15th July 1995, 221B Baker Street, 11:40 AM
The starlight-dust of Osian's apparition had barely settled on the landing before Ethan was issuing instructions with the brisk economy of a man whose morning had changed shape on him.
"Proper clothes, both of you — you can't go visiting in training kit. Pack for a few days. Necessities only; we shan't be gone long." He consulted his pocket watch, snapped it shut. "Downstairs in thirty minutes."
Harry and Luna exchanged one look — a few days? visiting whom? — and bolted for their rooms.
Luna had the guest room on the second floor, as she had on every stay at Baker Street these past two years; she and Harry were not so young any more that anyone would dream of letting them share, a fact that both of them accepted with scrupulous outward maturity and a certain amount of inward, unspoken regret. Harry's own room was up at the top of the house — the broad, slope-ceilinged attic with its skylight and its shelves and its general comfortable chaos of a boy's accumulated life.
He dug out his trusty leather satchel — enchanted years ago by Ethan, fitting roughly a wardrobe and a small library into something that sat lightly on one shoulder — and began feeding it: spare clothes, his wash things, three mystery novels (one Whodunit at Wand-point, two battered Muggle Christies), parchment, his holly wand in its forearm sheath.
'A few days,' he thought, folding a shirt with half his mind. 'Sirius's seal. So Sirius will be there. But Dad's face didn't say friendly visit. Dad's face said business.' He paused over the satchel. 'And the kind of business Sirius writes to Dad about, these days, only really means one thing...'
He shook the thought off, stripped off his sweat-stiff training shirt, and turned to the wardrobe.
He had just decided on the crimson jacket — military-cut, one of Verrona's finds, over a white tee, with khaki trousers and the matching shoes — and had got precisely as far as holding it when his door swung open without ceremony.
"Hah-ree, are you done? Teacher says—"
Luna stopped in the doorway.
She was, Harry registered in the first half-second, absolutely lovely — changed already, a baby-blue beret sitting just-so on her dirty-blonde hair, a baby-blue pleated skirt, an oversized cardigan in pale pink slipping off one shoulder over a simple tee, the blue-moon pendant at her neck and the mirror-lotus bracelet at her wrist catching the light, the whole of her so effortlessly, particularly Luna that for a moment he simply stood there, jacket in hand, mesmerised, falling into the grey of her eyes—
—and in the second half-second he registered that he was not wearing a shirt.
"Luna—!" Harry spun on the spot with the speed equal to that of a Seeker and the grace of a felled troll, clutching the jacket to his chest, face flooding scarlet to the ears. "I'll be — I'm nearly — go down first! Take Jasper and Osian with you — I'll be down in a moment—!"
"All right," said Luna, with perfect, devastating nonchalance.
She crossed the room unhurriedly, collected Jasper's cage from the shelf, waved a hand at Osian — who was sprawled flat on his side near his enormous kennel-basket in a patch of sun, and who heaved himself up with the long-suffering groan of a furred hillside being asked to relocate — and drifted out. The door clicked shut.
Harry let out a breath that emptied him to his boots.
He stood there a moment in the quiet. Then, slowly, he turned and considered himself in the wardrobe mirror — the shoulders that had broadened this past year, the lines of muscle the training had carved, the height that had come on him so fast that Ethan had twice lengthened his trousers by charm — and replayed, against his will, the perfect, devastating nonchalance.
'She didn't react,' he thought. 'At all. Not even a blink.'
A small blue cloud of entirely unreasonable gloom settled over Harry Potter, and he got dressed under it.
On the landing below, Luna Lovegood was holding Jasper's cage considerably tighter than the transport of one small Snidget required.
Jasper had noticed. He was peering up at her through the bars with his head cocked at a diagnostic angle. Osian had noticed too, and was pacing beside her with the careful tread of a creature in the presence of something that might detonate.
Luna's ears were the colour of ripe tomatoes.
The image would not leave. It had printed itself on the inside of her eyelids with a thoroughness that no amount of blinking improved: Harry, shirtless in the attic light, and the frankly unreasonable architecture of him — the flat six-fold plane of his stomach, the cut lines running down from his hips, the shoulders and arms of someone off the cover of one of those magazines Lavender hid inside her Charms textbook — and when had he got so tall? She came up to his chin now. His chin. When they had met she could look him level in the eyes, and now—
The red of her ears was spreading inexorably across her cheeks, and she had the distinct impression that steam had begun to rise, very gently, from the top of her head.
'The blue moon,' Luna told herself firmly, deploying her Cogitation with the desperation of a witch dousing a kitchen fire. 'The still water. The calm, hazy light. We used to share a bed, for goodness' sake, when we were small. It is the same Harry. It is exactly the same Harry—'
It was not remotely the same Harry, and the still water knew it.
A door opened above. Ethan came down the stairs in his summer suit — pale linen, waistcoat, his hat already on — a compact travelling trunk floating behind him and Hedwig's cage in one hand, the snowy owl within regarding the world with her usual magnificent disdain.
He took one look at his disciple — the tomato ears, the death-grip on the birdcage, the faint shimmer of furious Cogitation about her — and his face performed the small heroic feat of registering nothing whatsoever.
"I'll... take those," was all he said, lifting Jasper's cage gently from her white-knuckled hands and beckoning Osian to his side. "Go and fetch your trunk down, little owl."
"Yes—" Luna stammered — stammered, a thing she did perhaps twice a year — and bolted for her room with most un-Luna-like haste.
Ethan watched her go, and permitted himself one small, soundless chuckle, and said not a word about it then or ever.
The Knight Bus came to them with its customary tact — that is to say, it materialised out of empty air with a BANG that rattled every window on Baker Street and stood there, violently purple and triple-decked and leaning slightly, as though daring the laws of physics to make something of it.
Jasper, Osian, and Hedwig travelled within the charmed spaces of Ethan's trunk — a Re'em on the lower deck being, as Ethan observed, "a conversation we needn't have with the conductor" — and the three of them boarded and were promptly hurled into armchairs as the bus detonated forward.
Harry had never ridden it before. He spent the first thirty seconds with his fingers buried in the upholstery and his stomach two streets behind him, and the next ten minutes utterly delighted.
"It runs everywhere," Luna told him happily, entirely restored to herself and swaying with the bus's lunatic cornering like a sailor born to it. "Anywhere on land — you only have to throw out your wand hand. Daddy and I took it the length of Scotland once, hunting a Crumple-Horned Snorkack sighting. The beds upstairs slide about terribly at night, it's wonderful. And the conductor before this one could pull his nose quite off — for tips—"
The bus screamed sideways through a gap between two lorries that a cat would have declined.
"Brilliant," Harry wheezed, meaning it.
When his internal organs had renegotiated their positions, he leaned across the aisle to Ethan. "Dad — where exactly are we going? What's at this address?"
Ethan glanced up from the window. "Number Twelve, Grimmauld Place." A pause that was entirely deliberate. "The ancestral home of the House of Black."
Harry blinked. "Sirius's family house?"
"The very one." Ethan's amber eyes had a glint in them now, the particular glint of a man enjoying the withholding of information. "There are quite a few surprises waiting for you there, I'd say... Both of you."
And not one further word could the two of them prise out of him for the rest of the journey, which naturally meant they spent the whole of it in a fever of speculation — Luna proposing, with a straight face, everything from a dragon in the cellar to a wedding, while Harry tried to read his father's profile and got precisely nowhere, as years of trying had taught him he would.
The Knight Bus banged itself away into nothing and left them on a long, shabby London square.
It was a street of tired terraced houses — peeling paint, unwashed windows, rubbish bagged at the kerbs — and it was, Harry noticed at once, oddly deserted for a summer midday: no cars passing, no children, not so much as a cat. The hot air sat still and watchful over the square, and the grimy windows seemed to look back.
Ethan let the creatures out of the trunk — Hedwig ghosting up at once to a rooftop, Jasper to Harry's shoulder, Osian shaking himself out to his full furred enormity with a satisfied humph that no Muggle, mercifully, was present to witness. Then he walked them to the railing between Number Eleven and Number Thirteen, glanced once up and down the empty street, and tapped his wand against the air.
Number Twelve arrived.
It did not appear so much as insist — shouldering its way out from between its neighbours, brick by sliding brick, windows and railings and a battered black door with a silver knocker shaped like a twisted serpent unfolding into the gap as Numbers Eleven and Thirteen budged apart without their occupants noticing a thing. Within moments a tall, grim, soot-dark townhouse stood where no house had been, looking as though it had every right.
Harry stared. Luna's eyes had gone wide and delighted.
"Fidelius work," Ethan murmured. "In with you, quickly."
The black door swung inward onto a long dim hallway — gas lamps, a troll's-leg umbrella stand, portraits muffled under curtains — and Harry had time to register precisely that much before the hallway erupted.
"HARRY!"
They came from everywhere — out of the kitchen stairs, down the main staircase, through a side door — and Harry was engulfed.
Molly Weasley reached him first and crushed him into a hug that reset several vertebrae; Arthur was pumping his hand; Fred and George descended upon him from both flanks at once: "Our investor!" — "Our benefactor!" — "Have you considered a controlling interest—"; Ginny waved over the scrum; Ron came wading through his own family roaring "Mate!"; and Hermione threw her arms round his neck the instant a gap appeared, already talking at full speed about how much there was to tell him.
And planted at the foot of the staircase, in his best robes, with one hand on the banister and his chin tilted at a lordly angle, stood Sirius Black — visibly performing the part of master-of-the-house, every inch the gracious aristocrat receiving guests at the family seat.
"Welcome," he intoned grandly, "to the Most Ancient and Noble House of Black—"
"Oh, give over," said a voice like gravel, and the real Alastor Moody clumped out of the shadows by the kitchen door, magical eye whirring, flask in hand, looking sourly entertained.
The children burst out laughing.
Lupin, beside him, shook his head with the weary fondness of twenty-five years' practice; Tonks — her hair a celebratory bubble-gum pink — gave Harry a cheerful salute and promptly knocked over the umbrella stand; Kingsley Shacklebolt, deep and unhurried, righted it with a flick before the crash had finished echoing.
"Wotcher, Harry! Luna!"
And there at the hall's end, by the kitchen stairs, stood Sam — who exchanged with Ethan one of those compressed nods that carried a meeting's worth of content — and beside Sam, a little apart from the joyful riot, stood Draco Malfoy.
Harry saw him, and felt the noise of the hall recede a step.
Draco looked — worn. Not ill, exactly, and carrying himself with all the composure his upbringing had ever drilled into him; but there was a thinness to his face that Norway and Healer-training alone didn't account for, and a shadow bruised in under his eyes, and something held very carefully still in the way he stood.
Harry could guess why. The whole wizarding world had seen the footage from the graveyard by now — and the whole wizarding world included the Daily Prophet's readership, at least Lucius Malfoy's face hadn't been in that kneeling circle for every one of them to find but still...
Harry said none of it. He crossed the hall, and stuck out his hand, and gave Draco the brightest, most ordinary grin he owned.
"You look terrible," Harry said warmly. "Norway not feeding you?"
And Draco's careful stillness cracked — into something real, relief and gladness and the particular lightness of being greeted as exactly the same friend as before — and his pale face lit as he gripped Harry's hand hard.
"The food," Draco said, with feeling, "is fish. It is all, entirely, fish."
The hall roared with welcome around them — Molly already herding everyone kitchenward with promises of lunch, the twins interrogating Luna about Snorkack-hunting by Knight Bus, Osian attempting to fit himself through a doorway built for narrower centuries — and Number Twelve, Grimmauld Place, that grim old house of a grim old family, was for the moment the warmest address in London.