Harry practiced her Silencios. Dumbledore had been telling her bedtime stories about the Gaunts, about young Tom and the pieces of his soul. Harry had faced Voldemort, now, more times than almost anyone else had and lived.
She was sixteen years old and she was tired. The next time Blaise tracked her down, planning to laze about by the Lake with a bag of sweets from his mother, Harry sat quietly on the green grass for a long time. Blaise filled the silence easily, but she could feel him keeping an eye on her. Schoolyard taunts. Blaise tipped his head back, leaning on his elbows.
And Madame Pomfrey talked about, you know, paying it back— you get, and you give back. Let me finish. I have been where you are, or something like it. There are things about me that Millicent and Daphne are never going to quite understand. But I recognize me, in you, and that means something to me. Blaise smiled, dropping his chin.
She asked Luna and beamed when Luna offered to lend her some earrings, so they could be matching. There was something in the way he stood, maybe, or the way he smiled at her. Those crescent-moon glasses, that long nose, the way he had been dropping stories in her hands all year and making her carry them. He told her her blood was more precious than his, and she still thought he wanted to be okay.
He drank from the poisoned water, and she still thought he was going to come home. On the Astronomy Tower, Harry frozen under their feet, Dumbledore begged Snape— not for his life, but his death.
Dumbledore did. Snape did. Harry ran down the lawn after him, lit by fire and magic, hoarse with grief. Her hair was long. Her eyes were green, furious. When Snape looked at her, he saw Lily.
They buried Dumbledore. Harry had never been to a funeral before. Before they left for the Horcrux hunt, before Ginny and Neville and Luna and Blaise boarded a train back to Hogwarts, there was a celebration. Bill Weasley, partial werewolf, married Fleur, partblood veela. Luna came in a yellow dress. Fleur was luminescent. Harry was not surprised, but she skirted the edge of the happy, anxious crowd. She brushed her palms down the dress Blaise had taken her out to find, which was a green just a shade darker than her eyes.
Maybe that was a lucky color, too. Maybe she just looked good, standing here with her hair all brushed out and loose, and that felt nice in the middle of all of this. I like the green. Want to dance? She thought about the way their hands touched, dancing, and how close Ginny was standing. She thought about what it might be like after the wedding, as people put out the candles and took down the tents, as they walked home. But the wedding ended in warnings, a scattering to the winds.
Their quest began. And so here Harry was, curled up in their tent while Ron fiddled with the radio and Hermione inventoried her bag of plenty. She wrote, I think I would have tried to kiss you, after the wedding. I like to think I would have been brave enough. So had Dumbledore. Her parents had died for her life. Before she had left Hogwarts for the Burrow and then this long cold road, she and Blaise had gone out to sit beside the lake.
He shared a compartment with Daphne and a displeased Astoria, who had wanted to sit with Susan. Snape, as Headmaster, was rarely seen. Alecto and Amycus Carrow ran the school. It was the smallest first year class Hogwarts had seen since the height of the First Wizarding War. Hannah Abbott and Anthony Goldstein took charge of the first years, learning every name and nightmare, checking in with chocolate and comfort, and deciding which ones needed to be disappeared.
Neville and Ginny were hiding in the Room of Requirement before the first month was out, and they took in the kids who needed it. Susan Bones and Justin Finch-Fletchley were the best at lying low, playing nice, and so they stayed out in the open the longest excepting all the Slytherins but Astoria, who went into hiding around month two, after she cursed Alecto for making a third year cry.
Blaise smiled and flattered and made Amycus laugh. A new doorway opened off the Chamber the first time Neville buried his hands in his hair and tugged hard enough to hurt. Inside were pots of dark soil, benches of tools, packets of seeds. Every wall was windows, even the one that led back to the main Room. They were cloudy and impossible to see through, but the sunlight streamed in and the air steamed. Blaise did not sleep one night in the Room of Requirement.
He played chess in the Slytherin Common Room with purebloods who thought Hogwarts was finally getting its act together. He recognized their sneers and it was easy to copy the tilts of their smug chins.
He did not sleep one night in the Room, but he snuck out of his dormitory to spend many sleepless nights there, pouring over shifting maps of Hogwarts, advising on traps and enemy positions and timing, the things he had heard them planning.
Susan Bones took notes in court shorthand. Ginny listened close and drew up their battleplans. Blaise told the younger kids bedtime stories, the ones his mother had told him, the ones where the clever little kid always always wins.
Out on the road, Ron left, and came back, and struck the locket down in the forest with the sword of a true Gryffindor. Hermione pulled miracles from her bag. Bellatrix Lestrange wrote Mudblood into her arm. They found Luna and lost Dobby, and then they went home.
When Harry came back to Hogwarts, she had a messy bundle of letters tied together in the bottom of her bag. She had a destroyed locket, a cup, and an idea where the diadem might be.
Gryffindor raised their wands on her; then Hufflepuff; then Ravenclaw. Their backs were to Harry, black-robed shoulders like shields. The school decided to fight, and McGonagall told Slytherin House to go wait in the dungeons for it to all be over.
Blaise was turning his wand idly in his hand, eyes slanted down. Astoria rose up on her tiptoes in outrage, but it was Susan Bones who stepped forward.
Hannah Abbott stepped over, then Anthony Goldstein, the Creevey brothers, and Seamas and his singed eyebrows. McGonagall raised the statues and protections with Flitwick while Slughorn escorted first and second years, some scattered other students, and the bulk of Slytherin House out the tunnels to Hogsmeade. Blaise stretched out his wrists while Astoria and Susan sat with their shoulders pressed warm together, waiting. Harry had a diadem to find, and Hermione and Ron a bag of basilisk fangs to hunt down.
Ginny had a small army to marshall, but Harry hesitated beside where Ginny was tying her hair back and arguing with Seamas about explosives. Seamas glanced between them and then headed off, calling something acquiescing over his shoulder. All around them, the Hall was a flurry of preparation fluxing around small quiet pockets of people touching each other, saying good luck and maybe goodbye. Harry dug through her bag until she found a stack of folded papers at the bottom, tied with twine.
Harry smiled. Daphne and Astoria got separated in the first half hour of the fight— holding a fiercely contested corridor with flung curses, they saw a trio of robed figures heading for the back of a pack of Ravenclaws. Professor Sprout rose grasping, suffocating weeds out of the stones of the main courtyard, Neville and Hannah guarding her back.
Out in that mess of crushed greenery, Colin Creevey took down three Death Eaters and then took an Avada Kedavra to the chest. Fred died laughing. Tonks and Lupin went within moments of each other. Harry watched Snape die out in the boat shed, ugly and drawn out and painful. There was a choice here, but she could only see one answer she could live with. Well, not live with, or at least not for very long.
She wrapped herself in the Cloak, like she had at thirteen, looking for peace in empty spaces and invisibility. The greenhouses were dark shapes in the night, making the stars behind them go wavery as their light moved through warped glass. Under the bowed limbs of the trees, she turned the Stone over three times. Ghostly figures rose into view— the family she might have had in a kinder life. James smiled. Sirius looked tall, and clean, and rested, and still far too old for the bare three decades he had lived.
Harry had seen Lupin just a few hours before. Harry had seen Lupin just moments before she had pulled on her Cloak and walked out to die— his body on the Great Hall floor, beside Tonks. Warm hands had touched her cheek over the years. That was hers: Sirius, kneeling in a cave outside Hogsmeade, pushing the hair out of her eyes and telling her her parents loved her.
Everything you have done, everything you have been. Harry wanted her mother to squeeze her hands, tight and comforting, so she squeezed her own. She closed her eyes tight. She tried not to be afraid. She was given a choice to go forward, or to go back. But Harry had people who loved her waiting back at Hogwarts, too. She had made a promise. Harry woke up cheek-down in forest mulch. Narcissa lied for her.
Neville pulled the sword from the Hat and took down the snake. Harry killed Voldemort in a flash of green light, and his body hit the ground with an ugly thud.
After the war, Harry planted beds of flowers around the Burrow. She chose plants and charmed them so that there would be something blooming in every season. She made friends with the spiders under the sink and the little snakes who lived in the lot out back. Neville took over for Professor Sprout, who sent Harry postcards and plant clippings from her retirement world tour. Blaise rolled his eyes over drinks one night, as Ginny complained about bad water pressure in her new place, and said he was getting rid of the hat collection that was taking up one of his spare rooms.
And I think she only noticed because you were on a broom. When the Aurors started talking about promotions and bigger office spaces, Harry hesitated.
Harry thought about the things in her life that she had loved and not just lived through, and then she sent an application in to Hogwarts for a teaching position. Everyone needs something, Professor Sprout wrote back, cramped, on a postcard from the Galapagos Islands.
Be an ear, be a kindness, be safe. Blaise had picked out her earrings. Ginny had stuffed a muffin in her hand, kissed her good-bye, and pushed her out the door.
Hermione had been quizzing her on the curriculum standards for weeks. A half hour before her students were supposed to arrive, Harry climbed up to the Defense Against the Dark Arts classroom. Morning light poured through the window, washing over the desks and bookshelves, the stone walls, the young woman in dark robes who was squeezing her hands together. Harry breathed. It felt like home. She meant to stay.
All curses end, in time. I love a lot of things but many of those things are words. Filch felt his heart grow a couple sizes in his chest. She turned a mouse into a tea cup and Harry turned in a shaky twelve inches on the intersection of identity and form in Transfiguration theory.
Hermione got full points. Only by calling on Dumbledore was she able to get him to let Harry sit at a table with other students, instead of alone in a corner. She called Harry into her office after class soon after and thrust a pile of books at him. Beginning Potions. Ingredients: the Why and How of the What. History of the Brewing Arts. McGonagall looked at him sternly. When Harry, Hermione, and Ron figured out about Fluffy, Voldemort, and the Stone, Harry did not hesitate any more than he would have had the wooden stick in his pocket been anything of use.
If Hermione and Ron hesitated, they had the grace to keep it to themselves. Ron won the chess game and Hermione solved the potions riddle, though they argued longer, in this world, about who should take the one mouthful of potion and move on to the next challenge. He had no magic except what he made, what he earned— the way he asked his friends to raise their wands for him and they did.
But he still did have what they had given him— he had talked to the boa in the zoo, even if he had not managed to wish it free. Harry woke up in the medical ward to a furious McGonagall, followed shortly by a pleased, enigmatic Dumbledore.
In the heap of summer reading she and Flitwick sent home with him, McGonagall included a little volume about common sense and safety.
Harry read it aloud to Hedwig. Oliver Wood had still snatched Harry up, squib or not, during his first year, so when Harry got back to school his second year he threw himself into Quidditch practice. His professor had been possessed by the ghost of the guy who killed his parents and then the prof had died trying to kill Harry; his aunt and uncle had locked him in his room all summer til his friends had rescued him in a flying car; a tiny weird elf creature had told Harry Hogwarts was too dangerous to return to, but Harry had lived through bigoted shoves all the year before; McGonagall and Flitwick both had new stacks of books for Harry to read on magical theory and construction and glints in their eyes that said they expected work from him— so Harry threw himself into Quidditch.
Quidditch, at least, made sense. Flying felt like something that had been built into him. One of the few magics Harry had been left with, however, was Parseltongue, so Dueling Club went about as usual. He told a snake to leave Ernie alone, everyone else heard hissing, and then the castle was filled with whispered rumors about Harry Potter, squib, Dark Wizard slayer, Quidditch star, and murderous Heir of Slytherin. Ernie Macmilliam puffed up his chest and stuck out his chin.
The halls kept staring and jeering and sidling away from Harry. Anthony Goldstein watched this, for months, as Hogwarts fell into its intensive and absurd obsession with Christmas. Anthony did his homework, shared sympathetic long-suffering glances with Cho Chang Buddhist , the Patil twins Hindu , and Lee Jordan also Jewish , and wrote home to his parents and his big sister Leah. Then Anthony cornered a fairly alarmed looking Harry on the way to Charms.
The Cohen-Goldsteins lived out in the wizarding part of Bristol, but Mr. He made sure the kids got an education in mathematics and science past age ten and that they knew how to use a telephone, balance a checkbook, and drive a car. They put Harry in a little green-carpeted guest room and Harry put his little satchel down on the comforter and stared.
Anthony stood there, rumpled, having clearly been dragged down the hall by his sister. She thrust a hand out at him. You have to tell me everything. Hannukah fell over winter break that year, so Mrs. Cohen-Goldstein invited some of their friends and neighbors over.
Harry trailed around the bright kitchen, looking at the cases of butterbeer and bowls of fruit salad and platters of sufganiyot, looking and carefully not touching. Leah handed him a paper plate and told him to help himself. But Harry sat quiet, in a chair as soft as anything in the Gryffindor common room, and watched people walk and laugh, eat latkes with sour cream and so much applesauce that Mrs.
Cohen-Goldstein had to send Anthony down into the pantry and get more. The lights were soft and warm. No one snapped at him for staring. No one yanked plates of dessert out of his hands, or made jokes about coal in a stocking, or sent him to his room.
When the other kids came over to ask him to a convoluted game of hide and seek, he went. Kids were dropping, going frozen with mirrors and cameras clasped tight in their hands. The whispers were worse— the students hissing suspicions, but also the voice that no one else could hear, the hissing in the pipes.
Maybe the squib had finally gone mad. But Harry hunched his shoulders, ignored one set of whispers, and followed the disembodied voice like maybe he could find an answer at the end of it. He found red writing on the walls. They found Mrs. Norris, and Justin, and Colin. Then they found the note— basilisk, pipes. Then Ginny, who had been shrinking all year, vanished. When Harry got down to the belly of the Chamber, Ron and Gilderoy stranded behind him, there was the ghost of a boy standing there, waiting.
The boy had eyes like him and hair like him. Tom flashed hot, then cold; amused, then horrified, then gravely offended. This squib was meant to be his equal. Wandwork had never been how Harry won this fight. The Hat did not ask for magic, just bravery, just daring, nerve, and desperation.
Harry killed the snake, then the diary. A sword in hand, a fang, an evil diary spurting ink like thick black blood— but all he felt was tired. When Ginny sat up, inhaled, cried, Harry felt himself breathe in with her, desperately relieved. When Harry went home that summer, he was prepared to be lonely. No Hermione, no Ron, no overflowing Great Hall meals. Hedwig brought letters all through those long, hot, unfriendly days at Privet Drive.
Ron wrote about Egypt and Hermione about summer reading. Figg, craning out over her garden gate. Figg waved a hand and unlatched her gate, waving for him to come closer. It must be tough. How are you? Figg smiled pityingly. Would you like to come in for some tea? When Aunt Marge came to visit, Harry lost his temper and nothing happened.
He squeezed his fingers around the spatula he was using, rounded his shoulders, and tried to block out the thick sound of her voice. When he finally snapped back, raising his voice, he ended up in a three way screaming match with Vernon and Marge Petunia shrilled counterpoint, and Dudley shrugged and went for thirds.
They sent him up for bed without supper and left him grounded there for the rest of the summer. Harry snuck down to the kitchen at two a. Figg, on one of the summer afternoons he spent in her little, sunlit house. He found cat hair on his jeans for days, after. Back at school that fall, Harry sat at the Gryffindor table with Ron and Hermione like he always did. Fred and George were enchanting salt and pepper shakers to dance with each other. Seamus was missing his eyebrows again, and Neville was poking at his Herbology homework thoughtfully next to his eggs and toast.
She hooted back at the owls when they brought letters in the morning. In the Hogwarts Great Hall, the owl post came swooping in. Dean Thomas said something to Seamas and Seamas almost fell into his porridge, laughing. Leah would have fit here just fine.
McGonagall had signed a protesting Harry up for Arithmancy Hermione beamed at him. Dementors had searched the Express on their way to Hogwarts and Harry had gone down like a stone in still water.
The magic in you has nothing to do with how well your worst memories can rise up and drown you. A ragged, tired man in tweed rose up with a brilliant Patronus, then sat down kindly and passed out chocolate.
The Dursleys had never signed the permission form, so Harry was not allowed in Hogsmeade. That first trip, Hermione and Ron just brought him back treats. Then Fred and George gave him a gift. Ron stared at Leah until Hermione elbowed him. Leah, Ron. Harry was still studying Charms and Transfiguration theory, as well as whatever Potions texts McGonagall pushed on him.
Things that had been memorized random gibberish his first year were beginning to feel old hat, to make sense. When Ron and Hermione practiced their Charms homework, enchanting objects and throwing sparks, Harry watched their form and enunciation and understood, to a basic degree, where it had come from. McGonagall caught him helping Neville one evening and gave Harry ten points for Gryffindor and three new books to read.
When they learned how to Riddikulus a boggart, Lupin just talked to Harry about laughter in the face of fear— you can laugh a boggart into oblivion without a spell to make it ridiculous. When they went up against a grindylow, a red-cap, a hinkypunk, the other students drew their wands and Lupin offered Harry a knife. He told the other kids about good spells and hexes, and he told Harry about brittle grindylow fingers, easy to break, and how red-caps were cowards if you just nicked them once.
Dementors came to the Gryffindor-Hufflepuff Quidditch game and Harry went down, hard. He woke up furious— his broom splintered, the game lost, the only place he had ever felt right in this world stolen. He went out on a shaky old Cleansweep at practices, and in his freetime, just to get a jittery taste of it— the air under his feet, his hands on broom wood, the wind in his teeth.
He went to Professor Lupin and asked for help. Patronuses were as outside his power as Wingardium Leviosa, but Harry read books and books on dementors all year, on Patronuses and herbal supplements and all the myths and rumors about how to survive them.
What were Patronuses except for the glowing knowledge that things had not always been this dark? The mess with Sirius, Scabbers, and the Whomping Willow went about the same. What in that was magic? This was about old grudges and withered friendships, fears and petty jealousies and rage fermented in thirteen long, cold dark years.
Harry still stood up in front of the snivelling man who had handed his parents over for slaughter and told Sirius and Remus that James would not have wanted them to be killers.
Lupin had still taken the Map, so Snape still came to interrupt them. Lupin still turned, Peter still got away, and the dementors still came for them.
When Harry, struggling to stay conscious, looked across the lake and saw a silver Patronus racing toward them he saw two figures— one looked like his father. The other, a woman— was it his mother? It dipped in and out of the water, sinuous, small, and speedy. Harry blacked out and woke up in the infirmary. There was only one working wand on his lakeshore. Harry had read books and books on Patronuses, how they worked, why they worked, the swish of a wand and the type of joy that survived even in darkness.
He told Hermione the best he could, repeating things over and over in different words until they sunk in. Sirius was dying on the opposite lakeshore, their past selves were dying, but Harry knew they survived this. He knew how. He had tea with Mrs. Figg and read The Daily Prophet with one of her cats curled up in his lap the ginger cat Poppycock had taken a liking to him.
Leah also talked to her mother, who talked to her friends with squib children and other homeschool cases, and who then called Remus Lupin up for lunch. When Harry met up with the Weasleys for the Quidditch World Cup he discovered that Leah and Hermione had also exchanged contact information. Weasley looked put-upon, Mr. Weasley eagerly fascinated but not quite following, and Ginny was lying in an armchair laughing delightedly. She was going to make buttons , and Ginny would wear them happily all over her bookbag.
The Death Eaters came to the Cup— the kids ran, which takes no magic. It went about the same, except that Winky or, rather, the invisible Barty Crouch Jr. Harry had not bothered to bring his useless stick of maplewood to the Cup. Madame Maxine betrayed the first task dragons to Fleur, and Karkaroff to Krum.
Hagrid betrayed it to Harry, and Harry betrayed it to Cedric. Harry outflew the dragon, ducking flames and snatching the golden egg up like a large, stationary Snitch. Easy as a Quidditch game with a particularly nasty beast of a Beater. High in the air, with flames chasing him and the crowd screaming below, Harry felt magic rising up in the pit of his stomach the way he always did on a broom.
He wondered if it would have been better to be in some Muggle boarding school, away from the Dursleys but stuck in a dorm with people who were like him. High on a broom, a deadly fall of air below him, was the only time he knew for certain that he was exactly where he wanted to be.
The halls were still full of whispers. The whole castle was staring at Harry, again, and even in this world Ron Weasley had a variety of jealous bones in his body. The castle stared, the world stared, and Ron pushed his toast around and around his plate at breakfast. They studied late the nights before the Lake task. Harry nodded, paging through books that were growing less and less likely to be helpful with every new stack of them.
Neville sat quietly for a moment. Harry, tumbling to the stones. I wish, had been his last words to her, this boy she maybe could have loved, had she ever been given the chance. Time seems to stretch infinitely long as Tom decides how to kill her, but all she hears are the words stupid, silly girl echoing over and over again , and she thinks, you really never knew me at all. Because he has taken so much from her, too much, and she will not give him a single thing more.
Could you kill, if you had to? It builds and builds. Not fear or sadness or rage, but pure magic, her soul, her essence. She lets it build and build, the air seeming to crackle with it. There are other screams, spells impacting near her, but she ignores them.
Ignores everything but Tom and the magic she is not afraid of. Stretching out her other hand, she digs her nails into his face, pressing out yet more magic, no need for wands or spells, just her bones and her flesh and her determination. Never even deigned to know it existed, for all it nearly killed him once before.
He buckles in front of her, his face confused and childlike as she burns him from the inside out. Ginny wakes slowly, the light above her blindingly bright as it filters down through the trees.
She can feel grass under her legs, the brush of wind across her skin. Turning her head, she can see that she is in the orchard, the Burrow hazy in the distance, bleached nearly white by the intense summer sun.
He smiles, crouching down next to her, looking whole and warm and alive. But that was something else. He helps her sit up, one hand slung across her shoulders, and she leans into him, hugging him tight. Peering over his shoulder, Ginny can make out Remus and Tonks sitting together at the base of nearby tree.
They wave at her. A few feet beyond, Caroline stands, barely visible in the shadows, Colin Creevey nearby with Lavender. He shakes his head. A boy with wild black hair sits at the very end, bare feet swinging above the sparkling water like a child. The wood planks creak quietly under her weight, the water lapping against the shore.
Lowering herself, she sits next to Harry, letting her toe dip into the water. She nods, looking back out over the water, the way it sparkles with light. But there is also something hard building in her chest. That was a choice I never had to make. He smiles, something soft and regretful. There are people who need her. But it is so nice here. She closes her eyes. Back there, people call her so many things. Heir of Slytherin.
He reaches out, fingers brushing hers. She opens her eyes, looking at his face, the way all the dirt and wounds and weight are no longer there. Even the scar, his famous scar, seems gone. Maybe that kiss does last lifetimes. Maybe there are other ways this all happened. Harry rests his forehead against hers. That there was nothing they could have done differently.
They were…they were the best things in my life. She nods, the emotions coming back now, seeming to overwhelm her.
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