Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Harry’s eyes opened before his breath did. For a second, he simply lay there, letting the carriage’s motion settle him the way it always did: the slight sway, the smell of dust and wool, the distant clack of wheels on rail. Memory rose in him like a tide, not one clean, whole memory but a layered ache of places and endings, of faces that had blurred and sharpened a dozen times. He let the tide wash him and listened for the shape of the day.

He turned his head slowly. The compartment was the same as always: varnished wood, a narrow bench, a latch that never closed quite smoothly. Sunlight from the corridor threw a cut of brightness across the glass, and outside the fields were the same gentle, disinterested green. Things were familiar enough to be comforting and foreign enough to be dangerous; that was the lesson the loops had taught him better than any textbook.

Ron lay opposite, shoulders hunched, still half-sunk into sleep. For a long moment Harry only watched the rise and fall of his friend’s chest and counted the fine, ordinary details: freckles, a smudge on a chin, the slow breath that meant no fevered dream took him this time. Relief ghosted through Harry and left as quickly as it came. He checked the little watch at his wrist, an old thing that always told him the hour he already knew: 11:00 AM.

“Bloody hell,” Ron muttered, voice rough with sleep. He shifted and a cold current from the window brushed Harry’s knuckles. “Again,” he added, as if the single syllable would anchor them both.

Harry pressed his fingertips to the iron bench until the metal warmed slightly under his skin. The bench carried a dozen small dents and scratches, a geography of do-overs. He felt oddly reverent toward those marks. Each one had a story. Each one had been paid for.

“You okay?” Ron asked, waking properly now and rubbing his eyes. There was a brittle edge to his asking that made Harry want to laugh and break at once.

“Yeah,” Harry said. The word was thin. “I think so.”

He let his gaze roam the compartment carefully, as if taking inventory might make the rules clearer. The train smelled like other people’s breakfasts and the faint cocoa of chocolate frogs. A group of first-years in the corridor shrieked at some piece of luggage, and the sound cut through him like the echo of a bell. Eleven again. The knowledge sat in his chest the way a physical thing sits: heavy, small, necessary.

Harry had no proof there would be another loop when he chose to die in the last battle. He sat up, letting his robe slack against his knees. He had thought, in the furnace of that last moment, that a single selfless act might be enough, that stepping forward, letting Voldemort find him, would end the pattern by breaking the tether. He could still taste the copper of panic on his tongue and the strange, numbing calm of the instant before. If he had been lying about certainty then, he had been lying for a cause: his friends, the people who kept returning with him to this same beginning.

“It was worth it,” Harry said finally, small and steady. “I— I’d do it again.”

Ron blinked, the first look confusion, then anger. “Hang on—what do you mean ‘you’d do it again’?”

Before Harry could answer, Hermione’s footsteps slid into the corridor, and she pushed the compartment door open with the brisk authority she always used when she wanted to take charge of a room. The movement was enough to rouse Ron fully; he sat up with the startled expression of someone who had been pulled out of water.

Hermione closed the door behind her, cloak still drawn tight against the small chill. Her eyes went to Harry’s face first, then to Ron’s, and she took in the set of their shoulders with the quick, practical glance of someone already measuring consequences. In the space of a breath, she had a quill tucked behind an ear and a scrap of parchment out of her bag. There was always a scrap of parchment. Today it looked like armour.

“What happened to you?” Hermione asked, voice sharp with need rather than curiosity. The question struck the compartment like a thrown pebble.

Harry swallowed. He’d practised a thousand ways to say it and none of them softened the edge. “This time… you two died before me, during the battle. I—” He broke off, breath stuttering. “I stepped forward. I let him hit me. Avada Kedavra. I thought if I offered myself, it might let us start again.”

Ron’s eyes went blank for a heartbeat, confusion folding into him like a bruise. “You—what? You mean you actually let him kill you?” His fists clenched on the bench until his knuckles paled. “You can’t just do that, Harry. You don’t get to decide that for us. You don’t get to throw your life away and expect the rest of us to be fine with it.”

Hermione’s face had drained of colour. Her quill hovered uselessly between her fingers. “You did what?” Her voice was small and incredulous and then, fiercer: “You knew there was no guarantee we’d come back. How could you risk that?”

Harry steadied himself on the wood of the bench, sounding more exhausted than defiant. “We’ve looped before. Enough times that I thought the odds were in our favour. It wasn’t a comfortable gamble, I know that. But I couldn’t watch you die and do nothing. I couldn’t watch anyone else die again if there was any way to stop it.”

Ron’s anger sharpened into something rawer, half-accusation, half-plea. “You could’ve told us. You could’ve asked. We could’ve chosen to try something else, anything but you giving up like that.”

Hermione’s jaw worked. She sank down slowly, the quill tapping once against the paper as if to find rhythm in the chaos. “You had no right to decide for us,” she said quietly. “Not when the consequences could be everything.”

Hermione’s hands curled into the parchment until the edges bent. For a long, terrible moment she said nothing, as if silence were the only instrument left that could measure their loss. Then the words came, low and furious. “You had no right to decide for us, Harry. Not like that. Not when there was no certainty.”

Harry’s shoulders slumped. “I know. I know that now. I thought—” He stopped, because thinking aloud was a map he did not want to redraw in front of them. “I thought I was buying us time. I thought the loop would start again. I thought that if I gave him something—myself—he might be less able to go after the rest of you.”

Ron’s anger broke along a different seam, rawer and closer to panic. “You don’t get to make a habit of throwing yourself away,” he said. “You do it, and we all come back and pretend it’s fine, but it’s not fine. You’re important, Harry. You’re not disposable just because everything else is messed up.”

Harry let a humourless half‑smile twitch. “I’m aware I have dramatic tendencies.”

Hermione’s voice was small, trembling with disbelief and worry. “Dramatic tendencies don’t make sound strategy.” She forced herself to breathe, to be the one to shape the mess into work. “Whether or not I think what you did was reckless, it happened. We have to treat it as a fact and move on. Planning will help. Planning always helps.”

Ron’s fists loosened. He rubbed his palms along his knees, trying to find steadiness in the wood. “So what happened, exactly? You said you… you let him— Avada? You went up to him?”

Harry looked away toward the window, where the fields blurred into a watery comprehension. “It was at the end, when everything was collapsing. People were dying around me. You both were gone; I watched it happen. I could have tried something else. I didn’t. I stepped forward and—” He shivered as if the memory had a weight on his shoulders. “It took me. It killed me.”

Hermione made a sound that was equal parts sob and breath and then muffled it under a hard, determined set of her mouth. “You mustn’t ever do anything like that again without consulting us,” she said, not pleading but issuing the sternest command she had learned to give. “We are a team. We share risk and decisions.”

Ron barked a laugh that was almost relief. “Good. Because I’d have hexed you myself if you’d actually pulled that stunt without telling us.”

Harry gave them both a look that was half apology, half gratitude. “I should have told you. I’m sorry.”

Hermione’s eyes sharpened in the way they always did when she moved from reproach to action. She set her quill to the parchment once more, but this time she did not just list facts, she sketched possibilities aloud, voice quick and urgent. “We have new information. Horcruxes. That explains why we keep looping, at least in part. If a piece of Voldemort’s soul is lodged where it shouldn’t be, the fabric of the pattern could be tied to that. Destroying Horcruxes is the priority.”

Ron rubbed the bridge of his nose. “We know that. But how? We didn’t have a clue for some of them before.”

Hermione’s eyes shone with the fever of someone who lived to cross T’s and dot I’s. “Containment. We can’t just destroy a Horcrux without precautions. What if destroying it screams out and alerts whatever is left of him? What if the loop reacts? We need a vessel, a warded box that can dampen or isolate the Horcrux’s signature the instant it’s severed from its anchor.”

Harry straightened, the idea catching in him. “A containment box. Something to seal a fragment so it can’t… broadcast.”

“Yes.” Hermione’s pen flew. “Multi‑layered runes: anti‑scrying, dampeners, a called hush rune to muffle any metaphysical cry. Perhaps a blood‑ward to anchor the box to us, so only we can open it. We make it portable, escape‑proof, and we only destroy the Horcruxes when we are ready and at a place of our choosing.”

Ron’s face brightened with a practical gleam. “Right. And we’ll need to get to them earlier in the year than they expect. Intercept the diary in Year Two before Lucius has the chance to place it. We don’t let it fall into Ginny’s hands.” He jabbed a finger in emphasis. “And the locket—”

Hermione nodded, biting her lip. “Each action must be surgical. But we also learned something else: the loops force us into certain pivots unless we’re careful. We tried to avert some events once and everything went sideways afterward. It’s as if the timeline prefers some nodes. We can shift things, but not too abruptly or in the wrong place. We have to be deliberate.”

Harry’s throat tightened. “So we pick our battles. Intercept the items we can do without creating greater harm. Contain them. Build up to an extraction point where we can safely remove all fragments and then decide, together, whether to destroy them.”

“She’s right,” Ron said after a beat. “And I’ve taken care of one complication.” He turned to Harry with a look that mixed mischief and relief. “About Wormtail? Scabbers? I’ve been… handling things so we don’t have a squealing rat problem this year. You don’t need to worry about that for now.”

Harry’s eyebrows climbed. “You what—?”

Ron waved a hand, sheepish. “Not like murder, like—rational placement. He won’t be getting in the way of our plans.” His grin was quick and guilty. “Don’t make me get into details.”

Hermione’s mouth pursed but there was gratitude there. “Good. We’ll formalise safehouses before Year Three and plan a discreet transfer. If we free Sirius, it must be at a point when Dementors won’t be waiting, and he must have a secure identity. I’ll start working on concealment charms and false passports. Ron, you’ll handle diversions and practicalities; Harry, you and I will work on containment theory and warding.”

They began to talk in the way of people who have rehearsed hard answers until they fit: rapid, overlapping, each pushing the logic of the other. Hermione proposed a list of runes and rituals; Ron suggested decoys and misdirection when public events made theft likely; Harry argued for minimal public action to avoid signatures the way Voldemort might read them. They threaded memories of past loops into their plans, the mistake that had cost them dearly, the small change that had saved lives, and from those stitches a strategy began to shape.

At one point Hermione frowned and tapped the margin of her parchment, voice thoughtful. “We must remember that the loop does not just reset time. It resets consequence for everyone else. Only the three of us carry memory. That means the world will keep moving in ways that seem natural to it, and sometimes the safest route is to let certain things happen, then undo their damage later, rather than trying to prevent every single unpleasantness.”

Ron made a rueful sound. “That’s a horrible kind of compromise, but it’s sensible.”

“It’s the sort of sensible that will keep us alive,” Hermione said. Her smile then was small and fierce. “We’ll polish the details as the year goes, adapt. We’ll be cautious but not paralysed.”

They drew breath together and, for a moment, the carriage held only the sound of the train and their steadying plans. The anger and grief had not gone away; it had been folded into something workable. It was not victory. It was the map of one.

A tentative knock rattled the partition then, and Neville Longbottom’s head poked in, wide-eyed, clutching a toad-sized cage to his chest. “I—I think Trevor slipped out,” Neville stammered, voice barely above a whisper. “M-my toad… I lost him. Have you seen him?”

Hermione looked up from her parchment; the crispness of her planning softened into a kinder light. “You might try a prefect. They know the train inside out and can even cast a tracking charm on familiars.”

Neville’s shoulders eased a fraction. “Oh — right. Thanks.” Hermione smiled, setting her quill aside with the same careful politeness she used when she was about to teach rather than reprimand. “By the way, I’m Hermione Granger.” She nodded toward Ron. “This is Ron Weasley.”

Ron offered a small, steady wave. “Hello.”

“And this is Harry Potter,” Hermione added, indicating Harry with a brief, conspiratorial lift of her chin.

Harry grinned and threw up a quick, friendly wave that made Neville’s relief deepen into something like awe. “I’m Neville Longbottom,” he said, clutching his cage a little less tightly. “Nice to meet you all.”

Harry’s smile was quick and encouraging. “Good luck finding Trevor. Ask a prefect — they know the train inside out.”

“Thanks,” Neville whispered, and slipped back into the corridor, the door clicking softly behind him.

The compartment settled for a breath before the door opened again. Draco Malfoy swept in with the practiced ease of someone used to making an entrance; Crabbe and Goyle flanked him like badly behaved sentries. He scanned the faces with a faintly bored expression and then fixed on Harry with a smirk that didn’t reach his cold grey eyes.

“I’m looking for Harry Potter,” Draco announced, smooth as if reciting from a list. He leaned forward, narrowing his eyes. “Is the famous Harry Potter here?”

Harry sat up, meeting Malfoy square on. “Don’t trouble yourself, Malfoy.”

Draco’s politeness could not quite hold. He extended a hand in a mock civility. “Surely you’d prefer better company than—well, these,” he said, jerking his chin toward Ron and Hermione. “I could introduce you to a more… exclusive circle.”

Harry’s jaw tightened. He rose slowly, robes whispering against the wood. “Keep your introductions,” he said. “I know exactly who I’m lucky to have.”

The smirk slipped from Draco’s face for a second as his plan faltered. He straightened, eyes cold. “You’ll regret this insolence, Potter.” With a sharp nod, he swept out, Crabbe and Goyle shuffling after him.

Silence fell, the kind that presses around words and lets them chill. Ron exhaled, low and unamused. “First years and already he’s insufferable.”

They dropped back onto the bench. Hermione’s quill moved, this time to cross and underline Year Seven with a kind of careful finality. Outside, the fields rolled by in that slow, green certainty the train always offered, a landscape that felt ordinary until memory filled it with edges and dangers they now recognised.

Ron let out a short laugh. “Neville still loses Trevor on the train.”

Hermione tapped her quill twice, a small punctuation to the thought. “And Draco’s arrogance never changes.”

Harry traced a lazy line along the windowpane with his fingertip. “Some things never change,” he said, but the words had the weight of someone who’d seen too many endings and hoped, fiercely, for a different one.

The whistle blew, bright and clean. Steam threaded through the compartment as the train slipped into a tunnel of possibility. Three eleven‑year‑olds armed with knowledge no first‑year should possess sat together and breathed out a plan they would keep bending and sharpening for years to come.

Chapter Text

The path down to the lake smelled of wet stone and waxed boots. First‑years fumbled with trunks and cloaks, voices rising in nervous threads, and the castle wind tugged at scarves like a hand ushering them forward. Harry followed Ron and Hermione in a close line, eyes taking everything in as if cataloguing might make this iteration safer.

A small boy tripped on the steps and pitched toward the edge. Without thinking, Hermione’s hand shot out, quicker than courtesy, more like muscle memory, and caught him by the elbow. The boy blinked up at her, face flushing with embarrassed thanks.

“Cheers,” he stammered.

“You’re welcome, Justin,” Hermione answered before she registered the name. The word slipped out like an old key.

The boy’s smile widened in surprise. “You know my name?”

Hermione’s face went a shade too pale. She tightened her grip for a moment, then let go as if memory could be dropped alongside the boy’s sleeve. “Er—of course,” she said, voice precise and flat, then turned away as though the incident mattered less than the boat waiting below.

Ron made a stifled noise beside her. “That was close. Name reflex? Hazardous.”

Harry let out a breath that was irony and exhaustion braided together. “It happens. You say a name like it’s a thing you’ve always known, because in some loop you did. Then you must act like it’s the first time you meet them. It throws everyone off.”

Hermione’s jaw worked. “We have to keep faces and names separate in our heads. New face, new name. Ledger closed. Otherwise, we will give ourselves away by thinking of people as constants when they are not.” She forced a small, private smile. “Practice. Little lies that keep the rest of the world sane.”

They reached the boats; the lake inhaled and exhaled a silver breath around the lanterns. The water held the castle’s reflection like a stole of stitched black and gold. The oars dipped, the boat tilted, and they glided into a silence full enough to speak in.

For a long minute none of them did. Harry let the chill edge of the air clear his lungs. The castle loomed ahead, towers serrated against the bruise of sky, windows flaring warm. Even with the loops folding on top of one another like old maps, the sight of Hogwarts made something unfurl in him: awe threaded with grief, a hope that had been remade every time they had to start again.

“It never stops being…Hogwarts,” Ron said finally, voice low. “Even when we’ve seen the worst of it.”

Hermione’s hand found the seam of her cloak. “It’s not just walls. It’s where the rules live. We learn the rules, then we learn how to break them without snapping the whole thing. Coming back here feels like returning to the same wound and finding new trust in the stitches.”

Harry watched light ripple against stone and felt the threads of too many returns tightening into resolve. “It’s where things were taken and where things can be put back. That’s why it matters so much.”

Neville, clutching Trevor’s cage, peered into the darkness with a shy, earnest face. “Is it always like this? The first night, I mean?”

“Not if you’ve been through it more than once,” Ron said, giving a small laugh that tried to be ordinary. “If you have, you become suspicious of everything that’s meant to be magical and wonderful.”

The boat kissed the shore. The castle steps rose like an invitation and a test all at once. Professor McGonagall waited at the top, rigid in her tartan, eyes like measuring rods. Her tone was cold comfort: severe and exact, but it held a steadiness that meant business.

“Welcome to Hogwarts,” she said. “You will soon be sorted. Follow me.” Her gaze flicked from face to face, collecting and notating, and Harry felt the reflex to be small and ordinary inside her scrutiny.

“She always makes me nervous,” Ron muttered as they walked under her shadow.

“You could do without being noticed,” Hermione said, blunt and useful, but her lips twitched in something close to fondness. McGonagall’s stare was a risk and a shelter at once.

They followed her through the towering doors, the stone echoing beneath their feet. The castle smelled of wax and parchment, of old magic and secrets buried deep. Harry felt the weight of every loop pressing against his ribs, the memory of every time they had walked this path, sometimes victorious, sometimes broken.

The Great Hall opened like a cathedral of light. Candles floated above, flickering gently beneath the enchanted ceiling, which mirrored the dusk sky in shades of violet and indigo. The long tables gleamed with polished wood and empty plates, waiting. At the front, on its familiar stool, sat the Sorting Hat, creased, ancient, and very much alive.

A hush fell over the room as the Hat stirred. Its brim twitched, and then it began to sing, voice rich and resonant, echoing off the stone walls with a cadence older than any student present:

“I’m stitched with spells and brim with lore,
I’ve sorted minds for years galore.
Upon this stool I sit once more
To guide your fate through Hogwarts’ door.

I’ve seen the rise, I’ve watched the fall,
I’ve heard the whispers in these halls.
I know your hearts, your hopes, your fears
I’ve sorted souls for countless years.

So, lend an ear, and hear me speak,
Of houses bold and virtues unique.

Gryffindor, where courage burns,
Where daring hearts take wild turns.
They charge ahead through fire and fight,
For honour, truth, and what is right.

Slytherin, with cunning grace,
Ambition carved in every face.
They plot and plan with sharpened minds,
And chase the power others find.

Ravenclaw, the wise and keen,
Where intellect is always seen.
They seek the stars, the ancient runes,
And ponder truths beneath the moon.

Hufflepuff, so often dismissed,
Yet loyal hearts should not be missed.
They toil with care, they stand their ground,
In quiet strength, they’re truly sound.

But mark me now, while you are young,
The world is more than house and bonds.
For though you wear your colours proud,
The storm ahead is dark and loud.

So, choose your path with open eyes,
And do not fall for shallow ties.
The future waits, the threads unwind
Let unity not lag behind.

Destiny is not a game,
Nor bound to blood, nor bound to name.
The bravest hearts may walk alone
But only together can peace be grown.

Four houses stand, both proud and true,
But unity must guide what you do.
Choose not by blood, nor fame, nor might
But by the soul that seeks the light.”

The final note hung in the air like smoke. A few first-years clapped hesitantly. Most just stared, wide-eyed and unsure.

Ron leaned in. “Unity and destiny? Sounds like it’s been reading our notes.”

Harry did not speak. He watched the Hat, wondering, not for the first time, if it remembered. If it knew. If it had seen them loop through time, death, and choice, and was trying, in its own cryptic way, to help.

“Maybe it’s just being dramatic,” Ron muttered. “It is a hat.”

Hermione did not answer. Her eyes remained fixed on the stool.

“Granger, Hermione.”

Hermione stepped forward, head high, shoulders squared. The Hat barely touched her brow before shouting, “Gryffindor!”

She walked past Harry and Ron, her eyes flicking with unspoken tension. Her seat at the Gryffindor table felt both familiar and foreign, like a memory she had not earned yet.

Neville was called next. He stumbled forward, nearly dropping Trevor’s cage, and sat stiffly beneath the Hat. After a brief pause, it called, “Gryffindor!”

Neville beamed, cheeks flushed with pride.

“Potter, Harry.”

He stepped forward, heart thudding. The stool was cold beneath him, the Hat heavy as it slid over his head. Its voice curled into his thoughts like smoke.

“Ah, Mr. Potter. Again. Why not try something new this time?”

Harry did not flinch. “We did. Once. I went to Slytherin. Ron stayed in Gryffindor. Hermione chose Ravenclaw. We convinced Neville to try Hufflepuff.”

The Hat hummed, intrigued. “And?”

“It fractured everything. Unity didn’t come. The loop fought back. The more we diverged, the more chaos followed.”

A pause. Then a sigh, almost weary. “Very well. Gryffindor.”

The Hat was lifted. Harry walked to the table, Hermione’s eyes meeting his with quiet understanding. She did not smile, but her gaze held something stronger, resolve.

“Weasley, Ron.”

Ron strode up, grin crooked, shoulders loose. The Hat barely hesitated. “Gryffindor!”

When they found seats and the feast began, they tried to play the parts of boys and girls meeting school as strangers do. It was an awkward theatre; faces they knew from every loop were politely unfamiliar and it took effort to treat each conversation as a new discovery. A first‑year’s bright question about robes made Hermione answer with textbook patience while her mind catalogued how she would patch every hole in their plan. Ron joked with a boy they’d previously battled and paused because he remembered the exact cruelty that had once followed that face. Harry smiled at introductions with a politeness that had been practiced into muscle memory, but behind his smile a storm of recognition and strategy ticked like a metronome.

“Do you ever think they notice?” Ron asked in a low voice as he tucked a roast potato between his teeth.

“Notice what?” Hermione replied, not looking up from where she had been sketching ward patterns in the margin of a napkin.

“The way we treat faces like old books,” Ron said. “You ever say someone’s name and nearly blow your cover because you remember too well?”

Harry’s mouth tightened. “It happens. I nearly slipped with a Muggleborn girl in Defence last loop. Said things I shouldn’t know as if I’d been tracking her for years. She thought I was mad.”

Hermione’s pen tapped the table, a tiny metronome. “We must keep a ledger in our heads. New appearance, new introduction. No historical intimacy unless we choose it and only when necessary. It’s awkward but safer.”

Their conversation was halves of confession and halves of planning. Around them, the hall continued its performance of ordinary enchantment, and they played along because habit had become armour.

Near the staff table, Quirrell’s edgeless presence hunched in his robes. Harry’s eyes went to the back of the man’s head and the scar along his forehead flared like a living thing: hot, immediate, a warning that made him look away to bite down on the reflex.

“It’s burning,” Harry said quietly to Ron. There was no theatre to this admission between them; they had seen it enough times.

Ron’s face tightened. “Professor Quirrell? He gives me the creeps.”

Hermione’s gaze tracked to Snape, fingers curling at her quill as if she might write the expression down. “Snape’s watching Quirrell the way a hawk watches a rabbit. He’s not curious — he’s suspicious.” She glanced at Harry, voice softer. “And we know why.”

Harry let the words come out steady, because they had to be said aloud for them to sit where plans could be made around them. “Last loop,” he began, “Snape—he did something I never expected. He…he sacrificed himself.”

Hermione’s breath hitched and then steadied. “We know Snape hated you, Harry, but last time he did something that looked like hate, and it was really protection tied to Lily. Snape saw danger where others didn’t. Those instinct matters.” She tapped the rim of her goblet.

Ron made a sound that was part astonishment, part disgust. “That sod. All that spite and snide, faking it for years?”

Harry shook his head slowly. “He wasn’t fake. He was cruel. He hated my father, and he let me feel it. He humiliated me more than once. He—” He stopped, thumb worrying the rim of his goblet. “What he did afterwards doesn’t scrub clean the way he made us feel before. It complicates things. It doesn’t erase the past.”

Hermione’s face folded with a scholar’s ache. “People can act from more than one motive at once,” she said. “Loyalty to a promise and a capacity for cruelty are not mutually exclusive. We should be grateful for the protection but not surprised if the scars it left are still raw.”

Ron looked between them, the fierce, simple loyalty back in his face. “Fine. We keep our eyes open. But if Snape looks like he’s being a git, I’m keeping my hand on my wand.”

They let a brittle, necessary humour ease the edge of the conversation, but the truth sat between them like a stone: protection bought with years of bitterness could be real and damaging all at once.

They watched the two professors in the same quick, practical way they had learned to watch threats: catalogues opening in their heads, who looked at whom, who spoke little, who laughed too loud. The meal ended in the same rising tide of noise, and they were shepherded toward staircases that tangled the castle like veins.

A cluster of older students jostled them on the stairs and cursed softly. Ron bristled at the insult and stepped forward, but Harry’s hand on his sleeve stilled him. “Not tonight,” Harry said, low but ironed with warning. The older boy’s sneer thinned; they passed without a scrap of trouble. Ron exhaled with a noise that might have been relief.

“They’re like a pressure on the map,” Ron said as they climbed. “Sometimes I think the castle remembers the worse parts and nudges us toward them.”

Hermione snorted. “The castle doesn’t conspire. We do. We make patterns, and the world fills in the blanks. We’re dangerous only when we’re careless.”

At the portrait hole, the usual jokes and passwords waited like small charms of home. The Gryffindor common room glowed with firelight and nostalgia. Portraits whispered among themselves, and the shadows danced like old ghosts across the stone walls. The trio climbed the spiral staircase in silence, each step echoing with memories they had not made yet, at least not in this loop.

Ron peeled off toward his dormitory, yawning. “See you in the morning.”

Harry lingered at the doorway to the boys’ room, but Hermione did not move. She stood beside him, arms folded, gaze fixed on the flickering hearth below.

“I don’t want to sleep yet,” she said quietly.

Harry nodded and led her inside. The dormitory was unchanged, five four-poster beds, deep red curtains, golden tassels. The windows looked out over the dark grounds, and the moon hung low, pale, and watchful.

All the boys were already fast asleep, their breathing steady and oblivious. No one stirred as Hermione slipped in and perched on the edge of Harry’s bed, her fingers laced tightly in her lap.

“The Hat’s song… it wasn’t just poetic. It was a warning.”

Harry knelt by his trunk, fingers brushing the latch. He had not opened it yet. Something about it felt… off. Like it had been packed by someone else.

He lifted the lid slowly.

Inside, beneath his robes and books, was a small wooden box. No markings. No lock. Just smooth, dark wood, and a faint scent of ash.

Hermione leaned closer. “That wasn’t there before.”

Harry nodded. “Not in any loop.”

He opened the box.

Inside was a single object: a silver coin, tarnished and warm to the touch. On one side, etched with eerie precision, was the symbol of the Deathly Hallows: the triangle, the circle, the line. On the other, a skeletal hand reaching upward from beneath a veil, fingers curled as if beckoning.

Hermione recoiled slightly. “That’s a death mark. Not just symbolic. That’s ritual magic.”

Harry stared at the coin. “Why would this be in my trunk?”

Hermione’s voice was low, urgent. “The Hallows exist in every loop. But we only learned about them in the last one. Before that, they were just... stories buried in myth. You had the Cloak. You briefly held the Stone. But the Wand…”

“Voldemort stole it,” Harry said. “From Dumbledore’s tomb.”

Hermione nodded. “So, you never united them. You were never the Master of Death.”

Harry’s fingers tightened around the coin. “Then why this?”

Hermione’s eyes narrowed. “Maybe it’s not about possession. Maybe it’s about proximity. Or potential.”

Harry looked up. “You think someone’s assessing me?”

“I think someone, or something, is watching the loops. And this coin is a message. Or a trigger.”

Harry turned the coin over again. The skeletal hand seemed to shimmer faintly, as if moving beneath the surface.

Hermione’s voice dropped to a whisper. “Death and time are intertwined. The Hallows were created to cheat death. But what if they also bend time? What if the loops aren’t just resets… but echoes?”

Harry did not speak. The coin pulsed faintly in his palm, like a heartbeat that did not belong to him.

Hermione stood. “I should go. If McGonagall finds me here…”

Harry gave a faint nod. “We’ll talk more tomorrow.”

She hesitated at the door. “Harry… if this coin is real, then the loop is changing. And not by accident.”

He watched her disappear down the staircase, then turned back to the coin.

Later, when sleep finally came, it was not peaceful.

He dreamed of a field of stars, endless and silent. A figure stood at the edge of the void, cloaked and faceless. It held out a coin.

“You are not the Master of Death,” the figure said. “But death remembers you.”

Harry woke with a gasp. The coin was still in his hand.

Chapter Text

Morning’s first light seeped through the stained-glass windows of the Great Hall, spreading ribbons of amber and rose across polished tables. The usual hubbub of students was absent, only a handful of daring wizards and witches trickled in before breakfast officially began. Hermione sat at the Gryffindor table, quill poised over a stack of dog-eared tomes, her eyes flicking between pages of arcane runes and yawning classmates. Ron lounged nearby, idly surveying empty platters as though forecasting tomorrow’s feast.

Harry burst through the doors a moment later, robes askew and wand half-concealed in his sleeve. His chest heaved from sprinting down the corridor; cheeks flushed with adrenaline. He skidded onto the bench between Ron and Hermione, nearly toppling Hermione’s parchment. She shot him a wry smile and nudged a plate of warm toast toward him.

“You’re late,” she teased, voice gentle. “I was about to send an owl for you.”

Harry rubbed his forehead, trying to still his pulse. “Train delays,” he lied smoothly as he took a bite. The sweet crunch of toast grounded him, just for a second, before Ron cleared his throat and stole the spotlight.

“Alright,” Ron announced, eyes gleaming, “before anyone else arrives, here’s what I did before sunrise.” His voice dipped so low that passing students steered clear, ears pricked in curiosity but unable to catch a single word. Hermione set aside her quill; Harry sat up, intrigued.

“I slipped out of the dormitory cloaked in Invisibility, no noise, no one the wiser,” Ron began, hand gesturing theatrically. “Got to Fred and George’s trunks and ran through every jinx and counter-jinx in my head, Periculum, Colloportus, even Runespoor-venom locks. One precise flick, and their final charm snapped like a twig. The Marauder’s Map was tucked behind a false panel, folded tighter than a dragon’s wing.”

Hermione’s eyes sparkled. “You disarmed a Runespoor-venom lock?” she exclaimed. “That takes understanding of dark creature magic—where did you even learn it?”

“From you,” Ron shot back with a smug grin. “Your research notes, Hermione. Magical Creatures 3rd Edition page 412. I adapted your counter-venom charm to unbind the lock.”

Harry pressed fingertips to his temples. “Then you have the map.” He sat up straighter. “What did you do with it?”

Ron tapped the parchment peeking from his robes. “I unfolded it in the dungeons and followed ‘S.P.’ blinking in Snape’s private corridor. Slithered through the passages under Gregory the Smarmy’s statue, dodged Filch and even Peeves. Got to Snape’s cabinet, whipped out a quick counter-Colloportus, and there it sat… a vial of Draught of Living Death sealed with black wax.”

Hermione bit her lip. “A banned potion in Snape’s private stores,” she whispered. “If he notices the vial missing…”

“Not a chance,” Ron said, eyes flashing. “I retreated the same way, map guiding me through every twist. I was back in the dormitory before the Fat Lady even yawned.”

He leaned in conspiratorially. “Then I didn’t waste a second. I uncorked the vial, poured half into Scabbers’ bowl, and dripped the rest onto his fur. He squeaked once, thrashed, then went under deeper than any Sleeping Spell we used on the train. And unlike that Somnolence Charm, this potion is more potent and long-lasting, he won’t wake again unless we brew the exact counter-potion.”

Hermione’s eyes went wide. “That’s perfect,” she whispered. Harry exhaled in relief, running a hand through his hair. “No risk of him transforming or squeaking at the worst moment.”

Hermione placed a gentle hand on Ron’s arm. “You’re brilliant, but reckless,” she chided softly.

Harry folded his hands around his goblet. The chatter around them dimmed in his ears. “Every time we tried to turn him in, it backfires. Fudge pardons Pettigrew to save face. He rejoins Voldemort sooner. We need a plan that doesn’t just hand him over. We need a plan that frees Sirius and keeps Peter out of sight until we can manage him properly.”

Ron’s voice wavered between excitement and worry. “Do we risk freeing Sirius now? Or wait until Year Three, when it’s canonically supposed to happen?”

Hermione’s lips pressed into a firm line. “Any deviation ripples forward. We might save Sirius but spark another disaster. Yet leaving him…” She hesitated, eyes darkening. “…behind bars for two more years feels like betrayal.”

Harry lifted his gaze. “We decide today. We work out the how and we do it.”

Heartened by his resolve, Ron grinned. “I’m not the only one busy this morning.” He pointed at Hermione’s arms, laden with scrolls and battered books.

With a determined exhale, Hermione slammed her books on the table. “I was up at dawn too. ‘Magical Theory’ outlines time-binding charms carved in ancient runes. And ‘Beautiful Beasts’ footnotes temporal wards stabilized by dragon-heartstring.” Her eyes gleamed with urgent possibility. “We can’t just rewrite the loop without anchoring it properly.” Harry and Ron exchanged startled glances.

Harry spoke first. “We need more than potions and maps. We need…” He paused, then lowered his voice further. “Something else happened after you fell asleep last night.”

Ron turned to him, curiosity bright in her eyes. “What is it?”

Harry drew the small coin from his robes and placed it on the table between them. In the lantern light, the Deathly Hallows gleamed on one side: triangle, circle, line. On the other, a skeletal hand reached up through mist.

Ron’s fork clattered into his plate. “Where did that come from?”

“I found it in my trunk,” Harry said. “No idea how it got there. Nothing to identify it but the Hallows symbol and this death rune.”

Hermione’s expression tightened. “Last loop, we thought the Horcrux in Harry’s scar was the anchor. But this… Death and time have always been intertwined in legend. Maybe the Hallows aren’t just lore here they’re woven into the loop.”

Ron frowned. “But you never became the Master of Death. You had the Cloak, briefly the Stone, never the Wand.”

Harry’s voice shook. “I dreamed of a cloaked figure offering me this coin. Saying, ‘Death remembers you.’” He closed his hand around the silver. “So, if the loop is tied to the Horcrux, what role do the Hallows play?”

Hermione’s thumb traced the symbol. “A tether, perhaps something testing you, testing us. Or a failsafe nobody ever anticipated.”

Their exchange was cut short by a sharp whoosh of robes and the low clearing of a throat. Professor McGonagall hovered at the table’s end, arms folded, eyes narrowed with thinly veiled suspicion.

“Your timetables, if you please,” she said crisply, laying parchment scrolls before them. “And do remember, first years should not be roaming corridors unsupervised at dawn.”

Ron exchanged a guilty look with Hermione and Harry. Hermione leaned in, voice sotto: “Muffliato, remember? Her ears were buzzing as we used it.”

Harry rolled his eyes. “She’s convinced we’re up to something.”

McGonagall’s gaze lingered before she swept away. The trio unrolled their timetables. First block: Transfiguration with McGonagall. Second block: Charms with Professor Flittwick. Exactly the same as every first day.

Before they could speak further, a wave of wings filled the hall. A flurry of owls swooped down, feathers brushing the gourds on the tables. Hedwig glided through the swarm, landed gracefully at Harry’s elbow, and hooted softly.

Harry extended a trembling hand. He remembered the last time he saw her save him taking a curse meant for him. Hedwig pressed her head against his palm as if reassuring him that some things endure beyond loops and death.

Ron leaned in, eyebrows raised. “Do you think Hedwig loops with us?”

Hermione gave him a sharp look. “Don’t be ridiculous, Ron.”

Ron retorted, half-smile curling his lips: “I’m just saying look at her. She’s been everywhere we’ve been.”

Harry kept his hand on Hedwig’s feathers, breathing in the familiar warmth. Hermione placed a gentle hand on his shoulder. “Are you all right?”

He met her eyes and nodded, voice steady. “I’m fine. Just… this loop feels heavier. More losses than ever.”

Ron, ever the optimist, tapped his goblet. “Past is past even if the future was the past. The future’s not here yet. We can stop it. Nobody who doesn’t deserve it will die this time.”

Harry drew a deep breath, rolling his shoulders back. Hermione smiled, flimsy but real. Hedwig hooted, as if echoing their determination.

They finished breakfast in a flurry, gathering robes and books. The castle bell tolled. Time was slipping by. Without another word, they dashed from the Great Hall with the rest of the first‑years, bags banged against knees and new robes still smelling faintly of the feast. The bell’s note still trembled in the corridors when they reached the Transfiguration classroom, where Professor McGonagall waited with the no‑nonsense tilt of someone who expected order to be learned early and fast.

“Good morning,” she said, voice clipped and exact. “We begin with the basics. Attention and intent first. Today you will learn how to turn a match into a needle. Miss Granger, volunteer.” Her glance landed on Hermione as if she had predicted the motion; Hermione’s fingers tightened on her quill in a reflex of impulse, then eased. This was theatre, not mastery.

Hermione rose with the quiet obedience of a student who had weeks of practice in humility. She performed the steps McGonagall described: the precise wrist movement, the shaping of thought. The match shivered and, only with careful coaxing, became a splinter of silver wood, not yet a needle. McGonagall’s approval was thin, measured; she corrected Hermione’s focus, not her technique. The room watched, other first‑years trying to mimic the motion Hermione made look almost easy.

Ron waited until his turn with the good-humoured dread of a boy who expected to fumble, and he did, the match popping rather than reforming. Laughter, warm and light, reminded them all that they were beginners, something they had to sell in every class. When Harry stood his hands trembled because his fingers were practised at other things; he forced himself to be deliberate and slow, to let the movement be learning rather than surprise. The match held, and the needle formed, blunt and imperfect but wholly ordinary. McGonagall nodded. “See? Practice.”

They left the room with their reputations intact and their knowledge tamped down like embers under hearthstone. In the corridor Hermione whispered, “We must be careful. You are not to show advantage. We play novices.” She sounded exhausted at the thought of self‑control, a scholar forced to misplace her own competence.

Ron scoffed, but not unkindly. “I can be rubbish on purpose. It hurts my pride, but I’ll do it.” He ruffled his hair as if to show theatrical disarray. Harry felt the same tug of performative ineptitude and accepted it as necessary armour. Each class was a small lie of safety.

Charms the next period with Professor Flitwick was lighter in tone. The tiny professor clapped his hands and announced with delighted pride, “Today we will practice the Levitation Charm in a safe and supervised manner. Magic, like music, requires rhythm.” He showed them how to pronounce the incantation and how to structure a wand movement that was more about intention than force. The classroom filled with tentative attempts and the occasional small success: hovering combs, shy little motes of light.

Flitwick smiled at Hermione’s neat wrist movement. To the others it was a teacher’s pride, nothing more. Hermione made sure it stayed at the scale of a first‑year’s achievement. Ron’s attempt sent a scrap of parchment sailing into someone's hair; laughter eased the tension. Harry coaxed a small quill into the air with a careful “Wingardium Leviosa,” guiding it halfway across his desk and smiling when it hovered with a modest, wobbling grace rather than careening into a dramatic crash. The three of them practised being fallible and ordinary, and each tiny failure tightened the invisible rule they had set for survival.

Between lessons they kept to the margins of corridors, eyes on the map of the castle in their heads. Hermione translated arcane notations into manageable tasks on parchment while Ron rehearsed a dozen excuses to be anywhere at once. Harry watched Snape during a passing figure like a student watching a chessmaster; he felt the old, complex knot of resentment and gratitude toward a man who had chosen to cloak a vow in disdain.

After Charms they slipped into the library, seeking corners and old paper. The library felt like a lung where they could breathe technical language without the theatre of novices. Hermione coaxed books toward them, pulling out sections on dampening runes, temporal bindings, and small, portable wards. The volumes were technical enough that, when discussed quietly, the words sounded like notes rather than revelations.

“We can’t carry this tone in public,” Hermione murmured, tapping a diagram. “We talk in fragments in classes, questions that sound like confusion. Here we speak plainly. We experiment, but we do so in ways that leave no signature.”

Ron leaned over a folio of runes and scratched a nervous line on his palm. “So, schoolwork in class, master plans in the library. Got it. Also, less showing off, more deliberate incompetence.”

At a lull Hermione reached into her bag and produced a small notebook. “Containment schematics,” she said, and the page fluttered between her fingers like a compact map. She drew a dampening rune in the margin and tapped it for emphasis. “If we can make a vessel layered with anti‑scry and dampeners, then a called ‘seal’ that only we can open, we mitigate the risk of a Horcrux screaming. We don’t destroy until we’re positioned and certain.”

Hermione unrolled a spread of references: ancient runes that hinted at dampening properties, entries on ritual blood‑wards, footnotes on dragon‑heartstring stability. Their talk here was technical and private, the kind of conversation that turned theory into the scaffolding of practice.

“You could bind the dampener to a blood‑ward so that it recognises certain signatures,” Hermione said, voice low and rapid. “Layer it with a temporal dampener so it doesn’t broadcast across whatever bridge links the Horcrux to its maker.”

Harry listened and imagined the containment box, small, iron‑lined, threaded with runes, sealed by a called word only they shared. The idea steadied him. If they could learn to put danger into a box, they could learn to take careful steps toward dismantling it.

They spent the next hour drafting what would be a first‑year version of a search log: gentle probes to see who among the staff might be questioned without drawing suspicion; harmless tests to see who would react to certain hints; small reconnaissance that looked like curiosity and not an organised effort. Hermione assigned herself the library and research, Ron volunteered for on‑the‑ground misdirection and petty thefts that never risked exposure, and Harry took liaison, someone to test the limits of permission and who among the older students might be quietly helpful.

As afternoon turned toward evening, their mundane‑by‑design day delivered a few small, useful discoveries. A retired professor’s name surfaced in a footnote as an expert on dampening runes; an entry in a charity ledger suggested a family tie to a sympathetic Muggleborn scholar who often exchanged letters with Dumbledore, someone they might test for small favours. Each nugget was a slow victory. They made notes in a tiny cipher Hermione devised, the sort of private shorthand that would look like doodles to anyone else.

As dusk gathered, they met again in the Gryffindor common room. The fire threw rich embers across their sketches and the coin in Harry’s pocket felt heavier than it had that morning. They tightened their list in the glow: who to test this week, priority horcruxes to research, the early reconnaissance for safehouse candidates.

“No unilateral sacrifices,” Harry said again, his voice steady. “No gambits without the three of us.”

Hermione nodded, pen poised above the paper as if consecrating a rule. “We check each decision with the other two. We always have an exit route. And when we test an ally, we do it so that nothing we learn can endanger them.”

Ron, who had been joking all day to keep the heaviness from pooling, made a serious face. “And if it gets ugly?” he asked.

Hermione’s answer was practical, not sentimental. “We switch to contingency B. Fall back, protect people over artefacts, preserve knowledge over spectacle.”

Night drew a curtain over the castle. The three of them climbed to their dormitory carrying lists like talismans. The common room hummed with ordinary laughter and the sound of chess pieces clacking; outside, the grounds lay in moon‑washed hush. Harry lay awake later, hands empty on his quilt, thinking of runes and boxes and the small rules that might hold back an unravelling.

The day had been full of lessons: how to fold ordinary kindness into a rehearsed first meeting, how to build a box that might silence a scream, how to pick allies without giving them the map of your life. As sleep edged toward him, he repeated their rules as a prayer: observe, verify, contain, consult. Whatever else the loop might demand, they would meet it with plans that fit like armour and with friends who would not let one another decide alone.

Outside, the castle seemed to listen. Inside, the coin felt in him like a challenge rather than a claim. The year had begun in earnest; the map of their work was only just being inked.

Chapter Text

Breakfast moved through the Great Hall with its usual, comforting clatter: plates, steam, and the low current of voices knitting the morning together. Harry sat between Ron and Hermione and let the ordinary noise sluice the edge of the day, grateful for the hum that made thinking about Horcruxes feel for a moment like an absurdity.

Hedwig arrived in the middle of toast and conversation, gliding through the swell of owls and landing with a small, purposeful thud at Harry’s elbow. She bore a grease‑smudged envelope in her beak and nudged it into his hand with a single, eager eye. Harry opened it, folding back Hagrid’s sprawling, cheerful handwriting.

Tea at my hut 4 o’clock — H.

Ron whooped softly. “Hagrid invited you for tea? Do you think he’ll have rock cakes that are actually edible this time?”

Hermione’s smile was quick but cautious. “Hagrid is kind. Don’t say anything about the coin or the loops. Keep it about pumpkins and Fang.”

Harry rolled the invitation into his palm and felt a small, private warmth. Hagrid asked for company because he liked company; nothing more, nothing less. It was exactly the kind of uncomplicated human thing Harry had been missing.

They ate, traded small gossip, and let ordinary kindness play out between more deliberate conversation. The invitation was an incitement to something private: Hagrid’s tea meant a quiet place, a human welcome, and sometimes an ear that could listen without measuring consequences. Harry felt relief at the thought of the hut’s peat smell and the boil of a kettle.

They left the Great Hall with the rest of the first‑years and slid into the early shuffle toward Defence Against the Dark Arts. The classroom thrummed with that peculiar DADA electricity, nervous, eager, and a little dread‑tinged. Professor Quirrell stood at the front of the room like a man who’d been folded into himself and then glued together wrong; his turban sat awkwardly, his hands fluttered, and the man seemed to be keeping a great deal of air between himself and the class.

“Good m-m-morning,” he began, voice thin as ribbon. “W‑w‑welcome—w‑we w‑w‑will h‑h‑have an e‑e‑enjoyable term, p‑p‑possibly, and I‑I‑I sh‑sh‑shall tr‑tr‑try to—er—to make it in‑in‑instructive.” He stuttered on the small connector words and then smiled too widely, as if cheer could paper over a gap.

A few students exchanged smiles that tightened into private jokes. A stifled chuckle slipped from a cluster at the back, quiet enough to be a ripple but audible, and that sound turned the classroom the tiniest degree toward theatre. Quirrell’s hands beat the air once like someone fending off a moth. “Now, w‑w‑who w‑w‑would l‑l‑like to d‑d‑demonstrate a s‑s‑simple d‑d‑defensive p‑p‑posture? V‑v‑volunteer—e‑e‑er—if y‑y‑you a‑a‑are n‑n‑not a‑a‑afraid.”

Several hands went up obligingly. Quirrell selected a boy who approached the front with an eager, unsure bravery. The professor’s instructions came in halting sentences, each one punctuated by a stammer that seemed to require his whole attention. When the boy performed the defensive stance and received warm, clumsy praise, a ripple of genuine applause moved through the room. Quirrell blinked and smiled with the relief of someone who’d passed a test.

Harry watched the whole exchange carefully. Something in the cadence of Quirrell’s stutter felt studied rather than natural, an accentuated fragility arranged like a costume. The scar at his temple throbbed like a small, suspect metronome; not a flare of raw, wordless alarm but an ache that sat behind his eyes like a migraine beginning to shape itself. When Quirrell’s mouth made an odd, high sound of surprise and he glanced over his shoulder, the ache sharpened. Harry tasted the metallic tang of anxiety on his tongue.

After class, the three of them drifted down a corridor away from the tight focus of other students. Hermione’s jaw was a line of concentration. Ron’s shoulders twisted as if he had a nervous tick. “Doesn’t that seem odd to you?” Ron asked at last, folding his voice into the hush. “He’s doing that whole stammer‑act like it’s part of the lesson plan.”

Harry rubbed his temple, feeling the small, persistent throb. “It makes my head worse,” he admitted. “When he—” He stopped, the word “acts” breaking off simple and ugly. “It’s like he’s provoking something or protecting something by pretending not to be a threat.”

Hermione frowned. “Or pretending to be more threat than he is. There’s strategy in self‑erasure, make yourself ridiculous, people look past you instead of at you.” She tapped a thoughtful finger against her lip. “But for someone like Quirrell that feels risky. If there’s something dangerous near him, drawing ridicule might be a way to hide it in plain sight.”

Ron snorted. “Or it’s genuine. Maybe he’s just a nervous wreck.”

They shared a tight laugh that did not reach their eyes. Ron, ever blunt, pushed the needle where it hurt to loosen it. “Does Voldemort get bored of the act? I mean, if he’s the sort of person who can get into people’s heads, wouldn’t a real lord of terrible things get annoyed at having to hide behind a man who looks like he’s swallowed a teacup?”

Hermione considered that with the slow, precise inhale of someone weighing the physics of meaning. “Voldemort is not a man prone to boredom in the way we understand it. He is patient—he plans, he shapes. That said, there is seasoning in madness. If there is anything left like 'him', it may take strange forms to survive in another's body.”

Harry’s head pounded more insistently as they walked. The sound of Quirrell’s stammer had a rhythm that seemed to push something under his skull. He wondered whether the stutter was defensive—some charm?—or performative, an effort at misdirection that required him to be visibly weak to be overlooked. The logic had the cold arithmetic of villains: the more a puppet appeared harmless, the less it invited scrutiny.

“Maybe Voldemort likes the theatrics,” Ron said, half teasing, half speculative. “Maybe he finds parody amusing. Or perhaps—” he lowered his voice to a ridiculous conspiratorial whisper “—we’re just too uncharitable. Maybe he’s trying to win a comedy award.”

Hermione’s expression pinched into something sternly disapproving. “Don’t joke about that. But also: think of it in practical terms. Teaching is a position of access to young minds, to routines, to authority. If Voldemort can influence from the background, having Quirrell be a figure who is overlooked could be perfect cover. He would be the exact kind of person no one expected to carry the shadows.”

Harry fell quiet. The ache in his head became a lens that sharpened instead of dulled. If Quirrell’s stammer was an act, it could hide the way his turban sat like a swollen secret. If it was not an act, then the man himself might be a fragile host for something far older and far worse. Either idea made Harry’s chest work harder.

They left DADA and moved into the shadowed run of the castle toward Potions.

The dungeon corridors stretched before Harry like cavernous veins, torchlight flickering against damp stone walls. The air was heavy with the tang of acids and old magic, and the distant drip of water echoed through the silence. In the Potion Classroom, cauldrons hissed beside rows of locked cabinets, shelves sagging under ancient jars of mandrake extract and powdered dragon bone. Harry’s footsteps seemed unnaturally loud on the flagstones, each echo reminding him how long he’d tread this path, both as a student and a pawn.

He stood at his workstation, glass bottles and silver stirring rods laid out neatly. But his mind was elsewhere, full of questions about Severus Snape. Until the last loop, Harry’s hatred for Snape had burned hotter than any fear of Voldemort. Snape had been his tormentor, the one who made every class a gauntlet, every corridor a minefield of insults. Yet now he struggled to reconcile that man with the story of sacrifice, the desperate love for Lily that had driven Snape into Dumbledore’s service.

On one hand, Harry understood that Snape had always watched over him. On the other hand, he could not forgive the cruelty: the lessons laced with scorn, the taunts that dogged Sirius at every turn, the indifference the day Sirius fell. If Snape hadn’t goaded Sirius… Harry clenched his jaw. He should have factored Snape into their plan—spoken to him, demanded answers. But thoughts scattered as the classroom door bellowed open.

Professor Snape swept into the dungeon in a swirl of black robes, voice drifting across the rows of bubbling cauldrons with disdain. “Potions,” he began, “is the purest branch of magic, subtle, precise, and infinitely rewarding. Yet most of you lack the intelligence to appreciate its nuances. You will scald yourselves, poison your neighbours, or simply fail to grasp why a single drop can turn triumph into catastrophe.” His dark eyes roamed the first years, daring any to contradict him.

The room fell unnaturally still, as if the torches themselves were holding their breath before Snape’s gaze locked onto Harry. “Mr. Potter…what would I get if I added powdered root of asphodel to an infusion of wormwood?”

Harry’s pulse pounded. He met Snape’s glare. “The Draught of the Living Dead, Professor.”

For a fraction of a heartbeat, Snape’s expression changed in something indescribable, an echo of something in his eyes before he masked it with a frustrated snort. “Indeed. And where would one procure a bezoar?”

Harry did not hesitate. “From the stomach of a goat, Professor.”

A scowl deepened on Snape’s face. “Very well. Now… explain the difference between monkshood and wolfsbane.”

Harry’s tone stayed even. “They are the same plant at different stages of bloom.”

An exasperated sigh slipped from Snape. “Finally, which solvent most effectively extracts aconite alkaloids?”

Harry answered, “Pure Spring water heated to seventy degrees Celsius.”

Snape’s frustration flared; he banged his fist on a desk so sharply the students flinched. “Enough! Begin brewing. The recipe and steps are on the board.” He turned away, arms crossed as students scrambled to copy instructions.

As the classroom buzz died down, Hermione leaned over, voice barely above a whisper. “Harry, remember Snape’s first question about asphodel and wormwood? Do you know their meanings in the Victorian language of flowers?”

Harry frowned, brow knitting. Why on earth was Hermione talking about flower meanings in Potions? He stared at her for a moment, utterly bewildered.

Then a memory surfaced: Aunt Petunia’s gardening magazines stacked on the windowsill at Privet Drive. Harry had spent more than one sweltering summer potting dahlias and pruning roses, he had learned a bit of floriography by osmosis.

“I…did some of the gardening at the Dursleys,” he began slowly. “I remember wormwood means ‘absence,’ and I know asphodel is a type of lily, but I never caught its actual meaning.”

Hermione’s fingers trembled on the edge of her textbook. “Asphodel means ‘My regret follows you to the grave.’”

A cold shock pressed against Harry’s ribs. Snape had not been testing potion knowledge he had hidden a message of sorrow and guilt for Harry to uncover. He stared at his stirring rod, chest tightening, as the rest of the lesson blurred past.

When the bell finally rang, Harry slipped away before anyone could speak again. On the stone stairwell, his unease clung to him like a shadow. Ron met him halfway, shoulders hunched.

“Are you sure you’re not reading too much into it?” he asked quietly. “Okay, Snape was on our side, but he’s always been a git. We can’t pardon years of cruelty just because he mourned Lily—no offense, Harry.”

Hermione gave Ron a stern look. “We must try. He saved Harry’s life, several times. We can’t write him off entirely.”

Harry remained silent, torn between resentment and something like pity. He detached himself from Ron and Hermione with a quiet, “I’ll see you in the library,” and took the path toward Hagrid’s hut while they went on.

The path to Hagrid’s hut smelled of peat and damp leaves; the air seemed to loosen around Harry as he walked it. Hagrid opened the door before Harry could knock, face broad as a sunrise.

“Harry! Come on in, lad — sit yerself down now, don’ be gawkin’,” he bellowed, shoving a chair forward with both massive hands as if the furniture were an old friend. Fang thumped the floor, nosing Harry’s boot in a blunt, affectionate greeting.

Inside the hut everything smelled of tea and peat smoke and the ordinary, grounding mess of someone who looked after things that needed looking after: jars on shelves, a kettle the size of a bucket, and a stack of slightly misshapen rock cakes on a plate. Hagrid fussed at the teapot like a man making sure the weather was fit for guests before he sat opposite and set a large mug in Harry’s hands.

“You look like yeh could do with a cuppa,” Hagrid said, settling down with a pleased, rumbling sigh. “How’s school treatin’ yeh then? Settlin’ in all right? Made any proper friends yet, or jus’ the pair o’ yeh lot?”

Harry wrapped warm fingers around the mug. The hut’s clutter and Hagrid’s enormous, uncomplicated kindness felt like a shelter from the rest of the day. “I’m getting there,” he said. “Ron and Hermione help. It’s…a lot, but I’m fine.”

“Bring ’em next time, then,” Hagrid said, eyes bright as if the idea delighted him. “There’s always room. I’ll make more o’ them rock cakes an’ we can have a proper bit o’ a laugh. Don’ be shy t’bring friends—it’s nicer with company.”

They talked of small things that didn’t require plotting or proof: Fang’s latest attempt to steal sausages, a broom Hagrid swore had been sulking, and a sullen patch of pumpkins that needed extra feeding. Hagrid asked the sort of questions that let you say as much or as little as you liked; he noticed the tired line around Harry’s eyes but did not press where Harry did not offer.

“If yeh ever want a hand with a beast or jus’ someone to have a cuppa with, don’ be afeard t’pop by,” Hagrid added, nudging a cake across the table. “I like comp’ny, an’ it do’ s a body good t’ get away from school now an’ then.”

Harry left with the steady pleasure of having been liked for no other reason than himself. The visit did not solve any of the puzzles waiting in the castle, but it set him straighter for the next stretch of the day: tea, Hagrid’s warm talk, and an invitation to bring his friends next time.

By midafternoon Ron and Hermione had already sunk into a quiet alcove in the library when Harry, just back from Hagrid’s hut, arrived and settled opposite them. A single beam of sunlight picked out dust motes above the long tables. Ron nervously traced lines on the Marauder’s Map. Hermione tapped her quill against an open tome on magical clues. Sunlight slanted across dusty volumes as Harry recounted his tea with Hagrid, the kettle steam still clinging faintly to his cloak.

Harry folded a newspaper clipping and set it on the table between them. “I found this when I visited Hagrid — ‘GRINGOTTS BREAK‑IN ROCKS WIZARD BANK.’ Someone put it where I’d sit,” he said, the paper’s yellowed headline catching the light like a deliberate signpost.

Hermione’s brow pulled together. “Like someone wanted you to see it,” she said, voice low and sharp.

Ron shrugged, the map rustling beneath his fingers. “Or Death guidin’ you,” he offered, half a joke and half the superstitious pull that never quite left him.

Harry gave a short, hollow laugh. “No. This isn’t fate. It’s human. Someone’s leaving breadcrumbs.” He tapped the clipping with a fingertip. “Mirror of Erised, forbidden corridor, the Gringotts break‑in… there’s a pattern. Dumbledore kept turning up close to every twist.”

Hermione closed her book with a precise snap and folded her hands on the page. “You think Dumbledore engineered all of that? He lets you run loose, but would he really set it up?”

Harry’s voice dropped until it was mostly for them. “I’m not the bright‑eyed kid I used to be. He’s nudged things, tested me—sometimes I feel like I was being raised for some end I didn’t choose. Last year it was subtle. This year it feels like preparation. I don’t know if ‘care’ and ‘manipulation’ are the same anymore.”

Ron’s face went hard for a moment as he folded the map away and tucked it into his pocket with more care than usual. “It did feel too easy, didn’t it? Like someone was clearing the way.”

Hermione reached out and squeezed Harry’s arm, the motion small but steady. “He cared about you, Harry. That doesn’t excuse steering you without telling you. But we’re allowed to be angry and grateful at the same time.”

Silence settled over them, filled with the soft breathing of the library and the distant clack of someone sorting parchment. A raven croaked once from a nearby ledge and a mote of dust spun slowly in the sunbeam, as if time itself hesitated to decide which way to fall.

Harry stood up at last, smoothing his robes and pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose with a deliberate, calming motion. “All right. We watch Snape, we watch Dumbledore. No more half‑truths. If anyone’s steering, we’ll see the rudder.”

Ron nodded, shoulders less tense now that a plan had been named. Hermione snapped the book closed with a determined little sound and slid it into her bag. “We’ll be careful. We’ll test quietly. We’ll trust evidence, not feelings.”

They rose together, the three of them a compact, resolved line of movement through the hush. As they left the alcove the weight of the day pressed different on each of them, Harry with Hagrid’s ordinary kindness still tucked inside him, Ron with the map warm in his pocket, Hermione already threading possibilities into lists, but all of them carrying the same small, stubborn plan: to read the world closely enough to stop being led.

Chapter Text

The common room lay hushed beneath a blanket of embers and shadow, the fire reduced to a slow, breathing heart. The hour had passed well into what counted as late, windows black with the school’s sleeping roofs, the portrait hole shut, and ordinary guardians gone to their own rooms. Harry, Ron, and Hermione sat on the floor with their backs to the hearth; the coals threw long, wavering silhouettes across scarlet tapestries and dented armchairs, and the castle around them felt like a cave holding its breath. It had been a week of the loop, and the repetition had ground at their patience until it had become something sharp and raw.

“We’ve done nothing but secure Peter,” Harry said at last, voice low and knotted. The sentence uncoiled from him like a broken filament. “I want him out of our sight and Sirius free. I want to hunt every Horcrux, finish Voldemort before he even begins again.”

Hermione’s hand went to his arm and stayed there, warm and steady. “We can’t rush, Harry,” she said, careful as someone handling a glass that might shatter. “The loop rejects shortcuts. Every time we sped things up, everything unstitched.”

Ron made a small noise of impatience that was almost a laugh, almost a groan. “We got Peter stone cold, that’s something. But to free Sirius properly, we need someone in power at the Ministry who can make a sentence stick. An Auror by himself won’t do it.”

Hermione tapped her quill against a scrap of parchment, thinking through options with the methodical ferocity she reserved for knots that had to be undone. “Kingsley’s principled, but he’s not placed where it matters. Moody is too close to Dumbledore and too hot‑headed. Mr. Weasley is well liked but lacks jurisdiction. Madame Bones… she’s Head of Magical Law Enforcement. She’s honest; she’s proven she’ll stand up to people like Fudge and Umbridge.”

Ron rubbed his jaw. “How do we reach her? You can’t just send an owl. That’ll be flagged and read and probably used against you.”

Hermione’s eyes brightened with the kind of small victory that came from the right lookup and the right connection. “Susan Bones is her niece and she’s—” She stopped, then smiled slowly. “—she’s here. Susan could vouch for us, pass a private letter, arrange a meeting in Hogsmeade that the Ministry would take seriously without setting off alarms.”

Harry let out a breath that sounded like relief and gravel. “If Susan vouches, Madame Bones might listen,” he said, and the plan felt fragile and real at once, like something they all agreed to hold carefully.

They sketched the route in whispers, Hermione listing contingencies and dead ends, Ron offering the kind of impractical optimism that turned into practical stubbornness when he meant it. The talk tightened around logistics, but beneath it was a small, persistent ache: the nights. The coin had been appearing in Harry’s hand when he woke; he had been waking gasping and raw, dreams forgotten as if scrubbed out and replaced only by the lingering taste of panic. The coin pressed like a second skin, and the three of them had learned enough from the locket to understand how quickly an object could reach in and twist a mind.

“I wish we could speed things up,” Harry muttered suddenly, eyes fixed on the charred bed of the hearth. “But the loop detonates when we rush. I could go after the diadem myself.”

Ron looked as if someone had pulled a concealed string under his ribs. “What? You want to go into the Room of Lost Things and nick Ravenclaw’s diadem on your own?” His voice cracked at the edges with worry. “That room’s secret for a reason. We don’t know what’s watching that place.”

Hermione’s chin went up in that precise expression she used when she wanted to be heard and had already made up her mind. “Even if you could get it, Harry, where would you put it? We have no proper containment. I’ve been working on rudimentary Horcrux containers, but they aren’t ready. The diadem’s secrecy is its best defence. Pulling it out changes the entire calculus.”

“If I don’t retrieve it now, it could end up in someone else’s hands,” Harry said, voice sharpening. “Or disappear from our reach. We can’t afford to let possible Horcruxes slip away.”

Ron scoffed, but it was thin and brittle. “Brilliant plan. Get eaten by a basilisk while you’re at it. The Chamber’s still down there, who knows what’s left.” He pushed a pebble with his foot, and the coals scattered sparks like spattered teeth.

Hermione took both of Harry’s hands in hers and made him look up. “No solitary dashes,” she said, and there was no pleading in her voice, only the iron underlying everything she believed. “We go together. We scheme, we prepare, we make containment. No more one‑man solutions.”

A laugh that had lost its edge came from Harry and then turned. “We’re not very good at containing things, are we?” He let his forehead rest against his palms as if pressure would keep the words from breaking loose. “I don’t sleep. I wake up with that coin in my fist. I feel hollow. I don’t remember dreams, just this aftertaste—like someone’s had their hands in me and left a mark.”

Ron’s face folded at that, an ugly flicker of guilt crossing his features. “Harry—mate—I didn’t know it was that bad. I didn’t… We clung to jokes because laughing’s easier than looking. Sorry—I should’ve—”

Hermione’s voice cut in quietly but sharply. “We rotate who carries it, like with the locket. Spread it around so it can’t gnaw at one head.” The memory of the locket made their plan light and heavy at once; they had been burned by arrogance before, and the scarred edges of that mistake were visible in every quick calculation.

Harry let out a bitter sound. “Rotating helped before, but I woke with it in my hand even when I wasn’t carrying it. It’s like the coin has its own will about who it comes to.” He rubbed his temple where an ache had been gnawing since Quirrell’s stammer had set his nerves raw that afternoon. “Sometimes I wake, and I don’t know the room. I don’t remember the dream—just the waking, which is worse, because the waking’s always worse. It leaves me raw and furious and…numb at the same time.”

Ron moved closer as if proximity were armour. “You’re not alone, Harry. I’m here. Hermione’s here.” The words were small but earnest. “We’ll find Susan, we’ll get Bones on it. We’ll lock the coin away. We’ll—”

Harry cut him off with a laugh that had no humour. “You say ‘we’ the way it’s easy to say. But it’s me who wakes up to this. It’s my chest that tightens. It’s my hand that closes.” He pushed himself up and started to pace, the movement jagged and nervous in the quiet room. “Every loop, it’s the same: wake, panic, try to stop it from bleeding into the day. I keep thinking if I could shoulder more, if I could act alone, maybe I could take the edges off for you lot. Maybe I could spare you.”

Hermione’s eyes leaked something like a tide of grief; she stood so suddenly the quill fell from her fingers. “Harry, we survive because we act together. You shouldn’t have to be the one who bears it all. We promised—” Her voice stumbled only because she was trying to hold the whole of what they had promised together. “We promised to protect each other.”

Ron’s knuckles were white on the map. “We’re with you, mate. All of us.” He swallowed and the face of the boy who’d once stolen a dragon egg for a laugh looked very small in the flicker of the dying fire. “We’ll sort Mad‑Eye and the Ministry stuff. We’ll get Susan. But for the nights—if the coin is calling you—if it’s doing to you what the locket did to me and everyone—it matters we keep you close.”

Harry stopped pacing. His silhouette had a new, raw edge; the fire painted him in short, sharp shadows. “I’m tired,” he said. There was no theatrics here, no flourish, only a simple, enormous confession that stripped the rest of the night bare. “I’m so tired of waking and being told to pretend I’m not. I’m tired of being told the plan is everything and sleep is negotiable. I’m—” He could not finish. Words thinned like glass between them.

Hermione crossed the space and sat beside him, careful as if a wrong move might break something. “Tell us everything,” she said. “Say the raw bits. If there’s anything—anything—about the dreams, the waking, the coin’s pull, say it. We can’t help if we don’t know.”

Harry looked at her as if seeing a new life raft. He breathed in, the sound small in the vast room, and let the confession spill out: the way he woke to darkness that felt like an absence of walls, the way his heart hammers as if trying to escape a cage, the metallic tang at the back of his throat, the pressure behind his teeth that made the jaw ache. He told them about waking with the coin in his hand as if it had been a living thing that remembered things he could not, how sometimes his fingers had been found bloody with no memory of how the skin had split, how the coin leaned like an accusation on the edge of sleep. He told them how, sometimes, in the half‑light, he felt like someone else’s memory was rubbing against his skull and pushing out his own.

The words landed between them and the room thickened. Hermione’s face was a careful mask as she took notes in her head, small practical things to test, lists of who could verify, how to avoid Ministry scrutiny. Ron’s response was at first a crude, warm fury that smoothed into a protective, ineffable promise.

“You don’t have to do this alone,” Ron said finally, voice raw. “Do you hear me? No more secret carrying. No more lying to ourselves that we can shoulder it for you. We’ll do the hard bits with you, not for you. You’re not a one‑man army.”

Harry laughed, a sound with too much distance in it. “And what if the coin wants to come to me? What if it chooses? We put it in a place, and it finds a way back. We locked the locket away and it still made people…worse.”

Hermione leaned forward, urgent. “We learned from the locket, Harry. We learned to set up watches, to test, to watch for changes in behaviour. We can do the same. For the nights, we’ll stay next to you. Rotate watches, leave no gap. If you wake and it’s in your hand, we deal with it together. We do containment better this time. We test the Room of Lost Things for interference before we trust it. We set wards and forgetfulness charms.”

Ron’s voice softened into a whisper that wore a brave steadiness. “And if anything changes—if you start hiding things, if you act different—we notice and we pull you back. We’ll police each other if we have to. You’re too important to lose to…to an object.”

Harry’s eyes were hollow, but they held a kind of brittle gratitude that made his face look younger and more fragile than usual. “I don’t want you to have to watch me like I’m a plant that might wither,” he said. “I know what the locket did to all of us. I don’t want that for you.”

Hermione’s fingers found his and squeezed. “It’s what friends do. We watch each other. We look for the little things. We ask the awkward questions. We don’t let fear be polite.”

Ron’s eyes lit with a sharp, sudden hope. “The Room of Lost Things,” he blurted before anyone could stop him. “If it keeps the diadem hidden, it can keep the coin. It’s meant to forget stuff, isn’t it? That’s exactly what we want.”

Hermione leaned forward, fingers already worrying at the corner of a scrap of parchment as if the motion helped her think. “It’s not a room with a door you can knock on,” she said. “It’s the castle misplacing things into somewhere else. That makes its thresholds unpredictable, but it also means it doesn’t respond to normal guards or checks. It’s the best place we’ve got for burying something that calls to minds.”

Harry’s voice was quieter than the others but steady. “If the diadem’s still there, we should make sure before we put the coin in. If the Room has been meddled with it’s no use to us.”

Hermione nodded so hard a pen roll of ideas rattled in her head. “First, we approach at dusk when patrols change and corridors are busiest with students going to supper, not with sentries. We pick a stairwell behind a little‑used portrait so anyone watching would assume we’re just passing, not hunting some hiding place. We climb quietly, time our movement with a corridor sweep, and keep to shadows—no broom flights, no tricks.”

“Right,” Ron said, catching each point up breath by breath. “One of us tests the room first. We don’t put the coin in right away. We throw something useless in—like a Muggle trinket—and wait fifteen minutes. See if the room swallows it, or if things trip it awake.”

Hermione’s plan unfolded with crisp, precise edges. “We do two probes. A noisy object to gauge immediate reaction, and a marked scrap sealed with a forgetfulness sigil to see if the Room alters memory traces. If both pass, we proceed. The coin goes into a lined tin—bone chalk inside, heavy cloth outside—tied with a working knot to resist casual tampering. I’ll cast a non‑attunement knot on it, something to dull any urge the coin has to call a particular mind.”

“And who touches it?” Ron asked, voice small for once. “Not just one of us.”

“You rotate,” Hermione said. “No single carrier from the common room to the alcove. Ron moves the tin to the seventeenth step, Hermione carries it the next stretch, and I’ll be the last to place it. Abort signal is three sharp taps. If anyone feels odd or the coin shows a pull, we stop and retreat.”

Harry let the plan settle over him like a warm cloak. “If we’re already going to the seventh floor, we check the diadem while we’re there. If it’s gone or reactive, we’ll know what we’re up against.”

Ron grinned despite the tension. “So, we get the coin hidden, and we get a look at Ravenclaw’s lost crown. Nothing flashy. No heroics. Just careful, stupidly boring efficiency.”

Hermione allowed the faintest smile. “Careful and boring will keep us alive. We rehearse tonight in whispers and move at dusk.”

They sat in the thinning dark and drew a map inside the hearth light: when they would talk to Susan, which books to consult for containment and forgetfulness charms, which Hogsmeade afternoons would be least watched, and how to approach Madame Bones without making the Ministry prick its ears. They argued until plans were taut and sensible and left no wild edges. They turned over contingencies like a set of old keys.

When the talk finally petered, it did not leave them lighter so much as more armed. Harry’s confession had not suddenly fixed the sleeplessness nor calmed the coin; it had, however, rerouted the burden so that it was shared in small, deliberate ways. He let his head fall back against the rug and closed his eyes like someone who had at least finished saying what had eaten at him.

They rose together with the map and the list folded tight. Ron’s hand found Harry’s shoulder in a gesture less comical and more solemn than any fist bump would ever be. Hermione tucked the quill back into her hair as if she were tucking the night away.

As they left the common room and the portraits blinked up from their frames, Ron and Hermione fell a little behind Harry and lowered their voices until it was a hush that could be heard only by the ceilings.

“We keep an eye,” Ron said quietly, practical and quick to the point. “Like we did with the locket. If he starts doin’ odd stuff, we clamp down. No excuses.”

Hermione nodded, eyes sharp and soft at once. “Rotate the watch lists. Sleep near him when we can. Note any sudden changes—anger that’s out of character, withdrawal, unusual risk‑taking. Harry’s always been reckless at times, but this will have a different flavour. We look for the coin’s fingerprints on his behaviour.”

Ron’s jaw worked as he considered the humiliation of watching a friend for signs of being preyed on by an object, but his decision was iron. “If it starts changin’ him, we get the coin out. We don’t argue about feelings—we act. We keep him. Promise?”

Hermione’s voice was steady. “Promise.”

They fell into a companionable, resolute silence, the kind that says plans will be kept and that small watches will be kept through cold, tired hours. The castle hummed around them, indifferent but steady.

Down the corridor, the portrait of a stern witch dozed in her frame and the Hufflepuffs snored on in their common room. The night went on, and in a dormitory a little later, Harry slept with the coin out of his immediate reach for the first time that week, while two friends rotated their quiet vigils, small trades for the safety of all of them and for the fragile tether that was Harry’s mind.

Chapter Text

Hermione finished the last careful stitch by lamplight; tongue caught between her teeth in concentration as she tied the final knot. The tin sat between them on the table; its interior dusted with a pale chalk Hermione had pulverised from the bone‑white sliver she’d borrowed from a careworn herbarium volume. She ran a fingertip along the cloth wrapping, checking the non‑attunement knot she’d practiced three times until the weave held its mute promise. “It won’t be perfect,” she said, voice low and exact, “but it will blunt whatever tug the coin has. The Room of Lost Things will do the rest.”

Harry watched her hands more than her face, how steady they were, how fierce. The tin looked absurdly small and terribly important all at once, a domestic thing made a ward against something that had a taste for minds. Ron kept glancing at it as if expecting it to twitch or leap. The map lay folded between them like a private treaty; the library’s hush felt like another kind of protection.

By midafternoon the three of them had settled into their usual alcove, a narrow space with a single beam of sun catching the motes above the long oak table. Ron was fidgeting with the Marauder’s Map as if any line he traced could redraw the world, and Hermione had an open folio of charms and legal‑magic notations splayed beside her, quill poised like a surgeon’s scalpel.

Harry rose to meet the shelf and pull down the volume on the Department of Magical Law Enforcement that had led them to Susan Bones. He returned with the book balanced on his forearm, words ready on the tip of his tongue. He found Susan mid‑shelf, arranging textbooks with the deliberation of someone pruning a garden. Hermione gave him a small, almost imperceptible nod; Ron mouthed good luck like a charm.

“Excuse me,” Harry said when he reached her, keeping his voice low so the dust seemed to absorb it. Susan turned with an alertness that made her look older than her years.

“I don’t believe we’ve met. I’m Harry—Harry Potter.” His smile was honest, the kind that had worked on librarians and prefects before.

“Susan Bones,” she said, a thin smile ghosting her mouth. “Hufflepuff.” Her eyes were steady, not amused but not unkind. “The famous Harry Potter. What brings you to my corner of the library?”

Harry let the small ache of the coin sit behind his words. He slid the Department volume toward her by way of preface. “Your aunt—Madame Amelia Bones—heads Magical Law Enforcement. I need her help. It’s delicate. I can’t explain in the open.”

Susan’s expression flickered, memory, calculation, something like a private ache. She set her books aside and folded her arms, watching him with that cool, assessing look. “You expect me to vouch for you because of a name?”

“I do,” Harry said. “I don’t need the Ministry to know. I need honest help that can’t be shouted down. If you could pass a private letter, arrange a small meeting in Hogsmeade—anything discreet—Madame Bones might listen. I don’t want petitions or spectacle. I want the law to be able to act.”

Susan chewed the inside of her cheek in thought. The library seemed to hold its breath with them. At last, she reached into her robes and withdrew a quill, tapping it against her palm. “I’ll write,” she said quietly. “I won’t pry. Some things are harder for being said aloud.” She tucked the quill away and inclined her head. “Afterwards, Potter—you owe me a favour.”

Harry’s chest tightened at the words; favours in the Ministry were currency and obligation both, small hooks on which futures could hang. He managed a grateful lift of his chin. “Anything. I promise.”

“Good,” Susan said, then allowed herself the faintest smile before she returned to her shelves. “Go. Before someone else notices clandestine conspirators in the library.”

When Harry returned, Hermione’s eyes were bright with a particular mixture of triumph and anxiety. “She’ll write,” Hermione breathed. “Quietly, with wording that won’t set off Ministry filters. We’ll send it through a chain that looks like student correspondence and not a plea for emergency intervention.” She set the tin in the centre of the table, the cloth like a soft small heartbeat under the afternoon light. “Everything depends on discretion.”

Ron let out a sound that was half relief and half disbelief. “So—Susan Bones. Who knew Hufflepuffs ran back‑channels?”

Hermione flexed her hands as if arranging a knot in the air. “Not a back‑channel. An internal, trusted line. Susan’s proximity to her aunt circumvents a lot of noise. But we must be precise. No mention of Horcruxes, no accusations thrown across parchment. The letter will request a hearing on ‘extraordinary evidence’ with a sealed exchange. If Madame Bones authorises it, she can move through the Department without setting alarms.”

Harry’s fingers hovered over the tin. He thought of the dreams, of waking to find the coin heavy and warm in his palm. He thought of Hagrid’s quiet kitchen and Fang’s clumsy companionship and felt the small iron anchor of being cared for. “If Susan gets it to her aunt,” he said, slow and careful, “then we have a chance to keep Peter where he belongs and maybe get Sirius the appeal he never had.”

Hermione nodded, and the three of them bent their heads over the map and the book, words shrinking to whispers as they stitched the next moves together, who would carry the tin from the dormitory, the precise timing to intercept Susan’s note, the forgetfulness sigils Hermione would test. The library, full of patient knowledge and dust, felt for a moment like a room that listened and agreed: plans made here were promises that could be checked and counted.

***

They left the common room in a folding of shadows, the portrait hole whispering shut behind them. The castle exhaled as they slipped along its corridors, warm human noise shrinking into the distance until all that was left was their own careful breathing and the muffled sound of footsteps on stone. Hermione walked with the tin tucked beneath her cloak like a small, ridiculous heart; Ron kept close enough that Harry could have reached out and grabbed the back of his robe. Harry moved in the space between urgency and obedience: he wanted the diadem secured, the coin buried, the loop steadied by action rather than words.

They crouched behind the dented suit of armour on the fourth‑floor landing while Harry spread the Marauder’s Map over his knees. The inked footprints pulsed and slid with a life of their own: Filch was still on the third, Mrs. Norris a slow curl behind him; Peeves was mercifully absent. The absence of Dumbledore’s name on the map was a relief that felt small and fragile.

“Now,” Harry whispered. They let themselves become stones to the corridor, casting the Disillusionment Charm together until skin and fabric lost their outlines and their clothes dulled to castle greys. The spell always felt like cracking an egg, sluggish and sticky, then gone; they simply were part of the wall.

The seventh‑floor corridor stretched ahead, a familiar bruise of night. They stepped with the intention they'd rehearsed: three measured paces past Barnabas the Barmy, three breaths thinking of things lost and small, the Room listening and unspooling its seam. The wall shivered like a held breath and peeled back to reveal the Room of Requirement in a slow, obliging sigh.

Inside, the Room had shaped itself round their need and memory, generous and ruthless in its own way: a cathedral of clutter, moonlight pooling on motes that turned like galaxies around beams of empty air. Stacks of trunks made canyons; a rusted suit of armour leaned against a tower of trunks; shelves buckled under the weight of atlases and children’s toys. The smell of old parchment and hot metal and something older, an insomnia of objects, rose and settled around them.

Hermione’s voice was a thread of steel. “We run the checks as planned. Short, loud disturbance first. If nothing happens, the trinket. Wait fifteen minutes. Re‑entry and confirmation. Then the diadem. Then the tin. Remember the relay and abort signal.”

“Right,” Ron said, setting his jaw. He produced from the inside of his robe a small, clanking thing Hermione had insisted on: a petard, crude and screamingly loud when lit, salvaged from a skirmish of Fred and George. He placed it in what looked like the middle of an aisle, its wick a tiny, obscene defiance in the hush.

Harry’s pulse matched the little wick’s stubborn pulse as Ron stepped back. “Now?” Harry breathed.

Ron nodded and struck the flint. The petard exploded with the kind of sound that made books fall like dominos and sent a flock of dust motes spinning into the moonlight. For an instant everything in the Room answered, the air tightened, something metallic twanged in the far distance, and then, as if the place had shrugged, the stacks settled. They did not wait; they slipped out the seam while the echo still hummed in the walls and pressed themselves against the blankness of the corridor, breathless and wide‑eyed.

They re-entered immediately, staying low, eyes searching. Nothing stirred in any way that suggested a conscious guardian of the room had noticed them. No slow, purposeful footfalls, no soft rearrangement of a tower of trunks. For all its odd life, the Room had not shifted in recognition of their noise. They took that as their first green light.

“Drop the trinket,” Hermione whispered.

Ron moved with the elation of a boy who’d lit a firework and lived to tell the tale. He dropped a Muggle brass trinket into a shallow nook between two dusty goblets and they left once more, counting silently as their boots padded to the next shadow just outside. Fifteen minutes seemed like an age. Harry’s hands clenched into fists in his pockets; the coin in Hermione’s tin felt absurdly distant and very much present in his imagination.

They hung back in the stairwell, breathing and watching. Fifteen minutes passed slow and precise. Ron’s knee bounced once and then stilled. Harry’s throat worked like it had swallowed a stone and was trying to remember how to speak when the time came.

They crept back in. The brass trinket lay exactly where Ron had dropped it, dust settling around it as if the room had never seen the intrusion. Hermione crouched and tested the air, the books, the way the light settled over the trinket’s edge. “Good,” she breathed, and the word was small and hard with relief. “We can proceed.”

They moved toward the north bank of trunks where, months ago in another life, someone had said they’d last seen the Ravenclaw diadem. Harry kept his breath slow and deliberate. Up close, the diadem looked smaller than the stories, and more human in its vanity: a circlet of silver with faint, near‑hairline runes etched along its inner curve, runes that felt like sentences paused mid‑thought. When the moonlight struck its metal, the polish winked with something that was not quite light, not quite memory. It breathed a silence that made Harry’s heart feel like an intruder.

Hermione’s wand hovered at the edge of the bust where the diadem rested. “No reaching,” she warned softly, eyes sharp as she scanned for any trap or active tether. She murmured quick diagnostic charms, subtle threads of detection that skimmed the metal and slid back to her like tiny fish returning to a net. “No active hexes. No recent disturbance. It looks to have been in that same spot for a very long time.”

Harry leaned closer. The diadem’s lure was not thunderous. It was a private answering: a memory of a forgotten applause, a quiet insistence that stitched itself to the hollow places in a person’s chest. Where it touched, it made you ache for completion you had never learned to name. Harry felt the pull as a throb behind his shoulders, a sensation that made the world tilt toward the idea that perhaps a crown could fix a longing you thought you had learned to live with.

He had to remind himself, with a small, precise pinch to his own wrist, that the diadem’s voice was a trick. “You’re not for me,” he said under his breath so low Hermione might have missed it. “You’re not for anyone. You should be lost.” The words felt like a vow he could keep.

Hermione moved then, fingers sure, her eyes calculating the sculpture’s stability and the runes’ angle under moonlight. She muttered an obscuration charm to muffle the diadem’s small hum, a thing that lowered its immediacy rather than blunting its magic. “It’s secure for the moment,” she said. “We won’t move it tonight. We verify and leave it where it was—intact, undisturbed. We have bigger fish, or rather, a smaller, more dangerous coin to worry about.”

Harry’s gaze lingered, not out of possession but out of a careful, almost reverent appraisal. “If we leave it,” he said, “then someone else could find it later. I’d rather know it’s where it should be.”

Hermione’s answer was practical. “We note its coordinates within the Room—tracing marks, tracer chalk under the torn book—and make sure the corridor of entry is as we found it. If we can secure the coin first, then we’ll decide whether to bring the diadem for study or to leave it forbidden and forgotten for now.”

That settled, they set about the tin relay. Hermione opened the lining and showed Harry the little interior of bone‑white chalk, how it would absorb any subtle, corrosive attunement the coin might insist upon. “The non‑attunement knot is a legal‑magic adaptation,” she explained one last time for the way the words steadied her hands. “It will not stop a Horcrux from being a Horcrux, but it will blunt the personal pull.”

Hermione placed the tin on the marble beside the bust and opened it. The interior smelled faintly of chalk and old paper. The lining Hermione had worked on looked absurdly domestic against the mythic hum of the Room. She held the tin out to Harry with the same hands that had once gripped quills in midnight essays and ancient texts. “You place it,” she said. Her eyes held a ferocity that was not cruel but resolute. “We can’t let one of us be the lure’s chosen guardian.”

Harry took the tin with a hand that trembled. The metal was cold under his fingers and heavier than he expected. He felt the coin thrumming beneath its cloth like a heart trying to total everything into a rhythm. For a moment his palms clenched and the instinct to hide the tin in his cloak and not let it go rose like an animal.

“Now,” Hermione prompted softly.

He lowered himself into the hollow beneath a collapsed cabinet that serpented with old mirrors and chess pieces. His reflection in broken glass splintered into a dozen eyes. For a second he imagined all the versions of himself that might open the tin and let the coin be anything other than sealed. He lifted the cloth and set the tin into the hollow, his hands sure despite the clench of fear in his throat.

As he pushed the tin deep into the hollow, the Room seemed to notice and inhale. A low hum rose like a thread through the air; moonlight shifted as if to give the hiding place a private shade. He wrapped the cloth over the tin in the practiced way Hermione had shown him and then, at Hermione’s nod, covered the spot with a scatter of trivial things: a cracked toy soldier, a rusted key, an odd glove with a dragon scale patch. He felt the coin’s weight sink into the small shelter as if a stone had been laid onto a sealed chest.

“You placed it,” Ron whispered, voice wet with a boyish pride that tasted like relief and fear together. “You actually did it.”

Harry crawled back from the hollow and felt oddly naked with the deed done. The diadem glittered above them, patient and unchanged. They did not take it, not tonight; their embargo on one‑man heroic gestures had hardened into a rule as fundamental as any law Hermione could quote. They had looked at it, confirmed its hiddenness, and left it where it had been sitting untouched.

Hermione traced a faint chalk sign with her wand beneath a torn book near the hollow, a tracer only visible under the thin beam of a lamp with a particular mercury mix she’d stolen from a spectroscopy text. “Exact retrieval,” she murmured. “We must be precise. If the Room likes to forget, we must like to remember.”

Harry sat back against a stack of trunks and let the small, ridiculous relief wash through him, like a tide that might recede at any moment. “It’s hidden,” he said. “It’s done.” The words felt small but true.

They backed away in single file, breath slow. The Room exhaled. They reached the seam of the wall and listened as the Room closed itself with the same indifferent courtesy Hogwarts always lent to its happenings. The corridor that returned them was softer somehow, the stone less anxious. For a few steps they breathed like people who had not been allowed to for a long time.

Then a voice that could have been pulled from a warmer weather stepped into their immediate air.

“Oh!” Dumbledore’s exclamation came as if the night had a personality and it had chosen an amiable, astonished tone. He took a small step back and raised both hands in a mild, theatrical shock. “Goodness, I had no idea anyone was out this late.”

Harry felt his pulse pick up, a reflexive thudding that set tiny alarms along his jawline. Hermione’s cheeks warmed. Ron’s gaze dropped to the floor as if it might offer a convenient hole into which to hide.

Dumbledore’s face was kind and lined with that tired humour they had come to read like a private script. His eyes, though, were curious, the kind of attention that felt like sunlight and inspection at once. He peered at Harry with that soft, immediate interest that always made Harry feel oddly seen. “Harry my boy, you look chilled to the bone. Are you quite all right?” His voice held genuine concern, like a hand offered across a river.

Harry’s answer came out thin and quick. “Fine, sir. Just—got lost.”

Dumbledore chuckled, a sound they had all heard before, part indulgence and part question. “Lost has its charms, sometimes, but perhaps not on cold nights. Do take care of yourselves.” His gaze found the blank wall where the Room had been and for a heartbeat Harry thought the headmaster’s look carried a weight that reached beyond casual observation, curiosity, perhaps, threading through something private. “Hogwarts has a way of revealing what we least expect. Off you go now; rest will do you more good than midnight courage.”

Hermione opened her mouth to answer and closed it again with the practiced economy of people who had learned to tell truths sparingly to certain ears. “Yes, Professor. Thank you.” Her voice folded into the hush of the corridor.

Dumbledore’s smile softened into something both indulgent and a little rueful. His hand rose in a mild wave and then he stepped away as if an invisible parade of portraits called him.

They watched him go until his figure rounded the bend and the night swallowed the sound of his footsteps. When the corridor was theirs again, Ron’s grin cracked like thin ice and then settled into a more honest, relieved expression.

Back in the boys’ dormitory, the ceiling of the four‑poster felt both very close and impossibly high. Harry put his hand to his pocket and felt, absurdly and shockingly, only cloth and emptiness where the coin should have been. He let out a breath that was half laugh, half exhausted sob. The bed around him smelled of borrowed laundry and the safe, animal warmth of other sleeping boys.

He lay awake for a long time, replaying the Room and the diadem and the smell of chalk; the tin’s absence was a curious sort of proof that they had acted.

He closed his eyes, willing sleep to come. But the coin’s echo throbbed at his side as though alive, a heartbeat of silver against bone. His breaths grew shallow, mind and body caught between waking and dreaming, until at last he drifted beyond the veil of consciousness.

He found himself alone in a vast, deserted crypt. Lanterns hung from iron hooks, but their flames were dead. The only light came from the coin lying at the centre of a stone dais its surface molten with an inner glow, as if the sun had been caught in metal. Around the dais, the floor was inscribed with names: friends who had fallen, allies who had vanished, innocents caught in the crossfire. Each name pulsed once, then faded into darkness.

As Harry stepped forward, the hush was broken by a low, pulsating chant: All debts must be paid. His foot struck a cracked tile, and the walls shivered. The air smelled of damp earth and cold ashes, and every breath felt like inhaling centuries of sorrow. He reached for the coin but when his fingers touched its rim, ice burned through his skin, and the lanterns flickered to life, casting grotesque shadows on vaulted stone.

Behind him, a figure emerged from the gloom: tall, hooded, draped in charred robes that whispered like dry leaves. In one hand it bore a long scythe; in the other, an empty palm that beckoned. Harry froze, the coin’s flame pulsing stronger now, as if it welcomed the darkness as much as he feared it.

“Return,” the figure intoned, voice hollow and echoing, “or embrace the cost.”

Harry tried to speak, to deny every bargain he had ever made but no words would come. The dais fractured, and from the cracks spilled a tide of ghostly faces, all mouths open in silent screams. The hooded shape advanced, blade scraping stone, hunger in every movement. Harry’s grip tightened on the coin; its heat flared, white-hot, blinding him. With a shuddering gasp, he wrenched it free and hurled it behind him.

Light exploded. The ghostly faces dissolved into motes of silver dust. The courtyard of his dream, the crypt, shattered like glass, and Harry tumbled upward through layers of distant thunder and cold, storm-laden clouds.

He woke with a strangled cry, heart hammering against his ribs. Dawn’s pale fingers slipped through the dormitory windows. Silence reigned, but in his palm lay the coin, its surface smooth, unbroken, and utterly still. The shock of its weight was real, its pulse gone but the memory of that icy flame lingered.

Harry sat upright, blankets pooled at his waist and studied the coin in the weak light. How had it come to him when he had hidden it so deep? Questions pressed on his throat: magic or malice, fate, or foul play. He glanced at Ron, sprawled peacefully under his own scarlet drapes, then toward the girl’s dormitory, where Hermione ought to be. A flicker of suspicion ignited in his chest… if anyone knew of their midnight foray, it was Dumbledore. Could the headmaster have plucked the coin from its hollow? Or had the coin answered some darker call and returned on its own?

Clutching it, Harry rose and slipped quietly to the window. Below, the grounds lay silvered by frost, silent as a held breath. The coin lay heavy in his hand, silent, yet full of whispered promises and unending debts. And Harry Potter, torn between dread and determination, knew that this mysterious gift of dawn had bound him ever tighter to the bargain he had hoped to bury.

Chapter Text

Morning light poured through the towering windows of the Great Hall, laying long, patient bars of gold across the benches and carving the faces of the students into planes of light and shadow. The ceiling glowed a false blue sky studded with lazy clouds; the smell of frying bacon and warm bread filled the air. Around him the hall was a wash of ordinary school day noise, clatter, gossip, the scrape of cutlery, and Harry sat inside it like someone holding a secret too heavy for a boy his age.

He slid onto the bench between Ron and Hermione; shoulders slightly hunched against the weight in his robes. The coin pressed at his ribs as if it had settled there to be felt, a cold and private thing Harry did not trust himself to speak of. He kept his hands folded over the cloth at his heart more by habit than intention, trying to make the metal feel like a mundane object, a small, forgettable truth. It would not cooperate.

Neville’s owl screamed across the rafters and a small parchment fluttered onto the table, the interruption drawing eyes toward him. Neville’s fingers shook as he unfolded the letter; his face went a brilliant, foolish red. “I‑it’s from my gran,” he stammered, beaming half‑ashamed, half‑proud. “She sent me a Remembrall.” He lifted the glass ball as though it were something fragile and precious, and his hands trembled so that the globe caught the hall’s light and made small rainbows.

Dean leaned forward, amused. “A Remembrall? Isn’t that a little… parental? What’s it do, Neville?”

“It—er—glows red if you forget something,” Neville said, voice quivering between delight and the vulnerability of a boy who feels the world watching him learn. He gave the orb a tentative squeeze and the pale rose in its core deepened. “See? It’s... remembering for me.”

Seamus made a snort of laughter, an easy dismissal that hid a softer curiosity. “It’s like a note that reminds you to remember without telling you WHAT to remember! Completely useless.”

Laughter rippled through the Gryffindor table. Neville managed a shaky laugh himself, but his smile did not reach his eyes. He tucked the Remembrall against his chest, shoulders hunched, as if trying to make himself smaller. Even surrounded by friends, he felt alone.

Before the mood could settle, Malfoy swept up with his usual entourage, pale and precise. He set himself beside Neville like a garnish meant to make the plate look colder. “What’s this half-squib got now?” Malfoy sneered, stretching a pale hand toward the Remembrall. “Let me guess… another proof you’re dimmer than a broken wand?”

Neville flinched and tightened his hold. “B‑back off, Malfoy,” he managed.

Draco’s smile was a blade. “Hand it over. Or else...”

Harry was already on his feet. He did not think; his body moved the way muscle remembers a learned reflex. “Leave him alone,” he snapped, stepping between Neville and the Slytherin trio.

Draco’s eyes flicked to Harry with that familiar, insolent light. “Or what, Potter? You’ll do something dramatic?” His tone invited spectacle.

It happened in the sudden, chaotic way school life did when something sharp cut through the ordinary. Harry lunged, caught the globe before Malfoy’s hand closed on it. The glass flared to a bruised crimson the instant his fingers closed around it, a colour so wrong and deep that laughter died on people’s lips. The Hall inhaled as one body.

Draco recoiled, affronted and suddenly very aware of the thing in Harry’s hand. “You—” he began, voice narrowing.

He left the sentence hanging and stepped back, pale with the shock of having been outdone. Crabbe and Goyle swayed like guards discovering their spear is heavier than they imagined. Draco forced disdain back into his face and his lips curled into a sneer, but his eyes kept flicking to the dark orb clutched in Harry’s hand.

“Enjoy your toy, Potter,” he spat, voice low. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you. There are worse fates than forgetting your homework.” And with a final parting sneer, he turned on his heel. Crabbe and Goyle following him as they melted into the milling students, leaving a hush in their wake.

There was a single, metallic clatter somewhere toward the back of the hall, a fork slipping from a dish as if astonishment could make plates forget their purpose. Then the room exhaled, and the normal noise reasserted itself: cutlery, gossip, the soft belt of a joke. But for Harry the world had narrowed into the glass globe’s bruise of red and the faraway echo that landed like a reminder against the inside of his skull, a memory that evaporated the instant he tried to name it.

Hermione leaned forward, voice taut with precise concern. “Neville, what shade is that meant to be? It shouldn’t go that dark.”

Neville’s face drained. He touched the Remembrall with the tip of his finger as if he could make it speak. “I’ve never seen one so—so blackish. It usually goes scarlet, not—” He swallowed, the word lodged in his throat. “Either the Remembrall is broken, or you’ve forgotten something gigantic.”

Ron’s curiosity pushed at Harry like a hand. “Have you forgotten anything really important, Harry? Like a meeting, a promise?” His tone was half‑teasing and half‑worried; everyone at the table knew the mask Harry wore for practical reasons.

Harry felt the coin pulse beneath his robes, answering in its own small, invisible way. He closed his eyes for a fraction and tried to reach whatever blank the Remembrall hinted at. Nothing came. The memory was a locked room with no key. He forced a small shake of the head. “No—nothing I can think of,” he lied softly, the lie a tiny, hot stone in his mouth.

Hermione exchanged a look with Ron: a calculation, a worry, an acknowledgment that something else was pressing on Harry. She reached to steady Neville’s hand and then to pinch him, practical as ever. “Put it away in your dormitory, Neville,” she said. “Hide it out of sight. If Malfoy sees it again, he won’t be kind.”

They finished their meal with the Hall’s normal rhythms reasserting themselves, but Harry could not taste the bacon; each bite was a ritual conducted a world away from his attention. The Remembrall’s deep red sat like a question in his mind, and the coin pulsed an answering pressure at his ribs. He slid the little orb back into Neville’s trembling hands and let the boy clutch it like armour, while the thing in his pocket thudded in time with his heartbeat as though it had its own agenda.

They left the Great Hall in a swirl of scarlet and laughter, the chill air a clean draught that cleared their heads. The castle stood behind them, stone and patient, while the practice field lay bright and green under a sky that promised ordinary things: broom practice, shouted instructions, the predictable clatter of first‑years discovering wind. Neville was nowhere in sight for a heart‑stopping moment.

“Where’s Neville?” Ron asked, scanning the path between hedges, fingers worrying a loose thread on his robe.

Hermione bit her lip, impatience braided with worry. “He said he’d be back in a minute. He’ll—” She broke off as a flush of movement appeared from the courtyard: Neville, hair whipped by the wind, cheeks ruddy and breathless, clutching at his empty robes like a man returning from a small battle.

“Sorry I’m late,” Neville panted as he joined them. “I hid it in the dormitory, like you said.” Relief and something guilty flickered across his face; it was the sort of relief that tasted of being young and afraid and stubbornly brave.

Professor Hooch’s whistle cut across them like a knife. Her yellow eyes swept the line of broom‑bound bodies with the sharpness of a hawk. “Brooms, now!” she called. “Mount, lean forward, and trust the broom to carry you.”

Harry vaulted onto his Oakshaft Seventy‑Nine as second nature; the lift beneath him was so familiar it felt like muscle memory, an old friend. Ron and Hermione followed with less flourish but no less focus. Neville climbed with the kind of awkward determination that made Harry’s chest sting; his legs wobbling, chin set as if to will confidence into being.

“Spread your fingers, trust the wind!” Hooch barked. The brooms rose obediently, a clean line of motion humming under the morning light. Harry glanced at Neville, already stumbling slightly, and felt the old calculus click into place: rescue him, and risk the pattern of terrible consequences that had followed every time before; let him fall, and live with the ache of watching. Each past rescue came threaded with its own bad luck: broken bones, concussion, humiliation in the hospital wing, weeks of patching up a boy who had tried to be brave and failed. They had promised themselves restraint for Neville’s sake.

Hermione’s wand hovered, an itch to interfere. She forced it back into her pocket with a tightness at her throat. Ron’s jaw clenched so hard Harry could see the strain. It was possible to be kind in two directions: to step in and save a friend’s dignity, or to step back and let them learn the hard geometry of standing. They had chosen the latter, brittle protective as it was.

Neville’s broom lurched. He gasped, fingers flattening against the handle as if to stop the air itself from overturning him. For a breath he hung, a small figure suspended, and then gravity took its old, indifferent course. He toppled.

Hooch reacted like a hawk to a falling prey, fast, efficient, exact. She stooped and swept Neville from air to earth with a motion that made his tumble a tidy thing rather than a tragedy. “Down to the infirmary, Mr. Longbottom, at once!” she snapped. “Learn to trust your broom—no one else mount one until I return!”

Neville clutched his side where the fall had bruised him; his face drained and then returned a brittle, embarrassed smile. The relief that the Remembrall was safe softened them all a little; the cost was small enough today, and Madam Pomfrey’s efficient hands would stitch what fear had unmade.

Across the grass Draco Malfoy knelt by a broken branch, the morning sun glinting off something silver between his fingers. Harry’s heart lurched. The coin.

Without thinking, Harry surged forward. “Malfoy!” he shouted, voice sharp enough to turn a dozen heads.

Draco looked up with that practiced sneer that made him look like someone used to getting applause. He let the coin spin on his fingertip with a casual cruelty. “Looking for this?” he said, enjoying the way the question made Harry’s face go taut. He did not know the coin’s true nature, only that it unsettled Harry.

“Give it back,” Harry said, keeping his voice low but absolute.

“Or what?” Draco taunted, pale face splitting with a smirk. “You’ll hex me? You’re all posture, Potter.”

Draco kicked off onto his broom before Harry could reply, a clean, arrogant lift. Harry seized a nearby Cleansweep, launched himself after him, and the chase began in a slam of wind and adrenaline.

They carved the morning air together, a pair of streaks against a wide blue kitchen‑sky. The wind screamed in Harry’s ears and stitched his vision into a narrow tunnel, Draco ahead, silver coin bright in his grip, green and grey of robes trailing like flagging emotion. The chase folded into a choreography of skill and need: rise, dive, bank tight, curve over hedgerows that blurred into green smear.

Harry felt something like music in the motion, each twist and pull a measure, but beneath it throbbed the fear that Draco might toss the coin and let it vanish into the lake. He surged, drew level, and his eyes met Draco’s: a flash of triumph at being able to watch his tormentor’s face fear for the first time.

With a slow, furious motion Draco threw the coin with all his might.

Harry’s world tipped. He dropped toward the dark lake, muscles reacting with perfect instinct. His broom levelled beneath him.

As he skidded across the water’s edge, Harry thought of Neville’s tumble. Sometimes a fall was the only way to stand taller.

Only a hair’s breadth separated Harry’s fingers from oblivion as the coin spun toward the lake’s dark mirror. In that heartbeat, he shifted the Cleansweep beneath him, heel up, nose down, turning his broom into a razor-thin blade slicing millimetres above the water. Like a swift Wronski Feint, he dipped, feathered the pressure in his right hand, and let the wind carve a curve under his broom.

The coin grazed the surface, sending tiny ripples across the murk, before Harry’s hand snapped down. He caught it between thumb and forefinger only a breath before it vanished beneath the reeds. His broom hovered, quivering with the rush of air and adrenaline, its bristles ghosting just above the waves.

With a gentle upward pull of the stick, Harry lifted free of the lake’s pull, skimming in toward the shore as morning light flickered across the water. He set the broom down in the soft mud, boots slipping as he touched ground, and stood there panting, coin safe in his palm and the Cleansweep resting at his side.

Ron and Hermione scrambled down the bank, mud streaking their robes, faces bright with the fierce relief of friends who had seen something almost lost and kept it. Hermione’s eyes met Ron’s for a heartbeat, a silent question and promise, before they both knelt beside him.

“Harry! Are you all right?” Ron asked, offering a hand.

Harry pressed the coin into his pocket and nodded. Before they could gather their breath Draco returned, skidding in on a triumphal arc, landing with a thud that sent a spray of mud across the grass. “Not bad, Potter,” he sniffed as he straightened, face pinched with wounded pride. “But let’s see how you fare without a broom. Midnight, trophy room! Duel me there if you’ve still got the nerve.”

A knot of Slytherins chuckled behind him, riding on his confidence. Ron’s fists clenched; Hermione’s eyes flashed like a blade.

“Don’t think we’ll let you get away with this,” Hermione called. Ron put a hand on Harry’s shoulder, steady and fierce.

“See you tonight,” Ron added, voice tight with promise rather than bravado.

Their exchange would have flared and died like so many school dares, but the air shifted with an authoritative crack. Professor McGonagall stood at the water’s edge, skirts sweeping, spectacles askew, cheeks flushed with the shock of what she’d just witnessed. “Mr. Potter!” she said, voice more stunned than angry. “Never in all my years—”

Harry opened his mouth to explain, but she waved him off with a hand that trembled between reprimand and another emotion, astonishment, perhaps grudging admiration. “Not here, not now. Come with me immediately.”

Harry tucked the coin deep into his robes and let the sun and the ordinary need to prove oneself settle over him like something both heavy and strangely right. Mud clung to Harry’s boots as he followed, heart still punching wild rhythms against his ribs. Ron and Hermione exchanged a look that held the same mixture of pride and dread they always wore when Harry slipped across danger for them.

Draco lingered at the field’s edge, overheard the hurried whispers. A delighted smirk spread across his face. “Potter’s in trouble now,” he murmured to his cronies as they laughed behind him. The Slytherins drifted away in small groups, gossip replacing antagonism.

Hermione shot him a frost‑thin look. “He won’t be smug for long when he learns Harry’s the new Gryffindor’s seeker,” she muttered.

They knew what McGonagall’s summons meant even before she said it aloud: consequence, attention, and perhaps an impossible, absurd sort of recognition.

Ron punched her arm playfully. “And we’ll trample him during that midnight duel.”

Hermione laughed. “Not that Malfoy will show… true to form, the coward.”

“Let’s go see Neville.”

They pushed through the infirmary doors into a hush that felt like the inside of a held breath. The room smelled of boiled herbs and clean linen; row upon row of cradled beds exhaled the soft rhythm of sleep and low moans. Neville settled onto a high, white‑linen cot and folded his hands into the blanket, cheeks still flushed from the fall and the relief of being upright again. Ron and Hermione hovered at his side, the old, familiar choreography of worry and support.

Madam Pomfrey bustled across the ward with the efficient bustle of someone who could mend bones and sorrows with the same brisk hand. She inspected Neville’s wrapped wrist with an exacting eye and did not spare him the blunt kindness teachers cultivated. “Just a clean break, Mr. Longbottom,” she announced, voice brisk as a stitch. “A simple healing charm and you’ll be right as rain. That is, after you keep your feet on the ground for a few days.”

A soft, amber glow bloomed and folded itself around Neville’s wrist as Madam Pomfrey’s wand flicked in a series of competent sweeps. Neville flinched once, then exhaled as pain eased and the bone set itself to a whole. Pomfrey pressed a goblet into his hands, warm, bitter potion to dull the edge, and said in the no‑nonsense tone of someone who had no patience for theatrics, “Rest it. No heavy lifting. Come back if it stings more than it should. Off to lunch, then. And try not to break anything else today.”

Hermione let out the breath she had been holding without realizing it. Neville managed a lopsided grin that still held some of his earlier shame and a greater measure of gratefulness. They helped him to his feet and steadied him as the ward hummed with its low, mundane life; the morning’s small catastrophe had been made tidy.

They moved through the castle’s corridors with the muffled steps of people retreating from a tenderness they didn’t know how to speak. The archway into the Great Hall opened onto the familiar geometry of long tables and bright, heated light. They slipped into place with the ease of habit, Harry already at the Gryffindor table, the coin secret where he kept it, mud drying stubbornly into the fabric of his robe.

Steam rose from tureens and the Hall pulsed with the comfortable noise of appetite. Hermione’s fork paused on its way to her mouth; she fixed Harry with a look that mixed exasperation and a careful kindness. “Harry,” she said at last, voice low enough for only them, “how did the coin end up in Malfoy’s hand? We hid it in the Room. You didn’t go back for it, did you?”

Harry’s fingers pressed against the cloth in his robes where the coin slept; the weight beneath his palm felt like an accusation. He met Hermione’s eyes with a composure he had practiced until it became a second skin. “I didn’t go back,” he said, voice even though his throat tightened. “I’ll explain later.”

Across the table Neville, still pale from the infirmary, caught Harry’s expression and tapped at his wrist; the gesture was small and full of relief. Hermione’s suspicion softened into concern; she reached to steady Neville’s arm as if the simple hold could braid frayed courage into him.

The Hall unfurled around them, talk rising, a table’s laughter blooming like a bell. Harry’s hand hovered over his plate, the meal untouched; the coin’s pressure answered every question the Remembrall asked and none of the answers sat anywhere he could reach. He swallowed and pushed food around his plate until he had the practiced countenance of a boy doing what boys did.

Ron leaned in, voice simpler than the problem deserved. “You’ll take it easy now, Nev?” he asked, half tease, half earnest.

Neville squared his shoulders with a small, stubborn dignity. “I’ll try. No more unplanned dismounts.” His smile was thin but genuine; the kind of promise one meant in the slippery hours after being patched.

Above them the enchanted ceiling faded into perfect daylight while the Hall hummed, but Harry felt a different pressure press at the edges of his senses. McGonagall’s astonished voice, Draco’s thin taunt about midnight duels, the scrape of Madam Pomfrey’s wand, all these threads braided into a tension he could not wear lightly. He raised his goblet in something like private defiance. “Here’s to things that stay the same,” he said, and his voice tried to make the toast sound easy.

“To Gryffindor,” Ron echoed, glad and unapologetic.

Hermione rolled her eyes, but her smile was the kind you offer when fear is the furniture of your life. “And to fewer midnight duels, if anyone could manage that.”

A soft hush crept as Professor McGonagall rose at the High Table. Her face was the strict, unreadable stone of an exam she thought too easy; her gaze fastened on Harry like a bright, assessing pin. In that long second, expectation and consequence felt the same weight. Harry felt it settle, heavy and oddly appointed to him alone, and he drank the last of his pumpkin juice.

Candles guttered above and laughter rounded the benches back into ordinary sound. For all the safety of plates and the warmth of companions, Harry carried the coin like a little, private wound; it ached and thrummed under his ribs. The day ahead was a lattice of obligations, Seeker trials, Draco’s unmade challenge, the work of making sense of adult machinations, but underneath them all lay the small, relentless demand of that metal disc. He kept his hands folded, not because the secret was noble, but because letting it out might unmake what the three of them had spent hours fencing around: trust, plans, and the fragile confidence that tonight might pass without further price.

Chapter Text

Harry lay half-awake beneath the scarlet canopy, the four‑poster a cocoon of thread and warded silence. The runes embroidered into the crimson fabric pulsed in a patient, pale rhythm, each beat a small, mechanical promise that the night would hold its tongue. Outside the portrait hole, the castle sighed and shifted with wind and old timber, but inside the Silencio Circle the world had been folded down to the three of them and the hush that kept other noises from even thinking of intruding.

Hermione and Ron were curled beside him, eyes rimmed with exhaustion that no amount of bravery could hide. Moonlight threaded through a narrow seam in the curtains and cut Hermione’s face into silver planes; her wand lay light and ready across her knees as if she expected to have to bewitch the very air. “Harry,” she said in a clipped whisper that barely rose above the ward’s hum, “did you woke with the coin in your hand this morning? How did it get back there? Did you sneak off to the Room of Lost Things without telling us?”

He pushed himself up on an elbow, the coin cool and solid in his palm. It felt foreign and intimate at once, like an item he had known his whole life and a thing he had never seen. “I didn’t,” he said, the word thinned by the shock of repetition. “When we left, I watched the seam close. I crawled right out and never went back.” He kept his voice steady because he had learned that steadiness could be a kind of armour.

Hermione’s fingers tightened briefly on her wand. The runes above them flared faintly at her movement. “If it’s anything like Rowena Ravenclaw’s diadem,” she whispered, “it might not need to be physically moved to call. It could weave a thread into memory and tug. It could—” She stopped, because the thought of what that would mean had teeth.

A heat of indignation rose in Harry. “We hid it,” he said too sharply. “I walked away. I watched the seal. I’m not lying.”

Ron shifted, the cot complaining beneath him, and folded his hands in the kind of practical gesture that tried to stitch panic into order. “Hermione’s worried because we can’t map this magic,” he said quietly. “If it’s got a pull, it could be preying on one person’s mind. We all remember the locket—how quickly it got inside us. It’s not a moral failing to be affected by something meant to break you.”

Hermione let out a breath that might have been a laugh if it weren’t so raw. “We were reckless with the diary because we didn’t know what it was. We treated it like ink and paper and forgot that dark things don’t always burn the way we expect.” Her voice dropped to a hush beneath the ward. “When we tried to destroy it, the book fought… flames recoiled, voices filled the room, and the Basilisk came through the pipes. We nearly lost Ginny. We almost—” Her hand closed on Harry’s without thinking, the pressure a talisman against repeating that collapse.

Harry pictured the diary’s thin, malicious eyes and remembered the sting of venom and the thinned sound of someone gasping for breath. “We’ll not make that mistake again,” he said, slow and certain. “We’ll bind it, contain it, and then—” He swallowed. “And then whatever else is needed.”

Hermione’s whole face softened into that fierce practicality that made her look like a woman who cleaned magic like one might mend torn clothes. “Containment matters,” she said. “Ordinary destruction can spread the corruption. We need a box that resists whatever… outreach it has. We need seals that tell us if it moves and wards that blunt its allure.”

She drew a sharp breath. “We need answers first. Is the ward around the bed still sound?” she asked.

Harry glanced at the runes ribboning the canopy. They pulsed the same measured beat he had trusted before. “It held,” he said. “No breaches.”

“Good.” Hermione’s fingers danced once in the air as she listed charms like tools in a bag. “I’m going to run every detection charm I know. Revelio for surface magics, Invenio for hidden anchors, Detectus Metallum for foreign alloys, even the Black‑family diagnostic I filched last loop.” The edges of her voice warmed with an odd pride at the memory of forbidden study. “If anything clings to this coin, we’ll find it.”

She tapped the coin with a practiced flick. Green light flared for an instant and vanished as though swallowed. No residue, no halo, no echo of the old languages their teachers taught them. Hermione’s brow tightened and she tried again, an arc of air spelled Atmos Compositio Revelare, expecting a faint bouquet of elements to bloom in the curtain’s glow. Nothing. No letters, no drifting glyphs, only the warded dark answering like a closed door.

She kept trying, moving down a checklist of spells that had once scared her because they brushed the edges of forbidden knowledge. Each returned the same null: blank, mute, like a page whose ink refused to be read. The skin along her jaw went pale. “It makes no sense,” she breathed. “Even counterfeit things leave traces. Dust, char, a shard of iron—something. It’s like the coin doesn’t exist at all.”

Ron drew in a slow, uncertain breath. “But we can see it, we’ve held it. Malfoy had it today—” His voice went thin. “You can’t make something invisible that the world already knocked fingers against.”

Hermione closed her eyes, the muscles around them tired with strain. “Objects don’t vanish from the world’s ledger. Even if its magic is rooted in something we don’t have names for—antimatter, eidolon—there should be hints.” She let out a sound like a defeated exhalation and then squared herself again. “Which is why we have to take it somewhere it cannot call. If it can tug on your mind, Harry, and make you believe you put it away, we must remove your knowledge. We must create a blind.”

Harry felt the coin’s metal press at the hollow of his palm like a demand. He could imagine waking with it in the morning and hearing the soft, persuasive voice of a thing intent on returning to a single hand. He clenched his jaw, eyes flashing. “Why bother? We tried that before, and it reappeared directly in my hand the very next morning!” he said.

Hermione held up a hand. “Because we can’t overwrite the possibility that the coin has a luring or hypnotic enchantment on you. You might never have put it there to begin with. If it’s calling you back, relying on memories, we have to remove your knowledge entirely.”

Hermione’s face made a plan then, precise and quick. “We’ll layer wards this time—binding, monitoring, memory‑seals. I’ll set tracers that scream if it moves. If it reappears in your hand, we’ll know it did so without you acting.” She smiled, thin but fierce. “And if it moves, we’ll be watching the moment.”

Ron exchanged a look with Harry. “She’s right,” he said quietly. “At least this way, if it reappears in your hand again, Harry, we’ll know it’s doing it on its own.”

Harry closed his eyes, the pulse in his temple thrumming. He felt the coin’s promise flicker against his skin, tug at his mind. He forced himself to nod. “Fine. We’ll do it again.” The words felt smaller and larger at once: smaller because they were ordinary; larger because they kept meaning.

Hermione rose; shoulders squared despite the exhaustion pooling in her limbs. “No time like the present,” she declared. “It’s late but the castle is quieter; we go now.”

Harry and Ron grumbled as they climbed out from under the canopy, but they moved with the easy, practiced obedience of those who had learned to trust Hermione’s singlemindedness. The corridor beyond the portrait hole waited in torchlight and shadow, cool air drawing at their tired faces. Footfalls echoed on stones worn smooth by generations of students, and every door they passed seemed to hold its breath as the three slipped into the night.

They turned a torchlit corner and nearly ran Neville down before they realized who it was. He lay curled in a heap against the marble frame where the Fat Lady’s portrait should have been, robes rumpled and dust mottling his hair; a faint chill clung to him, and his breath came in quick, frightened gasps. Hermione’s hand shot out to grip Harry’s arm. “Neville?” she whispered, the name tight in her throat.

Neville stirred, blinking under the wavering torchlight. “I—I came back from the infirmary,” he stammered, voice trembling like a frightened mouse. “Madam Pomfrey wanted to check my wrist after that fall in flying class and I lost track of time. I…I forgot the password, and the Fat Lady has vanished from her canvas. I’ve been stuck here since curfew.” His words spilled in fits and starts, equal parts apology and alarm, the shame of being found alone at night plain on his face.

Harry exchanged a sharp look with Ron. In the tight recesses of their minds, a cold recognition settled: the loop’s cruel irony was tugging at them again, a familiar misstep masked as bad luck. Only the three of them understood the way a single lost minute could unspool an evening into danger; the rest of the castle slept on, ignorant and indifferent.

Hermione swallowed hard, the flicker of unease in her hazel eyes. She drew closer so only Harry and Ron could hear. “We can’t get back in,” she said softly, voice low and urgent. Her whisper tightened into a clipped plan. “We can’t take Neville with us to the Room of Lost Things it’s far too dangerous. We need another cover story for slipping out at midnight.” Her words were precise and quick, the same practicality that had pulled them from worse scrapes.

Harry squared his shoulders and adopted the most casual tone he could manage. He crouched beside Neville, forcing a warm, reassuring smile into place. “Neville, Malfoy publicly challenged me to a duel in the trophy room tonight at midnight,” he said as though imparting the most thrilling of rumours, letting the lie sit like an invitation rather than a confession.

Neville’s eyes widened, torchlight dancing in their green depths. “A duel? At this hour?” The question came out as if it were wondrous and terrible at once.

Ron stepped beside them, voice quietly confident, folding the story into a shape Neville could carry. “He won’t actually turn up; he’ll rat us out to Filch instead. But Gryffindor’s honour demands we accept. If we fail to meet him, he’ll spew everywhere that Gryffindor’s are cowards.” Ron’s tone had the hardy assurance of a boy used to telling tall tales that softened a terrified friend.

Neville’s brows furrowed in confusion, but he nodded, trusting them too much to question. He pushed himself upright, knees creaking from the trip to the infirmary. “Don’t leave me,” he whispered, voice small and earnest. “Take me with you. I don’t want to stay here alone, and the bloody baron’s been past twice already.” The plea was a brittle thing, part boy’s fear and part stubborn courage.

Hermione let out a soft breath, relief and command braided together. “Stick close,” she murmured, offering Neville a tight smile that promised protection. “We’ll lead the way.”

The four of them melted into the corridor’s shadows. Torchlight flickered along vaulted ceilings, and every suit of armour loomed like a silent sentinel. At one recess they froze as distant laughter drifted past: Peeves, gleefully shocking a pair of seventh years with a rogue farting charm. Ron pressed himself flat against the damp wall until the giggling faded, cheeks flushed with the near‑detection.

“Goodness,” Neville gasped once the laughter died away. “I never knew Hogwarts was so… alive at night.” His voice was raw with the newness of seeing the castle’s hidden pulse.

Harry peered down the corridor, eyes sharp. “Alive… and dangerous. Keep an eye out for Filch.” His words carried the weight of experience, the practiced caution of someone who measured steps by the shadow of a lantern.

A few yards on, they rounded another bend and froze as a patch of darkness shifted. A pair of squat boots scuffed against the flagstones, Argus Filch, his lantern casting long, grim shadows ahead. He strode past, muttering to Mrs. Norris in a low, menacing rasp: “Yes, my sweet. Find them… I know they’re close.” The cat’s amber eyes glinted like twin beacons, and the corridor seemed to tighten around their ribs.

Hermione’s heart hammered. She snatched Neville’s elbow. “Move!” she hissed, and they slipped into a narrow alcove behind a tarnished door, pressing themselves into the stone until their breaths became small, held things. Their lungs whispered in ragged measures.

Harry’s patience snapped with the thin, sharp edge of panic. He kicked at the wall to steady himself. “This is ridiculous,” he mouthed. “Ron! give me the Marauder’s Map.”

Ron drew the folded parchment from his robes and flicked it open. Across its surface, sepia footsteps scuttled through every corridor. A fountain of ink spread, revealing Filch’s route, Peeves’ swirl, and a hundred tiny heartbeats pulsing through Hogwarts’s hidden veins. The map was warmth and malice and salvation rolled into one inked sheet.

Harry traced a path with his finger. “This way,” he said, voice urgent, the route naming itself sharp as a line cut in night.

Neville leaned close, eyes alight with helpless admiration. “That’s brilliant,” he whispered. “It’ll get us clear.” For a breath the map changed from relic to lifeline in his hands.

They slipped into the shadows of a narrow alcove, hearts hammering so loudly they feared they might wake the castle’s ghosts. Harry pressed a trembling finger to his lips and drew the Marauder’s Map from inside his robe, letting it peel open like a secret unveiled. Its parchment edge curled in the torchlight, ancient ink glinting like whispered promises and plotting a safe passage through the labyrinth.

“Neville,” Harry began, voice hushed so even the mortar between the stones could not overhear, “this map... It was created by my dad and his friends—Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot, and Prongs—when they were at Hogwarts. It shows every secret passage, every hidden door, and tracks every soul in the castle.” He let the map flutter open reverently. “It’s the last heirloom my dad left me. If anyone else knew it existed, they’d try and take it from me. I’m trusting you with it because I think of you as a friend.”

Neville’s eyes widened, torchlight dancing across the map’s swirling corridors. His chest rose and fell in a determined rhythm. “I—” he swallowed hard, voice thick with emotion. “I swear on everything I hold dear—my parents, my grandmothers, even Trevor—that I’ll keep this secret with all my heart. I’m proud you trust me, Harry.” He slid a hand over his heart as if to seal the oath in the only way he knew.

Harry’s shoulders sagged in relief. He tucked the map safely back into his robes, cradling it like something fragile and dangerous. “Thank you,” he whispered. “Remember: this is the last piece I held of my father. Talk about it to no one.”

Hermione offered Neville a small, grateful smile, her wide eyes glinting with trust. Ron gave him an approving nod. Their friend circle, tested and bound by looping nights and narrow escapes, had never felt stronger; the map and their trust knitted them tighter than any ordinary night could.

Together, they crept onward, following the map’s guidance. Corridors stretched out like endless mazes, portraits muttered warnings as they passed; cold drafts whispered of dangers lurking in every corner. They ducked through a hidden doorway behind a tapestry of snarling dragons, stumbled down a servants’ stairwell that smelled faintly of old roots and coal, and finally emerged onto the third-floor corridor that hummed with a strange familiarity.

Hermione froze. “Here again,” she breathed. “Every loop pulls us back to this spot as though Hogwarts itself is forcing our hand.” The words hung heavy, like a challenge thrown at the walls.

The walls streaked with age and mottled banners seemed to lean in, urging them forward. At the far end, the barred entrance to the Forbidden Corridor yawned like an accusing eye. Gargoyles perched above, their stone wings half-unfolded, ready to dive.

They crept forward under the wavering torchlight, hearts thudding like frantic woodpeckers. Every few steps, Neville glanced from one shadowed arch to the next, eyes wide with bewilderment. Harry, Ron, and Hermione fell into a tight huddle, voices low as sifted dust.

Hermione pressed her lips together, then exhaled so softly it was almost a breath of wind. “Look,” she murmured, nodding toward Neville just a pace away. “We can’t risk him knowing everything especially not about that corridor.”

Ron’s gaze flicked to a black iron door studded with rusted nails: inside, Fluffy the three-headed dog prowled, a menace the trio had dodged by mere seconds in every past loop.

Harry swallowed, his own heartbeat hammering between his ribs. “We never go near that door,” he whispered, recalling the last time.

They had entered that cursed corridor five times before, each loop ending in fresh horror. The first time, Harry had barely slipped through the door before Fluffy’s three snarling heads snapped shut inches from his wrist. He still tasted the copper tang of fear on his tongue as the dog’s slobber spattered against the iron studs. When Hermione tugged him back by his robes, she found streaks of dark red coursing through the stone floor, proof that a single tooth had nicked Harry’s arm more deeply than he’d admitted.

On the second attempt, Neville had volunteered to lead. Hermione watched in horror as he stepped a pace too far. A thunderous growl rattled the corridor like an avalanche, and in one fluid, brutal motion, Fluffy spun around, jaws opening wide. Neville’s scream echoed against the walls, then cut short. When Harry and Ron raced back to pry the door open, they found only tattered robes and a smear of blood, no sign of Neville’s left leg, not even a scrap of bone.

The third loop blurred into the fourth. Each time, Hermione’s wand would drop, or the map would slip, drawing them nearer to the dog’s fury. One moment, Harry stood frozen by the iron door; the next, he felt the shock of cold steel on his throat as a massive paw pinned him to the ground. The acrid stench of wet fur and warm blood filled his nostrils as he strove to crawl away. Only Ron’s improvised spell, haphazard and desperate, sent Fluffy rearing back, teeth bared, before they tumbled through a secret passage and vanished in a swirl of tapestry threads.

By loop five, they knew the precise angle of Fluffy’s lunge. They knew how each head hunted, which growl meant a bite for Harry’s shoulder, and which meant a strike at Neville’s chest. They carried the echo of every broken scream, every visceral thud as flesh met fang. Hermione’s hands still trembled at the memory of that final loop: Neville’s shout, the sickening snap of bone, and the way Harry had blacked out mid-yell, his last sight a flash of crimson spraying the ancient stones.

Every scar they bore, Harry’s shallow slice across his forearm, Hermione’s scorched fingers from a rushed Protego, Ron’s bruised ribs, was a testament to how close they’d come to nothingness. They could not let that door claim another friend. Not tonight.

Neville shifted uneasily. He peered at the trio, trying to follow the thread of their hushed talk, but the words “loops,” “dog,” and “trapdoor” hung in the air like riddles he could not decode. He simply nodded, trusting them completely even when he did not understand, the sort of trust that sat in his chest like a small, stubborn lantern.

Hermione placed a gentle hand on Harry’s arm. “It’s direct,” she said, voice barely above the hush of wind through the corridor’s cracks. “But if we step in there, he’ll catch us. We’ve seen every loop nearly end there.” Her tone carried all the late‑night calculus they’d practiced under pressure: measure the risk, sacrifice the moment, keep the group whole.

She cast a quick, sideways look at Neville; confusion in the boy’s face shifted to concern when he caught the weight behind her words. “Neville, you stay right behind Ron,” Hermione instructed, crisp and quiet. “We’ve got another route.” Her voice was small but absolute, the authority of someone who had spent days turning fear into precise plans.

Neville’s eyes searched theirs. Even though he did not grasp the full danger, he read their urgency and squared his shoulders as if he could carry courage by willing it into place. He fell in line beside Ron, boots scuffing the stone, ready to follow any order that kept him from being left alone in the dark.

A low, gravelly voice drifted down the corridor, Filch, muttering to his lantern and his cat. Mrs. Norris padded ahead, a silhouette of glinting eyes. “Can smell you lot,” Filch rasped, the words clinging to the air. “You won’t hide forever.” The sound scraped along the flagstones like old iron.

Harry tensed. Every torch seemed to dim; each shadow lengthened as if the castle itself leaned closer to hear Filch’s grievances. Neville’s fingers tightened on Ron’s sleeve, heartbeat loud enough that it might betray them. Hermione’s jaw worked; she breathed slow and sharp, coaxing quiet into their limbs.

“We split up,” she hissed, the whisper a sudden, efficient plan. “Less chance all four get caught.” The logic in her voice left no room for argument.

Ron’s jaw clenched as if to make his next words steadier. He glanced at Neville, who looked back with the naïve loyalty of someone who already considered the other three a bulwark. “Right,” Ron said, voice low and certain. “Neville, come with me down the east passage.” He jerked his head toward a narrow archway swallowed by shadow.

“Harry, Hermione—go west,” he spat over his shoulder as he sprinted, taking Neville with him. Footsteps echoed like two sets of questions down the stone.

Behind them, Filch’s lantern bobbed into view; the caretaker’s bulky silhouette filled the corridor and his curses followed in a sloppy trail. “Oi! You four—stop!” he barked, but the echo of their departing steps swallowed his threat.

They tore through the castle at pace that made the torches blur. Filch thundered after Ron and Neville while Mrs. Norris slid like water toward Harry and Hermione, eyes twin moons in the gloom. The cat’s claws clicked a steady, chilling rhythm that marked how close they were to being found.

Harry and Hermione exploded around the next corner, boots skidding on cold stone. Hermione grabbed Harry’s arm and hauled him into motion. “All the way to the steps!” she gasped. They ran past ancient tapestries whose embroidered faces seemed to leer and mutter; suits of armour loomed like sleepy judges. Each breath was a bite of cold air. Each heartbeat a small drum calling them forward.

Mrs. Norris’s claws tapped faster now; the cat was dangerously near. Hermione’s lungs burned; Harry felt his legs protest, but he dared not slow. At a narrow archway they dove through, the torchlight slicing past like a blade before guttering out.

They did not pause. They hurtled into a short, stifling side passage. Hermione slammed a door behind them and dropped to the floor, dragging Harry with her into shadow. Outside, the cat rattled its claws and mewed in frustrated circles; the sound gnawed at their nerves until it drifted on.

When the clamour faded, they dared to breathe. Harry eased the door open an inch and peered into an empty corridor. They bolted again, sticking to the stone’s shadow like stains. At the base of a spiralling staircase they climbed without thought, two steps at a time, lungs burning with exertion until the air thinned and their sides ached with the ache of being alive.

At the top, the seventh‑floor landing breathed out. Harry yanked open the heavy oak to the Room of Lost Things, and they tumbled into its cavernous interior. They collapsed among towers of crates and battered trunks, dust motes coiling in shafts of torchlight like slow, sleepy sprites. The air tasted of old spells, lost promises, and the brittle tang of things people no longer wanted.

Outside, the faint scrape of claws passed the door and slipped away. Hermione pressed both hands to her ribs and let out a long, shuddering breath. “I never want to hear that mew again,” she whispered, voice frayed, the sentence a small prayer against the noise that stalked the castle at night.

Harry tried a shaky laugh. “We’re safe for now. But Filch will be furious,” he said, both a prediction and an offering of small comfort.

They lay on the cold stone for a long while, letting the adrenaline drain from their limbs in slow, sticky drips. The vault rose around them like a ruined cathedral: towers of battered trunks, broken wands, cracked cauldrons, and tarnished trophies forming a forest of memory. Each object threw a small, accusing shadow across their faces.

Hermione flung an arm across her eyes and groaned. “This loop’s trying to kill us,” she muttered, more to the vault than to herself.

Silence folded back over them for a moment, then Hermione pushed herself up with the stubborn efficiency that had carried them through worse. Her jaw set. “We can’t stay here forever,” she said, voice hoarse but steady. “We need to hide the coin, properly this time. No chances.”

Harry reached inside his robe and brought out the small pouch. The coin inside felt heavier than it should, as if it had absorbed the night and the glare of Filch’s lantern and the memory of every loop. He held it out, the metal catching the torchlight in a pale, accusing shine.

Hermione took it with hands that shook just a little, the careful steadiness of someone used to handling dangerous things. “Stay by the door,” she ordered. “I need to make sure you don’t see where I put it. If there’s even the slightest chance you’re being drawn to it—hypnotized, sleepwalking, whatever it does—we can’t risk you knowing.”

Harry frowned, half indignant. “You think I’m going to sneak back here in my sleep?” he asked, the protest small against the sheer gravity in Hermione’s voice.

“I think we don’t know what it’s capable of,” she said flatly, already moving toward the far end of the room with the brisk purposeful gait of someone setting a surgeon’s table. “And I’m not taking chances.”

He grumbled but obeyed, slumping against the doorframe and watching the torchlight ripple across the trunks. Hermione vanished behind a leaning stack of broken desks and shattered crystal balls. For several minutes the vault filled with the soft hum of magic and the occasional clipped incantation, the sound of wards being stitched together like careful sewing.

Then came the sharp, satisfying snap of a ward sealing and the faint, almost inaudible shimmer of monitoring charms weaving into the air. Hermione’s breaths came in small, sharp pulls. When she finally emerged, she looked like she’d been run through a wind, robes clinging damply to her, hair plastered to her forehead, her face drawn with exertion.

Harry’s frustration fell away in the face of her exhaustion. He rose and caught her before she could falter. “Hermione—” he began.

She waved him off with a tired small smile. “I’m fine. Really. I just… pushed too hard.” Her words were a worn-down thing.

“You’re not,” he said, voice low. “You used half the Black Library on that lot.”

She blinked and a crooked, tired grin slipped across her face. “Always full of dramatic hyperbole, Harry,” she murmured, then sagged. “But I did layer everything—wards, traps, memory glosses, monitoring runes, decoys. If it moves, the tracers scream.”

Harry’s hand found the small of her back and steadied her. “You should sit,” he said. “You’re wrecked.”

Hermione balked for a moment, then let herself be eased onto a battered trunk. “Don’t tell Ron I let you carry me earlier,” she muttered, voice thick with fatigue and a hint of fondness that made Harry’s throat warm.

He sat beside her, watching the vault’s shadows breathe and listening for the door’s small creaks. For all their plans and wards and mapped passages, there was still a weight in the pit of his stomach he couldn’t shake. He had bound the coin to secrecy and layered it in protection, but the thing that disturbed him most was not the metal’s movement; it was that the castle’s nights seemed to be shortening into a single, repeated argument they could not yet win.

When he finally eased Hermione down to the common room and set her gently on a couch, it was with the uneasy sense that tonight’s victory was only a postponement. He settled in by the door and watched the shadows, waiting for Ron and Neville to return and for whatever new twist the loop would throw at them next.

The portrait hole cracked open with a hiss and Professor McGonagall stepped through, her robes billowing in the warm common‑room air like a sudden wind. Ron followed close behind, rubbing the sleep from his eyes in a way that made him look younger than he felt. Harry and Hermione shot upright on the couch, hearts hammering against the ribs of the night.

“Mr. Potter? Miss Granger?” McGonagall’s voice was quiet but sharp, each syllable edged with suspicion. Her dark eyes took them in with the precision of someone trained to read students as easily as textbooks; they flicked over Harry’s dishevelled hair and Hermione’s sweat‑damp curls with an almost clinical appraisal.

Harry’s pulse thudded so loudly he felt it in his teeth. He looked to Ron. Ron gave the tiniest thumbs‑up, a private signal: everything’s fine. Still, Harry and Hermione could not banish the small, prickling fear that Ron and Neville might have been caught, that the night had taken more from them than it had returned.

“I—Professor,” Harry began, voice thick with sleep and adrenaline. Hermione opened her mouth but only managed a strangled “Mmph,” the warded exhaustion catching her words before they formed.

McGonagall crossed her arms, the movement folding silence into sharper accusation. “It’s nearly sunrise. Why are you in the common room instead of your respective dormitories?”

Hermione stammered, cheeks flaming as the question landed harder than she expected. Harry swallowed and tried again, but only a low, embarrassed grunt came out.

Ron hurried forward, clearing his throat in the clumsy way of someone who hoped a good story would patch the night’s suspicious edges. “Professor, they were waiting for Neville and me. We got held up in the corridor,” he said, shooting Hermione a desperate look as if to beg her to back him up.

McGonagall’s brow rose like an eyebrow taking on a problem. “I understand you might have awakened Mr. Potter when Mr. Longbottom requested to go to the infirmary, since you share a dormitory…” Her gaze sharpened on Hermione now. “But that doesn’t explain Miss Granger’s presence.”

Fear twisted in Hermione’s chest. She opened her mouth to protest, then Harry stepped in with a quick, blunt explanation that surprised even her. “She wasn’t feeling well. Hermione felt feverish, and I was just coming to take her to the infirmary.” The words landed like a small, clumsy shield.

Hermione stared at him, astonished as if he had sprouted a second head, and then McGonagall’s face softened for a heartbeat. She studied Hermione’s flushed cheeks, the heavy sheen of sweat along her temple, the faint tremor in her hands, and for a moment the stern lines smoothed.

“Indeed,” McGonagall said, voice gentler now. “Miss Granger, you do look unwell.” Her tone hardened again on a hinge of duty. “I appreciate your loyalty to your friends, but if you require medical attention after hours, you must wake me or a prefect. The corridors at night are no place for wandering.”

Harry and Hermione stood sheepish, Ron shifting from foot to foot like a boy trying to keep his shoes tied. The room felt suddenly smaller; every open face at the tables seemed to turn in the hush that followed.

“Because all three of you have shown admirable concern for one another, I will not deduct house points this once,” McGonagall said, the reprimand softened but unmistakable. “But if I ever catch you roaming these halls again, the next time points will be the least of your worries.” The warning sat heavy with promise.

She turned to them. “Mr. Weasley, Mr. Potter, back to bed at once.”

Then, with a quick change of posture, she offered Hermione a gloved hand. “Come along, Miss Granger. You’re coming with me to Madame Pomfrey.” The practical care in her voice erased leftover menace and replaced it with command.

As McGonagall guided Hermione away, Harry and Ron watched in silence, their chests still tight from the run and the close call. Relief washed through them, but a thinner thread of worry remained, a question about how many times the castle would let them step back from its brink.

They crept up the narrow stairwell, feet light but breath slow with the residue of running, stumbling in their exhaustion toward the Gryffindor dormitory. The stairwell swallowed sound; Ron’s footsteps echoed like small confessions against the stone.

Harry half‑listened as Ron rattled off the night’s chaotic version of events, a litany of near‑misses told in the cadence of someone who needed to turn fear into farce. “Filch nabbed us just outside the third‑floor landing,” Ron murmured, rubbing the back of his neck. “We tried to make a run for it, but Neville tripped and broke his wrist again. When Filch caught us I told him I was only taking Neville to the infirmary.”

Harry felt a grin flatten across his face despite the fatigue. “And did he believe you?”

“Not a bit,” Ron whispered, nudging Harry as they climbed the spiral stair toward the dormitory. “He marched us straight to McGonagall, muttering about curfew‑breaking and detention. Then he tried to insist we’d been lurking near the Forbidden Corridor.”

Harry arched an eyebrow. “And?”

“You should’ve seen her—she let him have it for failing to send any injured student directly to Madame Pomfrey,” Ron said, amusement threaded through his tired voice. “Imagine McGonagall screeching at Filch. It was glorious.”

Harry stifled a laugh at the image of their stern professor towering over Filch’s surly scowl. “That must’ve been brilliant. Filch never stood a chance.”

“Exactly,” Ron agreed, chuckling. “McGonagall bundled Neville off to the infirmary; Madame Pomfrey wants to keep him overnight to make sure his wrist sets properly. Then she marched me back here, lectured me on responsibility, and I got an extra-long scolding about wandering after curfew.”

They reached the landing outside their dorm. Harry pressed the door open and slipped inside, the familiar smells of common room and buttered toast an anchor after the night’s chaos. “So, no points lost, no detentions?” he asked, kicking off his boots.

“Not a one,” Ron said, collapsing onto his bed and pulling the covers back with a satisfied grin. “Professor McGonagall was in no mood to punish us further—she said my loyalty to my friend earned us a reprieve.”

Harry climbed into his own four‑poster, the scarlet canopy folding him back into safety. He and Ron lay in the quiet, listening to the castle settle into dawn.

“What about Hermione?” Ron asked, voice suddenly subdued as if afraid to stir a still healing thing. “Is she all right?”

Harry nodded. “She pushed her magic so hard warding that coin it drained her completely. We escaped Mrs. Norris without trouble, got to the Room of Lost Things, but after all that spellcasting she ran out of power. She could barely stand by the time we made it back.” The facts landed with a brittle weight; exhaustion had a taste like metal.

Ron’s brow knotted with concern. “Good thing McGonagall got her to the infirmary. She could use a chance to rest.”

A quiet settled between them, a comfortable hush after the night’s frantic chase. Harry slid an arm under his head and watched the ceiling as dawn smeared pale light across the slates. “I can’t believe we didn’t lose any points. We didn’t get detention. Maybe fate was finally giving us a break,” he said, trying to make hope sound plausible.

Ron yawned and stretched, limbs heavy with the day’s demands. “I’ll sleep better than I have all week,” he admitted.

Harry stared up at the canopy, the castle outside settling into a smug, battered calm. Fate had given them a reprieve; tonight belonged to rest. Still, as the first birds began to stir beyond the towers, Harry could not shake the sense of something darker waiting just beyond tomorrow’s sunrise, a feeling that the loop had merely let them breathe before it asked for more.

Chapter Text

Breakfast light slanted through the towering windows of the Great Hall, gilding long rows of polished tables in honeyed gold. The air thrummed with the clink of cutlery, low conversation, and the soft hiss of steam curling from mugs of cocoa. At the far end, the Slytherin table gleamed with green and silver banners; Draco Malfoy lounged among his housemates, eyes narrowed and bright as a snake’s, studying the empty places at the Gryffindor table where the golden trio and Neville should have been.

“They must’ve been caught,” Draco drawled, leaning close to Crabbe and Goyle. “Serving detention or worse, expelled by midnight.”

Crabbe snorted; Goyle’s laugh rolled like distant thunder. Across the hall, the Gryffindor benches gaped at the empty seats—no Harry, no Ron, no Hermione, no Neville—and a dozen whispered theories sprang up like sparks.

Before Draco could savour the thought, a dark figure glided past the High Table. Professor Snape’s robes whispered against stone; conversations thinned and Slytherin faces shifted, hungry for confirmation.

“Professor,” Draco called, voice oily with curiosity, “I hear the Gryffindors have been sacked. Is that true?”

Snape’s gaze skimmed the table like a blade. His smile was thin enough to cut. “Miss Granger and Mr. Longbottom are in the infirmary,” he said, tone neutral but unmistakably satisfied. “The rest remains enrolled.” He passed on, leaving a ripple of triumph and bolder gossip in his wake.

Outside the Hall, the castle’s corridors felt unusually exposed. With no morning lessons, students drifted in clusters, lounging, visiting the library, or sprawling on the lawns, yet nobody reported seeing the missing four. Rumour gnawed at every idle group; even Filch paused at doorways, peering down empty stairwells as if the stone itself might cough up an answer.

By mid‑morning, side tables that held tea and pastries looked half‑abandoned: cups half‑drunk, scones cooling where hands had dropped them. Ravenclaw alcoves and Hufflepuff corners hummed with low, anxious questions: Where had Potter and Weasley gone? Had the four fled the castle? Even the owls on the windowsills hooted at empty perches with uneasy rhythm.

When the lunch gong finally rang, its echo seemed to loosen every theory. Students tumbled into the Hall, plates brimming with roast beef and root vegetables. At the Slytherin table, anticipation crackled; Draco sat forward, fingers drumming like a conductor.

“Since Granger and Longbottom are in the infirmary,” Draco began, voice low and theatrically curious, “and Potter and Weasley have vanished all morning… what do we reckon happened?”

First‑year whispers fanned into a small gale of invented calamities. Pansy Parkinson leaned in, eyes alight. “I heard they tried to steal the Sorting Hat for study, and it snapped at them. Hat‑bite seems fitting for Granger.”

Blaise Zabini smirked. “I heard they charmed Madam Pince to fetch something from the Restricted Section. She screamed and chaos ensued, then they bolted.”

Theodore Nott offered a quieter rumour. “I saw Mrs. Norris prowling near their dorm at dawn. Maybe the cat led them on a wild chase through the boiler rooms.”

Millicent Bulstrode slammed her fist on the table for effect. “Too tame. I say they found an ancient artifact in Filch’s office—basilisk fang, cursed quill—petrified by old magic.”

Vincent Crabbe grinned, plate forgotten. “Maybe Weasley’s wand backfired. They’re touring the Forbidden Forest and sleeping under a troll’s armpit right now.”

Gregory Goyle laughed and pointed at the empty seats. “Bet they missed home and ran back to their mummy.”

Draco threaded his fingers together, savouring each new invention. “Or perhaps they found a secret flight of stairs and landed straight in the Forbidden Corridor. You know, with that bespectacled troublemaker leading the show.”

A chorus of hissing approval answered him; one increasingly outlandish theory piled upon another. Even second‑years felt emboldened to spin wild tales: Hermione charming a gargoyle, Ron turning the Fat Lady into a troll. The hall’s rumour machine turned and turned, and Draco’s laughter pealed the loudest, his pale face bright with the thrill of gossip.

Across the Hall, the Hufflepuff table sounded different—low, worried. Susan Bones picked at her porridge with ivory fingers, glancing repeatedly at the empty Gryffindor seats. “I’ve had it,” she muttered to Hannah Abbott. “All morning I’ve searched the common rooms, corridors, even the greenhouses. No trace of Potter or Weasley.”

Hannah gave a worried look. “You did hear Malfoy say Granger and Longbottom were in the infirmary.”

Susan’s jaw tightened. “In the infirmary,” she repeated, sharp with impatience. “Fine. If they’re there, at least I know where to start.” She rose without waiting for a reply, smoothing her robes by habit as she crossed the Hall.

The castle corridors felt cavernous on a Saturday; torches threw long, uncertain shadows as Susan hurried past yawning first‑years practicing duelling with wandering wands. The hush of curiosity followed until she reached the double doors of the infirmary.

A soft click, then the cool, antiseptic air. Relief uncoiled inside Susan when she saw the familiar rows of cots. Neville sat propped against crisp white sheets, his left arm in a careful sling, eyes bright despite anxiety. Hermione lay on the opposite cot, a warming charm rippling faintly across her cheeks; a dark curl had strayed from its clasp. Between them, Harry and Ron sat on low stools, heads bent in quiet conversation.

Susan’s boots slowed. The sight steadied some of her worry, no gaping wounds, no fevered delirium, yet the unfinished edges of their story remained. She folded her arms. “So, this is where you’ve been,” she said coolly. “Don’t you think you owe me an explanation? I’ve spent half the morning chasing rumours that you were docked points, expelled, petrified—you name it.”

Harry’s cheeks coloured. “I’m sorry, Susan. We didn’t mean to worry you.” He glanced at Ron, then back. “Hermione and Neville were really unwell—”

Susan cut him off. “I know they’re hurt. I saw Neville’s arm. Hermione looks pale. But I’m not your personal owl. Next time you vanish, don’t expect me to search everywhere for you.”

Without ceremony she pressed a folded letter into Harry’s palm. Her voice was low and sharp. “Aunt Amelia sent this for you. You owe me double, Potter.”

Harry’s fingers closed around the parchment; anxiety sharpened his green eyes. He rose so quickly the stool scraped; Madam Pomfrey shot him a warning look. Ron straightened, Hermione sat up with curious concern, Neville’s hand inched toward his sling.

Susan’s jaw set. “Come with me.” She drew Harry gently by the elbow and led him from the infirmary, leaving the others blinking in the sudden quiet.

In the corridor, torches cast steady light over ancient stone. Harry smoothed the parchment with deliberate care; the scent of lavender and crisp ink lifted from the page. The looping hand, precise, authoritative, belonged to Amelia Bones.

I have accepted my niece’s request for an urgent meeting, the letter read. However, as Head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, I cannot appear at Hogwarts without a valid pretext. Please propose a credible reason for my presence on school grounds.

Harry felt the words settle like a hinge catching. Amelia knew nothing of the tangled truth about Sirius Black or Peter Pettigrew, only that her niece vouched for Harry. Now they had to supply a reason.

Susan watched him, expectant. “She wants a reason… something official.”

Harry closed his eyes for a breath, weighing each possibility. “Tell her,” he said at last, voice low, “that as Head of DMLE she’s conducting a security review of Hogwarts during the Halloween feast, accompanied by a team of Aurors. It’s the only way she can step foot here without raising eyebrows.”

Susan tucked the letter away. “Halloween feast, security review, Auror detail. Got it,” she said with brisk competence.

Relief eased Harry’s face. “I can’t explain more… I promise she won’t come for nothing. Lives could depend on it.”

Susan’s nod was curt but not unkind. “I’ll draft it tonight. But next time you need me, don’t vanish without a word.”

He managed a grateful smile. “Thank you, Susan. Really.”

Together they retraced their steps back to the infirmary, the castle’s hush folding around them as they set a plan in motion that might change everything.

Malfoy could not believe his eyes when the four Gryffindors strutted into the Great Hall for dinner. They looked untroubled, even jaunty, as though the morning’s alarms and infirmary beds had been nothing more than an afternoon’s inconvenience. Curious glances tracked them across the long tables, questions written on faces, but Harry, Ron, and Hermione waved at their friends and took their seats as if the day were ordinary.

Midway through the main course, conversation thinned into a hum. Six great horned owls wheeled down from the enchanted ceiling and settled in a precise row before Harry’s place, each bird holding a corner of a massive, ribbon‑bound parcel that rustled and gleamed with promise. A seventh owl dipped low and let a single envelope flutter to the table. Harry loosened the seal and read the note in silence, the words folding into his chest like a private sun.

He refolded the parchment with a small, satisfied smile. Ron leaned in, elbow propping him like a conspirator. “Let me guess… another Nimbus 2000?” he guessed, hopeful and loud enough for several heads to turn.

Hermione’s grin was wry and quick. “She never fails. Every time we reset the year, Professor McGonagall manages an upgrade,” she said, tone half‑amused, half‑awed.

Harry nodded, blotting a smear of gravy from his chin with the back of his hand. “She says wait until we’re out of the hall.” He nudged the parcel with his knuckle. “Training starts Sunday morning with Oliver Wood.”

Hermione snapped him a mock salute, eyes bright. “Nineteen Nimbus in nineteen loops. Your Seeker skills must be improving.”

At the end of the meal, the trio rose, parcel tucked under Harry’s arm like a talisman. They knew, without needing to speak the plan, that Malfoy would be waiting at the foot of the marble staircase; he waited for any crack in their composure. As they reached the bottom, Draco’s sneer cut across the chatter like a cold wind.

“Planning to sweep the pitch with your expensive new toy, Potter?” he hissed, arms folded, voice honed for scorn.

Before Ron could let the retort loose, Harry’s hand found a loose brick in the wall beside the staircase. He tapped it; the stone shifted with the soft, secret grating of mechanisms long practiced. A panel swung inward, revealing a narrow, black passage yawning behind the stairs. In one fluid motion they slipped inside; the hidden door closed with a click that swallowed Draco’s outraged oath and left only the echo of his breath.

Pressed into the cool dark, the three of them grinned at one another. The corridor smelled of old mortar and a faint tang of history, the sort of smell that meant they were on a route known only to a few. Behind their shoulders, Draco’s furious threats dimmed into a muffled crescendo: “My father will hear about this—just you wait, Potter!”

Harry’s laugh was soft and private, the kind a boy shared with friends who had outwitted a common enemy. He tightened his hold on the parcel. Sunday’s training could not come soon enough; the thought of flying, of practice and speed and something ordinary to master, warmed the small, tidy corner of his mind that needed saving from the rest of the year’s dark, repeating pain.

Time thinned and stretched as evening settled; the Great Hall filled with the smell of roasting, spice, and sugar, while the enchanted pumpkins overhead bobbed and blinked, throwing wavering light across faces that ranged from eager to anxious. Platters bowed under pumpkin pasties, crystal bowls glittered with sugared treats, and cauldrons of syrup hissed like tiny, tame boilers. Yet at the Gryffindor table the three of them sat stiffer than the candlesticks, wands half‑concealed in sleeves, eyes flicking to every door as if the castle itself might cough out danger.

They could still taste the first loop like a bad dream. Hermione’s scream in the girls’ lavatory split Harry’s memory, sharp, splintering, and the image of the troll’s club arcing through the air had become a fixed, awful picture behind his eyes. He remembered the hard, cold stone pressing into his cheek as the world went dark; that fall had unspooled them back to the beginning of the year, forcing them to live it all again and again. The second attempt sat on his ribs like a stone: the plan had been different then, Hermione and Ron pulling the troll’s attention away, Harry’s voice guiding it, but Neville had been in the path, and the price had been Neville’s cry, cut short. Each reset grafted new grief to the old.

Later loops mattered mostly in the small differences, the corridor chosen, the item dropped at the wrong second, a stray third‑year who followed Harry for a joke and died in an instant of misread movement. Those variations were differences that cost lives. They had rehearsed a dozen strategies and watched each one collapse under the smallest, most unpredictable variable. The Hall’s laughter sounded thin as vellum; forks struck plates like distant alarms. They ate without tasting, swallowed to keep their hands and minds steady.

When a distant clang cleaved the meal, Harry’s spoon froze halfway to his mouth. The whisper of pain in his scar prickled and he felt it like a small hot wire under his skin. Ron’s knuckles went white around his fork; Hermione’s brown eyes found the High Table, where Dumbledore’s gentle expression was all calm and unreadable. That stillness did nothing to comfort them. The old nightmare sat under the rafters, waiting its hour.

Professor Quirrell burst through the doors in a flurry, robes askew and eyes wide with panic. “Troll—in the dungeons—thought you ought to know—” he choked, then pitched forward in a heap as if his legs had failed him, his wand skittering across the flagstones.

The Hall dissolved into noise, screams, plates overturned, skin flushed with the cold of a sudden threat. For a split second the scene was wholly chaotic; then Dumbledore acted with the surprising softness of command. With a swift flick, he sent a cascade of purple firecrackers arcing like small constellations, each popping sharply and scattering sparks; the sound cut the hysteria as cleanly as a blade. Silence followed, taut and complete.

Dumbledore’s next words were precise. “Prefects, lead your houses back to their dormitories immediately.”

Harry didn’t move to obey. He vaulted up onto the Gryffindor table, breath ragged, and shouted, “No, Headmaster—wait!” His voice cracked, but it steadied, and a dozen heads turned. Professors halted like statues on the verge of motion; for the briefest moment even the candles seemed to hold themselves still. Dumbledore regarded him with that soft, appraising curiosity that made students feel both exposed and seen.

“Mr. Potter,” Dumbledore said, the timbre even and encouraging, “by all means, speak.”

Harry planted his feet and spoke for everyone there. “Slytherin and Hufflepuff common rooms are in the Dungeons. If the troll’s down there, it’s too dangerous to send those Houses below. And we can’t be sure it stayed put—it could be anywhere in the lower levels.”

Dumbledore’s beard flicked as he considered the problem, the lamplight catching the silver. “A keen observation,” he admitted. “And what would you have us do instead?”

“Keep everyone here,” Harry said, voice rising with a steadiness born of necessity. “Prefects should do an immediate head count and report any absences to the nearest professor. Seal and ward the doors so the troll can’t come in while you search the castle and rescue anyone who’s trapped.”

That was the sort of clear, actionable plan that a frightened crowd would seize. A ripple of approval swelled up from the benches; Dumbledore’s eyes brightened into something like pride. “A most sensible plan. Fifty points to Gryffindor for quick thinking and courage, Mr. Potter.”

Prefects moved into place, torches flaring along the Hall’s edges as they drew breath and began the calls. Their voices rose and fell in measured cadence, every “Here!” and “Present!” reverberating off the high ceiling, a staccato pulse that steadied the room’s fear. Cedric Diggory read from his parchment with the sort of composure the moment demanded. “Abbot, Hannah… missing.” The name landed like a stone. Percy Weasley’s quill hovered and then ticked, and another name fell: “Jordan, Lee… not here.”

Two absences, two sudden hollows that widened across the clustered faces. McGonagall’s jaw tightened; Snape’s eyes cut darker. The Hall felt smaller, as if every seat had moved a little closer to the pit of worry in its centre.

Before more could be taken in, the enchanted doors burst open with a gust that smelled of damp stone and brisk, efficient movement. Amelia Bones entered as if she belonged to the cold, bright place of papers and law, robes set and shoulders squared, followed by a quartet of Aurors who moved with the taut efficiency of trained hunters. Heads turned; the professors’ faces hardened.

Dumbledore stepped forward, tone measured. “Madame Bones, Hogwarts is a sanctuary. We cannot have Aurors roaming our halls on a whim.”

Bones’ gaze swept the room like someone reading a docket. “Not on a whim Headmaster, we intercepted a credible tip suggesting a troll was to be released tonight as a prank. Several students are unaccounted for. If it is not contained within minutes, this mischief becomes mortal.” Her voice did not seek drama; it stated the facts with the cold precision of someone who knew what facts obligate.

McGonagall exchanged a glance with Snape: grim acceptance in her stern-blue eyes, reluctant consent in his. Sprout’s quivering smile betrayed excitement under the weight of responsibility. Bones pressed on, voice urgent. “My Aurors have non-lethal restraints and advanced Stunning Charms perfected for trolls. Allow us to hunt it down. You, professors, know every secret passage and hidden stair in this castle. You must lead the search for the missing students.”

Silence fell again, thick with the knowledge that any delay might cost lives. Dumbledore drew in a slow breath, hands clasped behind his back. His spectacles caught the torchlight until they shone like points of resolve. “Very well,” he said, voice steady. “Aurors go after the troll. Professors find our missing students.”

Bones inclined her head, and her Aurors moved like a breathing formation. Their boots clicked as they filed through the doors and out into the corridors; the wards behind them snapped shut with a solid thunk that felt to Harry like a door closing around an entire night. Professors vanished into torchlit passageways; every corridor seemed to hold its breath.

The Hall waited, tense and taut, each heartbeat a thin metronome. Torches guttered; whispers dwindled to attentive silence. The whole school had been made small and urgent by the single fact that something lived in the lower stone and could walk where pupil feet could not.

Harry, Ron, and Hermione pressed against the edge of the now‑vacant staff table, scanning the Great Hall. Clusters of students huddled like small islands under the torchlight: some faces pale and trembling, others puffing out chests in defiant bravado. First‑years clung to older hands; sixth‑ and seventh‑year prefects moved with controlled urgency, whispering instructions while trying to steady crying pupils. The Hall vibrated with the brittle tension of people suddenly aware of how little they could control.

Ron jabbed a finger toward the doors. “Quirrell slipped out as the doors flew open. Didn’t see him after that.”

Hermione’s brow furrowed. “He must’ve dashed for the Forbidden Corridor, probably to check the defences on the stone.”

Harry gave a short, wry laugh, shrugging one shoulder. “Good luck making it past a three‑headed, drooling guard dog.”

A shiver slid through a nearby cluster of second years; a Ravenclaw prefect hushed them in a tone that was steady only because she had to be. “Quiet now, help is coming,” she said, and for a moment the words offered more hope than any spell.

Susan Bones appeared at their elbow, face ashen, auburn curls escaping the clasp of her braid. She stood staring at the table where Hannah Abbott’s friends clung together, their sobs brittle and small. Hermione reached to touch Susan’s arm; Susan shook her off with a small, sharp motion.

“Don’t,” she said, voice too practised in steadiness. “I know you mean well, Hermione. But now that Aunt Amelia’s Aurors are hunting the troll, I trust her to find Hannah.” Her gaze cut to Harry. “Tell me, Potter — how did you know a troll would turn up tonight?”

Harry’s throat went dry. The Hall’s noise dimmed into the background as all three friends exchanged that quick, electric charge of concern.

Hermione opened her mouth to answer, but Harry stepped in with a measured steadiness that surprised even himself. “I… didn’t,” he said, forcing a shrug that felt thinner than it looked. “Since that other Halloween — when You‑Know‑Who attacked my family — bad things tend to collect on this night. I guessed something might happen. It felt like the sort of darkness that comes calling on Halloween.”

Susan studied him, suspicion flickering behind her pale eyes. For a long, taut beat she exhaled and nodded. “Fine. Just—” She let her arms uncross, the rough edges of her composure softening. “Be careful. I don’t want anyone else disappearing.”

Harry met her gaze. “We will.”

Relief eased a little from Susan’s shoulders, and she melted back into the swell of anxious faces, leaving the trio with a fresh, hollowed-out nervousness. The Hall’s guard had been raised; the night’s shadow felt closer, as if the castle itself had drawn in its breath.

After what felt like an hour of waiting, the Great Hall’s enchanted doors opened once more. Professors McGonagall, Snape, Flitwick, and Sprout returned first, escorting students whose robes were mud‑streaked and sleeves singed; their looks told the story before words could. Behind them, four Aurors stood with measured calm, a secured unconscious troll between them, shuffling in enchanted manacles that hummed faintly. The creature’s rise and fall of breath was a ragged drumbeat that eased some part of the room’s panic.

Dumbledore stepped forward and inclined his head toward Amelia Bones, who stood just inside the doorway beside McGonagall. “Madam Bones,” he said, “in all honesty, Hogwarts staff might have managed splendidly on our own, yet your arrival is deeply appreciated.” His voice was warm, but the words carried a soft edge, as if to say their help hadn’t been strictly necessary.

Amelia Bones’ posture remained crisp and contained. She gave a single, utilitarian nod, nostrils flaring the slightest measure as she listened to Dumbledore’s dismissal of necessity and to the undercurrent that meant well‑meant pride. Dumbledore’s carefully light smile softened into near‑apology as he added, “I imagine the Ministry will wish to remove both the troll and your team from Hogwarts grounds so as not to unduly alarm the community.”

Bones’s eyes narrowed briefly as she glanced at the secured beast. “Headmaster, if I may ask, how did such a creature slip past Hogwarts’ renowned wards?”

Dumbledore’s reply was polished, steady: “I fully understand your concern, and I’m pleased to report that our defences performed admirably save for this regrettable lapse. Rest assured, we require no further Ministry oversight for routine matters of security.”

A muscle moved in Amelia’s cheek, then she gave a curt nod. “Very well. My Aurors will return to the Ministry with the troll for containment.” She issued silent orders to her team, and, in practiced unison, they formed a line and led the creature out into the corridor. The wards pulsed faintly as the last Auror crossed the threshold and the door thudded closed behind them.

Dumbledore’s tone grew gently rueful as he turned back into the Hall. “Is there anything more you require before you depart?”

Amelia stepped fully forward, her voice lowering as she looked at her niece, Susan, ringed by friends. “As Susan’s guardian, I intend to remain until she is settled.”

“Of course,” Dumbledore replied, folding courtesy into concern. “Your niece’s welfare is paramount. I only ask you to be mindful of the hour—curfew approaches, and the students will need rest after tonight’s trial.”

He swept back to the High Table, and Amelia crossed the torchlit floor to enfold Susan in a protective embrace. Around them, professors and prefects fell into a quieter rhythm of checking over robes and calming the youngest pupils. Outside, the corridor’s wards glowed faintly for a moment longer, and the last echo of the troll’s breathing vanished into stone. For the night at least, Hogwarts held its breath and then exhaled, safe, though a little less sure than before.

Moonlight poured through high, dust‑rimmed windows and painted the classroom in a pale, indifferent wash. Chalk motes drifted like slow snowfall in the single flickering candle Hermione had coaxed from a supply shelf. The desks hunched in rows as if holding their breath; stone walls absorbed sound and seemed to listen.

Harry shut the heavy door with a thud that felt too loud in the quiet. Ron’s boots clicked behind him, urgent and raw. A cold current skittered along the flagstones. Amelia Bones stood unmoving at the far side of the room, pale eyes like chips of porcelain that reflected the candlelight, every line of her posture the practiced, unpitying poise of someone who had stared down criminals and redrafted their affidavits. She did not smile. She did not soften. She waited.

“You asked to see me,” she said, voice locked in the low, controlled cadence of an interrogator. “Explain. How did you learn of a Halloween threat, and why all this cloak‑and‑dagger secrecy?”

Hermione’s hand trembled only a little as she steadied herself against the desk. The candle’s warmth seemed suddenly too small. “We—” she began, then faltered, cheeks paling. “We couldn’t risk an owl being intercepted. This was too dangerous.” Her words were direct but the tremor in them betrayed the strain of nights and resets.

Bones’s jaw flexed. “Dangerous enough to bypass Ministry channels?” Her tone was clipped in the way of someone who expected that rule‑breaking required heavy proof.

Ron’s fists clenched at his sides; there was the ghost of family stories in his voice. “We didn’t dare trust even Harry’s owl,” he said, words tumbling out. “I’ve heard Dad complain at how cases were undermined—how evidence was buried, how things shifted in the papers. We didn’t think we could leave it to chance.”

For an instant Amelia’s expression shifted, surprise so brief it could have been imagined. She uncrossed her arms and, with a motion that made space for conversation rather than confrontation, invited them to sit. “Very well,” she said, softer now. “Sit. Let us speak plainly.”

Four wooden chairs scraped the floor as the three of them took their places. Bones remained standing a heartbeat longer, then settled, cloak whispering across stone. She closed her eyes briefly as if gathering patience, then opened them, blade‑bright and unblinking.

Harry drew breath like a man who had been holding it for a very long time. Each question cost him a little. “What do you know of Sirius Black?” he asked, fingers drumming the desk the way hands drum out a rhythm to steady themselves.

Bones sat straighter, lips pressed thin. “He’s in Azkaban. Secure. No chance of escape.” Her response had the clipped certainty of official record.

“But what of his arrest? His trial?” Harry leaned forward until the candle’s glow edged his face. The words felt urgent, hungry for a fissure in the tidy story.

Her features hardened. “Sirius betrayed the Potters, murdered thirteen Muggles, and killed Peter Pettigrew in a London alley,” she recited, the state’s line laid out like law. “That is what the trial record shows.”

Hermione exchanged a quick, imploring look with Ron. Harry’s voice dropped to a near whisper. “You weren’t Head of DMLE then. You wouldn’t have seen the full transcripts. You might not know—”

Amelia’s cheeks, usually a steady wash of pale, drained further. She folded her hands and levelled them on the table. “Correct. I was not. Why are you pressing this?”

Ron’s voice found a fragile edge. “Peter Pettigrew is alive. He never testified because there was no trial. We think he is hiding in plain sight.” The sentence seemed to land like a thrown stone; it sparked a new, sceptical line in Bones’s face.

“This is absurd,” Amelia snapped at first, the reflex of a veteran hearing a charge that upends precedent. She closed her mouth as if tasting the words and reconsidered.

Harry slammed a palm to the desk, a small shock of fury and insistence. “Look at the Ministry archives. There is no transcript. No record. For all anyone says, Black’s conviction is a paper house.” The statement was blunt, edged with the hurt of betrayal and the stubbornness of someone who had lost family.

Hermione moved forward, voice low and firm. “We might have proof,” she said. “Proof that Pettigrew is alive and close to Hogwarts.”

Bones’s eyes narrowed, then widened a fraction. “Proof?” she echoed, not dismissive anymore, but careful, the way a lawyer becomes careful at the scent of new evidence. “If you have incontrovertible proof,” she said, the professional tone returning, “bring it to me. I will reopen the case and follow the evidence.” Her voice was a promise and a warning: this would be hard, and it would draw attention.

Harry’s shoulders sagged almost imperceptibly. Relief flickered in his chest, only to be replaced by determination. “I need more. I need your word that you will do everything in your power.”

A steely resolve settled over Amelia’s features. She rose, cloak swirling. “You have my oath. Bring me the proof, and I will tear this case apart until the truth stands clear.”

They shared a quick, nervous look. Hope, fragile as glass, bloomed in the candlelight. From his pocket Ron produced the small, sleep‑curling brown rat; Scabbers slept in a pouch as if unaware he had just become the axis of suspicion. Harry unrolled a piece of parchment with reverence and laid it between them. “My father left me this,” he said. “It bears the magical imprints of him, Sirius Black, Remus Lupin, and Peter Pettigrew.” His voice smoothed as memory warmed him; the parchment felt heavier than its size.

Bones reached for the map with a professional calm that belied an undercurrent of curiosity.

“We searched Hogwarts records,” Hermione offered. “We found only the official story—Black’s betrayal. But this map…” She tapped the parchment. “It isn’t only a map of the castle; it tracks people. Where Scabbers should have been listed as a rat, the map names ‘Peter Pettigrew’.” Her words dropped into the space with the weight of revelation.

Amelia’s face shifted, scepticism first, then a quick, hard focus. She took the rodent, her brow furrowing in concentration.

Hermione’s voice came in a low murmur. “We drugged him with Draught of Living Death, so he’d stay under while you examined him.”

Madame Bones let out a low, exasperated sigh, the sound echoing off the stone walls. Her shoulders stiffened, steel-blue eyes narrowing in silent reproach. She pressed her lips into a thin, stern line, the candlelight flickering across her pale cheekbones. “I won’t ask how you obtained such a restricted potion,” she said, her tone clipped and icy, each word heavy with disapproval. She let her wand hum a soft hiss; Scabbers glowed with a faint Animagus trace as the charm slipped over him.

At the sight, something like professional astonishment escaped her. She traced the map with a fingertip, eyes narrowing as lines and names rearranged themselves into a pattern only someone used to reading evidence could see. “Here,” she murmured, voice far quieter, “it shows Peter Pettigrew right beside us in this classroom.”

Harry watched her face change from officer to investigator, from protocol to possibility. “Yes,” he said, close to a whisper. “It all fits. Black didn’t betray my parents. Pettigrew did.”

Amelia placed Scabbers carefully into a temporary containment box, the motion solemn and precise. “I will begin formal inquiries at once,” she said. “If you are correct, freeing Sirius Black will take time and will require patience. You must trust me to act through the proper channels.”

They exhaled together, relief stranded beside renewed anxiety. Amelia rose, cloak whispering, the containment box held between her hands like a piece of fragile evidence.

As she swept from the classroom, the candle’s flame seemed to straighten. Harry’s expression hardened in a different way now; hope braided with a new worry. Hermione’s fingers found his sleeve; Ron’s shoulders sagged a degree.

“Do you really think she’ll do it?” Hermione asked in a whisper as they crept back toward Gryffindor Tower.

Ron’s shoulders slumped. “We’ve set everything in motion. We just have to trust her now.”

On the spiral stairs back toward Gryffindor Tower, Harry paused and touched the chipped stone with a quiet hand, as if anchoring himself. “She’s our only chance,” he said softly. “We did the right thing.”

Portrait laughter bubbled distantly from the landing above as the Fat Lady swung wide and let them in. They slipped through the warm, painted hall into the safety of home, but Harry did not step forward at once. He lingered on the threshold, the map’s small mysteries and Amelia’s oath settling like coals in his chest, a slim ember of hope that might become a flame, that, at last, justice might find its way through the shadows.

Chapter Text

November arrived under a sky of pewter clouds, and Hogwarts woke to the slow, ceremonious fall of copper leaves along its courtyards. In the Great Hall students clustered beneath the enchanted scoreboard, eyes glued to the scrolling announcement: “Gryffindor vs. Slytherin — First Match of the Season.” Whispers braided through the benches: this would be Harry Potter’s first official Quidditch game.

To everyone else he was a rookie Seeker; only Harry, Ron, and Hermione carried the private knowledge that he had chased the Snitch more times than any ordinary season could hold. At the Gryffindor table Harry spooned porridge with a calm smile that belied the hum in his chest. “Honestly,” he said between bites, “I’m not even nervous. Feels just like practice.”

Ron elbowed him. “Famous last words,” he warned, then glanced at Hermione. “We’ll be right there if anything goes wrong.”

Hermione reached across the table and squeezed Harry’s hand, fingers warm and steady. “You’ve done this a dozen times already, but Quirrell will try something sneaky. Stay sharp, Harry. Ron and I will keep an eye out from the stand.” Her gaze flicked toward the professors’ dais, where the turbaned figure sat like a taut knot.

Harry nodded. Confidence showed in the set of his shoulders and in the quiet light in his green eyes, but a grateful little relief lived at the back of him for their vigilant faces.

They stepped onto the dew‑slick lawn, mist curling around robe hems, breath blooming in the air. The castle fell away behind them and the Quidditch pitch rose up, goal hoops glinting through a fine haze. Banners whipped as houses took their places, a diamond of colour and expectation.

Lee Jordan’s voice crackled over the public address with the electric mischief it always carried. “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the grandest spectacle of the season! Potter’s first official Quidditch match! Watch as Angelina Johnson threads the Quaffle through Flint’s iron guard, and Fred and George Weasley unleash their Beater mastery on those Bludgers!” His commentary rippled over the stands, equal parts cheer and carnival. “And don’t miss Keeper Oliver Wood, standing firm like a fortress in front of those goal hoops!”

At Madam Hooch’s sharp blast, the brooms vaulted into the air. Gryffindor’s Chasers surged forward, the Quaffle flashing between gloves; Slytherin answered in a tight, efficient coil of motion, Marcus Flint barrelling ahead like a living battering ram while Johnson and Spinnet wove swift counters. Leaves chased after speeding brooms, skittering in the wake of passing players.

Harry felt the old, clean thrum of wind against his face as he mounted his Nimbus 2000. Down on the pitch Bludgers hissed like iron badgers, black and dangerous, while Fred and George met them with furious, practiced swings that made the spheres skitter harmlessly aside. Oliver Wood crouched in the goal circle, eyes alight with the single‑minded hunger of a Keeper who understood the game as an art of tiny, hard survivals.

Slytherin struck first; green and silver voices rose in triumph. Gryffindor answered in a wave of scarlet as Johnson’s cheeky weave through the defence put points on the board. High above the chaos, Quirinus Quirrell sat in the professor’s stand, his lips moving in a small, steady whisper that felt like a thread drawn through the air.

Harry’s Nimbus shuddered. Once, twice, a tremor ran through the broom’s core as Quirrell’s curse brushed against the wood. Every tight banking turn sent the handle jerking as if the broom had a mind that wanted to hurl him free. Harry stiffened in the saddle and leaned into each motion, balancing weight and will to keep the broom obedient to him and not to whatever hand in the stand tried to steer it. The muscles along his arms and back remembered old rehearsals; his grip became an argument that the broom could not refuse.

Ron and Hermione stood near the professors’ stand, wands dug into gloves as if ready to sprint. Their eyes never left Quirrell; they were taut ropes of attention, poised to cut whatever snare he might set. Yet beneath that vigilance lay trust, their silent faith in Harry’s instincts, in the way he found a rhythm in flight. Harry felt steadied by that company

Points slid and jumped on the scoreboard. Gryffindor found itself down by forty as Slytherin pushed forward and Marcus Flint executed a heavy, practiced goal; Gryffindor roared back when Johnson soared above the bludger barrage and sent the Quaffle spinning through the hoops. The air tasted of iron and something like the thrill of impending danger, courage rubbing against desperation.

Lee Jordan’s commentary crackled in between: “Johnson dances through danger! Those Bludgers are cracking like thunder!” The crowd surged to its feet, cheers ricocheting off the walls.

Then the Snitch flickered past him, a sudden pulse of gold in the corner of his eye. It flashed like a heartbeat and then another, impossible and small. He calculated: a six‑hundred‑foot dive, wind tearing at his cheeks. He tipped forward, broom angling, stomach dropping as the ground seemed to open. Quirrell’s curse rippled down the handle; the broom bucked and flung at him like a wild thing.

Hermione’s whisper broke through the wind: “Stupefy!” The spell struck true across the distance and clipped Quirrell’s robes. With a strangled gasp Quirrell pitched forward off his bench, the chant that had been a low, grinding thread finally cut. He sagged where he fell, silence snapping around his sudden stillness.

Time cracked open.

Harry lunged, hand stretched. The Snitch’s wings shivered and then stilled in his palm as if surrendering to the grip that had long learned its rhythm. For a single breath the world narrowed to the warm, buzzing weight between his fingers.

An explosion of sound erupted below. Thunder rolled up from the stands, roars and stamping feet and the sound of a school discovering joy like a thing it had been denied. Gryffindor had won, one hundred and seventy to sixty, and every cheer felt like an unbottled sun.

Lee Jordan’s shout cut through the noise in a redoubled frenzy: “He’s done it! Potter clinches the Snitch in his very first official match! An absolute marvel!” The words rode the clamour and sank into the crowd like a spark.

As they wandered back toward the castle, late afternoon sun breaking through ragged clouds, Harry, Ron, and Hermione shared quiet laughter. Mud spattered their robes, grass clung to their boots, but exhilaration warmed them more than any hearth. Hagrid’s hut loomed ahead, smoke curling from its chimney like a welcome beacon. Inside, steaming mugs and hearty grins awaited them, victorious seekers of friendship, magic, and a slice of rock cake.

It was a still mid‑December morning when Hogwarts woke under several feet of new, immaculate snow. Turrets wore icicles like strings of glass, and every evergreen branch sagged under its white burden until the castle itself seemed to breathe slower, as if the land outside had hushed the usual clatter. Pale sunlight fractured through the tall windows of Gryffindor Tower into prismatic shards across frost‑etched glass, and the common room glowed a little gentler for it.

Inside, the fire crackled and sent warm, honeyed light across the rugs; from the kitchens drifted the faint, comforting tang of spiced pumpkin pasties and something sweeter, a promise of cakes and hot chocolate. Students in thick scarves lingered at noticeboards, laughter and low gossip echoing against the stones. On one board the holiday stay‑over sheet flapped every few seconds as quills scratched new names into place like tiny, hurried signatures of rebellion against the cold.

Hermione prowled past the Gryffindor sheet for the third time, shoulders tense beneath her robes, fingers twisting the hem until the cloth creased at her fingertips. Fred, George, and Percy clustered at the parchment like conspirators; Percy's neat, officious handwriting sat in a tidy line, while Fred stuck out his tongue at Percy with theatrical disdain and stepped back to let George sign in his turn. The scene was domestic and loud, a living, breathing proof that the school meant something ordinary to a great many people.

Moments later Harry and Ron arrived, both grinning, and added their names just below the Weasleys’. Their quill marks were jaunty, noisy strokes that sounded more like invitations than obligations.

“Don’t worry, Hermione,” Ron called as he fell into step beside her, boots skidding on the flagstones in a small, familiar way. “You’ve earned a break.”

Harry reached, gentle, and nudged her away from the sheet. “Enjoy Christmas with your parents,” he said. “We’ll hold down the fort. The library’s not going anywhere.”

Hermione’s hand lifted and found the cool stone of the alcove; fingers pressed to it as if anchoring herself. Her breath came in short clouds that fogged the nearby window. “I can’t,” she whispered, voice small against the cavernous hush of the common room. “There’s too much to do. Horcrux research won’t finish itself—this is the only quiet stretch we’ll have to get ahead.”

Harry and Ron exchanged a look and steered her toward a cozier corner hung with the tapestry of the Pumpkin Pasties Feast. Candlelight trembled across stitched gourds and tiny dancing mice; the woven scene looked absurdly festive; the sort of domestic detail that made the castle feel like a home instead of a series of cold corridors.

“Honestly, Hermione,” Harry said, his voice low enough that only she could hear, “we know that’s not why you’re hesitating.”

Her shoulders tightened. “What do you mean?” she asked, though the two boys had read the hesitation plainly enough.

Ron swung up onto the arm of a nearby chair, legs dangling. “You’ve been dodging your parents all term,” he said, a softness undercutting the ribbing. “Why?”

Hermione shut her eyes for a fraction of a second. When she opened them again, there were tears glinting like frost along her lower lashes. She drew in a tremulous breath and let the words spill out in starts and stops. “I… I did something last loop. They were in terrible danger, and I—” Her voice broke. “I wiped their memories. Sent them to Australia. It felt like the only way to keep them from being dragged into this. I can’t face them; I don’t know if I deserve to.”

Silence fell over them like a fresh layer of snow. Harry reached for her hand without thinking, feeling the small, hot tremor of her fingers. “You did it because you love them,” he said, steady as a promise. “You did it to protect them.”

Ron’s voice grew almost a murmur. “Would you really blame yourself if you knew it kept them alive? If you look at it the right way, it’s the kindest thing you could have done.”

She shook her head, the motion wet with grief. “But I erased who I was to them. I don’t know how to be their daughter when they don’t remember me. If I go home… I might not recognize how to fit in. I feel like I abandoned them twice.”

Beyond the hanging tapestry, Fred, George, and Lee Jordan paused in mid‑conversation and exchanged a quick, appraising look. Perhaps they heard the shift in tone; perhaps they simply felt the gravity and decided not to intrude. They melted back into the corridor like shadows, leaving the three friends alone in the hush.

The only sounds were the fire’s low murmur and muffled laughter trickling from another alcove. “Hermione,” Ron said at last, his voice the sort you use when something fragile needs handling, “you didn’t abandon them. You gave them safety.”

Harry lowered himself to kneel at her level. “You’re not the only one doing the heavy lifting,” he reminded her. “We’ll keep your research moving while you’re gone. Give me your lists—cataloguing, transcription—and we’ll owl you updates. We’ll work through your notes and keep everything exactly as you left it.”

Ron’s grin softened into something like solemn gratitude. “We owe you for every all‑nighter you’ve rescued us from, Hermione. Consider it paid.”

Hermione blinked away tears, voice thin with astonished relief. “You’d do that?” she asked.

“Absolutely,” Harry answered without a moment’s hesitation.

She inhaled, a small shudder that did half the work of untangling the knot in her chest. “I—” she began, and then faltered as the idea of home rose like a tidal memory—her parents’ ordinary habits, the little infuriating comforts that formed the axis of family.

“Look at me,” Ron said, brushing a stray strand of hair behind her ear with none of the embarrassment a gentler hand might feel. When she met his eyes he continued simply, “Do you really want to disappear from their lives forever? They’d want to see you. They’d want to fuss, to overcook the pudding and make you laugh.”

Hermione’s shoulders trembled once, then eased. “No—no,” she whispered, the answer arriving like sunlight after long cloud. “I don’t want that.”

“Then go home,” Harry said. “You’re their daughter. They love you. Let them have you for Christmas. Let them be the people they are—messy and doting and entirely human. It’s part of being family.”

The certainty in his voice did something small and decisive in her chest. She drew in another breath and let the tension slide out of her shoulders. When she opened her eyes again, the nod she gave was steady and sure. “All right,” she said.

Outside the high windows winter sunlight threaded between the clouds and fractured into prisms across the snow once more. Hermione hooked her arm through Harry’s and Ron’s and felt warmth bloom into her chest that had nothing to do with the common room fire. Christmas at home was terrifying and right in equal measures; the thought of it steadied her in a way the library could not. She would go; she would let her parents fuss and miss her and then welcome her back. In the quiet, ordinary courage of that choice, she felt, for the first time in a long time, like she belonged to something lasting.

Christmas morning light poured through the tall, lead‑paned windows of the Gryffindor dormitory, fracturing into warm gold across polished oak. The four‑poster beds stood quiet, their heavy red curtains thrown back as if they, too, wanted to witness the dawn. Stockings bulging with candy‑cane striped sweets twitched as though tiny, eager hands lurked inside; the garlands wound round the bedposts rustled faintly, as if clearing their breath for the day. From the corridor came a soft, continuous hum of excitement, punctuated now and then by the tinkling chuckle of a portrait who had mastered seasonal humour.

Harry and Ron blinked awake, blankets pooling at their feet and the familiar scent of pine and sugar in the air. Ron stretched with a satisfied groan, flexing toes against the rug, and noticed two neat piles of parcels at the foot of their bed. The wrapping shimmered with a subtle charm so that each paper glowed in a different hue when they nudged it.

“Merry Christmas,” Ron breathed, giving Harry’s nearest parcel a conspiratorial poke.

Harry sat up, rubbing sleep from his eyes. The dormitory smelled of garlands and the faint, irresistible tang of house‑elf toffee ribbons still curled on the banisters. They exchanged the small, private grin of boys who had shared too many scraped knees and too many secret plans, then tore into the presents with the practiced impatience of children used to magic.

Ron’s hands trembled with excitement as he peeled back crimson paper to reveal a snug maroon jumper, the “R” embroidered in gilt thread like a promise of home. He held it to his chest as if to test its weight and the warmth it might give. Beneath it lay a thick slab of Mrs. Weasley’s fudge, steam rising in the cold air; Ron broke off a corner and let the sweetness melt on his tongue with a sound that was almost a prayer.

“Perfect,” he sighed, tugging the jumper over his head and feeling the wool settle like an old, forgiving friend. The memory came back—his mother bustling about the kitchen, his father humming by the hearth, his siblings barrelling past in a stampede of laughter, images that made the knitwear less embarrassing and more like a talisman than anything else.

Harry went next. Beneath green velvet and silver ribbon, he found a matching jumper, its “H” worked in tidy silver loops. He slipped the wool on; it lay against him like a warm hand. He unwrapped a piece of the same fudge and inhaled the rich scent of vanilla and cocoa; for a breath the small, sharp edges of his childhood—cold breakfasts, Aunt Petunia’s scorn, the limp gift of a pair of socks—fell away.

With jumpers settled, they moved to the smaller parcels. Harry opened a compact box and found a hand‑carved wooden flute, its grain burnished to a satiny glow by the maker’s hands. He turned it over, feeling the small grooves and the balance of it, the sort of object that seemed to carry an old, deliberate kindness.

“What’s up?” Ron asked, raising an eyebrow as he watched Harry examine the flute.

Harry studied the wood with the subdued intensity that so often came over him. “Hagrid gave me this,” he said quietly. “Think about it. He brought me to Gringotts to get the Stone. He left a clipping in his hut, so I’d find it. Now he gives me a flute—the perfect thing to calm Fluffy. It feels almost… arranged.”

Ron looped an arm roughly around Harry’s shoulders in a hug that was half reassurance, half mockery. “Honestly, mate,” he said with a grin. “Hagrid’s the biggest softie this side of the Forbidden Forest. He isn’t orchestrating Dumbledore’s master plan. He’s Hagrid—loud, loyal, and likely to feed you everything on his shelf rather than plot anything devious.”

Harry brought the flute to his lips and coaxed a single, wavering note from it, soft as an owl’s call. The sound hung in the dormitory and then melted into the hush. He slid the flute into his pocket with a small, private smile, but his pulse still thumped with the memory of how often that very wood had made the difference between disaster and escape.

“You’re right,” he said at last. “It’s probably just Hagrid being Hagrid.” He added, after a beat, “Only—it shows how much he trusts Dumbledore. He’ll follow instructions because he believes in the headmaster. That trust is his strength, and sometimes his weakness. He gives himself completely to those he believes in.”

Ron’s expression softened at that, the boyish smirk giving way to something like admiration. “That’s Hagrid. He’d rather bake you into a rock cake than lie to you. The man’s a walking heart.”

They fell quiet for a moment, listening to the castle waking around them: the chirr of house‑elves preparing breakfast below, the distant murmur of students planning mischief or visits home, the gentle creak of the portrait frames as painted faces stretched and roused. Outside, the snow lay thick and immaculate, the world turned clean for a day.

Harry pocketed the flute without telling Ron all the thoughts it stirred; there were parts of his life that had become stitched with practical magic and with people whose kindness felt like a living thing.

Ron shrugged, handing Harry a small, flat box. “Well, open your last present. We both know what it is.”

Harry unfolded the paper with fingers that trembled a little despite the jokes. Inside lay the familiar shimmer of his father’s Invisibility Cloak, folded like a promise. The silvery fabric looked thinner and older than memory, a piece of moonlight pressed into cloth. Harry let it slide through his hands, feeling the cool, impossible weave; for one suspended moment time seemed to flatten. The mind replayed every narrow escape it had offered; every secret step it had kept from the dark. It was more than a tool. It felt like hope shaped into fabric.

A bright, small chime rang overhead, an old house‑elf charm perhaps, or the castle’s own way of marking holiday cheer. Harry glanced up just as the silver coin he’d tucked beneath his pillow lifted from the bedposts and hovered between them. The sight stole the breath from his chest; his pulse thrummed so loud he worried Ron must hear it.

“Blimey!” Ron jumped back, eyes wide as saucers.

Harry stared, breath stuttering. The coin spun once, twice with a lazy, uncanny deliberation, then shot straight toward the cloak in Harry’s lap. In the blink it takes a heart to flutter, the cloak shimmered, slipped, and vanished as if folded into the coin itself. The coin plinked onto the quilt and lay like a small, inert sun.

They lunged forward. Harry snatched the coin with hands that shook; it was warm, almost breathing in his palm. He turned it over. The Hallows mark was there: circle, line, and triangle. But the triangle’s tip was blunt; its edges curved outward in a way that made the symbol seem softened, adapted to something new.

“It… it changed,” Harry breathed.

Ron leaned in, peering over his friend’s shoulder. “Changed how?”

Harry swallowed. “Look at the triangle. It’s different from last time. It’s… rounded. Like the symbol just adapted to something new.”

He closed his fingers around the coin and willed the old, private word: Cloak.

With a shimmer of moon‑silver light the Invisibility Cloak reappeared in Harry’s hands, rippling like liquid night returning from a pool. Ron staggered back, jaw slack. “What in Merlin’s name?”

Harry pressed the cloak to his chest, pulse still drumming. “I think—no, it’s like the coin absorbed it… stored it.” He let the thought out slow; the cloak vanished. He thought again, and the cloak reappeared like a thing obeying the cadence of his certainty.

Ron’s eyes flicked between the coin and the cloak; disbelief carved across his face. He jabbed Harry’s shoulder with a finger that trembled almost as much as Harry’s own hands. “Harry, how did you get the coin under your pillow in the first place?”

Harry’s throat tightened. Clutching the Hallows galleon, he met Ron’s gaze. “I… I don’t know. It just reappeared one morning.”

Ron’s voice cut through the lingering shimmer of Christmas magic, sharp with incredulity. “Since when has the coin been reappearing?”

Harry’s hand tightened around the coin as though it might slip away. The dorm felt suddenly smaller, stocking hems quivering as if curious. “A while back,” he said, low.

Ron planted his feet on the rug and braced himself, eyes narrowing. “When Harry? Be specific.”

Harry thought of Hermione’s furrowed forehead when she’d slipped into the Room of Requirement clutching the coin. “The morning after Hermione hid it in the room,” he admitted.

“Bloody hell—” Ron exploded, flinging an arm up with such force a bauble fell from the stocking and rolled across the floor. “You’ve known for weeks, and you never told us?”

Harry flinched. His apology tangled with a dozen small, guilty reasons. “I… I don’t have an excuse. I was stupid not to trust you.”

A draft rattled the shutters, and the room felt momentarily as if it might loosen itself from the rest of the castle. Ron’s anger softened as he took in the worn look on Harry’s face; disappointment sat heavy, a clock always about to strike. He sank onto the edge of Harry’s bed and said quietly, “All right. Tell me the real reason you kept this from us.”

Harry closed his eyes, searching for a language that would not sound like cowardice. He remembered the way the coin had whispered at the edges of his mind, the steady tug as certain mornings it had found him. “First… I was terrified you’d think I’d gone mad, that the coin was messing with my head,” he said. “And… it calls to me. Every morning it turns up in my hand like it belongs there. I felt a connection I couldn’t explain.”

Silence settled between them, thick as holiday velvet. Ron ran a hand through his hair and said, blunt as always, “None of that excuses lying to us.”

Harry bowed his head. “You’re right. I’m sorry.”

Ron’s shoulders eased, and the anger softened into the worry that lay under all their friendship. He walked a slow circle around the bed, words coming out in a steady cadence. “I’m not the one you need to worry about, though. You should probably brace yourself for Hermione.”

A distant clatter through the corridor sounded like a bell of warning. Harry’s stomach flipped; Hermione’s cool logic and fierce protectiveness flicked through his memory like a weather map. “I can already hear her,” he muttered. “She’s going to go ballistic.”

Ron gave him one of those looks that was almost fond. “Honestly, you deserve it for being a moron.”

Harry couldn’t help the grin that broke through; the tension thinned a little. “Maybe I can distract her with a ten‑foot essay on the coin’s new feature. You know Hermione—she’ll insist on footnotes.”

They both laughed, the sound loosening the day. Ron peered at the coin again, speculative. “I must admit, though, this new storage bit is pretty handy. No more cramming the bloody Invisibility Cloak into our pockets.”

He held the coin out theatrically and cleared his throat. “Cloak—away!”

Nothing happened. The coin sat cool and inert in his palm. Ron’s face fell.

Harry shrugged. “Try imagining it, not just saying it.”

Ron screwed up his face, eyes closed, and murmured, “Cloak—away.” Still nothing. He opened his eyes to find Harry watching him with an amused, curious tilt to his head.

“Let me,” Harry said softly. He laid the cloak on the bed, raised the coin and spoke with quiet certainty, “Cloak—away.”

The coin trembled. Moonlight pooled, the cloak folded as if into a pocket of air and slipped inside. Harry palmed the galleon, winked. “Back…”

The coin quivered, then unfurled, and the cloak reappeared on the quilt as if it had never left. Ron’s jaw dropped. “That’s not fair! It only works for you!” he accused, pointing at Harry’s chest. “What’s your secret?”

Harry’s eyes fell to the silver triangle etched on the coin. The thought came soft and terrible with the clarity of a sudden idea. “I think it’s because I’m the cloak’s true owner. Maybe the coin only obeys whoever holds mastery over the Hallows.”

Ron slowed, the question rippling into something more dangerous. “So… do you think this coin could lock away the Resurrection Stone or the Elder Wand just the same? Like a portable vault, store each Hallow inside?” He lowered his voice to a hush, conspiratorial and a little scared. “And when all three Hallows end up reunited in there, what then? Do they merge into something more powerful, or does the coin itself become the final Hallow?”

Before they could unpack that thread further, the dormitory door burst open with the twin hurricane of Fred and George Weasley. Robes flying, scarves trailing, the twins stamped snow from boots and seized the room with their usual, blessed chaos.

George grabbed Ron’s sleeve. “Oi, you two! You haven’t misplaced the Weasley breakfast invite, have you?”

Fred, shoving his brother aside long enough to lean conspiratorially close, grinned like a fox. “And after breakfast, we’re launching a full‑scale snowball match on the lawns. Don’t imagine you’ll escape un–pelted.” He shot Harry and Ron a wink. “Perfect way to test your dodging skills before the real magic begins.”

They were gone before Harry could answer properly, already bounding down the stairs and dragging half the corridor with them. In their wake Percy rounded the corner below, clutching a sheaf of prefect notices; the twins swooped in like seasonal marauders and dumped a bright Weasley jumper over his head, arms snaked into the sleeves before Percy’s outraged yelp could fully form. Their laughter peeled after them down the stairwell.

Harry and Ron let out a laugh that felt like permission to be ordinary. Harry tucked the coin safely away, still buzzing with questions, and they hurried after Fred and George, Christmas hunger trumping mysteries for the moment. The galleon’s hum lay quiet in Harry’s pocket as they chased the twins toward breakfast, the coin’s uncanny feat folded into the day’s bustle, postponed and not yet solved.

Midnight had long passed when Harry and Ron slipped through the portrait hole, the Invisibility Cloak draped around their shoulders like living shadow. They crept down the echoing corridors, breath puffing in the chill air, hearts hammering with equal parts excitement and dread.

“Finally,” Harry whispered as they came to a halt before the barred door of the Restricted Section. “We couldn’t have tried this until we had the Cloak. Those wards detect any Disillusionment or Invisibility charm, and they’d trigger every alarm in the castle.”

Ron’s fingers curled tight on the finely woven fabric. “I know. Filch would have had us in his chains in seconds.” He hesitated, voice softening. “But with this…” He let the thought trail off as Harry lifted the latch. The iron‑wood panel swung open with a soft groan, and they slipped inside.

Once beneath the high vaulted ceiling of the library’s inner sanctum, silence pressed against them like a living thing. Lanterns cast warm pools of light onto endless rows of leather‑bound tomes, and dust motes drifted in the glow like slow, guilty fairies. Every footstep vanished on the thick carpet. Harry drew up his wand and murmured “Lumos,” and a narrow column of light traced gilded titles along cracked spines as if naming the things they had come to borrow.

They moved together through the stacks, shoulders nearly brushing, scanning for the books they needed: a Compendium of Ward Charms for Soul Protection, a Guide to Enchanted Vaults and Containment Circles, and a Treatise on Animate Containment Rituals. Ron hooked a thumb under the Guide and read a passage aloud in a voice that sounded too loud in the hush, the text promising ways to reinforce a chamber so no living essence could slip free once sealed, exactly the kind of containment they feared a Horcrux would demand.

Harry had his fingers on the Compendium when a thunderous clang split the stillness. A leaning tower of books trembled, then collapsed in a lumbering waterfall. Peeves erupted between the shelves in a spray of paint and paper, bucket in hand, inkpots and parchment spinning like confetti. “Midnight mayhem!” he crowed, darting between aisles and scattering rare folios with the delighted cruelty of someone born to cause trouble.

“Duck!” Harry hissed, hauling Ron down behind a low table as a rolling ladder hurtled past and a stray quill whizzed inches above Ron’s shoulder. Argus Filch thundered into the commotion, keys jangling so loudly they became a percussion; he swung his lantern only to slip on a stray sheet and crash into a cart of chained references, sending another cascade of books clattering in a deafening roar.

Snape’s arrival cut across the chaos like a dark blade. His cloak billowed and his wand traced a precise arc. “Silencio!” he barked; a ripple of hush followed, but Peeves only laughed and redoubled his havoc. Snape’s scowl sharpened until he snarled, “Quietus!” and Peeves’ cackle snapped shut like a broken latch. The timing opened a small window.

“Now!” Harry snapped, thrusting the Treatise into Ron’s hands while tucking the Compendium under his own arm. Ron clutched the Guide, their shoulders hunched as if to hide the stolen weight. Under the Cloak’s fluttering folds they bolted, the snarl of Filch and the clipped curse of Snape chasing them out into the cold courtyard.

They tumbled onto the dew‑slick grass, chests burning, lungs seizing with the cold. Harry lay for a second, the taste of damp earth and adrenaline thick in his mouth, then scrambled up and checked the books. Spines were whole, pages unbroken. “Every single one,” he panted, and the truth of it felt like a small, illicit triumph.

Lantern‑light from a distant tower rimed their faces. Harry pointed toward a boarded classroom window rimmed by moonlight. “There—through there.” They slipped inside. Desks crouched in spiderwebbed rows, kicked chairs leaning like spent soldiers; dust lay thick on everything. At the far end, under a carved arch, stood an oblong glass—dark and patient until their lanterns pooled light on its frame: the Mirror of Erised.

They skidded to a stop as if it had been expecting them. Ron’s face changed in the mirror’s light; something soft and hungry shifted there. “This blasted loop,” he muttered, voice rough. “Always landing us in the night’s most dangerous corners.” He crossed the threshold first and the glass breathed itself alive.

In the reflection Ron did not stand alone. He stood in the warm, chaotic heart of the Burrow: Molly bustling and piling platters of roast turkey, Arthur carving with an easy grin, Bill and Charlie elbowing each other and sharing an inside laugh, Fred and George tangling Percy in affectionate assault, Ginny leaning on the mantel with a look that mixed exasperation and pride. Beyond the open door, Harry and Hermione waited with the easy certainty of friends who had never been absent. The scene poured heat into the chilled room and Ron’s eyes shone bright with longing; for a moment the boy’s bravado melted away and what remained was simple, raw, and achingly human.

The vision wavered and Ron blinked. He looked back at Harry, an ache threaded through his expression, the kind you get when you have been shown what you want most and then had it slid away. “I kept thinking about Dad laughing,” he said in a voice that was meant to be casual but shook. “All the stupid little things that make it home.”

“Your turn,” Ron whispered.

Harry swallowed and stepped forward. For a long, disorienting heartbeat the glass offered nothing but the boarded windows behind him, the overturned desks, and Ron’s tense silhouette trembling at the edge of the frame. The mirror kept its face blank as if refusing to be hurried.

Then Harry’s scar prickled, and the surface of the glass rippled.

The classroom dissolved. In its place the mirror painted a vast chamber carved from black, glassy stone. Cold torchlight floated in the air, casting hard, uncompromising shadows that slatted across the floor. At the chamber’s centre rose a raised platform, and upon it, the box: the Horcrux containment chest he and his friends had been trying to imagine into being. It was finished, ornate, ancient, the runes along its lid the exact characters he had just read in the stolen Compendium. The craftsmanship felt inevitable, as if the thing had always belonged to that room.

Harry felt his breath go thin. The air in the vision was a different sort of cold, the kind that sits under skin and bone. He had been staring at boxes before; this was not a box alone. From the deeper gloom a figure arranged itself into being, a tall thing robed in black, skeletal fingers wrapped around a scythe of bone and iron. It stood with the slow patience of something that had waited centuries and expected him to arrive.

The coin in Harry’s pocket grew warm as if acknowledging the shape the Mirror had conjured. Around the dark figure images bled and glimmered: slices of memory and longing—his parents’ smiles captured in sunlight, Sirius laughing under a vault of stars, Dumbledore’s eyes catching the torchlight, bright then dim. Hermione’s furious, accusing face, Ron’s loyalty carved in stubborn gestures, and himself older, gaunter, standing alone at the lip of a battlefield littered with snapped wands and unclaimed courage.

The chamber folded again and, in that overlay, he saw another version of himself, standing before the Mirror but clutching not one thing but three: the Cloak thrown over his shoulders like a lived habit, the Elder Wand heavy and dark in his right hand, the Resurrection Stone held bright and small in his left. Above them, the coin spun, its edges now fully rounded and glowing softly, a small planet orbiting the Hallows. The dark figure—Death—waited still behind him, a presence that was neither malevolent nor kind, only inevitable.

Harry stumbled back, the image unmaking itself with a violence that left his knees unsteady. The Mirror flickered and then returned to show only the dust‑mottled room and Ron’s concerned shape.

“You saw something,” Ron said, stepping closer. His voice went low. “I can tell. What was it?”

Harry kept his eyes on the dying light in the glass for a moment, as if the memory might still be held there. Words came slow. “It wasn’t my parents,” he said. “Not this time.”

Ron’s frown tightened. “Then what?”

“A chamber,” Harry answered with a quiet edge. “Dark and cold. There was a box—the Horcrux box. Finished. Sealed. And Death was there. Not symbolic. Not some poetic idea. He was… real. Cloaked. Watching.”

“Actual Death?” Ron’s laugh came out thin, the ridged sound of someone trying to make terror into a joke.

Harry nodded once. “He didn’t speak. He just stood. Beckoning. And I—” He let the rest hang like a live wire. “—I was holding all three Hallows. Cloak, Wand, Stone. And the coin was there too, floating above them like it belonged.”

Ron began to pace, rubbing the back of his neck as if the motion might work through the thought. “The Mirror’s supposed to show your deepest desire,” he said. “So—what? Your deepest desire is to finish the box? To face Death? To… become his master?”

Harry’s mouth tightened. “I don’t know. It felt… right. Like everything lined up. Like the loop points to that place. Like the story ends there.”

Ron froze mid‑step. “Ends how?”

Harry met his eyes and the words dropped out of him with the dread of someone lowering a veil. “Not with triumph. With surrender, maybe. With sacrifice. I think the only way the loop ever stops is if I let go—give myself up to it. Let Death have me.”

Ron’s face contorted. “That’s insane. You’re not dying for this. We’ve fought too hard. You can’t—”

“I’m not saying I want to die,” Harry said quietly. “But maybe that’s the secret the Mirror showed me. Maybe the loop keeps replaying because I keep trying to win back what’s gone. Maybe the loop breaks when I stop trying to hold on.”

Silence landed between them like a heavy book. The castle outside creaked and sighed, ordinary sounds that seemed suddenly trivial. Ron’s voice, when it came, carried the raw, brittle edge of someone who would not let himself lose a friend without first breaking the world to stop it. “You know I’d follow you anywhere, mate. Even if it meant walking through fire. But if you think I’ll let you walk into this alone—”

“I know,” Harry said. “That’s why I thought we shouldn’t tell Hermione yet.” He managed a small, tired smile that did not reach his eyes.

Ron let out a short, bitter laugh. “She’d hex the Mirror and drag you out by your ear.”

Harry smiled a fraction more genuinely at that. They stood then in that broken classroom, two boys with books under their arms and a vision behind their eyes that unsettled every steady thing they had constructed. The wind picked at the window slats and the castle’s clock somewhere in the distance clicked forward, precise and unrelenting.

Hermione’s boots crunched on frost‑hardened gravel as she rounded the bend into the deserted corridor, the winter sun still low and sharp behind her. Her cheeks carried the flushed warmth of home, roasted chestnuts, her mother’s laughter, the safe weight of being wanted, and for a few steps relief unfurled inside her like a towel brought to life from a tumble. Then she saw them: Harry, pale and taut, the ancient silver coin clutched in his hand, and Ron, rigid as a struck pole. The warmth left her as if the corridor itself exhaled cold.

“Hermione!” Harry blurted, fingers closing so hard on the coin the silver chimed in his palm. He shoved the galleon into his pocket with a trembling hand. “We—”

She cut him short, voice low and brittle enough to chip stone. “Why do you have that coin? Why didn’t you tell me it reappeared?”

Harry’s throat bobbed; the question landed like an accusation and a plea all at once. He glanced at Ron; Ron’s face flushed, guilt and frustration crossing him like passing thunder. “We hid it in the Room of Lost Things,” Harry began. “You layered wards so dense I couldn’t have touched it without every alarm screaming. But at dawn I woke and there it was in my palm—smooth, cold—as if it had come to me on its own. I didn’t lie; I just—didn’t tell you right away.”

Hermione’s voice cracked and the stone rang where her fist met it. “That’s still lying!” Dust motes jumped out of the torchlight. “I can’t believe you’d keep something like that from me.”

Ron stepped forward, voice soft but urgent. “Please, Hermione—Harry knows he was wrong. But at Christmas the coin went wild: it lifted itself, leapt onto his cloak, and vanished it whole before dropping back. It can house Hallows.”

The words set Hermione’s mind alight. For a moment she looked like she might unfold into a thousand rational hypotheses at once—wards, keys, resonances between artifacts—her hands already itching for quills.

Ron pressed on, voice trembling with excitement. “That’s why it returned to Harry. It’s keyed to the Hallows, waiting to safeguard them.”

A charged silence fell. Hermione’s world of logic and order snapped into focus. “Alright,” she whispered. “First, let’s find somewhere quiet.”

The three of them moved almost without thinking toward the abandoned classroom near the Astronomy Tower, where carved initials and old pranks scarred the thick wooden door. Inside, the air smelled of dust and secrets. Hermione retrieved the battered tomes they’d liberated, spine creased where fingers had combed pages bare and set them on the desk with the same gravity she gave any living thing.

Harry produced a worn notebook and opened to a page where he had sketched lines that trembled with his hand’s uncertainty. He traced the angles again: a coffin‑shaped box, hinges masked by runes, glyphs that pulsed like a small, stubborn heartbeat. The coin sat on the desk and chimed faintly when Hermione turned it, revealing a narrow band of inscription along the rim.

“About what I saw in the Mirror of Erised,” Harry said, the confession low in his chest, “we thought if I could truly accept death—really accept it without fighting—it might break the cycle.”

Hermione’s quill clattered to the wood. She went white and then red in a breath, the shock of it sharpening her features. She grabbed Harry’s arm as if to anchor him to the present. “No,” she gasped. “You’re not dying, Harry. We will not gamble your life on a suggestion from a mirror. There must be a charm, a counter‑runic approach—something. You can’t give yourself up.”

Tears glinted at the edge of her lashes; fury and fear braided together in her voice. “There are always other ways. Always.” Her fingers flexed as though around an unseen wand. The room vibrated for an instant with the force of her refusal.

Harry looked down, shame and relief and something like gratitude warring in his face. Ron’s jaw tightened into a line. In that charged silence Hermione’s defiance became the axis around which their choices would turn: no single life would be wagered on an intuition, no matter how ancient or persuasive.

Hermione’s gaze sharpened into the practical order she wore like armour. She swept aside scraps of loose parchment and set Harry’s sketches between two battered textbooks, then crouched beside him, quill poised. “So, tell me everything, from the beginning,” she said, voice steady now, the command of a mind that would not be hurried by fear.

Harry explained the Mirror as best he could: the chamber of black stone, the box finished and sealed with runes, the figure robed in black holding a scythe, the Hallows in his hands and the coin orbiting above them. He spoke of the way the vision had felt like a logic rather than a threat: inevitable, fitting, like an answer the story had been waiting to give.

Hermione read every line of his face as much as she read the sketches. When he finished, she did not look away. “It isn’t proof,” she said finally. “Not of anything we can act on. The Mirror shows desire, not destiny. It could be warning, it could be bait. We cannot, will not, accept ‘it felt right’ as a strategy.”

Her hand moved to the coin and tipped it, eyes narrowing as she traced the faint rim inscription. “There’s an incantation here I don’t recognize verbatim,” she murmured, the scholar in her unspooling speculation in tight, quick ropes. “Not standard Runes, not Latin, not the ward dialects I studied in third year. It’s… old and layered. Someone crafted it to respond to possession and intent. If it can store an artefact, perhaps it can store a person’s tie to something. We need to know the parameters.”

They worked then with a cold, exact focus that pushed the earlier panic into the margins. Hermione cross‑referenced symbols from the Treatise and the Compendium, muttering like a metronome as she mapped correspondences and contradictions. Ron arranged small rune‑stones along the desk’s edge, testing the shapes by touch, while Harry drew the box again, line by line, trying to make the impossible angles honest on the page.

“Time loops follow rules,” Hermione said, voice soft but certain. “Not moods. We’ll map the repetitions, catalogue each divergence, test the boundary conditions. If the loop resets when you refuse death, that’s a data point. But it doesn’t mean the solution is to embrace it.” She tapped the rune she’d just copied. “We’ll find whether acceptance is cause or consequence.”

Ron sagged into a chair, the worn leather creaking under him. “I don’t want to lose you either, Harry,” he said quietly, fingers fidgeting with the hem of his jumper. “But I trust Hermione to find the sane way. I trust you to fight. We’ll do this together. No solo martyrdom.”

Harry let out a long breath that seemed to shiver out of his ribs. He placed his hand over Hermione’s as she hovered over the page. “I don’t want to die,” he said. “If that’s what the Mirror implies, then we’ll disprove it. I’d rather we try ten thousand other things first.”

They sketched until dawn thinned the night, the candlelight making the runes gleam like wet ink. Hermione annotated every curve and hinge, adding protection sigils in the margins, translating the coin’s inscription into several tentative readings. Ron, more literal than the two of them, set up small experiments with the rune‑stones: slight wards to see if the coin would react, soft charms to see what kind of intent it favoured. Each test taught them a small piece of the engine that bound the loop.

Dawn thinned the night’s shadows to a pale hush; they gathered their sketches and tomes, hands stained with ink and the cold, and set the coin and the drawn box back into the battered satchel as if tucking a sleeping thing away. Hermione folded the edge of the page over the runes, her jaw tight with questions that would not be answered by courage alone. Ron steadied Harry with a clumsy, wordless squeeze to the shoulder. They left the classroom without looking back, the door closing on the circle of candlelight and the piled notes, and walked toward the common room with plans already forming between them—measurements to run, wards to reverse‑engineer, and a cautious, growing certainty that whatever the Mirror had shown would need to be met with a map, not a martyr.

Chapter Text

A late‑winter gale rattled the mullioned windows of Amelia Bones’s office, the sound like dry leaves arguing with glass. Her lamp set the oak in a soft halo; its glow trembled across floor‑to‑ceiling shelves where case files breathed in layers, some closed tight with dust and age, others humming with the urgency of recent lives. She sat behind the vast desk she had carved wards into years ago; a quill poised over a decree whose ink had never quite lost its chill.

Since the Halloween when Peter Pettigrew’s name had split the night, Amelia had followed the loose thread of Sirius Black’s conviction. At first, she had worked alone, reading a file that grew stranger the more she examined it: an Azkaban decree stamped and signed, but with no trial transcript, no witness statements, nothing to justify a sentence that had condemned a man to years behind iron. The signatures on the margin, Minister Bagnold’s, the notation of Bartemius Crouch Sr. as head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, Dumbledore’s mark as Supreme Mugwump, read like a list of powers, but not a record of justice.

She had meant to keep moving alone, to pry and prod quietly, but the Ministry was a net that tangled secrets into its own weave. When she realized how deep the omissions ran, she had summoned two Aurors she trusted implicitly.

A cold breath of wind curled beneath the office door and, before she could stand, Dolores Umbridge swept in as if the room had been waiting for her. The pink of her robes was disturbingly bright against the marble, every measured step a tiny, clinical command.

“Madame Bones,” Umbridge said with a thin smile and the insistent sweetness of a lacquered bird. “Minister Fudge has appointed me Senior Undersecretary. I shall oversee the DMLE’s activities. Do send me daily briefings on every investigation, particularly any high‑profile matters.”

Amelia rose, courtesy a shield over something colder beneath her voice. “Senior Undersecretary, office protocol requires that ongoing investigations be channelled through Legal Enquiries. If you require updates, please submit a formal request.”

Umbridge’s smile wilted into a narrow line. She stepped closer, fingers skimming the carved runes along the desk as though testing for weakness. “I expect to be kept fully informed. Transparency is—”

“—the function of due process,” Amelia interrupted. “I will not undermine judicial protocol at the behest of a newly named official.”

Heat rose to Umbridge’s cheeks. She flared her nostrils, voice clipped. “I shall speak with the Minister about this.”

“By all means,” Amelia said. She inclined her head in a way that offered the path and closed it at the same time.

Umbridge left with her heels clicking down the corridor, the sound insistent and brittle. Amelia let the echo fade, eyes flicking to the corner where a tiny scrying mote had fizzled out; its tether had been severed. Her fingers stayed on the desk as if to feel the residual prickle of intrusion.

There was a soft knock. Celeste Hargrove entered, immaculate as ever, the neatness of her robes a match to the exactness of her spine. Close behind, Declan Hawke drifted in with a careless grin that did not reach the thoughtful sharpness of his hazel eyes. Amelia closed the door, watched their faces, then asked the only thing that mattered in a room where names could be used as weapons.

“Recite the Auror’s Oath under the Silver Shield. Every clause.”

The two voices rose in the hush, steady and ritual: words of secrecy, of protection, of justice without fear. When they finished, Amelia spoke small Latin words and the room filled with a pale blue glow as she sealed Secreto Arcanum and Imprimo Vinculum across the desk. The runes along the wood sprang faintly to life, forming a barrier against scrying and unwelcome ears. A whisper like a footstep scraped beyond the door and died; the wards had already done their job.

She slid the Azkaban dossier across the desk. The paper made a tiny, accusing sound. “Peter Pettigrew’s reappearance proves Sirius Black may not have been guilty,” Amelia said plainly. “There is no formal record of a trial. Not one sworn testimony. The conviction appears to be a ministerial edict dressed as legal process.”

Celeste’s jaw tightened. “All those years in Azkaban—on what? A signature?”

Declan did not smile. He opened the file, eyes skimming the margins where scrawl and note tangled. “Bagnold’s handwriting has corrections,” he said. “Crouch’s notes mention a ‘closed session’ that leaves no transcript. Someone back‑channelled authority.”

Amelia leaned forward, feeling the paper’s weight anchor her resolve. “My working theory is this: a midnight meeting, an executive summary issued as a decree. Dumbledore’s approval could have been sought as Supreme Mugwump, but without any formal hearing. If we’re right, the Ministry’s record is papered over to hide a procedural void.”

Celeste drummed her fingers, the sound precise. “We’ll need sworn affidavits. Clerks. Guards. The registrar. Anyone who handled the file or remembers the night in question.”

Declan’s mind already traced routes. “I can cross‑reference attendance logs with apparition records. If someone apparated in and out at odd hours—if one name repeats—then we have our start.”

Amelia steepled her hands. “And Umbridge will try to intercept. We work off the books. Protective wards on every statement. Sworn statements hidden in compartments only you two will control. No Magical Eyes, no photographs. We compile only on trusted parchment.”

Celeste’s voice was a blade of certainty. “I’ll start at the Chief Registrar’s office at dawn.”

Declan’s grin returned for a fraction of a second, tempered by purpose. “I’ll be through the apparition Wing at noon, tracing entry manifests. If one name keeps surfacing, I’ll follow it.”

“Record everything in separate caches,” Amelia said. “If the Ministry tries to scrub the file, we must have redundant records.” She rose, the motion deliberate, her silhouette a weathered statue against the lamp’s light. The three exchanged a quick, private nod, an unspoken pact.

They left the office with the hush of robes and footsteps down the corridor. Amelia watched the door close and then turned back to the ledger she had unrolled: Azkaban’s end‑of‑year audit. Ink spooled under her quill as she traced money movement, following the thin, honest line that often revealed corruption. The gale whispered at the windows, but behind the desk the only sound was the scratch of quill on paper as she began to unearth the Ministry’s buried choices.

Amelia stood on the snow‑slick wooden dock, wind tugging at her robes like impatient hands. Each gust carried the sting of salt and spray from the black sea, the fortress rose from the water as a jagged silhouette against the low grey sky. Minister Fudge, his woollen scarf and bowler hat a bright slash of green, paced beside her with the exaggerated impatience of a man who believed optics could substitute for governance.

“Amelia, really,” he huffed, rubbing his gloved hands together until the wool squeaked. “You can’t expect me to sit in my office all day waiting for your report. My constituents will love seeing me strolling through Azkaban. Shows I’m tough on crime.”

Her jaw tightened; her gaze remained fixed on the iron silhouette that loomed ahead. She kept her tone even, slow as measured steps. “Minister, this is an end‑of‑year audit, not a photo‑op. Your presence will only draw attention and hinder the inspections.”

Fudge waved a mittened hand as if brushing away a minor inconvenience. “Nonsense. My name alongside yours on every front page—that’s good politics. Now let’s be off.” He strode toward the small ferry moored at the dock’s end with a briskness meant to conceal nervousness.

She followed, boots crunching in fresh snow, replaying the late‑night reports that had compelled her inspection: missing logs, odd transfers of wardens, end‑of‑year entries that smelled of smoothing and convenience. The ferry was a battered skiff and the only option; no Portkey, no Apparition, only the slow, creaking vessel that threaded the dementor‑patrolled channel. They huddled beneath a tarpaulin as the boatman rowed, the wind moaning through the rigging.

Fudge coughed theatrically as waves sprayed them. “We’ll do a quick tour of the main courtyard, shake a few hands, and I can be back before lunch. Efficiency, Amelia.”

She forced a polite smile that did not warm her eyes. “The audit begins the moment we step ashore. I intend to speak with Warden Garrow first, then Inspector Catesby, and then the senior wardens in each wing. A superficial tour will defeat the purpose.” She set each phrase like a peg in a line, tightening the plan around the minister’s bluster.

Above the gatehouse two dementors hovered, their tattered cloaks drifting like ragged punctuation against the sky. The boatman gripped his oar as if warding off the cold made them less enormous. Amelia felt the old weight pressing at the base of her throat and deliberately kept her wand knuckled under her sleeve; she did not cast a Patronus. A public show of dread would be noticed and would be used.

They disembarked onto the snow‑packed quay where Warden Garrow met them, fur‑lined coat pulled high, breath clouding visible in the cold. He bowed with the formal stiffness of someone who had been trained to temper human gestures into routines.

“Madame Bones, Minister Fudge. Shall we proceed?” he said.

Amelia’s ledger was already open in her mind. She stepped forward, pen poised, and they moved into the low‑security corridors where the first block of inmates—debtors and minor offenders—were housed. The walls closed in, stone cold to the touch, the scent of damp metal and stale straw lingered. She checked registers against roll‑call logs, tracing signatures and schedules in a methodical rhythm. Where paper matched presence, she noted it with a soft, approving scratch; where it did not, she made a neat, hard mark and moved on.

Fudge leaned in to peer at a file, then yawned discreetly. “Why read every file aloud?” he muttered, voice loud enough for those nearest to hear. “A simple tally would suffice.”

Amelia met his flippant tone with something colder. “Because I confirm custody to record. A tally can be altered; cross‑checking the physical presence with the signatures and the times is how we find inconsistencies.” She let her pen drag a line through an out‑of‑place entry the way a surgeon marks tissue.

They worked their way through Block A and into Block B; the bars thickened, and the air seemed to take on a different temperature. Here, the violent offenders were kept, those whose records read like the smudged edges of nightmares. Fudge’s face, which had been pink with forced vigour on the quay, began to look drawn. He adjusted his green bowler hat and complained about the delay.

“It’s just method, Minister,” Amelia said without irritation. “A thorough audit is not theatre. It’s the only way to ensure the Ministry’s integrity.”

By the time they reached the spiral stair that led into the lower levels, Fudge’s stamina frayed. The stair wound down into a deeper cold; the lamps were dimmer, the shadows longer. Dementors drifted along the landings, their presence folding warmth out of each breath. Amelia noted the minister’s small, animal reactions, one step behind her, eyes flicking at the darkness, without pity. She had work to do.

They paused on a landing where several iron doors marched into the gloom. This was the third tier, the deep‑level wings. The worst offenders, those the Ministry deemed too dangerous for lesser confinement, were held here. The registry log for the doors was thick; the custody transfers older and, in places, oddly trimmed. Amelia’s quill moved with a sharpness as she compared the ledgers to the watch rotations and to the entry manifests she could access. An unsigned maintenance request here, a transfer without a signature there; the ledger’s omissions were never blunt, always the fine erasures that hid intent.

Fudge’s voice grew thin. “I—think I’ve seen enough.” He tried to reclaim his authority with a stiff‑backed posture and a cough that echoed down the corridor. “Yes, yes, I—I have Cabinet meetings this afternoon.”

Amelia did not bother to dissemble. “You may return to the mainland, Minister,” she said. “I will continue the inspection and submit a full report. You’ll have it by tonight.”

He straightened his collar and turned, leaving with the businesslike relief of a man who preferred headlines to hard work. Amelia watched him until his figure became a smear on the snow‑rimmed quay. When the last of Fudge’s retinue scurried back to the boat and the quay fell quiet, Amelia did not pause for satisfaction. She angled her face toward the iron door and caught her reflection, pale, determined, ghosted across the cold steel. The sight steadied her.

Warden Garrow led her through the further registers and answered questions with the slow, careful tone of a man used to having his speech measured. Amelia asked the same questions twice in different cadences and watched for the micro‑expressions that betrayed memory or avoidance: a too‑swift glance, a hand lingering on keys a moment longer than necessary. Where a clerk flinched at a date she cross‑checked it against candle requisitions and store manifests; where a warden hesitated about a name she matched it to entry logs. She followed the money as well as she followed paper; end‑of‑year audit often told the truth when testimony stalled.

In a small, recessed archive she found an entry that smelled faintly of incense, an oddity that suggested someone had tried to mask the passage of time. A ledger page had a different ink and a correction where none should be. She sealed the page with a narrow ribbon and made a ciphered note to cross‑reference that specific clerk’s movements. A maintenance log showed a late-night repair request on a day a ‘closed session’ was supposedly held. Each small inconsistency threaded a line she could follow back through records and human habit.

A Warden’s assistant mentioned, then corrected himself about a previously ‘tidied’ attendance sheet. A clerk offhandedly admitted to being asked to reconcile a roster because “it made the paperwork tidy.” Amelia’s pen stopped in midair and then moved again with a precise mark. She hummed an incantation and the small ward at the corner of a ledger flared; where someone had attempted to damp a charm, the residue gave up a faint trace. Tiny things, she knew, were the truth‑tellers.

Hours passed. Amelia’s ledger filled with marginalia, cross‑references, and neat arrows that threaded names to dates. She made no accusations; she collected. When she found a particular chain of transfers routed through a shell registrar’s account, she noted it and began a list of names to follow. Declan’s later observations about apparitions and Celeste’s search of clerical indexes would feed this list. For the moment she let the facts accumulate like quietly stacked stones.

The ledger in her hand was a ledger of questions, not answers, its pages already scored with cross‑references and names to chase. She stepped up to the iron‑grated door that led down into the prison’s depths, the frost rim of the metal catching her face in a brief, pale reflection. The heavy key felt cold and real in her gloved hand; she fitted it to the lock, listened to the mechanism sigh, and drew a breath that tasted of sea and old stone. There was work to do below—a man to find—and she moved forward, the echo of her boots swallowed by the corridor as the door closed behind her.

When the iron‑grated door sighed shut behind her, the corridor’s torchlight seemed to shrink, as if the stone itself were drawing breath. Amelia paused, key cold in her fist, and let the smell of the deep wing settle into her senses: straw, old metal, a sweetness of stale sweat and detergent long past its prime. She pushed the heavy door the last few inches and stepped into the cell block.

Sirius sat huddled on the straw‑strewn floor, back pressed to the wall where the stone had soaked up years of damp. His face had been handsome once; now the cheekbones showed like broken cliffs, the skin stretched thin over him. For a long, stretched second Amelia thought he slept—so still he seemed, broken by years of solitude—but then his head snapped up, and an old animal defiance flared in his eyes, raw and immediate.

“Sirius Black,” she said, lowering her voice until it was almost a murmur against the stone. She kept her wand tucked away, unfurling words instead of spells. “I’m Amelia Bones, Head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement. I’m here because there’s no record of your trial—no transcript, no witness statements. I want to know why.”

He blinked like a man clearing fog from his mind. “No record?” His voice was threaded with disbelief and something like contempt. “Of course there’s no record. There was no trial. They bundled me off to Azkaban less than twenty‑four hours after my arrest. I never saw a judge. I never heard a single defence.” The sound cracked as it left him. “No one’s come to see me since.”

Amelia crouched a respectful distance from the iron, keeping her posture open, her tone steady. “Were you refused legal representation? Any visitors at all? Family?”

He spat the answers back as though the words burned. “Legal representation? No. I had no one— what’s left of my family would sooner see me dead than hear I’m alive. Friends…” He flinched as if the word recoiled. From somewhere deeper in the wing a harsh, triumphant cackle skittered along the corridor, Bellatrix Lestrange’s laughter like broken glass on stone, and Sirius’s body tightened. “The last friend I thought I had—he must think I’m a traitor. Even Dumbledore… he never came.”

The old lines around Amelia’s mouth narrowed. “I know why.” She let the confession land between them and then drove forward with the thing she had come to deliver. “I’ve uncovered evidence that Peter Pettigrew is alive. He’s in secret custody. We’re not ready to make him public yet, but the reappearance proves what we suspected. You were framed.”

At those words, colour, the human colour of hope, rose and then crashed away from Sirius’s face. He lurched to his feet so suddenly the straw rustled; desperation made his knuckles pale on the iron bars. “I—never was the Secret Keeper!” he cried. “We switched. It was meant to be Peter. He betrayed them all. I swear it was him, not me!”

Amelia watched the confession settle into him, saw the way guilt and self‑blame had carved grooves deeper than a decade of stone. “Then explain why you were found at the scene raving that you’d killed them,” she said, not softening the question.

His shoulders dropped as if a load shifted and he let out a ragged breath. “Because… I suggested the switch,” he said, voice thinning. “I told them how to fool Voldemort. The method was mine. When it happened I—” He stopped, the memory a blade. “It felt like I’d killed them myself. I thought I had. It has been ten years of that thought.”

Amelia’s expression softened without conceding the record. She conjured a low stool, placed herself level with his line of sight and, for the first time since she arrived, let a measure of plain human sympathy show. “You’re luckier than you know,” she said quietly. “There’s someone who believes in you—Harry Potter. He insisted on reopening your case. He begged us to look. He has not given up.”

At that name everything inside Sirius shifted. The years seemed to ripple away a little; his posture altered as if someone had offered an anchor. Tears, thin at first, then more certain, shimmered at the corner of his eyes. He sagged, shoulders folding under the weight of relief and the old, raw sorrow. “Harry…” His voice broke into a sound halfway between prayer and confession. “I failed him. I should’ve been there. I should have protected him instead of chasing Peter. How can he forgive me?”

Amelia’s hand hovered, palm a hair’s breadth from the iron where his fingers curled. She did not touch him; the bars held a practical boundary as much as a symbolic one. “You are not alone anymore,” she said. “I will uncover every forged signature, every hidden transcript. I will assemble the witnesses. We will secure Pettigrew’s testimony and build the case so carefully the Ministry cannot ignore it. You will be free. You will see Harry again.”

Sirius stared at her long enough for the torchlight to carve shadows across the hollows of his cheeks. For a moment the cell seemed to hold its breath. A dementor slid past the doorway, dulling the torch’s glow like a hand over a candle, and a cold seeped into the walls. Amelia raised her wand without hesitation; she spoke the charm soft and precise. Warmth unfurled between them, a thin, stubborn bloom of light that did not dispel the prison’s gloom but made a pocket of human heat, a hearth-sent pulse against the chill.

When the Patronus faded and the glow thinned, the bars were merely cold iron again. Amelia kept her hand close to where his gripped, as if to leave an invisible reassurance. “I wish I could tell you this ends tonight,” she murmured. “But the Ministry is quick to bury scandal. If we move too fast and free you without the facts secured, the evidence will scatter and they’ll bury you again. We must be patient—months, not days—to make this unassailable.”

Sirius let those words sink in and then, with the humour of the exhausted and the beaten, forced something like a grin. “Months,” he repeated. “After ten years in here, what are a few more months? For Harry, I’ll wait.” He pressed his knuckles to the iron until the skin stretched white.

Amelia’s face held both relief and sorrow in equal measure. She gave him a firm nod, an agreement that was promise enough for that moment. She rose from the stool and adjusted the heavy key at her belt.

She turned to leave, footprints soft on the straw, and the sound of her steps mingled with the distant rasp of dementor’s cloaks beating the cold corridor. Behind her, Sirius slid back against the wall, chin to chest, and the cell folded around him, its silence patient, its darkness an old, familiar pressure, while beyond the bars the world she had opened a crack into began the long, meticulous work of proof.

Amelia gripped the ferry rail, salt stinging her face, wind clawing at her robes until they slapped against her legs. Azkaban’s black ramparts receded into the grey; the skiff’s thin engine hummed under the tarpaulin. She kept her gaze fixed on the fortress until the shape blurred and then turned inward, the corridor beneath the Ministry already living again behind her eyes.

Weeks earlier she had walked a narrow torchlit passage into a hidden holding cell, the air damp with mildew and cold stone breath. At the end of the passage a rune‑carved door had opened on Peter Pettigrew, crouched on a splintered bench like an animal backed into a corner. In the lantern light his human face shifted between the rat he’d been and the boy who once laughed in a dormitory; the sight tightened something in her chest she immediately slammed shut. She was there to do a job.

“I’m Amelia Bones,” she had said, voice flat and steady. “Head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement. I’m here to interrogate you under Veritaserum.”

Pettigrew’s eyes had widened. He scrambled backward until his spine met the cold stone and he stared at her like someone who had forgotten how to be brave. “Please—no,” he whimpered. “I’m innocent. I didn’t—”

She did not answer the plea with sympathy. She uncapped the small vial she’d carried, three trembling drops of clear potion catching the lantern glow. “Then start by explaining why you hid as a rat for a decade if you had nothing to fear,” she said, voice stripped of rhetoric. He bolted to his knees, fingers digging into the floor as if to pin himself to the place.

“I—I was terrified!” he rasped. “Sirius Black would kill me!”

Amelia’s lip curled at the familiar claim. She had known Sirius as a boy and could not reconcile that boy with the man crouched in Azkaban’s corridor. “He hasn’t set foot outside Azkaban in ten years,” she said. “He couldn’t harm a hair on your head.”

Pettigrew shook, the story tumbling out in a frantic whisper. “They’d help him—Death Eaters still at large. They’d tear me apart—” His voice climbed and frayed. She let him speak until the words thinned and his breath came in ragged pulls.

When she saw the moment to act, she uncorked the vial and tipped the three drops across his tongue. The potion took hold with the slow, inexorable spread of cold. His eyes cleared and the mask fell away; the man who had been a rat recited the truth in a voice that sounded detached from his own skin.

“I was the Secret Keeper,” he said without flourish. “I manipulated Sirius into suggesting the switch. In his arrogance he thought it his own idea. By then I was already a Death Eater.” He said it plainly, with the small, awful triumph of a confession that unburdens no conscience. Amelia’s dicta‑quill moved across the page, catching every syllable.

He told how he had exulted when the Potters trusted him, how he had run to Voldemort certain of reward, how the curse had rebounded and changed the world into a place that rejected him. He described running for three days and nights, cornered by Sirius in a narrow London street, screaming that Black betrayed Lily and James, blowing up the street, tearing off his finger and transforming into a rat in panic, then being found shivering in a meadow by a ginger boy who took him home as a pet. He spoke of hiding, of surviving as a rat, of watching and waiting.

At one point Amelia lifted the sleeve of his threadbare robe and found, coiled faint as a bruise around his forearm, the Dark Mark. A physical confirmation that matched the words. Her pen did not hesitate.

When the Veritaserum’s hold loosened, Pettigrew slumped back to the straw and whimpered for mercy. “Mercy, Madame Bones—please—”

Amelia stepped back and the revulsion in her posture was plain. “Mercy?” she echoed. “No. You will receive the punishment the law prescribes.” She did not speak of the Dementor’s Kiss lightly, but neither did she flinch from the consequences the Dark Mark implied. She arranged for the wards around his cell to be secured; there would be no escape and no self‑destruction on her watch.

She left the cell with his cries behind her, the echo striking the damp stone like a small, bitter drum. The ferry’s spray and the sea’s roar had to re‑establish themselves around her as she blinked back into the present. Pettigrew’s taped confession, every crooked sentence transcribed under a truth potion, sat now in her casebook, bound and sealed for the bureaus that would not sleep.

On the ferry she pressed her hand to her chest and felt the steady thud of determination. Pettigrew’s words, recorded and witnessed, would clear Sirius Black’s name if the Ministry could be made to hear them without smothering the noise. The work ahead was procedural and delicate: sworn testimony to the Wizengamot, corroboration from witnesses, the unpicking of forged signatures. Justice in their governing system required proof as meticulous as the fraud it hid.

She tucked the notebook under her cloak and braced as the skiff pitched. The sea’s grey spread ahead, indifferent. Amelia did not speak of triumph; she felt only the chill of the wind and the clear map of the next steps in her mind: a chain of offices, names to summon, guarded rooms to visit, and, finally, the slow, public unmaking of a lie. She let the ferry carry her toward the mainland and toward the ledger of work that would have to be done, knowing the path would be long and exacting, and that every recorded sentence would need to stand when the Ministry tried to look away.

Pale morning light filtered through the soaring windows of the Ministry’s Grand Foyer as Celeste and Declan slipped through a seldom‑used service door. The hum of the building shifted as they passed, quills scratching, distant voices, the shuffle of boots, but here the sound drained away, as if the stone held its breath. Each footfall against the polished marble carried; Celeste’s heart thudded in time with it.

They stopped before a pair of rune‑covered doors, layers of enchantment stacked like sediment from successive administrations. Celeste ran a fingertip over a curved glyph that predated her grandmother and then along a sharper mark laid down in the last year. “This isn’t only Bagnold’s handiwork,” she breathed. “It’s centuries of ministers burying their secrets under other ministers’ wards.”

Declan’s breath fogged in the chill, and he gave a taut smile. “Let’s peel those layers,” he said, wand already half‑raised. Celeste’s voice tightened into the rhythm of a charm. “Repello Arcanum.” Warmth flowed from her wand, meeting the wards in a silent, contained duel. The runes stuttered, shivered as if waking, then winked out one by one. Stone responded with a low, reluctant groan and the doors eased.

The oak panels opened to reveal ranks of ebony cabinets, each one polished to a flat, mirror sheen, brass plaques catching the lanternlight in neat, unjudging lines. The room smelled of old glue, slow dust, and the faint sweetness of aged parchment. Declan held the lantern high; its cone of light cut the gloom and named the plaques: NOBBY LEACH, 1962–1968; HECTOR FAWLEY, 1925–1939. Names like anchors in a tide of quiet forgetfulness.

Celeste’s fingers trembled as they moved down the aisle. When Declan paused, hand still on the lantern, she followed his gaze to the cabinet stamped MILLICENT BAGNOLD, 1980–1990. He cracked the glass seal with a practiced wrist and the pane slid aside. Inside lay unsigned memos, minutes clipped and folded, and a crimson‑ribbon bundle marked “DEPARTMENT OF MAGICAL LAW ENFORCEMENT — Confidential.”

A draft teased the ribbon and Celeste’s breath snagged. She untied it carefully and drew out brittle sheets. “S. Black III interrogation, closed session,” she read under her breath, mouth narrowing at each word. Declan leaned in. “Subject wept uncontrollably, insisting ‘I killed Lily and James Potter.’ No Veritaserum used. Trial avoided to prevent public uproar. Sentence to stand.”

Celeste’s fingers went cold. “They punished trauma as guilt,” she whispered. She slid the pages into her satchel with a care that felt like laying a wounded thing to rest. Declan moved down the shelf and extracted a cracked leather folio bound with faded ribbon. “Bagnold’s notes on procedural exceptions,” he said. “Everything covers the last scandal with a thicker coat of varnish.”

A sound, sharp, deliberate boots on marble, bounced down the aisle. Celeste flattened herself to the cabinet’s lacquered edge; Declan dropped behind a stack of Fudge’s correspondence. The air seemed to tighten, as if the runes themselves bristled. Footsteps approached, measured, and the shadow of Auror Dawlish fell across the entrance.

He paused, lantern raised, nostrils working as if smelling for wrongness. Celeste’s voice was barely a thread. “Nox Disillusio.” Both wands flicked in practiced unison. Their robes blurred and dispersed; their outlines thinned until there was nothing but the faintest absence where they had been. Dawlish sniffed, frowned, muttered about drafts, and continued deeper into the vault without noticing the gap they’d made.

When his footsteps receded, Declan exhaled with a sound that was almost a laugh and almost a sob. Celeste popped back into visibility and, with the same small, certain gestures that had opened the doors, began re‑sealing glass and re‑weaving wards. The runes shimmered and took up their work again; the cabinet closed as if untouched.

They stepped out into the bright corridor, shoulders touching for an instant in a pact of cramped triumph. Celeste’s satchel was heavier with the stolen files, centuries of carefully laid obfuscation now reduced to a handful of brittle pages. Declan offered a shaky grin, voice low with the kind of excitement that bordered on fear. “When Amelia sees this—when she reads those interrogation notes—we’ll blow a hole in everything they thought was safe.”

Celeste let the possibility of what that would mean hang between them for a moment. Then she smoothed the ribbons in her satchel and moved with the current of midday ministry traffic, each step measured. Behind them the vault settled back into silence, the runes resuming their slow, patient duty. The secrets were out of the dark now, but the work to make the truth hold in the light had only just begun.

It was the second week of spring; light moved through the Ministry’s high windows like a slow tide, filling corridors with drafts and the faint, green‑fresh scent of hyacinths. Desks crouched under end‑of‑term piles, quills scratched, and the building thrummed, yet in Dolores Umbridge’s rose‑tinted office the hum felt like an insect under glass. She leaned over a small mountain of ragged notes, each one the careful gossip of an informant who did not ask questions aloud.

“They vanish before dawn,” a hooked‑nosed clerk whispered, lowering his voice until it was nearly a secret. “Miss Hargrove and Mr. Hawke slipping past Auror Office, lanterns and satchels, no warrants.”

A pale witch with painted nails clicked her quill against the blotter. “I saw them by the restricted wing, near the old vault corridor. They’ve been moving at night for days—quiet as mice.”

Umbridge’s smile smoothed itself into the expression she wore like armour. Patterns were folding themselves into place: late‑night transits, furtive meetings with archivists, an abrupt hush whenever Amelia’s protégé crossed a corridor. Her minions had no proof, only footprints and the hush of shutters, but that was often enough for a woman who knew how to build a case of appearances.

She rose with careful composure and arranged her skirts before the long bevelled mirror. “Perfect,” she murmured, lips tight with a private joy. “If I cannot prove their crime, I will discredit their champion.” Amelia Bones had become too trusted, too visible; to undermine Amelia, Umbridge decided, she would work inward, smear a protégé and watch the ripple widen.

Her chief clerk came close at her summons. “Hear this through the grapevine,” she instructed in a voice honeyed and precise. “Miss Hargrove has been seen rifling through files that do not concern her. Unofficial investigations risk exposing sensitive material and embarrassing the Minister. Spread the word that she is overstepping her bounds: reckless, presumptuous, a liability. And—quietly—remind them that such undisciplined behaviour comes from Amelia Bones’ stable.”

No time was wasted. Clad in her characteristic colour, Umbridge slid into the Minister’s private office with a flutter of pretence. “Minister,” she purred, leaning forward with an artful look of alarm, “unauthorised enquiries—particularly those conducted by Ms Hargrove—are being whispered about. Amelia values procedure, yes, but her insistence on exhaustive audits risks bringing our work to a halt in a tide of red tape.” Each syllable painted Amelia as cumbersome and Celeste as a flinty, rogue agent. Fudge, already skittish under pressure, signed at the suggestion of oversight; a surprise inspection of Celeste’s quarters was ordered by lunchtime.

By noon, aurors moved through Celeste’s rooms with bureaucratic efficiency. Trunks were forced, drawers upended; private notebooks lay exposed on the bed like flayed creatures. Celeste stood by the hearth while an officious clerk rifled through pages, the indignity of it worse than any charm. Everyone’s rituals and charms, those neat habits of secrecy, could not protect her from a raid arranged in polished ink.

When news of the search reached Amelia, she was mid‑statute in her study. She strode from the library with a quill tucked behind her ear and the kind of anger that makes a woman quicken her step without losing her balance. The charge was a stunt, she knew; yet the Ministry ran on procedure, and procedure could bind them both until the inquiry moved or was dismissed. Until then, neither she nor Celeste could step beyond certain thresholds without formal permission. The investigation into Sirius Black would stall unless she forced the rules to work for them.

Amelia settled behind her heavy desk in the DMLE library, the hush of parchment wrapping around her like a cape. Declan hovered, lantern dim at his side, a look that was equal parts restlessness and hope. Before her lay four bound volumes, each thick with affidavits, approvals, precise citations of Articles 47 and 52. She tapped the corner of the first volume with the quill and, with slow deliberation, began to assemble their defence.

They called witnesses. Archivist Lydia Greengrass spoke with the crisp clarity of someone used to being asked to remember precisely: “Ms Hargrove accessed only vault indices approved in writing by Minister Fudge.” Clerk Marten Whitaker swore to Celeste’s meticulous record‑keeping. Groundskeeper Orlo Finch corroborated midnight wanderings as maintenance, not clandestine searches. Each flat, careful statement read like a small hammer striking at Umbridge’s thin case.

By mid-afternoon the volumes moved on crimson‑lined trolleys through the winding corridors to the Office of Legal Enquiries. The gossip moved as swiftly as ink on a fresh page; before long the department knew that Amelia Bones had filed an injunction. The DMLE hummed with a different current now, watchful, buoyed; whispers of solidarity threaded through doorways and quill scratched replies in margins.

In the hearing chamber Umbridge sat pale‑cheeked, cardigan perfect, palms folded. Three senior examiners stood with quills poised. Amelia placed the volumes before them with the composed gravity of a person who knew how to make law visible.

“Esteemed examiners,” she began, voice even, each syllable measured to land where it would do the most work, “I submit sworn affidavits from three senior Ministry officers, written approvals for each vault index accessed by Ms Hargrove, and a petition under Article 52, Section A requesting suspension of further searches until formal charges are laid. If no specific allegations are provided in writing by the end of official hours, I shall escalate this to the Wizengamot for administrative abuse.”

A brittle silence settled. Umbridge’s pink smile tightened; she lifted a ledger as if to clap down the moment with pomposity, then let out her practiced preamble, voice saccharine and sharp: “Hum‑hum — surel—”

“This is neither the place nor the role for commentary from the Minister’s office,” Amelia interrupted, her finger rising like a judge’s placard. Her tone was calm, but it cut the chamber with the same precision as a summons: measured, undeniable. “The Office of Legal Enquiries alone adjudicates motions of injunction. I ask that only the examiners rule on this matter.”

Umbridge’s mouth opened, closed, then opened again; colour flamed into her cheeks as the sugar‑coated manners curdled into something fiercer. “Madam Bones—” she began, voice strangled between outrage and wounded entitlement, “this concerns the Minister’s administration—”

Amelia’s gaze did not shift. “It concerns procedure,” she said, each word deliberate. “And procedural questions fall under this Office. We will not tolerate jurisdictional overreach disguised as counsel.”

For a long beat the chamber watched Umbridge unpeel her composure. Her lips pressed into a thin line; the ledger trembled in her hand. Then, as if a private engine of rage engaged, she smiled too sweetly and forced a measured nod. “Very well,” she said, the words brittle as cracked porcelain; the anger behind them glittered like broken glass. The clerk who had reached for the ledger withdrew his arm. The examiners leaned forward, the balance of authority returned to the dais.

“Article 47 requires defined scope for any inquiry before searches may proceed,” Amelia reminded them. “Article 52 forbids further inspections lacking sworn testimony of improper conduct. An auror’s rights, and the Ministry’s credibility, are at stake.”

The examiners leaned together and whispered; the sound was small but urgent. One of them straightened and spoke, voice dry and even. “Madam Bones, your motion is procedurally sound. The question before this bench is why those protections were not observed.”

A colour crept into Umbridge’s cheeks. She snapped the ledger shut with a little theatrical gasp and pushed herself to her feet as though affronted privilege demanded immediate redress. “This is a distraction,” she trilled, every syllable varnished with faux concern. “We have matters of national security—of public order—to consider. I must insist that these procedural points not impede urgent enquiries.”

Amelia’s hand rose, a single precise movement that held the room. She did not look at Umbridge as she answered, her voice was cool and businesslike, the voice that set things in order. “The Office rules on procedure, not on politics. The question is not whether an inquiry feels urgent, but whether it was lawfully authorised. The protections I cite exist to prevent the very sort of overreach we appear to be investigating.”

Umbridge’s smile curdled. She stamped a small, gloved foot and opened her mouth again, angrier now, the syrup gone from the tone. “Surely the Minister’s signature should be sufficient—”

“Ministerial signature does not substitute for sworn testimony and defined scope,” the lead examiner cut in, rapping his desk. “In light of these submissions, and until a detailed statement of charges is provided in writing, the Office rules that all searches of Ms Hargrove’s personal effects be suspended.”

For an instant Umbridge’s eyes flashed with calculation; she swallowed and straightened, the mask snapping back into place, thin and brittle. She made one last, clipped attempt—“I protest the delay this creates”—but the chamber had already folded back into procedure. The clerk lowered the ledger; the examiners’ decision hung in the air like a seal.

Amelia let the moment stand. She might have pressed the matter further—exposed every overreach, every shortcut—but she had other investigations already burning in her mind, threads that led to darker rooms than the one Umbridge occupied. Instead, she inclined her head once, small and unreadable, and said, “So ordered.”

Amelia allowed herself a private, satisfied curl of her mouth. Umbridge’s smile thinned into a tight, simmering fury, her fingers clawing the ledger’s edge as if to launch herself from her seat. Her scheme had misfired; for now, procedure had become their protection.

Outside the chamber Celeste let out a breath she had not known she was holding. “You did it,” she whispered, voice trembling with something like gratitude and relief.

Amelia set a firm hand on her protégé’s shoulder. “The law gives us cover,” she said. “Now we use that cover to buy time.”

Word of the ruling moved through the Department like a rising tide. Aurors straightened in their coats, clerks leaned from doorways, and the corridors hummed with a renewed confidence. Umbridge, back in her rose‑tinted office, stared at the court ruling parchment until her face flushed; she was not vanquished, only thwarted, and thwarted pride was a thing that festered.

That evening Amelia and Celeste walked the marble halls under a quiet curtain of wisteria scent. The Sirius Black inquiry had been delayed—not halted—and they had the statute in their hands now to proceed with safety. Celeste slipped her wand beneath her arm, resolve bright in her step. Amelia matched her pace, a steady presence at her side.

They moved forward into a next phase of careful, formal work: summoning witnesses, cross‑checking ledgers, and preparing testimony that could not be dismissed. The corridors kept their ordinary bustle; the campaign of papers had tilted the balance a fraction. The fight for justice, procedural and patient, had new momentum, and they walked into it with plans already forming between them.

Minister Fudge swept into the vaulted chamber of the Wizengamot before the first councillor had taken his seat, his face a flushed canvas of indignation. His voice ricocheted against marble and oak. “Madam Bones,” he barked, “explain to me—at once—why you have convened the entire Wizengamot without so much as a by‑your‑leave to the Minister’s office!”

Amelia rose from the gallery with the quiet certainty of someone who knows the weight of a law before she speaks it. The torchlight picked out the careful planes of her face. “Minister,” she said, steadier than the chamber’s murmur, “this session is to open the long‑overdue review of the conviction of Sirius Black.”

Dolores Umbridge at Fudge’s side inhaled as though preparing a theatrical retort; her rose‑pink cardigan hardly trembled with affectation. “Preposterous,” she purred with that honey‑venom she favoured. “He was convicted ten years ago. If you require drama, Amelia, perhaps you might spare the court and take a holiday.”

Fudge snapped his glare at Amelia. “A trial? We condemned him. He served a decade in Azkaban!”

Amelia inclined her head slightly toward Albus Dumbledore, who stood beneath a carved arch, the silver of his beard catching the light like a pale ribbon. “Professor Dumbledore, would you care to confirm whether Sirius Black ever received a formal trial?” she asked.

For a beat Dumbledore’s face softened and whatever private burden he carried shifted. He spoke plainly, the old cadence of confession in the quiet: “There was no trial. Only a ministerial edict, and a closed session. No witnesses, no defence, no transcript.”

A hush rippled through the chamber; murmurs like distant wings rose and fell. Dumbledore tapped the gavel twice and the assembled court folded into sudden, formal silence. “Order,” he intoned. “The court is now open. The Accusation Chair will receive Mr. Sirius Black.”

From the antechamber, they brought him in, gaunt, thinner than portraits suggested, every line of him shaped by ten years of cold. The Accusation Chair’s enchanted chains unfurled with a soft, metallic whisper, coiling cool and precise around wrists and ankles while attendants steadied him. A collective intake of breath moved through the benches as councillors read the man in front of them: not the caricature of treachery painted over years, but a person who had been hollowed by neglect and incarceration.

Clerks and page boys scattered whispering scrolls; scribes poised ready to catch the ledger of testimony. Dumbledore’s gavel struck again. “We begin with testimony,” he said.

When Peter Pettigrew was ushered in, rumpled, eyes darting, every small motion a tremor, the chamber’s air thickened into outrage and incredulity. Amelia stepped forward, placing a thick, bound sheaf of parchment on the clerk’s table with the deliberate care of a person who knows what evidence should look like. “I present my transcript of Mr. Pettigrew’s interrogation under Veritaserum,” she announced. “Alternatively, I offer that he repeats the potion before this assembly to remove all doubt.”

A ripple of anxious counsel drifted from the ranks of those whose names the confession might touch. Lucius Malfoy, resplendent in plum robes, lifted a sneer, but even his voice carried the edge of caution. “We may as well accept the written report,” he said, but the hush that followed bore the unstated fear: a forced truth potion could unpick many a comfortable lie.

Pettigrew’s hand went up in a thin, frantic plea. “I swear—no, I implore—this court—” His voice cracked into the chamber, thin as thread. “I am innocent! I served as the Potters’ Secret Keeper under duress. I never meant—”

Dumbledore’s gavel came down like a measured bell. “The court finds the Veritaserum testimony sufficient,” he pronounced. The word settled into the benches like falling dust. “Mr. Pettigrew will be remanded to face a separate trial for his role in the deaths of the Potters and other atrocities attributed to his actions.”

Amelia called Registrar Thornberry and Archivist Moreland forward; they walked with the air of people who have been guardians of paper for decades and who know how easily memory can be smoothed into myth. Registrar Thornberry’s spectacles flashed; she swore that no hearing transcript existed for Sirius’s conviction. Archivist Moreland corroborated that deep‑file wards had hidden margin notes and footnotes crucial to reconstructing the administrative chain. Scribe Owen Trevelyan slid a stack of hastily prepared transfer logs across the table: arrest, booking, Azkaban transfer, all within a brutal span of hours and none of the formal signatures that give law its weight. The last line on the final page was a sudden, blank space where a judge’s warrant should have been.

Amelia’s voice laid out the case with the precision of one who understands both statute and consequence. “We do not let rumour stand as justice,” she told the bench. “We require due process. We will hear testimony not of supposition, but of record and of character.”

To that end she called witnesses to testify to Sirius Black the man, not the figure of fear. Magister Helena Fairweather, a friend from childhood days, approached the bench and described a boy with a laugh that filled a room and a loyalty that was a kind of stubborn righteousness. “Sirius loved James and Lily,” she said, the sentence simple and absolute; it landed like a soft rebuttal to the rumour’s hard edges.

Auror Gideon Thorne, dust in the cuffs of his cloak, eyes rimmed with fatigue from a long career, spoke to the night of the arrest. “On that night my squad found Mr. Black gaunt, unarmed, and overwhelming distraught. The alley was wrecked; he shouted that it was his fault. He was not arrogant, he was shattered.” His testimony mapped the difference between a man who had committed horrors and a man ruined by grief and shock.

Amelia laid the closed‑session files on the table with the same calm deliberation she used when filing a warrant; the parchments made a small, authoritative rustle. The decrees, the department stamp, the crisply inked signatures, all were there, and then the absence that mattered most: no notation of a hearing, no line where a judge’s verdict should sit. She let the silence hold for a moment, then spoke.

“We will call previous minister Millicent Bagnold to the stand,” she announced. The chamber rippled; Bagnold’s name carried the weight of a Ministerial era whose policies had shaped the Ministry’s recent temperament.

The doors opened and a solicitor from the foreign missions presented a sealed statement. Amelia read it aloud, careful, as if each syllable were a statute: Bagnold’s health prevented travel, and in lieu of appearance she had supplied a sworn affidavit acknowledging that she had signed the decree. Her statement made plain that she had expected due process to follow the custody order she approved. The words landed in the benches with the quiet authority of an oath; murmurs threaded through the rows as councillors digested that even the ministerial signature carried caveats.

“Noted and entered into the record,” Dumbledore intoned. The air shifted; an earlier assumption, that a ministerial signature equalled unquestionable urgency, was no longer unassailable.

Amelia rose again and, with the same steely economy, called for Bartemius Crouch Sr. The heavy chamber doors swung wide, and Crouch’s polished shoes tapped the marble in a precise, confident rhythm. He accepted the stand with an expression used to certainty.

“We convened in closed session,” Crouch said, voice brittle with the firmness of someone who had believed crisis justified haste. “Evidence suggested immediate danger. A public hearing would have risked panic. We acted for public safety.”

Amelia’s question was measured, each word an instrument: “As Head of the DMLE, you were entrusted to balance urgency with the protections of law. You sanctioned incarceration without an open hearing, yet later ensured judicial review for your son. How do you reconcile treating one individual as beyond a hearing and another as entitled to review?”

The room tightened. Crouch’s jaw worked; for the first time his composure showed a hairline fracture. “We believed the evidence unambiguous. We prioritized lives in a time of panic,” he repeated. The conviction in his voice trembled where it met the bench’s quiet scrutiny.

Then Amelia turned toward the single figure whose presence had been invoked at every step of the decree. “Professor Dumbledore,” she said, “as Supreme Mugwump you occupied a position of trust. Please recount your knowledge of the chain of custody and the expectation of due process at the time.”

Dumbledore’s face, usually a calm mask, moved through a series of small, honest shifts, a flicker of memory, the pull of regret. He drew in a breath and spoke with the soft gravity of a man admitting an omission.

“I signed the custody approval submitted to me that night,” he began, voice steady though quiet. “It was represented as a measure to secure a dangerous situation while a formal hearing could be arranged. I believed the Ministry would proceed with the customary safeguards. I did not know that no such hearing would be convened. For my part in allowing a custody order to become an effective sentence without public adjudication, I am regretful.”

A ripple of stunned quiet followed. Amelia pressed on, not to shame but to clarify: “Did you sign any papers or give any authority that explicitly waived the right to a hearing, or was your signature given under the expectation that judicial process would follow immediately?”

Dumbledore closed his eyes for a breath, then met her gaze. “No waiver was presented to me. My signature was an assurance that custody—temporary—was necessary. I confess I failed to ensure the procedural step that would make that temporary custody subject to due legal oversight.”

The admission struck the chamber with the force of truth rather than accusation. Even Dolores Umbridge’s habitual composure faltered into a thin, drawn line; the contrast between Dumbledore’s contrition and Crouch’s defensive certainty created a new seam in the narrative.

Amelia allowed the bench to absorb the distinction. “So, the custody order went forward under ministerial urgency, Bagnold’s signature carried the expectation of process, Crouch sanctioned swift action for public safety, and you, Supreme Mugwump, signed the custody approval believing hearings would follow. The absence of any recorded hearing is therefore not an administrative oversight alone but a failure of the safeguards we place to protect citizen rights.”

Councillors bent over their parchments, quills poised. The record now showed a layered responsibility: a ministerial signature with caveats, a DMLE head who prioritized immediacy, and a Supreme Mugwump who acknowledged a misjudgement. The legal frame, statute, procedure, and the moral obligation it demanded, hung clearly for the vote that would follow.

When Amelia invited Sirius to speak, the chamber held its breath. Minister Fudge snapped forward like a man caught unexpectedly on a stage. “Confess it, Mr. Black,” he barked, tone sharpened with triumph. “Admit you betrayed Lily and James Potter and spare this court another performance.”

Dolores Umbridge’s smile was a blade folded in rose silk. She chimed in, the sweetness of her voice cutting: “Think carefully, Mr. Black. A full confession today would make things simpler for everyone. There is mercy in honesty. Confess, and we may temper the consequences.”

Sirius’s jaw tightened. For a moment the pressure in the galleries pressed at him like a physical thing. He raised his chin and met Fudge’s glare with a voice that trembled but did not break. “I never saw a trial,” he said plainly. “I was condemned on fear and rumour. I did not betray Lily and James.”

Fudge leaned in, nostrils working. “You screamed that you killed them the night we arrested you. That is an important fact, Mr. Black. The court remembers that the man at the scene confessed. Why should we not accept the simplest reading of the evidence?”

Umbridge tapped her fingers together and smiled. “People say much in panic. But the public needs certainty. If you were truly innocent, you would not have been found at the scene nor given the statements you now deny. If you were overcome with guilt and confessed, admit it now and show you are contrite.”

Sirius’s eyes flashed with a mixture of anger and exhaustion. “Do you want my confession because you seek the truth, or because you want the comfort of a tidy narrative?” His voice rose just enough to be heard across the benches. “You can demand whatever you like, but you took me away before a single hearing. You offered no defence. You relied on fear and called it verdict.”

Fudge’s face reddened; Umbridge’s pink composure thinned into impatience. “The public will not abide ambiguity,” Fudge snapped. “It is our duty to offer clarity.”

“It is also our duty to offer justice,” Amelia interjected, stepping forward so her voice bridged the space between the accused and his accusers. “The difference is the law. Mr. Black’s words must be weighed, not coerced. This court will not be satisfied with theatrics dressed as confession.”

Umbridge’s smile sharpened into something colder. “And yet, Madam Bones, the court should consider every utterance that sheds light on a man’s conscience. If Mr. Black admits guilt freely, who are we to deny the weight of his own words?”

Sirius turned to Umbridge, the exhaustion in him folding into fierce clarity. He took a breath like someone lining up for a fight. “Ask yourselves this: what more could I possibly say to prove I did not betray Lily and James?” His voice carved through the chamber. “Pettigrew stood under Veritaserum and spoke. If you doubt his testimony, if the memory of that night is what you claim to weigh—then test me the same way. Put me under Veritaserum. Let the truth come or stop pretending confession will stitch a wound you never tried to heal.”

The words landed with the force of thrown glass. For a second the room was a held thing between beats. Fudge’s triumphant expression faltered; Umbridge’s fingers stilled on the ledger as if the ink itself had been cauterised. The minister opened his mouth and closed it again; the courtiers who had fed on spectacle found their banquet gone.

“You would submit to Veritaserum?” the lead examiner asked, voice small in the sudden silence.

“I would,” Sirius said, every syllable an iron promise. “If the Ministry will not produce proof otherwise, then take my words under oath. See whether I lie.”

A low murmur rippled—this was not the performance Fudge had hoped for. Umbridge’s sweetness curdled into a quick, sharp intake of breath; her cheeks flushed with the first public thing she had not wholly controlled. Fudge’s hand hovered uselessly over his papers.

Amelia’s face remained composed, but something in her eyes tightened. The offer had cut the room’s momentum like an instrument plucked too hard. The examiners exchanged looks that no rhetoric could soothe. For once, the demand for certainty had been met with an unflinching test, and the courtroom found itself strangely disarmed.

A ripple of murmurs swept the chamber. Fudge’s hand closed into a fist on the bench. “Very well,” he said through clenched teeth, attempting to reclaim his composure. “The court will note your defiance.”

Sirius sank back into his seat, not triumphant but steadied, having forced the measure of proof the court claimed to hunger for. For a moment he simply stared at the ceiling as if drawing breath from the rafters; the gallery watched, the judges considered, and Fudge and Umbridge found the wind taken from their sails.

Amelia held the quiet even as she called for the next witness. The exchange had marked the attempt, the thin coercion wrapped in rhetoric, but it had also shown the court that forced confessions and public hunger for tidy answers could never substitute for due process.

Amelia then called Dr. Winifred Hawthorn, Chief Mental Specialist at St. Mungo’s, who spoke not of guilt but of the human mind’s brittle honesty in trauma. “Panic can masquerade as confession,” she explained. “Shock rewrites memory; regret and horror can make a man confess to acts he believes himself capable of, even when he is not.” Her words reframed the earlier testimony: shock, not admission, could explain the ravings that had been taken as proof.

Councillors dipped quills and leaned toward their parchments. The weight of law, testimony, record, and the gravity of unverified confession, settled over the hall like a shroud. When Dumbledore rapped his gavel and called for the vote, it was not emptiness they were voting on but the principle that law exists to constrain power, not to be a tool for hurried reprisal.

Dumbledore’s gavel fell one last time. “The verdict is in,” he intoned. “Sirius Black is cleared of all charges. He shall receive compensation for wrongful imprisonment and be remanded to St. Mungo’s for immediate physical and psychological rehabilitation.”

A sound that was almost a cheer rose, stiff, careful, but genuine. The Accusation Chair’s chains unwound in a precise little clatter, Sirius rose with tears in his eyes, every movement laden with disbelief and a fragile sort of hope. Two healers took his arms, and Amelia supported him as they moved. Photographers’ lenses flashed, capturing blurred, bright moments that would, by midday, travel the length and breadth of the wizarding world.

While the chamber exhaled into stunned, relieved silence, news already began to spool outward. In a cramped Charing Cross printshop molten type hammered delicate paper: TRUTH FLOWS AT WIZENGAMOT—BLACK EXONERATED. The printers’ hands worked with the fever of people who sense a story that must be told. Bundles of the Prophet were tied and loaded; owls in Diagon Alley were strapped with copies and set to flight. The morning sky, pale and cold, filled with the slow beat of feathered messengers bearing a name that would soon be spoken with new weight in households across the country.

White‑robed healers moved through the antechamber with calm efficiency. A soft cloak was drawn about Sirius’s narrowing shoulders; a litter was readied, and a pewter jug of warm broth was set near his knees. The first real colour in his eyes, the shimmer of a future he had not dared imagine, was captured in the quick strobe of a photographer’s flash.

Amelia stepped into a floo circle beneath the Ministry’s great hearth; the familiar green sparks wrapped her and carried her toward St. Mungo’s. At the hospital she threaded through hushed corridors to the recovery wing where healers had already readied a narrow cot. The air here smelled of herbs, brewed cordial, and the linen scent of a place attempting to make whole what cold had broken. A healer checked a pulse; another adjusted a pillow. The urgency in the healing rooms was gentler than the urgency that had filled the court, now it oriented only to mending.

Sirius’s lashes fluttered. His eyes opened and met Amelia’s. For a long breath they simply looked at one another: the woman who had untied the strands of a decade’s injustice and the man who had been the common thread of so many nights. Gratitude and cautious wonder mingled on his face, fragile as the first green on a winter branch.

Amelia lingered for a moment, not with statements or strategies but with the small human tasks a wronged man needs first: ensuring a blanket was warm, a cup of broth at hand, a healer’s promise that sleep would come. Then, as the immediate calm settled, she returned to the ledger. There would be affidavits to file, compensation to order, records to amend. The law’s mending work was slow, as careful as stitching bone back to bone.

Outside, the city roiled with the news. The morning that had begun with wind and rumour would ripple out into a week of hearings and appeals, letters from those who suffered and from those who sought vindication. For now, the room at St. Mungo’s held a single reclaimed life and a woman whose hand had opened a locked file and, in doing so, set a long arc toward justice.

Amelia stepped back into the corridor, shoulders eased but not unburdened. The trial’s verdict closed only one door; many more would open—investigations, reckonings, and the slow administrative work of making a legal system own its mistakes. She had cleared a name and called the Ministry to account; the rest would be a steady, detailed undoing of concealment.

Sirius slept at last, a soft evenness in his breath. Amelia stood beside the cot and made a list in her mind: witness statements to cross‑check, compensation disbursements, a petition to ensure his name was cleared in every official ledger. She folded that list into her pocket alongside the feeling of the man’s hand in hers for a breath. Then she walked out into the slow, bright spill of a London morning, the city’s noises already stitching themselves into ordinary life, and she began the next round of work.

Chapter Text

Morning light filtered through the enchanted windows of the Great Hall, gilding every carved table leg and turning the long-winged banners into molten gold. Breakfast chatter hummed like a distant spell until, without warning, the air thundered with the flutter of hundreds of wings. An army of owls—barn, tawny, screech, and snowy—spiralled down from the rafters, talons clutching scrolls emblazoned with the Daily Prophet’s logo. Parchments cascaded onto every table in a flurry of feathers and gasps, sending goblets rattling and candles flickering.

Harry, Hermione, and Ron froze mid-reach for toast, eyes wide as parchment unrolled itself before them. Hermione’s quill hovered above her essay, Ron’s juice trembled in his fist, and Harry felt his heart hitch in his chest. Whispers snapped through the tables like flaming curses: “Daily Prophet Special Edition!” “What’s happened?” “Is it… could it be?”

At the Gryffindor table, unfolding the scroll with trembling fingers, Hermione cleared her throat and read aloud:

SPECIAL BREAKFAST EDITION – The Daily Prophet
By RITA SKEETER, Senior Columnist

My dearest gossip-hounds, prepare to clutch your tea and possibly your nearest ceramic gnome because yesterday’s explosive Wizengamot ruling has splintered the very foundations of Magical justice! In what can only be described as the Trial of the Century, Sirius Black, once reviled far and wide as the Deceiver of the Potters, was declared INNOCENT by a unanimous decree, sending shockwaves through every corridor from Diagon Alley to the darkest cells of Azkaban.

Hermione paused, voice quivering. A flicker of uncertainty danced in her gaze as a Slytherin prefect’s smirk caught her eye. Across the Hall, a Hufflepuff third year dropped his cup in surprise, and a Ravenclaw boy whispered, “I never thought I’d see this day.” Professor McGonagall’s stern features softened, and even Snape’s shadowed glare betrayed surprise. Ron’s usual bravado softened into quiet pride; he mouthed, “It’s finally happening.”

Hermione steadied her quill and continued reading:

Yesterday, at the heart of the Wizengamot’s marble chambers, ten years of anguish and unanswered questions were swept away with four simple words: “Sirius Black, Not Guilty.” Behind closed doors, secret confessions were unveiled, damning records emerged from hidden archives, and high-ranking officials, once thought untouchable, offered eyebrow-raising admissions. The man the Wizarding world condemned has at last walked free.

A ripple of astonished gasps raced through the tables. A fifth year murmured, “Not Guilty?” as if tasting the words for the first time. Percy’s hand flew to his mouth. A Ravenclaw prefect leaned forward, quill poised: “That’s… unprecedented.” From the Slytherin table, Pansy Parkinson scoffed, but her eyes betrayed fascination. A faint tremor shivered through the enchanted windowpanes.

Hermione inhaled deeply and read on:

Under the unforgiving gaze of Veritaserum, Peter Pettigrew, so long thought dead, quivered as he confessed to a trembling court that he alone betrayed Lily and James Potter. “I manipulated events so Black would take the fall,” he admitted, voice cracking like ice. No longer can this rat-faced coward hide behind shadows: every forged statement, every silenced witness, every lie he spun has been laid bare for all to see.

For more on Pettigrew’s veritaserum testimony, dear reader, see page 5.

A collective shudder ran through the students. Neville gripped Harry’s arm so tight his fingers whitened. “I can’t believe he lived with that guilt,” he whispered. Professor Flitwick exhaled a soft, sorrowful sigh, the scent of burnt toast mingling with candle smoke.

Hermione cleared her throat once more and read on:

Yet the greatest scandal of all falls squarely at the feet of Bartemius Crouch Sr., former Head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement. How did one man’s gut instinct become the lynchpin of a decade-long miscarriage of justice? No witness sworn, no testimony transcribed, no formal hearing convened—just a sealed decree condemning an innocent soul.

 For more on Crouch Sr.’s dereliction of duty, dear reader, see page 7.

From the back, a Slytherin boy muttered, “Typical Ministry mess-up.” The Gryffindor prefect at the end of the table leaned in, voice low: “Headlines won’t restore the lost years.” At the Gryffindor table, Ron slammed a fist down, rattling his knife against the plate. Hermione’s lips pressed into a thin line of outrage.

Hermione’s voice gained urgency as she continued:

Where, one must ask, was former Minister Millicent Bagnold while an innocent wizard languished behind iron bars? Rumour has it she was “conveniently abroad,” leaving the fateful seal buried beneath layers of secret wards. Now, current Minister Cornelius Fudge strides into the light, chest puffed in self-congratulation, proclaiming, “My administration has righted the wrongs of the previous!”

A chorus of sceptical murmurs rose. A Hufflepuff girl exchanged a look with a Ravenclaw prefect: “Righted them? We’ll see.” McGonagall tapped her table thoughtfully, jaw clenched.

Hermione inhaled and pressed on:

Pointed Question for You, Dear Reader: When a clandestine edict can condemn an innocent for ten years, can we truly trust the Ministry to guard our liberties? Will freshly inked statutes prevent such cover-ups, or merely paper them over for another generation of scapegoats? Or is the only safeguard the vigilance of every witch and wizard with the courage to speak out?

Silence. In the High Table gallery, Professors Binns and Trelawney exchanged a rare look of agreement.

Hermione’s tone brightened as she read the next paragraph:

Enter Amelia Bones, Head of the Justice Wing, whose tireless pursuit of truth shattered the Ministry’s stone-cold walls. With iron-clad evidence, fearless courtroom performance, and a mind sharper than any Occamy feather, she unearthed hidden wards and decoded charmed documents that officials hoped would remain buried in the Department’s vaults. Without her, Sirius Black might still languish under Azkaban’s dementor-clouded skies.

A low murmur of admiration swelled. Hermione could see wonder sparkle in Ron’s eyes. “She’s incredible,” he breathed. Professor Sinistra in the staff gallery offered an approving nod.

Hermione’s voice softened as she reached the final lines:

And so, the final verdict rings clear: Sirius Black has been exonerated, awarded full restitution for wrongful imprisonment, and remanded to St. Mungo’s Hospital for both physical and psychological rehabilitation. The echoes of a decade’s torment now give way to applause, flash-bulb photographs, and the promise of healing. May he recover swiftly, his spirit unbroken, and may this Trial of the Century serve as a wake-up call to every marbled corridor of power.

A swell of relief coursed through the Hall. Harry exhaled, shoulders finally slack. Hermione’s quill trembled with emotion, and Ron’s grin was uncontainable.

Hermione cleared her throat one last time and finished:

Stay tuned, my darling gossip-hounds, for in the wake of this storm the ripples of truth will continue to wash over every vault and vellum-lined chamber. And remember: when the Ministry whispers “for your protection,” make sure you’re listening for the story they don’t want you to hear.

A stunned hush followed. Plates were forgotten, goblets left half-full. Then, as one, the students erupted into conversation: some jubilant, some sceptical. A first year cried out, “It’s a new dawn for wizarding justice!” while a Ravenclaw quietly mused, “Words aren’t enough.”

Professor McGonagall stood, voice firm: “Let this be a lesson: don’t let idle gossip guide you—always seek the facts for yourself.” Hagrid leaned forward, voice thick with pride, “Well said, Professor.” Snape merely folded his arms but did not look away, a silent acknowledgment of the truth laid bare.

Hermione closed the scroll and met her friends’ eyes. A flicker of determination lit her features. Harry’s fierce smile shone brighter than any candlelight. Ron reached out, gave Harry’s shoulder a hearty clap, and declared, “To justice, even if it comes late!”

Moments after the Hall’s tumult died to a buzzing undercurrent, Susan Bones slipped through the crowd toward the Gryffindor table. Her robes were neat, her auburn hair pulled back in a brisk braid, but her eyes held a gentler light than usual.

“Harry, Hermione, Ron,” she said, voice warm but hushed. She laid a small, parchment-wrapped bundle on the bench beside Hermione’s parchment. “A message from my aunt.”

Hermione scooted over, and Harry’s hand trembled as he untied the ribbon. Ron leaned in, curiosity and concern etched on his face.

Inside, two letters lay side by side.

Harry picked up the first. In neat, confident script it read:

“Mr Potter
I promised I would right this wrong, and I have. Sirius walks free today because I kept my word to you and to justice itself. Thank you for your patience and your trust.
Amelia Bones, Head of the DMLE”

A genuine smile spread across Harry’s face. He let out a breath like he’d been holding it for years. “She did it,” he said softly, then turned to the next letter without hesitation.

He unfolded it carefully, reading aloud:

“Dear Harry,
I’m not sure if you remember me, but I was very close to your parents, James and Lily. They even named me your godfather. I owe you more than I can say for standing by my name and contacting Amelia Bones on my behalf. I’m terribly sorry I couldn’t protect you or them, and that you’ve had to grow up believing the worst about me.

Though I’m free now, the Ministry insists I remain in rehabilitation at St. Mungo’s. I don’t know how long it will take to mend what ten years behind Azkaban stone walls, and worse, my own guilt, have done to me.

When I’m released, I would be honoured if you’d come live with me or, if you’re happy where you are, that you’d at least visit during school breaks. I understand you may already have a life, and I won’t presume. But my home is your home whenever you choose.

Write to me by owl. I want nothing more than to keep in touch and rebuild what was torn apart.

Your godfather,
Sirius”

Harry’s grin widened until his eyes sparkled. He folded the letter neatly, voice steady and bright. “He’s free, Ron. And he can’t wait to see me.” He glanced at Hermione and then at Susan. “Tell your Aunt Amelia I’m in her debt—and Sirius, I’ll write today.”

Ron clapped him on the shoulder. “That’s brilliant news, mate.”

Hermione beamed. “I’m so happy for you, Harry.”

Susan gave a small, satisfied nod. “You’ve both earned this moment.”

Harry stood and stretched his arms wide, all the teenage confidence of a young man who finally feels truly connected. “I’m going to write him back right now,” he announced. Then, parchment in hand and hope in his heart, he strode off toward the owlery, eager to begin a new chapter.

***

Later that evening, Harry returned to the Gryffindor common room clutching his books when Professor McGonagall appeared at the foot of the stairs. Her robes were immaculate, her expression composed but urgent.

“Mr. Potter,” she called softly, pausing only to nod at Ron and Hermione before directing her gaze back to Harry. “Professor Dumbledore would like to see you in his office at once. Please make your way there when you’re ready.”

Harry’s heart fluttered. He rose, murmuring a thank-you, and followed McGonagall through silent corridors lit by the soft glow of late evening lanterns. Dusk settled outside, twilight filtering through the arched windows and mingling with the lantern light. The castle felt hushed, as if holding its breath for what was to come.

At the top of the spiral staircase, McGonagall halted before the stone gargoyle. She tapped its head with her wand; it swung aside without a word. Inside, the Headmaster’s office lay bathed in warm lamplight, Fawkes dozing on his gilded perch.

“Good evening, Harry,” Dumbledore greeted from behind his desk, folding his hands over a scattering of papers. He rose to his full height. “Thank you for coming so promptly.”

Harry stepped forward and lowered himself into the high-backed armchair. “You wanted to see me, sir?”

Dumbledore’s eyes twinkled. “Indeed. You have surely heard that Sirius Black’s name has been cleared.” Harry nodded, relief still fluttering through him. “I have good news: the Ministry has arranged for you to visit Sirius at St. Mungo’s Hospital. Beginning next Saturday, and every other week thereafter, you will have permission to see him—always in the company of an appointed Healer, of course.”

A bright warmth spread through Harry’s chest. “Thank you, Professor. I’ve wanted to know how he’s doing.”

McGonagall, standing quietly to one side, offered a small, approving smile.

Dumbledore raised a gentle finger. “There is one important matter: ten weeks remain until your exams. I trust you understand how vital it is to balance these visits with your studies. Sirius would want you to press on with your lessons.”

Harry straightened. “I will, sir. I promise I won’t let my grades slip.”

“Excellent,” Dumbledore said, returning to his desk. “That is all I ask.” He paused, then looked up. “Minerva—if you please.”

McGonagall bowed and slipped out, closing the gargoyle behind her. The sudden hush left only Dumbledore’s soft breathing and the faint ticking of a bronze clock on his desk.

“There is more I wish to discuss,” Dumbledore said, voice gentle but firm. “Amelia Bones told me you were the first to press for Sirius’s reinvestigation. I confess, I wonder… how did you come to know he was innocent?”

Harry’s pulse thundered. He bit his lip, feeling the heat rise in his cheeks as he glanced at a stack of parchment stamped with the Wizengamot seal, a silent reminder of high-powered magic and secrecy. He swallowed hard, unsure how to answer. Fawkes stirred in his sleep, a tailfeather brushing the crystal inkwell with a soft clink.

“By… a stroke of luck,” he began, voice thick. “We uncovered that Ron’s pet rat was really Peter Pettigrew in disguise, and knowing that Susan Bones’s aunt headed the DMLE, we passed our findings along to her niece. She carried them straight to Madam Bones.” He pressed his fingers to his palms, remorse flickering across his expression.

At those words, Fawkes lifted his head, ruffling his crimson feathers as though sensing the room’s tension.

Dumbledore’s eyebrows rose. A long moment passed, broken only by the grandfather clock’s sonorous tick. “Why did you not come to me with that information? I might have assisted sooner.”

Harry’s throat constricted. He remembered the walls he’d hit whenever he’d tried to involve Dumbledore before—Fudge’s interference, the endless delays. He looked away. “I—I… didn’t realize you could intervene, Professor,” he stammered. “I thought you were… simply the headmaster of Hogwarts. I didn’t know you were Supreme Mugwump or that you had sway at the Ministry.” He kept his eyes fixed on his hands, bracing himself against Dumbledore’s silent scrutiny.

Dumbledore studied him intently, blue eyes searching, until Harry couldn’t bear the weight and chanced a quick glimpse upward. At last, Dumbledore inclined his head. “Very well. Perhaps you did not know.”

He leaned forward, expression softening. “Do you have any questions about the trial itself? I will answer as much as I can.”

Harry swallowed. Then, taking a deep breath, he asked the question burning inside him: “Professor… why did you allow Sirius to be sent to Azkaban without a formal hearing? Why didn’t you insist on due process before he was imprisoned?”

Dumbledore’s shoulders sagged. He closed his eyes for a beat, exhaling a slow sigh. “I made a grave mistake, Harry. In those chaotic times, my fear for the wizarding community blinded me. I acted on trust when evidence was needed. When I heard Black’s name read aloud in that courtroom, saw the weight of every pair of eyes condemning him without evidence, a chill ran through me. I knew then I’d failed him, yet I did nothing to stop it. For that, I am truly sorry.”

Harry’s lips pressed together. “But did you truly not know who the Secret Keeper was? And… wasn’t it you who cast the Fidelius Spell on my parents’ home?”

Dumbledore blinked, surprise flickering across his face. “Why would you think I cast it?”

Harry’s cheeks burned as he glanced again at the parchments. “I was told the Fidelius required a particularly powerful caster, someone of exceptional skill. I assumed… it must have been you, sir.”

Dumbledore’s gaze softened into a patient smile. “The Fidelius is not a solitary enchantment: while it demands prodigious power, it can be woven by multiple casters, your parents, Peter Pettigrew, and Sirius all joined their strength. The true force of the charm, however, resides solely in the Secret Keeper. Not even Veritaserum, a potion designed to compel truth, nor the most invasive Legilimency, the magical art of probing another’s thoughts and memories, can wrench that hidden secret from them.”

Harry frowned. “Then why was the role changed to Peter? If no coercion can force a Keeper to betray the secret, Sirius, even under torture, would never have revealed it.”

Dumbledore shook his head, sorrow in his eyes. “I do not know, Harry. That mystery is one you must take to Sirius himself. I can only say that grief and fear led to choices none of us foresaw.”

He reached out, placing a steady hand on Harry’s shoulder. “Believe me, I had no inkling Sirius was not your true Keeper. In my sorrow over your parents’ deaths, I prioritized safety over justice, and I failed both him and you. From now on, Harry, if ever you need guidance or aid, my door stands open.”

Harry’s chest tightened with conflicting emotions: relief, sorrow, lingering doubt. He rose, voice quiet and respectful. “Thank you, Professor.”

Dumbledore inclined his head. “Good night, Harry.”

Harry slipped through the gargoyle and down the spiral staircase, the torches along the walls casting flickering shadows over his hurried steps. At the bottom, Ron and Hermione stood beneath a single torchlight, breath misting in the chill. Their faces lit up at his approach, but Hermione’s brow creased with worry.

“Harry, we thought—” she began, voice tight. “Did Dumbledore catch you? Are we all in trouble?”

Ron offered her a reassuring nudge. “Honestly, Hermione, if this was about our midnight rendezvous, he’d have summoned all three of us, not just Harry.”

Hermione bit her lip and looked to Harry for confirmation. He shrugged, voice calm. “He only sent for me. It wasn’t about our little outing; it was about Sirius.”

A quiet relief washed over Hermione’s face. Ron’s shoulders loosened, and he gave Harry a grateful nod. Together, the trio stepped out onto the dew-slick grass, the castle’s turrets receding behind them.

They walked in companionable silence down the winding path that led toward the edge of the grounds, where Hagrid’s lantern glow swung gently beside his hut. Moonlight pooled in the hollows of hedges, and the distant hoot of an owl echoed over the lawns. Each footfall on gravel carried them closer to their secret mission: delivering Norbert to Charlie at midnight.

Around the hut’s corner, Hagrid knelt in the lantern glow, cradling the wooden crate that held Norbert. The dragon’s ebony scales seemed to drink the light from the air, and every few seconds a soft snuffle vibrated through the slats.

Hagrid cooed, “There’s my baby,” then rummaged beneath his coat for a ragged teddy. He pressed it through the bars, and Norbert sniffed once before snapping the toy into tatters. Hagrid laughed between sobs. “Well, he’s got proper dragon taste, ’e does!” he said, patting the crate. “But I can’t jus’ leave ’im ’ere.”

Hermione kneeled beside him. “Charlie’s Dragon Preserve has proper dens, expert handlers, room for Norbert to stretch his wings.”

Ron placed a steady hand on Hagrid’s shoulder. “Charlie’s my brother. He’s studied dragons his whole life and knows Norwegian ridgebacks better than anyone.”

Hagrid’s grip tightened on the crate. “I can’t abandon ‘im,” he whispered, voice cracked with love.

“You won’t,” Harry said, voice firm. “I’m sure Charlie will let you visit during the summer.”

Hagrid’s chest heaved as he pressed the crate closer. “Summer?” he whispered, eyes bright. “I’ll be countin’ th’ days ’til I see ’im again. Yeh’ve no idea ’ow much that means… thank yeh, Harry.”

Harry drew a silver skull-engraved coin from his pocket and pressed its edge. With a soft click, the Invisibility Cloak unfurled like liquid night, sliding around the crate. “We’ll meet Charlie at the highest tower at midnight,” Harry promised. “You’ll see Norbert again, Hagrid.”

Hermione smoothed the cloak’s folds over the crate’s top and sides. “It covers only two people plus the crate. We need to decide who goes under.”

Ron’s jaw clenched. He glanced at Hermione and Harry, then dropped his voice. “Remember that first time we tried?”

For a heartbeat, memory swallowed them whole: they’d hauled Norbert, then barely hatched, up the tower’s narrow, frost-cold steps. Inevitably, ineluctably, the cloak slipped free from their shoulders at the summit, vanishing into shadow as though the very stones demanded it. No matter how they’d tried to secure it, they always left it behind. The instant they turned to descend, Filch’s lantern beam cleaved the darkness and spotlighted their figures. Moments later, the castle’s corridors roared with shouting. Snape scolded them before sending them into the Forbidden Forest days later for detention. There, trailing moonlight and fear, Harry and Hermione had stumbled into the wraith of Voldemort, his gaunt form bent over a broken unicorn’s bloodied flank. The thing had turned on them, and in that forest stillness, they had died. Then the world reset, tossing them back aboard the Hogwarts Express as if fate insisted, they endure it all again.

Ron turned fully to her. “Hermione, go back to the common room. We’ll take the cloak and the crate. It’s too dangerous if you stay.”

Hermione shook her head, tears in her eyes. “I won’t let you face it alone.” Her voice trembled, but her resolve blazed. “I’ve faced it before. I can do it again.”

Harry stepped between her and the crate. “No. We won’t risk you. Ron and I will take the cloak. You head back to the common room, then wait for us there.”

Hermione’s eyes glistened. She swallowed, squared her shoulders, and nodded. “Be safe.”

Hagrid blinked, tears brimming. “Be careful, yeh two.” He pressed Norbert’s snout to his own one last time. “Take ’im to Charlie. He’ll teach ’im to fly proper.”

Under the cloak’s shadow, Harry and Ron lifted the crate handles. Norbert’s soft snuffles echoed in their ears, the only sound in the cloak’s silent world. Hermione slipped away along the hut’s far side, footsteps light.

They wound through the grounds in darkness, the cloak’s velvet folds shielding them. Midnight neared, and at last they reached the top of the Astronomy Tower. Harry pressed the coin closed; the cloak vanished.

Harry and Ron caught their breath as Charlie appeared at the parapet’s edge, lantern light catching the copper tones of his red hair. He was flanked by three of his friends, Fiona, Jacob, and Darius, each dressed in patched leather jackets and woollen scarves, broomsticks in hand. Charlie strode forward, grin cracking his face. “Ron! And Harry, good of you to make it.”

Ron handed Harry over with a mock bow. “Harry, meet my brother Charlie.”

Fiona stepped up, her eyes warm. “Glad you made it. Poor little hatchling must be eager to stretch his wings.” Jacob nodded and gestured toward a series of leather straps clipped to the parapet wall. “We rigged a harness here, see? Straps across Norbert’s crate, reinforced grommets, loops for each broom handle.” Darius ran a hand along the stitching. “Safe as we could make it. Once we lift him, he’ll ride steady.”

Charlie tapped his broom. “Ready?” The four of them mounted in a flash: Darius at Norbert’s head, Fiona and Jacob at the sides, Charlie at the rear. With synchronized kicks, they lifted into the sky, the crate swinging easily beneath them. For a moment, Norbert’s snuffles drifted up to Harry and Ron as the group arced off toward the distant ridge.

Left alone, Harry and Ron leaned against the parapet, shoulders brushing. Harry slipped the silver coin from his pocket and pressed its edge. Nothing happened. He jabbed again. “Cloak?” he muttered. The coin remained stubbornly shut.

Ron exhaled. “Time to face the music.”

Harry glanced down the spiral stairs. “Who do you think Filch will take us to—McGonagall or Snape?”

Ron smirked. “McGonagall. You owe me five Knuts if it’s not Snape this time.”

“Deal,” Harry said, tucking the coin away. They shared a final grin and set off down the stone steps.

Halfway down, a harsh squeak cut through the hush. They froze. Argus Filch appeared; lantern held like a cudgel. “Well, well, well, we are in trouble!”

The boys exchanged a rueful look as Filch’s withered hand snapped forward beckoning them to follow him.

Harry sighed. “Better McGonagall than Snape,” Ron whispered. Filch hustled them past the portraits and through cold corridors, the clang of the tower door echoing behind them. As they trudged after him, Harry murmured, “Ready to lose that bet?”

Ron grinned wryly. “Only if you think we’re heading to the dungeon.”

Their laughter drifted back down the stairs, mingled with Filch’s indignant mutterings and the promise of another long detention.

They sank onto the worn leather chairs in Professor McGonagall’s study, Filch looming by the door like a silent gargoyle. Ron nudged Harry and slipped a hand into his pocket. “Five Knuts,” he muttered. Harry groaned, fishing the coins out and dropping them into Ron’s palm. “Happy?”

Before Ron could answer, the door swung open. Professor McGonagall strode in, Neville in tow, his robes dusty, cheeks flushed. “Mr. Longbottom, am I to understand you added yourself to Potter and Weasley’s late-night escapade?” Neville shrank back, eyes wide, but McGonagall’s attention snapped to Harry and Ron.

“Potter! Weasley!” Her voice crackled. “Convincing Draco Malfoy that you were smuggling a dragon—do you realize how utterly reckless that was?” She strode toward them, robes billowing. “I suppose you think it’s funny that Longbottom here heard the story and believed it, too? You put yourselves in needless peril, all for a jest!”

Harry and Ron exchanged a helpless look as her fury mounted. She clutched the arm of her chair until her knuckles whitened. “I warned you about breaking curfew! Did you honestly believe I would overlook this again?” She paused, eyes blazing. “No. I will not tolerate such childish endangerment.”

She raised a single finger. “You will each serve detention, and I’m docking ninety points from Gryffindor—thirty from each of you. You will also write an essay on the importance of honesty and the responsibilities that come with magic.”

Silence fell as she turned on her heel. “Now march!” she ordered, her voice cold as stone. Filch hustled Neville between Harry and Ron, and McGonagall’s robes swept behind them as they filed out.

At the portrait hole, Hermione waited, worry etched into her features. As soon as the door swung open, she rushed forward. “Are you all right? What happened?”

Harry managed a rueful shrug. “Let’s just say Gryffindor’s got fewer points tonight.” Ron gave Neville a comforting pat. Together, the three first years stepped into the warmth of the common room, the crackle of the fire chasing away the sting of McGonagall’s wrath.

***

A week before the end of term exams, night fell over a chilly Hogwarts, and the last bell’s clang hadn’t yet faded when Filch stomped into the entrance hall. His lantern gleamed like a crucible fire, catching Ron’s worried face, Neville’s startled eyes, Draco’s smirk of half-concealed panic, and Harry’s tight-lipped resignation.

Without ceremony, Filch shoved Harry forward. “Up and at ’em,” he barked. “You lot are in for the last detention of this term: Forbidden Forest style. And don’t think my responsibilities end at sniffing out stray socks. In my day, miscreants were suspended by their thumbs, yanked under the Great Hall rafters until confession came easy.” His hooked finger jabbed the air. “I’ll have none of your midnight dragon-smuggling nonsense again!”

He marched them out into the misty night, boots splashing over dew-slick grass, as the castle’s turrets disappeared behind them. The boys trudged in single file: Neville huffing beside Ron, Draco flanked by Harry, all of them exchanging glances that mingled dread with defiance.

They climbed the winding path toward Hagrid’s hut, Filch rattling threats into the hush. “No loafing. One false step, and I’ll have Professor Snape draw every drop of blood from your veins for potions. Understand?”

By the time they reached the hut, Hagrid’s lantern glow painted his great silhouette on the cabin wall. Fang’s low growl rumbled from beside Hagrid’s feet as the door creaked open.

“Hurry up Filch,” Hagrid mumbled, voice gentle against Filch’s sneer. “An—erm—welcome ter yeh three.” He squinted at Draco. “Er—you too, Malfoy.”

Filch harrumphed and pointed into the shadows beyond the cabin door. “Ready yourselves. You’ll follow Hagrid’s lead straight into that forest. One mistake—”

Hagrid cleared his throat and stepped forward. “Come along then. Fang’ll show yeh the path. Be careful now, easy ter lose yer footin’, an more’n that out there.”

The five of them filed past Filch, into the cold embrace of the trees. Filch spat over his shoulder. “Return before dawn or I swear, I’ll have you peeling potatoes in the kitchens until summer break!”

Under the high canopy, Hagrid’s lantern cast dancing shadows across ancient roots and fallen leaves. Fang padded ahead, black as night, nose twitching at scents no student had ever dreamed. Neville stumbled over a gnarled root; Harry caught his arm.

“Steady,” Harry whispered. “Fang’s leading, just follow him.”

Hagrid loomed beside them. “Easy now, keep close,” he rumbled. “There’s a clearin’ jus’ up ahead, where th’ track starts.” His eyes twinkled. “An’ remember: no larkin’. This forest’s got teeth.”

They crossed a mossy ridge into a silent glade. Dew glittered on spiderwebs like liquid jewels. Three massive centipede-like roots twined overhead, forming a natural arch. Under it, Hagrid halted.

“Look ’ere,” he whispered, kneeling. Patches of silvery blood shimmered on moss. “That’s fresh. Follow this, an we’ll find th’ poor creature.”

Harry knelt beside him, heart pounding. “What’s this Hagrid?” he asked the half giant. “It looks like blood… is a creature injured?”

Hagrid crouched, lantern light trembling across his kindly face. “That’s unicorn blood,” he said gently. “Somethin’s been killin’ unicorns in th’ forest—and drinkin’ their blood.”

Harry swallowed. “What kind of creature could kill a unicorn?”

Hagrid shook his head, voice low. “I dunno rightly. That’s why we’ve gotta follow these patches an find th’ poor beast.”

Neville peered at the glimmering stains. “B-but why kill a unicorn? They’re so… sacred.”

Hagrid’s eyes grew solemn. “Unicorn blood can save yer life if yer close t’ death, it’s a powerful cure. But at a terrible price. Slaughter a creature so pure an’ it curses yeh t’ a half-life. Ain’t worth it.”

The forest fell silent around them, and Fang gave a soft whuff. Ron’s knuckles whitened on Harry’s arm, Neville pressed closer, and even Draco’s bravado faltered as the lantern light wavered across the path ahead.

The boys pressed against the trunk of a giant oak, heartbeats loud in the hush. Draco’s breath came in shallow gasps. Neville’s legs trembled. Harry felt the cold press of Hagrid’s presence at his back, a silent promise of protection.

Fang’s head rested on his paws, ears twitching. The forest breathed around them, a symphony of rustling leaves, distant hoots, and the soft drip-drip-drip of sap. Time stretched, and each second felt like an exam in endurance.

They pressed on through tangled ferns until, at last, the bloodstains grew too numerous to ignore. Clusters of silver dotted the leaf–littered ground, fanning out into two diverging trails.

Draco paused beneath a yew, stomach twisting. “Wait ’til my father hears we’ve been hunting unicorn killers,” he muttered, voice tight.

Harry traced the leftward stains. “We need to split up. Hagrid, Neville, Malfoy: go right. Ron, Fang and I will take the left fork.” He stood, voice firm. “That way we double our chances of finding the unicorn or the creature responsible.”

Hagrid’s lantern bobbed as he joined them. “Right fork—ye three stick close. Left fork—Harry, Ron, Fang, you too.” He rapped his knuckles on Harry’s shoulder. “If yeh run into trouble, fire a red spark,” he said. “If yeh spot the unicorn, send up a green blaze. Understan’?”

“Red means danger, green means found,” Ron repeated.

“Exactly,” Hagrid said. He turned to Draco and Neville. “Careful now.”

Draco swallowed once, then squared his shoulders. Neville nodded, pale but determined.

“Let’s be off,” Hagrid rumbled. He led the rightward trio into the gloom while Harry, Ron, and Fang veered left.

Immediately the forest closed in, each fern and root feeling alive beneath their feet. Harry hushed Fang to a slow padding pace, eyes fixed on the gleaming blood.

Ron edged closer, voice low. “You remember the first time we came this deep? We thought it was just Hagrid’s hunch.”

Harry nodded. “We followed the trail and stumbled right into Voldemort’s wraith. He was feeding on a dying unicorn’s neck.” He shuddered. “We barely got Firenze’s charge in time.”

“Then last loop,” Ron continued, “we lost the centaur’s call altogether and nearly froze when the wraith drifted toward us.”

Harry’s face darkened. “Firenze only appears the moment the unicorn breathes its last. We need to time it perfectly. Too early, and Firenze won’t come. Too late, we won’t survive.”

They crouched beside a mottled tree trunk where two paths forked in the twilight. Fang sniffed high, nostrils flaring. Harry closed his eyes. “We’ve got ten minutes until we hear the breaking twig, that’s our signal.”

Ron checked his watch by the moonlight. “Five minutes, forty–two seconds… I’ve got Plan B if Firenze doesn’t show.”

Harry glanced at him. “Run the Glacius Charm on the wraith, maybe slow him down long enough for us to distract him.”

“And Plan C?” Ron prompted, voice steady.

“Summon every bit of magic we can; Patronus, if we have to.” Harry swallowed. “I don’t want to use it on a wraith, but if it means saving each other…”

Ron nodded. “Agreed.”

They rose, wands at the ready, hearts pounding. Fang gave a quiet growl as they stepped forward onto the left fork. Above them, stars peeked through the branches.

Behind the misty veil, the forest seemed to hold its breath and somewhere in its centre, life and death awaited.

They pressed on until the forest opened into a narrow clearing, moonlight pooling where a fallen log lay half–buried in ferns. There, huddled over a broken horn, stood the wraith—Voldemort’s gaunt shadow—drinking the blood of a dying unicorn. Its dark form shivered with each gulp, robes flapping like torn willows in a chill wind.

Harry froze. Beside him, Ron’s breath came in sharp pants. Fang growled low and steady, hackles bristling. The unicorn’s silver flank rippled in its last tremor; its eyes, milky and unfocused, stared past the wraith as though seeking mercy.

Without thinking, Harry whispered, “Now.” He flicked his wand, sending a red spark arcing through the trees. Ron joined him, both curses fizzing into the gloom. The wraith hissed, head whipping around, and floated toward them in a blur of malice.

Before it could strike, a thunderous neigh shattered the silence. Firenze charged from the shadows, hooves drumming like war drums. With a powerful thrust, the centaur’s chest smashed into the wraith’s flank. The spectre reeled and vanished in a spray of shadow.

Harry and Ron staggered back as Firenze reared, eyes blazing gold. He fixed them with a silent glare that glowed in the lantern light. Then, as though conceding respect, he stamped his front hooves and whinnied once.

“Can you ride?” he offered in deep, rolling speech. “I’ll carry you from this horror.”

Harry exchanged a quick look with Ron. Neither answered for a heartbeat. Then Harry shook his head. “No… thank you, Firenze. We don’t ride our friends. You’re no beast to mount.”

Firenze’s ears pricked. He tilted his head, impressed. A soft rumble echoed through his chest.

He nodded, then swept them into a larger glade ringed by ancient oaks. There, five other centaurs emerged from shadow, eyes cold and wary. Their leader, Bane, snorted contempt.

“Firenze,” Bane hissed, “why have you broken the stars’ design and brought humans here?”

Firenze squared his shoulders. “They needed help. The stars showed me their fate waiting beyond nightmare.”

Bane’s nostrils flared. “You set yourself against the heavens, Firenze. Have we not read what is to come in the movements of the planets?”

Harry stepped forward, voice firm despite his pounding heart. “You misread the sky. Tonight, the stars guided Firenze here to save us, my life was written to continue until dawn. Your sight has failed.”

The centaurs exchanged glances. Bane’s lips curled in a sneer, but the others murmured among themselves. They looked upward, heads bowed to read the constellations. Their voices rose in an ancient chant about time’s river, destiny’s currents, and the fragile spark of life waiting beyond dusk.

At last Bane’s sneer faded. He dipped his head. “Perhaps your words hold truth, young wizard. We will not thwart your saviour’s will.”

With that, the centaurs slipped back into the trees, leaving only Firenze’s chestnut flank in the lantern glow. He turned back to Harry and Ron, nodding approval.

Harry raised his wand. A single emerald spark soared above the treetops. Ron followed, and Firenze’s deep neigh echoed in delight.

Hagrid burst into the clearing, breathless, eyes shining, his heavy voice drifted in relief. “Blimey! Firenze!” he called. Neville and Draco clustered at the clearing’s edge, wide-eyed. “Ye found th’ unicorn, then?”

Harry pointed to the far end of the clearing. “There, Hagrid. It’s dead—unfortunately. The wraith drank its blood, but Firenze saved us.”

“By Merlin, you’re safe,” he whispered, voice thick with awe. He looked up at Firenze, stammering, “Thank ye, thank ye, Firenze for savin’ them.”

Firenze dipped his head in quiet pride, then looked to Harry and Ron. “You showed courage,” he rumbled. “Your loyalty honours the stars.”

Ron offered a wide grin. “And your loyalty honours us, Firenze.”

Hagrid rose, brushing snow from his coat. “Forest’s no place for young’uns,” he muttered, cheeks pink. “Let’s get back before Filch turns us into potato peelers.”

Firenze turned as if to leave, then paused. To Harry he spoke in a voice like wind through reeds: “Remember… death is but an end of one path. Time waits for no heart’s desire. Cherish each dawn, for you walk between shadow and dawn’s first light.”

Neville’s brow creased. “What did he mean?”

Harry shrugged, meeting Ron’s eyes. “I’m not sure.”

With dawn’s first glow gilding the treetops, the group slipped back down the winding path, safe, battered, and bound tighter by the forest’s perils and the centaur’s cryptic blessing. They emerged onto the dew-slick grass just as dawn brushed the castle turrets in rose and gold.

One week now remained until the first years’ end-of-term exams, but no spell, no jinx, no amount of study would prepare them for the true trial still ahead: a desperate chase through the barred gates of the third-floor corridor, where the Philosopher’s Stone lay hidden behind deadly wards and Voldemort’s shadowed wraith waited once more. As Hogwarts stirred awake, Harry Potter realized that the greatest exam would not be written on parchment but faced in the silent traps and secret passageways guarding that glittering prize.

Chapter Text

A week later, the Great Hall fell into studious silence as first-years filed in for their end-of-year exams. Scrolls of parchment lay before them, inked with Potions questions, Charms incantations, and history essays. Hermione perched on her chair, quill poised and brow smooth; she knew every answer already. Ron and Harry exchanged amused glances, sliding their scrolls from left to right so their neighbours wouldn’t peek.

The final exam scroll slid into Professor Flitwick’s satchel with a soft flap. Harry, Ron, and Hermione rose from their desks together, quills still in hand, the hall’s hush dissolving behind them as they stepped into the sunlit corridor.

Hermione slipped her wand back into her robes. “Done,” she announced, voice bright. “I’ll surely get an O on Charms, Transfiguration, Defence, and I even managed a perfect sketch of the night sky for Astronomy.”

Ron shook his head, grinning. “Honestly, these exams are a joke. We’ve looped through this term a dozen times. The only challenge is not getting perfect marks every paper.”

Harry laughed. “I left a blank space in the History essay, just to feel challenged. After twenty loops, I know when the troll fought those medieval knights better than my own birthday.”

Hermione rolled her eyes. “Stop bragging. Besides, I never fake a few mistakes just to blend in. Only I get full marks every. single. time.” she teased in a singsong voice, sticking out her tongue playfully. “Let’s find a quiet corner.”

They squeezed past clusters of younger first-years rushing off to diner and slipped into a shadowed alcove beside a stained-glass window. Ron flopped onto a carved wooden bench.

“So,” Harry said, stretching his arms, “now that exams are over, what’s next? Midnight awaits.”

Hermione folded her arms. “You mean that back-to-back trial through the trapdoor? Devil’s Snare, flying keys, wizard’s chess, the troll, the potion riddle, and Quirrell’s final showdown?”

Ron nodded, eyes gleaming. “The loop drags us through every time. If Harry doesn’t reach the Stone, he dies; back to year one and another train ride.”

Hermione sighed. “It’s absurd. Dumbledore’s own enchantment on the Mirror of Erised means no one can remove the Stone while it’s hidden there. Yet we’re forced to try anyway.”

Harry straightened. “We’ve practiced every trap dozens of times. Tonight, will be a piece of cake.”

Hermione’s lips curved into a teasing smile. “Routine for you, maybe… until you nearly suffocated in Devil’s Snare and I had to yank you free by your robes.”

Ron chuckled. “Or when Harry got tossed by that giant knight and spent the rest of the loop insisting it was ‘an accidental butt-check.’”

Harry held up his hands. “All right, no cockiness. Just steady magic and clear heads.”

“Don’t forget the flute,” Ron reminded, tugging at Harry’s sleeve. “You know how Fluffy only calmed when you played last time. Hagrid swore it’s tuned to a unicorn’s lullaby.”

Harry patted his robes and smiled. “Right… Hagrid’s Christmas present.” He slid a hand into his pocket and produced the carved wooden flute, its surface worn smooth where fingers had gripped it. “Here, keep it. You’re better at holding a tune anyway.”

Ron grinned and took the flute, cradling it like something precious. “I am not going to mess this up.”

Harry drew the silver coin from his pocket. He tapped its edge and whispered, “Cloak.” The Cloak took a long, reluctant second to unwind from shadow, as if remembering that time it refused to appear during the dragon-smuggling fiasco, then snapped obediently back into the coin. He let out a short laugh. “There we are.”

Hermione consulted her watch. “Sun’s down. Curfew’s five minutes ago.” She nodded. “Ready?”

They slipped through the portrait hole, down empty stairwells and past lifeless suits of armour, until they reached the barred door on the third floor. Harry’s scar tingled. He tucked the coin safely away, gripped his wand.

“Here we go,” he whispered.

They reached the barred oak door on the third‐floor corridor and Hermione held up her wand. “Alohomora.”

The lock clicked, the door swung open, and Harry froze. “It’s absurd,” he muttered, staring at Fluffy’s three heads snarling beyond. “A first-year spell opens this door, yet there’s a giant dog waiting inside. You’d think they’d ward it more thoroughly.”

Ron scratched his head. “What were they thinking? If the corridor’s meant to stop intruders, why let a bunch of first years pick the lock?”

Harry dipped his chin. “It’s Dumbledore’s manipulation, isn’t it? He wants us to find our own way through every trial. Of course, the door must be simple enough to open with Alohomora.”

Hermione shook her head. “No. I asked Hagrid last loop. The answer’s far simpler.” She turned to Harry. “Who’s the only one allowed in there after hours?”

Ron grinned. “Hagrid, obviously. No one else could sneak past Fluffy to drop off supper.”

Hermione’s eyes sparkled. “Exactly. Hagrid’s not a fully trained wizard, he shows up with his broken wand tucked in his pink parasol. If the door needed anything more advanced than Alohomora, he couldn’t open it to feed the dog.”

Harry stared at her, stunned. “I… I never thought of that. I’ve gotten a bit paranoid about Dumbledore guiding everything, haven’t I?”

Ron clapped him on the shoulder. “Only a tad.”

They stepped into the chamber. Fluffy stood guard in the shadows, three massive heads turning to watch their approach, eyes glinting red. Ron lifted the flute to his lips and breathed the first soft notes of the lullaby. The melody was low and simple; the tune Hagrid had hummed while warming a supper. Slowly, each of Fluffy’s heads lowered; the beast’s breathing eased, the snarl relaxing into a rumbling sigh. Ron’s fingers never left the flute; the lullaby never wavered.

Harry edged forward. “Obviously the giant dog would fall right on the trapdoor,” he said.

While Ron kept the tune steady, Harry and Hermione worked the trapdoor. “Wingardium Leviosa!” they said together. The giant dog’s bulk rose a few feet as though caught on invisible threads. Harry and Hermione guided Fluffy clear of the circular stone panel in the centre of the corridor, piloting him a safe distance away.

Once he hovered to one side, Hermione found the tarnished iron handle built into the trapdoor and tugged. The board gave a long, reluctant creak as it swung open. “On three,” Hermione whispered. “One—two—three!”

They leapt together into the darkness beyond, Ron’s lullaby still a soft, steady presence behind them.

They landed in a tangle of thick vines, the cold stone floor far below. Hulk-green tendrils coiled around their legs, squeezing tight as the world dimmed to shadow.

“Lumos Solem!” Hermione cried, stamping her wand on the floor. A shaft of pure sunlight flashed from her wand tip, and the vines recoiled, hissing and wilting back into darkness. Within seconds they dropped free, shaking damp leaves from their robes.

Breathing hard, Harry brushed dirt from his sleeves. “See? I told you it was easy-peasy.” He strutted past Hermione, grinning as Ron punched his shoulder.

Ron shook his head with a rueful laugh. “Don’t get cocky, Harry, that was nothing compared to the chess. You can’t predict those enchanted knights and rooks. Last time, I got flattened by a pawn.”

Harry’s grin vanished. He glanced up at the silent, vaulted ceiling and swallowed. “Right. No more jokes. Let’s go.”

They crept into the next chamber, its floor littered with hundreds of brass keys, each winged and darting like angry insects. “Ready?” Hermione whispered.

Harry nodded and lunged onto the nearest broom; he grabbed the smallest key on the third row without breaking stride. “Got it,” he called. “Easy.”

They dashed forward and found the second iron door. Harry fitted the key, the lock clicked, and it swung open silently. Beyond lay the chessboard, its giant ivory and ebony pieces poised for battle.

Ron drew in a slow breath. “This is where it gets harder,” he warned. “We must play actual wizard’s chess. Every move can smash you flat or hurl you off the board.”

Harry’s jaw clenched. “No loop‑death by knight’s boot this time.”

They stepped into the chess chamber, wands stowed, heartbeats loud in the vaulted silence. The giant pieces loomed like a carved forest of intent; ivory eyes watched them as if the board itself judged their steps.

Ron took the lead, jaw set. “All right! No magic. We play it properly.”

He pointed with a steady finger. “Harry, you’re the Black King. Take e8.” Harry planted himself on the polished stone.

“Hermione, you’re a Rook. Stand on a8.” Hermione slipped into the corner.

“And I’ll be your edge pawn,” Ron said, sliding onto h7. “Flank pawns face the fewest attacks, statistically safer.” The pawns on g7 and a7 fell into line beside him, forming a crude shield.

Across the board the ivory pieces stirred. White’s knight leapt to c3; the enchanted pieces obeyed commands with the graceless violence of living things. Rooks clattered, bishops lunged, and the air filled with the ringing percussion of wood on marble. Ron barked orders, guiding Hermione’s rook into place and sending Harry’s king a careful step at a time.

Then the ivory queen angled herself toward their flank, gliding with calculated menace for h7. Ron’s face went white. He braced himself on his square and drew breath. “This is where I go,” he said, every word clipped and deliberate. “Remember the loops; every time I fell it was my choice.”

Hermione’s hand flew to her mouth. “Ron—”

“It’s easier if I sacrifice myself,” he pressed on, eyes bright with something like a smile. “If I’m lost today, it’s because I chose to protect you.” He shoved himself forward into the queen’s line, an offering he made with his own two feet.

The ivory queen swept in and struck him down; Ron’s body skidded and fell, robes torn, and lay motionless. Harry’s throat tightened at the sight. “Finish it,” Hermione breathed.

Harry didn’t hesitate. He pointed to his bishop and the dark-squared piece obeyed, sliding through the ranks with a thunderous clap as it hammered into c5, a check that opened the heart of White’s defence. The board answered with a rasp as the White Queen lunged to capture that bishop, moving to c5 and removing Harry’s tempo with a single, greedy motion.

For a breathless second the chamber seemed suspended. Then Harry’s king‑side knight leapt in a clean, impossible arc to h3, landing with a ringing finality. The white king stood exposed, trapped by the knight’s fork and the opened lines; there was nowhere left to run. The heavy figure tottered and fell.

“Checkmate,” Harry whispered, voice raw.

The ivory army dissolved into a fine dust that sparkled for a heartbeat before vanishing. The heavy door beyond the board groaned open, cool corridor air spilling across the marble like a benediction. Harry dropped to his knees beside Ron, hands already working; Hermione was there at his shoulder, voice steady as she checked for injuries.

“He’s breathing, but he’s out cold,” Harry said after a practised flick of his wand. Hermione laid a quick diagnostic charm across Ron’s temples; a pale shimmer traced runes and subsided. “No broken bones,” she reported, voice tight with guarded hope. She whispered a conjuration and a narrow cot folded from the floor, padding unfurling. They eased Ron onto it, Harry casting a faint ward about the mattress.

They stood for a moment over their sleeping friend, the victory heavy in their chests. Hermione met Harry’s eyes. “We finish this,” she said. They rose, wands ready, and stepped through the open door, carrying Ron’s sacrifice with them as resolve and fuel for whatever waited beyond.

They climbed the narrow stairwell from the chess chamber, torches sputtering as they emerged into a vast grotto. The air was colder, stale with damp stone, and a thin drip–drip–drip echoed from overhead stalactites. At its centre stood a troll at least twice the size of the one they’d faced on Halloween. Its mottled skin rippled with muscle, a grotesque crown of bruised flesh swelling above one eyebrow. A dank chill curled beneath their feet.

Hermione’s breath caught. “Most loops he’s already out cold,” she whispered. “But not this time.”

Harry stared at the beast, wand stowed. “Voldemort’s skill must be slipping,” he muttered. “He can’t even knock out a troll properly.”

“Shut up and concentrate!” Hermione hissed. “It’s awake and furious.”

The troll’s cavernous maw snapped as it caught sight of them. With a roar that shook the torchlight, it charged. Harry and Hermione darted aside, hearts pounding. The foul stench of its breath hit them like a wall.

Hermione raised her wand. “Bubble‑Head Charm!” she cried, flicking her wrist. Instantly, a translucent dome formed around her head, the dank chill cut off as if a door had slammed shut. Harry followed suit—he’d mastered it during the Triwizard tasks—and sealed himself in his own protective bubble. The grotto’s damp odour faded to nothing.

They circled the troll, boots scraping on the uneven floor. It swung a gargantuan club, cleaving stone where they’d stood moments before, each crunch of rock a percussion in the dripping gloom.

“We can’t hurt it with spells,” Harry shouted. “It’s impervious!”

“No,” Hermione panted, “But we can use the cave.”

They moved in practiced tandem. Hermione stamped and danced to one side, voice loud with taunts: “Over here! Over here!” The troll pivoted, snarling, its head lurching toward her orb. Harry sprinted behind a jagged boulder and raised his wand, fingers white on the haft.

“Watch out!” he yelled.

He didn’t try to strike the troll; he aimed at the ceiling. Harry drove the wand forward and spoke a sharp, controlled spell. The tip of his wand flared; rock dust puffed as a long, brittle stalactite shattered where it met the grotto’s seam. The re‑shaped ceiling gave with a grinding crack, and a carriage‑sized boulder, dislodged by the blow, tumbled free.

The boulder crashed down with a thunderous roar, stone dust billowing, as it slammed into the troll’s side. The cavern quaked, and the beast’s roar dissolved into a wet, strangled thud.

They waited, breathless. The troll collapsed in a thunderous heap, limbs sprawling and lying still. Hermione slid out of her bubble and rushed to Harry’s side. He exhaled, fists unclenching.

Hermione studied him, eyes bright with relief. “You didn’t have to kill it,” she said quietly.

Harry’s jaw tightened. “I couldn’t risk it waking again, and worse, reaching Ron. He’s defenceless on that cot.”

Hermione’s lips curved into a slow nod. “You’re right.”

Without another word, they pressed on through the door and into the next chamber. A low, humming fire glowed around seven potion bottles: Snape’s riddle waiting on the stone wall.

Hermione bent over the riddle. “Honestly, Harry, you don’t even need me,” she teased. “You know the answer already.”

Harry offered her a gentle smile. He glanced back where their friend lay still, and then at Hermione’s worried eyes. For a heartbeat, his feet faltered, his heart hammering with the weight of every choice that had led him here.

He pressed a steady hand to his chest and drew a slow breath. “Go back to Ron,” he said, voice soft but certain. “Wait here for Dumbledore’s rescue. He won’t be long.”

Hermione’s eyes glistened. She put a hand on his arm. “Don’t you dare die on me, Potter. I swear, if I wake up on the train without you I—”

Before she could finish, Harry swept her into a fierce hug. Their arms tightened, hearts pounding in unison. Hermione’s hand pressed to Harry’s chest, and his palm lingered on her back, an unspoken promise passing between them.

When he finally released her, his gaze was steel-strong. “Everything will be okay. Trust me.”

Hermione swallowed, her voice firm despite the tremor. “I know you will. I have complete faith in you, Harry.”

He offered her a small, reassuring smile, then turned to the gleaming bottles. His hand hovered over the suspects, fingers trembling almost imperceptibly as his heartbeat skipped a beat. Steeling himself, he lifted the correct vial, the one to pass through the purple flames guarding the final door.

He raised it to his lips and swallowed in one smooth motion. The flames hissed and parted, revealing Professor Quirrell’s hooded figure beyond.

Harry squared his shoulders and crossed into the firelight, leaving the chamber of potions—and Hermione, and their sleeping friend—behind. In the last room, he knew, Voldemort awaited.

The little chamber beyond was dim and spare: a single polished mirror in an ornate silver frame, its green light swallowing the shadows. Professor Quirrell hunched before it, fingers fluttering over the glass like a man trying to catch a dream. He started at Harry’s step, eyes frantic and bright.

“You don’t understand it,” Harry blurted before he could stop himself, voice sharper than he meant. “It shows you what you want. It won’t give it to a thief.”

Quirrell flinched, then smiled with a brittle, nervous twitch. “So certain,” he hissed. “So young.”

Harry’s mouth rode a dangerous edge. He kept his wand up, though his hands shook. “You’ve been stumbling about in the dark with this for weeks. You don’t even know what you’re doing.” The taunt came out hotter than mockery, something raw and old in him making the words worse. “You’re not cleverer than the mirror, Professor. You’re only… desperate.”

Quirrell’s face went slack for a beat, as if the sound of the word had knocked the air from him. Then a thin, wet laugh slipped from him and the turban at the back of his head tightened like a fist. The man’s eyes darted, pleading and furious both.

“Ah,” Quirrell said, voice low. “So brave. So reckless.” He reached as if to touch Harry’s sleeve and the room went colder than stone.

A voice not Quirrell’s, layered, ancient and soft as rot, braided through the chamber and stole the air away. “He thinks he knows,” it said, words like dry leaves. The turban quivered; the man’s posture changed as if something had stepped from shadow into his bones.

Harry’s bravado burned higher, a flare of anger he could not quite tamp down. “You’re not the great wizard you imagine, are you?” he snapped, eyes hard. “You don’t even know how to make the mirror work, and yet you crawl around trying to steal what you don’t deserve. You’re pathetic.”

The voice behind Quirrell laughed, a cold, concentric sound that made Harry’s scar twinge. The turban split at the seam as if some pressure had been released; a pale, terrible face recoiled into view for an instant under the folds, not whole, but something writhing, a hunger that had learned patience. It smiled without humour.

“You are bold, boy,” it said, silk over steel. “You brandish your small truths like weapons. You call to me from the dark. If you are so clever, make the mirror give, then.”

Before Harry could answer, ropes of shadow whipped from the turbaned figure’s fingers and lashed round his wrists and ankles. They bit cold and tight, not easily broken. Harry’s wand clattered to the stone and skittered just out of reach. For the first time his chest tightened with real fear, not for himself, but for what those ropes meant.

Quirrell’s mouth worked; the voice at his back pressed forward, patient and hungry. “If you boast so loudly of your insight, boy,” it breathed, “prove it. Make it give.”

Harry’s instant reaction was fury: he spat a string of words that would have been braver if they had been quieter. He could feel every old grievance in him, years of being looked at, of being told he didn’t belong, cracking into flame. “You think you can scare me because you hide behind someone else?” he snapped. “You’re nothing but a shadow with a voice. You haven’t got the courage to live your own power.”

The thing behind Quirrell hissed and Quirrell’s fingers tightened on the ropes; the bindings pulled Harry forward until the mirror filled his vision. For a heartbeat he flailed in his bindings, furious at himself, so close to freeing his hand, and then so foolish to let his anger hand him a leash.

Harry’s mind split into two urgent, clanging thoughts: the mirror of Erised cannot be stolen by force; it answers only the true desire of the seeker. If he looked, he could make it produce the Stone; if he refused, Quirrell, or what dwelt beneath Quirrell, might suspect that the boy could pierce something they could not. Either way, the very act of looking was a signal.

He tasted the bitter metal of his fear and, beneath it, the hot shame of having been led by his anger. He berated himself in furious whispers: of course you mocked him, of course you let your temper show. He could have kept his mouth shut. He could have been cleverer.

Quirrell leaned close, voice a rasp: “If you will not give it willingly, then show us how to make it obey. You know how, clever boy. Use your knowledge.”

Harry’s throat went dry. He had the knife-edge choice: keep silent and risk the thing behind Quirrell realizing the boy’s strength; or look and draw the Stone out, revealing what he could do. He looked at the ropes biting his skin; he thought of Ron on the cot, of Hermione checking him, of the price they had paid to get this far.

With a breath that tasted of dust and courage, Harry let his anger fall away like a cloak. He calmed himself with the precise, small control he had practised a hundred times over when fear wanted to run him: count, steady the pulse, feel the rope’s slack. He would not be goaded into another mistake.

But he could not risk the other mistake either.

Harry’s face smoothed. He made his voice quiet and level, the voice he used when he wanted people to stop looking at him like he was a thing to be pitied. “All right,” he said. “If that’s what you want, then I’ll look.”

He stopped berating himself. He stopped being the boy who had shouted. For a heartbeat he was only the seeker: breath measured, eyes fixed on the glass, listening for the hush that meant the world had folded itself to his question. The ropes held him, but they could not hold his will. He stepped forward as far as he could and stared into the mirror.

The glass sighed as Harry stared, and the room fell away.

The obsidian chamber unfurled again, vast and choking with shadow. Floating torches guttered in the cold air; their light struck the raised platform and fell away from it like a tide. On that platform, where before there had been a runed containment box, now sat the Philosopher’s Stone, at least his memory called it a plain, red pebble, but the thing in the mirror did not look like any ordinary rock. It gave off a peculiar, concentrated glow that cut through the chamber’s dim like a living thing, a bright, hungry point of warmth set against the world’s winter. The contrast between the Stone’s life‑light and the room’s deathly hush was so sharp it bit.

Death moved then, like a blur of cold wind made flesh. It stepped from the gloom, not a cloaked man this time but the terrible, patient shape he had seen before: skeletal hands, a hollow where a face should be, a scythe that drank the torchlight. Death’s presence pressed the air flat; the floating flames leaned away as if listening.

“It was never yours to keep,” Death said, voice like ice on bone and the slow turning of a page. “All things that borrow breath must answer for their loan. Tools that wrench back what was balanced at the first toll are heavy ledgers. They ask, and the world remembers.”

Harry could not tell whether the words were accusation or instruction; they felt older than language. He watched as Death lifted a bony finger and the scrawled light of the Stone bent toward it. On Death’s finger sat a silver ring, dull as old coins and threaded with a thin rune that made Harry’s palm prickle in sympathetic pain. As the ring passed nearer, the Stone’s glow thinned; light seemed to crawl from the gem into the metal as if the ring drank fire.

At that same instant, in Harry’s trousers pocket, the silver coin flared with a heat that crawled up his leg and pricked his skin. It felt as if the coin and ring were two mouths breathing the same light: one in the mirror, one in his hand, linked across a thing that resembled fate. The coin burned under his fingers with the intensity of a fever, and the sensation pushed all thought away but for a single, bright awareness.

The ring touched the Stone. The platform pulsed once, a sound like a great bell struck under water, and the Stone folded inward as if it had been rolled up and tucked into a palm. The light did not vanish so much as squeeze itself small. For a blink Death’s fingers closed around the Stone and then, with a whisper that tasted of iron and a word Harry could not quite catch, the thing was gone. The mirror’s scene imploded like a throat swallowing its tongue.

The glass itself answered with violence. Light ripped, a diamond‑white crack raced from its centre, and the mirror exploded outward in a bloom of splinters and sound. The force slammed Harry back, flinging him like a puppet; he felt the world tilt and then flip as the chamber he had left thundered into him.

Quirrell went with the blast, a heap of cloth and small bones thrown across the green light. The turban at the back of his head tore open in the impact and for the first time the other face showed in the open: pale, wiry, and terrible, eyes like burning coals. The scream that came from the throat under the turban was not one voice but two pitched together in a single, ragged howl. “What did you do, boy?!” one cried. “What about the Stone?!” the other screamed at the same time.

Harry was laughing before he understood that he was. It came out as a short, wild sound, half hysteria, half release, because something impossible had happened and the chest he had been dragging with him for months suddenly felt both heavier and emptier all at once. The coin had burned; the mirror had burst; the Stone was no longer where a thief could touch it.

Voldemort’s command snapped through Quirrell with a cold, reedy insistence: Kill him. The professor, small and trembling, pushed himself up as if urged by springs. He lurched forward, hands scrabbling for purchase on Harry’s robes. For a moment, the human in him seemed to act with a warped, desperate devotion; Quirrell’s fingers closed on Harry’s forearm and the man tried to drag the boy into a strangled embrace.

Harry did not pull away. If Quirrell meant to kill him, his mind cut through hot fear into a strange, steady clarity. He opened his arm as if to accept death, as if to make the thing that would take him feel the full weight of what it tried to take. The skin under Quirrell’s touch flashed white, then red; fire ran along his fingers. A smell of seared cloth and singed flesh hit the air. Quirrell gasped, voice breaking, and his hold stuttered.

But the thing at his back was impatient and ancient, it would not be denied by a mere burn. Quirrell continued to choke and claw at Harry, driven on by commands that were not his own. Heat licked along his body until his robes smouldered. With a last, awful keening, the man collapsed into a heap of ash and cinders that puffed into the air like grey snow.

Harry sucked in a lungful of air and tried to make sense of the sight: the twitching ruin where a man had been, the ash drifting in the green light. Relief cracked open in him like something that wanted to laugh; he tried to stand, and the world folded. Black smoke rolled up from the ashes, not ordinary smoke but a living shadow that pulled itself together into a wraith. It rose, coiling like a storm, the blackness shaped into a long, sinuous body. Two points flared hot and red inside it, eyes that burned like hate itself.

The smoke‑wraith plunged toward Harry with a speed that had nothing human about it. Heat and chill met in his chest as the scent of burnt things and old malice crowded his nose. The presence hit him like a hand across the face; the red points stared through him, and the room shrank to the whiteness behind his lids.

Harry’s knees buckled. A cold, spreading fog filled his vision and the last thing he felt before the world folded black was the hateful, bright sting of those red eyes as they took him.

Light returned in measured waves, like someone easing curtains open very carefully. Harry blinked into white linen and the faint, familiar smell of disinfectant and boiled cabbage. His skull throbbed where the wraith had struck; his throat was raw. Madam Pomfrey fussed at his side with brisk efficiency, tucking blankets, checking a pulse, muttering that children were far too reckless for their years.

“Mr Potter,” she said at last, voice brisk but relieved, “you’re awake. Headmaster will see you presently, but not yet, lie still.” She smoothed his hair as if he were a schoolboy’s and left, the door closing with a soft click that let the castle’s quieter noises creep in: a distant footfall, the faint hiss of rain on leaded panes.

He had time to remember in fragments: the torches leaning away from Death, the Stone’s hungry warmth, the mirror cracking like a bell, Quirrell’s cloth smoking, the ash puffing up like grey snow. The memory pressed warm behind his eyes, and with it a small, private thing: the knowledge in his hand that something had been hidden and taken away.

The footfall at the door changed its rhythm and then the headmaster himself was there, without his usual dramatic entrance. Dumbledore came in and sat on the edge of Harry’s bed as if he were a tired relative taking a chair, his hands folded and his eyes softer at the rims than Harry had ever seen. He looked… older, not by years but by a strain that sat under his voice.

“You did well, Harry,” Dumbledore said simply. His words were not loud, yet they carried the room. “You were very brave.”

Harry met the praise with a small, tired shrug. Brave did not feel like the right word for the way his chest still ached. “Why did you—” he began before he could stop himself. The question had been coiling all night. “Why set those traps inside a school? Why make the third floor into a battlefield? Why let him teach here for a year? It’s madness, sir. It’s not safe.”

Dumbledore’s face did not blanch. He sat very still for a long moment, then nodded as if he had been waiting for that exact word. “You are right to ask,” he said. “You are right to be angry. I owe you an explanation and an apology.”

Harry put his hands flat on the blanket and tried to steady the tremor in them. “It’s not just angry,” he said. “People could have died. You… you let him walk the corridors. You allowed him to stand in a classroom where children learn.” The shock in his voice surprised him; it had sharpened into accusation before he meant it to.

Dumbledore did not shrink from the force of it. “At first I believed him gone,” he said slowly. “There were whispers, things that did not fit, shadows that did not pass; I had doubts. But I did not believe, truly, that the man himself would place his foot in my school again. I had suspicion, Harry, but no proof. If I had known that he himself would be here in person, I would have done everything differently. I swear it.”

“You gave him Defence Against the Dark Arts for a year,” Harry said. The words tasted of incredulity. “That is—how could you let that happen?”

“For the best of reasons and the worst of failings,” Dumbledore answered. “I set protections because the Stone needed guarding. I asked that obstacles be placed to prevent a thief reaching it. But you are right to ask why such measures were set within school walls. At some point I stopped thinking merely as a headmaster and began to think as someone who had been fighting a war for a very long time. When you fight a war for too long you begin to measure everything by the threat that keeps visiting, and you forget some of the small duties that should never be traded for vigilance. That was my error.”

Harry’s mouth went thin. The idea that a headmaster might forget the small, obvious things because he had been busy with horrors made his anger flicker into something colder. “So, you accept it then. You accept that you put us at risk.”

Dumbledore’s eyes closed briefly, a quick, weary thing. When he opened them the old, quick humour had gone from their edges. “Yes,” he said. “I accept it. I accept full responsibility. I should have been thinking first of the children in my care, not only of how to keep some legend from falling into greedy hands. If I ever let myself become so convinced of an end that I trade away a child’s safety for it, then you have my word: remind me. I will not, I swear to you, put students at such risk again.”

There was steel under the apology now, not the cold of excuse but the hard tempering of regret. Harry felt some of the tautness in him loosen. He unfolded his hands and watched the dust drift, thinking of Ron on his narrow cot and Hermione insisting they should have been more careful. A single, short line from Dumbledore — “I will not put students at such risk again” — settled in him like a small promise.

Dumbledore shifted, and the conversation moved with the ease of two people who had been through things together, though hardly as equals. “Tell me about the Stone,” he said. “With the mirror wrecked and the room turned to ruin, no trace has been found. Do you know where it went?”

Harry could have told the truth: that the Stone had folded itself into a circle of light and into Death’s hand and that he had hidden it. He did not. The knowledge of it felt like a thing too private to lay out, a possession that might protect someone if kept unspoken. He kept his voice flat and measured.

“He didn’t get it,” Harry said. “Voldemort didn’t get the Stone. The mirror exploded and the Stone was destroyed in the blast.”

Dumbledore closed his eyes for a moment and then drew a slow breath, as if relief itself had weight. “If that is so,” he said quietly, “perhaps that is for the best. A thing that can cheat death is too dangerous to be left upon the earth. If it is truly gone, then temptation has one less place to set its foot.”

Harry let the lie sit between them. It was easier, somehow, to hear Dumbledore’s relief than to lay the truth on the bed like another burden. He watched the headmaster’s face and wondered how much guilt would settle into it in the months to come.

There came then the practical part of being a schoolboy in a world that had just fallen apart at the edge. “You must think of the summer,” Dumbledore said finally. “Sirius—well, he is in St Mungo’s and still recovering. He cannot take care of you as he heals. You will need to go to Privet Drive for the holidays. Your relatives have been informed. They will be at King’s Cross to collect you.”

The words hit like a small stone. Harry had expected it, had known it for a long while, and yet the certainty of it made his chest hollow out. He had thought, before everything fell apart, that some different arrangement might be made, that perhaps the people who knew something about him would offer a better home. Now the practicalities of hospitals and the rules of the world closed around him.

“You may write to him,” Dumbledore went on. “And Madam Pomfrey says you’ll be able to be released in time for the end‑of‑year feast. I will write to St Mungo’s about visits; the doctors might allow you to see Sirius every two weeks if the Dursleys can bring you.”

Harry pictured Aunt Petunia’s face and Uncle Vernon’s stout shoulders. He pictured them driving him, willingly, to a hospital. He shrugged, more to himself than to Dumbledore.

“They won’t drive me,” he said. The sentence was small and flat. Inside, he admitted a private truth: he preferred the Dursleys’ neglect to the watchful pity of someone like Sirius who would see all the damage and tend it. The Dursleys would leave him alone; Sirius would make him confront what happened.

Dumbledore’s face tightened in a way that was almost pain. “I am sorry, Harry,” he said after a moment. “I am sorry for how these falls upon you. I wish things could be different. If there is anything I can do—”

“You’ve done enough,” Harry said, more sharply than he intended. He regretted the tone the instant it left his mouth. He had not meant to be ungrateful; the feeling under his skin was complicated and not ready for simple mercies.

Dumbledore rose then, and for a moment stood in the doorway as if reluctant to leave. He reached out and laid a cool hand on Harry’s forehead, a gesture both fatherly and formal. “Take care of yourself,” he said softly. “There are things you must never do entirely alone. You have friends, Harry. Remember that.”

Madam Pomfrey bustled in at the sound of footsteps with a list of dos and don’ts and an encouraging promise that he would be up and about by the feast. Dumbledore’s shoulders were set differently as he left, as if the weight of choice had been moved and settled in his back.

When the door closed Harry let the day come back to him in a flood of fractured images: the mirror’s green light; the heat that had run through Quirrell’s fingers; the puff of ash; the wraith’s red points. The coin in his pocket pressed like a small, warm stone against his ribs. He folded the memory over and kept it silent. The infirmary stitched flesh and set bones; it did not, Harry thought, stitch the lines you draw through someone’s days after they make choices for you.

He lay there and thought of nothing and of everything. Outside, bells rang for some late hour; somewhere far-off, laughter trickled like water. The promise Dumbledore had made, the sworn vow not to put students at such risk again, fitted into his thoughts like a bracket that might hold future decisions steady. He decided, idly and not for the first time, that he would remind the headmaster of it if he ever forgot.

Before sleep finally tugged him under, he made himself a list of small things he would do over the summer: do his homework, write to Hermione and Ron, and correspond with Sirius at St Mungo’s about warding theory and whatever small, safe questions Harry could ask until he was able to learn in person, because there was, he told himself, no shame in learning what keeps others safe. The coin remained warm, and the knowledge of the Stone folded itself into the hollow of his private thoughts like a secret he had not yet decided to bring into the light.

He had not meant to sleep; the effort of not thinking seemed to be the only thing that quieted the ache behind his eyes. When sleep came it was not a falling but a slipping, as if the world had loosened its seams and let him pass through to somewhere edges were thin and meaning ran like ink.

He stood, or thought he stood, in a long room that smelled of old paper and iron. The walls were lined with lists of names written in cramped, steady hands; in the distance something rang that could have been a bell or the tolling of a vein. A hand came for him then, not slow with mercy nor quick with cruelty, only inevitable. It was the hand of a thing made of bone and the hush of winter, and about the wrist a band of silver threaded with a rune glowed so faintly that the sight made his skin prickle.

The hand did not touch him. It closed around a small bright object like a coin, and as it did the coin unmade itself into a spill of light and remade as metal and then as a band that held a single bead of deep red like a flame drowned in water. The rune on the band slid as if writing a name he almost understood and then could not hold. A single image stayed with him as the scene folded: the platform folding inward, like a bell struck beneath water. A voice that did not give explanations but weighed things laid itself across his chest like cold gold.

You kept what others let fall, it seemed to say. Avouch.

He woke with the metallic taste stubborn on his tongue and his fingers curled around something he did not expect to find. Where, a few hours before, his palm had pressed on a smooth silver disk there was now a narrow band of metal. For a second, half a second where the infirmary light seemed unreal, he thought he had not crossed back at all and that the long room of lists was only sleeping’s afterimage.

He sat up and turned the thing over in his hand.

It was a ring: plain silver, thin and near delicate, threaded on the inner curve with a hairline rune. Set low into the band was a stone that drank light rather than threw it back, a deep red that held flame like an ember in dark water. When he pressed the ring between finger and thumb it hummed, a small, thrumming vibration that slid up his arm and left a metallic tang at the back of his mouth.

Nausea came like a tide and the infirmary blurred; he had to lie back and breathe until the wave passed. The dream’s single instruction — Avouch — burned behind his eyes with an odd courtesy that tasted of iron and rain.

He did not slip the ring on. Instead, he folded his hand flat over his pocket as if holding the metal down under skin. Madam Pomfrey bustled in, all brisk comfort and scolding, and handed him a cup of something hot that tasted of lemon and sweetness. He smiled at her because such things were a small tether to ordinary life and kept his other hand pressed over the warm, unfamiliar weight.

“Lie still,” she said. “No sudden movements. You gave us quite a fright, you know.” She fussed with his blanket and rattled instructions about tonics and rest. He let her chatter settle at the edges of the room until she left, and when the door clicked, he let his fingers explore the ring again.

It was not merely different in shape. When he thought of Quirrell, of ash, of smoke twisting into the wraith, the ring made that small, warming tug in his pocket again, an echo of the fever he had felt in the mirror-chamber. He pressed his fingers to the metal and a flash of something unwanted, the smell of old fire and iron, the impression of cloth catching, ran through him and made the room tilt. He drew his hand away fast and lay with the domestic light pressing on his closed lids until the feeling dimmed.

Expectation is a teaching better learned slowly, the dream had seemed to say. If Death had used a ring in the vision to take the Stone, and if his coin and that ring had been linked across the mirror, then the change was not absurd. The coin had already adapted once, when it reached for the Cloak, the triangle in the Hallows mark had rounded, and his hands knew now that whatever this object was, it answered to patterns stronger than simple chance.

He kept the ring hidden in his pocket while Hermione arrived, breathless and sharp with questions. “Harry!” she said, then reached for his hand, notebook forgotten, and said only, “Tell me everything.” Her eyes searched his face as if she could lift answers out of skin. He gave her small, blunt sentences about the shape of the Mirror and the way the light had folded; he kept the rest shut tight.

Ron came later, cheeks freckled with the afterglow of worry and embarrassment and threw an arm over his shoulder as if to check he was still there. Ron’s shoulder stayed pressed to Harry’s as if to keep him anchored. They sat like that for a time, the three of them pressing against the fact that nothing had gone quite right and yet everything still held.

When Hermione and Ron left — Hermione promising to bring him homework, Ron promising to bring the sugar mice back in bulk — the infirmary felt suddenly larger and the ordinary plans he had made for the summer thin and fragile. He sat alone for a while, the ring warm against his hip, and then did what felt like a deliberate, private thing: he wrote.

He wrote to Sirius with care because he could not broach what had truly happened without alarming someone who did not know the whole story. Sirius, a Black by blood and training, might know old, obscure branches of magic or at least know who might. Harry kept his questions small and coded, the sort of curiosity a young man might ask without tipping a hand: Have you ever heard tell of charms that change how an object appears after it has... been touched by death? Are there books among your family that mention tokens altered by loss? He tucked a line asking only that Sirius advise which old texts or curators to ask, not to come himself. He wrote the rest in steadier strokes: that he was all right, that he would be released for the feast, that he was to go to Privet Drive for the summer. He hid the envelope in the cushion of the bed and, when sleep finally took him, let the ring sit warm under his fingers like a small and dangerous secret.

He woke later to the low clatter of voices and the smell of stew. The infirmary was cheerfully full of convalescents and low lamps; moonlight made the rune along the band look like a small river of ink. That night, when the first‑years had been tucked and the lamps turned low, Harry slipped from his bed and walked the short way to the window. He did not put on the ring, only held it between finger and thumb to feel its pulse.

A tug came then, small and insistent, as if something nearby wanted attention. The ring pulsed in his fingers; for an instant a picture flashed in the back of his eyes, a narrow stair, a lintel of stone, the smell of iron and the thin memory of a whisper. The flash left him with a cold certainty that the ring would call when things with death were near and that attendance would not be without consequence.

He slid the ring into his pocket; its weight made the fortnightly letters and summer chores feel suddenly trivial. The ring hummed with something that wanted questions, not essays, and the mystery of it made every ordinary plan feel trivial. He did not try the ring’s power that night, nor did he intend to until he understood more, but the simple notion of a summer spent writing and hiding from attention had been eclipsed.

Before he went to bed, he pulled out the letter to Sirius, smoothed the crease with care and, with hands that did not quite stop trembling, pushed it beneath his pillow where no one would think to look. The ring lay warm against his hip like a secret breathing.

He did not know if it had been given as thanks or taken as fee. He only knew that something had answered to what he had held out in the Mirror room and that answer had a weight and a voice and a habit of changing things. Avouch, the dream had said, and the word settled into him like a coin into a pocket: small, heavy, and impossible to forget.

The Great Hall shone like a held breath, banners stirring softly, house tables gleaming, the long candles bright as small moons. Students laughed and talked in every key of relief and exhaustion; plates clinked; Professor McGonagall wore her stern relief like a cloak. Dumbledore sat at the centre, as he always did, looking a little less like a man of triumph and more like a man who had been remembering things all night.

The feast went on with the pleasant clatter of things reassembling; highlights were eaten, speeches politely made, and then, as in every year, Professor McGonagall stood to announce the House Points. Tension threaded the room, Slytherin led by a comfortable margin, Gryffindor thin and behind, the usual murmurs of who would win.

Dumbledore rose to his feet then, very quietly, and the Hall cooled to whatever attention could be summoned from a thousand tired bodies. He spoke of bravery and of choices and of a certain courage shown by three students who had gone beyond expectation to defend the school. He spoke without flourish, simply and with that tempered tiredness about him, and then, in one small, delicate turn, awarded last minute points: one by one for Hermione’s quick thinking, for Ron’s sacrifice, for Harry’s willingness to face danger alone.

Gryffindor shot up the board.

Slytherin’s table went very still. The green of victory washed out as the numbers slid away and Gryffindor’s total rose to a close, unexpected lead. A ripple, not quite stunned, not quite angry, moved along their bench. Behind Harry, Ron whooped and clapped, Hermione’s face crumpled with an expression near to dismay and gratitude at once. The Gryffindors burst, loud and messy and very human.

When the clapping had died down and the House Cup was accepted in the cheeriest, most clinging fashion by a humming Gryffindor table, Harry found the applause oddly hollow. He watched Dumbledore’s hand rest on the Cup for a moment too long, like a man steadying himself, and he felt an odd pang: that the timing of the points, at the very end and in a mocking reversal, did not feel purely ceremonial. It felt political, it felt final, and it felt like a gesture made to be seen rather than quietly logged.

Hermione leaned close and spoke in a voice that was both small and sharp. “That was… poor taste,” she said. “If Dumbledore had intended it, he had a week. He could have given us points quietly. Doing it on the stage makes it a spectacle.”

“You’d have liked Slytherin to win?” Ron asked, half incredulous, half teasing.

“No, but this… publicly robbing them at the last second, it deepens things, Ron. It makes a chasm wider. We can’t pretend gestures like that don’t echo.”

Harry listened and felt the truth of it. The House Cup in his hands was warm and bright; it tasted of triumph but left a bitter afternote. He did not voice the thought that perhaps Dumbledore had been trying to fix something immediate, or that a man weighed by war and fear might make choices that read poorly in a hall of children. Instead, he let the unease sit like a small stone between them.

After the speeches and the singing and the last slices of pudding, robes were packed and trunks rolled; farewells were said with hugs that felt both hurried and earnest. The next morning the station was busy and slobbery with students and trunks and the smell of platform steam.

They found a compartment together as always, the square of space on the train temporarily their private world. Ron flopped down opposite Harry and began making holiday plans in the expansive, optimistic way he reserved for breaks. “I’ll get Dad to send an owl, yeah? I’ll sort it — you’ll come to the Burrow as soon as we can, Harry. Mum’ll make you dinner that isn’t boiled to death.”

Harry managed a smile. “Thanks, Ron.” He believed Ron would try; the Burrow promised something like normalcy. He did not say that his summer would not be ordinary.

Hermione folded a neat scrap of parchment and slid it across the table. She tapped the single sketch of the box and the thin runes on its lid. “Final stitch here,” she said. “We’ve practised it enough.”

“So, we do it when Malfoy slips it?” Ron prompted.

“You make the scene,” Hermione answered, looking at Ron; “knock a pile of books, anything loud. Harry, you reach in, take the diary, drop it into the box I hold open. I shut it and hide it out of sight. Quick hands. No fuss.”

They ran the tiny signals once, Ron’s cough, Hermione’s tiny lift of the hand, Harry’s curt nod, until the motions lived in their fingers. As Ron mimed the slip and Hermione closed her imagined palm over the chest, something sour tightened in Harry’s gut. The ring in his pocket grew unnaturally cold and gave a single, warning throb that made the hairs on his arm stand up. He swallowed the bad feeling and said nothing; the plan did not need another voice.

They crowded down from the carriage into the surge of trunks and voices and found the family gate where parents waited in small knots. Ron shouldered forward, all proud blur and motion.

“Mum! Dad! This is Harry,” he announced, dragging Harry by the sleeve.

Mr Weasley’s face went red with pleasure. He gripped Harry’s hand with both of his as if sealing a promise. “Good to see you, son,” he said, enthusiasm spilling from him. “How are you keeping?”

Mrs Weasley’s relief was immediate and loud: she kissed Harry on the cheek and fussed over him, murmuring something about getting him a proper roast and worrying over whether he’d had enough to eat. Her welcome felt like warmth put into the world.

Hermione’s parents stood a little apart, formal and careful at first. Mr Granger offered a polite handshake that was precise and lonely with caution; Mrs Granger inspected Hermione’s trunk with brisk efficiency. They hovered on the edge of reserve until the Weasleys’ easy kindness folded around them, and then, under that neighbourly warmth, they thawed. Mrs Granger smiled, a little uncertain, but it reached her eyes; Mr Granger’s posture relaxed by degrees as he met Arthur Weasley’s ready, bright chatter. The muggles’ stiffness eased into something like gratitude.

Then the Dursleys came through, a kind of rude impatience. Aunt Petunia’s smile was tight and carefully varnished; Uncle Vernon’s jaw set in that look of officious superiority he cultivated for public encounters. Arthur, polite as ever, stepped forward with his hand extended. “Excuse me… are you Harry’s relatives? I don’t believe we’ve—” he began.

Vernon cut him off with a look that said he considered the whole subject distasteful. “Yes, yes — unfortunately. This is our nephew,” he said, his tone flat and dismissive as if Harry were a bit of stuck gum to be scraped off a shoe. He glanced at Harry once, openly annoyed, and barked, “Boy, come along. We haven’t all day.”

Aunt Petunia pursed her lips toward Harry as if she might have preferred not to speak at all. “You know the rules,” she said, loud enough for those nearby to hear. “No nonsense. You’ll come with us, and you’ll behave.”

They were brusque, hurried, and openly uncomfortable among a crowd that smelled of magic and laughter. Vernon’s demeanour was pinched and officious, a man determined that everything be kept exactly as he pleased; Petunia’s face was a tight, practiced blank meant to make Harry feel invisible. Without another moment they started to move away, leaving the cluster of parents and friends behind as if Harry were a detail to be swept up.

Mr Weasley’s smile faltered; Mrs Weasley’s hand tightened on his sleeve. Mr and Mrs Granger exchanged a quick, worried look with the Weasleys, a shared, wordless alarm at how the Dursleys spoke to the boy. Their faces said something grown‑up and precise: this was not kindness, and they did not like it.

Harry managed a small laugh and waved both off. “It’s all right,” he said quickly, because he knew the look and knew how it landed, because he had spent eleven years learning how to make small apologies for other people’s manners. “I’m used to it.” His voice kept a calm he did not entirely feel.

Hermione hugged him harder than she had in the carriage. “Write to us,” she said, voice trembling only a little. “If anything happens — anything — you write at once.”

“Don’t be daft about the Dursleys,” Ron said, grinning with the fierce comfort of a friend who meant it.

Harry hugged them both back, then let go. “I’ll write,” he promised, louder this time, and he meant it. He shouldered his trunk and followed the Dursleys’ brisk stride, their heels clipping the pavement like a metronome urging him onward.

As he walked after them, he felt the plan folded in his trunk and the memory of the rehearsal on the train, Ron’s fake stumble, Hermione’s hidden hands, the quick snap of the lid. It was a clean plan; they had practiced the motions until they were second nature. But the rehearsal had left him with a bad, sour feeling, the sort of warning that sits under the tongue and tastes of trouble. He did not voice it. He did not add a new burden to their voices and promises.

He caught one more look from Mr Weasley and from Mrs Granger, the same worried glance they'd shared at the gate, and it sat inside him like a small pebble. He tucked the feeling away and hurried on. As the Dursleys' car door shut behind him, Harry felt the warning like a hand at his throat and knew, with a cold clarity, that nothing about this summer would go as they had planned.

End of book 1