A/N: Thanks for all the kind encouragement! For your enjoyment, I bring you the second chapter. Enjoy!
Brynn

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Book One: Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc

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Chapter Two: Induction

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"Bill is Mr Grumpy," Ronald said to Charlie, and Charlie hid his snicker behind his hand. Percival scowled at them and burrowed deeper into his armchair. He raised his book so that he wouldn't have to look at anyone – and anyone wouldn't have to look at him. Bill didn't mind in the least.

"And you are a little vexing gnome, but you don't hear me badmouthing you," Bill snarled at the kid, realising only belatedly that he was, in fact, confirming Ronald's statement.

Ronald stared at him curiously; it seemed he didn't understand what Bill had accused him of. Bill rolled his eyes, got up and stalked out of the house towards the pond. From distance he saw little Diggory and his pals swimming around and hastily changed the direction. He was fed up with children, having five siblings in the fifteen-year-long irritating phase.

"He's right, you know," Charlie said, catching up to him, and slowed down from jog to spry step, matching Bill's pace. "You've been in a right foul mood the past few days." Charlie paused and gave him a shrewd look. "Since you've seen Harry Potter."

Bill halted rapidly, and Charlie passed him by. He turned around and his shrewdness morphed into exasperation.

"For Merlin's sake, Bill, what's with you? Or what's with the kid?"

Bill sighed and sat down into the grass. When he remained like that for long enough, glaring at the horizon above the Pennines, Charlie sank down next to him, breaking ferns. A minute or two later, Charlie risked touching his arm.

Bill bit the inside of his cheek.

"Something happened, right?"

Bill shrugged. "I Obliviated a hag – a squib, I guess, but she might have been a witch."

"Harry's guard, you think?" Charlie asked practically.

Bill shrugged again. It kind of made sense that Dumbledore would have stationed someone there to keep an eye on the kid. It had to be someone half-blind and mentally retarded to not notice the amount of hostility Potter was treated with.

"Think they'll find out?"

"No," Bill said with calm certainty. "If they were going to, they would have by now." Even if someone had noticed the spell, it was probably ascribed to accidental magic of the only known wizard in the area.

"Then what's the problem?"

Should he tell? He could get himself into trouble, or alternatively he would give Charlie something pretty ugly to worry about – if even he, the resident cold fish, was being troubled to the degree that his eight-year-old brother noticed.

"Tell me, dammit!" Charlie demanded. "I thought you trusted me!"

"You want to know?!" Bill snarled, angry at the accusation. "Well, if you want it that much, I'll tell you! Potter's family is a bunch of bigoted prigs!"

Charlie blinked. "And that's a problem why?"

"Because it's obvious they don't like the kid one bit." He squared his shoulder and waited for the implications to hit. They did. Charlie went a little pale, and fell into silence that stretched and stretched…

They sat there on the slope, each lost deep in his thoughts. Bill contemplated the ramifications. He mused on what Potter would grow up as, how much the muggles would mess him up, if he would be likely to go into Slytherin and decide to get back at the muggles – or maybe at all muggles – one day. It wasn't a nice vision.

He should tell someone. He should, but if the old woman with cats knew who Potter was – and she couldn't have not known – she would have told. That meant the Ministry didn't bother to do anything about it. Dumbledore was the one that had spirited Potter away in the first place, and for whatever reason Dumbledore didn't do anything either.

"Who can I tell?" Bill asked. "Everyone who can do anything knows."

Charlie looked up, and there was hardness in his eyes that Bill recognised from the mirror. "Does Egypt have extradition treaties with Britain?"

x

"This will make me a criminal."

Charlie scoffed. "You already are a criminal. This will make you a good man."

Bill flipped his brother off and raised his head from the desk. He was scared. He wasn't too good a Gryffindor – never had been – and he rarely did something he was scared of doing. He either rushed into things before he had had a chance to become afraid, or found a good, rational reason why not to do it at all. This situation was unprecedented: never before had he been faced with a moral conundrum of this magnitude.

"Good man…" Bill said contemptuously. "Whatever motivation do I have to strive for that?"

"To get people to like you?"

"People like rich, powerful and beautiful people – for as long as they are useful to them."

Charlie looked to heaven as if begging for patience. He was ever an optimist and, incomprehensively to Bill, it wasn't due to ignorance. Charlie just suffered a terminal case of belief in the good of the world. "Harry Potter will like you," he said, going from shaky to totally ridiculous argumentation.

"The goal of my life – to get a brat to 'like me'."

Charlie grinned at him and started talking about the things a little boy would need.

x

"This is officially the craziest thing I've ever done," Bill whispered to himself for the thirteenth time. He strode down the underground hallway – it was more like an illuminated catacomb – and glared at the cuneiform-inscribed doors on both sides. Written Gobbledegook was just one of the thousand malicious pranks goblins installed to hinder their human employees.

Bill had the advantage of knowing way more about Runes than he was supposed to, but even so he went mostly on visual memory here. He knew what 'Rotharck' looked like in cuneiform, and he compared that in his mind to the plaques as he passed them.

He, in fact, was inclined to doubt that the goblins really worked here most of their time. It was drearier than Hogwarts' dungeons; there was nothing but smoking torches in torch-holders leaving smoke-blackened shapes on the rough rock of the walls and a hard, monochromatic grey of muggle concrete making the floor flat. He hated this place, but, as they said, need's must.

"Finally…" he snarled, coming to a halt in front of an entrance that looked exactly like the couple hundred of others he had passed along his way. He used the generic knocker to make his presence known and waited, mentally going one last time over the story he had prepared.

A creature that reached to his waist, but more than made up for it in muscle mass, armour, weaponry and sheer ferocity of expression glared up at him.

"Who are you and what do you want?"

"Weasley – recently accepted as curse-breaker apprentice, starting in August," Bill said with corresponding shortness.

The goblin huffed, expelling a cloud of stink and droplets of saliva. He turned around in the doorway, hitting both sides of the doorframe in the process and scuffing the already scuffed spaulders. He went back inside and Bill (who was well aware of the genetic taciturnity of these creatures and didn't let it bother him) followed.

"Fusty, deal with it!" the goblin snarled – it seemed like his natural way of using English was snarling it – and disappeared somewhere in the spidery innards of the gigantic Gringotts basement.

A harassed-looking young witch climbed out of a mountain of paperwork and resignedly gazed at Bill through thick glasses that made her look like a fly. She had three fingers on her left hand stuck on various pages of a law-book so that she wouldn't lose them, and a dripping quill clenched in her right fist.

"I'm Fiona McFusty, what can I do for you?" she said in a monotone that made Bill briefly doubt her authenticity as a human being.

"I'm going to Egypt for an apprenticeship on the 31st, Miss," he replied, not nearly as tonelessly, but doing his best. She didn't seem to notice he was mocking her, probably stuck with her head in the laws. "I'd like to know if it would be possible to take a minor with me."

She let her hand with the book fall (the quill continued dripping on her shoes, already stained with ink and wax) and closed her eyes, thinking deep. "Of course it is possible, Mr Weasley. May I know what relation to you is the minor?"

Bill's voice hardened; it usually did when he was lying, simply to intimidate his conversation partner to the point when they would not have leftover mental capacity to ponder the veracity of his words. "It has recently come to my attention that the boy's mother's family is incapable of providing for him satisfactorily. I would not see him suffer; therefore I intend to take him with me."

McFusty flushed, clever enough to make out what he was alluding to without needing a time to analyse his speech. She measured him from boots to head in a way that would have made her seem predatory, were she not wearing that incredulous expression. Bill was the first to admit that he didn't look older than perhaps nineteen (at a stretch), and therefore it was unlikely that he would have already procreated. He, naturally, refrained from mentioning the age of the child he would be taking with him. Potter would be... eight, actually, on the 31st. It was another cosmic irony, that Potter was going to get an abduction for his birthday.

Kind of amusing.

"You'll have to fill in this form, of course…" McFusty told him, awkwardly fishing a sheet of parchment out of a leather-bound pile. She tracked ink over its reverse, but Bill accepted it without complaint.

"Who should I submit this to?"

"Any Gringotts bureaucrat, really," she said, already reading again, though politely remaining outside of the parchment fortress behind her. Bill got the message, loud and clear. He took the form with him and decided that 'any bureaucrat' included Grainthunc, the goblin he was supposed to contact in the Alexandria office.

He did call out a half-hearted 'bye', but it failed to register.

x

"The one single thing useful about children…" Bill snarled at the staircase and glumly thought about the rest of the cake that his mother had left for tomorrow. He would have liked to take a piece with himself to eat before he went to bed, but considering he went to bed long after everyone else within the house, he could just go and grab it later.

Charlie rolled his eyes at him. "What?"

Bill scowled at the snot smears on his robe and promptly decided that children still weren't worth it. "Celebrations get cut short because of them." As if wasn't obvious enough. He had been subjected to parents giving him moths' worth of parental guidance within a couple of hours while admonishing his siblings, randomly attempting to accost him and keeping him from his well-deserved slice of cake, and he had had enough.

"You could have at least let mum hug you," Charlie chided him. "You're going away for… how long?"

Not long enough, Bill privately thought. Still, he was looking forward to Egypt and hoped to Merlin that Potter wouldn't mess it up for him.

"I've got something for you," Charlie said, exasperated, once it became obvious that Bill wasn't going to show the slightest hint of repentance for impugning their family integrity. He ducked into his room and Bill tapped his foot, making himself appear a little more impatient than he actually was. A tiny little… "Here!" Charlie exclaimed and thrust an official-looking scroll into his hand. "Got it from Frobisher. Don't use it unless you have to. It's a… last resort sort of thing."

Bill nodded noncommittally (it wasn't his fault that people tended to interpret that as acquiesce) and went to his room, ignoring Charlie's muttering about how he should have anticipated a lack of gratefulness. One day Charlie would be glad that Bill had a personal reason for wanting to repay that gesture. Family helped each other, perhaps, but Bill's general idea of help was, vaguely, giving them a good spanking so they learned.

He had never done so, of course. Never needed to. His mother kept all her children in a state of semi-terror and a bit of pain wasn't as strong a motivation to listen as it would have been normally.

Bill locked his door, unrolled the scroll and grinned.

Scratch last resort. He was going to do this. It was so much better than feigning a familial relationship. Potter didn't look anything like him, anyway.