February 1996, Hogwarts, night
The walk back to Ravenclaw Tower took a very long time, considering neither of them was walking slowly.
It was simply that neither of them could say anything.
The kiss had used up all the words.
So they went up through the sleeping castle shoulder to shoulder, hands laced tightly together — properly laced, fingers interwoven, a grip neither of them showed any sign of loosening — both of them staring straight ahead with faces of luminous, dignified scarlet, and the silence between them was not awkward at all.
It was full.
It hummed the whole way up five staircases.
At the door to Ravenclaw Tower, they stopped, turned to face each other, and stood there.
"...Goodnight," Harry managed.
"Goodnight," Luna agreed.
Neither of them moved.
And then, by some mutual accord that involved no visible negotiation, they kissed once more — softer even than the first, brief and warm and entirely certain and Luna smiled up at him with the last of the evening's starlight still somehow in her eyes, slipped through the door, and was gone.
Harry practically flew back to Gryffindor Tower.
His feet touched perhaps every third stair.
The Fat Lady took one look at his face, remarked "well, SOMEBODY'S evening improved," and swung open unasked for the second time that term — and Harry sailed through the portrait hole into the common room, where three figures were arranged around the dying fire with the studied casualness of people who had been waiting for hours and intended to deny it.
Hermione. Ron. Neville. Three mischievous smiles, pre-loaded.
They took in the state of him — the residual redness, the hood half-up, the unmistakable facial euphoria of a boy freshly returned from another planet and shared a three-way giggle of pure anticipatory delight.
"So," said Hermione.
"Nice walk?" said Ron.
"You've got grass on your shoulder," observed Neville, kindly.
"We — it was — nothing happened," said Harry, going redder, which was an achievement.
"We just talked. And. Confessed. And k—" His voice betrayed him utterly on the consonant. "—kissed."
The common room detonated.
"Awwww," Hermione produced — a sound of such concentrated, delighted, weaponised fondness that Harry physically retreated into his hood — while Ron and Neville descended on him with congratulatory shoulder-thumps from both sides.
"Finally," Ron said, with enormous feeling. "Years, mate. Years of the whole castle watching you two orbit each other—"
"—we had a betting pool," Neville admitted. "Third year onwards. Seamus ran it—"
"—took you long enough, the pair of you... here, was it romantic? It was romantic, wasn't it, look at his face—"
"Was it by the lake?" Hermione demanded, glowing. "Tell me it was by the lake at sunset, Harry, I have money on the lake—"
"—you were in the pool?!—"
The teasing built toward something Harry recognised, with the instincts of a trained tactician, as unsurvivable — and so he deployed the only countermeasure powerful enough.
"Hagrid has a giant brother hidden in the Forbidden Forest and Hermione and I have agreed to look after him," said Harry.
Silence.
"...His what," said Ron.
"Grawp. Sixteen feet. Very friendly. Hermione's met him. She'll explain everything." And under cover of the ensuing explosion — Ron's "HIS WHAT" achieving registers previously unrecorded, Neville sitting down abruptly, Hermione shooting Harry a look of purest betrayal even as she was forced by sheer factual pressure to begin the account — Harry bolted for the stairs and the sanctuary of his four-poster.
He drew the curtains, and pulled off the hood, and lay there in the dark.
And smiled.
He couldn't stop, was the thing.
The memory kept replaying — the log, the handkerchief, the I love you too, the twirl, her giggle silver over the water, the kiss, the kiss — looping warm and impossible through his mind, wearing a groove in it, and Harry Potter fell asleep still smiling, and the smile followed him all the way down into the sweetest dream he'd had in a year.
...
The next morning, everything was normal.
Which was, itself, the miracle.
Breakfast found the whole group reassembled at the Gryffindor table — Ron, Hermione, Draco and Astoria, Viktor, Lavender, Neville — and the conversation ran its familiar warm channels: the looming O.W.L.s; Hermione had produced revision timetables for everyone, colour-coded, and only Viktor had thanked her sincerely, the merits of various examiners rumoured to be coming, and — in carefully lowered voices, though carefully lowered voices had grown noticeably less careful of late — the ongoing decline of the Umbridge regime into something approaching comedy.
Because that was the strange truth of the post-Weasley era: the tyranny had become a joke.
The swamp still occupied the fifth-floor east corridor, Umbridge could not remove it; Flitwick, who plainly could, had roped off a neat walkway around it "for safety" and was heard to call it "a really good bit of magic" in the Headmistress's hearing.
Peeves was three weeks into Fred's parting commission and pursuing it with the devotion of a knight errant. Every Decree now went up pre-mocked, the student body having learned from the masters; and the Squad patrolled corridors in which nobody was frightened of them any more, which was a fatal condition for a squad.
Daphne arrived last — from the Ravenclaw table, where she had been observed making her farewells to Anthony Goldstein with a lingering warmth wholly incompatible with her public persona and the group received her with a broadside of teasing giggles and pointed remarks: "say hello to Anthony," "how is Anthony," "you've gone pink, Greengrass," this last from Lavender, who feared nothing.
Daphne coughed once, elegantly, and reassembled her high composure by visible force of will.
"As I was about to contribute," she said, with glacial dignity, seating herself, "before the nursery interrupted — you're all discussing why the Toad's grip has loosened, and you're enjoying the symptoms without understanding the cause. Allow me."
She poured her tea. "The twins' departure wasn't just theatre. Think about what it said. Two students — two commercially successful students, whose products are now sold in Diagon Alley to public acclaim — reviewed the education on offer at Hogwarts under Headmistress Umbridge, and concluded it was worth less than leaving. Flew out mid-term. In front of the entire school."
She sipped. "That's not a prank. That's a verdict. And it's mud — thick, clinging, public mud — on the one thing her appointment was supposed to guarantee: that Ministry control would elevate the school. Instead the story running through every wizarding household in Britain is 'Hogwarts is now the sort of place the best students escape from.' Which reflects on the Ministry. Which reflects on Fudge — whose reputation, after Azkaban, is already balanced on a knife's edge and wobbling."
She set down the cup with a small precise click. "So she's gone reserved. The Decrees still stand, the Squad still swaggers — but she daren't generate another headline. No expulsions, no spectacles, nothing that feeds the story. The leash is still on the school; it's just that the other end of it is now also around her neck, and she's finally noticed. Hence—" a dry gesture at the Hall around them, at the loose talk and the surviving swamp "—the slack."
"I understood about half of that," said Ron, "and I loved it."
It was at that point that the doors admitted the morning's Ravenclaw contingent — among them Rolf Scamander and his friends, making for their table — and Rolf, passing, caught sight of Luna who had drifted over to the Gryffindor table ten minutes earlier and showed no sign of ever leaving it again and raised a hand in friendly greeting.
Luna smiled and waved back.
And Harry moved.
It was not subtle.
It was not, in any respect, subtle.
He inched along the bench until his shoulder was flush against Luna's, and then somehow contrived to inch further — angling himself between her and the Ravenclaw table's sightline with the smooth, total, unmistakable body language of a wolf interposing itself before its lifelong mate — all while maintaining a facial expression of perfect breakfast-time innocence that would not have deceived a portrait.
The table dissolved into chuckles.
"Territorial," Draco observed, to his tea.
"He's guarding her," Lavender whispered, enchanted. "Look at the shoulders."
Luna, entirely serene, reached up and patted Harry on the cheek.
"He's just a good friend, Harry," she said, in her dreamiest voice, as though soothing a large dog at a garden gate. "We talk about creatures. You know that."
Harry pursed his lips and produced, under his breath, a low mutinous mumble in which only the words "good friend," "first edition," and "walks her to Charms" were distinguishable — while simultaneously, and without any apparent awareness of the contradiction, leaning his whole cheek into her touch like a cat.
The group's laughter carried all the way down the table, and — for the first time in a long grey month — nobody in it could remember why the morning shouldn't be a good one.
June 1996, Hogwarts
The O.W.L.s arrived the way weather arrives: discussed for months, and still somehow a shock.
The Great Hall was transformed — the four long tables banished, replaced by ranks of small individual desks facing the staff dais; the enchanted ceiling gone tactfully neutral; the examiners of the Wizarding Examinations Authority installed, tiny ancient Professor Marchbanks presiding — and for two weeks, the fifth years marched in and out of it, morning and afternoon, theory and practical, subject after subject, in a fog of ink-stains and revision-cramp and last-minute mnemonics.
Umbridge supervised.
She had appointed herself to it — patrolling the silent ranks of desks during written papers with her clipboard and her tiny clicking heels, standing in ostentatious authority beside genuine examiners who had not asked for her and visibly did not want her and she wore, throughout, the expression of a woman savouring the fruits of office: surveying the bent heads of the school at her feet, her school, ordered and silent and supervised, and finding it good.
What she harvested, in fact, was disdain.
The examiners were coolly civil to her and warm to the students; Marchbanks was heard to ask her, penetratingly, whose idea the wand-free Defence curriculum had been, "since we are now obliged to examine children on spells they were forbidden to practise"; and the students had simply stopped granting her the tribute of fear, which left her authority performing to an empty house.
Harry didn't bat an eye at any of it.
He noticed her, in the abstract way one notices furniture — the pink shape drifting between desks, enjoying her moment of seated power and found that she had simply ceased to matter.
All Harry saw, for two weeks, was the paper in front of him and the wand in his hand; all he intended, with the whole of his trained and settled mind, was to give his best.
Charms went well. Transfiguration went very well. Defence Against the Dark Arts — examined by a delighted Professor Tofty, who had heard things and asked, with a twinkle, whether Mr Potter could really produce a corporeal Patronus, and received a silver stag that cantered the length of the Great Hall — went, by any measure, magnificently. Ancient Runes he walked out of quietly satisfied, with McGonagall's study your Runes fulfilled to the letter. Even Divination's absurdities and History of Magic's deserts held no terrors for a boy with a Mind Palace.
He worked, and slept, and held Luna's hand between papers, and let the examinations be what they were: the smallest large thing in his year.
The same days — New York, the dead of night
Five minutes before the dead of night, in a torch-lit corridor deep beneath the wizarding levels of New York, three guards of the MACUSA prison service were passing the last of their shift the way guards pass all shifts: talking.
"—all I'm saying," the first was insisting, boots up on the duty desk, "is let him try. Seriously. Let him try this place. You seen the wards since the school? Tripled. Tripled, Marcus. Half martial law up top, Aurors on every level, the President signing emergency powers — he'd need an army just to reach the lobby."
"He had an army at the school," said the second guard, Marcus, unmoved.
"A rabble. Hirelings. And the element of surprise — that's all that was. Nobody was ready. And that seer punk of his doing the map-work."
The first guard waved a dismissive hand. "Strip that away and what've you got? A fella who got beat by a baby. One baby, no wand, nappy still on. That's your world-conquering Dark Lord. I'll take my chances."
The third guard, older, had been quiet. Now he shifted.
"I talked to one of the Aurors who reached that courtyard," he said.
"At the school." He was not laughing, and something in his voice made the other two glance over.
"Ilvermorny's Vice — Woodrow — was a champion duellist in his day. Transfiguration-combat, old style, the real thing. They found him standing up, boys. Dead on his feet, grey as the stone, and everything around him — the ground, the walls, his own spellwork — drained. Like the life had been pulled out of forty feet of world all at once." He looked at his colleagues. "The Auror I talked to has worked violent cases for twenty years, and he couldn't sleep. Maybe the papers are hysterical. Or maybe what they're printing is true, and that thing across the ocean really could start a world war, and we're the night shift standing between him and his shopping."
....
Then the first guard laughed — a little louder than the joke deserved and Marcus with him, and the moment was talked safely back down into banter, the way night shifts talk everything down.
"Anyway." Marcus consulted a battered pocket watch. "Five minutes to the dead of night. Shift change."
He yawned enormously. "You still on for tomorrow? The Atid Stella place, on the wizarding side of the Woolworth block — my cousin says they've got the new moving-picture cameras in, and those warming-boxes—"
"Been dying to see it," the first guard agreed, gathering his kit. "Controversial, mind. My uncle thinks the whole company's a menace — 'changing things that don't need changing,' hiring Squibs, upsetting the natural — but I'll tell you what, his house is lit with their lamps, so—"
While the two of them fell deep into the argument — innovation versus tradition, the whole wizarding world's favourite quarrel of the decade — the third guard rose, stretched, and made his final round of the shift: down the short corridor to the door of the secure section.
The special one.
He slid back the viewing latch and looked in.
The cell beyond was stone, and bare, and warded six ways past sense, and its single prisoner sat perfectly still on the bench against the far wall — a big man gone gaunt, grey-streaked, years of MACUSA hospitality carved into him — and at the sound of the latch, his head came up, and eyes like chips of dirty ice found the guard through the slot.
Asmus Drazkan glared.
The guard smirked.
"Evening, your majesty," he said, comfortable behind three inches of warded iron.
"Just checking the empire's still in order. Heard your old customer base is making headlines — school-burning, very classy. Shame none of it's coming your way, eh? Twenty more years of this view. Maybe thirty."
He tapped the latch. "Sleep tight, beast-butcher."
The ice-chip eyes didn't blink.
Drazkan said nothing at all — years, and the man had said almost nothing at all and the guard, whose banter died faster in that gaze than he ever admitted, was frankly glad when Marcus's voice came down the corridor:
"Oi! Shift change! Leave the animal, relief's here—"
He slid the latch shut and went, boots echoing, toward the light and the changeover and tomorrow's shopping trip.
And at that same hour, on the street far above — the Muggle street, dark and slick with earlier rain, where the Woolworth Building climbed in gothic tiers of lit and unlit stone into the New York night, and behind whose mundane face, invisible to every no-maj eye, the whole vertical fortress of MACUSA turned and hummed —
— two silhouettes stood together on the empty pavement opposite, hatted and still, faces upturned.
They did not speak. They did not move.
To the one policeman who passed, they did not exist at all — his eyes slid off the spot where they stood and found urgent interest in a shop window across the way as he walked on with a vague sense of having forgotten something.
The taller silhouette regarded the building the way a connoisseur regards a vault: floor by floor, ward-line by ward-line, its scarlet gaze crawling up the lit stonework with unhurried, proprietary malice — the look of something deciding not whether, but where.
The slighter silhouette had its head cocked, and its eyes half-closed, and its lips were moving — soundlessly, rapidly, running some long calculation against a text no one else could see — and every few seconds it gave a small nod, as a craftsman nods, checking measurements against a plan already drawn.
Assessment, and appetite. Appetite, and assessment.
Voldemort and Mordred Slythra stood in the dark outside the Woolworth Building, and looked up, and took their time.