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Chapter Twenty-Five

The Money Launderer

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Long after he had sent Nate and Harrison back to Gryffindor Tower, Severus Snape remained in his office, sitting at his desk, staring into the fire and thinking. There was nothing to be done for it. He didn't dare modify Harrison's memory so he wouldn't remember what he'd heard. That was useless. Nate would only tell him again, very likely. Severus's experience with the boy had taught him that threats would have no effect on Nate's loose lips. Harrison knew everything, it seemed, about his new friend's family life, including the fact that he was a regular part of it and had almost been Nate's stepfather.

Almost.

If she had accepted his proposal, which she had not.

Not that he blamed her. There had not been a great deal of romance in their relationship. He would not have called it "convenient," either, as it was anything but for him. A part of him knew that she was taking him for granted, somewhat, but he didn't care. It had been so long since anyone had sought him out for any reason that he simply took what company she wanted to offer him and did not question the rest of it.

He still thought frequently of the first time he had walked into her office. Dumbledore had told him her name, but until he saw her he had not remembered who she was. He was not yet the Deputy Headmaster, so he was not in the habit of visiting the new Muggle-born students during the summer. However, Dumbledore had told him that Minerva was quite concerned about a new girl whose wizard father had neither acknowledged her existence nor paid anything toward her support. After Minerva and the Ministry had "convinced" him of the justice of paying for his daughter's school supplies there was the issue of the additional support he had finally "decided" to pay the mother. It was a great deal of money, to make up for the years of neglect. Severus reluctantly admired Minerva's remarkable knack for inducing guilt.

The large sum of money had to be converted to pounds sterling and paid to the mother in some way that wouldn't cause the Muggle government to think she'd stolen it. In the past the usual way was to invent a long-lost relative who'd left the money in a will, but the mother had grown up in foster care, had never been adopted, and no one knew anything about her family, so it was agreed that that would cause more problems than it would solve. Future payments would also need to be explained in some fashion. Minerva was the one who'd come up with the idea of using a Muggle charity. She knew, in fact, of a witch who was living as a Muggle and working for the perfect organisation, a charity that provided grants to single mothers with incomes below a certain level. Anonymous donations could always be made to private charities with no problem, so all they had to do was see to it that the charity funnelled the money to the mother in question, who would then have a legitimate source to cite for the income.

Minerva was far too busy visiting other Muggle-born students to see the witch who worked at the charity so Dumbledore asked Severus to do this one favour for him and Severus could think of no plausible excuse for avoiding it, which was how he found himself striding through the streets of Fulham in Muggle clothes on his way to the Queen Alexandra Women's Aid Society.

He asked for her at the receptionist's desk and was given directions to her office. When he reached it, she was sitting in a rather lumpy-looking old fashioned desk chair, poking at a computer keyboard as though she was afraid it would explode if she did something wrong, her face screwed up in a grimace as she swore under her breath. She had the same long, dark curling hair he remembered, though he'd been accustomed to seeing her in Hogwarts robes, not in the Muggle clothes she wore now. Severus had not seen her, he realised, since she had left school at the end of her seventh year. He idly wondered why she was working here, instead of in the wizarding world, but he remembered that she was a Muggle-born and decided that he would never really understand the appeal the Muggle world had for them once they'd had a taste of the magical life. During the Dark Lord's second reign of terror more than a few Muggle-born witches and wizards had abandoned the wizarding world, many not bothering to return after the danger was past. She seemed to be one of these, as it had been three years since the war had ended and she was clearly firmly ensconced in her job.

"Miss—Miss Clearwater? I believe you can help me with a most delicate matter," he said in a low voice, lest her co-workers overhear them. The "offices" were in an old terraced London townhouse whose rooms were divided into work spaces by rude-looking low panels that defined small cubicles. Hers was in what had been the drawing room; the elaborate plasterwork on the high ceiling, coated with too many layers of aqua paint, was a strange counterpoint to the melamine desks and flickering computer screens.

She looked up and dropped her jaw. "P-professor Snape? What are you doing here?" She could not have looked more surprised if he had come to see her with a dragon in tow. He was very business-like and straightforward, all the while wanting to shake her for giving up the world in which she should have been living. But he had to put aside his feelings about her job and way of life and focus on their common ground. Lecturing her would be counterproductive and could cause her to refuse to do what he was asking. Dumbledore had given him a very simple task. It was time to get to it.

"As I said, I need your help."

And she had given her help, eagerly, impressed that he wanted to assist the woman in question, as though it had been his idea and not Minerva's. He found himself reluctant to correct this view. She was treating him strangely. It took him only a little while to determine what was different—they were equals now, both adults. He remembered that she had been somewhat reserved as a girl. She was a good Ravenclaw who had executed her work conscientiously, but she never stood out in any way in his mind until she and Hermione Granger had been Petrified. When he had arrived in the hospital wing bearing the Mandrake draught for reviving the Petrifaction victims, he had found Percy Weasley there already, sitting by her bedside, holding her stony hand, telling her it would be all right.

When he was rising to leave her cubicle, having done what he'd come for, her telephone rang. She nodded at him and waved a cheerful goodbye as she picked it up, saying, "Penelope Clearwater." As he walked down the makeshift corridor past other cubicles, he heard her say clearly, "Oh, no, Abby. No no no. You cannot do this to me. I'm the one who chose the book! I'm supposed to lead the discussion."

He paused for only a moment, wondering what on earth she was talking about, but a moment later he shook himself and continued moving toward the exit. When he heard footsteps behind him, it never occurred to him that she had followed him and she had to call his name before he turned around.

"Professor Snape! Erm, Severus!" she said both urgently and uncertainly. She strode toward him, red-faced and obviously nervous. When she reached him she bit her lip, then looked like she had decided to take a chance. "What are you doing tonight?"

That he was not expecting. "I am, er, nothing in particular."

"You see, I'm in this book club and I chose the book we're discussing tonight and my sitter just called and said she's sick in bed and can't come and there's no one else I can ask because everyone else I know is either coming to the book club or has kids themselves and I've tried sending Nate to someone else's house for the evening, but—" She paused in the middle of this rapid-fire verbal assault to look around nervously and put her face very close to his, whispering, "That's when he tends to do accidental magic. He gets upset, you see, when he has to go to a strange place." She straightened up again and cleared her throat. "You're my only hope," she added with a catch in her voice that he knew was meant to be quite affecting.

It was. He was utterly affected by her, which both surprised and appalled him. She was a student only seven years ago. She is sixteen years my junior.

"Of course. I—I did not know that you had a son."

After that night he did not hear from her for weeks, other than a thank-you note for the night he had watched her son. Then suddenly, on a Friday afternoon, he received an owl from her, asking him to come to her flat that evening. He left a note for Dumbledore to inform him of his plans and left the castle immediately after his last lesson, walking to Hogsmeade before Apparating to London, arriving in an alleyway outside her building, hidden behind a large rubbish tip.

She answered her door promptly and he almost fell over in shock. When he'd seen her at work she was dressed in a nondescript skirt and blouse, along with some odd purple Wellies that she'd also worn to attend her book club meeting. This evening her hair was piled on top of her head instead of hanging loose and she wore a dark blue dress of some sort of slightly shiny material that clung rather closely to her body. Below the hem of her dress he could very clearly see her legs without the interference of the purple Wellies.

"Good evening," he said stiffly, trying to keep his tone of voice even. He did not wish to reveal how affected he was by her appearance. She smiled in greeting and stepped back to admit him. To his surprise another voice—a male voice—spoke from the lounge at the end of the corridor.

"Who's there, Penny?"

"The babysitter," she called back.

Severus felt a jolt in his stomach. The babysitter. He thought back again to the tone of her note and realised that he should have caught on to the reason for her asking him to come to London, though it lent itself to another interpretation as well.

Before they entered the lounge, she put her head very close to his. There was a mischievous light in her eye as she whispered, "Do you think I should tell him that I also do money-laundering for you?" She gave him a wicked conspiratorial smile and he stared at her, bewildered and more than a little disconcerted by her perfume.

"What? Oh." It took him a moment to understand. Before he knew what was happening she was walking ahead of him into the light of the lounge, where her date was waiting, waiting for the babysitter to arrive so they could go out.

Though that evening had turned out differently than he expected based on that beginning, he felt sometimes that her announcing that he was the babysitter was prescient in some way. Now he only saw her to take Julian and his brother to the zoo, or to a puppet show, or whatever Severus had chosen to occupy the boys on a given day. He truly felt as though he was the babysitter again, and would be forevermore.

He stood and swore, flicking his wand at the fire to extinguish it before leaving the office for his solitary rooms.

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"I saw him in detention. I went downstairs to spy on him. Pathetic, yeah?"

"Oh, Harry," Ginny said helplessly, pressing her hand to Harry's bare chest as they lay in bed after their first attempt to enlarge their family.

"Seeing him is so amazing. I just stood there at first, watching him. My son was all I could think. He's my son. It was so—weird. Sort of like looking in a mirror but not. I mean, I know I don't look like that anymore. Not completely, anyway. But it's still how I see myself, I reckon. Like a kid. It was a bit like the time I saw my dad in the Pensieve. He's like me—but a little off. Actually, he looks more like my dad than me."

"Still, the apple doesn't fall far from the tree," she mused, tracing circles on his chest.

"I'll say it doesn't. You know what caused that row this morning?"

"What?"

"Carlisle insulted his mum. Tilda." Harry told her what he'd overheard, making Ginny sit up straight.

"He—he said that?" She shook her head. "Would you have used language like that when you were his age?" she asked, aghast.

Harry also shook his head. "Well, no, not me. But I heard Dudley and his gang say worse things, to kids at our school. Come to that, the Carlisle boys remind me of Dudley and Piers and the rest of their gang."

"Speaking of whom, you'll have to tell your relatives that you have a son," she said. To her surprise, Harry laughed out loud.

"Are you joking? I can't do that. If Aunt Petunia knew that I'd become a father before my seventeenth birthday and that Tilda was the mother she'd have it all over Surrey in five minutes flat. And she'd make what Carlisle said sound like a compliment. No, Ginny. I know we sent them an announcement when the girls were born but there is no way I'm telling them about this. Thank Merlin the last time I had to see them was at our wedding, and you remember how well that went."

Ginny did indeed remember. She hadn't known that her mother had taken it upon herself to invite the Dursleys. They had evidently shown up thinking that St Clare's Chapel was merely the church in which the ceremony was being held, but soon discovered, upon entering, that it had been turned into a home.

"Who the hell lives in a church?" she'd heard Vernon Dursley say from her vantage point at the top of one of the staircases in the drawing room. Vernon didn't see her, not being in the habit of looking up at people, only down.

"Whoever it is," Petunia Dursley opined, running her hand over some of the furniture, "they don't lack for money."

At the reception, Harry had obligingly introduced her to them, his jaw clenched. Neither Harry nor Ginny revealed that they hadn't intended to invite them. When his aunt asked him whose house they were using for the ceremony, he looked her squarely in the eye and said, "This is my place. I bought it last year when I finished school. Like it?"

Ginny could tell that Harry was enjoying watching the expression of surprise blossom on his aunt's face as she looked around. "Your place! And how did you afford something like—"

"Don't, Petunia," her husband warned her. "I don't want to hear about whatever he does for a living."

"I bought the house before I had a job, actually. For that matter, I still don't have a job. I've been training to be an Auror." Ginny smiled feebly at him, thinking of the news she had to give Harry later that evening, about being late. This certainly didn't seem to be the time.

"No job! Then what did you do, use your unnatural skills to steal the money?" his aunt accused, her mouth twisting in distaste.

Ginny had to try very, very hard not to pull out her wand and hex her on Harry's behalf. She thought these Dursleys were quite awful enough and was glad that they hadn't also brought Vernon's sister Marge, who, in addition to always setting off Harry's anger, was not to know about the wizarding world. Ginny thought it rather amazing that her wedding album wasn't full of photos of her throttling or hexing Dursleys—though the one candid shot that the photographer did get of all five of them together showed Harry and Ginny making faces at his three relatives and trying to creep away.

"Well, you see, Aunt Petunia, it turns out that my parents left me rather a lot of money. Wizarding gold. Buying this house didn't make much of a dent in it, either." Harry looked very smug and Ginny had to try hard not to laugh.

"Gold!" Vernon bellowed suddenly. "What do you mean gold?"

"I mean as in gold Galleons. A Galleon is worth about five pounds."

Vernon glared at him through very narrow, angry eyes. "And just how many of these—these Galleons did your parents leave you?"

Harry smirked, making Ginny think he was gloating just a little too much. "Not sure. Whenever I take money out of my vault it never really seems to—what word am I looking for?" he asked Ginny, who raised her eyebrows.

"Diminish?" she suggested.

"Yes. It never seems to diminish," he said, smiling broadly at his uncle. "And I've not bothered counting it, so I couldn't really tell you," he added. His smile seemed rather fixed on his face, quite stiff, and Ginny wondered how long he'd wanted to say these words to his uncle and watch his face go from beet red to deep purple. She was torn between enjoying his performance and feeling somehow that what he was doing was wrong. But then, the way they'd treated Harry since his parents were killed was wrong as well, so she reckoned he had a right to get some small revenge that didn't include actually casting spells. She thought he looked quite tempted, and she'd felt the temptation to start throwing hexes around herself, so she quite sympathised with his plight.

"All right," she said to him as they lay in bed, "we won't tell your Muggle relatives. But we really should tell Ron and Hermione and everyone else. And I think you should come back to teach the first year Gryffindors with me, so you can get to know him. You shouldn't have asked Minerva to let you drop that."

"I didn't!" he said defensively, sitting up. "It was her idea. She felt I was being a 'disruptive influence'," he grumbled, followed by a sigh. "I did find out his birthday, though. The first of May, nineteen ninety-seven. Almost exactly—"

"Right," Ginny said quickly. "Almost exactly."

"And I don't know how I can teach him! Or even talk to him about being his dad." He bit his lip. "He hates me, Ginny. He really hates me. Not sure I blame him."

"Nonsense, Harry. Just tell Minerva you'll behave yourself," she said, her eyes merry, prompting him to hit her playfully with a pillow, "and come back to teach with me."

"You'll see," he said ominously. "And even once I start talking to him—I have to explain to him how he exists. Somehow."

"And then there are the girls," she said, leaning back against her pillow.

"Which girls? Oh, the twins!" he said, hitting his brow with the heel of his hand. "Sorry." He groaned. "I don't have any idea how to tell them, either. Bloody hell."

"We have to tell them sometime, Harry. They might notice if a boy who looks like you comes home with us for the holidays."

He groaned again. "Tilda."

"What about her?"

"Don't you think that if we took him home for the holidays she'd want to have a say in that? Or tell us that we couldn't take him for the holidays? He might not want to come anyway, since he probably misses his mum and currently hates the very sight of my name. And even if he decides he doesn't hate me after all, how do I face her, after—after what he did to her through me—"

Ginny sighed and linked her arm in his, putting her head on his shoulder. "I have no idea, Harry. But I think it's like talking to your son or talking to our daughters: you just need to do it quickly, before you lose your nerve."

He nodded, closing his eyes. "I reckon you're right, but I'd rather face another Hungarian Horntail than an eleven-year-old boy, his mother, or a pair of eight-year-old girls. And I doubt that I'm going to feel differently in the morning."

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In the morning, however, Harry awoke with a feeling of great anticipation and optimism. I can do this. He's just a boy. Surely he's wanted to know about me, about his dad?

He woke the girls while Ginny was still in bed, acutely aware of his fatherly duties this morning, laughing with good humour when they both tried to snuggle down into their beds for "just five more minutes." With a wave of his hand the blankets flew into the air and he was met with a chorus of, "Oh, Dad, come on…"

He soon had them fed and dressed, and they were going down the winding stairs to the door that led directly onto the grounds, where Molly Weasley and the Thestral-drawn carriage were waiting. Molly looked surprised that she did not have to go up to their tower flat today but did not question Harry about it, clearly noticing his high spirits.

"Did you always think it was cool how the carriage goes without anything drawing it?" Rory said to Harry as she climbed in. Harry met Molly's eye for a moment.

"Of course, that's what I thought the first time I saw one," Harry said truthfully. Or he might have thought it strange, he couldn't properly remember. The first time he remembered taking notice of the carriages was when he was finally aware of their not moving under their own power, magical or otherwise. He hoped that his daughters would never develop the ability to see Thestrals.

"Yeah, it's sooo cool that it can do what a car can," Ruby sneered, climbing in after Rory.

"Ruby," Harry said, trying to make it sound like a warning but being too cheerful this morning to succeed. "Be nice to your sister."

"But Dad, why can't we get a car? Why haven't we?"

"It wouldn't make sense. We don't need one here at Hogwarts. When we're at home during the summer the weather is nearly always fine and we can ride our bikes into the village. When we go on holiday we sometimes rent a car, so it's not as though we never have one. We just don't own one. Someday we might. But now there's no need."

"What about the weekends? We could use a car on the weekends."

"Leave your dad alone, Ruby," Molly said, sounding impatient. "After I drop you off I still need to do my shopping."

"What's this sudden interest in a car?" Harry shook his head. "You'll be late for school if you don't leave now and you'll make your grandmother late for her shopping. Have a good day, the pair of you," he said, leaning forward to kiss them. He waved after backing away from the carriage. Even after all these years, Thestrals still gave him a bad feeling. "Thanks, Molly. Enjoy your shopping. See you this afternoon."

The carriage moved off around the tower and Harry breathed in the smell of the autumn morning, enjoying the feel of the warm sun on his face. Rather than going back into the tower he decided to have a walk around the castle, and when he reached the front door he entered the massive entrance hall just as the first students were coming down the marble stairs. He smiled and nodded at them, noting that some were still whispering behind their hands when they saw him, but he decided to ignore this. He was not going to let it bother him. He had a son. It wasn't as though he'd killed anybody.

Mad-Eye Moody drifted through a wall just ahead of him and wafted into the Great Hall. Harry bit his lip and tried to change his train of thought.

I have a son, but I've done nothing to be ashamed of.

"Hahaha!" Peeves cried the moment he saw Harry in the entrance hall. "Been a busy boy, eh, Potty-wee-Potty?" Peeves cackled with glee and threw up his arms. Suddenly everyone in the entrance hall was showered by newspapers. All was chaos for several minutes as students and teachers had to remove the papers from their heads so that they could see where they were walking. One fell down right into Harry's hands and he saw immediately that it was the morning's Daily Prophet.

As he read the large front-page headline he had one thought only:

Bloody hell.

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"Erm, sit down, please, Harrison."

Teddy hesitated in the doorway of the Defence against the Dark Arts office. A glass case in the corner held an elaborate antique sword. Moving photographs on the walls showed students waving and smiling at the camera, something Teddy was still getting used to. A number of the photos were of kids on broomsticks, throwing and catching dented red balls.

Potter stood in front of his desk, his hair on end and his robes open, revealing a shirt and trousers that seemed to have been slept-in and a tie with the Hogwarts crest that was loosened as though he were an overgrown student. Teddy grimaced and went to the chair before the desk. When the day came that he learned his father's identity he had assumed that he'd be an adult. Instead he'd got The Boy Who Lived, who still seemed to be a boy.

After he and Nate had left the dungeons the night before—arriving in the dormitory long before the other boys, still in detention—Nate had told Teddy what he'd read about Harry Potter since getting his Hogwarts letter. His mother had shown him her old schoolbooks and he'd spent the remainder of the summer reading voraciously. Teddy had been unable to believe that the irate professor who'd arbitrarily given them detention that morning was some kind of wonder-wizard. Now here he was, hero of the magical world, yet he didn't seem to know how to dress himself. (His shirt buttons were skewed.) Teddy managed to raise his eyes as high as Potter's chin, where he saw two red spots. This wally disposed of the Dark Lord? he thought, frowning.

The 'Dark Lord' must have been a right plonker.

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"I asked Professor Flitwick to excuse you from your Charms lesson this morning so we could talk," Harry began, trying to keep his voice from shaking. He picked up the Daily Prophet that Peeves had hurled at him in the entrance hall. He'd done his best to vanish all of the other copies—some while people were reading them—but he didn't know whether Peeves had distributed them elsewhere or how many students were in the habit of receiving the paper by owl post, as Hermione had done when she was in school. Handing the newspaper to Harrison, he said, "This is the morning paper. I don't know who told Rita about—"

The boy glanced at the reporter's name. "Rita? You know her?"

Harry hesitated. "In a manner of speaking, yes. At any rate, I'll be contacting the newspaper to demand an immediate retraction—"

"—about you being my dad? That's why you asked me to come, isn't it? I'm not stupid. Looks like I can thank my mum for that. I must have got the not-being-stupid thing from her."

Harry winced. "Actually, no," he said, doing his best to ignore the insult, and the boy's insolence. "I mean—yes. I mean, I wasn't going to tell you—what you already knew. I reckoned that had already—I mean, that you'd already—" Harry sighed, exasperated. He ran his hand through his hair and pulled himself up to sit on the desk. "Listen. What I meant to say was—I'll ask them to retract the things Rita wrote about your mum."

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Teddy really read the article now, feeling angrier and angrier with each word. He threw it onto the floor when he was done and swore bitterly, almost hoping that Potter would give him detention for his language, but Potter didn't say anything and Teddy felt the anger drain out of him again. He raised his eyes to Potter's and said, "I see what you mean. I mean—thanks." The word felt foreign in his mouth. "For getting them to—to take back this stuff about Mum."

Potter stood and started pacing. "I said I was going to ask them to do it. I can't make promises. The nerve! Rita hasn't changed. There was no call for her to—to make assumptions, based just on my age and your mother's age. She doesn't know. Although," he added, stopping to look out of the window facing the grounds, "for that matter, neither do I."

"What don't you know?" Teddy asked, frowning.

If I have to tell my own dad about where babies come from I'll have to be shot right afterward.

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"The morning paper, Master, sir." The house-elf spoke with a practised obsequiousness that somehow did not ring as true as it had before the Ministry had liberated elves from the jinxes and conditioning that had previously caused them to be utterly obedient to their masters and to punish themselves severely if, by some miracle, they temporarily overcame the effect of the jinxes and disobeyed in any way.

"Thank you," Blaise Zabini said grudgingly. He'd learned the hard way that to omit such banal niceties from his exchanges with the elf was a guarantee that he'd find salt in the sugar bowl, if not worse. He tried not to think about how much he missed the old days as he spread the paper on the table beside his toast and coffee. The front-page headline immediately caught his attention.

"Well, now," he whispered. "Isn't this interesting…"

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