16th July 1995, Number Twelve, Grimmauld Place, 8:30 AM
Morning at Grimmauld Place was, if anything, louder than the night before.
The long kitchen filled and emptied by turns as the working folk bolted their breakfasts and scattered to their duties. Arthur, Percy, and Sam went together to the Ministry — three men with three very different burdens under the same grey building. Bill followed soon after, off to his Gringotts desk. One by one the Order members departed on errands no one named in front of the children.
Lupin lingered last over his tea, eyeing Ethan and Sam with a grimness that had nothing to do with either of them. "There is," he said heavily, "a fortnight of incident paperwork on my desk at Atid Stella. From the Tournament. With my name on the routing slip." He drained the cup. "If I am not at it by nine, Verrona sends a Howler. She has done it. To a grown man. In an open-plan office."
"She's very thorough," Ethan agreed, entirely without sympathy.
Lupin left muttering.
Ethan rose last of all, and came round to where Harry and Luna sat. "I'm away myself today. France." He settled his hat. "Welcoming someone home — a person who's served their time and is owed a friendly face at the gate." A small pause, and a glint Harry knew well. "You've met her, in fact. Twice. I'll leave you to chew on that."
Harry blinked. "Met her? Who—"
But Ethan only ruffled his hair, kissed the top of Luna's head, and was gone in a soft scatter of starlight before either of them could prise another word loose.
Harry spent a baffled minute running back through every face he could remember, got precisely nowhere, and gave it up.
And so the great house emptied to its bones, until there remained only the eight children, the steady distant noise of Molly arguing with Mundungus Fletcher in a far room over the contents of a suspiciously clinking sack — and their host, the funny uncle of the establishment, Sirius Black.
They had just begun, dutifully, to clear the breakfast things when Sirius stopped them with a raised hand.
"Don't. There's a creature for that — though I use the word creature generously." He tipped his head back and called, with the air of a man summoning weather he knew he'd regret: "Kreacher!"
There was a crack, and a thing appeared that Harry could only describe as a house-elf gone to seed: ancient, stooped, swathed in a filthy rag, skin hanging off him in folds, a snout-like nose and great bloodshot eyes, and a continuous muttered undertone of complaint that never once stopped for breath.
"—called by the blood-traitor, oh yes, calls Kreacher to wait on guests, on mudbloods and half-bloods in my poor mistress's house, what would she say, what would she say—" his eyes rolled toward Hermione, "—filthy little mudblood standing in the drawing room of the Noble House of Black, oh, the shame—"
Hermione did not so much as blink. A year under Ron's tutelage in the art of the cutting reply had armoured her thoroughly.
"It's a very clean drawing room," she said pleasantly. "You've let the dust pile up in the east passage, though. Two inches. I'd have thought a house-elf of the Noble House of Black would be ashamed of two inches of dust. But perhaps standards have slipped, with only one master left to impress."
Kreacher's mutter cut off as though slapped. He glared at her with a look of pure outrage — and, underneath it, something that might almost have been wounded professional pride.
"Kreacher," Sirius said, "go and clean the east passage, then, since it's such a scandal."
"—takes orders from the boy who broke his mother's heart," Kreacher informed the room conversationally, shuffling toward the door, "the blood-traitor who ran away to the Potters, oh, mistress wept, mistress wept, and now he lords it in her house—"
"My house."
"—filth and ruin, filth and ruin—" And the elf was gone.
Sirius watched the door swing, and gave a short laugh that did not entirely cover something else underneath it.
Harry, for his part, had been watching the elf closely — and frowned. There had been venom in every word, yes. But not, he thought, any true malice beneath it. It had the same shape as the portrait in the hall: a creature who had loved one thing, fiercely and badly, and had no language left for grief but spite. He glanced at Luna. She gave a small nod; she'd felt it too.
It was the tapestry that turned the morning serious.
Harry had wandered to the drawing-room wall, where an immense, faded hanging stretched nearly floor to ceiling — a great spreading tree worked in gold thread, names and dates branching across it, and here and there a small scorched hole where a name had been burned cleanly away.
"The family tree," Sirius said, coming to stand beside him. His voice had gone dry. "The Noble and Most Ancient House of Black. Four hundred years of inbred lunacy, and they were proud of it." His finger found a charred gap near the bottom. "That was me. My mother did the honours when I left. Burned me right off the cloth — sixteen years old."
"Sixteen?" Ron said. "Where'd you go?"
"To the Potters. James's mum and dad took me in like I was theirs — and as far as I'm concerned, they were." A pause, soft. "My uncle Alphard left me a pile of gold a few years on — he'd been burned off the tapestry too, so it ran in the family — and I got a place of my own. Drove my mother quite spectacularly up the wall."
His finger moved a little along the branch, and stopped on a name still intact: Regulus Arcturus Black.
"My brother," Sirius said quietly. "Younger. The good son. The one who did as he was told." He looked at it a long moment. "He became a Death Eater, you know. At eighteen. Marched off to serve Voldemort with the full blessing of the family — because the family agreed with him. Not all Blacks took the Mark. But all of them cheered the song: purify the blood, throw out the Muggle-borns, put the pure-bloods on top where they belonged." His mouth twisted. "Lovely people."
The children had gone quiet. Draco, Harry noticed, was very still, his eyes fixed on the name.
"What happened to him?" Hermione asked gently.
"Killed." Sirius said it flatly, but his eyes did not leave the tapestry. "We never had the whole of it. The story we pieced together was — he tried to get out. Tried to leave them. And you don't leave the Death Eaters; you only stop being useful to them." A breath. "Regulus stopped being useful at nineteen."
There was no hatred in it. The children all heard that — heard, under the dry deflecting voice, that Sirius Black had never once stopped loving the brother who had chosen the other side and died for changing his mind. And not one of them said it aloud, but Harry caught the same thought passing round the room like a current: whoever Regulus had been, a boy brave enough to turn his back on Voldemort from inside his own ranks was a boy they'd have liked to meet.
Sirius shook himself, and the grin came back up like a drawbridge. "Right. Enough graveyard talk in a house that's full of it. Molly!" he bellowed down the passage. "I'm taking the children out before they expire of my charming company — London awaits!"
Molly's permission, once secured and a list of conditions as long as Harry's arm, launched them into the best day of the summer so far.
Harry and Luna made splendid tour guides — they knew Muggle London the way only children raised half in it could — and Sirius, loose in the city for the first time as a free man, behaved like a large dark dog let off the lead. They walked the Embankment and rode the top deck of a bus purely for the novelty; they ate appalling quantities of street food; Sirius bought ice creams for nine and tried to pay with a Galleon, and the resulting negotiation with a Muggle vendor nearly required Harry's intervention. They laughed until their sides hurt. For one whole golden day, nobody mentioned the war at all.
They got back, footsore and sunburnt, just as Molly's voice came hunting down the street for them.
"There you are — in, all of you, hands washed, I need help — we've a great deal of dinner to get through tonight—"
It was, they saw at once, an enormous dinner in the making. Far more than the household.
"Professor Dumbledore's coming," Molly said, bustling between three simmering pots, "and he's bringing guests. A few friends, he said — and that we'd all be 'most pleasantly surprised.'" She frowned at a sauce. "Wouldn't say who. You know how he is. I've been guessing all afternoon."
So had Sirius, evidently; he wore the expression of a man who hated a secret kept by anyone but himself.
While they chopped and stirred, Sirius filled the kitchen with more of the Black family's tangled history — and here it took a turn that sat three of the children bolt upright.
"You're all related to me, half of you, if you go back far enough," he said cheerfully, beheading carrots. "The pure-blood families are one great snarled hedge. Draco — your mother's a Black. Narcissa. Which makes you and me cousins of some degree, young Malfoy, however much it pains us both."
Draco's knife stopped. "We're—" He looked, for a moment, as though he didn't know whether to be appalled or oddly pleased. "...cousins."
"Afraid so. And Tonks—" Sirius waved the knife "—her mother Andromeda's my cousin too. Andromeda married a Muggle-born, so naturally the family burned her off the cloth as well. We collect scorch marks, the decent Blacks." His face sobered a degree. "Andromeda had two sisters. Narcissa, your mother, Draco. And the eldest." He set the knife down. "Bellatrix. Bellatrix Lestrange. She's in Azkaban — has been thirteen years."
Harry went still. Lestrange. The name landed with a cold weight he recognised — the dark-haired woman from Dumbledore's Pensieve, screaming her devotion at the Wizengamot from the dock at the Lestranges' trial, the one who had helped torture the Longbottoms past the end of themselves.
And across the table, Draco had gone pale and oddly distant — because the name had rung something in him, some deep half-buried memory from when he was very small indeed, a tall dark woman laughing somewhere in the Manor, a feeling more than a picture, vague and cold. He said nothing of it. But his knuckles had whitened on the carrot, and Harry, who missed little, marked it and let it lie.
"Cheerful lot, my relations," Sirius said, lighter, recovering them all. "Which reminds me why I'm even in this mausoleum. The Order doesn't use Grimmauld for the décor, Merlin knows. My charming father laid protections on this house decades ago — proper old paranoid pure-blood wards — and Dumbledore's stacked his own on top. Safest address in London, near enough. So here I am, lord of the ancestral dump, putting up with my mother's portrait for the cause." He sighed theatrically. "The things I do."
By evening the Order had filtered back — most of them; some of the unfamiliar faces from the first night were absent, and Mundungus had slithered off somewhere, and Ethan had not yet returned from France.
Percy and Lupin came in within minutes of each other, both grey with the day, and both stopped dead at the sight of the laden table.
"That," said Percy faintly, "is a great deal of food."
Tonks was already circling it, eyes shining; and across from her Ron was waging visible war with his own salivary glands, and the two of them wore — Harry noted with delight — exactly the same expression.
"Both of you, away from it until everyone's seated," Molly snapped, swatting Tonks's reaching hand and then, even-handedly, her son's.
The doorbell rang.
Molly hurried up the hall; the table half-rose, craning. There was the murmur of greeting — and then Albus Dumbledore stepped through into the kitchen doorway, half-moon spectacles catching the lamplight, nodding and smiling round at them all, exchanging a particular grave glance with Sam.
And behind him, Molly's bright welcoming face simply — stopped.
She stood frozen in the doorway, one hand rising to her mouth. Arthur, coming up behind her to see what was wrong, began to ask — and then he saw too, and the question died into a stammer. Around the table, one by one, people were getting slowly to their feet, staring past Dumbledore at the hall.
Dumbledore, with a gentle hand, drew Molly and Arthur aside, and cleared the view.
Four people stood in the doorway of Number Twelve, Grimmauld Place.
Neville Longbottom, beaming wider than Harry had ever seen him, a great wrapped gift held in both arms. Augusta behind him, vulture hat and all, her stern face working as she pressed a hand to her lips. And in front of them both —
Frank and Alice Longbottom.
Dressed, upright, present — smiling round at the room a little awkwardly at first, the careful effortful smiles of people relearning the shape of a crowd — until their eyes began to find faces they knew. Faces from a war years gone. And the awkwardness broke, and Frank's eyes filled, and Alice's hand went to her heart.
The kitchen made a sound that was half-cry, half-nothing-at-all.
Molly burst into tears where she stood. "How—" was all she could manage. "Frank — Alice — how—"
And Alice, her own face streaming, smiled and told them — haltingly, with Frank's hand in hers — what had been done: the long secret work of Ethan Esther and Samantheus Faramundo and Augusta, and the Dean of St Mungo's who had sanctioned it; the months of it; and the day, not three weeks past, when their son had walked into their ward and something in them had simply come home.
The room reeled with it. Those who had known the Longbottoms in the first war stood stunned past speech. The twins, Ginny, Percy and Bill — too young to remember — turned to Hermione and Draco, who told them, low, quick and themselves not far from tears, what Frank and Alice Longbottom had been, what had been taken from them, and what therefore they were now looking at.
And Harry understood, all at once, with a lurch of the heart — France. Twice. No. No, that was the other thing. This was the St Mungo's appointment. This was where his father had been that morning weeks ago, the day Harry had read the papers aloud and asked nothing. This.
It was Moody who moved first.
The old Auror clumped across the kitchen, magical eye streaming as freely as the real one, and seized Frank Longbottom — his own protégé, once — in an embrace that nearly cracked the man's ribs, growling something none of them could hear. Sirius came next, and Lupin behind him, and for the three Marauders-and-Order veterans there were, for the longest while, simply no words at all that could hold what they were feeling — for the first war had taken so very much from all of them, and here, against every law of how such things went, was a piece of it given back.
Only Sam, at the table, watched the whole of it with a quiet, full, contented happiness, and said nothing, and let it be.
Neville set his gift on the table and crossed to Harry, looking about the room. "Where's — is Mr Esther here? I wanted to—"
"France, today," Harry said. "Sorry. He'd have—" He stopped, scrubbing a hand through his hair, suddenly shy. "You don't have to thank me, Neville, I didn't—"
"You told him." Neville said it simply, certain. "That day. After I told you about — about the memory-borrowing. You write to him, everyone knows you do. You told him what I asked, didn't you, and he—" His voice thickened. "I don't know how you knew it mattered. But you did. And you said it to the right person."
Harry, scarlet to his ears, could find nothing to say to that — so he just gripped Neville's shoulder hard, and looked at him properly, and saw it: the boy stood straighter now. Brighter. Lighter, as though a weight he'd carried so long he'd stopped feeling it had finally been lifted off him. "Look at you," Harry managed, grinning. "You're about a foot taller."
And then the rest of the children were there, swarming Neville with their gladness, and the great dinner began at last — the longest, warmest, most spectacular table that grim old house had ever in four hundred years been asked to hold, with two people at the head of it who, against all the cold arithmetic of the world, had come home.