Chapter 28

Elle landed in into an unfamiliar room with a familiar queasy feeling in her stomach. There was a flurry of activity around her – people were yelling out for a healer. Elle could just make out Isidre's face, already three shades paler than it had been in the clearing. There was a man shaking Elle's shoulder, trying to get her attention, but she paid him no mind. She thought her brain might be shutting down for good. She welcomed the thought.

Harry Potter fought through the crowd that had quickly amassed around the aurors. Elle was tall, too tall by far to be lifted and carried like the way Harry carried her. But, somehow, Elle didn't mind. Her face was pressed to Harry's chest, and she could feel the warmth of his body, the deep, heavy pounding of his heart. He smelled of aftershave and something else – the sourness of sweat. Of fear.

Slowly, the sounds around her lessened, until they petered out into silence. She was sitting in small room. It looked to be an office of some sort, with a messy desk of scattered papers, a sagging, tired chair. Elle was sitting opposite a window, and, to her shock and surprise, she realized it was still light outside. Where had she been? Maybe it had all been a dream.

A cup of tea was set before her, steaming hot in a big mug adorned with the logo of a quidditch team. Elle strained to remember, and finally identified it as the Hollyhead Harpies. Her brain seemed to retreat farther into the recesses of her mind in response to the effort. Harry had been rummaging through a trunk that lay on the floor close to the door and produced a rough looking travel cloak from the bottom. He wrapped it around Elle's shoulders, and she thought it was rather nice. She hadn't realized how cold she was until she began to feel warm again.

This wasn't the Harry Potter she had known. Every previous interaction with the older man that Elle had before had left her angry and frustrated. He had demanded information from her, giving no context back. He left meetings and dinners abruptly, never apologizing for the suddenness. And he had watched her. Always, he had watched her. She had felt his eyes on her before, as she loaded onto the Hogwarts express, as she threw gnomes out of the back garden, when she stood in front of him, answering his thousandth question.

Harry was not looking at her tonight. He was sitting in the old desk chair, leaning slightly to the left due to the tilt of its legs. And he couldn't seem to meet her eyes at all. Elle reached out and drank the tea. It was still a touch too hot. It made her wince when it fell down her throat, but Elle didn't mind. It felt grounding. With each sip, she was coming a bit back to herself, pulling her protesting mind back into the light.

Harry opened his mouth, still staring at his hands. Elle braced herself, readying herself for the newest onslaught of questions. But Harry did not ask her a question. "I… I've been wrong. So wrong." Elle paused, the mug still at her lips. It felt a little more uncomfortable than it should, and Elle remembered that she'd bit her lip so hard it bled. Again. She really needed to stop doing that.

The reminder of her swollen lip was almost enough to carry her back to the field, but Elle fought it. She wasn't ready to go back. Instead, she focused on Harry. "I've been wrong. This entire time, I've thought I was protecting you, by keeping my investigation in the dark. I was hurting you. I was protecting myself." Harry was standing now, walking carefully around the small office, still not meeting Elle's eye.

Elle watched the tall figure was he made his way around the room. She had a feeling that this type of pacing was a habit of his. Based on the scuff marks on the floor, sometimes he must walk the route very quickly. Harry paused in front of a small sign framed near the door. It was a quote in beautiful calligraphy. Harry took it from the wall, holding it in his hands and smiling ruefully. "Hermione gave me this" he said, more so to himself than to Elle.

At that moment, there was a pounding on the door. Elle flinched violently. Harry's mouth was a firm line. He paused to set the small frame down again and headed towards the door. There was briefly the sound of raised voices, and then an instant muffling. Elle was glad for the quietness. In other times, she would have cursed the spell, the curiosity of what was being said would have driven her mad. Now, the curiosity seemed to have died in her.

Elle stood, her own feet finding the space Harry had just vacated, directly in front of the little frame. The calligraphy was so ornate it took her a moment to decipher the words. Knowledge is power.

There were other frames hung up on the wall. Most of them were photographs. She could pick out a tiny Albus, his pudgy arms wrapped around a squirming pink blob, James pulling a funny face behind him. There was a picture of Harry looking much younger than he did now, his suit a dark forest green, his eyes, made brilliant by the reflected light, fixed lovingly on a young Ginny, radiant in a cream gown. There was picture of Harry even younger still, sitting between two other teenagers Elle vaguely recognized as Rose's parents. They were all three grinning, sitting in seat of what appeared to be a quidditch stadium, the crowds around them decked out in Irish flags.

There was one final picture on the wall. If it hadn't been for the fact that it was clearly much older, the colours faded and the photo itself slightly warped, Elle would have sworn the baby in the center was Albus. But the two adults gazing lovingly at the baby were not Harry and Ginny. Elle looked closer and realized she must be looking at Harry himself. The two adults must be Albus's grandparents, the set he'd never met. She looked at the two strangers – Harry, and therefore Albus, clearly took after the man in the photo. The woman had red hair, which is why she'd at first mistaken her for Ginny, but upon closer inspection they really didn't look alike at all. This woman's hair was a much darker red, the same shade as James' Elle realized.

Elle looked around the photo wall to see if there were any more pictures of Harry's parents, wanting to see if a young Harry looked as much like Albus as she thought he would. But there were no more photos of young Harry. There was baby Harry, and there was Harry, a young teen, at a green quidditch match. The gap must have been at least a decade.

Elle remembered, suddenly, two things. The first was the conversation Harry had had when he had gifted Teddy the photo at Christmas – "they're damn hard to duplicate… and I have to confess I wanted to keep the original for myself…" the fact the photo had been sentimental enough that Harry wanted to keep the original hadn't struck Elle as particularly odd, back then. Then she remembered the conversation she had had on the tube platform, the day they had gone back to look for her memories. "Teddy and I both lost our parents young." At the time, Elle had dismissed his words. She had been too angry at him to really understand what he had been saying. Elle thought she saw more of the point he had been trying to make in the ten-year gap before her. In his unwillingness to give up the original photo to Teddy, who he clearly considered family. The hesitation, the absence of photos. It revealed a lot.

Harry brought Elle out of her thoughts when he opened the door. "I believe this belongs to you" he said, holding out a thin piece of wood. Her wand. Elle snatched it up quickly. The wand thrummed in her hand, and she was reminded of Cat's contented purring. Harry ran his fingers through his hair tiredly. "There are aurors outside of this door that wish to speak with you." Elle frowned, but Harry continued. "I can hold them off for a while longer. And this" he said, gesturing to the small fireplace against the wall, "can be our plan b if they get impatient."

Elle thought that she would be very angry at Harry right now. She ought to be screaming at him, blaming him for her mother disappearing into the night, wrestling the scariest man she'd ever met. Instead, she retook her seat. The tea was lukewarm now, but still she drank it. Harry resumed his pacing.

"It started the night McGonagall found you. She sent me a letter the minute you were off to bed…" Elle was confused for a moment. Then, she realized Harry was telling the story of his investigation. All of it. "After you gave me the memory of you at the tube, we knew she wasn't a muggle. It confirmed our suspicions… there was in incident in Dublin, strongly suspected that the confounded muggles had happened upon a wizard on the run… we began to worry about ties to dark magic, there were traces of it, we started tracking them… we realized all of the dark magic was defensive, yes, dark magic can be defensive. Sometimes it's the best way to defend against offensive dark magic… we were grasping at straws by fall, still couldn't predict where she would be next, only finding old sites where she might have been, still didn't know who or what she was running from…"

On and on Harry went, and slowly, the picture of the investigation began to form in Elle's head. He really hadn't known anything, not really. He had suspected that her mother was magic, had suspected from the spells she was using to defend herself that she had previous experience with dark magic. The first real lead he'd gotten was the wreath, the wreath he'd found near Christmas, the reason he'd been working overtime over the holidays. He explained how that had led him to Chester Edevane, a name that Elle had never heard. He pulled out the letter Chester had written, read it out loud.

"I was still working the Chester lead, interviewing old schoolmates, trying to figure out where he was living when he sent that letter. I was close, Elle. And then tonight – we got the call that there were trespassers on yemHwei." Harry looked at Elle's confused face. "It's the unceded land of the centaurs, the last free plains of the earth – plains that have been raised to exist between dimensions, where it is always night. Wizards can only travel there through apparition, and only if they apparate in the circle of Stonehenge. That is a very well-kept secret of the Wizarding World, Elle. I could lose my job for telling you that. It's a magic we don't even understand – the wizards who worked on it were rebels, powerful people who rejected the pure-blood caste system. The existence of the lands is well known in pureblood circles, but never spoken of. Because in all the thousands of years since then, no one has been able to figure out how they did it. And no attack of the lands to claim it for wizards has been successful."

Elle shivered. She remembered how the field had felt – unnatural. The moon had not shone the way it did on earth, the shadows has not laid in the way she had expected them too. And it had been quiet. So quiet. She really had felt as if she had been hanging in stagnant air, her head above invisible water, her feet buried in the earth.

"We got the call to investigate the intruders. Aurors are in charge of making sure the land goes undisturbed, more for our own safety than that of the centaurs. And that's how we found you. So there it is. The entire story. I thought I was protecting you by keeping it from you. I thought that it would scare you how much I didn't know. The reality is that it scared me."

Harry finally sat, exhausted from his speech. The sun was hanging much lower in the sky. And Elle started speaking. Harry listened intently to everything she had to say. When she mentioned the moment before the bench took her away, she noticed his eyes dart to an unopened letter on his desk, bearing the Hogwarts seal. He must have received it just as he was getting the call to investigate the plains. Elle wondered how differently things would have gone if he had opened it before he left.

She watched his face twist into shock and confusion when she recounted the conversations she had overheard. She called the man, Amon was the name her mother had given him, her father. Elle lost her breath a bit when she explained how her mother had disappeared, but she was surprised how easily the words came out. They felt more real when she said them out loud. "She's gone. He took her. And the rest you know."

Elle was just taking a breath to calm herself when Teddy Lupin walked through the door. Harry stood up hastily, relaxing when he recognized who it was. Teddy looked between Harry and Elle, blushing lightly when he realized he was interrupting an intense conversation. "I'm sorry" he stammered "but you gave me a key, and I thought you might want to know. The boy, he was taken to St. Mungo's, but he's awake now…"

The boy.

Isidre.

A dozen memories flashed through Elle's head. Isidre, freezing ever so slightly when Elle awoke in the train carriage on her way to Hogwarts. Isidre running up the hill after Albus and Scorpius, the other two carrying her trunk between them. He had never explained why he had left the thestrals to Ruth. Isidre, the one who set off a volley of sparks to warn others of patrols, but who had not gotten caught himself. Isidre, asking nonchalantly what the symbol Elle had been sketching in the margins of her notes was, over a year ago at this point.

But there was also Isidre, thrusting a broom in her hands on platform nine and three quarters. Isidre who had been picked up at the train station by a house elf that had clearly loved him dearly. Isidre, muttering darkly that he knew what it felt like to be lonely. Isidre shouting that it was his wand on the grass. Isidre, a slash of blood on his face and his torso, never once glancing to where he must have known Elle crouched. Isidre, who had stopped all their friends from getting close to the bench. The way that Isidre had shouted at her to be invisible, the way he'd saved her life.

Isidre.

Elle stood up. "I'd like to see him" Elle said, looking between Harry and Teddy with a determined expression. "I'd like to see my brother.