Just realized that I haven't updated this story on in a hot minute, despite having a regular update schedule on AO3. Further reason to follow me on AO3 and not this website. Excuse me as I go update my one (1) other active story on this website.
Tim's departure from home this time around was much like the first, save for it being a late-afternoon departure versus the ungodly hour Tim had had to wake up at the first time around. Damian had somehow allowed Tim to take Alfred the Cat back to Hogwarts with him, citing Tim's care as 'adequate' and threatening him with his katana should any harm come to the creature (Tim decidedly did not mention the time he'd thought the cat had been impaled by a rusty sword).
He once again took the zeta tubes to London, however, this time, instead of taking the Hogwarts Express to the castle, Tim arrived at an eerily empty Platform Nine and Three-Quarters. Minutes after his arrival, there was a little pop, and an old wizard appeared in all his bearded glory, holding out a hand towards Tim.
"Shall we?" Dumbledore offered, and he grabbed one of Tim's suitcases so that the boy could have a solid grip on Alfred.
They weren't headed for Hogwarts just yet. No, it was a couple days too early for that. Instead, Tim had asked if he could spend the weekend at Grimmauld Place. Tim claimed it was for the company and to check in with the Order, but, in reality, it was so that he could ask the almost-healed Arthur Weasley about the attack.
"Timothy," Dumbledore told him very seriously, "I want you to know that if you ever want to locate the headquarters on your own, it would be best if you knew that it is located at Number Twelve Grimmauld Place."
Tim wasn't exactly sure why Dumbledore though he needed to know this, given that Tim already knew the street name and would have been perfectly fine finding the house on his own.
This time, when Tim Apparated, he was prepared for the odd sensation, so it was less like someone forcing his head underwater and more like Tim jumping off a high dive, something controlled and manageable.
They arrived at Grimmauld Place just after dessert had been finished (judging by the distinct smell of fudge that sat in the air), meaning the children had fled upstairs to avoid any potential chores and Molly was busy enchanting the dishes to wash themselves. She jumped when she heard the crack of their arrival, the dishes mimicking the movement but somehow not breaking against the faucet.
"Tim!" she exclaimed, bustling over to him and giving him a giant hug that only a mother of seven could have perfected. "Happy Christmas and a Happy New Year, dear! It's so good to see you." As she pulled away, she finally caught sight of his sweater, and she gasped, covering her mouth with her hands.
"Your—you got the jumper!" She looked ready to cry.
"It's really comfortable, Molly," Tim told her, rubbing his fingers between the yarn. "Thank you so much for making it for me."
"Anytime, dear, anytime," she said, pulling him into another hug. "We just finished having dessert, would you like some peppermint fudge?"
"Yes, please," said Tim immediately, his mouth already watering.
"And some for you, Albus?" she offered, conjuring up a second plate.
Dumbledore smiled, shaking his head politely. "While I always enjoy your cooking, Molly, I unfortunately have other matters to attend to right now."
Molly only looked slightly put-out by this. "Yes, well, I suppose that can't be helped."
Dumbledore nodded sagely and disappeared with a ghost of a smile and a noise like a gunshot that had Tim flinch reflexively. Molly sighed, ushering Tim to the dinner table and giving him a generous helping of red and white-striped fudge, which Tim immediately dug into while maintaining a pace acceptable for society (but just barely, this stuff was insanely good). A couple minutes later, while Tim was explaining his complicated family dynamic to Molly, Ginny came down the stairs in a hoodie and sweatpants.
"Who was that—?" She stopped, staring at Tim for a good three seconds before saying, "Oh. Hello, Tim."
Tim nodded in her direction. "Hi, Ginny. How's it going?" he asked, trying to be nonchalant. He was just now realizing that Ginny may have never actually heard about the whole Tim-working-with-the-Order ordeal. He wondered what this must be like for her and suddenly felt a little ashamed of how casual he was taking this whole thing.
"It—I'm doing fine." She fidgeted in place. "A little shocked, but otherwise fine."
"I'm working with the Order," Tim explained, trying to be respectful to the awkward situation into which Ginny had unknowingly stumbled. "I also work for the Justice League of America."
She nodded slowly, though the blank look in her eyes suggested that she didn't really understand.
"Okay then," she said, and walked back up the stairs. He heard a door slam shut moments later and the sound of muffled shouting. Tim sheepishly returned to his fudge but had barely taken another bite when a flurry of children came storming down the stairs all at once.
"Tim!" said Harry, reaching the table first and sliding into a chair. "You didn't tell me you were coming here!"
"You didn't tell me when you left school to save Mr. Weasley," Tim commented, "and yet here we both are."
"Tim, you gotta tell me where the hell you got that chocolate, I swear it's made me a changed man—"
"Did you get my letter?" Hermione interrupted Ron. "Oh, I hope I got the address right."
"The chocolate was made by my butler," Tim said, pointing at Ron, "and, yes, I got your letter," he continued, switching over to Hermione. The answers seemed to satisfy the both of them. Fred and George, however, did not limit themselves to one question each.
"So, how long have you been in the Order, Timmy?"
"Does this mean you're of age?"
"Were you ever planning on bringing this up?"
Tim patiently explained his situation to the two of them, carefully leaving out the parts about himself being a vigilante, something which Harry, Ron, and Hermione all visibly reacted to. Subtlety wasn't exactly their strong suit. The peppermint fudge was half-eaten and stayed that way for another half hour when Ginny came down and forced Tim to start the story all over again. By the time he returned to his dessert, it was a little stiff, but Tim wasn't one to complain about something as trivial as that.
Tim ended up spending the night in one of the bedrooms on the second floor (or the first, depending on what country you called home), a dark room with peeling wallpaper and a very flat mattress with inexplicably clean sheets and a quilt on top. There was also a mountain of blankets folded next to the bed ("The nights get terribly cold," Molly had told him, "and the last thing we want is you getting sick while you're here."). Tim wasn't able to go to sleep, though, because almost immediately after he entered the bedroom, it was raided by the other kids of the house, and it became the Tim Interrogation Hour, during which they all tried to weasel out of him any and all information he'd heard in meetings with the Order.
"I'm not actually in the Order," Tim tried to tell them. "We're just working together." But this was not a good enough excuse. They all wanted to know about some kind of weapon and everything that had been said about Harry behind closed doors. Tim, of course, remained tight-lipped—this wasn't even close to the worst interrogations he had endured—and managed to avoid all of their questions. Somehow, Harry, Ron, and Hermione managed to convince Fred, George, and Ginny to leave, and then it was just the four of them, like this was lunch at the Gryffindor table.
"Okay, Tim, be straight with us," said Hermione after Ginny had closed the door and Fred and George left via apparition, which Tim found rather unnecessary, "why were you saying all that weird stuff down there?"
Tim decided it was useless at the end of the day to try and feign ignorance on the topic. And, additionally, he needed to make sure that they hadn't spilled information about him which he desired to stay as secret as possible.
"I'll tell you if you know a way to make sure no one hears this conversation," Tim told her, knowing full well that someone like Hermione would have a spell like that at her disposal, being a more advanced magic-user than Tim. Harry and Ron looked at each other nervously, but a sly smile crossed Hermione's face.
"You know," she said, pulling her wand from under her robes, "I think I do." She pointed at the creaky wooden door and whispered, "Immotus."
Ron's eyes grew wide, and he grinned. "Oh, mum would be furious if she knew you could cast an Imperturbable Charm."
"It's just a failsafe in case the Room of Requirement is compromised somehow." Well, Tim was a fan of a well-devised failsafe, admittedly.
"All right then," Harry said as they all sat in a circle on the ground, like this was just another one of their midnight meetings in the Room of Requirement. "Spill."
Tim sighed. With these three, it was best to get to the point quickly or else the conversation would quickly segue into a boatload of unimportant questions. "The—the Order doesn't know that I'm not a real wizard."
The three stared at Tim with shocked faces.
"No way," Ron breathed. "So they just think you're a magical kid interested in stopping You-Know-Who?"
Tim decidedly ignored the 'kid' part of that question. "More like I'm a consultant for the JLA who happens to now also be a consultant for the Order of the Phoenix."
"Blimey…" Ron scratched the back of his head. "That's gotta be difficult, keeping so many stories straight."
Tim let out a sharp peal of laughter. "Trust me, I'm used to it."
"But why?" Hermione asked. "Wouldn't it be more helpful to have all the cards on the table?"
Tim shook his head. "If Dumbledore is keeping secrets from everyone else, I'm not just gonna become another one of his army. I need to have the upper hand."
"He does love his secrets," Harry mumbled angrily. "Wait," he looked up at Tim, "are you keeping secrets from us?" He gestured to the three Gryffindors in the room.
"Oh, definitely," Tim immediately answered, thinking about what Dumbledore had told him.
Harry looked offended by this blunt confession. "Really? But I thought we were supposed to be friends or something."
"Friends don't tell each other everything," said Tim. "It's really nothing personal. It's just a defense mechanism." This did not seem to be the answer Harry was hoping for, but the boy backed off for now.
"So we're the only ones who know about the whole—?" She pointed at her chest and traced a small circle.
Tim tapped the annulus under his shirt. "Yep. Now you guys have a secret of your own."
That seemed to make Ron excited. "Not even Dumbledore knows?"
"Not even Dumbledore." This brought a sort of devious smirk to Harry's face. He must have been really desperate to have something over Dumbledore.
"Dammit, where did you get to be so good at this?" Ron groaned, watching as Tim's bishop captured his knight in a terribly brutal assault involving a crosier to the neck.
"Lots of practice," said Tim, which sounded pretty lame, but the alternative was to explain the way that high-stakes matches tended to bring out the best in him and that he learned most of his chess moves from playing his clingy arch-nemesis. Ron's pawn whacked the bishop's knees with its club, but it looked over its shoulder back at Ron, as if it knew the move was pointless in the grand scheme of things. Ron was an exceptional player, Tim could recognize that, but he wasn't quite at Tim's level, though he was giving Tim quite the hard time with this match.
Molly poked her head into the room just as Hermione's cat, Crookshanks, was trying to sneak away from them with Ron's other defeated knight, and Harry was in the middle of trying to encourage Tim's rook to get a more violent kill in on Ron's terrified pawn.
"Harry dear, could you come down to the kitchen?" Molly asked him. "Professor Snape would like a word with you."
Ginny let out a low, "Ooooh…" under her breath, but she seemed only half-listening to what her mother was actually saying.
Harry was very invested in this pawn's death. "Squash him—squash him, he's only a pawn, you idiot—" He looked up from the board suddenly. "—sorry, Mrs. Weasley, what did you say?"
"Professor Snape, dear. In the kitchen. He'd like a word."
The effect was instantaneous. Everyone turned to Harry, looking truly horrified, mouths agape and chess games all but forgotten to everyone but Crookshanks, who finally cracked and started pouncing on all the other pieces on the board, who fled in terror like it was a bad Godzilla movie.
Harry tried to form some sort of coherent thought, but, "Snape?" seemed to be the only thing he could manage right now.
"Professor Snape, dear," Molly chided. "Now come on, quickly, he says he can't stay long."
The moment Molly's head disappeared behind the door, Ron shouted in a whisper, "Holy shit!What's he want with you?"
"You haven't done anything, have you?" Ginny asked quickly, her face paling.
"No!" Harry hissed, though he looked very much like he was mentally analyzing every single interaction he had had with Snape in the past year. Tim knew that look because he made the same face all the time.
"Go!" Hermione whispered—why they were all whispering, Tim was unsure. "You definitely don't want to be late."
Harry nodded blankly, swallowing nervously. He stood up, giving the rest of them one final glance, and, like a soldier off to war, he left the room stoically.
While Harry endured whatever horrors Snape had in store for him in the basement, Tim and Hermione joined the Weasleys in heading to St. Mungo's to pick up Arthur, who Dumbledore had been informed was finally ready to come home after almost three weeks away. This, of course, was the main reason Tim had come to Grimmauld Place at all—that is, to finally hear firsthand what happened at the Department of Mysteries. Tim had been expecting a secret entrance more like Platform Nine and Three-Quarters or Diagon Alley, but he was instead met with a shabby, rundown department store with a secret door imbedded in the outdoor display's glass, which made Tim oddly disappointed in a way he couldn't quite put into words.
The interior was orderly pandemonium, a logistical nightmare for Tim. Everywhere people were sporting quirky magical injuries and raising a ruckus, while the staff calmly directed patients to different areas of the hospital like this was their everyday. Tim could not imagine working here for more than a week and not going crazy. A man to his left was tearing fistfuls of hair off of his head and shoving it into his own mouth. A little girl to his right was wailing, probably due to the giant scar raked across her chest that looked like it came from a wild bear.
Ron chuckled at Tim's astonishment and horror, practically dragging him through the double doors and down the corridor full of floating candles and amicable portraits. They went up a floor and made their way to a ward labelled:
"DANGEROUS" DAI LLEWELLYN WARD: SERIOUS BITES
Molly ushered the children into the room, and Tim ended up having to endure a long lecture on Molly's end about how "Muggle medicine only leads to unnecessary complications" before he was finally able to talk to Arthur. Well, it was really only after Arthur had been officially discharged from the hospital and everyone was back in a fleet of non-magical taxicabs that Tim found himself alone with Arthur and an old taxi driver who was wearing hearing aids. Tim had spent the first half of the trip loudly talking about how beautiful London was and how endearing everyone's British accents were, waiting until the irritated driver had turned his hearing aids down enough for the two to speak to each other unheard.
"What was all that for?" Arthur asked, frowning at Tim.
Tim tapped one of his ears as though activating a comm link. "The driver's wearing a hearing aid."
Arthur peered unabashedly at the man's ears. "A what now?"
Right. Wizards weren't familiar with non-magical technology. "The man's experienced hearing loss, so he wears a Muggle device behind his ear that amplifies certain sounds to be able to hear better."
"Really!" Arthur looked at the driver in awe. Given Molly's whole spiel about stitches, Tim figured that Muggle technology was one of Arthur's interests.
"They have manual controls so that he can hear softer sounds and ignore louder sounds as he pleases," Tim continued. "So, I just gave him a reason to turn them down for a while." Arthur looked so genuinely excited by Tim's words that Tim resolved to show the man some of his technology when he had the chance.
"Incredible," he muttered. "Truly incredible."
Tim clapped his hands together. "So," he started, taking note that the driver hadn't even flinched at the sudden noise, "that being said, I had some things I wanted to ask you about." Arthur nodded excitedly, evidently eager to please.
"As a student, I don't end up really hearing about most news concerning the Order," Tim told him. "I was hoping you could tell me about the night you were attacked, if that's all right with you." Tim was expecting some kind of visceral reaction to mentioning such a recent traumatic event, but apparently, Arthur was coping much better than Tim had expected. The man nodded, suddenly looking very grave.
"Yes, yes, of course. What would you like to know?"
"Tell me everything you remember," Tim said. "And don't think you have to hide anything from me, I know about the Department of Mysteries."
Arthur's eyes widened marginally. "You do?" He adjusted his glasses. "Well then, that certainly will make this easier.
"I think I had been on guard duty for seven hours straight when I first started getting drowsy. I'd been staying up fairly late for the past couple of nights, so it didn't come as a surprise to me when my eyes started to droop. Nobody had come by, and even if they had, I was wearing an Invisibility Cloak, so they would have had to specifically be looking for me."
Or they just traced your chemicals in the air, or they sensed you thermally. Tim still wasn't sure what kind of snake attacked Arthur, but anything was possible right now. And those were just the non-magical ways a snake could find him.
"Well, I might have started using it as a blanket," Arthur admitted sheepishly. "I'm not sure that it would have mattered, though, if the ol' bastard could smell me anyways. Luckily, I heard it slithering by and woke up. Though I suppose it didn't really change things, did it?"
Tim nodded, drinking in the information. "Who attacked first—you or the snake?"
"I did," said Arthur. "It was almost halfway past me before I heard it, but the moment I got up, it attacked. I think it bit me three times, but it's kind of hard to remember past that."
It was halfway past him…it was originally headed for the prophecy, not for Arthur.
"That's all right," Tim assured him. "You've been incredibly helpful, Arthur. And, for what it's worth," he added, "I'm glad you're better."
Arthur grinned and patted Tim on the back. "Anytime, my boy. Now, tell me more about this 'ear aid'…"
The scene to which Tim and the others returned upon their arrival at Grimmauld Place was…peculiar, but not unexpected, given Tim's previous observations of Sirius and Snape's dynamic. He was fairly certain that no one was actually convinced by Sirius's claim that it was "a friendly little chat between two old school friends," but they all played along for the sake of not starting another fight.
Tim found out later that evening how the confrontation had occurred, as Tim was certain neither Snape nor Sirius would willingly enter a room with the other present without a specific purpose in mind.
"Dumbledore wants to stop you having those dreams about Voldemort," Hermione immediately said, as though Harry hadn't just been told this only hours ago. "Well, you won't be sorry not to have them anymore, will you?"
For some reason, Harry didn't look like he completely agreed with her assertion.
On the other hand, Ron was anything but hopeful. "Extra lessons with Snape? I'd rather have the nightmares!"
Tim rolled his eyes. "I'm certain it'll be fine, Harry. And even if it isn't, I can always help you out on the side."
They all gave Tim inquisitive looks.
"With…Occlumency…?" said Harry slowly, narrowing his eyes.
"Yeah," Tim said. "Apparently, I'm pretty good at it."
"What's that supposed to mean, mate?" Ron asked.
"I stopped Snape from entering my mind when I was interrogated by the Order," Tim explained, trying to keep a straight face at the shocked expressions of his friends. "You know, when I accidentally Apparated here a couple months ago?"
Hermione nodded slowly. "You successfully stopped Snape from reading your mind?"
Tim nodded.
"Fuck," Ron whispered, dropping his spoon into his bowl of soup with a loud clang. "That's insane, Tim."
Harry was positively beaming at the news. "So, you can teach me Occlumency?"
"I can help you learn it," Tim corrected. "I don't know the ins and outs of wizard mind-probing like Snape does, but I can teach you some techniques that have worked for me in the past."
"Brilliant," Harry grinned, and Tim wondered if Harry had actually internalized the distinction or if he was just excited to learn Occlumency from someone other than Snape.
Fun fact about Tim's little hearing aid trick: I got the idea from my uncle, who was in this college class with a really smart guy, and one day, there was an old substitute teacher who was proctoring their test, so this dude honest-to-god coordinated with the rest of the class to gradually increase the noise level in the classroom until the sub turned down her hearing aid, and then the dude starts reading aloud his test answers. And then this bitch separates the class into groups and has each group change, like, two random answers (more for my uncle bc he had the worst grade in the class and they didn't want to be suspicious), and then he has them go in different groups in shifts to turn in their tests throughout the last twenty minutes of class. My uncle got the highest score he'd ever gotten on a test, and the sub apparently told the teacher that the class was incredibly well-behaved. I aspire to one day have the IQ of that dude in my uncle's class.