All According to Plan

by LysandraLeigh

Thirteen-year-old Bella Black intended to go back in time to start a war in service to her patron Power. Ritual magic goes awry and she finds herself in 1993, faced with a failing House of Black, an insane alter ego, and a Dark Lord on the rise. Chaos ensues. Title drop. (A collaboration by LeighaGreene and inwardtransience)

14. Define human

There was something seriously wrong with Lyra.

Well, "wrong" wasn't quite the right word. There were implications that came with that word that Hermione didn't really intend. It would perhaps be more accurate to say that there was something different about Lyra, something...suspicious. Before, Hermione had been able to mostly ignore it — there were other things to focus on, after all, even other Lyra things, there were more than enough distractions vying for her attention. But she was becoming increasingly convinced that something...

She didn't know, was the thing. But it was definitely something.

It had started way back toward the beginning of the year. Hermione had already been rather more mindful of Lyra than she normally would be some random student even then — putting up that barrier in the middle of the dorm had been quite a way to get her attention — so she'd noticed what had happened when Lyra had faced the boggart.

It had turned into the moon. The full moon, to be precise.

That was just...odd. For one thing, Hermione found it rather hard to believe that Lyra was really afraid of anything. That wasn't quite what she meant, everyone was afraid of something, she just couldn't quite imagine Lyra being afraid. Especially not over something so innocuous. The idea was just so weird, she had absolutely no idea what to think of it. And the look Lyra had given the thing, a blank sort of surprise, she hadn't even moved to do the charm, Lupin had had to take care of it. She had to wonder...

And it wasn't just the moon thing, though that was one of the more confusing bits of evidence. There was Lyra's absurd magical competency to consider. Okay, forget for a moment that Lyra had supposedly been homeschooled by a cursebreaker, or whatever, she was still only thirteen. She hadn't been able to find much anything definitive on the topic — apparently, British mages didn't seem to think magical development was a worthwhile area of study — but Hermione seriously doubted Lyra's abilities were at all...realistic. Feasible, that was a better word. She meant, Lyra was too powerful, the breadth of her knowledge too wide, the ease with which she threw around magic, sometimes silently and even wandlessly...

There was a difference, Hermione had already noted, between the way students and adults cast spells. A sort of familiarity, a confidence, that even few NEWT students seemed to approach. But Lyra didn't use magic like a student. Her spellcasting looked like an adult's. Which, according to everything Hermione knew of magic theory, quite simply made no sense at all. She either had to have years more practice using magic than a thirteen-year-old reasonably could (unless she'd started learning and using formal magic at age three or something), or there was some reason she had a closer or deeper connection to her magic than anyone else Hermione had met since she'd come to Hogwarts.

Not to mention Lyra herself was just bloody weird. Hermione had mostly passed this off at first, assuming hers was just an unusually straightforward, brash personality. But it was more than that. She didn't seem to... Despite how intelligent she was — Hermione could count on the fingers of one hand everyone her age she'd ever met who could actually keep up with her and still have a couple left over — Lyra seemed confused far too often. Not by academic stuff, but by people stuff. She just...didn't understand people.

It had taken a while for Hermione to put this together, but it explained far too much. Why Lyra did and said things the way she did, it wasn't that she chose to not care about the effect she had, it wasn't that she was intentionally provoking people — though, she did do that sometimes, it was usually obvious when she did. No, Lyra simply didn't expect to offend people, most of the time. It was true she didn't care when she crossed a line (like blowing up the bloody common room — Hermione still didn't know why she'd done that), but she didn't even seem to know where they were, she just...

Honestly, Hermione was becoming increasingly convinced Lyra simply didn't understand human emotion. She hadn't thought so at first, she'd thought Lyra was...the way she was on purpose, that she was doing it to mess with people. Either that, or she just thought social niceties were stupid, so had consciously chosen to ignore them, said or did what she wanted to say or do with no concern for what anyone else might think. (Hermione could admit she agreed, for the most part, she just couldn't not care as easily as Lyra did.) At worst, she'd thought the other girl was just thoughtlessly impulsive. But it was more than that, it was too... She was too consistent. If she was just doing things on impulse, Hermione would expect her to care about unintended consequences of her actions, for herself at the very least! But she just didn't, at least not so far as Hermione could see. And one would think, if it were an act, Lyra would slip at times, would show some hint of sympathy here or there, the tiniest indication that she understood Hermione's misgivings about half the nonsense that she got up to.

But no, there was never anything. Nothing, ever. Lyra was always the same, the "act" of her complete emotional dissociation from everything around her never wavered. Even when she was amused or annoyed, her reactions seemed somehow superficial, as though if no one were watching, she wouldn't bother.

Hermione had noticed almost right away that Lyra didn't care what anyone thought of her. By this point, she was starting to doubt Lyra cared about anything at all.

Put all of it together, the peculiarities she'd catalogued over what, after all the time travel, amounted to nearly five months of observation, and Hermione had an unsettling suspicion she couldn't ignore any longer.

She couldn't shake the thought that Lyra might not be entirely human.

She had, of course, considered the possibility that Lyra was just a garden-variety human psychopath who happened to also be a witch, but that wouldn't explain her unreasonable magical abilities and range of knowledge. No mundane, human explanation she could think of would.

But of course, this being the magical world, there were more than just human explanations available to her. And the more she saw of Lyra Black, the more convinced she became that there was something literally inhuman about her.

Not that there was anything wrong with that. Or...not necessarily, at least. "Not human" could mean a whole lot of different things, and whether that should make any difference at all to Hermione or not depended on exactly which they were talking about. Some non-human magical beings were more or less harmless, it didn't really matter. Others were...

Well, not so much.

At one end of the spectrum were relatively normal people who had some sort of magic (or, as in the case of werewolves, a curse) which led them to act less human over time. Metamorphmagi, for example, were just witches or wizards with an extreme talent for reflexive transformation magic. They tended to live absurdly long lives, regenerating their bodies with magic, periodically changing their identities and age and even sex, growing apart from humanity as other people aged and died around them.

Metamorphmagi could be extremely dangerous spies and criminals, but they didn't actually prey on humans, as in, for food. They were born human, after all, even if they tended to outlive their families by centuries or even (hypothetically) millennia. It was hard to track their histories, but according to one source, Perenelle Flamel was supposed to be a metamorph, and there'd been a notorious thief and con-woman called Lady Grace who was a metamorph and a legilimens (which Hermione thought was just cheating at life). She was one of the thieves who had broken into Gringott's in 1965, though she'd apparently abandoned the identity after that. And the Blacks, of course, had had a few very notorious metamorphmagi in their family tree. One geneology suggested that a single Black metamorph called Nymphadora had fathered over three dozen children in the generation preceding Lady Cromwell's rise to power. (At least, she assumed "fathered" was the right word — that was a feminine name, but the birth dates made absolutely no sense otherwise.) She'd disappeared centuries ago, and no one knew if she was still alive, but there was a younger one called Cassiopeia who had only been missing for a few decades.

It would make a lot of sense if Lyra was really Cassiopeia, or even Nymphadora. She certainly looked like a thirteen-year-old, but if she was a metamorph the advanced magical skills she displayed could be the product of decades or centuries of practice, rather than just a few years. And her detachment from the world around her could easily be the product of a metamorph's...extended perspective on life and death and the very idea of personal identity — even her complete lack of modesty, and the way she always looked good, even first thing in the morning, would make sense if she could change anything about herself whenever she wanted. But then she'd come across a source — quite by accident, in a potions theory text — that claimed the aging potion she and Lyra had used when they went to London didn't work for metamorphmagi. And if it just didn't work, she could have convinced herself that Lyra had used her metamorphy to fake the effects, but the text — and the two corroborating sources she'd found later — were very specific on the fact that the potion should have some effect, but the results would be dangerous, erratic, unpredictable, and very, very obviously not right.

So Lyra wasn't a metamorph. Which was a shame, because quasi-immortal shapeshifter was the least disturbing possibility Hermione had managed to come up with. (And also it suggested that Lyra was just that pretty, which was annoying.)

The list of possible explanations also included that she was a werewolf or demon (or possessed by one), or a lilin or veela, or a vampire (or dhampire?), or a fae changeling, all of which were more likely to be more dangerous to humans than a metamorph, though how they were dangerous, and to what degree, varied wildly. Unfortunately she just didn't have enough data to properly inform the differential.

She was almost positive that Lyra wasn't a veela. They were supposed to have some sort of inherent sexual aura and begin experimenting with sex at what humans considered a disturbingly young age. They supposedly had very little concern for human ideas of propriety and hated being in enclosed spaces, which kind of fit. But while Lyra was annoyingly attractive, she didn't exactly seem to be aware enough of other people to be that...sexually oriented, and much as she might like to go wandering off in the Forbidden Forest, she didn't seem to have a problem with Potions in the dungeons. And also, veela were supposed to be some sort of human-bird hybrid, they tended to have feathers in their hair even in their most human form. So that one was out.

The information on lilin was much...spottier. Contradictory. Some sources described them as being rather like veela, but with a slightly different psychological profile. Others seemed to be referring to some sort of sex demons, using the term interchangeably with incubus and succubus. Which wouldn't be mutually exclusive, except for the fact that incubi and succubi were supposed to be more or less intangible except when they were feeding on humans. But those could both be eliminated, too, either for the same reasons as veela, or because Lyra was undeniably tangible.

Vampire or dhampire was...probably almost as unlikely. Again, there seemed to be some confusion about what the two terms meant, specifically. Some authors used them interchangeably, while others implied differences in the way they were created or organized socially (though which traits were attributed to which creature varied by author). But nearly all of them agreed that both types of creatures had problems with sunlight, either because it physically hurt them or because it revealed their true nature. It was possible that there was some sort of magic they could perform to prevent or hide that effect, but if there were Hermione would have expected it to be well-known and publicized, especially since most of the information she'd found on vampires had been focused exclusively on identifying and killing them. (Humans really didn't like not being at the top of the food chain.) And Lyra had never made any efforts to avoid the sun.

Outside of the lilin thing, it was nearly impossible to eliminate all of the different types of demons and possessing entities that could possibly be responsible for Lyra's emotional blind spots, odd behavior, and even odder magical abilities. Or rather, it was easy enough to eliminate dozens of them, but there were just so many demons, and they were so poorly catalogued and studied that she couldn't even know if she'd found all of the relevant ones.

She had asked Professor Lupin about recognizing possession — completely aside from the Lyra issue, it seemed like a sensible precaution given their experiences with Quirrell and Ginny. And there were no hints that Lyra's body was being corrupted by contact with a demonic entity — most demons couldn't possess anyone for very long without their victim growing very ill, undergoing involuntary transfigurations like the face Harry had described on the back of Quirrell's head, or simply having their body break down on a fundamental level. And mental possession, like what had happened to Ginny, almost always resulted in a dramatic shift in personality, dizziness, poor motor control, confusion, exhaustion, and memory loss. While Hermione hadn't known Lyra long enough to say whether she'd undergone a sudden shift in her personality before coming to Hogwarts, she could certainly say that Lyra never seemed confused or exhausted, and her memory was nearly as good as Hermione's. And she didn't think she'd ever seen Lyra lose her balance. She had seen her turn around to talk to Zabini while skipping down the stairs and avoid all the trick steps without breaking stride. So possession was out, but that she might be some sort of demon wasn't.

Changeling fae was probably the best fit, based on the behavioral descriptions she'd been able to find in the library. There was just one major problem with that theory: the Fae hadn't been known to interact with humans in centuries. They had apparently shifted their entire society to a plane of existence slightly out of sync with this one when humans became too numerous. The only evidence that they were still alive at all came from veela and goblins, with whom they apparently still occasionally interacted. But neither goblins nor veela had any particular reason to be honest with humans about anything (given what she knew of human-goblin interactions and the way veela were treated like animals in the literature, Hermione would be surprised if they were), and there was quite a lot of speculation about potential misinformation disseminated about the fae in the centuries before their disappearance. One source had even suggested that accounts of interactions with the fae had been enhanced or entirely fabricated based on the lives of certain notorious and legendary witches and wizards, including no less than six members of the House of Black. Which was just — urgh, seriously?!

So it was very, very possible that the similarities between Lyra's behavior and abilities and the accounts of changelings was because the accounts of changelings were based on the antics of ancestors from whom she'd inherited some strain of familial insanity, rather than because she actually was a changeling.

Granted, she'd never seen Lyra handle anything made of iron or steel, but she couldn't think of the last time she had, either. All the doorknobs and taps and hinges in the school were brass, glass, or porcelain; the tableware was pewter (enchanted to prevent lead leaching into the food); and the buttons on wizard's robes, including their school robes, were traditionally carved from bone or stone or softer metals like copper. Which, she realized belatedly, was probably because the castle was maintained by house elves. The jeans Lyra had borrowed when they went to London had rivets, but the few spots where they touched skin would be easy enough to cover with transfiguration, or even Spellotape. And none of their potions had called for iron cauldrons or stirring implements yet.

So the leading theory at the moment — at least partially because it was the easiest to test (outside of ambusing Lyra with a bit of iron, which, given her reaction to the Hippogriff Incident, she might not visibly react to even if it did hurt her, and would almost certainly annoy her and reveal Hermione's suspicions) — was that she could be a werewolf.

There were a couple of compelling reasons to think this, aside from the fact that werewolves tended to become more wolfish and less human the longer they lived with the curse, which dovetailed nicely with Lyra's lack of human understanding. First, her boggart had been the moon. The full bloody moon. And then she had disappeared on the night of the last full moon. She hadn't showed up to turn back at eleven, throwing off their entire time-turning schedule — Hermione had had plans for the second and third iterations of that evening, to say nothing of the night shift — and when she'd finally come back to the dorm, well after sunrise, she'd been tired and irritable and apparently less inclined to make an effort to act, well, human, than usual. (And not coincidentally, less inclined to explain her abominable behavior.) And, perhaps most convincing, when she'd changed her robes that evening, Hermione had seen that she was covered in cuts and scratches. Werewolves were known to inflict damage on themselves if there were no other targets for their aggression, and if those cuts weren't cursed, she was sure Lyra could have healed them in two seconds.

This was the easiest theory to test because tonight was the full moon again. If Lyra was a werewolf, she'd have to find some excuse to disappear again (or just vanish, but still). Which didn't necessarily prove anything, but if she showed up to turn back as usual, she couldn't possibly be a werewolf.

Though it would be good to know ahead of time if she wasn't planning on coming, if only so Hermione could plot out her day accordingly. She supposed she could just ask. Not whether Lyra was a werewolf, per se (though she was sure the other girl wouldn't hesitate to ask if she suspected Hermione wasn't human). Just...whether she was planning on showing up tonight. She checked her watch. Lyra should be coming back to the dorm any minute now.

About two seconds later, the door flew open. "Hey, Hermione. Ready to go?"

"Ah, well, I actually wanted to talk to you about something," she began, hesitating slightly because, well...trying to deduce the species of her roommate wasn't exactly the sort thing she'd ever expected to come up. The purpose of her question made it difficult to ask innocuously, no matter how unexceptional it might be.

Lyra gave her a blank look. "I swear, I had nothing to do with the new wall."

"Wha— No, it's not about that." They had discovered only that morning that a wall had somehow developed behind Lyra's room divider. She'd made it transparent to check whether the other third-year girls had left for breakfast already, only to find a solid wall, indistinguishable from any other wall in the castle. After poking at it for a few minutes, Lyra had declared that the house elves must have put it in when they were repairing the damage to the tower two weeks before.

Personally, Hermione suspected Professor McGonagall might have had something to do with it. She'd had all six of them in her office after the professors had inspected the dorms in the wake of Lyra's as yet unexplained decision to explode the bloody commons. She'd been livid. Hermione had never seen her lips go so thin, even when she'd flubbed the polyjuice last year and gotten stuck halfway between cat and human.

Lavender and her cronies had sat there all smug while Professor McGonagall lit into Lyra for lying to her about the paling in the first week of school, and Lyra just sat there taking it, her smirk growing broader as the tirade wore on. When the professor finally paused for breath, she'd said, "I never said I didn't do it, just that it was a bit absurd to believe that I had," which had rendered Professor McGonagall absolutely speechless for a full ten seconds.

When she'd finally recovered her senses, she'd slapped Lyra with a month's worth of detentions (with Filch, she didn't want to deal with Lyra herself) and ordered her to take it down. But then Fay, much to Hermione's surprise, had spoken up, asking if they could keep it, but maybe just make it so Lyra couldn't take it down whenever she wanted. And Professor McGonagall had asked them if they all wanted the room divided (which they did, none of the others wanted to share a room with Lyra, and Hermione didn't want to share with them, either), and, after ranting about Hogwarts policy for a few more minutes, agreed they could keep it, but only because the Castle had already given the new room its own exit and loo.

"I don't care about the wall—"

"Huh, I thought you were annoyed about it earlier."

"Well, yes, but only because you still haven't told me why you set off a runes-based bomb in our own common room."

"It's all your fault, you never should have told me I did," she insisted. If it weren't for the shit-eating grin on her face, she might have almost sounded sincere.

"You're infuriating, you know that?!"

"It's part of my charm." (Hermione glowered at her.) "So what did you want to talk about?"

She sighed. "Are you planning on turning at eleven and seven?"

"Uh, yes? Why wouldn't I? I mean, I do have a thing I was planning to do, but it shouldn't interfere with the schedule."

"Well, you did just vanish on me, that one night—"

"Oh, come on, that was one night, and it was ages ago — besides, why would you wait until—" And then she cut herself off and started laughing.

"What's so funny?"

"Uh, you think I'm a werewolf?"

"Well– I— No, I don't, I just..."

"Why else would you think I wasn't going to show up on the night of the full moon? Gods and Powers, that's hilarious. You know like, half my jewelry is silver, right?"

Hermione couldn't stop herself defensively crossing her arms. "How would I know that, for all I know, it's costume jewelry."

There were half a dozen little silver flowers with bright red hearts nestled in Lyra's curls today. She pulled one of them free and offered it to Hermione, still giggling. "It's silver, promise. You can test it, if you like. Just mind the ruby, that's real too."

Of course they were. Because apparently the Blacks had more money than they could ever possibly use. Lyra, in typical Lyra fashion, thought nothing of spending thousands of pounds on illegal books on a whim. Why wouldn't she casually wear real jewels around school?

She took it anyway, just in case Lyra was trying to fake her out, but she didn't really doubt it. She was just kicking herself over missing something so obvious.

"It wasn't that funny," she said, pouting slightly, but she had hoped that she'd be right about this one, because while werewolves were dangerous, and naturally dark creatures, they were basically just normal witches and wizards about ninety-eight percent of the time. They weren't contagious when they weren't transformed. If Lyra wasn't a werewolf, that only realistically left some kind of demon, or a changeling, both of which were more likely to be dangerous (and even malicious) all the time. A lot of them preyed on humans, either stealing energy from them or killing them for food and...

"Yeah, it was. Why would you even think...?"

"Well, you weren't here on the last full moon, and when you came back, you were covered in cuts and scratches, and I saw your boggart!"

"Bog— Oh! Yeah, I don't know what that was about, maybe it was just confused, it had just been forced to change quite a few times. And you've clearly never seen real werewolf scars, if you think those little scratches were— Seriously?"

"Fine, yes, it was stupid, forget I said anything. What are you doing tonight?" she asked, a desperate and obvious bid to change the subject.

Lyra grinned, giggling again. "Tailing Professor Lupin. I'm pretty sure he's a werewolf, you see..."

"Oh, shut up."

"You have no idea how funny this is. I've got to tell Blaise..."

"Are we turning back or not?" Hermione snapped.

It wasn't until the world had solidified around them once again that Hermione thought to ask, "What were all those scratches from, if not a werewolf?"

Of course, Lyra just smirked at her.

"Let me guess: 'That would be telling.'"

"Got it in one!" the infuriating girl said cheerfully, shrugging off her robes and letting down her hair. "Now, if you'll excuse me, even werewolves need to sleep."

Hermione glared at her, but said nothing. She might be laughing now, but Hermione would figure her out. Eventually.

---

Harry jumped, suddenly and painfully, like the worst static shock he'd ever gotten in his life. Heat flaring across his face despite the highland autumn chill, he forced himself to look away, staring at the bare branches of the trees above him.

Somehow, when Lyra had warned him that wilderfolk didn't really behave like normal people, it hadn't occurred to him that normal people behavior included wearing clothes.

Harry had been anticipating today with no small amount of dread. For one thing, it was Hallowe'en — the last two years, this was about the time everything started going swiftly downhill. He realized it was likely nothing horrible would happen, that his first couple years at Hogwarts had been very unusual, all things considered. But with the visceral horror that were dementors and the sinister threat that was Sirius Black combining into a lingering feeling of danger, yeah, he wasn't convinced this year would be any different.

(Though, he was mostly convinced that Lyra was right, and Black was innocent. He had been an Auror and a fighter for the Light — and, according to the papers, a close friend of his parents'. He never had had a trial, and from what Harry had heard the evidence he'd ever done anything wrong was extremely thin. But, while he might very well be innocent, other people didn't know that, which meant things could still go horribly wrong pretty easily.)

The other thing bothering him, Hallowe'en just happened to be the first official Hogsmeade trip of the year. Sixth- and seventh-years did go off to the village all the time, nobody tried to stop them, but this was the first time the carriages were actually made available to get people back and forth, a few staff members lingering in the village in case the younger students needed anything. Though, he knew from a few Gryffindors (Fred and George, mostly) that even lower-year students sometimes wandered off to Hogsmeade, the staff letting them go so long as they had permission from their parents.

Harry had noticed before how little supervision they were usually under — the professors did keep an eye on them in class, of course, and in the halls and at meals, but otherwise they were mostly left to their own devices. It was why the students could get away with all kinds of stuff, from smuggling in contraband to having noisy all-night parties in the common room to rampant bullying to snogging (and more, he'd heard) in broom cupboards and abandoned classrooms. And some of the rumors of what went on in the Hufflepuff common room were so extreme he couldn't believe half of them were true. Hermione had commented before that, from what she'd read (because she was always reading about everything), magical society held to a pre-modern concept of childhood, thought of people their age less like fragile babies that needed to be coddled and more like tiny adults who could for the most part manage themselves.

Honestly, nobody had ever treated Harry like a fragile baby that needed to be coddled, so he mostly had to take her word on that one (which wasn't unusual, he just took Hermione's word on a lot of things). He was just relieved he was allowed to do what he wanted without being yelled at.

So, everyone had been all excited about the first big Hogsmeade trip of the year, the first time most people in their year would be going. So he'd been surrounded with them all gushing about it, for weeks now. And he couldn't go. With his little explosion at Marge being a bitch, he never had gotten Vernon to sign the damn form, and McGonagall hadn't been willing to make an exception. (He thought because of Black, from how uncomfortable she'd looked, which was stupid.) Which at once was a disappointment and a relief. Yes, he'd like to get out of the castle, be able to do ordinary things like go out to village and mess around like a normal bloody kid.

But on the other hand, going to Hogsmeade would mean having to go past the dementors at the gates. So, it was complicated.

He'd been lingering in the entrance hall, watching everyone else cheerfully crowding out to the carriages, trying not to look like it was bothering him, when Lyra had suddenly shown up out of nowhere, saying she was going out to the forest to meet with the wilderfolk girl she'd met a couple weeks ago, and asked if he wanted to go with.

There was nothing he could say to that but agree to go along. Honestly, he'd had absolutely no idea what he was going to do with himself, with everyone else he might have hung out with out of the castle. He might have otherwise have taken the time by himself to get his classwork done — he'd noticed Ron was more a hindrance than anything when it came to studying — but, well...there were side effects to Hermione being in a fight with Ron, and actually having other friends to hang out with. Particularly, she outright refused to help him with his work like she used to, so he had to do it all himself these days. With quidditch practice and Ron being a constant distraction, if he didn't want to be up past midnight finishing things the night before he had to get everything done early. Which meant he didn't really have any work to do at the moment. If Lyra hadn't appeared and given him something to do, he might have ended up just...sitting around somewhere, trying not to think about things.

And that never ended well for him.

And, well, even if he had had something else to do, he might have decided to tag along anyway. He was sort of interested about wilderfolk — they didn't learn much of anything at all about other magical races, and people seemed to know nothing about wilderfolk in particular. (Harry had asked a couple magical-raised people about wilderfolk and they had very little to say, even Hermione had only read references to their existence.) That was just...weird, especially since there was a whole tribe of them, dozens, living out in the forbidden forest. But then, apparently most people thought they were werewolves, for some stupid reason. Werewolves were still human twenty-eight days out of the month, why would they be living out in the forest? Idiots.

It did sound interesting, but he would have gone with Lyra even if it didn't. Honestly, Lyra was one of his favorite people in the world these days. He couldn't think of a single other person who had always talked to him like he was just a normal bloke — not a worthless freak ruining everything, or some sort of magic Jesus who was either going to save the world or ruin everything. Even Ron and Hermione had flipped out a little when they'd first met, but Lyra hadn't reacted at all. (He was actually a little embarrassed that the first thing he'd said to her was asking if she was related to Sirius Black, that seemed almost as bad as asking if he was the Harry Potter.)

That, and she was just nice. Okay, she was nice to him, anyway. Well, no, she wasn't even really that nice to him. "Nice" wasn't quite the right word. She just... She just talked to him, was all. (And had all sorts of interesting things to say when she did, even if he didn't know what to think about a lot of them.) And listened when he talked about things. Granted, she often thought the things he had to say were silly or stupid, but she did actually listen — the things she thought were silly or stupid were what he actually meant, not what she decided he must be trying to say. He hadn't noticed how often people assumed he meant something different than what he was actually saying until he'd met someone who just took all of it at face value.

And, well, when he did say something she thought was silly or stupid, she'd explain why she thought it was silly or stupid, and more often than not she had a point. It honestly didn't bother him that much. After a couple years being friends with Hermione, he was used to a smarter girl telling him he was being an idiot. Lyra was just less patronizing and more blunt about it.

That was reason enough for him to want to hang out with her, but he had another he'd deny if anyone asked. He wasn't so ignorant of what was going on in his own head. It wasn't the most important thing, but he did notice Lyra was a girl. A pretty girl, who actually went out of her way to talk to him.

So, he hadn't even really thought about it, he'd just agreed to come along.

And now he was standing in the middle of the Forbidden Forest trying not to stare as Lyra chatted with a girl wearing a cloak and nothing else — even the cloak was Lyra's, she'd been completely naked at first — as though it was the most normal thing in the world. Or, well, talking at her, at least, saying hi. The wild...person? Wild...ling? (A wilderfolk, just one, didn't sound right.) The wolf girl, anyway, wasn't saying much. She was just kind of staring at him, all tense, like she was going to run away or attack him or something.

"Why is he here?" she asked abruptly. "Why is he, all..."

Lyra looked over, he could feel his face burning even more. Trying to pretend someone else didn't exist was way harder than sitting in his room, making no noise, and pretending not to exist himself.

"Acting all weird and embarrassed? Probably because you're not wearing clothes, people can be weird about that. And he's here because you were asking me about humans last time, I thought it would be easier to bring one than try to explain them myself." And then she stepped away from the wolf girl and smacked him in the back of the head. "Stop acting like a moron."

"Hey!"

"Honestly, haven't you ever seen a naked woman before?"

"No!"

Lyra tilted her head to the side, giving him a completely uncomprehending look. "I thought you were on the quidditch team. In case you haven't noticed, all of your chasers are female."

Was it possible to burst into flames simply from embarrassment? If accidental magic could make the earth swallow him up right now, that would be great. "I– Well, yes, but—" From the beginning it'd struck him as very strange, the open showers in the quidditch changing rooms, he always just went up to the tower where he could do it in private. "I know we can shower together, but that doesn't mean—"

Lyra sighed and turned back to the girl. "I'm not sure, but you know how humans don't go into heat?" The wolf girl nodded. "Human males want to mate with human females all the time, but there are social conventions and stuff that make it inappropriate for them to act like it sometimes. Most of the time, really. Including when they're first being introduced to someone."

"B– wha– That's not—" Honestly, it wasn't. He– Well, the wolf girl was a girl and very naked, he couldn't deny that, but he wasn't... That wasn't what he was thinking about, not even close. Honestly, she hardly even looked, well, like a girl. She was almost an adult, for one thing, and well, he could believe she'd lived her entire life out here in the forest. She was almost painfully skinny. There was a leaf in her shaggy, uncombed hair, and her feet were covered with mud from the recent rains. And more importantly, she looked like he was making her just as uncomfortable as she was making him. (She was being very careful to keep Lyra between the two of them, and it almost looked like she was baring her teeth at him.) Harry didn't like making girls uncomfortable. Which was just annoying, because he seemed to do that sort of a lot. It was just...

Well, it was just really bloody uncomfortable, wasn't it?

"I probably should have brought Blaise, but Harry's the most normal human I know."

"What? Wait. Is that supposed to be a compliment or an insult?" Honestly, he couldn't tell, that flat way she had of saying everything. If Petunia had said it, "normal" would have been a compliment, but Harry had never met anyone less like Petunia than Lyra.

She blinked at him, her face as expressionless as the wolf girl's "It's just a fact."

"Well...okay. But, um..."

"What, was I wrong? About the clothes?"

"What? I– I don't know! I just— It's not polite, staring."

"And why is your reflex to stare?"

"Well– It's just weird, uh odd. Unusual. You just don't see naked girls around."

Lyra just kept looking at him, if anything confused that this was making him uncomfortable.

Which, well, he was used to Lyra being bloody weird, so that wasn't even surprising, when it came down to it. Besides, she did see naked women all the time, or at least herself. Probably Hermione, too. (Not that he really thought she'd think it was any weirder if the wolf girl had been a naked bloke, but that wasn't the point.) "It's– It's like if you were to go and, I don't know, start flying around Muggle London. Anyone would bloody stare."

"And it's not polite because...?"

"It's just...not? Most people don't like to be stared at. It's awkward."

By the way a single eyebrow ticked up her forehead, she didn't understand that either. "Not as awkward as obviously not staring," Lyra said, motioning toward Harry's entire...person.

And, well, she had a point. With an act of sheer will, he schooled his face into a neutral expression, stood up straight, and met the wolf girl's eyes. Pointedly ignoring everything below her chin, but still. She peered back at him, head cocked slightly to the side, her narrow, dirt-streaked face peculiarly expressionless. Just looking at her, he wouldn't guess she wasn't human — he might just pity her a bit, the tangled nest of mixed blonde hair was thicker and messier than his ever got — if it weren't for the bright gold of her eyes. "Let's start over. I'm Harry. What's your name?"

"Name?" the girl repeated. "What is a name?"

Harry was staring again, and now it had nothing to do with the wolf-girl's lack of clothing. "You... You don't know what a name is."

"No."

"You have got to be kidding me!" Harry muttered, turning back to Lyra. "Seriously? How long did you spend talking to each other, and you didn't introduce yourself?"

Lyra just shrugged. "It didn't come up."

Harry pointedly ignored that, turning back to the wolf girl. "Then what– How do you talk about each other? You and the rest of the wilderfolk, I mean, how do you talk about people if nobody has any names?"

"We do not talk. Not in any way that would make sense to you, I mean. Talking is a human thing that humans do with other humans. And centaurs, they do it too. We only talk when we have to with humans or the centaurs. We do not talk with each other." This was the most the girl had said at once so far, making the peculiar way she spoke far more obvious. It was cautious and stilted, as though she were taking special care to say everything correctly, like...well, like it were completely foreign to her, and she didn't do it very often.

The idea was so completely strange Harry had absolutely no idea how to respond.

Luckily, Lyra had fallen into that explaining-things mode she and Hermione both seemed to live in half the time. "A name is a special kind of word used to refer to a specific person. All humans and most other magical beings have one, though exactly how they work varies from culture to culture. Some cultures, they'll have names that describe them somehow, which might change over their lives, but here people are given a name which isn't usually meant to mean anything, just a series of sounds people will use to refer to them for the rest of their life."

The wolf girl slowly nodded, eyes a little unfocused, digesting the idea. "Is that why he said he is hairy earlier? Humans are not really, so I was thinking."

Lyra let out a short cackle, Harry trying to ignore the added warmth to his cheeks. "Ha, no, that's not what he was saying. His name is Harry, but it doesn't mean hairy, they're separate words."

"That is confusing."

"Human language is stupid sometimes."

With an odd noise Harry couldn't quite figure out, somewhere between a moan and a giggle, the girl said, "Is funny, humans be stupid to show they are not stupid. They come up with special things, all kinds of things, and say, they do things because they are smart. But it is a lot of work to do human things, I think. There are so many things, humans have to be taught how to do human things for years and years and years. And you know, I watch them, and so many humans are scared and sad all the time. All your human things, they do not make you happy, I think. It is stupid."

The faintest sense of a frown crossed Lyra's face — from the question she asked, she was completely passing by the part of that ramble Harry thought was strange, but okay. "If you think the way humans do things is stupid, then why do you want to learn about it all?"

"It is like me." The wolf girl grinned, a peculiar, frozen, close-lipped version of the expression, the gold in her eyes almost sparkling. "I don't want to learn human things because they are better, but because they are different. Most of us, we don't care, we just try to stay away, but I was always different. I am always most curious, I am always most brave. I hunt with the centaurs and I start fights with the spiders and I sneak into human places, and I listen and I watch. I am always finding new things, it is what I do.

"And now I am thinking that if I talk to humans enough they will not be afraid of us so much. And they will learn wolf things instead of human things and maybe they will not be so sad."

"I'm perfectly happy."

"You are not human, you said so yourself."

"Good point."

Harry had been trying to work through what the girl was saying, but that little exchange completely distracted him from everything she'd said before. "You're not human? I thought— I mean, but..."

A crooked grin spreading across her face, Lyra's voice was shaky with laughter. Which was weird, Harry didn't think this was nearly that funny. "Why, Harry, that's a rather personal question to ask someone, isn't it?"

It took Harry a couple seconds to figure out what the hell he was supposed to say to that. The way Lyra and the girl kept smiling at him was not helping. "I mean, I don't care if you're not." He'd always known Flitwick wasn't entirely human, and now he knew Hagrid wasn't either, and it didn't matter to him, really, not even a little bit. It was just a thing, he didn't see why it should make a difference one way or another. "I just mean... Some of this stuff is still new to me, you know, I'm not entirely used to the idea of there being people who aren't human. I'm just curious, I guess, I don't really care, but I don't want to—"

"It's fine, Harry, you can stop panicking. The wilderfolk concept of race is one defined by behavior more than biology — I don't act like a normal human, therefore I'm not one."

The wilderfolk girl nodded at that, the gesture a bit robotic, something more imitated than natural. "Is obvious. I think, I look human now, but no one would think I am one because I cannot do human things, see? Doing is more important than being. My people, we do not accept only people who are exactly like us. Sometimes we will take in plain wolves, or dogs, or, or..." The girl trailed off, glancing up at the sky and frowning for a second. "What was the word you used again?"

"Animagi," Lyra answered, instantly.

"Yes, that was it. The humans who can change, animagi," the girl repeated, slowly and carefully, "some of them are still humans even when they are not. But some of them know enough wolf things to live with us, and they are welcome."

"Does that..." Harry cleared his throat, hoping to shake the discomfort out of his voice. He couldn't help it, this whole conversation was just bloody weird, he had no idea what he was doing. "Does that happen a lot? Animagi coming out to live with you I mean?"

"Not a lot, but sometimes. Right now we have...two? Maybe three, there was one with one of the other clans who was very old, I do not know if she still lives."

It only took a few seconds of a questioning look from him before Lyra obliged with another explaining-things moment. "Sometimes, an animagus will fuck up and not be able to change back the first time, or simply decide they'd prefer to abandon their humanity entirely. It's very rare, but it does happen. Given how many mages there are in Britain, and how common canine animagi are, I'm not surprised the pack here has two or three. Hell, it's where wilderfolk came from in the first place."

"Wait, you– You mean wilderfolk are from animagi and, and—" Harry cut off, turning an uncomfortable glance toward the wilderfolk girl. She didn't look particularly bothered by this topic of conversation. If anything, she looked confused again, staring at him with her head tilted a few degrees, as though trying to figure him out.

"Yes, Harry, that's exactly what I'm saying. Sometimes, an animagus will fuck the animal he shares his form with. The products of these unions and their descendants are wilderfolk. There's a reason most mages often try to pretend there's no such thing as wilderfolk, just the fact that they exist makes people uncomfortable. I mean, with how obsessed so many British mages are with muggleborns, can you imagine how much they hate the thought of some of their number breeding with literal animals?"

Harry avoided both their eyes, trying to ignore the squirming in his stomach and the heat on his face. Honestly, the thought was making him more than a little uncomfortable, and he thought that pureblood shite was the stupidest thing he'd ever heard.

After a few more minutes of teasing Harry, there was an odd shift in the wolf girl's posture, a sense of tension slipping away. Of course, that didn't make things any less awkward — once she'd decided Harry wasn't a threat (if he understood correctly), she walked right up to Lyra and licked her face. Just, went up to her, and— It was really fucking weird! Lyra didn't even seem to care that much, just laughed and shoved her off.

Seriously, sometimes he wondered if Ron wasn't perfectly on about that whole Lyra-Black-is-completely-insane thing.

They ended up sitting on the ground, having a meandering conversation which mostly consisted of the girl asking question after question after strange, disconcerting question. Lyra hadn't been joking when she'd said wilderfolk didn't really get human things, and the wolf girl hadn't been joking when she'd said she wanted to get human things. Over and over and over, why this, why that, why bloody everything.

Why did they always wear clothes even when there wasn't a good reason for it (what the hell qualified as a good reason...), why did they build things, and then spend all their time inside of them, how did they get by with so many packs (he translated "pack" to family in his head every time) living in so tight a space, didn't they fight, why did they send their kids here, didn't they miss each other, what exactly did they teach them here, couldn't they do that at home, what was all that stuff for anyway, why did humans use wands, it wasn't like they really needed them to do magic (which, obviously, Harry had completely forgotten he'd done plenty of magic before he'd even heard of wands), what if something happened to it, clearly in a fight with a wizard she'd go straight for his wand and bite it in half, how many students were there in the school anyway, how did they stay cooped up in that big stone cage so long without everything just getting messy, why did people put up with bullying, you all have wands just hex the arse, did people really believe something as stupid as pureblood supremacy (there was one thing they agreed on, at least), why did people get married anyway, why did it matter if someone's parents were married or not, why did anyone care who other people were having sex with, why was jealousy a thing, why was money a thing, why did people want fancy but pointless things, why did people care if other people knew they could afford fancy but pointless things, why did people do jobs they hate, why, why, why, why...

Of course, that didn't include the questions involving why Harry was uncomfortable with things. See, possibly for warmth, or possibly just because, the girl was practically curled up in Lyra's lap, which was just sort of...weird. Not to mention she kept smelling Lyra's hair. And there was that whole licking her face thing. Harry kept trying to explain that smelling people or licking their faces was just kind of weird, but something about that clearly didn't click, she just kept staring back at Harry like he was the crazy one.

It probably didn't help that it didn't seem to bother Lyra at all. When the girl had started crawling all over her, Lyra had given her something of an exasperated look, but hadn't actually tried to shove her off. The hair-smelling she even seemed to think was funny. Which was...

Well, Lyra had said just a few minutes ago she acted so un-human the wilderfolk didn't even think she counted as one. And...Harry was realizing just this second she'd never actually said she was. So, uh... Now that he thought about it, it wasn't that surprising Lyra didn't seem to have a problem with it.

All things considered, even given the bruises and scrapes he ended up with by the end, the chaotic three-way play-fight they ended up in was far less uncomfortable.

(Except for the times Lyra tackled him anyway, that was...awkward.)

Eventually, about the time Harry was worn out enough it almost hurt to move, the wolf girl changed back into human form again. Which was unfortunate, because she'd lost the cloak a while ago now. And it was also awkward, because at the time she'd had Lyra pinned down on her back, licking at her face in victory. She didn't stop licking her face right away, getting a couple more in before sitting back a bit. (Harry consciously turned away, his face going all too warm again.) "So. I need to go back now."

"Right, we should be getting back too. Think you could do me a favor?"

"Maybe."

"I'm trying to find someone. He's pack, but he's been lost and alone for a long time, and I'm afraid he might be hurt or sick. I'm told he should be somewhere around here, but I don't know where. If you happen to run into him, maybe you can bring him to me next time we meet."

The wolf girl let out an odd sound, something halfway between a hum and a whine. "Yes, yes I can do that. But, how will I know him?"

"He'd look like— Let me up, I can cast an illusion." There were some shuffling sounds from their direction, Harry glanced over his shoulder. (He carefully focused anywhere but at the very naked wolf girl, putting her well into his peripheral vision.) Lyra cast a quick charm with silent ease. An image of Sirius Black snapped into existence, or at least someone very much like him, looking so sharp and so solid it could be real. (He looked rather less insane than in the photos in the Prophet, almost normal.) "Something like this. This won't be perfect, it's been a while since I've seen him, but it should be close. Keep an eye out for him for me?"

"Yes, I can help. When do we meet next?"

While the two of them talked about that, a thought suddenly occurred to Harry. He blurted it out the second he thought of it, actually, he was probably talking over one of them, but he couldn't really help it. "Hey, there's a quidditch game in about a week, if you want to come."

Even without looking directly at them, he somehow knew both Lyra and the wolf girl were blankly staring at him.

Feeling the heat spread across his face again, he said, "I mean, you were just saying, human things, and quidditch is a human thing, I just thought..."

"Breathe, Harry. And sure, I don't see why...Sylvia here couldn't hang out and watch the match."

"Sylvia?" the wolf girl repeated.

"Well, now that Harry and I have both met you, it really would be convenient for you to have a name. If only so we can talk about you when you're not around. 'Sylvia' was the first thing to come to mind. Like it?"

"Oh, yes, that is good, okay." It was hard to tell, but Harry thought there might be a cheerful note on her odd, stilted voice, slightly higher, slightly sharper. "Sylvia," she muttered under her breath, slow and careful. "I will try to remember that."

Harry snorted.

It took a couple more minutes to explain to the newly-named Sylvia where to meet Lyra and, more importantly, when — turned out, wilderfolk didn't exactly keep to such silly human concepts as dates. With a last lick of Lyra's face, Sylvia changed back into a wolf, sniffed at Lyra's hands and clothes for a bit, then bounded over to Harry, circled him a few times, wet nose prodding and snuffling at him. (Nearly knocked him over, she was big as a wolf, a hard mass of muscle and white-silver fur, waist-high on him.) And then she was crashing away through the underbrush, a long string of bright, cheerful barks gradually fading away into the distance.

Her voice flat, casual, Lyra said, "So, that was Sylvia."

Despite how awkward the whole thing had been, Harry couldn't quite keep a smile off his face.

---

The trek back to the Castle was rather more miserable than the walk out had been. For one thing, playing with Sylvia had worn him out quite a bit, and it was late October, it wasn't exactly warm out. Of course, he was also absolutely covered in mud. It had been raining, and they'd just been rolling around across the ground, he was filthy. Lyra was too, of course, her hair matted and heavy with it, streaks across her clothes, even her face. Which was a bit odd to look at. She was usually so, well, pretty, it was strange to see her all mussed up and dirty and sopping.

Okay, he needed something to distract himself from how bloody cold he was. "You're looking for Sirius?"

Lyra glanced over her shoulder, just for a second before turning back around again. "Of course. It's the whole reason I came to Hogwarts, actually."

"Uh, I thought..." Well, the story was Lyra had been being homeschooled, but whoever was raising her had died...but then, the story was also that Lyra was muggle-raised, and that was so obviously a lie that Harry didn't think anyone still believed it.

"Honestly, Harry, you've seen me do magic. Does it look like I need to be here?"

...Well, when she put it like that...

"Hopefully I can find him before the idiot gets himself killed. Hide him away somewhere while I work on getting his name cleared. I do have a few ideas on how exactly I can go about that, but it'll probably get tied up for a little while, it might take a year to get the Wizengamot off their stupid arses."

"And you're sure he's innocent."

"Yes, Harry, I'm sure he's innocent."

He didn't doubt her, not really. He'd looked into it, a little, after asking Hermione how exactly the archive of back issues of the Daily Prophet in the library worked. Sirius Black did turn up here and there, before that Hallowe'en, and a lot of it very strongly suggested he'd been on their side. He'd more or less been kicked out of the Blacks, the scandal had been enough to get into the stupid society pages, he'd been a good enough of a fighter for the Light in the war that he'd been mentioned in the paper plenty of times.

(Not as many as his mother, Harry had found, but those articles were infuriating, he'd stopped reading them pretty quickly. Racist pureblood shites.)

But anyway, he'd also confirmed Sirius hadn't gotten a trial. Take it all together, it certainly did seem very possible, even likely, that he'd been innocent the whole time. It was a bit hard to believe, that everyone had been so very wrong about him for so long, but, well, people could be stupid sometimes. Most of the time, really. Harry wasn't as confident as Lyra, he wouldn't come out and say, yes, everyone else was a fucking idiot, and Sirius Black was totally innocent, but he was willing to just go along with it.

Before long they were walking out onto the grounds — which just made Harry colder, at least the trees blocked most of the bloody wind. So, eager to get back up to castle, he noticed right away that Lyra was walking in the wrong direction. He'd never come at it from this direction before, but she was headed more or less straight toward the quidditch pitch. "Uh, Lyra? Where are we going?"

"Sylvia got us both completely bloody filthy. Because of course she did. I don't know about you, but I'm miserable, want to get cleaned up as soon as possible."

It took Harry a second to figure out what she meant, heat flaring in his face and his stomach set to squirming with record speed. "Ah, no, we don't— We should just head up to Gryffindor, it—"

"That sounds like far too much of a walk when I'm cold, wet, and covered in mud."

"But, um... I just, I mean—"

"You don't have to come with me, but I'm stealing a shower in the changing rooms."

Harry forced out a harsh sigh, shaking his head to himself. Normally, fine, he'd just walk off and leave her, and that would be that. But... Okay, this might be kind of silly, but he knew the pitch wasn't empty at the moment. He'd seen the schedule, and they were still a ways away, but from here he could see tiny figures buzzing around in the air, tiny figures on broomsticks. Tiny figures wearing green.

It was kind of silly, very silly, he knew Lyra could more than take care of herself. But...he just wasn't comfortable leaving her alone, when he knew the Slytherin team was in there. Especially when he knew she'd be taking a shower, and therefore...in a rather more vulnerable position than normal.

No matter how intensely awkward the thought made him, so awkward he felt his skin might nearly crawl itself right off his bones, he simply wasn't comfortable with lettering her go in there by herself.

Some day, he was really going to get himself in trouble.

Of course, Hermione would argue he already had, far too often, but he couldn't really help that, could he?

After two years and a couple months on the team, the Gryffindor changing rooms were quite familiar to him now. The whole thing cast in the red and gold of their house, it was made up of three sizeable rooms (not including a toilet here or there). The largest was a sort of sitting room thing, with one of those magical fireplaces that seemed to operate without a flue at all, a few armchairs and couches sitting around. Oliver's shite was still set up, easels and poster boards dense with sketches of one play or another, the disorganized jumble taking up a whole half of the room. This room was fine, he'd never had a problem with this one.

Going in further from there, that's when things started getting seriously uncomfortable very quickly. Harry had been completely blind-sided, on his first day with the team, to learn that there was only one changing room. British mages, it turned out, were far less...modest than their muggle cousins. Now, Harry had already been planning to avoid changing with the rest of the team whenever possible — there'd been...issues, with the other boys, during PT back in primary, he'd gotten into the habit of going off by himself. But... Honestly Katie and Angie and Alicia were intimidating enough already, without them being in there too, and...

These days, he changed into his quidditch robes back in his dorm room. Things were just easier that way.

The changing room itself was somewhat odd, or so he'd thought at first. Maybe primary school changing rooms were just terrible, he didn't know, but the wood floors and the lockers (really more closets than anything, much bigger and with proper nice polished wood and everything) were just far nicer than he'd been expecting.

He'd peeked into the showers before, but he'd never actually used them. An open space without even any dividers of any kind, the whole thing was just so... Yeah, that had been all he needed to know.

Harry parked himself on a bench in the changing room, back turned to the door into the showers (just an open portal, no actual door, because of course there wasn't). He'd wait right here, and it would be awkward, yes, but it would be fine, he'd just keep an eye on the door out, and wait for her to finish, and try not to think about...well, anything. Yes, it would be fine, no big deal, no matter how twitchy and uncomfortable he was already feeling, it was fine, she—

She peeled off her sticky, clinging robe, dropped it down onto the floor. Right there, in the middle of the room, as though she weren't doing anything out of the ordinary. She was working off her shirt when Harry abruptly caught himself, turning his head sharply away, his neck, the backs of his shoulders itching, painfully hot.

In the awkward silence (awkward on his end, anyway), the room rang with an amused scoff. "Honestly, Harry, you're so ridiculous."

That was rich. Harry was pretty sure, no matter where she went, Lyra was always the most ridiculous person in the room.

Except, well, ridiculous kind of implied that she couldn't pull it off, whatever she was doing. Somehow no one ever seemed to act like she was ridiculous even when anyone else doing the same exact thing definitely would be.

"Seriously, you're almost as bad as Hermione," she said, over the sound of the water starting.

Harry did not want to think about Hermione, Lyra, and nudity at the same time. "Can we just change the subject?"

She laughed at him. Because of course she did. "All right, all right. Are you going to the Revel tomorrow?"

"The what?"

"The Revel," she said again, her words clearer — she must have come closer to the door or something — but that didn't help.

"I can hear you fine, just, what's the Revel? Also, no, I wasn't planning on it."

"Obviously." He could hear her smirking. "It's for Samhain. The Slytherins — well, all the Traditional students, really, but that's mostly just Slytherins — do this ritual out in the Senior Woods. The Dance of the Dead. Basically we pierce the Veil and allow the spirits of the Dead to return to this plane for the night, and they go around possessing people and you get to remember some of their lives. Also, there's a bonfire. Sounds like fun, right?"

Yes, Lyra Black was definitely completely insane. "Er... No. You're really planning to go and volunteer yourself to be possessed?"

"Eh, I'll probably just witness the rite and maybe talk to a few spirits for a while, but yeah, most people get possessed."

And of course it wasn't suspicious at all that she didn't think she was going to be possessed, even though most people would be. Maybe she really wasn't human.

"It's pretty minor, just sharing memories, basically. Which, seriously, you don't think that sounds neat? I think it does."

"Well, you like riding hippogriffs and reading textbooks, so..."

"Hey! Hippogriffs are awesome, and only interesting textbooks. Think about it: we have magic. My tutor used to say that knowledge is power, literally when it comes to magic."

Which was a good point, and one Hermione had made before, but that didn't change the fact that Harry would rather actually do things than just read about how to theoretically do things and why that would work or not. And if he didn't change the subject, Lyra was almost guaranteed to start recommending magical theory books that he didn't have a chance in hell of understanding, which always made him feel like a bit of an idiot. He should be used to that after two years being friends with Hermione, but he still didn't like it.

And he definitely didn't think letting bloody ghosts or something possess him sounded like fun.

"What is...Sowin, did you say?"

"Yeah, Samhain. Spelled 'sam-hain'. It's the holiday honoring Death and Destruction, and also traditionally considered the end of the year, in a magical, ritual sense."

"Er, don't take this the wrong way, but a holiday all about death and destruction sounds kind of...creepy and, well, dark."

Lyra laughed, apparently not offended. Though Harry didn't actually think he'd ever seen her offended, unless he counted when she'd found out he knew nothing about the Noble House of Potter, and even that was more outraged than offended. (She'd written to a solicitor called Mrs. Tonks on his behalf, and Mrs. Tonks had offered to challenge Dumbledore's guardianship of him on the grounds that Dumbledore hadn't told him anything about anything, ever — Harry hadn't even known the Headmaster was his guardian in Magical Britain — but Harry wasn't sure he wanted to. Sounded like the sort of thing that was bound to get him more attention than he wanted from just about everyone, and he didn't exactly have a lot of options as a replacement.)

"It is dark, but that doesn't mean it's bad. And even the Light honor the dead, even if they don't actually celebrate the Deathly and Destructive Powers. Or any of them, anymore, really. Most of them are Progressives, you know?"

"Uh...huh." That was straying into a realm of politics Harry was even less comfortable discussing than the weird magical religion. Mostly because he didn't think he was expected to have an opinion about other people's religions, but he definitely was expected to have an opinion about politics. Which was, well, he didn't really know what to think.

He knew Dumbledore and the Weasleys were "progressives" and "Light" but he didn't really know what that meant. And he was pretty sure Hermione didn't either, because if she did, she could explain it a lot better than she had when he'd asked about it after finding out that Lyra was definitely "Dark" and also called herself "anti-statutarian", which she described as thinking the Statute of Secrecy was more of a problem than a solution and Hermione described as one of Grindelwald's basic principles.

Which sounded kind of terrible, honestly. Wasn't Grindelwald just as bad as Voldemort? History of Magic was a bloody useless class, but he'd definitely managed to pick up that Grindelwald had killed like half of the witches and wizards in Europe (or something) before Dumbledore stopped him. And Ron said that the Slytherins were all Dark. The Malfoys were basically the head of the opposition party in the Wizengamot. (Potter was apparently traditionally a Light house, which seriously? Even Ron had known the Potters were nobility, and no one had ever mentioned it?!)

Obviously it was better to be Light and Progressive than Dark and...whatever the opposite of Progressive was. Backward? But...see, the problem was Lyra. It was beyond obvious that she didn't think much of the Light or the Progressives, including Dumbledore, but she didn't seem evil or bad. And her views on muggles were more modern than the Weasleys — Harry hadn't missed the way Mrs. Weasley always talked about muggles like poor slow children who needed to be protected by wizards, rather than, well, people, and Mr. Weasley thought it was just amazing that they'd ever managed to survive without magic, let alone thrive. And he found himself pretty much agreeing with the idea that the Statute of Secrecy was a problem, especially since it and Dobby had almost gotten him drummed out of Hogwarts the summer before last. Sure, the Dursleys were scared of magic, but Harry was pretty sure most muggles were more open-minded than the bloody Dursleys.

"You have no idea what I'm talking about, do you?"

"Uh, no," he admitted.

A snort of unamused laughter floated out of the shower room. "'Progressive' encompasses a whole set of beliefs, but the relevant one here is that there's no such thing as the Powers, which is just...wrong. Objectively, factually wrong. But they took the idea of science and muggle rationalization of the natural world and ran with it, apparently not realizing the fact that magic is a part of the natural world. Traditionalists believe in the Powers, which are... You know what, I'll get you a book, that'll probably be clearer than if I try to explain."

"Isn't it just some magic religion thing?" Harry asked, as the sound of the water cut out.

"Well...no, not really. Not the way you'd think of religion. Pre-Abrahamic religion, sure. But it's not so much about belief and faith and all the philosophy that goes along with modern muggle religion as...recognizing certain realities about magic. Really, this will be much easier if you read a couple things first, then ask questions," she said, casually walking past him, absolutely starkers, her wet hair plastered down her back, and not a towel in sight.

"Gah!" There was nowhere he couldn't see her out of the corner of his eye. He stood up and turned to face the nearest wall, his face burning.

"Gods and Powers, Harry, stop being so dramatic."

"I'm not being dramatic," Harry ground out. This was a perfectly natural response to being confronted with a naked girl.

"Yes, you are. It's just a body. You have one yourself, in case you hadn't noticed."

"Well yeah, but yours is..."

"Basically the same as yours, but without the penis. Do you hide from your roommates like this?"

"Well, uh..." He did change his robes in front of the guys, that was true, but he always changed his shorts when he took a shower, so...

"Well, uh..." she repeated mockingly, suddenly sounding much closer. "Stop being stupid."

And she seized his upper arm and spun him around.

Harry was caught off guard, and Lyra was stronger than she looked. He turned and stumbled, ending up with his back against the wall, Lyra Black — all of Lyra Black — standing about six inches away from him, her wand in his face and a very annoyed expression on hers.

Not any more annoyed than he was, though. "What the hell!"

"Look at me, damn it!" she said, taking a couple steps away so he could. "Don't make me jinx you."

"Why are you doing this?" He hated how whiny that sounded, even as he said it, his eyes fixed firmly on her knees.

"Because you're being bloody stupid."

That startled a snort of laughter from him, because it was stupid. But she was being just as stupid as he was! He let his eyes flick up to her face. Well, to the wall well to the left of her, and then to her face, avoiding looking directly at anything between her knees and her neck. She looked very serious — he didn't doubt she actually would jinx him and force him to look. But it was such a ridiculous thing — seriously, "What does it matter if I don't want to see you — or anyone — naked? It's none of your business!"

"It matters because there's no reason for you to not want to! There's no reason for you to want to and there's no reason for you not to want to! It shouldn't matter at all, but it does. That's why it matters!"

"That is the stupidest thing I've ever heard!"

"No, it's not! You're acting like something matters when it doesn't matter — why? Because you think it should, but it doesn't and it shouldn't, you're just wrong, and you're insisting on being wrong even though you know it doesn't make sense. And it's my business because you're insisting on it to me!"

"It's not just me! It's– it's just not right. It doesn't have to make sense! People don't have to make sense all the time!"

"People are fucking stupid."

"You can't just force people to not be stupid about everything you think is stupid," Harry said, as scathingly as he could.

"Not everyone, no, but I can definitely stop you being stupid about this. Look. At. Me."

He did, really paying attention to the look on her face for the first time since they'd started shouting at each other. There was something almost desperate behind her fury. He didn't even know why they were fighting about this, it wasn't like it was that important, really, he didn't care that much about being polite and respectful, especially to someone who obviously didn't care, he just... He hated being forced into things. And had, he suddenly realized, gotten trapped into this argument somehow, and everything had gotten ridiculously out of hand, and he had no idea how. So. Fucking. Stupid.

"Fine. You know what— Just. Fine."

He let his eyes travel down from her face and hair — now nearly dry — to her neck and shoulders and...chest. Which, well, she hadn't been exaggerating, when she said she pretty much looked like him. She had little almost-boobs, but not really boob boobs. Only a couple of girls in their year did. Neville's pudgy chest was more boob-like. Goddamnit, stop thinking about Neville with boobs, seriously, what the fuck, brain! Lyra's waist was a bit thinner than Harry's, and her hips wider, but not by much. His trousers would probably fit her, though she was a little taller. And she didn't have a cock, obviously. She didn't have as much hair down there as the wolf— Sylvia (he hadn't been able to prevent himself getting a few glimpses of her), but he still couldn't really see anything between her legs from this angle, for which he was extremely relieved. Her legs themselves matched her arms, long and thin and graceful, and...covered in scars?

He did a double-take, his eyes skimming back up. All the annoyance he'd felt at being forced into looking at her in the first place (he could not emphasize enough how much he hated being forced to do things) vanished in an instant. There were at least a dozen relatively normal-looking slices and burn marks, mostly on her arms, including the cut she'd gotten from Buckbeak, but also a vicious-looking slash across her stomach, old enough that it was just a flat stripe with a visibly different texture than the surrounding skin. There was a long, welt-like mark curving around her left hip, and her right leg, from the knee down, looked like it had been cross-hatched by something — a curse? It had to have been a curse of some kind, Harry didn't know anything else that could do something like that.

"Now, was that so terrible?" she asked, smirking at him, all her anger and frustration gone now that she'd gotten her way (which was more than a little unsettling), apparently not noticing that he wasn't even thinking about the fact that she was naked anymore.

"What happened to you?" he couldn't stop himself from asking.

"Uh, what?" He waved indistinctly toward her scars, though, really, that was pretty much all of her. She looked down, then back up at him, apparently seeing nothing out of place. "You're going to have to be more specific."

"Your — your leg. And that... Is that from a whip?"

Comprehension dawned. "Oh, yeah. Fire-whip. Dueling practice. The leg was a flaying curse set into a trap-ward." She frowned slightly. "Completely missed it when I was disarming the thing, walked right into it." And then she shrugged, turning to the very important task of removing mud from the clothes she'd left lying in the middle of the floor. Her hair, dry now, swung aside to reveal even more marks covering her back. Marks that couldn't possibly be the result of dueling practice, unless she'd been practicing sitting still and taking whatever curses her dueling partner wanted to throw at her. Harry bit his tongue on the comment he wanted to make — mostly because he didn't know exactly what that comment was, just. Something.

Instead he asked, "Why didn't you heal them?"

She shrugged, answering between cleaning charms. "Oh, you know, some were laced with curses to resist magical healing, some just weren't bad enough to bother. And, well. My tutor told me when I started learning to fight that scars were reminders of mistakes we weren't going to make again. Plus I think the flaying curse one looks kind of neat."

Harry had so many questions about Lyra's life before she'd come to Hogwarts. She mentioned little bits and pieces like that sometimes, enough to make him believe what he'd heard about her being raised by a "travelling cursebreaker". (Ron said that really meant a sort of magical mercenary, thief, con-man type of character.) But she never actually said where she lived or who the travelling cursebreaker actually was, or what had happened to him, even when he outright asked.

Though that possibly not human thing that had come up earlier was seriously looking more and more likely. (Who thought getting flayed was neat?) And she had never actually said that she was.

He had to ask, just to be clear. "Are you actually human, really?"

She hesitated for a long moment, but eventually gave him a tiny smirk, a hint of mischief in her eyes. "I'm a Black. Make of that what you will."

Right. Clear as mud.

---

"Well, this is just balls," a first-year Gryffindor muttered, kicking one of the squashy purple sleeping bags Dumbledore had just conjured all over the Great Hall.

Ginny thought that pretty well summed up the situation.

Sirius Black was somewhere in the castle, they were all stuck in the Great Hall for the rest of the night, and Percy was in charge.

The worst part was Percy being in charge, she decided as she heard him call over the crowd, "Lights out in ten minutes!"

Most of the Gryffindors, all still clumped together on the side of the hall where their table normally sat, erupted in protest. It wasn't even nine-thirty yet, and curfew wasn't until ten. But Percy always let power go to his head, Ginny was sure he would insist on being a complete plonker over this, though it looked like Chauncy and Oliver were heading up to the front of the room to attempt to reason with him.

"Come on, let's find a place to sleep." Ginny looked around, slightly surprised, but then realized Ron was talking to Harry, not her. They had grabbed a pair of sleeping bags and were looking around as though any spot in the Hall would be any better than any other.

Well, Ginny had to admit, any spot that wasn't near her dorm mates would be better than any spot near them, but Ron and Harry didn't have the same...issues with their year-mates that she did with hers. (She was pretty sure everyone knew that she had been involved with the Chamber of Secrets last year, and the other girls hadn't liked her before that.)

Except, well, that.

Hermione was coming toward them, stalking between sleeping bags and looking very annoyed to have to come anywhere near Ron. Ginny was more familiar with their ongoing feud about Scabbers and Crookshanks than she wanted to be, simply because Harry had been busier than usual this term, which meant that Ron had to find other people to occupy his time, and apparently he didn't have any other friends. The twins had threatened to start testing their inventions on him if he didn't leave them alone. Ginny was absolutely his last resort, but she was conveniently available. AKA, not very good at avoiding him. She was far too busy trying to avoid other people, like her roommates, Colin Creevey, and—

"Harry, have you seen Lyra?"

Lyra bloody Black.

"Not since the feast. She said it's a holiday, so she was going to hang out with the Slytherins. Some Powers thing, I guess? I still don't really understand the whole magical religion thing."

"Wouldn't worry about it, mate, only stuck up traditionalists like Malfoy celebrate the old holidays. Wonder who invited Lyra."

"Would've been Zabini, wouldn't it," Harry said. Ginny thought he was probably right. Black and Zabini spent a frankly suspicious amount of time together for a Gryffindor and a Slytherin.

Hermione huffed at them.

Ron ignored her. "Still think it's weird she's friends with him. After she scared the piss out of Malfoy, I thought she didn't like the Slytherins, but they were still sitting together in potions."

"Oh, honestly, Ronald, it's not as though all Slytherins are the same bloody person!" Hermione grabbed a sleeping bag and dragged it away without waiting for a response. Ginny considered following her, but Hermione was even worse than Luna about trying to get her to talk about What Had Happened.

"C'mon, Harry," Ron said, storming off in the opposite direction. Harry followed him with a rather resigned look, leaving Ginny to find a place for herself, alone.

Of course, neither Hermione nor Luna was nearly as bad as Black, she mused, taking her own sleeping bag and wandering off toward the Hufflepuffs and Ravenclaws. They might be annoying, with their supportiveness and misplaced sympathy and comments about how it would be better for her to talk about it, but Black just came right out and asked things like, "So who's Tom?" and "Were you kidnapped by the Heir of Slytherin last year?" And as much as Ginny wanted people to stop treating her like a fragile little kid who would fall apart if they so much as looked at her funny, it was like walking through a ghost, being reminded of What Had Happened so...directly.

Which was one of the reasons she hated Lyra bloody Black.

She would have understood if Black had just put her foot in it, and then backed off when Ginny told her to, but she kept trying to corner her and talk about it, like she just didn't get that it was horrible and Ginny just couldn't talk about it, and even if she did, she wouldn't want to tell Black about it, of all people. Trying to avoid her would have been relatively easy if Ginny had been able to just hide in her dorm room, Black had never followed her there. But if she stayed there, it was all too easy for Janine and Caitlin to find her. And while they weren't nearly as bad as they were last year (or maybe it just seemed that way after What Had Happened), they still made it very clear that she didn't really belong every chance they got. But if she went to the library or the owlery or out on the grounds, to the part of the woods that weren't Forbidden, Black was there. No matter how random it seemed, there was no way it could possibly be a coincidence, she had to be doing it intentionally.

Somehow. Ginny didn't know how. What she did know was it was bloody creepy. (Well, that and infuriating.)

Of course, there were a lot of things about Black that were creepy. Like every time she ran into her, Black just gave her that bloody smirk, like I-know-something-you-don't-know and said "Hello Ginevra" in that way that reminded her so much of Tom. Just being in the same room with her kind of reminded her of him, actually, and not just because she kept bringing up What Had Happened. Tom had been all sophisticated and smooth, all the time, and Black was crass and weird and didn't seem to give a rat's arse what anyone thought of her, but under that, they both had this confidence. Like they had everything and everyone under control. They walked into a room like they owned the bloody place, like they were going to do exactly as they pleased, and God help anyone who got in their way. But it wasn't just that. It was like...wherever they were was the place to be, the center of things. Because they were the sort of people who made things happen.

Just being in the same room as her made Ginny's skin crawl.

She obviously wasn't muggleborn, she knew far too much about, well everything, according to Hermione. And even when she was being crass and weird, she was still graceful and proper like she had to think about it to be rude, and turned out all girly — Ginny might not use fancy glamours and hairstyling charms herself, but she'd seen her dorm mates at it enough that she knew them when she saw them. In a way, that made her weirdness even weirder. Nothing seemed to fit about her.

Everything she wore — the dueling outfits that probably cost more than everything Ginny owned put together, her knee-high, high-heeled boots, even her bloody hair ornaments and earrings — was so old fashioned, it was like she'd walked out of the 1940s — the magical 1940s — but she only listened to modern muggle rock music (according to Hermione, who hated it), and the way she talked was more like Helen and Sam (the muggleborn second-year Gryffindor girls) than Janine and Caitlin (who were rich pureblood bitches like Black). Apparently she was a bloody traditionalist (who even celebrated Samhain, really?), but she didn't act like a blood purist, and she claimed to be a Black, but she also claimed she got the name from a squib, and no noble Ginny had ever met would be caught dead admitting there were squibs in their family, let alone claiming to be muggle-raised squib-spawn. (Though if Ginny was the incestuous love child of Sirius and Bellatrix Black — not that that rumor had been confirmed — she'd probably think squib parents were better, too.) She kept secrets and snuck around like a Snake half the time, and the other half kept drawing attention to herself by doing insanely Gryffindor things like riding Hippogriffs and mouthing off to Snape in her first lesson with him.

Ron thought she was entirely mad (impressive as hell, but still bloody mad).

Ginny honestly wasn't entirely sure she was human.

She was almost positive she'd seen Black sneaking out to the Forbidden Forest one night last month, and she hadn't been too out of it on the train to miss her standing there all annoyed and talking to the fucking dementor. It hadn't occurred to her until a few days later, but Ginny wouldn't be surprised if it turned out that the reason she spoke 'Greek' was because she was actually some kind of 'demonic dark creature' too. (And that definitely hadn't been Greek she was speaking. Ginny didn't actually know Greek, but she'd heard enough Greek spells to know know that it sounded completely different.) That would explain why she was just so unconsciously terrifying.

Because Ginny didn't think she was actually trying to scare people, most of the time, if only because she went so over the top with Malfoy. She just did things, and didn't seem to get why anyone would think them unreasonable or disturbing. Even Malfoy — Ginny had seen her just casually go up to the Slytherin table and sit down next to Zabini a few days after their duel, and she'd looked so confused (and amused) when the blond ponce scrambled to get away from her. And Hermione had told her about the hippogriff attack in their first Care class. She said she'd been afraid that Black was going to lose her arm, or faint from blood loss, but she didn't even scream, just healed it herself and was cracking jokes and asking about the homework ten minutes later, no big deal.

So she was apparently immune to dementors and pain, and had no idea how real people worked — which probably meant she was tormenting Ginny accidentally, but that didn't make it any less terrible — yeah, she was sticking with a firm not human. She didn't know what Black was, but she definitely wasn't normal, and it was creepy and sometimes terrifying, and it was really more surprising that so many people seemed to like her, than that Ginny couldn't stand her.

Because people did like her. Well, mostly. Some of them, like Ron and Neville, just wanted nothing to do with her because they thought she was crazy, and rumor was she'd done some things to Lavender Brown that made most of the third-year girls hate her almost as much as Ginny. But Harry, Luna, Hermione and the twins liked her (and Hermione and Fred and George disagreed on everything). She'd only been here for two months, and she already had friends in all four houses.

Ginny would be lying if she said she wasn't a little bit jealous about that.

About Harry especially. He spent almost all his free time with her, now, or her and Hermione, and even when he was hanging out with Ron (and Ginny, she tended to enjoy Ron's company more when Harry was there as well), he kept bringing up Black, and things she'd told him, or asked him and made him think about, or things they'd done — apparently she'd dragged him out to visit the hippogriffs with Hagrid, and insisted that Sirius Black was innocent and didn't have a trial, and told him that Potter was a Noble House (which Ginny could have told him, she didn't know how he could have not known that) and his mum was into High Ritual, and she didn't believe he'd had a bloody thing to do with getting rid of You Know Who (which he apparently thought was a good thing), on and on and on!

It wasn't fair! Ginny had known him for two years, she'd loved him since before they'd even met, and he barely noticed her. She'd thought things would be different this year, that was the only good thing that had come out of the Chamber of Secrets — he'd saved her. Her. Ginny Weasley. And she, stupidly, thought that now, after that, he'd actually see her. Maybe ask her how she was on occasion, how she was getting on with the whole not-being-possessed thing, but no. She was just his best mate's kid sister, and that was all she'd ever be.

And Lyra fucking Black had been here for two months, and she'd apparently never even heard of The Boy Who Lived (which was weird, since she was obviously a pureblood, but she was equally obviously a terrible liar, so Ginny was pretty sure she wasn't just pretending not to have heard of him), and she had already practically taken over his whole life! She wasn't even very nice to him, she was just as condescending to him as she was to everyone else, the lying, superior little rich bitch! Ginny had thought Harry had better taste than that. There were dozens of other girls who would be better for him! (It went unsaid that Ginny herself was at the top of that list.)

The lights went out then, before Ginny had settled on a spot. She'd been looking for Luna, and she'd kind of expected her to be easy to find. She tended to stand out. But she hadn't seen her anywhere, and she didn't really have anyone else to meet up with. "Damn it, Percy!"

She lit her wand along with about half the other students, filling the room with eerie shadows and pinpricks of light under the cloudy ceiling. It was just bright enough for her to tell that there wasn't really any space left that was large enough to spread out her sleeping bag, except at the very edges of the hall, under the tables that had been pushed aside to make room for them all.

No sooner had she laid out on her sleeping bag and nox-ed her wand, than a dark shape obscured the lights from the center of the Hall.

"This spot taken?" a boy's voice asked.

"Uh, no. No, it's not."

He dropped his own sleeping bag beside hers, sitting cross-legged upon it. "Blaise Zabini, I don't think we've met."

Ginny groaned. If Zabini was here, that almost certainly meant—

"Come on, Blaise, it'll be fun."

Lyra bloody Black.

Goddamnit!

She peeked under the table to see who Blaise was talking to, and like clockwork, that fucking smirk spread across her face. "Hello, Ginevra. Long time, no see."

She shoved Zabini aside so she could sit on his sleeping bag as well, leaning on one hand and tucking her feet under herself. She started casually casting light charms and a couple spells Ginny thought were meant to prevent eavesdropping with her free hand. Which suggested they were planning on staying, now that Black had her cornered.

Ginny glared at her, but surprisingly, she didn't follow up with some question about What Had Happened. Instead she ignored Ginny entirely and turned back to Zabini. "I don't get what you're so worried about, it's not like he'd really expel you, Zee's on the Board."

"This is Snape we're talking about. If he says he'll expel anyone out of bounds tonight, he'll find a way."

"Any Slytherin."

"I am a Slytherin."

"I'm not."

"You really think that would matter?"

"It doesn't matter, we're not going to get caught."

"Yeah, because I'm not going." Zabini paused for a moment, then added, "He's not going to stick around, you know. If the professors don't catch him, he's gone."

"Who said anything about looking for Sirius?"

"If this was really about Samhain, you'd be bugging Theo. Truth? I thought it was a little weird when you showed up in the first place. You did skip Mabon."

Black rolled her eyes. "I'm not allowed to go to Mabon."

"You actually didn't do something because you're not allowed? You." Zabini sounded like he didn't quite believe it.

"Well, that and it's just good sense. Wisdom doesn't really like Chaos. Too impulsive. Shut up." Zabini looked as confused as Ginny was about the "shut up," but Black just shook her head as though it wasn't important. "I really only celebrate Walpurgis, but I'm allowed to participate in Samhain and Yule rituals. Destruction and Mystery are complements to Chaos, and even the other Powers bow before the Ultimate Inevitability."

"What are you even talking about?" Ginny asked, slightly annoyed. Following her around to interrogate her was one thing, at least that she could understand, but following her around to ignore her and talk about the bloody Powers? What the hell?

"It's Samhain," Black said, with an uncomprehending stare, as though she thought that explained everything and Ginny was an utter moron not to realize it.

"No," she said, just to be contrary, "it's Hallowe'en."

Black's eyes narrowed. "Are you fucking with me? Blaise, is she fucking with me?" Zabini laughed. "I know Dumbledore is a progressive bloody twat, and Harry's appallingly ignorant about...pretty much everything. At least Hermione tries to learn what's going on around her. But the Weasleys are purebloods, how can you not know this?"

Ginny glared at her, crossing her arms. "Just because we're purebloods doesn't mean we hold with outdated nonsense like the Powers."

Another uncomprehending stare from Black. Zabini smirked, though. "Careful, Red, you almost sounded like Darling Draco there for a second. The House of Malfoy doesn't care for antiquated, barbaric rituals either."

Black muttered something under her breath that sounded suspiciously like, "Going to have a talk with Cissy about that."

But Ginny's attention had been caught by something Zabini had said. "Rituals?"

"Uh, yeah? Not much point in celebrating the holidays if you're not going to commune with the Powers, is there?"

"You can't do ritual magic, it's illegal."

Zabini snorted. "Like that would stop her?"

"Besides, it's not. Well, okay, it's kind of a grey area, but since holiday rituals don't use the power summoned to create an external effect, they don't count."

Zabini looked as surprised to hear this as Ginny was.

"What? You didn't think Dumbles would let the Slytherins keep the traditions alive if he had that good an excuse to get rid of them, did you? Honestly, I'm surprised he hasn't found some other reason to stomp them out yet."

"He tried, but there's enough Traditionalists on the Board that they threatened to remove him as Headmaster if he made such a blatant attack on their beliefs."

Ginny's mouth dropped open at that. She couldn't imagine a Hogwarts without Dumbledore. "They couldn't. He's Dumbledore."

Black raised a very unimpressed eyebrow at her. "I see what you meant, Blaise, about the Light practically worshiping him. Trust me, Gin, the Powers are far more worthy of your respect than Dumbledore. Even if he is the most powerful wizard in Britain, he's still only human."

"I know that," Ginny snapped, glaring at the both of them. "We don't worship him. He's our leader, not our god. If anyone was worshiping their leaders, it was the Death Eaters!"

Neither Black nor Zabini reacted to that, other than a slight snort of laughter on Black's part. "The Zabinis weren't Death Eaters, Gin. And neither was Sirius. Bellatrix... Well, she was, and she did worship that bastard, but only because he used compulsions on her for her entire life, since she was a child."

Zabini shot a sharp look at Black, probably wondering how she knew that, just like Ginny was. But if it was true... "But that's unforgivable." Bill had told her and Ron about all the Unforgivable Acts when they were little (and the Powers, and all sorts of things Mum didn't think kids ought to know). Using compulsions on a little kid was one of the worst. "You're saying the only reason Bellatrix Lestrange is an evil bitch is because R– You Know Who made her his mind-slave? But — how would you even know that?"

For some reason, they both found this amusing, Zabini sniggering and Black giggling. "Oh, no," she said, after a moment. "Bellatrix was always an evil bitch, Monsieur de Mort just turned her from being the Blacks' evil bitch to being his evil bitch. And Arcturus, the last Paterfamilias, was a legilimens, he suspected what was going on as early as the Nineteen Sixties, wrote about it in his diaries. But by then it was already too late."

Both Ginny and Zabini were gaping at her. "But if that's true..." Ginny started to say, trying to think of the implications. Could Lestrange's crimes even be held against her, if she'd been twisted that tightly around Tom's finger? Surely they had to be — she'd killed so many people, tortured more — the Longbottoms... But, well, if people had known, she might have been Kissed or sent through the Veil rather than to Azkaban. Just put her out of her misery, and everyone else's.

Zabini must have said something, she'd completely missed it. It was Black's voice, speaking in a rather annoyed tone that caught her attention again. "Of course I've read Arcturus's diaries. I was getting nowhere focusing on the Family Magic itself, so I thought I'd start working my way back, see if any of the Lords Black said anything about it. Nothing so far, though. Seems like the last few generations didn't really pay any attention to it before Sirius broke it, which, really? Seriously not helpful." She pouted at Zabini for a brief moment before adding, "Which is why I really need to find that bloody bastard."

What? How could Family Magic be broken? And Black was trying to fix it? It certainly sounded like it. But that was insane! And absolutely absurd for someone their age to think she could pull off, not to mention she shouldn't even know about any of that — Ginny didn't know anything about the Weasleys' Family Magic. She didn't even think Bill did, and they'd been raised in their family. Black was supposed to have just been introduced to hers.

It was incredibly annoying, how bad she was at lying about who she really was, especially since no one (Ginny included) seemed to be able to figure it out, despite the hints Black had to be dropping left and right.

Zabini didn't seem to be annoyed, though. He probably knew. If she really was a demon of some sort, he'd probably summoned her, she did seem to spend even more time with him than she did with Harry. (Not more than she spent with Hermione, but they were rooming together.) Demon Summoning seemed like exactly the sort of thing a Snake like Zabini would be into.

"I'm still not going. And if you are, you should wait until the professors give the all-clear, so they don't catch you while they're looking for him. But I'm telling you, he's not going to stick around, he can't be that much of an idiot if he's managed to avoid capture this long."

"What makes you think you could find him, anyway, if Dumbledore and the professors can't?" Ginny had to ask.

"I've been looking up obscure tracking spells. Most of them are too dark for any of the professors but Snape to try, and he isn't related to Sirius by blood, so." Was she really suggesting that she was going to use dark, restricted Blood Magic to try to track down Sirius Black?

Apparently yes, because Zabini rolled his eyes. "Maybe go tell a few more people how many laws you're planning on breaking."

"Pft, it's not like either one of you have actually seen me do anything, I could just be talking out of my arse to impress you." She gave Zabini a blinding grin. "But yes, fine, I'll wait until the professors are done."

A tension Ginny hadn't noticed until it it was gone disappeared from Zabini's posture. "Good." He shifted around to lounge across Black's legs, his back to her chest, facing Ginny. It seemed like that would be kind of awkward to her, but he looked perfectly comfortable, and Black just looked down at him with a sort of bemused look on her face.

"Hey, while we're waiting, check out her aura," she said after a moment, gesturing at Ginny. "It's super weird, right? What even does that?"

Zabini stared at her very intently, frowning slightly.

Goddamnit! It had been what, nearly twenty minutes, and Black hadn't once tried to question Ginny about anything, and now when she let her guard down, just a little... Ginny glared at her. Then she had an idea. "Are you a demon?"

She might not be able to make Black leave her alone, but she could definitely ask a few uncomfortable questions of her own.

Black was obviously surprised. "Uh, no. Have you been talking to Hermione?"

"Should I be?"

The girl shrugged. "Not like I care. She was asking weird questions yesterday, not important." She poked Zabini in the shoulder. "So, what do you think?"

He opened his eyes — Ginny hadn't noticed him close them — and smirked up at Black. "Well, if you ask me, demon fits better than werewolf—"

"Hey! I'd make a great werewolf! And you know what I meant."

He shrugged, then turned his insinuating smirk on Ginny. "Someone's been a naughty girl — soul magic and subsumation? Tsk tsk."

Ginny felt all the blood rush from her head. "Wh-what are you talking about? I didn't– I haven't– Tom—" she cut herself off there, biting her lip hard, and trying to focus on the pain rather than the memories threatening to drag her under.

"Why do you call him Tom?" Black asked. That was a new one. "Isn't he like, old enough to be your grandfather?"

"What?"

"We are talking about Tom Riddle here, right? Heir of Slytherin. Swotty dark arts nerd, talks to snakes. He'd have to be about seventy by now. Calls himself Voldemort, but you call him Tom. That's interesting."

Time stopped. All Ginny could hear was the thundering of her pulse in her ears and his voice, talking to Harry, "Voldemort is my past, present, and future, Harry Potter..." and losing control of her body and the fierce joy of having a body after endless nothing, and waking up in the Orphanage as the bombs fell and writing Dear Tom, and the awful, awful disgust and disdain he felt even as he wrote back pretty poison words, and—

Black snapped her fingers in front of Ginny's nose. "Hey, Gin! Earth to Weasley!"

Zabini was rolling his eyes. "That's not going to work. She's terrified, I'm surprised even you can't feel it." Then he reached out and gently turned Ginny's chin so that she was facing him, looking directly into warm brown eyes. "Gin, can you hear me?"

She didn't say anything, but he seemed to know she could.

"Gin, I want you to listen to me. Ignore him, he's not here. You're not in the Chamber of Secrets, you're in the Great Hall with me and Lyra. You're warm and safe, he's gone. Harry stopped him, remember? He killed the basilisk and stopped Tom, remember?"

Oh, she did. She remembered pain, first as the basilisk was torn away from her, the familiar bond dying with its death, fracturing her already fragile soul even more deeply and tearing at the bond with Ginny. She remembered the phoenix song, piercing through her mind like knives, like acid eating into her brain, and death, the journal dissolving into a puddle of ink and blood and basilisk venom and clinging with all the strength she had to Ginny's soul and life, and slipping, shattered soul tearing itself apart, no longer bound to the book, and Ginny's soul, not yet fully assimilated, not enough to hold her here, and fear as she slipped further and further from life, and then a snap, and blackness overwhelmed her—

"He destroyed the book, didn't he, Gin? Can you tell me why?"

She remembered Tom explaining, taking pleasure from the heady terror building in the noble young idiot standing before him, "Ginny poured out her soul to me... I grew stronger... powerful... Powerful enough to... start pouring a little of my soul back into her... It took a very long time for stupid little Ginny to stop trusting her diary..."

"Tell me."

The compulsion washed over her like Tom ordering her to sleep from the back of her own mind. She heard herself say, "He... Harry destroyed the diary...because the diary was Tom. It... he... He died. Harry killed him."

"Good girl, Gin. Very good." A feeling of warmth and safety spread through her, calming her, almost like...almost like Tom used to make her feel, like her problems were small and distant and—

"Get out of my head," she growled, slapping Zabini's hand away from her face, turning away from his eyes, suddenly aware of the floating lights and him and Black and the tears slipping down her cheeks. "How dare you, you—"

Zabini rolled his eyes. "Fine, next time, I'll just let you panic until you remember that he's dead by yourself. It was a horcrux," he said, turning to Black, who was watching the pair of them as though this whole thing was utterly foreign to her, but fascinating. Ginny shuddered. Creepy bitch. "It tried to subsume her soul to revive itself, but Potter interrupted before he could manage it. If I understood what was going on, they were already pretty deeply connected by that point. When it fell apart, she ended up with a few fragments of his soul, memories and such." He grinned. "Who knew the Dark Lord was such an angsty bastard?"

"He always was a bit melodramatic," Black said, as though she knew him personally. "Huh. Well, I should have asked you to do that weeks ago. Wait — you know he's not really dead yet, right?" she said, turning to Ginny.

She thought her voice sounded admirably even for someone getting news like that. "What do you mean by that?"

Black shrugged. "Just, you know, the horcrux is gone, yeah, but the original's still alive. Must've had more than one, or, you know, did something else to keep himself on this plane. He is a demon now, though. You know, since he doesn't actually belong here."

"What do you mean? How do you know that?"

"Uh, I...have my sources."

"Lady E?" Zabini asked. Black nodded.

"Well, that and the Dark Mark would have faded if he was really gone. Lucy's is still pretty visible, or at least it was last month, so, yeah. He's not dead yet." And then she smiled. "Which means I still have a chance to kill him. Want to help?" This last, Ginny thought, was directed toward her, but she honestly wasn't quite following the conversation anymore.

"Uh, what?"

"Do you want...to help me...murder the shit out of Tom fucking Riddle?"

Zabini buried his face in his hands, shoulders shaking with laughter. Ginny could see why. Black just looked so serious, as though she wasn't a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl casually talking about killing the the greatest Dark wizard in recent British history.

"You're insane," Ginny heard herself mutter.

"So I've been told. Are you in or not?"

And while Ginny may have hated Black, while she may have been weird and creepy and probably a demon, all that was utterly insignificant against everything Tom had done to her.

"Fuck yes."

---

Lyra is so bad at pretending to be a normal person some people aren't even convinced she's human. That's, like, a whole nother realm beyond "not subtle". —Lysandra

Just to be clear, this chapter should not be taken as an indication that we like Lyra/Harry better than Lyra/Hermione. I totally ship Lyra/Sylvia, though xD —Leigha

However, this should be taken as an indication that Harry is a silly moo. —Lysandra

(A very silly moo.) —Leigha