Chapter Text
It has been several days since Harry had arrived to Number Twelve, Grimmauld Place. He still didn’t know how to think of that place, or the Order. To be honest, the house felt less like a home and more like a long-forgotten museum of Dark Arts, with its moth-eaten velvet curtains and the severed heads of house-elves staring down from the walls. It was a place where the shadows seemed to have a weight of their own, pressing against him whenever he walked through the drafty corridors.
"More tea, Harry?" Mrs. Weasley asked, her voice snapping him out of his trance.
She was bustling around the long, scarred wooden table, moving with a kind of frantic energy that suggested she was trying to scrub the gloom out of the kitchen through sheer willpower.
"Thanks," Harry said, holding out his mug.
"Did you sleep any better last night?" she continued, pouring the dark liquid with a steady hand. "I thought I heard you moving about quite early. It’s that old mattress, isn't it? I’ve told Arthur we need to see about the Charms on those beds."
"It’s fine, really," Harry replied, wrapping his hands around the warm mug. "Just... not used to all..this."
It wasn’t just the house, though. It was the Order in general — the way they seemed to exist in the walls, in the stairwells, in the lowered voices that dissolved the moment he entered a room. They were everywhere and nowhere at once.
Whenever the door to the meeting room clicked shut something in his chest tightened. Just a strange, prickly heat that spread under his ribs and up into his throat. He would be left standing in the dim hallway with Ron shifting awkwardly beside him, Hermione trying not to look as frustrated as she felt, and Ginny pretending she didn’t care. The adults’ voices would blur into an indistinct hum beyond the door, rising occasionally in sharp emphasis before flattening again into careful neutrality.
He knew they were protecting him. That was the word they always used: Protecting. As though he were something fragile. As though the scar on his forehead had not burned with the presence of Voldemort himself. As though he had not stood in graveyards and watched friends die. As though he had not faced dragons and dementors and the cold, suffocating certainty of being utterly alone. Protection implied innocence. It implied ignorance. It implied that he needed shielding from truths he had already survived.
After everything he had been through these past few years — the tournaments, the trials, the nightmares that left him gasping in the dark — being “protected” felt a lot like being ignored. Like being patted on the head and told to wait upstairs like a good kid. He understood the gravity of this war in a way few of them ever could. He did not need protecting from the truth.
And Harry knew that he wasn’t some stupid kid who didn’t know the gravity of this war.
"You're thinking about the hearing again, aren't you?" Ron said, sitting down heavily beside him and reaching for the marmalade. "Hermione’s been at it since six. She’s found three more cases of wizards using magic in front of Muggles and getting off with just a warning."
"It’s not just the hearing," Harry muttered, watching a stray dust mote dance in a sliver of grey light.
He didn't know how to explain this to his friend. Also, he still wasn’t that happy with the fact that Ron and Hermione had kept this all a secret to him as well.
"Eat your toast, dear," Mrs. Weasley said softly, patting his shoulder as she passed. "Everything looks better on a full stomach. And don't you worry—Dumbledore will be there. It’ll all be sorted out."
Harry nodded, taking a bite of the cold toast. He wanted to believe her. He ate through his breakfast wondering what kind of boring-slash-useless uneventful day will be waiting for him today.
“Wait…Harry? You hear that too?” Ron tapped him on the elbow.
Indeed, a strange sound seemed to be coming from the ceiling upstairs. Harry froze, his fork hovering halfway to his mouth. At first, he thought it was just the house settling—Grimmauld Place was famous for its groans, its sighs, and the occasional shriek from a moth-eaten curtain.
But none like this.
"Yeah," Harry whispered, setting his fork down quietly.
Mrs. Weasley stopped mid-scrub at the sink, her soapy hands dripping onto the floor. She tilted her head, her brow furrowed in a mix of irritation and sudden alarm.
"If that’s Fred and George testing those Skiving Snackboxes in the drawing room again, I’ll have their wands for a week."
"It doesn't sound like Fred and George," Hermione said, finally closing her heavy law book with a soft thud. She looked toward the ceiling, her eyes narrowed. "It sounds... mechanic."
The adults all shifted with unease, pulling their wands out and carefully moving out of the kitchen to find the source of this illsounding noise. The casual, clinking atmosphere of breakfast vanished in a heartbeat. Mrs. Weasley’s face went pale, her motherly fussing instantly replaced by the sharp, practiced alertness. One by one, the adults at the table rose. Their chairs scraping hoarsely against the stone floor. Wands were drawn from pockets and sleeves in a series of fluid clicks, the wood gleaming dully in the dim kitchen light.
"Stay here," Lupin commanded, his voice low and unusually flinty.
He didn't look back as he led the way, his shadow stretching long and jagged against the peeling wallpaper as the group of wizards moved toward the door with predatory caution. Harry, Ron, and Hermione stood frozen by the table. But Harry slowly followed the members of the Order as they advanced out the kitchen.
"OH MY — FUZZBUCKETS!!!!!!"
The shout was high-pitched, frantic, and entirely out of place in the grim, death-obsessed house of the Blacks.
There was no crack of Apparition, no familiar rush of Floo powder.
Instead, suspended in the otherwise dust-choked drawing room of the ancient and most thoroughly unpleasant house of Black, there hovered what could only be described as a vast, gaping rent in reality. It simply was — a ragged aperture hanging several feet above the staircase, as though someone had taken a blade to the air itself and sliced it clean through. The thing appeared to be composed entirely of shadow, though not the ordinary sort cast by candlelight. These were deeper, denser — a swallowing kind of darkness that seemed to drink in the light around it. The edges shifted and curled inward like smoke caught in a draught, folding over themselves in slow, deliberate motions. And tracing the circumference of it all were thin veins of electric-blue light, crackling in irregular bursts.
What was more alarming was the person who clearly and quite literally fell from it.
He hit the first step with a heavy thud and proceeded to fall down the rest of the staircase.
Thump.
Clatter.
Bang.
Oof.
Next to him Ron muttered, “Ouch, That must’ve hurt a lot.”
Finally he descended in a chaotic blur of flailing limbs, his head knocking against the portrait of a very startled Phineas Nigellus Black.
A heavy, bewildered silence fell over the house. Even Mrs. Black’s portrait, usually prone to ear-splitting shrieks, seemed to have suffered a momentary system failure, her mouth hanging open in silent shock. Harry, Ron, and Hermione leaned over the adults trying to get a good look at this chaos.
"Right," he wheezed, his voice muffled by the rug. “Next time Krel tells me something is not ready yet, it really isn’t”
The boy with a thick British accent groaned softly and rolled onto his side, pushing himself up onto his elbows with visible reluctance. He blinked several times, trying to get focused.
“Brilliant,” he muttered to himself, brushing at his black hoodie. “Absolutely textbook landing. Ten out of ten. No notes.”
He got one foot beneath him, then the other, rising at last to his full height — tall, wiry, and distinctly out of place amid the heavy curtains and ancestral gloom of Number Twelve, Grimmauld Place. For one thing, he did not look like any wizard Harry had ever seen. But nor did he resemble a Muggle in any familiar sense.
He dressed funny; a fitted hoodie, worn boots, which for some reason, were all black. Silver bracelets circled his wrists, catching the low lamplight, and a small skull necklace rested against his chest.
Which, Harry thought uneasily, made the situation far more confusing.
The adults appeared to be thinking the same thing. Their wands did not waver, yet none of them had cast so much as a Stunning Spell.
He did not bear the marks of a Death Eater — at least no visual marks. And yet nothing about him read as harmless, either. He had no wand and all, but certainly no ordinary Muggle would simply wander through a shimmering, blue-edged tear in reality and land in the drawing room of the ancestral home of the House of Black.
Finally the boy noticed them.
Wands pointed directly at his chest.
The clear tension in the room.
There was a pause — a very long, very delicate pause.
The boy’s eyes crossed slightly as he examined the forest of wand tips hovering inches from him. His brows lifted.
“Oh,” he said.
Another beat.
“Okay?”
Then, slowly — very slowly — he raised both hands.
“Woah, woah, woah — mates,” he said. “Let’s not get too hasty now, shall we? I’ve only just arrived. No need to..point daggers, er, your wands at me.”
No one lowered their wand.
Behind the front line, Harry craned his neck for a better look. Ron whispered, “Blimey—”
Hermione elbowed him sharply.
Mad-Eye Moody’s magical eye spun in its socket, whirring ominously. “So you are a wizard,” he barked, looking at him up and down.
The boy winced. “Right. Yes.”
He cleared his throat, attempting something between composure and charm.
“Well,” he said lightly, gesturing vaguely at the assembled circle of armed adults, “on the bright side, I’ve at least landed among hedge-wizards instead of ordinary mortals. That would’ve been a complete nightmare. Explaining the portal alone! It would be just another decade of Quantum physics!”
A collective silence followed. Several brows furrowed.
“Hedge—what?” Ron muttered from behind.
Moody’s magical eye clicked. “Careful.”
He blinked, clearly taken aback by their expressions. His gaze moved from one stern face to another — Molly Weasley’s outrage, Sirius’s suspicion, Remus’s quiet scrutiny.
“…You are hedgewizards,” he said slowly, as though testing the term. “Magic. Community-based, you know. Wands. Spells. Specialized in certain magics, no? Rings any bells?”
No one answered.
His confusion deepened. “Right. Fine. Terminology differences. Happens. Zoe did mention that…”
He trailed off, then drew himself upright, brushing the dust from his sleeves.
“Okay, nevermind that. Well — um — now can we perhaps put those wands down?” he asked hopefully, glancing at the ring of spell-tips still aimed squarely at his ribs. “I really see no need for a fight.”
Sirius stepped forward slightly, wand steady, expression sharp. “Why should we do that?” he demanded. “You just blasted through the wards on this house and expect us to treat you like a friend?”
The raven haired teen blinked. “I did not blast anything,” he protested, mildly offended. “I fell. Didn’t you see? There’s a difference. This was more of a—” he gestured vaguely upward toward the still-flickering tear in the ceiling, “—miscalculated disaster.”
“The wards are ancient,” Lupin said quietly, though his wand did not lower. “Layered. Blood-bound. Very difficult to bypass.”
“That kinda explains the turbulence.”
Moody’s magical eye whirred. “You’re saying you didn’t mean to land here.”
“Well, yes, I’m pretty sure I would’ve thought twice before trying to test this out if I knew that I would fall into a circle of very angry hedgewizards.”
“Then why did you…make this portal…thing?” Sirius pressed.
The boy opened his mouth. Then closed it.
“…That is an excellent question,” he admitted. “Wish I could explain, though I’m afraid that might mix up the timeline more than it already is.”
A muscle ticked in Sirius’s jaw at that. “The time line?”
The boy exhaled slowly, hands still raised. “Look, if I wanted to hurt any of you, you’d know. For one thing I wouldn’t announce myself by falling on my back and insulting your carpet.”
There was the faintest flicker of reluctant logic in that.
He looked back up at the ceiling.
The rift apparently had sealed itself. The air where it had hung now shimmered only faintly, residual threads of blue and green sparks dissolving into nothing. As though it had never been there at all.
“Fuzzbuckets…” he muttered under his breath.
His hand moved toward his hoodie.
Wands snapped up in perfect, lethal unison.
“Don’t you try anything clever,” growled Moody, magical eye whirring as it fixed on him. “Spare us the polished chatter. You don’t set the terms here, lad.”
“Oh,” he muttered, almost to himself, eyeing the magical eye with open curiosity. “You’re intense.”
His hands were still in his pockets. The Order exchanged glances. Kingsley’s wand shifted a fraction higher. Tonks adjusted her stance. Moody’s magical eye spun, tracking every twitch of the boy’s shoulders.The teenager regarded them in silence. None of the Order lowered their weapons.
Both sides, unsure which move to make.
At this point it was clear that he wasn’t a Death Eater. But still the wards had flared when he arrived. If he had forced his way through them, matters were already far worse than they appeared.
The tension snapped.
“Stun him!” someone barked.
Spells burst through the air in a blaze of coloured light. Through the chaos of flashing lights and shouted incantations, Harry saw it.
The boy’s hands did not take out a wand at all. They darted instead to the strange stone-and-iron bracelet clasped around his forearm. A celestial blue radiance spiralled outward, coiling up in bands of light. Symbols—ancient letters that Harry couldn’t recognise but instinctively assumed were runes—ignited along the metal.
Then, as though conjured from the air itself, a staff snapped into existence in his grasp.
It was unlike any wand Harry had ever seen. Forged of blackened metal that seemed to drink in the surrounding light, it rose taller than the boy by a head. At its crest sat a deep, electric blue gem, blazing with magic. The glow was not merely light; it felt alive, thrumming the air.
A shimmering shield flared into place just as the first Stunning Spell struck.
The jet of red light collided with a half-transparent barrier of luminous blue. Energy rippled outward in a violent, concussive wave that rattled the windows in their frames and sent dust cascading from the ceiling.
The dust and light cleared and at the centre of it all, the boy stood perfectly still. He planted the base of the staff against the floor.
“Please,” he said, more sharply now, eyes flashing with something far older than his youthful face suggested.
As with they were aged for hundreds of years
“I’m really trying not to escalate this.”
Silence fell — strained, disbelieving.
And then—
A sharp, guttural croak from behind him.
The boy barely had time to register movement before something heavy and surprisingly solid struck the back of his head with brutal precision.
With that he collapsed in a graceless heap.
Standing behind him, clutching the smoking skillet with bony hands, was Kreacher, ears flattened, eyes blazing with vindictive triumph.
“Filthy intruder threatening Mistress’s house,” he croaked.
Moody lowered his wand slowly, staring at the unconscious unknown wizard sprawled on the floor, staff rolling from limp fingers.
Slowly — very slowly — every wand lowered.
Ron stared.
Hermione blinked.
Harry looked from the unconscious boy… to the house-elf… and back again.
“…Well,” Ron piped up. “That’s one way to disarm him.”