Chapter 7

What's Going To Be Done


When Kingsley emerged some hours later, his face was a bit somber. That had been a weighty discussion, even for someone who had seen and done the things he had seen and done.

"That world...what was prevented from happening...was beyond what any of us fathomed," he commented as he looked around the seated crowd of Harry, Hermione, Minerva, & Draco.

He sat down among them and said, "He is who he says that he is, and there is nothing magically odd about him that I can tell. He seems, at the root of it, unharmed by the Time-Turner itself."

"But?" Hermione asked, sensing something.

"He knows things a child should not need to know and some things an adult would never even need to know. Our world is an entirely different culture, with different rules and expectations; everything, everyone, in his world was potentially dangerous. He's going to see it that way and react that way from muscle memory and conditioning alone, no matter if he logically can start to feel safe here."

"Well, he's traumatized, of course," McGonagall said.

"I'm not sure traumatized is the correct word, but I hazard to find a better one. To us, these are wounds, they are things that make him-." Kingsley could not usher the right words. He started over. "You would see him as damaged. His world scares you, so he makes you uncomfortable, you pity him that life, and I'll caution you against that. It's not going to help him assimilate."

"But it was horrible," Hermione pointed out.

"It was his life, Granger," Draco said. "You can't just fix this, you can't fix him, he's not broken. To him this is probably the trauma, not his world."

"Yes, in his world, he knew what to expect. He prepared for it. He had support for it. Here he's alone and lost in a world that he doesn't understand and that will have a hard time understanding him."

Hermione eyed both of them, unsure of how to deal with the different thoughts and feelings at once. Usually her cool logic prevailed, but even sketchy motherhood had a way of clamping on one's heart. "You seem hesitant still, Kingsley." She could tell there was more. He had been in there for almost two hours.

"There are other considerations that come up with Time-Turners. There are spells and things in his memories that do not exist here. Things he knows of which could very well turn up here in the evolution of our time. Twenty years of unfettered Dark Arts and unrestricted magical research made it happen faster there, but the players are the same. Their basic make-up is the same. Those same persons could be developing those same things now somewhere in our timeline."

Harry was the first to figure out what Kingsley was saying. "And he would know the use and defense of that magic where we do not."

"Yes, exactly. Or he could accidentally bring a spell to life here that we might not have."

"Or want," Harry added.

There was a collective silence as everyone pondered this.

"But you are not worried about him using Dark Magic? I honestly hope you are not suggesting that he's dangerous or that you intend to use a thirteen year old boy," Hermione asked. It sounded like he wanted the Aurors to pick the boy's brain!

Kingsley shook his head and put up a calming hand. He had truly not missed their rashness in jumping to conclusions in some situations.

Once her huff died down, he replied in his calm baritone, "No, no I don't think he's consciously dangerous, beyond not understanding our world or knowing where he fits into it. And if he could not control himself, even in the worst of circumstances, he would be dead. We can only ask him to control himself here if we know what we're asking him to control and tell him he is expected to do so." It was not like the boy understood their world at all. He could not tell them what he knew and did not know. A fact that could easily be taken for granted.

"Good, because I think we can all agree that after dying twice for our world, fighting for a collective 6 decades for the cause, we can likely safely assume Professor Snape did not raise his son to be the opposite." Hermione said.

"He is just a boy," Harry said, diplomatically. "It is our fault he's here…"

Draco rolled his eyes. Yes, and all of them had done some pretty spectacularly advanced magic when they were thirteen. The sooner they got off it, their strange Gryffindor senses of childhood, the better they would all be.

Thankfully, the elder and cooler head of Kingsley dealt with Potter, "Oh, he is just a boy. In age, Harry. Not in magic. To survive that world with his parents and his memories, Severus spent years teaching him magic to protect him, to make sure he could stay alive. You all were just children and did not know our Severus Snape as I did or Minerva; he knew very powerful magic to spy, and he started researching and developing his magic when he was still at school. As you know from Sectumsempra," Kingsley said, giving Harry a look. "He did not simply fool Voldemort with cunning, although he had plenty of that too. Did you neglect to think that Severus learned magic from both Dumbledore and Voldemort? The two greatest wizards of recent time? Both of them needed him. That's no small feat. He was simply a professor to you lot, who was brave and knowledgeable in the end, but that is very little of what he was...that was his cover and all he ever wanted anyone to see. You are not a very good spy if all know your capabilities."

"What precisely do you mean, Kingsley?" Hermione probed.

He wished they all could think like a Slytherin. They would need to at least try if they were going to understand this boy at all. He shared a look with Draco, who kept smugly silent, rolling his eyes.

"If Severus Snape knew as many curses, jinxes, hexes as most 6th & 7th years when he entered Hogwarts, and even that did not protect him from his tormentors, precisely what do you think he would have taught his son to protect him from Death Eaters and a Dark Lord who would just as easily kill them all torturously as snap his fingers?" He asked her. "After he watched dozens and dozens of you kids die in the wars and thereafter, what do you think he would have taught his son to protect him?"

Hermione blanched some although her cool logic did provide the answer. It was the same one the boy had given him when he had asked, "Everything he could."

"Exactly," Kingsley replied, pointing at her as he did so, "And the boy has his brains and your brains. You're a very powerful witch, and Snape was a very powerful wizard."

"Oh Gods," Harry said, imagining an intellect more annoying that Hermione's when they were kids. There never was a spell that didn't like Hermione, and never a question that Hermione could not answer or miraculously find and learn the answer.

Kingsley nodded, "He doesn't need to learn magic as much as he needs to learn how to live a normal life, how to be a thirteen year old boy. He hasn't even had friends. You can absolutely forget about concepts like trust or safety. They have never existed to him."

"He was very frightened earlier, it was difficult for him to think we weren't going to hurt him, I think," Hermione said.

"I don't think he's entirely decided we are not going to hurt him," the former Minister answered. "He's perhaps decided we aren't going to torture him and kill him, but he assured me several times he knows right from wrong, despite where he comes from. There was a passing look of some recognition when I said I used to be an Auror."

"Torture and kill him!" Minerva said. "Whyever!"

"He cannot fathom you all are going to molly coddle him and welcome him with open arms. Do you think he has a very good frame of reference to figure out what might be happening? He doesn't know this world! He heard Auror and probably thought the entire purpose of Kingsley was because he was an Auror, that you lot are interested in Dark Magic, not the political situation," Draco interjected.

"He's smart enough to know that a world without Voldemort is going to have difficulty understanding a thirteen year old who had killed people before," Kingsley let the veil fully drop away. It was worse than what they could possibly think. Even Harry had never seen the worst of it in his years as an Auror. The boy had seen and done things that they had not seen and done.

"He's killed people?" Came the dual voices of the two women in the room.

"Not many, but it was compulsory or mercy," Kingsley affirmed. A grim truth but necessary. He did not want any reckless decision making, or rather any more reckless decision making. Kingsley was not even wholly sure the lot of them had realized that the two of them were responsible for that boy's 'horrible' life entirely; it was a real 13 years that had happened for that boy, for the only reason that they were careless with a Time-Turner.

"Compulsory?!" That was Harry.

McGonagall covered her mouth. For all the times Filch talked about torture in the dungeons!

"Like I said. That world was like nothing we can fathom. Absolute blackness. Students walking around hallways talking about shedding Mudblood entrails and getting traitor blood on their shoes. They stuck victims to the dungeon walls and let the students do whatever they wanted."

"They would be dead anyway, Potter," Draco said. "Trust me, there is mercy in a quick death if you're strong enough to do it." That was something he had grown to learn over his foul year plus of slave-service. "He'd be risking himself to do that, even. Quick deaths don't get the full sport of it." His lip curled, cringing at the memories.

"Correct," Kingsley said. "He'd been punished for ruining one before, and was forced to blame it on the screaming disturbing his homework and giving him a headache, that he just couldn't take it anymore." It was far from a reality that could immediately make sense even in their minds. Not even their one year of the Carrows had been that bad with Snape doing what he might to temper it.

Everyone looked uncomfortable. Hermione kneaded her clasped hands, looking at them. Harry stared absently at a portrait. Draco's lips thinned so much, they disappeared. McGonagall almost seemed twitchy over such a gruesome situation.

Kingsley was reliving that portion of their talk in his own memories.

"Have you ever killed anyone before?"

"...Yes, sir..."

Dare he ask. "More than once?"

The boy seemed highly uncomfortable. "S-seven times, sir, other than...for mercy."

"Mercy?"

"They were going to die worse deaths, drawn out deaths..."

"And the others, the seven, on purpose?"

"I hardly think it could be seven times on accident, sir," the boy replied quietly, but with Snape snark. Then he elaborated more gently, "I didn't have a choice."

At least they did not need to worry that the kid enjoyed any of it, because he surely had not. His body language and the way he spoke about it to someone he knew was from a different world betrayed that easily.

To break the silence, Kingsley said, "He is calm and rather quiet right now. There is no way he could produce such a Patronus if he held such Dark Magic like that world inside, but this is no simple matter. You cannot just expect him to mix seamlessly here once he's had some time to get over the shock. The problem is not that he will seek to hurt someone, but he thinks anyone might seek to hurt him because it's what he's used to. Any accidents where he thinks he's protecting himself, and you know how things can be."

The Prophet would go wild. Wizards had only wizened up a little since the Ministry fiascos of Fudge's days.

"Ruthless. They can write whatever they want, and Dark Magic still scares everyone absolutely silly. Not that you can really blame them," Hermione said. She had never been a fan of reporting in the magical world.

"Well we'd be doing a damned bloody bad job of finishing raising the Professor's child if we get him locked up in Azkaban," Draco said. "Listen, the man died twice to save our sorry selves, and his son is in that other room, probably scared out of his wits. The only person he has ever had, at all, just screamed to bits after being soul-sucked by a dementor, and you are all talking about trust and trying to understand or judge what he's had to do? Why don't we talk about how we are not going to leave him alone? If you want his trust so that he can feel safe so that others will feel safe, then you can't let him sit there. He will pull his armour up the longer you let him think about it. The Professor would have taught him to protect himself, you can bet on that. I know a little of what that's like." Of all of them, he knew.

The eyes then all turned to Draco, who seemed to have the strongest paternal drive of any of them despite not being as demonstrative with Scorpius. It was a bit shocking.

"Do you disagree?" The blond said, putting up his hands. "He knows a lot of dangerous magic. So what? Why do we not see what kind of kid he is? He seemed quiet to me, like Scorpius." He looked around to see what the others' assessments were.

"Down at the lake he was absolutely petrified, and if he was truly dangerous and that jumpy, I think we would have seen some spells then," Harry added. "He seemed in control of himself for a little guy."

"I am not worried about his magic or truly him, but he needs some time just to understand this world and to talk, to let out some of what has happened so he can understand the differences and learn how things work here," Kingsley said.

"To talk to someone who can also understand both worlds and their magic," Hermione finished the sentiment, rationality kicking in. "Why don't you take him, Kingsley, at least for now? I have a feeling he needs quiet, and I truly had Minerva call you because you know the most about, well, all of it." She looked at the blond who was gearing to object and said, "I would say you, Draco, but with the rumors about Scorpius and Voldemort already, you do not wish to add to them, and he knows a you from his other world." It was the same reason she did not think it wise for the boy to stay with her and Ron; that was spot on its head for the boy. Not to mention Ron.

That seemed to silence the blond, who qualified, "But if he wishes to contact me, you will let him." It was not a question, but a statement. It was simply best one of the Gryffindors was not left with the task; Kingsley, he could handle. Draco was more familiar than the Gryffindors with being surrounded by Death Eaters and what they got up to. Even he had a hard time fathoming an entire life and adolescence filled with a charade of it. If he was little Snape's godfather in some Dark World where he was also Scorpius' best friend, then he sure was not going to abandon the duty in this world. "In the meantime, I'll get him some clothes and things and bring them to your place, Kingsley."

"You know, this was not the peaceful retirement by the coast that I was anticipating," Kingsley said to the table. He already had known that was what needed to happen. The others would be too apt to go about things a way that would not be congruent with how things had been done with the boy thus far; the Gryffindor way, not the Slytherin way, or the Severus Snape way. After seeing some things of the boy's memories in the pensieve, he had already known it was not the stuff for bleeding hearts.

"You know, Kingsley, I never thought you the type to enjoy peaceful," Draco drawled. "Always looked your best when dueling a handful at once."

"Well, at least it will be better than my time as Secretary to the Muggle Prime Minister," he replied, with a chuckle.

"It's only until he more acclimated, then you can resume your beach walks," Harry added with a silly smile. At least all this activity meant that he could delay doing anything with his paperwork stack that Hermione kept bugging him about.


AN - Thanks to Duj and Prince-Slytherin for the reviews!

This was a rough chapter for me to write, but I think I accomplished what I needed to accomplish to move things forward :D Large group interactions are always a challenge for me. Some 'that was not as crappy as you're imagining it' would be lovely! I've edited this chapter way too many times.

That said... Read it? Review it! Please