15th July 1995, Number Twelve, Grimmauld Place, 12:30 PM
The hall's first riot of welcome had barely subsided before Ethan was drawn into the slower, warmer business of greeting the adults — and it was the twins who got to him first, flanking him with the synchronised precision of two young men who had been rehearsing.
"Mr Esther—"
"—a word, if we may—"
"—or several thousand words—"
"—regarding premises, fixtures, fittings, stock levels, and the precise legal definition of 'reasonable quantities of explosives'—"
Ethan laughed and held up both hands in surrender. The joke shop — the joke shop, the dream that Harry's winnings had seeded and an Atid Stella partnership had watered — was to open after this coming year, and the logistics, he assured them, were further along than they feared: Verrona had the premises survey in hand, and Percy, of all people, had quietly steered the licensing paperwork through three separate Ministry departments without a single form returned.
"Percy?" said Fred and George together, in tones of theological crisis.
"Percy," Ethan confirmed gravely. "Your brother files a flawless application. It is a form of love. Learn to read it."
And then Molly was there, and Molly would not be deflected.
She took both of Ethan's hands in hers and thanked him — properly, fully, her eyes bright — and the words came tumbling: for the twins, whom he had taken seriously when the whole world had told them to be sensible; for Percy, who had been guided back from a cold path no one else had even seen him walking; for Arthur — Arthur, whose tinkering shed of mad Muggle-touched contraptions had somehow become a genuine research line at Atid Stella, whose ideal of magical transport that borrowed from Muggle ingenuity instead of sneering at it was being studied and built by salaried professionals — for letting her husband, even at this age, live a little of his dream.
"You've given this family so much, Ethan, and I don't — I can never quite—"
"Molly." Ethan's voice was kind, and a little wry. "You have it backwards. I'm the one in profit." He smiled. "Your family's liveliness. Its generosity. The sheer noise of it. I had... rather a quiet stretch of years, once. A grey one. There was a time I'd have told you there was no particular point to any of it."
He said it lightly. But for a half-second something moved behind the amber eyes — an old grief, the shape of a life that had nearly stopped meaning anything the day the love of it died — there and gone, like a fish under dark water.
Molly Weasley had raised seven children, and missed nothing.
She said not a word about it. She simply stepped in and hugged him — brief, warm, fierce, the hug of a mother who has decided a thing needs hugging — and Ethan, after one surprised beat, accepted it with the faint helpless smile of a man being mothered against all rank and reason.
Across the hall, Sirius was conducting a tour of approximately four square yards.
"—the panelling's original, mind, I only stripped the varnish — that sconce is goblin bronze, took me a week to get the tarnish off — and the runner, you'll notice, picks out the grey in the stair—"
The house was, Harry had to admit, genuinely impressive. He had gathered from stray remarks that Grimmauld Place had been a dark, festering mausoleum a year ago; what Sirius had made of it kept the old bones — the cool tones, the high ceilings, the formal gravity of an ancient townhouse — but cleaned and brightened and chosen, classic and rather fancy, cold in palette but warm in light.
It looked like what it was: a grim inheritance that someone had decided, out of sheer spite, to make beautiful.
"He has been waiting for you two," Lupin murmured to Harry and Luna, in the tone of a man betraying state secrets. "Every guest so far has been ambushed exactly like this. He whinged for three days that you hadn't seen the cornicing yet. Three days. I aged."
"Slander," said Sirius, without turning round. "Moony helped choose the runner."
"I deny everything."
Harry, grinning, glanced about the hall. "When did you all get here, anyway?" he asked Hermione, as she and Ron and Draco drifted over. "I thought you were in Italy—" to Ron "—and you were in Norway..."
The accounting was quickly made. Hermione had come at Sirius's own invitation, collected from her house by the Weasleys, whose acquaintance her parents already trusted; the Weasleys themselves had decanted here almost straight off the boat from Italy; and Draco had arrived with Sam, who had likewise had a letter under Sirius's seal.
"Funny sort of guest list, though, isn't it," Ron said, scratching his head. "I mean, it's not exactly a birthday do. Half the Auror office is in the kitchen, and it's not like Sirius invited us all over to admire his cornicing—"
Three glares hit him simultaneously — Hermione's, Draco's, and Ginny's, arriving from a full room away with sniper precision — all carrying the identical message: not in front of the adults; children's council later. Ron's mouth performed a smart about-turn. "—which is lovely cornicing, Sirius, really top-shelf cornicing."
"Thank you, Ron."
Meanwhile, at the foot of the stairs, a crisis was developing. Jasper had been discovered. The little golden Snidget was being passed reverently from cupped hand to cupped hand under a barrage of cooing — Ginny utterly lost to the world — while Osian, sprawled across half the hallway, had drawn an audience of his own: the twins were circling the great Re'em with the bright-eyed speculative look of two entrepreneurs assessing either a marketing opportunity or a dare, and were, by Harry's expert assessment, approximately one prod away from learning why one does not prod a Re'em.
"All right —" Harry waded in and extracted Jasper; Luna collected Osian with a touch and a murmur, the beast rising past Fred and George with a parting humph of profound disdain — "tour's over, he bites, the bird's shy, nothing to see."
"He'd be brilliant on a poster—"
"No."
The children were dispatched upstairs to show the newcomers their rooms, which became, in the way of these things, a tour of the whole house — landings of curtained portraits, a tapestry room Draco went oddly quiet in, bedrooms smelling of beeswax and fresh linen. Harry and Luna were given rooms on the second floor; bags went down; Jasper installed himself on a bedpost; Osian poured himself onto the cool boards in a patch of sun and was asleep between one breath and the next.
And then the five of them — Harry, Luna, Ron, Hermione, Draco — closed the door, and held the children's council.
"Right," Harry said. "What do you actually know?"
What they knew, pooled, came to this: the company downstairs called itself the Order of the Phoenix — an elite group, founded in the first war, whose members fought Voldemort and his Death Eaters directly when the Ministry would not or could not. Everyone in the kitchen was a member — everyone, they noted, except Ethan and Sam.
Draco had dug further than the rest, partly through old archives and partly out of Uncle Sam: the Order had been formidable in the first war, had bled terribly for it, and was now reconvened — but operating quietly, almost underground.
"Because of Fudge," Harry said.
"Because of Fudge," Hermione confirmed grimly. Harry and Luna had hardly needed telling; they had watched the man's performance on the lawn. "He can't deny the return outright — the footage saw to that — so instead he's minimising. Have you read the Prophet lately? Every article. 'Isolated incidents.' 'No cause for alarm.' 'The Ministry urges calm.' He's an ostrich, he's buried his head so far in the sand he can see Australia, and anyone who pulls it out is an alarmist or a traitor—"
"To be fair," Ron said, "at least he's not pretending Vol— You-Know-Who isn't back at all. That's the bar now, mind. That's how low it is. 'Hasn't denied a man rose from the dead in front of a hundred witnesses.' Give the Minister a medal."
It got the bitter laugh it deserved. And then, in the small quiet after it, Harry's gaze drifted to Draco — who had been listening from the window seat with his arms folded and his face composed in that particular careful way.
"Draco. How've you been? Really."
Draco looked at him a moment. Then he gave a low, self-deprecating chuckle, and a long sigh went out of him, and some of the composure with it.
"The first day home," he said, "the Manor was cold. Not the temperature. You know what I mean." He studied the floor. "My parents argue now. Behind silencing charms, mostly, but charms slip. I couldn't hear most of it. I heard enough. Something about... going down the same road again. And once—" his voice flattened very carefully, "—I heard my mother say: I won't let Draco follow your mistake."
Nobody breathed.
"The Ministry sent people, one morning. To 'chat' with Father. Very courteous. Nothing came of it — nothing ever comes of it, that's rather the point of being my father." Draco's mouth twisted. "But I'm not a child. I know what it means when the owls come at strange hours and the Floo's warded and Father is away on business with no business named. He's back at it. He's back in it."
He looked up at last. "Norway was for my Healer's certification. It was also Mother's idea. She wanted me... at a distance. From him."
The silence held a moment.
Then Luna crossed the room and sat beside him, and patted his arm with great gentleness. Hermione took the window seat's other side. Ron, lacking any subtler instrument, gripped Draco's shoulder and gave it a rough shake.
"Well," Ron said stoutly, "your mum sounds like she's got the right idea, and you've got us, so. There it is."
"Eloquent," Draco said, but the word wobbled, and his eyes were suspiciously bright, and nobody mentioned it.
Harry let the moment settle, then pressed gently on. "So... the meeting today. Any idea what it's about? Why they wanted Dad and Uncle Sam specifically?"
Headshakes all round. They'd been kept out of everything substantive — too young, was the ruling from on high — and had spent their days here on summer homework and on touring the house in a manner calculated to feed Sirius's pretentiousness, "which," Ron added, "is a full-time job, the man fishes for compliments like Dad fishes for plugs—"
CRACK.
Two identical forms materialised out of empty air in the middle of the room, and five wands were halfway drawn before the forms resolved into Fred and George, beaming.
"Passed," they announced in unison.
"Apparition tests," George clarified, buffing his nails on his shirt. "This morning. Both of us. First attempt."
"Distinction in style," said Fred.
"That is not a real category," said Hermione.
"It is now."
Ginny appeared in the doorway behind them, unimpressed. "If you two are quite finished — you do realise it's pointless now anyway. The Extendable Ears, the loose floorboard, all of it. Mum found the lot. And they've put an Imperturbable Charm on the kitchen door besides. The meetings are sealed."
But what eavesdropping and family osmosis had already yielded, the Weasley children now shared.
Severus Snape was a member of the Order — Harry's face did a brief complicated thing at the name, an old frown surfacing and being deliberately set down again — and so, now, were Bill and Charlie. Bill had transferred home from Egypt to be near the family and the fight, taking a desk at Gringotts in London; and in what Ginny reported with a very straight face, he had also been giving English lessons to a former Triwizard champion — one Fleur Delacour — who had taken a position at Gringotts to improve her English.
"Lessons," said Fred.
"Extensive lessons," said George.
"Charlie's staying on the continent," Ginny went on over them. "Dumbledore's task. Recruiting — foreign wizards, sympathetic ones, to the cause."
"Speaking of monstrous language-learning," Ron said, with the bright doomed cheer of a man lighting his own fuse, "Fleur should take notes from Hermione. Bulgarian in one summer. Mind you, she's got motivation — the poor owl, have you seen it? Staggering under the post. Twice a day, some days. 'Herm-own-ninny,'" — the impression was, infuriatingly, rather good — "when's the family introduction, then? Shall I hire a hall—"
Hermione had gone scarlet — rage and mortification in roughly equal parts — and was halfway off the window seat with a karate-chop already chambered when Ginny caught her round the middle and whispered something in her ear.
Hermione stopped.
Hermione sat back down.
Hermione's eyes curved into a smile of such silken, patient menace that the temperature of the room dropped by degrees.
"You know, Ron," she said sweetly, "you're right. It is hard on the owls. I feel terribly sorry for Pigwidgeon, for instance. All those letters to Lavender — twice a day, some days. And of course Lavender and I write to each other as well." A pause, exquisitely timed. "She tells me the most interesting things about her dear Ron-Ron."
Ron's face went from freckled to fire-engine in the space of a heartbeat.
"She — what — what things—"
"Mm," said Hermione.
"Hermione. What things."
"Mm," said Hermione.
The room was a held explosion — Fred biting his own fist, Draco's composure cracking visibly at the seams, Luna watching with serene academic interest — and Ron broke entirely, flinging himself into a posture of theatrical supplication, hands clasped, eyes brimming with enormous fraudulent tears.
"Hermione. Light of Gryffindor. Brightest witch of the age. I spoke hastily. I have chocolate frogs — premium ones, hidden, you can have the lot—"
The room went up. Even Draco was laughing outright now, the shadow of the Manor briefly nowhere in his face at all, and that — Harry thought, watching his friends howl — was probably worth more than any comfort the rest of them had managed.
When order resumed, the last of the family news was tabled: Percy came by when the Ministry could spare him, which was seldom. Since the announcement of the return, the inside of the Ministry had grown far more complicated than its public face — doubt and worry and fear threading every corridor, factions forming, nobody sure who believed what. Percy and their father had been quietly tasked — by the Order, through Arthur — with steadying the Ministry from within: holding the sensible centre together, marking out the like-minded for recruitment, and watching for hidden threats. Percy's new promotion served the work perfectly. He was now Junior Assistant to Cornelius Fudge himself.
"Right under the ostrich's wing," said Ron, with grim family pride.
And the Prophet, Hermione finished bitterly, had picked up where Rita Skeeter left off — with the Ministry's hand now openly on the tiller. The campaign wrote itself in every edition: Dumbledore, doddering and alarmist; and Harry Potter, a disturbed, attention-seeking liar.
Harry and Luna received this without so much as a blink. They had read the editions. After Fudge's performance on the lawn, neither of them had expected anything else.
"Sticks and stones," Harry said. "We've got the footage. The truth keeps."
The call to dinner came up the stairs in Molly's unanswerable voice, and the children thundered down.
In the hallway they met Tonks properly at last — "Wotcher! Tonks. Just Tonks, the other one's a hanging offence" — and Harry and Luna liked her immediately and completely: the bubble-gum hair that cycled through three colours during the introductions alone, the cheerful clumsy candour, the screwed-up face that turned her nose into a duck's bill to make Ginny shriek with laughter.
It was the laughing, perhaps, that did it. Tonks took a step back, gesturing expansively in the middle of an anecdote, and her heel found the troll's-leg umbrella stand.
The crash was tremendous.
And the hallway answered.
The moth-eaten velvet curtains halfway down the hall burst apart of their own accord, and behind them a life-sized portrait of an old woman in a black cap woke screaming — screaming, at a volume that stood every hair on end, a torrent of shrieked abuse that scorched the air: filth! half-breeds! blood-traitors befouling the house of my fathers! begone, scum, mutants, FREAKS—
The children stood rooted. Luna's eyebrows had risen to her beret.
"Don't just stand there — the curtains!" Lupin and Tonks were already wrestling the velvet; Harry and Ron leapt to help, hauling against what felt less like cloth than a living thing fighting back, the painted woman's eyes rolling, her yellowed skin stretched in fury—
And then Sirius was there, seizing a curtain in each fist.
"Shut up," he bellowed at the portrait, "you horrible old hag — SHUT UP!"
"YOU," the portrait shrieked, redoubling, her eyes finding him with terrible precision. "Blood traitor! Abomination! Shame of my flesh! You DARE return — you DARE fill my house with this — this—"
"It's MY house now, Mother! I'll fill it with dancing Hippogriffs if it pleases me!"
They roared at each other across the hallway, son and painted mother, a battle plainly fought a hundred times and won by no one — and yet, Harry thought, hauling on his curtain, there was something in it, under it. The portrait's fury never once, in all its venom, wished Sirius gone the way it wished the others gone. Shame of my flesh — but my flesh, still, always; the rage of a woman whose love had only ever known how to come out as fury. And Sirius shouted back with a force that was its own kind of tether; one does not fight that hard, that long, with something one feels nothing for.
The curtains slammed shut at last. Silence rang.
Sirius stood a moment with his hands still pressed flat against the velvet, breathing. Then he turned to Harry and Luna with a crooked, exhausted grin.
"My mother," he said. "Walburga Black. Charming woman. The permanent sticking charm on the frame is, I assure you, entirely in character."
He told them, then, in a few quiet sentences as the others drifted kitchenward — the short version of a long story. This was the ancestral seat of the House of Black, his by inheritance on his mother's death, the last Black standing being, by the universe's particular sense of humour, the one who had run away from it at sixteen. His eyes went, briefly, to a point on the tapestry-room landing above — "My brother's room's up there. Regulus. He'd have hated what I've done with the runner" — and for a moment the grin went somewhere else entirely, somewhere years deep.
Then Sirius laughed — shook the whole of it off him like a dog shaking off rain — and threw an arm around Harry's shoulders and turned him bodily toward the kitchen stairs, from which rose lamplight, and the clatter of a great table being laid, and Molly's voice marshalling, and the steam and smell of very good food in very great quantity.
"Come on," said the master of the house. "The dead can keep. Dinner can't."