Chapter Sixteen
Burglary

He was one trial down, one step closer to a prettier past, a finer future. The Crumble-Horned Snorkack horn was in his possession, checked off the list. He simply needed to transport it across the gap between worlds, an obstacle Harry had been increasingly referring to as, simply, the "Gap."

Horn in hand, Harry turned on the spot and leapt over the Gap. After a brief, familiar transition, he arrived home in a Scottish January, in the same Hogsmeade alleyway he always used, but naked and hornless.

"Dammit."

In a routine motion, Harry reached for the backpack he kept stashed behind the rusted rubbish bin. Dancing in the frigid snow, he hurriedly dressed in thermal clothes before hopping on a broomstick and flying toward the ruin of his Hogwarts. A wintry wind slashed at his face, but his looted Quidditch goggles kept the moisture in his eyes from escaping to freeze on his cheeks.

Harry alighted on the top step of Hogwarts and had just ducked beneath the sagging door when a queer feeling fell over him. Something wasn't right: He could feel it if not name it.

Wand out, Harry crept into the entry hall. Great shards of castle remained where they had lain for years. The dusty, half-swept floor was as streaked with grime as always, no matter how many times Harry asked Scully to sweep it. Nothing was amiss, nothing was disturbed. All was as it had been, save for the uneasy instinct in Harry's gut telling him it wasn't so.

It wasn't until Harry reached the Hufflepuff common room that his fears were confirmed. The furniture was overturned, Hermione's beaded bag had been pulled inside out, its many contents spilled onto the floor, books torn apart, papers shredded. It had clearly been handled roughly, half its beads scattered like an arterial spray. His clothes had all the pockets turned out. Helga Hufflepuff's frame was vacant. The air was tainted with unpleasantness—a violation, a disturbance of peace and sanctuary. It bore a stark contrast to the cozy atmosphere Hufflepuff was known for.

"Merlin's beard," muttered Harry, tiptoeing into the room.

Harry bent to touch one of the scattered beads, trying to get a sense of what happened. Clearly he'd been burgled, but by whom? Another survivor? Harry doubted it. Whoever had been here had been looking for something. With only a cursory glance, Harry couldn't be certain they'd found it; by the look of things, it was as though the culprit had been quite desperate.

Harry stalked through the deserted dormitories, seeking answers and expecting a fight. But nobody was there. After several charms and counterspells, Harry was reasonably sure he was alone. So he dug his hand into his backpack and pulled out the Resurrection Stone. All the valuable things he kept stuffed in the backpack and hidden in the alley whenever he was away: It had seemed safer that way, and Harry felt validated in that decision now.

"Harry!"

Ron and Hermione were with him again, wearing garish orange robes and purple silk shirt respectively. The translucence of their faces emphasized their distress.

"What happened here?" he asked them.

"It was You-Know-Who, mate! He was here, rifling through the place!"

Harry's fist clenched around the Stone, its sharp edges digging painfully into his palm. "What did he take?"

"He didn't take anything, Harry," said Hermione, her hands caught amongst themselves with worry.

"Is he still here?"

They shook their heads.

Harry burst into the common room, his friends following, whisper silent. "Fucking hell! When was this? What happened? What was he looking for?"

"Easy, mate, calm—"

"Don't tell me to calm down!" thundered Harry. "For years he couldn't give a fuck about me, never thought me worth crossing off his list, and now he comes looking for me? After all this time? Why?!" He kicked an upended armchair. He felt his toe break, and it hurt certainly, but he was too angry in that moment to care.

Hermione noticed his wince. She tried to speak but—

"That bastard!" Harry tossed his backpack onto the sofa's ripped cushions with more force than necessary. "This close to finishing him off only for him to slip away. Months of searching for absolutely bloody nothing! And then he strolls into my home while I'm away—! I could have—! If I'd been here—!"

He had missed yet another opportunity to slay the monster.

Harry sank to his knees and screamed out his anguish. When he remembered upon a sudden the Liquid Luck brewing in the potions classroom, and the valuable ingredients in Snape's secret storeroom, Harry bolted to the dungeons, Ron and Hermione trailing behind, calling after him. He could see the golden potion spilled across the floor, tiny gold dolphins struggling to leap from its surface. Then he rounded a corner and found the potion merrily bubbling away in its cauldron, just as he'd left it. Scully, ever the faithful custodian of Harry's will, watched over the brew with expressionless vigilance.

He collapsed against the door in relief. "Thank Merlin! He didn't find the potion."

Ron coughed; Hermione squeaked. "No, no," she said. "He did."

Harry stared. "He… He sabotaged it, didn't he!" He hobbled toward the cauldron, cursing his luck. He dipped a ladle in and brought a spoonful out for examination. The golden potion looked unaltered. Confusion cleared from Harry's face as he thought of the hidden storeroom and all the rare ingredients he'd collected thus far.

"Harry—" said Hermione.

But Harry wasn't listening. "Unicorn blood!" he yelped, dashing into the storeroom.

Yet everything was in its place. The vial of mercurial blood sat in its stand unmolested. Also undisturbed was the cabinet of philters and phials he'd brewed over the past few months.

"No, Harry," said Ron, lurking like a ghost in the doorway. "We saw the whole thing. You-Know-Who just looked around and left. It was only the common room he tore apart."

A weight settled in Harry's stomach at the mystery implication. Why not sabotage your enemy's every advantage? What was Voldemort up to?

"I don't understand," said Harry.

"Neither do we, mate."

After much fussing, Hermione convinced Harry to tend to his broken toe before they reconvened in the Hufflepuff common room, which Harry set to rights with an incantation and a wave of his wand; it would have been quite reminiscent of Dumbledore had Harry been in a mood to reminisce. They sat in armchairs around the crackling hearth, which, at least for Harry, had been lit to ward off the winter chill.

"What do you think he was looking for?" wondered Ron. "You?"

Hermione shook her brown curls. "Isn't it obvious?"

Harry reached into the backpack to retrieve another item. He slapped the Book onto the coffee table betwixt them. "He was looking for this. He wanted it back. He doesn't care about anything else. Had I been here, I would have been a mere nuisance."

Six eyes stared at the Book's black leather shell, lost in its dark majesty—so black it might've been forged of darkness itself.

A chill crept down Harry's spine.

"He was desperate for it," said Hermione quietly. "Kept muttering to himself about it."

Harry glanced at her. "What was he muttering?"

"The same thing over and over—that he 'had to find it.'" She shook her head. "It was… difficult to hear because of, you know, the interference."

Harry rather thought the afterlife should get over itself and install better reception.

"Whah?!" cried Hermione in rare inarticulateness. "But they aren't, er, they're not—"

"I told you they were," said Luna in her subduedly cheerful, serene way, her big round eyes sparkling. "It's a shame it died, Harry. The crumple-horned ones are quite rare."

How she could possibly know anything about otherworldly entities, nobody knew. "Sometimes," she had suggested, "a mystery is more fun if left to the imagination."

Ron and Hermione had accompanied Harry to the kitchen for dinner. That is to say, they lounged at the house table nearest the stove that Harry used to cook his own dinner and watched him do it; soup wasn't on the menu tonight. While he worked, he told them of his exploits in Dartmoor. Luna had been summoned simply because Harry knew his was a story she'd want to hear.

Hermione was still flabbergasted as Harry minced the ginger and tossed it into the vegetarian stir fry. Meat was hard to come by these days.

Ron pointed at her, guffawing. "Bloody hell, Hermione! You're sputtering like a faulty Filibuster Firework!"

It was rare to see a ghost flush, yet flush she did. She shut her mouth with a snap and looked away, but Harry could read her easily: She was neither petulant nor stubborn in that moment, but rather somber and ponderous. She was considering other impossibilities in the neighboring world.

"I wonder…," she murmured, though she never elaborated.

Luna kicked her feet to and fro. "I must admit, Harry, I'm rather jealous of your adventures in this other place. Just imagine all the beautifully strange creatures waiting to be discovered! Oh, how I wish I could join you…"

Her face fell.

The fact that Harry was the only of the four that would ever experience this other world was not lost on any of them, and Luna's melancholy brought a cheerless silence to the kitchen and a premature end to their conversation.

The friends parted ways after dinner, but Luna's company had reminded Harry of another conversation he'd been putting off. It was long overdue, he knew. He told himself he hadn't been ready for it before, not that he was particularly eager for it now. He idly swirled the Stone between his fingers—once this way, twice that way, but never a third turn in either—as he gathered up the courage to summon her.

He lay in bed for over an hour, spinning the Stone in cowardice as his eyes drooped lower and lower. Perhaps it was his unconscious mind telling his hand to get a move on already, or perhaps it was simple carelessness, but the Stone was turned a third time, and suddenly Ginny Weasley was sitting on the bed beside him.

With a cry of alarm, Harry bolted upright, his wide eyes absorbing her face.

It was dark in the dormitory, but Ginny's hair shone with a fittingly fiery vibrancy that complemented her pouty lips and smoldering eyes.

"Er, Ginny! I…"

She pressed a soft fingertip to his lips. "Shh," she whispered. "I know."

Harry floundered. "Oh, er, you… you do?"

She leaned in close, her lower lip pinched delicately between her teeth. "Mhmm. Let's not waste precious time on words…" Her nose brushed against his cheek as she drifted over his face, pressing her lips against him.

Harry's breath fluttered like his eyelashes. "Oh, Ginny, I've missed you."

"Yeah?" She leaned back and grinned at him. She straddled his knees now. "Let me show you how much I've missed you…" She reached beneath the bedsheets and grabbed him.

Harry awoke with an ache and a hunger that kept him company only on his loneliest of nights. But as he entertained lingering thoughts of Ginny's hand, his previous anxiety returned, smothering the flame inside him and leaving him cold with dread.

He sat up and pressed his palms into his eyes.

He couldn't remember the last time he'd had a lusty dream of Ginny. A decade, perhaps. It used to be exciting, once upon a time. Now it just felt creepy to fantasize about a dead girl. A young one, too: Ginny had been nearly seventeen. In life, they had been within a year of one another, hormonal teenagers in the blur between child- and adulthood; now, years later, Harry was a man grown. It felt weird, even wrong, to think of her that way anymore.

His relationship with Ginny was in the faraway past.

The Stone had fallen into the high pile of the rug beneath the bed. He stared at it.

"Blast it."

He took up the Stone and summoned Ginny.

And she was there, arms crossed over a sweater knitted, most likely, by her mother. She had arrived wearing a scowl, and for a moment, Harry had the ridiculous notion that she could read his mind.

He rubbed the back of his neck. "Hi, Ginny."

"Bastard."

Harry recoiled. "Wh-what?"

Ginny raised a hand and attempted to strike him. Harry was too stunned to dodge, and the slap landed, a blunt, ethereal force on his jaw. He winced, raising a hand to his cheek out of reflex than true pain.

She continued her assault with angry words. "You left us there! In that graveyard of a hall, you left us there, all of us. To rot and liquefy until the floor was soup, until the sun bleached our bones. They carpeted the hall, our bones, jumbled like puzzle pieces in a box.

"But you came back. And you buried Ron, and you buried Hermione." Her nostrils flared. "But did you bury the rest of us? Did you show us the same respect?"

"I, I wanted—"

"No! You left me there! My skull was crushed by a fallen timber. Did you know that?"

A tear fell past Harry's slack mouth. "N-n—"

She slap-thwacked him again. And again. He raised an arm in defense, but her strikes were erratic and hit whatever she could reach.

"And it takes you this long to call? You found that Stone months ago, you bleeding coward! You could have called me. You could have found that bloody Stone years ago and called me, you, you—you twat!"

They both cried now. While Ginny gasped and sobbed, Harry wallowed in silent self-loathing—an old and familiar acquaintance.

"I… I'm sorry, Ginny," he managed to say. "I c-couldn't. After Ron and Her-Hermione… Two graves… It was already too much…"

She seethed at him, fists balled. It was an angry glare. It was a challenging glare. It was a hurt glare. It was a wistful glare.

"You—!"

But Harry could bare no more of it. He didn't want to hear what came next, he couldn't. He dropped the Stone and let Ginny disappear with her resentment. But his shame remained, present and solid a force as ever. It took a seat beside his self-loathing, and they heckled him like passionate spectators at a football match.

He sobbed once, then fell sideways into his pillow. "Coward," he croaked.

Not even in sleep did he find peace.

Whereas Ginny had been quite characteristically fiery, Harry's friendship with Penny had become downright frosty.

Harry had apologized to Penny on his first day back at work, following the disaster of the Quidditch World Cup afterparty, and Penny had taken his apology, though neutrally. Perhaps the apology hadn't made things worse, but it certainly hadn't made things better either. They barely said a word to each other. Harry felt awkward any time he attempted conversation, and Penny had adopted a professional, almost cold demeanor, a far cry from her normal cheer. Whenever Penny was forced by her seniority to issue Harry an order, it was always in quick, curt sentences, and never were there ever any please's or thank you's.

Where once Harry had found a surprising joy in tending the shop, now he was caught amid a storm of permanent tension—and this time there was no voice to guide him through it. The past two weeks felt very much like working in a minefield, he imagined, if one swapped the lethal explosives for volatile chemical compounds in wafer-thin glass tubes.

The only silver lining that fueled Harry's flickering optimism was in his shifts; twelve hours a week wasn't a difficult quota to meet. He had considered quitting once, but he cared too much about Penny to go through with it. He wanted things to go back to normal, which was a strange sentiment to have as a visitor from the universe next door. In any case, Harry had made a commitment to Penny and her store, and he would carry on until such a time that Penny fired him—something that Harry, cringing at the thought, found all too possible.

Harry was amid the aisles, mechanically restocking shelves and avoiding eye contact with Penny. The silence between them was thick and uncomfortable but also sharp and pervasive, like someone had bottled the atmosphere of an awkward pause between strangers when one of the strangers says something odd and both wait for the other to say something to break the silence, and smashed that bottle of tension in the shop like one of Fred and George's prank dungbombs.

Harry cleared his throat, the noise loud in the quiet. "We're low on doxy eggs," he reported, speaking in Penny's general direction.

"I'll check the storeroom," she said, literally leaping at the opportunity to leave the room.

He watched her leave, her braid swinging in her haste to exit.

There weren't any doxy eggs in the back; the last of their stock had just gone on the shelf. He knew that, and he knew she knew that as she had been the one that had set them aside for restocking.

Harry found himself hovering at the curtained doorway to the backroom. Half of him wanted to enter and apologize again, whereas the other half wanted to return to the doxy eggs and swallow the lot of them.

Penny emerged from the back a moment later, almost colliding with him. She squeaked. "Oh, sorry. Was there something else? How are the gurdyroots?"

"I'm sorry," said Harry, the words tumbling past his lips.

"Gurdyroots. The onion-looking things next to the—"

"No, I mean I'm sorry."

Penny's jaw snapped shut. She averted her gaze. "About what?"

"You know what," said Harry. "I was a right arse at the world cup match."

"You said that before," said Penny coolly, smoothing the front of her robes as if with indifference, though Harry rather sensed she wanted him to continue.

"I had something else on my mind that night, and I shouldn't have let myself be distracted like I did. It wasn't fair to you, and I, well, I'm sorry."

Penny met his eyes for perhaps the first time since the match. "Was I that boring? I… I felt ignored. What was on your mind to distract you that much?"

Harry hesitated. Had he been mid sprint, he'd have skidded to a halt and probably tumbled arse over teakettle. "I, er, can't say."

Her eyes hardened. "You can't say."

"It's personal," he hurried to clarify.

"Oh, it's personal," said Penny flippantly. "Fine. Tell you what, Harry—if it's that personal, you can keep it to yourself. I don't want to know anymore." She looked away then, raising a hand to fiddle with her hair in a way that conveniently shielded her eyes. "I think I'll close the shop early today. You can take off."

"Wait, Penny—"

"Just go, Harry. Please."

Harry's chest deflated. He surrendered with a sad, lingering look at the side of her half-hidden face. "I'm sorry," he said again.

And then he left.

The weekend, a time of rest and recuperation for students and faculty alike, was the perfect time for Harry to sleuth about for clues to the next stage of his ultimate mission. And he was eager to get in as much sleuthing as possible before Quidditch started in October; with the match count doubled, there would be a game every third week or so, which would demand, over the course o the school year, nearly two full weeks of Harry's otherwise free time. And his two biggest quarries, Heliopath fire and a soul, would take plenty of time to pin down. Time and research.

And the only thing standing between Harry and a weekend in the library was Quidditch tryouts.

With the Triwizard Tournament coinciding with Quidditch this year, the four house team captains were more determined than ever to assemble an unbeatable team. It was as if they were committed to outperforming the prestigious international tournament in both excitement and grandeur, something that made Harry snicker. The captains had been arguing and squabbling and griping about having to share the field for tryouts.

"The other teams will be spying!" they objected: "There are four teams and only two sets of hoops!" and "There won't be enough flying space for everyone!" and "Why shouldn't I be allowed to bring a pocketful of flapjacks?"

Harry was familiar with these complaints when he had been but a student himself, and he followed his Madam Hooch's example and held firm.

At five o'clock on the dot, he watched from midfield as students streamed onto the Quidditch pitch, their robes fluttering in the early autumn breeze. The captains had eventually quit their moaning and now took positions half a field away from one another, their hopeful housemates and last year's players piling up around them, some shooting furtive glances in the other teams' directions. It all looked comically secretive.

There were more familiar faces here than not, but none of them Harry knew, and none of them knew Harry. If anything, it was sheer nostalgia that found Harry paying extra attention to the Gryffindor team. Angelina Johnson had made her debut as captain this year, which had not surprised Harry. And commanding the Ravenclaw, Hufflepuff and Slytherin teams were, respectively, Roger Davies, Cedric Diggory and Draco Malfoy.

Harry's job was really just to organize and observe. He would be there to resolve any disagreements or emergencies, but otherwise the captains took on their houses' tryouts privately. So he took to the air in his Comet V Series and watched from above midfield.

The Comet Harry rode wasn't truly his, but rather a perk of the job. It was the newest Comet model and one of the top brooms in the world. The students, meanwhile, flew on the school's stocked Cleansweep Sevens if they did not possess their own. Something Harry learned upon becoming flight instructor was that Hogwarts—this one, anyway—had a list of regulated broomsticks allowed for Quidditch matches; a student was prohibited from flying during a match on a non-approved broom. And a Firebolt was not an approved broomstick.

As a student, Harry would have been devastated by such a ruling. But as a teacher, Harry found himself in agreement. He supposed it helped to even the playing field. If sport was about skill and dedication, why encourage rich parents to buy their children state-of-the-art racing brooms to make up for talent? In retrospect, though he still smiled whenever he recalled his old Firebolt, Harry decided it had been rather unfair of the school to allow him, as a teenager, to fly a top-tier professional racing broom.

It amused Harry, in a way, to see how much his opinions and perspectives had shifted in the last decade. Was this what being an adult felt like?

The teams were variously running drills or racing timed laps about the pitch or generally showing off their skills. Angelina in particular had set up a sort of obstacle course for her fellow Gryffindors, and they were taking it in turns to run the gauntlet. Harry had had to deny her request to release Bludgers.

A number of students watched from the stands, some out of encouragement, others for mere curiosity. Among them were two that caught Harry's eye. Lavender Brown he had seen before, passed her in the hall, but to see her sitting beside Hermione elicited a raised eyebrow from him. The two were such opposite personalities that Harry would have expected to see Hermione looking bored or annoyed by whatever Lavender was gossiping about. His other eyebrow rose when he realized it wasn't so; whatever the girls were talking about, they both shared an animation born of mutual excitement. Hermione even laughed at something Lavender had said!

"Different world, indeed," muttered Harry under his breath.

Then Hermione interrupted Lavender with a hand on the arm, pointing onto the field.

Harry followed the finger to one of the Gryffindors returning from their obstacle run just as another took off, leaping from the ground to the air in a blur.

For those that had worn their robes to the pitch, they doffed the garments and tossed them over the railing along the stands, or passed them to a classmate to hold, or otherwise just left them pooled on the ground. Quidditch uniforms were specially made with flying in mind; school robes were not.

So it was in a smear of Hogwarts-uniform black and charcoal gray that the student zoomed down the pitch, corkscrewed around the levitating dummy fliers, rounded the goalposts with perfect braking technique, and catapulted back toward the assembled Gryffindors. The flier landed amid applause and whistles, grinning ear to ear, dark hair messy and windswept.

"Alright, alright," said Angelina with a roll of her eyes. "We both knew it was a formality, get back in line, Evans."

Evans.

Harry's breath caught in his throat at his mother's name. Was that…?

It could've been anybody. Evans was a popular name in Britain, after all. But Harry couldn't contain his curiosity. He had to know. He descended, drifting over the heads of assembled students, discretely following Evans to the edge of the field, where—Harry swallowed—Hermione and Lavender were waiting.

"You were amazing!" gushed Hermione.

Lavender groaned in feigned exasperation. "Honestly, Hermione, like you've never seen Melanie fly before. You aced the course, Mel."

"Thanks," said Evans, still grinning. She raked a hand through her hair, undoing tangles. "Nothing beats hitting the pitch after a boring day of classes."

"Stop, stop, you're making it worse," said Hermione, shooing Evans' hands away and taking over for her. "I don't know why you don't put your hair up before you fly, I tell you every time…"

"Because I like feeling the wind in my hair, Hermione." Evans winked at a smirking Lavender. "And besides, I know you'll be there afterward to sort out the knots."

"Oh, you do, do you?" countered Hermione, and she shoved Evans away. "Fix it yourself, then!"

The girls' laughter startled Harry from his pensive puzzlement. A good many thoughts were hurtling through his mind like busy trains dashing in and out of King's Cross Station, and every time he tried to board one, it would take off and be replaced by another train of thought. Who was this Evans girl? More importantly, who was this Evans girl to him? Driven by a need to know, he tilted his Comet forward, landed on the pitch and hastened over.

He tried on a professional smile and said, "That was impressive flying, Miss…?"

She turned to him, faced him head-on, and it was almost as though he stared into a mirror.

"Melanie Evans," she said, green meeting green. "Nice to meet you, Mister Crossley."

Author's Note

Not a long chapter, this one, mostly following up on previous scenes and setting up future ones. As of this chapter, I've run out of material already written. Full transparency here, there's been a death in my family and it's really shaken me. I can't promise to adhere strictly to the predefined update schedule (I haven't written a thing in over two weeks, and I forgot to leave a note at the end of the last chapter), but I'll do my best. Even if I miss a Saturday here or there, I'm committed to this story and to you guys, and I'll see it finished.

Happy Thanksgiving to those that celebrate it!