Author's note: This basically picks up where I left 'On The Headmaster's Secret Service'; I got stuck for a while, life got in the way and I never finished Chapter 5. It really does help to read that one first.
By the way, the Golden Trio and their friends are somewhere in their mid-twenties in this.
Rick groaned, and looked at his watch. Eight? Christ, I'm on duty in... He laughed at himself, and lay back down. I'm not a full-time Auror any more, he reminded himself, I'm a Beater for a national Quidditch team. Luna snuggled up against him, murmuring softly. He grinned. Fiddling with the course of history was a risky venture, but damned if they hadn't brought it off pretty well. Harry's parents. Neville's parents. Sirius. Dumbledore. All those hundreds of people he'd never know, but would have another shot at life without the spectre of Dark Magic in the background... That thought terminated abruptly.
Let's not get cocky, Rick. There's still work to be done. He slid out of bed, dragging on a somewhat threadbare bathrobe, and went in search of coffee.
At the top of the stairs, he heard somebody moving in the kitchen. Quickly but silently, he snatched his pistol from the top shelf of the airing cupboard. He carefully made his way downstairs, the slightly battered Desert Eagle in both hands. The chances of Death Eaters trying to break in twice in the space of a week seemed fairly small, but he was in no mood to take chances. He cautiously opened the kitchen door, and sighed. "Fred, George, just what the hell are you doing in my kitchen? No, don't answer that, just undo whatever it is you've done already and beat it before I call the police!" There was little heat in his voice, but he hadn't put the gun away.
"You have no appreciation of the finer points of comedy," one of them -Rick neither knew nor cared which one was which- complained good-naturedly.
"That's not entirely true. I do however have a vivid recollection of you nailing all my bedroom furniture to the ceiling, which wouldn't have been so bad if it hadn't fallen down. You destroyed my television, traumatised my cat, alienated my neighbours and got Dad in trouble with the Ministry for use of magic by minors on his property all in the space of a single day!"
"We weren't-"
"They thought it was me. Now get out of my house!" He brandished the Desert Eagle. Affronted, they apparated away.
Very cautiously, Rick switched on the kettle. Satisfied that nothing awful would happen, he extracted Nescafe and sugar from the cupboard and dumped both into a mug, added milk and stirred for a few seconds while the kettle boiled.
"You're up early," Luna remarked. "And what's with the hardware?"
"I heard something downstairs; turned out to be those redheaded menaces going by the names of Fred and George, but for all I knew it was another bunch of fanatical Wasps supporters." Wimbourne LQC (League Quidditch Club) had recently lost badly to the up-and-coming Northampton Mavericks, a newly formed team inaugurated in the wake of Minister Weasley's opening up of the Quidditch leagues, but Rick was referring to the two Death Eaters who'd broken into the house and threatened Luna's life until he'd intervened.
She giggled, and pulled down a mug of her own. "They do have their moments."
"That they do," Rick replied, sipping his coffee, "and I stopped finding them funny a long time ago. I still think that straitjacket has the potential to be interesting, though..." he grinned, and slipped an arm around her and squeezed her somewhere intimate. This time, she merely giggled again.
Two hours later, the phone rang. Rick groaned, stuck his head out from beneath the duvet and picked it up. "Whoever you are, unless this is unbelievably important then please go away and leave me alone- oh, sorry Major Black."
"If it wasn't important I'd still be in bed as well, lad. Somebody's shot up the Ministry; one of the Sunday staff got hurt, but the biggest casualties were people's potted plants."
"I see. This Heir of Voldemort's mob again?"
Sirius shrugged. "Good question. Just about all the Death Eater mobs are picking up guns these days, but drive-bys seem to be his style. Anyhow, we've got most of our people going over London with a fine-tooth comb looking for the car; we've got a description off a uniformed patrol in the area, but the plates turned out to be fake. I've had to pull people off the Minister's detail, so I need some backup from you lot."
"Oh, joy. Okay, I'll be at the Burrow in half an hour."
The Order of the Basilisk convened at the Burrow, clutching an assortment of weapons and complaining good-naturedly about the hour of the morning at which they'd been aroused. A smoulderingly furious Hermione Granger was sitting in what had once been Ron's bedroom window with a shotgun, and Rick felt genuinely sorry for any Death Eater foolish enough to tangle with her. He carefully attached his wand to the old Uzi submachine-gun he'd carried in battle so many years before. I wonder if the neighbours knew the history when they bought the place? Their grandson had been a surprise wizard, and his mother's childhood friend turning out to be both a witch and Harry Potter's younger sister had rather caught them off balance. Rick had met them briefly once at some Christmas do, and thought the boy's father had the rare distinction of being as amiably weird as Luna. Not to mention having worse hair than Harry...
He shook his head, and tried to concentrate on the issue at hand. The location was pretty good, with open ground on all sides for at least thirty yards and only one covered approach. There were no privacy wards up besides the standard NPM-screens (non-practitioner of magic, the polite alternative to Muggle, which the more forward-looking members of the magical community had adopted in recent years) stuff and a few basic anti-intruder charms aimed primarily at burglars. They'd set off a bell if anybody climbed over the garden fence, but that was about it. The large, Auror-issue Sneakoscope they'd brought with them was scrambled to the point of uselessness, and it turned out that the neighbours were playing poker.
"There's probably a by-law against doing that on the Sabbath," Harry quipped. "Where the hell is Ron with those pizzas?" Even Molly had her limits as far as catering went, and seeing as every Weasley grandchild -not to mention the Potter, Malfoy and Malone children- was being gathered under the one roof for reasons of safety (at Molly's insistence and without troubling to consult anybody else), they had decided not to impose on her more than necessary.
"When was the last time it was this noisy?" Ginny yelled over the minor riot that seemed to be breaking out in the garden as various Weasley children chased a football.
"Probably Tiffany's christening!" Draco replied. Rick still found the sight of his cousin -who he recalled as an arrogant, condescending little shit- bantering happily back and forth with the Golden Trio and bouncing a redheaded three year-old girl on his knee a touch surreal. And yet Draco had proved he never had it in him to be a bastard in two separate timelines; in the one Rick was in now he'd saved all three Dursleys from certain doom and caused his father to be severely concussed with a mobility aid. And by God, I'd have given just about anything to have Uncle Lucius in the room when Draco saluted Sirius Black the other day!
"Still makes you do a double take, doesn't it?" Ginny remarked. "Don't look so ashamed; it happens to me sometimes, and I married the bloke!"
"Damn! I thought my Mr Nice Guy act had you all fooled!" Draco laughed, exaggerating the famous Malfoy sneer to the point of caricature. "I must report to my Master at once!"
"Don't bother, Draco; I can still see you hyperventilating on my doorstep after the attack on Privet Drive!" Fran laughed. "The last time you were that scared was when Cedric hid in your wardrobe in seventh year."
Draco winced. Just about everybody's ears pricked up. After the unfortunate incident in their sixth year and her seventh when Cho had walked in on Cedric Diggory's departed shade locked in a passionate embrace with Moaning Myrtle in the ladies loo she haunted, they had assumed he had kept a low profile.
"You were there?" Draco spluttered.
"Cedric terrorised Mr Peroxide here, in front of your very eyes, and you never told any of us?" Harry exploded.
"Couldn't prove it, and if I'd told you I'd pinched your Invisibility Cloak and hidden under it with Pansy Parkinson you would have gone mad. Okay, listen up, all of you." They gathered round. "It was actually Pansy who put him up to it; this was just after the breakup, you see. She wanted an independent witness she could trust, so she went to me. I appropriated the cloak, put some film in my camera and rendezvoused with her at a safe distance from the tower. She let us both in, and I made my way to the men's dormitories. Pansy was behind me with her own camera, and I got the impression she'd had to sneak in here a few times before."
"You're right there," Draco remarked. "Oh, the stories I could- Ow! Knock it off, Gin!"
"Anyway," Fran continued pointedly, "at about midnight Draco goes up to bed, takes off his robes and goes to hang them in the wardrobe. What are you turning red for, you fool? You called me a dyke so many times when we were sprogs that I believed you!" Draco went even redder. "And just as he's opening the door, Cedric sticks his head through it and asks for directions to the Astronomy Tower 'cause he's meeting somebody. And poor old Draco faints dead away."
"Would that be Myrtle or Fleur?" Cho called out from the other side of the room. The only blonde Weasleys in the family made valiant attempts to shout her down until tackled to the floor by their cousins.
"I didn't ask," Fran replied. "And then he sort of floats down the stairs, moons the common room and wanders off. I was laughing so hard I could barely press the button, and would you believe it? The sodding shutter stuck! Luckily Pansy had a backup camera, but I never found out what happened to the photos."
"They never came out," Draco ground out from between his teeth, "on account of me wrestling the camera away from her and drop-kicking it across the common room when I came round to find her bragging about it to just about everybody." He had now gone such a deep shade of crimson he looked like a negative photograph of a Weasley. By way of consolation, Cho told him the silly petname she'd given him so that if they ever saw each other again he could get some measure of revenge. Luna slightly spoilt the effect by remarking in her usual apparently offhand way (in what Rick knew full well was in the spirit of causing deliberate mayhem) that Harry had picked up on the petname he'd given Cho in return, causing her to shout a stream of Chinese at Luna that would have made Malcolm Reynolds blush and sparking a lengthy side debate between Rick and Hermione over whether the David Bowie single in question (do I really need to tell you which one it is?) was any good.
Any Death Eater trying to approach the house would probably have fled in terror by now, Harry suspected, right up until a dozen bullets and a Stunner hit him in the chest.