1st July 1995, 221B Baker Street, 7:48 AM
The morning came gently to Baker Street.
Pale London light slid through the tall sash windows of the flat above the unassuming black door, catching the brass of the instruments on the mantel and the worn leather of the armchairs, and warming the long-familiar clutter of a home where two people and several creatures had built a life. In the kitchen, the air was thick with the good smell of frying — bacon, black pudding, eggs spitting in butter — and Ethan Esther moved through it with his hands in easy motion, three pans tending themselves under his hand while the kettle hummed toward the boil.
Harry shuffled in still in his pyjamas, hair damp from washing, a small golden Snidget perched contentedly atop his head and a very large, very grumpy Re'em following at his heels. Osian announced his opinion of the early hour with a low snorting bellow and shouldered the doorframe as he came.
"Mornin', Dad" Harry mumbled.
"Morning, kiddo." Ethan flicked his hand and the table laid itself — two places, two full English breakfasts settling onto the cloth with a soft clatter of crockery, the teapot drifting down between them. "Sit. Before it goes cold."
Harry sat — then paused, taking him in properly. Ethan was already in his three-piece suit, waistcoat buttoned, his hat resting on the table's edge ready to hand.
"You're dressed early," Harry said. "Going somewhere?"
Ethan's smile was tender, and gave nothing away. "An appointment. St Mungo's. I'll be back by noon."
Harry didn't press for the details. But something stirred at the back of his mind — Neville, weeks ago, asking him in that hesitant way about memory-borrowing, about mind magic, the question Harry had promised to bring to Ethan and somehow never had.
He looked at his father a moment longer, and said nothing, and reached instead for the two tins he kept in the dresser. Jasper got his on the table; Osian's great bowl went down by the hearth, and the Re'em fell on it with a contented huff.
They ate.
Halfway through, Harry set down his fork and asked, with a sheepishness he could not quite hide, "So. This summer. The training—"
"You're too eager." Ethan didn't even look up from his eggs. "There's time, Harry. There is always going to be time for that. What there is not always time for—" now he did look up, and the amber eyes were kind, "—is rest. Your mind first. The rest follows."
Harry opened his mouth to argue. The words caught in his throat, because Ethan was right, and they both knew it. The nightmares had not stopped — the cold ground, the green light, the high cruel laughter — though the blue-moon stillness of his Cogitation drew them off a little more each night. He closed his mouth and nodded, and Ethan let it lie, which was its own kind of mercy.
"Oh—" Harry remembered, and spread his hand. The morning's papers came swooping in from the front mat: the Daily Prophet, the Quibbler, a few others, settling beside his plate.
"You read them," Ethan said. "I've had my hands full."
So Harry read aloud.
The front pages carried the same enormous headline — VOLDEMORT RETURNS — and the same still-frame from the graveyard footage, the bone-white face caught beneath the print. But the tone could not have been more different. The Prophet had clearly been got at: the story was hedged and softened and stuffed with reassurance, the Ministry's competence trumpeted in every other line, the threat trimmed down to something almost manageable. The Quibbler, by contrast, simply told it true — plainly, with a thread of its founder's odd good humour running through, equal parts warning and encouragement, urging every reader to keep their wits and their courage both.
Ethan and Harry shared a look over the Prophet, and the same dry sneer; and then a warmer chuckle over the Quibbler, and Harry thought, not for the first time, how glad he was that a particular grey-eyed girl came by her strangeness honestly.
Ethan finished his tea, rose, and settled his hat. "Be good. Mind Verrona if she calls. I'll see you at noon."
"Bye, Dad." Harry was already pulling a battered detective novel from the shelf, setting it hovering in the air before him to read hands-free as he finished his breakfast.
Ethan shook his head fondly at the sight, said nothing, and went.
1st July 1995, St Mungo's Hospital, the fourth floor
The corridor outside the long-term ward was hushed and high-ceilinged, hung with the portraits of distinguished Healers of ages past — grave men and women in old-fashioned lime-green robes, watching the living pass beneath them.
Ethan found Sam there, deep in quiet conversation with an elderly woman in a Healer's robes of fine cut, the two of them standing before one of the larger paintings. He knew at once who she must be. To attempt what they meant to attempt today, one needed the personal sanction of the Dean of St Mungo's herself — and here she was, come to see it done.
She noticed his gaze before Sam did. Sam turned, broke into a grin, and pulled Ethan into a brief rough embrace; then Ethan took the Dean's offered hand and bowed over it.
The three of them walked slowly toward the ward.
"Your work, Mr Esther," the Dean said, "is the boldest piece of mind-Healing I have reviewed in forty years. Bold to the point of recklessness, some of my colleagues would say." Her old eyes glinted. "I told them recklessness and genius are very often the same coin, viewed from different sides."
"You're generous," Ethan said. "And you anticipated my caution, I think, before I could voice it. I cannot promise a full restoration. The damage was very deep, and very old. At best — they may come back as the figures in your paintings have come back. Present. Themselves, in part. But not entirely as they were."
The Dean smiled, a small rueful thing. "Perhaps. And perhaps today surprises us. We live in a world of magic, Mr Esther... I have learned never to wager too confidently against it. And if it does not—" she touched his sleeve lightly, "—then know that without what you and Samantheus have given, this family would have had nothing at all. That is not nothing. That is a very great deal."
They spoke, as they walked, of the other shadow over everything — Voldemort, returned. The Dean's view was bleak; she had Healed the wounded of the first war and did not relish Healing the wounded of a second. Sam, walking with his hands clasped behind him, was firmly, stubbornly hopeful — we beat him once, we are wiser now, and we will not be caught sleeping — and the Dean only sighed and said she hoped he was right.
And then they were at the door, and waiting beside it were a tense, upright old woman in a hat topped with a stuffed vulture, and a thoroughly bewildered boy.
Augusta Longbottom's face, at the sight of the three of them, broke into open relief. Neville — who had plainly thought this just another ordinary visit to his parents, and could not for the life of him work out who all these people were or what they were waiting for — straightened and stammered his greetings.
The four adults looked at one another. Then Augusta let out a long breath, and turned to her grandson, and made her voice steady by main force.
She told him. What she, Sam, Mr Esther and the Dean had been doing, all these long months — the work begun in secret, the attempt to bring his mother and father back from the place the Cruciatus had sent them.
Neville's eyes went huge. "Does — does that mean—"
"We tried our best, Neville... " Ethan said gently, before the boy could finish and break his own heart on the hope. "But you should know, going in... They may not be the... parents you would have known, had none of this happened. They may be — like... the figures in the paintings out here. There. Themselves. But changed."
The light dimmed in Neville's face. Augusta's eyes had already filled.
But Neville drew himself up, and when he spoke his voice did not shake. "Thank you. All of you. Whatever — whatever they are now. I only ever wanted them back. Even a piece of them. Even a little." He swallowed. "It's more than I ever thought I'd have."
And Ethan opened the door.
The ward beyond was bright and clean and quiet, sunlight pooling on the pale floor.
Frank and Alice Longbottom were standing by the window — dressed, properly dressed, in good formal robes — looking at a small album of photographs spread between them.
At the sound of the door they both went still.
Frank turned first.
He looked at his son, and he smiled — and though there was a stiffness in it, a careful effortful quality, as of a man wearing an expression he was still relearning the shape of, the warmth beneath it was unmistakably, achingly familiar.
"Neville," Frank said. His voice was gentle, exactly as Neville had carried it in the deepest part of his memory all these years — and yet not quite, threaded faintly with something unsure, something that did not quite know its ground.
Then Alice turned, and crossed the floor toward him.
And Neville looked into his mother's eyes and found them living — not the empty, unfocused, drifting eyes he had spent his whole childhood visiting, but hers, truly hers, alight and searching and fixed on his face. When she said his name — "Neville" — it was nearly, so nearly, the way she had said it when he was very small.
Every happiest moment Neville had never quite been allowed to have rose up in him at once, and he threw logic, caution and every careful word the adults had said aside, because these were his parents, and with tears streaming and the most wretched, joyful, ugly smile on his face he crashed into the both of them and was gathered up between them.
"Yes," he managed, half-laughing, half-sobbing. "Yes, it's me—"
And then the four who stood watching beheld something none of them would ever forget.
It began as the softest pressure on the air — Neville's magic, rising. Not the wild, scattering accidental magic of a frightened child, the kind that shatters teacups and inflates aunts.
This was something else entirely: a mind-magic, vast and gentle, pouring off the boy in a warm tide of pure feeling — happiness, and memory, and love unguarded by any wall.
It spread through the whole ward and beyond. The light brightened, but did not dazzle. The very air grew warm. The potted plants along the sills unfurled and bloomed and gave off a low melodic humming, and a resonance of something good — heart's-ease, gladness, the warmth of being known — touched against every mind in the room.
It rippled, too, against Ethan's Occlumency. By long reflex he nearly closed it out. Then, on instinct, he let it through —
— and was astonished. The resonance did not intrude or unsettle. It cleared. It settled the surface of his mind like a hand smoothing water, made his thoughts brighter and calmer, soothed some old ache he had stopped noticing he carried. It mended.
And then, under the four adults' wondering eyes, Frank and Alice Longbottom — holding their son between them — began to weep.
They could not hold it back. They sobbed aloud, openly, and clutched Neville tighter, and Ethan, without needing to look into either mind, knew.
Their minds were flooding — with memories of their own, their own, surging back from wherever the long dark had kept them. They had come back. Not all the way, perhaps; but the greater part of them, the part that mattered most, the part that had a son. It had come back.
Truly, the most magical thing he had seen in a very long time.
The Dean made a small broken sound, and pressed a hand to her mouth, and then turned to Ethan with bright eyes. "That, Mr Esther," she said unsteadily, "deserves a medal. And a painting in my corridor, beside the rest."
Ethan came back to himself, and chuckled softly. "It deserves nothing of the sort — and certainly not on my account. This was Neville's doing, not mine; I only opened a door." He inclined his head, his tone going light. "And in any case, Dean, I'm dreadfully allergic to fame. Comes out in hives. Best keep my face off your wall."
The Dean only hummed, and did not argue.
But she had already decided otherwise — that Ethan Esther's contribution would go down in the records of her hospital, and that his likeness would hang in that corridor among the great Healers, for every soul who walked it to see; and that Samantheus Faramundo, who had given as much in the quiet, would have his due as well.
It was a thing Ethan himself would not learn for many years yet.
For now there was only the bright ward, and the blooming plants, and the soft impossible humming on the air, and a boy held tight in the arms of a mother and father who, against all the cold arithmetic of the world, had found their way home.