted a defection? Or did you like knowing you understood me? 

If I had lured James Potter nearly to his death, would you have expelled me? 

If I’d come to you his first year and tried to get Harry out of that house, would you have listened to me? 

He eyes the empty portrait space, and thinks with a curl of pride of the only time he’d ever actually seen Albus Dumbledore caught off guard, which was last year, in April. All their conversations that year had been some variation of After you kill me, you’ll need to… and Severus had taken it all on the chin like a good spy, memorizing how the dead drops Albus had set up worked, and letting his questions about Harry’s private lessons go unanswered, and learning Dumbledore’s bizarre instructions— yes, when the Dark Lord begins to fear for the life of his snake, I will find a way to tell Harry that he should call for Fawkes and hear some ominous last instructions you have set up for him, I’m sure I’ll survive that long— oh good, you have contingencies in case of my death, that makes me feel very valued. 

But before that, in April, Dumbledore had turned from the window and gone After I’m dead, Harry will return to Privet Drive, which will of course be safe until the blood wards break on his seventeenth birthday, and Snape hadn’t been able to keep the laughter in. Dumbledore had tilted his head slightly, his withered hand clasped behind his back, and given him a look he must have perfected back when he was a professor. 

Care to explain what is so funny, Severus?

Maybe he was tired of playing games, and lying to everyone about where his loyalties really lay. Maybe there had just been too many people he’d watched die lately, people he hadn’t been able to save. And maybe there was a little part of him that had wanted Dumbledore to go to his grave knowing that he’d been outmaneuvered by a man he’d been keeping on a leash. 

Harry, says Snape, and he’s pretty sure that’s the first time he’s said his name to Dumbledore, and the effect is not lost on him, hasn’t been back to Privet Drive since he came to Hogwarts. And he sees the naked surprise ripple across Dumbledore’s aged face before it is swallowed up into something that might be rage, and it steadies something in him, the part that’s spent this whole year begging to be let into the general’s plans, only to be turned away again and again.

What have you done, Severus? he asks. 

Snape crosses his arms, feeling the burn and crackle of the Headmaster’s magic, like ash and molasses— fading, as the curse strengthens, but still there— and doesn’t waver. They weren’t feeding him, he says. Molly and Cindy Granger did. 

Silence, for a long moment. He wonders, sometimes, how much Albus had known about what had happened at Privet Drive, and if he had known, if he even would be concerned by it. Alive is alive, after a certain amount of battles in glades and funerals, but Snape’s come too far to mistake survival for happiness. And last summer? When I picked him up from Privet Drive? Dumbledore’s voice is cool, covering something dangerous.

He was with me, says Snape, meeting Dumbledore’s gaze. I have a house, in Lake District, that even the Dark Lord could not get to. Dumbledore looks at him like he’s had his whole world recalibrated.

He shakes the memory away, vanishing the butt of a cigarette and lighting another. That night had ended predictably— a demonstration of where his loyalties lay, the Headmaster insisting Harry return to the Dursleys for one final summer anyway and Severus looking at him and saying you really think Hermione Granger and Ronald Weasley would allow that?

Maybe it’s just another strike against him, the fact that he doesn’t miss Albus Dumbledore that much at all, not for the right reasons. He misses having the power he brought, and the guidance in the war, and the way he could make you feel valued, even if you had blood on your hands, but—

For all his power and skill, there had always been things Albus Dumbledore just hadn’t seemed to understand. Like the fact that Slytherin produced survivalists, not monsters. Like the fact that the Trio were closer than blood, and Harry couldn’t be slotted into the war like a pawn because Ron and Hermione wouldn’t permit it. Like the fact that if he’d sent Harry back to that house every year, sooner or later the Dursleys would have ended up dead— maybe Harry’s doing, more likely Ron and Hermione’s. 

Like the fact that he wasn’t doing this because of a vow, or because of what color the kid’s eyes were, but because he was Harry.

The night swallows him whole, and in the dreams, there’s just green. 

In the margins, Longbottom and Weasley and Daphne and Theo are seeding a revolution. He takes the bait they offer him, moves in predictable, bastard-like ways, nailing educational decrees to the walls and stepping in with a blood-curdling smile when it looks like the Carrows will take things too far. They are exactly what he thought they would be, and it’s a delicate balance, to keep them in check all while knowing every word he says is reported directly to the Dark Lord. Filius must have spent an enormous amount of both time and power on the spell that’s keeping the first and second years beneath their and his notice— he can feel just the edges of it, and the faces of the young ones blur in his mind— and he wishes he was in any position to show his shear relief at it. At the rate this is going, there are going to be far too many third and fourth years with suspicious blank spots in their minds, from where he intervened and said let me handle it and then just pretended to hurt them, but the spells aren’t anchored well, and will unravel when he dies. 

Are they winning? Is he? Are there winners, when every possible path involves suffering and triage and the fact that at every meal his eyes find their way back to Susan Bones, because she’s the most likely to look visibly distraught if something has happened to the Trio? 

No winners. Just blood, all the way down.

It’s early October, when the summons comes, and he kneels on the marble as the Dark Lord vibrates with fury. They broke into the Ministry, apparently, and Snape feels torn between awe at them and terror for them. The Dark Lord is furious beyond measure— apparently, Harry single-handedly managed to break all the muggleborns out of the cells deep beneath the Ministry (Severus would bet his life on the fact that it was actually Hermione Granger, but the Dark Lord doesn’t need to know that) and also burned down the entire Muggleborn Registration Commission. I want you to take this island apart, he snarled. Severus, take who you need, and get through those wards on their safe-house.

So there he is, apparating into the street in London, Number Twelve sliding out in front of him. Even from the other side of the street, he can taste the sheer power of Hermione’s wards, and when Rockwood whistles— Dumbledore’s work’s held up well, hasn’t it— he doesn’t correct him. Actually, it’s an eighteen-year-old who’s a better wix than you could ever hope to be. 

He has a deep-set fear that they are here, sleeping off their raid. He’ll have to unwind the wards with enough carelessness to wake them, give them time to flee, and then— if he can kill Rockwood and Travers, Goyle’s memory can easily be modified. 

If he hadn’t taught Hermione for the past six years, he wouldn’t have been able to do it. It’s almost like the house itself has wound itself in with her wards, like it understands. Even if he’d wanted to, he’s not sure he could have done it without arousing suspicion. 

The thing he doesn’t account for, holding open a tunnel through the wards and into the house, is that all three of them have enough Gryffindor in them to be fucking idiots. That all three of them hate him enough to risk it. It’s all he can do, to keep his facade of Severus Snape, loving nothing and no one, at the sight of Harry, standing on the stairs in his pajamas, like for a moment they’re back at Lake District last summer. 

Standing there, alive. 

He shouldn’t have tried to keep his cover. He should have sent an avada at Rockwood and left Goyle and Travers at the Trio’s mercy and then just fled, taken the crucio for his failure. But everything’s moving too quickly, magic crackling and Harry fighting like a demon, and with the lights up he can see the rage and loathing outlining all of his movements and it hurts, like it hurt all those years ago when Lily walked away from him—

The sectumsempra. Ron, being a bloody Hufflepuff. Hermione, too powerful for her own good, and the counter-curse is on his lips and Harry shoots him a look that’s going to haunt him for the rest of his life, and then vanishes, apparating out. Hermione follows, and then they’re just standing in a dark house, blood on the steps. 

(Do they know the counter? Is Ron bleeding out somewhere?)

There is in fact quite a lot of crucio. For once, it feels deserved, and he staggers back up to the castle sick to his stomach. It’s— he didn’t cast it, but he invented it. He brought Rockwood, thinking mainly about who he’d relish the opportunity to take off the board. He’d been distracted, by seeing Harry. If he’d just moved a little faster—

He puts his head in his hands, sitting at the Headmaster’s desk with his shoulders shaking. Black died so Ron and Hermione could live, didn’t even hesitate, and if he— if he got Ron killed—

There’s not a world where Harry survives such a thing, he thinks, his mind spinning and his chest constricting. He’s a survivalist but he also loves Ron and Hermione more than anything. He’d throw the war if that was what it took for them to live, Severus knows; the Greater Good and the general populus could rot in hell. 

(He can’t even muster the energy for an it’s fine lie, as his tears drip onto the desk.)

Bones seems fine at breakfast, and at lunch and dinner, though that means little, if the Trio— he winces at the very thought that it might not be a trio anymore— hadn’t gotten a message to her yet. The next day, he snaps, and throws caution to the wind. Bones might have many talents, but the mental arts aren’t one of them. He picks a fight, drags her off to a classroom and imperios her into a dose of veritaserum. Have you heard from the Trio in the last two days, he says, his heart pounding wildly in his chest. 

Yes, she says, though he can tell she’s fighting it. 

Describe the message, he demands, and she does, and he can’t contain the slump against the wall at the contents: a successful mission, a change of location, an injury sustained, but they’re all fine. Ron says he misses me, she says, and since he’s going to obliviate all this anyway he doesn’t stop himself from collapsing in a chair and burying his face in his hands. 

When he looks up, she’s looking at him like she can see right through him, even though she can’t say anything under the veritaserum, and he has the insane thought that maybe he shouldn’t obliterate her. Maybe he should let there be one person at the castle who doesn’t think he’s a thrall to the Dark Lord who wants Harry dead. 

He does it anyway, clean and crisp. 

Snow in heaps against the castle. Weasley’s sneaking out, with Brown and some of the other Gryffindors, to set fire to things, and he ignores it. Minerva spits on him one evening, after a particularly awful speech he’d given, about the Dark Lord and their service towards him, and he lets his dry on his robes. Pomfrey’s healing the student’s wounds with a brisk efficiency, and Pomona’s working to subvert his decrees, and he lets them. Filius and Li and Theo are working on something— some spell, he thinks— and he surreptitiously copies what he can of it, while Li is asleep in the library. Charms and transfiguration and blood magic for Hermione, he assumes, until he stumbles upon something that just screams Reg to him, and he has to put his head in his hands at his desk for a long moment. Did Hermione find something, at the house, and was trying to finish it now? 

He’s not a specialist in the main methods of it, by any means, but there are places where the problems touch on potions theory, and he can see Daphne’s been trying to work it out, but he’s better. Sleepless nights working out potion problems is a wonderful respite from sleepless nights worrying what the Trio are up to (he can multitask, at least) and it’s no work at all to give an exhausted Li a false memory of finding the work in a textbook. It’s not much, but it’s something. 

You need to give them the sword, Dumbledore’s portrait reminds them, and he’s trying, he really is— it would have been far easier to let Weasley and Longbottom and Lovegood steal it, but he has to keep at least some illusion of running a tight ship. They’d survive a detention with Hagrid— probably laughing about how of course the blood supremacists thought hanging out with a half-giant was a punishment. 

He’ll figure it out. The Christmas Holidays are a blessed break from the sheer chaos of the term, and he stands smoking at one of the windows and thinks of Harry. Is he alright, out in the wind? Are they safe, are they warm, are they well fed? Whatever quest Dumbledore gave them, is it working? 

He has what he deserves, he knows. A castle bereft of allies, or friends; a slave brand and a sadistic overlord; a child who he has no right to call his, and doesn’t want anything to do with him. The impending scythe of death, coming for him as surely as the term will end. 

(He hopes Minerva does it, instead of the Dark Lord. She’ll make it quick, at least.)

He has what he deserves. But as the term dies and the winter deepens, he finds himself composing letters all the same, letters he’ll never send and Harry would never read anyway. It was a betrayal of the highest order, yes. He was the reason he was an orphan; the reason he’d grown up in that house. He had the Mark on his arm and had believed the whole thing at one point. He had nearly gotten his best friend killed. 

But it’s not about your eyes, he’d write, hand shaking and salt burning in his eyes. It’s about you.

But the letter stays unwritten, and in the dreams Harry never makes it out alive.

Chapter Text

The Hogwarts Express back to the castle after Winter Hols is almost deserted, and Justin sits at the very back, his fist clenched around the portkey Hermione made him over the summer, which should take him to the Burrow. There’s a blanket of mist coating the station, and he’d taken the train from Reading to King’s Cross alone, unwilling to drag his mum any closer to the maelstrom of war. The rumors about kidnapping targets and pressure points were such that only he’d left the castle, needing to see his mum and hoping all his years of sliding under the radar had kept him off the Death Eaters’s radar in a way Ernie and Hannah and Susan weren’t. 

It’s worked, so far. On the way out, they’d stomped aboard the train, in masks and swirling robes, demanding his friends— Luna Lovegood, they’d snarled; Ginny Weasley; Neville Longbottom— but they’d been at Hogwarts, sleeping in the Come-and-Go room, out of reach. 

And no one, other than his crew, had ever looked twice at Justin Finch-Fletchley, and the Death Eaters were no exception. 

He thought it would be more difficult, leaving Hogwarts with a bag full of letters but Flich had been in charge of searches, and so of course hadn’t found anything. And so at the King’s Cross Station, with just his satchel for luggage, he’d bought tickets for Reading.

It had been a cozy Christmas, Hedwig delivering the letters and then returning for the next batch (his mum started making rashers just for her). Wet, and homely, and he’d missed Susan and Ernie and Hannah something fierce. Ron and Harry and Hermione too, of course, and the others, but last New Years Ernie and Suze and Hannah had all been here, clustered round the neon glow of the telly laughing, and the house feels empty without them. Hogwarts is fine, and all, but it’s no home, and after everything, his is pretty much all his friends have left. Susan’s grief is burning lower, these days— they have too much to do for it to not to— but it’s still there, like a pile of coals glowing with the heat. So much of this term has just been spent holding her, letting her cry into the shoulder of his jumpers, sitting next to her in whatever farce of a class they’re still bothering to attend and taking notes she won’t look at later. It’s undone something within her, he thinks, which— why wouldn’t it have? He wouldn’t be okay if his mum had been murdered.

They just deserve something more than the cold brick of the castle, and the wind whistling between the stones, and Snape glowering in the corners. His mum had bought them all presents, and they’re wrapped and tucked in the bag.

He leans his head against the glass and tries to gird together some semblance of hope against the swirling miasma the coming term promises to bristle with. Ron and Harry and Hermione are okay, safe on the run. At the castle, they’re holding their own against Snape and the Carrows, with feints and explosions and healing spells and the fact that Mille knows the castle better than they could ever hope to. 

And he’s rallied his own allies to his side— Flich and Mrs. Norris, always with intel; Hagrid, who he’d talked out of throwing a support Harry Potter party and is helping protect the grounds; the paintings, with their reams of gossip; the ghosts, who move with abandon through the hallways; the elves, who’s loyalty is to Hogwarts and Hogwarts alone and have no interest in letting her fall to the Dark Lord. Even Peeves, who he’s struck some kind of strange truce with: you, FF, are so singularly boring I am actually interested, he’d jeered at him the other day, and Justin couldn’t find it in him to be offended by that. He is boring. And if that got them even one more ally, he would take it. 

The castle looms over them in the cold night, windows through the mist like punches through gauze. Six and a half years ago, he’d come off the train with his heart in his throat, nothing but awe and wonder, and now, at the last juncture, he has nothing of the sort, only a cool resignation. Hogwarts, and indeed the entire Wizarding World, have a tendency to hide their ruthlessness and their brutality behind beautiful facades and impressive displays of colors and lights, and Justin has no tolerance for obfuscation. Call it what it is. 

He’s not sure what he wants to study, in uni. What he wants to do, out there in the world. It’s hard to think about the future when the very idea that he’ll make it out of this death trap feels laughable some days. They’re all going to go down with the ship, aren’t they— in the dreams, it’s Hannah taking a crisp bolt of AK to the chest; it’s Susan bleeding out from a gash in her throat; it’s Ernie with his neck snapped in the rubble. In six months, they’ll leave Hogwarts and vanish into the network of safe houses he helped Ron set up over the summer, and run the war from there, taking turns sneaking out for groceries and electrical parts and missions. Or maybe they’ll hunker down, at the castle, in the Come-and-Go Room as Headquarters, dare Snape and then Voldemort to come oust them. 

And then it’ll be a war of attrition. Of how well they can survive, and give the Trio ways to survive, to see if they can finish their quest before Voldemort catches up. Justin doesn’t want to fight— he’s got none of that, no skill in a duel or quick-draw in him— but if it came down to it? If he was the last one standing, between the Dark Lord and the Trio?

What does it say about him, that it wouldn’t be about the world, but about Ron and Harry and Hermione, maybe getting to live?

Means that Hat chose right, I guess, he thinks, fingering his tie as he slips back inside the castle, unnoticed in the gloom. 

Headquarters is empty except for Millie, who’s asleep at the war table, drooling on a stack of papers. He goes into the bunk room for a blanket and finds Luna and Neville and Ginny all passed out, on various levels of the same set of bunk beds and has to grin at that, at how in sleep they all just look like teenagers and not like generals in a war effort. 

Neville’s grandmother is missing in action, according to the latest reports from the Order. Ginny’s parents have had to abandon the Burrow and the facade that they were ever anything but deeply against Voldemort. Luna’s dad is running the Quibbler from a series of safe houses, relying on intel the Order gets back to him. Justin tucks the blanket over Millie’s shoulders, and sits down at the table, removing the cornucopia of electronic parts he picked up over Hols from the slots of his bag. If this ever ends, are they going to have actual funerals? Or are there just going to be small candlelit vigils, sitting in a circle and all the while sort of hoping it’s all a fake-out, and they’ll come in through the door?

He sketches diagrams while Millie sleeps and the night wanes into morning. There’s no world where he thought he’d be running communications for the Order, but it turns out they’d been going to conduct an entire war effort via Owl Post and in-person meetings and so here he is, puzzling his way through enough basic electronics and niche charm theory to build out a grid. It was one thing to broadcast a rebel radio program; it was another thing to figure out a way to construct a portable set for the Trio, that would help them automatically tune into the frequency.

Millie stirs, somewhere in the dead center of the night, and turns her head to the side, catching him in one sharp brown eye, before her mouth curls into a grin as she realizes it’s him. “Hey,” she says, pushing herself to vertical and sliding over a few seat so she can throw her arms around him. Her tie is undone, hanging loosely around her lapel, and there are bags under her eyes, but the smile is real. She puts her forehead into the point of his shoulder, and Justin wonders, not for the first time, if there’s a future where he asks her to go on a date with him. If he was in school in Reading, and she was a girl in his class there, or the corner-store clerk, and there wasn’t the war, he would, he thinks. He’d like to see her in a neat blouse and jeans, and they could go walk around the park and crack open beers on the gravel up by the railroad. Put out feelers, see if they land. 

Because it’s not love— not romantic love, at least. It’s a friendship with a hint of potential; she’s beautiful and she moves through the world with a blistering confidence he’s completely in awe of. And if they had time, he could open it up, go out to dinners in the failing sunsets and see if the both of them wanted more, or if they were better off as friends. 

But war is no time for feeble attempts at romance from teenagers who don’t know any better. Justin looks over the stray electronic parts strewn over the desk, and slumps into Millie’s embrace.

January at Hogwarts is always brutal, and Justin won’t miss it next year. He goes to classes when Susan does; when she doesn’t, he slips behind the scenes, into the thin places of the castle where no one, lest of all Snape, would think to look for him. The portraits and the ghosts have gossip— Snape’s a hot mess behind the scenes, apparently, coming back covered in blood from Death Eater meetings, and smoking, and sometimes just breaking down in tears in the Headmaster’s office. In the kitchens, the House Elves lay out defense plans for him and Luna and Millie. Hagrid, after nearly a year of work, has managed to reestablish a shaky peace with the giant spiders, and sitting in his hut with snow coming down is the safest Justin’s ever felt at Hogwarts. That’s what he’ll miss: the sleet, and the crackling fire, and Fang slobbering on his knee and Hagrid telling stories from before everything looked like this. 

Flich gives him little salutes in the hallways, when they pass late at night, off to fight the war in their own ways: Flich might be a squib, but there are things he knows about this castle that Voldemort doesn’t. Sprout gives Smith detentions for threatening to expose the truth of his family tree, and Ron pages back with pretty much only questions, asking after his mum and his course work and if he’s picked a muggle uni yet. 

He’s never been a very good wizard; he’s pretty much the muggleborn stereotype: not powerful, un-cultured, unwilling to assimilate. Ready to tear the wizarding down brick by brick, out of ignorance. And he’ll admit it freely: this is not his world, with the manor houses and the Ministry and the castle filled with magic entirely beyond him. 

This is not his world, but these are his people, and he’ll burn the whole thing to the ground if that’s what it takes to save them. Susan, with her red-rimmed eyes and rage gathered around her frame; Hannah with her gentle touch and open arms for the sobbing first-years and him alike; Ernie, with the way his posh accent will always slide off into a feral, crackling grin, if that’s what it takes to win the war. Millie, with her burning curiosity and hunger to understand; Luna, always seeing what no one else bothers with, like she’s always seen him. Ginny, brutal and burning; Neville, taking the blows meant for others without hesitating; Sue and Theo and Anthony and Daphne, scheming behind the scenes. 

Ron and Harry and Hermione, risking their lives in the woods somewhere, on a quest to defeat a genocidal maniac. 

The hat had said it was brave, for him to be here. Would it think that now, when none of this feels like bravery, really, or even something as simple as loyalty?

He comes into the bunk room late one evening, finds Susan sitting on the bottom bunk in the far corner, hands pressed into her face, weeping, and he doesn’t even hesitate. He crosses the room to her and pulls her into his arms, and she’s still sobbing but she’s not alone in it. He doesn’t say anything, just holds her until she’s done.

It’s just fact, as clean and as clear as the bolt of AK would be. He loves them, and so he’s here. Power the Dark Lord knows not? he thinks sometimes, as the winter deepens around them, and Susan sobs salt on his shoulder and Neville comes back with worse and worse wounds and Millie steals sleep only in packets, when no one needs her. Surely it can’t be that simple. 

But how the hell could Voldemort ever do anything like this?

_______________

The only moments she feels totally in control is in the bathroom, doing her eyeliner. She’s always the only one in there— Pansy and Alice sleep in, Tracey pretty much lives in the library with Blaise and Morag these days, and Millie sleeps in the Room. So she has it all to herself, humming to herself as she straightens her hair and puts on concealer and lipgloss and mascara, before delicately winging out the eyeliner. Five am, in the dungeons, with the lake water pressing against the walls, and for just a minute she can pretend she’s back in third year, where their biggest problems were Sirius Black and how sometimes it was hard to focus in potions because of Hermione’s sheer competence. 

There were problems, of course, because was Hogwarts and it was never anything like safe, but they were problems they can solve, because they’re a crew full of powerful, intelligent kids. At breakfast, she’d straighten Harry’s tie, and help Ron clean up a few notes on his potions essay, and Hermione would be deep in talks with Theo about theoretical magic and Millie would have fallen back asleep at the table rather than listen to them, and it had felt like home, in a way the manor house in Coventry with the marble busts and the magic always hovering in the corners never did. 

Growing up in a pureblood house, with two parents who had only married to carry on bloodlines, had imbued her with a deep distrust of the potential of romance, but there were other ways to build a family, weren’t there? Other ways to get your dining room table in your crumbling manor house filled. 

She puts the makeup away, and pulls on her tie, doing up the silver-and-green with her deft fingers. The Greenglass Heir ring is prominently displayed on her finger, now— she’d never liked the way the magic grated against hers, but it’s necessary, to look the part. And how she looks it: a perfect little pureblood in the House of the Serpent, on a direct pipeline to join the Death Eaters once she had her NEWTs.

She smirks at herself in the mirror. Yeah, right.

In another life, without the war, she imagines she would have spent her final year at Hogwarts snogging a wide variety of people in dark corners, breaking hearts and then turning in O-worthy essays while they sobbed in bathrooms. She and Susan and Millie would have stayed up late gossiping in their hideaway in the dungeons, cool stone and butterbeer and fire whiskey, dragging Theo to Quidditch matches and Hogsmeade weekends. 

But all of that is just mist, burning off in the morning sunlight. She tries to channel Sue— the sheer practicality and obsessive focus of a Ravenclaw. This is what it looks like, and we’ll work with it. 

She straightens her tie knot, and feels her ache for Harry widen— at least his quest to defeat the Dark Lord doesn’t require a straight tie, or he’d be dead in a ditch somewhere by now. And then she heads up to the great hall, and goes to work with the hand she’d been dealt.

Early February sleet, midterm maneuvers. The whole castle is a chessboard and she misses the hell of out Ron in these cold, short days. Theo is a born liar and a survivalist bar-none, but he has no conception of the larger mechanism of the thing, too primed to think of everyone as a threat to figure out who he can use. Neville is rawly powerful and charismatic and unafraid to take a hit; Ginny is, in another timeline, the Dark Lord herself, which is what they need for the actual business of doing the war, but neither of them are anything like strategic. 

Which leaves Daphne as the brains of the operation. Ron would be better, of course, but what situation wouldn’t be made better by Ron? 

She eats slowly, writing up what is charmed to look like her potions essay but it actually brewing notes Hermione asked for— they’ve been cribbing off private notes Harry stole from Snape, but Hermione, ever paranoid, wants them checked over. They’re all, in typical Snape fashion, innovative in a devastatingly effective way. 

As she works, the Great Hall slowly fills, and she cuts them all with her eyes, taking them apart to slowly build her state of the union. Astoria, who is priority number one, is yawning, but gives her a chipper smile before settling down to actually do homework. At her shoulders are two of her friends from Slytherin— Delilah Vanderwerk, who was unaware of her wizarding ancestry until this summer (when Ernie invested it out of thin air), and Katie Selwyn. She and Dennis have built quite the core of power in fourth year, slowly but surely cultivating a warren of allies who fill the classroom in TA meetings. 

(Astoria is thriving as an agent of pure chaos in the midst of a rebellion, and Daphne is starting to think she should have been in Gryffindor. It’s only going to be a matter of time before Ginny wants to take her out into the field.)

Ginny, along with Neville and Luna, are living a shadow existence right now, lurking in the firmaments of the castle, appearing to lead TA meetings or talk to the elves or set something on fire, before tucking back in. She feels a keen sting of pain, at the thought of Neville— his grandmother has been presumed dead since January— but she shoves it away. If they make it out (we will, she tells herself) they can grieve when it’s over. 

Across the hall, she picks out Hannah sitting with a small knots of Gryffindor first years, including one of Anthony’s sisters, and she can’t make out the words, but the warmth of her tone carries. Hannah isn’t contributing strategy to the affair, but she’s probably the only reason they’re all sane. She’s put bones back together, turned burns back into skin, and manage to convince her mentor at St. Mungo’s to hand over the antidote to the snake venom he’d developed a few years back. He wasn’t aware it was the Dark Lord’s snake, but he didn’t have to know, not when Daphne had brewed one cauldron here and Hermione had brewed another wherever the Trio were hiding out at. 

Hannah’s the one who can get the first years to stop sobbing, and also always seems to know when one of them is at the end of their rope. She’d been the one who’d sat up all night with Neville the night the Order reported his grandmother missing, so that he wouldn’t be alone with it. She still doesn’t understand why the hell Snape made her Head Girl— Theo, she sort of understands, if she squints and assumes Snape bought the act he’s been putting on all these years— but Hannah Abbott? Pureblood, sure, but in no world is she going to help subjugate the school to the Dark Lord’s ideals. 

The man in question is sitting at the head table like a carrion bird, just watching. Daphne scrutinizes him out of the corner of her eye, and comes up with next to nothing, same as she has all year. 

The Carrows are easy. They’re sadists, who don’t care about using crucio on anyone that moves, but they’re also laughable simple to maneuver around like pawns. Between the Map and the elves and the ghosts and the paintings and Flich and the sheer amount of magic Flitwick and McGonagall and even Sprout have poured into protecting the castle and the kids, they’ve managed to mainly work around them. Hell, if things got bad enough, Theo and Neville, not to mention Flitwick and McGonagall, were powerful enough for imperio and then an obliviate to reshape their memories. 

The Carrows are easy, and Snape is an enigma. Even as she scrolls through the rest of the allies she can see at breakfast— Colin, whispering to his pack of Gryffindor hooligans who have been helping them out; Lisa Turpin and Terry Boot, working together on something that Daphne’s pretty sure is for Hermione; Ernie, talking to Leanne and Emma at Hufflepuff— she keeps an eye on Snape, who isn’t eating, just watching. 

She watches right back.

“This is who we need to protect,” says Theo, two nights later, up late in Headquarters. The war council is him and Neville and Daphne and Ginny, the four engineers of the resistance at Hogwarts. Two Gryffindors and two Slytherins, sticking it to the Dark Lord and Severus Snape. Not that Houses matter at all right now— in another life, Ginny’s in the silver-and-green, she ended up in red-and-gold, Neville took Hufflepuff, and Theo asked for Ravenclaw, and they’d still be here, all edges and burning with power. 

Up on a whiteboard is a tree they’re drawn of all their allies; at the bottom are the people Susan and Luna have highlighted as low risk, low commitment. “They don’t like Snape, they don’t like the Carrows, and they don’t agree with the Dark Lord, but it’s all theory. What they really want is a path of least resistance,” says Theo, pacing back and forth. His tie is discarded on the table and his sleeves are rolled up to the elbow, so she can see the pale white of his un-Marked forearm, and it brings a weird sheen of relief to her. 

“So we need to protect them?” Ginny asks, tilting up her chair so only two of the legs rest on the floor. Neville rubs at his face; he’s got five o’clock shadow and bags under his eyes. 

“If the Carrows torture them, they’ll cave,” he says, picking at one of the bandages on his forearm, a cursed burn that Hannah and Madame Pomfrey are trying to figure something out for. “So we have to keep their attention off them.”

He looks up at Daphne, and she can almost feel the exhaustion wafting off him. They’ve been playing that game for months now, in tandem— she’ll try subtle tricks, subterfuge, and if it’s not enough, he’ll do something stereotypically Gryffindor like saying the Dark Lord’s name that will land him cursed burns or bleeding hands. 

Are we making a difference? she thinks, her eyes finding the scars on his hands and arms and throat. Or are we just being hurt? 

They’re alone in the greenhouse, just her and Neville, when she musters up the courage to ask him that. He’s got top soil on his hands and a pink strip of newly healed skin on his check. He wipes off the sweat on his forehead with the back of his hand, and then sinks down to the pavers, hands held out in front of him. She Vanishes the dirt non-verbally, mirroring his stance. It’s some time in the middle of the night, and everything is quiet. 

“I don’t know,” he says, quietly. But— what else are supposed to do? Just— just let them hurt people? Let Voldemort win?”

She tries, and fails, not to flinch from the name. Leans her head back against the planter, stares up at the glass panels of the roof, and the darkness beyond. “No,” she whispers. “But it’s— it’s hard to watch you and Gin be hurt.” 

“It’s nothing I can’t handle,” he says, with that idiotic disregard of Gryffindor martyrs. She brings her gaze back to him and gives him the most disgusted look she can muster.

“Of course it’s not. But you shouldn’t have to.”

He gives her a sliver of a grin. “Yeah, well— when has it ever mattered what we want?”

The memory that comes to her is of Glasgow, the summer after fifth year. The way Astoria had walked along the top of the low wall next to the street in the rain, humming, and how her fingers had been thin and warm in her hand. She thinks Harry lying in the sun in the gardens of the Coventry House, before the Dark Lord had returned, and walking the toe path besides the canal in Woking with Millie and Susan. About the still blank slot on her forearm, and the portkey she still keeps on a chain around her neck, burning with Hermione’s sheer force of being. 

“It matters to me if you’re hurt,” Daphne says, finally, unable to look at Neville as she says it. It feels like pulling teeth— what kind of survivalist owns up to their weaknesses? “And I— I don’t want it to be for nothing.”

It’s only when Neville lets out a strangled sort of sound that she looks back at him, and she realizes that he’s crying, one hand pressed into the crease of his nose. The scars on the back of his hand are shiny in the green house lights. 

She’s never been good at this part, but she moves without thinking about it; maybe all those years with Susan have rubbed off on her. Her arm over his shoulders, his head under her chin. He’s shaking with sobs, and she wonders how long he’s been keeping all this in— the pressure of the war, the grief over his grandmother, the ache for the Trio, the pain. It takes her a long moment to realize that there are tears trailing down her cheeks too— thank Merlin her mascara is magical— and she tilts her head back against the planter and lets them come. Sobbing for Susan’s aunt, and Neville’s grandmother, and the fact that she’s trying to strategize without Ron, and brew without Hermione, and survive without Harry. Sobbing for the wounds on Neville and Ginny, and the detachment Theo’s cultivating, and Astoria growing up in the middle of this mess, and the fact that all of this is theirs. 

They sit there in the greenhouse, holding each other and just letting it out, until the dawn comes. 

_______________

There is a single, burning question, which haunts Anthony like a phantom: where the fuck are the two unaccounted for Horcruxes?

Millie, being Millie, had manifested for him a side room in Headquarters with both a passage to the library and walls made entirely out of cork-boards, and the timeline that used to be in the library is now here, with more notations than ever. He sits on the table, kicking his legs, and lifts the latest cup of tea Mavis has brought him to his lips. 

Start at the beginning, he tells himself, but pictures of crime scenes blur with the photos of very young You-Know-Who blur with that eerie Snape mugshot he’ll never be able to unsee, and he still can’t make heads or tails of any of it. The fate of the entire wizarding world is depending on him and Harry and Hermione and Ron figuring it out, and yet, since the Trio successfully broke into the Ministry, none of them have managed to make any progress on where they might be. 

Outside, the February wind pitches sleet against the stone of the castle, and he cradles his head in his hands. Everything feels blurry, underwater, documents bleeding into each other like ink down a page, family trees and private histories and monographs on obscure charms methods and the clotted evil of the Horcruxes and internal Ministry documents. He’s doing his best, he really is— him and Madame Pince, two archivists against the world— but the list is never ending. Hermione alone, with her ravenous appetite, would keep him busy, but there’s Theo and Sue and Ernie and Daphne and sometimes even Hannah and Neville, and then there’s the Horcrux hunt—

It’s fine, you’re fine, he tells himself. Wars run on information, really, and no one else can do what he’s doing. Hell, he knows the Death Eater Corp backwards and forwards and none of them could do this— maybe Snape or Rockwood, but that’s not how You-Know-Who’s using them. Information he got the Trio let them get in and out of the Ministry; information he got the Order let them corner Jugson a few weeks ago. Information he got Ernie let him fake family trees, keep people like Dean and Justin safe; information he got Hermione and Sue and Theo are helping them put together powerful magic.

He shuts his eyes, and tries to remember how important all this is. Ahava is in Slytherin, Aelwen in in Gryffindor, and now they’re thick-as-thevies with muggleborns he and Ernie helped Sprout back-stop back in June, and un-assuming half-bloods, and kids with last names that match the mugshots on the walls. None of them evil, but Hogwarts doesn’t feel safe for them, doesn’t feel magical and stunning. 

It’s just a prison, with monsters around every corner and the war leaking everywhere. 

The thought of the two of them, growing up in a world where You-Know-Who wins— where nothing is ever enough for the bastard, where he keeps drawing blood just to prove he can— keeps him moving forward, even through the haze of exhaustion and the dull panic rooting around behind his sternum. Maybe it’s too much, but what else is he supposed to do? He, more than anyone else (maybe even Dumbledore, or the Death Eaters) knows how the monster works. Knows what it will look like, if they don’t find these fucking Horcruxes and end it. 

In late February, he wakes from a crooked, turbulent nap on his stack of papers to find Susan in the annex, eating a scone the elves must have brought up and pacing around the bulletin boards, occasionally making rude hand gestures at the Death Eaters. Anthony’s fairly sure he’s seen Ron do the exact same thing, and it makes him smile. 

“What do you need?” he asks, pushing himself back to sitting. Susan turns to look at him; she’s not wearing her tie, and her eyes are red-rimmed, and her hair is greasy. Anthony’s no expert, but he can tell she looks like shit, and that usually means things aren’t going well. Though— when are they ever, these days?

“I need a problem I can solve,” she says, running a hand through her hair, and then leaning on the table with her palms on stacks of Ministry files. “And you are exhausted, over-worked, and fucking lonely. So tell me what you need.”

He stares up at her for a moment. The first two, he could have told you, but lonely? 

But she’s right, isn’t she? Not that Susan’s ever really wrong about this sort of thing. There had been a time when he’d gone on his insane research benders and then come up for air because Sue had wanted him to come and fly with her, because Hermione wanted someone to study with for an exam, because Millie had shown up in the middle of the night and wanted to chat. 

(Ron, wanting to play chess over lunch. Harry, ducking in with a question or an invitation or just a moment of peace and quiet, alone in the study room, away from the world. Theo with a fun little problem or just a new idea. Susan and Luna, always knowing if they needed to talk or just sit there in the silence, let him work but not alone.)

But it’s not fun and games anymore; it’s not him toying around with a side project that Dumbledore and the Order have handled. It’s the real fucking deal, him trying to save the world, and when he steps out of his corner no one’s asking to fly or see a new secret passage or a cool bit of work. Everyone’s in their own worlds, and why wouldn’t they be, but—

“Three for three, as usual,” he says, heaving out a breath and standing up, coming around the table and hoisting himself up on it. She does the same, so they’re shoulder to shoulder looking at the timeline. He’s not actually sure when the last time someone touched him was— he and Sue have been ships in the night, Theo and Ernie aren’t really the physical types, and he keeps missing Luna— and Susan’s shoulder is a welcome weight, like a port in a storm. Her hand finds his, and she leans her head on his shoulder.

“What do you need?” she asks again, the timeline studded with the dead— studded with her dead— wrapping all around them. 

He knows the Horcruxes are the secret. As long as You-Know-Who doesn’t know they know, they have the upper-hand. But— if they’re going to win, they have to find them, don’t they? And for all he and the Trio are, they aren’t Susan Bones. She, along with Luna and Daphne, have heard the story in bits and pieces, but maybe—

“I’m going to walk you through something,” he says. “And you’re going to tell me what you think.”

“Alright,” says Susan, drawing one leg up on the table and wrapping her arms around it. Her hair has slipped out of the bun and is hanging limply down her back, but there’s some kind of spark back in her eyes. “I’m guess it’s about You-Know-Who?”

“When is it not?” he says. 

The night ebbs and flows around them— Mavis brings tea, and more tea, and finally an entire breakfast— as Anthony spares no expense on the history of You-Know-Who. Susan’s heard some of it before, but the fullness of it is always disorienting. 

“So,” says Anthony finally, drawing in a tight breath. He’s made it to Godric’s Hollow, and there’s salt dried on Susan’s face but her attention is still rapt. “Harry’s mum and dad die so he could live. The Killing Curse rebounds.”

“But he doesn’t die,” says Susan, picking apart a scone Mavis brought. “He’s some kind of— shade.”

“Exactly,” says Anthony. “And that’s not because he didn’t take a full killing curse. That’s because he did some fucked up magic to try to become immortal.”

Silence, for a moment, and then Susan nods. “Makes sense. His whole life is just fear and rejection. The only person he can trust is himself, and the only way out is power. And once you’ve got enough, why not try to conquer death?”

Anthony lets out a sigh— for the first time in a long time, he feels like he’s getting somewhere. Susan seems to get You-Know-Who instinctively, in a way that’s taken him years to get a feeling for.  He sketches out the Horcruxes in the barest terms, not even using the word.

“We need to find the other two,” he says, after explaining about the locket in the cave, the diary left the Malfoys, and the ring in the shack, and the snake. Susan’s gotten down from the table to pace; her shoes click slightly on the stone. “We’re pretty sure one is here, at Hogwarts, because of the curse on the DADA position and the timing of his visit, but Millie can’t find it.” Susan nods. “It’s— I mean, it’s like Luna says. He loves nothing and nobody. How are we supposed to find something important to him.”

“He loves himself,” corrects Susan absentmindedly. “He loves his power, he loves what’s he’s built.” She blows out a breath. “The locket, in the cave where he hurt muggle children on a trip. The diary, a record of him being Heir, with Lucius— who— what was his standing with the Dark Lord in the first war?”

“One of his top lieutenants,” says Anthony. “Him, and Bellatrix.”

Susan lets out a hmm and continues pacing. “The snake— that’s with him all the time, isn’t it? And he’s got parseltongue. A symbol of that, maybe. The shack— another connection to Slytherin, and his wizarding heritage….” She trailed off, and then looked up at him, her eyes shining. “He loves being a wizard. It all comes to that, doesn’t it?”

Anthony blinks, and then flicks out his hand to summon his ledger with the notes from Harry’s conversations with Dumbledore. “Here,” he says, flipping through them and then spinning the page around to show Susan. “Dumbledore talks about he’s almost obsessed with his heritage. Trying to trace it, trying to prove it.”

“Of course he would be,” says Susan. “Surrounded by rhetoric about pure bloodlines, and already understanding that his magic is a key to power, which is a way out of his situation in the orphanage.” She bites her lip, turns back to the pacing. “But all the bloodline shit is a tool— he’s using it to prove that he belongs.” Anthony swallows, and thinks of the pieces he knows about Harry’s past, and hates the way things parallel each other. Susan is still talking. “Hogwarts makes sense— it’s a valued institution. I don’t— because the cave was about power— maybe something else from his childhood? The orphanage— no, that doesn’t make sense—“

Something clicks in Anthony’s head, and his eyes go wide. “Valued institution,” he whispers. “Top lieutenant.” He slides off the table and unpins the mugshot of Bellatrix, from after the attack on the Longbottoms— the heavy, lidded eyes; the mane of unkempt hair. And the Black name meant something, didn’t it? Surely it did to You-Know-Who, growing up without it. The through-line is so obvious now that he thinks about it he feels stupid for not seeing it. “Susan, you’re brilliant.”

“What?” asks Susan, who is still talking, about the ring and the cup and the locket. “What did I say?”

“He wants to belong in the wizarding world. Root himself in the valued institutions of it. And if he’s grown up with nothing— with having to take handouts from the school to afford books— of course he’d be thinking about money.”

Susan just blinks at him. “Gringotts,” he says. “In the Lestrange vault, I’d bet. They were his top lieutenants, but Bellatrix and Lucius also represent everything he’d always wanted to be in the wizarding world. He’d want to tie himself into that, right?”

“Yeah,” says Susan, breathing hard. “Yeah, he would.” Silence, except for the frantic scratching as Anthony scrawls out notes for himself— he’s never tried to get Gringotts internal records before, just wills, but between him and Pince, surely they can figure it out. “Did we just— did we just do it?”
Anthony looks up at her; his heart is beating wildly, like he’s run miles, and he feels more hopeful than he has in months. Now that it’s occured to him, it just feels right— the symbolism, and also the practicality, of hiding a Horcrux in a bank infamous for preventing thefts. “I mean, I want to check, before we send the Trio false hope— but— yeah. I think we did.”

Susan’s face curls into a wide, liquid smile, which Anthony doesn’t think he’s seen all year, and then she’s across the room, and he’s got an armful of Susan Bones. It takes him a moment, startled as he is, but then he returns the hug.

He lets her tug him to a bunk in the bunk house, dump a Hufflepuff blanket over him. He sees her curl up in the bunk across the way, also drapped in yellow and black, and he thinks he won’t sleep, but then there it is, like a train. 

Susan coaxes him out onto the wide, cold lawn the next morning, and they sit on the rocks by the lake and talk about the small things, the things that have nothing to do with the war. His corgi at home, and how the twins are doing in their classes. Her and Ron, and how much she misses him. British League Quidditch. He feels like he can breathe, for the first time in a long time.

Above them, the castle rises, and from the outside, it doesn’t look like a hell-hole. Susan is a warm weight against his shoulder, chattering on about Quidditch teams he’s never heard of. He probably should get outside more. Make his friends come outside more. Be the one making them take breaks.

Five down, one to go. And it’s in the castle somewhere, it has to be. For the first time in a long time, Anthony feels something verging on hope.

Chapter Text

The cold follows them around like a shade, in dark campsites with snow on the ground, and Harry takes the watches in the middle of the night, and tries to ignore the hunger. He’s had much, much worse before, after all, but it’s been years. He sees Snape, sitting across from him at the Chinese place in Chelsea saying don’t thank me for basic human decency and shoves the memory away viciously, disgusted with it. 

With himself too, but he tries not to dwell on that too much.

They’ve made no progress, on any of their missions, except for volo vivre, which is a pipe dream at best. Their Horcrux quest feels stalled out mid-stride— if Millie can’t find it, how can it be at Hogwarts, but also where else would Voldemort put one— and they can’t even destroy the one they do have. Snape’s dumped the sword of Gryffindor, which should also do the trick, (according to Phineas Black’s portrait that Hermione had shoved into foldspace) into Gringotts, and even Hermione isn’t brash enough to try Fiendfyre unless they have to.

He puts his chin on his knees and blows out a cloud into the frigid January air. They’ve made no progress, except for volo, and out in the real world, people are dying.

They listen to Potterwatch every night, on the radio Justin left for them at their dead drop in London. It’s Luna’s dad and Lee Jordan and sometimes a cameo by Fred or George or Lupin. Every time, they hope beyond hope they won’t read off a name of someone they know, but they only get lucky some of the time. Neville’s Gran is missing-presumed-dead, and just because they don’t know the muggles doesn't mean they don’t matter. 

They’re counting on us, Harry thinks, the hunger like a living thing in his gut. He presses his thumb against the ring, trying to steady himself— sometimes, when he’ll wake up in the bunk in the dark, hungry, it will take him long minutes to remember he’s not ten waking up in the cupboard. On the bad nights, he’ll be preventative, coming back in from night watches and crawling into bed with Ron or Hermione. They’re counting on us, and we’re starving in the woods with no idea of where to go next. 

Something about tonight feels off, and he’s cold and jumpy. They’d eaten a meager dinner of tinned soup they’d shop-lifted earlier in the week; they’d have to go back to a town soon, but in the snow and cold the dementor attacks and Death Eater raids had increased and they last thing they wanted was to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. He runs his fingers over the scars on the back of his hand, and feels the disgust well up like water through the floorboards. Just tonight, on Potterwatch, Lee Jordan had expressed his deep belief that he was out there, working hard on defeating Voldemort, and Harry had wanted to be sick. They all seem to think he’s some symbol, some rallying point, with the power the Dark Lord knows not— hell, even the Dark Lord thinks it, with his idiotic quest to find a super powerful wand— and he’s—

He’s a seventeen-year-old starving in the woods, good at a quick draw but not much else. Good in a fight but still waking up with nightmares about that fucking house. He misses his girlfriend and the four-poster in the Slytherin dorm and somehow also a man who never actually loved him, just cared about the color of his eyes. 

Should have just told the Order about this, he thinks. McGonagall and Kingsley and Ron’s mum would have solved all of this. 

He misses Ginny, her biting sarcasm and how she always knew if he wanted to talk or fly or just be quiet. He misses Theo, eternally at his shoulder; he misses Daphne straightening his tie and correcting his essays; he misses Millie, with her optimism and her complete lack of decorum. He misses Susan’s easy support; misses Neville’s power and ethics; misses Luna seeing right through him, asking him to dance. Misses all of them, misses the way he was just Harry with them. 

The night is suddenly filled with a soft, silver light. Harry is on his feet, Hermione’s wand drawn from the holster, and then his breath catches. Just outside the ward boundary, shining and beautiful, is a patronus.

It’s a yearling deer, the spots just fading. Perfect silver hooves, not making a mark in the snow. There’s a familiarity to it, somehow, and then it all clicks, and he has to raise a hand to his mouth to stifle the half-sob that’s forced its way out of his lungs, thinking of the letter he found in Grimmauld: the yearling has a single antler bud, velvety and fragile. 

“Prong,” Harry whispers, and the yearling tilts his head, and then turns, sauntering off into the frigid cold the woods. 

He follows it without logic, without thought. He knows it can’t be true— they’re dead, he knows they’re dead, they were just at the grave— but who else in the world would have him as their patronus if not— 

Half-dreamt daydreams come back to him, as he pushes through the brush, following the yearling. Of a house in Godric’s Hollow, with a cat and a bedroom with his name on the door. Of Hermione working on charms with his mum at the kitchen table, of him and Ron and his dad playing Quidditch in the back garden. Of having the Grangers, the Weasleys, his school friends over for dinner. Hermione would want it to be his mum— smart, powerful, a bit of a firebrand. Ron would want his dad— charming, endlessly loyal, able to fix things. Harry doesn’t care. Either. 

The yearling comes to a halt in a small glade, with a dark pool covered by ice. “Hello?” calls Harry, raising Hermione’s wand high and spinning in a circle— the woods are nothing but pockets of shadows. He can’t bring himself to call out for his parents out loud. Once he gets close to the yearling, it vanishes into a puff of silver smoke, and then he looks down through the ice and sees it. Rubies like eggs on the hilt.

He shuts he eyes and almost laughs to himself. Hasn’t Ron been dreaming about a sword in a pool in the woods for fucking years?

He’s down to his boxers, shivering violently in the cold, before he can think about it. Maybe he’s too hungry, too keyed up to think straight. Just another Dumbledore ploy, he thinks, splitting the ice and then strapping the wand to his wrist, leaving a spill of Hermione’s blue fire along the side of the bank. Sent Fawkes with the sword, conjured some illusion, all because he couldn’t do anything like a normal person. 

The water like fire. He dives for the sword, curls his hands around the handle and pulls, but it won’t come free. The cold is suffocating, holding him down, and it’s only down there, unable to find the strength to fight his way back up to the top, that he remembers what happened last time. 

He’s only one part of a Trio. His bravery is useless, unless it’s with them. 

Arms. Air. The smart of the snow and then the bracing weight of warming charms. “Bloody hell mate, what were you thinking—“ goes Ron, and Hermione’s warding with her entire being, the sword on the snow and Ron’s arms around him, he’s shaking—

They end up back in the tent, a blanket around his shoulders and a cup of tea in his hands, which are still shaking. The sword of Gryffindor is on the bottom bunk, the rubies catching the light.

“I know it was dumb,” says Harry, attempting to prevent the rare combination lecture from the two of them. “I know. I just—“

“I get it, mate,” says Ron. “We’re not in a great frame of mind.”
“It looked like Prong,” Harry says softly, staring into his cup. “Like— like what my mum or dad’s patronus would have been if—“

Hermione reaches over and takes his hand, and then sit in silence for a long moment. “It was clever, whoever did it,” she says. “Some kind of illusionary patronus, designed to lure you out, give you the sword in the right manner to have the transfer hold.”

“Dumbledore shit,” says Ron, over his own mug of tea. “He couldn’t ever do anything normally.”

That’s a fact. Hermione spends a while dissecting the pieces of the illusion, the gambit, but Dumbledore, needlessly complicated or not, was one of the most powerful wizards they’d known, and he did have a phoenix who could have swooped in and dropped off the sword. 

And what could it have been, but a Dumbledore gambit, when the only two people who would have had their patronus as a yearling deer with a single antler were irrevocably dead?

They sleep on the floor that night, all together, on a transfigured mattress, him between Ron and Hermione. He can’t blame them— he’s sure he gave them quite a scare.

They take it out to the woods the next night, to end it, Ron with the sword and Hermione with the locket and him with the parseltongue to coax it to open. Riddle’s dark eyes stare up at them from the interior, winking in the low light. His voice curls out into the gloom, his quicksilver tongue darting out at all of them, like Riddle in the chamber had done.

Least-loved son, he hisses, and Ron pales in the moonlight, his hands shaking, least of the family— who would want you when they could have a daughter, when they could have the boy-who-lived— 

Awkward, useless know-it-all, never fitting in our world, he snarls, and Hermione takes a few steps back, fumbling for her wand, you think your brains will save you but what have they ever gotten you, you’ll never belong—

Freak, purrs Tom Riddle, and Harry feels like the air has been driven out of him. What power do you have, what skill— they’ll leave you the moment they realize what you truly are, should have stayed in the cupboard—

The snow. The dark woods, and the wind. From the locket billows smoke, condensing into the form of Tom Riddle— Harry recognizes him as not the sixteen-year-old from the diary, but the hungry nineteen-year-old from the dusty house, hooking his fingers into the cup and letting the locket chain slide through his hands. 

Who were any of you, ever to go against me? asks Tom Riddle, inhumanly handsome. And now you’re here, alone on a quest you will never complete, with no family, no friends—

That snaps them out of the stupor, the inanity of that statement. If they know nothing else, they know that’s not true. Hermione steps forward, Harry draws his wand, and Ron brings the sword down in an arc, shattering the locket with a screaming crash that echos through the woods. 

Harry’s not sure if the gin came from the cellar in Grimmauld, or the upper cabinets at the Burrow, or underneath the china hutch in Birmingham, but it’s a relief, when Hermione summons it from the foldspace and pours them all a measure. The locket is still smoking slightly, open on the table between them. 

Maybe it’s the gin; maybe it’s the shock of finally killing the Horcrux; maybe it’s the lingering hunger the patronus raised in him, but the words just tumble out from him in the gloom. “Sorry I’m so shite at this,” he says, putting his head down on the table. 

“Shite at what, mate?” asks Ron. 

“Saving the world,” he mutters to the table. The room is spinning slightly but Ron and Hermione are fixed points, their magic anchors. “Being the Chosen One.”

“All things considered, I think we’re doing quite well,” says Hermione.

“You don’t understand,” says Harry, the wood grain under his head, thinking about the yearling in the woods and the swell of want. Thinking about the vigil at the Burrow, and the way Dumbledore had cut his hand in the cave, talking about how his blood was more important, and Cedric, dead in the grass. 

There’s a hand on his face, and his chin is lifted to meet Ron’s face, his brown eyes and freckled nose, lick of red falling over his forehead. “Mate,” Ron says, “It was all bullshit, yeah? ‘Mione’s fucking amazing, and we’re lucky to have her, and you’re not a freak, Harry. You couldn’t get rid of us if you tried.”

“And we picked you, Ron, out of everyone,” comes Hermione’s voice. “It’s you we want. It’s always you.”

There’s salt trickling out of his eyes. “Everyone— everyone that gets close— it gets fucked up. It goes wrong. My parents— and Sirius— and Cedric— Snape—“

“Yeah, but not us, mate,” says Ron, pulling him from the chair into an embrace. They’re both drunker than they really should be for a quest to save the world, so they end up on the floor, and then Hermione’s there, and he buries his face in her shoulder and thinks about being eleven, and how they’d held him like this at breakfast and he hadn’t been able to breathe, because no one had ever touched him like that before, and he’s sobbing snot on her Oasis t-shirt and when they cast a patronus it’s him too. 

Because how could it not be?

“Not us,” says Ron. 

We’ve always had friends, you son of a bitch, he thinks, sinking into a haze of alcohol and the come-down of killing a piece of Voldemort’s soul. They’re right here. 

_______________

Things go wrong in March. Maybe it’s past due; their luck had held for a good long time, through several trips to London to their dead drop, through a few quick phone calls to Hermione’s parents, through research missions to try and find out where this bloody Horcrux was. 

It’s a rainy, disgusting day; Ron wakes up from another dream about showers of gold and a cup— it had to be about the Horcrux, doesn’t it, but he can’t for the life of him make heads or tails of it. Is it one of the true ones? The ones about the sword had been true, but that hadn’t been any help. 

(He shivers, again, at how it had been, awakened by Harry’s sheer panic through the ring, racing through the snow without even shoes, and the cold water, Harry still for a horrible moment. Maybe he understands just a little better why Harry and Hermione are still a little antsy, over-protective of him.)

He rolls over in the bunk, watching Harry sleep— right now, without the eyes Snape’s obsessed with and his dark hair covering the scar, he could pass for a normal British school boy. The secret he’s been keeping sits oddly against his sternum— it’s his crew, for Merlin’s sake— but he just doesn’t know how the hell to have the conversation. 

Probably just have it, dummy, he hears Susan’s voice say, and a pang of longing goes through him, as sudden and shocking as the pool in the fen. It would be easy to tell it to Susan, like it always was, and then afterwards he could go back up to the bolthole and tell Harry and Hermione. There was this quality to Susan that couldn’t be rattled, like a brick wall, and Harry and Hermione would obviously take the idea that he thinks he actually did die quite badly.

They haven’t really talked about it, but he woke up to their faces streaked with blood and panic and sheer anguish, and he can imagine the inverse easily enough to want nothing to do with it. He was very hurt, or maybe unconscious, or maybe fucking dead, but then he was back. He was alright, and they’d made it out, and things could continue. 

He moves words around in his mind, tries to pretend it’s Susan. So, while I was maybe-dead, I had a not-dream. A vision, I guess. And I was on the pitch at the Burrow, and I was talking to Harry’s dad. 

It had been spring, and the hedges had been in bloom, and the sky had been bright and high. It had taken him a minute to place the man— taller than Harry, with darker skin and a different way that he held himself— but eventually it clicked. James Potter, standing opposite to him on the pitch he’d basically grown up on. 

It didn’t feel real. But it didn’t feel like a dream either.

Ron shuts his eyes, feels along the threads of the ring to Harry and Hermione, who’s taking the last watch. How the hell is he supposed to tell Harry that he had a whole conversation with his dad on the other side of what he feels like might have been the Veil? A whole conversation about Quidditch (James Potter had also gone for Ipswich) and transfiguration and the fact that his patronus had been a fawn, by the end, and how in another life he could have been in Hufflepuff too. Maybe then I would have chosen my friends better, he’d said, staring out into the distance. 

A whole conversation about Harry. About how bloody amazing he is, about the way he’d always sided with Ron is every fight, about the defense work and the love and the dedication. About The Before, and how he thinks there was this long lacuna between that night in Godric’s Hollow and the train to Hogwarts where no one cared if his friend suffered, and James’s eyes were a different color but they got that same look Harry’s got sometimes, when things were wrong. The bite of Gryffindor to him. 

When I was maybe dead, I met your dad and we just talked about you, mate. About how bloody cool you are and how much we love you and how neither of us hesitated to step in front of death for you. Because it’s you.

When I was maybe dead, I met your dad and somehow it made everything seem more tenable. Because he died for you and I would have done it too and that’s really what this whole fucking war is about, isn’t it, even if maybe it shouldn’t be. We have to kill Voldemort before he kills you. 

He’s not sure how long he talked to Harry’s dad before his finger started burning, and when he looked down at his hand with the ring, there were two gold threads spilling from it, like he’d seen before in dreams. They want you back, James Potter had said, with something almost like wistfulness. You should go. 

He had walked for miles, through the countryside he’d grown up in, until it was unfamiliar. Until it was dark woods and tight glades. Until it was cold night air and the pinpricks of stars, until he could smell blood, and then—

And maybe that’s why he can’t find the words to tell them. Because somehow, in a way he cannot understand (but has been seeing in visions since he was a child), they dragged him up from deep water. And if he talks about it—

Harry stirs, stretching like a cat and then opening one of his eyes to peer over at him, and the musing burn off like mist off a pond in favor of the more pressing issues of the day. 

And it goes well, the relocation and the errands to town and the check on one of their more distant dead drops, until they round the corner and come face to face with a motley lot of what are obviously wizards. 

It’s been months, of being on the run, of only fighting shadows, and they’re sloppy. They let the polyjuice wear off, and they’re not using the Clock, and Harry, always the quickest on the draw, has his arms full, and they’re too far away from each other to try a quick apparation. It’s embarrassingly quick, considering how much fighting and training they’ve done, before they’re disarmed and bound in the alley, Hermione knocked out cold from a stunner. The only silver lining is Hermione’s quick-thinking use of the swelling charm Kellah invented, so Harry no longer looks like Harry, but a swollen, disfigured mess of a kid. 

“You, girly, look an awful like this Hermione Granger,” snarls one of the Snatchers, who Ron distantly places as Greyback— a werewolf, he can hear Anthony telling him, a known associate, but You-Know-Who never Marked him. Hermione is still on the concrete, bleeding from a cut on her face and a thin blonde man has their wands in their hand. Harry’s scar, barely visible, has begun to bleed, and he’s screwing up his face into the concrete, trying to resist the pull of a vision. If one of them could get away, the other could follow the rings, but the anti-apparation wards are a mire across his magic. “And if this is Potter—“ 

They end up somewhere Ron thought he’d never see, except perhaps at the very end of it all: Wiltshire, the ancestral Malfoy estate. Harry is shaking with pain, caught in the throes of the vision; Hermione’s being hefted along like a sack of flour, and Ron catches a glimpse of an albino peacock. 

Of course the Malfoys have fucking peacocks. 

They’re in over their heads, badly, and Ron fights the urge to panic.

“We’ve got Potter!” crows Greyback, as they come to a set of gates. On the other side, a figure steps out from from the gloom, and it takes Ron a long moment to place him as the father of their rival. Lucius Malfoy looks like shit— wearing filthy robes, his hair matted and as greasy as Snape’s, and his checks are hollow. Ron can't help but feel a bit sorry for him— maybe he is a fully committed Death Eater, with a great deal of blood on his hands, but he looks like he’s gotten a rotten deal of it. “We’ve got Potter, and we’re here to see He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named!” 

Plans bloom and die in his mind as they are escorted into what at once point must have been a lovely house, but is now all shattered glass and blood smeared on the floor. If they call for Voldemort, it’s all over, especially with Hermione incapacitated, but the longer they can keep them guessing— 

“My, my, what do we have here?” comes a voice that fills Ron with even more fear that he already feels. “Who have you found, Lucius?” Bellatrix comes into the room, surveying them with her lidded eyes, and Ron feels the hatred that would power an Avada burning right beneath his skin— this is the women who killed the only decent parental figure his best mate’s ever had. 

He flexes his hands in the ropes, and reaches out with his magic. He’s never been particularly good at non-verbal, wandless magic, not in the way Hermione is, but it seems to come easier this time, as he dumps a concealment charm over their rings. There’s been a different quality to his magic, he thinks, since the maybe-death— it’s lighter, and more fluid, but also has this density and complexity to it he lacked before. Bellatrix is bickering with Lucius, and Ron’s eyes alight around the room— other than the Snatchers, it appears empty. Harry’s eyes have rolled back, and Hermione has been dumped on the flagstone next to him.

Bellatrix and Lucius and the Snatchers are focused on Harry, trying to determine if the smudge on his forehead is in fact that scar; Ron hates their hands on his friend. “We have to be sure,” says Bellatrix, dropping Harry to the floor and stepping towards Hermione, her eyes flashing. “Let’s start with the mudblood, see what she can tell us.”

He and Harry end up in the basement, dragged down by Greyback, Harry’s dripping blood down his face and his is smarting from Bellatrix’s backhand, and Hermione—

Her screams echo in the halls, going through him like he’s being stabbed. The basement is dark and damp. On the ground, Harry is murmuring Hermione’s name to the stone, trying to shake the vision; Ron worms his way into his hip pocket for the deluminator, clicking light into existence, only to come face-to-face with the starved, bruised visage of Ollivander. Behind him, in the shadows, are three equally rough-looking prisoners Ron doesn’t recognize— two goblins, and a dark-haired woman.

“Hello,” he says, to the wand maker; upstairs, Bellatrix screams IS THAT HARRY POTTER and Hermione’s swearing he isn’t and Ron fight desperately to keep his cool: it’s on him to get them out of here. “Is— is there any way out of here?”
Ollivander blinks at him. “None that I’ve been able to find,” he says, finally. “The wards the Dark Lord has put up are strong, as one would expect from him.”

Ron shuts his eyes; with his hands still bound Hermione’s screams fill his ears, her screaming and her sobbing. The ring on his hand is sparking, begging him to go to her, stop it, but what good would that do but give their cards away—

Think, Ron. Voldemort warded this place. What does that mean? 

It’s Luna’s voice he hears this time. He doesn’t value magic that’s not his. Magic he doesn’t understand. That’s where he’s vulnerable. 

“Harry,” he says, kneeling down next to his friend. “Call Kreacher.”
In the end, it is probably less than five minutes that they have to wait, in the dark basement. Ollivander takes the ropes from their hands, Harry manages to sit up. But above them, Hermione’s screaming and begging and it feels like a lifetime.

And then, into the basement: not Kreacher, but Dobby, the ex-Malfoy House Elf who had attempted to warn them about the diary and the Chamber of Secrets nonsense. 

“Dobby has come to save Harry Potter,” says Dobby. “Dobby owes him a life debt.” Harry manages to get a grip of the situation, negotiate with him to take Ollivander and the other three prisoners out of here, and then come back for them.
“Shell Cottage,” Ron tells him, which is the first place that comes to mind. The crack of the disapperation is loud enough to draw attention from upstairs. “Well, someone has to check,” hisses Bellatrix from upstairs. “And Wormtail is still out trying to track down Potter’s infernal bird, so it’ll have to be you, Lucius.” 

Ron looks over at Harry, who is wiping blood off his face. “We’re going to have to tackle him,” he whispers; Harry pushes himself to his feet and nods. 

“Back up,” calls Lucius, and his voice is raspy, without the polished edge, and Ron thinks of Draco in the bathroom, and how pitiful he’d seemed. Voldemort broke people, even people on his side. There were no winners, not with him.

Ron looks over at Harry, who nods. Lucius opens the door, and in the single moment when he’s dazzled by the light, he and Harry jump him. 

For being a Pureblood who’d never done a day’s work in his life, Lucius puts up a good fight. Harry has his hand over his mouth, calling back up to Bellatrix “All clear, no problem,” in a passable imitation of his posh, Pureblood draw, and they struggle in the dark, Lucius’s hands closing around Ron’s throat. 

“Really,” hisses Harry, blood still dripping in his eyes. “You’re going to kill the person who saved your wife and sons’s lives?”

Lucius’s eyes widen, and he releases his grip just enough for Harry to sock him in the temple. His body sags on top of Ron, knocked out cold. 

Another one of Hermione’s screams echos upstairs, and Harry drags Ron out from underneath Lucius. “Come on,” he hisses. 

They don’t have wands. The swelling is going down on Harry’s face, and it’s clear who he is now, and Ron is still rasping for breath after almost being strangled, but Hermione. Nothing matters but Hermione. 

In the dining room, Hermione is lying at Bellatrix’s feet, twitching. There’s a lot of blood, and Ron tries not to think too hard about it. There’s a disgusting hunger on Greyback’s face as he watches her, and the Snatchers are murmuring to themselves— they were not prepared for Bellatrix’s brutality.

Maybe he doesn’t have a wand, but he knows expelliarmus backwards and forwards now. And he loves Hermione with his entire being. 

The end result has so much power in it that even as he catches her wand, she’d thrown against the wall. Harry dives at the Snatcher with their wands in his hand, tackling them to the floor, and Greyback turns on Ron with a livid snarl. Ron’s knocked to the ground himself, before the werewolf is thrown into a wall by Harry’s stunner, cast with all three wands. The snatchers are backing up, scattering, and Ron stumbles to his feet, clutching Bellatrix’s wand, only to find himself face-to-face with the witch in question. She’s holding up a barely conscious Hermione by her hair, her knife pressed into her throat.

“Drop the wands or she dies!” yells Bellatrix, breathing hard. 

He glances over at Harry, who’s hands are shaking. He’s quick on the draw, but— 

Bellatrix presses the knife closer, so that beads of blood appear on her neck. He drops the wand with a clatter, without even thinking about it, followed by Harry just a breath later. “Good,” purrs Bellatrix. “Now— there’s no denying you’re the Potter scum, right?”

Harry stares her down. Ron watches Hermione twitch her fingers, and suddenly, he understands. He spreads out his hand for the wands on the ground. “Yes,” says Harry. “It’s me.”

Everything moves, then. Bellatrix’s face cracks into a feral grin. She slashes across Hermione’s throat with the knife, but Hermione isn’t there anymore— she’s across the room, translocated by the magic in the rings, and Ron catches her in one arm while the wands jump to the other hand. Bellatrix’s eyes widen, but her hand has already gone to the Mark on her arm, and Harry’s hand goes up to his scar, and then—

Dobby, cracking back into the hall. Bellatrix, throwing the knife, but they’re gone before it reaches them, all smears and colors, and then the smell of salt in the air, grey waves pounding on soft sand.

I know this beach, he thinks, a well of horror rising up in his throat. I know this beach like I know my own name.

And indeed, when he turns back to Hermione, sprawled out on the sand, blood welling up, he finds himself inside the dream he’s dreamed a thousand times before, just as helpless. 

Just as terrified. 

He drops to his knees in the cold sand, and casts like he’s never tried to cast before, hot blood slick on his hands; Harry’s doing the same. On his finger, the ring is burning.

Come back, he screams, the salt and surf soaking through his jeans. We can’t do this without you. 

And when her eyes blink open, refocus on his face, it’s all he can do to slump across her chest, and let the waves tear into him, sobbing like he’s not sure he’s ever sobbed, in pure, white-hot relief.

_______________

They stay at Shell Cottage, trying to get their bearings. I’m fine now, she wants to tell the boys, every time they look at her like she’s something fragile, but she supposes it’s the same sort of thing as it was in the woods when it was Ron. She examines the scar on her throat in the mirror after showers sometimes, rubs the tips of her fingers along the ropey raise of it. There’s the words carved into her forearm, too, and the shakes from crucio that took weeks to get over, but it was this one that nearly ended it. 

(Did, maybe. The boys haven’t talked much about the beach, but they hadn’t been able to cast for a week afterwards, and apparently Bill was shocked she was alive when he got down there, running out from the house without shoes.)

It’s odd, to be in a house after several months on the run. Bill and Fleur takes turns cooking— Fleur makes complex french food, and Bill makes hearty English fair, but Hermione’s pretty sure she would eat anything after living off tinned meats and stolen rice for five months. Members of the Order occasionally drop in— the House is protected by Fidelus, and Bill and Fleur’s best wards, and now her’s too— but she can’t help but worry that something will slip. She keeps replaying their missteps in the muggle village— they’d been so far out in the wilds, she hadn’t panicked when the polyjuice had worn off. Hadn’t drawn her wand quick enough to get them out. 

We did the best we could, ‘Mione, Ron had said, a few nights ago, after she’d taken the blame for it again. They were sitting on the cliff side, the wards spilling around them like an open flame. Really, if it hadn’t been for the rings—

You thought about calling Kreacher, Harry had said; Ron countered with you freed Dobby in the first place. Dobby, having formerly been in the Malfoy’s employ, had been able to crack the wards when Kreacher hadn’t. 

Is he alright? Hermione had asked, thinking of the odd elf who had scared them so badly second year, who they had bought socks for at Christmas the past several Hols. He and Luna, she knew, got on like a house on fire. 

Just dandy, Ron had said. You and him got us out of there before Bellatrix could do anything. 

She has a vague memory, she thinks, of trying to disaparate from the manor, the way the sharp edges of the wards keeping them in had mingled with the echos of pain from the crucio and the slash on her throat. 

A week and a half into their stay, she wakes in the middle of the night, from another dream about Wiltshire. On one side, Ron is spread out; on the other, Harry is curled up into her chest. Pale moonlight slots through the window, and far away she can hear the sea. She flexes out her hand and studies the Black Heir ring on her finger, feeling around the edges of her magic. It’s still immense and hungry and powerful, but somehow shot through with a practical solidness she didn’t think had before. The simple things— lumos, episky, basic wards— seem cleaner, sharper. And she has a feeling that a patronus would come easier to her now, but she can’t bring herself to try it. 

What did I do? she wonders, testing the threads that tie them all together. She had been sixteen, scared more than anything, cribbing together power that didn’t quite go together, taking blood, drawing ritual circles on the floor, and then Ron and Harry had found more spells and she’d done them over the rings, modifying them with ease and—

She slips from the bed. In the kitchen, the sound of the waves are louder, and she fills the kettle and sets it on the hob, and it takes her a long moment to realize she has to use magic to light it. Some witch she is. On the wall above the small dining table is a clock that must have been a wedding present from Mrs. Weasley, because it has two hands, both pointing to home, for Bill and Fleur. 

The thought occurs to Hermione that if they make it out of this, Mrs. Weasley will probably make her one for her household, and it makes her smile a little. 

The small table is still filled with her and Fleur’s scribblings related to volo, which, other than the food has been one of the best parts of camping out here. Bill will help when he can, and Theo and Sue had recruited Terry Boot and Lisa Turpin to help out, and Daphne and Ernie and Anthony and Hannah are pitching in as needed, as well as Flitwick, but to be able to sit down with Fleur and explain, in detail, what exactly they’re trying to do has been so illuminating. 

“A counter,” Fleur had gone, breathless with awe, once she’d gotten to the end of the work they’d put together so far. “This is genius.”

“It’s top secret,” Hermione had cautioned. “And we still have a lot of work. But—“

Fleur had summoned a self-inking quill from mid-air and was already getting into expanding a half-finished derivation Hermione had been floundering on before Wiltshire. That dinner had been the happiest she’d felt in months— there was still a piece of gauze tapped over the cursed scar on her forearm (Bill had been working on coaxing it to close), but the late winter sunlight had been slanting through the windows, and they’d all been talking about magical theory and volo. Harry had been sitting in the kitchen chair, back against the wall and the light on his dark hair, looking more relaxed than he had in months; Bill was splitting peas by hand, throwing out information about Dark magic that Harry played off of; Ron was pre-gaming dinner with lunch leftovers, being made fun of every time he talked with his mouth full. 

I want this, she’d thought, and for the first time in longer than she wanted to think about, she’d felt steady. The pain from the crucio was still a phantom memory, keeping her on edge, but Bellatrix had been a fool, to torture her instead of just kill her, and they’d made it out. She went to sleep that night with her mind full of visions that weren’t the war, or the pain: little flats in central London she split with the boys; learning to cook in a kitchen filled with light; doing spell work in the Weasley kitchen, Ginny and Harry and Charlie and Ron ducking off to fly with the twins, Susan talking to Percy and Ron’s dad about how Ministry politics were going, Mrs. Weasley cooking, her and Bill and Fleur doing theory, and then Neville and Luna would be over, and they would have dinner in the garden in the long days of summer. 

They survive. They save the world and they live. 

The steam from the tea billows, as she sits back down at the table, staring down at their work on volo. Her arms still twinges. She hopes Ollivander and Griphook and Riptooth and Amanda Pryor, who’d apparently been spying for the Order, are recovering alright— they’re at Ron’s Aunt’s house, where the Weasley parents are also laying low. They’d had a lot of worse of it, for longer. 

Ollivander had confirmed their theory that Voldemort was searching for some legendary wand, which went by many names, but apparently was unbeatable. Luna had referred them in the direction of the Tale of the Three Brothers, and “the hunt” and the symbol, and it did seem like something Xenophilius would be obsessed with. The idea that someone could be a master of Death. 

Hallows. Horcruxes. She flexes out her hand again, stares down at the ring. 

It was just some odd sort of dream, she tells herself, as the moonlight catches the Black crest. And then they dumped magic into me, like we did we Ron. 

She had been sitting in the back garden in Birmingham, the raspberry bushes heavy with fruit, and next to her had been a red-headed women. It had taken her a moment to place her— she’d thought for a minute it might have been an older Ginny, or a younger Mrs. Weasley, but the eyes—

Harry’s eyes. 

Lily Evans Potter. 

In the maybe-dream, Lily had pulled out a notebook and a muggle ball-point pen and handed it over. Show me what you’re working on, Lily had said, and Hermione had obliged, just like she had for Fleur.

This is familiar, Lily had said, and Hermione had explained, about the lies Regulus had crafted, and the locket in the lake, and how in the end, he’d picked Kreacher over himself. There was an ease in talking to her, like talking to Harry. In the end, they had talked for hours, in the fading light. About volo, and solutions, and some of the thornier concepts Hermione hadn’t been able to untangle. About how in another life, Lily thought she might have made a damn good Ravenclaw. Maybe that would have fixed things, she’d said, looking off into the middle distance. Could have studied more, been faster. 

Talked about Harry. About how quick on the draw he was, about his skill in Defense, about how maybe if they hadn’t spent their entire Hogwarts careers nearly being murdered, he could have pursued potions, or charms— not transfig, though, she said, and Lily had laughed. About the way he flew, about Ginny, about how he always stood up for her and Ron in the hallways. About the specter of what had happened in that house. But don’t worry, she said, and her face looked nothing like his until it went pinched and drawn like his did, when she or Ron said something concerning, when they were hurt. We got him out. He’s ours, now. 

The moonlight shifts across the floor, and the sound of surf swells and falls. Hermione runs her fingers over the volo equations. She wants to believe it was a dream, that in that slippery place between life and death things had resolved, and she’d figured out some of the more complex elements. But— 

It had been so real. So solid. Lily Evans Potter, with her hair like Ron’s and her eyes like Harry’s and her mind like Hermione’s, who in another life might have been what Mrs. Weasley was to her; Lily Evans Potter, who she felt a camaraderie with that had taken some of the edge off the torture. Lily had faced down the Dark Lord and point-blank refused to stand aside for Harry, and again and again Bellatrix had asked is that Harry Potter and again and again Hermione had said no. 

He wasn’t Voldemort’s. He was theirs. 

In the dream, dusk had come slowly, but inevitably, and two gold threads had unspooled from her ring, stretching out the gate at the back of the garden, which lead to the alley and then to greater Birmingham. You should go, said Lily, not without a little sadness. They’ll be waiting. 

She’d walked. And walked and walked and walked as Birmingham faded, and then there was the cliffs, and then a narrow, rocky beach, and then she was gasping for breath in the sand, Ron’s hand on her neck, Harry drenched in surf and shivering and still dumping healing spells into her. 

She tangles a hand in her hair, tries to force it to make sense, like this whole business with the Hallows. It can’t be real. It doesn’t work like that, right? No masters of death, no cheating it, even the Horcruxes a cheap substitute— 

I’ve been dreaming about the beach for years, Ron had told them, a few nights ago. ‘Mione, bleeding out, and then— being alright. I could never tell how much of it was real.

The floor creaks, and she looks up to see Bill, standing in the doorway of the kitchen. He flicks out his hand to rewarm the tea in her mug, long gone cold. “Alright, Hermione?’ he asks.

“Yeah,” she says. “Just— just thinking.”

“You lot are welcome to stay as long as you like, you know,” he says, moving to the hob to relight the burner. “The project you are Fleur are working on— it’s fascinating.”

“That’s not the real quest,” Hermione says. “It’s just— just a side mission. Once we— once we figure out what’s next, we’ll have to move on.”

Bill nods, turning around and leaning back against the counter, like she’s seen Ron do, cradling a mug of tea in his hands. “Anything I can help with?” Hermione feels a swell of gratitude that he’s not asking about the quest, and wraps her hands around her newly warmed mug. 

“What do you know about the Deathly Hallows?”

Bill studies her for a long moment. “I’ve heard of them,” he says, finally. “Cloak, stone, wand, right?” Hermione nods. “It’s always seemed a bit of a stretch to me.”

“That they exist?” Hermione asks. 

“No, I think they exist,” says Bill, slowly. “At least, the goblins think so, and the goblins aren’t usually wrong. I mean the quest aspect of it. This master of death bullshit. Death has no master.”

She thinks of how Voldemort had taken what they can only presume is the Elder Wand from Dumbledore’s grave. She thinks about the sordid magic of the Horcruxes, how they’d made Voldemort less than human. She thinks about following the threads back up from something, back up to her crew. 

“Tell me that’s not what you’re doing, Hermione,” says Bill, and for once she can be honest. They sit in the kitchen, listening to the waves roll in against the shore, until the sun rises, and somewhere around the third cup of tea she tells Bill in a low tone about the torture, and the feel of Bellatrix’s knife on her throat, and he tells her about an Order ambush gone wrong, and how he’d been vomiting in the snow by the end of it. 

Bill makes french toast for breakfast. Fleur wakes with a solution to one of the corners they’d backed themselves into regarding volo, and it had been Harry, a week and change ago, who’d had the idea to redirect the spare power into some kind of priori incantatem. Like in the graveyard, he’d said, and he so rarely brought that up that Hermione took it to heart. Ron falls asleep at the table again, drooling on Harry’s shoulder, and the reports coming in from the Order aren’t awful, hideous things. Tonks has had her baby, and Lupin drops by and apologizes to the three of them, and asks Harry to be the godfather (one of them— Kingsley’s the other); Fred and George managed to capture Rowle using mainly Weasley Wizards Wheezes products. 

And then, three days later, some good news at last, in Anthony’s scrawl in the linked journal. The cup’s in the Lestrange Vault, and with it, internal Gringotts records that Hermione doesn’t want to ask how he got his hands on. 

She looks up at Ron and Harry, who have some weight back on their cheekbones after eating well for a fortnight. Harry looks relieved, at the break in the case; Ron has a spark in his eyes that means he’s already thinking through mechanisms, plans. 

“Oi, Bill?” he calls, and Bill pauses where he’s washing dishes. “Hypothetically, if we wanted to break into Gringotts, how would be do it?”

Her hands aren’t shaking anymore. And maybe it’s not Hallows, or Horcruxes, what she’s built between the three of them, but it’s something. 

She hopes like hell it will be enough. 

Chapter Text

He kills quickly, without fanfare, as the cold winter gives way to a damp spring. Avada, sometimes, but sometimes other things. A little messier, if push comes to shove. But Harry had given them one mission, and one mission alone, and that was to stall. And Kingsley has no intention of taking that mission lightly, no matter what it might cost him. 

He lives day-to-day now, dancing between motel rooms and Order safe-houses and more than a few times sleeping rough, in the corners of Muggle London the Death Eaters would never think to look for him. Burned into his brain is the list of known Death Eaters, and as fall turned into winter it stopped being missions to rescue muggleborns from Manor House basements and more about crossing off names. Lestrange, Yaxley, Jugson. Wards only go so far, and house elves that haven’t been respected in generations are always easy to turn with a wand the Weasley twins stole from the basement at Ollivander’s. Apparation can be tracked, magical signatures can be tracked— hell, almost anything can be done, once you stop playing by the rules. 

And Kingsley hasn’t played by the rules since he was eleven, and the Hat said Better be Slytherin, and the snakes had been vicious but so had he. 

He’d killed Jugson in his sleep, in the manor house that was decaying around him, after the elves had let him in. Green, and then it had been over. 

(Jasper, who in another life had been a DLME DA, who used to go out on lunch breaks in the alley and smoke with him. They’d never talked much, but there had been a kind of camaraderie, in how they were trying to make the world a better place.)

He’d killed Yaxley on the way to a raid in Manchester, his magical signature burning a hole in his mind for nearly two weeks, until he’d slipped up, gone somewhere less defensible than the Ministry of Magic. It had been raining, a disgusting January rain, and Yaxley hadn’t even heard him incant, had just fallen to the mud stone cold dead. 

(Corbin, who in another life had been a few years above him in Slytherin, had helped him with his potions essay, who had always been the first to intervene in the Slytherin-Gryffindor fights, before he could hold his own.)

Rabastan Lestrange had been a slipperier beast, but eventually Kingsley had caught up with him too, in a wizarding pub in Bath in mid-February. Bartender had tipped off the Order, and Kingsley managed to show up before he got murdered for his troubles. And there he’d been, the same kind of disheveled handsome as he’d always been, when they were sixteen and he gave Kingsley the scar on the side of his face. 

That one hadn’t been clean.Lestrange had fought like hell, and maybe Kingsley could have ended it sooner if he’d really been trying, but Amelia and Scrimgeour and Moody were all dead and so what if he just wants to hurt someone a little for it? Those were his friends, damn it. 

Lestrange hadn’t been able to hold his own against Kingsley at sixteen, and he had no chance now. Kingsley stood over him in the broken glass and barstools, watching him bleed out, trying and failing to find the need for an Avada to make it quick. 

(A lifetime ago, they had been dorm mates. Kingsley can still remember the way he’d frozen one day at fifteen, how Rastaban he’d been then had just thrown him a cheeky wink. He’d been too Slytherin to see if a first crush could have become a first love.)

The thing is: he knows them all. Every one. Former colleagues, school mates, men he once looked up to in the Order, wished could have been his Head of House. The fathers of his friends; Wizengmont members he was on protection details for. 

But it doesn’t matter. It can’t matter, because he has a job to do. Harry and his associates are on a quest; McGonagall is doing her best to triage damage at Hogwarts; Molly and Arthur are protecting the muggleborns. He’s evening the playing field, the only way he knows how. 

Occasionally, there are moments of light in the darkness. He’ll run into Kovac and Greer at a safe-house, drinking off a bad mission. Tonks makes him the godfather of her child, who she named after he dad and who’s hair just starts changing color the moment he’s born. You’re giving them hell for me, right? she asks, and he nods, the less details the better. Mundungus, of all people, has become a central piece of the Order’s resistance, undaunted by security and more powerful than anyone has given him credit for. Sometimes, he runs into Molly and she always makes him sit down and eat. His best friend’s mum, it turns out, has a wicked power to her, and can curse like only a Black could. And Harry’s friends from Hogwarts continue to provide crucial pieces for the war effort— briefs, and technology, and the occasional manor house on fire.

But it’s always only a reprieve. He stands from a tea at a safe-house, a warm bed and a round with his friends, and then heads back into the dark. 

They aren’t winning, he doesn’t think. But this isn’t the sort of thing you win. It’s the sort of thing you survive. 

In March, he ends up at a safe-house, to do an interrogation in a basement. How the Weasley twins managed to capture Thorfinn Rowle was a story for another day, but now the man was tied to a chair in the earthy underbelly of a house in the moors and all Kingsley can think about is how they’d sat next to each other on the train that first year. How small they’d been, before they’d become violent.

Torture is rarely effective at producing good information, Kingsley knows. But he doesn’t really want information. 

A while later, Rowle looks up at him, from where he’s vomiting blood on the floor, and gives him a crooked grin. “I knew you would have been good, Kings,” he says, spitting blood onto the dirt. 

“Excuse me?” Kingsley asks. 

“I recommended you, you know,” he says. “Dark Lord asked for recruits and I told him all about you. Got the blood status wrong, ‘course, but barring that—“

He has Rowle up by his lapels on the wall before he knows it, breathing hard. Rowle spits blood in his face, lets out a hoarse chuckle. “We’re the same, Kings. Don’t lie to yourself.”

“You murder children,” hisses Kingsley.

“You murder your friends,” says Rowle. 

Kingsley drops him to the floor and walks away, his hands shaking. Rowle pushes himself up to sitting. “We’re both monsters, Kingsley. We’re just doing it for different people.” 

The avada is across the room before he can think twice about it, green illuminating the bare earth walls. And then there’s just Thorfinn, who had helped him study for his Herbology exams, and who’d he’d stayed up all night with after his mother died when they were third years. Thorfinn, who in another life, had been his friend.

He lies to the Order. Tells him he wouldn’t talk, took his secrets with him, proclaiming the Dark Lord’s name. He turns down the requests to stay the night, the offers to appear on Potterwatch as a special guest. He can feel Xenophilius and Lee Jordan watching him, but he ignores them, puts on his cloak. Outside, the night is pouring. 

He doesn’t bother with rain-repellent charms, just lets it soak him through. Mud on his boots as he walks to the apparation boundary. He’s never been under any illusions about being a good man; at most, all he’d ever been was a survivalist. But—

Maybe it’s true, he thinks, as he walks into the rain. Thorfinn, Rabastan, Corban, Jasper, and those were only recently. He’s got blood all up to his throat. 

But maybe that’s what they need. 

He walks into the darkness, and it swallows him whole.

_____________

Bill’s not sure exactly when he turned into his mother, but he’s worrying over the Trio like he’s sure she would be. 

The Trio had known about the cottage from the moment he bought it; he’d made sure of that. And he’s made sure, even with the complexities of the war, to send a scrawled piece of paper with Hedwig with the secret of the Fidelus. Just in case they needed somewhere to hide, he’d told himself. He knew the three of them had doubts about the Order, and who could blame them after Snape, but he and Fleur had always gotten on well with the three of them. If push came to shove, turning up to Shell Cottage and him and Fleur probably would have been less stressful than stumbling into a random safe house to be faced with some odd combination of defectors and ex-Aurors and Xenophilius’s mumbo jumbo. 

He’d just never thought they’d use it. And then there they were, in the rapidly darkening March evening, a house elf appearing on their beach with Ollivander and two of his former colleagues and a muggleborn in tow, all looking like they’d been starved and tortured. 

Ollivander had muttered something, about Wiltshire, and the Dark Lord, and Harry Potter, and by the time Bill and Fleur had gotten the four of them up to the house, Dobby was back, and Ron and Harry were screaming Hermione’s name as the surf tore into them, rivulets of blood clotting in the sand. The boys were all out of magic, dripping from reopened scrapes and wounds, but whatever they’d done, it had been enough, because as he skidded to the sand next to her, Hermione was stirring feebly, the words carved into her forearm still trickling blood. 

The next days had been a blur. The rescued prisoners ended up at various safe houses around the country— they didn’t have room, and Bill had a feeling that the Trio would want to be alone. Hermione had clearly been tortured, by Bellatrix, it turned out; Harry and Ron were bone thin, had dirt under their nails, and had that wild-animal look of being hunted to them. Neither of them could cast for a week, that’s how much magic they’d used on Hermione. 

In bits and pieces, Bill and Fleur pulled the story from them, though the Trio had been careful to dance around the quest. Grimmauld, finding notes from Sirius’s dead brother that Hermione was convinced she could build out into a counter for avada. The attack at the Ministry, which Bill had heard about through the grapevine

(Perce’s on our side, though, Bill, Ron had told him, and for a moment he’d looked like his brother again— the grinning nine-year-old who he’d taught basic magic theory too; the twelve-year-old with enough gall to bring Harry Potter home from school for Easter Break and say this is my mate, he’s ours now. Not like the war-torn man with sharp cheekbones and hard eyes who sat at his table with his hand around a mug of tea like a lifeline.)

The Ministry had been a success; trying to fight off Snape and the three Death Eaters he’d brought with him to Grimmauld had not. Harry had told that part of that story, with a look in his eyes that reminded Bill of some of the boys he’d gone to school with, who were Gryffindor down to the bone. The kind of people who liked reopening the wound of their mistakes just to punish themselves with it. He’d wanted to tell Harry that it wasn’t his fault, that he couldn’t have known, but he thinks it goes deeper than trust, when Snape and Harry are concerned. From what little he’d seen of them together, that summer at Grimmauld, it seemed clear that Harry thought of Snape as a kind of parent, and all along to Snape, Harry had been a stand-in for the only women he’d ever loved, which was about as fucked up as it got. 

Ron nearly died, Harry gets out, when it’s just him and Harry in the kitchen. Bill looks over at the kid; he’s wearing a crusty hoodie and his hair is shaggy and greasy. He doesn’t look like the savior of the wizarding world, or Undesirable Number One; he looks like an exhausted, starving kid who’s got the world on his shoulders. And they said it wasn’t my fault but I— I wanted to get Snape so fucking badly. 

Bill reaches into the cabinet above the stove and pulls out the whiskey, slides into the seat across from Harry, and pours them both some. Tell me about it, he says. 

Harry walks him through it, over three glasses— the fight, the woods, the moment when he and Hermione had thought Ron was dead. The months on the run, how hunger had made them snappy. Bill’s heard snippets, about Harry’s Before, overheard from his parents, but it’s different, coming from Harry, when he says shit like I don’t know why I was so angry, I should be used to it, meaning hunger. 

Look, kid, he says to Harry, who might not have red hair but has been his brother for all intents and purposes since Ron saw him on the train, because Ron just worked like that, we all make bad calls in the field, sometimes. That doesn’t mean you deserve any of this. 

Harry had looked up at him, with his eyes burning green. Why not? The war is on me, and I’m not moving fast enough—

It’s not, though, Bill had said, and Harry’s face had crumbled. It’s not, I swear it’s not. The war is on You-Know-Who. Hell, I’ve killed more people in this war than you have, alright. Harry was just staring at him, his face thin with hunger and the scar pale on his brown skin. You’re seventeen, Harry. 

He hadn’t been sure Harry would go for the hug, but the kid melted into it like he’d never been held before. 

Hermione, once she’d been feeling better, had mainly wanted to talk theory, which he supposed he couldn’t blame her for. But since she was an insatiable nerd, she’d eventually spilled some of the finer details— the Deathly Hallows; the mechanics of volo; and, one dark, cold night in March, the patronus Harry had seen in the woods. Dumbledore knew magic we’d never even thought of, that’s what I keep telling myself, she’d said, tracing her fingers (still shaking slightly) in circles on the table. But how do you fake a patronus? 

You don’t was the simple answer, but for the life of him Bill couldn’t think of who might have Harry as their patronus. Ron and Hermione, maybe, but those would be mirror images of his, not this— this almost parental affection.

His dad’s patronus was a weasel. His mum’s patronus— 

Well, Harry was her kid, more than he was anyone else’s. But there were seven— nine of them including Harry and Hermione, ten with Fleur too— to split it between. And besides, his mum did not have the subtlety to wait in the bushes and guide a starved-looking Harry on some quest into the freezing cold woods. Not in a million years.

“She would know what to say to them,” he confides in Fleur one morning. They’re still in bed, and rain is coming down on the tin roof, and for the first time in a few nights, the monitoring charm he and Fleur placed over the Trio hasn’t gone off. They’ve taken turns with them, based off their best guesses of moods. Fleur’s better at excessiveness, at whipping up bread in the middle of the night and chatting about charms theory or fashion or the insane drama of her French cousins; he’s better at making tea and being quiet and letting them talk to him. They’ve gotten better, at guessing right. 

She slings a thin arm over his shoulders and brings him in, so his face is resting in the crock of her neck. “Maybe. She is very good at many things, your mother.” Her long fingers toy with his hair, and he thinks about that night in London, when they’d kissed slowly against the side of a muggle pub and he’d felt like he’d never breathed before. “But they came to us. They are choosing to stay with us. That means something, does it not?”

It does, Bill thinks. Hermione has healed; the boys were able to cast solidly at the end of last week. He’d offered them their spare tent, and as much provisions as they could fit in Hermione’s ingenious foldspace. But here they were anyway, curled up together in the guest bed, sleeping through the night for once. 

They’re too young to be fighting this war, Bill thinks sometimes, but then— aren’t they all? He’s barely twenty-four, and Fleur’s twenty-one, and most days he feels small, and out of his depth, out on the moors or breaking wards on haunted manors or waiting up late for Fleur to get back from an Order mission. 

They’re too young, but what else is there to do? They were never going to be able to walk away from this. There’s only the going on through, and putting food on the table in an effort to have the kids look a little less like skin and bones. 

And so, when the Trio start talking about breaking into Gringotts, Bill doesn’t ask why. He just pulls up a chair to the table and looks at them in the eyes— Hermione with a sweater Fleur made into a turtleneck, to hide the new scar; Ron with the enduring notch on his chin from when he was a toddler and Bill didn’t move fast enough when he slipped on the rug; Harry, wearing one of his coats because all of his were shit. His kid siblings, really, when it comes down to it. “Yeah, I think I could help,” he says, and it doesn’t matter, all the oaths he’s breaking, just to see them grin. 

_____________

From the outside, the row house looks like all the rest, in the crumbling industrial core of Manchester. Andromeda casts her magic out subtly over the street as she approaches, feeling for any cracks in Hermione Granger’s empire of wards, or in her and Cissy’s numerous tripwires. But other than that a stray dog and a dark grey puddle, the street is still, and Andromeda steps up to the door and opens it like she would open any other door. Of course, if she hadn’t been on the approved list, the door would have sensed her magical blood and eaten her whole, which was one of Cissy’s most recent innovations in infusing blood magic into classic Black pieces of work. If they hadn’t been at war, Andromeda thinks she would have found it excessive, maybe a bit tacky, but, given what they’re protecting inside the row house, they can’t be too careful. 

She locks the door behind her, on instinct, even though it doesn’t actually matter, and hangs her coat on the coat rack. The interior is Cissy’s compromise between the fact that she hates Grimmauld and the fact that Cissy’s a posh pureblood— velvet wallpaper, sure, but in light cream and transfigured, not made in France. 

Her nephew pokes his head out from the living room, his shock of white hair slicked back. “Uncle Ted just got him down,” he whispers. “And Tonks is passed out up there too. Mum said whoever wakes them up has to fix the pumping in the third story loo. Without magic.”

Andromeda nods, reaching into her coat and pulling out a stack of shrunken books. She un-shrinks the books with the wave, and hands them over to Draco. “I couldn’t find Keller & Childs, but I did find Childs’s monograph on advanced integral synchronicity,” she whispers.

All trace of Pureblood decorum vanishes off Draco’s face, and he leaps for the books with a split-faced grin. “That’s supposed to be unavailable in modern Britain, Auntie. How did you manage that?” 

“I have my ways,” she says; there’s no need to let him know about the crumbling library she’d raided at the Goyle Manor, right before she and Greer and Lupin sent it up in flames. The less Draco knows about the war, the better. Over the past six months, she’s seen him go from a cagey, on-edge prat, to a studious, excitable arithmancy nerd who’s almost as excited about Teddy as she is. 

He reminds her of Cissy, actually, before the politics and the business with the Dark Lord. 

In the kitchen, Jarvis and Nolly are making dinner; Andromeda talks with them for a few minutes, about the weather and the glazed carrots and the situation with the war. One of her conditions for taking up residence had been Cissy doing right by them— the Malfoys were many things, but they were not known for sharing their magic well, or honoring the pacts that held the House Elves and the ancient families together. She pulls out from her pockets the groceries they asked her to pick up— leeks, turnips, fresh mussels.

Cissy is in the study, her hair up in a messy bun, scrawling long-hand across a chalkboard. Andromeda lingers in the doorway for a moment, watching her little sister work— she’s wearing pants and a sweater, barefoot with her wand holstered on her wrist. A lifetime ago, she had looked like this in the library at Hogwarts, at eleven and twelve, before she’d gotten the talking to about being a Black and what that meant. 

She would have done well in Ravenclaw, Andromeda had always thought. Just like Bella could have made a fine living for herself in Gryffindor, and she would have loved Hufflepuff. 

“How’s it going?” she asks, stepping into the study and perching on the desk. Narcissa looks up at her, her pale eyes darting over her frame with a precision that Andromeda hadn’t allowed herself to miss all these years. Cissy puts down her piece of chalk and comes up to her, runs her hand along her hairline and heals the scrape seeping blood into her roots with just a tingling of magic from her fingers, before pressing a kiss to it. 

“What happened here?” she asks. 

“Tried to apparate fourteen times in a single afternoon,” says Andromeda. “Reopened the cut I got from our dearest sister last week.”

“Lovely,” says Narcissa, pushing aside textbooks and sigils to sit on the table next to her. “Did Draco tell you? Your husband finally got Teddy to sleep.”

“I was informed,” she says, putting her head on her sister’s shoulder. “I was also informed that if I woke them up, I’d have to fix the plumbing on the third floor without magic.”

She can envision the smirk Narcissa’s mouth curls into, which, if she doesn’t think about Bella’s madness, reminds her of their mother. “Well, I figured it would probably be Draco, if he wasn’t sufficiently motivated.” 

Andromeda shuts her eyes and reaches out to the magic of the house, humming with Hermione Granger’s sheer force of being. Is is wrong that in some ways, this past six months of open war have been the closest thing she’s felt towards peace in years?

She’d fallen for Ted hard, at seventeen. Tried to fight it for a year and a half, as she’d finished out NEWTs and then clerked in DLME, while he got his Charms Mastery in Switzerland. But then she’d seen him, back home for the summer in London, and the way the sunlight had hit his hair—

Well, when you know, you know. The things her last name meant weren’t worth a lifetime without Ted. 

They’d stayed off the grid the best they could in the first war. Dora had been a surprise, and it had just been the three of them for so long, she’d thought that would be all there ever was to it. Dora would marry some pretty French witch or hotshot Quidditch player, and she and Ted would retire, and that would be that. 

And then the Dark Lord, again. And well— if Dora wanted to be in the middle of it, she wasn’t going to be alone.

Suddenly, the house had been full of Dora’s friends— Kingsley, and Kovac, and Greer, and Amelia Bones and Alastor Moody. Assorted Weasleys and old classmates from Hogwarts. And then, with the Ministry falling to pieces around them, Dora had come home and explained that she was in fact pregnant, and yes, she wanted the baby, and that the father was, of all people, Remus Lupin, who she had been seeing on and off for a year.

And then Narcissa. And then suddenly, the Manchester row house, with leaky pipes and house elves used to hosting the Dark Lord and a nephew who flinched from loud noises and was nervous around her because she looked like Bella. He wasn’t nervous around Ted though, because Ted was so Hufflepuff he bled black and yellow. He’d been the one to spend the hours with Draco, coaxing him through charms formulas, reminding him that before all the business with the Dark Lord, he actually had been near the top of all his classes. Long before he’d called her Auntie, he’d been calling him Uncle Ted. 

(She hasn’t missed the places where the horror of the year before will slip up— the way he’ll still wake from nightmares sobbing; the place on his forearm where the Mark used to sit that he’ll scratch absent-mindedly. How sometimes, he’ll jerk his head up at Teddy’s sudden sobs, breathing hard; how sometimes his hands still shake a little. But he’s here now, out of the mess of it, learning Arithmancy and being with his family. He was never, in any universe, cut out to be a Death Eater.)

So it’s Ted, and Cissy, and Draco, and Tonks, and baby Teddy, and Kingsley occasionally stops in, though she can tell it’s hard to on him, to put the parts of him that are brutal away long enough to hold an infant. And sometimes Remus Lupin, who is very definitively not with Dora, stopping into see his son.

It’s a weird fucking family, but it’s a family. 

Even home, leaning against her sister, her mind won’t stop working. Narcissa is working on blood magic that was passed to her by the Order, just one part of a bigger puzzle; occasionally, she passes their arithmancy problems to Draco. There’s still Lucius to contend with— Lucius, her asshole of a brother-in-law, who despite his many crimes and blood purity bullshit and his hideous hair and the fact that he owns fucking peacocks, is the love of her sister’s life. And both the house she was in and the house she could have been in harp pretty heavily on loyalty, and her sister saved her husband. The Death Eaters have control of their ancestral house, and also the Heir to the Most Ancient and Noble House of Black is Harry Potter, of all people. Except Hermione Granger’s wearing the ring, apparently, and Ron Weasley is apparently involved (at least that’s what Draco said— it’s always the three of them) and somehow, according to Order intelligence, the three of them are on a quest handed down to them by Dumbledore that alone can provide the keys to the Dark Lord’s defeat. She’s not sure she believes it, because Dumbledore was a bit off his rocker sometimes, but she hopes it’ll work.

Bellatrix. She heaves out a breath at the thought of their middle sister, who feels beyond reach. Lucius might be a bad person on paper, but he was still sane enough to love people; Draco and Narcissa, if no one else. Bellatrix—

Well, she’s pretty sure her sister loves nothing, and no one, not anymore. Does she have an avada in her, if push comes to shove? 

She supposes she’ll know when the time comes. 

They’re in the thick of it, now. She wakes from the nightmares— childhood bleeding into Hogwarts bleeding into the first war bleeding into this one— and sometimes just sits down in the shower until it turns cold, just to get all the sobbing out of her. The father of her grandson is a complicated, hurting man, but how badly she wants him to try. Draco and Narcissa both are coming off a lifetime of pureblood bullshit, and there is a part of her that knows that if the Dark Lord had been smarter, more discerning, more careful, she wouldn’t have them back at all. Draco would be strutting around at Hogwarts like a posh prat and Narcissa would be doing the blood magic for him. Just because they talk to Ted like a person now doesn’t make them good.

But right now, there’s a moment. Cissy laces her fingers with hers, and around her, she can feel the wards, almost seeming to breathe with power. She’s reached that final place of Slytherin ambition, she thinks: she wants her family to live. And maybe that’s more Hufflepuff at heart, but it all bleeds together in the end, doesn't it?

With the war burning all around them, Andromeda leans into her sister’s shoulder and just breathes. 

_____________

Lee can feel the war eating through him, like a bad potion through a caldron bottom. The current safe-house is way out in the Hebrides, and they’re more likely to be fighting off a gale than Death Eaters. But he still can’t seem to get to sleep, even with Fred and George snoring on the transfigured mattresses dragged into the living room— he should be able to close his eyes and imagine they’re still in the Gryffindor tower, right? 

But they’re not, and no matter how much he might want to, he can’t pretend it’s how it used to be.

Lee slips from the couch and heads out into the night. Outside, the dark is liquid and alive, mist and rain swirling in the porch lights, and he transfigures a stray knot of grass into a sweater with the ease of the Mastery student he could have been, if—

Well, there was never really any world where he was going to leave Fred and George in Britain and shove off to the Continent to get a Mastery like a nerd, was he? He sits on the porch steps, holding his wand between his hands, and lets out a breath that fogs into the mist. No— he’s here. Call it courage; call it loyalty; call it being nineteen and a fucking fool. 

What had he thought it would be like, when he left Hogwarts, arrived in Diagon and immediately began telling Fred and George to take products off their shelves that he could see other uses for? That smug feeling of being right, and then going up to their apartment over the shop and drinking top shelf stuff until the sun rose? That together, the three of them would take the Dark Lord to task like they’d taken Umbridge?

But Umbridge was only ever a bully. You-Know-Who is a monster and a lunatic, who also happens to be one of the most powerful wizards of the century (both he and the twins agree the number one spot is Hermione; they’re split on who between Dumbledore and You-Know-Who is number two.) Against him, their bag of tricks feels like small potatoes.

He stares into the mist, but instead he’s seeing the neighborhood in Glasgow that the Death Eaters had set on fire nine months ago. He and the twins had been tapped as part of the rescue squad, and they’d been clever, when they’d gone. Apparating into houses to get people out; Switching lumber for lake water; deploying fast-acting healing packs George had developed. 

Don’t focus on who you couldn’t save, Moody had told them roughly, at the debrief, sitting at the table in Grimmauld, which had apparently been Harry’s godfather’s house before he’d been murdered. Living like that, it’ll kill you. You have to focus on who you did. 

And he’s tried, he really has. But he can’t stop thinking about the bodies. How small the kid had been. How Fred had tried, repeatedly, to renuverate the man, but there’s no undoing avada. The way the women had screamed, fallen to her knees, at the sight of them. 

That could have been my family, he thinks, as he’s thought for the past nine months. Which is what’s driving him forward, maybe, in that Gryffindor way, but it’s also eating him alive. How small and powerless they are, against the monsters in the glades. Because he sure as hell doesn’t have an avada in him, and he doubts Fred or George do either. You have to want it, Jordan, Moody had snapped at him at training, what feels like a lifetime ago, but he hadn’t wanted it then and he doesn’t want it now. 

Even for Fred or George, he’s not sure he’s got what it takes. What that makes him, in the midst of a war where the other side is monsters, he’s not sure. 

(The other side is their friends. Anton Rowle, who teased them about the Yule Ball dates and used to come over to the Burrow and listen to Quidditch, the summer between third and fourth year. Clarissa Coleman, a half-blood from Sussex, who would always let her crib off her Herbology notes and had a wicked crush on George when they were all fifteen, and then the next thing you know she’s in the robes flinging unforgivables. Christy Jacoby, who’d been the star Chaser when they were second-and-third years— he remembers calling her passes in the final against Ravenclaw with a manic, joyful glee. She’d been playing for the Unicorns but not anymore. Caleb Rosier, who’d been a Prefect and a bit of a spoilsport but not evil, they’d never thought.)

He spins the wands idly in his fingers, reaches out with his magic to check that the wards are still solid. In the nearly two years since he and the twins joined up with the Order, there have been many victories. Moody would tell him to focus on those, he supposes. Keeping dangerous products off the shelves, channeling them directly to the Order. Successful battles with the Death Eaters, where they protected muggle villages from devastation. Moving the Order underground. Rescuing muggleborns from the basements of Manor houses; engineering new magic to fight back against Dark shit they’d never dreamed of before. Helping run a covert resistance radio show, sending hope and humor out into a world that sorely needed it. Backing the Trio, whenever the call came in through the grapevine that they needed something send to their dead-drops. 

And he tries. He really tries. But how can he do that when so much of it has been death and destruction? 

The door creaks open, and he can tell by the footfalls who it is. He shifts slightly to the side, so that Xenophilius Lovegood can sit next to him on the step. The man offers him a cigarette wordlessly, and he takes it, lights up. Xenophilius does the same. 

“I can feel you thinking, Lee,” says Xen, after a long moment. “It will start to grow in there if you don’t get it out. And the last thing we need right now is for you to get a Gillythrush infestation.”

Xenophilius is, without a question, the single most eccentric man Lee has ever met. He believes in invisible floating gnats that follow confusion, animals that have never and will never exist, that Sirius Black was actually Stubby Broadman, and that he alone will be able to recreate the lost Diadem of Ravenclaw. He is also a brilliant polymath who can do magic Lee has never even thought to do, never fails to produce a stirring monologue when the occasion calls for it, and is coping remarkably well with the fact that there’s a war on and he’s spent the last nine months publishing the Quibbler, which is now apparently the mouthpiece of the resistance movement, from various safe-houses, some of which lack heat or running water. Over the course of the year, Lee has gone from thinking he’s a complete loon to calling him his friend.

“It’s fucking me up, Xen,” he says, flicking ash into the mist. “I’m not built for this kind of shit and I can’t make myself be.”

Xenophilius takes a long drag on his cigarette. “Me neither, Lee. I mean— this time last year I would have told you Luna and I would spend our Easter Break in the jungles of Peru, tracking down the Ulloñoradon.” Lee, from long experience, does not ask. “And now, I am simply hoping she is as safe as she can be at Hogwarts.” 

Lee sighs, watching the smoke trail. Through the grapevine, they’ve heard that Luna, along with Ginny and Neville, are the three ringleaders of the Hogwarts resistance, and are also all apparently high value targets for the Death Eaters. Fortunately, the three of them decided to remain at school, vanish into the countless corridors and secret passages. 

“My Pandora would have been so bad at this as well, you know,” he says softly. “And I cannot imagine my Luna is fairing any better. Both of them— they’re the sort who would find it quite sad that the Dark Lord has only followers, not friends.” 

Lee doesn’t know Luna very well, but that does seem like the sort of thing she’d be concerned with. Xenophilius takes a long drag on his cigarette and props up his chin with his hand. “But they would be out here with us, if that was what it took to save the world.”

Lee looks down at his hands, at the thicket of scars they’ve accrued, from tinkering with radio gear and brewing in bathtubs and fight a fucking war. “I— I guess I’m just scared,” he says softly. Xenophilius reaches over and puts a bony hand on his shoulder; the pressure is grounding. “If we— if we do do it, if we win— I’m not sure I’m going to be able to recognize myself in the mirror.”

“I wonder that myself sometimes too,” Xenophilius agrees. “But if we were not concerned with our own humanity, we might as well be fighting for the other side.” He flicks his cigarette into the mist; the rain swallows up the ember.

Lee inhales nicotine— the cigarettes are Xenophilius’s hand-rolled ones, with magic herbs folded in with the tobacco leaves, and he swears they have additional medicinal properties, but all he knows is that the first time he tried one, it was after he and the twins had been tapped to help Mundungus Fletcher and Greer and Kingsley break into a manor house to recuse muggleborns, except they’d gotten there too late. The basement had been only bodies, and the house elves had been out digging graves. He’d been in the middle of a panic attack on the porch before Xenophilous showed up, offered him the cigarette and told him about the quest for the Crumble-Horned Snorlac. 

His friends, who’d taken the Mark— they didn’t have that quality to them. They were Gryffindor in that brutal way, where you wrote off people who didn’t serve you. Where you could put the Greater Good above anything, only sometimes the Greater Good was power, and murder, and the subjugation of Britain. They all have the need for an avada, he knows. 

He doesn’t have need. He just wants to run a joke shop with his two best friends and hit on pretty girls with them at the Leaky Cauldron and go over to dinner at the Burrow and learn to cook. And if he has to save the world to do that, so be it.

He takes a drag on the cigarette. The lights leave halos in the mist, and he thinks about waking up on spare bed in the apartment above the shop, which the twins bought just for him, and how he can get even the hardened core of the Auror to laugh at the right joke for the radio broadcast now, and the way the Trio would move around each other, like they couldn’t live without the others. “You know, if you think about it, it is really sad that he doesn’t have any friends.”

“Yes,” says Xenophilius, with the seriousness Lee has come to love about him. “It really is.”

_____________

“You’ve got the charges?” Neville asks for what has to be the fourth time. Ginny rolls her eyes. 

“He’s a blue-blood, not an idiot, Nev,” she says. They’re standing underneath the slab of stone that will lead up into the cellar of what used to be Honeydukes (the Carrows had tried to block all ways in and out of the school, but apparently when you had both Flich and Millicent Bulstrode on your side, they didn’t stand a chance), and Colin personally thinks this is a less-than-ideal place to run through the checklist yet again, but he’s not about to bring that up, not to the core of the resistance.

“If you can’t get back, you go where?” Kellah asks. 

“Safe-house in Oxford,” Colin repeats automatically. “We’ll take muggle transport, password is the Canons suck.” 

“Damn right they do,” says Ginny. She flicks her eyes to the rest of his team— Dez is calm, like she always is, but Seamus has the jitters, and Dean is standing with his arms crossed, focused on Ginny. 

“Good luck,” says Lavender, shifting a perfect curl off her shoulder, and Collin bites down on his crush like stomping on a leaf. Later. Once they win. 

Colin has, in his sixteen years (his June birthday can’t come fast enough), lived three distinct lives. His parents are peerage, as stuffy British blue-bloods as they come, and he suspects that his childhood had more in common with Malfoy’s than Ginny’s— endless tutors, dance lessons, being taught to ride and shoot and to identify the crests of the major families. The memories are soft things now, the sorts of things he brings up when he tries to cast a patronus (it’s a fucking pheasant, which is not badass at all, but he can’t argue with on a basal level). He and Dennis sliding down the bannisters of the grand entry; trying to fit in the dumbwaiter; currying his horse in the stall and talking softly to her. His mother reading to him before bed, making a point that it was to be her, not a nanny. 

And then Professor Minerva McGonagall had been on their doorstep, with a letter and an offer, and that part of his life had been over.

His parents took it very well, surprisingly. His father had always been a progressive, and had never been too keen on the direction the British aristocracy was taking, with all the scandals and terrorist attacks. He’d shelled out on the magical film, keen to help him have another avenue for his hobby. His mother was fascinated by magic, by the beauty— she read all his books, and bought an owl at Diagon to send letters to him at school. 

When the Hat had come down on his head, he’d still be caught up on the high of meeting new friends on the Express, and the castle turrets, and seeing the squid in the lake. His father couldn’t care less about the idea of bloodlines and peerage and power; though his mother had tried to instill that in him, it simply hadn’t stuck. And so the Hat had seen a kid who skidded through the mud, who climbed trees in tailored suits, who stole cheese from the kitchen, and the Hat had said Gryffindor without even hesitating. 

(Dennis, two years later, had slide into the bench beside him at Gryffindor and said it gave me a choice, but I picked Gryffindor! and it would be years before he recognized enough of their mum in his brother to understand that the other choice had been Slytherin.)

(It would be years before he understood that while Dennis had said I picked Gryffindor, he’d really meant I picked you.)

Even with the petrification and the intrigue and the prejudice, Hogwarts had been everything he’d ever wanted. He didn’t like flying (though Dennis took it to like a duck to water), but he did like being able to take pictures that moved. He did like the fact that there was enough room in the castle to set up a dark room, and that eventually he learned enough magic to ward it. He loved charms, and transfiguration, and Care of Magical Creatures. He loved going to Quidditch matches, decked out in Gryffindor colors, and playing wizarding games with his mates, and bringing his wizarding friends home to meet his parents. 

And then, the war. 

He’d explained it to his dad last summer, walking back and forth in his study. His dad had poured him a snifter of scotch, but he hadn’t touched it yet, too focused on making it make sense to him. 

But of course he’d understood it. His dad was more Malfoy than the Malfoys. 

“Something I’ve been trying to teach you your whole life, son,” his father had said, standing from the desk and going to stand at the window, fiddling with the ring with the Creevy crest on it— Colin had one too, now, like the wizarding kids from posh families, but he didn’t know if he was going to wear it at Hogwarts. “Is the difference between being proud of who you are, and who you come from, and thinking that makes you better than everyone else.” He’d put his hand on the window, where it overlooked the lawn all the way down to the forest. “You know, if there was some politician with a lot of money and power who promised the peers what this Voldemort is promising those wizards, I think he’d have a lot of takers.”

Colin had swallowed, and choked on the scotch, and worn the ring to school, though with a glamor, showing the crest of the family Ernie had pretended was theirs. (He’d always wondered, what with him and Dennis both having it, but Ernie had confirmed it, when he’d faked the family trees last summer. You really are muggleborns, he’d said, handing over falsified paperwork in their formal sitting room; he’d looked very at ease in the space, and Colin had remembered that they both had been raised like this. Sure helped with the lie, though.)

And so he’s on his third life, now. The one where he embraced a lie and came back to Hogwarts and refused to be cowed by people like Parkinson calling him mudblood. The one where he’s a revolutionary, sticking it to Voldemort and Snape and doing his best to help out with the war. 

They slip through the shadows of Hogsmeade, avoiding the patrols of the Death Eaters. Dez is sold with disillusionment, and Dean is quite good at translocation, and so perfectly manages the apparation to the first location— a new monument Voldemort commissioned, honoring the Purebloods, in the magical district of Bath. One of many. 

Colin knows every line in Ginny’s muggle book about bomb making. Colin also knows the kinds of wards that will keep a blast perfectly contained, so as to avoid any casualties, and Seamus slings a pack off his bag filled with explosives.

It’s about making a statement, he’d told Ginny, when he’d floated the idea to her a few weeks ago. She’s always been scary, even when they were kids, and these days she’s downright terrifying. It’s a public show of defiance for their new order. 

Ginny hadn’t liked it, but Daphne had. Daphne Greenglass, who’s Astoria’s sister, who’s Dennis’s best mate. So she’s basically family too at this point, in a weird way that’s nothing like his parents would do it but feels real enough for him to bet his life on. “Give it to him,” Daphne had said, her eyes sharp, assessing. “They’re qualified, and they’ll have fun.”

“I’d have fun!” Ginny had said hotly. 

“No you wouldn’t,” Daphne had said, with that smug look to her that Astoria must have learned from her. “You’re doing bigger fry than statues now, and you like fire. Not explosives.”

Ginny had glared at her, but hadn’t argued. Considering she was currently working on some top secret plan to hijack the Prophet’s printing offices and replace a Sunday paper with a special edition of the Quibbler, Daphne wasn’t wrong, and she’d been right that blowing shit up was great fun. 

They destroy six statues across Wizarding Britain that night; they could have gotten to more but they’d run out of explosives. They make it back to Hogsmeade in the slivers of dawn, avoiding the Death Eaters with deft ease and running into no one but Flich on the way back to the Tower, who gives them a curt nod where when they were thirteen would have given them six weeks of detention. He showers, gets the smell of rubble and fertilizer out of his hair, and makes it down to breakfast in time to sit next to Dennis and send Snape a loathing glare out of pure habit. 

“Holding up alright?” he asks his brother; Dennis, who’s going to be all of fourteen next month, shrugs.

“Making it work,” he says, his eyes finding Astoria across the hall at Slytherin (maybe it’s a crush, actually; either way it’s the kind of love you carry with you for a lifetime). “You?”

Colin thinks about the manor house in Kent, and what kind of person he would be if he’d gone to Eton. A brash troublemaker who’s main hobby was photography and who snuck out to snog girls on the weekends, probably. He thinks about the world that’s his now— staircases that move, simple incantations that can manipulate the fabric of reality. Dragons. Pictures that move. 

He’s living the third version of his life to get back to the second. The one where his greatest ambition is to become a photo journalist for the Daily Prophet and maybe ask Lavender Brown on a date. Where his best mates come over to the estate and he teaches them to ride, and where Astoria Greenglass is his sister one way or another and where he wears the Creevy ring openly around the wizards, proud of who he is, where he comes from. 

He see the statues exploding in the night, white light and rubble. He sees his dad, standing in front of the window, understanding. He sees Harry, up at the front of the room, teaching people how to do a patronus. He sees the outline of Hogwarts like he’s seeing it for the first time, eleven and excited out of his mind. Goddamnit, it’s his world too. 

“I’ll be alright,” he says, clasping his brother’s hand on the table. “I’ll be just fine.”

_____________

The only way she’s been able to get any sleep over Winter Term is as the cat. Thoughts are simpler, crisper, less cluttered— the smells of mice and magic; her love for the students and for transfiguration. The cat dreams of jungle fens and hunting rabbits in an open field and the crunch of bird bones, instead of her students dead and torturing Snape, which is a reoccurring one that she can’t decide is aspirational or a nightmare. 

It’s nice, to be able to sleep, but the cat’s instincts haven’t caught up with the present day. The cat isn’t aware that Hogwarts is a shell of what it used to be, that Albus’s absence is permanent, and that Severus Snape is not a friend who will sit on the pavers in the sun and have long conversations with her. It feels a bit like waking from a dream every morning, when she transforms back, and feels the weight of grief and betrayal hit her all over again. 

Hogwarts feels more like a prison now than anything. The Carrows stalk the hallways, handing out infractions for nothing to children; Snape hovers, somehow everywhere at once, turning up to sneer at the worst moments. 

She knows her best and brightest— Neville, Lavender, Kellah, Ginny, Colin— are masterminding the resistance. She’s done her best to protect them from whatever wrath the Carrows and Snape have thrown their way, pulling them into her office and offering them biscuits and privately flooing for Poppy. She’s also kept her eyes on the Slytherins (Slughorn sure isn’t)— they’re skeptical, because of course they are, but they’re starting to warm up. 

She’s doing her best, but it’s not enough. 

In the mirror, she combs her hair up into a severe bun, cleans and irons disheveled robes with magic. She’s a transfigurationist, and she’s not a bad duelist, and she’s rawly powerful. On the weekends, she slips out of the castle and adds to the net of spells she and Albus built over muggle Britain, to stymie the Death Eaters in their attempts to murder civilians. Occasionally, she joins in on the Order missions she’s helped plan, makes the night bleed green at the seams. But then she has to come back to a castle where Severus fucking Snape is playing house with everything she’s ever wanted, and children are being hurt because she can’t protect them, and she can’t use any of the power she has, because that would bring You-Know-Who down on them all. 

Filius has been slick, in that Ravenclaw way of his— nets of charms to direct attention off the smallest, most vulnerable students; the kind of magic that can make blood tests come back wrong, should anyone ever try them. Pomona has been kind, in that Hufflepuff way of hers— staying up late comforting sobbing students, lying about bloodlines, causing distractions in order to get students out of sticky situations. Slughorn has been a useless, self-severing sack of shit, but that was to be expected, really. She, on the other hand—

Biscuits. Silent support. When she saw something, trying to stop it, but most of the time, she didn’t see things. There was always their extreme option, where they killed the Carrows (and Snape?) and took Hogwarts for their own, and she would be very good at that part, but doing that would bring the full force of the Death Eaters and the Dark Lord down on a castle with eleven-year-olds. 

The part of her that had chosen Gryffindor, with no subtlety or patience, longs to do it anyway. But Filius and Pomona talked her out of it, and she trusts them, at least. 

Like she once trusted Severus. 

She leans her head against the window in her quarters, looking out over the snow shining in the early March sun. She is angry, and she is grieving, and she wants revenge, but she is not a fool. And that part of her, who spent the long years in the lead up to the first war at conferences and lectures and doing research in the Continent, can admit that Severus Snape is not running this school like he should be, if he were a true-blooded Death Eater. 

The Carrows are idiots, who have greatly underestimated everyone involved from Luna Lovegood to herself. Of course they’re getting played— they don’t understand the players and they have no desire to learn. But Snape?

A decade and a half she’s spent with him as a colleague, now. Maybe all along he’s been evil, but he’s also always been wicked smart, and insightful, and powerful, and the kind of person who gets exactly what he wants. He knows them all, knows how they work, how they move. Maybe he couldn’t take her in a straight fight, but he’s a potions master. Surely he could slip something in a drink that would end it all. Surely he could report her to his Lord, get her arrested, tortured, murdered. 

Surely he knows that some of the students are only faking their heritage; there’s no reason to get things like proof when you’re part of a genocidal maniac’s inner circle. Surely he suspects Filius and Pomona of protecting the students instead of following orders— wouldn’t it be better to replace them with reliable Purebloods, people with the Mark on their arm? Surely he knows Theodore Nott’s real loyalty is to Harry Potter— even she knows that. And yet he’s Head Boy, and she and Filius and Pomona are still employed and not dead, and—

He’s a piece of shit, she tells herself forcefully, straightening her collar. He killed Albus. And the white-hot rage at that thought is enough to propel her forward, no matter what the logic might entail. 

The term swirls around them, like snow caught up by the wind. New restrictions on student gatherings; wanted posters for Undesirable Number One on the walls; flashes of green out on the frontlines. Every bottle of alcohol she buys vanishing into the maw of the castle— the elves have to be doing something— and maybe it’s for the best. She’s got work to do, after all. 

Whatever picture they found to use for the Undesirable Number One poster is so classically James that it almost makes her laugh. Harry’s staring straight into the camera with a moody, bad-boy tinge to his eyes; his hair is long and disheveled, like he’s just come back from flying, and somewhere in these long intervening years it doesn’t hurt to look at him anymore. He looks a lot like James, but he’s not. He’s Harry, out in the glades trying to save the world. You would be so proud of him, she thinks. He’s got all the best parts of you, and all the best parts of Lily, and then some.

Severus Snape, on the other hand, looks like hell warmed over. He’s always been greasy, and skinny, and prioritized brewing and solving his Slytherins’s problems over sleeping, but the man she sees now, giving speeches in the Great Hall and lurking in the halls, looks just a few steps shy of a dementor. He didn’t look this bad when he was twenty-two and mourning Lily, she thinks; the part of her brain that has known him for a decade and a half picks out the cracks, the exhaustion, the loneliness,the fear. He’s running scared and he shouldn’t be.

He’s a piece of shit, she reminds herself, as she watches him limp up from the ward boundary one evening, dark cloak flapping in the late evening sunlight, hands shaking. He killed Albus, she reminds herself, when she runs into him late one night in the hall, his eyes bloodshot and his cheekbones like knives. He betrayed Harry, and me, and all of us, she tells herself, when the napkin he was coughing into comes away bloody at dinner one evening. This is what he deserves. 

The evidence isn’t adding up and the grief is like being held down in deep water and Hogwarts is a ghost town and is it a nightmare, or is something she wants to do?
If she cast the curse, would it have the desire, the need behind it, to make the pain take root? 

He’s your friend, says the parts of her that are the cat. Says the parts of her that held him as he sobbed, says the parts of her that valued that prickly, dangerous man opening up to her, says the parts of her that have loved having a competent, ruthless Head of Slytherin for the past fifteen years. Says the parts of her that laughed at his dark humor, and appreciated his care for Harry when she couldn’t offer that, and was deeply grateful about how he’d helped clear Sirius’s name. What kind of Death Eater does that? it wants to know; what kind of friend kills my mentor and betrays my protégée’s son, other parts of her want to scream back. 

It is late March, when they meet in the entrance hall after a Death Eater meeting, entirely by accident this time. There’s blood dripping down Snape’s fingers, pooling on the stone in the torch light. His eyes are hollow, dead, and his hair is crusted with mud and blood in a few places. He goes still at the sight of her, opening his mouth and then closing it, and it occurs to her how young he still is. She steps forward, and he takes two steps back until he’s against the wall, breathing hard. 

“You are dismissed, Professor,” he says, trying to be sharp, but his voice is raspy. Probably from the screaming, her mind supplies, before she can clam down on it. 

Pain. Exhaustion. Loneliness. Fear. 

She’s not sure where the words come from, but after the term they’ve had, with his blood dripping on the floor like ink from a cracked well, she can’t stop them. “Severus.” He jerks his head up at the name, wild-eyed. “If you— if you’ve changed your mind, about what side you want to be on— we can— we can work something out.”

He stares at her. She stares back. There’s a moment, just a single moment, where she thinks he’ll cross the Hall and step into her arms, like he did when he was twenty-two. 

But then that moment is over, and she sees his eyes close up, like Vanishing something. “You are dismissed, Professor,” he says again, and this time, she goes. 

She spends the rest of Winter Term pretending to teach Transfiguration, and helping Sue Li proof a series of complex equations she and Granger had derived (she could have sworn some of it was familiar, from James or Sirius’s work, but that could just be the years playing tricks on her), and shoving Nerve Regenerator down Neville Longbottom’s throat after a particularly bad altercation with the Carrows (his grandmother is probably dead, which is something else she tries very hard not to think about). 

But it’s a nightmare, when she has that dream again, and that at least, is something.

Chapter Text

The library is quiet, what with it being Easter Break, the sound only broken by Theo’s soft snores. Ernie shoots a quick glance over at him— he’s fallen asleep on French Wizarding Families and Their Heraldry Symbols (Volume 7), which he figures he can do without for the interim. Hannah will kill him if he wakes him.

Not that she, or any of them, have been sleeping well. There’s just too much work to do, and far too little time.

Outside, grey, flinty rain lashes at the windows, and he rubs at his temples, the small bubble of wards protecting him and Theo and his work curling out like rust and leather. He’s working on building a cover the Order asked for, for someone they rescued; someone will sneak out and post it using the muggle way, he assumes (or else Hedwig will just appear and take it where they need it to go. That owl is out of everyone’s league). In his sleep, Theo shifts slightly, and Ernie screws up his face and does his best effort at a transfiguration of scrap paper to blanket. It’s not the softest one, but it should do. 

He’s been doing his best to play the games like Daphne and Theo tell him, but other than Ginny, he’s probably the most notorious blood traitor at Hogwarts. Though— he’s also a Hufflepuff and his last name is MacMillian. There was never a world where he was going to be recruited as a Death Eater— the most they could have hoped for was a loyal asset within the Ministry. 

(Like his parents, he thinks. A few months ago, he’d seen his mother’s portrait in the Daily Prophet— yes, he and Daphne and Anthony still take it, and yes, they do read it cover-to-cover, for the insight— and learned she’d been given an award for “integrity and dedication to the Ministry” and have been promoted to Head of Magical Education. So she was overseeing the Hogwarts curriculum now, which might explain why every subject was required to discuss how muggles were filth and the importance of preserving magical culture.)

“Just keep your head down, focus on work and bring a Prefect, and don’t start anything,” Daphne had told, and he really had tried, despite Smith pontificating on about the Dark Lord, and Pansy sneering at his friends who’s family trees he faked. But two weeks ago, one thing had turned into another, and he’d broken Smith’s nose.

They’d been surrounded by a small ring of gawkers, and Ernie knew he probably shouldn’t feel proud about Smith howling on the ground clutching his shattered nose, or the warmth of the blood on his fist, but it felt good, in a fucked-up way, to actually put his money where his mouth was. Harry hadn’t abandoned them to rot; Harry was suffering far more than they were right now. 

“What exactly is this?” came the cold voice of Theo, and the ring of observers parted before him. But it hadn’t been Theo, not exactly— it had been Theodore Nott, Head Boy of Hogwarts and future Death Eater, his eyes cold and his tie perfect. 

(Theodore Nott, their inside man.)

Smith had pushed himself to his feet, blood still dripping from his nose, and Ernie had watched Theo’s eyes flick over to him with a cool detachment. “He attacked me, Nott. I think we should teach him a lesson. Right here, right now.”

Ernie’s not Susan, or Luna. Theo is opaque to him at times, and he won’t pretend to be able to read what’s happening in his mind off his face. But he doesn’t need to, not when he trusts him. Theo might look like the picture of a Dark Lord-aligned pureblood in the hallways, but he’s also the same kid who’s spent the last five years listening to his nerd facts about History of Magic, and is currently helping him undermine all the Pureblood’s notions of family trees, and who two summers ago let Luna and Millie put his fluffy hair in two tiny french braids. 

“I don’t think that’s necessary,” Theo had said, but then Amycus had been there, like an overgrown carrion bird, and Smith had made his case to him. 

“It will be good practice, Theodore,” Amycus had said, his hand a claw on Theo’s shoulder. “Remember to focus on your disgust, and loathing.”

Their eyes had met, for just one moment, and Ernie would like to say he saw panic, or fear, or apology, but he’s never been good like that. He saw nothing, and he took the curse on faith.

In the hospital wing, Pomfrey had done a quick diagnostic; he’d said crucio with his eyes cast down on the pavers and she’d let out a huff, and then shook her head. “Well, they didn’t know how to do it, clearly. You don’t even need nerve regenerator.” Still, she’d let him sleep it off in the corner of the infirmary, and he’d fallen asleep thinking of course I didn’t need it, he didn’t want to do it.

Theo’s sitting cross-legged on the bed when he wakes up, inside the curtains, and the whole thing’s been buzzing with wards. His tie is been undone, and he doesn’t look like he’d slept, dark circles under his eyes and his hair in disarray. Ernie squints at him for a long moment, before Theo looks over at him. He looks young— like he’s eighteen and a NEWT student, not a posh pureblood about to become a Death Eater. “I’m sorry,” he says. 

“I know,” says Ernie, pushing himself upright. “I could tell, because I think it hurt more to punch Smith in the nose.” 

Theo studies him for a moment, trying to convince himself Ernie’s not lying— he isn’t, it truly was a shit attempt at crucio, though Ernie had done his best to sell it— and then offers a sliver of a grin. He runs a hand through his hair, which makes it stand up in a way that would give Daphne a conniption. “I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing,” he says, softly. 

“Triage, Theo,” says Ernie. He looks over at him sharply. 

“You sound like Hannah.”

“Well, she’s usually right, isn't she?”

Theo can’t seem to find fault with that, because there isn’t any. His Heir ring is catching in the low light of the candle flame. 

“Do you ever feel like that no matter how far we run, it won’t matter?” he asks softly. “Like maybe we’ll always be—“ He trails off, but holds up his hand with the ring. 

Ernie shuts his eyes briefly, wishing he could force Theo to understand that of all the traumatic things that have happened in the last year, his friend pointing a wand at him and utterly failing to hurt him was not even worth mentioning. Hell, if they were living in a normal Hogwarts timeline, that could have been a stupid drunk bet that they’d be laughing about. “Theo, if it didn’t matter, you would already be a Death Eater, and I would best friends with Smith, and you’d probably actually know how to cast crucio. It does matter.”

Theo works his jaw. “You swear it didn’t hurt?” 

“Yes, Theo,” says Ernie. “Yes, I do. But even if it had, it wouldn’t mean anything.”

Theo glances sharply over at him. “What the hell does that mean?”

“It means you’re my friend,” says Ernie. “And you’re a good liar but that’s always going to be true.”

Ernie thinks about that now, sitting in the library with the rain coming down, at how slack and shocked Theo’s face had gone. Just because his loyalty was all out in the open and Theo’s was held like pocket cards didn’t mean it wasn’t there. 

The wheels of the resistance churn on, as spring term marches forward. Ginny and Neville and Luna are living in the Room full-time, ducking out only for missions or to set something on fire. Sue and Theo and Daphne are knee-deep in research and derivations for Hermione; Anthony and Millie are scouring the castle for something; Justin is building alliances and talking to the ghosts about what they might know; Susan and Hannah are doing their best to help the students, make them feel safe even though they’re living in a ghost town.

Ernie slots himself in wherever he can. Jack of all trades. He checks derivations, backstops identities, teaches the TA how to construct stunners and shielding spells and patronuses. He slips out of the castle and mails records through the muggle post to the Trio, to an Order dead drop. He gets between groups of Purebloods bullying suspected muggleborns (they are, but no one needs to know that) and goes on about genealogies until even the nastiest are bored to tears. He goes with Justin to talk to the ghosts and Flich and the elves; he goes with Millie to scour the dank corners of the Chamber of Secrets— we’re looking for something sticky with evil, she explains, and he doesn’t ask and does his best not to wonder. 

The truth of the matter is that for the most part, he’s already fought and won a small war of his own. Justin, wandering around the castle without fear. Dean, sleeping in the Gryffindor tower and helping Ginny and Neville with guerrilla warfare missions. The Creevys; Micheal Corner; the tiny first-years who just last summer had thought they’d be going off to muggle secondary school. They were always wizards, and now they’re wizards according to the insane rules the new order has instituted. There’s murmuring, sure, in the hallways and in internal Ministry minutes, and the occasional investigation, but Anthony gets copies of Ministry documents and the Order has sources that supply them with internal gossip and sometimes he’s sent Ginny or Colin or Neville out to some obscure library with a doctored codex or a name to burn into a family tree, just to make sure the illusion holds. 

The rain. Ernie switches Volume 6 for Volume 7 under Theo’s head, scanning down lists of names. Inside, there’s a part of him wondering how much longer they’re going to have do this for. Despite what he broke Smith’s nose for saying, on late nights like this, sometimes he begins to question the Trio on his own time. 

They’re doing their best, Ernie, he tells himself. He focuses, drawing out some of his favorite memories of them, like he’s building a patronus. Ron, on the train after he’d been disowned, holding him it mattered that he was there. Hermione, plopping down next to him fifth year and going tell me what I need to know for the History of Magic OWL. The way Harry had accepted his apology for being shitty second year, with open arms. At heart, they’re loyalists too. 

He backstops the identity perfectly. Theo wakes up from a nightmare, his eyes wild and his wand drawn, and Ernie talks him down, holding out his hands and telling him about the sixth goblin war until Theo remembers where he is. “Want to talk about it?” he asks. 

Theo’s face ripples, and he pulls files from the table towards him, and Ernie thinks that will be the end of it, double checking his work while Theo gets his bearings. 

“Wiltshire,” he says, finally, without looking up at Ernie. “Nothing concrete, just— blood. And him.”

“You’re never going back there,” Ernie says, with a little more force than probably necessary, but it’s enough to startle a slight chuckle from Theo. 

“No,” he says. “I’m not.”

The din of the rain. Ernie transfigures a stray piece of scrap paper into a pillow and shoves it back over to Theo. “Hannah’s going to ask,” he says, and Theo must be exhausted, because he doesn’t argue, just puts his head back down and shuts his eyes. 

However much longer we have to, he thinks, watching Theo’s face relax in sleep, until he looks like his friend again. 

_______________

Class is forgotten. The Ravenclaw tower is forgotten. Luna lives in the thin places of the castle, and lives and breathes the war. 

“Sooner or later, he’s going to come here,” Millie had said at the beginning of the year. “The Dark Lord won’t be able to abide a seat of power not his own.” Luna had remembered the way the castle had moved around her sometimes, late at night when she’d been young; how she’d put her hand on the bricks and could almost feel it breathing, and hadn’t been able to argue. Every week without fail Hedwig leaves a new copy of the Quibbler at the forked tree north of Hogsmeade, and they reprint it inside the castle and distribute it, and she scans the text for the little inside jokes her dad leaves her, just to know he’s still alive. And besides all that, there’s this diadem business to contend with, which apparently the Trio and Anthony and Susan and Millie are convinced is somewhere in the folds of Hogwarts. (Justin had been the one to coax the Grey Lady into telling the story, a few weeks ago— about charismatic, articulate, lonely Tom Riddle, and how she’d told him how to find it. I’m so sorry, she’d said, tears in her eyes. He was a fraud and liar, and you—)

(Justin had done his best to give a ghost a hug, then. Luna had thought it had been a success.)

Luna believes Millie. Luna can feel the spiral of the war tightening, even if the others can’t quite sense it. The cracked door on Dumbledore’s tomb, which she had fixed with a careful mending spell. The flinches from Snape in the Great Hall. The messages from the Trio, the building pressure in the Ministry, the way Voldemort is never content to just rest on his laurels. She has a feeling in her gut that soon enough, Harry and Ron and Hermione will return here, to finish what they started, and then Voldemort will follow, and all hell will break loose. 

And there’s still a lot of work to do. 

“You must understand that our loyalty is to the castle, above all,” says Vityok, sitting across from her and Luna and Millie at the negotiation table. “We would only fight to protect her, no matter who is darkening the doors. No matter who is headmaster, or who is enrolled.”

“Makes sense,” says Justin.

Luna leans forward a little, looking directly into Vityok’s eyes. “When you say protect the castle, what exactly are you protecting?” 

Vityok tilts his head at her. “The magic of it, of course. You all should know, considering how much time you spend near the nexus.” 

“You mean the Come-and-Go room?” Millie asks. 

Vityok chuckles, looking between the three of them. “For all you lot have investigated this castle, do you truly not know?” It’s all they can do to shake their heads. Vityok folds his hands, and asks Polly, who’s taking notes, to bring them all a new tea service. 

“This is privileged information,” Vityok informs them, once the tea is poured. “Take this elsewhere, and you are enemies as well.”

The three of them nod. Vityok stirs sugar into his tea. “Traditionally, in House Elf-Wizarding pacts, two lines bind themselves together. The elves pour magic into the House, animate it, bolster it, enliven it. And the wizards ensure there is a House to come back to. At some point, the wizards forgot we were partners, instead of slaves, and attempted to bind us to the Houses. Which cracked the magic, causing their Houses to wither.”

“But Hogwarts is different,” says Millie, with a gleam in her eyes.

“Yes,” says Vityok. “Hogwarts is very different. There is enough magic here that we have nothing to contribute on that front. Instead, we are the protectors.” 

Justin nods, but Millie tilts her head. “But if you’re not contributing any magic to bolster it, how does it work? Surely it’s not some endless font of power?”

Vityok tilts his head, and the pieces click for Luna. “It really is alive,” she says softly, and both Millie and Justin look over at her sharply, but Vityok smiles.

“Indeed, Lovegood. She’s very alive. And the beating heart is on the fifth floor, nestled somewhere near the Come-and-Go Room.”

Justin still looks a little lost, and Millie looks like she’s having an epiphany, but Luna leans across the table to Vityok. “How do we wake her up?”

“The fifth ring,” says Vityok, tapping one of his long, thin fingers. “There are four rings for the Heads of Houses— and a fifth, intended for the Headmaster in a time of emergency. Lost, with the Founders.”

“Well,” says Millie, and her eyes are burning, illuminated. “We’ll just have to find it, then.”

“I wish you the best of luck,” says Vityok. Luna leans back over the table to him. 

“When it comes here, we’ll be honored to fight along side you,” she says. “We’ll defend her to the best of our ability.”

Vityok studies her for a long moment. “Coming from you, Lovegood, I believe that does indeed mean something.”

They peal off, heading in different directions from the kitchens— Millie, to interrogate the map of the in the Come-and-Go yet again; Justin to ask the ghosts for more gossip, and Luna to go see Hagrid. Piece by piece, they’re building a coalition, the sort of which Voldemort would never dream of. 

“You know he’d be proud of you, right, Hagrid?” Luna asks, as she carefully slips her rock-cake off the table to feed to Fang. Hagrid, who is in the middle of washing dishes, looks over at her. 

“Who do you mean?”

“Dumbledore,” says Luna. Dumbledore was a fiendishly complex man, but in retrospect, some things are clearer. Of course he would take exile to Headmaster, if it meant staying near a seat of magical power. “He loved this school more than anything, and he chose you to protect it.”

Hagrid sits down heavily in the chair; it creeks under his weight, and he buries his face in his hands. “I just miss him,” he eventually gets out, between sobs. Not many people can say that, Luna know. 

“I know,” she says softly, thinking about the thestrals and their careful steps, and the spiders lurking in the rotten places of the forest, and the unicorns, and the giant squid, and how now that she knows it’s there, she’s not sure how the hell she missed it. The castle is bleeding magic freely, like an open blaze. They sit there for a long moment, as the April sun spills down the sky. “How are we going to do it, when they come?”

It feels foolish, to be making battle plans under the brilliant April sun, but they do it anyway. Flich has an oiled pistol in a box under his bed, and Justin comes back from an excursion with three boxes of bullets and a hard look to his eyes. Madame Pomfrey takes them seriously, over a secretive tea in her office. If you can get me the ingredients, I can brew extras, to have on hand if it does go down like that, she informs them. 

Pince has the archives warded to the teeth. McGonagall has the gargoyles ready to animate at a moment’s notice. Aberforth, who Luna has always liked (the goats are really cool), agrees to be their point person in Hogsmeade, and Justin slips him a pager and everything. It’s Millie’s idea to borrow Sue and Theo for an afternoon, get them down to the Chamber of Secrets and burn a back door through the wards and into the foyer of her parent’s tax haven house in Bordeaux. 

“It’s a risk,” warns Theo, rolling up his sleeves. 

“It’s an escape hatch,” says Millie. “Snape lets him through the wards every time. What we need is a way to get the students out if they box us in.” It takes them a few day, and a few consultations with Hermione, but eventually they manage it. 

“It’s all got to be in the Come-and-Go Room,” Millie says, late one night when it’s the three of them and Anthony, pacing around in his annex, where his magic spills like tea and soot. “The diadem, the ring— they’re somewhere in here. We’re just got to get at them.”

“Can’t you just ask?” Justin says. Luna’s already shaking her head before Millie gets there. 

“It’s not that simple,” says Millie. “You-Know-Who did something, when he put it in here— you can feel something wrong in the Hidden Things variation. And the ring— different matter entirely. But right now, we have to prioritize Headquarters, I think.”

Two nights later, as the April moon waxes high in the sky, she and Ginny sneak out onto the pitch. Ginny takes a few laps; Luna sits in the shadows of the forest and eventually one of the thestrals comes up to sit next to her, legs folded. They watch Ginny flying, reckless with it, just needing to burn energy off, and Luna thinks about Harry, and the diadem, and Voldemort. About the castle, breathing just underneath their feet, her magic a soft and ancient stranglehold. The next steps of the war are instinctual, like a lumos: they come here, Voldemort comes here, and then they fight it out. And if he wins, he razes the castle to the ground and starts over, because no matter how much he might profess to love it, he can’t abide power that is not his. 

Ginny joins her in the shadows, eventually, breathing hard, her hair windswept. Curls up beside her, all flying leathers and angles. “Do you think,” she says softly, after the thestral on Luna’s other side has settled down again, and her breathing is more even, “That he misses me?”

“With his entire being,” says Luna, with complete conviction. This is Harry they’re talking about, after all— he doesn’t do things by halves. Ginny heaves out a breath, and Luna feels around in the grass until she finds her hand, laces her fingers through Ginny’s gauntleted ones. “You make him feel safe. Like it’s not on him to save the world.”

“It’s not,” says Ginny, indigently. “It’s stupid that people think that.”

“Exactly,” says Luna. Ginny reaches up to wipe at her face with her free hand. Above them, the castle looms, flights and decks of lights, and from a distance it almost looks like some kind of home, instead of a haunted house. 

“Tell me about the future,” says Ginny, after a long moment. Luna draws in a breath. They invented this game, her and Hannah and Millie, one night a few months ago, sitting around the table in Headquarters, exhausted and scared and desperately wanting to daydream about something other than war. Between the three of them, they’d scraped up enough audacity and bravery to sketch out some shaky ideas of it— I want to kiss a boy, Millie had said, blushing, and then I want to find a lost city. 

“I track down Newt Scamander,” Luna says, “I make him teach me everything he knows.” Ginny’s grip on his hand is bruising, and Luna doesn’t let go. “I meet some dashing American. We raise thestrals and have identical twins and my dad and I go on expeditions to South America and Nepal.”

“But you live in Ottery-St-Catchpole, right?” asks Ginny. “I want our children to be friends.”

“They’re the best of friends,” says Luna. “You name them after Harry’s parents.”

Ginny’s eyes trace the outline of the castle, her breath fogging slightly in the cold night air. “No,” she says softly. “We name them after our friends.” She breathes low, her voice cracking. “Ronald Neville. Hermione Luna.”

Luna feels her heart crack open in her chest, and her vision gets blurry. The thestral nudges at her hand, and she runs her fingers along his bony nose. Ginny’s still talking, her voice getting stronger as she goes on. “I’m the best Seeker the league’s ever seen,” she says. “We set up Neville and Hannah. Ron teaches us how to cook so we’re not shite at it. Hermione gets Masteries in everything.”
“Every year, we throw a blow-out party for Harry and Neville,” says Luna. “And we stay up until it’s midnight.” 

“All of us,” says Ginny, and it’s a wish, desperate and fragile and there. “All of us, together.”

They stay like that, trading dreams, until the dawn bathes the turrets of the castle in light. 

_______________

Every day, Hannah takes the Daily Prophet the owl brings Ernie before he can read it, and flips to obituaries, scans the list once, twice, and then one more time for good measure, before handing it back to Ernie and letting her shoulders slump. Ernie picks it up gently, and then nudges at her until she eats something. 

It’s mid April now, and the best she can tell, her father is still alive. She gets occasional notes from him, but his new roll in the Dark Lord’s administration has kept him rather busy. Deputy Head of DLME sounds like it has a lot of work attached, and if Hannah thinks too hard about how it’s her dad helping hunt down Ron and Hermione and Harry, she won’t be able to keep her breakfast down. But at the same time, she’s not sure how she’d cope if she found him on the list of the dead. 

Susan slides in next to her, takes one look at her plate, and then adds some oatmeal and some fruit, with the solidarity Hannah’s spent nearly seven years doling out. Hannah cuts her eyes over at her friend; she’s got her hair back in a braid today, which means she probably hasn’t washed it in a while, but she’s got her tie on straight and has her books like she’s coming to class, which is sort of an optional activity these days for most of them. She’s been in better spirits since that all-nighter she pulled with Anthony back in February, and while the grief has crusted underneath her features like blood under fingernails, she’s far more fluid and even-keeled than she was even in January. “Can’t get scurvy in a time like this, Hannah,” she says, pulling a sheet of parchment out of her bag. 

It’s not actually homework, Hannah sees, as she peers over Susan’s shoulder, though it’s spelled to look like it. It’s Susan’s master-list of everyone in the castle, complete with their level of defense ability, their loyalty, and how interested the Carrows seem in them at the moment. “Give Kelsey Dearborn a plus one for unwanted attention,” Hannah whispers to her, between bites of oatmeal. “Alecto saw her reading a muggle novel the other day.”

“You deflected?” Susan asks, marking it down. 

“I deflected,” says Hannah. It had been very late, and Hannah had been making the rounds (sans Theo, which was a tragedy, but he was knee-deep in theory with Sue for Hermione, and no matter how much she would have preferred to have him at her back, the war effort would always come first), when she’d found Alecto taunting a sobbing Kelsey (fifth year, Ravenclaw, top marks but no street smarts to save her life). Hannah had schooled her face, strolled in with an easy confidence she thinks she cobbled together from watching how Daphne and Ginny move, because it’s sure as hell not hers. What seems to be the problem? she’d asked, and when Alecto had explained, Hannah had lied through her teeth, about Kelsey’s sheer interest in muggle studies and how else are we supposed to learn they’re pitiful and beneath us and on and on and on, like she was a Slytherin, and Alecto had bought it, eventually, because she was Hannah Abbott, Head Girl, daughter of a Death Eater and the Deputy Head of the DLME. 

Thanks, Kelsey had said softly, once Alecto had gone, and Hannah had walked her back to Ravenclaw and done a spell Hermione had taught her, what felt like a lifetime ago, to keep the book concealed from prying eyes. 

Hannah stares down into her oatmeal as Susan double checks her list and Ernie pulls out the bulk of The Sacred Twenty-Eight: A Primer. She’s done a lot of the deflecting, this year; deflecting and lying and stepping between students and monsters, shoulders held high. 

She’s done what she needs to do, become what she needs to be, to survive this year. To protect the tiny first-years and the moody fourth-years and their friends, with only her last name and the Head Girl badge as a weapon. For the most part, she thinks it’s worked— none of the eleven-year-olds have been tortured. Neville and Ginny and some of the more senior members of the TA have taken a fair amount of damage (when the Carrows can catch them), but she’s healed their wounds, so cleanly they haven’t even scared. Ernie’s web of lies has held, and the few times anyone attempted to brew an actual heritage potion, she or Daphne got there first, spiking the mixture and falsifying the results. 

She’s done what she needs to do. But sometimes, when she finds herself pulling her braids back after a brutal night of lying and nightmares, she’s not quite sure who she’s looking at in the mirror. Like maybe, in the becoming and the deflecting, she’s broken some part of her she quite liked having, just to go on through.

Where would the Hat sort all this, she thinks, shoveling oatmeal into her mouth before Susan or Ernie can yell at her again. Across the hall, her eyes find Theo’s— from the outside, he looks every inch composed Head Boy, Death Eater waiting to happen, but she can see through and he’s nothing of the sort. There’s a comfort, in stripping away layers, in seeing what no one else can see. 

She wonders, sometimes, what they’re going to do next year, if they don’t end this mess soon. Will she had to go back to Cardiff, lie to her father, take a year of Healer’s classes under the crushing weight of the Dark Lord’s administration? Where will Susan and Ernie and Justin go, scattering to the crevasses to continue their war of attrition as a ghost army? Theo’s done with lies, so he’ll be with them; Daphne’s got Astoria to think of. And if they all go to ground, who’s going to be here? Who’s going to take care of the kids? Snape fucked up, by picking her and Theo; he won’t fuck up next time. 

Is all this going to be in vain? 

She tries not to think like that. She tries to think about what they have accomplished. About potions she’s helped Pomfrey brew, in case shit hits the fan. About first-years sobbing in her arms instead of alone and about people like Kelsey, who weren’t hurt because she stood in front of them. About Anthony and Sue and Theo eating and sleeping because she bullied them into it. About how Ron and Hermione and Harry might be out there, facing the Dark Lord with nothing but their wits and magic, but they know how to heal because she made sure of it. They have an antidote to the Dark Lord’s snake’s venom and more blood replenisher than they could possibly use.

And maybe none of that is enough— of course it’s not enough— but it’s a lot more than the Dark Lord’s doing.

April rattles along, like a fuse. Something’s in the air, something’s in the water. She can almost feel the castle bracing itself, like shit’s about to hit the fan. “If it comes down to it, we need to make sure the students are safe,” she tells the crew in Headquarters one night; Millie tells her about the doorway she burned in the back of the wards and Hannah makes her show her how to open the Chamber of Secrets, so she and Theo can get to it. 

She ends up with Sue in the library, late one late April night. Sue is tweaking equations, writing back and forth frantically to Hermione in the spelled journal. Hannah is exhausted, from three nearly sleepless nights and the gross amount of power she expended earlier today, to non-verbally disillusion a Slytherin fourth-year who was out of bed at a very foolish time, right when Amycus was walking past. Sue is talking in her typical transfiguration babble, but from the sound of it they’re getting close.

“It’s just not working,” hisses Sue, throwing down her quill in frustration. 

Hannah drags herself back from where she’s leaned her head deep into her hands. “Walk me through it.”

Sue blows out a breath. “Alright.” She scrambles for different papers, and Hannah turns her head, studies her friend: same straight dark hair, same spray of freckles, but hollow cheeks and bloodshot eyes. She doesn’t think Sue’s been to a single class this entire school year, burning the midnight oil writing letters to the Death Eaters and posting threats and designing magic and reading things Hermione can’t. Has anyone told her how much it matters?

“You know it’s important that you’re here, right?” says Hannah, with the bluntness of an exhausted Hufflepuff who doesn’t want her love to be in doubt. Sue stills, her hands above the papers. “We love you, and we wouldn’t have made it this far without you.”

Sue breathes out a shaky breath, looks over at her briefly. “Thanks, Hannah.”

Hannah rubs at her eyes, loosens her tie, rewarms the tea that’s long gone cold, before pour herself a cuppa. Outside, the night is black and windy, and it takes a herculean effort to wrest her mind from the innumerable points it wants to wander back to Sue, and transfiguration of all things— she’s passable, but mainly in the way Smethwyck and Pomfrey are, in that they can turn anything into a bandages or a vial— but it’s Sue. It matters. 

Sue’s work, as far as Hannah understands, over several cups of tea, is attempting to transfigure an immense amount of power into something else. “It can’t be deflected,” Sue explains, which niggles something in Hannah’s mind, the part still trying to think occasionally about studying for NEWTs, but she’s simply too tired to follow that thread. “But it can become something.” She launches into a long explanation of what their friends are working on— blood magic; runes; a bit of potions theory; wards, of course.

“So you’re just trying to transfigure raw energy into a usable state for the wards and blood magic to deal with,” Hannah says, eventually.

“Exactly,” says Sue. “But it’s bloody rough.”

“Because you don’t know what’s coming at you,” Hannah says. “They could be putting anything in there. Isn’t the first rule of transfiguration to figure out exactly what you’re dealing with before you try to change it into something else?” That was on a flashcard in her bag somewhere, probably in Sue or Hermione’s hand writing. 

Sue lets the quill fall from her hand and turns to stare at Hannah in open shock. “Hannah, you’re brilliant.”

Hannah leans back in the chair and stares up at the library ceiling, where the stone is dark with torch ash. She wants to feel a swell of pride but all she really feels is exhaustion, and a faint sheen of worry over the Prefects patrolling the castle and Cory Selwyn, who had spent all of lunch sobbing into her shoulder after he’d failed his Dart Arts exam. Kid didn’t have the appetite for anything evil, and Hannah had told him to just play that he was a bit thick. 

Was that the right call? Has any of this been the right call? 

“But how do I figure out what’s in there?” Sue asks herself, chewing on her quill. 

“Send something out to meet it, I guess,” says Hannah. She thinks about her patronus— it’s a bean goose, with little orange feet. It’s more whim, than anything, that has her pulling out her wand at one in the morning and trying to cast one, but maybe it’s also proof. That underneath everything, it’s still her— Hannah Abbott, a future Healer, a solid friend.

She casts it with the future in mind, like she and Millie and Luna talked about. Millie, with someone to snog and a lost city. Luna, with a Mastery and a thestral herd. Her, with a Healer’s license and a little private practice and a cottage with potted plants in the windows (and so what if they were from Neville) and hosting brunch every Sunday for the crew. She’d get Hermione to help her with the wards, so that no one she loved would ever be locked out. 

I want to come home from work and you lot are already there, sitting on the couch, because it’s your house too, she’d said, and when she whispers expecto patronum in the gloom of the library, the goose is there, waddling out across the table, ruffling her wings. Sue stops her work to look at the spectral goose, and then her eyes widen. “Like a patronus,” she whispers, and Hannah feels relief all the way down to her bones that it’s still the same.

She falls asleep in the library, while Sue works through the night, but in her dreams, there’s only geese, flying low over snow-covered mountains. “Did you do it?” she asks Sue, as she sits up from where a book has become a pillow and a stray piece of parchment has become a heavy blanket. A stray spear of sunlight falls through the window, and for a moment, Hannah can pretend it’s any other year, and when she goes down to breakfast she’ll be met by all her friends, grinning, unmarred by war. 

“Yeah,” says Sue. “I think so.” 

“Breakfast?” Hannah asks. 

“Breakfast,” agrees Sue. They walk up to the Great Hall shoulder to shoulder, and Hannah thinks about the bean goose, and the shrine outback of the Burrow for Sirius, and the scar on her palm, and how when push come to shove she probably could have done fine in any of the Houses.

Sue doctors her tie with a wave and slides in next to her at Hufflepuff, Ernie on her other side. Snape, like always these days, looks worn thin, like a strong wind could blow him over. Susan is a warm weight against her shoulder, and her father’s name isn’t in the paper today either. 

“Did you sleep?” Susan asks, putting more oatmeal into her bowl after she finishes the first round. 

“Yes,” says Hannah. Her eyes alight around the hall, on their allies, on their friends at every table. Everywhere, people she would sit next to her if her tie was a different color. Everywhere, people she trusts, people she loves. 

She leans back into the pool of magic that wells from within the castle, and squares up to face another day.

Chapter Text

One by one, the things he’s been dreaming of for years have come true. Ron lays awake in the spare bedroom in Shell Cottage, Hermione’s arm flung across his chest and Harry curled up into him, and carefully retraces his steps. How many times, in the last six years, had he dreamed of the pool in the woods with the sword, of the tent in the rain? Of Hermione, bleeding out on the beach? Of waking up in the woods with blood on his hands and Harry and Hermione stricken with fear?

What haven’t they gotten to? The cup and the showers of gold— surely they’ll encounter that, in the vault.

Harry, dead in the woods. 

(Just the thought makes him still, focus on the threads of the rings, on Harry’s breathing as he sleeps next to him.)

He thinks of the conversation he’d had with Trelawny, when he wasn’t fifteen yet, in that stuffy tower room. About how the future was immutable. He’d hated the idea at the time, but now that it’s rushing towards him, he can’t seem to find any kind of counter proof. The only way to avoid the dreams would be to turn away from the quest all together and—

(And if he knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that turning away from the quest would keep Harry alive—)

He’s been dreaming of Hermione bleeding out on a beach almost since he met her and now that it’s happened, he’s sure he’ll keep dreaming of it until the day he dies. It had seemed like such a clean break, like against all odds they were going to make it out, and then she’d staggered to her knees and fallen to the sand, clutching at her throat, blood welling up. Salty surf and sand and the cold wind, and every healing spell he’d ever learned. Over the years, Hermione had given herself magical exhaustion countless times, and he’d never understood— how could you possibly use that much magic— but then there he was, on his knees, dumping it all out. Ozone and burning sugar, he could feel his ring burning, someone was sobbing, him or Harry or the both of them— 

Her blood was all over his hands, clumping in the sand. We can’t possibly do this without you, he has a distant memory of thinking, or maybe saying, or maybe screaming, and then she’d blinked her brown eyes up at him and Harry, and he’d sunk down to his heels in the surf in naked relief. 

The ring that had once belonged to Hermione’s grandmother— the Granger Heir ring, for all intents and purposes— had left a deep burn underneath it. He and Harry hadn’t been able to cast for a week, not anything, and he’d been reminded of how Harry and Hermione had been, in the woods after bringing him back. And maybe that was just how magical exhaustion worked— maybe he and Harry had dumped so much magic into Hermione that it had kept her alive.

But maybe—

He turns slightly, burying his head in Hermione’s shoulder. He feels her breathing, warm and alive. 

The dreams have all come true, and in the dream, he’d known, in the way you know things in dreams, that she’d been dead. 

Piece by piece, they’re assembling a plan for breaking into the most fortified place in the Wizarding World. Bill had supplied them with maps, and a detailed knowledge of the security systems— Hermione had taken to breaking curses like a duck to water, but it was Hermione, so that hadn’t exactly been a surprise. Mundungus, slipping in through the Fidelus Charm on their invite, had given them all hugs, broken out the whiskey and was generally acting as though Christmas had come early— One of my greatest ambitions in life has always been to rob Gringotts, he’d informed them. Fred and George had sent him with a small treasure trove of potentially useful creations— widgets to block sensory fields generated by sneak-o-scopes; highly advanced disguise potions; Peruvian instant darkness powder. 

Griphook, Bill’s former co-worker and friend, who they’d rescued from the basement of Malfoy Manor had come over for dinner a few times. He had a bone to pick with the new administration of Gringotts— cowards, afraid to go against the wizard in open rebellion— and what loyalty he still felt to his former employers had been cleared away when Hermione had brought the mangled locket from the foldspace at her wrist. Griphook’s eyes had widened as he’d scooped it up. How did you come by this? he’d asked, his eyes darting between the three of them. 

Does it matter? Harry had said. You can have it, if you help us. 

It had taken a few more dinners to convince Griphook that they had no interest in the vast treasures of Gringotts, but only in one very specific thing. It’s Voldemort’s, Harry had told him. And if we get it, we can end him. He had agreed, eventually, but had promised them that the first thing he would do after the defeat of Voldemort was to reconfigure the vast defenses of Gringotts so their knowledge would be rendered useless. 

Ron made sure to tell this to Mundungus, in particular. 

He feels like they’re making progress— once they’re in, a lot of the security measures seem like they could be subverted if they just imperio someone with sufficient clearance. They’ve been very careful to avoid letting it slip exactly who’s vault they’re after, but Anthony has gotten them internal plans and Ron knows the Lestrange Vault is deep in the marrow of the place, protected by a full dragon. 

And of course, once they’re in, they’ve got to get out. And even Hermione isn’t good enough to burn her way out of the Gringotts wards on short notice. 

April bleeds around them as they work out their strategies. “We’ll need to throw them off, somehow,” says Harry, when they’re up late, the kitchen table layered with paper and Dung asleep on the sofa. “If he knows which vault we broke into, he’ll know we’re hunting them.” So now they have distraction plans, to go along with Hermione’s refresher from fourth year on burn wards, and the letter Hedwig brought from Charlie, about best tips for dealing with dragons in stressful situations. And between Griphook, Bill, and Dung, they’ve got the dream team as consultants. It’s all actually starting to come together, with a surety that scares him.

One particularly blustery night in April, there are no drop-ins from the Order, or the kind of news that sends daggers through the evening, and Fleur challenges him to a game of chess. Hermione is deep in theory at the kitchen table, and Bill and Harry have given up on the dishes to brush up on technique in the back garden. Fleur retrieves the chess set and lets the pieces scurry across the board— it’s beautiful, all ivory and wood, with little French turrets. “Black or white?” Fleur asks. 

“Black,” says Ron, after a moment of thought. Fleur gives him a raised eyebrow but takes white nonetheless. “It’s a familiar position, these days.”

“The Dark Lord does not know what to do with his position of power,” says Fleur, opening Ruy-Lopez, which Ron knows she favors when she’s got other things on her mind. “He does not even seem to understand that you and Hermione are integral to Harry.”

“Yeah, well, we all know he’s an idiot,” says Ron, sidling his way into the Berlin defense.

The sound of waves, and Hermione’s quill scratching, and occasionally Bill and Harry’s voices outside— not the words, just the sound. I could get used to this, Ron thinks, as he castles, and as he and Fleur trade white-squared bishops. Even the endless onslaught of the war has seemed more manageable over the last six weeks, with food on the table and a soft place to sleep. He hasn’t missed the way that when he wakes up in the middle of the night, restless with the dreams, Bill or Fleur will come join him on the kitchen, or on the porch. A few nights ago, he managed to fall back asleep against Fleur’s shoulder sitting on the back steps, the ocean awash in starlight and her talking about obscure lines of the Sicilian. 

“You’re going to go soon, aren't you?” Fleur asks, as her rook takes his knight. “And you won’t be back.” He looks up from the board to her, where she’s studying him with her liquid, gleaming eyes.

“Yeah,” he says softly. “We— there’s more we need to do. And it’s a risk. Even with the Fidelus. We’re a risk.”

“We don’t mind,” says Fleur. “It’s been good to have you here. It makes it feel like a home.”

Ron shuts his eyes briefly. That’s what it does feel like, doesn't it? “For us too, Fleur,” he says. “It’s— it’s nice to be somewhere with no ghosts.” He edged his pawn closer to promotion.

“I know you have a quest,” Fleur says, after murdering a few of his remaining pawns. “But— you know it does not matter what Dumbledore told you, yes? You come to us, at any point, and we will help.” 

Ron knows that— hell, Ron thinks he known that about any of his family, since he was small, at least on paper. But the part of him that is forever just the sixth son of a house of blood traitors still wants to weep at it, at the urgency in Fleur’s voice. At how he knows, in his bones, that she would absolutely stare down Voldemort on his and Hermione and Harry’s behalf, fighting mad, like a true sister. 

“Thanks, Fleur,” he says, softly. “You— you said that to Harry and Hermione, right?” 

“Of course,” says Fleur, moving her remaining bishop into easy reach of his queen. Harry probably did weep, Ron thinks, as he takes it. 

If they make it out of this mess, is this what it’s going to to look like, Ron wonders, as the night falls in long curls around them. Visions flit in the eves of his mind: a flat in London, with a good kitchen and a gas hob and Crookshanks sleeping on a window sill. Pictures of their friends on the walls, putting on Oasis while they cook. Maybe they can figure out how to sleep in separate rooms again, if the war isn’t pressing in at every window. Maybe he can take Susan on a proper date, maybe he can kiss her under a streetlight, everything yellow.

He and Fleur draw, in the end. “Good game,” she says, reaching out to shake. Ron feels out of breath, like he’s run miles. 

“I’m so glad you married Bill,” he says. “It would be real rough if my favorite person to play chess with was my brother’s ex.”

Fleur laughs. “It’s good to be part of this family. Good to have all three of you here.”

He’s putting it off, he admits to himself, that night as he lies awake. They have everything they need for the heist. But there’s safety here, and it’s a creature comfort. To see Harry’s cheeks slowly fill in, to watch Hermione’s wounds close up and her hands stop shaking. To actually talk through some of the things they simply couldn’t when they were out in the woods, fighting for their lives— the sword in the pool; the torture at the manor; the haunting specter of Snape; the  Elder Wand, which Voldemort apparently now has. To laugh around the breakfast table about the fact that the Order’s intel reports that several Death Eaters have been assigned to track down a particular snowy owl after she delivered a Howler to Voldemort himself, but they haven’t been successful, if Hedwig showing up at Shell Cottage with mail is anything to go by. (Bill make her a whole pack of rashers.)

He tells them the next morning, when they’re out on their walk after breakfast, walking the strand-line in the cool dawn. The light coming down from the broken clouds is limpid, stunning, and the wind is blowing out Hermione’s hair, ruffling Harry’s so his scar is visible. They’re holding hands absently, and Harry is kicking at stray rocks, and Ron takes a moment to just look at them. He can still remember, as clearly as ringing a bell, the moment he’d seen them for the first time: Harry, tiny and nervous, asking if there was room in the compartment; Hermione, in robes already with her hair everywhere, uncowed by Draco Malfoy. With Susan, it had been like the dawn, the gradual lightening and brighting of everything, until he’d realized he wanted to kiss her; with them, it had been the work of an instant: they’re mine. 

“We should do it tomorrow,” he says, and they both look up sharply at him. He sees Harry’s shoulder shift into his battle stance, see Hermione adjust, ready to go for her wand. 

“Alright,” says Hermione. 

“It’s past time, probably,” says Harry. “I’m ready.”

Ron nods, falls into step with them; Hermione reaches over to take his hand too. The sea is like curls of blown glass. 

“It’s funny,” says Harry, softly, after a long minute of silence. “I’d never seen it before, and now I’m going to miss it, I think.”

Right. Because his best mate had never been to the ocean. “We can buy a house on the coast, then,” says Ron, before he knows what he’s saying. “One of those big ones. We can each have a floor.”

“I want the bottom,” says Hermione, at the same time Harry says, “I want to the top,” and then they’re grinning, sunlight falling through on their faces. 

Ron reaches out to that future— a split manor house, Harry and Ginny out flying, cooking in a big kitchen while Hermione and Suze gossip at the table— and closes his fist around it, like if he wants it enough, he can make it real. 

It won’t work, but it’s worth a shot, isn't it?

________________

Gringotts looms above them, and Hermione takes a steadying breath. She has a meticulously detailed replica of the cup in foldspace, which won’t fool Voldemort but will hopefully fool Gringotts internally. Buy them just a bit of time. 

Impersonating Death Eaters was always going to be a bit risky, but Anthony knew a staggering amount about them. Ron is Rosier right now, thanks to Fred and George’s newest concoction, and Hermione is his legal council, a dull Pureblood named Richard Morehead. Harry is under his father’s invisibility cloak. If they run into Rosier, well—

They don’t run into Rosier; they run into Travers. She can feel Ron reaching for his charm, for the dossiers of information Anthony has made them all but memorize over the years. They make small talk— the war, the family, the fact that apparently both of them support Sunderland in British League— and Hermione shapes the imperio in her mind, until it’s honed like a knife. Imperio’s a tricky, slippery thing— ethically complex, in a way crucio and avada obviously aren’t, and the Ravenclaw in her adores it. 

The bank is polished marble, and the warning on the threshold curls out above them, like an ill-portent. But is it really stealing, if Voldemort stole it first? 

What did it matter, about the rules, about the grand framework of ethics? Voldemort wants to kill her best friend; they’re going to kill him first. It’s simple. A light pattering of rain, and she can feel the threads of the ring reaching to her friends.

Late at night, or early in the morning, Griphook had told them; they’re here bright and early. The lobby is nearly empty, and Ron heads straight for a goblin Bill had singled out from headshots Anthony had scrounged up for them— Bogrod, the current managing director of the banking floor. He always handles sacred twenty-eight clients directly, Bill had said. Real hob-knobby with them. If you get him under imperio and hold him, you’ll have no trouble fooling everyone else. 

She and Harry pounced at once, as Ron shook Bogrod’s small hand. Harry took Bogrod; she took what Ron had termed in planning the free agent and Mundungus had called the inevitable clusterfuck. “Every great heist has one,” he’d told them, pacing around Bill and Fleur’s living room like they were still in Grimmauld, and he was thinner and more threadbare, but he also looked alive in a way that reminded Hermione of Sirius. “You can’t out plan that. Luckily for you lot, you have a secret weapon.”

“The power the Dark Lord knows not?” asked Harry dryly. 

“Hermione fucking Granger,” Mundungus had said, and no one had argued with that. 

Travers succumbs to the imperio without a struggle. Go hide, she directs him. Bogrod is an easy study under Harry’s imperio, and doesn’t ask for any kind of identification. Ron’s eyes scan the bank, but no one else seems phased by their arrival. 

They take the cart into the underbelly; it reminds Hermione of muggle rollercoasters, in the worst way. Harry has taken off the invisibly cloak and she has her wand at ready, as the damp underground air boils past them. 

No matter how careful you are, they will eventually realize you’re not supposed to be there, Bill had told them, pacing in the kitchen. The wards are an empire.

So it’s dismaying, but not really surprising, when they’re knocked out of the cart by the Thief’s Downfall. Hermione casts the best cushioning charm of her entire life; they make it to the cavern floor, Harry reasserts the imperio over Bogrod, and Ron pulls out their make-shift map of the bank, sketched by Bill and Griphook and checked by Anthony (with a few comments by Millie, which made Hermione feel better.) “They know we’re here,” Ron says grimly, folding the map back and setting off into the gloom. Hermione leaves a shield charm burning in the passageway behind them, just to buy them a little time. 

Most alarms are designed to scare you off, Mundungus had said. If you know the score is worth it, you keep going anyway.

The dragonhas them drawing up short, even though they’d known. We have him trained, Griphook had said dismissively, but it’s another thing entirely to see him down here, in the damp of the cave, milky-white and chained to the walls. Around them, vault doors peer out from the gloom, inscribed with archaic numbers that Griphook had told them changed on the daily, just to keep people guessing. But Bogrod knows, and compelled by Harry (who has a distant sheen to his face, like he’s about to be sick) he forces the dragon to cower back from a sound he’s learned to fear. 

“Charlie would have a fit,” mutters Ron, “Not to mention Luna.” The smell of damp stone, and the charcoal ash of the torches. Bogrod draws up short in front of a vault door, and behind and above them the sound of the ruckus are getting louder, closer. 

The problem’s going to be the vault door, Griphook had told them. You can get in without a key, if you’ve got a goblin. The problem is going to be getting back out.

Maybe, maybe, you could crack it like you would a curse, Bill had said. But you’d need time, and if there’s one thing you won’t have, it’s time. 

Yeah, that’s the point I’d always get stuck on, Mundungus had said. You’re in. How the hell do you get out?

Their line in discussions had always been leave that to us, but in reality, that part had been the simplest, Ron just tapping his fingers on the band of his ring. “You really think it’ll be strong enough?” she’d asked; the boys had scoffed. 

(Which was fair— if they worked like she maybe thought they did, cutting through the Gringotts wards was nothing.)

They exchange kits— Ron takes the cloak and control over the imperio; Hermione douses both her and Harry in burn wards. Bogrod opens the vault door for them, revealing a cavern of gold and armor and classic pureblood nonsense. “Be quick,” hisses Ron, as he sends Bogrod to loiter in front of the Malfoy vault. 

The door closes behind them, and then they’re alone in the vault, with the cursed gold and the horcrux while above them an army of goblins and possibly Death Eaters bare down on them. She flicks out her hand, spills blue flames into the gloom; Harry’s face is drawn in concentration. Everywhere, there’s loot, like they’re raiding a tomb— gold plated suits of armor; the replica of the sword of Gryffindor; jeweled goblets and loose galleons (how the hell did the Lestranges find shit in here) and strange salvers and platers buzzing with dark magic. She shut her eyes, let her magic unfurl in the gloom. She’d lived with the locket long enough to get used to it, to memorize the magic of it, like rot and bog water. 

“Found it,” she breathes, even as Harry is already raising his wand to shine the lumos on the uppermost shelf. The cup is even smaller than she’d thought it would be. 

“How are we going to get up there?” asks Harry, even as he knocks into a shelf with an elbow and sends a shower of golden trays falling, multiplying. Thank God for the burn wards. “We can’t use—“

“I know,” says Hermione, and then she raises her wand anyway. 

The wards are old, and completely beyond her. She can feel them in her teeth, buzzing in her ears, smarting at the corners of her eyes. They know she doesn’t belong here, that she’s an intruder who doesn’t bank here. They know she’s a thief, and they’re trying to close in on her. 

Except she’s not some common thief. She’s Hermione Granger. She fixes the cup in her mind, and raises her wand. The wards spark at the edges of her magic but she doesn’t need to keep them out forever. Just for a moment. 

“Accio,” she says. The wards snap, with the sheer force of the power she dumped into them, and then the cup is in her hand, burning even though the wards, copies falling freely from her fist. She raises her wand hand to wipe the trickle of blood from her nose, turns to Harry, feeling light in the head. 

“Holy shit,” says Harry. She switches the real cup for the fake in foldspace; he knocks gold and treasure around to cover their tracks, and then she puts her fingers to the ring and thinks about Ron. The wards cease to matter, and taking the portkey to him is not a translocation— it’s like stepping over a threshold.

“Cutting it really fucking close,” hisses Ron, from where he’s crouched in the shadows. There’s the sound of the dragon roaring, and the clanking. “Got it?”

“Yeah,” says Hermione. Ron is scanning over the both of them for damage, but Harry has already moved onto the next stage of the plan: having Bogrod open the Malfoy vault, and making a scene.

That part goes off without a hitch. Their escape plans have always been the ricketiest part, dependent on circumstances— can they disguise themselves as goblins? Go invisible and sneak out undetected? Burn through the wards despite everyone saying it was impossible?

Harry goes in a very different direction, in response to what appears to be every single Gringotts employee converging on them with daggers and swords and double-bladed axes. He sets the dragon free.

It’s an insane plan, but hey, in another life, they all could have been in Gryffindor, and she really had felt bad about the dragon, spending its life as a security measure. She and the boys help the dragon enlarge the tunnels, clinging to its back as it beats its way upwards, towards fresh air. They wing over the underground lake, through the passages, rock falling all around them, and Hermione might feel a bit worse about destroying the bank if they weren’t backing Voldemort. The dragon bursts into the marble foyer, all wings and teeth and fire, and then takes them straight up through the glass dome, shaking free of the shards and the shackles of its former life, into the grey late April sky. 

“Holy fuck we did it!” screams Ron, and Harry turns back to her, grinning, and beneath them London unfurls, grey and blue and green. There’s blood on her teeth from the accio, and she can feel the faint thrum of the cup’s magic against the foldspace, begging to be let out, and some of her hair is charred, but Ron’s right. Holy fuck, they did it. 

They’re too tired to apparate, and so they let let the dragon take them where he wills, soaring over the country side, until they’re so far out in the wilds she doubts even Millie could find them on a map. The loch water is dark and cold, and they fight their way to the shore, panting for breathe in the shallows, grinning at each other. They set up the wards and change back into jeans and Weasley sweaters, grilling the sausages Fleur packed for them over a low fire, while the dragon snoozes in the shadow of the distant mountains. They sleep curled up on mattresses pushed together on the tent floor, no one taking watches for once. 

“Anything from Voldemort?” Hermione asks over breakfast; Harry stares off at the lake and shakes his head. 

“Faint flashes. He’s ruffled, I think. But I think they bought it, so far.”

“Won’t hold up to a full internal audit, which they probably started last night,” says Ron, stepping out into the sunlight, shoving up his sweater sleeves. He takes a piece of bacon from the plate and sprawls out on the grass. “But we’ve got time.”

Hermione looks over at the two of them, in the gauzy spring light— Harry sitting cross-legged, his glasses askew and his hair falling over his scar; Ron, his shaggy hair messy from sleep and his dimpled grin. The loch water sparkles, and the dragon must have moved on overnight, because they’re alone in the green, lush hills. 

“Want to destroy a Horcrux?” she asks, twisting foldspace and letting the cup fall onto the grass, followed by the sword. 

(This time, the shade of Tom Riddle looks like a ruined wax figure, and his arguments feel soft, and foolish. They just broke into fucking Gringotts, and she managed an accio under a blanket magic ban, and if being Pureblood is having gold-plated garbage in a vault guarded by an abused dragon, she doesn’t want it.)

(I have everything I need, she says, raising the sword high in the spring air. I have my crew.) 

________________

Five days after the raid on Gringotts, when they’re still camped on the shores of the loch, Harry jolts awake from an late afternoon nap with his scar burning, blood running down his forehead into his eyes. He staggers to his feet, and then out into the grey-toned afternoon. We need a break, Hermione had declared, and neither him or Ron had argued with her. She had pulled together the final threads of volo together— Sue figured out the energy transformation issue! she’d crowed the day before yesterday— and Harry could see her and Ron the distance, actually trying to cast it for the first time. So far, none of them have managed to produce anything but gold shimmers, like an incorporeal patronus, but that could be the fact that no one is actively trying to kill them. 

Green, in his mind, and rage. He wipes blood off his face with his fingers, flicks it into the rocks, and then cups his hands to yell for Ron and Hermione. “Oi!” he says; they turn to him, even as he scrambles up across the heather to meet them. 

“He knows,” he pants. Hermione’s hair is pulled back and she’s wearing an old Cannons jumper; Ron’s in one of his Slytherin jumpers than Millie got him for Christmas. “He knows we took it. He—“ Another flash of white-hot rage, and Harry’s knees buckle before Ron and Hermione catch him. “He knows we’re hunting Horcruxes.”

He falls into the vision, then, like falling into the sea.

When he comes back to himself, he’s lying in the heather in front of where the tent used to be. Ron is sitting by his side, and Hermione is scribbling furiously in the notebook that connects them to Hogwarts, occasionally reaching down to send a quick message on their pager. 

“Hey, hey, you’re alright,” says Ron, helping him sit up and handing him his glasses. “What happened?”

Harry tries and fails to shake the feeling of murdering goblin after goblin in the foyer of Gringotts. “We were right,” he breathes, reaching up to feel his scar, which is covered in a patch of gauze Ron must have summoned. “Diary, ring, locket, cup, snake, diadem. Nothing else.”

“Thank God,” says Hermione, summoning a glass of water for him wandlessly. 

“He’s going to check them,” Harry says, drinking greedily. “He’s worried about the ring, and the locket, but he thinks the one at Hogwarts is safe for sure.”

Ron nods grimly. “Any insight into where it is?”

Harry shakes his head. “Just— the idea of Hogwarts. He’s confident that if he lets Snape know we might be coming, we won’t be able to get it.”

Hermione shuts the journal and sends it into foldspace. “Well, he’s about to get the shock of his life. Millie says we should apparate to Hogshead and Aberforth will get us in.”

Ron nods, and then stands, pulling Harry to his feet. Harry peels the gauze off his scar gently, and looks around the loch, his heart pounding in his chest. Hogwarts. Snape. 

“Millie says she’ll brief us when we get there,” says Hermione, stepping up to him and Ron, holding out her hands. “Ready?”

Just like when they’d decided not to go back for seventh year, there’s no discussion, no argument. Just the certainty of what they have to do. Harry takes Hermione’s hand in his, she layers disillusionment on all of them, and then they’re gone.

They land in the back room of Hogshead, where a lifetime ago, they had met Sirius. Harry’s heart rents at the thought— the way his godfather had embraced him, and how he’d cared so much about Ron and Hermione from the beginning. They wait with bated breath for a long moment in the gloom, but no alarms seem to have been tripped. 

The door to the backroom is unlocked, and Aberforth sticks his head in, wand raised. “You’re clever, to avoid the Death Eater’s wards, but not as clever as you think. Come out with your hands up.”

Hermione drops the disillusionment. “It’s us. Millie said—“

Aberforth lowers his wand. “Millicent didn’t say it would be you lot, but I can’t say I’m surprised.”

They end up in the apartment above the bar, waiting for the patrol change, so they can sneak across to Honeydukes. “I can get you into the school, but why you want to go, I can’t imagine.” The three of them are squeezed together on Aberforth’s sagging couch. Every now and again he’ll get a flash of something from Voldemort, and he wonders how much time they really have. 

“We’ve got something to finish,” says Hermione, and Aberforth laughs. 

“What, my brother leave you with a quest? Swore you to secrecy, and promised you it was the only way to save the world?”

Harry can’t quite contain the flinch. Aberforth sits down across from them in an old leather armchair and sighs. “He always was that sort, wasn’t he?”

Harry lets out a long breath, thinking about the way Dumbledore had talked about the Prophecy, and the grave in Godric’s Hollow, and the truths at the core of The Life & Lies, about Grindelwald, and how maybe it wasn’t malice, that he’d been left at that house, but it was negligence and disregard at the very least. 

“We’re not here for him,” Harry says quietly, and Aberforth turns to him. “Just— just so we’re clear.”

“Why are you here, Potter? You’re in Slytherin, aren’t you? I always thought you had a bit more survival in you.”

He thinks of Cedric, killed for standing there, and Sirius falling back in the veil, and how in the Chamber, Tom Riddle didn’t know Ron and Hermione’s names. He thinks of Snape (everything is about Snape, somehow) and growing up in that fucking house. And of course he’s a survivalist, but also all that matters— all that has ever mattered— are his friends.

“Because maybe I don’t want to survive if my friends don’t,” says Harry, sharper than he means to. 

A slow smile curls across Aberforth’s aged face. “Now that, Potter, I can get behind.”

Honeydukes is boarded shut, with anti-apparation wards smothering it, but Aberforth has a passage in the basement of the pub, concealed behind a heavy barrel of ale. “Can you get word to the Order?” Harry asks, shutting his eyes briefly as a searing howl from Voldemort cuts through his mind like a knife. “I think— I think we might need them.”

“You think he’ll come here?” Aberforth says, staring at the three of them. It’s all Harry can do to nod. “Alright. In that case— yeah. Yeah I can.”

Something flickers over his face, like a cloud over the sun, and then he spreads out his hand and begins to work a ring off his gnarled knuckles. Harry blinks, and then blinks again— he could have sworn—

“I don’t know if you know what this is,” says Aberforth, as he holds up the ring that used to be a Horcrux. “But I think maybe you might want it.” 

“That’s not— it can’t be,” says Hermione, and Aberforth gives her a sliver of a grin and deposits the ring, warm from his hand, into Harry’s open palms. 

“The resurrection stone,” he says. “Three turns, and you can talk to anyone. But you know how the story goes. Talk to them too long, and…” 

“And you forget which side you want to be on,” Harry says, staring down at the silver and black of the ring in his brown hand. 

“Yes,” says Aberforth softly. “Be careful.”

The minute they’re out of sight down the tunnel, Harry presses the ring into Ron’s hand; Ron takes it without a word. “He knows Dumbledore took the ring,” Harry whispers, feeling lightheaded. “He’s going to check the locket.”

“Alright,” says Hermione, taking the lead, laying wards thick over them as she walks forward into the gloom. “We’ll have to be quick.”

There is a hole in the ward barrier, which feels like Sue and Theo’s work. They make their way quickly up through the cold stone underbelly of the castle, towards the witch statue. “Harry?” calls a voice he would know anywhere. “Is that you?”

“It’s us,” calls Harry, and then the passage is bathed in a soft, radiant light, and he has an armful of Millicent Bulstrode

“It’s so good to see you,” she says, drawing back, and then hugging Ron and Hermione too. In the light from her lumos, she looks like shit— her hair is greasy and tangled; she has a festering black eye, and she doesn’t look like she’s slept in a week. Not that the three of them look much better, he supposes. “We’ll get back to the Room and we’ll make a plan.”

Between Hermione’s wards and Millie’s intimate knowledge of the castle, they wind through the hallways to the fifth floor unobserved. It feels like being back in a fever dream— the alcove where he and Ginny made out last year; the window seat he and Hermione and Ron crammed for their third year transfiguration final on; the bathroom with the entrance to the Chamber of Secrets. Every shadow he expects to turn into Snape, and he can feel the blood pounding behind his temples, his hands shaking. He hadn’t had time to think about it, really, in Grimmauld— it had been about protecting his home from the Death Eaters. This—

He’s spent the last year reminding himself that it meant nothing. That Snape was only in it for the color of his eyes and a vow. But being back here— somehow it’s harder. The memories flow fluidly together, and all he can think about is how sometimes when he didn’t feel like he could breathe he would go to Snape’s office and knock and pretend to have a question about potions. 

“Welcome home,” says Millie, when the reach the Room. They follow her into a cavernous, high-ceilinged room, with bookshelves and a massive round table and the unfurled tapestries of the four houses. 

Everyone’s here, and seeing their faces looking back at him feels like finally getting a drink of water on a hot day. How could he have done all this without them? Susan, hugging Ron and him and Hermione and then Ron again; Theo who initiates for once in his life, looking thinner and paler but alive, still without a Mark on his arm; Hannah who waves her hand and heals the reopened wound on his scar; Neville with a split lip and gashed face who embraces him like a brother; Daphne, her eyeliner on point even in the middle of a war, holy hell it’s good to see you, she whispers in his ear as they embrace; Sue is hugging him, Ernie is hugging him, Justin is hugging him; he hugs Anthony, because they’d be dead without Anthony; Luna holds him tightly, like he’s a precious thing; and Ginny—

Ginny has her hair up like she’s about to go fly, has a cursed burn that’s making a long seer underneath her left eye, and is currently wearing a crusty Wesley sweater and a pair of sweatpants that must be Luna’s, because they have radishes with bowties on them. Ginny has never looked more beautiful. “You’re a fucking idiot, to come here,” says Ginny, and then she’s kissing him. Across the room, Ron is kissing Susan, and Hermione is already reading something Anthony has shoved into her hands, and is telling Sue and Theo about volo. 

Hogwarts isn’t home, but this— this feels like home.

They end up around the table, Ginny with her arm around him, possessive, and Theo on the other side, with his shoulder pressed up against his. The contact is grounding. Neville paces, outlining what’s happened at Hogwarts— their efforts to sabotage the Carrows and Snape, their allies, their escape plans. “How’s the quest?” he asks, his eyes falling on Harry. 

“We’re close,” says Harry. “We need— we need something hidden here.”

“It’s probably in the Room,” supplies Millie. “Just in a different configuration.” 

“And that big bloody snake that Voldemort’s got,” says Ron. “If you see that, kill it.”

Neville nods. “You think— you think he’s coming here, then?”

Harry sees, from Voldemort, a flash of the pounding surf and the rock that marks the entrance to the cave. “Yes. I think he’s coming here. And I think it might be a fight.”

“Hell yeah,” says Ginny.

“We need to make a plan, then,” says Neville.

“Before we do that,” says Hermione, standing from where she’s sandwiched between Sue and Anthony. “There’s a spell you need to know.”

“For what?” asks Neville.

“It’s a counter,” says Hermione, and despite the fact that they’re about to be in a fight for their lives, Harry can’t keep the grin off his face as he watches Hermione look around the room at their friends. “For Avada Kedavra.”

Ginny slips her head into the crease of his collarbone, and Theo goes as far as to take his hand in his, and Harry shuts his eyes. Just for a minute. The magic of the Come-and-Go room is liquid, quizzical, almost alive. “You summon a spectral version of yourself, to stand between you and the killing curse,” Hermione is saying. “Representative of how much you want to live.” The Dark Lord is cutting his pale hand on a rock, and in a minute, they’re going to have to get up, split up, gear up for the fight that’s coming, but for now—

He thinks of the shade from the diary, trying to suck Ginny’s life force from her. He thinks of Theo, walking into Wiltshire with only his charisma as a weapon.

I’m here for them, he thinks. If you want them, Tom, you’re going to have to go through me. 

Chapter Text

It is early April when Poppy decides she has had enough of playing games. 

It’s been a hell of a year, and the only thing she can say for herself is that no one has died on her watch. She’s treated far more torture cases than she’d ever thought she’d have to at Hogwarts, and she knows there would be more, if Hannah and Theodore Nott and Daphne Greenglass and Neville Longbottom and Ginny Weasley weren’t so singularly talented at turning the Carrows away from targets, and Filius hadn’t drapped wards over all the little ones.

Her hands are cracked from all the brewing she’s been doing, and she knows she’d be magically exhausted if it weren't for Hannah’s skills. She’s going to be one hell of a healer— Poppy’s seen her close up basic cuts without even a wand. 

The moonlight slants through the windows of the infirmary, and she makes one last round. Colin Creevy is sleeping off the aftermath of a nasty beating, and Cassie Markov is getting over wizarding flu. She layers them both with monitoring wards, and then opens the potions cabinet and takes down nerve regenerator and blood replenishers. Weighs the Dreamless, before putting it back. Now is no time for an addiction.

It’s late, and Hogwarts is quiet. Which, why wouldn’t it be, with both the Carrows sleeping off a Death Eater meeting? Like the other times they came to her in the after, it had taken almost more than she had to give to avoid spiking a nerve restorative with something that would incapacitate them permanently. But as much as she wants to make them suffer for what they were doing to her students, she knows there are worse people Voldemort could send. Would send, if he felt his little kingdom was unstable.

She thought she might have to guess the password, but the gargoyle doesn’t deny her entrance, which only confirms the suspicions she’d been nursing for a while now. About the kid who’s case DLME never took seriously; about the man who’d come back wane with grief and used to come sleep off torture in her infirmary. 

About the man who’s spent this year not eating, and not sleeping, and generally looking like shite. She climbs the stairs in silence, the potions heavy in her pocket, and thinks about the kind of marks she knows Voldemort leaves on his own, and how she’d never refused to treat the Carrows, even though she knew what they were. They might be monsters who hurt children, but what would it make her, if she didn’t help them?

Severus is sitting at his desk, with his head in his hands, shaking. The room smells faintly of smoke and nerve restorative, and he doesn’t seem notice her arrival. She clears her throat, and he glances up, wild-eyed, before forcing his face back to disinterest. 

“Ah— Madame Pomfrey. How— how can I help you?”

She flicks out her hand and casts one of her favorite wards, which Filius painstakingly taught her one Christmas Hols. All of the portraits of the former heads are smothered in thick black curtains, buzzing with silence wards. 

Severus goes to stand, hand reaching for his wand, but she holds up her hands. “It’s not like that, Severus,” she says. “I just thought you might want some privacy.”

He’s looks at her like he’s seen a ghost. Up close, he looks even worse— his hair is matted with blood in a few place, and there are raw burn marks peaking out of the collar of his robes. His cheeks are sunken, and his eyes are bloodshot. “For what?” he asks.

“If what he did to you looks anything like what he did to the Carrows, nerve restorative isn’t going to get you very far. Let me take a look at it.”

Snape just stares at her. 

“Severus, you’re qualified and powerful, but you can’t treat what looked to me like fiendfyre burns by yourself.”

Silence. He looks like he did when he was fifteen, after Remus nearly killed him. Cornered, and hurt, and scared, but most of all alone. “I don’t understand,” he says, small and cracked. “Don’t you— don’t you want me dead?”

Poppy resists the urge to put her face in her hands. There have been a number of nights just like this one, when the Carrows had summoned her to their quarters to treat the aftermath of a meeting and she’d left Severus to his own devices, convinced it was nothing he couldn’t handle with a nerve restorative and some basic healing spells. Because if she was wrong, and she played her hand when it wasn’t warranted—

Except she isn’t wrong, is she?

“I’ve never wanted you dead, Severus,” she says. “And I will admit that I have no idea what game you’re playing, but I do know that if your true loyalty was to the Dark Lord, the first thing you would have done as Headmaster is fired me.”

He stares at her for a moment, naked shock on his face, and then crumbles, putting his face back in his hands. She takes a few careful steps closer, rounding the desk slowly and then putting a hand on his shoulder. He’s always been a bit indifferent about physical affection, but it’s been a long year, and when was the last time someone touched him gently?

One hitching sob, and then two, and then he turns to her, and she’s holding him, his face pressed tight against her robes and his shoulders heaving. 

“It’s alright,” she whispers, trying to keep her shock out of her voice— she expected a confrontation, possibly a fight, but not whatever this is. “It’s alright.”

The burns are bad, when Severus finally unbuttons his robes and sheds his undershirt, but worse is how clearly underweight he is. “Severus, you can’t just subsist off nutrient potions, you know,” she says, as she peals dark magic out of the wounds. 

“I know,” he whispers. “I just— I can’t.”

“And why not?” 

A moment, then another. “You can’t— you can’t tell anyone this. I— If he finds out—“

“It’s dying with me, Severus,” she says. “Healer-Patient confidentiality, remember? Besides, considering how no one has even asked to see the family tree I put so much effort into faking, I doubt the Dark Lord would even think to interrogate me.”

Silence, except for Snape’s slight hiss of pain as she pulls dark magic from him. It lasts for so long she thinks he’s not going to answer.

“I saw him,” he whispers, his voice like a thread. “Over the hols. He— he didn’t look like he was eating. Couldn’t— couldn’t find food, maybe. I—“

Poppy freezes, barely daring to breathe. She’d heard all the rumors, same as the rest of them, about Harry having Lily’s eyes and how none of it had been real. How much of that had been the truth, she hadn’t been sure— over the past six years, she’d seen a hell of a lot of Harry Potter in her infirmary, and every time he was there Severus always seemed to be too, sitting by the door reading a potions journal— but he was a good liar, and a complicated man. Just because he was playing his own games with Voldemort didn’t mean he hadn’t been shit to Harry.

But maybe it did.

“He’s all I think about,” Severus whispers, his voice hoarse. “I don’t— he’s just out there and I— there’s nothing I can do.”

He’s sobbing again, she realizes, as she begins to bandage up the still raw burns on his back. She doesn’t know what to say; maybe there isn’t anything to say.

She gets him to his feet and into the sterile bed chambers— no personality, just stone walls. He wipes at his face and she pretends she doesn’t see, and he pretends she doesn’t use a clever little charm to get the blood out his hair. It’s only when he winces as he crawls into bed that she realizes he could benefit from another pain relief potion; he downs it quickly. “Running short of powdered moonstone?” he asks, handing back the vial, and for a moment, he looks like the man who is her friend.

“Yes,” she says. “Yes, I am.”

“You can substitute diced knotgrass, you know,” he says. The bandages on his back and ribs stand out like shattered glass, and she pulls the sheet and blanket up over him. She’d forgotten that, in the mess of the war; if things were normal, he would have reminded her months ago. 

“Thank you,” she says. “Send a house elf for me if you need anything.” She turns to go, but he reaches out and grabs her wrist.

“You— you can’t talk about this,” he whispers. 

“I know, Severus,” she says. 

“He’ll—“

“He’ll never come looking,” she says, looking down at his hand. There’s dried blood on under his nails, and his fingers are sallow and skeletal. “But if you want to come down and obliviate me tomorrow, you’re more than welcome to.”

His fingers fall from her wrist and he rubs at his face. “No— I’m not— I’m not going to do that. Thank you.”

“Of course,” she says.

In the infirmary, Colin and Cassie are still asleep, and the moon has set, leaving the wing dark and cold. She’s up late that night, turning Snape’s words over and over in her mind. He killed Dumbledore; he’s doing a shit job of running this school for Voldemort; he’s got the Mark on his arm; he loves Harry. 

His burns are healing. Hopefully, he feels a little less alone.

Snape is at breakfast the next day, looking as impassive as ever, but when he notices the heavy weight of her gaze he takes a bit of porridge, and then another, and then another. She substitutes in the knotgrass and brews more pain relief potions, and waits for Severus to turn up with a wand in hand, his mind changed about who’s holding his secrets, but he never does. 

She brews for the war Hannah tells her is coming. She heals broken clavicles and cutting curses gone wrong and hex victims with a sure and even hand and thinks about what it might look like, if Snape had fired her. Calliope was dead, thank Merlin, but there were other Death Eaters who dabbled in necromancy and would have appreciated a pool of hurt children to toy with. 

It’s probably not right. It’s definitely not enough. But it’s what she has to offer. Spring opens up, and the rumors come back about the Trio and their exploits (don’t worry, I made sure they knew basic healing spells before they left, Hannah had told her in September, and few things have relieved Poppy as much as that), and Severus picks at his food but eats some of it, at least, and no one ever asks her to prove her blood status, or about Severus’s loyalties, or Harry Potter.

And that suits her just fine. In the thin, in-between places of the war, she pulls out her wand, and keeps things together the best she can.

________________

Arthur walks the long track up from the ward boundary in a thicket of April rain, letting it soak into his heavy traveling cloak. The mission was a success, perhaps— Kingsley or McGonagall would have called it that, he supposed. Sabina Kovac had killed Gibbon, and they had rescued three muggleborns from the basement of the manor house. Never mind the elves talking about the unmarked graves out back, or how pale and broken the survivors had looked. Never mind that Gibbon had gone to school with him and Molly, and had a daughter in Ginny’s year. 

Never mind that he doesn’t know if all his children were alive right now.

The rain is like a wraith, and he lets it wash the line of blood from his face. Bill and Fleur are hunkered down at Shell Cottage for the most part, taking care of Ron and Hermione and Harry. Dad, it’s— it’s bad, Bill had told him, over a cup of tea when he’d stopped by Muriel’s a few weeks ago. They turned up beat to hell, like they hadn’t eaten in weeks— Hermione was tortured. None of them are sleeping through the night, not really.

It had taken all Arthur had in him not to apparate to Shell Cottage on the spot, but Bill had talked him out of it. It’ll be too much, he’d said. They’re all skittish, and on edge. And Harry and Hermione—

Arthur had understood what he was saying, as much as he didn’t like it. Ron would have been delighted to see him, and so would Harry and Hermione, but Hermione had to be missing her parents something fierce, and Harry—

Well, Harry had a dead father and Snape, who had betrayed him. Arthur won’t kid himself— he loves the kid like his own, but he’s an adjunct-father to him at best. Bill and Fleur are an older brother and sister, and there’s a level of comfort and discretion they can provide that he can’t.

They couldn’t be in better hands, Arthur reminds himself. The trees are green with new leaves, and the hedgerows are thick with small flowers. Bill and Fleur are powerful, generous, and cooked damn good food. 

Charlie is on the Continent, making connections, recruiting people, smuggling back supplies. Arthur hasn’t seen him since the summer, but he’s in regular contact, with messages and memos and updates. And things aren’t as bad over there— he’s not in the thick of it. There’s some reassurance there, at least.

Percy.

Arthur hasn’t talked to Percy in nearly two years. Hasn’t seen his flat in London, hasn’t heard about his work or his coworkers, hasn’t heard if he’s seeing anyone. Hasn’t held him. 

And, if Ron’s right (and why wouldn’t Ron be right, it’s Ron), Percy hasn’t turned his back on them after all. He’s been their inside man in the Ministry all along, passing them information from the Minister of Magic’s office. That’s the information they’ve been exploiting in order to even have a fighting chance in this war, and Arthur feels sick to his stomach at the thought of Percy in the den of the lions, lying through his teeth, and then going home alone to his cold flat in London.

He’s fine, he tells himself, though the lie doesn’t land, not after years of it on repeat. We’ll get through this and we’ll make it right. He viciously shoves thoughts of the alternatives away, pulling his cloak tighter around himself— from past experience, he knows that if he dwells too long on the idea of bolts of greens and gravesides and headstones that say Weasley, he’ll end up vomiting in the grass, shaking with fear and grief. 

Fred and George— he’s seen them recently, at least. They’ve been in-and-out at Muriel’s, as they move between safe-houses, distributing potions and products and powerful pieces of magic. They’re all innovative and intricately crafted, and Arthur’s not sure where they got that from— Molly’s powerful, and quick with a hex, and he’s many things, but no academic. 

He’s seeing them more frequently than most of the others, and so he can see the way the war has crept into their faces, dug its claws in. Fred has a notch on his chin and a streak of grey in his hair— dementor, or maybe a too-close call with a killing curse, neither things Arthur wants to think about— and George is missing two fingers on his left hand from a vicious curse on the battlefield a few weeks ago. Beyond that, there’s a thing to how they hold themselves. They still make jokes, are always the first to break the tension at Order meetings, but they carry their shoulders differently. Arthur recognizes it, because he did the same thing, the first time around. 

The mud squelches under his boots, and through the haze of rain, he can see the distant lights of the house. There’s supposed to be an Order meeting tonight, and he’s not sure he’s ready. Not that he’s ever ready, really. 

Ginny is at Hogwarts, at least. Which isn’t safe, what with Snape there, but at least there she’s not facing down avada. He has a feeling that his daughter, who is never content to sit on the sidelines while other people have all the fun, is involved in some (or all) of the guerrilla warfare that’s been unfolding in the small crevasses of the war, and maybe if they all make it out of this alive he’ll be able to look her in the eyes and tell her he’s proud of her. 

Right now, he’s mainly just terrified. 

And then there’s Ron, and Harry, and Hermione. 

Who are on a quest to defeat You-Know-Who. A quest handed down to them by Dumbledore; a quest that’s so secretive they haven’t told the Order about it. 

A quest that’s left them on Bill and Fleur’s doorstep, starved and tortured. 

The rain soaks him all the way through, washing blood off his hair and hands. At least they have somewhere safe to sleep for the time being, someone to feed them. And if Bill says he and Molly shouldn’t go see them, that they’re too fragile for that, he’ll have to trust him. No matter how much he might want to take them all in his arms. 

The house is loud, with Molly arguing with Muriel about dinner plans. He hears, from the living room, Kingsley talking with Fred, and Mundungus chiming in occasionally. He hangs up his cloak and drys himself off with magic, letting the magic of the fidelus pool around him. In the breakfast nook, Griphook and Riptooth are talking lowly; Amanda Pryor, who had been missing-presumed-dead before the Trio had found her, is reading over briefs by the fire, and gives Arthur a nod as he walks in. Hedwig, who might be Undesirable Number Two at this point, is asleep, perched on a coat rack with her head under her wing, waiting for the cover of darkness to deliver the next letter. How, exactly, she always knows when she’s needed most, he’s not sure; Harry really knew how to pick ‘em, he supposes. 

He misses the Burrow more than he cares to admit. He and Molly had never meant for it to be a permanent situation— it had been a good deal, for two broke newly-weds who’s families had left nothing for them to inherit, but then slowly it had become home. Creaky floors and gnomes and ghoul and all. 

He wonders if they’ll be anything left when they go back. If they go back.

The Order meeting goes as they all do, these days: Kingsley, who is their defacto general with Minerva so often stuck at Hogwarts, coordinating missions. They cross off names of Death Eaters they’ve confirmed are dead, like that’s any measure of progress. Not when they’re people he went to school with, when they’re people his children went to school with. Three weeks ago, Greer killed a kid who Bill had brought home one Christmas Hols, when he was twelve, because he hadn’t had anywhere else to go, and Arthur can still see his face, as he sat at the table in the Burrow. 

He’s still wondering if there’s any other way that story could have gone, but he of all people should know there’s no saving everyone.

“Are you okay?” Molly asks him that night, as he stands at the window in their bedroom, staring out at the darkness and the sound of rain. “Did something go wrong on the raid?”
“Nothing— nothing new wrong,” says Arthur. “Just— all of it.”

Molly comes to stand next to him, and gently wraps her arms around him. Not saying anything, just understanding. They’ve been married for twenty-six years, and half of that has been nights like this, the war like an oil slick over everything. Always wondering who they’re going to have to bury next.

Arthur pushes the fear away, pushes the ghosts away. As far as he knows, all ten of them are alive tonight, and Molly is here, a constant through the thickets of war, and maybe that will be enough to curb the nightmares. Maybe, somehow, what they’re doing will be enough, and the Trio will finish their quest and they can end You-Know-Who and they’ll rebuild the Burrow and the kitchen will be filled with laughter. 

It’s not much of a dream, but maybe survival is as ambitious as it gets in these thin, cold days. 

He curls up next to Molly and sleeps. He expects nightmares, but there’s just darkness. Heavy, almost warm. 

________________

He should never have come back. 

In August, his mum had sat him down in the airy sitting room of their house in Venice and laid out all her cards, one after another. “Blaise. My love,” she had said, taking his hand in both of hers. “I only sent you to Hogwarts because that was what I thought your father would have wanted, and at the time, it was better that the school here.” The sea breeze had ruffled the curtains, and Blaise had thought about moving staircases, and the way the castle hummed with magic, and Morag and Tracey. “But now, with everything— perhaps it would be better— we can get you a Mastery here—“

In the sun-drenched summer, he had said no. So what if the Ministry had fallen and the Dark Lord was in charge now? So what if the Trio were on the run, so what if Snape had killed Dumbledore and was now Headmaster? None of that changed the fact that he was Blaise Zabini, a pureblood Slytherin who had never once drawn attention to himself. He would go to Hogwarts, study for his NEWTs with Tracey and Morag, and maybe at the end of last year he had entertained faint ideas of helping with the war effort, but that had been before the Dark Lord had taken over the Ministry. Before he’d put the man who’d murdered the last Headmaster in charge at Hogwarts. There would be no fighting, Blaise knew— there would only be survival. 

He should have known better, he thinks, lying awake at night as a late April storm ruffles even the deep lake water. Greg and Vince are both sound asleep, drooling into their pillows, but Theo is out on rounds as Head Boy— rounds, or sowing seeds of the resistance, or maybe both—  and Draco and Harry both are gone. Both wanted by the Dark Lord. He longs for his bed in his mother’s villa, with a canopy and expensive silk sheets and the Slytherin banner he’d hung on the wall. 

He uncurls his palm and summons a bead of light to his other hand, staring down at the newly healed pink skin. Hannah Abbott, the Head Girl, had pulled him aside after class and healed it with a quick incantation and a warm flush of magic like mint and mildew, but he can still feel the phantom pain. He’s had worse, over the years— it’s Hogwarts, anything could happen— but this was the first time it hadn’t been an accident, or some idiot Gryffindor who got too zealous with a tripping hex. 

The whole year has had a blight on it, as much as he’s tried to ignore it, as much as he’s tried to put his head down, studying in the library with Morag and Tracey. The Carrows seem to be everywhere, only too happy to hex students for minor infractions; Snape is a wraith who Blaise has suddenly found himself afraid of— if he killed Dumbledore, what else can he do— and on top of it, Weasley and Longbottom seem only too happy to launch themselves into the line of fire. And Lavender and Kellah— and thus, Leanne, and Emma, and Parvati and Padma, and thus Morag and Tracey— are right behind. 

He stares up at the canopy of the bed, where last year Greg had enchanted small glow-in-the-dark stars, because everyone kept having nightmares. Harry’s were almost invariably about the graveyard where the Dark Lord had been resurrected; Draco’s were just screaming, mostly, and sometimes sobbing— crucio he’d received at the hands of the Dark Lord, probably— and Theo’s were quiet but his eyes would always be bloodshot and his hands would be shaking when he stood to turn on the lights. 

He hadn’t had nightmares back then, but he’s having nightmares now. About blood on stone and Tracey with a black eye and Morag with a singe of dark magic down the side of her face and them on the pavers, stone cold dead. 

About the Dark Lord, and how all of this is going to end. 

He’s spent the year exactly how he said he was going to, and it hasn’t fucking worked. There are children with split lips and their faces cut open and even if he had believed the lines about pure blood and new world order, there’s no denying the Carrows are sadists. Hell, Vince, who he’s pretty sure wants to take the Mark as soon as he gets the chance, had said as much a couple months ago. 

There are hurting children. There’s graffiti spelling out Potter Lives! and Trio Supremacy! and Lavender Brown and Kellah coming back from Merlin knows where with ash in their hair and issues of the Quibbler passed around, publicizing the attacks and suffering and despite himself he’d read every line: nightmare fuel. 

(He wakes up shaking, tears soaking his pillowcase, and like all the years before, Greg and Vince and Theo say nothing. No matter what they are to each other in the hallways, in the confines of the dorm room, they are Slytherins, standing together.)

There is no peace at Hogwarts. There is only the war, coating every surface and making it hard to sleep or eat or think. There is only Morag, working up wards to protect Lavender and Kellah and the rest of them with they go out into the field because Hermione Granger is on a quest and Morag was probably the next best at them. There is only Tracey, reading feverishly about magical law and litigation, and passing that information off to Li and Goldstien. It’s not like we’re fighting, Blaise, Tracey had said in October, when Blaise had raised his concerns. That had been after the black eye, which had been Pansy’s work, something relating to the fact that Tracey was a half-blood from an affair. We’re just pitching in. 

But you don’t have to! Blaise had wanted to scream, which he’d been screaming for years now. When he’d seen the writing on the wall with Harry and turned away; when after a couple of meetings of the DA in fifth year he’d forced his hunger for a decent Defense education to the back burner— it simply wasn’t worth the risk. The war doesn’t have to involve us if we don’t make it!

He runs his fingers along the healed burn and listens to the water slosh against the castle walls and wants to laugh at how naive he’d been. All along, his mother had known what she was talking about, and if he’d just listened— 

What exactly are you working on, Miss Davis, Alecto had asked in Muggle Studies this afternoon, with a hungry glint in her eyes, and the whole class had gone silent and still, Tracey curling her hands around the ledger she was taking notes on. Notes on loopholes in the Wizengmont seats, and the Hogwarts Board of Governors, and the line of succession for Headmaster. Nothing illegal, but Alecto had made no secret of how much she liked to hurt people, just for the hell of it. 

There had been no time to think. There had been only time to act. And like an idiot Gryffindor, he’d tossed out a jab at Alecto so sharp, so barbed, that it gave Tracey time to Vanish her notes and had left him with a burn on his hand.

You didn’t have to do that, Tracey had whispered to him at dinner, as he’d still be prodding at the healing skin; he’d looked sideways at her and seen through to what she’d meant: blow your cover? For me? and he’d gone always. 

He rubs at his face, trying to let NEWT-level potions and charms theory drown out the sheer turmoil pounding inside his rib cage, but it doesn’t work, like it hasn’t worked all year. Maybe he wants to be neutral, but there’s no such thing in war, is there? Not when he’s here, in the middle of it, enough of an idiot to stand up to Alecto and get his name on a list somewhere. 

(Enough of a Slytherin? Because at the end of the day, what was survival if he was alone in it?)

Blaise curls up in his four poster, wishing to be anywhere else. Wishing he made different choices, trying to reach for the cool emotional distance he’s prided himself on for most of his life. 

But in the nightmares, Tracey and Morag are bleeding out on the cobbles, and he wakes up sobbing, and the detachment shies away from him like a fish from a hand. What kind of idiot cares this much, he thinks, staring up at the glow-in-the-dark stars, his chest rising and falling too fast, salt in his eyes. 

(Theodore Nott, masquerading as a perfect Head Boy while keeping the kids safe. Draco Malfoy, too soft to be a Death Eater. Gregory Goyle, who enchanted glow-in-the-dark stars for them. Vincent Crabbe, who might believe the Pureblood bullshit but didn’t want to see children hurt. Harry bloody Potter, who was out trying to save the world.)

(Because that’s what Slytherins do.)

The skin heals back brown and taut. The nightmares are hideous things, but Tracey and Morag are there, in the library, and he slides in at their shoulders, just to reassure himself that they’re here. He counts down the days until the end of term and everywhere hangs the war and—

And he cares. Not about the Dark Lord, not about school, but about them. 

He reaches over for one of Tracey’s books, and gets to work. 

________________

Why, exactly, Severus would summon the school to the Great Hall after dinner on a Monday in early May, Pomona does not know, but she rises from her office in the greenhouse and slings her heavy cloak over her shoulders, running her finger over the Hufflepuff House ring and hoping her students are smart enough to attend the summons, if they are not currently being hunted by the administration. She’s only seen Neville in snatches since Winter Term, but on occasional she’ll stay out late in the greenhouse and find him, watering or repotting something or just staring off into the middle distance. She’d always sit beside him, give him space to talk or not talk. His grandmother is dead, and his parents have never really been in any state to be his parents, and she is well aware she is a long way from filling the void, but she is his mentor. She’s no healer, but she knows enough field first aid to seal up a cut, and she knows him well enough by now to know when he needs to just hear about her feud with Jasper fucking Burns, or the latest cultivar, instead of thinking about the sheer weight of the war. 

She makes her way back up to the castle in the falling dusk of the May night, her cloak flapping in the brisk wind. Above her, the turrets rise in jagged shadows against the night, and she once again feels the unfamiliar feeling, of longing to be anywhere else. She’s missed Marsha a lot this year— well, not Marsha, not really, because Marsha was working for the new regime, and has probably killed people— but how it had been with Marsha. The feeling, of open doors and limitless futures. 

The hallways are filled with students, whispering to each other, their steps uneasy, and Holland Sholar, a tiny Hufflepuff first year who’s family tree she had Ernie forge, creeps up to her and bundles up into her side. She catches Ernie’s eyes as he tries to reassure a few frantic second-years that things are going to be okay, and sees something there that’s more than the facade he’s done his best to put up all year, of resolve and politeness. He knows something, and it’s fortified him. There’s fear, still, but also that cool Hufflepuff brutality that she’s always loved about him. She scans the hallways for others in the Trio’s inner circle, who might know something— she catches a glimpse of Theo, who though he looks as broody and mulish as possible, has a slight spring back in his step. Hannah has her arm around a sobbing third-year who’s had a particularly rough go of it these past few months, and the Gryffindor contingent— Lavender with a nasty black eye; Colin with a pink strip of newly healed skin on his face; Kellah shifting her eyes around at every movement— don’t seem to hold themselves any differently. 

Something’s happening, but what, exactly, remains to be seen. As they file into the hall, her eyes fall on Filius, who is standing near the back, his hand flexed like the champion dueler he once was, and Minerva has her arms crossed, but she’d bet her life that she already has hers drawn. 

Years of habit, of finding her three greatest allies and best friends in any room, have her eyes going to Severus. He is standing in front, the Carrows flanking him, and even from the middle of the Great Hall she can tell he looks exhausted, and nervous. He may have perfected his Severus Snape, loving nothing and no one persona for the masses, and for the Dark Lord, but not for her. 

It’s been a long year, and at every junction Severus has made it feel longer. Perhaps all of this was inevitable— Dumbledore’s death; the fall of the Ministry; the occupation of Hogwarts; the Trio off in the weeds on an insane quest to somehow defeat the bastard— but it would have been tenable, she thinks, if they could have had Severus. He’s slippery, she knows; slippery and slick and a spy besides, and also most certainly a murderer who took that Mark willingly at one point, but he’s also her friend. Her friend, who helped her cultivate one of the best potioneer’s gardens in the world, and who came to her quarters and let his guard down enough to drink, and had once trusted her enough to protect his Slytherins for the night, his House ring pulsing with power on her finger. If Slughorn had been the traitor, with the Mark on his arm and the Headmaster’s office, running the school with crass carelessness and occasional fits of well-tailored brutality, and they’d still had Severus—

Even in the Great Hall, looking up at the man who’s helped make this year a living hell, her heart still keens with want. She wants him back so much it hurts to breathe. Not in this two-faced slick way he’s been doing it, where he lets the fear do most of it for him, where he keeps the Carrows carefully in check and lets the Mark on his arm and the murder stand as proof of his loyalty, but as himself. As the clever, ruthless, powerful son of a bitch she knows he is.

Minerva had wanted to kill him, back at the beginning of the year, and take the castle as their own. Attempt to hold it against the Dark Lord. And though she knew that it was Minerva’s way of grieving— Severus had killed her mentor, and taken her job, and was facilitating the hurt of their students— every piece of her being had rebelled against it. She doesn’t know what games Severus is playing, or where his loyalty truly lies, but but she knows him. 

She knows that no matter what words he might have exchanged with Harry on the lawn on Hogwarts, he loves the kid with his entire being. And he’s might have been running this castle like a Death Eater, but they sure as hell hadn’t been up against Severus Snape, one of the smartest wizards she’s ever met. 

If they’d been up against that Severus Snape this year— she shivers. When he wanted to be, he was ruthless, and completely without bounds. He would have killed them, in subtle, undetectable ways, and bleed the kids dry. 

“You are no doubt wondering why I have summoned you all here at this hour,” drawls Snape, his dark eyes flickering over the Great Hall. His cloak billows as he paces, and the facade is immaculate, she has to give him that. Pomona presses her thumb against the band of the Hufflepuff ring, and wonders, for the thousandth time this year, if she could have done more. More to protect the students, more to soften the hard edges of the dark-leaning ones, more to stymie the Carrows.

More to let Severus know that she wasn’t fooled by whatever game he was playing. That maybe he could play it, and let the three of them on the inside of it. 

(Over Easter Break, she’d had a conference in America to go to, war be damned. And she could have left her ring with anyone— well, not Slughorn, but anyone else— but she had been tired of him cutting around her in the corridors and how he picked at his food at dinner. And so she’d climbed the stairs behind the gargoyle and found him up there, looking fucking miserable.)

(Off to your conference, Professor? he’d asked, acrid like the cover he was playing, and she’d just taken the ring from her finger and put it on the desk in front of him.)

(Yes, Severus, she’d said, even as he’d jerked his eyes up to her, bloodshot and wild. Keep them safe, will you?)

(He had. They haven’t talked about it, because Severus was a twitchy, avoidant bastard, but he’d done it.)

“If anyone has any knowledge of Mr. Potter’s movements this evening, I invite them to step forward now,” hisses Snape, his footsteps echoing on the flagstone, the whole hall holding their breaths.

And then there he is, stepping out from the shadows of the hall to face Snape, wearing borrowed robes and a green-and-silver tie, his hair shaggy and his cheeks hollow, but his eyes burning. “How dare you stand where he stood?” he says, with eyes for no one but Snape.

Snape, who to Pomona, looks relieved, more than anything. But why wouldn’t he, with Harry standing here, furious and thin but so tremendously alive? 

“Tell them!” yells Harry, and behind him, filtering into the Great Hall from the corners, are the rest of the gang: Sue and Anthony; Millie and Justin; Susan and Luna and Neville and Ginny. And Ron and Hermione, of course, who also look a worse for the wear but have their wands trained on Snape already. “Tell them about how all of this was a fucking lie and how it was just about the color of my eyes!”

Tell him, Severus, Pomona thinks, but of course Snape, paranoid bastard that he is, does nothing of the sort. He takes one step back, and then another, and then Minerva is there, and they’re fighting, and the Carrows are disarmed, and the window is shattered, and the Hall is in uproar, Ron and Hermione by Harry’s side and Minerva taking up the podium at the front. In the back of the hall, more familiar faces have filed in— the Weasleys; Tonks and Kingsley; what remained of the Auror office; and such diverse elements as Xenophilous Lovegood, Remus Lupin, and Narcissa Malfoy. 

Her eyes find them again, like she’s so used to. Minerva up front, directing the evacuation; Filius in talks with Hermione, about warding the castle; Severus—

They’re about to fight for their lives; there’s no time for regrets, or desperate pleas. But for just one more moment, she stares at the black blot of the night through the shattered window, and wants him to come back, thin and fucked-up as he is. Just forget you’re a Slytherin for a moment, Severus, she thinks, and own your side, and your loyalty, and tell him you love him because it’s him. 

________________

It’s been a long Monday, after an all-hands on deck weekend, and Percy will admit he’s exhausted, and looking forward to maybe finally sleeping in his flat instead of taking a quick kip beneath his desk between attempting to deal with the break-in at Gringotts.

(He’s managed to maintain his disgusted and inconvenienced facade that he perfected as Prefect and Head Boy, largely thanks to Fred and George, but in reality the whole incident sent shivers of pride and awe and hope through him. Ron and Hermione and Harry had broken into the most fortified building in England and then gotten out unscathed, with a dragon. He’s given the briefs in a dull, bored tone, typical Harry Potter nonsense, but underneath he’s still grinning. Who needed Power the Dark Lord Knows Not when you have Ron and Hermione?)

He shuffles papers around his desk, casting his gaze out the door of the Minister’s office suite towards the bullpen, trying to decide if he can slip away. Pius is still working behind him, in that half-dazed, slightly misshapen way he always works, that Percy would like to assume is him resisting the imperious subconsciously, even after all these months. Percy lets out a long breath, and resists the urge to bury his face in his hands. He’s doing his very best, to compartmentalize and suppress and spy, but the sheer weight of the war comes leaking up at the worst moments, threatening to pull him under. 

Even if it’s the Dark Lord’s government, it’s still a government, which means it thrives on bureaucratic rubbish. Sure, maybe somewhere the Death Eaters are out torturing muggles, but so much of what they do is mundane, supporting his agenda in insidious ways. Tax breaks for the Sacred Twenty-Eight; reworking the Hogwarts curriculum; making it more difficult to obtain international portkeys. Even as he passes memos and confidential documents to the Order, he can feel the weight of their legislative agenda curling around the country, stifling the resistance, reshaping the world how the Dark Lord wants. Complete control of the Daily Prophet; fines for mingling with muggles; funds to build a new prison, since Azkaban was razed by the Order. 

Back in his flat, which feels stifling these days— all he can think about is how no one in his family has ever seen it— he thinks of the good old days, that first year out of Hogwarts when he’d been working for Crouch. The comfort of trying to standardize cauldron thicknesses, and how the twins would lock him out of his room so he’d have to play Quidditch with them instead of getting through memos. How Hermione would ask him questions about the Ministry at lunch, and Ron and Harry and Ginny would tease him about his love letters. 

How everything had felt safe, and tenable, and like he still belonged somewhere. 

Other than a few glimpses of his dad, and that brief encounter with Ron, he hasn’t seen his family in nearly two years. He follows the reports of who they’ve arrested religiously, his chest twisting every time he sees the name of someone he went to school with, but those are feeling he can put aside, in the name of the war effort. His family, though? 

He has a plan, though he wouldn’t admit it at wandpoint. If the names that come across his desk is Fred Weasley or Fleur Delacour or Hermione Granger or Ginny Weasley (he won’t get a chance if it’s Harry, he knows), he’ll burn his cover to ash to get them out. 

He’d always heard the wars bled the black-and-white out of you, made you see everything in shades of grey, but it doesn’t feel like that for him. Everything has narrowed to a binary, like a knapped blade: there is only the family, all eleven of them now. Because maybe he hasn’t meet his sister-in-law, and maybe Hermione and Harry are just two kids Ron brought home, and maybe he hasn’t talked to his mum— been hugged by his mum— in two years, but that doesn’t make it any less real. Any less true. 

There is only the family, and every choice is simple, now. There is no grey; there are no line he wouldn’t cross. And he’s not sure if that’s the Gryffindor he was or the Slytherin he could have been or some distillation of both— hell, does it really matter, after everything— but it’s the road forward, as clean and clear as the sunrise.

And so maybe he steals packets of sleep at the office more often than not. Maybe he’s surviving off tinned soup and rice and beans; maybe every day he works with the Death Eaters trying to kill his family and he gives them polite smiles and the memos they ask for. Maybe sometimes he wakes up from nightmares just sobbing, not from the dreams as much from the crack in the wall behind which he is hiding every emotion he’s feeling. 

When he makes it out of this— if he makes it out of this— he knows he’s going to be fucked up, but he’s got a job to do. What does it matter that he’s alone at the heart of the machinery trying to kill everyone he loves if he can give them even the slimmest edge?

He staples a stack of papers on the upcoming hearing about Hogwarts appropriations (the Dark Lord was oddly keen on funding the school, considering he was a genocidal maniac), only to feel the pager from the Order buzz in his pocket. 

He swallows, and glances around before pulling out his wand to cast a few privacy wards as subtly as possible.

It’s Kingsley’s voice that comes through. We’re fighting. Apparate to Hogshead and we’ll get you in. 

Percy slides the pager back in his pocket and swallows, looking over the bullpen. His hands are shaking, he distantly realizes. 

At that moment, Pius comes out from his office behind Percy’s desk. His face looks the same as ever, craggy and a bit haggard, but his steps are sure. “You can go,” he says, and Percy notes that his hands are shaking too.

There is no grey. There is no right or wrong. There isn’t even any sympathy, not really. There is just the simple fact that if he’s being summoned to a final fight Pius is too, but for the other side, and it will be his family in the crosshairs.

Percy levels his wand at Pius’s back and hisses “Imperio,” like he’s been practicing on cats and birds and the occasional muggle. 

He’s no wizard of note; never has been, never will be. But Pius Thicknesse was DLME, and has been fighting back all this time, and his imperio is just enough to shake the other, just enough for Pius to get a grip on himself again.

Pius freezes in place, breathing heavily, and his hand reaches out to clutch the frame of the door. Slowly, he turns his head back towards him, his eyes wild. “Percy?” he whispers.

Percy invokes a silencing ward and stands, stepping towards the Minister of Magic. “We’re fighting him. At Hogwarts. If you want to come?”

And so that’s how Percy Weasley turns up at Hogwarts: sleep-deprived, and lonely, and with the newly un-imperioed Minster of Magic in tow, who is spoiling for a fight. They follow the others: he catches glimpses of the members of the Order he knows, and sees the columns of students being led by the Prefects hopefully out of the reach of the fray, and his heart is beating wildly in his chest. He wants to see them— he needs to see them— but also the very idea of it—

All eleven of them are in emptied-out Great Hall, planning for the battle, and he pauses on the threshold, his heart in his mouth. Fred and George conferring with Lee and Millicent Bulstrode about how best to fortify the castle; Bill deep in talks with Kingsley; Charlie with Luna Lovegood and Hagrid. Hermione and Fleur are talking to Flitwick about large scale warding protections; Ron has his arm slung over Harry’s shoulder, as they talk to McGonagall; Ginny seems to be rallying an army of her own, a wand on each of her wrists as she dictates battle plans to a knot of barely legal students. His dad is doing the same with some of the younger members of the Order of the Phoenix.

And his mum is standing in the center of the hall, talking to Narcissa Malfoy and Andromeda Tonks. He swallows, and takes a shaky step forward. “I’m not too late, am I?” he says, and they turn to him, grinning.

“Right on time,” says Ron. 

But his mum is running, and then her arms are around him, and she’s sobbing into his shoulder, and he thinks he’s sobbing too. Over her shoulder, his eyes find his dad, and he stretches out an arm, and then he’s there too. 

The Hall is a fervor of planning— Sprout and Theodore Nott; Kovac and Greer and Mundungus Fletcher; Remus Lupin and Xenophilius Lovegood and Oliver Wood and Viktor Krum and Susan Bones; Feivel Goldstein and Warrington and Penny and Tonks. But slowly, like a whirlpool, his family coalesces around him— the twins, with snarky comments; Fleur, delighted to meet him; Bill and Charlie, ribbing him lightly and then embracing him; Ron and Ginny with solid hugs; Harry and Hermione, clearly exhausted but thanking him for his intel. 

“I hate to break this up,” calls Kingsley, and they turn to him, where he’s standing next to McGonagall. “But they said midnight and that’s half an hour away.”

“Don’t you lot have something to find, Mr. Potter?” asks McGonagall; Harry’s jaw clenches at the address, Percy notices, but he draws himself up and nods. 

“Yeah,” he says. “We do.” And he turns, looking across the hall towards Millicent Bulstrode. 

“Thank you, Perce,” says Ron, clasping him on the shoulder. Percy thinks again about that day in the Ministry, and how Ron had risked their entire mission just to talk to him, and how the bite of hope that day gave him, that his family might not hate him— the hope, and the hug— has fueled him all this way. 

“Thank you, Ron,” he says, and turns to Kingsley, wand drawn. “Where do you want me?”

________________

Draco is curled up on the settee in the drawing room, trying and failing to read Cunge’s meticulously crafted monograph on matrix solution schemes for ward networks (he remembers seeing Hermione reading it when they were maybe fourth years and he’d obviously known she’s the greatest wix of the age, but it’s hitting him all over again). Upstairs, Uncle Ted is feeding Teddy, and he is trying desperately to think about arithmancy instead of the fact that his mum and aunt and cousin are off at Hogwarts, facing down the Dark Lord, but it isn’t working. 

Subconsciously, his hand goes to the slot on his forearm where the Dark Mark used to sit, and he rubs at the pale scar his mum left behind when she pealed it off. Uncle Ted put a ward over it back in December, when he found him scratching it until it bled after a particularly bad nightmare, and his hand glides over the shimmer of magic. 

Off at Hogwarts, facing the Dark Lord— and his father. “It’s happening,” Aunt Andi had said, coming into the study already in her heavy cloak. Tonks was a few steps behind her; clearly, she’d already lost that fight. “We’re fighting. At Hogwarts.” 

“Let me get my cloak,” his mum had said, standing from where she’d been helping him decipher Cunge’s use of blood magic principles. She’d kissed him on the forehead, like she had when he was a child, and then embraced him. “I’m going to get your father,” she’d whispered in his ear, “I love you,” and then she was gone, and he was alone with Uncle Ted and baby Teddy in a creaky muggle row house, unable to concentrate on Cunge and not sure to be relieved or insulted that no one had asked if he wanted to come to fight.

He would have been startled by the patronus if he didn’t recognize the magic peeling off it, like moss and copper. The porcupine scuttles up to him, and opens its mouth. “Draco,” it says in Millie’s voice. “Harry and Ron and Hermione and me— we need you. Not to fight, just— just to help end things. Apparate to Hogshead, the barkeep will get you in. Just trust me.” 

Draco watches the porcupine vanish, sets Cunge off gently to the side, and stares down at his hands. They’re pale and well-kept, and also shaking.

He’s had an empire of time on his hands this year, without the constant stream of drama and danger of Hogwarts. Time enough to remember that in another life, he’d actually been quite fascinated by magic, and curious enough to devour tomes— he’d spent great swathes of his childhood in the library at Wiltshire. But with Hogwarts had come politics, and petty fights, and taking every opportunity to insult Potter, and Granger was just so much better at everything that it felt foolish to try after a while, and there was always something. Dementors, or the Tri-Wizard Tournament, or Umbridge—

(Or the Mark on his arm and a suicide mission.)

He’s had an empire of time, to rediscover that he actually enjoys school work, if he’s not in the press of Hogwarts. To think about how different things might have been, if there wasn’t the war. 

To admit to himself that Hermione is the greatest wix of the age; and that Ron is smart and cunning and brave and most of all kind, able to discard a centuries-old feud in a moment because he had salt on his face and was asking for help; and that Harry is not some Chosen One needing to be brought down a peg, but a kid who’s never had anything, and who probably would still be his friend if he apologized to him and Ron and Hermione for being a prat. 

It’s such a stupid, juvenile thing to want, but how he wants it. Hermione, helping him work through Cunge; Ron, hauling him to his feet with his ruddy hand, saying come with us, we’ll fix it; Harry, out flying with him in the crips blue dawn. 

(Hermione would listen to his interest in advanced arithmancy, he thought, and his growing ideas for application. In the bathroom, he’d rolled up his sleeve and Ron had had the audacity to look at him like the Mark didn’t even fucking matter. Harry had kept his word, all these years, and never breathed a word of the nightmares he had.)

(If he’ had been less of a prat at eleven, and if he’d understood that they were here to stay, Weasley and muggleborn though they were, could he have had everything?)

(The Hat, at eleven, had taken no time at all. But what about now?)

He leaves a note for Uncle Ted, and takes one of his mother’s spare wand holsters, and transfigures a quick approximation of a Slytherin tie. Aberforth gives him a raised eyebrow, but he pulls up his sleeve. “I didn’t doubt you, kid,” he says, ushering to the cellar. “I just never took you for the fighting type.”

“Me neither,” says Draco, running a hand through his hair— when did he stop putting gel in it? 

He doesn’t get more than five steps from the passage entrance before Millie is there. “Thank you, thank you, thank you!” she says, drawing him into a quick hug that he absolutely did not see coming, and then grabbing his hand, dragging him behind the tapestry into the walls of the castle. “Come on.”

“What— what do you need?” he asks, as they duck through a maze of passages he never even thought to look for. 

“Room of Hidden Things. The Dark Lord hid something in there. You know it best.”

“Better than you?” Draco asks. 

“Better than me,” says Millie. “Come on.”

Even inside the walls, Draco can hear the beginning sounds of battle— explosions, cracking stones, distant screaming. He tries and fails not to think about his mother— and his father— out in the great mess of it somewhere. 

They emerge, panting, on the fifth floor. “They’re in there, looking,” says Millie, flinging open the door and ushering Draco inside. “But we don’t— it’s enormous, and even Hermione’s accio won’t work—“

Stepping back into the room where he spent so much of winter term last year, torn between the ecstasy of invention and sheer terror, is like stepping back into a nightmare. The high ceilings, the towering piles of junk, the feeling of it, like something was buzzing, like something was wrong—

“Oi, he came!” calls Millie, and he sees, one by one, Ron and Hermione and Harry emerge from the labyrinth. All of them look worse for the wear, by a significant margin, and Draco feels a curl of guilt— he’s spent the last year in a warded row house, and the three of them look like they’ve been sleeping rough and maybe not eating at all. There are new scars on Ron’s face, there’s grey in Hermione’s hair, and Harry’s face is all hollows, but it splits into a grin at the sight of him.

“Draco,” he says, and Draco’s thrown off his game a bit, but the lack of hostility in his voice. “We’re looking for the Diadem of Ravenclaw. It’s in here, somewhere.”

“It’s like a tiara,” offers Ron. “Little weird crown?”

“We think it’s behind the curse on the Dark Arts position, and the reason the room feels wrong in this configuration,” says Hermione. “Did you see anything like that when you were in here?”

Draco looks between the three of them, who for the first time he can remember aren’t looking at him like he’s a threat, or at least a massive inconvenience. He forces himself to relax, and pushes his mind back to sixth-year.

“Like a tiara?” he says, cautiously. 

“It would have felt weird,” says Ron. “Dark and a bit hungry.”

Draco’s eyes widen. Merlin, he hopes he’s right— he doesn’t want to fuck up the fragile trust the Trio is offering him. “I— I think I remember seeing something like that.” He looks around the room to get his bearings, and then sets off into the maw of it, the four of them following in his footsteps. They get about halfway down one of the rows before Millie cocks her head and breaks off. 

“I’ll catch up,” she calls. “I’ve got— well, I’ll explain later, if it works out.”

It’s Hermione who steps up to take her place. “That transform that you did, with the Gaussian elimination modification— it was exactly what I needed. Thank you.”

He looks over at her sharply. “How did you get that, Granger?”

She rolls her eyes. “Who do you think was passing Andromeda problems to pass onto you? I was so busy with ward theory and putting it all together that I didn’t have time for arithmancy.”

Draco remembers the problems— he’d worked on them, but he hadn’t thought they were for anything— but to find out all along Hermione Granger had been having him do her arithmancy—

“What on earth could you have used that for?” he asks.

She flashes him a slick grin that makes something inside him go a bit shivery and hot. “A counter. For Avada.”

He pauses mid-stride to just stare at her; Ron runs into him and gives him a light shove. “Yes, Malfoy, she’s the greatest wix alive, let’s defeat Voldemort and then you can gape all you like.”

He shakes himself from his stupor, ignores Harry’s chuckle, and leads them deeper into the heart of the Room. 

He remembers the tiara— the diadem, whatever— because of how it had felt. It had been a subtle thing, but after spending so long steeped in the dark magic theory h’d been more attuned to it. He winds through the piles of junk, trying to tap back into that frequency.

“Here,” he says, as they round the final corner; he can feel it, just a little, buzzing with a wrongness and a hunger. He opens the drawer of the side table gingerly and the circlet slides forwards, grimy and discolored and still caked with that sense of wrong. He goes to pick it up, but Harry jerks out his hand to stop him.

“Don’t,” he says. “Voldemort’s got a habit of trapping them.”

“What is it?” he asks, as Hermione starts casting diagnostics on it. 

“It’s a long story, mate,” says Ron, “But it’s going to win us the war.” Draco looks between the battered circlet and Ron, and the skepticism must be clear on his face because Ron claps him on the shoulder. “We’ll buy you a pint and tell you all about it once this is over, yeah?”

He’s so overwhelmed to receive an offer like that from Ron Weasley that he almost misses Hermione declaring it free of curses— “Well, nothing we didn’t expect.” He doesn’t miss Harry picking it up and confirming that it is the long-lost diadem of Ravenclaw, and he certainly doesn’t miss Hermione putting her hand to the band of her watch and then pulling a sword out of midair. 

“We’ve all done one, now,” says Ron, looking at Harry and Hermione. “Since you did the diary. Should we—“

The last thing he expects is for them to turn to him, Harry apprising him seriously. “Draco,” he says, and it still feels weird to hear his name from his former rival. “Do you want some revenge against Voldemort?” Hermione holds out the sword, and Draco looks between the blade and the diadem, now sitting on top of the cabinet. 

“What— what?”

“It’s going to fight,” Harry says, and his green eyes are fixed on Draco’s. “Because it’s a piece of his soul.” That niggles something in Draco’s mind, about magic beyond the pale, but he can’t place it. “It’s going to know things, and try to twist them against you. But you need to kill it any way.”

He looks between the three of them— Ron’s wearing a Slytherin jumper; Hermione’s hair is falling out of her bun; Harry’s glasses are crooked. Now feels as good a time as any. “I am sorry, you know,” he says. “For being such a prat, on the train. And after the train.”

Harry lets out a startled laugh. “Well. Thanks, Draco.”

“For what it’s worth, we all knew you’d be shit at being a Death Eater, mate,” says Ron.

Hermione just holds out the sword, and he takes it.

Harry isn’t wrong. The Dark Lord’s soul does in fact know things, and isn’t afraid to use them. But standing in the Room, with the Trio standing behind him, for the first time he can remember, he doesn’t hesitate, or overthink.

He just swings the sword in a clean arc, and cleaves the diadem in two. 

Chapter Text

It had started off as a completely normal Monday. She’d woken up in the bunk room of the Come-and-Go Room, curled up next to Hannah. They’d done their ties up, gone to breakfast, and she’d even gone to Herbology— Sprout still put in the effort of teaching, but didn’t seem to mind if they never turned anything in or skipped at will. She’d stopped by the library at lunch with a plate for Ernie and Sue, who were in the middle of something political now that Hermione’s spell work was wrapped up, and she hadn’t hesitated when the perfect opportunity to hit Alecto with a tripping hex showed itself. Sixty more days, she’d remained herself, as she’d skived off Muggle Studies yet again (the Carrows didn’t have time to deal with truancy right now, not when the TA was setting things on fire), and then they’d be on a train out of this hellhole. And she might now have anywhere to go on paper, but home wasn’t a house anymore. Home was Ernie and Hannah and Justin and Theo and Daphne and Millie and the rest of them (and Hermione and Harry and Ron— maybe most of all Ron, if she let herself think too hard about it) and they were coming with her. 

It wasn’t going to be easy, but at least they’d be together. And Justin at least knew how to cook, so that was something.

(She’d tried and failed not to think about how her Aunt had promising to teach her to cook since she was about thirteen, but then the war had exploded their small pockets of normalcy, and sometimes there had been barely time for takeaway and now—)

It had been normal, as normal as things had been at Hogwarts this year without the Trio and with the oppressive weight of Snape and the Carrows, and now she’s standing in the Great Hall, shattered glass on the floor, as McGonagall calls them all to order. The Order is slowly filtering in, but she has eyes only for Ron. Ron, in a crusty Slytherin jumper with greasy hair and new scars on his face, Ron who had kissed her in the Room like a man who hadn’t had air in weeks. 

(Not that she hadn’t kissed him back with the same fervor, and then she’d taken his face in her hands and kissed the new scars, and now she’s still staring at him, like they’re not about to fight for their lives.)

She hasn’t seen him in nine months, and seeing him now, with fresh scars and blood under his fingernails, makes her wonder how the hell she’d been living without him all this time. 

Later, Suze, she tells herself forcefully, as she drags her attention back to McGonagall, talking about evacuating the students; Kellah, being Kellah, stands at Gryffindor— “And what if we want to fight?” and McGonagall is unable to argue against the of-age students staying, though Susan can tell it pains her. Her eyes find Millie, who’s slipping along the Slytherin side of the Hall to the front, probably to tell McGonagall about their back door in the Chamber, and then to Theo, who’s sitting at Slytherin next to Pansy, but is carefully rolling his sleeves up, like he does when he’s jittery.

Voldemort’s voice is sudden, and silky, and has her thinking avada kedavra with absolute, blood-hot certainty. I do not want to kill you, he says, and Susan bites back a laugh, because of course he does. All he’s ever wanted to do is spill magical blood, starting with Myrtle when he was younger than they are now. After what Anthony told her on that long, haunting all-nighter, she feels like she’s in close to the monster, peering over his shoulder: I see you, Tom Riddle, and find you a pathetic coward who love nothing, and no one. 

Give me Harry Potter, says Voldemort, and Susan jerks her eyes to Harry, who is sitting on a bench with his hand clutching his forehead, Ron’s arm curled possessively over his shoulder. Give me Harry Potter, and I will leave the school untouched. Give me Harry Potter, and you shall be rewarded.

With what? thinks Susan, her hand shaking on her wand. What could we want more than Harry?

An echoing silence falls over the Hall, and Ron moves before the school has time to react, standing with a liquid certainty she’s only seen from him a handful of times. “Don’t even fucking think about it,” he says, and at Hufflepuff, Zacharias Smith sinks back down to the bench. “You want him, you go through me and Hermione, and we all know you don’t want to do that.” 

Smith is appropriately cowed, but at Slytherin, Pansy is tugging on Theo’s sleeve, like she’s thinking about it, and then Theo is standing up, brushing her off, and reaching up to tear the Head Boy badge from his lapel. 

“In case anyone is still wondering who’s side I’m on,” he calls, and the Hall pivots to him, with his dark eyes and perfect hair and Slytherin tie. He holds up the Head Boy badge and then sends it sliding across the table, before swinging himself over the bench and stalking across the hall before sitting down next to Harry. He slings his arm over Harry’s shoulders with an easy familiarity that Susan knows has cost him greatly to display, and looks round the room, even as Harry slumps into the embrace like he always does. “It’s theirs.”

“Me too,” says Daphne, as she pushes herself off the far wall, and then Hannah is standing, tearing the Head Girl badge from her lapel, and then Ernie and Justin and Lavender and Terry Boot. Slowly, and then all at once, the Hall gets to their feet— Tracey Davis and Lisa Turpin and Colin Creevy and Megan Jones; tiny first-years and reserved sixth years and Blaise Zabini, even. Declaring their loyalty— not to the Order, or Dumbledore, but to Harry.

Harry looks stunned, looking up at the Hall turned towards him, so brazenly on his side, and Susan feels, not for the first time, a fierce swell of resentment towards those nameless muggles who raised him: who told you loyalty was undeserved? 

After some whispered negotiations with McGonagall, Millie slips off to lead the majority of the school towards the Chamber of Secrets. Susan is the one who steps forward, then, as the under-aged students retreat, to tell the brave and the ambitious and the loyal and the obsessive that, despite their love, they aren’t cut out for an all-out fight against the Dark Lord himself. “Lisa, your specialty is runes,” she tells her, getting her out the door, to live; “Emma, I get it, but I think we both you’re in no shape for an all-out fight,” she says, and she sees a bite of relief spark in the girl’s eyes; “Blaise—“

“Don’t tell me I’m not qualified,” says the boy who, in another life, could have been her friend. 

“I’m not saying that,” says Susan; across the Hall, the Order is conferring with Ron and the Heads of the Houses (minus Slughorn, of course); Voldemort’s deadline of midnight is creeping ever-closer. “I’m saying that we’re going to be fighting, for real, and you might not make it out. And it won’t make you a coward to leave.”

Blaise swallows, but looks over to where Tracey is sitting next to Morag, and Susan understands. Wonders if in another life, he would have been in her House. “Well, if you’re staying, I’m going to guess they’ll want you to help out with perimeter warding.”

There’s a lot of ground to cover, but the Dark Lord was a fool, to give them a head start. To think he could turn them against each other. Her eyes dart over the Hall, even as she stares down kids who are absolutely not seventeen (when she tells them their birthdays, they drop their eyes and stand to go, and maybe they are qualified on paper, but there has been a single goal that’s lived rent-free in their heads this entire year: no dead kids and she’ll be damned if she’s betraying her ideals now). Flitwick and McGonagall have broken off to talk with Hermione and Hagrid about external defenses. Kingsley and Ron and Neville are splitting up Aurors and the students who have stayed to fight, while Ginny rallies a knot of the most pyromaniacal of the TA to enact some large-scale sabotage, and Flich talks with Justin and Luna and Vityok. Fred and George and Lee Jordon and Mundungus confer even as she get Colin Creevy to his feet. 

She turns from Colin and finds herself face-to-face with Harry, who is swaying slightly on his feet, the palm of his hand pressed into his scar, which is leaking blood down his face. “Hey, hey, it’s okay,” she says, grabbing him by his shoulders. On the other side of the table, someone she distantly places as Andromeda Tonks is interrogating Theo and Sue about their dueling abilities, while a little bit further away, Hannah and Pomfrey are tapping people to help with healing. “You good, Harry?”

“He’s angry,” he says, and Susan transfigures a stray piece of parchment in her pocket into a handkerchief (in purple paisley, of course) to hand to him to stanch the blood. He takes it, presses it to his forehead, and then she’s got him in her arms, pressed up into her shoulder like they’re still children, and the worst thing that’s happened is Sirius Black breaking into the castle. He’s thin, in a way that makes her chest ache.

She is not Ron or Hermione; she is not Ginny. But if (when, she has to believe it’s when) all this is over, she won’t be leaving Ron’s side for love or money and Harry isn’t hers like he’s Ron’s and Hermione’s and Ginny’s, but she still knows him close enough to bruise. 

“We’ll be okay,” she whispers in his ear, as around them the machinations of the battle kick up into high gear. “He’s an idiot, and you and Neville taught us how to cast better than the sorry sods of DADA teachers taught them, and Hannah can heal pretty much anything now and Hermione invented a fucking counter.” She feels Harry slump slightly into her, and across the room she can see Ernie and Daphne in talks with Ron’s dad and Greer about defensive strategies, and Anthony conferring with Pince about how to best protect the archives.

“We’ll be okay,” she says again, and maybe she can’t make it true but she knows Harry will at least try to believe it, if it’s coming from her. “We’ll keep them out. You’ll find what you need to find, we’ll kill the fucking snake, and then we’ll end this.”

She feels Harry nod into her shoulder, and then he pushes himself away from her, wiping at his forehead, schooling his face back into the mask he wears sometimes, of Harry Potter, Chosen One. Pivots towards the center of the hall, where things have rearranged, Ron talking to McGonagall now, Millie pulling out the map to show Kingsley, Hermione and Flitwick, casting together. 

Susan reaches out a hand to him. Tries not to think about how this might be the last time she sees him, but thinks it all the same. “We love you,” she says, with all she has in her, in the same way she know she’s going to say Avada Kedavra if it comes to it. She feels Harry still under her hand, looking back at her with hollowed cheeks and bloodshot eyes and wonders if, between all of them, they could manage to make a killing curse bounce again. If all it took was love, she knows they have that in spades.

“I love you too,” Harry says, and then he goes, and then there are spells hitting Hermione’s wards, shaking the castle, and Kingsley and McGonagall are directing them to their battle stations. She finds Daphne, laces her fingers in hers. 

“Come on,” she says, dragging her through the halls, on the heels of the Order and their classmates and the elves and Flich with his muggle pistol. “I want to kill Rockwood,” she says, meaning it like only a through-and-through Hufflepuff could. 

“I want to kill Theo’s father,” Daphne says, as they wait in the shadow of an arched window where once upon a time they had sat with Millie, gossiping about their crushes and what it might be like to kiss someone. “And Snape.”

“Me too,” says Susan, and then, “And Voldemort,” and Daphne doesn’t laugh, just nods.

And the thing in her chest isn’t hate. Isn’t need. 

It’s fucking love.

________________

Ginny looks around at her troops, trying to think of them like a general, instead of as her friends. Kellah, face stormy and eyes set; Seamus, spoiling for a fight; Dean, with the accelerants; Colin, who was technically under-age but had snuck back in and joined her group and well, there was a war on, and she’s not exactly legal either. Sixteen, seventeen— what was some arbitrary line when Voldemort was concerned?

“Got the rest of the charges?” she asks Kellah, as they make their way in the dark towards the bridge. Kellah gives her a nod. 

It’s a Ron and Neville plan— the bridge is a choke-point, and if they blow it at the right time, they could take out quite a few of them, especially if they let the wards down to lure them onto it— but she’s got the technical knowledge for it. She hasn’t been reading Sirius’s old muggle books on arson and bomb-making all year for nothing. 

Ten minutes to midnight. Harry and Ron and Hermione are in the Room with Millie, looking for whatever it is they need to end Voldemort, and she shoves the thought of Harry from her head as she affixes incendiary charges to the bridge posts. The wards Hermione left her with hover around her like a second skin, and she strings magic between the bombs, so they’ll trigger with a slight delay. The night wind is cool, and last May she and Harry had made out here, after dark, before everything had gone to shit. 

No time for that. There’s only Kellah packing magically spiked dynamite around one of the central supports, and Colin fiddling with detonation timers, and Dean smothering wood with accelerants, and Seamus unspooling tripwires. There’s only the sliver moon and the Death Eaters on the other side of the ward boundary who’s names she does not know, who’s names do not matter. 

(That’s why she took this particular group of people. Because Luna would have reminded them that maybe they had friends, and children, and families; because Millie would have questioned if maybe any of them were under imperio; because Susan would have picked up the humanity in them even under the masks. But they don’t have time for that. Maybe they’re not evil, the Death Eaters on the other side of the wards. Maybe they’re here out of obligation, or imperio, or fear, like Draco was. Maybe, if Susan or Luna or Millie could just talk to them, they could turn them.)
(Or maybe, they’re the real deal and they’d cut her friends down with a razor-sharp bolt of avada and she can’t risk it. Everyone she’s ever loved is within the castle right now, and what is one Death Eater who could have been good in another timeline compared to all of them?)

Tom Riddle probably would have liked the disregard that’s blooming in her chest right now, she thinks, as she fiddles with the wards on the far end of the bridge. But he never could have understood the motivation. For him, everything narrowed down into a pin-prick of power and pain and murder and she—

Luna, taking her hand in the Forbidden Forest detention, when she’d been shaking, and telling her about the will-o'-the-wisps and the foxfire and how the thestrals knew them, would come to their aid. Neville, breaking into Alecto’s office after setting a fire in the corridor, dragging her to her feet and out of a cruciatus haze, vanishing them both into the fabric of the castle. Susan, curling up with her in the bunkhouse with dessert the elves sent up from the kitchens, silence charms unspooling, and just commiserating, about how much they missed Ron and Harry and Hermione, and she hasn’t had the guts to tell her but sometimes it feels like Susan’s a sister too, like Hermione and Fleur. 

Harry, leaving her little pager messages when he could afford to; they were nothing special or elegant or particularly romantic, but it was steadying, just to hear his voice. Ron, who didn’t feel some absurd need to protect her, and always wanted to hear how her guerrilla warfare missions had gone, so she’d written back in their linked journal about razed manors and disrupting the Prophet’s distributions. Hermione, who even with the enormous weight of building a counter to avada on her shoulders had never been too busy to respond with tips about wards, or charms, or how one might exactly burn an estate to the ground.

Everyone she’s ever loved. She walks to the end of the bridge, where she can feel the power from the ward boundary curling out, holding back a clot of Death Eaters with their masks low and their wands drawn. Hermione’s wards curl around her— charcoal and petrichor, but also Ron’s bread and stone and Harry’s ozone and burning sugar. Because it’s all of them, always has been. Always will be. 

“I’ll lure them in, and then you’ll blow it once they’re halfway across,” she’d said, looking around at her friends as they’d crouched in the bushes, and such was her crew’s faith in her that none of them doubted she could outrun a flock of Death Eaters, and she’d loved them fiercely for that, a bright flare in the gloom of the night.  

“It’s the girl Weasley!” jeers one of the Death Eaters, as Ginny stands at the end of the bridge, the yew wand in her hand practically begging to be used, and almost wants to roll her eyes. “Potter’s girlfriend!”

(Last year, before everything had ended, they’d been lying in the roots of the willow tree, Harry’s head in her lap and Hermione reading and Ron talking lowly to Susan, and Harry had said I bet one day you’ll be so famous they’ll just refer to me as Ginny Weasley’s boyfriend and everyone had laughed and above them the sky had been high and blue and she’d wanted the moment to last forever.) 

She flexes her hand, feels along the edges of the wards like Hermione taught her some long-ago summer. She’s in her flying leathers, her hair up, her spare wand strapped to her other wrist, and she’s not afraid. She’s spoiling for a fight in fact; every single one she kills here is another monster her family and crew won’t have to face. 

“It’s Ginny,” she tells them all, flicking out her wand to crack a doorway through the wards. “Not that it really matters, when you lot can’t take me.”

Her eyes flicker across the Death Eaters, the bone white of their masks glinting in the slight moonlight. She thinks of the way it had felt to throw that Molotov Cocktail in the manor house, Luna and Neville flanking her, and how she and Susan and Lavender had broken into the distribution center of the Daily Prophet and burned messages of resistance into the pages of the Sunday edition, the newsprint smearing slightly on their hands. She thinks of slipping out to Hogsmeade, armed with only memories for a patronus; of the smell of fertilizer and how simple it had been, in the end, to append magic to the muggle methods of bombs. How it had felt to burn what Voldemort was trying to build to the ground. 

She looks out at the Death Eaters and sees, as she sees in her nightmares and sometimes in the corners before she whirls around with her wand drawn, Tom Riddle at sixteen. As old as she is now, but sticky with a festering disgust and a livid, burning hunger to make something irrevocably his. She knows it too; the Hat had offered her Slytherin. 

It had told her, then, when she was eleven and the worst things that had ever happened to her were broken bones and her brothers going off to Hogwarts without her, that she was no survivalist. She had the ambition, but not the raw-edged thing that Harry and Theo and Daphne and even Millie had sometimes. 

She’s a survivalist now, and she’s also a Gryffindor who’s spent this last year setting things on fire, and the Hat was right and the Hat was wrong and also it’s a fucking Hat, and she’s Ginny Weasley, and no one can tell her who she is, who she isn’t. 

She flexes her hand around her wand, and stares out at the Death Eaters, and cups an avada in her chest with the same nervousness she’d had when she’d lined up at scrimmage for her first school match. She’s got power, she knows (yew likes power, she remembers telling Hermione, when the wand from the grave Dung had gotten her had been yew too) and she reaches for the need.

(Harry, in the tall grass in front of Sirius’s shrine, because there hadn’t been a body to bury. The deep cuts on Neville’s face from where the Carrows had gotten too zealous, and the anguish on his face when they’d seen his parents on the Closed Ward. The idiot purebloods who couldn’t hold a candle to her calling Hermione a mudblood. Harry, who hadn’t remembered being hugged until it was the Trio when they were eleven. Ron and Fred and George with their battle-hardened eyes and scars. Susan, the night after the vigil for her Aunt, sobbing on her shoulder in her bedroom at the Burrow. The wane, hollow look Luna had to her now, stretched thin with worry for them all.)

(Tom Riddle, pouring liquid from the diary when she was eleven, and eating her alive.)

She reaches for the need and finds it burning everywhere. 

The Death Eaters, with their bone-white masks, and she takes one step back, and then another, the yew wand in her hand, and breathes out. Sees green. “What, the Dark Lord’s finest can’t take a seventeen-year-old blood traitor?” 

That gets them, and they surge forward, and she turns to run, throwing avada back at them with an ease that maybe should have been scary, but just feels right. Curses burst around her, but she’s not a professional-caliber Quidditch player for nothing, ducking bolts of green like they’re bludgers, the stunners shattering off Hermione’s wards.

“Go go go!” she screams, as she reaches the crest of the bridge, her boots pounding on the timber, and she feels rather than sees the flare of magic as Kellah triggers the explosives. The night erupts into shards, wood and screaming and fire, and she’s running like she’s never run in her life as the bridge buckles around her, Kellah and Colin and Seamus and Dean waiting for her. She feels the boards give way beneath her, and she leaps, timber and smoke and screams as the Death Eaters fall and die, hand outstretched—

Her gauntleted hands find purchase on the edge of the intact bridge, as behind her and beneath her the bridge crumbles into the darkness. She chucks her wand up on the deck, and then Kellah and Seamus are there, grabbing her shoulders and pulling her up. “Holy fucking shit,” says Kellah, as Ginny summons her wand back into her hand and sits up, wiping ash from her face. Colin’s staring at her with wide eyes, and the place where the bridge used to sit is a void. 

“How many do you think we got?” asks Dean, holding out a hand and hauling her to her feet. The wind has started to pick up, and in the distance, there’s the sound of spells hitting the still-intact ward boundary, flashes of green and red and blue like fireworks. Ginny’s heart is beating wildly in her chest and there’s a curl of blood coming down her cheek from a stray splinter of wood. 

“Dunno,” she says, cracking her jaw and looking over this small subset of her army, feeling a hot rush of love for all of them: Colin with his blue-blood and grit; Kellah with her fiery hair and indefatigable violence; Seamus with principles and care even in the middle of a war; Dean back here, sticking it out, even though he could have run. All of them hers, all of them worth fighting for, in a way Tom could never have dreamed of. “Should we go get some more?”

She turns from the bridge and heads back into the thick of it, grin hot and liquid, the need  burning in her blood, and her crew following in her wake.

________________

All year long, she’s felt the castle moving around her, like leaves caught in a high wind. And to hear from Vityok that it’s more than just powerful, that it’s sentient, has lit something inside her ablaze. If she could just find that ring—

It’s got to be in the Room, she decides in April, after enough discussion with Anthony and Luna and Justin. They’ve torn the castle to pieces in search of the diadem the Dark Lord allegedly left here, and there’s only one place left to look for it. Except they can’t, because then they’ll have to abandon Headquarters.

And now, in the space of an evening, the day has gone from routine to final stand. She, with Aberforth’s help, had gotten the Trio in, shortly followed by the entire bloody Order, and then she’d convinced McGonagall that the best evacuation route would be to take the student body through the hole the burned in the wards down in the Chamber, to her parents’s estate in France they only kept for tax purposes; Hogsmeade felt too close. “He’ll use them if he can,” Kingsley had said, and something had gone cold and dark in McGonagall’s eyes and she knew she’d won that battle.

It had been a long shot, to ask Draco for help with the Room of Hidden Things. But then he’d been there, with no gel in his hair and looking a great deal healthier than the last time she’d seen him, and the gamble had payed off, because he’d known. He’d found it before, somewhere in sixth year when he’d been in here, cribbing off dark magic. But even as she follows him into the labyrinth, she can’t help keep her eyes peeled and her magic outstretched, thinking all the while, I need the ring. 

The last thing she expects is for it to work. To feel a summoning curl of magic from another pathway, like the very castle is reaching out to her. 

She doesn’t hesitate— between the Trio and a Draco Malfoy who is neither a prat or a Death Eater, whatever artifact the Dark Lord hid stands no chance— and peels off into the cloister of the room. There’s a weight to the magic, an urging. Come, find me, it seems to say. She remembers putting her hand on the door at the beginning of the year and asking the castle to help them; she thinks of the mangle of this variation, how the Dark Lord’s artifact is impinging the nexus. How the idiot had had the audacity to say he had great respect for the teachers of Hogwarts, and didn’t want to spill magical blood as if he was not an omnivorous killer who would tear this place down brick by brick the minute he understood what it really was. 

“You want to fight,” she breathes, breaking into a run, and around her she can feel the castle shivering, like it’s trying to shake herself out of a coma. She skids around centuries of the hidden objects of Hogwarts, leaping desks and boxes, ducking under lamps and pocketing stray wands. “Okay, okay, I’m coming.”

She’s forced to come to a stop by a wall: stone blocks, and the carved visage of the crest of Hogwarts, though it looks a little different. She stares up at it for a moment, and then her face cracks into a feral grin. Instead of the normal motto, with that nonsense about sleeping dragons, carved into the wall is intra muros coniungere, which she remembers just enough Latin from her tutors as a child to decipher, the motto they’ve been living this whole damn year.

“Unite inside her walls,” she whispers, going up on tiptoes to touch the H in the center of the shield. “Or else we’ll crumble from within.”

The H depresses under her fingertips, and in the cavity where it had been, she feels the slim band of the ring.

She rolls it into her hand, hardly daring to breathe. From the other side of the Room, she hears a piercing scream, but then the Room shifts, like a ship righting itself, and she turns the ring over in her fingers. Compared to the House rings, it’s not much— a simple gold signet ring, with the Hogwarts crest on it. But it vibrates with power, so much so that she almost feels scared to put it on. Except she can feel the castle nudging at her, begging. 

“Alright,” she says softly. “You trusted me, I’m trusting you.” She slides the band on the finger, and watches as it shrinks to fit.

It’s a hideous combination of apparation, being bucked from a broom, and being punched in the gut. She’s on all-fours, vomiting up lunch, and then vomiting up blood, as the power digs into her, like ivy into brick. She can feel her mind stretching, expanding, and there’s blood trickling from her nose too, and the corners of her eyes, and she can feel her. Every corridor, every gargoyle, every flagstone. Holy shit. Holy fucking shit.

She drags herself to her feet, staggering slightly, trying to wipe blood from her face and only succeeding in smearing it everywhere. It’s like the Map is burned into her very consciousness: Harry and Ron and Hermione and Draco, heading back towards the door. Dolohov and Sanders and Goyle in the East Courtyard. Ginny and Seamus and Dean and Kellah and Colin coming back from blowing up the bridge; Vityok and Polly and Ollie reinforcing the crumbling wards by the edge of the lake. She knows which doors are open, closed, which passageways the Weasleys have trapped, how the staircases are moving. She can move them if she wants to. She has the wards in the palm of her hand and she can break them. 

And underneath all of that: the castle herself. Like a dragon, pacing in a cage, waiting to be let out.
She staggers against a shelf, spits blood, and then licks her lips. If she didn’t already know the castle so well, she thinks it would have killed her on contact. As it is, she can feel it tearing at her, like looking directly into the sun— too long, and she’ll burn her corneas out. “Hello,” she says, and she feels her perk up. “I need you to wake up and help us.” 

It’s not a feeling, this time. It’s a voice, low and warm. Oh, don’t worry, purrs the castle. I intend to protect my own.

When she comes to, she’s on the floor outside the Come-and-Go Room, more vomit on the floor, curses whirring overhead. Harry and Ron and Hermione and Draco are covering her, dueling four Death Eaters who’s name hover in her mind like labels on the map. All around them, the castle is rattling, stones shifting, torches dying only to flare up again, and she hauls herself to her feet and wipes blood off her mouth and waits for what she knows is coming.

One of them fires off an Avada, and the castle moves. The floor rises up to take the blow, and the pavers underneath the Death Eaters buck and shiver, knocking them on their backs, and when their wands roll away, they fall into sudden slots in the stone, consumed by the castle. With her mind burning with too much knowledge, Millie feels this happening everywhere, everywhere her walls have been impinged on. 

The Trio and Draco make short work of four wandless Death Eaters, and then they turn back to her. “You got it?” she asks, before they can ask her if she’s alright. 

“Yeah,” says Harry. “Millie—“

“She’s awake,” she says, pushing off the wall and sliding her finger down to the ring. The castle is all doors, and she know she could step forward and end up anywhere within her. “She’s fighting with us.”

“Millie, you need the infirmary—“ says Ron, and she shakes her head. She can feel the battle blooming through her brain, in a thousand places at once, and it’s a struggle to focus on what’s in front of her. 

“I’ve got a bit more time,” she says. “Get the snake. End it.” And then she grits her teeth, puts her finger on the ring, and pivots on the spot to step through to the Entrance Hall, where the fighting is thick and her crew needs her. 

It’s not dueling as much as moving, and shifting, and using. Just by thinking about it, she can lock doors, barricade entrances, patch up wards. Beside her fights the great shivering presence of the castle, her magic immense and jagged-edged, stalking in tandem, nudging her in directions to intercede where she can’t. She steps through hallways and corridors like they’re doorways— one moment she’s in the Entrance Hall, Lavender twitching on the floor as Kellah blasts Greyback into the wall with a stunning spell; the next she’s got her friend in her arms, and is laying her down in the infirmary, calling for Hannah. And then she’s out by the lake, tackling Dezmelda out of the way of a killing curse, and then she’s in the West Courtyard where McGonagall is fighting alone, sending Death Eaters flying as the castle surges up beside her, pavers shivering like scales—

She knows the castle like she knows her own name; she steps through her like she’s all doors, and they fight as one. They lock the Death Eater who would have ambushed Blaise in a bathroom. They drop the one dueling Sprout through the trick stair down nine stories and kill him on impact. They put a wall between the avada and Colin. They drag Megan Jones back in through a window when she’s thrown from the tower. Millie know it’s killing her, but that’s okay. It’s not a bad way to go. 

Absolutely not, she hears the castle tell her, between steps, as she coughs up blood in a currently-deserted fourth floor corridor. She has been wearing the ring for maybe half an hour; it feels like a century.

I’ve got more in me, she tries to argue, taking two steps forward, trying to head back to the Entrance Hall, but the castle shunts her to the infirmary. 

Take it off, she tells her, as she falls to her knees on the flagstones, blood dripping from every orifice. I’ll take it from here. 

She pulls the ring from her finger, and it’s like the power being cut at a rave. The ring falls from her hand and rolls and is swallowed up by the pavers, and she throws up again, and then Hannah is there, dragging her to a bed— “Mill, what happened—“

“I woke the castle up,” she says, and then she promptly blacks out. 

In the dream, she’s walking the hallways, pointing out the people she loves to the castle, and every time the castle goes yes, yes I know, I love them too.

Chapter Text

Flashes of curses crackle against the wards, and Sue watches their light flash green and blue and red over Ernie’s drawn face, as they wait for the fighting to begin in earnest. They’re situated in an high tower, overlooking the front lawn of the castle. The wards are Hermione’s and Flitwick’s, but they’re quick work, and won’t hold forever, and when they fall— 

When they were fifteen and sixteen and Harry had proposed the Ministry, she hasn’t hesitated, and neither had Ernie, fighting like hell in the cool dark stone of the Department of Mysteries. And this year, the war has been everywhere, seeping up through the floorboards and blazed into every new wound Ginny and Neville came away with. But this feels different, somehow— the waiting is worse than anything. 

Ernie’s grip is sudden, and tight enough to bruise, but it’s enough of a distraction.  She shoves down the memories that keep threatening to leer up from the firmaments— doing math at the kitchen table with Alexis; getting tipsy with Anthony in the weeds of the golf course; late nights with Hermione in the library, trading equations back and forth— and focuses on transfiguration. Coefficients float and weave in her mind, magic like ink and coal blooming around her in the gloom; it had been McGonagall, in a private study session in her office, who’d told her the Death Eaters don’t fight like us, you know. They’re all thinking about hexes and curses and not how they might block being turned into a sea urchin or a pile of sand. 

She breathes out, breathes in. Thinks about transform coefficients for turning wands into sand, stone, mist, worms (a personal favorite). The wands shiver again, and Ernie squeezes her hand before letting go to draw his wand, and then they collapse all at once, and the Death Eaters pour in.

The fighting is quick and sharp, like broken glass— red jets of stupefy sparking from the towers; McGonagall’s animated gargoyles swooping down to the lawn; Sprout lobbing venomous plants directly at the enemy’s faces. She and Ernie cast stunners, shield spells, expelliarmus. In the flashes of light, she can make out distant, hulking figures, and she’s heard the rumors that they’d recruited the giants, but to see them—

Rocks, flung through the air by the giants; Death Eaters trying to cross the threshold. She transfigures one rock into a flock of doves and another into mist and another into sand, but one of them hits the tower, and there’s fire, and she and Ernie are running down the stairs, into a side corridor, where a pair of Death Eaters have blown through a section of the wall. 

Ernie’s got a hell of a stunner up his sleeve, and sends one of them to the pavers out cold; she holds the transfiguration solution in her mind, and with a flick of her hand the Death Eater is holding a worm, not a wand. Ernie makes quick work of him too, and then they summon ropes and layer them with notice-me-not wards (on Ron’s advice, so no one could find them to revive them) and then Sue directs her wand back at the busted wall of the castle, transfiguring stray bits of rubble into new stone. Outside, the night is alight with curses, and the giants are hulking ever closer, and is that a fucking spider—

Buy time, she tells herself, as she slots brick together, trusting Ernie implicitly to cover her. We’re buying time so the Trio can find their thing in the Room and kill the snake and then we can kill him, before he gets Harry. 

She gives Ernie a nod, and then they move, pacing the corridors, dealing with whatever they find. Sue manages to transfigure what looks like fiendfyre into normal fire, even though it has her wiping a thread of blood out of her mouth; Ernie summons his pointer to keep a shoal of dementors away from Megan Jone’s sister and her best friend, and she takes great pleasure in transfiguring the dementors into piles of sand. They duel Death Eaters, throwing up shield spells and ducking bolts of green like Hermione and Ron and Harry and Neville taught them; she turns shoes into snakes and robes into mist and gives Ernie openings to stun them. They hear gunshots, and then turn a corner to find Flich reloading a pistol, a manic light in his eyes and two Death Eaters dead on the threshold. “Have enough?” she asks, and then transfigures more for him. 

Giant spiders become sea urchins, timber, potted plants. Ernie tackles her out of the way of a nasty piece of work from Lestrange, and then Kingsley swoops in to duel him. Sue gets back to her feet, Ernie covering her, and even though she’s already used a hell of a lot of power, she pushes just a little further, like Hermione always does, and turns his wand into sand too, just in time to Kingsley to lay him out with a bolt of green. 

“Nice work,” he says, turning with a swirl of his robes, leaving them alone in the corner of the corridor with a body. Of a monster, sure— this is one of the people who tortured Neville’s parents— but still a body.

“Don’t think about it,” she says, grabbing Ernie’s hand and dragging him away, deeper into the castle, towards the sound of more fighting. “Just— don’t.” 

House elves pass them, and Ernie offers them the wands they took off the Death Eaters, and they take them with vicious grins. Professor Lupin is dueling Dolohov, but before Sue or Ernie can intervene, he’s blasted out of the way by a hooded and cloaked figure. Peter? Lupin says, but her attention is diverted by dealing with yet another knot of dementors, the effort of which leaves her woozy, staggering against Ernie.

“You good, Sue?” he asks, as they pivot down another corridor, wands held at the ready. 

“I’ve got more,” she insists, as the castle shakes from the impact of another boulder. “I’m not done yet.”

They round the next corner and stop cold, at the sight of a body on the stone. “Renuverate,” casts Ernie sharply, like Hannah taught them to do, but Sue is already on her knees, her hand over her mouth. The battle seems muted, all the explosions just useless ringing her ears. There’s blood seeping out of a forehead cut, but even she can tell that’s not the cause of death— she’d guess avada, with how clean it seems. 

She’d know that shawl anywhere.

(How old had she been, that summer she’d taken them to the libraries in Ireland that she loved the most? Hermione had still had buck teeth; Anthony hadn’t hit his growth spurt. They’d gone down the archives and Sue had checked out dozens of tomes on transfiguration and then she’d vouched for them to the head librarian— these are my grandson’s best friends, I will personally ensure these books are returned.)

(It had been last summer, in the maelstrom of the war, when she’d fallen asleep on the kitchen table at Anthony’s house, and woken on a transfigured cot on Anthony’s floor instead, and her favorite bread for breakfast. Thanks for having me, she’d said, and Anthony’s grandmother had looked at her and said girlchik, this is your house as well, you know that, right?)

“She took some with her,” Ernie says softly, his hand on her shoulder, his wand still raised, and Sue looks over to the other side of the hall, where two Death Eaters lay crumbled against the wall, like they were thrown into the stone by a blasting curse. One of their masks has come off and Sue distantly recognizes from Anthony’s board, but the name won’t come. She looks back down at Feivel Goldstein, and chokes on a sob. 

Ernie’s hand is a weight on her shoulder, keeping her from falling apart. Anthony is defending the archives with Pince, and doesn’t know yet, she realizes, and it’s like a blow to the chest. They got the twins out, and his parents are in Bath, away from all this mess, but she’s— 

She reaches out with a trembling hand and shuts her eyes, and then transfigures a stray piece of rubble into a crude approximation of a shroud. 

Ernie barks out a protego as a curse careens towards them, and it shatters against the shield. He hauls her to his feet and drags her out of the way of the now too-familiar green. “Sue, we can’t—“

We can’t afford this right now, she knows he’s going to say, because it’s what she would have said if they’d found one of his parents, or Justin’s mum, or Sprout. Because that’s what the war has reduced them too. Because, with Death Eaters slinging the killing curse at them, it’s true. 

“Come out, little birdies,” calls the Death Eater, and Sue recognizes him from Anthony’s wanted posters: Travers. She flicks her gaze over to Ernie, who gives her a sharp nod. “Let’s see how muddy your blood looks when it’s on the floor, shall we?”

This is the man who’d sent death threats to her mother, who’d been there at the Ministry and helped kill Sirius. He’s not worth the time it would take to dismantle him, and besides, the need is everywhere. And Feivel Goldstein was many things, but she was never one of those idealists who talked about how it would ruin you to take a life. 

Who the fuck are you to think you can take any of this, she thinks, and then the green, and he’s flung back, stone cold dead. 

Ernie, who Sue knows could have done avada since they were about fourteen, if he’d need it to protect them, takes her hand. “Come on,” he says, and they step around Anthony’s grandmother’s body, and past Travers, and she raises her shaking hand to smear at the blood on her face, where it’s mixing with salt. She doesn’t feel worse for the killing, or better, just the same numb buzzing. It’ll all come later, she figures, but not yet. 

She shoves it all off to the side, flicks blood off her hand, and squares her shoulders, Ernie beside her, the castle burning around her. 

______________

There is a part of him that thinks he’s been preparing for this battle since the end of fourth year, when Harry came back from the maze and Cedric didn’t. Or maybe it’s been since first year, when Harry sat down next to him at the Welcome Feast, Slytherin and theirs. 

Or maybe it all started when he was a child, and he’d crawled into bed with his mother as she’d fought and fought against that final illness, and she’d whispered what he’s always taken as gospel: your father did this to me. 

But wherever it began, he’s here now, a slick shadow moving through the darkness of the castle lawn, the crescent moon setting low, and Hermione’s wards like a tapestry over his shoulders. He is not the greatest wix of the age, but he is among the best in their year, and the Dark Lord had made the mistake of giving him time, maybe not wanting him to think it was like Draco’s Marking. Maybe wanting him to come to Wiltshire and kneel at his feet and ask. 

But Theo was never going to do that, and if the Dark Lord had been smarter, wiser, better, he would have known that. And so instead of having to spend the year on the run, scrapping survival together, starving like the Trio apparently have been (Theo can’t get Harry’s thin face out of his mind), he’s spent it at the castle. Protecting people, learning spells, perfecting blood magic, helping Hermione build a fucking counter. 

And now, he’s invisible in the darkness of the castle grounds, waiting to use everything he knows, because all that matters is buying the Trio enough time to finish their quest.

He’s been focusing on blood magic this year, because that’s what Hermione needed and what the Dark Lord wanted from him, but he’s always been a bit of a jack-of-all-trades. An omnivore. Transfiguration, translocation, the Dark Arts themselves; dueling work, Charms— alright, he’s never really gone for Herbology or Div, he can admit, and though he’d kept pace with Hermione and Draco (back when he was trying) in Arithmancy and Potions, neither of them were as intriguing as some of the rest of it. But all of that is bedded down in his bones now, waiting to be used.

The thing about blood magic is that it offers up information. So when his nets of spells come back to him, the Death Eaters boiling up from the boundary aren’t faceless monsters. The magic gives them names, and so when he kills them, he knows who they are. Despite everything, Avada still feels out of his reach, but there’s a whole host of spells he knows the Dark Lord would be thrilled to see him using, and Sectumsempra might be Snape’s, but that doesn’t mean it’s not brilliant and flush with power.

He incants softly and sees, in the flashes of spell light, one of the Rowle boys a few years older than them crumple to the ground; he hesitates, for just a moment too long, over other names he knows: Daphne’s mum, Greg’s dad. Even if they have the Mark, he doesn’t seem to have the guts for it, to take that away from them without explicit permission. He stuns them instead. 

A few of the names he knows from Order intel lists as suspected victims of imperio, and he’s better than whoever’s been doing them, his curse slipping seamlessly over the old one. Apparate home, he tells them, and then drops it one they’ve done it, and moves on to the next one. 

He moves through the night like a wraith. The giants are throwing boulders, and somehow there are spiders, and his magic is sticky, many-legged, hungry, like salt and lavender. The turrets high up in the castle are burning, and he stalks across the lawn, and it takes a great deal of power to bring a giant down, but he has power. He has power and skill and everything to loose, in a way he never would have dreamed of when he was eleven and the Hat had told him Slytherin, because he was a survivalist. 

But what had survival ever meant without his friends?

Fire crackling against the night. He kills spiders, Death Eaters, spiders again, only to find himself face-to-face with a hoard of dementors, reaching out with their scaly hands, and he’s been casting dark magic for so long that he can’t reach the memory that would get him a patronus. He stumbles instead, falls to his knees in the wet grass. The dementors advance, rotting hands outstretched, and all he sees is his mother’s dead face, and the Dark Lord’s hand on his chin, and his father shoving his head into a pensive— 

Silver light blooms around him, and the hare takes one hop, two hops, and the dementors hiss and snarl. “It’s alright, Theo,” he hears Luna telling him, her hand on his shoulder.“Remember how Harry taught us to do it? Just think about who you love.”

He’d never managed to cast it corporally, when they were fifth-years in the mirrored room, and he doesn’t know why he’d be able to now, but he screws up his face. Thinks of Luna, in his mother’s rose garden. Thinks of Daphne, getting drunk with him in the Room over Christmas Hols. Thinks of Susan in the courtyard when they were children, not needing proof of his loyalty because she knew. Thinks of Ernie not caring if the crucio hurt, and Hannah staying over Christmas so he wouldn’t be in the castle alone, and Sue dragging his latest work over to take a look at it, correct it. Of Millie and Neville and Ginny, and how they’ve been masterminding a resistance together, and Anthony with his impeccable research and Justin putting more food on his plate. 

Of the Trio. Of Ron looking at him and seeing him, like that first summer when he’d falsified the birthday party invite just so he could spend a day with Harry. Of Hermione and her brilliance and how she’d let him into her corner of the world, no matter what his last name meant. Of Harry, who’d never doubted him, who’d stood there again and again and gone if you want out, we can get you out like the Gryffindor he could have been, like the Slytherin he was. 

“Come on, Theo,” says Luna, and he incants, and out from his wand slinks, with languid ease, a shining silver panther. The hare hops forward, and the panther follows, and the dementors turn tail and flee, back towards the lake, as Theo pants from the effort of it. 

“I love him,” says Luna, as the panther strolls back towards them and chuffs against Theo’s shaking palm before vanishing along with the hare. She offers him a hand up, and he takes it. Most of the battle seems have moved inside now, through the shattered front facade. Though the patronus had cost him a great deal of magic— an old scar on his chin has reopened, and is slicking blood down his neck— he feels lighter, clearer. Everything has narrowed and clarified, and the moon is set and Luna is at his side and he’s here because of them. Like he always has been, like he always will be.

“Come on,” he says, and sets out for the fight raging just inside the side courtyard, Luna at his side. 

Inside, he feels something shifting, like the castle itself is moving. Cho Chang and Warrington are dueling a Death Eater together; Tonks is dueling Bellatrix before Narcissa Malfoy shoves her aside and stares her sister down with burning eyes— where’s my husband, Bella— and Theo ducks a curse from Mulciber, who’s dueling Neville, and then leaps over a cleverly placed hex from to join him. 

“Alright, Nev?” he asks, throwing up a protego Hermione would be proud of. Mulciber snarls in wordless fury. 

“You traitorous scum,” he hisses, before Luna hits him with a tap-dancing hex, which is surprisingly useful in a fight.

“Yes, he is,” says Luna, with great pride, before Neville casts what Theo can only assume he’s been casting this whole fight, because it’s perfect and green as a forest in spring.

Mulciber is dead before he hits the ground, and Neville gives him a nod, wiping blood off his face. “Thanks, Theo.”

“Of course,” he says, and then they split, Neville and Luna heading back into the main castle and Theo turning to help Cho and Warrington finish off their man with a well-placed stunner.

It’s only once they’ve raced off, and he’s alone in the courtyard attempting to extinguish the flames licking down the turret, that the very last man he wanted to see tonight steps out from the darkness, wand drawn, mask off. 

The last man, and also the first, because somewhere in his chest he was holding out hope that he did have an avada in him.

“Well, look what we have here, boy,” says Tiberius Nott, who’s face is still ruined from Azkaban but who’s magic has returned, hungry and leeching, and Theo goes to step back, to raise his wand, to do anything, only to find himself frozen in place. He wants to say it’s his father’s magic but the truth is that he can’t be sure. It could just be reflex, from all those years. “Out here, playing solider, and for the wrong side at that. The Dark Lord does not like traitors, Theodore.”

“I was never his,” says Theo, shaking, and he tries to raise his wand but he can’t. “I’m on Harry’s side.”

“Are you now?” asks his father, swooping closer like some carrion bird and fixing his chin in a pincher grip. “Are you really such a fool as to think Potter will prevail where thousands of other wizards have failed? All because of some Prophecy, some idiotic seer declaring he has the power the Dark Lord knows not?” 

His fingernails are digging into his chin, and all these years with the Hufflepuffs and Gryffindors must have rubbed off on him because Theo has the audacity to say, “Yes.”

His father throws him roughly to the ground; Theo can’t move to cushion the fall, just takes the impact bodily, his wand rolling away from him. “Let’s see how long you can hold onto that attitude, boy,” he says, and Theo shuts his eyes. “Cru—“

Two voices, both of which he knows like he knows his own name, scream Avada Kedavra before Tiberius Nott can finish the torture curse. They must hit, because there’s a dull thud, and then the body-bind releases. Theo summons his wand back to his hand and drags himself to sitting, staring at the crumbled form that used to be his father. 

“I have been waiting to do that for fucking years,” says Susan Bones, stepping over his father’s body and hauling him to his feet before embracing him. Daphne, at her shoulder, doesn’t say anything, but Theo meets her eyes and sees the same deadly satisfaction there. It takes him a long moment to place the emotion he’s feeling as relief. 

Susan steps back from the hug; her place is taken by Daphne, who puts her hands on his shoulders, looks him over for damage. “He didn’t have time to cast it,” Theo says, before they start producing nerve regenerator from midair and force it down his throat (he wouldn’t put it past them). “Good,” says Daphne, squeezing his shoulders lightly.

Theo looks down at the body, and lets out a long breath. Above them, the on-fire castle casts strange shadows over the faces of his friends. “My patronus is a panther,” he says, because what can you say about your best friends doing what you’d always wished you could do, but could never mange?

“Of course it is,” says Susan. “What else would it be?”

“Want to kill Rockwood?” Daphne asks, already walking back towards the battle. “Or Dolohov, maybe?” 

“Whatever we’ve got to do to end it,” says Theo, and they walk back into the maelstrom together, the body growing cold behind them and his footsteps light.

______________

The ache he’s been carrying this year is in his bones now, bleeding into his magic, and every curse comes out crackling with power. He’s reopening scars to get at his magic, and it’s still not enough— every spell he casts is burning, ragged, raw, with the fact that they never found his grandmother’s body, and that these people tortured his parents to insanity, and that he’s spent this whole year taking damage to protect children from that same infernal curse.

He’ll never cast crucio. He doesn’t have the stomach for it. But avada?

Neville lights the night up green.

The fighting is thick, but he’s left the fear somewhere out of reach, because he moves through it without hesitation. This year has been one long unraveling, of stepping in front of curses, of burning down manor houses, of holding up falsified family trees, of Hannah’s hand cupping his check as she healed something, of slipping into McGonagall’s office to try to plan the resistance and realizing that all along your heroes were brutally human too, and he feels burned out, worn-down, and most of all angry. 

At the Carrows. At Snape. At Bellatrix, and the Death Eater Corp, and mainly Lord fucking Voldemort. 

The thing he’s thought about a lot since the Christmas Hols, as he’s grieved his grandmother in stolen packets, is if the Hat was right. Because he’d sat there at eleven and the Hat had cottoned onto his fear of ending up in Hufflepuff because he was useless and had told him he would be good at it, but because he would love them. And he’d asked for Gryffindor, in the end, and the Hat had given it to him. 

But he’d looked at his hands, and how seventeen years of fighting like hell, in one way or another, had bitten scars into them, and wondered how the hell that ever would have worked. He had no softness in him, not like Hannah or Susan did. Or maybe he had, once— he has a distant memory of walking up to the base of the castle on the anniversary of Susan’s parents’s death, when they were children still (were they ever children) and sitting with her in the melted snow and just grieving—

And now all of that was curses, and spit blood in sinks, and plans to ruin empires, and he hasn’t cried about his grandmother yet, but he’d cried when their incredibly rare Shrieking Palm had died and he’d cried when Daphne had told him his suffering mattered and he’d cried when Luna had introduced him to the new thestral foal, all trembling legs and no knowledge of the war (but maybe all of that had been about his grandmother, really, and his parents too, and how much he missed the Trio, and how much all this hurt, in the fucking marrow—)

He knows, he knows, that it’s never black-and-white, with how the Sorting goes. He knows it doesn’t really matter— he could have been in Hufflepuff and Ginny and Luna could have been in Slytherin and they would still be thick-as-thieves. But— with them, he can see the places where the roads would have gone. There are parts of Ginny, especially after what happened with the Diary, that are slicked in blood, morality just a thing to be discarded if it stood between her and who she loved. And Luna— well, she’s unnerving and insightful and clever, when she wants to be. But him?

What does it say about him, and how the war has seeped down into the water table of his soul, if he has no idea how to get back to those parts of himself now?

Does it make him evil, if he knows, even as he incants the killing curse, that this won’t haunt him? 

(How could it, when he dreams are filled with visions of Luna and Ginny and Harry and Ron and Hermione in the closed ward; of Luna with blood seeping from a fresh cut at her hair line and how Ginny’s hand had been twitching when he’d broken into the office; of vigils and open graves, but for his people?)

The battle rages, and he fights with all he has in him, anger and grief and ache like falling water. Despite what he was told in the clotted mess of his childhood, he’s become a wizard with quite a lot of power, and only a true idiot would have been able to hang around the Trio for six years and not come away with quite a bit of skill. The Death Eaters aren’t afraid to use hideous pieces of magic, true, but so many of them are unprepared for a full-out battle, and he is. 

For years now, maybe.

The castle had been the first place he’d ever felt safe— the soft pools of magic, the four-poster in the Gryffindor dorm, the light falling through the greenhouse windows. Home, in a way the manor house had never been, the ghost of his father in every corner. And he can feel it now, all around him, creaking and stretching and waking up, and he hopes that means Millie was right. He wants to kill Bellatrix, but he’ll settle for any of the names they know, any of the monsters who shows their face and bears their teeth.

He ducks between hallways, pitching into fight where he can. The twins and Percy and Pius Thicknesse are holding their own against Roiser, but a little help never hurt, just enough for Pius to finish him off. His mountain lion gets an exhausted-looking Rosmerta out of a scrape with the dementors; he helps Justin get an injured Tracey Davis to the infirmary; Padma and Parvati and Morag are dueling Avery together, and when Neville steps in, it’s over, and the man is dead on the floor from his killing curse. 

“Thanks Nev,” says Morag, as they split up, the castle rattling around them, bricks shifting, power sparking. In the side courtyard, he and Theo duel Mulciber; in the annex beyond the entry hall, he and Ginny duel Rockwood, who in the end stands no chance against their twin bolts of green. 

He fights. He kills. Around him, he can feel the very castle moving, bricks and stone work shifting to protect her own, and he’s back-to-back-to-back with Luna and Ginny, fighting spiders, spells slashing through the air, Harry and Ron and Hermione fighting with viciousness and verve like they’d fought at the Ministry. Emeralds on entrance hall floor, and blood in his hair, and need in his veins and he’s so angry it burns—

They hold the threshold of the castle, as the night burrows inwards, the castle itself sealing up ruptures when given a bit of breathing room. Voldemort’s voice comes over the grounds again, terrible and high and cold, and Neville leans against Ginny and lets Luna wipe blood from his face. 

You have one hour, he hisses. Dispose of your dead, treat your wounded. If you continue to fight, you will die, one by one. 

“He’s scared,” says Neville, wiping blood from his month. “He wasn’t prepared for us to fight like this.”

I now speak directly to you, Harry Potter, Voldemort continues, and Neville thinks if he saw the face Ginny’s making now he would be reduced to ash already, at the sheer disgust in it. You have permitted your friends to die rather than face me, he says, and then hands down the ultimatum.

“Fucking bullshit,” says Ginny, who has dust in her hair and blood dripping from the reopened cuts in her arms. “It’s like he thinks we’re the Death Eaters. Harry doesn’t permit us to do shit. He’d probably tell us to all go home.”

The Great Hall is filled with bodies, and Neville walks down the rows, waiting for the grief to hit as he sees the faces he knows, but it never does. There’s just a buzzing numbness, as he passes Sue and Anthony sobbing by Anthony’s grandmother, and Ron’s parents sitting by the body of Great Aunt Muriel, and Viktor Krum, with blood dripping down his temple, holding vigil next to Warrington, who had played for Ipswich too, in the end. 

Ernie is sitting next to a wizard he distantly places as Dirk Cresswell; Luna goes over to sit with the elves, who’s dead include Polly and Ollie and Vityok. Greer and Kovac are laid out side-by-side, their hands almost touching, and Susan is sitting with them, along with Kingsley. He sees Remus Lupin, his head bowed to his knees, sitting next to the body of Peter Pettigrew, of all people; Draco Malfoy and Goyle are sitting next to Urquhart; Percy Weasley next to Penelope Clearwater. Katie Bell and Angelica Johnson and Marcus Flint and Oliver Wood are holding each other next to the body of Alice Spinnet; Fred and George and Lee Jordan and Flitwick are with Mundungus Fletcher’s. Cho Chang and Cedric Diggory’s mother are holding each other, next the body of his father. 

He sees Cormac McLaggen, who had been a prat of the highest order but had chosen to stand against Voldemort anyway; he sees Pius Thicknesse, who’d shaken imperio and then come here to die; he see Aberforth, and wonders who will take care of Hogshead and the goats. 

He swipes at his face and finds his hand coming away wet. Ginny, who hasn’t left his side, reaches out to grab his hand.

He thinks of his grandmother, and how she’d loved him but sometimes it had never felt right, or enough, and how now he won’t get the chance to figure that out. He thinks of his parents, tottering around in the closed ward, and he thinks of green, and he thinks of Luna, and Ginny, and how Harry would never ask for this kind of loyalty, but they’re giving it to him because they love him, and maybe the Hat had been right.

He turns to Ginny, and she wraps him in a trembling embrace, and around them the Hall fractures with grief beyond words, as they wait out the night.

Chapter Text

They’re down to one. 

If he thinks too hard about the fight— curses flying everywhere, his friends dueling for their lives against monsters, he’ll loose his nerve, and he’ll turn around, go back to the castle. Ernie always leaves his left flank open, Harry knows, and Ginny sometimes forgets that you can’t use blasting curses in confined spaces, and Sue is a transfiguration master but she’s too reliant on it, and Theo’s never quite gotten the knack of a patronus—

“Come on,” says Ron, pulling him into the night, down the lawn, towards the Whomping Willow and the Shrieking Shack, where Voldemort is waiting with the snake for Snape to come to him. His face in the light cast by the flaming battlements is pale, and Harry knows he’s probably thinking about that bolt of light that Bill barely ducked, or how Sectumsempra would have left Charlie bleeding out if Hermione hadn’t derived a counter curse after Grimmauld. His scar is still dripping blood feebly down his face, and he feels worn through from the effort of summoning his patronus in the middle of a battle, with fear and grief like a stranglehold. But he’d focused on the ring, and Prong had been joined by Ron’s beagle and Hermione’s otter and the dementors had retreated in the silver light. He hadn’t had the guts to check the bodies that littered the lawn— Death Eater or theirs, he couldn’t quite stomach the idea that they were dead.

“I think Millie must have woken the castle up,” Hermione is saying, as they approach the willow, curses sparking behind them. “It keeps repairing itself— the amount of magic that must take—”

Harry can’t possibly think about that now, as much as he would like to. One more, he thinks instead, and then he says, “Snape might— Voldemort was asking Draco’s dad to get him.”

Hermione shifts her jaw, as they push through the bushes behind Hagrid’s hut. “Do you think he believes this nonsense about the Elder Wand only passing through death? Because Snape did kill Dumbledore.”

Harry doesn’t know what to do with that idea; it’s too big, like the battle. All he can think about is Snape’s face, when he’d stepped out from the shelter of the student body, to stand before the school. His hands had been shaking, and he’d been in borrowed robes, and he’s wanted to make a scene, wanted answers—

Snape had looked like shit. And Harry was aware that he and Ron and Hermione didn’t look good, exactly— six weeks of meals from Fleur and Bill had helped, but they hadn’t fixed several months of near-starvation in the woods— but Snape had looked like hell warmed over. Sunken, hollow cheeks; hair greasy even for the git; bloodshot eyes, and for a moment—

You’re exhausted and scared and you imagined it, Harry tells himself, as they approach the willow, Hermione’s vine wand in his hand. But for a moment, it had seemed like the emotion that sparked across Snape’s face was relief.

“Mate?” asks Ron, and Harry jerks his gaze to Ron, who’s come to his side. “Do you want— what do you want?” and Harry knows he’s asking about Snape.

“I don’t know,” says Harry, honestly. “We— we need to get the snake.”

“Alright,” says Ron, not pressing. Hermione levitates a twig and stops the motion of the branches, and they slip into the dark underbelly of the tunnel as a tryptic. 

Hermione’s wards are a fortress, curling around them like Crookshanks would. “It’s a trap,” Harry whispers to them, as they slither through the darkness. “He— said he knew I’d come.”

“Well, we’ve got to get the snake one way or another,” says Hermione, cool and practical; Ron goes, “Bet he didn’t reckon on all of us coming,” and Harry supposes that is true. Voldemort would have expected him alone, and he’s not alone.

The passage is blocked, but Hermione hollows them out enough space to crouch behind the wall, smothered in wards, the candlelight catching just a lick of Ron’s hair and three of Hermione’s brown fingers. The snake is floating in some kind of silver cage, and Voldemort is playing with the wand that had once been Dumbledore’s.

“My Lord, let me find the boy,” comes Snape’s voice, and it takes everything Harry has in him not to move, to stay still behind the barrier and not think about crucio, about the lawn and the front hall of Grimmauld and Snape sobbing in the Pensive memory because he had his mother’s eyes—

(To not think of Lake District, and the rain on the roof. To not think of how Snape had held him after Sirius had died, in the infirmary at four in the morning, his robes still smelling slightly of iron. To not think of after the World Cup, and how Snape had flooed over, and made excuses but he’d known— he’d thought—)

(How can he not know, after a year? He hates Snape, and yet somehow, he’s never stopped missing him, wanting him back.)

They talk about wands. Harry can hear in Snape’s voice that he does not know about the Elder Wand, about winning it, about how though Voldemort might have it in hand, he is not the Master of it. Snape bargains, and then begs, to be let go to find him, and there’s a hint of something like desperation there, something like fear, and Harry doesn’t know what to make of it— what’s real, what’s not real. He thinks about the way Snape hadn’t wanted to summon the Dark Lord at Grimmauld, and how he’d said Potter’s mine. 

Ron’s chin is on his shoulder. Hermione’s got her wand drawn. He knows where this conversation is going, though Voldemort is taking his time, but it will get there all the same, but it’s not like they can do anything— they haven’t killed the snake yet. 

And it’s not like it’s anyone who actually matters. The Dark Lord isn’t about to kill Ginny, or Susan, or Ron’s mum. Hell, it’s not even Draco. It’s just Snape, who lied about it all, who would have left him to rot with the Dursleys if his eyes had been his father’s—

“While you live, Severus, the Elder Wand cannot truly be mine,” says Voldemort, and Harry knows the flash of green will cut through his eyelids, but he shuts them all the same, clutching Ron’s hand hard enough to bruise. He feels like he’s twelve again— it’s a stupid thing to want, it was never like that, not from him—

There is not green. There is the hissed parseltongue of kill, and the snake falling from the cage just long enough to sink its fangs into Snape’s neck, and then Voldemort is sweeping off, the snake behind him— “I regret it,” he says cooly, but through the muffled distance of the bond they share, Harry know he feels nothing.

Voldemort, like the idiot he is, does not look back. Not that he would see anything, because Hermione’s wards are better than he could ever hope to be, but still. The three of them tumble out of the alcove into the dusty ruin of the Shack, to where Snape is convulsing on the floor, trying desperately to staunch the wounds on his neck.  

His eyes go wide at the sight of Harry, reaching out with a bony, blood-soaked hand. Ron is casting something, the smell of bread and stone, but Harry is already on his knees, trying to put pressure on the wound himself. Snape gurgles something unintelligible— the snake bite must have messed with his vocal chords— and there’s something silver and viscous leaking from Snape’s eyes, but Harry doesn’t care. This whole year he’s told the Order that he wanted Snape alive and maybe it was about crucio but maybe he just wanted answers and— 

Snape is trying to say something, his grip on Harry’s robes weakening, but Ron cuts through it, in a voice Harry’s only ever heard him use on other people. “Harry, move.” He does, more out of shock than anything, and Ron takes his place, potion vials in his hands. Snape’s blood is clotting in the dirt, but what he dimly recognizes as a stabilization ward is hanging in the air. Ron dumps the antidote to Nagini’s venom they brewed in the woods down Snape’s throat, followed by three vials of blood replenisher, and then forces the wounds to close with the kind of power he rarely uses. Behind him, Hermione tugs on the stabilization ward, so that it’s anchored in the passive magic of the room. What he now recognizes as memories are swirling into the blood and dirt, and Harry scoops them up, cramming them into one of the empty potion vials Ron tosses aside. Snape has lolled to the ground, eyes shut, but based on the color of the wards, he’s alive.

“I fucking hate that snake,” Ron says, sinking back into his heels. His hands are dripping with Snape’s blood, and so are Harry’s, and he hands the vial of memories to Hermione so he can crawl forward, put his shaking fingers on the unconscious Snape’s neck. The pulse is soft, but it’s there, and maybe the fact that all he feels is relief says it all. “You’ve spent this whole bloody year talking about how you want him alive, mate,” says Ron softly, as Harry stares down at Snape’s hollow face, and tries to remember how to breathe.

“Do you think failing to kill someone with your horcrux snake counts as defeating them for the purposes of the Elder Wand?” asks Hermione, after a long moment, and Harry stares at Snape’s wand still holstered on his arm, and thinks about the stone and the cloak.

Voldemort’s voice curls through the walls, then, cold like midwinter. I now speak directly to you, Harry Potter, he says, and Harry heaves out a breath, squares his shoulders. Looks over at Ron and Hermione. You have permitted your friends to die rather than face me. He shivers, the faces of his crew flashing before his eyes, and puts his fingers back on Snape’s neck, until he can feel his pulse again. Come to me in the Forbidden Forest, and give yourself over to me, or else I will come to the castle myself and find you. And anyone who stands in your way will die. One hour, Harry Potter.

Silence, except for the soft buzz of the stabilization ward. Neither Ron or Hermione say anything, because they know. Harry thinks of Regulus, telling Kreacher to take him back to the cave. “Should we bring Snape round and figure out what he wanted to tell you?” Ron asks, after a long moment. Harry shakes his head, looking at the vial; the idea of talking to Snape right now feels more daunting than dueling Voldemort. At least he knows how he feels about him.

“We’ll— we’ll leave him here. We can deal with him afterwards.” He stares down at Snape’s bloodless face, and tries to find the disgust for crucio, but only finds a well of longing, which stretches back to that house in the suburbs, and the cupboard in the dark. 

“I’ve got a tracing charm on the snake,” says Hermione, drawing herself to her feet, and helping them up. “So we’ll know if he tries to leave with it.”

“Brilliant, ‘Mione,” says Ron, as if he did not just save a man’s life. Harry looks between the two of them, and there’s a part of him that knows that if he said actually, I’m going out to the woods to meet Voldemort, they’d simply refuse to let him go, and he loves them for it, with all he has in him.

_______________

Hermione vanishes the blood from his and Harry’s hands, and they leave Snape breathing but unconscious, bound and under the cloak. Maybe it’s The Cloak; maybe it’s not. Either way, it’s not like they need it. Above them, the castle is burning, and Ron can’t stomach the idea of who they might find laid out in the Great Hall, so they slip in through the side doors, sneak through the corridors until they come to the gargoyle. “What if he got rid of it?” Hermione asks, still clutching the vial of memories; “He wouldn’t have,” Harry says, with confidence, and Ron still thinks Snape is a bastard, but Harry doesn’t want him dead so he’s not. It’s as simple as that.

There’s blood dripping from the corner of his mouth, where he burned through too much power too quickly, with the stabilization ward. There are cuts on his shoulder, from a curse he didn’t quite dodge, and he’s still a bit shocked at the way avada had come to him when he’d needed it. Maybe he’ll feel guilty later, but a Death Eater for Neville’s life was a trade he’d make over and over again. Around them, the castle smells of ash and spent magic, and there’s blood smeared on the floor in places, and the fear is like a stranglehold. He’d last seen Ginny dueling in the front hall with Neville and Luna by her sides; he’d last seen Susan setting off from the Great Hall, her hair tied back and her eyes wild; he’d last seen his mother when she’d embraced him before leaving to go fight, and he’d felt her put all kinds of unspoken but deeply true things into the hug, because he knew how to do the same now.

They don’t know the password, but the gargoyle springs aside anyway, and they climb the stairs to the top. The Pensive is waiting for them, sitting on the desk, and Hermione dumps the memories in. 

“Snake’s still in the forest?” Harry asks Hermione; she nods, shoving back her hair; it’s fallen out of the bun, and has blood clumped in it. Ron swallows, looking at the liquid, and wonders what Snape needed so badly to tell Harry, that would have him bargaining with a man who could not be bargained with. He knows what Harry wants it to be; he fears that it’s nothing of the sort— more insults, or some kind of final piece of a quest. 

They lower their heads to the liquid together, and hit the ground in the Great Hall, in the middle of the sorting ceremony. Everything feels real, like they’ve stepped back in time. Ron pivots around, sees Snape and Dumbledore at the Head Table, and— 

“Harry Potter!” calls McGonagall, and Ron spins back around just in time to watch his eleven-year-old self give a tiny Harry a shove towards the stool with the hat. 

“Holy shit,” he says softly. Now, with years of knowledge, it’s easy to see that Harry at eleven is thin in a way that’s abnormal, even for a child, and he feels a burn of rage behind his sternum. 

“I can’t believe we were so small,” whispers Hermione, and Harry has turned around, his eyes on Snape.

“Slytherin!” calls the Hat, after a long moment, and Ron grins at how even at eleven, he whooped for Harry when no one was clapping.

A muscle twitches in Snape’s jaw, the only sign of emotion. 

The scene dissolves, like fog, and then reforms around them. They’re in Snape’s office, and Harry inhales sharply at the sight of himself, still so small his feet don’t reach the floor. Snape is calm, asking all the right questions— the sort of questions Ron himself would ask now, he thinks, if he were in a similar position. He takes two steps closer to his Harry, presses his shoulder against his shoulder, and feels his mate’s trembling fingers entwined with his. 

Ron shuts his eyes as Snape brings up a fact that he hates thinking about— Harry had never seen a picture of his parents before he came to Hogwarts— and then opens them as they follow Snape through the floo, as he breaks into McGonagall’s quarters and steals that first picture for Harry. 

When Harry leaves, they stay, and watch Snape break and repair glassware until his hands are bloody.

In the next memory, they follow Snape out from the apparation onto a suburb street which makes Harry, battle-hardened and powerful, shrink into Ron’s shoulder, and Ron knows. Snape stalks up to Number Four and even as they follow him inside, he and Hermione step in front of Harry, wands drawn, memory or not. The house is sickeningly perfect, and when Ron sees how none of the pictures on the wall have Harry in them, he thinks he understands better why he’d used to find him staring at the ones on Hermione’s parents’s wall with tears in his eyes. 

Snape and Harry’s aunt clearly know each other; Ron distantly remembers some story— from Sirius, maybe— about how Snape and Harry’s mum had grown up in the same town. You should have loved him, Snape hisses; Harry’s aunt flinches and then goes like you sorry sod could have done any better, he looks just like his father and Snape doesn’t argue, just informs her coldly that she’ll never see Harry again.

Which she wouldn’t, if Ron and Hermione have anything to do with it. 

They watch Snape run down to the Whomping Willow after they crash the car, listen to Harry try to explain it all. They still look so small, but here the three of them are, back from the Chamber with a bloody sword and Ginny and the thing in Snape’s face when they stumble in is nothing but crystal-clear relief. 

The next memory is one Harry has never shared with him and Hermione— Chelsea had long ago become a short-hand, for a month out of time and place where he felt safe— and he watches Snape and Harry share Chinese at a place by the river. I know this is not ideal, says Snape, but I appreciate you understanding the severity of the matter. 

Harry looks down at his takeaway, and then back at Snape, and Ron feels his heart constrict in his chest, as Harry fumbles through explanations and ends up just gesturing at the food. Thank you. 

The thing on Snape’s face is probably almost exactly what’s on his own right now. You do not have to thank me, Mr. Potter, for basic decency, says Snape, and then the memory changes to Harry, on the top of the ward tower, after they’d learned about the alleged betrayal, Snape covering him with his cloak, and his Harry grinds the heal of his palm into his eye. 

They’re back in what Ron assumes is Chelsea, based on Harry’s soft hiss. Snape has pieced together a shredded letter from the trashcan— a letter to me! Ron realizes— where Harry had been trying to explain his summer. He’d gotten the words out eventually, but later: it’s also Snape, I think. In the memory, they watch Snape sit on the floor, hand tangled in his hair, trying to breathe, at just the sight of them. 

In the Shack, Snape stands down when Harry asks him too, and then takes Pettigrew’s torture curse, and then catches Harry before he collapses. Then, they’re somewhere Ron’s never been before: a crumbling sea-side hut, where Snape makes a haggard Sirius drink veritaserum and then asks questions after question about if he would hurt Harry.

Snape stays for dinner at the Burrow, when Harry asks him too. Snape turns up the morning after the World Cup, looking flustered, looking scared. When Harry’s name comes out of the Goblet, Ron watches himself and Hermione stand as Harry stands— Merlin, even at fourteen and fifteen they’re still so small— and there’s a thing to how Snape is poised, at the Head Table, that makes him think he would have backed them, if they’d chosen to run. 

Snape and Harry, in his office, his hand on Harry’s shoulder— you will live, I swear it. Hermione sucks in a sharp breath, and Harry shakes off their hands, steps forward, as if he can burn truth out of the memory, make it make sense. 

Snape, running across the castle lawn, bursting through the doors of the DADA office, stunning fake Moody with every scrap of magic he has, and then kneeling before Harry, his hands shaking.

There is no memory of the meeting with Voldemort, but they join up with him afterwards, see the crumbled form at the edge of the ward boundary, summoning the doe to get help, coughing up blood in the dark while he waits, and Harry turns back to them with anguish on his face.

A bedroom on the upper-story of Grimmauld; Sirius, so alive it hurts, trying to set the ceiling ablaze, and Snape leaning in the doorway, though Ron can tell he’s hurt. They snip at each other, until Sirius pushes it too far: what, still regretting fucking it up with Lily and hoping you can get another shot with the kid? which makes Harry recoil and has Snape holding Sirius had wandpoint against the wall. 

I could have killed you, hisses Snape, deadly like the monster he’s hiding. I could have told him you didn’t want him, that you were unstable, that I thought you would hurt him. And he would have believed me. Harry has stepped closer, like he can intervene, and Ron feels his heart catch in his throat. There’s a clause in the Hogwarts bylaws that has successfully been used by Heads to apply for guardianship in the past.

Hermione brings her hand up to cover her mouth. Harry freezes, even as Sirius goes you care that much, Snape? About him? and the way Snape lets him slide to the floor is answer enough. “Shit,” says Ron softly, even as the memory blurs around them.

Harry had not told them— maybe Harry didn’t know— about how Snape had returned from a Death Eater meeting, bleeding and hurt, and gone up to the infirmary, and asked after Harry, and then just sat there and held him. Like his mum would have done. 

“Mate,” he whispers softly, stepping forward and wrapping an arm around his Harry, who’s shaking, tears dripping down his face. 

None of them expect the next scene: to be back at that suburban house. Harry is still leaning into his shoulder, Hermione holding his hand, and they watch Snape dismantle Harry’s aunt, before she gets her own jabs in: Tell me you’re placing him with someone decent, because it’s not like you could do any better than me. Snape’s stance gives it away, and her jaw falls open. You? Still hung up on Lily, are we?

It’s got nothing to do with her, says Snape, and there’s such a curt brutality that Ron doesn’t doubt him.

Harry’s aunt lets out a mocking laugh. Really, Severus? That disgusting boy? When he looks exactly like his father, and has all the worst parts of Lily? Harry flinches, curls closer into Ron’s embrace. 

But then Snape says yes, with complete certainty and burning eyes and what the hell are they supposed to do with that? 

Lake District, it must be; Harry turns his face fully into Ron’s shoulder rather than watch them, but Ron sees it all— most of all, how relaxed Snape seems. Happy almost, even coming back wiping blood off his face and with the war everywhere. 

And then the scene changes again, and they’re in Dumbledore’s office, and there’s a kind of clarify and focus and urgency to the memory that makes Ron think this is what Snape really needed them to see. Dumbledore is here, slumped over in his chair, and Snape tips a goblet of potion down his throat, muttering incantations. His arm is burned and withered, like it was all last year. On the desk, smoking slightly, is the ring that used to be a Horcrux, with the resurrection stone, with the sword next to it. How long do I have, Dumbledore asks; maybe a year, Snape says, hesitantly, and Ron realizes what’s going to happen before Dumbledore says it. I ask you do one favor for me, Severus, says Dumbledore, after they discuss Draco and the war. Only you will know if giving me a painless death will damage your soul.

Hermione gasps. “Fuck,” whispers Harry softly.

Dumbledore’s office again, but it’s spring. After I’m dead, Harry will return to Privet Drive, Dumbledore says, and Ron bristles and next to him Hermione does the same— like hell he would have, the whole fucking Order would have had to go through the two of them— and Snape has the same exact reaction, breaking into laughter. 

Harry, says Snape, and Harry stills, as Snape says his name— is that the first time he’s heard it, Ron wonders— hasn’t been back to Privet Drive since he came to Hogwarts. 

The shock on Dumbledore’s face makes it worth it, as Snape explains the gambits of the previous summer, and being at Lake District. 

Don’t tell me, says Dumbledore softly, that you’ve grown to care for the boy after all?

Ron’s arm is over Harry’s shoulders, and they’re all watching, barely daring to breathe, as Snape’s jaw shifts. Then, he flicks his wand into his hand and whispers expecto patronum. 

They’ve seen Snape’s patronus a hundred times by now; it’s a doe, just like Lily Evans’s had been, before she’d had Harry (learning that fact had not been conducive to a pleasant afternoon at Grimmauld). But instead of a doe, what steps out from Snape’s wand is a yearling deer. 

A yearling deer with one antler bud, just like its adult counterpart. 

Harry lets out a strangled sob and steps forward, hand outstretched. He’s mine, says Snape, softly but with complete conviction. 

More memories— Dumbledore tells Snape that when Voldemort begins to fear for the life of his snake, it will be time to tell Harry to call for Fawkes, for one final message, but Harry isn’t listening, and frankly, neither is Ron. Harry’s on the stone just sobbing, and Ron kneels down next to him, wraps his arms around him. He knows Hermione will be taking notes: Snape trying to counter the sectumsempra in Grimmauld; Snape agonizing over if they were okay, out in the wind; Snape, putting the sword in the pool. Snape, seeing Harry step out of the crowd, and the thing in his eyes is sheer, unadulterated relief. 

“Mate,” whispers Ron.

“Thank you,” whispers Harry, clutching at his robes, as they rise out of the pensive, and Hermione joins the hug. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.” As if Ron would have done any different— Harry wanted Snape alive, and so he’d done it for him. Simple math, really.

There’s still the snake, and whatever ominous news Dumbledore left for Fawkes to bring them. They still have to finish it. But for now, for one more shining moment, there is only the yearling dear, and how it had never been about what color Harry’s eyes were, and how maybe they still have a shot at building things.

_______________

The letter Fawkes was left to deliver is horrific. The letter is also true. 

By her best reckoning, they’ve been fighting for most of the night, and she’s cast the kind of magic that would have killed Voldemort a thousand times over if he hadn’t made Horcruxes. Maybe she had to watch their friends walk out to face an advancing army, but she didn’t let them go without her wards, and a primer on how to cast volo, and she and Flitwick had bought them a hell of a lot of time with the wards. In the press of the battle, she’d dueled with the rest of them— she would never been as quick on the draw as Harry, but she could cast the kinds of stunners that kept people down, the kind of protegos dark magic just shattered against. And Ron had saved Snape’s life, and it had been real after all, and she knows there are bodies lying out in the Great Hall, but she has the snake’s location pinpointed in her mind and they have Snape back and—

And none of it matters, because Harry has to die. 

She’s slumped on the floor of the Headmaster’s office, across from Ron, who’s picked up the letter again, like it will reveal more secrets. Harry has stood up, stepping over to the window and leaning on the lintel, his thin shoulders between them and the night. She wishes, with a hot flush of anger, that she had learned necromancy, because she would give quite a lot to summon Dumbledore’s shade and just yell at him. If I’d had a year I could have worked this out! she thinks, as Harry reaches up to rub at his scar, and all the pieces of visions and weird connection and unstable soul slot together into the worst possible outcome. We a counter for fucking avada, we could have gotten a horcrux out of a person!

But Dumbledore didn’t think like that. Never had. Dumbledore thought about worst case senerios, and acceptable losses, and the greater good. And if Harry had to die to defeat Voldemort, then what of it? The world would be saved.

Hermione looks at Harry standing in the window, at his thin shoulders and shaggy hair, and all she can think is that she doesn’t want the world, not without him. 

“Maybe he’s wrong,” offers Ron, looking up from the letter. There’s a grim set to his face, blistering, dangerous.

“He’s not,” says Harry dully, turning around to face them. He looks exhausted, which— why wouldn’t he? They just went from a battle to learning Snape actually cared about Harry so much his patronus was Harry now, to learning that if Harry wanted to save the world, he’d have to die. “It makes sense. The connection and shit.” He works his jaw; by Hermione’s count, they have twenty-one more minutes to meet Voldemort’s deadline. 

“You can’t possibly be thinking about this,” says Hermione, clawing herself to her feet. Harry gives her the kind of smile he used to give when someone talked about his loving family and she hates it with her entire being. 

“What other choice do we have?” he asks. “I don’t want to die, but— we can’t end him otherwise. He’ll burn the castle to the ground. He’ll kill our friends. He’ll kill you.”

Hermione summons the letter wordlessly to her hand, scans it again. Dumbledore’s writing is all flourishes, and stray phrases jump out at her— his soul was too fractured; latched onto the nearest living thing; once you’ve destroyed the rest of them; I have no doubts you will arrange it so that when you meet your death, it will be the end of him as well; I am so sorry, my boy— and she feels a hot welt of anger under her skin. All along, he was marching Harry towards the slaughter, and she and Ron had been helping, by finding the Horcruxes. “It’s like he didn’t believe we could fix it. But I bet— there’s got to be lit on stuff like this— Narcissa got the Mark off Draco, maybe she can help, and Theo and Sue— Flitwick and McGonagall— and we’ll have Snape too—“

“We don’t have that kind of time,” says Harry, and his voice is shaking. He swallows, looking down at his hands. “Neither can live while the other survives, right? It was always going to end like this.”

“Prophecies are bullshit and you know it,” says Hermione desperately. “Look, just— couldn’t we just avada him and then deal with the Horcrux and the shade—“

Harry grits his teeth. “He can possess people, Hermione, he’d just— he’d come back—“ and she know he’s thinking of the graveyard, and Cedric, which seems to solidify his resolve. “We have to do it right. And if— if this is what it looks like—“

“Easy for you to say,” snaps Hermione, her fear roiling in her chest. “You’re not going to have to live without you like we will.”

Harry jerks his gaze to her; his eyes are dagger-sharp, and there’s the beginning of tears. He shoves off the window and takes two steps closer to her. “You think I want to die?” he snaps, fear animating his movements. “After everything? But he’ll come here, he’ll kill you lot—“

Hermione steps back, breathing hard, and looks over to Ron for support; he’s still on the carpet with his head in his hands. “Ron, help me out here.”

Ron doesn’t move, staring down at the rug like it’s the most fascinating thing he’s ever seen. “You know,” he says, and Hermione feels a visceral trill of fear that she doesn’t quite understand. “I’ve been dreaming of that beach for years. You’re in the sand, and you’re bleeding out, and then you’re dead.”

“She didn’t die,” says Harry automatically. 

Hermione swallows, thinking of the vision, and Lily Evans-Potter. “Maybe I did,” she says softly. “I— I saw things. When I was— whatever.”

Harry pivots to her, his eyes roving over her face, and then turns back to Ron, touching his ring absent-mindedly. “But you— we— it didn’t snap. I could feel you.”

Ron looks up at Hermione, his brown eyes intense. “Who’d you see?” he says quietly.

“Harry’s mum,” Hermione says, and Harry lets out a muffled gasp. “We— we talked about volo. And how Harry wasn’t alone because he had us now.”

Ron pushes himself to his feet, and looks at Harry. “I saw your dad, mate,” he says. “When— when it went wrong after Grimmauld. We talked about Quidditch and friendship and how you were ours.”

Harry looks back and forth between them, breathing heavily. “But I— you’re here. I— I could feel you.” 

Hermione swallows, and looks down at her ring, which was once the Black Heir ring and is now more. Thinks about the burn scar it left after what happened in the woods, and waking up with blood slicked down her throat after Wiltshire, and the hunch she’s had, ever since. How when she’d been doing the readings on Hallows and Horcruxes, she’d been thinking of something else entirely. “Exactly, mate,” says Ron.

In the quiet of the Headmaster’s office, in the interlude of the final battle, she opens her palms and murmurs the kind of detection spells Flitwick taught her, years ago, when she was small and wanted to understand where the magic was, and around them the room blooms with light. It’s a sentient castle; there’s magic everywhere, obviously. But strung between the rings— and between the three of them— are burning threads of liquid gold, molten and shining. There’s a twitch in her chest at the sight of them, a little almost like hope.

“I’ve been dreaming of you dead in a forest, mate,” says Ron quietly, and Harry jerks his head away from the magic, to him. “For years, now. But maybe—“

“Maybe I come back,” Harry whispers softly, his voice shaking. “Maybe you bring me back.” 

It can’t be that simple, can it? Hermione thinks, staring at the web between them, the way the threads are weaved, like a labyrinth, like a fortress. Neither can live while the other survives, except maybe they went and built the inverse— none of them can die while the others live. 

She thinks of Horcruxes. She thinks of Hallows, of Bill standing in the kitchen saying there’s no such thing as a Master of Death. “We can’t trust it,” she says, and the boys turn to her. “I was fifteen. I was scared. I just wanted Harry to have a way back to us, if something happened.”

“You’re the brightest wix of the age, ‘Mione,” says Ron. “You did more without even meaning to. You wanted us to get back to each other, and we can. From anywhere.”

Hermione thinks of the Veil, fluttering in the Department of Mysteries. Death is just another place you go, isn't it? She thinks of the vision, how she’d stood from the back garden and walked— walked back?— just following the threads that leads her so clearly to her friends. 

“Luna’s always on about how friendship’s the Power the Dark Lord Knows Not, isn’t she?” says Ron. Harry swallows again, and Hermione thinks of the girls at the birthday party who’d locked her in the shed, and the loneliness that had followed her around for her childhood, and how though she loved Sue and Anthony and Ginny and Susan and the rest of them, what she had with Ron and Harry was of a different caliber all together, and everyone knew that.

And the Dark Lord is many, many things, but Hermione knows he would prefer to split his soul into seven yet again over doing the thing the three of them are doing, so close to each other as to bruise.

Hermione scrambles for arguments, but they slip through her fingers— she’d set up the locker keys to be delivered on a week’s delay after their deaths; none of them really were that good at healing magic when push came to shove; they’d dreamed of Harry’s parents. “Look,” says Ron. “All I know is that my dreams come true sometimes. And I’ve been dreaming of you dead on that beach for years, ‘Mione. Dead in the way you know things in dreams. And you’re here now.”

She looks over at Harry, which is a mistake, because Harry is rolling up his sleeves, knocking dirt from his hair, cleaning the lenses of his glasses. “Ron, I think I’m going to need the stone after all,” he says, and Ron produces it from his pocket. 

“Harry—“ she says, and he turns to her, and he doesn’t look afraid anymore. His thumb is pressed into the band of the ring.

“Voldemort’s going to kill me, and the Horcrux,” says Harry, low, urgent, focused. “And then you’re going bring me back. And then we’re going to end it.”

Hermione takes one breath, and then another. “What if it doesn’t work?” she asks, and it come out begging.

Harry takes two steps forward and wraps his arm around her, reaching out his other for Ron, who joins. For a moment, they just stand there, holding each other. 

“Of course it’s going to work,” says Harry, quiet but with complete conviction. “It’s you guys. How could it not work?”

They ward the office to the gills— her and Ron are staying up here, even if the fighting resumes, so Harry will have some definitive point to come back to. It takes almost more than she has to give to watch him leave, to let him walk out the door without stunning him. But he slips the ring that used to be a Horcrux and was always a Hallow into his pocket, and her wand is on his wrist, and they hug him tightly, just one more time. 

“I’ll see you soon,” he says, running a hand through his hair. “I love you.”

She and Ron say it back, like they have for the past six years: like an oath, like a vow.

Chapter Text

He walks out to the forest alone, with Hermione’s wand in one hand and the stone Ron had handed him in his pocket, disillusionment concealing his footsteps. Except he’s not alone, not really, because the ring on his hand is burning with the connection to the two of them. 

The castle is deserted, and he allows himself no room for doubts. It will work, because Hermione is powerful beyond measure, because Ron has been dreaming of true things for years. Because they love him, and he can follow the threads of that love home from anywhere, now. 

It’s not dying, he tells himself, his footsteps soft on the stone. It’s a little jaunt, to the other side, to divest himself of the Horcrux that had infected him, and then coming back.

Because of course I come back, he thinks. Because I’m a survivalist. 

Everything seems shot through with clarity, like turning on all the lights, and for the first time since Sirius died— since Voldemort came back— he feels like he can see through to some kind of future. We’ll get a flat in London, he thinks, as he slips out of the castle into the cool pre-dawn darkness. Hermione will get about nine Masteries and Ron will cook so we’re never hungry again and Mrs. Weasley will make us a clock and all our hands will point towards home.

On the lawn, from a distance, he sees his friends lifting bodies form the dewy grass, and his heart twists in his chest, in agony, in relief, to see Ginny’s flaming hair and Neville’s broad shoulders and Luna’s pale face still alive, still moving, even as they carry the dead in from the night. His steps are sure as he makes his way down from the castle, towards the Forbidden Forest, and the dreams he thought he’d starved out in the woods come bleeding back up, quicksilver. We throw a joint birthday party every year, he thinks, in the cold darkness. Ginny makes starting seeker on the Harpies and after they win the championship we kiss on the field. Luna paints us a mural for our flat and Neville brings us plants we don’t know how to keep alive so he has to keep coming back over and we have dinner with everyone. 

When he reaches the woods, he fumbles in his pocket for the stone. When they’d first learned about the Hallows, they’d all claimed one for themselves, instinctively— think of the magic you could do with a wand like that, Hermione had said wistfully; invisibility cloaks are bloody useful, even when they’re not unfailing, Ron had gone, and all Harry had been able to think about was the pool of want that rested behind his sternum, like water behind a dam. 

He turns the stone three times in his palm, and like the bloom of light the yearling deer had brought in the woods (Snape, the future has Snape—), four figures step out from the glades, somewhere between corporal and ghostly, shedding soft light.

“Hey,” he whispers. 

In person, his father looks less like him than everyone always said— his skin is darker, and he holds himself differently. He’d been through a war, sure, but he also grew up in a house where it mattered if he lived or died, and on his finger he has a ring with the Potter crest. “Harry,” he says, his voice rough, his eyes shining, but when he goes to cup his chin in his hand, it slides right off, like there’s a veil between them, and Harry understands why the ring was a trap. 

“Oh Haz,” says his mum, and he turns to her— she has hair like Ron and Ginny’s, and his eyes are the same color as hers, but the intelligence glinting in them reminds him of Hermione. Her hand also skates off his shoulder, and she lets out a sigh. “You’re so— you’re so old, honey.”

“Got all the best parts of best of you tossers,” says Sirius. Harry turns to him; he looks healthy, in a way he never did when Harry knew him, even several years removed from Azkaban, wearing a velvet vest with his curls neat.

“Thank you,” says Harry, with all his being. “Thank you so much, Sirius.”

“Wasn’t like it was a hard choice to make, kid,” says Sirius. “I knew you couldn’t live without them.”

There’s dampness growing on his face. Harry swallows, and turns to the last figure. “I’m so sorry,” he says. “I never should have told you take it with me.”

Cedric is wearing his flying gear, the yellow-and-black badger over his heart, his hair fluffy and his face open. They’re almost the same age now. “Harry,” says Cedric, with that same genial warmth he’d had since the beginning, since they played that first match of Quidditch. “You couldn’t have known. It’s not on you. And if— if me dying gave you even a sliver of a chance to get out of there alive, you know I would have taken those odds.”

He does know, because Cedric was a Hufflepuff down to his very bones, and he knows a few Hufflepuffs like that. 

He looks over at the four of them, and feels his heart constrict— this is why Aberforth had cautioned them against the stone, he supposes. But he slides his thumb down to the Prewett ring and feels the buzzing threads stretching back to Ron and Hermione, and knows which side he needs to be on. 

“I’m going to face Voldemort,” he says to them. “And he’s going to kill me, and the Horcrux in me, and then I’m going to do my best to come back.” Because Ron and Hermione will probably invent a new field of magic if I don’t, he thinks. “And if you could— if you could just walk with me—“

“Of course, Harry dear,” says his mum. “Anything.”

Voldemort has made his lair in the place where the giant spiders once made their nest, and he walks into the gloom, following the faint tracks in the forest and the connection between him and Voldemort, telling his parents and Sirius and Cedric about the Ford Angelica and how hopefully it’s taken out a few Death Eaters by now, and Sirius throws his head back laughing at that. 

There’s too much to cover over the course of one walk, of course, but he tells them the important parts. Ginny, with shining brutality and ragged-edged love and how she was shaping up to be a transcendent seeker— that was obvious from when she was thirteen, Cedric says; his mum asks him what he loves about her and he almost trips over his words with how much there is of it. He tells them about being in Slytherin, and the common room under the lake and Theo and Daphne and Millie and how they’d been good liars and survivalists but his, always his. He tells them about how his patronus is a one-antlered stag— because it’s both of you— and what Snape’s is now (his mum has tears shining in her eyes) and how there are three kitchens he thinks he could call home now, if he’s brave enough to. 

Ron, and Hermione. Every conversation circles back to the two of them, because of course it does, because how could it not? He tells them about how Hermione had invented a counter and bought Be Here Now and how they’d danced in the kitchen of Grimmauld— she finally figured out how to get the picture of your mum off the wall!— and his dad and Sirius high-fived; he tells them about how Ron had saved Snape’s life and dragged them to a pub when they were screaming at each other in the woods, how he had played chess with Kreacher and how he hoped he’d marry Susan. 

“I’m so glad,” his mum says, as the woods being to fill the webs. “I— I never wanted to leave you alone.”

“Don’t worry, mum,” says Harry, his thumb on the band of the ring. “I’m not alone.”

He comes to the edge of the lair, where a small fire is throwing off light in the last dregs of the night. He makes out a few faces— Bellatrix, Lucius, Dolohov— but huge swaths of the people who once haunted the mugshots on Anthony’s board are absent. “I thought he would come,” says Voldemort, from where he sits in the center, hands curled around the Elder Wand. “I expected him to come.” 

You were right, Harry thinks, but also so, so wrong. He takes a breath, then another, and then turns to his parents and Sirius and Cedric. “I love you,” he whispers. “Thank you for walking with me.”

Then he throws the Resurrection stone as hard as he can into the forest, and steps out into the firelight, with eyes only for Voldemort. “Here I am,” he says. He ignores Hagrid’s cries, and the snake hovering in the cage, and stares at Voldemort. For the first time, he feels afraid—  a crackling, curdled fear that the stone had stemmed. What if it doesn’t work? What if Dumbledore had been wrong, and all this is for nothing?

It’s Ron and Hermione, they’re right, he tells himself. Just a little kip, on the other side. 

Voldemort stands languidly, his eyes like rubies, toying with the wand that used to be Dumbledore’s with his long, pale fingers. “Harry Potter,” he hisses, and his bloodless lips curl into a smile devoid of any warmth of joy. He levels his wand at Harry’s chest, and Harry stares at him, willing his hands not to shake. He remembers, a lifetime ago, how Voldemort had told him to bow to death in the graveyard, and he didn’t do it willingly then and he won’t be doing it now. 

“Avada Kedavra,” says Voldemort, and Harry doesn’t even try volo. He just watches the green bloom towards him, and then it’s over.

________________

Ron and Hermione hadn’t told him much, about their conversations in the between-place, but if he’d had to guess where he might end up, he thinks this is where he would have picked. He is sitting at the Chinese place in Chelsea, the fog cool and damp over the river. There’s the sound of boats, and lorry horns, but the place is deserted, except for him. The hoary smell of the river mixes with petrol and cooking oil, and he rubs at his chest absent-mindedly, where the killing curse had hit him.

If I have to talk to Dumbledore, I’m going to fucking loose it, he thinks. This thought is followed by a worse, bone-chilling thought: what if we didn’t actually do it and he is dead.

“Hi,” says the man who slides into the seat across from him, who is certainly not Dumbledore and is far too young to be Snape. “I hear you’re the Heir to the House, now,” and Harry feels his jaw drop open as he stares into the dark eyes of Regulus Arcturus Black. 

“Is it going to work?” he asks. “Can I— can I go back?”

“Look,” says Regulus, gesturing to Harry’s hand. From his ring, two golden threads unfurl, stretching into the fog, and Harry has been relived quite a lot today, but this takes the cake. “You really did go and befriend the greatest wix of the age.”

“You started all that work on a counter,” says Harry. “She would never have thought of just asserting how much you want to live. It’s too Slytherin.”

Regulus gives him a corner of a grin, and it strikes Harry how young he is. Fred and George’s age.

“Why did you do it?” he asks. “Why didn’t you just— tell someone? Or— build an escape plan? Or—“

“Or leave Kreacher there?” asks Regulus, and Harry bristles. 

“That was never on the table,” says Harry. “We both know that.”

Regulus raises his eyebrow in a gesture so Sirius-like it makes Harry’s chest ache. Shrugs. “Hat did offer me Gryffindor, you know.”

“Me too,” says Harry. “But I didn’t take it, and now we’re here. Why— why?”

In the distance, there’s the low wail of a foghorn, and Regulus crosses his arms, leans back into the chair. He has Sirius’s curly dark hair, but his face is thinner, more bony, and if he slicked his hair back he probably could have passed for Snape’s brother instead. “I joined up because I wanted power,” he says. “All the blood stuff, supremacy over muggles— the Dark Lord wanted to kill people. It was too late to get out, once I realized what I was really in the middle of.” The wind off the river ruffles his hair. “And then I looked around. My parents were dead; Sirius was fighting for the other side, and Sev— well, you know. He’s tricky, when he wants to be.”

(And how Harry knows.)

“It was just me and Kreacher and I— I don’t know. I was trying, with volo, it just wasn’t enough. I didn’t have enough.”

Harry thinks about Privet Drive, and the cupboard, and how before the Hogwarts letter— before Ron and Hermione— the very idea of an exit had seemed laughable. How do you outrun monsters who own you, tooth and nail and soul?

“It was your escape plan,” Harry says, quietly. Regulus’s face goes funny and pinched, before he gives the barest of nods. 

“There was just enough defeat the Dark Lord, save my friends and family who weren’t talking to me nonsense mixed in there to make it feel tenable. Like it could pass as a sacrifice.” he says. 

And when you put it like that—

Well, Harry thinks of the pool in the fen in the forest, and the hunger in the tent, and how alluring the Resurrection stone had been, and thinks maybe he understands. How if he’d been faced with the quest and the hunger and the cold without Ron and Hermione—

(Last year, in the torch-lit halls of Hogwarts, he’d assumed that without them he’d have followed in Tom Riddle’s footsteps, but after this one—)

(I don’t think I want to meet the person I would have been without my friends.)

“I’m sorry,” Harry says.

“Well, it’s done now,” says Regulus, folding his hands in a way that reminds him more of Snape than Sirius. The fog is cloying, and Harry has a deep desire to, when all this is done, go back to that cave in the cleft of rock with his crew and undo the magic and bury all the bodies. 

“Is volo going to work?” he asks, instead of any of that. Regulus runs his palm along the ridge of his knuckles. 

“I think it should,” he says, finally. “The theory was always going to be a beast, but you’ve built quite the crew for that sort of thing. You’ll simply have to decide to live more than the Dark Lord wants to kill you.”

“And if he has the Elder Wand?” Harry asks. 

“Does he have the Elder Wand?” asks Regulus. “Because I think it would take a lot more than a non-fatal snake bite to disarm Sev.”

Harry lets out a sigh of relief, and then reaches up to rub at his scar, which has resealed itself. “It’s gone,” says Regulus. “Avada took care of that. And if you go back—“ He gestures at the gold threads trailing from Harry’s hand— “You won’t bring it back with you.”

“How do you know?” Harry asks softly.

Regulus looks at him with the apprising glint he used to see in Sirius’s eyes sometimes, mainly when he asked a question about information the Order hadn’t given him leave to tell him. “The blood magic you lot did on those rings didn’t involve the Dark Lord. It involved you.”

“But if I’ve been a Horcrux this whole time—“

“Yes, but they don’t love the Horcrux, now did they?” Regulus asks, leaning forward. “They love you.”

Harry takes one deep breath, and then another, and then holds up his hand with the ring. “So that’s what all of this was? Love?”

Regulus chuckles, and then leans forward, takes Harry’s hand in his, his thin fingers twitching as he cast non-verbal spells on the ring. “If I had to guess,” he says, “It probably started off as a translocation circle anchored in blood magic, and then you all kept appending it, and then you all kept using it— I don’t know. It’s possible it just— understood. All of your power, all of your love— it cottoned onto the translocation.”

“We can get back from anywhere,” says Harry. 

“Exactly,” says Regulus, letting his hand drop. “I doubt it will work if your body becomes so damaged it is no longer fit as a vessel, or if more than one of you die, but for now— it’s an elegant solution.”

Harry shuts his eyes briefly. The fog is like a wall, and Regulus’s eyes are dark, burning coals. “So what? I just— go back— someone kills the snake— and then we kill him?”

Regulus nods. “Severus would give you the Elder Wand if you asked for it, you know. He loves you.”

Harry averts his eyes, looking around at the Chinese restaurant in the fog, thinking of Snape saying don’t think me for basic human decency, and thinking of the records in Snape’s collection at Lake District that still had Regulus Arcturus Black written in neat cursive on them, and Sirius’s stories about his brother, how they would always start animated and end wistful and full of ache. 

“He loved you too, you know,” says Harry. “Him, and Sirius.”

When he looks back at Regulus, he’s wiping tears from his face. The threads connected to the ring are beckoning him, like a hunger that goes all the way down to the soul. 

“Tell Ron and Hermione hi from me,” he says. “And give Kreacher a hug. And—“

“Snape,” says Harry, and Regulus just nods. “I will.”

He stands from the table, shakes Regulus’s hand, one Slytherin to another. “Thank you,” says Harry, trying to put into words the great awe he feels for Regulus, who tried to build a counter that depended on the desire to live when maybe he wanted nothing of the sort. There’s a thing in the man’s eyes that makes Harry thinks he understands. “Thank you so much.”

And then he walks into the fog wall, the threads of the ring his only guide. 

He walks for a long ways, through city streets and sticky Thames clay and through small copses and then into deep fens. The trees get bigger, and more magical, and then he’s walking up the lawn of Hogwarts in the purple pre-dawn. He sees Neville and Ginny and McGonagall and Susan and Theo and Sue and Ernie on the front steps of the castle, their faces split in anguish but their wands held high; Voldemort is yelling about him abandoning the school and Susan is refuting him tooth and nail; Hagrid is holding a bundle in his arms—

Hagrid is holding his body. Harry breaks into a run.

Several things happen at once, then. Neville draws the sword of Gryffindor from the depths of the Sorting Hat and slices the snake’s head clean from the body, blood spilling into the crisp dawn air. From the woods comes the thestral herd, all leathery wings, and his body tumbles from Hagrid’s arms as the scene in front of the castle devolves into reignited battle, and he lunges forward—

His body hits the ground with him in it, and his thumb goes to the ring and he doesn’t even have to think. He just moves, and lands in their arms.

________________

There’s no time, really, to regroup. Ron and Hermione grip him tightly; they’ve been crying, he thinks, and they’re crying harder now, clutching at his shirt and sobbing into his shoulders and muttering his name. “I’m fine, I’m fine,” he tells them, but he can’t find the heart to shake them off, not after all the years where no one touched him. “It was just AK. Didn’t even do any physical damage.”

“Just AK, alright, mate,” says Ron through tears. Hermione has buried her head into his collarbone and is clutching him like he’ll vanish if she lets go. Had they heard Voldemort announcing his death from up here? He shivers at the thought.

“Come on,” he says, giving Hermione a pat on the back and gently trying to pry her free. “We have to end it. Neville got the snake, so that’s it. We’re almost done.”

“Right,” she says, untangling herself from him and wiping her eyes with the back of her wrist. “Let’s finish this.”

Ron hauls them to their feet, and Harry reaches out to the foldspace on Hermione’s watch for the original Map, which falls into his hand. “Who do you need?” Ron asks. 

“Snape’s got the Elder Wand,” says Harry. “He’ll give it to me if I ask him for it.”

“Right,” says Ron, peering over his shoulder as he unfolds the map. “You think he’s still in the Shack?”

Harry shakes his head. “It was my spells keeping him stunned— he probably woke up—“

Most of the school is fighting the Death Eaters on the castle threshold, and he finds Snape’s dot in a corridor off the front hallway, squared off against Dolohov. And then Dolohov’s dot winks out. “Shit,” says Ron.

Harry, after everything that’s happened tonight, cannot find it in him to care at all about the fate of Antonin Dolohov. “Come on,” he says. 

The sound of the battle echoes through the castle as they run, Harry’s worn trainers on the stone. There are stray smears of blood everywhere, but they find no bodies until they find Dolohov, who looks like he got the very worst of a sectumsempra. Harry looks back at the Map— the fighting has shifted to the Great Hall, and Snape is a few turns in front of them, headed that way. They follow, Harry’s heart pounding in his chest, and then they round the corner and see him, limping in the direction of the fight, leaving blood on the walls. 

“Sir!” yells Harry without meaning to, and Snape turns, and stills, and Harry is reminded of that awful mugshot of him Anthony used to have up on the bulletin board. 

He doesn’t expect Snape to move so fast, to cover the distance between them in a few quick strides, but then he’s there, holding him at wand point. His hair is matted with blood and mud, and there’s a healed gash across his neck, and he looks like shit (Harry’s pretty sure he looks like shit too, what with coming back from the dead). Harry holds out a hand to still Ron and Hermione bristling behind him, even as Snape’s wand digs into his neck. “It’s me,” he says. “It didn’t stick.” He raises his eyes to meet Snape’s— the white of his left eye is smeared with leaking blood— and feels Snape push into his mind.

He offers up a memory of the Lake District, which this past year has felt acrid and oil-slick, but now feels right again. He’d fallen asleep on the sofa after an afternoon spent in the woods screaming at the wind, letting the cold mist match his grief stride for stride, and then he’d come inside and collapsed on the sofa soaked through and covered in mud, and when he’d woken, he’d been dry and clean and there had been a blanket drapped over him and Snape had been cooking dinner. And they’d never talked about it, because of course they hadn’t.

“It’s me,” he says again, staring at Snape, who lowers his wand, his hand trembling. “Look, if I could just borrow—“

Snape takes two steps forward and embraces him. 

There’s a manic, desperate edge to the hug, and Harry is reminded of how Ron’s mum had hugged him after the graveyard, like he would slip from her grasp if she gave him leeway. Snape is bone-thin, and he reeks of blood, and he’s shaking, and Harry doesn’t think he’s ever had a better hug.

Snape draws back, eventually, and holds out his wand. Harry takes it from his palm, and the wood feels warm, familiar, like the wards at Lake District. “Thank you,” he says. 

“Don’t fucking die,” says Ron, from behind him, to Snape. “‘Mione does not have time to learn necromancy.”

“I mean I could,” says Hermione. “But it would be easier if you just stayed alive.”

Snape looks between the two of them, and something almost like a smile cracks across his face. He squeezes Harry’s shoulder, gives Ron and Hermione a nod, and then the three of them head towards the Great Hall and the epicenter of the fight. Harry feels shaky, a bit light-headed— he could probably cast the best patronus of his life right now. 

“Disillusionment,” hisses Hermione as they approach, and he shrouds them all with it.

The Great Hall is a boiling cauldron, as the Death Eaters attempt to reckon with the overwhelming weight of their friends and the Order and the elves and the castle itself. The three of them slip through the seething mess, towards where Voldemort is slinging curses at anyone who moves. They see the elves, lead by a blood-thirsty Kreacher, bring down a hulking brute of a Death Eater; Cho has salt on her face and can do a damn good avada; Charlie and Krum are dueling Crabbe’s father; Narcissa is laying the Death Eaters out indiscriminately, fighting her way towards her husband. 

In the center of the hall, Voldemort is dueling Sprout, Flitwick, and McGonagall all at once, with a sheen of cold rage on his face. A little bit away, Neville and Luna and Ginny are dueling Bellatrix in triplicate, and both fights hang in a stalemate, flashes of hexes and a killing curse that would have gotten Ginny if she wasn’t so quick—

Around them, their friends snuff out the last gasps of Voldemort’s army, Susan killing Greyback, Ernie stunning a masked and hooded figure, Sue and Daphne polishing off a few last Death Eaters. It’s just Bellatrix and Voldemort now, really, and their side lines the walls, panting and dripping blood. 

Harry pauses, Ron and Hermione behind him, Snape’s wand— the Elder Wand— clutched in his hand. He’s not sure he can intervene without hurting someone, but he can’t just stand here and watch his friends die—

From disparate points of the Hall, three figures converge towards Bellatrix. Ron’s mum, her hair tied back and her face crackling with rage; Andromeda Tonks, who could pass for Bellatrix in the wrong light, with grey in her hair like spiderwebs; and Narcissa Malfoy, wandless but with a silver dagger dripping with blood, casting the kind of magic Theo had always talked about.

Against the six of them, Bellatrix has no chance. It’s Neville’s killing curse that lays her out, in the end, but it’s a joint effort, her body convulsing from blood magic and Luna’s tap-dancing jinx both. 

Voldemort turns, to find his last and best lieutenant dead, and lets out a scream of rage that seems to rent the very fabric of the castle. Sprout and McGonagall and Flitwick are blasted back by the force of his anger, and then he turns his attention to the knot of people who’d just killed Bellatrix, his wand raised—

“Protego!” yells Harry, stepping forward, Ron and Hermione at his sides, and then he drops the disillusionment, and it’s just the three of them, in the center of the hall, against the darkest, most idiotic, and least-nosed wizard of the age. 

The crowd lets out a roar of delight and joy at the sight of him, and Harry grips onto it, along with the weight of Snape’s embrace, and Ron and Hermione sobbing on his shoulders after he’d come back, and his parents and Sirius and Cedric and Regulus. “I don’t want anyone else to try to help,” he says, as he stares at Voldemort, at his blood-red eyes. “He’s ours.”

Voldemort lets out a mirthless chuckle. “Good thing you brought two more cronies to die for you, Potter, then.”

Harry feels the white-hot stab of rage he felt in the Chamber, when Voldemort hadn’t bothered to learn their names, yet again. “They’re not cronies. These are my best friends. Ron Weasley, and Hermione Granger. Ron figured out how to break into the Ministry and Gringotts so we could find your stupid Horcruxes—“ Voldemort’s face shivers at that— “And Hermione’s the greatest wix of the age.”

Voldemort lets out a chuckle. “You dare compare some mudblood to the might of Lord Voldemort—“

“You can do a summoning charm inside a Gringotts vault, then?” says Harry, and he sees Voldemort freeze, slightly. “You should know their names, because they’re the only reason I’m still alive.”

(He thinks of Regulus, and the dark water of the cave. He thinks of Tom Riddle at eleven so lonely, so hurt, so scared. Ron is gripping his free hand, and Hermione has her forearm propped up on his shoulder.)

Voldemort laughs again, high and cold, like the laughter in his nightmares in the cupboard. Harry pushes aside all of that, feels the warmth of Snape’s wand in his hand. “Having friends will not save you, Harry Potter. Not this time.”

“Power the Dark Lord Knows Not,” says Harry, a ghost of a grin on his face. The ring on his finger is pulsing with the threads back to Ron and Hermione and the war would have been lost a thousand times over without Susan and Theo, without Sue and Anthony, without Millie and Hannah and Ernie and Justin, without Daphne and Luna and Neville and Ginny, and Luna is usually right, when push comes to shove—

Voldemort looks at him for a moment, and then laughs again, a cackle. “I should have known— Dumbledore rearing you up on lies about love and care— you really do have no place in my house.”

That makes Harry bristle. “I’m a survivalist, just like you,” he says. “We both come from places where no one wanted us. But I have friends now. You—“

“I have an army who laid down their lives for me,” hisses Voldemort, his hand curled around the wand that used to be Dumbledore's. “Loyal servants, devout soldiers—“

“What, like Regulus Black?” Harry says, and he sees Voldemort’s face twist in confusion. “You took Kreacher, the Black house elf, to your cave in the sea, and left him to die, remember? Told him everything, because you’re an idiot—“ Voldemort lets out a hiss— “and then Regulus called him back, and went after the Horcrux himself.” 

Voldemort looks rattled, for a moment, before he rights himself. “That was decades ago—“

“Theodore Nott?” asks Harry. “Who you had at Wiltshire this summer, like he hasn’t been my friend since we were eleven? Or Daphne Greenglass, or Hannah Abbott, or Draco Malfoy? All on my side.”

Voldemort purses his lips, and then gives him a cold smile, made entirely of blood. “Fine. Say your power is your friends. Tell me, what can your friends do against the Elder Wand, but die?”

Harry lets out a deep breath, and clutches Snape’s wand tighter. “I’m glad you brought that up. You thought killing Snape, who killed Dumbledore, would win you the Elder Wand, right?”

Voldemort’s eyes narrow, and he feels Ron and Hermione tense beside him. “Snape is dead. The wand is mine.”

The thought of Snape, alive, and with him as his patronus, makes Harry’s face curl into a grin. “Yeah. The thing is, when you just leave someone to bleed out from a snake bite, it leaves a lot of room for us to come in and save their life.”

Voldemort’s eyes widen for a moment, but he smooths it over with forced chuckle. “Your pitiful sentiment strikes again— Severus would have given the wand over to me, even if you happened to save his life— he’s always been my best, most loyal servant—“

“Snape isn’t yours,” says Harry, harsh and confident. “He’s mine.”

Silence in the hall as Voldemort stares at him, doubt clouding his face for a moment before flitting away. “Severus Snape has never been anything but completely loyal to me—“

“His patronus is a yearling deer with just one antler,” says Harry bluntly, and also with a shining kind of pride in his chest. His patronus is common knowledge by now, among the Order and the Death Eater Corp alike, and he sees the understand dawn on Voldemort as he pales. “It’s me. And Snape gave me his wand.”

Dawn splits the hall open, casting both of their faces gold. Ron and Hermione are steady constants beside him. He sees Voldemort move to cast, and he knows what it will be, and so he casts the only thing there is to cast. 

“Avada Kedavra!” yells Voldemort, like he’s surely yelled a thousand times over.

“Volo Vivre!” yells Harry, dredging from the corners of his soul all he has to give. The visions of the flat in London; crawling into bed with Ron or Hermione after a nightmare; snogging Ginny for the first time on the Quidditch pitch; falling asleep on Snape’s couch at Lake District; out in the wet grass to feed the thestral herd with Luna and Neville. How Regulus invented this when he was staring his own death in the face Harry doesn’t know, but somehow that feeds into it— he can’t leave Kreacher alone in the world, now can he— and he hasn’t even met his godson, and lunches with Bill and Fleur and he wants to build a sand castle and Draco’s face when they get a pint and tell him all of this— 

It’s Mrs. Weasley coaxing him to eat over the summer. It’s Hannah, teaching them how to heal with precision and care and so much love it’s staggering. It’s Justin, standing with him on the train bridge, looking over Reading and not letting him be alone. It’s Theo, taking his essays and correcting them with quick strokes and a liquid smile; it’s Daphne straightening his tie.

There are pictures of him on the wall in Birmingham and his friends will put pictures of him on the walls of their houses. Millie will bring them back weird things from all her dig sites and Luna will floo and ask them to help her name thestral foals and he wants to vote for Sue for Ministry of Magic, see Anthony and Ernie publish monographs about things they’re actually interested in. He and Hermione are going to fight over who gets to be best man at Ron’s wedding, and Ginny’s going to play on the World Cup squad, and in twenty years he’ll get too wasted at some pub and instead of trying to get back to his house, he’ll just follow the ring to Ron, to Hermione, to home. He wants to live. 

Oh, how he wants to live. 

________________

Hermione designed volo so that caster would summon a spectral version of themselves, to step out and meet the bolt of green light, but Harry isn’t surprised when it’s all three of them. Why wouldn’t it be?

Maybe it’s that. Maybe it’s the fact that Harry is wielding the Elder Wand; maybe it’s the fact that he just came back from the dead and has three people’s worth of magic crackling in his blood. Maybe it’s the final gesture from the castle, anteing up the kind of magic none of them could dream of. Maybe it’s all of it. 

But whatever it is, when Voldemort’s avada hits the golden, shimmering forms of Harry and Ron and Hermione, it arcs, separates, blossoms, and suddenly the hall is bathed in golden light. From every corner and lintel and stones steps forwards one of the dead of the war— those killed by Voldemort, and those killed on his orders. Everywhere, they step up, stand in front of the living, and stare down the monster. For one more moment, they are here, a thousand strong, for a reckoning.

(Susan held by both her parents, her aunt with her arm over her shoulder. Feivel Goldstein, standing in front of Anthony and Sue. Molly Weasley, with both her brothers; Arthur standing with his parents. Kingsley and Tonks, leaning on each other, the late Auror office covering them. Neville’s grandmother, complete with her vulture hat, in front of him, staring down the Dark Lord.)

(Theo’s mother, who looks like he does when he’s happy. Myrtle, the very first of them, in front of Justin and Luna, scowling with all she has in her. Frank, the muggle gardener, in front of Flich. Caradoc Dearborn covering Hagrid; Hestia Jones covering Ginny; Mundungus Fletcher covering the twins and Lee Jordan. Vityok and Polly and Ollie, golden and furious, in front of Kreacher and Dobby and the rest of the Union.)

(Cedric is here, shoulder-to-shoulder with his father, standing in front of Cho and his mother. Warrington has his sleeves rolled up and his jaw set, a step in front of Krum. The Riddles, in all their pale and haughty glory, standing in front of Ernie and Daphne and Colin, one set of blue-bloods covering the other.) 

(To stand in front of McGonagall, who has burned more magic that she thought she had to give, comes James; to stand in front of Lupin, the last of the Marauders, comes Sirius, and a Peter Pettigrew who attempted to be brave one final time and payed for it with his life, strangled by the hand Voldemort gave him. To stand in front of Snape, leaning against the back wall, exhausted and elated and in a great amount of pain, comes Lily Evans Potter, and Regulus Arcturus Black.)

Everywhere, the dead: little muggle children, who didn’t have time to be good or evil; powerful wizards who stood against him and payed with their lives; loyal servants, who took the Mark and died by that same hand. Harry and Ron and Hermione stand at the front, and behind them stand themselves, outlined in gold. 

“Tell me their names,” says Harry, taking a step forward, while Voldemort lowers his wand with a shaking hand, his eyes wide. “Tell me their names!”

He can’t do it, of course.

Across the Hall, the dead open their hands. 

________________

(Later, the volo paper will be the first of countless. Granger et al. (1999) will become one of the most renown papers of all time— The Counter Paper, they’ll call it, eventually. R.A.B. is immortalized as the second author. Years and years later, when she has mastery students of her own, Hermione will be asked by a reporter from Witch Weekly about the process of creating it. How did you even do it, Dezmelda Robins will ask her, and Hermione will think about the hollows in Harry and Ron’s faces in the woods, and the fear like a living thing, and being tortured on the floor of Malfoy Manor, and how can she explain, that she’d done it because she needed them to live, with all she had in her, and it had worked?)

(Later, Ron will wake from dreams of mundane things— kissing Susan on a snowy street; Harry, falling asleep on his shoulder while they listen to Quidditch; Hermione, apparating through his wards (well, her wards) at three in the goddamn morning to explain her latest breakthrough— and some of them will come true. Some of them won’t. He’ll always dream about Hermione dead on the beach, and Harry dead in the woods, and even years later, with the ring trailing threads on his finger and Susan sleeping beside him, sometimes those dreams will have him waking up just sobbing. Years and years later, when they’ve had a few too many, his colleagues in the Auror office will pluck up the courage to ask him about it— did Potter really need you to defeat Voldemort— and he’ll think about dragging them to the pub when they’d all been starving, and the break-ins, and how no one had ever held Harry until they did, and he’ll look that asshole in the eyes like the Hufflepuff he is and say actually, yes he did.)

(Later, Harry will be the one to pick the flat in London, and Hedwig will swoop in and out of the wide windows, bringing back mice and rats. Ron will do all the cooking, and Theo brings them books every time he’s over, and Millie becomes fascinated with the history of maps of the London Underground. Luna paints their names on the doors of their rooms, and they make Ginny sign the first Harpies poster with her on it, and Mrs. Weasley will in fact make them a clock. Years and years later, when the kids are at Hogwarts and Harry finally agrees to take the DADA post, his office hours are filled with children asking are you really married to the Greatest Seeker Britain’s ever produced? (And a rare, lovely few who will ask him if he’s really best friends with the Hermione Granger, who just published another innovative paper on ward theory, or the Ron Weasley, who just busted a dark artifact smuggling ring.) But sometimes, he’ll get a nervous-looking sixth year or a small first-year who’ll ask him if he’s really the Chosen One, and he’ll call for tea and tell them a story, about the greatest wix of the age, and a wizard who found two loners on a train and made them his with his force of being, and an orphan who’d never had anything, until he had them. And how if he was chosen, it wasn’t by Voldemort or a Prophecy, but by Ronald Weasley and Hermione Granger.)

(And years and years later, the students of Hogwarts will tell a very different kind of story, in their common rooms late at night, and in the dark hollows by the edge of the forest, and during the vigil they hold every year. About how Neville Longbottom had taken the damage for them, and then drawn the sword from the Hat and killed the snake. About how Theodore Nott had lied like the best of the Slytherins, and protected them all, until it was time to show his loyalty. About how Sue Li had written the Dark Lord a howler, in the depths of the war. About Hannah Abbott, the best Head Girl Hogwarts has ever had; about Anthony Goldstein, who took the Dark Lord apart and tore his secrets from him. About Daphne Greenglass, who had helped mastermind a resistance; about Ginny Weasley, who’d destroyed printing presses and blown up bridges; about Luna Lovegood and Justin Finch-Fletchley, who’d befriended the people Voldemort had never thought to. About Ernie MacMillian, who’d forged family trees and protected the muggleborns from the laws that had tried to tell them they didn’t have magic. About Lavender Brown and Colin Creevy, who fought like hell; about Terry Boot and Lisa Turpin, who stayed calm and did the research; about Draco Malfoy, who came back.)

(And how, when it had come down to the wire, Millicent Bulstrode had known the castle well enough for it to trust her, and how she’d woken it up to protect them. And how, in a battle that had left so many dead, no students or faculty or staff had been killed, because the castle had taken the blows for them.)

(And it’s not a story about a Chosen One, coming back to save the day. It’s a story about how, when the time came, they united within her walls, and she fought along side them. About how it doesn’t matter if you’re a survivalist, or a crime lord, or a loyalist, or an obsessive, just that when the time came, you stood your ground the best you knew how to do, and fought the war in your own way. About how, when push comes to shove, at the root of every House is just love.)

(And years and years later, after the rager they throw for his and Neville’s joint birthday party, Harry will wake up on the floor, curled up between two people he’d know anywhere, a home all themselves, and go back to sleep, no wars to fight, nothing to save, nowhere he’d rather be.)

________________

The dead open their hands and let the avada Voldemort threw at Harry out. He hits the floor of the hall stone cold dead, the Elder Wand rolling across the stone. Ron and Hermione have their arms around him, and he takes one breath, and then two, as the dazzling gold of the sunrise warms his face. 

“It’s over,” he whispers, even as the Hall erupts around them. 

“Yeah, mate,” says Ron. “It is.”

The future is all open doors and porticos. Tomorrow, he’ll talk to Ginny, Susan, Theo, Snape. Now—

In the bolthole, they curl up on the mattress like first year was just yesterday, Hermione’s wards still fluted with power, and he falls into sleep slotted between them. 

There are no dreams.