17th July 1995, Whitehall, London, late afternoon
They came up out of the Ministry's visitor entrance into the long London evening, and it was Harry who saw them first.
Across the street, half-screened by the foot traffic of homebound Muggles who took no notice of either of them, Cornelius Fudge stood in close conversation with a tall, pale, fair-haired man in immaculate robes, a silver-topped cane resting in one gloved hand.
Lucius Malfoy.
Harry felt rather than saw Draco go rigid beside him — and then, with an effort that cost him visibly, smooth himself back into careful blankness, eyes forward, jaw set. Harry shifted half a step so that his own shoulder came between Draco and the sightline, and said nothing.
"Blimey," Ron breathed, staring. "Look at that. The Minister, all matey with... him." His brow furrowed in genuine puzzlement. "You don't reckon — Imperius Curse? Maybe old Lucius has got Fudge under the Imp—"
Hermione's elbow found his ribs with surgical precision.
"Ow — what—" Ron followed her pointed glance to Draco, and his ears went red. "Oh. Right. Sorry, mate, I didn't—"
But Draco only smiled — a thin, tired, oddly grateful thing. "It's fine, Weasley. And it isn't the Imperius." He looked back at the two men across the street with an expression far older than fifteen. "That's just Father. Doing what Father does. Buying people."
Ron, lost for a reply, did the only thing he could think of and reached up to ruffle Draco's immaculate hair into ruin. Draco yelped and swatted at him, and the moment broke into a scuffle that was, Harry suspected, exactly what Ron had intended.
Arthur, watching the pair across the road with a grim look, drew them all gently on. "Best we don't linger." And, quietly, as they walked: "Dumbledore's wondered the same as you, Ron — whether Cornelius is being made to behave so. He doesn't believe it. He thinks Fudge is acting entirely of his own accord." His mouth thinned. "Which is rather worse, when you think about it. A man under a curse can be cured."
Back at Grimmauld Place, Harry's spirits lifted the moment he came down the kitchen stairs.
Ethan was back.
He was at the long table with Molly, the two of them deep in conversation over a pot of butterfly-pea-flower tea that glowed a startling deep blue in the lamplight, comparing — of all things — Chinese spice blends and the proper way to balance a five-spice against a roast. Molly was in her element; Ethan, who had apparently spent part of his French errand acquiring obscure ingredients, was producing small twists of paper from his coat and explaining each with grave enthusiasm.
"Dad—" Harry was across the kitchen and into a one-armed hug before he'd quite decided to be.
"Kiddo." Ethan ruffled his hair, amber eyes warm. "Good day? You look like you've something to tell me."
They told him — all of them, over fresh cups of the blue tea — the whole of the trial: Amelia Bones's cold relentless excavation, Fudge presiding like a king, and the pink-clad horror of Dolores Umbridge blunting every blow Amelia landed. Molly came down firmly on Amelia's side — "the woman has sense, which is more than I can say for the rest of that courtroom" — and Sam's account of the anti-werewolf legislation made her go quite still and then quite furious on Lupin's behalf.
Ethan listened to all of it, and turned his blue cup slowly in his hands, and offered no comment at all. Harry, who knew that particular silence, said nothing either. His father was filing it somewhere, the way he filed everything — and would speak when he had decided what the thing was worth saying.
The days that followed were, by the unanimous and exhausted agreement of seven young people, the most brutal of their lives.
Harry — teacher Harry, who grew steadier and more certain in the role with every session — moved them off defence and into the harder country beyond it. Offence. Countering. Footwork. Spatial awareness, the trick of holding the whole room in your mind at once. He ran them until they were wrung out in every sense there was — mind, body, and that deeper magical well that ached when it emptied — and they hauled themselves up Grimmauld's stairs each evening like the survivors of a small war.
But the results showed. On all of them, visibly.
And along the way, Harry made each of them find their own shape of it — the spells that fit them, the ones they understood in their bones, the ones they could learn to throw fastest and hardest and truest.
Draco took to a set of vicious, precise hexes built to leave an opponent open, a genuinely nasty curse he would not say where he'd learned, and a clean Expelliarmus and Stupefy to finish.
Hermione, with Harry's help, assembled her charmwork into linked sequences — Flitwick's own style, she noted with pride — combinations flowing around a core of Stupefy and Petrificus Totalus.
Ginny had her famous Bat-Bogey Hex, a wicked curse she'd wheedled out of Sirius, and a Reducto that hit like a falling wall.
Neville surprised everyone, Harry most of all, by reaching for Transfiguration — conjuring whipping vines of steel, which Harry taught him to command for both shield and snare, with Expelliarmus and Stupefy behind them.
Ron settled on Expelliarmus,Bombarda, and a Stupefy that came out, to general astonishment, almost frighteningly strong — strong the way Harry's own Expelliarmus was, some natural knack none of them could account for.
And the twins were exactly what anyone would expect — a bottomless arsenal of jinxes, hexes, and weaponised firework-charms that gave Harry himself one or two genuinely difficult moments when they sparred two-on-one.
"Don't stop when term starts," he told them, the last evening, all of them flat on the basement floor and grinning despite themselves. "Keep at it. And — practice feeling your magic. Cast the small things wandless when you can — Lumos,Scourgify. Get to where you don't need the wand for the little things. That's where the real control lives."
The Hogwarts letters came on the last morning of the holiday — and with two of them, a small heavy badge each.
Ron and Hermione had been made prefects.
The kitchen erupted. Molly burst into tears of pure joy and seized Ron in a hug that lifted him off his feet — her Ron, a prefect — and was so delighted that she agreed on the spot to his long-shot request for a new broom when she went to Diagon Alley for their books.
"Nothing grand, mind—" Ron trying to speak between Molly's happy bear hug "Anything, Mum, honestly, anything that flies—"
Hermione glowed quietly over her own badge, and was hugged in turn by everyone in reach.
Harry felt it — a small, traitorous tug of blue, low down. Not envy of Ron or Hermione; he was glad for them, fiercely. It was only — he'd have liked, quietly, to walk a little further in Ethan's particular footsteps, and some childish part of him had half-hoped. He set it down at once, and crossed the kitchen, and congratulated the two of them with a grin that was entirely real, Jasper bobbing on his shoulder and Osian, with no idea what was being celebrated, contributing an enthusiastic bellow that knocked a chair over.
That night Molly threw a dinner party for her new prefects, and the house was loud and warm with it.
And midway through, Ethan settled beside Harry with two glasses of pumpkin fizz and said, conversationally, "I was never a prefect, you know. Nor Head Boy."
Harry blinked. "You? But you were — Dad, you were top of everything—"
"Precisely why I refused it." Ethan's eyes glinted. "Do you know what prefects do? Patrol corridors. Mind first-years. Attend meetings. Hours and hours of it — hours I would vastly rather have spent in a library taking some piece of magic apart to see how it worked." He sipped his fizz. "I was, your uncle Lupin would tell you, a tremendous nerd. Unrepentant. I had better things to do with Hogwarts than supervise it."
Harry laughed — and his eye fell, across the room, on Remus Lupin, who sat slumped at the table's end with eye-bags like bruises, the cost of a fortnight of Atid Stella paperwork and meetings and client trades written all over his gentle face — and who was, at that precise moment, looking back at Ethan with an expression of the purest, most exhausted murder.
Harry mouthed sorry across the room. Lupin's eyes flicked heavenward.
"And it runs in your family," Sirius added, dropping down on Harry's other side, overhearing. "Your father... James and I weren't prefects either, fifth year. They gave it to Moony instead." He grinned. "Wisest choice McGonagall ever made — someone in our dorm had to be responsible, and it was never going to be us."
Harry sent yet another silent apology across the room. Lupin, who had now been volunteered as the responsible party by three separate people in one evening, drained his glass.
It was after the party, as it wound down, that the night turned.
Molly went upstairs to deal with a Boggart that Moody had detected earlier, lurking in an old writing desk. And while she was gone, Moody drew Harry and the children round an old, creased photograph he'd produced from an inner pocket.
"The Order," he said gruffly. "The first one. Taken just before the worst of it."
They crowded in.
Rows of people, younger, smiling, waving up out of the frame — and Moody named them, one by one, his battered finger moving across the faces. That's the Prewetts — Molly's brothers, Gideon and Fabian — took five Death Eaters with them at the end. The Bones lot — Amelia's brother, his wife, the little ones — all of them, one night. The McKinnons. Dorcas — Voldemort killed her himself, took pride in it. The list of the dead went on, and the children grew quiet, and then quieter, a cold blue weight settling over them at the sheer toll of it — a whole photograph of brave faces, and so many of them gone.
But then Moody's finger stopped on two figures near the front, young and laughing, a baby in the woman's arms.
"And there's Frank and Alice Longbottom," he said — and his ravaged old face did something complicated. "Who, by every law of this world, ought to be on the list of the lost." He glanced toward the far end of the room, where Frank and Alice stood deep in conversation with Arthur and Sam, present, alive, restored. "And aren't."
The mood lifted at once, warm and astonished, every eye going to the couple who had, against all the cold arithmetic, come home.
It was Harry who went up after Molly, when she'd been gone too long.
He found her standing over the open desk, frozen — and the Boggart had not been banished. It lay on the floor in the shape it had drawn from her deepest fear: bodies. Her children, one after another. Arthur. And — Harry's stomach turned — himself, sprawled and still among them, green-lit and gone.
Molly was sobbing, her wand hanging useless, unable to make herself cast the spell that would dispel the sight of her dead family.
"Riddikulus—" Harry began, raising his wand — but feet were already pounding up the stairs behind him, and Lupin swept past, Sirius and Moody at his heels, and with a single steady "Riddikulus" Remus reduced the horror to a puff of nothing.
They gathered her up between them, Molly weeping into Arthur's chest when he came, murmuring the thing that lived under every adult's careful calm in that house: what will become of them — all of them — when it comes—
And Harry stood in the doorway and looked, without meaning to, around the room. At Sirius. At Lupin, gentle and exhausted. At Moody, scarred and watchful. At the friends crowding up behind him, the people he'd run ragged in a basement all week so they might live. At Ethan, come quiet to the stairs, amber eyes steady on his son. And, last, at Luna.
The graveyard rose up in him, cold and green — the cauldron, the kneeling masks, the high cruel laugh — and Molly's words gave it a shape: what will become of them.
But there was no fear in Harry's eyes as he stood there. Only something hard and clear and absolutely settled. Not them. Not while I can stand between him and them.
Then a small cool hand slipped into his, and Luna was at his side, her fingers threading through his, and the relentless cold thing in him eased back from its edge. He looked down at her. She did not say anything at all. She didn't need to.
He held on, and breathed, and let the night quiet around them.
1st September 1995, Number Twelve, Grimmauld Place, morning
The morning of departure was the usual splendid chaos.
Molly's voice carried up three flights as she discovered that Fred and George, rather than carry their trunks down like civilised people, had bewitched them to fly — and that one of the careering trunks had clipped Ginny clean off her feet on the landing. The twins' apology was cut short by Ginny's retaliation, a well-aimed Bat-Bogey that had them both swatting at their own faces all the way down the stairs while their mother delivered judgement at full volume.
They went to King's Cross in a convoy — the children chaperoned by Molly, Sirius who decided to be in his great black dog form, padding cheerfully at Harry's heel and drawing fond looks from passing Muggles, and Ethan.
And along the station concourse, Harry noticed them.
Men and women, scattered through the ordinary crowd, doing entirely ordinary things — reading a paper, checking a watch, leaning on a pillar — and doing them just a fraction too deliberately, their eyes never quite still, sweeping the throng in slow careful arcs. Luna had noticed too; he caught her tracking one of them with mild interest.
Ethan, without breaking stride, murmured, "Aurors. Watching the platform. Doing their job. Leave them to it."
They passed through the barrier onto Platform Nine and Three-Quarters, where the scarlet Hogwarts Express stood steaming under its sooty glass roof, and the last of the goodbyes began.
Sirius had changed back, looking around the station as if relieving some memories.
Hermione found her parents in the crowd — she'd telephoned ahead, sparing them the worry of an unexplained summer at a stranger's house — and there was a small, fond exchange and a pressing-in of things she'd forgotten. Luna's father, Xenophilius, drifted up in robes the colour of egg-yolk, and he and Luna had their own quiet talk, foreheads nearly touching, two strange gentle people perfectly at ease in each other.
And then the six adults stood together on the platform to watch the children board — and Xenophilius, beaming, leaned toward Ethan and remarked, as though resuming a conversation interrupted only moments ago, how very pleased he remained at the prospect of Harry one day marrying his Luna.
Ethan choked on nothing at all.
Beside him, Sirius and Molly fought visible and losing battles to keep their faces straight. The Grangers, newly arrived and quick to read a room, found sudden urgent reasons to drift toward Molly and Sirius and leave the two prospective in-laws a diplomatic space.
Ethan recovered his composure with the grace of long practice.
"That," he said, "is entirely up to Harry and Luna, Xenophilius, and no business of ours to arrange."
He paused — and then, because he was, after all, a man who saw things, his mouth curved. "Though if you want my reading of it — I'd expect Harry to ask the very moment Luna's eighteenth has safely passed. Not a day sooner; he's far too proper for that. And not a day later either."
He watched, across the platform, his son turn to say something to Luna and his whole face go soft and unguarded the way it had been doing since the boy was thirteen — that particular gentle, longing look Ethan had clocked a hundred times and never once remarked upon. "He's been certain of it for two years, perhaps earlier, perhaps the moment they met... He just hasn't told himself yet."
Xenophilius laughed, delighted, a high happy sound — and somewhere down the platform a whistle blew, and the great scarlet engine gathered its breath, and the children leaned out of the windows waving, and another year began.