Chapter Summary: Harry/Alex gets an unexpected Christmas present, tells Hermione and Neville about the Philosopher's Stone, and returns to Hogwarts after the holidays end.
The next day, when Neville came to visit, Beth, Alex, and Ron told him that they had found out who Nicolas Flamel was. They then proceeded to explain everything Beth's mother had told them, and concluded with the fact that it was most likely the Philosopher's Stone that was hidden at Hogwarts. With Hermione, they couldn't exactly tell her right out in a letter, just in case the information ended up in the wrong hands. However, they came up with a way to get around this. Beth was able to borrow a book on alchelmy that had a chapter devoted to Nicolas Flamel and the Philosopher's Stone from her mother, and sent it to Hermione, with a note asking her to read it as soon as possible and to return it when she was done. A postscript advised her not to discuss the contents of the book with them in a letter.
On Christmas Day, Aunt Maria and Uncle Tobias held the annual gathering of the families. Luna and her father joined them, which they had done ever since Mrs. Lovegood's death due to a spell experimentation gone wrong. Alex was very surprised when he found his biological father's invisibility cloak among his presents, and looked over at Remus, who said, "I didn't give it to you, Alex. I expect that it was Professor Dumbledore, since I remember that James lent the cloak to him."
"I'll write Professor Dumbledore a thank-you note then," said Alex, admiring the cloak. Then he looked pleadingly at his adoptive parents. "Mum, Dad, can I please keep it?"
Ana and Stephan exchanged looks and finally Ana said, "You may, as long as you don't use it to go around causing trouble. If we find out that you're using it to go around breaking school rules, then we're taking it away and you won't be allowed to have it with you at Hogwarts. Is that understood, Alexander Jacob Harry James Potter Romanov?"
"Yes, Mum," replied Alex, understanding that she was very serious, since she had used his full name plus his birth name. "I swear I won't use it to cause any trouble."
"Good," said Ana. "And that goes for you too, Elisabeth Ilse Romanov. Alex is not to lend it to you so you can go around causing trouble, either."
After breakfast, Hermione contacted Beth and Alex via the mirror they had gotten her as a present. The two, plus Neville, and Ron, had gotten mirrors linked to each other a couple years previous so that they could talk to each other whenever they were grounded and couldn't see each other, and the four of them had decided to include Hermione in it now. Therefore, Alex and Beth had gotten a mirror, and with some help from their parents, had spelled it so that it was linked to the other mirrors, was unbreakable, and would never be lost, as it would always be in Hermione's pocket or otherwise near at hand.
"Merry Christmas and thanks for the gift, Alex and Beth!" exclaimed Hermione happily, her face beaming out of Beth's mirror. "Oh, I read the book you sent me, and figured out what you meant by sending it. So it's the Philosopher's Stone that's being hidden at Hogwarts?"
"Yeah," answered Alex, nodding. "Mum and Aunt Maria told us who Nicolas Flamel when we asked, and since we didn't want to risk a letter with the info getting intercepted, we sent the book instead. But we're not going to get any more involved in it. Dad asked us to stop meddling in things that don't concern us and leave it to Professor Dumbledore to worry about."
"All right, then," said Hermione. "Actually, it is best that Professor Dumbledore handle things, since we are only first-years."
"Oh, Professor Snape isn't after the Stone," added Beth. "You can't tell anyone else, but our grandparents told us that he's not that type of person. He was Granny Ilsa's apprentice at her apothecary for a couple of summers, since you need to be apprenticed with a Potions Master or Mistress for at least four months as a requirement to achieve a potions mastery. So our families got to know him and helped him with things." However, as promised, she didn't reveal that Snape had made the mistake of becoming a Death Eater, instantly repenting what he had done, and after Granny Ilsa and Granddad Vladek had helped him recover, had become a spy on Voldemort for the side of good. Even though Hermione was trustworthy and could keep her mouth shut, Snape wouldn't appreciate having more people know his secrets.
"That's a relief," sighed Hermione. "I really didn't like the idea of Professor Snape being after the Philosopher's Stone, even if his behavior in public makes him seem more like the type. Well, I'm going to talk with Ron and Neville and help Mum make Christmas dinner, so I'll talk to you guys later. See you."
Alex, Beth, their cousins, Luna, and the Weasleys went outside, split up into two teams, and had a rousing snowball fight with a couple of snow forts they built. Luna, being Luna, lobbed a few snowballs into the air occasionally, claiming that there were Wrackspurts around and she was trying to get rid of them. None of them commented on this, for they were used to her sometimes weird behavior.
After the snowball fight, in which the team consisting of Alex, Beth, Ron, Luna, David, and Jonas barely managed to win, was the Christmas dinner. There was one very large turkey, about the size of the one that Ebenezer Scrooge had bought and sent to the Cratchits in A Christmas Carol, a mountain of mashed potatoes with plenty of gravy to go with it, stuffing, a platter of green beans, another of mixed vegetables, and for dessert, flaming plum pudding, Christmas cake, and apple pie.
Feeling rather stuffed after the feast, Alex spent the afternoon playing chess (he lost the game he played against Ron, ended in a draw against Beth, and managed to win a game against David), and then a game of Monopoly (Cara ended up winning, with five properties and an utility and nine thousand thirty pounds). There was a tea consisting of sandwiches made from the leftover turkey, and the leftover dessert. In the evening, everyone bundled up and went to the town of Ottery St. Catchpole, where they walked around and sang carols.
The rest of the holidays passed quite pleasantly. Alex tried out his invisibility cloak, and scared some of his cousins a couple of times by sneaking up on them while wearing it and shouting "Boo!" or grabbing them for fun, but otherwise kept his promise of not using it to cause trouble. Neville came over a few times, or Alex, Beth, and Ron would visit him, and Hermione used her five-way mirror a few more times to talk with them.
The only not-so-great part occured two days before New Year's, when Alex was going through the books in his maternal grandparents' small library and came across the accounts that they had written on their experiences in the Holocaust. Actually, they had each written two accounts, one in the Roma language with some French (they had grown up in France) and German for things that didn't really fit in the former not long after they had moved to Britain, and the other in English, written a few years later, when their command of English was better.
Alex knew his parents, aunts, and uncles had read the accounts, and suspected that his older cousins must have also done so. Therefore, he started reading the English account that Granddad Vladek had written, while Beth began reading Granny Ilsa's account. It didn't take very long for them to be absolutely sickened. While they knew the concentration camps were completely awful places and that their grandparents were quite lucky to survive the Holocaust, they hadn't known all the details about it. Alex and Beth knew quite well that they likely wouldn't survive if they were sent to a camp, in no small part due to the fact that children were normally sent to the gas chambers. The only ways they'd escape that was if Dr. Mengele took them aside, since they were supposedly twins, and then they would be lucky if they survived his experiments, or they lied about their age and used Glamour Charms or something to make themselves appear older.
Their paternal grandparents also turned out to have written accounts about their experiences, but Alex was too upset after reading Granddad Vladek's account to read theirs or Granny Ilsa's. Beth did read Grandmum Lise's account, but after that, couldn't bring herself to read about her grandfathers' experiences. The two had to have a talk with their grandparents after, who did their best to comfort them.
"But that means Anne Frank also went through similiar stuff!" exclaimed Beth, who had read The Diary of Anne Frank last year and knew that Anne Frank and the other people she was in hiding with had been found out by the Germans after two years in hiding and ended up dying in the concentration camps a couple of months before liberation due to illness. Anne's father, Otto Frank, was the only member of the group to survive. "It's no wonder she didn't survive. She wasn't as lucky as you, and didn't have any magic to help her."
Granny Ilsa sighed. "Even having magic didn't guarantee that you'd live. After all, my brother died a few days before liberation."
"And my parents didn't survive either," pointed out Grandmum Lise. "Well, technically my father did survive the camps, but he ended up dying a week later from illness. Anyway, please don't dwell overlong on this. It is in the past and can't be changed. All we can do is make ensure that such atrocities don't happen again."
"I guess," said Alex with a sigh. At least his grandparents had managed to survive, or his life would be very different. Either his biological aunt and uncle would have kept him, in which case he would have a miserable childhood, though it wouldn't be anything like what his grandparents went through, or he'd be in an orphanage. While orphanages today weren't like the ones in Oliver Twist, it could be like the one mentioned in the book Beth had read, where none of the kids were abused, but was still a rather dreary place. The entire wizarding world would know who he really was, and while he could still be friends with Ron, Neville, and Hermione, he wouldn't meet Ron and Neville until starting Hogwarts.
All too soon it was time to return to Hogwarts. Alex was quite eager to return, but at the same time wished he didn't have to return so that he could spend more time with his family. Of course, he did see his cousins, with the exception of David and Jonas, at school, but they were in different houses and older than him, so he didn't interact with them much except at mealtimes. Even then, his time spent with Cara and Vera was less than with Ivan, and that was only due to the fact that Ivan never sat with the Slytherins except at the beginning- and end-of-year feasts and split his time between the Gryffindor and Hufflepuff tables. Still, it was nice to be back at school, and Alex focused his attention back to schoolwork.