25th June 1995, the Hospital Wing, 9:14 AM
The morning light came soft and gold through the tall arched windows of the Hospital Wing, falling in warm bars across the white linen of Harry's bed and the cluster of friends gathered around it. Ethan had gone back to Atid Stella before dawn — there was a war's worth of work waiting for him, and a company to set on a footing for it — but he had left, on the bedside table, a folded note in his careful hand and a flask of Verrona's lemon-and-honey tea, still faintly warm.
Harry felt, this morning, very nearly himself.
The Cruciatus had left its marks — a deep ache in the joints, a tremor that came and went in his hands, a tiredness that ran beneath the bone — but his mind had cleared overnight in a way he had not dared hope for. The horror of the graveyard was still there, would be there for a long time, he understood that. But it had receded, just enough, behind the ordinary warmth of a sunlit room and the people in it.
It helped considerably that Ron was attempting to give him a massage.
"You've got to work the knots out, mate," Ron declared, with the grave authority of a man who had no idea what he was doing, and proceeded to deliver a series of firm punches to the area of Harry's shoulder-blades. "Mum does this for Dad after de-gnoming. Loosens it right up."
"Ron," Harry said, wincing and grinning at once, "that is — ow — that is not a massage. That is assault."
"It's technique."
"It's punching."
"Same thing, really."
It was, by any professional measure, dreadful. But there was something in the ridiculous earnestness of it — Ron's tongue stuck out in concentration, his red ears, the sheer determined kindness of a best friend who did not know what else to do for a boy who had been tortured the night before and so was punching him very gently in the back — that did more for Harry than any potion Madam Pomfrey had administered. Each daft thump knocked another small fragment of the night loose and away.
Around the bed, the others kept up their own warmth. Luna sat on the edge of the mattress with Jasper cupped in her hands, the little Snidget preening contentedly. Hermione stood with Viktor — who was leaning on a cane, his splinted leg stretched out, recovering with the slow grace of a Quidditch player who had broken bones before — and the two of them were keeping up a steady, scandalised commentary on Ron's medical technique.
"You are going to bruise him, Ronald."
"I vould not let zat man near my back," Viktor agreed gravely.
"It's helping!"
Draco and Astoria stood a little apart, watching the whole performance with the detached interest of two people observing a peculiar species. The bedside table beside them was heaped with treats — Honeydukes, Bulgarian honey-cakes, a tower of Mrs Weasley's fudge — all of which Draco had personally inspected and pronounced, in his healer-apprentice voice, "appropriate for a recovering patient, in moderation, Weasley, which means not all at once."
The doors swung open.
A small, breathless first-year boy came hurrying in, clutching a brown-paper parcel to his chest. Harry recognised him vaguely — Nigel, a Gryffindor, one of the small wide-eyed ones.
Ron was up off the bed at once. "Ah — there he is. Cheers, Nigel." He took the parcel.
Harry watched this with a slowly narrowing gaze. "Ron. Why is a first-year delivering you parcels."
"Pig's not available," Ron said, with elaborate unconcern. "Owl. My owl. He's, ah — Fred and George have got him. For the — the thing. The business thing they've been at." He shot Harry a look that was just slightly too sheepish, just slightly too apologetic, the look of a man who has done something and would prefer not to be asked about it yet—
And then Harry caught sight of Nigel's face.
The boy was staring at Harry with an expression Harry knew intimately, having spent four years being subjected to it by Colin and Dennis Creevey: the shining, reverent, fit-to-burst gaze of a true and committed fanboy. Harry hunched back against his pillows by reflex.
Around the bed, his friends fought, and largely failed, to suppress their grins.
Ron coughed, and adopted his most serious and businesslike tone. "Harry. Allow me to introduce Nigel. Nigel is — well, Nigel's a great admirer of yours. Enormous. And Nigel very kindly agreed to fetch me this parcel from the Owlery, in exchange for which I may have promised him—"
"Ron."
"—your autograph."
Nigel was already leaning in, half-reverent, half-terrified, extending a small trembling hand. Harry, with a wry smile he could not quite suppress, shook it. The boy looked as though he might faint with joy. Then, from somewhere about his person, he produced a notebook and a Muggle ballpoint pen and held them out with both hands like a holy offering.
Harry signed.
Nigel read the signature, clutched the notebook to his chest, beamed at the entire room, and skipped out of the Hospital Wing on air.
A silence fell.
Ron became aware, slowly, of a cold weight settling on the back of his neck. He turned.
Harry was looking at him. The wry smile was still there, but it had acquired a distinctly chilly quality, and his eyes had narrowed to green slits.
"You know, Ron," Harry said pleasantly, "perhaps you'd like an autograph too. Seeing as you're trading my name about the castle now. I could do you a whole book."
"Now, Harry—"
Harry sat up.
"The parcel!" Ron said quickly, brandishing it like a shield. "Look — look at the parcel, you'll love this, honestly—"
And he tore it open.
Photographs spilled out across the white coverlet.
Dozens of them — glossy, moving, magically rendered in the rich colour of the Atid Stella Billywig-Cameras — and the entire bedside went quiet as everyone leaned in.
There was Harry at the First Task, small against the vast bronze bulk of the Hungarian Horntail, his wand raised, the dragon's great head lowered toward him — and, in the moving frame, the moment the beast bowed. There was Harry underwater in the Second Task, caught mid-stroke as he dragged an exhausted Robert Thornwood toward the bronze box, both of them ghostly in the green lake-light. There was Harry in the maze, the silver wave of his incorporeal Patronus rolling out from his wand to scatter the Boggart-Dementor, his face lit white by his own magic.
And there were the Yule Ball photographs.
Harry went very still over one of them.
It showed two figures alone on the dance-floor, turning slowly under a fall of enchanted starlight — him and Luna, just the two of them in the frame, the gold and silver of the Hall blurred to a sparkling haze behind them. In the moving image he watched himself watch Luna, and watched Luna watch him, around and around, and there was on both their faces an expression that made his chest do something complicated.
Luna leaned in over his shoulder to look. Her hair brushed his cheek.
Harry made a heroic and entirely unsuccessful attempt to cover both his blush and his idiot smile.
"Oh, I like that one, Hah-ree," Luna said serenely.
"Mm," said Harry, who had lost the power of speech.
Around the bed the others had found their own. Hermione and Viktor were bent together over a photograph of their own Yule Ball dance — Viktor's careful formal precision, Hermione laughing in her pink silk — and over the action-shots of Viktor in the Tasks, which Viktor examined with quiet professional satisfaction. Draco and Astoria studied a frame of the two of them turning together on the dance-floor with the composed elegance of two people raised to it. Ron had found a photograph of himself and Lavender mid-shuffle, Lavender beaming, his own ears scarlet, and was — there was no other word for it — kissing it.
There were more, and more. Their friends crowded into the viewing-stand, cheering — Sirius and Lupin among them, Sirius caught mid-bellow. Harry being carried back from the lake slung between Ron and Draco, all three of them grinning with exhausted relief.
"Ron," Hermione said, looking up, genuinely impressed, "how on earth did you get all of these?"
She regretted the question almost at once.
Ron drew himself up to his full height, and his nose tilted toward the ceiling, and he began.
"Well. The moment I clocked those Billywig-Cameras Atid Stella had put up everywhere, I thought to myself, Ronald, my lad, there's an opportunity here. So after the Tasks I went straight to Miss Rogeiros and asked, very politely, for the pictures. And then I went to the Creevey brothers for the rest. And—" he paused, savouring it, "—by using a certain name that opens certain doors in this castle, I got the whole lot. Every single one. Without spending a single Knut."
His nose was now very nearly vertical.
Luna applauded. "That was very clever, Ronald."
"Thank you, Luna. At least someone appreciates—"
His self-congratulation was cut short by Madam Pomfrey, who had materialised at his elbow and delivered a smart cuff to the back of his head that was in no way gentle.
"Volume, Mr Weasley. This is a Hospital Wing."
Hermione and Astoria offered sarcastic praise. Harry and Draco exchanged a long-suffering side-eye. But beneath all of it — and Ron knew it, which was rather the problem — every one of them was quietly, genuinely impressed. It was exactly the sort of resourcefulness none of them would have managed and all of them were glad of.
They thanked him, each in their own way, and sorted through the pile, taking the private ones — the dances, the couples, the small intimate frames — and leaving the group photographs for Ron, who declared, with great solemnity, that he would keep them safe for their children to see one day.
A number of the room's couples went faintly pink.
It was at that precise moment that Luna moved.
She set Jasper down on the pillow, slid off the bed with the unhurried lightness of a cat, crossed to the nearest window — and, in one swift practised motion, clapped an empty jam-jar down over something on the sill and screwed the lid tight.
She turned around holding the jar up to the light.
Inside it, a fat green beetle with curious markings around its head buzzed furiously against the glass.
Hermione's eyes lit up like struck flint.
"Got her," she breathed.
"Got who?" Ron asked.
Hermione took the jar from Luna and held it up, turning it, her gaze fixed on the beetle with an expression of such cold and contemplative satisfaction that a small chill went round the entire room.
"Rita Skeeter," she said, "is an unregistered Animagus." She tilted the jar. The beetle scrabbled. "She turns into a beetle. This beetle. It's how she's been getting every private conversation in this castle all year — sitting on a windowsill, hiding in someone's hair, perched on a statue, and no one the wiser. An unregistered Animagus. Five years in Azkaban, under the Codes Act of 1925." Her smile widened, and it was not a comforting smile at all. "And I am going to consider, very carefully, exactly what I'd like to do about that."
The room went cold.
Luna giggled. Viktor put a steadying hand on Hermione's shoulder — "Hermin-ee-nee. Breathe" — with the careful air of a man defusing something.
The pieces fell into place for Harry all at once. The bug on the statue at the Yule Ball, the night Hagrid had told Madame Maxime his secret. The beetle Viktor had picked out of Hermione's hair after the Second Task. The bug on the windowsill in Divination, the day his scar had burned. And — he sat up sharply — Theodore Nott, that afternoon weeks ago, sitting under a tree, talking, holding something cupped in his hand. They had known. Nott and Parkinson had known what she was, and that was how they had given her their interviews with no one ever seeing a reporter.
"This," Hermione said, capping the jar firmly and tucking it into her bag, "goes straight to the Headmaster. Today. Miss Skeeter will not be troubling any of us again. And it is, I think—" her chin came up, "—a rather good first step toward cleaning out the Daily Prophet."
Over the days that followed, while Harry rested, the Hospital Wing saw a steady traffic of visitors.
Fleur, Robert, and Adaeze came together to congratulate him — properly — on winning the Tournament alongside Cedric, in case the events of the night had rather overshadowed the fact that he had. Robert, irrepressible, opened his mouth to ask about the Dark Lord and was immediately and firmly steered away by his now-official girlfriend, the tall dark-haired Selene Goshawk, under the pointed glares of Fleur and Adaeze. He went, grinning sheepishly, with a backward wave.
Ginny, Neville, and the twins came by — and with them, another small mystery resolved itself. The person Fred and George had been blackmailing, it emerged, was Ludo Bagman. The man had paid out their World Cup winnings in Leprechaun gold — which vanished by morning — and had refused even to return their original stake. It was why he had fled them through every corridor of the castle. Bagman, the twins explained with grim relish, had a gambling problem of long standing and a great debt to the goblins, who had followed him to Hogwarts to collect. He had bet everything on Harry winning the Tournament outright — which was why he had kept trying to help — and when Harry and Cedric tied for first, Bagman had bolted, and was now on the run.
"So we reckon," George said, sliding a heavy pouch onto the bed, "you should have this. The Triwizard winnings. You earned it. Twice over, after—" he didn't finish.
"After last night," Fred said quietly.
Harry looked at the pouch. He understood exactly what it was: the only thing two boys who could not undo a graveyard could think to do.
He pushed it back across the coverlet.
"Take it," he said. "For the shop. All of it. Build the thing." He managed a tired grin. "Just promise me the Atid Stella partnership goes through the roof. I want to be able to say I funded the start of it."
The twins stared at him. Then, for once in their lives, they were entirely without words — and accepted, with a rough gratitude that said more than any joke could have.
The real Alastor Moody, recovering in the next bed, met Harry properly before his discharge. It was a short conversation, and a strange one — Harry had spent a year being taught and guarded and unsettled by a face that had never once belonged to the man in front of him. But beneath the grizzled scars and the gruff, clipped manner, Harry found at last the genuine article: a hard, watchful, deeply upright old soldier, and beneath that, unexpectedly, a warmth.
"Shame," Moody growled, eye whirring, as he prepared to leave. "Would've liked to've actually taught you, Potter. Properly. You've got the makings." A pause. "Constant vigilance," he added, almost gently, and limped out.
The day before Harry was to be discharged, Cedric came, with his mother and father. No one spoke of the graveyard — no one needed to. But Amos Diggory, all his bluster gone, took Harry's hand in both of his with tears standing in his eyes, and Mrs Diggory pressed a kiss to his forehead, and they thanked him — thank you, thank you for our boy — until Harry, who did not know in the least how to receive it, went quite still and red and could only manage, I'm just glad he's all right. And he was. Looking at Cedric, alive and whole and standing between his parents, Harry found he was glad past all words. Cedric too, gave Harry the longest hug he ever had.
On the morning of his release, it was Hagrid who came with Harry's school robes folded over one enormous arm.
They walked up together through the castle, the great half-giant ambling at Harry's slow pace, and Hagrid talked, in his low rumbling way, about what was coming. He did not soften it. Voldemort was back; there'd be a war; and the only thing left to do was stand and fight it, same as last time. He'd a job from Dumbledore — secret, he couldn't say what, only that it was important, and that Madame Maxime might be coming along.
"An' they found Crouch," Hagrid added, more quietly. "Senior. What was left of him."
Harry thought of the man as he had seen him last, raving and ruined at the edge of the Forest — and of everything Ethan had pieced together since: the Imperiused son, the dead wife, the broken Bertha, the long terrible arithmetic of a man who had thrown everything, even his own child, onto the altar of his career and his pride. And had lost it all anyway.
"Poor old sod," Harry said, and meant it.
"Aye," said Hagrid. "Poor old sod."
They reached the portrait of the Fat Lady. Hagrid clapped a hand on Harry's shoulder — gently, for Hagrid — said his goodbyes, and turned back down the corridor.
Harry gave the password. The portrait swung open.
And the Gryffindor common room erupted.
The whole House was packed inside, and the instant Harry stepped through the hole a roar went up that nearly knocked him backwards — a banner reading WELCOME BACK HARRY — TRIWIZARD CHAMPION strung crookedly across the mantel, small firework-charms fizzing gold and scarlet up by the rafters, and the entire room surging toward him.
Whatever awkwardness Harry had braced himself for evaporated in the same instant that Ron and the twins seized him, hoisted him bodily into the air, and bore him aloft around the common room on a tide of cheering, Fred and George leading the chant, Lavender and Hermione laughing, and the firework-sparks raining gently down over all of it.
For the first time since a cold Cup had pulled him into the dark, Harry Potter threw back his head and laughed without a single shadow in it.