Chapter 12: The Room of Requirement

Eyes blurring from staring so long at the same spot, Harry barely found it within himself to move. 'I—Ginny—oh my god, I've got to get over there—'

He stumbled away from the table and towards the kitchen fireplace. It was smaller than their usual floo exit, but he certainly wasn't bothered by having to stoop like he usually was. Harry's hands shook as floo powder slipped through his fingers, softer than sand but heavier than sugar.

'I'm coming too.' Ginny said, grabbing her wand from the table. 'I spotted her. I've got a right to come.'

Harry wasn't so sure about that reasoning, but was surer than anything that, if he were Ginny, he would not tolerate being left at home for this for a single second. Nor would he expect her to.

They stumbled, one after the other, towards the fireplace. He was sure Ginny was still in her slippers. He was wearing a holey jumper, and neither of them cared the slightest before—

'Mum? Dad?' Lily shuffled into the room, eyes narrowed in suspicion. 'Are you flooing somewhere? Where are you going?'

Stumped in the face of a nine year old, Harry began making indistinct noises that wouldn't pass for an explanation to a toddler, let alone a critically thinking and naturally mistrustful child. He was quite shocked he had briefly forgotten the existence of his youngest child. Harry felt very lucky that Ginny, at least, held her cool.

'You're off to Uncle Ron and Aunt Hermione's; we've got to dash off!'

'Oh. But it's—' she looked at the clock, '—half past eight at night. Do they know I'm coming? Is this like that time when—'

'Just tell them we've gone to Hogwarts, they'll know what we're talking about.'

Lily immediately brightened. Her suspicion was dropped in favour of asking to go to the school with them, even as they gradually manoeuvred her towards the grate. She was still trying to emotionally manipulate them into allowing her to tag along ('I'll be quiet, I won't run off, I promise!') when they pressed floo powder into her hand and shouted Ron and Hermione's address for her.

They wouldn't be allowed to forget about this for some time, Harry thought, as she stared grumpily at her parents as she was enveloped in green flame and whisked away.

'God, I hope they're in,' Ginny muttered, shaking some soot from her knee. She cast an eye around the kitchen and let out a long, loud sigh.

As was becoming customary, Harry rocketed out of the fireplace of Professor McGonagall's office without preamble (a portrait's disgruntled voice echoed down an 'I say!'). She was writing at the grand desk, or had been, as her head cracked upwards and she clutched at her chest. It reminded Harry of her age, and he decided, not for the first time in his life, to attempt to refine his flooing technique.

'Mr Potter—' she began, before stopping as Ginny stepped out behind Harry with barely a noise. Something about this seemed the last straw for McGonagall. She didn't need to speak, for Harry knew she was asking him whether it had happened again. He nodded and felt the atmosphere in the room turn as McGonagall thrummed with excitement and fear.

'It's happened again. I saw them by the Room of Requirement,' Ginny said. She was breathless.

'Who?'

'Tonks.' The word rushed out of Ginny's mouth where air did not. Her flushed cheeks made her face almost the same as when they had been carried from the Chamber of Secrets by Fawkes all those years ago; a churning mixture of wonderment, fear and joy.

McGonagall stood, rattling her desk. The inkpot teetered dangerously on the edge, but they paid it no mind. 'Well,' she said as her eyes flickered between them both, 'we had better see for ourselves.'

Harry wanted to speak on the journey up, wanted to discuss and theorise, but he had not the faintest idea of what to say. Questions grew, lived and shrivelled before he had the chance the grasp them; speculation turned to smoke and wisps before it could pass his lips. The others might have been feeling the same, for the only noise was the stalking sound of their footsteps on the stone as they made their way up through the castle.

The tapestry which had featured in so many of Harry's nightmares was innocuous against the wall. The entry to the Come and Go Room looked dormant, the walls as solid and ancient as they always appeared. Harry, Ginny and McGonagall exchanged looks in the candlelight; there were no windows and the winter sun had died long ago anyway. The shadows flickered and the heavy air was lost on none of them.

Wordlessly, Harry stood in front of the wall with his hands married together in front of him, pondering what to say, think or believe. Ginny and McGonagall moved to the side and stared at him as he tried to find a useable phrase.

I need to find those that were lost … too vague. I need to find Tonks, perhaps? Show me Tonks?

But then Harry thought of the sentience of the Room, of how it always knew. How it directed him to the Horcrux, and how it had provided the DA with endless training supplies and books for their lessons that were perfectly suited to the topic of the moment. Perhaps he did not need to focus on closing the loopholes. Perhaps he should think about what really needed to happen, what he really wanted from the Room. He did not need a single, defining phrase, after all.

Show me the person I need to see he thought, beginning his pacing. Show me the person I need to see … Show me Tonks … Show me anyone that needs me … that needs us …

When McGonagall gasped, Harry knew a door had appeared. He was unsure if she had ever seen the Room materialise. The door was simple: wooden and plain. The handle was burnished bronze, and the planks of what looked like oak were pockmarked with age. With a jolt, he saw that it was the same door of Dumbledore's Army, no longer polished or proud, but wearied.

All three stared at it, all three Gryffindors afraid of what could lie behind it—because, despite it all and despite the Map's infallibly truthful record, a glimmer of doubt had rooted itself in the back of Harry's head, always whispering that it could be a trick.

As the nearest, Harry moved rather reluctantly towards the door. His shaking hand closed around the handle and he swallowed before asking Ginny and McGonagall with a look if they were ready; pale, both nodded.

The room beyond was a strange imitation of the Gryffindor Common Room with alterations that made no sense to Harry. There were round windows next to mustard-yellow shelves, copious green plants hanging from the ceiling on coils of chain and rope, sturdy hewn hammocks dangling empty against the right-hand wall. But it was the Gryffindor that overpowered it all; deep armchairs and lumpy scarlet cushions, tapestries threaded in gold, broad bookshelves carved with lion's heads. Even the fireplace's warmth turned the Room into a place that Harry relaxed into instinctively, like a favourite old jumper.

He could not take time to bask in the warmth of either the fire or kind memories, because a girl walked into the room and froze at the sight of them.

It was Lavender Brown, eyes rounded, dressed in a large dark jumper and comfortable looking trousers. She wore not an ounce of the girliness Harry remembered of her; but perhaps she had grown out of that during the Carrows' regime and Harry had failed to notice in the drama that followed his return to Hogwarts at that time.

When Ginny breathed her name, Harry remembered that his wife would know Lavender just as well, for they had spent that year and all the other Hogwarts years together too. They had certainly grown out of any childishness together under the Carrows.

Ginny took a step towards Lavender, who immediately stepped backwards. Her chest heaved and her mouth dropped open, and her too-practiced eyes flicked backwards and forwards over their faces, their postures and their undrawn wands. She was deciding if they were going to attack her, even as her eyes began filling with tears at the sight of them.

'Do you …' Lavender was uncharacteristically speechless. 'Do you know? That it's me? On the radio—you said—but we are us—really …' she burst into tears, and Ginny ran, pulling her into a crushing embrace that tangled their hair and caught fingers in their clothes.

'Morgana,' said McGonagall as Harry's eyes watered, watching Ginny comfort a seventeen year old girl who had died a horrific, violent death and did not deserve a single scratch of it.

'Oh Lavender, we know, it's all right,' Ginny said, eyes wet.

'We figured it out and then we tried to find other people we knew but it was all so strange, and I saw someone I thought was Harry for a second and I tried to speak to him but when I saw him closer his face was all wrong—'

Sniffing, Lavender pulled away from Ginny. As she rubbed her face she caught the eye of McGonagall and muttered a quiet apology.

'You have nothing to be sorry for, Miss Brown,' said McGonagall. Her voice was taut and strained, and Harry knew that the emotions draping over the room like a large cloak had not avoided her.

'Lavender?' Came a shout from the doorway. 'Where've you gone, are you all right?'

Lavender looked up quickly and stared at Ginny with owlish eyes. The steps, muffled from carpet but approaching all the same, did not drown out her quiet 'oh—'

Fred Weasley emerged from behind the ajar door in blue striped pyjama bottoms and a threadbare jumper with a large purple letter G in the centre of it. His youth was agonising in the face of decades of George aging painfully, reluctantly, every change and crease a reminder that the life he led was forever divided into the before and after his twin's existence. And the most painful of all, Harry was sure his face bore the same slight smile he had when he had died.

'Merlin's balls,' said Fred stepping forwards, brown eyes—Ginny's eyes—wide as Lavender's had been. After a second of staring he craned his head over his shoulder and bellowed: 'COME IN HERE!'

When he turned back to them he grinned the wicked grin that George rarely wore, that Harry had not realised he had missed so desperately. 'Look at you,' he said, 'you're so … middle-aged. Professor, you've aged wonderfully, I wish I could say the same to you Harry, Gin—'

In the same moment that Harry emitted a startled laugh, groaning from his unexpected, disbelieving chest, Ginny flew towards her elder brother in a whirl of red hair.

Harry, too, moved towards Fred without ever making the decision to. He stopped perhaps a few feet away, watching as Fred's eyes grew wide at his sister's tears and clinging to him. It seemed he had not expected this, though Harry was unsure what he could have expected and was a little concerned that he was so unprepared for meeting the rest of his family too.

And wasn't that a dream come true?

Soon enough, Ginny pulled away from her brother. She moved, instead, to stand by Harry and grip his arm while her other hand concentrated on wiping her face. Harry and Fred stared at each other, both looking for similarities and differences from what they knew.

'Look at the Chosen One,' Fred said without the usual bite around the name because his eyes were too wet with tears to carry it off, 'getting a little grey around the temples, aren't you?'

Harry laughed and it was a watery, unsteady thing, as he tried to tell Fred to shut up before drawing him into a hug. It was bizarre, but right—Harry relived every blissful summer as a child going to the Weasleys after spending weeks in a single room at the Dursley's, of having people who, for once, wanted to see him.

And then he saw, over Fred's shoulder, Teddy's most long-held hope of all.

Tonks had vivid yellow hair which could have made Harry cry at the very thought of seeing again. When she walked through the door Fred and Lavender had a wide smile broke across her face the instant she saw McGonagall. While Lavender and Fred were wearing comfortable clothes, she was wearing an incongruous Hogwarts uniform; and with it Harry would have expected nothing less than the Hufflepuff crest she wore on the drooping jumper, yellow and black tie loose around her unbuttoned neck. Holding the hand which was brushed by a torn sleeve trailed a dubious Remus Lupin.

Death had been kind to him. He was not free of scars and scratches, but he had no purple under his eyes and even in his surprise of locking eyes with Harry he held himself with quiet calm and confidence. Was this the last few days that had given him this? Or was it, Harry asked himself guiltily, gathered slowly over the time he, Hermione and Ron had spent away from them horcrux hunting?

Remus looked delighted, truly delighted, for perhaps the first time Harry had ever seen. He strode over to Harry and clasped either hand on his shoulders; now they were not only of the same height, but of the same age.

'Well done, Harry,' his eyes glinted. 'You did it, you killed him.'

It took an ashamedly long split-second for Harry to quite catch what he meant. To these people—two of whom were Teddy's age—Lord Voldemort was a real threat that had not been dampened by age or thought. It was days since they had been faced with his servants, not years upon years.

'Oh,' Harry said, voice wobbling, 'I—thanks—'

'Remus,' came Fred's voice, 'I think that's old news, mate, you better catch up—'

Remus rolled his eyes fondly, glanced at his wife, and pulled Harry into a tight hug. Harry couldn't quite believe it, could not journey through the last few steps of his imagination to allow reality to take hold.

'Sorry,' Harry said gruffly as he dug the heels of his hands into his eyes, lodging his glasses in his hair.

'Oh please,' came Tonks' voice, 'you're not the only one sobbing your heart out, you should have seen Remus when he found out about your kids!'

'My kids?' Harry asked, looking up to a sly grin on Tonks' face.

'I've been stalking anyone called Weasley trying to get the gossip.' She said airily, with the hint of a waver in her voice. 'Then, of course, I saw your little lookalike.'

'Al,' Ginny said with a watery smile, hand now buried in Fred's jumper. 'It's quite terrifying, really.'

'I will not ask his full name and I do not want anyone to inform me,' Fred said loudly, shaking his head. 'I won't acknowledge the fact that any nephew of mine has a stupid name such as the one I suspect you've given him—'

'You may take that up with Professor Dumbledore, Mr Weasley,' McGonagall cut in. 'Since he is back with us as well.'

Lavender began laughing in disbelief, still sniffling but mostly loud and carefree. 'Of course, of course he is,' she said between breaths.

Ginny looked at Harry meaningfully then. Her eyes glanced quickly towards Remus and Tonks, and Harry caught what she was telling him immediately. When he turned to face them, allowing McGonagall, Lavender, Ginny and Fred to talk gleefully, they looked eager in a scared sort of way.

'Wotcher, Harry,' Tonks said, drawing him into a deep hug that would have made Molly Weasley proud. Her voice was soft, and when she drew away from him she wiped hurriedly at her eyes. Remus put his arm around her shoulders and drew her close.

'Speaking of children,' she began in a wobbling voice, 'we have to ask about … about—'

'Teddy is a wonderful, brilliant boy,' Harry said for it was all they needed to know and it was the absolute truth. Remus let out a long, deep breath that was halfway between a sigh and a sob. It stuttered to a long, unsteady halt. Tonks' face crumpled.

'Has he … has his life been …'

'I've made sure,' Harry's voice wobbled on the edge of a very tall precipice, 'that even without you he's had the best he could have ever had. And he has had me and Ginny, and the kids, and Andromeda, and all of the Weasleys, and all of his friends. And, I think, he knows he'll always have us.'

For the first time, Harry saw Remus' eyes fill with tears even though he was obviously trying to hold them back. He could never have guessed, on that dark day when Remus had tried to join them on the run, that they would end up here.

'All we could have asked for,' Remus said as he drew Harry in, 'I knew it Harry, I knew it. I knew you would be perfect. Thank you.'

AN: Oof! A big one! (Sorry for the cliffhanger last chapter)