15th July 1995, the kitchen of Number Twelve, Grimmauld Place, 7:20 PM
The kitchen of Number Twelve was a long, cavernous, stone-flagged room below stairs, and by evening it had been transformed — the great scrubbed table laid for a small army, copper pans throwing back the lamplight, the air thick with the smell of Molly Weasley's stew — into the warmest place in London by a comfortable margin.
It was very nearly the scene of a maiming.
"Coming through—"
A cauldron of stew, an iron flagon of butterbeer, and a heavy breadboard with its knife came swooping across the kitchen in convoy, steered by two wands held with considerably more confidence than care — and the knife, banking too hard around the flagon, slipped its board and came down point-first toward the table with a thunk that buried it half an inch deep in the wood, precisely between Sirius's spread fingers.
The kitchen froze.
Sirius looked down at the knife, still quivering, bisecting the space where his hand lay flat. "Huh," he said, with genuine academic interest. "Close."
"FRED! GEORGE!"
Molly descended upon her sons like weather. Ever since the pair of them had come of age they had Apparated to breakfast, levitated everything not nailed down, and generally treated their licensed magic as a toy on Christmas morning — and the dressing-down they received now, conducted at full volume with Arthur's quieter disappointment underneath it like a bass line, peeled the varnish Sirius had so lovingly restored. The twins weathered it with bowed heads and synchronised contrition, and were observed, thirty seconds after its conclusion, levitating the salt.
Dinner, after that, was wonderful.
The long table filled shoulder to shoulder — Weasleys and Order folk and Esthers and guests, Osian installed along the wall by the hearth like draught-proofing, Jasper darting between the candles — and the talk ran loud, overlapping and determinedly, deliberately light. Tonks turned her nose into a pig's snout, a beak, and a small trombone. Sirius and Lupin traded stories of their school years, each correcting the other's libel. Ron gave the table his account of Italy, chiefly the food, in heroic detail. Luna explained to a fascinated Kingsley her father's theory regarding the Minister's hat. Not one word was spoken of Voldemort, or the war, or whatever the Order had been about that day — by an unspoken treaty that even the children honoured — and the kitchen rang with the kind of noise that grim old houses wait centuries to hear.
It was near the end of the meal that the fire turned green.
Percy came through the Floo first, brushing soot from a Ministry robe that had plainly been worn since dawn, his glasses askew, his face grey with exhaustion; Bill followed a moment behind, long-haired, fang-earringed and grinning. The table hailed them both with a roar; Molly was up at once, steering her third son into a chair and pressing food in front of him and patting at him with the fierce fussing of a mother who could see precisely how tired he was and intended to feed it out of him.
"Thanks, Mum — really, I'm fine — it's only that the Ministry's been—" Percy stopped.
His eyes had travelled down the table: Ron, Ginny, the twins, Hermione, Draco, Harry, Luna — eight young faces all looking back with rapt, shameless attention.
Percy smiled, closed the sentence like a drawer, and picked up his fork. "—been keeping me from Mum's cooking," he finished smoothly. "Criminal. Pass the bread, would you, Bill."
The children exchanged a look of collective, eloquent disgust.
The plates emptied; the pudding went the way of all pudding; and at last Sirius leaned back in his chair, stretched, and made a grand shooing gesture down the table.
"Right — children, upstairs and play. It's the adults' time."
"Why can't we join?"
It was Harry, and he was on his feet before he had decided to be. The kitchen quieted.
"The Order. Why can't we at least listen?" His jaw was set. "I was there, Sirius. In the graveyard. It's my blood in his veins. I'm the reason he's back at all — if anyone's earned the right to—"
"Harry." Sirius's voice came gentle, and it stopped him. The man came round the table and set both hands on Harry's shoulders, and his grey eyes held none of the dismissal Harry had braced against — only something older and sadder and kind. "He was always coming back. By your blood or another's, this year or next — a thing like him does not stay dead for want of one boy's cooperation. That weight is not yours, and I'll not watch you carry it." Then the grin slid back up his face, irrepressible. "Besides — you may possibly have underestimated this collection of old warhorses. We did this once before, you know. Some of us are even quite good at it."
"But—" Hermione had risen too, and Ron beside her, voices overlapping — they weren't babies, they'd fought a basilisk, they'd been through —
"Enough." Lupin did not raise his voice; he never needed to. He looked down the table at the three of them with a seriousness that had understanding folded all the way through it. "Everything you've said is true, and changes nothing. What is discussed in this kitchen tonight can be taken from an unguarded mind — and there are those on the other side who take. Until you can shield what you carry, what you do not know cannot be stolen from you, and what cannot be stolen cannot be used against the people you love. That is not a punishment. That is a wall, and you are on the protected side of it."
A beat, and his tired face softened. "Let us keep you there a little longer."
Harry looked, last, to Ethan.
His father met his eyes down the length of the table and smiled — gently, with everything unspoken in it — and reached over as Harry passed and ruffled his hair the way he had when Harry was nine.
Harry went. Reluctantly, mutinously — but he went, and the children's feet thundered up the stairs, and the kitchen door swung shut behind them, and sealed.
Bill opened the business of the evening, and the business was not encouraging.
The goblins would not commit. Gringotts' neutrality was iron at the best of times, and the Bagman affair had soured what little warmth existed — a Ministry department head defaulting on goblin gold and fleeing the country had confirmed every dark suspicion the Nation held about wizarding good faith. "They won't join Voldemort," Bill said. "They remember him. But they won't join us either. They'll sit on their gold and watch us bleed, and honestly — given Bagman — I can't entirely blame them."
Mundungus Fletcher, from the shadowed end of the table, contributed a rambling account of soundings taken through his "business contacts" — the polite term, all present understood, for the criminal underworld of three counties — and the soundings came to very little. Fear was general; commitment was nil.
Then Percy set down his fork, took off his glasses, rubbed the bridge of his nose, and delivered the Ministry.
"Two factions," he said. "Broadly. Everything inside the building now bends around them."
The first he called the Conciliatory Side, and its leader required no naming.
Fudge's position, dressed in its own best robes, ran thus: this time was not last time. Last time Voldemort had been Britain's private nightmare; this time the whole world had seen the footage, the whole world had posted bounties, hit-wizards from four continents were hunting him in the field. The Tournament — "the quite successful Tournament," Percy quoted, in a voice dry enough to strike matches on — had knitted the nations together as never before. Through diplomacy, through communication, the International Confederation of Wizards could be marshalled into a single unified global response, and the combined might of the I.C.W. would address the crisis cleanly, internationally, properly. And presiding over this triumph of statecraft, naturally, its architect: Cornelius Fudge, the Minister who united the world. The hero. The greatest politician of the age.
Sirius made a noise of pure spat contempt.
Lupin, Ethan, and Sam wore three versions of the same expression — the grimace of men acknowledging a kernel of sense baked into a loaf of vanity. International coordination was the right instinct; the world had changed since the first war. But anyone who had ever sat in a room with the I.C.W. knew that "easily" was doing more work in Fudge's sentence than the rest of the words combined.
"And the second faction," Percy went on, "calls itself nothing, but the corridors call them the Belligerent Side. Madam Amelia Bones leads it."
Sam smiled — the small particular smile of a man hearing a friend's name spoken well. "Of course she does."
The Bones position was the mirror's other face: waiting on the I.C.W. to catch Voldemort was waiting for rain in a drought. Prepare for war now — shift the Ministry onto a martial footing, train, fortify, recruit; and show the Confederation not warm communiqués but the cold evidence of exactly how terrible Voldemort was, and drive its whole weight toward ending him at speed. Because every month he was given to gather his scattered and his faithful, the war at its end grew vaster — and once his army stood assembled, the devastation would beggar anything either war had shown them.
"Hear, hear," growled Moody, and Kingsley nodded slow and deep, and Sirius thumped the table.
"It's the right spine," Arthur said carefully, "but martial footing means martial powers, and martial powers in a frightened Ministry—"
"—end up pointed at the innocent within five years," Ethan finished quietly. "Ask any history of any war. Amelia is right about the clock and right about the enemy. The extremity wants watching, that's all. Tools forged for emergencies outlive their emergencies."
Molly murmured agreement; Percy pinched the bridge of his nose again.
"In any case — right or wrong, the two of them, between them have the building at a standstill. Every appointment, every budget line, every memo is a proxy battle now. The Ministry is tense, divided, and slow precisely when it can least afford to be." Ethan and Sam exchanged a glance and a grim nod; they had both read the same weather.
The recruiting picture was no better. He and his father had sounded out the like-minded, Percy reported, and found sympathy everywhere and commitment almost nowhere — for the simple brutal reason that Fudge sacked dissenters. To stand with Amelia Bones was survivable; she had rank, voice, and a department, and could shield her own. But the Order — the Order fought, openly, in the way the first war remembered; and however quietly it had reconvened, Fudge was not entirely a fool.
Association with it, discovered, was a career's end at best. "So we start them with Amelia," Arthur summarised. "Her camp first. The Order after, for those who prove out. It's slower. It's what there is."
"And meanwhile," Percy added, with the weariness of a man required to read every edition, "the Minister prosecutes his other war." The campaign against Dumbledore — the Prophet's drip of mockery and insinuation, the doddering old alarmist, unfit, past it — all of it aimed at one end: whatever Dumbledore was building, Fudge had decided it was a threat to his chair, and the chair came first.
The scoff went round the table like a wave.
"Which brings us," Sirius said, and the room's temperature changed, "to what Dumbledore actually is watching." He leaned forward into the lamplight. "Voldemort's keeping his head down — recruiting, yes, rebuilding, yes. But there's a thing he wants. A thing he's moving for, quietly, underneath all of it." A pause. "A weapon, Dumbledore calls it. Something he didn't have last time."
Silence held the kitchen for a moment, every face grave.
"And on that note." Sirius straightened, and looked across the table — at Ethan, and at Sam. "You've sat the meeting now. You've heard what we know and what we are. Dumbledore asked me to put it to you both, plainly, tonight: join us. The Order of the Phoenix wants you."
Lupin spoke into the pause that followed, quiet and honest. "For what it's worth — join or don't. I know what you'll both be doing either way. The same thing you'd be doing inside it: standing between this war and the innocent. The roll of members is a formality next to that." It was said to both of them, but his eyes, Sirius noticed, rested on Ethan; Remus Lupin had heard Dumbledore's request faithfully, and made it, and trusted the Seer's own compass a half-step more.
Ethan and Sam looked at one another. The glance lasted a second and carried a whole negotiation; Sam's eyebrow said I'm in if you're in, and said it to no one's surprise at all.
Ethan turned back to the table.
"Then yes," he said simply. "We join." He let the smiles begin — and raised one finger. "With this said first, and said once, so it need never be said again. I am joining the Order to fight Voldemort and to protect the innocent. I am not joining to be Albus Dumbledore's subordinate. Where the Order acts, and I find the action sound, you will have everything I am. Where I find it unsound, I will say so, plainly, and I will not lend my hand to it — and where my own judgement tells me a thing must be done, I will do it. That is the shape of what I'm offering." The amber eyes moved round the table, steady. "But hear the other half too: I will never betray this Order. Not its people, not its secrets, not its purpose. On my name and my craft."
"Seconded," said Sam, comfortably. "All of it. He's the conscience; I'm the paperwork."
Sirius's grin spread slow and wide. "I'll relay it to Dumbledore — word for word, mind, I intend to enjoy his face." He raised his flagon. "The Order of the Phoenix — two stronger tonight."
The kitchen rose to it, and the butterbeer went round, and the welcome was loud and long and real.
Upstairs, behind a closed door, the second council of the evening was already in session.
CRACK. Fred and George folded into existence in the middle of the rug — to groans, and a thrown cushion — and the eight of them settled into the lamplight to pool what they had: Voldemort lying low and building; and a snippet Ginny had caught from her father's end of a Floo call — the Ministry's overseas counterparts, even out into Asia, reporting sightings of Mordred Slythra, moving through the shady ends of foreign wizarding districts, doing business with local dark wizards.
"Recruiting," Draco said flatly. "Abroad. Where our Aurors can't reach and the bounties matter less."
And — Sirius's slip at the door, caught by four separate pairs of young ears — a weapon. Something Voldemort sought. Something he hadn't had last time.
It was there, in the weighing silence after that word, that Harry told them.
All of it. The graveyard, start to finish — for the first time, to all of them together: the Cup, kill the spare, Cedric forced home, the bone and the blood and the flesh, the thing rising from the cauldron, the circle of masks, the Cruciatus, the Imperius and the breaking of it, the duel he could not win and stood up for anyway.
The room changed around the telling.
Hermione ended it with her arms around his neck and her face wet. Ron had gone pale, then a slow furious red — at himself, at his own summer in Italy, at every hour he'd spent on pasta while this had been sitting in his best friend's chest. The twins, for once, had no second voice between them. Draco's face was grim as slate. Ginny's eyes were brimming. And Luna — Luna did not cry. Luna's hand had simply found Harry's somewhere in the first minute and closed around it, tighter and tighter as he spoke, until her knuckles were white; and Harry held it tight right back, and drew on it like a fire in winter, and did not let go even after the words ran out.
"But here's the thing," he said at last, steadying. "The wands. When his curse met mine — they locked. Gold light, the echoes—"
"Priori Incantatem," Hermione and Draco said together.
"Priori in-what?" said Ron.
Two pairs of eyes rolled in unison, and the explanation was delivered in efficient relay — brother wands, shared cores, the reverse-spell effect, one wand forcing the other to disgorge its history — while Ron nodded along with the expression of a man receiving directions in a foreign city.
"So his wand can't beat mine," Harry finished. "Not properly. They cancel. Which means — if I were him, I'd want a different wand. A stronger one. What if that's the weapon? Some wand of legend—"
"Ooh." Ron brightened. "Maybe he's after his idol's. Salazar Slytherin's wand — bet the old snake kept a spare in the Chamber—"
Draco's knuckle came down on the top of Ron's head with a pok. "Some respect for the Founders, Weasley, honestly — and no, but also—" he frowned, turning serious mid-rebuke, "—we can't rule the shape of it down to a wand. Think bigger. Artefacts. We know he's gone for artefacts before — the Philosopher's Stone was barely three years ago—"
"All right, sorry I insulted your snaky forefather—"
"That is not what I— right. Come here. We're doing gentlemen's deportment, lesson one—"
The ensuing hand-lock, brief wrestling match, and Ron's muffled surrender "fine — Mister Slytherin — gerroff—" broke the room's gravity at exactly the moment it needed breaking, and the laughter came warm.
The twins, riding it, tabled their own news: the shop plans were booming — Harry's gold, Atid Stella's machinery, and Percy's uncanny way with a licensing form had carried them further in one summer than they'd dreamt — premises still to be found, but the catalogue swelling nightly; and their mother had achieved the lofty diplomatic position of not outright protesting, which by Weasley arithmetic was a blessing with full honours. The room congratulated them at volume.
"Oh — and Mum's cancelled the Prophet," Ginny added. "Out of disgust. Wouldn't have it in the house."
"A pity," Hermione said, with surgical sweetness. "She'll miss the most entertaining, ridiculous fiction being published in Britain. I hear the Harry Potter character is quite the villain this season."
And then, by common unspoken consent, the heavy things were set down by the door like muddy boots. The chessboard came out, and Ron's pieces began their evening's bullying; Exploding Snap claimed the twins and Ginny and a corner of singed carpet; Luna folded herself against Harry's shoulder with a novel; and Hermione and Ron, united in a rare alliance, pinned Draco between them and force-fed him snacks over his Healerly objections — "Sugar content — the hour — you absolute barbarians—" — on the grounds, firmly stated, that physician should heal himself last.
That was how Molly found them, an hour on: flushed, scattered, laughing, the chessboard mid-massacre and the carpet gently smoking.
"Bed, the lot of you."
And — eventually, amid groans and one last detonation of Snap cards — bed it was.