CUCKOO IN THE NEST
Disclaimer: This sequel to "Who Lives in Disguise" is a non-profit tribute to the works of JK Rowling who created and, together with her publishers and licensees, owns the characters and settings elaborated herein.
Warning: HBP-spoilers. Thanks to all my reviewers. This is unbetaed as both my previewers are currently unavailable. Please let me know if you notice any mistakes.
On their second-last day, Hermione sent the boys ahead after breakfast and cleaned the kitchen by herself. Even without magic, it didn't take long, but long enough for her to be still there when their reluctant hostess arrived. The Dursleys had done a sterling job of avoiding them so far, but there were questions that needed answering and the boys had decided that Hermione was the likeliest to coax the answers out of them.
"It's Harry's birthday tomorrow," she said. Waiting for Mrs Dursley to speak first was probably not a good idea. "We'll be off then."
The woman sniffed, her horsy face looking more equine than ever.
"I know when his birthday is," she snapped.
Hermione wiped down the sink and wrung out the dishcloth.
"I would never have guessed that if the Xmas presents you used to send him at Hogwarts were any guide." She bit her lip and reminded herself that, however low her tolerance for Dursleyness might be, tactlessness would get her nowhere.
Mrs Dursley bridled.
"I'll have you know he never missed out," she said.
Hermione stared at her with furrowed brow and puckered mouth.
"But you sent him things like old socks, used tissues –"
"It wasn't used. I'd never send something so insanitary through the mail."
Hermione snorted at Mrs Dursley's strange priorities.
"The nicest thing you ever sent him was 50p," she pointed out.
"And what's wrong with that?" Harry's aunt demanded. "He could have turned it into anything he wanted, couldn't he? My sister was always boasting about turning socks into sailboats and toffees into treasures. What could he possibly have needed from us that he couldn't magic up himself, just the way he wanted it?"
For a long moment, Hermione gaped at her as she bustled around the kitchen, wiping all the surfaces Hermione had just wiped.
"What about before he started Hogwarts? Did you ever give him a decent present then, before he even knew about magic?"
Mrs Dursley sniffed disparagingly.
"And why should we? He was doing magic then, wasn't he? Killed the Dark Lord as a baby, didn't he? Grew back his hair, flew onto the roof at school, let the snakes out at the zoo. What did he need from us?"
Hermione's hands went to her hips and her hair frizzed up around her face.
"How about a little love and kindness?" she said. "He was a child under your care, your own nephew!"
"A cuckoo in the nest, just like Lily," Mrs Dursley spat. "A freak! But I made sure my Dudders didn't suffer like I did, growing up with a witch in the family. We tried to cure him and it would have worked too if they'd only left him alone and not taken him to that freak school you all went to."
The world tipped sideways and righted itself again as Hermione blinked at her.
"You can't just suppress someone's magic, Mrs Dursley, it doesn't work that way. It's too strong. It would have just bubbled up and burst through, wilder and stronger the longer it was left dormant."
"Then my sister was a liar, as well as a freak. I should have known. She said her friend's mother had lost all her magic and if a full-grown woman could lose her magic, why not a boy?" She rinsed and wrung out the dishcloth and draped it over the tap, then moved to the fridge for some bacon.
Hermione eyed her doubtfully.
"Her friend's mother? Which friend? Do you mean Professor Snape?"
"Yes, the murderer. Severus Snape!" She'd heard the name on the nightly news too often for her tongue to trip on it. "The one that became a Death Eater right out of school and told her so too. Only she begged and pleaded with him to go to Dumbledore. He didn't want to. He said they'd throw him in Azkaban and he wasn't going to risk it. But he did in the end."
"Right out of school?" That couldn't be right. "You mean he told her years later that he'd become a Death Eater, and then –"
"I think I know what I mean better than you, thank you very much!" Mrs Dursley set the frying pan on the stove and began breaking eggs into a bowl. "He stood in my mother's kitchen as large as life not two months after they finished school for the last time and argued with her till he was blue in the face. It was the day I met Vernon for the first time. I had to get out because they were screaming all over the house, and then Lily sent for Dumbledore and I went for a walk to get away from them all and bumped into Vernon at the local chippie." Her face softened. "He was ordering chips and battered savs and scallops, and he asked if I'd join him in the park and help him eat them."
Hermione blinked, torn between amusement and bewilderment. Snape couldn't have confessed and joined Dumbledore two months out from school. That didn't make sense.
"Now get out of my kitchen!" Mrs Dursley nodded viciously, pointing at the door. "I can hardly wait to see the back of you. All three of you!"
"We'll make sure to leave straight after breakfast then. And just for your information, we feel exactly the same about you, Mrs Dursley. We wouldn't have stayed here a minute if Dumbledore hadn't said to. I've seen Death Eaters with more kindness in their veins than you lot."
As Hermione climbed the stairs, thinking of all the other things she'd have liked to say to Harry's aunt, Dudley was coming down them. He yelped when he saw her and flattened his bulk ineffectually against the wall.
"Oh, honestly," she snapped. "What are you making such a fuss for? I've been here weeks and haven't hexed you. As if I'd bother!"
"All his other friends have," Dudley said, inching down the stairs with his back pressed to the wall and his hands shielding his abdomen and groin. "Right from the time that giant lunatic came when he was eleven and gave me a pig's tail. I had to go to hospital to have it off and all the doctors and nurses came to look and have a laugh and I couldn't sit down for a month. I had to go to Smeltings with an air-cushion taped to my trousers."
It seemed to be the day for disturbing revelations.
"You mean Hagrid," she said incredulously. "Hagrid gave you a pig's tail? What did you do to provoke him?" Hagrid might be a bit rough around the edges, but he wouldn't hex a kid.
"Nothing. He was arguing with my dad and then he turned and poked his umbrella-thingy at me and suddenly I had a tail. So get away from me. I don't want anything to do with you freaks." With that, he was past her and he ran the rest of the way, slamming the kitchen door safely behind him.
She fobbed off Harry and Ron when they asked if she'd managed to learn anything from Harry's aunt.
"Only that the Dursleys are all nutters," she said. "She told me they didn't send you anything decent as presents because you could just Transfigure what you wanted."
"Not about me, about Snape," Harry said. "Didn't she tell you anything?"
Hermione's hand paused on its way to picking up Regulus's book on Curse Reconstruction. She couldn't tell him his aunt thought Snape had started working for Dumbledore before he passed on the prophecy. It would only upset him and, besides, it couldn't be true. She'd have to ask Snape himself what that scene had been about. Not that he was likely to say.
"She wasn't interested. But she did mention that his mum apparently lost her magic. I suppose she must have been depressed, like Tonks all last year."
"Having a kid like Snape'd make anyone depressed," Ron said, and Harry laughed.
The day dragged, but finally the boys went to bed and she could Apparate to her parents' garden. Snape was waiting by the hedge as usual.
"Well?" he asked, after casting the privacy spells. "What is it this time? Have you news of another Horcrux or has Potter got a hangnail?"
Hermione glared at him.
"Neither. I heard something rather disturbing at the Dursleys and I wanted to ask you about it."
"That sounds like another waste of my time. Is it worth risking my life for?" he asked.
She looked him up and down, noting the crease between his brows, the set of his mouth and the tautness of his stance. It probably hadn't been a good day for him either, but she wasn't inclined to feel sympathy tonight.
"How long have you been working for Dumbledore?" she said abruptly, and watched the slight widening of his eyes and jerking of his chin.
"You don't need to know and therefore you need not to know. If that's all?"
She grabbed his sleeve as he turned to leave, then let it go when he raised an eyebrow, but she didn't step back or drop her gaze.
"Wait!" She took a deep breath. "Mrs Dursley says you changed sides two months after you finished school. She says Lily persuaded you to speak to Dumbledore."
His eyes narrowed and his lips thinned.
"I fail to see why I should be interested in anything Petunia Dursley might have said."
"Is it true?" she pressed.
"That I'm not interested in the maunderings of that spiteful harridan? Certainly."
"That Dumbledore recruited you years before you told the prophecy? That you were working for him?" She wanted him to deny it. Even if he had to lie, she wanted him to deny it.
"I've already told you that the less you know about my past the better."
"It is true then." The bottom had dropped out of her stomach and her heart was plummeting through it. "How could it be?"
"I leave that to yourself to determine. Dangerous knowledge, indeed; I suggest you Obliviate Mrs Dursley before you leave tomorrow. You do know the spell, I imagine? Use Legilimency to find the right memory. And I remind you that you swore utmost discretion to me, neither to pry into my secrets nor to pass them on."
Again he turned to leave. Again she held him back, not with a hand but with an argument.
"That isn't good enough, Professor. Not now. I can only see two ways you could have told the prophecy if you were already working for Dumbledore at the time: either you betrayed Dumbledore after working with him for a while, in which case you could be betraying me now –"
"This news affects nothing. I am not more likely to betray you than I ever was."
"Or he told you to tell it," she continued.
He loomed over her, a darker shadow against the dark hedge.
"Or it was harvested from my mind by Legilimency or tricked out of me when I was drunk or a dozen other ways the news could have got out."
She shook her head.
"Dumbledore told Harry that you told your master, because it concerned him greatly. That doesn't match with any other way but two. Either you betrayed Dumbledore for You-Know-Who or Dumbledore was your master and you told him how much you'd heard. Which is it?"
He was watching her from behind his hair.
"And you trust his killer to tell you?" he sneered.
"I'm here, aren't I? It can't be any more dangerous for you to answer than it is for us to meet at all. Tell me!"
He drew himself up and looked down the length of a long nose at her.
"Your guesswork is improving. As you've deduced, I followed orders. And Potter must not know."
She gazed up at him, studying the urgency in his lined face.
"Because it would get back to You-Know-Who?" she asked.
"Because it would destroy him. He must not know. Not now. After all is over, it will not matter."
She took a step back, then another. Her legs felt too shaky to stand. She shook her head, gulping.
"Then it wasn't real? All Dumbledore's love and care … Harry was just a weapon, like he thought in fifth year; he was just a tool in Dumbledore's hands? Defeat Vold – You-Know-Who and then it doesn't matter if he dies, was that it?"
He removed her clutching hands from his coat and she wondered vaguely when she'd come close enough to grab it. His hands were cold, but she wouldn't let them go.
"We were all tools to Dumbledore, even himself," he said in a low voice. "Do you think he valued Potter less than himself, though he died for him?"
"But –"
He released her hands with a little push and turned away from her.
"What do you know of it, you who have only played at heroes? There are things worse than death. There are even things worse than sending friends to their death."
Or killing them yourself. The words hung in the air between them.
"Tell me. I need to understand."
His back was rigid, but straight.
"No."
Her eyes burned, but he didn't turn towards her.
"I'm your student and I need to know so that I can do the right thing myself when the time comes. You must tell me," she said, and waited, watching his head drop then rise again. The pause seemed endless till he began, slowly, reluctantly, to speak.
"It was a desperate gamble, almost a last throw of the dice. The Dark Lord was winning everywhere and we were beginning to suspect there was a spy in the Order because so many were dying. Every word I brought and every word I took back had to be carefully weighed in the balance. And then this opportunity arose."
"This opportunity?" She recoiled. "Is that what you called it?"
"Dumbledore did not believe in prophecies, but he thought the Dark Lord might. He decided to feed him just enough to lure him into a false step, not enough to identify the subject. Only we didn't expect him to decide it was a baby."
She watched his white-knuckled fists and remembered what he'd told her the last time she accused him of betraying a baby. 'Born', not 'will be born'; there'd been no way of knowing from the overheard fragment that it referred to a child as yet unborn.
"When the Dark Lord chose the Potter child, I was – we were horrified. But Dumbledore warned the Potters and hid them in what should have been safety. But someone kept betraying them! The number of times I sent a warning just in time – until the only safety left was a Fidelius. We thought it would be temporary, just until we'd trapped the spy with traceable tidbits of information. And it would have worked, if Potter and Black hadn't been so arrogant as to change the Secret Keeper without telling even the Head of the Order. It would have worked."
Hermione couldn't see his face behind its shield of hair, but she could see the bobbing of his Adams-apple.
"And you wouldn't have lost your friend," she said. Very daringly, she placed her hand over his, in mirror image of the way his hand had covered hers the last time they met. She held her breath, but he didn't pull away as she'd half-expected. Is that why you want to die? She didn't quite dare ask him.
All she wanted to do after that traumatic meeting was fall onto the Dursleys' couch and sleep her sorrow and confusion away, but when she entered the living room she found the boys sitting there.
"Anything you want to tell us?" Ron said.
Her hands found each other and clenched hard.
"I was visiting my parents," she said, grateful for Snape's forethought in choosing that meeting-place. She didn't even have to lie.
"Is that where you disappear to sometimes at night?" Harry asked.
"Yes, I've gone there before. Just to check in on them. They don't know I come." She grimaced. "We'd only get into an argument. They're still angry about all the things I never told them all these years."
"Why didn't you tell us? We'd have come with you. It isn't safe to go alone."
Again she blessed Snape's forethought.
"You can't. The house is warded. If anyone but me" (and Snape) "goes there, it triggers alarms. So, don't worry, it's as safe as anywhere is these days."
o-O-o-O-o-O-o-O-o-O-o-O-o-O-o-O-o-O-o
There were Dementors at Godric's Hollow. Not just a couple, but a colony.
"Whoa," Ron said, as they stared at swirling fog and dark, ragged figures from a safe vantage-point. "I've never seen anything like it."
"We have," Hermione reminded him. "There was a whole swarm the night we saved Buckbeak and Sirius. You didn't see because you were unconscious. And Harry held them off single-handed. It'll be okay. There's three of us this time."
"Hermione," Harry whispered. "I don't know if I can."
"Whyever not? You've cast a Patronus tons of times before."
He looked down, his face set.
"My happy thought used to be my dad, leastways that's who I was thinking of when I drove the Dementors away that night. And then I didn't really need to concentrate on a happy thought when I was teaching you because there weren't really any Dementors there so I could do it out of habit. But, well, I'm not sure my dad's a happy enough thought any more."
"Eh?" Ron asked. "Why wouldn't he be?"
Harry blushed.
"Because, well, you remember I told you about looking in Snape's Pensieve and seeing my dad and Sirius ragging on Snape? I know it was Snape and all and I'm sure he must have deserved it, but – I just didn't much like what I saw and I'm not sure I can drive off this many Dementors thinking of my dad. Even with you two helping."
"What about your mum? Wouldn't she do?" Hermione asked.
Harry shook his head.
"When I think of my mum, all I remember is the way she looked at him that day in the Pensieve." His face twitched. "She looked at him like he was Malfoy. Sirius and Remus told me that she really did fall in love with him afterwards, but when I remember how she looked, it's hard to believe it." He sighed. "Oh, I know she must have! I'm just not sure I can manage a Patronus out of it, not when there's so many of them and they make me hear her dying. Begging for my life and screaming and dying. Or I'm facing Voldemort myself, which is just as bad."
"Blimey," Ron said. "What do we do then?"
"Haven't you ever used any thought but your dad?" Hermione said. "Think, Harry. Are you sure you don't have another memory you can use?"
There was a pause and suddenly Harry's eyes shone brightest emerald.
"You're brilliant, Hermione! Of course there was. When Umbridge sent that Dementor after me, I didn't use Dad." He ducked his head shyly. "I used you two."
All three blushed and looked in different directions, and then Ron cleared his throat.
"This'd be a good time to have that wand Luna was telling us about, the one from Ollivander's window. Pity it was just one of her stories," he said.
Hermione chewed on her lip. She hadn't told them yet about that relationship. It would have been too difficult to explain how she knew, but this might be her chance.
"I wonder if it is," she said slowly to the boys' surprise. "They look a lot alike, Luna and Ollivander, don't they? And I think I read once that he was a Ravenclaw."
Ron goggled at her.
"You're not taking one of Luna's stories seriously, are you? They don't call her Loony for nothing. What about Storkracks and Primpies and Bargles? Don't tell me you suddenly believe in those too."
"Of course not," Hermione said defensively, resolving to look for a good wizarding genealogy book at the first opportunity so she could prove him wrong. "It was just a thought."
"You have to admit she was right about Thestrals," Harry told him. "You thought I was ill when I saw them pulling the carriages, but Luna didn't."
"Yeah, but –"
"Let's not argue about it now," Hermione said. "Your parents might know, Ron, since she is a neighbour, after all. We'll ask them sometime. Right now we've got Dementors to clear out."
"Okay, let's just do it," Harry said. They followed him down the hill towards the ruins of the isolated cottage he'd briefly lived in as child.
"I wasn't sure we'd even be able to see it," Hermione whispered. "I didn't know if it was still under Fidelius or not. It would have been awful if Harry had to go in alone and we were stuck outside."
"But how would Hagrid have pulled him out if he couldn't see it?" Ron asked.
"He was one of the people in on the secret," Hermione said. "He'd been there before. I thought that might be why Dumbledore sent him."
Ron glanced at her out of the corner of his eye.
"How do you know that?"
"I asked him once in third year when I used to visit him by myself to work on Buckbeak's case," she said.
At that moment, the Dementors seemed to become aware of their presence. Suddenly, there were dozens of ragged figures gliding or flying towards them.
"Expecto Patronum!" Harry said, and Ron and Hermione echoed him a half-second later. "Expecto Patronum!"
Out from Harry's wand sprang Prongs, tall and silver and magnificent, galloping forward in antlered splendour. Gambolling around his hooves then shooting off to the left and right like sheepdogs came Hermione's shining otter and Ron's tenacious Jack Russell, bright as moonlight. Around and around the Dementors they raced, driving them back further and further. And the Dementors fled.
"Yes!" shouted Ron, pumping his wand hand in the air. "That was amazing!"
He reached out to pat his silver dog, but his hand went through and then it was licking his face. He felt his cheeks in wonder. They were dry and clean.
"Weird!" he said, looking around to see where it had gone. Beside him, Harry and Hermione were grinning with delight at empty space. The Patronuses were gone.
Harry was the first to recollect himself.
"We should get started right away," he said, "before anyone comes looking. Everyone from miles around probably caught some of that."
"Started on what?" Ron said, scratching his chin. "It's all ruins."
Hermione lifted her wand. Her research had given her ideas. She took a few steps past the boys and waved her wand in a circular manner to encompass all the ruined cottage.
"Specialis Revelio Horcrux," she chanted, tweaking Scarpin's Revelaspell as her studies had suggested she could.
A sickly green light formed in the shape of a key a little above the rubble.
"You're joking," Ron muttered. "The front door key was a Horcrux?"
"Not the front door," Harry said. "Doesn't this remind you of anything?"
Ron shrugged.
"Can't say that it does. Should it?"
"I don't know," Harry said. "But do you think it's coincidence that Flitwick Charmed flying keys to guard the Philosopher's Stone? Because it does seem a bit too good to be true to me." He pointed his wand just under the conjured light, adding, "Accio Horcrux key."
The rubble shifted and a large gold key zoomed into Harry's hand. It had a head shaped like an eagle and a long cylindrical shaft with two claw-shaped protrusions near the end.
Hermione turned to examine it.
"Harry," she said, "I'll bet you're absolutely right! This must be the Ravenclaw Horcrux."
"Why didn't Dumbledore know, though?" Harry wondered aloud. "You'd think he'd have asked Flitwick for ideas on what Ravenclaw could have left."
"I suppose it could have been as much a secret as Slytherin's Chamber," Hermione suggested. "Maybe it was something only Ravenclaws were allowed to know."
"Maybe."
Ron laughed.
"Who cares why?" he said. "All that matters is we've done it. Dumbledore searched for years to find one Horcrux and we've found two in two months. At this rate, we'll be done by Halloween."
"I hardly think so," Hermione said. "We don't have any leads on Hufflepuff's cup at all." Unless Hepzibah Smith was related to Zacharias, but Smith was such a very common name.
"And there's still a whopping great snake to kill," Harry reminded him.
Ron waved a dismissive hand.
"How hard can Nagini be after you've killed a Basilisk?" he asked.
Harry grimaced.
"The Basilisk killed me first, you know. If not for Fawkes, I wouldn't be here. But how are we supposed to find Fawkes without Dumbledore?"
"We'll think of something," Ron assured him. "Just see if we don't."
A/N Dudley went to hospital to get his tail removed on Sept 1 of Harry's first year.
In HBP, "the Seer Overheard", Dumbledore told Harry that Snape was already working for Voldemort when he passed on the prophecy fragment and he mentioned that Snape told "his master", but he didn't specifically identify Voldemort as that master. This chapter gives a possible alternate reading of those words. Dumbledore's unfinished comment about "the reason he returned" did not, in that case, refer to Snape's repentance.
Although Sirius accused Peter of having been "passing information … for a year before Lily and James died" (PoA, ch 19), I've chosen to follow the Harry Potter Lexicon Timeline, which places Pettigrew's spying as starting as early as 1979, before the prophecy was made.
Ron got the names of Luna's imaginary creatures wrong. He meant Crumple-horned Snorkacks, Gulping Plimpies and Nargles. Plimpies (but not the Gulping kind) are mentioned in Fantastic Beasts as a type of fish.