A massive Thank You to all of my brilliant supporters, with a shout-out to Josh, Lloyd Bunyan, Joe Foster, Julia Hitch, Shep, Silver1119, Joel miller, sam, Jimmy Adams, Jo Daviz, LegendaryWasabi, Optimum Prime and MareBear. I would really struggle to keep this up without the support you guys give me.
If would like to join my pat re on and get updates at least a month early and be recognized as an all-around great person go to Pat re on and add a /Lowten to the end of the URL.
Chapter 1
"The problem is, we know Voldemort is definitely not gone this time. A lot of the kids and most of his followers saw him become a wraith of some type and fly away. The Death Eaters know he is still alive and will be back, they don't have the same fear of the loss of position this time. And we all seriously doubt that it would take thirteen and a half years for him to return this time. They aren't going to give up ground like they did last time," Harry heard Sirius talking to someone as he walked down the stairs.
Harry had a rough night. Despite being in bed by five o'clock, he didn't get up until noon the next day. Both he and Hermione had suffered with bad dreams and had woken each other a lot. When you take out the time they had taken to calm the other down, they hadn't actually gotten that much sleep. Hermione was currently in the shower, having let Harry go first. She wanted to take time with her hair today since she couldn't use magic to dry it like she could at school. A fact that Hermione found particularly annoying, as her birthday was only about two months away and then she would be allowed to do whatever magic she wanted, but until then even a simple drying charm was illegal for her. Harry promised to himself that he would make a drying frame for her as soon as he got the opportunity.
Harry was in search of breakfast - or was it lunch? Hermione had once told him that the breakfast was from breaking your fast, so whatever the first thing you ate was in a day that was technically your breakfast, no matter what it was or when you ate it. Harry didn't know or care about that though. He was just hungry. He walked into the kitchen to find Sirius with Dan and Emma. "Morning," Harry said, still sounding a little tired.
"Afternoon," Both Dan and Sirius replied with a smirk at each other after they spoke together.
Harry was just about to start looking through the cupboards for something when Sassy popped into the kitchen and asked what he wanted for breakfast. Harry considered for a moment and decided that Hermione needed a good pick-me-up breakfast, and since he had come to like it as well he ordered two plates of poached eggs, kippers, and avocado on toast with chopped up bacon sprinkled on top, as well as a pot of strong coffee and for Sassy to help Hermione with her hair once she got out of the shower. The elf happily nodded and disappeared, only to return a few minutes later with armloads of ingredients. The little elf quickly put the bacon and the kippers to fry and started slicing up some bread with a snap of her fingers. Harry saw the newspaper laying on the table and pulled it over so he could see what was being said.
Harry was not surprised at all to find that his fight with Voldemort was the front page story. There was a large picture on the front of Harry beheading Voldemort from behind. Harry wondered for a moment how on earth they had gotten a picture of that, until he read underneath the photo that it was taken from the memory of a Hogwarts student who wished to remain anonymous. "At least it wasn't some photographer standing and taking pictures instead of helping," Harry muttered to himself. The first page of the paper had a list of everyone who had died at the battle. Harry's eyes scanned the list, looking for his friends. There were a few he knew but the only one he considered a friend was Ginny.
'Ginevra (Ginny) Molly Weasley, age 14. Miss Weasley was an outgoing and fun-loving girl who had a thirst for life and who was hit hard by the war having lost her father only a few months ago. She was a member of the Gryffindor Quidditch team and a close friend of Harry Potter. Miss Weasley's dream was to become a professional Quidditch player and fly with the Holyhead Harpies.'
It just felt wrong to Harry. Ginny deserved better than this, she deserved more than a paragraph in the newspaper. She… she deserved to live. For all of Harry's experience with death (Quirrell, Auror Moonshine, and the Death Eaters he had killed), this was the first time since his parents he had lost someone he cared about. He couldn't keep the tears from his eyes as he thought about his friend. Maybe Mrs. Weasley had a point, it was dangerous to be close to him.
Harry felt a hand on his shoulder and he looked up to see Emma standing there offering what support she could. "Do you want to talk about it?" She asked.
Harry wiped the tears from his face. He remembered that they had told the adults about Ginny yesterday so he just said. "I saw Ginny in the paper listed among the dead. It just brought it all back up. Seeing her body laying there…" The silence hung in the air for a while and the next thing he knew Emma was pulling him into a hug.
Harry was still hugging Emma when Hermione walked in. She glanced at his face that still showed some evidence of him having been crying not long ago and saw the paper open on the table. She was able to put it together pretty quickly, and she folded up the paper and set it aside, knowing that if she read it it was going to set her off as well. Hermione gently pulled Harry from her mother's arms and into a hug instead. The two had spent most of the previous night together like that trying to comfort the other enough to get even an hour of sleep.
Sassy set two plates of breakfast on the table along with a pot of stone coffee and said to the two teens. "Master Harry and Miss Hermione is needings to eats now." Her tone made it clear that the elf was ordering them. The two teens were tired and emotionally wrecked and just did as they were told, and despite the breakfast being excellent they ate mechanically, barely tasting the food.
About half way through the meal Daphne and Tracey joined them, almost as distraught as Harry and Hermione. They may not have been as close to Ginny, mainly because they were in Slytherin, but they were fellow members of Harry's little self defence club. They had interacted with the girl plenty, seen her drive to improve her skills. She had been a friend. The atmosphere in the house was understandably a sombre one and quickly fell into silence as people either processed what they had experienced or worried about those who had experienced something so bad.
The silence was broken by Dobby, who popped in holding one of the communication mirrors that was currently showing a very frantic looking Fleur. Before Dobby could even hand Harry the mirror, she started talking when she saw him and Hermione. "Oh thank god the two of you are okay! The French papers are saying that Voldemort attacked the Hogwarts students as they left the school yesterday. They said you had to fight him but they didn't have any details yet. Is that true?" It was clear from her tone she was begging the universe that it wasn't.
"Yeah… it's true. Voldemort attacked us yesterday and I had to fight him. He… he killed Ginny," Harry said.
Fleur may not have ever really talked with Ginny, but she knew just how much of a friend she had turned into over the last school year. "Oh god!" She was shocked by the news. "How are you both holding up?"
"About as well as can be expected. That is to say somewhere between not good and devastated. Exactly where, seems to shift from minute to minute," Hermione admitted.
"I will be there tonight, okay? Are you in London or Hogsmeade?" Fleur asked them.
"I thought you were going to take a few days to get everything sorted out in France before you came over," Harry replied.
"And I thought you wouldn't get into another life or death fight before I got there. Papa got all the paperwork I needed to fill out from the French ministry, and there is nothing stopping me from filling it out over there and mailing in. If you're in London it will even be a shorter flight for the owl. So which house are you in?"
"We are in the London house Fleur," Tracey called over, giving Harry a push to get out of his own way.
"Thank you. So I will join you later this evening."
Sirius grabbed the mirror for a moment, turned it to face himself, and said, "Give us a call on the mirror as soon as you arrive in the UK and I'll come give you an escort. With what happened yesterday and your connection with Harry, I doubt you would make it out of the Ministry unaccosted."
"It's that bad there?" Fleur asked.
"Harry cut Voldemort's head off yesterday and everyone saw his wraith leave the body, proclaim immortality, then run away. We haven't been out today, but my guess is that the public is currently seeing Harry as either the second coming of Merlin or the second coming of Mordred."
"Harry did what?!" Fleur screamed through the mirror, obviously taken completely by surprise. Apparently it was taking a bit of time for the full story to reach the French papers. That, or they had heard the story and thought what they had heard was so far-fetched that they wouldn't print it until they had confirmed the story.
They talked for a while longer as Fleur let it settle in that her boyfriend and girlfriend were both okay and most importantly not dead.
-ϟϟϟ-
Sirius and Fleur arrived through the Floo at a little after six that evening, both looking haggard. Harry and Hermione were waiting in the kitchen and immediately pulled the girl into a hug, sandwiching her between them. In that one moment they were able to forget about everything that had happened over the last day and just bask in having the missing piece of their puzzle back where it belonged.
Despite how good that moment was and how much the three of them wanted to hold onto it forever, it was fleeting. Pretty soon the reason that Fleur had rushed there so quickly reared its ugly head. Harry and Hermione spent the next half hour convincing Fleur that while they weren't exactly fine, they were going to be in time. Then they got to discussing exactly what they were going to do this summer.
"I have a week until I need to submit a bunch of paperwork to the French and British ministries. They basically say that I will be living and working here in Britain for the foreseeable future. And I have another week after that before I have to present myself at Gringotts for training," Fleur explained.
"You never said exactly what the job you'll be doing for Gringotts is," Hermione prompted.
"Well there are a few things that I will be doing at first, until we work out exactly where I excel. I will be acting as a liaison between the bank and mundane banks because I pass as fully human. One of the bankers wants to see how having a Veela involved in negotiations affects any negotiations. I will be learning basic warding and curse breaking to see if I have any talent in that field. Oh, and of course everyone who works at the bank is taught Occlumency. Once I know what I want to pursue, they will train me up to a mastery in that field in a working apprenticeship," Fleur explained. A working apprenticeship was the most common type in Britain, where you provided cheap labour in exchange for the master also teaching you the trade. The other type was an academic scholarship, where the student paid the master to teach them. Academic apprenticeships were usually shorter and were more likely to be in a branch of magic like Runes, Transfiguration, or even something like Alchemy. "What about you two, what do you have to do this summer?"
"Nothing really," Harry said with a shrug. "All the N.E.W.T. classes are voluntary, and they don't know what classes we even qualify for until we get our O.W.L. results. So they didn't give us any homework."
"That's not true and you know it, Harry," Hermione scolded him. "Every subject gave us a book they wanted us to read before we went back if we intended to continue with the subject."
"Recommended we read. It's not the same as a bunch of homework, and even if it was, there is little point before we get our results back."
"Harry, I'm sure you can already guess what you have qualified for. What are you looking to take?" Fleur asked.
"Well, I was hoping that I could take Charms, Transfiguration, Runes, and Defence Against the Dark Arts," Harry admitted.
"That's a fairly solid grounding for a lot of jobs. Any ideas on what you actually want to do yet?" Fleur asked. She had asked before, of course, but Harry didn't have any solid ideas.
"I'm still thinking I might go for a Runes mastery and continue trying to make new things. There aren't really many jobs out there that I find appealing. Sure I'm good at defence, but I can't see myself as an Auror or a curse breaker and always being in danger. I have enough of that already and I don't want it to be my life. I also don't want to spend my life doing parchment work, so most of the jobs at the Ministry are out. However, I found I like making things from Runes. I was going to see about selling my drying doorway this summer," he told his girls.
"Who do you think you could sell it to?" Hermione asked.
"I was going to see if I could modify the design so that it was a few easily-installed thin metal plates that people could just stick wherever they want, and then see if any of the shops in Diagon Alley or Hogsmeade wanted to sell them. I even have an idea that should make them pretty easy to make." Harry explained the idea he had to use a mundane engraving tool to make mass production of the plates a lot faster.
-ϟϟϟ-
Dinner that night was a take away, the Grangers' tradition of an unhealthy meal the day they got back from school having been forgotten in all the excitement. They had decided to go with pizza which Dan had driven out to get. While he was out, an owl flew in through a window that was enchanted to open for post owls and dropped a copy of the Daily Prophet next to Sirius before turning around and flying off.
It turned out that there was a special edition of the Prophet that night that was sent to every wizarding home paid for by the ministry. For the most part it was a recap of what had happened the day before, but the interesting part was that there was a lot in there about what was going to happen going forward. Minister Bones gave a press conference where she laid out the Ministry's plan for going forward. For one, all the Death Eaters that were captured by the Aurors were going to be put on trial. That was good news as far as Harry was concerned, the more of the blood bigots that were locked up the better off the world would be.
Next, the Department of Mysteries was now tasked with discovering what it was exactly that was keeping Voldemort from truly dying so that it could be rectified. This too was favourably received by everyone at Grimmauld Place. Whatever Voldemort had done to keep himself from dying was unnatural, and it was about time someone started taking it seriously. Finally, Minister Bones was offering a deal to any Death Eaters who turned themselves in over the next two weeks. It wasn't an amnesty, but the punishments they received would be a lot less severe than they would face otherwise. However, after the two week time was up, or if any Death Eaters were caught committing a crime during those two weeks, the Aurors were under orders to put them down with extreme prejudice.
It wasn't long after they had finished reading when Dan arrived back with three large pizzas, a number of garlic bread baguettes, and (in an attempt to save everyone from the looming mountain of cheese and carbs) a large sharing bowl of salad to go with them. The newspaper and everything in it was temporarily forgotten by the teenagers in favour of the food. They all sat together in the kitchen as it had much more of a family feel than the dining room, and plates were quickly passed out as well as glasses for the couple of two-litre bottles of cola that Dan had also brought.
They were about three quarters of the way through devouring everything when the fire flared green and the head of Amelia Bones herself was floating among the emerald flames.
"Amelia, what can I do for you? Are you calling as an old friend or the Minister of Magic?" Sirius greeted her and asked.
"This is official, Warlock Black. I was hoping to have a quick word with Warlock Potter if it wouldn't be any trouble."
Harry was more than happy to talk to the Minister, and she was quickly invited over. Harry and Sirius quickly led her out of the kitchen into another room where they would have privacy. "So, what do you want from me?" Harry asked as he stood behind Sirius, who was sitting in his chair in Grimmauld Place's Warlock office, with Minister Bones sitting on the other side of the table in a guest seat.
"Did you get your copy of the special edition of the Daily Prophet earlier today?" She asked, and they both nodded that they had. "I announced that the Unspeakables were now handling certain aspects of the You-Know-Who problem. Because of this, they want to ask you about your experiences that are in any way connected to You-Know-Who. There aren't many people who have faced off against him multiple times and survived to be questioned, let alone witness a ritual he was doing. They are hoping that you know something that will help them work out the truth," the minister explained, and it was clear she was asking Harry had every right to not go in if he chose.
Harry was more than happy to speak with the Unspeakables once he was made aware of who exactly they were. As far as he was concerned, a group whose job it was to delve into the mysteries of magic finally looking to uncover whatever it was Voldemort had done to keep himself alive was a very good thing. Sirius agreed as well, and it was quickly arranged that Harry would go to the Ministry in the next few days and tell the Unspeakables everything he knew.
Now that her job as the minister was done, Sirius invited his old colleague to join them for a slice of pizza. However, Amelia hadn't had much of an opportunity to catch up with Susan yet after the mess Voldemort attacking the students had created, so she had refused, eager to finally have a chance to spend some time with her niece. They accompanied Amelia back to the floo and everyone gave a polite goodbye before she left. Harry and Sirius took their seats back at the table, but before Harry could grab his last slice of pizza Fleur asked, "What did the Minister want,Harry?"
Harry told her about the newspaper article and how the Ministry was handling the fact that Voldemort had revealed that he wouldn't die, by investigating what the Dark Lord had become and trying to see if they could work out how it was done so that it could be undone. "They want me to tell them about all my experiences with him and see if it gives them any ideas about what to look into," Harry told her before grabbing his slice and taking a bite.
She nodded but frowned in thought as she did so. "Asking you about the fool with the messed up French name makes sense. But why are they only doing that now? Hasn't Director Bones believed you all year? Why wasn't it the first thing she did when she got the Ministry job?"
"I wouldn't be surprised to find out she did, maybe she is just revealing it to the public now when there were so many witnesses to him only being mostly dead. If she had revealed it earlier, then it would have caused a panic because the Ministry would be confirming he is unkillable. Now the public will quickly hear about him being unkillable, but not unbeatable, and the Ministry is working on the unkillable part," Hermione speculated.
"Oui. That makes sense. But why now ask Harry to tell them what he knew sooner?" Fleur pointed out.
Daphne took this one. "We were right in the middle of preparing for our O.W.L.s and Harry was spending his free time teaching a bunch of us real self-defence, and that included the minister's niece. The summer would have been the best time to approach Harry anyway. Maybe she was already planning it and the attack yesterday just pushed up the schedule."
"That's possible. I used to work with Amelia and she can definitely be patient and wait for the right moment when she believes the situation calls for it. I would also say it was probably worth hiding the research before now because of counter intelligence. You-Know-Who would expect the Ministry to be researching how he keeps surviving, now that he has done so publicly. You-Know-Who will take more precautions now to hide his secrets because he will assume the Ministry is looking. There is no strategic advantage to hiding the efforts any more, and being open about it may actually have some people with information coming forward," Sirius explained, his own plate of pizza now piping hot again as he had cast a heating charm on his when he had sat back down.
The conversation about the war continued, but Harry noticed that Dan and Emma were both rather uncomfortable about it. It made sense to him, their daughter and the boy they accepted responsibility for were both involved in a civil war and had no way of backing out. Their instincts were probably screaming at them to either fight or pack up and run to the other side of the world. The problem was Voldemort would never let Harry go, and he was well enough aware that Hermione is someone Harry cares about. That would mean they would chase Hermione and Fleur just as much as they would chase Harry. And here in Britain there were people trying to protect them, to fight against the Death Eaters and their leader. Somewhere like Australia wouldn't have that, there the monsters could just walk down the street and no one would try to stop them.
There was also nothing the dentists could do to fight back. What could they do, not fix their teeth for them? Harry understood that the two of them must feel helpless in this entire situation. Hermione, their little girl, was even turning to Harry and Fleur for comfort and reassurance now rather than them. He wished he knew a way to help them, but he couldn't think of anything that wasn't just papering over a crack. He would have to talk with Hermione and Fleur to see what they suggested.
-ϟϟϟ-
Harry and Hermione both refused to go to bed that night, what with all the nightmares the night before, lots of coffee and cuddling up on the sofa seemed like a much better idea. Fleur didn't even consider leaving them; she instead went and made the drinks, coming back with three large mugs of steaming hot chocolate that each had two shots of espresso in them. How Fleur managed to get espresso without leaving the house was a mystery for another time, and the three of them cuddled up on the sofa.
Harry and Hermione were still too rattled from their experiences the day before to do anything more than that. Fleur had settled herself in the middle, and as soon as she was finished with her espresso-infused hot chocolate she had set her mug to the side and had pulled her two loves to her and got them to start talking, not just about what had happened but how they felt during the whole thing.
Harry had to keep himself from letting out a chuckle as Hermione questioned if she was a terrible person for killing people. It was weird having Hermione on the other side of that conversation, given the amount of time Hermione had put into telling him he wasn't a monster for what he had done. In a way it helped them both. Harry was able to look at his own actions through a different lens now that he and Fleur were giving Hermione all the same points they had given him, and Hermione was able to see how her actions didn't differ that much from how Harry had handled things. They also talked about Ginny and how Harry felt he had failed to save her. Hermione had reminded Harry that he wasn't the only one there, and that he had done more than Dumbledore to save their friend.
It was impossible for them to heal in one night, but it was a good first step. After a few hours Fleur got up and went to make them another set of drinks, only this time they had a little sleeping draught in them. As soon as her loves were asleep, she hit them with a couple of cheering charms, enough that they would get a good night's sleep and wouldn't be too tired to continue healing tomorrow. Then she curled up with them, happy that after a year of rarely seeing them, they were back where they belonged, wrapped up in her arms.
