For Harry, there was no torment quite like knowing that Professor Watson had taken up residence at Grimmauld Place—sleeping under the same sagging roof, passing through the same groaning corridors—and still refused to see him—not even once.
His freedom for the rest of his life depended entirely on this man, and yet the professor moved through the house like a ghost who had decided Harry simply did not exist as though it were no concern of his at all.
This, more than anything else, was why Harry refused—no matter how persistently Hermione urged him—to bring his strange recurring dream to Professor Watson's attention in the days before the hearing began.
As for Sirius—Harry had genuinely considered talking to his godfather.
But since the Order's joint meeting, Sirius had been ridiculously busy. He was away for days at a stretch, and when he did return briefly, it was only to tell Harry to stay put inside the house and not to worry too much about the hearing—the sort of hollow reassurance Harry had no patience for.
It left him with no desire to share anything private with Sirius at all.
The absence of reliable information only deepened the dread that had settled in his chest. What if he really was sentenced to life in Azkaban?
He didn't want to show that fear in front of Hermione and Ron. He didn't even particularly want to be around them, though he found himself dropping toward their presence all the same, unable to bear isolation for too long.
He didn't know what Ginny and Hermione had discussed between themselves—he suspected it had been quite a lot, and quite quietly—but whatever was said had sharpened Hermione's attention into something relentless.
She had become intensely watchful about his new dreams, always circling back with careful, indirect questions, always watching his face for the slight change in expression that meant he was lying. Harry, worn thin by her persistence had eventually lied and told her the dreams had stopped.
But they hadn't. Every night, those long corridors and that tightly sealed door continued to torment him, making his scar throb with a dull, pulsing ache.
On the eve of the hearing, the children still enrolled at Hogwarts gathered in Harry and Ron's room as the clock crept toward midnight.
The room had grown considerably messier over the course of their stay—their large trunks sat open and ransacked on the warped floor, clothing and books and empty Chocolate Frog wrappers spilling out in every direction.
Beneath the window, a substantial stack of Muggle newspapers leaned against the wall at a titled angle, every front page and inner column was combed through multiple times in the hope of finding something useful. The pages were soft at the corners from handling, annotated in Hermione's cramped pencil in the margins.
As it turned out, Professor Watson's dismissive attitude toward Hermione's idea of using the Muggle press to establish Harry's innocence had not been without reason.
The newspapers had produced nothing. No supporting witness accounts, no appropriate records of unexplained deaths that might have cleared Harry's name. Nothing except perhaps a fresh and disheartening awareness, for Harry, of how thoroughly he had become a stranger to the ordinary world outside of Hogwarts.
The window was open to the summer night. Hedwig circled against the low sky in long, lazy loops beneath the moonlight, her white wings were catching the silver glow each time she banked and turned.
Harry watched her with a blank expression that was not quite peaceful—more like exhaustion that had settled into stillness.
It was almost impossible to grasp that just one month ago he had been standing on a Hogwarts pitch under the roar of the crowd, competing alongside his classmates in the Triwizard Tournament's final task, heart hammering, magic singing through his blood. And that after tomorrow, he might find himself in grey dark of Azkaban, with nothing but Dementors for company.
"Relax, Harry—"
Hermione was trying to lift his spirits in the dim amber light. "After tomorrow it'll all be over, and then we can celebrate your birthday properly. Mrs. Weasley has already said—"
Harry had completely forgotten about his birthday.
"I'm not sure the Dementors will allow a birthday party in Azkaban," he said. His voice came out flatter than he intended.
The low, heavy atmosphere that had been pressing down on the room all evening thickened at that, and left everyone at a loss for what to say.
After all, the Ministry of Magic had charged Harry with murder. It was the kind of charge that could crush a grown man, let alone a boy who had not yet turned fifteen.
"Don't worry, Harry—"
Fred bared his teeth in a wide, unconvincing grin, leaning back against the wall with his arms folded.
"If Professor Watson actually loses an argument to the Minister for Magic—which frankly would be the most astonishing thing I've seen in my entire life, and I once watched George accidentally transfigure his own eyebrows into caterpillars—we'll round up everyone from PE and bust you out of Azkaban ourselves."
"Brilliant idea, brother," George said immediately, brightening as if the plan were entirely reasonable. "If You-Know-Who managed it with a squad of Death Eaters, why can't we? The Ministry's got no answer for that particular trick, have they?"
Ron's mouth twitched at the corners but a well-timed look from Hermione, sharp and warning as a thrown dart, made him swallow the laughter back down before it could escape.
The night ended on one of Fred and George's awkward jokes.
Harry barely slept for the first half of the night.
First, the terrifying prospect of losing the defense never left him. Second, he had no desire to be dragged back into that unsettling dream the night before his hearing. Third—and perhaps most infuriating of all —Sirius and the others hadn't even managed to come home, not on a night like this.
Thought after thought coiled through the darkness of the room, each one chasing sleep further away until he lost track of how long he'd been lying there.
And then he was somewhere else.
Gurgle—
As though the floor had simply ceased to exist beneath him, a suffocating weight closed in from every direction at once, pressing like deep water at depth.
The corridor stretched before him longer than any corridor in any building he had ever entered.
At the far end, the black door waited. It always waited. It loomed like the mouth of something vast and patient, like a whirlpool that wanted nothing from the world but to consume it, and Harry's gaze was drawn to it with a pull that bypassed every rational objection he might have raised.
A longing rose from somewhere deep beneath conscious thought—inexplicable, overwhelming, more physically real than the mattress under his sleeping body.
He wanted something with a desperation that had no name, no shape, no rational object. He only knew that it was behind that door. That it had always been behind that door. That it would always be there, waiting.
Harry.
The voice came to him muffled, as though it were pressing through several feet of cold water—distant and close at the same time.
The voice was urgent, familiar—but Harry didn't want to listen. The yearning for whatever lay behind that door consumed him entirely.
Harry.
It was louder now. The corridor shuddered around him—not like an earthquake, but like a painting disturbed by wind, its edges were blurring and doubling, the light was pulsing once and went strange.
"Harry, you have to wake up!"
The voice broke through whatever membrane had been containing it, suddenly sharp and abrupt and real—and the world shattered like a reflection disturbed in water, the corridor were dissolving in concentric rings from the center until there was nothing left of it but the fading warmth on his skin and the distant, familiar pull that dissipated like breath in cold air.
"Hah— hah— hah—"
Like a man hauled from deep water by the collar, Harry sat upright in his bed, gasping in ragged bursts. His eyes were open but still adjusting to the light. His heart hammered against his ribs as if trying to escape them.
"What—a nightmare?"
Sirius's voice came from beside him, sounding genuinely startled—then immediately was sharpening into something urgent. "There's no time, Harry. You need to get up. Right now."
Harry didn't waste a breath asking how his godfather—absent for days without explanation—had appeared at his bedside in the small hours of the morning.
His mind had already leapt ahead, following the urgency in Sirius's voice like a thread, and the cold prickling sensation that spread slowly across his scalp told him, with unpleasant clarity, that whatever had brought Sirius home tonight was not good news.
"Am I going to be late?"
"Not quite—but something's come up."
Before Harry could form the next question, Sirius had already turned toward the other bed, where Ron was buried so completely beneath his blanket that only the top of his red hair was visible above the hem.
"You too, Ron. Up."
Sirius ripped the blanket away without mercy.
"What—Sirius—" Ron sat up, deeply confused and blinking in the light, his hair was standing out from his head in multiple directions at once. "Do I need to go with Harry as well?"
"I'm afraid it's a bit more complicated than that."
Sirius looked at him steadily, his expression was grave. He didn't give either of them time to change out of their nightclothes before he herded them both toward the door and out into the cold dark of the corridor.
"Kitchen first. There are things that need to be confirmed."
He said this in answer to Harry's questioning look.
On the way down of the second floor, they nearly collided with Tonks and a sleep-rumpled Hermione emerging at the same moment from the girls' room. Tonks's expression in the dimness was serious and blank like Sirius's.
Hermione blinked at them with eyes that hadn't yet caught up to the situation, a strand of dark hair was caught at the corner of her mouth.
Ron yawned enormously. "Are we all going to the Ministry together, then?"
"That's right," Sirius glanced at Ron's bewildered face and the corner of his mouth pulled slightly. "You're all going to the Ministry with Harry."
"You could've at least given us some warning," Ron said, yawning again as they descended the stairs in a close, shuffling group, gripping the banister against the dark.
Hermione wasn't her usual sharp self—she drifted along with a glazed, uncomprehending look, her mind clearly still trying to assemble the pieces into something that made sense.
"I need to wash my hair first," she said, with an earnestness that showed she was more asleep than she realized. "I can't meet anyone like this."
"That can wait, Hermione," Sirius said, and the lines of exasperation that crossed his forehead were outnumbered by something else.
And so the three of them stumbled, still in their nightclothes, after Sirius down through the house and into the basement kitchen.
The moment the door swung open and they made out who was inside, all three of them snapped into full, startled wakefulness.
Nearly half the Order of the Phoenix had packed itself into the kitchen.
Mr. and Mrs. Weasley stood together near the stove. Amelia was there, and Remus—his face worn and deeply shadowed and Alastor Moody, his magical eye were rolling in its socket as it swept the room. Kingsley Shacklebolt stood with his arms folded, very still, very tall.
Harry had no illusions that all these people had gathered simply to escort him to his hearing. Because he had never in his life seen the Weasleys wearing expressions like this—Raw worry gnawing, etched into every line of their faces.
Mrs. Weasley's hands were pressed together in front of her like she was holding something between them. Mr. Weasley was very still.
"What happened, Mrs. Weasley—"
Every syllable Harry forced out felt unsteady, like ground that might not bear his weight.
"Half an hour ago," Sirius began, looking not just at Harry but at Hermione and Ron as well, making certain all three pairs of eyes were on him before he continued— "the Ministry sent official notification letters specifying the exact time of tomorrow's hearing. Delivered by Ministry owl. Three of them."
Harry's mind went blank for one airless moment before the meaning caught up to him.
"Three?"
"Ron and Hermione."
Remus's soft voice settled over the room like snow settling over ground.
His gaze moved to both of them—watched their expressions travel slowly from bewildered confusion through to stunned disbelief. He let them arrive there before he continued.
"Yes. Three letters. The Ministry of Magic is requiring both of you to appear for formal questioning as well." He paused. "What do you make of that?"
————————————
For More Chapters; .com/FicFrenzy