"Well . . ." James said, they were still outside of the house; the Aurors that had arrived with Dumbledore were putting out the smoldering remains of the house.
"Well, you see, ImfromthefutureandDumbledorerepressedmymemories."
"What was that?"
"James, lets get over to mine and Heather's place, we can talk there." Sirius said seeing his wife's discomfort.
"Good idea, let me go tell Remus and . . ." James' face faltered. Lily noticed it, and walked over to him.
"What is it?"
"Hermione was our Secret-Keeper, and she betrayed us."
"What!" Sirius said.
"She'd never do that intentionally. Would she?" Heather asked. Her brother and husband looked at her.
"She was rather insistent that we use her for the Fidelius Charm." James said.
"I'm afraid to tell you, that was not Hermione Lupin, Remus let me know moments before I arrived that Hermione was nowhere to be found. It confirms what my spy in the ranks of Lord Voldemort had told me earlier today. He said he found her in the dungeons of the current Death Eater headquarters." Dumbledore said.
"You had a spy in his ranks?"
"Since when?"
"Since before I told you to use the Fidelius Charm, when it became apparent that you were in trouble, I suggested that. My spy unfortunately is not someone who you would want to see right now." There was the sound of apparation, and a familiar oily voice sounded out.
"You wanted to go to Dumbledore Mrs. Lupin, here he is." Severus Snape said. James and Sirius immediately trained their wands on the ex-Death Eater.
"Put your wands down, he did not wish for you to know who he was because of your school days." Heather had to hold Sirius back so that he wouldn't kill Snape. She knew he would be needed.
"He tried to kill my wife, Albus!" Sirius said.
"Oh joy it's the mutt and the prancing stag." Snape said, and they knew the reference to be to their Animagus forms. "Why aren't you dead?"
"That's what I wanted to know," James said, "All I know is my sister had something to do with saving both mine and Lily's lives." For a moment, Heather looked at Snape and saw a look of relief before it was replaced with a stony expression.
"Let's get inside." Heather said, "I'll tell you all that I can. Seeing as time has already been changed." She had muttered the last part, and it didn't escape James' ears. She looked and saw a look of confusion on his face. They made their way over to the Black house, and walked inside.
"MOMMY!" came a scream. Heather looked up to see Maria up at the top of the stairs.
"Just a second sweetheart, I'll be up in a minute, let me get your aunt and uncle into some comfortable chairs." Heather said. They continued into the living room, where Lily and James took a seat on the couch. Seeing they were comfortable, Heather returned to talk to Maria. Taking her back into her room, Heather sat down on Maria's bed.
"Mommy, why is Aunt Lily and Uncle James' house burnt down?" Maria asked.
"The bad wizard came tonight and tried to kill them and Harry, Your father, and well mainly I, managed to save your aunt and uncle. But Harry has a terrible curse on him now. One he cannot be cured of at the moment." Heather said. Her two year old daughter frowned.
"Harry inn't gonna die is he?" Despite him being a year younger, Maria liked to play with her cousin.
"No, he isn't gonna die, he's okay right now, your daddy's holding him so that your aunt and uncle can recover and sit still while they get checked out by a Healer." Maria smiled.
"Ares they gonna be livin' here now?"
"For a while, which means you'll have to be extra quiet even though Elizabeth is awake more now." Kissing her daughter's forehead, she added, "Good night, see you in the morning."
"An' I play with Harry." The little girl said. Heather tucked her daughter into bed, and left the room leaving the night light on. On her way down, she ran into Sirius who was coming out of Elizabeth's room.
"I just put Harry down to sleep; your brother is still waiting on your explanation." He walked her down the stairs. "You don't need to tell him everything right now, just what really matters."
"Thanks Siri." She said using her nickname for him that she hadn't used since Hogwarts. He blushed, and wrapped his arm around her waist. He guided her downstairs, both were thankful that she hadn't miscarried the baby she was pregnant with. At least at their knowledge. Walking into the sitting room, she glanced at her brother who was holding Lily. She was shaking really bad.
"Are you two okay?" Heather asked, startled, James jumped, before replying.
"I guess thanks to you, yeah, but I want to know what it was that you said, and what you said before we came into the house."
"Oh, um . . . do you remember the end of your fourth year at Hogwarts?" he nodded, "You all thought I was the victim of a spell, and despite what I said back then, I knew about Hogwarts, I knew who had me in their grasp, plus I survived him several times. I was the victim of a spell, one that I had thought he made up, but when I recently remembered it, Sirius told me that it was in a book in the Hogwarts library, but that most of the information on the counter-curse was missing." Sirius pulled out a piece of paper that was in his pocket, handing it to James.
"I remember this, we were going to hex you with this Snivelly, but when it said it would backfire on the caster if said incorrectly, we didn't want to take the chance." James said to Snape, who was scowling in the corner of the room.
"As best as I can remember, I was somehow brought back in time by a Portkey, landing in Malfoy Manor, where Moldyshorts was currently hiding out." Sirius snorted at the stupid version of Voldemort's chosen name. "He wanted information on the future, more likely to see what would happen if time continued the way it was. When I wouldn't give it to him, he wanted my name, probably so that he could kill my parents before I was born, so I wouldn't exist to stop him. I wouldn't tell him, so he used that spell, to try and get me to talk, a minute or two later, I apparated to the first place I could think of."
"Hogwarts. The castle must have known you or it wouldn't have let you through." Sirius said.
"Anyway, when I was speaking with Dumbledore, two more people came from the future, my brother-in-law and sister-in-law. Ronald and Hermione Weasley. I accidently set off my wand which Ronald had brought with him, after securing it from the corrupt Ministry. It de-aged them both to the age of fifteen. Hermione, who tried to give me my wand, set off another spell, turning Ron into a twin of herself."
"Oh, god!" Hermione Lupin said from the couch she was sitting on. She had been quiet the entire time. "He became my twin sister Haley, didn't he?" Heather confirmed it.
"That day in the common room, I suspect Peter let in a junior Death Eater, and he or she fired off a spell, that was supposed to get rid of me, but instead it hit Haley, reversing the curses on her, making her into Ronald Weasley once more."
"It was Bellatrix Black, if you must know, the Dark Lord had me working among the students trying to find potential recruits, and Pettigrew who was trying to prove his worth, agreed to help with this. It was shortly after he was branded with the Dark Mark. He stole your invisibility cloak from the tower Potter, and gave it to Bella and she snuck in following your group. Peter was to report to me on how he did. He messed up, or rather she messed it up for him. He had given her the signal to leave, to try another time, but she, in her rush to prove her worth, took it as the signal to attack. The rest you know." Snape said.
"You said that if he killed your parents before you were born you wouldn't have been around to stop him, so who were your parents."
"I'd rather not finish this in public, but I will tell you this, when I was Sorted, I sorta had to fight the Sorting Hat to have it put me somewhere else. It wanted me to go into Slytherin, but that was when I was 11 years old. Not the second time I was sorted. I had seen Lucius Malfoy's son and he acted like a complete arse, and bully, it reminded me of my cousin, so when he was sorted into Slytherin, I begged the hat to put me anywhere but Slytherin, so it placed me in Gryffindor." Heather said, "If we knew what the conditions were for the reversal, we could place them back in the book, but I think old Tommy boy ripped them out." She would have originally wanted them so that she could have gone back, now that she remembered, but she now wanted to stay here with her husband, and with what Voldemort had said when Maria was born, she was sure that being pregnant was one of the conditions for it not to work, and she was in the middle of her third pregnancy. Dumbledore seeing discomfort, with everyone there, began to move people toward the exit. As soon as the place was clear except for the four of them, Heather looked at her family. Sighing, she continued.
"When I arrived in this time, Dumbledore repressed my memories of my past so that while he was working on a way to send me back, Voldemort couldn't get any information out of me. I was . . . a man, as you've probably figured out by now, and I had been falsely accused of murdering my wife, and my other two friends, one of which you can tell is not dead. Just exhausted. The government was under the control of Lucius Malfoy who wished to continue what his master started. Dumbledore made up false memories to satisfy anyone, yet made them close enough to my actual childhood. I grew up abused and a slave to my aunt and uncle. They hated magic, and anything to do with it, so naturally they hated me."
"That sounds a lot like my sister and her pig of a husband." Lily said.
"That's because, it was them." Heather said reluctantly, "Although I have no blood relation to them anymore, otherwise that blood bond we did back in the summer before fifth year, it wouldn't have worked, as I would have been a relation to you James." At their stunned faces, she continued.
"Where I saved you tonight, there was no one to save you back when I was a year old; no one knew that charm, as it had not been invented yet."
"So you were our son, and we died for good?"
"Yeah, the Killing Curse acts like a gun pointed at a vital area that would kill you instantly, but leaves no marks, the charm I used merely acts like a Muggle defibrillator." Lily looked on in awe.
"I thought there was no cure to death though?"
"The trick with this spell is that it has to be used within ten minutes of the victim's death or they can't be brought back at all. So there is a time limit."
"I figured that, but why did you choose to change time?"
"To make everything better for my past self, and for everyone, including my husband and Remus. Last time, Remus went off the deep end, no one could contact him for several years, as he had left the country so that he wouldn't commit suicide right then and there. He had thought that Sirius here had betrayed you and killed Peter, whereas Peter betrayed you and fled down the sewage drain in Muggle London. Sirius went to Azkaban with a life sentence without a trial. He escaped in my third year, and everyone including myself thought that he was after me, but it was Peter he was after.
"He was at Hogwarts posing as a pet rat. In fact on Halloween Sirius attacked the Fat Lady trying to get into the common room so that he could get the rat. It was near the end of the year, when he caught Peter, and explained everything. We almost had him free had it not been for Moony." Heather said referring to the werewolf Remus.
"He transformed didn't he, and Peter got away." Lily said, James just stared on in silence.
"Yeah, so we had no evidence that Sirius was innocent. Hermione and I went back with a Time Turner and saved his life and helped him escape afterward. In fourth year, the Triwizard Tournament happened, and I was chosen as the fourth champion, the only fourth year in the competition. Voldemort had my name entered and I ended witnessing his 'rebirth'. Fifth year the Ministry denied his return, and at the end of the year, he sent me a false vision as I had a connection with him, depicting Sirius being held in the Department of Mysteries." Sirius paled at this, he had seen his wife's reaction to this earlier. "I and five other students went there to save him, and it turned out to be a trap, set up by Voldemort so that he could get his hands on the prophecy. He was knocked through the Death Veil by Bellatrix LeStrange.
"Sixth year, Dumbledore finally figured out what was making it so Voldemort was bound to the mortal plane." Heather started.
"Must have been some very Dark Magic." James said.
"It was," Sirius interrupted, as he had seen this in her memories, "Horcruxes are made with the most horrible crime, murder in cold blood. It splits the soul, and a ritual seals the piece inside of a container, binding that person to Earth until their whole soul is destroyed. He made six on purpose, one accidently." This news seemed to hit them all hard. It was awhile before someone spoke.
"Sixth year ended with Dumbledore's death. Seventh the war started, and ended. He controlled the Wizarding World in Britain, and everyone was too afraid to stand up against him, except a small group, named . . ."
"The Order of the Phoenix." Lily said. "That's where you got the name, wasn't it?" Heather nodded, and then continued.
"I searched out and destroyed Slytherin's Locket, Hufflepuff's Cup, and Ravenclaw's Diadem, I had destroyed his diary second year and the Resurrection Stone was saved from being a Horcrux by Dumbledore, Nagini, Riddle's snake, had its head chopped off by Frank and Alice's son . . ." A look of horror crossed her face at the memory of Frank and Alice Longbottom.
"What's the matter sis?"
"It's soon, they'll be attacked soon. They will need help or the LeStrange's and one other will drive them insane with the Cruicatus." Sirius suddenly remembered the memory of seeing the Longbottoms in the hospital.
"Do you know the exact date?"
"No, but I think I know who does. But we can't get it from her at the moment. All I know was that it was sometime after Voldemort fell, that they were targeted supposedly for information on his whereabouts. They wouldn't say anything, as they didn't know. So they were tortured to the point where they were no longer sane. They didn't even recognize their son."
"Death would have been better." James said. Everyone in the room nodded their heads.
"Well, you two can have the guest room, feel free to stay here as long as possible, we're here if you need help." Heather said, not wanting to talk about her past anymore. She wanted the memories gone; it wouldn't help to have these memories.
The next few weeks seemed to fly by fast, as Lily and James began to sort through the rubble of their house. On the day they were due to leave, a letter, bearing the Ministry crest on it arrived for Sirius and Heather.
Mr. and Mrs. Black;
We, at the Ministry regret to inform you of the deaths of both the Head of the House of Black, and his wife.
We give you our kindest regards,
Amelia Bones
Head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement.
"I can't believe it, Mum and Dad dead; this is truly a good day." Heather looked at Sirius as he started jumping for joy. A few minutes later, a letter bearing the Black Family Crest on it arrived.
To My Only Heir;
Sirius, while you may have disgraced us, and ran away from home, when your brother died, you became the only eligible heir to the Black fortune. I had, therefore reason to re-inherit you into that, so that the fortune would stay within the family.
You are by the time this letter reaches you the Head of the House of Black.
Your father,
Orion Black
"Well at least something came out of this." Sirius said. "I can throw Bella out of the family, along with Narcissa."
"Would you really do that?" Heather asked.
"I don't know, would I have done that?" Sirius said.
It was a few days later that Nathan James Black was born to his proud parents. Maria of course adored him, while Elizabeth seemed a little put out.
"At least she didn't run out and down the hall like Maria did." Heather said to her husband.
"Now I won't have to make it so that the Black fortune will not go to Narcissa's boy. That boy won't know what hit him when he finds out that his father is not the kind of man he makes him out to be." Sirius picked up his son, and held him in his arms.
"Yeah, this is the way life is supposed to be." He said.