Chapter Text
December, 21st, 1996, Grimmaould Place, Great Brittain
If Harry had ever sat through a longer night than this one, he could not remember it.
Lupin suggested once without any real conviction, but a great deal of gentleness, that they all go to bed, but the Weasleys looks of disgust were answer enough. They mostly sat in silence around the table, watching the candle wick of one of Sirius stupid black candles sinking lower and lower into liquid wax, occasionally raising the bottle to their lips, speaking only to check the time, to wonder aloud what was happening, and to reassure each other that if there was bad news, they would know straight away, for Mrs. Weasley must long since have arrived at St Mungo’s.
Fred fell into a dose, his head lolling sideways onto his shoulder. Ginny was curling like a cat on her chair, but eyes were open; Harry could see them reflecting the firelight. Ron was sitting with his head in his hands, whether awake or asleep it was impossible to tell. Harry, Sirius and Remus looked at each other every so often, intruders upon the family grief, waiting… waiting…
At ten past five in the morning by Ron’s watch, the door swung open, and Mrs. Weasley entered the kitchen. She was extremely pale, but when they all turned to look at her, Fred, Ron, and Harry half rising from their chairs, she gave a wan smile.
“He’s going to be alright”, she said her voice weak with tiredness. “He’s sleeping. We can all go and see him later. Bill’s sitting with him now; he’s going to take the morning off work.”
Fred fell back into his chair with his hands over his face. George and Ginny got up, walked swiftly, over to their mother and hugged her. Ron gave a very shaky laugh and downed the rest of his butterbeer in one.
“Breakfast!”, said Sirius loudly and joyfully, jumping to his feet. “Where’s that accursed house-elf? Kreacher! Kreacher!”
But Kreacher did not answer the summons.
“Oh, forget it then”, muttered Sirus, counting the people in front of him. “So, its breakfast for- let’s see- eight… bacon and eggs, I think and some tea, and toast- ”
Lupin nudged him gently. “Nine, Padfoot.”
Sirius jerked upward. “Oh yea, right- where is he anyway?”
“Sleeping in, I wager.” Lupin shrugged.
Harry hurried over to the stove to help. He did not want to intrude on the Weasleys’ happiness, and he dreaded the moment when Mrs. Weasley would ask him to recount his vision. Not even the opportunity of finding out about the visitor seemed worth the trouble.
However, he had barely taken plates from the dresser when Mrs. Weasley lifted them out of his hands and pulled him into a hug.
“I don’t know what would have happened if it hadn’t been for you, Harry”, she said in a muffled voice. “They might not have found Arthur for hours, and then it would have been too late, but thanks to you he’s alive and Dumbledore’s been able to think up a good cover story for Arthur being where he was, you’ve no idea what trouble he would have been in otherwise, look at poor Sturgis…”
Harry could hardly bear her gratitude, but fortunately she soon released him to turn to Sirius and Lupin and thank them for looking after her children through the night. Lupin said that they were very pleased to have been able to help, and Sirius added that he hoped they would all stay with them as long as Mr. Weasley was in hospital.
“Oh, Sirius, I’m so grateful… they think he’ll be there a little while and it would be wonderful to be nearer… of course that might mean we’re here for Christmas:”
“The more the merrier!”, Sirius said with such obvious sincerity that Mrs. Weasley beamed at him, thew on an apron and began to help with breakfast.
“Sirus,” Harry muttered, unable to stand it a moment longer. “Can I have a quick word? Er now?
Sirius hesitated and shot Lupin a questioning look. Lupin nodded and turned to help Mrs. Weasley.
He walked into the dark pantry and Sirius followed. Without preamble, Harry told his godfather every detail of the vision he had, including the fact that he himself had been the snake who had attacked Mr. Weasley.
When he paused for breath, Sirius said „Did you tell Dumbledore this?”
“Yes”, Harry said impatiently, “but he didn’t say what it meant. Well, he doesn’t tell me anything anymore.”
“Well- I suppose it is true that Dumbledore’s been acting secretive lately, but I’m sure he would have told you if it was anything to worry about.
“But that’s not all”, Harry said, in a voice only little above a whisper. “Sirius, I… I think I’m going mad. I’ve been having these flashes of emotions all the time… sometimes I just feel curious for no reason. Or impatient. Or angry, or- pleased, I guess? And then, back in Dumbledore’s office, just before we took the portkey… for a couple of seconds there, I thought I was a snake, I felt like one- my scar hurt when I was looking at Dumbledore- Sirius, I wanted to attack him!”
He could only see a sliver of Sirius’ face; the rest was obscured by darkness.
“It must have been the aftermath of the vision, that’s all,” said Sirius. “You were still thinking of the dream or whatever it was and-”
“It wasn’t that,” said Harry, shaking his head, “it was like something rose up inside me, like there’s a snake inside me.”
“You need to sleep,” said Sirius firmly. “You’re going to have breakfast, then go upstairs, and after lunch you can-” he paused. “Did you hear that?”
Harry had. A few yells, a loud banging sound and- shrieking?
He and Sirius hurried towards the entrance hall.
The twins, Ron and Ginny were all panting heavily with their wands drawn and threateningly surrounding someone who had just entered the foyer. Mrs Weasley was yelling at the lot of them while Mrs. Black was once again screeching some nonsense about blood purity. Lupin, perhaps strangest of all, was doing his best to mitigate the situation, all while keeping Hedwig and Pigwidgeon from barrelling into the person being threatened and- from the looks of it- scratching their eyes out.
Then the person- the boy- suddenly shouted, “SHUT IT!”
Everything halted. For a second it felt as if time had stopped as a whole; an oppressive force weighted on everything as if they were underwater and everything moved through a thick syrupy mass; a power so all-encompassing he could hardly sense anything else. Then, suddenly, it lifted, and he could breathe again.
Harry recognized the voice. Then Ginny shifted a little as if spooked and all of a sudden Harry saw the strange figure standing in the entrance hall. It was Tom Riddle again- only this time everybody else saw him too.
“This is rather rude, you know?”, Riddle said. His appearance was- uncharacteristically- rather ruffled, his tie limply hanging untied around his neck, as if he had changed in a hurry, and he held a white plastic bag, which was weirdly muggle, but despite all of this, or perhaps because of it, he managed to look entirely too at ease, considering he was actively being held at wand point by about six people.
Then, as soon as he caught sight of the other people in the room, he did the strangest thing. He brightened instantly. “Oh, hey guys! I brought bagels!” Cheerfully, he raised his arm holding the bag.
That seemed to startle Mrs Weasley back into action. “Let the poor boy go, Merlin knows he wouldn’t harm a fly- he must be so frightened- don’t you dare throw that vase at him Fred Weasley!”
Fred blinked, once twice, and then lowered a vase he had presumably grabbed from one of the dressers, but only a little. He seemed helplessly confused, as if the vase, hideous as it was, was the only thing tethering him to reality.
Harry pinched himself to make sure he was not stuck in yet another dream. Then again, he did not feel particularly like a snake right now, which at this point was as good a sign as any.
“Oh, Merlin help me with these children, I don’t know what to do anymore, this-” she muttered to herself as she tried to fix Riddle’s tie. “I’m so sorry, Perseus, normally they would never attack a stranger.”
Riddle- Perseus shrugged, appearing somewhat taken aback himself. Everything that had just appeared frightening about him had dissipated as if it had never been there. A flash of the perfectly polite prefect, Harry had encountered in the diaries memories flashed through his mind, but the sight did not align with tis boy, who seemed more like the boy who would push the prefect down the stairs. “No harm done.” He smiled a little, but it seemed forced. “It nice to meet y’all.” He had a strange accent, his vowels seemed shorter, and he dropped the r almost entirely. Harry felt strangely reminded of some of the Muggle-shows he had seen Dudley watching from a distance.
His eyes widened in realisation. “It’s you! You’re the wizard from the Lethal Lands!”
The boy seemed surprised. “Well, um- yea. That’s me.”
Ginny was still staring at him queerly. “So, you’re some sort of shapeshifter?”
“Uhm, what?” Confusion coloured his tone. Then it turned to understanding. “Uh- no not that I know of at least, you never know, you know? Wait, can wizard do that? I just- I just look like this.”
The noise Ron made could only be qualified as sympathetic “That must be hard mate- to look like you-know-who. Awful bit of luck.” The twins nodded unusually sombre. Fred took the opportunity to rid himself of the vase by throwing it through the opened window. It landed outside with a crash. Ron flinched. Harry, who had a weird history with inner room décor since his aunt had him help her renovate the living room some odd years ago, felt strangely relieved. Ginny, on her part, remained frozen.
Harry then happened to glance at Sirius by chance and saw how the man’s amused expression was quickly overtaken by realisation.
“Well, yes, but it not that surprising I guess”, Perseus shrugged. His smile was still strained. “I am his grandson, after all.”
…
December 21st, 1996, Malfoy manor, Great Brittain
In the privacy of her own mind, Narcissa could admit she was scared. Her own son was to arrive later that day, a few days earlier than usual, claiming a family emergency. He was to be marked that evening. The house elves had cleaned the entire manor from top to bottom, they had hung fey lights through the hallways and given the murals of the old myths a new coat of paint. Narcissa had had a seamstress in magical Paris make a new fitted robe fitting the occasion. A dark emerald green, and rather simple cut, a symbol of subservience.
“What is this about a boy, Kreacher?”, she asked as gently as propriety would allow her. He was a house elf and she a Malfoy, yet it would not benefit anyone involved to frighten him away. There was a clear difference between dignity and stupidity, and she had always been far from stupid.
“A wizard, a foreigner, but as proper as circumstance allows him. He asked Kreacher for lessons, he did, Mistress. Kreacher showed him as much as he could.”
She glanced over her shoulders, towards where the Dark Lord was looming in the shadows. His gaze was cold and unreadable as it always was, but he shook his head once, sharply. It was a more benevolent gesture than anything she had ever seen of him. Usually, he just waited for the people around him to make mistakes and showed his profound displeasure after.
It made sense, she mused. The Dark Lord had been acting rather queerly since the last proper death eater meeting but so had Lucius and every other Death Eater in attendance. Something unexpected had occurred similar to the information Lucius had discovered a few months ago. Narcissa had not been privy to either of these events, nor had she pried to know details afterwards, but she could tell the differences in behaviour very well for herself.
She could tell that the Dark Lords moods had turned more sporadic and then, strangely, stabler than they had been since sometime back in the first war. She could tell that Lucius had spent an inordinate amount of time staring at the mural depicting the Slaying of Medusa and that the Dark Lord had ordered the guest chambers in his own wing be prepared indefinitely for an unknown visitor. She could tell that sometimes she caught flashes of unknown visitors from the corner of her eyes, beautiful beings wearing the airlike garments of the wizards of old and making her eyes burn from the brightness emanating from them.
She stepped back and left the room.
…
Decembre 21st, 1996 Hogwarts, Great Britain
In the last few weeks, the Room of Requirement had quickly become Harry’s favourite room in the entire castle.
The air was crisp and clean. There were widows opening into a dreamlike vale, reminiscent of one Ginny mentioned she had seen in a tourist brochure at Flourish and Blots. Vines had taken over one side of the room. The other side was being occupied with books, newspaper clippings, mug shots and the heaps of red string Hermione had conjured.
All in all, Hermione had joked, it looked as if Rapunzel had chosen to investigate a murder in her tower.
The Weasleys had all tuned to stare at her in confusion.
There on the centre of their mystery collection was the article that had started everything; around it was various other documentation on unusual weather. After the first few weeks of unplanned rain hitting the British Isles, with a focus on the area surrounding London, as Hermione had meaningfully underlined, everything had stopped. There was no rain at all, even if there was supposed to be, which was- to be frank- most of the time. They were surrounded by water after all.
Then there was the corner of prophet slander- all the articles where Harry was called deranged and fame hungry, or where some form of mental illness was attributed to him, as well as a selection of comments regarding dumbledores age and his unreliableness. Ginny had arranged it next to the rubbish bin the day Umbridge had been named high inquisitor. The following morning Fred and George had thrown a blanket over it to hide it from view, and they had collectively decided to call it a day.
Next to it was a pile of political articles, from various sources, concerning wizarding as well as muggle politics in a variety of countries. It took up almost the whole wall, and the yarn was spanned so thickly over it, one could hardly understand anything depicted on it. Little notes and scraps of parchment could be found among the large moving pictures of the newspapers- the search for Sirius, the educational decrees, Sturgis Podmore’s arrest, some anti-muggle diplomat dying of unknown causes in Eastern Europe.
“A bloody murder”, Harry had heard Ron mutter more than once, in the first few days after Hermione had established it. The name had stuck, thanks to Fred and George.
Thus, the Bloody Murder, headquarters of the Super-Secret-Extra-Order short SSEO, was born.
Sitting in the dark in the room he and Ron shared, Harry couldn’t help but yearn for the simplicity of connecting some newspaper clippings.
Ron was asleep. The anxiety and subsequent relief of the news of his father had knocked him out clean. The last time he had seen Ginny she was wandering the halls towards her room like a prisoner walking towards his execution, shell shocked and for all intents and purposes deaf to the world. Fred and George too had retired. So had Remus taking along an uncharacteristically silent Sirius. Perseus Riddle had smiled and nodded at him, as if any of this was in any way normal. As if he had not just summoned some kind of unmoveable force without a spell or a wand. As if he had not lived his life in the one place that killed all wizards. As if he didn’t wear Tom Riddles face.
No one seemed particularly in the mood to explain his presence, but neither did they seem to be keen on being in his presence anymore either.
Harry meanwhile still sat fully clothed hunched against the cold metal bars of the bedsteads, keeping himself deliberately uncomfortable, determined not to fall into a doze, terrified that he might become the serpent again in his sleep and wake to find he had attacked Ron, or else slithered through the house after one of the others…
We cannot help what we are. That’s what Perseus Riddle had told him back in the potions classroom. Had that been a threat? A warning? Had he known what would happen? That he would-
…
Smiling brightly Lily and James stood in front of their house in Godric’s Hollow.
James did that thing he always did when he was in the middle of executing a plan. His brows were a little furrowed and his hands were fiddling with everything everywhere. Lily, meanwhile, had a knowing glint in her eyes. That woman had always seemed to know everything everywhere. That morning, he remembered with astounding accuracy- twelve years of relieving memories will do that to you-, James and Sirius had hidden all the forks and glued Dumbledore’s face onto every picture in their yearbook.
Sirius cannot, however, for the life of him remember how Lily had reacted. He had, after all, not been present for it and James never got to tell him.
Perhaps she never had. Perhaps her cold, empty eyes had stared directly into one of the picture frames from where she had fallen, and it would be Dumbledore face winking at her instead of Peters’ and she would not have comprehended, since she was beyond comprehension. Perhaps James had fallen right on to the fork they had hidden in the floorboard, and he would not have yelped in that girlish vice Sirius had always teased him for, since he was silent, his voice ripped from him.
They were standing there, smiling brightly and laughing without a care in the world, if only for one second. And young. Painfully young. They would never be old. In Sirius eyes, in the eyes of the world, James and Lily were young parents forever, bright students, if at times a little mischievous, a mother and a father who had a bright future ahead of them.
And both dead, murdered in their own home next to their child.
Murdered by Percy’s grandfather.
“So…” Sirius had asked all those weeks ago, “your family, uhm… what are they like?”
And Percy had shrugged. “It’s a bit complicated.”
Sirius had asked him about the man, and Percy told him that he looked like him. That he was powerful. That people looked up to him. That he had been, maybe still was- as inconceivable and unfair as it was-, loved.
Back then he seemed to have forgotten mentioning that he was a monster.
“So, he’s still out there? Being a death eater and all that?”
“And all that.”
All that indeed.
A moment ripped out of memory, a knife tearing jagged edges through the tentative friendship he had built with a boy he had felt a connection towards.
Baby Harry was laughing in the picture, despite technically being too young for it. Sirius had never really seen older Harry laugh like that.
“Percy he- he can’t understand what happened,” Sirius found himself saying almost against his will. “He wasn’t there. He has never seen war.”
Moony crouched down next to him. A warm arm slung itself over his waist. “You’re right. He’s still a child. He forgives, like Harry did, remember? He wanted to spare Wormtail even after what he did to his parents. Percy is just like that. He will find everything redeemable about Voldemort even if it’s completely made up.”
“Percy isn’t Harry.”
“Of course not. But he isn’t Regulus either.”
The picture frame was old like everything in this house. He had taken it with him back when he had run away from here to the Potters. There had been a picture in it, of him and his brother, before the war, before Hogwarts, when they both had been as happy as they could be considering what they were. Blacks. Sirius remembered how Regulus looked at him the day he left. He remembered burning the picture of them after he learnt of him becoming a Death Eater. He remembered crying when he found out that it had cost him his life.
“Percy said something. That he thinks that it is the things he did not the thing he is.”
“Well.” Moony smiled. It was bitter. Even in his untransformed state he could see indents of his canine, teeth that were sharper and pointier than the one of a regular human. “No one wants a monster for family.”
He looks up, sharply. “You’re not a monster!”
Moony shrugged. “Perspective.”
Sirus sighed. Long and deep and somewhat hysterical. “What am I supposed to do later. I’ll just go downstairs make myself a cup of tea and talk with the bloody grandson of You-know-who about the weather?”
“No, you will talk to Percy about the weather.”
Sirius remained silent. It was a little petulant. “Well,” he said, once it became apparent that Moony wouldn’t fill the silence for him, “I don’t think we should talk about the stupid weather at all. It’s a bit boring don’t you think? I mean- sure- magical impossibilities or whatever, but what does that have to do with us? Nothing, that’s what!”
Moony sighed. “Come back to bed, Padfoot.”
…