Missing in Kings


Not for the first time that evening, Albus dearly wished to be somewhere, anywhere, else. "Minnie," he pleaded, watching the woman pace around his ruined office, "Minnie, please."

She hiccuped, favored him with a sour look, and called him a goat.

Albus gazed heavenward in despair. To his bitter disappointment, scones failed to rain from the ceiling. Although he did notice that Fawkes had finally worked up the courage to poke his head back in through one of the smaller holes in the stonework, where he looked on with trepidation. "Cowardly bird," thought Albus.

He heaved a sigh and contrived to find a middle ground between supportive and stern. "Minnie, Minerva. Please stop, this is . . ." he trailed off, trying to think of something diplomatic. She glared at him. "Isn't like you," he finished lamely.

Minerva appeared unmoved, and her bleary eyes looked first to him and then to his letter opener, which was currently buried to the hilt in a book case that wouldn't have looked out of place in a modern art exhibition. Seeing the meaningful glint, Albus headed off her train of thought hurriedly, "No, no, don't do that. Let it be, excellent. Now-" And there she went again. "Minnie."

The poor woman had reason to be upset, but he'd have preferred that she be more composed about it. So he'd swished when he should have flicked. He'd had a long day, who could blame a man for that?

"You smug, overconfident-" Present company exempted.

Albus bobbed up and down over his chair sourly, listening to Minerva's inspired dissertation on the virtues of aggressive contraception. Fine, he was willing to admit that he'd made a mistake. Maybe even a large one. These things happened sometimes, particularly when a man was trying to tie a rats nest of wards and tracking spells and one very, very temperamental relative of the Fidelus Charm into a hand mirror.

Unplottable Charms were not, strictly speaking, intended to be directed at people. At least not living people. And even if good sense were to be ignored, surely not at anyone the caster liked very much. There were essays on the subject.

Albus had reckoned that the warnings were largely overblown. The explosion from that particular spell going off had been directed at the ceiling. No great loss, it wasn't as if the castle couldn't do with a little remodeling. He'd even managed to salvage most of the roof afterward.

It really wasn't so bad as botched experiments in warding went. Even the most critical observer would have been forced to agree that there wasn't a single body hanging off the rafters- or from what rafters remained. There were no . . . Well, few scorch marks still in evidence, and nobody had been carted off to the Saint Mungoes ward for the incurably disfigured or anything similarly unpleasant.

There was only the small matter of the baby to smooth over.

Albus mulled over that thought and stared at Minerva's bottom as she stalked to the far corner of the room, having found a new point to rave about. Had she gained weight?

Damn Minerva's sweet tooth. He'd consult with the kitchen elves later.

Where was he? Yes! The baby. It was safe. Probably. Safe for a given value. Until the thing learned to walk and ask uncomfortable questions, even. Albus wished it luck and good fortune.

Goodness, could she ever rant when she put her mind to it. "Miss McGonagall!" he pushed into her mind at last, finally out of patience. Minerva stared back at him, momentarily shocked out of her tirade. Giving her a meaningful look, Albus made another attempt to move the conversation past childish name calling, "Sit down, my dear," he said aloud.

Minerva slumped in the chair across his desk. "You should have told me what you were after," she croaked.

"The result is rather more thorough than I'd intended," he admitted sheepishly.

"You turned a tea cup into a secret keeper," Minerva hissed.

Albus cringed. It didn't sound very good when she put it like that, did it?

He'd been aiming to enchant a hand mirror he'd fished out of a box of magical knickknacks earlier that week into a sort of all in one tracking system. Unhappily, he hadn't taken into account that he really should have been aiming at the frame, rather than the shiny, magically charged and above all, reflective, surface. The knot of spells he'd been trying to attach to it actually bounced off and sprayed all over his office. The results were proving to be educational.

His beard still tingled, and he was certain beards weren't supposed to do that. But there it was, tingling. Tingle. Tingle, tingle, tingle.

The mirror was in good condition; he'd find a use for it later. That much could not be said for most of his lunch. Worse, as Minnie was happy to remind him, his favorite cup —the one with the pretty yellow sparkles— was now lost to him. That several other objects dear to his heart, among them his prized animated rubber bath ducky, had disappeared as well . . . Was something he hoped she would never discover.

On the desk between them sat a fetching blue saucer with absolutely nothing atop it. A quietly insistent sort of nothing that made their eyes water when they looked too closely. This, they knew, was that tea cup. The universe disagreed. This difference in opinion would likely not be easy to resolve.

Albus made to prod it with a silver spoon, but paused with a pensive expression on his face. After a moment's thought he concluded that doing so was probably a bad idea. He did it anyway for the sake of satisfying his curiosity. The spoon looked a little worse for wear after he yanked it back out.

"Oh, bother," Albus murmured. He tapped the slightly warped spoon against his desktop, trying to determine what had happened to it. The spoony end didn't appear to be made of silver anymore. It was purple, for a start. Minerva sniffed disdainfully at his experiment.

"It will be alright, my dear," he said, examining the sizzling pit the purple bit of spoon had gouged into the wood.

"But we don't know where he is," she growled.

Albus watched her point sail past him with interest. "That is . . . Unfortunate, yes." He leaned back in his chair to work a crick in his neck, leaving the spoon embedded in the table, where it slowly turned completely black. His movement was made complicated by the fact that he was actually floating several inches above the seat cushion. "But I'm certain wherever we did place young Harry is quite safe. He'll turn up eventually," he said flippantly.

It occurred to him that he couldn't recall having any aptitude for blatantly defying gravity in the past, but since Minnie hadn't said anything, and because he'd much rather avoid setting her off on yet another topic, he let it go without comment.

"Fine, that's just perfect," Minerva huffed. She waved her hand to the hole in the wall where his window had vacated the castle in the general direction of Paris. "What do you propose we do when it's time for him to come to school and our owls can't find him? What if he never 'turns up' all by himself? What then?"

Albus smiled broadly. "We'll lie through our teeth, of course."

Minerva mustered a glare. "Honesty from you, Albus?"

"I do try not to make a habit of it."

She sat with him for a time and he floated in place, thinking about retiring someplace warm.

The former spoon dropped through the desk with a distinctly unspoony clank and began to melt a neat, not quite spoon shaped groove in the stone floor.

If, in the following years, it seemed to some that the Headmaster tended to flicker in and out of sight whenever lunch rolled around, and if tea sets were known to rattle whenever he looked at them, and if his stride had taken on something of a gliding quality since his youth, nobody cared to comment on it to his face. It was just one of those things.


Far away, in a place now thoroughly hidden from most magical eyes, a pair of very, very magical eyes opened in an unhappy baby's crib. They were green, and they belonged to a large brown duck. It looked around a dark room in a suburban home and bowed its head.

"Quack." It snuffled miserably, then heaved a great, unducky sigh. "Just . . . Quack."

The baby under the duck wailed.

"Shut up, Harry," said the duck, and it sat on his head.

Harry quieted and scrunched his nose at the feathers blocking his view. The duck warbled at him briefly, then hopped out of the crib with a flutter of its wings. It looked around with a critical eye.

"Bloody quacking hell," it said, staring up at a framed photo of one Petunia now-Dursley holding aloft her son.

Footsteps thudded in the hallway, and the duck waddled up the wall to stand on the ceiling, where it warbled darkly to itself.

Petunia peeked into the room and glared at Harry before closing the door with a loud slam.

Harry tried again.

This time, the duck fluttered down and pecked him on his forehead.

"Quiet," it said, "mummy's thinking."


This is an old project of mine that is really only half done, but I'd like to see it in chaptered form so here it is. The full story is roughly forty four thousand words at this point, and I intend to upload the first twenty five or so and do some more work from there. I do hope you enjoy, cheers!