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Chapter Three

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The Chocolate After the Dementors

o

"Expecto patronum!"

Sometimes, the greatest things can come from the smallest ones. Like a phoenix hatching from an obsidian egg in the heart of a volcano, a tiny speck of hope turning into its own shining sun, or, in this case, a small, silvery spider growing to the size of a man's fist. The spider didn't stop there. It kept growing until the starlight glow of it burned in the dark, until its bristly legs reached from one side of the room to the other, until it was so bright that I could close my eyes and still see the shape of it burning through the lids.

An Acromantula. Potter's Patronus was an Acromantula. It was so huge that its back brushed the ceiling in a spark-filled haze. It ran at the front windows, slamming itself halfway through them. The Dementors flew back in a blur, ripping the oppressive cold away like a blanket. Summer air filled my lungs again. Potter took in a harsh breath next to me. The Patronus stood where it was a moment longer, restlessly twitching its legs. When nothing challenged it, the ghostly form retreated into the house. It stood over us, then slowly dissolved into a massive swirl of silver dust.

The streetlamp flickered back to life outside, dropping its light over an empty street. Curtains up and down the street were open, filling with their own wavering light as the neighbors' recovered their power. Faces pressed out, most of them looking in our direction. The TV, tipped on its side, started bleating senselessly about local news to the carpet.

I pulled from Potter, finally realizing how closely we were pressed together now that the warmth had returned to my body. He didn't say a word when I asked if he was all right. His gaze was elsewhere, focused on the Dursleys. All three of them stared up at the ceiling, unblinking, unseeing in the electric glow of the television. The rise and fall of their chests were barely discernible. "Are they ...?" I began, but I already knew.

"As good as," he said tonelessly. He reached down for my purse, which had been dropped sometime during the attack, and pushed it into my hands. When it kept falling from my trembling fingers, he shrunk it and stuck it into one of his pockets.

"We have to ... we have to ..."

"Help them?" He shook his head, his hair spilling into his eyes. "They're beyond it. Even you know that."

"No, we have to contact someone. Dumbledore. He'll —"

A short, harsh laugh erupted from him. "Merlin, you are mad." He took my hand in his own calloused one. "What we have to do is leave. If whoever is out there is worth a bent Sickle, they'll be watching the doors, front and back ... but there's one place they won't be looking." He pulled me into the hallway, heading for the cupboard under the stairs. It wasn't as full of junk as I thought it might be, but it was a tight fit for the two of us once he'd slammed the door shut.

I kept seeing the Dursleys on the floor. Their horrible, open eyes. The slack faces. That didn't change when he turned on the overhead light. "What are we doing here?" I said, my voice sounding far away.

He rummaged in his trouser pockets until he came up with the shrunken trunk. He opened it with a twitch of his fingers and nothing more. "We — or rather I — am coming up with a plan to get us out of here." Another few twitches of his fingers drew some tiny objects from the trunk. Two looked like misshapen dolls made of some dark, reddish material and the third was unmistakably a broom. He closed the trunk, then snatched these three objects out of the air. "You do like being alive, don't you?"

"Your only family members are dead. Shouldn't you be a little more —"

"Contrite? Stricken? Weepy?" he said. He stuffed the trunk into his jacket this time. "Don't lecture me on how I should feel about them. You of all people should know not to do that."

I turned my head from him in disgust. Why had I expected anything better of him? My eyes stayed pointedly off whatever he was doing to his toys. It may have involved blood at some point; I tried not to look as the coppery scent of it became oppressive in the small space. The light buzzed above us, blinking intermittently. When he was done, he turned off the light with a bloodied hand. He shifted slightly on the cardboard box beside mine and eased the cupboard door open. He threw something down the hall towards the kitchen, then threw another something towards the front door. Both hit hard surfaces with the soft tink-tink-tink of pebbles over a sidewalk. Potter stilled, maybe listening for something that might've been in the dark. Nothing answered. He whispered in a language I didn't know. The rasp of those alien syllables raised the flesh on the backs of my arms all the same.

Two new sounds came now, each at opposite sides of the house in the directions of whatever he had thrown. Two large thumps. Two soft and large somethings hitting the floor. To our right, one of those somethings stood, its silhouette blocking most of the streetlamp light filtering through the window of the front door. It was a man, a tall, thin one. There was something terribly familiar about him too. He opened the door halfway and the light caught on his face: it was Potter.

My breath hitched. The Potter next to me set a staying hand on my arm, one that was wet with something I didn't want to think too long about. Leaning forward, I saw that a second silhouette was moving towards the kitchen door. That one was harder to see since there was much less light at that part of the house.

"Don't make a noise," my Potter said, his words fluttering against the side of my face. "You'll give away our position." A quick succession of spells followed, sparking faintly in the dark, most of which healed his arm, which he'd cut open in several places. Two more spells cleaned his blood from the both of us and the chain of the light above. The final bit of magic was different altogether. With his wand tip glowing white, he tapped my head. It felt as if he'd dropped something cold and slimy onto my head, a feeling that slithered all the way down my spine. He then twirled his wand around as if he were wrapping himself in a shroud and disappeared. Where he had been, the light and shadows bent strangely, unnaturally, like a mirror that had been altered to fit around his body. He gave a short, sharp whistle.

The two silhouettes opened their respective doors. Potter shut ours after he gently nudged me back into the cupboard, a sensation that was far stranger when I couldn't see either of our bodies. He said something and a bead of spell light dropped from his wand, rolling through the gap under the cupboard door. He grabbed me without warning, bracing the both of us in a spell that felt like soft cotton. The entire house rocked as if struck by a brief and tremendous earthquake. The cocoon of cotton dissipated soon after.

We disentangled and were out of the cupboard before I could ask him what the hell he thought he was doing. He cast another spell, one that barely illuminated his purpose: he had enlarged the broom and turned it translucent. Not invisible, but more as if it had been made of almost clear glass. It would've been easy to see what he was doing without spell light — the glow of streetlamps and stars poured through the place where part of the ceiling and upper story had been.

He straddled the broom, then turned to grab at my sleeve. I stepped out of his grasp and got behind him. Sitting down, I had the strangest sensation of there being a comfortable cushion beneath me, though my fingers passed through the same space unimpeded. I tried gripping the broom at first, but I couldn't trust my shaking hands to keep their hold on such a narrow thing. His waist, I'd have to hug his waist. His back stiffened at my touch but he didn't protest it. Together, we rose steadily upward.

My first instinct was to squeeze my eyes shut. I fought it. We moved through the enormous, circular gap and into air, far above the lingering smells of death and ice that the Dementors had left in their wake. Only when I was out of it had I recognized the cloying stink existed in the first place. It clung to me, to him, even as we cleared the roof.

Potter edged the broom forward, peering cautiously towards the street. His copy was creeping to the neighboring garden, hunkered down in the shadows. I couldn't take my eyes off it. Once it reached the hedge dividing the two properties, it dragged itself upright. Several spells flashed from half a dozen directions, some as close as the sidewalk and some as far as the other side of the street. We weren't the only invisible ones creeping around tonight. Another similar light display started at the back of the Dursleys' house. Potter pushed off the roof, urging us over to the house on the right. He pulled up against the sky several houses away. We pressed so fast into the night that the stars blurred above us.

o

One long broom flight, an illegal Portkey, and several Apparition jumps later, we came to a small park located in a city that didn't seem to be London. Potter removed the Disillusionment Charms from both of us. He inspected me for defects first, healing the cut on my cheek and several other places. After he'd healed his own injuries, he dug my purse out of his pocket and returning it to regular size. "There's a pub across the road," he said, nodding in that direction. "I'll bring you there and you can have a drink or two as you wait."

I blinked up at him, uncomprehending.

He waggled my purse at me, but I didn't want to touch it. I didn't want anything except for this nightmare to be over with. "This is the part where you ask me, 'As I wait for what?' " he said, carefully pushing my arm through the straps the bag. "And this is where I tell you that you shall be waiting for me to come back."

Potter was going? He was leaving me somewhere? Was he fucking crazy? No, stupid question, one I already had the answer to. "No," I said. "You're not leaving me in ass-end of nowhere by myself without protection."

He sucked his teeth as he fixed me with a considering look. "I can remedy one part of that, I suppose." He pulled something out of his waistcoat pocket: three phials full of an ugly brown liquid. "Whatever you splash that on is not going to have a pleasant time afterwards."

"What is it?" I said, taking them. "And how do you have so many things in your pockets?"

"It's an all-purpose stain cleaner used for potions cleanup —"

"That doesn't sound very useful."

"— when diluted by drops to the gallon. Use it in the concentrated form if you want to see interesting things happen to people who bother you."

His definition of "interesting" wasn't mine, so the alleged stain cleaner had to be potent beyond all reckoning. I dropped two of the phials into my purse and palmed the other. It'd be best to keep one at the ready after what had happened on Privet Drive. From the number of spells that had struck his copy, a lot of people wanted to find him. Had those attackers also brought the Dementors? With all the differences between this dream and canon, it was hard to say.

He slung an arm around my shoulder, steering me towards the golden light of the pub. "As for my pockets: magic."

"That's not an answer," I said, trying to shrug him off.

My feeble efforts didn't shake his grip. "Fewer people shall be interested in you if they think you're taken."

"If anyone's interested in me, I'll break a beer bottle and carve them up with it."

We stepped from the grass and onto the sidewalk. "That's the spirit," he said.

o

To keep up appearances, Potter got an ale for himself and a "whatever, I don't care, just make sure it's alcohol" for me, the latter of which proved to be something so dark that it looked like a glass of crude oil. He sat beside me. I took one sip of my drink and pushed it away.

He said, "Don't care for Guinness, do you?"

If that was Guinness, I never wanted it again. "I have taste buds, so no," I said, my words coming out duller than I'd intended. Couldn't help it. Try as I might to act normally, there wasn't anything normal about this situation. And being funny felt like blasphemy. My heart just wasn't in it.

Shifting his glass my way, he said, "Here, wash out your mouth with my ale. I've something that needs to be done." He started to slide out of the booth and I snared his sleeve. He glanced at me from the corner of his eye. "I'm checking on the flat," he explained. "If anyone has found where I really live, it's better that you're not there."

If that was meant to soothe me, it failed. "Will you come back?" I said, the words almost catching like a hook in my throat. It felt like a question I'd been forever asking ... I looked into his dark eyes — yes, dark, green but dark all the same — waiting for him to say something.

"I have a habit of doing that," he said.

My breath froze in my lungs and a strange coldness numbed the rest of me. It felt like the only answer he could've given me. With what might have been his version of comfort, he gently pried my fingers from his sleeve. He was out of the pub and gone into the night before I could think to go after him. Seconds later, there was the small thunderclap of his Disapparition.

He returned for me on my second glass of Guinness.

o

Potter had proclaimed me too drunk for Apparition (great risk of splinching, apparently) and use of a Portkey (wouldn't be able to stick the landing) and so half-carried me to the first taxi that we saw, a yellow one. "Aren't these supposed to be black?" I said as he poured me into the backseat.

"Not in this city," he said, and clambered in after me.

The trip to the train station was a blur, as was our railway journey to London. Most of it passed in a near stupor, one filled with sightless, pale blue eyes. I jerked awake to find myself next to Potter in yet another taxi, leaning on him as if he were a pillow. He didn't say a word as I pulled back from him, wiping at my mouth. There was a little patch of drool on his shoulder. "Sorry," I said. He twitched irritably when I tried to clean it off. With little better to do, I looked out my window. Early morning was fading the dark dirty-purple sky to grey.

When we got to our flat, I tried my best to get up the stairs. Really, I did. But there were so many of them and they just kept moving. Had he enchanted them? That wasn't fair. I clasped the railing and waited for the world to stop spinning. Potter grabbed me up and carried me the rest of the way, muttering the whole time about witches who had the constitution of house-elves. My eyes fluttered shut before he managed to get his wand out of his sleeve and unlock the door.

I woke up in the dark, in what felt like a bed. Not an awful, thin mattress in the corner of a basement, not a lumpy sofa, not a pile of bedding on the floor, but a normal, real bed. It had to be my bed. I'd woken up. Actually woken up. I flailed a hand to my right, missing the bedside lamp that should've been there. My heart leaped. This wasn't my bed. Okay. That didn't mean anything. It could be a bed somewhere else, at Fyodor's maybe or, or, or —

Or a bed in a mental hospital. Yeah, that was a distinct possibility, one that wouldn't go away if I just sat here. I gulped down my fear and sat up. Something brushed against me as I swung my legs out of bed. It felt like robes or a cloak or —

Calm down. It's nothing. Just a curtain. My fingers slid over the smooth, heavy fabric. A bed curtain. My bed didn't have curtains. Neither did Fyodor's. This had to be a hospital then, one with a weird sense of style. Bed curtains had to be a strangling risk for lunatics. By shuffling in the dark, arms outstretched, I found what felt like a nightstand tucked against the wall next to the bed. The top of it was bare except for something made out of metal. A light flared to life: a candle burning in a holder. Blue candlelight. It illuminated a familiar room, one that had been a lot smaller the last time I'd seen it, the big bedroom in my imaginary London flat.

I sank down on quivering legs, crouching so close to the floor that I could feel the cold of the wood radiating against my bare shins. Bare? Looking down, I found myself clad in some kind of shift-type nightgown, an old-fashioned one that ended at my knees. Where the hell had this thing come from? No, what I should really be asking is why I hadn't woken up in the real world. Answers wouldn't come by me sitting here and crying over things. I straightened to my full height, took up the candle holder, and headed for the door.

The hallway had been extended by several feet. The flooring looked different too, wide boards of light golden-red wood that continued into my room and well beyond it. The boring, beige wallpaper had been exchanged for silver and coal-colored willow branches that sat above handsome mahogany wainscoting. The flat was icier than it had any right to be in summer, icy enough to draw goosebumps out of my flesh. I left the hall behind, moving my free arm over my chest in a poor attempt to hold onto some warmth. The willow wallpaper continued here, covering an altered sitting room occupied by a four-door china display full of beautiful tea sets; a love seat covered in tufted black fabric pricked with silver thread stars; a side table topped by pale grey marble, with vines and serpents twisting up the sinuous, wheeled-tipped legs; a bookcase with glazed sliding doors filled with title after title; a roll top secretary desk in the distant corner by the closed airing cupboard; various smaller tables scattered about; a full-sized sofa that matched the smaller one; a thick-topped, rectangular coffee table with sensual, carved dryads for legs; and two deep, emerald-upholstered armchairs that bracketed the hearth. Most of those were the things we'd ordered at the antique shop.

They weren't the only new things. The once-narrow fireplace was now wide enough for me to have comfortably tucked myself into it; a low, red fire glowed within. A knot of wood burst from the heat of the flames, making me jump.

A shadow shifted in the right-hand armchair. "Awake, are you?" said Potter.

"You know that I am."

He shifted again and I was hit with two familiar spells, the ones that left me smelling like flowers and tasting mint.

"Ask permission before you do stuff like that to me," I said, rubbing a the back of a hand against my mouth.

"There's no room for politeness when I can smell old Guinness seeping through your pores." A small, scratchy noise, like a page being turned, came from his direction. "You've been asleep a day and a half, by the way."

I slipped around the furniture, drawn by the warmth of the fireplace. "You've been decorating while I was out."

"Yes," he said. "The bookshop had a number of helpful volumes on interior design, and I had time to spare." He didn't look up from his new, large book when I sank gratefully into the empty armchair. Nothing at all seemed to have changed about him. No, he just sat there in his neat clothes and a stupid waistcoat and slid his fingers over photographs of well-appointed rooms as if nothing had happened.

"How can you be so callous?" I said.

He turned another page. "About?"

Was he really going to pretend now, of all times, that he didn't know what I was talking about? My teeth ground together. "The Dursleys are dead. We nearly died. Don't either of those things bother you?"

"What's done is done. Fretting over it shan't do any good."

"Yeah,"I said, and the trembling of my legs now shivered up to the rest of my body. "All of this must make you happy. Was the thought of them dead the one that finally lighted your Patronus?"

The covers of the book slammed together so loudly that I nearly clapped my hands over my ears. He stared into the fire, jaw clenching and unclenching as if he were keeping himself from saying something. He shot to his feet, dropping the book to a small table at his right. Off into the kitchen he stalked, stomping the whole way like the giant child he was.

A shaky breath left me, one I had been holding since he had stood. He would frighten me like that often in our early days. Every gesture that was too quick, every word that was too sharp, they all seemed to hold the threat of violence. You must be wondering, whoever is reading this, why I didn't leave or fight back or yell. I'll ask you something: Have you ever escaped yourself? Won a fight against yourself? Changed your worst habits with a few words? If you have, you're a better person than I am and you have no right to ask why I didn't do "anything" again. Some things are impossible, even in dreams.

But I shall let you know one thing — I soon learned how I frightened him right back.

o

He returned with two mugs that let off banners of steam, handing one off to me. I eyed the dark liquid with suspicion until he returned to his chair and said, "It's chocolate."

"Is it poisoned?" I said, and took a drink, half-hoping that it was. The only thing it was laced with was cinnamon and nutmeg. Each sip seemed to lighten the terrible cold that had clung to my bones ever since I got up. The intermittent shivers lessened until they were gone, and the room felt tolerably cool instead of bitterly cold. I uncurled my legs from the seat of my chair, pointing my feet at the fire.

Potter's gaze tripped over my white calves before he flinched away from the sight. He said, "You were drunk and then you refused to wake up, so I couldn't get you to take any chocolate, drinking or otherwise." He sunk back, hiding his face in the shadows thrown by his chair. "The chill that you've been feeling is a lingering effect —"

"Of the Dementors," I said, and took another drink. The chocolate warmed me all the way down to my stomach. "I know."

"There's plenty that you don't, which is why we'll have to visit Diagon Alley in the morning."

"What do I need there? Robes?" Saying that reminded me of something. "And where did you get this nightgown, anyway? I know I didn't get one the other day."

"In my line of work it's vital to keep items for nearly every contingency."

I plucked at my lap, pulling up the soft cream-colored fabric. "Is that your way of passing this off as something that an old girlfriend didn't leave behind?" Although I couldn't see him, he was probably frowning. "And what is your line of work, anyway?"

His arm lifted, bringing his cup into the shadows where he was hiding. "We don't know one another well enough to share secrets like that."

"Something illegal, I'll bet," I muttered into my chocolate. "You Slytherin Harrys are all the same. Can't you ever be anything different than a thief or a hitman?"

His laugh was brief and low. "Why, I am different," he said. "I'm just a simple tailor."

My eyes narrowed. "Was that a DS9 reference?"

He refused to tell, no matter how many times I asked him that evening.

o

The next day, we took a bus to Charing Cross Road, and afterward walked to our final destination, which proved to be a dingy little pub wedged between two shops, one that Muggles had no chance of seeing. Well, that was one question answered. Huzzah, I was a real witch. What a shock.

The inside of the pub was shadowy and worn, crowded nearly wall to wall with low tables. Potter and I ordered tea and coffee, respectively, before setting off for a spot in the corner. After he sat, I had to squeeze my way around him. Potter had Transfigured himself into a portly, middle-aged witch before we had Apparated to our bus stop. Using what he had earlier claimed to be a spare wand, he now turned his own light jacket into thin outer robes robes, then turned my long jacket into plain, open one that rested over my skirt and blouse.

This didn't seem to draw any attention from the other patrons; a few of the witches and wizards who came through the Muggle side of the pub Transfigured articles of their clothing into more native ones or reversed Transfigurations that were already in place. Catching me watching, Potter said in a prim, Dublin-laced voice, "What had you expected to see, my dear, our kind coming in from London wearing bathing suits with stovepipe trousers and Wellies?"

That'd been alarmingly close to what I had expected to see, but I wasn't going to tell him that. I drank my coffee instead. "Don't call me your 'dear' anything." I spaced my sentences with a smile. "It gives me the creeps, Mom."

He made an irritated noise in his throat, sounding ever bit the stodgy old witch he was trying to be. That sourness probably wasn't an act. When we finished soaking in the local atmosphere — and the local gossip, such as it was — we moved on. You can guess where we went first, I should think: robes shopping. It was about as exciting as it sounded; the overlong session of measuring and fabric discussions sullied whatever thrill I'd had by stepping into Diagon Alley. For the people passing by outside the windows of Madam Malkin's, this was just another day. And, in a way, it was the same for me too. I'd been here again and again through the years when I'd read the books.

It wasn't our only stop, unfortunately. Potter insisted on buying what he called "standard supplies for any witch," supplies that included a cauldron, potions ingredients, an enormous trunk, and more books than I'd ever read in a year.

"You can't honestly think I need all this," I said as he weighed me down with yet another textbook for those interested in remedial spellcasting. This was the second bookshop of the day.

"I do not think that you need it," he said. "I know that you do." His gaze skipped along the shelves until he found another one that he unceremoniously dropped on the heap of them I was already carrying.

Craning my neck, I read the title: Magical Customs for Late-Bloomers. "Oh, come on," I said, my arms groaning with the weight of yet another volume. "You can tell me everything I need to know."

He was already back to hunting the titles. "Even if I were in possession of a Time-Turner, I couldn't possibly manage that, my sweet little pigeon."

My nose wrinkled at the new nickname. The mouth of his temporary body ticked into a smile. He was enjoying this. Torturing me. Got off on it, in all likelihood, the twisted maniac. I said, "Should you really be in this good a mood after everything that happened to your family?"

His mirth slipped away instantly. "We can't change it."

"But you can go around on a spending spree afterwards, can you?"

His fingers, thin and frail in this form, stilled as he reached for another book. "This 'spending spree,' as you put it, is for your own good," he said. "You're as good as useless when it comes to magic right now." He yanked the book from the shelf, then dropped it so hard on the stack that I almost lost my grip on the whole thing. "If you don't want to also be as good as dead, you'll take the things that I'm buying and use them." He looked at me sidelong. Besides his eye, the rest of his face was in the shadows of his hat and widow's veil. "This is how I'm protecting the last of my blood in this world."

Those words rocked me like a strong spell. Had he really come to think that much of me? My hopeful confusion evaporated in an instant. God, that was fucking stupid. No, he hadn't. He was only protecting something that he found useful, far more useful than the Dursleys had ever been ... not to mention complicit and compliant. But someday — four years from now to be exact — he wouldn't have a use for me any longer. He'd be twenty-five, a full wizard in the magical world. So maybe it'd be best if I did learn magic. I'd need it to end up not-dead, one way or the other.

I shrugged the books up higher against my body. "Fine," I said. "I'll use every damn thing you buy me."

Smug satisfaction filled his expression before he could fix his face. Hubris had been the undoing of many a man. Potter might turn out to be no exception.

o

The wand was last on the list. Garrick Ollivander was just as ethereal as I'd expected, with quick, silvery eyes that saw too much. Or maybe I was just being paranoid. It was hard to say when Potter the Terrible hadn't allowed me a second's rest since the Leaky Cauldron. As Ollivander measured my wand arm, he asked questions of me that Potter answered. Our cover story was that I was a late-blooming witch who had come into my own only a week ago.

"Strange," Ollivander said, and I stiffened.

God, this wasn't an important moment to the half-assed plot of this dream at all. "What's strange?" I said. Did he somehow know who I was?

He straightened his back. His measuring tape, floating in midair, rolled itself into a neat coil and drifted into his hand. "Your accents," he said, glancing to Potter, then to me. "You must've grown up overseas, Ms. Henry."

Potter gave a smile that looked forced, as if an old witch were trying her best to be polite. "You're correct, of course," he said. "My family is ... old-fashioned, to put it kindly. It had been necessary to bring up my daughter in a more accepting environment. But when Violet's magic made itself known, I decided that it would be safe to come home." He paused, looking abashed. "Or as close to home as I could allow myself to go."

"I understand perfectly, Madam Henry," Ollivander said. He gave brief look to the wand Potter carried, not his Holly one, but something that was allegedly a spare. "If I might hazard a guess, I'd say that your wand appears to be ... fir. Sometimes the tendency for wand woods runs in families, so we shall start there, I should think."

Fir wands might as well have been sticks for all I didn't manage to do with them. There had been a few lazy sparks with some redwood, an anemic bubble or two from several blackthorns, and a disastrous belch of smoke from a willow wand that Ollivander quickly snatched out of my hands. "I had thought ..." he began, then cleared his throat. "No, no, of course that wouldn't have done for you. Perhaps something a bit more unusual ..."

There was a minor success with a black walnut that gave off a flurry of sparrows, a success quickly dampened when their feathers started burning. Ollivander Vanished them before their crisp little bodies hit the floor. Potter grabbed the wand away from me first, while the wandmaker started muttering things about black walnut being ill-suited for inner conflict. "But I think that there might be something to the dragon heartstring," he commented. His gaze roved over my face. "And ... perhaps ... Yes, that might do. There would be a symmetry to it, in a way." After an apology, Ollivander sent back all the useless wands lined on his counter so he could freely totter into his labyrinthine shelves. The shadows swallowed him up.

Potter took his flask from his purse and had a drink. "Of course you'd be difficult," he said.

"Yes, of course," I said. "How else could we increase the tension of this scene?"

His eyes narrowed but he didn't say anything else — couldn't say anything else, for Ollivander had returned with a single box. The wandmaker set it with near reverence on the counter; the surface of the box was a dark, plain wood that had been scuffed and dented so thoroughly that it had at first seemed to be covered in abstract carvings. The lid creaked on its hinges. Inside, resting on a cushion of indigo velvet, was a thin, plain wand the color of blood stains. I recoiled, and the beams of late afternoon light shifted to show that the wood was only a deep red-gold. It was beautiful, though looking at it still brought a touch of unease. But it was just a wand. A stick. A piece of wood. There could be no harm in touching it.

The surface was smooth and cold, far colder than wood had any right to be. And it felt right, as if my hand had been expecting the weight of it every day of my life. Snow flurries burst from the tip, scattering over the shop in a blizzard of biting cold. "What is it?" I said softly, unable to take my eyes from the wand. Magic, I'd done magic.

Ollivander looked neither pleased nor displeased. "Dragon heartstring," he said, as snowflakes fell and clung in his white hair, "and yew."

My heart plummeted. I wanted to drop the wand. Wanted to let it go. Wanted to wipe my hands clean because I knew, I knew what this meant. It could mean nothing else.

"Yew?" Potter said, with a strain of curiosity I'd come to know and loathe.

"Yes," Ollivander said, "yew heartwood, and of a particularly auspicious tree — one that had been struck by lightning in nineteen hundred and twenty-six." He fixed his gaze on my wand. "A bolt during a winter storm. Quite unusual. It was that very unusualness that had led me to collect what wood I could from the remains." His gaze shifted to me now; he stared at me with those dreadful, unblinking eyes. "The tree had been a strange specimen to begin with, nearly two thousand years old. A church had been built near it, though the site had long been sacred to those who had come before the Christians. Muggles had buried their dead in its shade, you see."

A graveyard tree, one infused with nutrients from corpses, had been made into a wand. That was what I held in my hand, a dead thing meant to make more dead things. My flesh prickled as the last of the snow fell over me, but it was not the cold that chilled me.

Ollivander talked on, either not noticing my reaction or not caring. "It was of that same tree that I had made another wand" — don't say it, please don't say it — "one that belongs to He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named."

"Give her another," Potter said, hoarsely. "Something else. Something better."

"We both know how futile that would be. The wand chooses the witch." Ollivander Vanished the snow; his shop and shelves looked no worse for the flurry. "Go to another shop if you must, but I daresay that you shall not find a better match for your girl than this. Few other wands would manifest so strong a reaction for her, not even if the one that she now holds was to be destroyed. Some things are simply fated to be, young man."

Potter started, reaching for his wand before he checked himself. "I'm hardly a 'man,' Mr. Ollivander," he said, "as you can see for yourself."

The old wandmaker smiled and it was a gleaming, worn crescent that brought out the melancholy in his ancient face. "I see many things, but most of all, I see the souls of things, their very centers. Their cores, you might say." His shadow darkened to the color of pitch as he spoke, going against the light to stretch higher and higher against the shelves behind him. Its edges grew jagged, as if a thousand sharp and invisible teeth had burst out of his skin.

The sight filled me with an awful buzzing, as if a million insects had crawled down my throat and into my stomach. His teeth looked sharper too when he spoke. "That goes for wizards as well as wands, so if you are indeed considering wiping my memory of this encounter, Mr. Potter, then I am bound to inform you that others have tried and failed to do the same." He grinned, the silver of his eyes tarnished and dead and old. His face stretched more than any human's could, but despite the sheer unreality, the impossibility of it, he looked more real than anything in the rest of the world did. Solid. Undeniable. Unchanging.

Potter didn't stop himself from taking up his wand now.

In a tone that might've been at home on a vicar, Ollivander said, "Please don't be foolish," and there was the sound of a thousand other men in it, each one as commanding as the last. "You have so much ahead of you, do you not? So many years planned ..."

Potter dropped his arm to his side, his face bloodless. Ollivander's shadow promptly dwindled to something normal-looking. He shuffled more closely to his counter, where he leaned heavily. Plucking a quill from its holder next to an ink pot, he said, "That shall be eight Galleons; prices have gone up since you first purchased yours, I'm afraid." He marked the number without asking if it was to be paid.

Eight Galleons were handed over without a peep. Potter didn't need to drag me to the door; I was headed for it before the coins left his money pouch. "The hell was that?" I said as he caught up with me.

His brow creased. "I'm not sure."

"How can you not be su —"

"Hey!"

That voice brought us both up short, me for the familiarity of it and Potter for God knew what reason why. "You don't know him," Potter said to me, taking the phial of memories from my blouse, "and you don't know Harry Potter from anything besides the newspapers." He tapped his wand to the phial, then said a hushed spell. "Remember that." He tucked the phial back into my blouse. "You don't know me and you don't know him."

"I don't know who?" I said.

That question soon had an answer — Sirius Black burst out of the milling customers surrounding the front of Florean Fortescue's Ice Cream Parlor. It was him from the black hair to the cool grey eyes. He cut through the late crowds like a dagger. He shoved Potter from me and grabbed the front of my robes. He wrenched me to him, anger burning in his face. "What in fuck's name have you done?" he said, twisting harder into my clothes. When I lifted my wand, he yanked it out of my hand. He might as well have pulled off my arm with it, vulnerable as it left me feeling.

I took a gulping breath, one that did nothing to push down my rising panic. Potter slipped into a growing formation of bystanders, loudly promising to contact the authorities. My hands went for the one holding my robes, trying to pry it off. "I don't — why are you —"

Sirius dragged me so close to him that I could feel his heart hammering through his thin chest. "Stop playing innocent, Harry," he said, leaning down to speak against my cheek. His voice was low and terrible. "The Dursleys are dead and you're prancing around Diagon Alley wearing your mother's face?" He gave me a shake. "You do realize how all this makes you look, don't you?"

"I'm n-not ... I'm not Harry."

"Sirius?" said another man, one I knew too. If I had looked at him, I would've seen concerned etched in every inch of his kind, tired face. "Merlin, what are you doing? Let her go."

"It's him," Sirius spat.

A pink-haired woman appeared on Sirius's right side, staring at me speculatively. "Him-him, you mean? Or him as in —"

"The boy," Sirius said.

Remus began, "That's r —"

"Ridiculous?" Sirius pulled me around, almost shoving me at his friend. "Look at that face and tell me what you see because it certainly isn't funny to me."

Two ice cream cones fell out of Remus's hands and splatted against the cobblestone street. Behind us, Tonks said plaintively, "Oh no, and those took twenty bloody minutes to buy."

o

We Disapparated to a place that I recognized, one full of grubby, run-down terraced houses that seemed to have more shattered windows than intact ones. No one peeked outside to watch our approach, at least not that I could tell. Maybe in this area the residents knew better than to be curious about things that sounded like gunshots. Firearms might be restricted in Britain, but they weren't nonexistent. They seemed like they should've been required here, though, maybe passed out when you passed through. I had no weapon, not even my wand. Although I didn't have it long, its absence already gnawed at me. Sirius, still hanging onto my robes, frogmarched me out of the tiny park and across the road. Remus and Tonks, who'd Side-Along Apparated together, rushed to catch us.

"Take it easy now, Sirius," Remus said, frowning. "There's no reason to drag her — him — around like that, not when we haven't heard his side of things."

Sirius didn't loosen his grip a bit. "I'll drag him until his feet wear down to bloody bones if that's what it takes."

Tonks chewed her lip. "Is it really him?" she said. "It is, isn't it?"

"I'm not anyone but me," I said, and earned another shake for my troubles.

"Save it," Sirius said.

I rolled my eyes. If it wasn't one crazy asshole in my life, it was another. We continued on, not that I had a choice. Number twelve, Grimmauld Place popped into existence between its neighbors as we approached. The front of it looked slightly less dirty than the others and the red door seemed recently painted. We passed into the house without a single pause; Tonks had used her wand to open the handle-less door before we reached it. The interior was gloomy and shabby but well-scrubbed. There was a faint whiff of cleaning spells in the somewhat stuffy atmosphere. Our journey took us past a long hallway covered with portraits on either side, the largest of which was covered with curtains. I held my breath as we passed it, wary of making the faintest sound. Things were bad enough without having to listen to a dead, old racist bitch screech on about Mudbloods and half-breeds. The only other thing of mention were the serpents on the peeling wallpaper, serpents in the silver frames of the paintings, the metal serpents in the chandelier, and the serpents decorating everything else imaginable. A previous owner or two might've had a hard-on for snakes. Almost everything here was covered in them. Well, except for the umbrella stand that Tonks gave a wide berth to. In that case, someone had allowed a hairy troll leg to spoil the theme of the decor.

Once clear of the entry hall, we hooked right, then took another right down a set of narrow stone stairs. What waited at the bottom of them was an enormous, gloomy kitchen. Sirius steered me to the table, forcing me to sit on one of the benches. There followed several minutes in which the three of my captors tried to dispel the enchantments and Transfigurations that they imagined covered every inch of me. Mostly, it was boring and harmless.

Potter couldn't have known this had been waiting for me. No, he had just left me to my fate. Hadn't even held on to me tightly. Just let me slip, let me be captured.

God, what was wrong with me? He'd captured me first. Technically, these people were the rescue party. And they were also mistaken pricks, but they seemed slightly less dangerous than Potter did. None of them had made me gouge out an eye so far, which was a plus.

"Right," Tonks said, standing back. She stuck her wand behind an ear. "If this is Harry, he's either a secret Metamorphmagus or he's using Polyjuice." She dropped to the bench next to me. "Nothing to do for the first and little to do for the second except wait it out."

Sirius's expression curdled. Couldn't wait to see what he looked like when the non-existent potion didn't wear off. That would be be a treat. Seemingly oblivious to his friend's mood, Remus started puttering around the kitchen, using magic to set up a kettle on a range. Hob. Whatever it was called. Sirius said, "What are you doing?"

Remus didn't miss a beat. "Making tea."

"Making tea? At a time like this? For him?" Offense laced Sirius's voice.

It didn't bother Remus. He brought down mugs from one of the shelves. "No," he said evenly, "for all of us."

"He doesn't deserve tea," Sirius grumbled. His petulance made him look like a big, looming man-baby. Which he was. What other kind of person but a man-baby would be stingy with tea? Even the actual, not-me Potter would have merited tea, it was just common courtesy. Denying tea in Britain was, like, a high crime or something.

Happily for me, Remus continued ignored Sirius's mutterings. The tea was had, with biscuits. The tea was delicious. The tea did wonderful things to my insides. How could it taste so good? I moaned after the first drink, which did not go unnoticed. Sirius glanced down at his mug in suspicion, Tonks looked amused, and Remus looked alarmed. "Sorry," I said, "this is just the best tea I've ever had from a kidnapper and I'd like to marry you for it. Before you say no, just understand that I have a reasonable tea-to-sex exchange rate."

Tonks inhaled tea and choked.

Maybe I'd been a bit too honest in my praise.

"Kidnapper?" Remus said, looking ill. "I'm not ... I haven't ... We haven't ..."

"What he meant to say," Sirius began, "is that we've apprehended you, not abducted you." He squinted at me. "But why are you acting so strangely?" He glanced to Remus. "What exactly did you give him?"

"Oh," I said, "you drugged my tea? That makes sense. You wouldn't be very good 'apprehenders' if you weren't willing to be underhanded." Of course, funky tea paled a bit in comparison to Potter's tactics, but I didn't need to volunteer information unnecessarily. They should have to work a little bit for it. "Veritaserum, I assume?"

Sirius took an angry gulp of his tea. I didn't know the act of drinking could be angry. "Stop playing games, Harry. We need to know what happened with the Dursleys."

"My name isn't Harry," I said. Relief flooded me — it seemed I could sidestep statements that weren't direct questions.

My three apprehenders shared startled, guilty looks. So far, they were better hosts than they were interrogators. Their lack of finesse almost had me nostalgic for Potter's methods. Yes, he was so far off his rocker that he'd been catapulted into space, but he didn't pretend concern about my welfare. Everything he had done to me or for me had ultimately been to further his own goals. I knew where I stood with him. He was consistent. These people pulled in three different directions, so I wobbled off-balance, unsure of where to step next.

"You're not Harry?" Sirius said, brow furrowing. "Harry James Potter?"

"Nope," I said straight into my mug as I prepared to take another drink. The tea really was that good. Looking to Remus, I said, "What have you done to make this tea so sexy?"

High color dusted his scarred cheeks. His face was half-frozen, half-pained. He stammered for what seemed a full minute before managing to say, "I'm, I'm, I'm sorry?"

Only Sirius seemed remotely amused by this, despite his diminishing rage. Tonks had her lips pressed so closely together that they had disappeared. That was good. Making comments was the way to figure them out. To find where I could push, where I couldn't. To find where I stood. To find my next step. Potter had offered no true solid ground, just sharp points to avoid. These people though ... these people were feelings first, logic second. I could tell them everything that had happened to me and they might believe me, grudgingly ...

But I wanted to see what would happen next. How Potter would handle it, how these people would handle it, how I would. I wanted to see that. All of it.

"Tea from a kidnapper," Remus said. Everyone looked at him. "You said that tea had been the best you've ever had from a kidnapper." He set his mug carefully down. "You can't have been lying when you said that, not with the Veritaserum. And your reactions, they're all wrong." His eyes, a keen amber, focused on mine. "You aren't afraid. Why aren't you afraid?"

Sirius had set aside his mug and now had his wand out. Tonks had done the same thing. Both of them were dressed in near-identical plain brown robes which pinged some old memory of mine. It was probably something Potter had mentioned, probably when he was boring me to death with facts of the magical world at breakfast. No matter what had caused it, the reason for the robes was no doubt tied to the Auror badges on their hips. Huh. Well, that was interesting. "Yeah," Sirius said, noticing where I was looking, "why aren't you afraid?"

It was strange that I felt like smiling. I said, "Because there's nothing you can do to me that hasn't been done," and the words felt as if someone else had given them.

Remus flinched. The two Aurors didn't look any more comfortable. Someone started to say something, but the sharp, sudden claw of some unseen monster hooked into my guts and pulled

(... ripped)

me away

(... far, far away)

into

(... churning chaos)

a familiar sitting room, where I tumbled to the floor with indignation and spilled tea. Potter sat ensconced in his usual armchair, reading a book like he hadn't just abandoned me in Diagon Alley. His pure lack of concern radiated through his Polyjuice disguise. "And how was your afternoon?" he said.

"Oh, fine," I told him. "Just fine. And I'm fine too, by the way."

"It couldn't have been all that bad," he said, turning a page. "They gave you tea."

I pulled myself up to sit, then looked mournfully at said tea now decorating the floor. The mug was intact, but my precious drink? Alas. "That's not necessarily true," I said. "You gave me tea the first time we met, then you gave me a lesson on how to properly gouge out an eye."

"Fair point." He lazily reached for his wand on the table at his elbow with characteristic Potter indolence — unnerving to see that on another person — and then cleaned up the mess. He frowned at me thoughtfully before cleaning me up too. "Veritaserum?"

My eyes were still on my now-empty mug. "Yes."

"Is it still in effect?" After I said yes, he said, "What did you tell them?" I told him everything, even without him asking. He didn't seem worried, even when I added that they had my wand. "You've done as well as I expected you might do," he said, answering now in his own voice, for he'd changed back to his usual terrible self sometime durning story hour. "I'll buy you another one."

An image of falling snow filled my head. Another wand wouldn't be the same. But telling me that I'd done as well as he'd expected me to? That made it sound as if ... as if ...

"Did you want me to get caught?" I said, staggering to my feet, mug forgotten on the floor. My hand flew up to my neck, yanking the phial free of my blouse. "You must've because you turned this into a Portkey." I stalked towards him, shaking the phial. The memories splatted against the glass, leaving shimmery streaks as they slid back down. "That was your plan, wasn't it?"

He smiled that thin, awful smile of his and my hand flew out. The slap of it was a thunderbolt. It was a long time before any other sound seemed to touch my ears. He set his book aside so he could pry my palm from his face. The raw-looking ghosts of my fingers already marred his skin. He threaded his fingers through mine with the tenacious, sickening gentleness of a lover and looked straight up into my eyes. "My plan," he said, "had been to see what would happen when you were set loose."

And like that, the anger dimmed in me. It still burned, though not as brightly. His curiosity wasn't that far off from my own, the curiosity that had kept me calm when three people from the Order of the Phoenix had stolen me off the street, the curiosity that had kept me sane in this nightmare, the curiosity to see what would happen next. His had been part of some game to see if I was loyal to him or something. I was less loyal and more suicidal. But the part that I really hated was that, for a few minutes, I had felt utterly alone without him. "Are you happy with what you've seen?" I said.

Potter released my hand. He returned to his book, which had fallen off his leg and to the side of his chair. "Happiness," he said, at once finding the place he'd left off reading, "doesn't matter."

I stalked off, no longer willing to look at him, and headed for the bathroom. It took some time before I scrubbed the feel of his face off my palm.

o

Dinner looked as if it'd been liberated from a restaurant with at least two Michelin stars, which rated as an apology as far as Potter could give them. It was a good attempt at one, as he claimed it was twelve courses. Twelve. Were twelve courses really necessary? Thank God they were tiny or else I wouldn't have survived them. It was over our small clay bowls of chilled Vichyssoise that I said, "So, what gave you a taste for luxury? A desperate childhood that turned you to crime?"

"I wouldn't call it desperate," he said, "but yes."

Color me skeptical at his sudden honesty. I took up my last bit of soup and sucked the spoon clean. Company not withstanding, everything about dinner had been wonderful so far. "Harry Potter as a criminal. How does that work?"

"Well enough." He eyed my empty bowl, then flicked his wand, exchanging one course for the next. No, he couldn't have stolen these, not for one course to have followed the other. He might've used some "persuasion" on a chef, likely the same sort of persuasion that had led to my eye getting acquainted with a knife. "It's the only valuable thing the Dursleys had ever taught me."

"And now you're the valuable one. Should I be flattered you're spending so much on me?"

"We both know that I'm not doing it out of the goodness of my heart. I need your help."

"My 'help?' How could you need my help in anything?"

"Many things," he said, "not just one. But the most important shall be helping me collect the Deathly Hallows, a task that shall be made much simpler once Voldemort is killed."

My appetite died away with such ease. "There's nothing simple about killing Voldemort."

"Not without a plan, no. But you have given me that plan." That was news to me. He had read that thought on my face because he said, "Or rather your memories have done." Potter picked up his fork, one of too many at his place setting, and started in on the little piece of bloody lamb at the center of his plate.