As usual on Wednesdays that year, Harry's first class of the day was History of Magic and, after a whole term without Mia there teaching it, she was back. Her lecture that day, though, sounded rather… off.
Usually, Harry thought, it was the passion she spoke with when telling them about history, her interaction with the students and one or other comparison of complex past events with things right out of their daily routine that got the class interested. That day… well, she sounded like a recording of someone reading an incredibly plain textbook. Was she that out of shape after only a few months not working as a teacher?
"What's going on with Mia today?" Ron whispered by his side, his head propelled on his arm in a bored fashion that matched the vague look on his face. "She's sounding like bloody Binns now."
"Shut up and listen, Ron," Hermione demanded on Harry's other side, carefully taking notes of Mia's words in her parchment – something in her seemed to bide her immune to Mia's boring lecture that day.
"What? She is," the redhead replied, peeking behind his best mate's back to look at her.
Hermione sighed, allowing herself not to pay attention for a moment. "She sounds upset, even looks so," she said, turning to Harry. "Do you know if something happened?"
He shook his head. "Maybe she's just tired. I suppose Mary may be keeping her and Sirius awake lately. Aren't babies supposed to be teething at her age?"
"That usually doesn't happen before they turn six months old. She's not even four yet," Hermione said, doubtfully.
Ron raised an eyebrow. "Do you know everything?"
"It's called reading, Ronald. You should try it sometime. Now pay attention. This may come in the exam and I'm not lending you two my notes this time…"
Despite his earlier dismissal of it, Harry spent the following minutes wondering if Hermione was right regarding Mia being upset about something… later, he concluded she was. As he paid closer attention to the dull sound of her voice, he noted a tone of anxiety behind it. It was hardly noticeable and he certainly wouldn't have identified it if he hadn't known his godmother for so long…
He hoped there hadn't been an attack and someone had gotten hurt… Or that Alex or Mary weren't ill or something. Those would be more and more things piling over Mia's shoulders, as if there weren't enough already. That thought rather eased that internal battle he'd been struggling with for the past couple of weeks over keeping or not things – important things – from his godparents. He just couldn't add up more to that weight…
For the rest of the class, Harry tried to pay attention to Mia's words, taking a few notes so as not to anger Hermione, who elbowed him whenever he got an absent look on his face (and also to have some backup plan in case his friend really kept her promise of not letting him and Ron borrow her notes).
By the time the class had already ended and most of the students were making their ways out the door, heading to the next one, Harry heard his name being called as he, Ron and Hermione finished putting away their things to follow. When he looked up, Mia, who'd been the source of the call, was standing near her desk looked at him with slightly uncertain eyes. It was like she was fighting her feelings right then.
"Would you mind staying a few minutes longer?" she asked quietly.
"Yeah, sure," he said quickly, turning to his friends for a moment. "You guys go ahead to next class without me. I'll meet you there."
They nodded. "I'll inform Professor McGonagall you're talking to Mia," Hermione said as she and Ron grabbed their bags and headed out.
With his two friends gone, Harry grabbed his own bag and approached his godmother, feeling rather uncertain of what might be about to take place. Why did he have such a bad feeling about it? "Did you need something, aunt Mia?" he asked nervously.
"I do, actually," she said in a low tone, followed by a sigh. "Sirius and I need to talk to you. I'm not sure if you have any free time before I'm supposed to leave in the afternoon but I can…"
"I've got a free period right after lunch. At half past one," he told her quickly.
She nodded. "Alright. That will do. Meet us at your godfather's office then. We can talk there."
Her tone was so… disconnected. More and more he believed she was trying to shadow what she was feeling. "Is there something wrong?" he finally asked.
Another sigh came. "You tell me, Harry. It seems lately you haven't been telling me many things," she said in a low tone before taking a deep breath. "There wasn't an attack and nobody was physically hurt, if that's what you're wondering. We just need to talk to you."
"Okay," he mumbled, an uneasy feeling still resting inside his chest. It clicked, then: she knew he was hiding something, Harry realized. He'd been hoping it wouldn't reach that – he'd been hoping his godparents would either be too busy to notice he was being secretive or that they would just let him be and not corner him about it. He didn't want to lie to them but he didn't want to tell the truth either…
A knock on the class's door made him resurface from his thoughts and Mia turned to look at it as well. Colin Creevy was standing by the door. "Oh, come on in, Colin," she said, before facing Harry again. "We'll talk later."
He nodded. "Later, then," he mumbled again, turning and heading to the door as several fifth year Gryffindors and Ravenclaws made their way in – Luna Lovegood, among the students, greeted him happily as she walked in. He was still thinking of what to tell Sirius and Mia later in their talk when he very literally ran into a blur of red, leading into a loud crash of books all over the floor. It took him a few fractions of second to realize the blur was Ginny, who stood opposite him with Izzy.
"Well, aren't you clumsy today?" his girlfriend with an eyebrow rose before reaching down to pick up the school books she'd been carrying.
"Sorry," he apologized, reaching down as well.
"What are you still doing here?" Izzy inquired with a chuckle. "I saw Ron and Hermione rushing to McGonagall's class like five minute ago."
"Oh, I was held back for a while talking to your Mom," he said quickly, before shooting Ginny a pointed look, which she replied with a knowing one – he didn't even need to utter a word in order to tell he needed to talk to her alone.
Ginny cleared her throat. "Iz, can you go in and save us some seats at the front before they're all taken?" she asked her friend. "I'll meet you there right away."
"You know, if you guys want me out of here so you can snog, just say so," Izzy said, shaking her head as she turned to walk away and entered her mother's classroom.
"What's wrong?" Ginny asked in a whisper as the two leaned down, picking up her books from the floor.
Harry turned his face to face hers. "It's Mia. She knows."
"About the…" she paused, noticing a group of her classmates passing by "…you-know-whats?
"I dunno – about something, at least. She knows I'm keeping things for her and Sirius. She asked me to go talk to them later today," he informed Ginny.
She took a deep breath. "Well, I'm not going to say I told you so…"
"You might as well," he mumbled.
"… but it was awfully stupid of you not to tell them right away," the redhead finished.
A moment of mutual silence followed, during which Harry was torn between agreeing with her and convincing himself he'd done the right thing. "What do I tell them if they ask about it?" he asked while the two motioned to stand up.
There was a momentary flicker of irritation on Ginny's face and, before Harry could react, she was slapping him on the back of the head with her free hand. "The truth, you idiot!" she told him firmly. "They've helped you through… everything, Harry. They've always been honest with you – the least you could do was be honest to them too. Honestly, I don't get why didn't tell them about the Hor…" she paused again, "oh, the you-know-whats from the beginning."
"They have enough to worry about," Harry told her.
"Well, I don't think they'd agree. If my Mom found out I'd been hiding something like that from her, she'd keep me grounded until I was old enough to walk with a cane no matter what the reason was," Ginny told him seriously. "Lucky for you, Sirius and Mia usually aren't as strict about grounding as Mom is."
He sighed, her point getting stronger in his mind. "Well, you'd wait for me if they did ground me that badly, wouldn't you?" he asked as he handed her the books he'd picked up, trying to cheer himself up a little.
Ginny snorted. "Of course I wouldn't." She took one step further and kissed his cheek softly. "You know how to do the right thing. And try not to get grounded – it's bad enough you keep getting yourself detentions." Then, she walked away and entered Mia's classroom, leaving him standing alone in the hallway.
He hoped she was right and he'd really do the right thing. Or else he might dig himself a much larger hole…
"I just wanted to grab him by the shoulders and ask him what the hell he thought he was doing by not telling us You-know-who had shattered his soul to pieces and gotten himself immortal!" Mia told her husband later that day around lunch time while standing inside his office, pacing with her arms crossed against her chest.
"Well, you didn't, did you?" Sirius asked her, raising an eyebrow from the sofa where he sat.
She let out a huff and uncrossed her arms. "No, but it took all the self-control I had for me not to. And I didn't want to cause a scene in front of half the sixth-years…" she replied, using her hands to rub her face. What she'd give for a single hour of rest without a single worry.
Sirius stretched an arm towards her. "Come here," he told her, seeing she could probably use a little support right then.
She didn't even bother trying to refuse – instead, she pushed her chair back from the desk and got up, walking towards her husband's waiting arms and curling against his side on the sofa. Feeling his arms around her soothed her in a way that nothing else could – the short couple of hours she'd managed to sleep in the previous night had only happened due to the fact that he'd been there holding her…
"Why would he keep this a secret from us?" she asked in a whisper. "Why would Dumbledore keep this a secret? We're his godparents – Harry is our responsibility. We had a right to know."
Sirius nodded. That part was bothering him as well. "We'll deal with Dumbledore after we talk to Harry, Mia. Don't worry about him now."
She sighed and nodded, taking a few moments just to close her eyes and lean against him, hoping that would ease the tension she had in her body. Then, minutes later as she felt slightly better, she took a deep breath and pulled away a little to look up at her husband. "You're taking this awfully calmly," Mia observed.
He sighed – he might appear calm but we wasn't all that great either… who would be, faced with the fact that an incredibly hard task such as Harry defeating Voldemort had just gotten even harder? But someone had to stay strong and that time that was his task. "No, I'm worried too," he admitted to her, running a hand down her hair. "I'm just trying not to freak out before I know everything – and to see the, well, positive part of this."
"There is a positive part?" Mia replied sceptically.
"Well, just because You-Know-Who has a bunch of backup soul fragments, it doesn't mean he is immortal, does it? I mean, if we keep on getting rid of the Horcruxes, one of two things will happen: either he'll run out of them at some point and Harry will be able to wipe him out or he'll just keep making more of them and eventually end up destroying himself in theory by doing it. We all know that people who get their souls sucked out by Dementors become vegetables – it can't be all that different for people who shatter it so much they end up with just one percent of it inside them," Sirius explained to her simply, though he knew that it could be years, decades, before any of those options became part of reality… that part, he'd just keep to himself. "As for the kid, until I hear otherwise coming from his mouth, I just can't believe he didn't have a good reason to keep it from us at least in his head. And you know why?"
"Why?" she asked.
"Because he loves you and he's more… noble than a kid his age should worry about being – he wouldn't lie to you if he didn't think it was necessary or he wasn't desperate enough to do it," Sirius explained.
She shifted her body in order to get herself lounging along the sofa with her legs resting on his lap. "I hope you're right on both accounts."
"That makes two of us," he replied softly. "Do you want to go grab something to eat before Harry gets here? We can just go to the kitchens and charm the elves into making us a sandwich."
Mia shook her head. "I'm not hungry now – I'll eat something afterwards when we get home," she stated. Food was the farthest thing from her mind right then. "You can go if you want to, though."
"Nope, I'll stay," Sirius told her, rubbing his hands softly on her legs.
With a sigh, she leaned her head against the back of the sofa, intending to just close her eyes for a moment and rest a little. The next thing she knew, she was awoken by the knock on the door and felt Sirius tugging her legs away from his lap. Her eyes opened to see him putting down a Quidditch magazine she didn't recall him having when she'd closed her eyes earlier and getting up. Clearly, she'd been snoozing for a while: ten minutes? Twenty? She couldn't really tell.
Figuring the visitor was likely Harry, she got up as well and stood behind Sirius looking at the door. He looked awfully nervous, Mia noted as he came in. Nervous and… guilty. Somehow, that last part made her feel slightly better.
"Take a seat, kid," Sirius told him in a calm, neutral tone. Mia had to give him credit for being able to sound so unruffled when she'd barely been able to keep her cool a few hours before when she'd spoken to Harry.
"Alright," their godson responded, sitting down on the sofa she and Sirius had occupied minutes before. "So…" he started awkwardly, noting that Sirius seemed to be currently casting an imperturbable charm around the office, "what did you want to talk to me about?"
"We know about the Horcruxes," Mia heard herself blurting out – well, seemed like the conversation was going to start by there. "We know what they are and we know You-Know-Who made more than one to make himself immortal."
Harry looked at her, half shocked, half regretful. He'd been expecting them to know only that he was hiding something from them, not to know what – that only made him feel worse and realize that he was in even more trouble than he'd imagined. Harry hadn't wanted them to know about the Horcruxes but if they had to find out somehow, he'd hoped it would have been by him telling them…
"Why didn't you tell us, Harry?" his godmother asked, then. "We had an agreement, remember? We made it during the Summer before your fifth year: we would be honest to you about the order if you were honest to us about whatever you found out. Why didn't you tell us about this or about Dumbledore's lessons for that matter?"
She sounded hurt and disappointed and that made him feel even more awful than her words did – how odd was it that the agreement hadn't even crossed his mind during those weeks he'd spent keeping the truth from his godparents?
"Because… I mean…" he stammered at first. "Because I didn't feel like there was anything to tell at first. In the beginning all I was learning was Occlumency and about Voldemort's life before he became… what he is now."
"Learning about him? How?" Sirius asked, seemingly interested.
"Pensieve memories," Harry explained. "From Dumbledore and other people. It was just memories of Voldemort's parents and him as a kid, during his Hogwarts years and shortly after. The only point of them was for me to know who I was fighting and it didn't seem… essential to tell you all about them. You had more important things to worry about than his biography."
"We wouldn't be having this conversation if it just involved a biography, Harry," Mia stated. "When exactly did you learn about the Horcruxes? And how?"
He sighed, knowing his answer would make her. "I first heard about Horcruxes last February…"
"February?" she shouted, getting up in a jump. "February? As in two months ago, Harry?"
"I…"
"You knew about them for two months and it didn't occur to you that they might be something worth telling us about?" she insisted in disbelief.
"Mia, let the kid explain," Sirius told his wife quietly, approaching her to rest a hand on her shoulder, silently telling her to sit back down.
Still looking frustrated and now getting close to furious, she gave in, crossing her arms against her chest in a temper. "Fine," she mumbled.
"Okay," her husband muttered, turning to Harry. "Why didn't you tell us about it then, Harry?"
"Because it was just a word back then," he told them. "I first heard it in a memory. Voldemort – he was still Tom Riddle back then – was talking to a teacher and suddenly, he asked him about Horcruxes: he seemed to be awfully interested in them even though he couldn't be more than sixteen at the time. But when it seemed like the teacher was about to answer, he sent Riddle away in a really odd way and I ended up not knowing what they were. Dumbledore told me the end of the memory sounded so odd because it had been tempered with. Hermione looked all over the library, trying to find out what Horcruxes were but she couldn't find anything there."
"You should have asked us, then," Mia said, exasperated. "We might know and if we didn't, we'd try to find out!"
"I… I didn't want to bother you with that," he replied – that was the point of the whole thing, wasn't it? "Besides, I had another way. After we saw that memory, Dumbledore gave me a mission: I was supposed to convince S…" he paused, recalling Slughorn had asked him for secrecy on that "…the teacher who'd tempered with the memory to give the real one to me so we could know what had really come out of that conversation. It was pretty clear he'd told Riddle whatever a Horcrux was, so if I got the memory, I'd find out too. It took me a while but I managed to get then real memory a couple of weeks ago."
"Right before the Easter Break, I gather," Sirius observed, still sounding neutral as he stood against his desk, right behind Mia, who looked more and more frustrated. "And I suppose you were right about it explaining all about Horcruxes – that would explain your gloominess during the whole break."
"Yes," Harry replied with a faint nod, followed by a moment of silence.
"Do you know how many he made?" Mia asked at some point.
He was about to ask in return how she even knew Voldemort had made more than one Horcrux but quickly gave up on it – he was in enough trouble as it was. He guessed that now that they knew everything, there was no use hiding the number, then. "Six, according to Dumbledore. He would have split his soul in seven parts, one of which is still in his body – Dumbledore first figured he'd done it when I gave him the diary."
"The diary?" Sirius asked. "You mean the one that possessed Ginny in your second year? That was a Horcrux?" Dumbledore knew about this all that time? He thought.
Harry nodded. "Yes, I destroyed that one and Dumbledore destroyed another: a ring that had belonged to Voldemort's grandfather. That's probably what damaged his hand."
"So there are four left," Mia concluded. "They could be anything. Be anywhere. It will be like finding a needle in a haystack!"
"We… Dumbledore and I suspect what some may be through what we saw in the pensieve memories," Harry told her in a quiet tone. "There were a cup and a locket – they were supposed to have belonged to Helga Hufflepuff and Salazar Slytherin – that Riddle seemed awfully interested in. We suppose they may have been turned into horcruxes because their owner mysteriously died soon after he saw them. And then there's also the snake…"
"The one that bit Arthur?" Sirius inquired, receiving a nod in return. "Merlin. I didn't even know one could turn living beings into Horcruxes…"
"See? It wasn't so hard to tell us this," Mia said, getting up. "Why didn't you do it right away? Didn't you think we could keep it a secret?"
"Of course I thought you could," Harry replied without hesitation. "I just thought it was for the best. I didn't want you to have to worry about…"
"We should worry about it, Harry!" she shouted back – his logic just didn't make sense in her mind. Likely it was because it was clouded by the ever growing frustration and worry that filled her. "We're responsible for you! You're our family! Good or bad we want to know what is going on with your life and we want to help you with it! What made you think it would be better hiding something that important from us? "
"I don't know!" he replied, also frustrated. "I get that you are supposed to worry but not like this. Not all the time. Sometimes I just get myself thinking that life would have been a lot easier for you without me in it, Aunt Mia."
The silence that followed that statement was suffocating. At some point, Sirius had seen himself retreating to the sidelines as the argument shifted between Harry and Mia. Now, his wife just stared, her mouth half hanging open as she looked at their godson. He knew by the look on her face that she had no idea what to say, so the only word that she managed to utter in a chilling whisper was predictable enough.
"What?"
"It's true!" Harry said, standing up too – he could feel all those moments over the years when he'd caused trouble piling over him and ready to come out. "How many times have you ended up sitting by my bedside in the Hospital wing because I got myself there for a reason or another? How many times did you have to worry because Voldemort or the Death Eaters wanted me dead? You're right in the middle of this war because they're all after me and if it wasn't for me, you all could be far away from here! Safe!"
Mia stared some more before her voice came out again, cold and sharp as an icicle. "Are you out of your mind, Harry? You think you're a burden to us?"
Suddenly, Harry couldn't respond. He could see that simple statement had affected her more than him not having told her about the Horcruxes.
"Do you?" she insisted.
"Sometimes," he admitted.
"Well, you're not!" she said, furious at his admission. "You're not now, you never were and you never will be. You're my son and the day that turns you into a burden is the day when this world stops being worth living in as far as I'm concerned! How can you possibly think that?" By the time she yelled that last part, her eyes burned as tears of fury wanted to come out but she wouldn't let them.
"I…" he mumbled.
"Did it ever occur to you that the very thought of you being a burden crossing your head is insulting to me? To us? Did it ever occur to you that we don't care about how much trouble lands on you because we'll always love you despite it? That even if one day you got yourself in a mess even more terrible and life-threatening than all the ones you've already been in together we'd still love you and wouldn't stop at anything to get you out of it?"
She might as well have punched him or slapped him or maybe given him that decade-long grounding Ginny had mentioned earlier when they'd met. It wouldn't have made him feel worse than that. He'd always known Mia loved him like a son – he just hadn't realized how deeply that feeling went. He couldn't even find his voice to apologize!
She lifted a hand and pointed at him – her eyes might as well have been as incandescent as burning lava, so angry she looked right then. "If you ever dare thinking like that again, Harry James Potter, I… I will…" But she couldn't bring herself to finish speaking. Instead, she turned on her heel, headed to the door and walked out after opening it. Then, she closed it with such force that not only did Harry think he heard the wood of the sturdy door crack but also he could swear he felt the millennia-old castle tremble under his feet.
His heart thumped so fast he thought it might explode and for a moment he wondered if his face was on fire because he could certainly feel it burning. He'd never seen his godmother that angry in his near seventeen years of life. Not at him, not at Izzy, not at anyone. Until then, he hadn't even believed she was capable of it…
When he turned to face Sirius, his godfather didn't look all that surprised – instead he seemed almost… comprehensive about it though he clearly wasn't all that happy either.
"Well, kid, I suppose now it's our turn to talk," he said calmly.
A/N: To be continued...
Well, I hope you liked this chapter - I won't even bother about complaining about writing instead of studying when I have an exam tomorrow because, let's face it, I can't help it... Anyway, I felt inspired this week - furious!Mia is surprisingly nice to write. Feedback if very welcome here. Review!