Chapter 1: Resolutions

Saturday, 3 July – Saturday, 10 July 1993

Granger Home, East Farleigh, Kent

The summer after her second year got off to a great start, in Mary's opinion, despite her trepidation beforehand. She had gone home from King's Cross with Hermione and the Drs. Granger, instead of with Professor McGonagall or Catherine Urquhart. This was a concession to the fact that the Grangers would be in France, visiting Dan's mother's family, over Mary's birthday, and the fact that they had more or less demanded to talk to the girls about what had been going on at school as soon as possible. After the incident with the Howler, Professor McGonagall was willing to compromise on when Mary would visit. She called it an olive branch, and said nothing more on the matter. Dan and Emma had taken the girls to dinner before grilling them mercilessly about their exploits at Hogwarts over the past two years.

The girls told them everything.

They had admitted to the Veritaserum Conspiracy (which Hermione confirmed really had involved Veritaserum – Mary now had no idea how they had gotten away with it), the Catification, the encounters with the Basilisk, the Unicorn, and the Thestral, Mary's kidnapping, the weird memory-sharing thing Hermione and Ginny had done, Ginny's possession, lying to their mind-reading professors and sneaking around the school for any number of reasons. They described the Yule ritual, and Mabon, and then (in trying to prove that all ritual magic wasn't terrifying) Midsummer, the previous year's Yule, and Samhain. (Somehow, the adults didn't find the additional stories all that reassuring.) The only thing Mary didn't mention was the whole evil, undead grandfather thing, which she still hadn't told Hermione about, either.

The Grangers already knew about Dobby's attempt on Mary's life in her first Quidditch match, in addition to Quirrell's possession, all the times Mary had almost died first year, and the stupid obstacle course. These were brought up by Dan, who was the more vocal in his arguments that neither of the girls should go back. Emma, on the other hand, was most concerned with the utter disregard for laws, safety, and common decency the girls demonstrated with the Veritaserum Plot. She had lectured them about it until Hermione looked like she was about to cry. None of them went to bed until well after midnight, and Mary had expected that the elder Grangers would require weeks more talking-around before they agreed to let Hermione return to school. They certainly had last time, when they first found out about Quirrellmort.

Even after resolving to tell them everything, Hermione had been very worried that her parents would take her away from Hogwarts forever. She had sneaked into Mary's room after her parents went to bed, and they talked for at least another hour about it. Mary was just relieved to not be lying anymore to two of her favorite adults in the world. She was positive that Hermione could convince them to let her return – after all, most of the things they had done over the past year were the older girl's idea. If she just promised not to stir up any more trouble, next year should be much easier. After all, how likely could it possibly be that the Dark Lord (in any incarnation) would manage to possess people and infiltrate the school three years in a row? In the end, that was the argument that convinced Hermione to go to her own bed.

Still, even Mary was surprised when Emma and Dan appeared the next morning, looking like they hadn't slept at all, and immediately told the equally tired girls that they would do it: they were 'all in' and would do everything in their power to support the girls, and become a part of Magical Britain just as much as the Mundane UK. It was left unsaid that they would be doing everything in their power to fix the many things they saw as lacking in the magical world, as well, though it was heavily implied by the immediate flurry of planning.

Dan had been given permission to take full advantage of the banking system, in order to fund a private magical library and extensive new wards and various enchantments for the house. Emma was outlining objectives to begin networking in earnest, beginning with Professor McGonagall and Catherine Urquhart, but also, if she could find one, a good muggleborn solicitor. Dan was making lists of all the magical amenities he wanted to procure – a floo connection was chief among these, but he wouldn't say no to a few space-expansion charms for the soon-to-be-growing library and possibly magical alternatives for heating and air conditioning. Emma reminded him that electricity tended not to work across strong ward-lines, and he re-routed his muttering and list-making to figuring out how to procure a generator for the house, to place inside the wards, and considering whether he could get it enchanted to run, rather than burning petrol. Emma took over Dan's initial list, adding 'anti-muggle-repelling amulets' and 'equivalent of wizarding telephone directory' and half a dozen topics of books to look into, before asking Mary very seriously if she thought Professor McGonagall might allow the Grangers to join in on the Annual Muggleborn Shopping Trip again, for networking purposes.

Mary said that she would have to owl the Professor, and Emma went back to scribbling. Mary shot a bemused look at Hermione, who was rolling her eyes at her oblivious parents, relief that she would apparently be allowed to return to school clear on her face. The older girl grabbed the last piece of toast and the front section of the Independent from a neglected stack of Sunday papers.

"I'm going back to bed," she whispered as she slipped past Mary.

The Slytherin thought this sounded like an awfully good idea herself, and snagged the abandoned Prophet to read until she fell asleep. (The Doctors Granger had let their subscription lapse after the girls started school, but decided to renew it on learning about the basilisk attacks at Hogwarts, just to keep an eye out for any other major issues in the magical world that no one saw fit to tell them about. Hermione insisted that this was incredibly passive-aggressive of them, but Mary thought it was a sensible response, even if ninety percent of the articles were little more than gossip.)

As it turned out, that morning set the precedent for Mary's stay with the Grangers. In many ways, it was like her previous visits, but this time, when Dan and Emma came home from work, they researched and wrote letters to the wizarding world with a purpose, rather than in idle curiosity.

The second major difference between this summer and the previous one, so far as Mary could see, was that Hermione had decided not to return to summer school. She confided to Mary that by the end of the class the previous year, she had found it just wasn't worth being locked up with the delinquents all summer. Plus they had made her re-take Year 7 with the other kids her age, when she had already been a year ahead before she went to Hogwarts.

Instead, she begged Dan to take them to Dillon's on his day off, and picked up a stack of books designed to help Year 11 students prep for the GCE O-levels. After all, she explained to the younger girl, it wasn't like they had to worry about Entrance Exams, and if she knew what she needed to learn, she could study year-round, anyway, and just take the exams independently either next summer or the one after.

Mary nodded along, distracted by the sight of so many books in one place. She had never been to a muggle bookstore before. Dillon's was much larger than Flourish and Blotts. It was almost as large as the Hogwarts library, and all of the books were for sale. She quickly regretted the fact that she had no muggle money, and got lost wandering in the extensive fiction section while Hermione looked at the academic books. The Ravenclaw found her two hours later, giggling over a book about a 'wizzard' who lived in a world that flew through space on the back of a giant turtle.

"Hey, Liz, ready to go?"

Mary sighed. "I guess so…"

"What're you reading?"

She held the book up so Hermione could see the cover.

"Oh! I have that at home, somewhere. You can finish it later. Come on, dad said we had to leave by one, and it's nearly two already."

"What did he need to do?"

"No idea, but he'd stay here even longer than I would if he didn't give us a deadline."

Mary sniggered at that. "Runs in the family?"

"Mum says I take after him when it comes to books," Hermione nodded. "This is my favorite store. Dad and I used to come here on Saturdays and stay all day. But I do want to leave eventually." She held up one of the maths texts she had chosen, and Mary saw that it was wrapped in plastic. "I can't read these here."

Ah, yes, of course. Mary grinned. "I don't have a favorite store. I've never been shopping just because before."

"What?"

"You heard me. When would I have gone shopping for fun?" Mary asked irritably, thinking that she shouldn't have brought it up. This was almost bound to lead to an uncomfortable conversation about her life with the Dursleys.

Thankfully, however, Hermione's mind seemed to be running off on a different track entirely. "We'll have to see if mum's got plans for Friday, then. It's her day off, and I know she thinks you need more clothes. We'll go to Chequers and have a girls' day."

Mary rolled her eyes at the idea of Hermione, of all people, wanting to have a girls' day, but was spared having to think of a response by Dan, whom they found sitting cross-legged in an out-of-the-way corner, surrounded by books on electrical engineering and generators.

When Hermione pointed out the time, he jumped up with an almost comical "Egad!" and rushed them to the checkout. He explained when they were back in the car that he wanted to get to Gringott's before they closed, so that he could look into currency conversion fees to, as Emma put it, facilitate his assault on the British economy.

An hour later, Mary and Hermione took a mine-cart ride to visit Mary's vault while Dan was escorted to a meeting in some back room of the bank by a rather shifty-looking goblin called Sinkshaft. Hermione was very impressed by the piles of gold and silver coins, much to Mary's embarrassment. She hadn't been trying to rub it in that she had money. She only suggested that they come to the vault proper because she hadn't wanted to sit in the lobby while Dan had his meeting, and it was clear the girls weren't invited. It had been nearly two years since she had seen it herself, and she had rather forgotten how overwhelmingly gaudy it was, a literal vault full of gold. The Grangers were not poor by any means, but Mary suspected there was far more cash in her trust vault alone than in the Grangers' savings account. She filled a bag with galleons so she wouldn't have to return before she did her school shopping, and avoided mentioning the fact that this was only a fraction of the family wealth that she would inherit on her majority.

Hermione must have noticed her chagrin at the social faux-pas of displaying her wealth so blatantly, because all she said was, "We're definitely going shopping now. There's no way you can have that much gold, and only a week's worth of clothes."

Mary's blush grew deeper at that. She had been wearing the jeans the Grangers had given her at Christmas and her wizarding under-shirts, which looked muggle enough to pass for a week of lounging around the Grangers' house. She always wore robes at school. She hadn't realized that Hermione had noticed how small her wardrobe was. It wasn't like she really needed more clothes, but she really didn't have many compared to the older girl, whose closet was packed. For someone who insisted she valued practicality, Hermione Granger had a lot of stuff she hardly used.

Dan eventually returned from his meeting with the goblins, looking rather put out and grumbling about bloody clever buggers and how it had been too good to be true, anyway. From what Mary gathered, his brilliant plan to make a lot of money very quickly wasn't going to work, because, despite the fact that it wasn't illegal to buy gold in Magical Britain and sell it in the UK (unless it was considered smuggling on the muggle end), the goblins, who controlled the vast majority of actual gold in the magical world, weren't keen on the idea. In fact, knowing that he planned to funnel it out of their economy, they outright refused to sell him any. It seemed they preferred to keep the gold itself in their own hands, even more than they would have appreciated watching humans cheat each other by taking advantage of their own stupid laws. And, of course, if there was no gold for sale, the plan would go absolutely nowhere, very quickly.

He cheered himself up by teaching Mary how to make the ratatouille she had been too out of sorts to learn the year before, and Hermione begged Emma over dinner to take the girls to the Mall before Mary had to go back to the Urquharts'. She agreed almost at once, despite Mary's protests that she really didn't need anything.

Wednesday and Thursday passed in a blur of muggle pleasures – television and radio and records and computer games – as Hermione readjusted to electricity, and Mary enjoyed the novelty of entertainments she had never been allowed to use at the Dursleys', and didn't have access to in the magical world. There would be time for books and practicing spellwork later.

The shopping trip was much more fun than Mary had expected. Shopping with Aunt Petunia was a wretched affair: she never got to try anything on herself, or even look for things in her size, but had to follow Aunt Petunia and Dudley around, pushing the basket and nodding when Aunt Petunia said how sweet her little angel looked in whatever ghastly outfits she chose for him. Shopping with Professor McGonagall and then with Catherine had been an exercise in getting what they needed for school as quickly as possible. Shopping with Emma and Hermione, however, involved giving her friend advice on colors and being buried under a pile of every sort of clothing before being shoved into a fitting room of her own. Hermione must have found time alone with her mother to explain that Mary had never been shopping before, because even though the main purpose of their trip was supposedly clothes for Mary, they also went into a number of different shops "just to look around." To make it a 'real' girls' day, they had ice-cream for lunch and stopped at a chippy on the way home for dinner.

"Don't tell Dan," Emma had said with a grin, "but some days just demand greasy and entirely horrible food, not perfect risotto or beef bourguignon."

Hermione had solemnly promised not to give away her mother's guilty pleasure, while all Mary could do was laugh.

By the time the girls made it back to the Grangers', Mary had enough clothes and shoes and little extras, like the sweet-smelling candle she had bought for her desk at Hogwarts and the fountain pen she had found for Lilian's Christmas gift, that she could barely close her trunk. Emma helped her re-organize everything to fit while Hermione kept trying to lend her books to take with her to the Urquharts'. She eventually accepted the novel she had started at the bookstore, but there was no room for the others. She had no idea what she was going to do when she got her new school supplies. Perhaps, she thought anxiously, Catherine would have a solution. Surely the older girl had had a full wardrobe at school?

Before Mary knew it, Saturday morning arrived, and with it, Professor McGonagall, come to fetch her back to the Urquharts. She arrived in the back garden with a quiet 'pop' and greeted the elder Grangers rather stiffly. They made stilted small-talk for a few minutes, and with promises to owl before they went to get their school supplies and hugs all around, Mary was whisked away through the crushing blackness.

Saturday, 10 July – Monday, 26 July 1993

Urquhart Mansion

Catherine was waiting in the Apparition Room when Mary and Professor McGonagall appeared. She was clearly pleased to see Mary again in person, after having had only letters for months, but she insisted on maintaining the proper degree of formality and distance, which came as rather an unpleasant shock. After ten months with very little practice, going back to formal manners was a difficult adjustment.

It took nearly a week for Mary to get back in the habit of propriety. Catherine seemed disappointed in her for forgetting so much over the school year, but not entirely surprised. Laina, now seven, was now officially in training, just like Mary, which meant their lessons were somewhat restructured compared to the previous year.

Laina and Mary were excused from morning history and maths lessons in favor of dance, piano, or drawing lessons, depending on the day of the week. Tommy and Angel joined William for their magical theory and wand movements lessons before lunch, and Catherine began teaching Laina the simplest of charms, using a great-great grand-uncle's wand – demeler to detangle hair; mundo to clean one's teeth; lumos to create light; and point me, a direction charm that worked within the house wards to find almost anything except, they quickly discovered, Mary. Catherine said Aunt Minnie or the Headmaster must have put anti-tracking charms on her for safety outside the school.

Mary, meanwhile, was set to working on the list of International Dueling Commission spells, all of which Catherine said ought to be covered in DADA at some point, but probably never would be. Mary considered defending Remus Lupin, whom she knew would be the next DADA professor, and who seemed like a surprisingly competent sort of man. She was sure he would teach them more than the last two 'professors' combined. In the end, however, she didn't even mention that she knew who the new DADA prof would be, because she actually enjoyed practicing the dueling spells, and suspected that she would have to learn cleaning charms or something if she mentioned that she thought she would be learning them in class.

While they practiced, Catherine lectured. She allowed Mary to choose the first topic of these lectures, because, as she pointed out to Laina, Mary would only be there for a short time, and her needs were more immediate than those of the seven-year-old. Mary, who had been hoping that she would be allowed to request specific lessons, already had a list of things in mind, mostly to do with things she had seen over the course of the year at school. They started with birthdays and birthday rituals, which lead quite naturally, over the course of the month, into discussions of rituals related to birth and death, funerals, weddings, and then other kinds of family alliances, like fostering and godparenthood and treaties and formal bonds of politics.

From there, Catherine moved directly to the development of the Wizengamot as a political entity, its current organization, and the Potter Heir's role within it (when she came of age). Mary mentioned that Dumbledore had offered to let her sit in on a session, a topic which she had neglected to include in her letters over winter break, and was flatly informed that that would have been highly inappropriate. Children were not welcome in the formal chambers of the wizarding government until they were at least thirteen years old, and then they were invited strictly to accompany their Heads of House for the purposes of learning the course of formal proceedings. In short, Mary had been right to refuse the old man, regardless of the reasons for his offer. Catherine assured her that when it was time – probably over next winter break – Lord Urquhart would contact her about observing a session.

After lunch, everyone returned to classroom lessons. Mary was introduced to Formal Logic, which was a fiendishly difficult, tedious sort of maths that Catherine said would help with Arithmancy, and set to working on her summer homework. Laina and William were now responsible for helping Tommy and Angel with their reading, writing, and arithmetic. Catherine minded little Bryce, supervised the older children, and read muggle or wizarding history and literature aloud, pausing to answer questions when her young tutors could not.

At three, the younger children were dismissed to draw pictures from the stories Catherine had been reading, and play in the nursery under the supervision of Tiffy, the Nursery Elf. Laina and Mary were sent to dress for tea and begin whatever assignments they were given for the evening. Laina was spared the crash course Mary had been given in lineages and family relationships because, she explained (with a degree of condescension only a seven-year-old could manage), that's what the littles were learning in the mornings now. She was also spared the embarrassment of endless essays on proper etiquette, as she had grown up with, in Mary's opinion, entirely too many forks, and already knew how she was expected to behave at the table.

Tea was, in many ways, less awkward than it had been the year before. For one thing, Madam Urquhart, Lady Urquhart, and Mrs. Urquhart now joined them only very rarely. For another, Mary now knew how to act around the women of the house, and at almost-thirteen, was no longer considered a bumbling child, to be corrected at every turn. On the other hand, she was now expected to have opinions on things like current events and recent developments in the Wizengamot, and reasons for those opinions. The little smirks and raised eyebrows Ms. Primrose and Ms. Nanette threw at Catherine when Mary said something indefensible were infuriating. The worst part was that they would never explain why they were laughing at her. She was almost convinced half the time that they were only making faces to disconcert her, but then afterward Catherine would explain exactly where she had made a false assumption, or said something that would have been terribly insulting to Lord Burke, or else something incredibly naïve that marked her out as a muggle-raised child, and Mary would be set to researching points of order and recent history and major decisions of the Wizengamot over the past fifty years in the library while Catherine and Laina practiced French in the background.

On days when Mary managed to avoid putting her foot in her mouth at tea, she was allowed to go flying before dinner. The Urquharts had heard of Mary's outstanding performance as the Slytherin seeker the previous year, and though Lord Urquhart insisted that Quidditch was no sport for young girls, Mr. Urquhart and his sons whole-heartedly approved. Mary overheard Mr. Urquhart telling his father that it would be a crime to force her to give up something that she had such an obvious talent for, and Mr. Stephen and Mr. Conrad even joined her to race around the house and gardens on occasion. One weekend they let her help teach Laina and William how to fly for the first time, which was very exciting. After that, William was allowed to accompany her, provided she didn't show off any seeker stunts, or let him fly too high or too fast. Laina stuck her nose firmly in the air and refused to join them. Mary was pretty sure this was only because she had developed a dislike of the older girl, because she had appeared to like flying with her father and uncle well enough. She decided not to mention it – it wasn't like Laina couldn't practice with her family after Mary went back to school, and Mary had more important things to worry about than the jealousy of a child she only saw two months out of the year. In fact, she was fairly certain that Laina's attitude problem wasn't even in her top five concerns for the summer.

The thing she was most worried about was the thing she was most eager not to think about at all: the fact that Tom Riddle, the not-quite-late Lord Voldemort, was her biological grandfather. She had promised Professor Snape that she would not discuss it with anyone or release the information unless it was, in some way, necessary. But it was really bothering her, and she wished she could, if only so that Emma could tell her that it didn't matter in the slightest, or Lilian could make a joke about how the Dark Tosser's own granddaughter blew him up, or Hermione could research spells to use their relationship against him (because she was sure the Ravenclaw would). But of course she couldn't be sure that they would respond so positively, anyway, or that it wouldn't get out to their ever-fickle peers. She had nightmares about Wraith Voldemort calling her 'granddaughter,' but not nearly as often as she had nightmares about howlers and Daily Prophet headlines denouncing her as the Next Great Evil or the Dark Lady of Slytherin.

Second to the evil, undead grandfather thing was the fact that Professor Snape had been friends with her mother – very good friends, apparently – and had invited her to be informal with him in private. She couldn't say exactly why this was so strange, except that it was odd to call such an intimidating figure by his given name. Thanks to Catherine's lectures, she knew that when Snape said that he might have been her godfather if things had gone differently, what he was really saying was that he should have had nearly as large a role in her life growing up as her own parents – certainly more than an estranged muggle aunt like Petunia.

Godparenthood in the magical world was a bit different from what she knew of the Christian practice. Aunt Marge was Dudley's Godmother, but she certainly didn't have as much say in his life as Aunt Petunia, and she definitely didn't help the Dursleys with his education at all, though she did rather smother him in gifts at Christmas and his birthday. According to Catherine, magical godparents were a more modern replacement for the fostering system, and held the same sense of bringing a child into one's family. Each parent chose one person, normally from outside their family, to be a godparent to the child. James Potter had chosen Sirius Black, and Lily had chosen Alice Longbottom, but it wasn't always a godfather and a godmother. Laina had two godmothers. If Snape hadn't been a Death Eater, when Mary was born, he and Black would both have been her godfathers.

Godparents or compatres were bound to their godchildren by family magic, and were recognized by society as equally responsible for a child's upbringing as the parents themselves. It was unforgiveable for Black to have betrayed Mary and her parents, but he was in Azkaban, now, suffering for that crime, and Alice Longbottom, Neville's mum, was apparently in St. Mungo's with brain damage from the war, so Mary shoved aside the whole issue of whether or how she ought to try to reconnect with either of them fairly easily. She thought she might ask to visit Alice in hospital over the winter hols, but she would talk to Neville about it first.

None of that solved the problem of whether or how to deal with Snape, now that she realized that he had more or less admitted that he should have treated her like a daughter or at least a very close niece all these years. In fact, she was pretty sure he meant that that was how he thought of her now, because otherwise he never would have brought it up. She wondered what he thought she meant when she said that she thought she'd have liked it if he was her godfather. She hadn't had any idea that it was anything nearly as serious as it apparently was. He was her favorite professor, but she didn't know that she thought of him like a parent, and she certainly hadn't meant that. On the other hand, he could hardly be worse at it than Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon.

Mostly she couldn't decide what to call him. 'Severus' was right out, and 'Professor' was too formal. She suspected that if he was really her godfather, she would have grown up calling him 'Uncle Severus,' and that would be appropriate, much like she was now allowed to call the Professor 'Aunt Minnie,' in private, but the only Uncle she had was Vernon, and she didn't want to put them in the same category. (Professor McGonagall was very strict and formal, upright and stern, not altogether unlike Aunt Petunia in some ways and Aunt Marge in others, though she was much nicer. Professor Snape was very different from florid, blustering Vernon.) She supposed she could have grown up calling Remus 'Uncle Remus' too, in another life, but for some reason it wasn't nearly as odd to think of him only by his first name as it was for… Severus. Nope, still weird. That left only 'Snape' or 'sir' which were the compromise she had settled on almost at once. It was still unsatisfying.

Mary's third major preoccupation throughout the month of July was the rituals which would happen at the end of it. Catherine had promised that the Urquharts would introduce her to magic on her birthday, as she and her friends had done for Hermione and Lilian at school, and that she would be welcomed to participate in the Lammas ceremony that night.

From what Catherine had said the previous summer, Mary had the vague recollection that she would have to reflect on choices, commitments, and plans for the coming year. The meditation was important because it directed what you would see over the course of the night. Unfortunately, Mary had no idea what the next year would bring. She didn't have anything she was particularly trying to accomplish, except doing well in all her classes and not stumbling into some insane and arguably illegal adventure… again. She didn't even think she had any major decisions to make, unless you counted figuring out how to tell Captain Flint that she might have a conflict with Quidditch due to earning herself about a hundred hours of detention with Snape. (He was going to kill her, she was almost positive.)

Trailing a distant fourth and fifth were the fact that Lilian had had to change her visit to the first week of August due to one of her more distant family members coming to visit in the last week before school, and the fact that Mary had not, despite repeated gentle urgings, managed to get even a tentative answer as to whether she might be able to visit Ginny Weasley at some point (she was still not speaking to the twins, but Ginny had been a victim as much as Mary had, and she couldn't bring herself to hold the girl's family against her. After all, Mary was related to him). Sixth was probably the institution of Sunday tea with the girls who properly ought to have been her cohort growing up.

After two weeks back at the Urquharts', Catherine had declared that Mary was now well-trained enough to visit the other girls in her cohort as they hosted their own tea parties, not unlike the ones Catherine still attended on occasion with her own friends from Hogwarts. On the one hand, this was a triumph of sorts, because it meant she was catching up to where she ought to have been all along. On the other hand it was terrifying, because she wasn't sure she wouldn't embarrass herself (and by extension Catherine) in front of Daphne Greengrass or Susan Bones.

In practice, it was far more tedious than triumphant or terrifying, and a much larger affair than she had expected. The last Sunday in July found her travelling by floo to Abbott House to join Hannah and Janine, her hostesses, along with Daphne Greengrass, Morag MacDougal, Megan Jones, Susan Bones, Lavender Brown, and the Patil twins from her own year; Artie Seran, a now-second-year Slytherin; a few girls she thought might now be fourth-years; and nearly a dozen eleven and twelve-year-olds, whose names she did not know.

The girls were ushered into a ballroom that had been transformed into a sort of enormous parlor, with eight tables, each with four seats. How the seating arrangements had been determined was entirely mysterious, but Mary found her name-card placed with Padma Patil, Anastacia Bagnold (a fourth-year Gryffindor), and Tabitha Diggory (who would be a first-year come September). Stacy took the lead in their conversation, and they made it through the afternoon without any major missteps on Mary's part, though little Tabby did spill the cream at one point, and Padma kept shooting longing looks at Mandy Brocklehurst at the next table, as though sitting with people she hardly knew was some strange form of torture.

A number of adult women circled amongst the girls, supervising their interactions. Stacy named them discretely for Mary and Tabby, as older sisters and aunts of the girls in attendance. Their presence put rather a damper on the conversation, limiting the girls to idle chat about Hogwarts, their friends and siblings and plans for the remainder of the summer, and the latest gossip-mongering of Rita Skeeter, the Prophet's most notorious 'special correspondent.' Apparently the Hob Goblins (a band Mary was certain she had never heard of before) were considering doing a reunion tour of the Continent, but Stubby Boardman, their former lead singer, was refusing for reasons unknown. Skeeter speculated that it was due to a curse the former singer sustained from an ex-lover at his final concert, which rendered him completely tone-deaf, though he and his former band-mates vehemently denied all such claims. (This, Skeeter said, was clearly proof – they wouldn't deny it if it wasn't true.)

Padma must have realized how bored Mary was, because as they were leaving, the Ravenclaw informed her that after they turned fifteen, they would be allowed to host their own, much more intimate and less-heavily-supervised parties, with their actual friends. This was not nearly as much of a relief as it might have been, considering it meant that Mary still had two whole summers of this sort of 'party' to get through. She was, for the first time, quite glad that she hadn't grown up in the wizarding world, if only because it meant she had escaped the first two and a half summers of this tedious process of joining 'her set.'

The next day, Mary saw an article in the paper saying that the Weasleys had gone to Egypt after winning some kind of lottery. Their picture was on the front page, all nine of them, waving happily in front of a pyramid. So much for that visit, Mary thought, skimming the article and noticing that they would be gone all of August. Still, Ginny was smiling, with Ron and a man who had to be her oldest brother, Bill according to the article, on either side of her. The twins were laughing at a fully-recovered Percy, who hadn't noticed a tarantula on his robes. Even Ron's rat, perched on his shoulder, looked awake and alert, which Mary supposed passed for cheerful in rat terms. As long as they were moving on from the horror of last year, she supposed she wouldn't be too angry that they had left the country without so much as a warning that the invitation to visit was no longer open. Then again, perhaps they had taken her last letter to mean that she had given up trying to get Catherine to agree to the visit anyway.

She sighed and passed the paper on to the older girl, whom she suspected had a bit of a crush on Bill Weasley when they were in school together. This suspicion was entirely based on boredom, and the fact that when they had run into the Weasleys at Diagon Alley the year before, Catherine had asked Percy to pass on her greetings to Bill, but not to Charlie, who was the next oldest Weasley. He did cut a rather daring figure, with his long hair and cursebreaker's robes, far less all-encompassing and restricting than normal wizards' robes. Mary wondered if he had had an earring in his Hogwarts' days, too.

She made a mental note to send the Weasleys a letter of congratulations before heading off to her dancing lesson, considering again what she ought to meditate on for the Lammas ritual.

Monday, 26 July 1993 – Thursday, 29 July 1993

Azkaban Prison

Sirius Black

Sirius Black had no idea how long he had been in Azkaban. He didn't know what day it was, or even the year. Most days, he would have been hard-pressed to tell you his own name or the last time he ate or showered (neither was a priority, when in the company of dementors). He could have told you two things: First that he was innocent, and not mad, and second, that it was much better to be Padfoot than Sirius, because if Padfoot was a Bad Dog, Sirius was the worst scum on the face of the planet. But that might just have been the dementors talking. He spent most of his days curled up in dog form, knowing that he was a Bad Dog, and that he deserved his punishment, whining softly to himself as he tried to sleep, ignoring the cries of the madmen all around him.

Sometimes people would come into the prison. Those were the worst days, because those days he had to be Sirius. They couldn't know about Padfoot. No one could know about Padfoot. If they did, they would take him away, and then Sirius would always have to be Sirius, and being Sirius was the worst. So when he felt the faint retreat of the dementors' cold, driven away only by the light of a Patronus charm, he forced himself to become Sirius again, pulling himself into a tiny ball, hoping (or perhaps wishing, because there was no hope in Azkaban) that the human's visit would end soon, and he could be Padfoot again, and sleep and mourn and eventually die.

As the person – whoever it was – moved closer to his cell, he wondered why they had come. You had to be mad to come to this place. Cissy came, sometimes, to see Bella, or she used to, before Bella stopped talking like all the others. His evil cousin used to be the only half-sane voice in the eternal night, though she would never speak to him, Blood-Traitor and all. And Snape, too, the sadistic, nightmarish, Corpse Munching bat, but he only ever came to make Sirius feel worse, never about what he had done to Snape and Moony, but about Lily and Prongs and the little, innocent Fawn, and rub it in that she was in his hands now, at Hogwarts, a Slytherin, and that Sirius had missed her entire childhood, rotting away for a crime he didn't commit. Sirius might have thought him a nightmare, if not for the patronus. Even that was a painful mockery – a doe, like Lily's. There were other visitors, sometimes, but never on his floor.

Sometimes the Aurors would come in for an inspection. The new minister of Magic had come, too, when he took over. He'd looked ill and weak after only an hour in the prison, with four Aurors' patroni keeping the dementors away. Sirius had sneered at him, silently, through the bars, and the weak, pudgy man had flinched away. He tried to remember how often Ministers inspected Azkaban, and reckon the odds that it was an inspector, and not Snape. He failed miserably, but it didn't matter, because before he realized it, they were upon him. He had to pull himself together. Even if he did hate every powers-bedamned one of them, he was a Black, and he was innocent, and he would not cower in a corner like some pathetic madman, no matter how much he wanted to.

"Prisoner Gebo-Algiz Three-Nine-Zero: Black, Sirius, Minister," a secretary-looking wizard announced, reading off a scroll and trying not to look at the men and monsters all around him. "Delivered to Azkaban in November of 1981 on the orders of Bartemius Crouch, approximately eleven years, nine months contained in highest security. Got to be mad as a hatter by now."

"I'll thank you to keep your opinions on my sanity to yourself," Sirius growled in his haughtiest tone, and winced at the gravelly sound that was his own voice. He hadn't used it for years, and clearly it had suffered.

"Merlin's beard!" the minister, a pudgy man with a lime-green bowler hat, exclaimed. "He talked!"

"Merlin's beard!" Sirius mimicked him, "He heard me!"

"Right, health – better than expected. I'll make a note to increase the presence of the guards," said the secretary, who was quickly beating out Snivellus for the position of 'worst person ever' in Sirius' books.

"Now that's just not fair!" Sirius pushed up his left sleeve and pressed his bare arm against the bars. "I'm not a Death Eater! You could at least give me a trial, seeing as how I'm doing 'better than expected.'"

"Shut up, Black," one of the Aurors snapped. "No one's going to listen to a traitor like you."

"Did he really not get a trial?" the Minister asked.

"I didn't!" Sirius insisted, but another Auror spoke over him.

"Of course he did. Even Crouch wouldn't have let a Black sit in here for ten years without a trial."

"Obviously he was just mad to begin with – he fooled us all," the first Auror said.

"Yeah, old Moody was never the same after…" the second agreed.

Sirius slumped. Of course the Aurors wouldn't believe him. They had to believe that they were serving the light, and the light didn't just throw innocent men to the dementors. And of course the Minister would believe the Aurors over a condemned murderer. Hell, he wasn't sure even he would have believed himself, if he were an Auror still.

"Well, if I can't have a trial, are you finished with your paper?" he asked, in a hopeless bid to keep the minister and his guards around and the dementors away for as long as possible.

"Good Lord, why?"

"I've missed doing the crossword something fierce," Sirius drawled sarcastically. It had been over a decade since Sirius had had word (honest, non-Snivellus-tainted word) of the outside world. What did he think?

"Come on, Minister," the flunky interrupted. "We've just got to get through half a dozen more, and then we can get off this gods-forsaken rock."

"Yes, yes, let's go," the portly man replied, but he did hand over the Prophet, with a look akin to pity on his face.

Sirius was astonished. He hadn't expected that to work at all. But as it had, and he couldn't go back to being Padfoot at least until they left this level, he turned to the newspaper in fascination, running his fingers across the print over and over, hardly daring to believe it was real.

Monday, 26 July 1993.

1993.

It was true, then. Mary, Jamie's little Fawn, would be at Hogwarts already, or rather, going back soon. He wondered where she was now. Not with him, and he'd heard that Bella was in here for torturing Alice into madness, so not with her, either. Petunia, maybe? They didn't have many friends or family left, by the end. He hoped she was being looked after, wherever she was, even as he fell ravenously on the printed words.

It had been so long since he had read anything, and this was even good news – Arthur Weasley – he remembered Arthur and Molly and their little boys – had won a pile of galleons. The picture of his family – Lords of Light there were a lot of Weasleys, now – was the happiest thing he had seen at least since James went into hiding.

And then he looked closer, at the rat on the boy's shoulder, and he froze.

The dementors weren't even back yet, but he saw it all happening again, as though he were there: Chasing down that traitor, cornering him, waiting for an explanation that would never come; watching him incredulously as the incompetent idiot blew up the street, watching him shrink, as he had so many times before, into the rat, into Wormtail.

Into the rat, staring smugly at him from the picture, from that boy's shoulder.

And he remembered:

Sirius Black was innocent.

Peter Pettigrew was the traitor.

Peter Pettigrew, Wormtail, was still free, and living, it seemed, at Hogwarts.

With the Fawn.

Pettigrew could get to his goddaughter at any time.

That was unacceptable.

She wasn't safe.

She had to be protected at all costs.

He had to get out of here.

The dementors came back, but he hardly noticed, so focused was he on the goal, the unfulfilled duty. He felt guilt, yes, for failing her all these years, but it wasn't too late. The Traitor was in Egypt, and the Fawn was not. All he had to do was escape from Azkaban, get to Hogwarts, and kill him when he came back, and then she would be safe.

For the first time in ten years, Sirius Black passed a night in Azkaban in his own form. He had to watch. He had to wait. He had to pay attention to times and patterns and find a way to get out of here. He had to do this, not Padfoot, because all Padfoot knew was that he was a Bad Dog and deserved to die, neglected in a corner of this nightmare hell. Padfoot would never leave. But Sirius had a job to do.

Sirius would leave.

He slept and woke and slept again, watching the dementors as they moved around the prison, marking the floor where the sun hit when the meals came, eating those meals, because, revolting as they were, he would need all his strength to escape.

Finally, when he thought he could not learn anything more from his cage, he transformed into the dog and slipped past the confused dementor that came to deliver yet another bowl of bland porridge laced with disgusting nutrient potions. He wriggled through the bars of the portcullis, found the landing-site for the ministry's supply boats, and began to swim, making for the nearest lighthouse.

For the first time in a very long time, Sirius knew he was doing the right thing.