Chapter Text
It took a week to notice the chimney smoke.
Not that Molly realized it at the time; one day, she thought her family was alone in their stretch of countryside, and the next, the woman was outside checking the garden for hibernating gnomes when she noticed a faint plume rising over the bare trees.
“Did you realize we have new neighbors?” She asked her husband that evening, just the two of them in the kitchen cleaning up after dinner.
Arthur blinked, pausing with a handful of dried plates in hand. “No?”
“I hadn’t either,” Molly fretted. “Not until today, at least. I feel dreadfully rude, not popping down right away with a pie at the very least-”
“We’ve got six children in the house, love,” her husband reminded gently, and oh, didn’t that number sound so odd with Bill off at his first year in Hogwarts, “I daresay you’re allowed a little leeway.”
“Still.”
“Well, how about you pay them a visit tomorrow, then? I’ll be home, I can manage whoever you don’t want to take with you. Introduce yourself and ask what sort of treat they’d like best, hm?”
She took the opportunity to kiss him, before they returned to putting away clean dishes.
Mid-morning the very next day, Molly filled a small basket with jam preserves, and left off with Ginny bundled in a sling and Percy trotting at her side, Arthur handling little Ron and the twins with Charlie’s help at home.
A small and very new looking cottage occupied a small plot of land down the way, across from where their lane intersected the path leading up to the Lovegood home. So new, in fact, that Molly spotted a rather tattered tent set up behind it, clearly being used as habitation during the construction process. Still, when she and Percy reached the property line, they headed up to the front door to knock, rather than going around back. A tingle of warmth spread across Molly’s skin as they got close - clearly the builder’s efforts had first gone into a powerful set of wards, rather than physical walls.
Considering the magical community hadn’t yet reached a full six months since the War’s end, she could hardly blame them.
“Alright, sweetheart,” the woman said when they reached the door, unpainted but very sturdy in its frame. “Would you like to knock for us?” Percy nodded, his whole face screwed up with determination as he lifted a little fist. Tap, tap.
The wards flickered. Inside the cottage, something heavy went thump-crash, and Molly barely held back a wince.
It took a few moments, but soon enough the door opened, revealing a young man wearing heavily plaster-spattered clothes and a battered pair of glasses. He blinked at them, eyebrows rising high enough to be hidden by his truly unruly mess of hair. “Um- hello?”
“Good morning! I’m Molly Weasley, from the house up the hill - this is my son, Percy.” She offered a bright smile, and held out the basket of preserves. “I’m sorry we didn’t pop round to say hello sooner, but I only just noticed you’d moved in yesterday!”
“Oh. No, that- that’s fine, we haven’t been here very long,” the young man said, awkwardly accepting the basket and just... staring at it in his hand. After a pause, he cleared his throat, looking back up to meet her expectant gaze. “I’m- Jorey. Jorey Hatter. Would you like to come in?”
A small pair of eyes peered around Jorey’s knees, and Molly let her smile soften. “We’d love to. Is there anything I could help with?”
In very little time at all, Molly managed to learn quite a bit about the Hatter family. Jorey, only twenty years old, was new to the area, and hoping to establish a decent home life for his ‘band of misfits’, as he called them. Delphi, age four and quite shy, refused to ever let go of his trousers. A distant cousin, with Death Eater parents in Azkaban and no one else willing to take her in, poor dear. Teddy, a year younger and a Metamorphmagus of all things, was Jorey’s godson. Already an orphan, sadly, one who’d recently lost the grandmother looking after him as well. And then Junior, barely eighteen months old, who looked so much like Jorey that Molly thought he was the man’s actual offspring before he said ‘nephew’.
“None of them are mine by blood,” he told her, something very hurt and haunted in his green eyes. “But I’m all they’ve got now. And I need to do right by them, no matter what.”
Her heart swelled. If Molly hadn’t only just met the man, she would have pulled him into a hug then and there.
She did let loose a few tuts, however, when he gave her the brief tour of a home still very much in the process of being properly outfitted. A bare-bones kitchen and larder, three small bedrooms hardly worth the title, a den furnished only with a pile of blankets and pillows heaped before the fireplace, and what would become the loo once Jorey figured out how to set up his indoor plumbing. Thankfully they had an enchanted outhouse to use in the meantime, along with the much better equipped traveling tent set up in the future garden.
By the end of their looking around, Percy’s eyes had grown rather wide, and he tugged on Molly’s hand until she bent down and he asked in a too-loud whisper if they could help the Hatters get their house in order.
Jorey looked entirely too hopeful when Molly turned back to him.
They wound up returning the next day, and with reinforcements: a river of redheads flowing down the lane and through Jorey’s impressive wards to fill his decidedly less-impressive cottage.
Arthur cheerfully started with the plumbing, Ginny’s sling situated on his chest for the time being. Molly set about establishing a much better kitchen, Ron and Junior placed within a playpen under her supervision. Charlie eagerly accepted the task of scouting the small property’s boundary and taking note of anything in need of repair, Fred and George and Teddy gleefully romping through the snow in his wake. And Percy seized the position of ‘assisting’ Jorey as he set up proper furniture in the bedrooms, along with minding the still-quiet Delphi. Not that she needed much minding, compared to the younger children, but it made the lad feel important nonetheless.
He’d apparently appreciated Delphi’s deferment to his seniority the day before so much that the boy brought along his pet rat to show off - something Molly didn’t realize until well after their arrival, when Jorey slipped into the kitchen rather grim-faced, Scabbers in hand.
“Mrs. Weasley,” because he’d yet to accept her insistence on ‘just Molly’, “I don’t want to alarm you, but this is an Animagus.”
...oh dear.
His fireplace had yet to be connected to the Floo Network, so they ended up shifting Ginny from one parent to the other, and then Arthur Disapparated off to the Ministry with a Stunned rat in hand. Jorey remained quite adamant he didn’t want Delphi upset by Aurors arriving to interview anyone, so shortly afterward, Molly gathered up all her children and set off for home.
Well. All but Ron - he seemed quite delighted with a playmate practically his own size, and put up a mighty fuss over being removed from Junior, so Jorey promised it was no trouble to mind the toddler for a while longer.
It proved to be a smart decision, as Molly was able to turn the twins loose with Charlie again at the Burrow, and put Ginny down in her crib before focusing solely on the tearful Percy when two Aurors came to talk to him about his former pet. They ended up checking the entire house over from top to bottom, a process that left Molly at her wit’s end by its conclusion. She huffed a farewell to the pair when they left, comforted Percy a touch more, and eventually began fixing dinner just to work off some of the bubbling anxiety.
Arthur came home in the early evening, clearly worn out. “They’ve given me the week off,” he informed his wife in a quiet tone, away from the children. “Not sure if that’s a good sign or not.”
Because it wasn’t just some random Animagus who’d chosen to hide in their home.
No, Scabbers was in fact Peter Pettigrew, and quite a few people were loudly asking questions about his unregistered status, and why he’d been in hiding, and most especially why he wasn’t dead. Arthur recounted being questioned by Aurors and Ministry officials and Albus Dumbledore himself before finally receiving permission to return to his family, and their one spot of good fortune was that none of those same people felt the need to go pester the Hatters.
Once her husband and present children were all tucked into bed, Molly hurried back down to the in-progress cottage to fetch her final son, and did give a startled Jorey the hug she’d been wanting to for two days. He stiffened, at first, before melting into the embrace as she sniffled against his shoulder.
PETER PETTIGREW ALIVE, the Daily Prophet screamed the next morning, along with ILLEGAL RAT ANIMAGUS and SIRIUS BLACK FRAMED? Thankfully the Weasley name was left out of things, or else Molly might have fretted even further.
Still. By lunchtime, she left the boys under Arthur’s supervision, visiting the Hatters again with Ginny tucked in the crook of one arm and a freshly baked treacle tart in the other.
A week later, Sirius Black was released from Azkaban.
And a day after that, the Prophet began screeching over his discovery of Harry Potter’s disappearance.
Delivered to his muggle relatives, people exclaimed, and handed off to the first wizard to show up at their door! A disgrace, an outrage, and of course speculation ran rampant. Black only made a single statement to the press, begging anyone with information that might lead to his godson’s retrieval to come forward, before vanishing into parts unknown with a friend from his school days. A handful of pictures cycled through with the headlines, including one of the last photos taken of James Potter and Lily Evans before they went into hiding during the War.
Molly stared at that particular newspaper for an awful long time, the morning it came. And each morning afterward, until the weekend arrived once more, and she was able to let Arthur manage the household for an hour.
Down the lane, the Hatter Cottage had come an awful long way since her first visit. A proper picket fence lined their front boundary, a low stone wall encircling the rest. The tent no longer occupied the back garden, a clearly marked path led up from the lane, and even their front door had received a coat of bright blue paint.
Molly knocked upon that door, despite the standing invitation she’d been given to come in any time, and held up the paper as soon as Jorey answered.
His green eyes promptly slid shut in an expression of pain. Without that difference, his resemblance to James Potter looked even more uncanny. “Did you Charm your hair?” Molly couldn’t help but ask, because it was a mess, yes, but a dark reddish-brown one rather than pure black.
“Muggle dye,” Jorey answered. “...do you want to come in?”
“I think I’d better.”
Junior was in fact Harry Potter, as Molly suspected.
And so was Jorey, which she hadn’t.
“But I thought-”
“Yeah. I know ‘James secretly survived’ sounds a lot more likely than ‘a grown-up Harry came back in time’, but that’s the truth.” Even with his hair color changed, Jorey’s green eyes still matched little Harry’s perfectly - eyes inherited from Lily Evans, apparently. “I thought I could come back far enough to save them. Didn’t quite make it.”
“...I’m so sorry, Harry.”
His lips twitched into a wry smile. “Might as well keep calling me Jorey; I’ve started to get used to it.”
“Jorey, then. I’m still sorry.”
“Thank you,” he said quietly. “I- I don’t know what’s going to happen, with Sirius out of prison. I’d like him to be involved in little Harry’s life, but if Dumbledore finds us, there’s going to be a row about him going back to our muggle relatives.”
Molly frowned at that. “Even with his godfather a free man again?”
“Yeah. There’s a protective enchantment our mum managed to cast, some kind of blood magic, but it only works as long as he lives with a relation on her side of the family. I figure I count. But the fewer people who know how, the better.”
Slowly, she nodded. “And that means, not letting many people know about you at all, doesn’t it?”
He returned the nod, gaze going distant as he looked at his younger self playing with Teddy and Delphi in front of the fireplace. “It was- a risk, coming here. Buying this place, when I found the advert. But I thought- if I- I couldn’t save his parents, so... I’d at least give him longer with Ron, and all of you.”
Oh.
Molly hadn’t even considered that.
At her astonished glance, Jorey’s expression turned bittersweet. “We first met outside Platform Nine and Three Quarters, ages ago. I was alone; didn’t have a clue how to get through- must have looked a right pitiful sight. And you- you didn’t hesitate, when I heard you mention Hogwarts and came over. Told me exactly how to cross the barrier, made me watch Percy and the twins go first so I’d be less nervous. I slipped away, on the other side, figuring that was that - but Ron told me, years later, you stuffed an extra pair of sandwiches into his pocket and sent him off to sit with me, so I wouldn’t be alone my first time.” A pair of tears slipped free from his eyes. “We stayed best mates for years. Had some up and downs, ‘course, but I always trusted Ron. And when it- when it came down to it, he watched my back. All- all the way ‘til- until-”
Molly sniffed, unsurprised to find herself crying. When Jorey’s face wobbled, she reached over and hauled him into a hug, tucking the younger man’s face against her shoulder just as the first sob tore through him.
Mister Black,
Your godson is perfectly alright. Better, actually, than he was even two months ago, thanks to a young man who saw how poorly things were going in the Dursley household and intervened. It’s also entirely due to this man that my son’s pet rat was outed as an Animagus, which led to Peter Pettigrew’s arrest and your own release from Azkaban.
He’s expressed to me a reluctance over reaching out to you himself, in fear of how closely Professor Dumbledore is monitoring your recovery. From what he told me only recently, it’s entirely likely the headmaster would insist on your godson returning to his aunt’s keeping, regardless of you or anyone else being willing to take him instead.
The reason for this is due to a last act of protection on Lily Potter’s part, a spell that only works as long as Harry lives with a blood relation of hers. As far as we know, there are three people who fit that bill: Mrs. Dursley, her infant son, and my neighbor, who is currently looking after him along with two other small children he’s adopted.
Any more than that, I don’t dare put in writing.
Please, consider this an open invitation to you to visit the Burrow any time, and we’ll arrange an introduction for you.
Best wishes,
Molly Weasley
P.S. My neighbor insisted I include in this letter the phrase ‘I solemnly swear I am up to no good’. He said you would recognize it, even if I don’t.