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The frustrating thing about being fifteen in the middle of the war was that Harriet knew she was being unreasonable, and couldn’t just stop. It was really a good thing that Hermione had transferred to Beauxbatons after Sirius and Andromeda talked to her parents. It meant Hermione would be safe from the war, and Voldemort, and violence against muggleborns. Harry could and did still write to her, and telephone, and go to see her on holidays. It wasn’t the same, but how could it be?
It was really a good thing, too, that Grimmauld Place existed. It was a very secure location, and big enough for Sirius and Andromeda and Ted and Tonks and Harriet herself to all move in, and there was still so much space everyone rattled around and barely saw each other unless they went to an effort. It was just that, first of all, being in Grimmauld Place made Sirius and Andromeda snappish and irritable about everything, and second, all of that space felt like barely anything at all when Harry wasn’t allowed to leave the house because of the war.
It wasn’t a complete restriction, it only felt like it. One adult was not enough, there had to be two available and a security plan, and Tonks was always working at the Ministry, and Sirius and Andromeda were in bad moods all the time. They tried not to argue with Harry, so instead they fought with whoever else came, each other or Ted, which was not better.
Worst of all was the need to learn about Legilimency and Occlumency, necessary because of Harriet waking up in other people’s dreams increasingly often after she turned fifteen. This apparently meant she had inherited a rare magical talent in mind magic. Sometimes it was funny, as when she shared Tonks’s dream about being a small, purple winged dogs who stole the quaffle and was chased around a quidditch pitch by the players. Mostly it was just awful, or embarrassing, or both. To top it off, Harriet was awful at Occlumency so far.
None of it had anything on being murdered by Voldemort or almost murdered by Voldemort or having your business burnt down or being fired from your job for being opposed to him, of course. There just didn’t seem to be anything Harry could do about the country or the war in general, except trying not to bother the adults when they were working on political stuff, and not being murdered so as to remain available as a symbol.
“Not that I want to be murdered,” said Harry to the dusty, cobweb-strewn ceiling of her new bedroom, “But avoiding it’s not as exciting as it’s cracked up to be.” Mostly it meant more of the same: behaving herself and staying inside, where it was safe. Worse, Grimmauld Place didn’t have a muggle phone installed, so that limited her time talking to Hermione, too.
The room, of course, did not reply.
Harriet thought about remaining where she was, lying on her bed, staring at the colored glass windows sending dim blue and green light across the floorboards and sulking. But sulking was also not very fun, and frankly made her feel uncomfortably like Dudley if she kept it up long. Harry had finished her summer homework weeks early, written a number of lengthy letters to Hermione, looked over her O.W.L. year textbooks unenthusiastically, and studied at length the quidditch plays from major games of the last year covered in various newsletters for use in school games. She wanted go out and actually fly, or failing that, go for a walk.
If she couldn’t do any of that, she might as well go for a walk inside, she decided, and pushed herself up from the bed.
This was also frequently sort of unpleasant. Grimmauld Place was mostly safe, having had the cursed objects removed before they all moved in, and, people kept telling her, being inclined to protect the ward of the Black family’s head. It was nevertheless full of disturbing and disconcerting things, and judgmental portraits alongside malicious bits of architecture. But it was something to do. Harriet left her room, made a rude gesture at the nearest portrait’s immediate remark on ‘those horrid muggle trousers,’ and started climbing stairs.
The house got weirder the further up and out you went, away from the regularly-used places. Today, Harriet wandered through a room filled with death masks; a corridor lined with a long, continuous mural of ships lost at sea, with mermaids calling threats or outright hurling sailors down into the waves; and a number of spaces with nothing overtly wrong, full of furniture covered in dust sheets that formed pale, alarming shapes at the edges of Harriet’s vision. After several of the last, Harriet found a short, spiraling staircase down, dusty and dark, and took it, hoping to shake the feeling she was somehow entering and leaving the same room repeatedly. She clattered down the stairs in a hurry, and opened the door at the bottom onto a circular room, lined with tapestries and more colored-glass windows, and ringed all around with padded seating. A brightly-patterned curtain fluttered in a doorway across from the stairs.
Breathing hard and embarrassed by her relief, Harriet shut the stair door and sank into an armchair. The tapestries in this room were practically normal. A lady in a medieval gown and bright, golden hair stood on a field of flowers across from Harriet, holding up one hand. Probably it was some scene from a story or allegory or something. But none of the tapestries included anybody’s guts on the floor or anything, here.
The sunlight fell brighter than elsewhere in the house, coming through that ring of colored glass. Harriet began to wonder how there could be windows in a full circle – although on second look, there weren’t quite, the tapestry colors only blended with the glass. She still thought there ought to have been more house behind some of the windows. She gave up on making sense of it quickly. Grimmauld Place’s architecture obeyed no geometry she could find.
It was very quiet, in here.
After a while, Harry’s panting slowed, and she looked around the room with more interest. There was a small, closed basket, out of place, seated on the edge of a trunk in place to be used as a table by a loveseat, and Harriet got up. It was covered in dust, clearly not in use, and she hesitated only briefly before pulling the lid open to find...
Sewing stuff. Typical. Grimmauld Place’s mysteries had two modes: horrifying and boring as hell. Harriet was about to close the basket again when she spotted a bit of paper tucked against the lining, mostly under a bunch of thread. There was something written on the paper. Harriet frowned and reached for it. She was very careful at first, shifting the supplies around the paper bit by bit, but she needn’t have bothered. It was written on the magically-made rag paper that lasted forever, and not particularly fragile. Finally, Harriet smoothed the paper out on her knee and read:
Spell for Companionship
Speak into mirror in Grimmauld Place, with flame cupped in hand illuminating face: “Grant me that I might be alone no more; grant me that trustworthy advice and alliance I require; grant me that I might be held in bonds of friendship again.
Notes – this is supposed to be a house-keyed spell that uses the enchantments built into our family, so it would only work here. I assume the mirror is meant to serve as a communication medium and that’s why the setting, but I’m skeptical. This sounds like a nursery game, not a spell. Not going to try it, in any case – I don’t need to get an additional person stuck here, too, if it should work.
Harriet snorted. It didn’t inspire a lot of confidence in her, either. She remembered Ron Weasley trying to show off on the train first year with a fake spell his older brothers had taught him to turn things yellow. She bent and studied the handwriting curiously, feeling a pang of sympathy for the last remark about being stuck, but it was unfamiliar. She wasn’t sure how old the paper was, or who else had even lived in the house at all in the last century. She wasn’t going to figure out whose sewing things these had been, unless she went and asked Andromeda, which was likely not wise.
Maybe there was more writing in the basket? Carefully, Harriet disassembled the sewing kit piece by piece. But though she found plenty of thread, ribbons, needles, and other bits and pieces she couldn’t identify, there was no more writing, and no sign of the owner’s name. Finally, Harriet gave up, oddly bereft. For a moment, it had felt as though somebody else was here, and had seen her loneliness. Harry reassembled the sewing kit carefully, putting the pieces back where she’d found them as well as she could until she closed the lid. But she kept the paper.
Harriet knew better than to attempt strange magic she’d found in a house full of Dark Arts stuff, probably fake or not. Really.
It was just that she had had another disastrous Occlumency lesson with Tonks. This one, horribly, had ended in making Tonks cry with a memory Harry accidentally pulled up of her parents arguing about leaving Britain during the last war. Then when Harriet tried to go apologize, later, Tonks had been called in to work an emergency shift, and Andromeda and Sirius were snapping at each other about something to do with the Daily Prophet but when Harry tried to talk to them claimed they weren’t. When Harry asked if they could go use a payphone so she could call Hermione, Sirius snapped at her, too, and afterward tried too hard to apologize, in a way that made Harriet feel vaguely sick. And she was going back to Hogwarts in a couple of weeks, and that meant no more visits to payphones, and still no Hermione, either.
Later, when Harriet had been lying around in bed for a while after dinner, she thought of the paper. It was tucked, now, into her dresser mirror. She got up to look, and reread it.
It wouldn’t be hard to try the spell, really. Hermione had taught Harriet to conjure safe, mostly-heatless bluebell flames all the way back in first year. She had a mirror right in front of her.
Harriet took her wand out of her jeans pocket, and cupped her left hand to catch the flames she conjured. Then she put her wand down on the dresser and her hands together. She looked into the mirror to recite the spell, and...
Nothing. Well. Harriet sighed. She had even agreed it didn’t sound like a real spell. She extinguished the flames, straightening, and--
Where had that extra door in the mirror come from?
Harriet whipped around to check it was there in the real world, too – which it was – and grabbed her wand hastily before approaching. Her hand was sweating on the wood. Stupid, stupid to go trying unfamiliar magic found in somebody’s handwriting in Grimmauld Place, ‘a friend’ or ‘companionship’ could mean practically anything--
“Morgana’s dirty knickers,” said a voice – a young, female voice, totally unfamiliar – on the other side of the door. “What the hell?”
Harriet clutched her wand, hearing footsteps approach. The door knob turned as somebody tested it, and paused. Then it was flung open.
In the open doorway was very possibly the prettiest girl Harriet had ever seen, dressed in a practically transparent white dress – that was probably her underwear, actually – with gleaming black braids that went down to her knees. Harriet’s stomach lurched.
The girl was, also, holding a wand in Harriet’s face.
To be fair, Harriet had at some point leveled her own wand at the opening door.
“Okay,” said Harriet, conscious now of how badly this could go without anybody even trying. “Uh, sorry about the... door... but I have no idea what I just did, either. Wands down on the count of three?”
“Admirably fair,” said the girl. “One, two, three...?” They both made hesitant starts, and then dropped their wands the rest of the way all at once, to stare at each other instead.
This, Harriet reflected, was absolutely the worst time to be horribly aware she was gay. Worse than the locker rooms for quidditch, even, because then she was busy and also expecting it.
The other girl was blushing. Harriet’s own face felt hot. She wasn’t in her underwear, but she wasn’t sure an old shirt of Dudley’s with a hole in the armpit, big enough to hit her at the knees, was much better.
“So, you live here?” said the girl brightly.
“Yeah,” said Harriet. “I did something dumb – let me show you.” She was tense, turning her back on the mysterious girl, but – Harriet’s new Legilimency was enough to be pretty sure, at least, that she was really talking to another real, basically normal girl, and not some horrible trick of the house’s. If a real girl with much better mind magic skills than Harriet’s own. “Here—” She took the note from her dresser and brought it back.
The girl hesitated to take it, but her eyes went wide as she read. “Aunt Cassie?” she said, voice wavering.
Harriet... had never heard that name. “I guess,” she said. “I found it in an abandoned sewing kit, you know, in the upstairs bits of the house where I’m, um. Not really supposed to go alone.”
The strange expression on the girl’s face was wiped blank like a blackboard, and instead, she grinned. “Yeah, I know that feeling. So. Friendship, huh? And that’s how you opened a mystery door into my room... Alternate dimension or time travel, you think? You obviously don’t live here now. My now.”
“Good question,” said Harriet. “Um – let’s leave the door open, in case, but do you want to come through?”
She should probably yell for Sirius or Andromeda, but they’d still be in horrible moods and suspicious because of it, and honestly, she wasn’t sure what they could do. Except tell Harry she’d been stupid, which she was fully and uncomfortably aware of.
“Sure,” said the girl, coming through the doorway slowly as if braced for something – but nothing happened. She stopped on the other side and shrugged, glancing from side to side. Harriet flushed again at the room, which was a cluttered mess of school supplies and clothes and crumpled paper strewn across mismatched furniture hastily brought out for her at the start of holidays, but the girl only pulled out Harriet’s desk chair and dumped the jumper on it on the desk surface to sit down. “So! What’s your name?”
Well, that was a novelty with another witch. “Harriet Potter, but call me Harry,” she said, experimentally, and waited.
There wasn’t much reaction. “Nice to meet you!” said the girl, and smiled prettily. Harriet’s stomach turned over again. “I’m Bella Black.”
“Holy fucking shit,” said Harriet, and immediately felt guilty, but the girl just laughed:
“You can’t be shocked to meet a Black family member! This is our house!”
“It’s – not that.” Harriet’s mouth went dry. But – this wasn’t the Death Eater, was it? She was Harriet’s age. And it wasn’t a trick either, because she hadn’t tried to murder or kidnap Harriet at all. “It must be time travel,” she said, as though that was what had shocked her. “It’s 1995.”
“Wow,” said Bellatrix. “Really? It’s been decades! Have the muggles got into a nuclear war? Did we ever get rid of slavery in magical Britain?”
“No,” said Harriet, blinking slowly as she crossed the room to sit on the bed facing Bella. “To both.” These were, to say the least, not the questions she would have expected a teenage Bellatrix Black to ask her. “Um, we’re having a war because...” Was Voldemort even around in Bellatrix’s time? “A Dark Lord’s trying to conquer Britain. My best friend moved to France to get away from it, and I’m not allowed out of the house much, so...”
“So you tried Aunt Cassie’s mysterious friend summoning spell?” said Bellatrix, laughing. “I guess that makes sense. Forgive me, this is rude, but how do you come to be living in Grimmauld Place?”
“My parents are dead,” said Harriet, feeling uncomfortable. It was no longer entirely foreign to say it, because since Andromeda got custody of her she had been allowed to actually talk to people in the muggle world, and sometimes had to tell them; but it was strange to say it to Bella Black. “My godfather’s head of the Black family.”
“Uncle Orion?” said Bellatrix, looking very surprised. “He’s excommunicated.”
“No, Sirius,” said Harriet, trying to do math, but she wasn’t actually sure when Bellatrix had been born; presumably the family tree tapestry would say, but Harriet had hardly memorized it. She knew Sirius was in the same Hogwarts class as her parents, but she wasn’t sure if that meant he was born by the time Bellatrix was this age.
“Sirius?” said Bella, surprised, but clearly recognizing the name. “I suppose I’m around here somewhere, then,” she said, curiously glancing at the door out to the corridor.
Oh, bugger. “Er,” said Harriet.
Bella glanced back at her, gray eyes alive with curiosity. “I’m not? I’m supposed to marry him – Sirius, I mean. The baby.”
Harriet was not touching that. “There was an earlier war,” she said, temporizing, because even were it a good plan to tell Bellatrix her adult self was a fugitive from justice after being convicted of conspiracy to commit treason, this news would not be easy to break tactfully. “This is the second one, because he – the Dark Lord – came back.”
“Oh,” said Bella again, and looked suddenly very much more cheerful. “So I’m dead, then!”
“Er,” said Harriet, again.
“Sorry,” said Bellatrix, “It’s just that I’d always wondered; my name’s strange – the full name is Bellatrix, I don’t know if you know? – and people say it’s unlucky, because it’s a classical astronomical name but you don’t usually want girls to be prophesied warriors. But honestly, dying in battle really doesn’t sound too bad as fates go in this family.”
Harriet decided not to correct her. “That’s how my parents died,” she said cautiously.
“So Sirius was friends with them and raised you instead? The Potters must have been decimated to agree to that... Sorry, I’m being very rude, it’s just that it’s not quite real to me.”
“It’s okay,” said Harriet, cautiously. At least Bellatrix wasn’t worried about her being famous, or trying to thank her, or something. “I don’t really remember them.”
“So Aunt Cassie’s spell thinks we’d make good friends, does it? Let’s try it,” said Bellatrix, smiling wider.
Harriet’s heart was beating very, very fast, like she was diving for the snitch. “Um,” she said, “Okay.”
Just then, a knock sounded – not on Harriet’s door, but through the open one, in Bellatrix’s.
“Better go!” said Bellatrix, and dove through, shutting the strange door with a slam.
There it remained, at least for now, apparently solid and real.
Harriet considered confessing to Sirius or Andromeda, or even Tonks. She really should. She was pretty sure that had really been teenage Bellatrix Black, who didn’t seem to be a Death Eater, but was definitely already extremely dangerous. Andromeda had mentioned offhandedly once, when drunk, that the Black family traditionally started teaching their children to murder before they went to Hogwarts. Further, there were any number of other people in the house in Bella’s time who might come through the door.
Aside from that, if she changed time by accident... Harriet didn’t know. It was supposed to be impossible.
She didn’t confess, because she didn’t want to admit to what she had done, and she knew that it would immediately be followed by moving Harriet’s bedroom, boarding up the door, and seeking out expertise to determine what the hell had happened and how to stop it, leaving Harriet even worse off than before. But she also didn’t confess because she was starting to like Bellatrix, and even more so, because it had taken all of two meetings to be genuinely very worried about her.
Part of this was because Bellatrix had obviously assumed a number of incorrect things about Harriet’s upbringing, among them that Harriet had been raised by Sirius as long as she remembered, and that therefore Harriet’s upbringing was more like a Black’s than not. Bella was willing to say things very casually to Harry that Harry was almost sure she couldn’t possibly go around telling other people, like:
Jokingly, “I suppose we can’t beat the incest allegations, but it would be nice if everybody at least waited to marriageable age;” or--
Wistfully, “I do sort of miss when Uncle Orion claimed that he didn’t believe in corporal punishment outside of criminal matters so nobody else was allowed to use it on the children either... No, I’m fine, do you see where the cream for welts went?” Or--
Miserably, having been drinking clear liquor out of a bottle when Harriet knocked and with a few bits of blood still visible under her nails, “I know it’s legal. I understand that. I just – why do we have to be involved? And just because it’s legal doesn’t mean—” At which she stopped abruptly and, finally, wouldn’t answer any of Harry’s questions.
Which was fair. Harriet had been utterly and totally removed from the Dursleys’ authority for years, but she never would have answered questions from a teacher without absolute promises to take her away first. A few had tried. The weird part was what Bellatrix would say. But obviously she assumed Harriet’s experiences had been similar, which was--
Itself pretty concerning, but it made sense, as Harriet had been avoiding explaining just how much of the Black family was dead.
Bellatrix wasn’t only sad or disturbing. She was also, in addition to gorgeous, helpful: she was also awakening in Legilimency, but either she was naturally better at it or she had a more dedicated teacher, or both. She was willing to help Harriet understand what Tonks and Andromeda were by turns trying to explain, when they had time and patience, which was not as often as desirable. She was less interested in school than Hermione, but at least as into books, and she actually asked to read over Harriet’s summer homework and textbooks in certain fields in order to find out what the future state of the field was.
(“I’m just not very good at, you know, academic stuff,” Harry said, embarrassed, at Bella correcting things absently as she read.
“It’s fine, my little sister’s the same way, would much rather be flying or riding or dueling,” said Bellatrix with her tongue between her teeth. Harry thought, feeling strange, of the adult Andromeda downstairs.)
That stuff made Harry miss Hermione wildly, actually, but – it was easier not to miss Hermione constantly with somebody else her age to talk to. This made her feel disloyal even before getting into it being Bellatrix Black, but she was sure Sirius or whoever would have said making new friends was a good thing. She wasn’t going to stop writing to Hermione because of it, definitely.
And it particularly wasn’t worth worrying about that because, as much as Harriet was enjoying practicing dueling with Bellatrix and playing with her hair – much better behaved than Harriet’s or Hermione’s – she was well aware that sooner or later she would have to confess, and this would all come to an end somewhere between bad and horrible.
Harriet had mostly resolved to wait until the holidays were over and then tell Aunt Druella when everybody came over for dinner to send her off to school. Aunt Druella knew more about Dark Arts than Sirius or Andromeda, and would probably be less angry, since Bellatrix was her daughter, too; and since they still had to send Harriet off to Hogwarts after things couldn’t be too bad for long. Probably. Harriet had never actually deliberately made Sirius angry before and wasn’t looking forward to finding out what happened. The only thing she was sure was that it wouldn’t be like the Dursleys.
So it was very nearly their last visit, a couple of days before the school holiday, when Bellatrix demanded to be allowed to do Harriet’s makeup and hair. “You don’t have to care about it if you don’t want to!” said Bellatrix quickly. “I wish I didn’t have to sometimes! But just once?”
Harriet was definitely blushing again. “Fine, but I don’t really have any makeup,” she said.
“You’re close enough to my skin tone, I think my things should work. Come through and sit,” ordered Bellatrix.
So Harriet submitted to the administrations of Bella’s long, graceful fingers; and the touch of those fingers on her face and hair and the back of her neck; and the press of Bella’s breast against her back when Bella leaned forward, reaching past her cheek to pick up something from her vanity; and the trail of her braid over Harriet’s shoulder...
“Though, problem, the blushing might make it difficult to apply the powder correctly,” said Bellatrix, and Harriet could hear her grin.
“I’m not used to this,” Harriet mumbled.
“You said you had a best friend, but she just left the country?”
“Hermione’s even less interested in makeup.” This wasn’t completely true, as the Yule Ball had demonstrated. But whoever had taught Hermione, she hadn’t shared it with Harriet. Knowing Hermione, it had probably come out of a book – as difficult as it was to imagine Hermione studying Witch Weekly or whatever the way Lavender did.
“Okay, fine,” said Bellatrix. “But I’m not torturing you—”
Harriet made a low, involuntary sound. “I. No. You’re not.”
“Mm,” said Bellatrix, sounding insufferably smug. “I thought so,” and she reached for Harriet’s shoulder to tug her around on the stool.
Harriet went. She was trying not to think, or hope, or expect anything at all, because she knew Andromeda and Sirius touched each other all the time, and Bella thought of her as basically a cousin, so it didn’t mean anything--
Bellatrix leaned down and kissed her.
Er. So it did mean something, then.
Harriet had kissed Neville exactly once at the Yule Ball, which had been sort of awful, and Parvati and Hermione each a couple of times playing stupid party games in Gryffindor, which had been very brief, and occupied mostly by Harriet trying not to show she liked it. Bellatrix did not kiss like any of them. Bellatrix kissed like somebody who knew what she was doing. Harriet opened her mouth when Bellatrix seemed to want it, and made a truly embarrassing noise as Bellatrix nibbled her lip, and--
Okay. Harriet was not going to be confessing to Sirius or Andromeda or Aunt Druella, then.
She had better come a little cleaner to Bella, so they could figure out how to hide this.
Bellatrix broke the kiss, and Harriet looked up at her, panting. Bellatrix was grinning down, eyes wide and her own cheeks flushed. Harriet wondered for a moment if this was the moment when Bellatrix would give up some ruse and – devour her, or reach for her wand to strike Harry down.
“Oh, I thought you wanted to, too, but I wasn’t sure,” said Bellatrix.
“I,” stammered Harriet. “Yes. Please.”
“Good!” said Bellatrix, and swooped down to kiss her again.