2nd September 1994, Hogwarts Castle, Gryffindor Tower, 7:42 AM
The first morning of term arrived in the soft grey-gold light that came through the dormitory windows when September was thinking about being autumn but had not yet committed. Harry woke to the familiar small weight of Jasper on his pillow, the smell of porridge being conjured somewhere far below in the great kitchens, and the particular Hogwarts hush that preceded the day's first stampede toward the bathroom.
By half past seven he was dressed, satchel checked, Jasper concealed in his inner pocket. He met Ron and Hermione on the staircase—Ron yawning expansively, Hermione already with her schedule out and reading it whilst walking, which Harry had watched her do for three years and found endlessly impressive on the grounds that she had never once, in all that time, walked into anything.
The Great Hall was its usual breakfast chaos. Owls came down with the morning post in a fluttering cascade. Toast appeared. Fred and George were already conducting some sort of reconnaissance from the far end of the Gryffindor table, conferring in low voices over what Harry suspected was the early planning for their Age Line assault.
Harry was halfway through his porridge when he saw her.
Luna had emerged from the Ravenclaw table with that drifting deliberation she had, her wand tucked behind her ear in a manner that no one but Luna could quite manage to make look tidy, her eyes finding Harry across the Hall with the soft brightening that had become its own established weather pattern. She drifted across the central aisle with the freedom that had been earned over years of professorial sighs and resigned acceptance.
"Hah-ree," she said, settling for a moment beside him with the absolute unconcern of someone who had decided long ago that house-table conventions did not apply to her. "Good morning. The pumpkin juice is particularly orange today. I think it means something."
"Probably means it's pumpkin juice," Ron suggested.
"That as well," Luna agreed serenely. "Harry, what's your first lesson?"
"Herbology. Then Care of Magical Creatures with—"
"Luna."
Astoria materialised beside the Gryffindor table with the exasperated efficiency of a sister-in-spirit who had been searching the Hall for her wayward charge. Her grey eyes did the catalogue once, lingered on Harry for the precise fraction of a second required to register his presence with deliberate amusement, and returned to Luna.
"You said one minute. It's been four. We have Potions in twenty, and Snape will deduct points if you arrive after him again."
"Oh," Luna said, with the air of someone who had genuinely forgotten about Potions.
"Up."
Astoria's hand closed around Luna's wrist with the firm decisiveness of someone reclaiming property. Luna allowed herself to be levered to her feet with serene cooperation, waved at Harry over her shoulder with a small, slow gesture of fingers that meant we shall continue this later, and was towed back across the Hall whilst saying something to Astoria about Wrackspurts in the dungeons.
Harry watched her go with the precisely controlled expression of a boy who had decided he was not grumpy about this and was failing.
Ron and Hermione exchanged a look. Hermione's mouth twitched. Ron's did not bother to.
"Oh, bless," Ron said.
"Don't start," Harry said.
"Mate, you're wearing the exact face you wear when Filch confiscates—"
"Don't start, Ronald."
Hermione laughed into her tea.
Herbology with Professor Sprout was warm and damp and usefully distracting. They were repotting Bouncing Bulbs—a plant that lived up to its name with considerable enthusiasm—and Neville, who came alive in greenhouses the way most people came alive at meals, was already two steps ahead of everyone else. Harry was glad for the labour. Earth under the fingernails. Something solid to focus on. The first morning of term always had a quality of needing settling, and Herbology settled him.
Care of Magical Creatures followed. The lesson took place at the paddock behind Hagrid's hut, and Hagrid was waiting for them with the broad anxious enthusiasm of a half-giant who was unveiling his Newest Project. The Newest Project, when revealed, was a wooden crate roughly the size of a small donkey, from which emerged sounds and smells that were not encouraging.
"Right!" Hagrid boomed. "Blast-Ended Skrewts! Just hatched! Yer goin' ter be raisin' 'em yerselves—nice bit o' practical work, yeah?"
The Skrewts looked, Harry thought, like deformed, shell-less lobsters which had been put together by someone with strong opinions and limited skill. They were perhaps six inches long, pallid and slimy, and at one end of each one—Harry leaned closer with the mild scientific curiosity Ethan had taught him, at the other end was something that periodically emitted a small jet of fire.
A Skrewt fired itself approximately eighteen inches into the air on its own propulsion. It came down on its back, righted itself with a sulky gesture, and tried to bite Lavender Brown.
"That's normal," Hagrid assured them. "Means they're 'ealthy."
"Of course it does," Hermione muttered, taking a small careful step backward.
By the time they reached the topmost room of the North Tower for Divination, Harry was already philosophical about the day's likely trajectory.
The room was as he remembered it: thick incense, dim light, low cushions, the faintly oppressive heat of a fire that nobody had ever quite asked to be lit. Professor Trelawney drifted between the small tables in her layered shawls and bangles, pronouncing, in the dreamy and absolutely confident voice of someone who had decided long ago that drama was the better part of prophecy, that this term we shall be studying the planets, my dears, and their mysterious portents.
Ron had been cheerful through Herbology and tolerant through Care of Magical Creatures, but something about Divination unsettled him in the particular way it unsettled Ron—the suspicion that he was being asked to take something seriously that was, on its merits, not particularly serious. He shifted on his cushion. He sighed audibly. When Trelawney bent over the next table and began to inform Lavender Brown, in tones of considerable gravity, that the thing she dreaded was likely to occur on the sixteenth of October, Ron leaned to Harry and said, in a voice he intended to be a private aside but which carried with the cheerful inaccuracy of all such asides—
"Honestly. The 'thing she dreads.' Probably running out of mascara."
The classroom went very quiet.
Lavender's face went red. Parvati's went redder. Trelawney straightened with the slow gravity of an outraged battleship.
Ron's expression completed a brief journey from satisfaction to dawning horror to genuine regret in approximately two seconds, by which point Harry was already wincing on his behalf.
"Mr Weasley," Trelawney said. "It is regrettable, deeply regrettable, that those whose Inner Eye is most thoroughly clouded should also be the most quick to mock those whose vision pierces the veils. You will write me an additional twelve inches on the planetary influences, due Monday next. And the entire class—" she swept her gaze around the room "—will produce, in addition to the standard chart-work, a personal divination of a fellow student's coming month. Twenty-four inches. Monday."
The class produced a collective low groan. Lavender, twenty inches richer in homework, gave Ron a look of such concentrated injury that Harry was surprised it did not require a Healer.
"Ron," Harry said, as they descended the ladder afterwards.
"I know," Ron said, miserable. "I know. I didn't think she'd—"
"You've offended Lavender," Harry said, "and Parvati, and given the entire class extra homework, and Hermione is going to have opinions."
"I know."
"I'm just saying."
"I know."
Hermione had opinions.
They lasted, with breaks for Transfiguration and a long walk between corridors, until well into dinner—at which point Ron was no longer apologising so much as quietly absorbing his stew with the hunched posture of a man waiting for the storm to pass. Harry was buttering a roll with diplomatic neutrality. Hermione had moved from active disapproval to the more dangerous phase of pointed silence.
It was at exactly this moment that Theodore Nott chose to make his approach.
He arrived at the Gryffindor table with a folded copy of the Daily Prophet in one hand and his customary expression of cultivated cruelty arranged across his sharp features. Three years had not improved Theodore. They had merely refined the quality of unpleasantness he could produce per square inch of facial expression. He stopped behind Ron, leaned, and unfolded the paper with the particular care of a man laying out evidence.
"Weasley," Theodore said. "You'll want to see this."
The article was on page four. The byline was Skeeter's. The headline read: MORE EMBARRASSMENT FOR THE MINISTRY OF MAGIC: MUDDLE WITH MISSING AUROR. And in the second paragraph, picked out for Theodore's pleasure with the tip of his finger, was a sentence that began Arnold Weasley, who was charged with possession of a flying car some years ago—
Ron's face had gone the particular colour it went when he was about to do something regrettable.
"Arnold," Theodore drawled. "How many of you are there, exactly? She can't even get the names right. Probably hard to remember when there's so many redheaded brats running about in second-hand robes—"
"Theodore," Hermione said, sharply, not looking up.
"—and your mother, of course," Theodore continued, with the air of a man warming to his theme. "The size of a—"
Harry's spoon set itself down with quiet precision. His holly wand was already in his right hand under the table. Ron was rising. Hermione's hand had clamped on Ron's forearm with the sudden iron grip of a girl who had spent three years restraining the same Weasley.
"Sit down," Hermione hissed at Ron. "He wants this, sit down—"
"Tell me," Hermione said aloud, turning to Theodore with the precise icy clarity she deployed when she had decided that diplomacy had run its course, "is it your father's recent acquittal that has you in such fine form this evening, or your mother's column in Witch Weekly about the importance of correct breeding in young witches? Because I read both, and I have to say—the prose was not what one would call distinguished."
Theodore's face did something complicated. His mother's column was, as Hermione had correctly identified, a regular embarrassment to anyone in the Nott family with literary standards. His father's acquittal—on a technicality involving a Ministry official and a quantity of Galleons, had been even more recent, and had been the subject of considerable private commentary.
Hermione turned back to her stew.
Theodore's wand came up.
He was fast... Harry registered the movement at the edge of his vision with the trained instinct that Ethan had spent years building into him—and the wand was rising in the sequence Theodore favoured for casting the Stinging Hex variant his father had taught him. He aimed it at Hermione's back as she walked the two paces toward the Hall's exit, having decided to leave Ron's company before either of them said something further.
Harry had moved before the curse left Theodore's wand.
He did not stand. He did not draw attention. He simply finished a wand gesture he had begun under the table approximately a half-second earlier—a silent Finite Incantatem directed at the precise threadwork of magic he had felt forming in Theodore's wand—and Theodore's hex unravelled before it had quite finished assembling.
Theodore looked at his wand with an expression of brief, blank confusion. He attempted the casting again. His wand produced a thin discharge of pinkish light that fizzled approximately three inches from its tip and vanished.
"What in—"
"Constant vigilance!"
The voice came from the staff table, and it carried with the precise gravelly volume of a man who had spent forty years projecting in active combat. Mad-Eye Moody had risen from his place. His magical eye was fixed on Theodore with the entire distinctive horror of its independent swivel. His other eye flicked, briefly, to Harry.
The moment the eye landed on Harry, it lingered.
It lingered for approximately one second. There was, in that second, the same texture of attention Harry had felt the night before—focused, professional, evaluating and underneath it, this time, something that might have been approving.
"That," Moody said, in the carrying voice of a man addressing a lecture room, "is what we call situational awareness. That, Mr Potter—" he jabbed a thick scarred finger toward Harry "—is exactly the right reflex. Counter-spell timed to interception, silent casting, no theatrics. Good."
Harry, who had not been expecting this, produced a small wry smile and said "Th-thank you, sir," with the careful brevity of a boy who was determined not to be drawn closer to Moody than was strictly necessary. He kept his shoulders very precisely angled away from the staff table.
Then Moody's wand snapped up and Theodore became a ferret.
A white ferret. Small, twitching, considerably less verbose than he had been three seconds before. And then, with a flick of Moody's wand, the ferret bounced—up into the air, down onto the flagstones, up again—
"ALASTOR."
Professor McGonagall arrived from the direction of the staff table with the hawk-stride of a woman who had been observing this particular tableau for several seconds and was at full stop now.
"Hello, Minerva."
"What in the name of Merlin's beard are you doing."
"Teaching."
"Teaching what?"
"That casting hexes at the backs of unsuspecting students has consequences."
"We do not transfigure students into animals as a method of punishment, Alastor!"
"He'd have hexed the Granger girl, Minerva. I saw the wand work. He's lucky it's a ferret and not something with—"
"ALASTOR."
McGonagall's wand whipped through the air and the ferret resumed Theodore, somewhat dishevelled, somewhat dust-coated, and considerably less composed than he had been previously. He gathered himself off the flagstones with the wounded dignity of a boy who had been very publicly humiliated in a manner that his father's recent acquittal did not cover.
"Hexing students is not a permitted disciplinary technique," McGonagall said, in the particular tone she reserved for occasions when she was speaking for the formal record. "We use detentions. We use Heads of House. We do not, under any circumstances, animate them and bounce them off the floor."
"Thought a sharp shock would make a lasting impression."
"It will make a lasting impression on his lawyers, Alastor."
Moody, having absorbed this with the philosophical resignation of a man who had heard worse, gathered Theodore by the collar with one hand. "Right, lad. Snape's office. I'll explain it to him myself."
He gave Harry one final glance as he passed. Harry kept his eyes on his stew.
Hermione, who had stopped two paces from the Hall's exit upon hearing the sequence of events behind her and had turned around to watch, returned to the table with the brisk composure of a girl who had decided that she would unpack her opinions about Moody's methods later, in private.
"I'm going to the library," she announced, gathering her books. "I want to start on the Trelawney essay. Twenty-four inches, Ronald."
"I know."
"For fun. Not because anything was assigned to me personally."
"Hermione, I know..."
She left.
Fred and George arrived approximately two minutes later, with Lee Jordan in tow. They had the bright-eyed air of three young men who had just emerged from a lesson that had exceeded all expectations, and they fell on the Gryffindor table with the manic joy of new converts.
"Did you hear—"
"—about the ferret, yes—"
"No, no, no," Fred said, "the ferret is a footnote. We had Defence this morning. Defence, Harry."
"He's—" George searched for a word, failed to find one of sufficient calibre, and settled. "Mental, Harry. He's properly mental. In the best possible way."
"He had us duelling—"
"—moving objects whilst duelling—"
"—against him, Harry, all of us at once—"
"And he won," Lee said, with reverence. "Obviously. But he taught whilst he was winning, which I've never had a teacher do."
"When do we have him?" Ron asked, with a flicker of genuine interest cutting through his still-considerable Lavender-related self-pity.
"Thursday," Fred said. "Brace yourself."
8th September 1994, Hogwarts, Defence Against the Dark Arts Classroom, 11:14 AM
Thursday came. The classroom was transformed: the desks had been arranged in a semicircle around an open central space, on a small table at the centre of which sat three glass jars, each containing a single large black spider.
Moody stood behind the table with his wooden leg planted and his magical eye doing its independent rotational work. He did not bother with introductions.
"This will be the only year I'll be teaching you," he said. "Old man wants me here, I'm here. After that, retirement. Properly, this time."
"That's the Defence post," Ron said, before he could stop himself. "It's cursed."
Moody looked at him. The magical eye fixed. "What's that, Weasley?"
"T-the Defence Against the Dark Arts position, sir. No one keeps it more than a year. Quirrell, Lockhart, Lupin—" Ron faltered, recognising mid-sentence the slightly dangerous water he had paddled into. "Just... observation, sir."
A long pause. Then Moody's scarred mouth pulled into something that was technically a smile.
"Constant vigilance," he said, "extends to job security. Noted, Weasley."
He picked up the first jar.
What followed Harry would remember for years.
The Imperius Curse came first, demonstrated on a spider that proceeded, in considerable embarrassment, to tap-dance, do a pirouette, and attempt three impressions of a Hogwarts professor before Moody released it. Several students laughed. Hermione, beside Harry, did not.
The Cruciatus came second.
The spider's screams were small but they were not the screams of an insect—they were the screams of something that had been suddenly given the capacity for suffering and was using it. Neville Longbottom, seated three desks to Harry's left, had gone the particular waxy white that meant a person was no longer entirely present in the room. Hermione's hand found Neville's elbow without looking. Ron's mouth had set into a hard line. Harry felt the back of his neck go cold.
Moody released the spell. The spider lay still, twitching. Moody set the jar down.
Then the third spell.
"The Killing Curse."
The spider was placed on the table. Moody's wand rose. "Avada Kedavra."
The green light filled the classroom.
It was the same green. The exact same green. The green that had—
Harry's mind began, instinctively, the spiral. The cottage. His mother's voice. The exact—
'Cogitation.'
The blue moon assembled itself behind Harry's eyes with the speed of years of practice. The spiral arrested. The green remained green and did not become anything else. Harry's breathing evened out within a second and a half. He registered, distantly, that his hands were gripping the edge of the desk hard enough to leave marks, and he relaxed them.
Beside him, Hermione was watching him. Her brown eyes held the precise concern that asked a question without phrasing it.
"I'm fine," Harry murmured.
"Are you?"
"Yes."
He was. Not entirely—but enough.
Moody, apparently oblivious or apparently not, had moved on to the law. "Use any of these three," he said, "on a fellow human being, and the punishment is one thing. Azkaban. Life. No appeal, no parole, no mitigation. They are called Unforgivable for that reason. The Wizengamot will not forgive them."
The bell rang at the end of an hour that had felt considerably longer than an hour.
The class filed out. Neville did not. He sat at his desk with his hands folded carefully in his lap and his eyes fixed on the surface of it. Hermione stayed. Ron stayed. Harry stayed.
"Longbottom."
Moody's voice had changed. It was lower, and the gravelly authority had been replaced by something Harry had not expected to hear from him: a careful, almost embarrassed gentleness.
"Yes, sir," Neville managed.
Moody crossed to his desk. He pulled, from a shelf, a thick leather-bound volume titled Magical Mediterranean Water Plants, and set it down in front of Neville.
"Borrow this. Bring it back when you've finished. Sprout tells me you're the best Herbologist in your year. Thought you might find it interesting."
Neville looked at the book. Looked at Moody. Looked at the book again. Something in his face that had been very tightly held began to unclench.
"Thank you, sir."
"Off you go."
In the corridor, Hermione's hand was on Neville's shoulder, Ron was carrying Neville's bag, and Harry was walking on Neville's other side, and none of them were saying very much.
...
Dinner that night was the first time in some weeks that the whole group sat together.
Harry, Ron, Hermione had taken seats at the Gryffindor table near the centre. Draco arrived from the Slytherin side with the unhurried ease of a boy who had stopped pretending years ago that he was bound by table conventions. Daphne came with him. Astoria came with Daphne.
Then Luna drifted in.
Harry had felt her before he saw her, like a kind of low-frequency awareness of where Luna was in any given building—and he turned and stood and, in a small movement that he had absolutely no plans to examine in detail later, intercepted Luna's path before Astoria could and brought her, with one warm hand at her elbow, to the seat directly beside his own.
Astoria's grey eyes found his. They held an entire small comedy.
Harry returned the look with what he hoped was perfect blandness. "Astoria. There's a seat between Draco and Hermione. Lovely view of the pudding."
"How thoughtful of you," Astoria said, settling into said seat with the regal grace of a queen accepting a slightly insulting estate.
Daphne snorted into her pumpkin juice. Hermione's mouth twitched. Ron grinned openly. Luna, perfectly content, leaned into Harry's shoulder with a small contented sigh and applied herself to her shepherd's pie.
The professors, Harry noticed when he glanced up, had observed this entire arrangement. Dumbledore at the staff table was watching them over his goblet with an expression Harry recognised as pleased without being demonstrative—the half-smile of a Headmaster who had quietly approved this kind of cross-table arrangement for years, McGonagall's mouth had a small approving softness at one corner and Professor Sprout had outright beamed.
The conversation went immediately to Theodore.
"He's not been expelled," Draco said, with the controlled disgust of a Slytherin who had been hoping for better. "Snape spoke with him. Snape does not expel his own. He gave Theodore detentions until the end of the month and called it adequately addressed."
"Father said he was lucky Moody didn't do worse," Daphne added quietly. "Mother was not pleased. The Notts have been—they're slipping. The ones who think like them are slipping."
"Slipping how?" Hermione asked.
"Numerically." Daphne stirred her tea. "Three years ago, Theodore had perhaps thirty per cent of Slytherin behind him. Now? Maybe fifteen. Draco's faction—" she nodded at her friend "—has grown every year. Most of the year-mates we'd consider civilised now sit with Draco. The pure-blood ideology is contracting in the House. Slowly. But measurably."
"Civilised meaning?" Hermione asked.
"Ambition without cruelty," Draco said simply. "Cunning without bigotry. Slytherin as Salazar would have originally meant it, before it became a recruiting house for prejudice. There are more of us every year. There are fewer of them."
Astoria nodded. "And of those who remain on Theodore's side—they are angry, mostly, because they are losing."
Ron, who had been working his way through what appeared to be his third helping of treacle tart, leaned across the table and changed the subject with the efficient grace of a boy who had had quite enough heaviness for one evening. "Harry. Mate. Help me with Trelawney's essay. Twenty-four inches. On someone else's coming month. I cannot do this."
"You can," Harry said.
"I cannot."
"Make it up."
"Harry, that is the moral foundation of the Divination subject and I cannot in good conscience—"
"Now he has ethics," Hermione said.
"I had ethics this morning, Hermione, I just had to put them aside for Trelawney."
Harry was laughing. He glanced past Ron's shoulder and caught Fred and George at the far end of the table—heads bent together, an entire cauldron of plotting between them, the precise concentration that Harry recognised as the early stages of an Age Line scheme. Hermione had noticed too.
"I give them three weeks," Hermione said quietly. "I expect Aging Potions, Confundus attempts, and possibly an attempt at counter-warding. None of which will work."
"Care to wager?" Ron said, immediately.
"Ron..."
The conversation moved to the Tournament. Ron was still openly mourning the absence of Quidditch. Draco was speculating about European schools they would see. Luna, beside Harry, her shoulder warm against his upper arm, said quietly, almost as if to herself—
"Not just European's Magical schools. The Headmaster knows. He simply hasn't said. He will say at the appropriate time, and not before."
"How do you know that?" Hermione asked.
"He was looking at the sky during dinner the way one looks when one is thinking about distances."
Hermione absorbed this with the expression of a girl who had spent years cataloguing Luna's observations and had stopped attempting to disprove them.
A flutter of wings interrupted them.
Hedwig descended onto the table beside Harry's plate, a folded parchment tied to her leg, her amber eyes carrying the particular pleased composure of an owl who had completed a long journey and was ready to be appreciated. Harry untied the letter. He recognised Sirius's handwriting at once.
He unfolded it.
Harry—
We're hearing things. Rumours from contacts in three countries that your scar's been hurting. Don't ask how. It's the sort of thing that travels.
Remus and I are coming home. To Britain. Properly. There's a place we can use, and we'll be settled by the end of the week. Don't worry about the legalities—Ethan's handling it. Bring your friends round at half-term if you can. We've gifts. A great many gifts. Some of them are from Remus and they're tasteful, and some of them are from me and they're not.
Write regulary. Watch everything.
See you soon.
Padfoot
Harry refolded the letter.
The table was watching him.
"Sirius," he said. "And Remus. They're coming home."
Hermione's eyes sparkle at seeing their most favorite DADA professor again. Ron was grinning. Luna's eyes were bright. Draco was murmuring something in Daphne's ear about useful adults. Astoria was eating her pudding with the air of someone who would politely ignore the family moment whilst still attending to it carefully.