16th August 1994, Little Hangleton, The Riddle House, 11:47 PM
The old man had not screamed. That, at least, was something.
Frank Bryce had simply turned in the doorway, eyes wide with the particular bewilderment of a man confronting something his mind refused to categorise, and then Peter Pettigrew's wand had moved in that small, almost apologetic arc, and the word had left his lips like an exhaled breath.
"Avada Kedavra."
The green light touched Frank Bryce's chest, and he was gone before he fell.
Peter stood over the body for a moment, his rat-like nostrils flaring, then bent to his work with the brisk efficiency of a man who had done worse things and expected to do them again. His wand moved in short, precise strokes—Evanesco, Tergeo, Obliviate cast wide upon the empty lane below to catch any lingering traces of a curious mind. The night outside the grimy window was absolute, the village below a scattering of amber lights that had nothing to do with this room, this house, this moment.
When he was satisfied, Peter descended the creaking staircase without looking back.
Mordred Slythra was waiting in the doorway of the room at the end of the upper hall, one shoulder resting against the frame, arms folded, his expression that of a man who had been moderately entertained by a moderate performance. The scar along his jaw caught the faint light from inside the room and rendered the left side of his face into something colder than the rest of him, which was saying something.
"Tidily done," Mordred remarked.
"He was just a Muggle," Peter said, though something flickered in his eyes that might once have been discomfort, had enough of Peter Pettigrew remained to feel it.
"They generally are." Mordred turned and walked into the room without further commentary.
The smell hit first—something medicinal beneath the rot, acrid and sweet together in a way that coated the throat. The fire had been built high despite the August warmth, and in its light the armchair in the centre of the room seemed to contain nothing so much as a bundle of rags arranged around a question. Then the rags moved, and the question answered itself.
Lord Voldemort's current form did not bear lengthy contemplation. The homunculus that curled in the chair was the colour of something that had spent too long underground—waxy, raw at the edges, barely the size of a large infant and possessed of a face that suggested the concept of a face more than any actual arrangement of features. His eyes, however, were precisely themselves: red as cinders, flat as an adder's, and entirely, continuously awake.
Nagini lay in a loose coil near the hearth, her scales catching the firelight like hammered copper. She turned her great head as they entered, regarded Mordred with the patient assessment of something that had never needed to hurry, and returned her attention to the flames.
Peter moved to the small table where the potion simmered—the nightly preparation, the careful measure of venom extracted from Nagini's great body and reduced down into something sustaining, if not quite alive. His hands shook slightly as he worked. They always shook slightly.
Mordred stood at his ease near the window, where the glass had filmed with decades of grime and the darkness beyond it was its own kind of privacy. He thought, without particular sentiment, of how smoothly the journey here had been. Peter's intelligence had been solid, for once—the sightings, the rumours tracked carefully through the underbelly of the wizarding world, the whispers that accumulated around absence the way water pooled in low ground. They had found the Riddle House without incident.
He had, upon reflection, expected more resistance from Fate. There had been a quality to the last several months that felt almost like a door left open—an invitation of the kind one accepted whilst remaining fully aware it might also be a trap.
Still, Mordred thought, here we are.
Something that might have been a smile crossed his face, or would have, had the scar not given his features their permanent commentary of contempt.
"Wormtail." The voice from the chair was barely above a whisper, but it filled the room entirely, the way cold did. "The potion."
Peter scurried forward with the prepared measure, his breathing audible. When it was done, the silence that followed had the quality of something slowly expanding—the quiet of a creature digesting, reconstituting, re-anchoring itself against the necessity of a body it despised.
Then the red eyes turned to Mordred.
"The servant," Voldemort said. "The one you spoke of. The one who is to help us take the boy."
"I have met him," Mordred replied. His voice remained perfectly level. "Everything proceeds according to the arrangement. It will not be long before your loyal servant is positioned exactly where he needs to be."
Nagini stirred again, her tongue tasting the air in slow pulses.
"And the boy will come to us," Voldemort murmured. The satisfaction in his voice was the particular kind that had nothing warm in it—the satisfaction of a mechanism clicking into place. "He will come, and it will be finished. If."
The word hung there.
"Iif," Voldemort repeated, and now his tone had acquired an edge cold enough to make Peter go very still beside the hearth. "You said if with some intention behind it, Slythra. I did not survive thirteen years of half-death to have my plans qualified by a single syllable." The red eyes narrowed fractionally. "You are a Seer. Tell me what you saw."
Peter made himself smaller, which required effort given that he was already a small man. He had lived long enough beside Wormtail to recognise the quality of silence that preceded a lord's displeasure, and he was intimately familiar with the potion-cabinet behind him as a destination, should departure seem advisable.
Mordred, for his part, did not flinch. He had faced Dementors for four years. He had stared at the architecture of his own worst memories and found them merely instructive. The wrath of a homunculus in a fireside chair was not, in his considered assessment, a thing that warranted trembling.
"There are more eyes on Harry Potter now than there have ever been," Mordred said, calmly, directly. "Watching him. Watching for anything that approaches him."
Voldemort's lip—such as it was—curled. "If you mean Dumbledore—"
"A Seer." Mordred said it without inflection, and the interruption landed the way a stone dropped into still water lands—the stillness around it becoming somehow more complete. He let a half-beat pass before continuing. "A true one. Not a parlour diviner, not someone who reads entrails and calls it prophecy. Someone who sees. When Wormtail and I came near the boy at the end of last year—" he paused, and Peter made a small affirming sound from near the fireplace, "—I felt it. A weight of perception. The sensation of being observed by something that understood precisely what it was looking at."
Peter nodded rapidly, as though the memory of it still made him nervous. "I noticed it too, my lord. Towards the end. Like being—like being counted."
Voldemort's red eyes moved between them with the steady deliberation of something that had learned to find impatience wasteful.
"This Seer," he said at last. "Who?"
"I don't yet have a name I can give with certainty." Mordred held the gaze without difficulty. "What I have is a pattern. And the pattern tells me that whoever watches over that boy does so with a precision that will complicate any approach we make without care."
The fire popped. Nagini settled with a slow ripple of scales.
"Then what," Voldemort said, very quietly, "do you propose?"
The smile that crossed Mordred's face then was the kind that had never particularly reached his eyes, but was genuine in its way—the satisfaction of a chess player surveying a board that still held options.
"I am here, my Lord," he said. "A Seer watching on your behalf is worth considerably more than a Seer watching uncontested on the boy's. Whatever vigilance is set against us, I can divert it, misdirect it, account for it in the planning. The vision I have... what I have seen—tells me this: the plan succeeds. It is not guaranteed; nothing is, or the seeing would be worthless. But the path is there, and I am standing on it." He paused. "What I am telling you is that we cannot afford to rush. The servant must be positioned carefully. The timing must be exact. We must revise."
The word revise seemed to give Voldemort something to contemplate. His silence was not the silence of a creature thinking—it was the silence of a creature who had already thought, and was now simply deciding how far the conclusion satisfied him.
"Then revise," he said at last.
Outside, a nightjar called once from somewhere in the darkened grounds, and then was quiet.
17th August 1994, 221B Baker Street, London, 2:03 AM
The dream had no beginning he could locate—only a middle, and then an end.
A house. Large, empty, and wrong in the particular way that empty houses in dreams were wrong, which was to say wrong completely, every shadow in the wrong place, every door slightly too tall. An old man in a hallway, turning toward something Harry could not see. Hissing—long, unhurried, conversational, the kind of hissing that did not belong to small garden snakes but to something that had been alive long enough to have opinions.
Then a flash of green, the colour of it searing through the dark like a blade, and Harry woke.
He lay very still for a moment on his back, staring at the attic ceiling. The oval window above his bed had gathered the last hours of night into its glass, a square of dark navy in which a handful of stars were still visible, indifferent and infinitely patient.
Cogitation.
The technique came without thought now—had for years—the image assembling itself behind his closed eyes with practised ease. The blue moon, soft and precise, its light emanating outward through the dark space of his mind. The fragmented heat of the dream began to cool. His heartbeat, which he hadn't noticed was elevated, descended. His hands, he found when he flexed his fingers, had been gripping the sheets.
He relaxed them one by one.
The dream did not clarify as Cogitation cleared his head—it dissolved, leaving only impressions, like a letter left in rain. A house. An old man. Something hissing in the dark.
His scar, he realised, checking it with careful attention, ached. Very slightly. The way a healed bone sometimes ached in cold weather—present but not alarming, a reminder rather than an event.
His mood, despite everything, remained low. There was a quality to that particular kind of dream, the ones that vanished and left only weather behind, that resisted the blue moon's soothing. He was not going back to sleep tonight.
A rustle of feathers and a small, warm weight settled onto his forearm—Jasper, the golden Snidget, his jewel-red eyes bright in the dark, his tiny rounded body radiating heat that seemed disproportionate to his size. Harry brought his arm up automatically, feeling the bird press its head against his palm in the gesture that had always been, from the very first night in Interlaken, its version of an embrace.
"All right, Jasper," Harry murmured. "All right."
From the kennel in the corner came a sound—not a sound of distress, but of deliberate, pointed wakefulness. Osian raised his great golden head and fixed Harry with eyes that conveyed, with the precision only a Re'em could achieve, that being disturbed before dawn on a August morning was not something one would submit to without significant grievance.
Harry looked back. "Sorry."
Osian held the stare for another two seconds, then rose, crossed the attic with the unhurried dignity of something that had decided to make its displeasure manifest by being present for it, and placed his considerable chin on the edge of Harry's bed. His amber eyes moved once across Harry's face with an assessment that was, if one were being strictly accurate, rather less irritated than his posture suggested.
"Don't look at me like that," Harry said quietly. "I didn't ask you to get up."
Osian breathed out through his nose in a sound that eloquently conveyed the irrelevance of this observation.
Harry got up.
The kitchen was dark when he came downstairs with Jasper on his shoulder, and he reached automatically for the light before stopping. From the sitting room, a soft amber glow reached into the hallway—the particular shade of Runic Lamp light that Ethan kept at low when he was working late, the tone of it warm enough to read by and quiet enough not to disturb the night.
Harry padded to the doorway and stopped.
Ethan sat at the dining table in his formal indoor clothes—the dark waistcoat, the rolled cuffs, the silver-frame glasses precisely in place despite the hour. Before him was an array of papers that bore the Atid Stella letterhead in the corner, the pile substantial enough to constitute a considered argument against the existence of reasonable working hours. He had a mug of something beside him that had gone cold, judging by the lack of steam, and was reading the uppermost document with the focused attention he brought to everything, which was to say: entirely.
He looked up when Harry appeared in the doorway.
For a moment he simply regarded his son—the rumpled hair, the shadow still present around the eyes, Jasper curled on his shoulder like a small breathing ornament—and then understanding arrived quietly across his expression, as it always did, as though it had simply been waiting politely for him to notice it.
"Tea?" he said.
"Please," Harry answered.
Ethan rose without fuss, moving to the kitchen. The sound of the kettle, the particular clatter of cups familiar enough to be a form of reassurance, filtered through the quiet house. Harry settled into his usual chair at the table, pulling his knees up automatically, and looked at the stack of papers. They were dense with figures and correspondence, the kind of administrative weight that Remus usually intercepted before it could reach Ethan's desk.
When Ethan returned with two cups of lavender tea and set one before Harry with a small, careful precision, Harry wrapped both hands around the warmth and breathed in.
"Atid Stella?" Harry nodded toward the papers.
Ethan resumed his seat with a slight, wry exhalation. "The new oversight branches. They require more signatures than the legislation that established them, which is remarkable." He paused. "Though I'll allow that the reports themselves are positive. The overseas offices are running ahead of schedule. Remus estimates they'll be operational before Christmas."
"That's good," Harry said.
"It is." Ethan sipped his tea. A companionable quiet settled between them—the particular quiet of two people who had long since learned that silence together was not the same as distance. From upstairs came the faint sound of Osian resettling, the creak of the kennel's wood registering his displeasure with the disruption to his routine.
Ethan set down his cup. "What woke you?"
Harry looked at the steam rising from his tea. He told it—the house that was wrong in a dream's particular way, the old man in the hallway, the hissing. He described the green light with a brief flatness that did not entirely conceal what the colour of it had done to his chest, even in sleep. He mentioned his scar, the dull ache of it, and watched Ethan's expression from the corner of his eye.
The slight furrow between his father's brows was brief, and controlled. But the eyes, behind their silver frames, were doing something else—the amber depths catching a quality of light that was not entirely the Runic Lamp's doing. The starlight brilliance, that rare visible flicker of the True Sight working beneath the surface.
Then Ethan reached over and ruffled Harry's hair once, with the particular gentleness reserved for moments when he had more to say than circumstances allowed.
He said nothing.
Harry waited, then decided not to push. He yawned, which was genuine, and the yawn released something tightly held in his chest along with it.
"Perhaps it was just a nightmare," he said. "Some aftermath of—well. We faced rather a lot of Dementors." He drank the last of the lavender tea, the warmth of it carrying all the way down. "I'll sleep properly tonight, I expect."
He stood, gathered Jasper from the table's edge where the bird had been investigating the corner of Ethan's stack of papers with evident curiosity, and tucked him against his shoulder.
"Goodnight, Dad."
Ethan raised a hand in farewell, his expression arranged into the easy fondness that was the closest his face came to smiling without reservation. Harry climbed the stairs.
Behind him, he heard, in the quiet of the sitting room, the soft sound of Ethan's wand tapping the cups once. The small sounds of crockery cleaning itself and placing itself away followed—efficient, silent, settled—and then there was only the sound of papers being turned, and the low amber light, and the night.
17th August 1994, 221B Baker Street, London, 8:14 AM
The morning had resolved itself into the particular clear-bright quality that occasionally visited London in late August—the kind that made the brick of the houses look almost warm and convinced starlings to make noise about it. Harry stood in his room pulling on a grey cotton shirt, his satchel open on the bed, checking methodically through its contents.
Wand—holly, eleven inches, phoenix feather, the public-facing wand that Ollivanders had matched to him that first visit to Diagon Alley. The walnut and Re'em horn wand Ethan had made was already in the enchanted satchel's inner compartment, the pocket that had been specifically designed by his father for that purpose. Both present.
Extra parchment, since last summer's practice sessions at the clearing near Ottery St Catchpole had demonstrated that he consistently ran out.
Jasper's small travel perch, collapsible, which the Snidget regarded as beneath his dignity but tolerated.
The silver pocket watch—Ethan's gift, its constellation face catching the morning light—on its chain.
He closed the satchel and stood for a moment at his window, looking out at the ordinary London street below with its plane trees and morning pedestrians, and thought about Luna.
She and her father had gone to somewhere Scandinavian this summer, following what Xenophilius Lovegood described in his letter as a credible and recently corroborated trail regarding the Crumple-Horned Snorkack. Which was, Harry knew from experience, the Lovegood family's way of saying holiday. A good holiday, by all accounts—Luna's last letter, written in her looping, unhurried hand with the occasional small drawing of a bird he didn't recognise in the margins, had described fjords with a quiet delight that had been somehow more vivid than any photograph.
He found himself imagining it—the pale summer light of the north, and Luna moving through it with her characteristic dreaminess, probably wearing something impractical and entirely herself. She had mentioned a hat.
He was smiling without having decided to.
The image that followed was not deliberately summoned: Luna in a clearing of tall summer grass, her waist-length dirty-blonde hair loose, the clean outdoor fragrance that always seemed to cling to her like some quality she'd absorbed from all those years of genuine attention to the natural world. Her protuberant grey eyes, which could look in all directions at once and still seemed to find you specifically. The way she had of tilting her head slightly to the right when something interested her, as though the world looked different from that angle—which, Harry had privately concluded, it probably did, if you were Luna.
The softness of her-
Harry stopped thinking about this immediately and became very interested in the buckle of his satchel, which required no adjustment whatsoever.
His face, he was aware, was warm.
Absolutely not, he informed himself, with the firm practicality of someone who has become used to managing inconvenient truths.
He picked up the satchel and went downstairs at a pace that was brisk and purposeful and had nothing whatsoever to do with avoiding his own thoughts.
"Harry!"
Ethan's voice came from the sitting room. Harry turned in the hall doorway and found his father standing at the writing table, envelope in hand, his expression carrying the precise quality of resigned amusement that he reserved for the Weasley family's more exuberant communications.
The envelope was extraordinary. It was not so much covered in stamps as upholstered in them—every available surface of the manila rectangle had been colonised, layer upon layer, Muggle and wizarding stamps alike applied with such thorough enthusiasm that the address beneath was barely visible. It looked less like correspondence and more like a topographic map of a postal fever dream.
Harry came to stand beside Ethan. They both looked at it for a moment.
"That's certainly one approach to postage," Harry said.
"The Weasleys have never done anything by halves," Ethan replied, with the warmth of a man who had spent several years being periodically ambushed by this family's generosity and had arrived at something approaching fond resignation. He opened the envelope, extracted the letter within, and read it with the slight movement of his lips that accompanied his quicker reading—the habit he'd had for as long as Harry could remember.
His expression settled.
"The Quidditch World Cup," Ethan said. "The final." He looked up.
Harry blinked. Then the words arranged themselves properly in his mind, and his face broke into a grin that had nothing managed about it.
The Quidditch World Cup. The final.
"When?" he asked.
"The twenty-fifth," Ethan said, and passed him the letter.
Harry took it and read Ron's enthusiastic, slightly hurried handwriting with the automatic smile it always produced—the warmth of a household contained in every line, the particular Weasley quality of making an invitation feel like being told you were already expected.
Outside, the London morning continued its bright, unhurried course. Somewhere north, a pair of Seers watched different things across different distances, with different purposes, and the world turned on regardless.