"What was the deal with the band?" Harry asked as they took the train the morning after the Yule Ball. "I thought they were just kind of, like, folk performers, but when I came back in they were doing Metallica and Rolling Stones covers." With the magical amplification and full drum kit, they'd even managed to capture a lot of the rock sound as opposed to what Harry expected from a purely acoustic session.
"They're the Weird Sisters," Neville explained. "I guess those are Midgard bands? The Weird Sisters are all Midgardborn. My gran thinks they're too nontraditional, but the real conservatives hate them so she let me go see them once at a festival."
"Your granny is an interesting lady," Dean grinned. "So how'd it go with Fleur?" Harry had hung out for a half an hour after coming back in from the gardens, but hadn't really had much time to talk with everyone before they crashed out to bed.
"I thought this was the dude compartment," he countered. It was just the five boys from their dorm room packed in while all the girls from the study group were next door. "The girls talk about their dates last night, we talk about… football or something."
"So, good, huh. Got it," Dean nodded, and Harry blushed a little. "What about you, Seamus?"
"What?" the Irish boy nearly squeaked. "I was just hangin'. Ye all saw me."
"You did kind of go for punch for a long time after Harry got back and told us where he'd been," Neville observed. "You didn't happen to go on a walk in the gardens with someone yourself, did you?"
"No comment," Seamus said, realizing he'd been made. "If I was, it would be wi' someone who's still in the closet, right?"
"Got it," Dean nodded with a grin. "We're just happy you found someone, man."
"It's early, yet. If anythin' happened. Which it didn't."
Ron had been quiet and, in the lull of conversation he asked, "Harry. You know Krum best, right? Do you… think he's taking advantage of Hermione? He's so much older."
"About the same age gap as me and Fleur," Harry shrugged. Viktor had just turned 18 late in the summer, and Hermione had her birthday early in the school year so they were only slightly more than three years apart. Similarly, Fleur would be 17 until sometime in the spring, which seemed about appropriate for her name. Or title, as the case may be.
"But that's like… you're the bloke, right?" Ron shrugged.
"Aren't you the one scared of her mind control powers?" Dean ribbed him. "Shouldn't you be worried she's bewitched poor Harry with her elf magic?"
"Ah, double standards," Seamus piled on. "None o' ye asked if I was wi' an upperclassman. Maybe I'm gettin' taken advantage of?"
"You've never been taken advantage of in your whole life," Neville told him. Seamus just grinned at the complement.
"But no," Harry got back to the question Ron had originally asked, "I don't think Viktor would do anything with Hermione that she wasn't totally comfortable with. And, if he did, Parvati and Lavender would tell us about five minutes after they found out. If they didn't run off to kill him themselves."
"Right. Right," Ron glanced at the wall that separated them from the girls, who were discussing their night. "It's just… he's a dark wizard. What kind of future can they have?"
"One where he lives on Earth," Harry shrugged. "At least she's not dating elf royalty that has to marry a prince or something on another planet." He shook his head as if to remind himself he wasn't looking for a long-term relationship. "Guys. Chances are that none of us are going to marry anyone we date in school. You gotta let everyone figure this dating thing out."
"And you're with Lavender," Neville reminded Ron quietly.
"Yeah," Ron sighed. As an afterthought, without much enthusiasm, he added, "And she's great."
The other boys shared a worried look. They'd thought they'd dodged the Ron/Lavender/Hermione drama for a good long while after the "permanent" pairings were chosen at the end of the previous year. Already uncomfortable enough with the limited sharing they'd already done, and not feeling like trying to counsel Ron on his relationship difficulties, the boys just kind of tacitly agreed to change the subject. Harry asked, "So… were Snape and Karkaraoff Death Eaters?"
"Probably?" Ron nodded. "Would explain why Snape's such a git."
"And why the Ancient One doesn't like Karkaroff, maybe," Harry remembered.
"Why?" Dean asked.
Harry explained, "I heard them talking about getting an invitation that they were worried was a trap. Sounded like maybe the same group that attacked the World Cup."
"I'll ask my gran," Neville volunteered.
"Huh. Yeah. Sirius might know, too," Harry realized.
"I'm not sure," his godfather admitted, when Harry asked that question as they were leaving the train station, a few hours later. "I mean, probably. But I missed the other trials after the war, for obvious reasons. Maybe Andi and Ted will know."
"Oh, yeah? Are they coming?" he asked as they walked up to the green-flaring bonfire. This year, he was following a different crowd than his usual path with the Midgardborn that ultimately led to the Goblin Market and back out into London. Nearby, a bald, glasses-wearing man with darker skin was gawking at him, standing next to a burly, pale, and dark-haired man. He tried to ignore the celebrity attention. Now that he was more used to his status, he was oddly more cognizant of how many people watched him when he was out in public.
"Yeah, they're coming by for Christmas day. Watch your step," Sirius explained as they stepped into the fire and spun through the flaming void for a moment before Harry barely avoided sprawling on the flagstones in Diagonalt. "And Tonks the younger is living with me now, since I had the space and there was no point in her renting lodgings in town."
"Oh, yeah, I think you mentioned that," Harry agreed, collecting himself and beginning to roll his luggage after Sirius. He hadn't seen much of the city when they'd been there for the trial, but it looked like they weren't going too far from the Ministry.
The interesting thing about a city where transportation was mostly walking-based was how packed together everything was. Even the nicer houses were basically townhomes, shoved together without much in the way of a yard. Sirius led him up to a house that nonetheless took up a wide swath of the row it was on, black facade looming implacably across the street. "Welcome to number 12, Grimmauld Place," Sirius introduced him to the building, and Harry could feel the wards relaxing so he could safely enter.
"Is this where you were hiding out?" he asked as they entered the front door into a tight corridor with multiple rooms off of it and a spiral staircase visible at the end.
"Nah. Too close to people, and it wasn't safe. I was just glad after the trial I could hire professionals to clean this up. My mother… made some choices before she passed. Involving curses and booby traps."
"Ew. Wait, so your mother was a witch?" Harry asked, leaving his trunk in the small foyer and taking in that this was what the house looked like after it had been cleaned up.
"Well… kind of?" Sirius shrugged. "There's a line between being able to call up dark entities sometimes and actually binding yourself to them. My family's usually been careful to walk right up to that line."
"And it's only after you bind yourself that your magic gets purple in it?"
"Or if you've used a lot of dark spells," Sirius agreed. "Worried about Viktor?"
"Ron is. But he's nice and he's making Hermione happy, so I'm trying not to be hardcore about it or anything."
Sirius frowned and admitted, "I'm usually one to say any hint of purple in your magic is a sign someone's a terrible person… but, yeah, he seems like a good kid, and it would suck if you have to put him down someday. Anyway! Let me give you the tour…"
The house was huge and mazelike, built as if someone had barely heard of hallways and resented them. The tour was mostly a running litany of the things Sirius had removed: lots of grotesque taxidermy, curio cabinets full of cursed magic items, and furnishings that matched the black decor only because they'd never been cleaned. One thing he'd kept was an immense tapestry that showed the vast family tree… and how few living members it had left.
"Took me a while to find someone who could repair it," Sirius explained. "My mother had taken to burning off the names of anyone she disapproved of, including Andi and me."
"Because you went to prison?"
"Because I didn't join the Death Eaters. She probably liked that I went to prison. She wasn't a good person. It's why I basically lived with your grandparents for most of my years at Hogwarts."
"That sucks," Harry said, browsing the tapestry. He found the bottom corner where the living family appeared. There was Sirius, the Tonkses, Draco and his mother, the crazy cousin Bellatrix, and… "Hey. I'm on here!" He traced the branch up and said, "Oh, right, great grandma Dorea." Pepper had told him about her grandmother, who'd married in from the Blacks.
"Yeah. Mother burned her off as soon as I started associating with James."
Harry picked up what he was leaving off and asked, "But you made sure to add her and us back?"
"Good catch. I was going to wait to mention it until later but… I registered you as an heir. In case I don't manage to have kids of my own, I wanted to make sure the Malfoys don't inherit. You're after Dora."
"We're calling her that instead of Tonks?" Harry asked, trying to process being in line for another massive inheritance.
"Andi and Ted are around enough that calling her Tonks got confusing, so we compromised. Is this too much?"
He considered it and shrugged. "It's a lot. And it would have been if she wasn't first in line. I don't plan to move back here and join the Wizengamot."
"You'd be able to set up a proxy," Sirius dismissed that concern. "Besides! I plan to live another century and have a bunch of kids of my own. This is just insurance."
"How's that going, by the way?" Harry asked, mollified.
"Well I haven't met any elf princesses, but I've been getting around…"
As they finished looking at the house and catching up on their respective love lives, Sirius saved the kitchen for last and Harry was surprised to almost stumble over a stooped, wizened old man with an insane tuft of white hair and a patchy beard, wearing a frayed black housecoat. "Ah! The Potter brat! Another pretend heir! Probably wants his tea all special."
"That won't be necessary, Kreacher," Sirius interjected as Harry stood uncertain what to do about the unexpected resident. "I thought I told you to stay in your suite."
"Did you?" the old man asked, a picture of disobedience masked by senility. "My mistake. Good night, usurpers!" He took another evil look at Harry before shuffling off out the back of the room.
They waited a moment for him to be out of earshot before Harry asked, "Your butler's name is Creature?"
"Not spelled the way you're thinking," Sirius corrected. "Don't ever let him cook for you. He might poison you. Maybe unintentionally."
"So… you just have an old man who hates you living here?"
He shrugged helplessly, "He's worked here literally his whole life. I think it would kill him if I forced him out. He cleans… a little. Plus, if he's here I know he's not out plotting with Lucius how to kill everyone in between Draco and the inheritance."
"That doesn't really sound like a good reason," Harry insisted, not thrilled to be spending the holidays with a murderous manservant.
"I know. He wasn't this bad when I was little. He loved my brother. Sadly, he went crazy in the same way as my mother after being left alone here with her, and then without her. He has a portrait of her in his room that he talks to."
Harry hadn't really thought of Sirius as being soft in that way, but behind his dismissive words he picked up a sense that the old butler was the last piece of the Black heir's lost childhood that he had. "Okay. But I'm putting locking spells on my bedroom when I sleep."
Most of Vanaheim didn't celebrate Christmas, but Ted Tonks had kept it up with his family and Sirius had heard about it from his Midgardborn friends and was thrilled by the idea. He'd gone a bit overboard decorating the living room and very overboard on presents. At least he'd spoiled the three Tonkses as much as Harry. He'd also somehow managed to rendezvous with Pepper, or have a service do it, and Harry had his presents from Earth to open as well. He took that Tony had included something as a good sign.
That it was a really nice hardbound set of sci-fi novels featuring aliens let Harry know that Tony was not just going to let it go.
Of course, when he thought they'd finally climbed through the mountain of presents, Sirius said, "I have two more! Wait here."
He came back in a moment with two brooms that had bows on them. Well, calling them brooms was like calling high-end Japanese racing motorcycles "bikes" in that it was both correct and very inadequate. The wood was jet black, they seemed to have their bristles precisely oriented for aerodynamics, and they featured actual seats and footrests that seemed articulated so they could fold up tight and the broom could still fit into his pouch of holding.
"What in the world?" Andromeda asked.
Sirius grinned, "Special order. I worked with a little known broom crafter named Spudmore of all things. We call them Firebolts. Now, Harry, I know you don't really play quidditch much, and obviously Dora doesn't but these… well, actually, they'd probably be really good sport brooms. Old Hooch might ban them because they go too fast and turn too tightly. But they're meant for combat."
Harry had taken the one Sirius had handed him. With it in hand and Tonks admiring hers right next to him, he could tell they were subtly different from each other. Had Sirius somehow gotten them precisely calibrated for their individual builds (and was Harry going to be offended that Sirius had assumed—probably rightly—that he was basically done growing)? "Do they have lasers?" he checked.
"Hah! No, that one we couldn't really figure out. But they've got force fields! Well, technically, they have deflection charms. If there's a way for an attack to miss, it will, particularly if you're in motion. And they should self repair if they do get hit. Like, if a shot misses you but hits the bristles."
"Wild," Harry said. "Thanks so much, Sirius!"
"Yeah. Wow," Tonks said, cradling the broom. "And if you spend the whole Black fortune on presents, Harry and I don't even have to worry about inheriting."
"They really are extravagant gifts," Andromeda said with a bit of disapproval. "But if they keep the two alive with all the trouble they get into…"
"Hey!" both Harry and Tonks said simultaneously, and laughed.
Both of them were eager to try out the brooms, but Sirius had also learned the tradition of a big Christmas breakfast after presents. Fortunately, he'd hired a local restaurant to cater, rather than relying on Kreacher or one of them to cook. While they were enjoying the meal, Harry remembered to ask, "Sirius didn't know… do any of you know if Snape and Karkaroff were Death Eaters?"
"Absolutely," Andromeda answered without any hesitation. "Unlike some that claimed they were mind controlled, both were confirmed. They only went free from extenuating circumstances."
"Spying," Tonks clarified.
"Well," Andromeda corrected, "Severus Snape was spying for Dumbledore. Igor Karkaroff simply gave evidence for secret Death Eaters that had previously avoided prosecution."
"How did they stay secret?" Harry wondered.
"Sadly, it's not like they got matching tattoos on their faces or anything," Tonks chuckled. "We've been discussing it after the attack at the World Cup. They were in a cell structure. Wore masks to big meetings so nobody could be certain of who everyone else was. Only the people in charge knew the whole roster, and used a lot of different communication methods to coordinate."
"Like invitations spelled to only give the location of the meeting when it's about to happen?" Harry checked.
Her eyes widened, "That's why you're asking about Snape and Karkaroff! They got invitations? Have you seen them?"
Harry shook his head and admitted, "I just overheard them talking about it. Karkaroff seemed to think it might be a trap. I guess because he gave up those names, and Snape was a spy."
"Not enough to get Bones to sign off on going through their stuff," Tonks frowned. "But can I pass along that something is happening?"
"Sure," Harry shrugged. "You think the others got their own invitations and they're planning for another attack like the World Cup."
She nodded but sighed, "Well, that's what we figure in the auror department. But Fudge thinks it was just a bad prank that someone set up to cover for the dark elves escaping. He's convinced that the Death Eaters are over as a political entity and that You-Know-Who is dead."
"Well…" Harry said, drawing all the eyes in the room so he elaborated, "Tom Riddle is dead. Like, double dead, since his draugr got eaten by a giant snake. But he was only Lord Voldemort in the beginning. Someone killed him and took over his Death Eaters like sixty years ago. The guy that killed my family was an alien, I think, just using the wizards for some reason I haven't figured out yet." Jaws were hanging open as if that wasn't common knowledge. He thought back to Trelawney's prophecy from the previous year and added, "And I don't think he's dead. Just got seriously injured or something so he's been taking it easy for most of my life. But he may be close to ready to start back up again."
Tonks thought about it for a second and then suggested, "We might be able to sell the Ministry on preparing for alien attacks pretending to be Death Eaters for the fear factor."
Sirius beamed at his cousin, "Fudge can't protect his pureblood friends if it's aliens just using an old political group as cover. Brilliant!"
"Especially because it is aliens using an old group as cover," Andromeda nodded. "Harry, you're certain that there's some kind of alien behind all this?"
"Well, I'm pretty sure people like the Malfoys are also involved," Harry shrugged. "But, yeah, 'Mistress Morgan' wasn't a hag, she was a green-skinned alien lady that was trying to steal the… uh, the thing that Dumbledore had in the school… for a guy that she thought of as her father. Huh… and, the book that was controlling people my second year was working for a 'Father' too…"
"This is all very cool, and has given me a lot to think about…" Tonks interrupted. "And there will be plenty of time to pick your brain about it so I know what to tell Bonesy and Siri can tell the Wizengamot and mum and dad can prepare a court case about it, but…" She stuffed the last bit of her muffin in her mouth and finished her tea before announcing, "It's time to ride brooms! I can get dressed faster than you!"
"Honestly, you wouldn't know she's twenty-one," Andromeda said, fondly, as her daughter was suddenly racing Harry out of the kitchen.
The two third-cousins were warmly dressed and up in the air over Diagonalt within ten minutes, and in another ten they were far out into the countryside. "These things can move!" Harry shouted.
"Whaaaaat?" Tonks shouted back, and then abruptly pulled up to hover in midair.
Harry managed to do a high-G turn and stop just short of Tonks. "I said they can really move. Looks like they can really stop, too."
"These are too much!" she grinned, shaking out her hair which obediently fixed itself from its windblown state to a much more coiffed set of spikes reminiscent of Madam Hooch's hairdo. Only Tonks' was neon green in her excitement.
"I've been meaning to ask," Harry said, "what's up with your hair?"
"Oh!" she said, leaning back and enjoying the rolling vista of the winter farmland beneath them. It took quite a few miles of carefully-tended farms to feed a pre-industrial city, even one as small as Diagonalt and with the use of magic. "I'm a metamorph. The hair is the easiest thing to switch, but with some effort…" she crossed her eyes in concentration and her face shifted to a pretty good approximation of Harry's, her hair settling into his dark mop, even matching how crazy it looked after racing through the air at over a hundred miles an hour. "I'm Harry Potts!" she said in his voice.
She hadn't bothered to change the rest of her body, so that was a weird thing that was going to haunt his dreams for a while.
Relaxing, her face settled back to her own and her hair once again became green spikes. "And that's not a glamour?" Harry asked.
"Nope. Shapeshifting," she agreed. "Really good for undercover work."
"I bet," he agreed. "Did you learn how to do that, or cast a ritual, or…"
"Genetic, sorry. Nobody's really sure how I got it, but now there's a pretty good chance my kids will have it. It probably came from my dad's side, since nobody else on the Black side had it… at least that they ever admitted."
"I bet it would come in handy to keep a secret, like being able to turn invisible," he shared, letting his cloak fall over him. It even mostly managed to cover the broom.
"Wow! Nice! I still don't have any relics like that," she agreed. "You're sure you don't want to join the aurors after Hogwarts? We could use you."
Letting his cloak once again withdraw, Harry shrugged, "I'm still trying to figure out what I actually want to do. Seems like everyone has something they expect me to do. I feel like the Masters got there first, though, you know?"
Tonks frowned, explaining, "Not a lot of life expectancy with Kamar-Taj. It's one of the reasons dad stayed here. Auror isn't half as dangerous. They lose something like ten percent of their numbers every year, on average, to all the things that they fight."
"That's what I keep hearing," he shrugged. "But I think part of that is that most of their apprentices don't really have enough training." He'd had years of summer camps to observe, after all. "From what I hear they mostly don't see any real fights until something scary breaks out of another dimension. All of us Hogwarts kids have way more combat experience than most of the apprentices." He kind of gave an expansive shrug indicating his deep belief in his own combat training and youthful invulnerability.
From what she'd heard, Harry wasn't necessarily wrong, but she still kind of thought he was underestimating the threat of horrors from beyond compared to the much more defined monsters he had fought. But before she could come up with another point, she noticed the owl swooping directly at her. "That's an auror messenger owl," she recognized the red jesses. As it got closer, she also thought she read annoyance in its eyes at having to chase them this far out of town. "Must have left just after we did," she announced, letting it perch on her broomstick and taking one of the messages attached. It had several others, and immediately set off as if to deliver the rest. Tonks unrolled it and said, "Marauder attack. I know this town, it's near the train platform! They must be going after the rail line again. Can you make it back home?"
"Or I could come with you," he shrugged.
Most adults would have laughed at the idea, but he had been telling her how much combat experience he had, and she believed him. Rather than dithering or trying to persuade him she sighed and ordered, "Follow my commands when we're there. Don't get hurt, or you'll get me fired." At his nod of agreement, she fished her sling ring out of a pocket and spun open a portal in midair big enough for them on their brooms. "You first, I'm right behind."
Harry came flying out of the portal above a melee that was like the battle of Hogsmeade in setting and combatants, but going way worse for the village than it had the previous time he'd fought marauders. Instead of orderly lines of shields and spears with ranged attackers behind, the marauders had clearly come upon the village unawares.
Strange-hued and garbed aliens were rushing through the small neighborhood, chasing fleeing townsfolk trying to escape to a pocket of resistance. From above, it was easy enough to see clusters of armed Vanir congealing at high points, but the marauders were busily ransacking homes at the other end of the small village while their fellows harassed the scattered defenders. This was a raid for supplies, which could leave the villagers bereft of goods for the just-arrived winter.
And on Christmas, no less.
There was at least one set of spells being cast near a defending group, so Tonks probably wasn't the first auror on the scene. "Let's try to screw up the ones raiding the houses," she ordered as she flew in behind him, letting the portal close at her back.
"On it," Harry agreed, entering a steep dive on his Firebolt toward a trio of marauders that were making off with a whole skinned and drying cow clearly carried from someone's basement. While there was probably a whole social conversation to be had about whether it was fair to attack people stealing to try to feed themselves, that they were doing it as part of an armed raiding party didn't speak well for them. "Total Petrification of Gleipnir," Harry incanted, binding the man in the lead and causing him to crash to the ground, the purloined meat landing next to him as the rest of his friends realized what was going on.
"Wizards in the air!" one shouted. Obviously having trained for that, not far away four marauders on guard pointed bows at Harry and Tonks before loosing arrows.
As he was beginning to cast a shield, Harry felt the broom wanting to turn on its own, and he went with it. The shaft twisted just far enough that both arrows coming his way managed to swish by, narrowly but completely missing. Harry chanced a glance next to him and saw that Tonk's broom had accomplished something similar, though she'd also gotten up a shield just in case. "Guess that's the deflection charms!" Harry told her.
Unused, she flicked her wand to send the shield spinning like a discus into one of the archers' bow, cutting the string. "Nice. Don't rely on it too much, though," she cautioned.
He nodded and launched a whip to disarm another of the archers, the man unable to hang onto the bow as Harry moved past at interstate speeds. As he bowled along at about ten feet in the air, he sent the whip back and forth along the road, forcing otherwise-engaged marauders to dive to avoid it. He blinked a little as he noticed he'd taken pressure off of the same pair of men that had been watching him when he got off the train—the bald one with glasses and the paler, dark-bearded one—who managed to take out the two left confronting them with brutally effective martial arts.
"More wizards incoming!" another marauder yelled, as Harry spotted more sling ring portals appearing at various spots around the town as the rest of the auror relief began to arrive. Someone sounded a loud horn, and all of the raiders that were still mobile began to make a retreat to the nearby treeline.
"Why are we having so much trouble with these guys?" Harry asked Tonks as he flew back up next to her. "We've got portals."
"Rare that we get warning. Someone must have gotten an owl off as soon as they spotted them," she explained. "Come on. Bet we can stun a few more before they get into dense woods."
As Harry and Tonks rocketed off to pursue fleeing marauders, back in the town Jasper Sitwell and Brock Rumlow had a hushed conversation. "Where did those… wizards—it still kills me to say it—come from," Sitwell asked.
"Who knows," Rumlow shrugged, straightening the medieval-style outfit he'd stolen off of an honest-to-fashion-gods clothesline. "Every time I think I understand how it works, I'm wrong. I hate this place."
"Think Harald made it out?" Sitwell asked, trying to scope out which marauders were down around them. If their contact with the raiders had been taken out, they'd have to start making inroads again, almost from zero. They'd had such a good plan of putting up a good showing against the gang to gain the appreciation of the townsfolk, while still not preventing the raid.
"Who knows. We really need to meet a higher class of insurgent," Rumlow grumbled. "And was that Harry Potts?"
That last bit had been overheard by a passing villager, "Harry Potter, yes! We think so! The Boy-Who-Lived helped save us. Not that we missed your contributions! Come feast with us tonight, that we survived!"
"We'd love to," Sitwell nodded to the friendly villager. After all, as far as the locals were concerned, the two of them were traders who'd lost everything to marauders months earlier, and had been doing odd jobs around the area to survive. And would keep that cover until they could figure out why the portal between worlds at the train platform hadn't opened back up three days earlier. But now that they knew that their original suspect was famous here… "And while we do, you can tell us stories of the Boy-Who-Lived."