DISCLAIMER: Harry Potter canon can be controlled. You just disconnect it.
"The current plan isn't the only one he's a threat to, now, is it?" Molly said, a crafty grin spreading across her face, "there's also the plan you've been distracting me from. I'm pretty sure Albus's plan didn't include evacuating civilians at all, he was never the sort to give a monkey's about the little people. Excepting maybe in the abstract, or when he got his nose rubbed in it like we kept trying to do after Claig Castle. I distinctly recall you giving him what-for over that, back before that bitch took all the spitfire out of you. No, I reckon Albus has got some wing-and-a-prayer scheme for time travel that he's set you on. You think it might work?"
-oOo-
Chapter 8
Earlswood, West Midlands, 24 July 2004
Harry had been a bit surprised to learn that the 'kitchen' that was the foundation of Molly's power was actually in a twin-axle caravan on a small Romani site a little way south of Solihull, just off the M42. He'd assumed that a kitchen had to be in a built house. Apparently a caravan parked in a herb garden was enough.
That she'd chosen this place to live in wasn't altogether surprising, though. If you wanted to surround yourself with people who were really, really careful about talking to outsiders in general and the authorities in particular, the travelling communities were a good place to start looking. The sheer quantity of shit they got off just about everyone - even Vernon wasn't much out of the norm when ranting about 'bloody Pikeys' - gave them plenty of motive.
As well as the natural closed ranks of people who had to endure constant racist bollocks, they offered another advantage for a witch who needed to lay low. Reading between the lines of the lengthy account Molly'd given of the local family relationships and dramas, they were people out on the frayed edges of modern life. As such, they were exactly the sort of people who'd be glad to have a witch about the place, no questions asked. Even if they couldn't come straight out and talk plainly about what she was, they'd see to it that she felt welcome.
And protected: when Harry and Jane had got out of the car - Jane couldn't apparate them somewhere she hadn't been, so they'd left the elves on stag and driven - they'd been asked their business almost immediately. And then been watched the whole way to Molly's caravan by people who looked like they'd be only too glad to re-enact one or two key scenes from Snatch if Molly asked it of them. The kids Molly had asked to keep an eye on the car had all but saluted before double-timing off to see to it.
Naturally, the inside of Molly's twin-axle caravan was bigger than the outside, albeit not so much that you'd spot it if you weren't paying attention. Molly had nevertheless managed to fit a wood-fired cast-iron cooking stove and better furniture than the usual built-in stuff you usually saw in caravans: Harry suspected that this particular model had never been towed anywhere, just magicked from place to place. Certainly your normal family car wouldn't have a hope of shifting it.
Every wall and window was festooned with little bits of arts-and-crafts made with twigs and yarn and scraps of cloth embroidered with runes. Harry guessed they were all the genuine article rather than tat from new-age shops, and meant to protect the place and conceal it from magical surveillance. Everywhere that wasn't decorated with that sort of thing was festooned with bunches of drying herbs, racked and stacked with jars of pickled and preserved things, hung with cauldrons and pots and otherwise cluttered with witchy stuff. Either the stereotype of the country witch had some evidence on its side, or Molly had found out about it and leaned into it hard.
The only exception to the olde-worlde theme was the telly and DVD player mounted where it could be seen from the curtained-off bed. Harry wasn't rude enough to have a nosy at the stack of obviously-knock-off DVDs to see what her taste in movies was.
Molly being Molly, nothing got discussed until they were all on the outside of a hearty plate of faggots in onion gravy - mushroom dumplings for Jane - with marrowfat peas and mashed spud, with Summer Pudding to follow.
Once they were finished, the dishes levitated away to wash themselves, and tea in front of all three of them, Molly said, "So, young Katie tells me that as of yesterday they've got ten families out of the country. France to start with, and Madame Delacour has her people finding them places to move on to from there."
"Good," Harry said, "Are we going to be needed for escorting people to the ports and stations and such?" Harry was willing, although he was a little shy of meeting members of the magical public. Molly had figured out who he was all too easily.
"Katie says there are some groups that are going to need to travel in a rented minibus," Katie was part of the group Molly had called together to help organise the evacuations, introduced as having been on the same Quidditch team as three of her sons. Harry understood that to mean that she featured in his own missing memories and he should be careful, "do you think you can get one of those?"
Harry nodded, mentally noting that he'd have to chase up the coloured contacts and take a few other measures to improve his disguise if he was going to be spending more time around magicals, especially ones who'd known him before. Katie only hadn't recognised him the way Molly had because the meeting was short enough that Jane transfiguring his eyes would last. He'd also got his hair clipped suede-head to remove another point of description, and started growing a moustache. "Shouldn't be a problem, just a question of booking in advance and paying. Minicab firms don't have anything big enough?"
"Some do, I shouldn't wonder, but it's not size that's the problem. Katie says that there have been some funny looks from the drivers they've been hiring. Even with the foot-in-both-worlds halfbloods, she says, and there are some families that really need their contact with muggles kept to a minimum because Those People are watching out for the use of memory charms. They'll have to be escorted on to the train or boat they're taking - we're talking about people who we can't send by air - and met at the far end by people who can shepherd them."
Harry snorted his amusement. He'd spent a while at the safe house after that first chat with Molly. In obvious muggle attire, the reactions to him had ranged from fearful through condescending to, in the worst cases, daft as a box of frogs. They'd need shepherding, all right. Some of them would attract less attention sedated and wheeled onto the train or boat with a sack truck. "Noticed some handy-looking lads on the way in, here. Any chance of recruiting them to help? Strikes me they'd keep their mouths shut if it was you doing the telling, no matter how strange things got."
Molly chuckled. "Oh, you'd want the girls for that sort of thing, at least among the families that are here right this minute. The boys have good hearts, all of them, and smart as you could ask for. Trouble is, they're proud of how subtle they ain't."
Harry grinned back. "Known a few lads like that in my time. Catch me on the wrong day, I'm one myself."
"I don't doubt it, and I dare say you'd get on famously," Molly went on, "but involving them in witch business is a line I don't care to cross. Not just because of the whole Secrecy thing - the travelling folks have always been a bit of a grey area on that front, even more than most country folk - but I've an obligation to my neighbours. Keep them safe if I can, and surely not bring trouble to their door."
"Fair enough," Harry said, "and now we've got the Order of the Phoenix alongside the idea of burner phones we can organise a lot faster." Some of them had been more than slightly weird about the idea of telephones full stop, never mind the mobile ones, but between Harry and the others with at least a foot in the muggle world they'd all at least learned to answer calls and read texts.
"Which I suppose means we're on to the Other Thing," Molly said, pronouncing the capitals. That was at Harry's insistence: the exercise Jane had asked him to do on possible uses of the Taboo Curse had got him good and paranoid about what could and could not be spoken aloud, and while Jane and the Elves were fine with 'Operation Gallifrey' Molly had drawn a line.
"I have reworked the ritual for five participants," Jane said, sliding a manila folder across the table to Molly, "with options for myself as sole caster and for you to assist. Please review the script and notes and determine which you prefer."
"Many wands make light work," Molly murmured, donning her reading glasses and flipping open the first page, "and I shall let you know whether I can …" She slapped the folder down on the table and jabbed a finger at a particular line of symbols, "Well, I can tell you right off that I can do better than that. I dare say I could have done better when you first met me, too, young lady. You'll need to amend this unless you want to be all but carrying the whole thing by yourself."
Jane tilted her head. "I acknowledge that while my memories are clear, they are coloured by the emotional prejudices I held at the time they were formed. I assumed that a housewitch would be the same as the housewives I had direct experience of, and I have not directly observed you performing complex or high-energy magic since those days. Please be as objective as you can in assessing your capabilities."
Molly gave Jane a flat and level look.
Sensing possible friction, Harry put in, "She's got a point, Molly. We've still got our pride, and Jane hasn't. I reckon it'd be easy to let that pride lead us to mistakes, just like her lack of it makes her blunt at times."
Molly harrumphed. "You've a sensible head on your shoulders, Harry Potter. Jane, I apologise for the tone I was taking. I'll do my best to measure myself fairly."
"I have inadvertently given offence," Jane said, "for which I apologise."
There was a long, uncomfortable silence.
"So," Harry said when he couldn't bear it any more, "how much set-up is needed on the day, and how long does the magic take, and how much of it do the elves and I have to be actually in the circle for?" He already knew the rough answers, but if he was going to get a planning session going here he'd need to get Molly briefed quickly.
Jane blinked, with her I-am-calculating face on for a few seconds. "I estimate two hours without assistance. The full ritual should take thirty-one minutes and one second, with the passengers, for want of a better term, joining the circle five minutes and one second before the end. For safety's sake you and the elves should be ready to step into the circle thirty seconds before that time."
"And the consequences if any of this is interrupted?"
"Catastrophic, for us and anyone within three hundred paces and a pace, which places minimum safe distance, with a reasonable margin for error, at five hundred metres. I am assuming for safety's sake that the text means a complete walking pace that returns to the same foot."
Harry looked at Molly. "And, importantly, the only component we absolutely can't do without, we have to steal from the Ministry and it will tell them what we're up to. So, it's got to be done at the absolute last minute. The only advantage we've got is the fact that the list of potential sites we can use is in the thousands in the UK alone."
"Thousands of sites, eh?" Molly mused, lifting her mug and staring into her tea while she thought, "We've plenty of choice as to red herrings, then?"
"I thought that, too," Harry agreed, "We should pick out at least a couple of dummy sites and lay a false trail straight from the scene of our crime to one of them, one we can set an ambush at. Keep them busy trying to gather enough forces to survive apparating in. While they're busy hammering away at that, I'm not even close to exhausting all the booby-traps I know, we sneak off to the real site. We tested Private Oshin, and he can apparate me, being the heaviest of us, the distance we're talking about, and do it fifteen times before he even starts to feel tired. Elf apparition isn't detected by the enemy, so they'll have no idea where we went. Between now and then we need to do as much force reduction and degradation of enemy capabilities as we can, while reserving enough that we can throw an almighty lot of bollocks at them on the day."
"Diversions," Molly said, "so that just as they're picking themselves up after getting mauled by your ambush, they get word of henges lighting up in all the wrong places. If Jane can teach Order members how to open a henge they can make it look like there are rituals being done up and down the country."
"What do we tell them?" Harry said, at the same time as Jane put in, "They cannot be told -"
Molly waved them both down, "Well of course we don't tell them it's time travel. The ones that know it's possible know why it's illegal, and they will refuse to take part and they'll persuade anyone who'll listen not to take part either. They'll be assuming we're going to do the Mintumble experiment all over again. Whatever she changed in the past, not that we'll ever know, when she returned it was catastrophic. We're not going to be returning, so all this," she waved a hand in the air to take in the world in general, "is just going to go poof, if I understand Jane correctly. And, touch wood, we're going to change things so much for the better that nobody'll know we were ever there. We're going to need to tell them it's some big piece of magic that'll shift the balance in the war, and they're the diversion. Doesn't have to be a real piece of magic, just one that's plausible. Tell them to get those circles open and hold them at all costs. Not run unless it's truly hopeless, like the Bastard Himself turning up. They don't have to do anything with the magic, just be as big a distraction as possible for as long as possible, and bleed the blighters. Everyone they put down, or just put in St. Mungo's for a few hours, is one less that might come chasing after us. Have them start at different times, too. Jane, what's the smallest number that can open a henge?"
"Larger henges tend to be tourist attractions and as such impractical. Excluding those, to open them well enough to manifest will require three, five, seven or thirteen wands depending on the size of the henge. There are none that can be fully opened to be useful, but as distractions they need not be. There will be a minimum distance from our own site that must be maintained so as to prevent destructive interference. That limits our choices among the sites we can use and -" Jane paused. Frowned briefly. Then, "Before recommending a pattern of sites and optimum team size I must consider the likelihood of an Unspeakable spotting the pattern, even when taken by surprise and under pressure of time. Our own henge will not appear to be open if observed from outside the circle until the last few seconds of the ritual. However, a wide gap in the pattern of decoy sites may prove noticeable to a sufficiently astute enemy."
"Work on it later," Harry said, "but don't let the best be the enemy of the good. Or, maybe, consider a line of sites that passes ours just outside the minimum safe distance. A nice obvious pattern with no holes in it so they don't consider what other patterns were possible."
Jane nodded.
"We've got people in the Ministry too," Molly went on, "and since this one's for all the gobstones we should ask for a diversion there. Set for shortly after we leave. At least one big one, since we've got a man in there who's already been nearly caught once and says he don't mind dying."
Harry paused a moment. Literally everything Molly Weasley had just set out as her contributions to the plan amounted to sending people, people she'd likely known for years, on suicide missions. And she'd capped it all with a call for her own son to die for the cause. Hadn't so much as turned a hair while saying it. Harry was bloody glad she was on his side.
He flipped open his notepad to the blank page with OP GALLIFREY written at the top. "So," he said, "Proper Planning And Preparation Prevents Piss-Poor Performance. Working back from the end, we want to be coming out of the ministry by oh-nine-hundred at the latest on the day …"
Waterloo International Railway Station, 3 August 2004
"Packed with muggles, of course."
Harry cringed. 'There's always one' was a proverb for a reason.
Here and how the one was Molly's crotchety old great aunt. It'd been a three hour drive starting at half past three in the fucking morning in Somerset, and the old biddy hadn't shut her wrinkled old trap once. It wasn't even like she had the excuse of losing her marbles: a hundred and fourteen was old, but well short of 'declining years' for a witch. She was just like that, and always had been according to Molly.
Molly was on the case, though. "Now, Aunty Muriel, two things. First, remember what I said about not using words from our world? If a spy overhears you, we're all done for. And the second thing, of course, is that it's their railway station, they're allowed to pack it if they want to."
Given Muriel's admittedly-not-very-thick West Country accent, Harry reckoned they'd get away with 'muggle' as old-fashioned dialect unless a Ministry spy was directly listening in. It was the sentiment he objected to. She'd already nearly made them late by refusing to pack any of the jewelry she insisted on wearing, metal detectors or no metal detectors. Or 'pestiferous muggle contraptions' as she called them, to distinguish them from the 'ramshackle muggle contrivance' that was the rented minibus Harry had driven her here in.
Molly was confident they'd get away with a confundus charm on the metal-detector and its operators - too many witches and wizards used that spell to avoid muggles every day for the Ministry to pay much attention to it - but it meant she had to stick to her great-aunt like glue from here on in.
"Couldn't arrangements have been made?"
Harry tried not to let the kids see him rolling his eyes as he chivvied them along, but managed to exchange a knowing look with Muriel's widowed granddaughter-in-law, who was called Patience and plainly had to exercise it every day. No love lost there, Harry thought, while clinging desperately to the thought that he'd personally be rid of the old bat in less than half an hour.
"No, Aunty Muriel, they couldn't. The best we could do is come early in the morning when the station's nearly empty."
"This is nearly empty? There must be a hundred muggles here, at least!"
Harry strode ahead to lead the way to the ticket barrier. Much more of this and he'd be in twitching-eyelid territory. Worse luck, he was pretty sure that if he chinned Aunty Muriel people would look at him like he was the bad guy.
"Yes, Aunty Muriel, but you're in London now. There are more people here than in the whole of Somerset, so naturally it's a little crowded even at its quietest time." Molly was being the soul of forbearance in not pointing out that there were fifty people at the absolute outside, besides the extended Prewett family. And, rattling around in a couple of acres of station concourse - at least! - they were hardly crowded.
"Well, they could still make better arrangements. And it's not like I've never been in a town before, young Molly-my-girl. I went to Wookey Hole only last year."
Reaching the barrier, Harry presented the tickets to a woman in Eurostar livery who was visibly trying not to crack up. Aunty Muriel carried. "Will it be all right if we go on the platform to see 'em off?" he asked, adding in a quiet murmur, "Only Aunty Muriel's a bit of a handful and everyone else is busy with the kids."
"No, that's fine, you just need to check in at security," she said, with her attention on counting the tickets and matching them up to bodies. The charms on the tickets and passports that prompted people not to question anything had proven reliable, but this was Harry's first time personally relying on them so he watched carefully. After only a few moments, she said, "just make sure you're off the train at least two or three minutes before departure if you're not travelling. Which is two of you, have I counted that right?"
"You have," Harry confirmed with a nod, "and thank you."
"Why does everything have to be so big? I'm sure nothing had to be this big in my day, we made do, without wasting all this space," said Muriel as Molly led her past Harry and on to the platform with a hand around her arm and an air that suggested that while she wasn't actually frog-marching her great aunt, frog-marching was definitely an option.
To add insult to injury, the Eurostar lady's eyes were sparkling and she was actually biting her lip.
"Ain't even seven in the morning yet, and it's already been a fucking long day," he muttered as he turned away to follow Molly.
Blackburn, Lancashire, 3 September 2004
Harry spoke the incantation for the umpteen-thousandth time, and finally all of the practise and effort paid off. He felt warmth flow through his hand and fingers and opened his eyes. There, in the middle of the circle he'd formed with the thumb and forefinger of his left hand, was a shimmering blueish-white point. Smoothly and calmly, like Jane's written instructions said, he swivelled his hand to bring his palm under the spark and opened his fingers.
With an electric crackle, hiss, and hum, the spark dropped into his palm, splashed, and flickered up as a handful of glittering, shivering cold-white flames. Cool and ticklish against the skin of his hand, bright enough to read by in the dark, and would only kindle ordinary fire by his express will.
It had taken over four weeks of daily practise, two hours at a time, and rigid self-discipline not to get discouraged and give up. But now?
Fuck my old boots, I'm doing magic!
The best part was that he could feel it. A tickle in his mind, a dance in his heart, warmth in his fingers and another sense he didn't have words for, all surging and babbling in time to the dance and flicker of the flames in his hand. They'd taken his ability to use a wand or cauldron from him, the fuckers, but as soon as he'd shown he could work rune-magic, Jane had dug through her personal library for every scrap of literature she had on other traditions of magic, looking for everything that could be done without either.
She said that she did not know enough to structure a programme of study for him: the teachers at Hogwarts had never explained to her why they taught the spells in the order that they did, if they even knew themselves.
She recalled that learning new spells became easier with each one she mastered. By fifth year, acquiring a new spell became the work of minutes and all she had to practise was speed, efficiency, points of style and useful variations. That motivated him like nothing else could. If he got one spell, he could get another. If he had two, he'd find it easier to pick up a third. And so on, and so forth.
For now, the next exercise was to hold the flame until doing so required no concentration, was as automatic and heedless as motorway driving. After that it was exercises to cast the spell without speaking the incantation aloud - subvocalization was the first step to truly silent magic, according to Jane. She said casting spells by will alone, eliminating the gesture as well, was likely to take years for any spell 'of more than trivial power'.
As far as Harry was concerned, the advanced stuff could wait. He was doing magic! Master this spell, move on to the next. He'd seen one in the books that threw a bolt of force, aimed with a punch or a spear-thrust. The beginning stages of learning the spell sounded a lot like some of the drills he'd done in martial arts, so he reckoned he had a head start on that one. He could pick up a few cheap punching-bags to use as targets.
Even if he never went back in time and got his wand back, Harry could do magic. Being an unorthodox weirdo wizard he could live with: the important thing was that he was a wizard again.
He'd beaten the fuckers who'd taken it away from him.
Brat's Hill, Cumbria, 22 September 2004
"Okay, you can come back down, Lance Corporal" Harry said. Lance Corporal Dobby could hear him whisper from anywhere, or so he said. Harry hadn't found a limit to it yet, although they hadn't tested it rigorously. Oshin, by contrast, needed him to shout with intent so it was a bellow of "Private Oshin!" to get the second elf down from the other peak that overlooked the stone circle. All he could do was sense a forcefully-expressed call as he lacked Dobby's ability to hear at a distance.
All of the dozens of different tribes of elves had their differences like that, they'd told him. That had prompted a debate between the two about how many sorts exactly there were. Harry had been particularly amused to learn that there was an entire sort called Dobbies and a lot of them were named Dobby, but Dobby himself was actually a Puck, which Oshin insisted were properly called Robingoodfellows. Dobby said that was another type of elf altogether, there being apparently no limit to Elf Weirdness.
He'd sent them up with the survey staffs and GPS units while he manned the optical level he'd rented. The 1:10,000 OS map was all very well by itself, but it was no substitute for measuring up properly on site. He just wished that somewhere in the massive pile of professional development the Army had given him for free there'd been a basic course on surveying, because figuring this stuff out from first principles and A-level trigonometry, having seen it done exactly once, was painful.
"Next step is photographing everything," Harry told his troops when they returned, pointing at the holdall full of disposable cameras, "Like we drilled, a picture of every clock direction from all the points fifty metres in every clock direction from this point. Same from both of the spots I picked out for shooting from."
The pictures would probably not be needed other than to refresh his memory while drawing out the plan on the sketch map he'd made,, although maybe accidentally dropping one somewhere would help sell the ambush, like those 'accidentally' lost invasion plans they used to fool the Nazis before D-Day.
The stone circle was a wide ring of knee- to waist-high stones on an east-ish to west-ish saddle ridge between two craggy peaks. Valleys fell away to either side, and there were four other stone circles nearby, arranged in two pairs. The Taboo ambushes - Harry had done three since that first, and the reprisals had kept the refugee teams in brisk business - had been teaching basic tactics to the enemy, not least of which was the value of not dropping yourself blindly right on top of your target. Molly had advised him on apparition and Jane on portkeys, and for complicated magical-theory reasons they were both safest if targeted at relatively level ground.
The ridge between the two peaks was wide, flat, and a little boggy in places, maybe a quarter square kilometre of flattish ground. If the enemy didn't want a steep climb up or down to get to their target from their arrival point, they'd have to arrive pretty close and in plain view from either or both of the peaks. With the long grass and clumps of heather, stake mines and claymores were going to be easy to hide, and in late December he'd likely have snow on the ground to help with concealment.
There were a few sheep nearby, and Harry supposed the elves or one of the witches - probably Molly, she'd been a farmer most of her life - would have to do something to get them out of the way on the day. And the whole day before, Harry realised as he tallied up how much wire he'd have to run about the place if he was going to really set this place to blow up every possible approach of bad guys - it was a full day's work, and not a short one. Unless the sheep weren't left up on the hills in winter? He'd have to ask Molly, or possibly just do another recce the week before d-day.
The important thing, though, was making sure that there was something in that circle that would make the enemy head toward it, draw them into a prepared area so he could soften them up with explosives before finishing them off with a hail of magic bullets. Come d-day, he'd have no reason to conserve ammo. Come d-day, he'd have literally every bullet he'd stolen enchanted one way or another, so unless the enemy had really got a clue, he'd be able to do quite a lot of damage, too.
What kind of bait would do that, though? That bore thinking about.
Diagon Alley, 25 September 2004
Diagon Alley was a weird emotional maelstrom for Harry. Something about the place filled him with a sense of joyful wonder. Something else about the place - possibly the haunted, furtive looks on the faces of most of the shoppers despite it being a fine autumn Saturday - made him feel a hollow, aching sense of loss. And then there was the anger, as here and there some smug-looking twat in a black robe swaggered through like he or she owned the place.
It didn't look like a place much worth owning, in Harry's view. Maybe every third shop was boarded up and plastered with enemy propaganda posters, and Harry was pretty sure only a few of the more recent ones had been emptied by the evacuation teams. Although he was basing that guess on only having been asked once for the elves' help with packing up a shop for export.
Being run by racist lunatics was bad for an economy, who knew?
He shook off the dismal thoughts, and went into the tearoom Jane had told him about. He was not just taking this meeting - despite the risk - because he wanted to recce Diagon Alley as a whole for the sake of the next day's op. He was taking it because he was the only one who could. Jane was ruled out because although she could adopt any physical disguise she liked, she would give herself away as soon as she had to interact with anyone. Molly had ruled herself out because she wasn't sure she would be able to control herself in the presence of the enemy. From the hints she'd dropped here and there about what she'd seen at Claig Castle, Harry didn't think he blamed her.
He'd downed a dose of Jane's dwindling stock of polyjuice - the bottleneck in production was the skin of a south african snake, which was a controlled substance under the current Ministry - to take the decidedly hairy risk of joining Percy Weasley for lunch in Diagon Alley. When Weasley had accepted the meeting - they weren't going to put this request in a dead-drop letter or in writing anywhere for that matter - he'd specified that Jane should come in a female disguise.
So, for the next - he checked his watch - forty-seven minutes, after which he had to be away from here or re-dosed, he was wearing the form Jane had used the first night he met her. Jane herself had not been able to see what was wrong with his performance during the practise session he'd insisted on - had not been able to see the need for a practise session at all, in fact. Molly, for her part, had spent the first ten minutes hooting with laughter and the rest of the hour teaching him to, if not pass, then at least not be horribly implausible as a witch.
He suspected he wasn't doing well, but hoped he was managing well enough not to be stand-out weird from the outside. From the inside it was definitely … odd. Using polyjuice to be other blokes was something Harry could get used to within a few minutes. This was his first time as a woman, not counting practise, and he didn't think he'd ever get quite alongside it. Trying to shove that thought to the back of his mind, he went in.
The tearoom's interior looked like the kind of place Aunt Petunia would love. Spindly, over-carved furniture, floral prints and chintz everywhere it could be applied and several places it shouldn't have been, lace doilies edge-to-edge on every flat surface, twee little portraits of jolly-looking animals in human clothing on the walls, and pottery knicknacks so densely arranged everywhere that Harry instinctively pulled his elbows in to avoid knocking anything over. Which told him he'd probably been standing like a man outside.
The proprietress was a tall and spindly-looking witch who looked over from her counter as he came in. She didn't visibly dislike what she saw, but contrived to imply by twitch of eyebrow and tilt of nose that disapproval was only the tiniest of social miscues away. Gathering his skirts in to thread his way through the close-packed tables - barely a third of which were occupied, mostly with disagreeable-looking old biddies who were trying not to be obvious about measuring up this new witch in their midst - Harry went to the only table with a single man at it.
Said man was a narrow-faced, long-nosed redhead with not-quite jug ears and early-onset male pattern baldness. If they were hoping to make this look like a lunch date, they were going to give Weasley a reputation for punching well above his weight. Sitting down and remembering to keep his knees together - a lot more comfortable as a girl, for all that Weasley's old-fashioned manners in rising to greet him and pulling out a chair for him had done his head in a bit - Harry said, "I hope the cakes here are good, Percy, because the decor looks like my aunt had a hand in it. And she was frankly insane."
Of an instant, Harry could feel the eyes of the old biddies swivelling to bore into him: he hadn't quite used his NCO voice, but he'd definitely spoken louder than a woman would in his place. He'd read a phrase once, 'the imp of the perverse' and in that moment he knew exactly what it meant. It was an effort to keep his mouth closed around the malevolent grin that bubbled up from inside him. You ain't seen nothing yet, you lot of old trouts. Let's see how you handle the traditional soldier's drag act.
Weasley snorted his amusement out loud, but there was a sudden air of nervousness in his eyes. "They have both sweet and savoury petits fours, and I've yet to be disappointed," he said, "Which would you prefer?"
"I think - savoury," Harry said, putting some salacious performance into the word, "unless they do something spicy?"
Behind Harry, a dozen pairs of nostrils discreetly flared.
While Weasley was at the counter ordering a stand of savouries and a pot of tea for them both, Harry got a brass three-wise-monkeys figurine out of his handbag. Jane had assured him that once activated it would keep any conversation at the table entirely private. He'd only just set it down next to the table centrepiece - a pottery figurine of a peasant girl with a bovine expression on her face - when one of the biddies came over.
"Are you sure you're in the right place, dear? It doesn't seem right for your sort," she said, with a little sniff after she'd barbed those last two words like the venomous serpent she was.
"I was invited," Harry said, letting his smile show just a hint of teeth, and wondering just what sort he was that was unwelcome. It was a three-way toss-up between being black, young, and 'not a nasty small-minded old prune'. "And besides, my sort goes where she pleases." He gave a dismissive flick of the wrist that he could play off if what he was trying didn't work - but it did. Subvocalised incantation for the win. Flames kindled in his palm and danced a moment. Carefully not looking - it would spoil the effect - he snapped his hand shut to end the spell before his attention wavered and he set his lavender kidskin gloves on fire.
Old Biddy's eyes widened and her nostrils flared. "Well, I never," she exclaimed, and flounced off back to her table. Molly had told him that wandless magic was, among British wizards and witches, widely thought to be incredibly difficult and only possible for the powerful. She admitted she'd thought as much for a long time, until she'd had her horizons forcibly expanded by the total collapse of her old life and learned that it was merely foreign and a skill like any other.
He heard the word veela stand out from among the murmur of gossip and wondered briefly what it meant as Weasley came and sat back down. Harry was fortunate to have his attention on the other man taking his seat when a cake-stand and tea-service appeared from thin air on the table. If he'd startled, that would've been a dead giveaway.
Weasley was about to speak, so Harry held up a finger and with the other hand stroked each monkey's head in turn, murmuring the activation phrase. The monkeys began shifting and lashing their little brass tails, so he knew it was working. "Okay, go on," he said.
"I, ah, that is - you're not quite how I expected you to be."
Harry raised an eyebrow and tilted his head. "More character than you were expecting?"
"That's one way to put it, certainly."
Harry allowed himself a chuckle, "That was the problem. Doesn't matter what disguise you put her in, Jane's recognisably Jane, so she sent me with the message. I can act at least something like whoever I'm disguised as."
Weasley harrumphed his embarrassment, "Yes, well, that worked out better than expected. You see, there's pressure at the Ministry that wizards should marry, especially us purebloods, they're putting out pamphlets saying it's our duty to get the population up. There's also talk of cracking down on the homosexuals, too, and a wizard who's still a bachelor at thirty attracts gossip, and I'm not far off that. I've been very publicly answering lonely hearts notices in the Prophet, much though I dislike the idea of giving a hostage to fortune. I suspect you've provoked quite the groundswell of gossip about my romantic exploits, so thank you for that. I dare say the other chaps in the office will be asking me for my secret if that bit about you being a veela gets around."
"If I'd known that, I'd have come in the form of a more plausible date," Harry said, "I'm pretty sure that witches that look like this don't feature in the lonely hearts column." He decided he didn't care to comment on the idea of open institutional homophobia still being around in the 21st century, even the Army was relaxed about that these days, and wasn't going to give himself away by asking what a 'veela' was and revealing how little of the magical world he really knew.
"Ah. I was wondering. That veela rumour will be a reasonable excuse for me not seeking a second date, I suppose. Officially the Ministry regards veela and part-veela as just as good as any other witch - something to do with preserving good relations with the few nations still willing to deal with us - but unofficially there's a great deal of prejudice. Nobody will blame me for declining to pursue an interest in someone I learned was other than entirely human. Is the woman you're impersonating a veela? Or just a regular witch?"
"I've no idea, Jane found her. And before you ask, I'm a bloke under this." He discreetly checked his watch, an Elizabeth Duke ladies' model that Molly assured him was the sort of gaudy-shiny that a lot of witches favoured. Molly was betting that most witches couldn't tell it from the real thing, either. Which wasn't important: the fact that he had thirty-nine minutes before he had to re-dose was the thing he had to keep his eye on. He needed to crack on. "Getting back to the point of this meeting, there's two parts to the message. First is that you were nearly caught. We destroyed the file Snape had on you -"
"He's officially listed as missing by the Ministry."
"Really? No idea where he is now," because Harry had no idea what Staffordshire Police did with remains recovered from suspicious house fires, especially not ones with nine millimetre holes in their skulls, "but Jane wrote a summary of his investigation which you should destroy after reading, it's nearly as incriminating as the original. Should help you avoid getting nearly caught the same way. I'll slip it under the cake-stand in a moment, while we're serving ourselves. When I leave, I'll loudly tell you I shan't take that sort of nonsense from any man, and you better not owl me again. It'll be exactly what the local crones are expecting, and while their eyes are on me you can take it."
"That's one thing," Weasley said, visibly wincing at the thought of the scene Harry was proposing to make, "What's the other?"
"We're going to be making a very big play this winter. We're going to need a huge distraction at the Ministry. You need to have something ready to go by 29th November, and any time after that day you'll have twenty-four hours' notice by Jane's usual means of letting you know to go see your dead-drop, whatever that might be. On the named date you need to be in work early, that part's important in case what we do makes them lock the doors. Once you're in, be ready to trigger whatever you've prepared at half past ten unless you hear from Jane with different timings."
Weasley frowned. "Do you want anything in particular?"
"I'm told this one's for all the marb- er, gobstones, so make it big, spectacular, and unmissable. Explosions and fire at a minimum. If you can make it look like the real plan is actually the diversion for an attack on the Ministry that'd be perfect."
"Noted," Weasley said, "and just off the cuff I think I shall dedicate this one to the memory of my brothers Fred and George. An inventive pair of hooligans, those two, and amazing with novel potion effects. I'm fairly sure I can recreate some of their more pyrotechnic feats, and if I'm around to stir up the chaos a little, so much the better, eh? Now, how do you take your tea? And can I help you to a vol-au-vent?"
"A slice of lemon and two lumps," Harry said, going for the girliest possible option he could think of, "and just one of the mushroom ones. A girl has to watch her figure, you know."
Weasley put a pastry in front of Harry, neatly covering Harry's sleight of hand with Jane's notes, and attended to the teapot. As he was pouring, he asked, "There's been no official word, but a few people have noticed there have been - disappearances. Does anyone on your side know anything about those? I've heard people worrying that the Snatchers have them. Whole families in some cases. Outside the Ministry I've overheard talk that there might be a way to get out of the country that isn't closed off."
Harry could spot an opsec problem as well as anyone: Weasley did not need to know and was extremely capture-prone every time he clocked in at work. The lack of official response was surprising, though. They'd been moving half a dozen families a week out of the country since late July, and in a population as small as Magical Britain that ought to have been noticed and responded to by now. "I think," Harry said, covering up his pause for thought with what he hoped was a ladylike sip of tea, "that you should say, next time someone brings it up, that the higher-ups know what they're doing and that everyone who's properly loyal to the Ministry has nothing to fear." He finished up with a bright and cheerful smile.
Weasley recovered from his shocked expression quite quickly. "I dare say that ought to scare everyone silly," he said.
"While making you look like an upstanding Ministry loyalist, yes. I'm sorry, but you're too valuable to risk, so if there is an evacuation going on - might be, might not, if there is they're maintaining good operational security - you need to look like the absolute last person to approach." Another thought occurred to Harry while he was chewing a dainty bite of mushroom vol-au-vent, "In fact, assuming Snape wasn't the only one who was on to you, or if someone figured out what he was looking in to and puts that together with him disappearing, the sensible thing for the enemy to do would be to have a ringer approach you about getting them out of the country. Probably be a very convincing one, too. Up to you how you handle it, of course, but if it was me I'd start with the official denial that the disappearances are a problem, move on to pretending not to understand what they're asking you for, and then turn them in as traitors if they really push. They won't get in trouble, of course, because they'll be secret agents."
Harry hoped. Weasley had famously gone all-in with the same regime that had imprisoned his brothers and executed his father, so anyone who tried to use him as a point of contact for the resistance in general or the Order in particular had to be a ringer. Risking Weasley's position in the Ministry on the vanishingly small chance that there really were people stupid enough to ask him about escape opportunities? Absolutely not worth it.
"I suppose," Weasley said, his reluctance compounding Harry's discomfort.
"Where you are, you're important," Harry told him, "more lives depend on you achieving all the things you can with the Ministry's trust. Anyone really pushing you for help in that direction - they have to be agents trying to catch you out."
Although Harry had been trying to convince himself as much as Weasley, it seemed to have worked. "Fine," Weasley said, "and you're probably right. Also, if I couch my expression of loyalty in the terms you suggested, I'll more than likely frighten off anyone that genuinely wants to get out. Convince them to look elsewhere. Who knows, they might even find help?"
"They might." Harry checked his watch. Twenty minutes left. "Jane's notes are under the cake-stand like I promised. I've got five minutes before I have to leave, and for safety's sake I should move sooner. Any message for her, any questions?"
Weasley paused long and thoughtfully. At length, he said, "No, I don't think so. I'll make notes of whatever plan I come up with and leave them at the usual place along with my regular reports. From here on in I'll not go longer than two days without leaving at least something: if I'm caught you're going to want at least some hint that you can no longer count on me."
They would. If Weasley was caught, he was dead if he was lucky. They'd have to assume that the enemy would wring him dry and be put on their guard. If that happened, hope shrank to the prospect of the enemy getting bored and relaxing by the time the Solstice rolled around because they'd thought the attack was going to be on or shortly after the 29th of November. "Be careful," he told Weasley, "if you visit a dead drop too often, it risks compromise." Or so Harry had read in some spy novel or other.
"Not that risky," Weasley said with a wry grin, "I don't know how long you've known Jane, but she was a sharp one at eleven and has only got more capable as she got older. Unless she specifically, in terms, and with intent tells you where my dead drop is, you simply can't know. You can't even know that it is a dead drop. A very rare and powerful charm, very few are able to work it. She helped Dumbledore improve it, and used some muggle thing called 'information theory' to give it real teeth. It used to be that the secret keeper could give the secret away unwittingly, but now it requires intent to reveal. The head of the DMLE himself could follow me, watch me pick up a letter and drop off a report. He wouldn't be able to hold the knowledge of what he'd seen in his mind unless he'd heardþe secret from Jane. While I'm en route to and from that place with the formed intention of conveying information, I'm perfectly safe, because the charm protects the secret from being revealed even by deductive reasoning."
Harry nodded. "All the same, don't get cocky. That sense of security might be what let Snape get as close as he did to catching you."
"Perhaps," Weasley allowed, "and you have my word that I'll be careful between now and whatever spectacular you have planned."
"Good. Now, brace yourself. As soon as those monkeys are back in my handbag, I'm going to make a scene and then my getaway to the enormous satisfaction of that collection of miserable old trouts behind me. While they're watching me flounce out, grab the paper and storm out in a raging huff before they get chance to interrogate you."
"A good plan," Weasley agreed as Harry swept the monkeys off the table.
Harry shot to his feet. "HOW VERY DARE YOU!" he shrieked.
It went off like clockwork. Harry made it back to his hotel room with two minutes to spare, and he was still giggling like a naughty schoolboy three hours later.
Charing Cross, London, 26 September 2004
Harry had been mildly surprised to discover that the magical world's efforts at secrecy extended to ensuring that about fifty metres of Charing Cross Road didn't appear on any map. You could walk along it, wizard and muggle alike, and plenty did. There were muggle shops on both sides of the extra bit of street, and a side alley on the same side as the Leaky Cauldron that took a left turn to meet Cecil Court. Which was also a fair bit longer than it ought to be. And the surrounding streets looked subtly different on the ground than they did on the maps, like there was something in between them that bulged them outward: Cecil Court was straight on the map, but visibly curved if you looked down it from either end.
He had no idea why that was. Jane theorised that the unplottability charms on the Alley itself had been sloppily cast and that was what affected the surrounding area. The important thing was that it confirmed that Diagon Alley wasn't in some expanded pocket dimension, and so could be seen into from the outside.
So long as you weren't a Muggle, Harry supposed, but he didn't have that problem as he lay prone on a flat part of one corner of the roof of the Garrick Arms. The chances of anyone down below noticing him were near non-existent, but he was wearing an invisibility cloak anyway and had every single spare one they possessed spread over him and the roof behind him. There were tall buildings nearby and the non-magical world would know exactly what he was aiming down into Diagon Alley. It would put a crimp in his plans for the day should they call for the more serious branches of the Metropolitan Police.
"Bad old master is moving up the Alley, Lieutenant sir," came Lance-Corporal Dobby's whisper in his ear. The elf was invisible somewhere in the Alley, while Private Oshin was in charge of watching his rear and, later, apparating Harry back to Blackburn.
Harry didn't bother with his binoculars. Diagon Alley wound around and about when you looked at it from the outside - it was charmed to look straight if you were actually in it, nobody much caring if the resulting visual distortion made most of the buildings look wonky - and from where he was perched he only had a view down two short sections of it.
On one of them was the rostrum from which the Minister of Magic Lucius Malfoy would be addressing a hand-picked crowd today, and the laser rangefinder that had been surprisingly cheap from Maplins gave him a range of eighty metres. Harry was mildly sad that the library next door was two stories shorter. Getting to shoot a head of state from a book depository had real historical resonance that he was missing out on: sniping from the flat roof of the back annexe of a pub just wasn't the same.
Only a couple of minutes passed before a party of wizards and witches in elegantly-tailored black robes mounted the podium. Not including, Harry noted as he panned his scope across the assembled magical dignitaries, Darth Bastard. It was too much to hope that he would come out in public. He might be impossible to kill, but shooting him would be cathartic.
There was only one wizard answering Lucius Malfoy's description on the podium, and he looked enough like his son that Harry had to take a moment for breathing exercises so as not to give in to the surge of hatred and just let drive right away. When he got his eye back to the scope the dignitaries were lined up to the rear of the podium and some flunkey was to the front, standing at a lectern and making some sort of introductory speech. About standard for this sort of bollocks, Harry thought, god forbid the toff in charge start talking without someone coming on first to remind us all how important he is.
The flunkey was acceptably brief in reminding the assembled crowd how big his boss's cock was - you occasionally got some fucker who went into lengthy raptures about how nice it tasted, too - and stepped aside doing that over-theatrical up-high clapping that reminded the crowd that it was time to applaud or else. Harry'd seen it at school assemblies a time or two, and apparently it didn't change when you got into politics.
Malfoy stepped up to the podium and struck a pose. Chin lifted, blond hair flowing back from the noble brow, nose elevated so he could look down it at the little people. Without really thinking about it, Harry picked the moment the over-groomed tool opened his mouth to speak as the best time to squeeze the trigger.
Malfoy convulsed as the round went through his head, and Harry followed up with two more somewhat more hurried shots as he crumpled. He could only be sure one of them had hit, right into the chest cavity.
He thumbed the selector to automatic and waited for the other dignitaries to gather around. They obliged him, wands raised in all directions, and he could see the faint shimmer of shield charms.
"Science time," he muttered, and emptied the magazine, firing rounds that had taken him three days to enchant in the space of four seconds. The bullets punched through the shield charms and there was a satisfying amount of carnage and visibly-injured bad guys. There was at least one that no amount of magical healing could help: sheer luck had put a round through someone's head. There were probably a couple more that wouldn't make it to a healer, judging by the amount of flying claret, but it wasn't sensible to sit around admiring his handiwork. With the magazine empty, he made safe, muttered "Experiment successful," and wormed his way back from the edge of the roof.
Rolling over to sit up, being careful not to come out from under the cloaks, he reflected that it was a nice demonstration of how the standard shield charm could be beaten. Or, at least, a nice demonstration of the same that left living witnesses. Teaching the enemy to proceed slowly and carefully required that particular thing to happen, and Harry wanted the lesson firmly in place by December. Jane and Molly alike reckoned it'd take them months to find shield charms that'd hold up to magic bullets and get everyone trained up on them.
He'd been doing an ambush a week since that first one back in June, and all he'd managed to teach the enemy so far was that apparating to somewhere a little distant from the Taboo and spreading out made sure that not all of them went down in the first blast. For some reason they were apparating back out rather than shielding, seeking cover, or attacking into the ambush once the explosions went off, and the ones that couldn't apparate were generally in no condition to cast anything anyway. So, making sure the Ministry knew that standard-issue shield charms were useless now required a more obvious demonstration unless Harry wanted to take risks with his own life and limb by tempting the stronger Snatchers to stay behind.
The prospect of several weeks of disorganisation at the Ministry in the wake of an unscheduled change of Minister wasn't to be sniffed at, either. Reading through Jane's detailed files on the enemy leadership, the impression he got was that the current Ministry was what happened when you put a bunch of careerists with personality disorders into a confined space and told them to have at it without regard to the actual mission of the organisation.
Harry could only hope that the competition to fill the resulting vacancies - whoever became Minister would leave a job vacant, and his replacement likewise, and so on right to the bottom of the scrotum pole - would turn homicidal at least once. It certainly sounded more entertaining than the muggle civil service.
"Lance Corporal, clean up all traces we were ever here and return to base when you're done. Private Oshin, take me home."
AUTHOR NOTES
Harry is making a common mistake in conflating Irish Travellers (as depicted in the movie Snatch) with Romani. They're two distinct peoples with origins on different continents, for all that form following function makes them hard to tell apart from a distance. The confusion is not helped any by 'Pikey' being the racists' slur of choice for both peoples alike.
American readers can stop giving me the side eye and understand that faggots are baked pork-and-suet meatballs, sometimes done wrapped in bacon (best way!) and had that name centuries before the slur sense of the word was first attested around 1914. Molly serves them here with the traditional trimmings. Really Traditional faggots are made with bits of the pig rich people turn their noses up at, always the mark of a Really Traditional recipe. If you can't make your own - there are plenty of recipes online, at least one of which is flat-out illegal in the US - Mr. Brain's Faggots are exported world wide and nearly as good, if a bit short of the rich flavour of homemade ones due to leaving out most of the Alarming Organ Meat.
Summer pudding is made by layering whatever berries are in season together with bread or cake into a mould. You press it as you layer so the fruit juice soaks into the bread/cake and it becomes cohesive. Chill it for a few hours while keeping it pressed, turn it out - if you've done it right it keeps its shape, a smear of butter in the mould helps - and serve it with thick cream or ice cream. It's usually done in single-serving moulds, but I've seen it done with a ring mould and cut into slices. Simple, delicious, and all but free if you know how to forage. From july to early october there's some damn' tasty stuff hanging about in hedgerows and woodland, far more than what gets cultivated and sold in grocers' shops. You just have to beat the birds to it.
The Register of National Monuments for the UK alone has over six thousand entries with the keyword 'henge' in them, and Ireland has them in plenty too. Not all of those are true henges, of course, some are stone circles, causewayed enclosures, or hill-forts. Even so, my ancestors built a powerful lot of the things.
West Country accent: like the West Midlands speech mentioned last chapter, actually a group of similar-sounding accents from the area covered by the old kingdoms of Wessex and Cornwall. And, due to an accident of casting in a really popular remake of Treasure Island that got imitated by everyone, famed the world over as 'talking like a pirate.'
The dazzling metropolis of Wookey Hole had a population of less than 500 at last census, and gets a mention here because it's amusingly-named and the home of a show-cave of considerable repute. One of the stalagmites is reputed to be a petrified witch. Really is a petrified witch in the Potterverse: Muriel was visiting to pay her respects.
I've not even tried with the procedure for boarding a Eurostar. I walked past Waterloo International nearly every weekday for five years, but I was a commuter in a hurry and never paid attention. Also, that part of my life ended six years before this is set. Nothing else, the security would've been higher after 2001.
Prisoner of Azkaban doesn't say that Lupin's handful of flames spell is wandless. It also doesn't say it's not wandless, and he's not described as drawing his wand until after he has a handful of fire - I specifically checked. So I'm not taking much of a liberty by having Harry learn it. (While checking I also learned that my years of remembering it as blue flames were wrong. No colour is given at all, the only description is 'shivering'.)
It's true about the name Dobby, they're native to Lancashire and Yorkshire (although not the bit of Lancashire I grew up in, where they were called Hobs, but then I lived a fair way away from the border with Yorkshire.)
The Brat's Hill stone circle is the largest of what are called the Burnmoor circles. Bit of a misleading name: if you want to see them they're far nearer Boot in Eskdale, and there's an easily-followed trail up (although the first time I visited I was hiking over from the campsite at Wasdale Head).
Am I the only one that thinks cross-sleeving with polyjuice is gender dysphoria in a bottle? Fleur plainly hates it when she does it in Deathly Hallows. Hermione only seems bothered with Harry's eyesight, wonder what that's about? (More seriously, everyone's going to have a slightly different reaction. Be a funny old world if we were all alike.)
Astute readers will have noticed Harry making another Blackadder reference in this chapter. The BBC Comedy Greats channel on Youtube has the first appearance of The Gorgeous Georgina, a real eye-opener for everyone who thinks Mr. Bean and House were the starts of their respective stars' careers.
Elizabeth Duke is a brand of affordable bling for ladies, sold through Argos. Used to be a sort of shop-within-a-shop, don't recall when they stopped doing that.
Fic Recommendations: 'A Matter of House' by EmeraldAshes (of Seventh Horcrux fame) on FFN only. (For some reason EmeraldAshes doesn't post their potterverse work on AO3.) Also 'Hello, my name is Alastor Moody. You get that wrong, prepare to die.' by Starchart (on AO3 only as far as I can tell). Well crafted, and it made me cheer at the start, cackle maniacally in the middle, and mist up a bit at the end, there.