Chapter Text
“.... and of course we’re both ostracized because I’m the disappointing son of Harry Potter, and you have the rumours going around about you being the secret son of Voldemort because supposedly your mum traveled back in time because your dad’s impotent…” Albus continued, as the clack clack clack of the Hogwarts express gently rocked the quiet compartment.
“How is that even remotely believable? I look exactly like my father!” Scorpius countered. “Even before Snakeface lost his nose, he had the whole tall, DARK, and handsome description handled. Meanwhile, I’m practically a light source!”
“Well, bully for you - my dad just told me that he wishes that I weren’t his son!” Albus exclaimed.
“Mmhmm, and this happened after Mr. Diggory came to your house just before fourth year, and introduced some madcap scheme to travel through time and save his son?”
“Yes, that’s exactly what I just said. How much did Rose stopping by just now scramble your brain? Just because she wants to be friends again, it hardly means you have a shot - I hate to disappoint you, I know you fancy her, but-”
“I what now?” Scorpius all but shrieked. “What in Merlin’s cracked cauldron is going on in your brain…”
“What’s going on in yours?!” Albus yelled back. “Why do you suddenly need a recap of the last 3 and a half years?! Did someone obliviate you over the summer?! As if I don’t have enough stress, what with Rose going on about Theodore Nott and Time-Turners now-”
“Albus,” Scorpius said, willing himself to approach this in a calm manner. “My lovely bewildered Potter, this is very very important for you to understand, so listen closely…”
Albus blinked at him, looking a little confused. Scorpius took that as a good sign.
“...None of this is real.”
*
“How long since he was taken?” Dean asked, as soon as he and Sam had shook off the overseas portkey nausea, dumped their multiple bags with a thunk in the living room, and gathered around the long table in the Grimmauld Place kitchen. Harry lay out the map, the search area circled in red. Teddy, Kevin, and Charlie were at the far end of the table, sorting through Charlie’s research from just a few weeks ago to see if there was anything she somehow missed. Nate was hovering in the kitchen, trying to cover everyone’s basic needs.
“Six hours,” Harry replied. “He and Scorpius were visiting Molly, when they went into the local village to buy sweets. It was still daylight. Scorpius stopped to pet a cat, and then saw Albus get grabbed from someone in an alley less than 10 paces away from him. They moved too fast for Scorpius to keep up, but from his description it sounds like a djinn.”
“Where’s Scorpius now?” Sam asked. “Can we talk to him?”
“I had to send him home,” Harry replied, with a grimace.
“He okay?” Sam asked softly.
“He’s fine,” Harry reassured him. “He just takes after his father when he doesn’t get his own way, apparently.”
Dean chuckled. “So, not too traumatized to help out - just too annoying?”
“And then some,” Harry replied. As much as it didn’t make sense for him to be angry at a fourteen year-old who had just seen his best friend abducted, Harry couldn’t keep the anger out of his voice when he continued. “As if I’m not doing all I can to find my own son!”
“Hey, we know Harry,” Sam said.
“So, are we thinking this might be targeted? A djinn that somehow flew under the radar from your team after the incidents last month,” Dean refocused them on the problem at hand. “Somehow figuring out who the head-honcho was and going after your son for revenge.”
Harry paled, no one had really said that out loud yet - but it wasn’t like Harry hadn’t heard the story already of the djinn who had specifically targeted Dean. Those djinn had been able to kill in minutes, not hours.
As if reading his mind, Sam continued. “It could also be random - and the djinn you dealt with last month kept their victims alive for a day or two, right? So, we have time - and there’s plenty of hope.”
“Yeah, yes,” Harry said softly. “If it’s the same type of djinn, then… then we still have time.”
The problem was that they didn’t know. There were too many different kinds of djinn out there. Last month, when they were trying to track down the djinn who had gotten a taste for wizard blood - the Winchesters and Charlie had told them all their experiences with the creatures. From the one that strung Dean up and tapped him like an IV drip and showed him his wishes come true, to the ones that had tied Charlie to a chair and roasted her with fever while they trapped her in a recurring nightmare, to the ones that had killed Dean’s neighbours in seconds and made their last moments pure terror. As horrible as it was to have put his children in jeopardy, Harry could only hope that this was a targeted attack by the same djinn that he and the aurors had hunted - those victims had been kept alive for at least 24 hours.
“Alright, tell me where your people are concentrated, and if you can arrange us some transport, we can cover more ground-”
“If we could just bloody trace him,” Harry interrupted. They’d discovered in their previous dealing with the djinn that their particular breed of preternatural magic basically made anything in their vicinity untraceable and unplottable. “Can you not tell Castiel that-”
“Harry,” Dean started, and Harry wanted to strangle him, because he could tell just from the tone of his name what was coming. “You know we can’t. He’s dealing with a really sensitive Nephilim situation at the moment. I know there’s nothing more important to you than Albus, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t other kids out there who also need help right now.”
“But just long enough to-”
The fireplace in the corner of the kitchen roared green and Ron stepped into the room.
“Sam, Dean,” Ron greeted. “Nice to see you again, I wish it were under better circumstances.”
“How’s Molly?” Harry asked.
“I finally convinced her to go to bed, and that we didn’t need her to charge through all the barns in Britain in search of her grandchild.” Ron sighed. “I stopped in at home to check on the kids. Hermione’s got them all researching - mostly to keep them distracted. She said Scorpius came through earlier cursing you and the horse you rode in on - but when she sent him home he went willingly. Rose and James have been pretty quiet since. Hermione’s a little worried, but I suppose it’s a good thing that we don’t really have a benchmark for expected behaviour in a situation like this - so maybe we just both have the type of kids that go quiet when they’re worried rather than loud like Malfoy’s boy.”
“Sorry about Scorpius,” Harry said. “I swore he said Malfoy Manor when he floo-ed out earlier - I should have escorted him home and explained to his father, but I had other things on my mind, and I just didn’t want to hear another bloody word about…” Harry winced “... worst case scenarios.”
“He’s just frightened, Harry,” Ron said, and Harry never thought he’d see the day when Ron defended a Malfoy, but times had changed, and Harry knew Rose and Scorpius were good friends.
“Yeah, well, I didn’t need to hear about how djinn were boiling Charlie’s brain, and would have killed her within hours, thanks, not when Albus has already been missing for-” Harry cut himself off. He still couldn’t think of it.
Charlie spoke up from the end of the table. “There’s absolutely no reason to believe that this djinn is different from the others - it’s true that it might not be a dream world, but none of the survivors last month who had bad dreams suffered fevers.”
“Yeah, but try explaining that to a fourteen year-old who’s not listening,” Harry said. “I hope he didn’t scare the other kids too badly.”
“Is Ginny still out there?” Ron asked.
“She’s doing fly-overs,” Harry said. “She’s hoping that if she’s close enough a tracking spell will work.”
“I’ve made sandwiches,” Nate announced, coming to set a tray between the two groups on the table. “Would you like some tea, Mr. Weasley?”
“Ta, Nate, that would be fantastic,” Ron said, sitting down next to the sandwiches.
Harry knew Nate was just trying to be helpful, but honestly, this was not a time for tea and sandwiches.
Before Harry could voice the thought, a little silver butler figurine levitated himself over the table until he was in front of where Nate still stood. Nate looked at it in confusion, while the little silver butler transfigured into a bell and began to ring.
Teddy’s head shot up at the end of the table.
“Did you set an alarm for something?” Teddy asked.
“No,” Nate replied, studying Teddy closely. “How are you feeling, Ted?”
Teddy looked perplexed. “Uh, stressed and worried, but you know-” he waved a hand as if to indicate the entire circumstances in which they found themselves.
The bell rang again. Nate poked it with a finger. It transfigured back into the miniature silver butler and flew to hover by the closed kitchen door.
“Right,” Nate said. Harry watched his eyes dart quickly around the room, landing on each occupant for a moment. “Tea in a moment, Ron - just have to… check the washing.”
Harry looked over to Kevin, wondering if the other occupant of Grimmauld Place might know the function of the tiny silver butler. He was surprised to find him also giving each person in the room a quick glance, his lips moving as though he were reciting names to himself. Harry’s eyes darted back over to Nate just in time to watch him draw his wand before he slipped out the kitchen door - the tiny silver butler leading the way.
Harry drew his own wand and was moving to follow before Kevin even spoke.
“There’s someone else in the house.”
*
“Ron, stay with the kids,” Dean ordered as he and Sam moved to follow Harry out of the door. Teddy was already out of his chair and moving to. “Teddy, st-”
“It’s my house and my mate,” Teddy replied, his eyes turning green while jets of black shot through his hair. He didn’t pause for even a moment as he pushed past Dean into the hallway. Dean knew a losing battle when he saw one, and any battle that came up against the stubbornness of Harry Potter, or little copies of him, was definitely not worth fighting in an emergency.
The four of them followed Nate’s footsteps up the staircase. They’d definitely lost the element of surprise with that many feet running up the stairs. But what they lacked in surprise, they could make up for in numbers.
Nate, or the little silver butler, Dean supposed, led them all the way up to the attic - which they reached panting. Dimly lit by a single lantern on the worktable and only the soft glow of the city at night coming through the window, Teddy’s lab looked just as gloomy as Dean remembered it. It was also empty - save for the little silver butler hovering in the air, waiting.
“I don’t understand,” Nate said, as Harry ran to the window to see if someone had escaped onto the small roof terrace. The window was nearly stuck shut when he went to open it - so that was unlikely, but Harry still climbed out to search the roof.
“They could have apparated-”
“Can’t apparate into or out of the house under Fidelus,” Teddy said, followed quickly by. “No one touch anything! Someone’s definitely been in here.” He walked over to the workbench where a small caldron sat next to several empty bottles and open notebooks. “They’ve used my things. Who would break into our house just to access my old lab?”
“And where did they go?!” Harry asked, jumping back into the room from the window. “There’s no sign that anyone has been on that roof.”
“But it doesn’t make sense,” Nate insisted, still staring at the silver butler. “I didn’t even charm Jeeves to alert us to intruders. Did you, Ted?”
“Jeeves is yours, mate,” Teddy replied, looking at the empty vials on the table with a furrowed brow.
“What’s he charmed to do?” Dean asked. He wondered if someone else may have charmed the little guy to be a distraction, in which case the real danger might be down in the kitchen.
“We can set alarms - wake up, egg timer - that sort of thing, and uh… “ Nate glanced at Teddy, “... health emergencies. He gets me if Teddy has a panic attack.”
Teddy’s head shot up, staring at Nate. “ That’s how you always find me! I thought that was our soulmate energy.”
“That too,” Nate said.
“So, there’s someone in this room having a medical emergency,” Sam concluded.
“Maybe we have mice? Can mice have health emergencies?” Nate wondered.
“Mice wouldn’t mess with my old cauldron,” Teddy pointed out. Dean ignored them as Sam stepped forward slowly, eyes on Jeeves, who was still hovering in the air in the middle of the empty room. No, not in the middle - Jeeves was hovering in the air a little to one side of the room, out of the way of any sort of regular foot traffic.
“Sam,” Dean warned.
“Yeah, I noticed,” Sam replied, as he carefully crouched down and slowly moved towards where Jeeves was hovering.
“What-” Harry started, just as Sam did a broad sweep with one arm through the air just above the floor. His fingertips caught on something and suddenly there was a shoe in the room.
A small shoe, toes pointed up at an angle.
“Fuck,” Sam said, as he quickly pulled the invisibility cloak off the body.
“NO!”
“What’d he do? WHAT DID HE DO?”
“Shit, buggering fuck-”
Everyone spoke over each other, as Dean crossed the distance to Sam in two strides - falling on his knees and pressing his fingers into the artery at the neck. Dean looked into Sam’s wide terrified eyes.
Scorpius Malfoy didn’t have a pulse.