Bill poured a vial of Pepper-Up into his third coffee and returned to his equation. The fact that Regulus stole whatever the wards had been guarding opened up new avenues for cracking them, and Bill sensed the solution just out of his grasp. He loved being in the field, the rush of adrenaline and split-second decisions based on nothing but a gut feeling, but he also enjoyed this part, the beauty of magic captured and pinned with formulas and numbers.
He wondered what exactly it was that You-Know-Who protected so zealously and that Regulus stole. A horcrux. He still couldn't place where he heard that word, but it sure wasn't anything good. No matter. It had been kept hidden for ten years, and it would keep for a bit longer. Unlike, say, a potential Inferi pandemic if the next undead to break free decided not to go conveniently for the brain.
The thief himself was lying on the sofa, unseeing eyes staring into the distance. He slipped away when Bill had bandaged him up, and hadn't returned since. The Flesh-Mending Potion had little effect the last time Bill checked, not that he had expected wonders from a formula designed for the living. Hopefully, Saif's answer would offer a better option; the man managed to cure his wounds somehow, even after that dragon had burnt half of his face off. Now that Bill thought of it, Saif had insisted on taking some of that dragon's blood despite the sheer insanity of approaching an already enraged beast. Rich Dead Boy had better still be rich if that was one of the ingredients. Dragon blood cost a fortune even on the black market, and Bill didn't have any galleons to spare.
Harry stumbled out of the bedroom, bleary-eyed. "Why didn't you wake me up? I thought we were going to your parents' farm?"
"Are you up to going anywhere today?"
Harry shrugged. "Fred and George were looking forward to seeing you."
"The Burrow will still be there tomorrow," Bill said. He hated disappointing the younger kids, but Harry had just gone through a horrific event. Events, multiple. "I already talked to my mother earlier. We should have a quiet day in."
"I'd like that." Harry smiled at him, relieved.
"That's decided, then." Bill took in Harry's clothes. Merlin. He fancied himself a great babysitter for his siblings, but so far, his performance as Harry's guardian deserved a strong T. "Let's find you something fresh to wear, shall we? I've scrubbed the bathroom cleaner than when I got it, so you can go ahead and have a nice soak while I'm magicking us some breakfast."
"I can help if you want?"
"Maybe next time." He ruffled Harry's hair in passing. Yes, it did need a good wash. "I should have my brother's old T-shirt here somewhere…"
Charlie left behind some clothes after the house-warming party, and Bill shrunk them to fit. As the water turned on in the bathroom, he stared at Harry's tattered trainers by the door. It must be only Harry's innate magic still keeping them together. They would have to find him something better at the Burrow. The boys were used to wearing hand-me-downs, but Mum would never let any piece of their clothing get this bad. Were Harry's relatives that poor, or just neglectful?
He was all ready to make the kid Mum's patented breakfast crumpets in an attempt to make up for his failures when Harry returned, still steaming a bit, and shyly asked for that Muggle cereal instead.
"You sure? I'm going to pretend to be devastated you snubbed my five-course breakfast—crumpets for each course—but here you go." He summoned the carton from the cupboard and got a bowl and a spoon by hand as Mum always taught them. He was confident enough in his magic's precision that it was mostly a habit; Kingsley had once shown him how to summon a glass from the middle of a champagne tower as a party trick. Still, it was important to instil good magic habits in kids. "You may get the milk," he added, and was glad he did because Harry looked happy to be useful.
In between spoonfuls, Harry looked at Regulus critically. "Should I read to him?" he asked. "They say it's good to read to a patient in a coma. It's kinda the same thing with him, right?"
"It's very thoughtful, Harry. You can also try reading to him when he's a little more aware."
"I don't want to do it when he's more aware. I'm still angry at him."
"Fair enough."
After breakfast, Harry curled on the mismatched settee Bill transfigured from an ugly plant stand he had got from Uncle B and his new wife. The bloody had thing refused all shrinking charms he had known and a few he specifically researched, and no matter how many times he tried to turn it into a leather armchair now, it ended up as Grandmother Cedrella's Victorian plush.
"The magic draped the northern sky in a curtain of glowing green, vast and wild and inconceivable, older than time itself. It moved and pulsed with monstrous power, and the stars shone through it, cold and sharp. We thought we could tame it. Oh, what fools we were! The minds of men crumble if they get too close to the unknown, unable to endure its awful beauty. We found ourselves reduced to our primal state. Hunt or be hunted; kill or be killed.
What saved Frederik's sanity was his bear form: he took refuge in the simplicity of the animal mind. For the rest of the crew, it meant having a ten-foot-tall beast invading our tent."
Bill rested his forehead against the kitchen counter as he listened to Harry's voice, high and bright. Why hadn't he given him Babbity Rabbity instead? Or Hogwarts: The History. No, that one was so dry that only Percy could enjoy it at that age. What kind of lessons had Harry learned about the wizarding world so far? Bill should show him the side of it that wasn't all violence and murder. Maybe they could go to a Quidditch game or that new sickleodeon in Diagon. And Fortescue's. Ice cream was true magic and, most importantly, age-appropriate.
Regulus didn't move, but Bill imagined that some part of him was listening. Whether the reading material would do him any good remained to be seen.
The banging on the door interrupted Harry's reading. He looked up questioningly, and Bill squeezed his shoulder on his way to open it, wondering if it was Kingsley. At dawn, a bedraggled Ministry owl had brought a Howler containing three quiet and pointed words, 'Fuck you, Bill.'
But it wasn't Kingsley. On the other side of the door was Charlie, wearing a robe with a hand-sewn, off-centre logo of The Underbellies, his aspiring punk band, and scowling his most petulant scowl at him.
"Has something happened?" Bill asked.
"Has something happened, he asks." Charlie shouldered his way inside. "You tell me! You blow Mum off, busy with who knows what, and Fred and George of all people seem to know something! Of course, being the little shits they are, they can't just give a straight answer. Just obnoxious giggles and dramatic readings of Ginny's Harry Potter books. They were singing the Twinkling Starlight song for the fifth time when I left. Fifth time! It's all your fault somehow."
Bill winced. Some of the books would play music if you poked the right part, and Ginny had the unicorn pony's theme song on repeat all day long when she was five. Any attempts to silence it would lead to a tantrum.
"I promised Mum I'll be home tomorrow," he said.
"You and I both know that your promises ain't worth shit." Charlie shifted his gaze to something behind his shoulder. His face clouded with anger. "This is what you skipped on us for? A fuck?"
Briefly, Bill turned to see Regulus standing in the doorway to the living room, wearing Bill's clothes, hair rumpled. Yes, he saw how that could be a reasonable assumption at first glance. That didn't mean, however, that he was going to accept this kind of talk from his brat of a brother.
"Now listen here, you little twerp." He took Charlie into a headlock. "If I hear anything like that coming from your mouth ever again, I know a handy spell to switch your face with your arse. Oh wait, nobody would even notice the difference."
"Regulus, don't!" Harry's voice rang, alarmed. He tugged Regulus, who was baring teeth at Charlie, back into the living room.
Hastily, Bill stepped back. He wasn't going to be the reason his brother got eaten after a bit of roughhousing because Regulus mistook him for an enemy.
"What's wrong with him? Is he sick?" Charlie followed behind, studying Regulus more closely. He turned to Harry who was sitting Regulus back on the sofa. "And why are you wearing my T-shirt?"
"Do you want it back?" Harry asked.
"Yes, I bloody want it back. Unshrunk."
Bill intervened. "You don't need that T-shirt. It was too small for you before your growth spurt, and you'll never fit into it now."
"It's the principle of things."
"I know it's hard to go against one's nature, but do try and not be a jerk for five minutes here, Charles."
Charlie glared. "Who are you, anyway?" he asked Harry.
Harry glared back as he said his name.
Charlie's eyes darted to his forehead. "Harry. As in…"
"I wish people would stop doing that." Harry patted down his fringe irritably.
"Boo-hoo, celebrity life is so ha—Who is that?" Charlie spotted Slithers on the windowsill, and everything else was forgotten. "A horned serpent!" He lit up and rushed to her, shedding his teenage cynic persona. "Oh, you're so pretty, baby girl. How did you get here?"
"How can you tell she's a girl?" Bill asked, curious.
"Only female horned serpents actually have a horn," Charlie said scornfully, as if he was stupid for not knowing this extremely obvious snake fact. "Who's got such glossy scales, such a cute snout?" he cooed. "You must be so sad here in this arsehole's sorry flat, even without a proper enclosure."
"She's not sad," Harry said defensively.
"How would you know?"
Harry hissed rapidly, and Slithers hissed back.
"Slithers is not sad," he repeated. "And if you baby talk to her again, she'll bite your scrawny arse. Her words, not mine."
"You're a parselmouth?" Charlie asked, looking at Harry with newfound appreciation. He bowed at Slithers. "My sincere apologies, m'lady. Slithers, you say her name is?"
"She Who Slithers In The Dark."
"Cool name." He grilled Slithers with questions through Harry until she slipped from the windowsill and disappeared under the sofa, done with the questioning. Bill could emphasise—Charlie tended to get obsessive with his favourite topics and could go on for hours if you let him. "Can you talk to certain dragons as well?" Charlie asked Harry. Of course, that's what he would want to know. He loved all dangerous animals, but dragons were his true passion. "Wyverns, maybe, or Asian species like the Chinese Fireball, the ones that are more serpent-like?"
"Dragons are real too?" It was Harry's turn to sound excited.
"Are dragons real, he asks! Where d'you live, under a rock?"
"Surrey, which is basically the same thing. Well, I lived there until two days ago." A shadow flickered across Harry's face.
"You don't anymore?"
Harry looked at Bill uncertainly. He was probably waiting for the other shoe to drop and for Bill to send him back to his Aunt, Bill realised.
"Harry isn't," he said firmly, putting a hand on Harry's shoulder. "He is not going back there."
Charlie looked between them curiously. "And how's your weird boyfriend fit into this?" he asked pointing at Regulus who was sitting on the settee and fiddling with Harry's book.
"He's not my boyfriend," said Bill.
"He ate my uncle," Harry said at the same time. "But he also saved me, and another family too," he added awkwardly.
"I'm sorry, what?" Charlie stared at Regulus. "He ate your uncle?"
"Well, just his brain."
Bill swept his hand across his face. The last thing he wanted was to try and explain the situation. "It's a long story."
"Wait, is that why George was asking me about zombies? How do the twins fit into this?"
"I met Fred and George first when I accidentally ran into Hogwarts," Harry said.
"You know about zombies?" Bill asked. "That's a Muggle term."
"We went to the Muggle movies with Tonks and Jake on Easter hols. You would know it too if only you went with us, as you'd promised."
Bill sighed. "Sorry. You know my final exams—"
"Whatever." Charlie turned back to Regulus. "Was the Hogsmeade murder also you?"
Bill and Harry exchanged looks.
"Oh my God!" he exclaimed.
"McNair was evil," Harry defended.
"He could be You-Know-Who's right-hand man for all I care. But now Mum's trying to forbid me from playing at Hogsmeade, just when Aberforth finally caved in and allowed us a thirty-minute set in his pub."
"I'm sorry these gruesome Hogsmeade murders are so inconvenient to you," Bill said. Expecting an ounce of tact from his brother was like expecting his beloved dragons to suddenly become vegetarians.
"You mean to say there were more than one?"
Bill groaned.
Charlie threw his hands into the air like the drama queen he was.
After swearing to keep the illegal details secret, he got the full story out of them, and offered some more obnoxious commentary in return. When had Mum and Dad gone wrong with him? Such a shame Bill had failed to convince them that he was a changeling all those years ago.
Charlie raided Bill's kitchen cupboards like the bottomless pit he was, immediately honing in on the biscuit stash. Then he flopped on the sofa and shovelled the biscuits into his mouth, dropping crumbs and staring at Regulus. Regulus stared back with his unseeing eyes, fingers stroking the settee's upholstery.
"You're one creepy fellow, aren't you?" Charlie asked, having realised he had no chance of winning the staring contest. "I see why you would like that old piece of furniture though—Grandma Cedrella was a Black." He looked at Bill. "Did the gold-digger give it to you?"
"Share with Harry." Bill looked at the biscuit tin pointedly. "And no, obviously, she didn't." Uncle B's new wife would never part with anything of value, material or sentimental, from the 'Weasley family seat', as they called it, even if it was destined to rot in the attic. Dad might be content with getting 200 galleons and a cursed tea set after Grandmother's death while his older brother got the Hillock House with all its artefacts, books and family portraits that the generations of Weasleys amassed over the centuries, but Bill was still quite bitter about the whole affair. "She sent that ugly plant stand from the small dining room, and it only transfigures into this."
The younger kids hardly ever visited the Hillock House or stayed there for long enough to properly look around, but Bill, Charlie and even Percy still remembered it in its former glory, back in the days when Grandpa Septimus had been alive and Grandmother hadn't fully succumbed to her demons yet. She would let Charlie ride her hippogriffs despite Mum's disapproval, and for that, Charlie had loved her fiercely.
"How generous of her." Charlie sneered. "Bitch."
"Language," Bill said, glancing at Harry.
"I've heard worse." Harry shrugged.
"No matter."
"You've had a kid for less than two days, and already you're turning into Mum," Charlie said, rolling his eyes. "Now. What do you have here for entertainment, because seeing an Inferius is much less exciting than I thought it would be."
"You should be glad for that," Bill said, and Harry nodded in agreement. If Regulus was offended by Charlie's conclusion, or heard it at all, he did not show it, still engrossed in the settee.
They settled on watching TV. Charlie had tried it in his metamorphomagus friend's house and thought it was 'the best thing Muggles came up with'. He asked Bill to find the next episode of a series he had watched about lifeguards in Hawaii, but Harry said it didn't work like that. Apparently, you had to watch whatever was on different channels at the moment and check the program. So there was still room for improvement, Charlie decided, and Bill agreed.
Bill hadn't turned the TV on once since he moved in, and had only a faint idea how to do it, but he figured that a tap with a wand would do. The antennae moved—something they weren't supposed to do if Harry was to be believed—and the screen came alive. He planted himself on the sofa between his brother and his charge, satisfied that he didn't make a fool out of himself and managed the Muggle apparatus on the first try. Dad would be so proud.
Even Regulus abandoned the upholstery in favour of watching scenes flicker across the screen.
A group of ladies in colourful sarees twirled, singing in Hindi. A man in a rumpled beige raincoat stared suspiciously at a tense couple. A woman was telling some guy called Ian that their son was not his, for Ian to crash his car dramatically. Finally, the TV settled on daytime news.
'SEASIDE TRAGEDY: MURDERER STILL ON THE LOOSE; YOUNG BOY MISSING,' read the caption. A woman with a blond perm was smudging her mascara with a handkerchief. 'Petunia Dursley,' was written at the bottom corner of the screen. Wait. Wasn't Petunia the name of—
Harry gasped and sat straighter.
"—the devil brat's fault; I just know it. He must have come in contact with other freaks," Harry's aunt sobbed. "I knew taking him in was a mistake. And now my husband is dead because of him."
The camera switched to another woman. Where Petunia was all long lines and sharp angles, Marjorie Dursley was square and squat, her French bulldog eyes gleaming scornfully from under a modest black hat.
"Of course, the boy had nothing to do with it," she said with absolute confidence. Bill sighed in relief. At least someone in Harry's family was on his side. "He's a rather dim child, a runt of the litter. Some condition his mother passed to him, you understand." Oh. It seemed Bill had been too hasty. "If there's a devil in our family, it's my brother's upstart of a wife. You know, the one time we came across a priest, she cursed and rushed to the other side of the road. Called him 'one of those people'. What God-fearing Christian woman would do that? I want the police to investigate her."
The last one to be interviewed was a round boy in a black suit that was too tight on him. His face was red and blotchy. Dudley Dursley, the name Harry had given Bill first. Bill didn't get a feeling that he was close to his cousin, but maybe—
"I've never liked Harry. He's a weird kid," Dudley mumbled. Well, that answered the question. "But I don't want him to die, y'know? Please find him. Maybe don't bring him back, though."
A picture of Harry appeared on the screen, clearly outdated at least by a few years. On it, a younger-looking Harry was poorly cropped from a group class photo. His T-shirt's collar was stretched out, his hair was even wilder than now, and his shy smile missed a few teeth. "HAVE YOU SEEN THIS CHILD?" was written in big letters underneath, with a hotline number to contact.
The news moved on to another story—London Zoo facing financial problems. A monkey with sad eyes shoved a banana in its mouth, and a pair of snakes limply hung from mossy rocks in a terrarium. At any other time, Charlie would start bemoaning these animals' horrible living conditions, but now he just looked at Harry, eyes wide.
"Gee, Harry, that's your family?" he said after a moment. "What a bunch of arseholes."
Harry's expression was blank, but his fists clenched on his lap, and his lips trembled. He gave Charlie a grim smile, way too old on his face. "Actually, these are the nicest things Dudley and Aunt Marge have ever said about me."
"Kid, that's… Come here." Charlie moved to sit next to Harry, half-perched on the armrest, and enveloped him into a hug.
At first, Harry was as stiff as a broom. When Charlie didn't let go, he sagged into the embrace and started crying quietly, tears soaking into Charlie's robe.
"We're keeping him," Charlie mouthed over Harry's head and hugged him tighter.
Bill nodded. Sometimes, rare as it might be, his brother was alright.