"Harry? What are you doing up here?" an all-too-amused voice called from the other side of the common room, as Harry made his way toward his dorm.

Harry sighed. He didn't really want to talk to anyone right now, especially anyone as...inappropriately cheerful as Lyra. But it would be rude to just outright ignore her. He wound his way through the couches and chairs to the corner she'd claimed for herself and Hermione. "I do live here, Lyra. Hey, Hermione."

Hermione, her nose buried in a muggle physics book, mostly ignored him, giving him a vague "What? Hi, Harry..." without even looking up.

"Are you sure? I thought you lived in Blaise's room, now."

He felt himself flush. Yes, it was true he'd taken to sleeping in Blaise's room. If anyone asked it was because, with the wards Lyra had put around his bed to stop his sleeping mind wandering into any of his roommates' dreams, he'd started invading Voldemort's mind more often again. But really, he just...liked sleeping with Blaise.

...And doing other things with Blaise.

...Things which Blaise was probably doing right now with one of his Hufflepuffs.

Harry quashed the hint of jealousy that flared up whenever he thought of Blaise's Hufflepuffs. It wasn't like Blaise actually cared about them. And it wasn't as though Blaise was just saying that to make Harry feel special, he'd been in the bloke's head enough to know it was true.

A small, paranoid part of him still worried that Blaise didn't really care about Harry, either — he was still better at mind magic than Harry, he could be hiding things from him — but Harry was aware that that was ridiculous. Yes, Blaise could be hiding things from him, and probably was — he'd definitely blocked Harry wandering into certain memories involving the other people he did care about (Mirabella and Daphne, mostly, though he was also keeping a few secrets for Lyra and Theo too, apparently). But he didn't actually think Blaise was faking the things he did let Harry see. He wasn't sure he could, at least not as consistently as he had over the past six months or so, and especially this summer. (Blaise could fake emotions unnervingly well most of the time, but not when he was barely awake.)

There were a few other sets of memories that Blaise said he didn't mind sharing, but Harry didn't really want to get into — things Harry would think were horrifying and traumatic, like everything that had happened with Husband Number Five. He could be hiding things he didn't want Harry to get into along with them, any deep, dark secrets he was holding about himself. But, well... Harry had kind of gotten annoyed that Blaise was trying to protect him from something Blaise had obviously lived through just fine and looked at some of them anyway, and they had been exactly the sort of thing Blaise said they were. (And yes, Blaise was right, Harry really hadn't wanted to see those things, especially not first-hand. If Mirabella really had killed that bastard, Harry thought she was completely justified.) He'd just taken Blaise's word for it after that that he didn't want to know everything about his...boyfriend?

It was still very weird, thinking of Blaise as his boyfriend, as opposed to... Harry didn't actually know what he would have called their relationship before they'd started snogging and...getting off together?

He wasn't really sure it actually counted as sex, there were still things they hadn't done. Quite a lot of things, if Sirius was to be believed — Harry had kind of thought The Talk was a joke that only happened in sit-coms, but apparently no one had told Sirius that, so he'd spent an entire afternoon over the summer trapped in an excruciatingly embarrassing (albeit informative) lecture about sex from the godfather he barely knew, and his boyfriend's mum. (Which Blaise and Lyra had thought was hilarious, because they were both unsympathetic, sadistic prats like that.) Whatever, he didn't want to think about that, it had been awful...

Sure. Before they'd started getting off together. That was a fine way to describe their...whatever. Before that, Blaise had already been probably his best friend?

It seemed...wrong, to think of anyone but Ron as his best friend, but Ron Weasley was a fucking wanker, not answering his letters for months and then having the nerve to accuse him of hanging out with Blaise and Lyra instead of him just because they had money, and trying to warn him that Lyra was actually Bellatrix Lestrange! And then trying to drag him into his stupid shite with Malfoy — it had been pretty fucking clear, at the World Cup, that he and Ron weren't really friends anymore, let alone best friends.

Best friends didn't really seem to do his...whatever with Blaise justice, though.

Even before they'd started sharing a bed and snogging and things, Blaise had probably known him better than anyone else in the entire world. It was kind of impossible to teach someone occlumency without learning all their deepest, darkest secrets. And Harry had gotten to know Blaise almost as well.

Well enough to know that Blaise really did care about him, in a way he didn't care about his Hufflepuffs. Harry had thought Sirius was full of shite, when he'd said that (no matter how much he obviously enjoyed it) Blaise probably didn't think snogging was that big a deal, but as it turned out he was completely right. (Probably because Sirius, like Blaise, had never had trouble snogging anyone he pleased.) If he'd been spending his evenings snogging, say, Daphne, or any of the other very few people Blaise actually cared about, Harry might have been upset about it — okay, he would almost definitely be upset about it — but they'd talked about it (kind of, mostly it had been legilimency, but whatever), and Harry had decided that he was fine with the Hufflepuffs.

He actually felt sorry for them sometimes, because he knew they cared a lot more about Blaise than he did about them. (Blaise knew this too, but really didn't care.)

It was just— It was stupid, okay, he knew it was, but Harry had never really had anything that was just his before, anything that couldn't just be taken away from him whenever, for no reason at all. This...whatever this was, with Blaise, was his. And he couldn't help getting a little reflexively defensive about it, even when he knew there was absolutely no reason to, because there was approximately zero chance that any of Blaise's snogging companions (as Hermione called them) were ever going to have anything like what Harry had with him.

They were, at best, a mildly engaging diversion, a hobby of sorts.

Which Harry was fine with. (Mostly. He was working on it.)

"Ha bloody ha. You're the one who just goes and hangs out in Slytherin," Harry pointed out. He might sleep down in Blaise's room...pretty much all the time...but he didn't just sit around in their common room like he belonged there. He'd only ever gone in there looking for Blaise (or Lyra), and once when he was talking to Tracey and Daphne after Potions. (And that one time in second year that was frankly embarrassing in hindsight — even Malfoy wasn't stupid enough to just tell people if he was attacking his classmates.)

"I hang out in the Sett, too. The towers are too sunny. Anyway, what did Dumbles want?"

Ah. That. He'd forgotten Lyra had been there when Dumbledore's note had reached him at lunch, asking Harry to come to his office after dinner. He'd fobbed her off with some vague thing about the Voldemort Visions. Which it had been, if only very tangentially. He'd hardly had any dreamwalking issues since he'd started crashing in Blaise's room, so he didn't exactly have anything useful to tell Dumbledore (or Lyra) about what Undead Riddle might be up to. But it had come up, briefly.

Just, most of the meeting had been watching memories of Riddle in this cool pensieve thing — not quite as immersive as legilimising someone, but you could go in with multiple people and talk to them while you watched the memory, explain shite. And because it was actually a scrying focus — like a wand, kind of, except you didn't actually have to cast anything — you could see details the person the memory belonged to couldn't, like a story told in the third-person instead of first-person.

See, he hadn't actually told Lyra, or Hermione, or anyone, about the prophecy thing. (Well, Blaise, obviously, but Blaise was just as good at keeping his secrets as anyone else's.)

He wasn't really sure why. He did know that Lyra was planning on killing Riddle herself, and was organising something involving Snape and Gin, and maybe Sirius? He'd kind of implied that he'd...talked to Snape about it? in his last letter, which was really weird, because Sirius hated Snape. Possibly more than he hated Lily. He called him Snivillus, which Harry had to remind himself not to think too loudly whenever Snape was being an arse in Potions.

But then, Sirius's whole last letter was kind of weird and rambly (it might be contagious, come to think of it, the rambling). There was a bit that kind of sounded like he wanted Harry's permission to teach Gin ridiculous advanced light magic, or maybe like he was trying to apologise for offering to teach her and not Harry? Which, on the one hand, yeah, it would be nice to know some half-decent spells to maybe use against Voldemort if and when he tracked him down (again), but on the other, it kind of sounded like the only reason Sirius had agreed was because Gin was scary-dedicated, and if Gin-level dedication was a requirement, then, well... What was the point of surviving his next encounter with Riddle if he spent all his time practising and didn't get to have any sort of life? Plus, Sirius had definitely implied that learning that sort of really heavy emotionally-driven shite meant a lot of working on your issues, psychologically speaking, which...Harry wasn't prepared to do. Not with Sirius. Blaise, maybe, but...

Yeah, no. He'd stick with the less advanced light and dark magics Professor Lovegood was teaching in class, and maybe try to learn some more serious elemental spells. And something good for running away. Apparition, maybe, seemed like it could be useful, and the animagus thing was just fucking cool, he'd have to ask Sirius about it the next time he saw him. In person, because the rest of the letter was damn-near incomprehensible, a confused argument with himself about...introducing Harry to magic? (Harry thought he was already pretty familiar with magic? He did...do magic. Every day.) Something Lyra had mentioned about something, and James wouldn't want Sirius to do it, but Lily and Dorea, James's mother, would have considered it absolutely essential, and Sirius would be kind of surprised if Lily hadn't done it when Harry was named, or on his first birthday, because she was a fucking madwoman, but it was generally done again a few times, like, after the kid was old enough to remember it, and Sirius didn't know, so he was leaving it up to Harry if he wanted to do it — whatever it actually was.

Letters just didn't exactly seem like the best way to get any sort of straight answer about how to become an animal at will.

"Harry? Are you okay?"

Er, oops, kind of got distracted, there. But now that he was thinking about it, "Sirius said I should ask you guys about some introduction to magic thing?"

Hermione went positively scarlet. "You told Sirius about that?"

"About what? Are you okay?"

"Er...yes? I told your mum, too." ("You what?!") "Maïa's all embarrassed because she got high on magic and almost shagged me in front of Gin—" ("Lyra!") "—but what the hell is there to ask about? You just call up Magic — capital-M Magic — and say hi, get a sense of what it actually is. I'd be shocked if Lily didn't do it when you were a baby, but he should know how important it is to do it again now that you're old enough to know it. I specifically told him he needed to do yours, because who the fuck else would have — unless you wanted me to do it?"

"Er...considering I had no idea what he was talking about...I'll think about it?"

"Lyra! Why would you tell my mother about– that?!"

Lyra blinked at her. "She asked? I offered to Introduce her as well, and—"

"You offered— WHY?!"

This outrage was met with a shrug. "Why not? She is part of our world, now, voting the Black seat and all. It's not like you can't Introduce squibs, a lot of families do before they realise their kids aren't mages. So I don't see why I couldn't Introduce a muggle. Worst case, nothing happens. She hasn't gotten back to me yet. If she says yes, you should probably give her a run-down on what the magic high is like — it doesn't really affect me, so."

Hermione went, if possible, even redder. "So, does that mean— Did you, or did you not, tell my mother about...exactly what happened, after the ritual?"

Lyra smirked. "No. Somehow I doubt Emma's harbouring some secret lust for me, didn't really seem relevant."

Hermione closed her eyes, took a deep breath, obviously trying to master her embarrassment. Harry figured it would be good to give her a minute. "So, just to be clear, it's not like, some weird sex thing, or if I did it, I'd be overcome by a sudden urge to snog Sirius or something."

She giggled. "No. Most of the time it's not sexual at all. Though, no guarantees, if Blaise helps. Actually, come to think of it— Zee should have Introduced him, but... Eh, I'll ask him next time I see him. Not important. I doubt that's what Dumbles wanted to talk about, though. He's not really into high magic. And it definitely doesn't take an hour and a half to tell someone you've been avoiding legilimising undead dark lords in your sleep. So, what gives?"

Harry sighed. It wasn't like he actually had a reason not to tell her, beyond maybe just because she tried to keep secrets from him all the bloody time. "Look, don't get angry, okay—"

"Always a great way to start a conversation."

"Shut up, Lyra. What's going on, Harry?" Hermione fixed him with a very intense you have my attention expression, probably worried they had another Chamber of Secrets situation on their hands. Which, he guessed it kind of was, but it wasn't like anyone was being attacked today.

He glanced around quickly. No one seemed to be paying them any attention, but just to be safe, "There are privacy palings up over here, aren't there?"

"Wards, actually, pretty solid ones — Maïa's been practising, added exceptions and everything." Hermione pinked slightly under Lyra's praise, but Lyra didn't seem to notice. "Why do you think I'm going to be angry at you?"

"Because, well... Not angry at me, maybe, but..."

"Harry! Just tell me!"

"Okay, okay. So, you know that meeting I had with Dumbledore the first night back?"

"Mmm, yeah, forgot I never asked you about it. I got caught up with Slytherin and Rachel and cat armour and Éanna and the map... Never finished that, either, I should do that. But, Dumbles?"

Right, Harry knew about her attempts to bait the stupider arseholes in Slytherin into doing something that would give her an excuse to kick their arses. So far, this involved a first-year muggleborn she'd convinced to go to Slytherin, and Lyra pretending to be a prefect, he thought. Somehow. (Really, the only thing that had happened with Rachel so far was Blaise convincing her to join their dueling 'study group' so he didn't have to be their fourth.) And he was vaguely aware that she'd befriended Snape's awkward apprentice so that he wouldn't get overwhelmed by everyone at Hogwarts being complete twats and bugger back off to Éire and leave her with all the marking. Her words. (Harry was pretty sure she actually enjoyed Éanna's company, or at least not being the most socially awkward person around.) But, "Cat...armour?"

"Decided it would never work — fur, it's a problem. And shaving Missus Norris first is way more effort than I'm willing to put into this thing. Not important. Stop trying to change the subject."

"But, you make it so easy."

She glared at him, but it was Hermione who spoke. "You told me Dumbledore just wanted to talk to you about the blood ward and your mother's protection."

He had, yes, because he hadn't wanted to talk about this — he still didn't, really. But he didn't want to hide it from them either, and it might be better to talk about it, remind himself that...well, that Riddle wasn't just some poor kid who'd gotten caught up in a completely shite situation.

He meant, he knew Riddle was an evil git. He didn't think Riddle should have become a Dark Lord and killed all those people, but seeing the memories they'd watched was...humanising, kind of. He could see how...how Riddle would've thought it seemed reasonable, he guessed. Because, well, everyone had been killing everyone when he was a kid, hadn't they, what with World War II and the Blitz and all. And, in Lyra's words, everyone at Hogwarts really could be complete twats — especially in Slytherin when they thought you were muggleborn (and you didn't have a terrifying force of nature like Lyra looking out for you, waiting to pounce on the first idiot who gave her a reason).

"Er, well...we did. Kind of. A bit." They hadn't really, just mentioned them in passing, more like. "But, well. He told me..."

"Spit it out, Potter!"

"Shut up, Lyra. This obviously isn't easy for him. Take your time, Harry."

He took a deep breath. Lyra was right, he had to just tear off the bloody bandage. "He told me why Voldemort wanted to kill me, when I was a baby."

"...And? Because I'm not seeing any reason I would—"

"There was a prophecy."

Lyra's face went completely blank. "A prophecy," she repeated, sounding horribly confused. "He tried to kill a baby...because of a prophecy?! What the actual fuck?!"

"Er, Lyra..."

"No, Maïa, this is just— What the fuck happened to him? Did someone give him a fucking lobotomy? Because Professor Riddle is not that stupid! Unless he wasn't trying to avert the prophecy, it was just prophesied that he was going to... I don't know, I really don't — there's nothing I can think of that's as idiotic as trying to kill Lily's kid on Samhain, because of anything to do with a fucking prophecy! Or for any reason at all! It's not like someone wouldn't have told him about her thing with Kore — they tell him shite about me, and they liked Lily a hell of a lot more than they like me!"

There was probably a question in there about who was telling Riddle about Lyra, and one about who Kore was — probably a god, from the context, but Harry had never heard of them, and wasn't sure he wanted to know. Professor Lovegood had mentioned some...pretty disturbing things about Lily, just in passing, not even counting the whole casually shagging thing, which was disturbing in a very different way. (Harry did not want to think about his mother and his Defence professor running off to "ride unicorns" together in the Forbidden Forest, okay.)

But he definitely did want to know about, "Professor Riddle?" Because Lyra referred to He Who Can't Even Die Properly as Not-Professor Riddle. She'd told him that it was because Riddle had applied to be a professor at Hogwarts, and had only really thrown himself into the whole Dark Lord thing after Dumbledore refused to hire him. But that, referring to a Professor Riddle, suggested that wasn't the reason for Voldemort's nickname, even if the Riddle-wanting-to-be-a-professor story was true — which it was, it had just come up in one of the memories Dumbledore had shown him.

Harry thought Dumbledore could be forgiven for thinking that Riddle, striding about the Ministry like he owned the place with Draco's great-grandfather — a weirdly serious eight or nine-year-old Lyra lookalike and an absolutely miserable looking thirteen- or fourteen-year-old Malfoy (Draco's grandfather) trailing behind them — had never really intended to leave his modest but increasingly successful political career to come teach. Yes, it was a bit paranoid to assume he had some ulterior motive, but, well, it was kind of suspicious, Riddle applying for a job with Dumbledore as his boss. He had to have known, based even on the tiny bit of their history Harry had just seen, that Dumbledore would never give him a job.

So who the hell was Professor Riddle?

"Er..."

"Lyra. Have you still not told him— I thought you said he knew about Eris, and the Conspiracy, and everything!"

"He does know about the Conspiracy! And Eris — or, well, kind of, I don't know, did you know her name?" she asked Harry, though she didn't actually give him a chance to answer. (Yes, he did, because he'd asked Blaise about it after the whole incredibly disturbing experience of kind of sort of almost possessing Lyra and running into a fucking god in her head.) "He just doesn't know where I'm from—"

"He's sitting right here," Harry pointed out, entirely unable to keep the annoyance from his voice. Honestly, he didn't really try, she was such a hypocrite — she hated being talked about like she wasn't in the room.

"—though I guess there's no reason not to tell him, really. I mean, he can definitely keep it secret just as well as you, so." She turned to Harry, a smirk tugging preemptively at the corner of her lips — anticipating an amusing reaction, apparently. "Bella's not my mother, or my bioalchemic twin, or whatever, we're the same person, from different timelines." What the... "Grindelwald's war didn't get off the ground in mine, I was trying to go back in time to make it happen, Eris — the goddess who lives in my head — thought this would be more fun. Long story short, I was born in Nineteen Fifty in a universe where Dumbledore never defeated Grindelwald, because he wasn't a significant enemy to defeat. He was still the Head of Gryffindor and the senior Transfiguration professor when I left — Sixty-Three."

Harry...had absolutely no idea what to say to that. On the one hand, it sounded completely impossible, that Lyra was actually...some alternate universe Bellatrix Lestrange? but on the other hand...this was Lyra. Impossible was practically her middle name.

She laughed at what had to be a completely stunned expression on his face.

So...Ron had been right? And Blaise had lied to him! That— That was fucking infuriating, really. Much more so than Lyra lying to him about who she was (even though he was fucking positive he was the last person to know, or just about, he always was). He didn't expect Lyra to be honest with him. But Blaise— That supreme fucking arse had some explaining to do! A lot of explaining, in fact!

"Harry?" Hermione said cautiously. He swallowed hard, pushing his fury away. Unlike some people, he could control himself — he would control himself, damn it! He didn't want to scare his friends! "It's not that bad, really. I mean, there's not that much difference between Lyra being identical to Bellatrix because she's a clone and because she's from an alternate timeline."

"Hey, that bitch and I are very different people! I never ran around worshipping Tom fucking Riddle, for one thing!"

"But you knew him," Harry said, his voice sounding distant and wooden, even to himself. "That's why you call him Professor Riddle. Or Not-Professor Riddle, whatever."

"Well, yeah. Who did you think gave me a pet name in Parsel?" Not someone who'd been half-dead pretty much as long as she'd been alive! "He was my Head of House and probably my favourite professor — Defence. Well, nominally. Huge Dark Arts nerd, relatively popular ritualist — ah, popular among the Powers, that is, it wasn't like you could do black magic openly at home, either. His public reputation was more like Snape's — he was obviously pretty deep into the Greater Dark Arts, but never got caught actually doing anything, so mostly respectable. He's very sharp. He didn't give much of a fuck about what we got up to down in the snake pit, but he definitely knew about everything going on behind his back. Bella said when she jumped off a balcony and broke an arm trying to fly—" Harry nearly commented on the suggestion that Lyra had apparently jumped off a balcony trying to fly, but on second thought that sounded like exactly the sort of thing she would do. "—Not-Professor Riddle just told her to jump off a bench or something next time, which is definitely something I'd expect from Professor Riddle — they seem like they're pretty similar, which makes it even weirder that he decided to become a fucking Dark Lord.

"Because Professor Riddle was not Dark Lord material. Yeah, he's a mind mage and sorcerer-powerful — I wouldn't be at all surprised to find out he was doing subsumption rituals to enhance his natural abilities — and the Powers like him, which makes him dangerous as hell, but he has absolutely no interest in politics outside of Hogwarts. He spends most of his free time writing articles on obscure magical theory — and driving Dumbledore crazy, which is fucking hilarious to watch. But Dark Lord Riddle is like Dark Lord Éanna, it's just...silly. And a stupid Riddle is...a fucking oxymoron, really.

"It's just completely inexplicable that he would have— Lily wasn't dedicated, okay, but it wasn't exactly a secret that Persephone was courting her. Trying to kill one of Death's favourites on Samhain? That's fucking suicidal. And over a prophecy of all things? Come on!"

"What was the prophecy, Harry?" Hermione asked, exactly as Harry predicted she would, back when Dumbledore was first telling him about it.

"I don't know. Dumbledore wouldn't tell me the exact wording, he didn't want it to get back to Voldemort. I guess his spy only heard part of it, back in the Seventies? But he said it's definitely about me, and there's a line that neither of us can live while the other survives — that one of us has to kill the other."

Lyra's eyes narrowed. "No."

"What do you mean 'no'?" Hermione snapped. "Even you can't argue with actual Fate."

"Watch me. Riddle's mine, Harry. I realise you might have some sort of claim against him because he killed your parents, but his crimes against Bella and the House of Black were worse, so we get precedence, and Bella said I could have him. If you want to kill a Dark Lord, go find your own. Or, I don't know, start learning necromancy so you can resurrect him and kill him again, because I called dibs!"

"You can't call dibs on murdering someone!"

"Obviously, Maïa, I can. And Harry, you do not want to cross me on this."

She glared at him, magic roiling in the air around her, cold and dangerous and entirely unnecessary, because, "I don't want to kill him! I don't want to have anything to do with him!"

"Well, good, then. Because you really shouldn't be trying to kill anyone anyway, even if they are inexplicably stupid."

"What is that supposed to—" Harry cut himself off when he realised how completely ridiculous it was to be offended that Lyra didn't think he should be trying to kill people. She just sounded so condescending about it! "No, you know what, good. I'm glad you think so. He's all yours. Give him a kick in the balls from me."

Lyra apparently didn't catch the very heavy sarcasm in his voice, as she just grinned. "Done. So—"

"What about the prophecy?"

Fuck. For a brief, glorious moment, Harry had forgotten about that, only too pleased to hand over the responsibility of killing Voldemort, even if Lyra was being completely ridiculous and patronising about it. (When wasn't Lyra ridiculous and patronising, honestly?)

Lyra clicked her tongue impatiently. "What about the prophecy, Maïa?"

Her dismissive tone made Hermione look a little uncertain, just for a second. "You— Prophecies are a certainty, Lyra. You know that. Even you can't..."

"Prophecies are dragonshite, Hermione. Even the real ones. Seers are human. Even when Magic tells them exactly what's going to happen, they get shite wrong, things are lost in translation, and it's only certain that some outcome that fulfills the prophecy is going to happen — the best way to deal with a prophecy is to ignore it. Live your life and pursue your goals regardless of what the universe has to say about it, because even if you orchestrate circumstances to fulfill it, that might not be one of the potential outcomes it was referring to, and one of them will still happen, and specifically trying to force an outcome you like by focusing on the prophecy instead of just working toward an outcome you like in general is far more likely to result in an outcome you don't like.

"And I for one am not going to just stand aside and stop trying to kill that fucker just because Fate seems to think that Harry's going to strike the actual killing blow. What if my trying to kill him is the difference between Harry killing him and Stupid Riddle killing Harry? No. I refuse to give a single flying fuck about this thing, and if you two are smart, you'll ignore the bloody thing, too. It doesn't matter."

"It kind of does, though," Harry had to point out, anxiety rising in his stomach again. "I mean, even if we don't care about it, Riddle does. He's going to keep trying to kill me because he thinks his life depends on it."

"As opposed to trying to kill you because people perceive you as the cause of his downfall back in Eighty-One, and taking you out would at least save a small measure of face? Or as revenge because you stopped him getting the Philosopher's Stone? Or because he wants to undermine Lily's victory over him by killing you at long last? It's not like he was ever going to come to the table and negotiate some sort of truce with you. At this point, this prophecy changes nothing, it means nothing."

That was somehow...not comforting. "Dumbledore thinks it means something."

"Yeah, well, Albus Dumbledore is an idealistic fucking moron. Bella and Riddle were playing with him, you know. And he never realised it."

"They were what?"

"You heard me. It was a game. The entire war. I mean, it's fucking obvious if you just look at some of the shite they came out with, ridiculous, stupidly complex plans with enough moving parts it would be more difficult for Dumbledore to not foil them. I mean, organising a massive, incredibly obvious ritual in the middle of Moel Tŷ Uchaf? the Three Days' Rebellion? staging a bioalchemic attack on the Ministry which required access that they could easily have used to just take the place over? booby-trapping Platform Nine-and-Three-Quarters, and building that ridiculous vault, with the inferi? They weren't trying to just win — they were fucking playing with the Light, drawing it out and refusing to just take over once and for all because that wouldn't be nearly as much fun. And according to Sirius, Dumbles had no idea. Excuse me if I fail to consider him a paragon of intelligence, here."

Hermione glared at her. "Did you consider that he didn't think it was a game because they were killing people?"

"No? Obviously that's what happens when you lose."

"Are you honestly telling me you don't— Urgh! You're infuriating, you know that?"

"Yes? I mean, it's obvious that you're frustrated and annoyed with me. I don't know why — it's not like I started a war to entertain myself. I stupidly agreed not to go around doing that sort of shite." She pulled a face. "Compromise, since there are only three of us in the House at the moment and Siri broke the Covenant — he didn't want me getting into real fights at all, even if another riot broke out right in front of me."

"That was such a Bellatrix thing to say," Harry noted, stealing Sirius's favourite one-liner to change the subject back to a point he really felt needed to be more thoroughly addressed. She giggled, because of course she did. Hermione didn't, scowling at him for interrupting her telling Lyra off for being a ridiculous, bloodthirsty psychopath (as though telling Lyra off ever made any impression at all), but that wasn't exactly a surprise, either. "Speaking of which, why the fuck wouldn't you tell me that you're from an alternate universe?!"

She shrugged. Shrugged. "Didn't really seem important."

"It didn't. Seem. Important."

"Well, the bioalchemy story explains the weirder shite like magic knowing I was born in Nineteen Fifty and my magical signature being so similar to Bella's. Only real difference is I was raised by the Black elves and Ciardha, instead of Mickey's pack and some non-existent Black metamorph. And even if it would be a hell of a lot harder for Mysteries to lock me up for meddling with time and/or to study me like an exotic fish now that Sirius's name is cleared and the House is a political player again, that doesn't mean they wouldn't try, so yeah, just forget about the dimension hopping, it's not important."

"I kind of think it is!"

She groaned. "Why?"

"What do you mean why?"

"Why the hell does it matter where I came from or who I was before I got here?" Harry...had no good response to that. He hesitated, which apparently meant they were done talking about this. "So, is Dumbles, I dunno, teaching you some kind of ridiculous light sorcerer spells to use against Riddle, or something? I mean, he hasn't got a bit of common sense, but he is obnoxiously powerful, he's got to know a few really good ones."

"Er, no. I mean, maybe, but— If I wanted to learn light battlemagic I could ask Sirius. And even if he did want to teach me some ridiculously powerful shite, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be able to cast it. I mean, ridiculous light sorcerer, remember?"

Lyra grinned. "There are ways around that, especially for someone with a talent for subsumption and unfair magical ambivalence. Plus it's not like you're a weak mage to begin with. Normal thirteen-year-olds don't cast patroni, remember? But if he's not teaching you badass light spells, what did he want? I mean, you said he told you about the idiot bait on our first night back, right? So..."

Harry groaned, letting his head fall back to stare at the ceiling for a moment. Why couldn't she just let it go? (He knew the answer, of course — because that would be too easy, and Harry's life simply wasn't easy.) "We were watching memories. Dumbledore has one of those pensieve things you were asking Shirazi about..."

She didn't take the bait. "So a getting to know the enemy thing? And what does His Excellent Judgment want you to know about Not-Professor Riddle?"

That was...kind of a hard question. He meant, he thought he knew what Dumbledore was trying to show him — he'd practically told him, that first night back, that Tom Riddle was a soulless monster, cold at best and sadistic at worst, just completely irredeemable. Which he was. But the memories...didn't really show that. Yeah, it was pretty fucking obvious, especially in the earlier memories of him, in the aftermath of siccing a snake on...Draco's great-uncle? (Harry wasn't really sure who Scorpius Malfoy was) and in his earliest meetings with his Head of House, one Horace Slughorn, that Riddle wasn't, he didn't know, normal. But, well... He'd been a creepy kid, sure, but Dumbledore really hadn't had any reason to think he was as evil as he actually was. Or if he had, he hadn't shown it to Harry.

In fact, if he hadn't already known how evil Riddle was, Harry suspected that the memories he'd just watched would probably have convinced him that Dumbledore was a paranoid old man, reading too much into them. Because, well, he hadn't really shown Harry anything he hadn't already seen, spending the summer with the Blacks and the Zabinis. Of course, Dumbledore would probably think that just meant Lyra and Blaise were every bit as evil as Riddle, which they definitely weren't.

Like, Riddle had been unnervingly contained and...aware, of the people around him, too confident for an eleven-year-old in an entirely new world, but Harry was pretty sure that was just a child-legilimens thing. He'd seen the same creepy, entirely unimpressed stare on Blaise, even when he was five or six. Granted, he hadn't come into his legilimency by then, but he'd been an empath longer than he could remember, and had definitely been a competent occlumens already.

And yes, Riddle had been absolutely ruthless, trying to make a place for himself in Slytherin despite being muggleborn (as far as he or anyone else had known), and dirt poor to boot. But he didn't obviously enjoy hurting people. Certainly less so than Lyra. Hell, Harry could imagine Hermione convincing herself that that level of violence was necessary, if she had to live in Slytherin with Draco. (She'd set Snape on fire, and he was a professor.)

In the later memories, like the one where Riddle was convincing the Headmaster of the time to expel Hagrid over Aragog and the Chamber of Secrets petrifications, he was much smoother, clearly manipulating everyone involved to shift the blame off of himself. But it was only clear because Harry knew he'd had an ulterior motive in turning Hagrid in. If he hadn't already known, hadn't heard it from the diary horcrux itself, he might not have believed it at all. Because, see, Hagrid had been raising an acromantula, in the school. And while Harry would easily admit that the acromantula was clearly a conscious, intelligent being, not just some mindless creature, Aragog had given his children permission to eat him and Ron. (It had taken all of two seconds for Harry to decide that no matter how fucked up it was for Lyra to be killing sentient beings for fun, as long as she stuck to giant spiders he didn't care.)

Dumbledore had tried to use the whole incident as an example of the way Riddle didn't care who got the blame for his crimes as long as he got off scot-free, playing on Harry's fondness for Hagrid. And Harry would always have a soft spot for the gentle giant, the man who had introduced him to the magical world. But that was itself kind of manipulative, and it had kind of been a good thing, even if Riddle did it for a bad reason. Not entirely unlike Lyra capturing a bunch of Death Eaters at the World Cup — she had definitely not done it to help the Aurors, but it was still objectively a good thing.

And yes, Riddle had gone off to become a disgusting, manipulative acquisitions agent for some Knockturn Alley shop, and then, after disappearing from Britain for a few years, returned to become a slimy, manipulative politician, writing bills and arguing for laws that served the Malfoys' interests, but...that was what salesmen and politicians did, serving their own interests, or those of their employer, or whatever. (Including Dumbledore, though he wasn't very good at it.) Mira had spent all summer jumping back over here to do that sort of thing for the Department of Education.

And then he'd interviewed at Hogwarts, to become the Defence professor. His appearance, in that memory, was shocking — very different from the face he'd had only a few years before, which Dumbledore said was simply a mask of glamoury, imitating the charming features he'd once had. He hadn't worn it when he came to the Castle, showing Dumbledore his true face, features waxen and burned-looking and eyes painfully bloodshot. Dumbledore claimed that this was due to his delving into the Dark Arts, his face reflecting the state of his soul, but Harry did have to wonder, because the Blacks were, collectively speaking, every bit as bad as Riddle. Sirius had let slip that they used to kill people in human sacrifice rituals — that Sirius himself had taken part in these rituals, when he was a kid and hadn't known any better — and he didn't look like he'd been in some horrific potions accident. In fact, Harry had never seen an ugly Black, or even a portrait of one. (Seriously, every one of them was unnaturally pretty, it was fucking weird.)

Harry wanted to believe Tom Riddle was evil, and always had been. He knew he had been — Blaise had told him what making a horcrux entailed, killing a person and twisting their soul into a grotesque copy of yours, overwriting its identity like an all-encompassing compulsion they could never escape from, trapping it in a book or necklace or whatever, possibly forever. And Riddle had done it at least five times. And he knew that Riddle had been a sick motherfucker long before he made his first horcrux. Gin had told him a few things about Riddle when he'd been their age that legitimately turned his stomach. According to her, he used to go out into muggle London and torture people over the hols just because he found it relaxing, or something, mind raping them and cutting them up. That he got off on it, turning people into fucking puppets. He hadn't killed anyone before he made his first horcrux, she didn't think, but neither one of them doubted that he would've become a fucking serial killer even if he hadn't become a Dark Lord.

But comparing that, what he already knew about Riddle, to Dumbledore's memories of him, he couldn't help finding Riddle more sympathetic now than he had two hours ago.

"I...think he wanted to show me what a terrible person Riddle was, but..."

"But?" Hermione echoed.

"Well, I kind of already knew that, didn't I? I mean, Gin has to have told you..." From the look on Hermione's face, she had. "Yeah. In comparison, the things Dumbledore had to show me were— He didn't seem like such a bad guy. Not worse than you, Lyra, or Blaise, and definitely not as bad as he actually was. Was the professor version of him a serial killer, by the way?" he asked, as it occurred to him Lyra might be able to confirm that theory.

Lyra raised an eyebrow at him. "I don't know. The only professor I've had who discusses their sex lives with their students is Cassie."

"Sex and murder are not analogous subjects, Lyra," Hermione informed her, inarticulate discomfort escaping her hold on her mind, along with a hint of doubt — are they? She redoubled her efforts to occlude almost immediately, much to Harry's relief. He really didn't want to follow that train of thought, which would undoubtedly lead to her and Lyra's sex life. (People were depressingly predictable like that — almost everything led back to sex, and surprisingly quickly.)

"Maybe not for you."

Hermione let her head fall to the table, her hair spilling over her books. The pile of curls muttered something that sounded very much like, "I'm dating a crazy person."

"How can you possibly still sound surprised about that? Was this a one-time thing?" she asked Harry, ignoring Hermione's frustrated groan. "Because if not, you should try to get him to show you the Battle of Denbigh Moor. I hear it was fucking awesome."

"Meaning..."

"Riddle versus Dumbledore, Bella holding off half the Auror Corp, their allies — Greyback and the vampire division, mostly, but also a fair few hired warlocks — completely slaughtered the Hit Wizards and volunteer corps, while the actual Death Eaters staged a series of coordinated raids across at least forty-five magical and muggle targets. Retaliation for the Diagon Alley Massacre, the death toll was well over a thousand. How do you not know this?"

"Er..." Because that definitely wasn't the sort of thing he would call fucking awesome, any more than he would run off to join in a fucking riot just because it was there? Because he couldn't just think of the casualties as numbers, and he didn't like thinking about his parents and their friends being in mortal danger? It really wasn't worth trying to explain either answer.

"Now, Lyra, you know one can't be expected to learn any actual history at Hogwarts."

Yeah, Harry wasn't touching that one, either. Hermione could rant about the shortcomings of their various professors for hours.

Lyra wasn't either — she just shrugged. Hermione huffed, returning to her book in a show of ignoring them right back (though Harry was certain she was still listening). "If you can't get Dumbledore to show you, ask Siri about it. I mean, I did read about it in one of Maïa's history books, but he's the one who told me how impressive it was — like Cassie at the World Cup, but against actual battlemages. I haven't found a pensieve yet, but if I were a legilimens, I would definitely get him to show me."

Somehow, Harry thought Sirius might be less enthusiastic about sharing battle stories with him than he was with "Little Bella", even if Harry wanted to hear them. (Did Sirius know who she was? Was that why he called her Bella?) They kind of brought out the worst in each other, like just because there were two of them they didn't have to pretend to not be completely insane, and Sirius tried to at least fake being a better person than he actually was around Harry. Which meant trying to not be inappropriately excited or nostalgic or whatever about situations where people actually died. (Either that or looking at Harry reminded Sirius that people he'd actually cared about had died. Maybe both.)

But that really didn't seem worth trying to explain to Bellatrix Lestrange either — even if Lyra obviously wasn't quite as violently sadistic as the older, Riddle-fucked version of herself. "No, it wasn't a one-time thing. I think he wanted to kind of set the stage, show me what kind of person Riddle is, first. He's going to keep looking for other memories that kind of show how Riddle thinks."

Lyra raised an eyebrow at him. "You do realise that the things Riddle does and says, especially anywhere His Excellent Analysis might see him, aren't going to actually show you anything about how he thinks, right? He's kind of like Zee like that."

Harry snorted. "Yeah. Dumbledore knows that, too, believe it or not. He kind of hinted that it would take longer to get the next batch of memories together because he needed to convince the D.L.E. to share some of the shite they got from prisoners in plea deals, and Snape — you know, get some insight on what actually happened behind the scenes with the Death Eaters."

"Like Sev will really be hard to convince? Though... Look, go through the Potter vault and properties and see if you can find a pensieve — the only one I've been able to find is broken."

"Er...why?"

"Because Cissy and de Mort used to play Autocrátores. And also because I'm not a legilimens and I missed thirty years of potentially interesting shite, obviously."

Still fucking weird, hearing her say something like that, but Harry was already starting to get used to the idea that Lyra was a time traveller, not a clone... Not that that hadn't been weird. Whatever.

"Autocrátores?" Hermione looked up, her curiosity apparently overcoming her annoyance.

"Stratēgoi Autokrátores. It's this stupidly complicated strategy game based on Alexander's invasion of the Achaemenid Empire. The specifics aren't important. She definitely won't let Dumbledore see those memories — if you want to know how someone thinks, looking at the way they plan a military campaign or a political takeover is a hell of a lot better than looking at the act they put on for their followers and political opponents, but that's exactly why it would be a good idea to look at Riddle's strategy, and she would let us. I mean, I would say look at the actual war, but there's really no way to tell how much of that was Bella. He was definitely the tactical commander, because there's no way Bella would just sit back and direct a battle, but he's a muggle-raised orphan. Didn't exactly get a proper education. He'd have to be a complete idiot not to take her advice on the overall direction and specific objectives of the campaign. Which he wasn't...Samhain attack notwithstanding. So?"

Harry sighed. "I'll look for one." Not that he actually minded, that thing was really cool, he was sure he could think of other things to use it for, memories he might be able to convince people to share that he didn't actually want to see from their perspective, but just like a movie he could walk around in, or something. Being able to re-live the World Cup, complete with all the details he hadn't been able to notice at the time, for example.

She grinned. "Good. I hadn't even considered trying to get background on him from his enemies, but this is good. Coordinate with Gin putting together an understanding of the wanker, different perspectives to get the whole picture, you know. I would say Sirius and Sev, too, but I don't really think either of them knew him very well. If you want to give it a shot, it can't really hurt, though. Try to figure out why Not-Professor Riddle would do something so phenomenally stupid as to attack you — and by extension, your mother — on Samhain."

"I'm pretty sure we already answered that one. The prophecy?" he reminded her, ignoring how irritating it was when she gave orders like she just expected him to do whatever she said. Mostly because it wasn't actually a bad suggestion.

"What part of phenomenally stupid do you not understand? We need to know what the hell he was thinking to actually pay it any attention at all."

Hermione rolled her eyes. "I can't believe I'm saying this, but you did say Bellatrix was willing to give us information, right?"

Lyra scowled. "Yes, but fuck that bitch." Harry still wasn't entirely certain what Bellatrix had done — when Lyra had first told him that she'd visited her evil twin (he was still going to think of them that way, he decided), she'd seemed to be completely fine with the escaped madwoman — but he didn't really care. Lyra not wanting to talk to her or be anything like her was, as far as he was concerned, a good thing. Especially since they were apparently the same fucking person. "I'm not going to ask her for help. I will start working on Cissy to give us what she knows, though. Worst case, if you can't find a pensieve, I'm thinking about making one for my Runes project anyway, so. And don't tell Dumbledore any of this. If he finds out about the Conspiracy, he'll just get in the way."

No, you think? If anything, get in the way was probably understating it. Harry was pretty bloody certain Dumbledore wouldn't want Lyra anywhere near his attempt to prepare Harry to finish off Voldemort. And not just because she would almost certainly tell Dumbledore he was a fucking moron to want Harry to do it, bugger off so she could do it herself.

"And I do still think we should try to find out exactly what the prophecy says," Hermione pointed out. "It could be important," she added defensively, in response to Lyra's annoyed glare. "Especially if Riddle let it influence his movements toward the end of the war."

Lyra harrumphed. "Well, if you want to look into it, you know I'm not going to stop you. But I don't want to know. It only matters if you let it matter, and I say it doesn't."

"This is why you're so bad at divination, you know."

"No, I'm bad at divination because divination is a crapshoot."

"Well, if you actually believed it would work—"

"But I don't. Arithmancy, yes, probabilities are fine. And specific inquiry charms, whatever. But—"

"I'm just...gonna go," Harry muttered, edging away from the girls and their bickering.

They completely ignored him. "But nothing, there's no reason you shouldn't be able to—"

"Fate doesn't like me. Which is fair, I don't like it, either. So, yes, there is a reason I—"

"But you can do every single part of it, reading magic and interpreting it, and inquiry charms are basically identical in principle, and—"

Yeah, Harry didn't need to hear this argument again. He was just going to go up to his room, and... Probably sit around for twenty minutes trying to remember why he'd come up here in the first place, he'd completely forgotten, in the midst of the revelation about where Lyra came from and Blaise being a lying liar who lies, and talking about Riddle, and everything.

Bugger.

Minor ret-con: we're including Candidus Malfoy in this fic, one of Sandra's characters, who didn't exist in Coming of Age in the House of Black (the story this one is a divergence from). This means that the Malfoy at Bella/Lyra's fifth birthday party with Tom would have been Candidus (a couple years older than Tom, in the same class as Cygnus), possibly accompanied by his son, Abraxas, who would have been about twelve, and quite plausibly would have seemed very grown up to five-year-old Bella. (Abraxas knocked up his future wife when he was thirteen or fourteen. Shotgun wedding ensued. Candidus was Very Disappointed.) This would have happened in both timelines. —Leigha

Of course, Candidus Malfoy and Tom Riddle were also dorky high school boyfriends, because sometimes Tom is unknowingly adorable. —Lysandra