(AN: I'm getting into the densest plot, so updates will likely be slower. The legwork is insane xx.)

Small Things, Ben Howard

Has the world gone mad

Or is it me?

All these small things they gather 'round me

Gather 'round me

Is it all so very bad?

I can't see

All these small things they gather 'round me

Gather 'round me

And I can't see my love

By Monday morning, Harry had rescheduled their meeting with the Unspeakable and Crux was set on becoming a full-time weirdo.

Awkward and accusatory—though it was all unspoken, he'd been markedly quiet—flighty like a spooked sparrow, startling when Harry shifted in his seat.

'Is this how you felt when I wouldn't acknowledge anything?' Harry wondered, fluctuating between irritated and amused.

'The stakes weren't quite this high. But yes.'

They'd woken with Crux locked around them as though he'd drown if he let go. Once awake, he let go like Harry was made of spiders and demanded a bath—tongue-twisted— with a bright red face, neck, and chest.

Harry hadn't pressed him. Content to let him freak out internally while he dealt with everything else.

The plan was to be back at Hogwarts by nightfall on Tuesday. On Wednesday, the other schools would begin arriving, and that summed up what he knew. On that front, he planned to have Narcissa fill him in as much as possible after they'd seen the Unspeakable.

Numerous Hogwarts staff positions needed filling—no headmaster, no Charms professor, vacancies in Martial Arts, Flying Instruction, and Runes—and he hadn't thought about it.

Reed needed to be replaced for the duels. Harry was less hopeful that they'd get to her in time with each passing second. If at all. Three days to replace her with someone who seemed intentional—political bluster.

Tom wanted to gather the Dark Lord's inner circle and bluff before they left Gwrych. Harry considered it to be a worse idea the longer he considered. Taking Polyjuice and mimicking Voldemort was fine in theory, but they couldn't be normal. They weren't normal. And they were terrible liars. Crux in particular—even if Harry's Horcrux did his absolute best at imitating Harry, he was still far too… Crux.

"Ugh, that was… Cement flavour, I think," Crux said, snapping Harry out of his thoughts.

He was talking to himself—or more accurately, talking to the mangled jellybean he'd spat into his palm—sat in the large white and cream piano room, waiting for Vale. Surrounded by sweet wrappers and chocolate frog cards—several escaped frogs smeared chocolate wherever they landed, the fireplace softening them until they melted into lumps.

And they'd found next to nothing on Nagini, furious when he thought of her, fists clenched automatically.

There was also the hostage transfer that needed to take place when Beauxbatons arrived, and Harry realised that he hadn't checked if Hagrid was still alive. Something else to ask Narcissa. Incredibly awkward, at a minimum, to hand over a corpse.

Harry's stomach tied itself in knots while they waited, eyes torn between Crux and Eris—lounging, half asleep, quill precarious in his hand. Harry assumed he'd been awake all night spying, though there had been little to report.

That grated on Harry, too. He'd pinned quite a few hopes on dead critters. But nought. Ironwood spent a good amount of his time quietly smug. It seemed as though any meetings were held elsewhere, if at all. And as many addresses as they'd found and infiltrated, they weren't fruitful, aside from more and more names.

Names weren't what Harry wanted.

They knew that Ironwood could Disapparate from within the vast wards on the manor where he held Reed and that he was likely the only one who could. A problem for when they raided the building. If they raided the building.

"Err!" Crux yelped, "That one was… I dunno? I can't even tell? Try it? It's awful." He offered the half-chewed bean, and Harry shook his head.

"I'll take your word for it."

Crux's Kneazle, Bitty, moved from melted chocolate frog to melted chocolate frog, and Harry wondered if cats should eat that. He supposed they'd find out.

Crux seemed to remember he meant to be nothing but ill at ease and returned to the beans with a confused frown.

The Dark Lord had filled out nicely under Crux's regime. Three square meals a day and ample snacks agreed with him. Less pale, less thin, hair and eyes and skin luminous. His lips were a healthy, soft pink, flushing Harry with poorly timed adrenaline. Dressed in robes Crux bought the day before—Deep red, almost a match for his eyes. Tarnished silver clasps—Tom had taken care of Crux's hair and stubble, and though he hadn't announced himself, Crux always knew the difference between Tom and Harry.

Bed Sheet tightened on his shoulders, and Harry had noticed that he'd been clingy. The Lethifold chose not to leave him more often than not.

A quiet knock at the door went unanswered. He knew Narcissa would let Vale in without acknowledgement.

"Get some sleep," Harry said when Eris snapped awake, "Back here before sundown."

Eris nodded and stood, but Harry didn't think he would rest. Too stubborn. He passed by Vale as she entered and she surveyed the room with a squint, cherubic face exposed. Her hood pulled back, gold tattoos twining up her neck.

"…Did someone smear shit everywhere in here?" She asked before she found the piles of chocolate frog boxes strewn at Crux's feet, "Ah. Okay."

"We need your theories on how Ironwood controls Reed's mind."

She sat in Eris' seat, one of the few that frogs hadn't assaulted. "Certainly not with an Imperius."

"…We know that."

"Or any magic as most use it. There has been no recorded control over a cerebromancer." She said it like she'd said it before.

Harry had heard it before.

"Morty says- he said…" Crux closed his eyes, scowling, "He said something like that would have to be anchored somehow. Held and amplified by something else."

"I did examine that possibility, but nothing I've ever come across fits the criteria-"

"Shh," Crux snapped, irritated, red eyes flaring, "That just means you haven't found it, not that it doesn't exist. This snake? In my chest? Brand-spanking new technology, Vale. We're trailblazing. Trendsetting. Innovating." An unlit cigarette had fallen out of his mouth, and Harry watched him accidentally squash it under his knee—cross-legged on the couch.

"So you believe that Ironwood manufactured a way to hold the cerebromancer?" She examined the tattoos that seemed to flow uninterpreted from her hands to her jaw, then eyed Crux the same way. Sharp.

Crux shrugged, still frowning at the arm of his chair, "Everything is new once."

"…Thank you," Harry said in Parseltongue, struck silent since Crux had announced what the Dark Lord had said.

"For what?"

"For telling me. What he said."

"Yeah. Whatever. I didn't do it for you."

"Then who did you do it for?"

Crux shrugged again, glaring death at his hands.

"So, it's possible Ironwood's made something? Like the snakes?" Harry asked when it was clear Crux's mouth was firmly shut.

She spread her hands and raised her eyebrows, "It would make things significantly more complicated, if he has."

"Look into it," Harry said, agitated and halfway to standing, though he wasn't sure where he'd go.

She nodded, stood before he did—sensing her dismissal—and checked her red robes for stray chocolate. Finding none, she ducked out of the sitting room without another word.

He didn't think she was going to discover anything. If Voldemort was right and they'd created something new, there wouldn't be long-lost notes. But maybe, maybe, a concept. A clue. A direction to go in.

Mid-afternoon and Crux had given himself a stomach ache.

He hadn't given up on the beans throughout Harry and Tom's discussion with Narcissa around the plans for the return to Hogwarts, announcing flavours and disrupting flow—particularly thrilled with finding a butter-flavoured bean—until he disrupted the flow by complaining about the state of his insides.

Narcissa told them that most arrangements had been made before the Dark Lord and Harry's Horcrux had fused, explaining why he'd been told nearly nothing, and Voldemort's foresight, at least in this instance, had his shoulders slumping with relief.

The Weasleys would come with them, moved to the Room of Requirement at Harry's request—easy to have their needs covered in a room that could be manipulated—though that meant they'd need a full-time guard or alternative security. It also meant that Harry wouldn't get his room back. They wouldn't be in the dungeons, so he made the sacrifice.

Plans were made to hand Hagrid over to Beauxbatons when they arrived, and Harry was relieved to hear he was the only one who'd let that slip his mind.

Narcissa had hired new staff, taking liberties that would ordinarily get her into trouble. Cedrum took Snape's place as headmaster while still holding Necromancy classes.

One of Harry's marked, Leander Decker, had taken over the Charms position. The vacancies opened by the Drumlanrig incident had been filled far earlier by the Dark Lord's marked, and Harry wasn't sure who'd made those choices. He didn't care enough to ask.

It would be Harry's job to establish duelling pairs, which seemed to him to be some kind of massive advantage in his favour. Narcissa had said it wouldn't be an issue, but she didn't say why not. The first fight was on Friday, and Harry wanted to cancel the whole thing.

He especially didn't want to think about the politics, the real reason for arranging the competition. Something that Narcissa had only hinted at, evident on her face that she wanted the Dark Lord back in command for that process.

So did Harry. Desperately.

Sitting down with the heads of the foreign schools and imitating Voldemort was the last thing he wanted to think about.

Tom thought about it for him.

"I want the ring." Crux was excellent at snapping the band of Harry's thoughts and shooting them clear out of his head.

"…What?" Harry said after a beat, "This ring?"

"No, your asshole ring, Harry." The first time he'd even come close to making a comment about the night before, and Harry almost smirked.

Eris choked on his tea and blustered until he was red in the face, flapping his arm in an effort to show he was fine, though he was plainly fighting for air. They'd gathered in the white sitting room once more, no longer covered in chocolate. A room he kept coming back to despite the way it made his chest feel open.

Eris finally inhaled and Harry was glad he didn't have to fix him.

"Hand it over? This counts as what I want to do today." Arms crossed, Kneazle sleeping—and farting, apparently chocolate wasn't for cats, periodically gassing the room—on his lap.

He didn't consider telling his Horcrux no. It had been a thought he kept having, to let Crux speak to their mother. Maybe even their father. Harry didn't want to think on how he felt about that.

Harry knew, though, that giving Crux what he wanted would likely end in some kind of cataclysmic meltdown. Not giving him what he wanted was guaranteed to result in the same thing.

"…Not here."

Tom had planned an inner circle meeting that night, so they had a few hours to spare before that nightmare.

One nightmare at a time.

"Well come on then," Crux said, scooping his kitten up and walking backwards towards the door, face expectant.

Harry was impressed he didn't trip.

Almost an hour later, they'd argued out a plan for Crux to get the privacy he wanted without Harry's eyes leaving him.

Crux sat on the Dark Lord's bed—silenced—facing away from Harry, who sat in a green armchair pretending he wasn't there. Clear he was talking to someone. Head bobbing while he showed them his kitten.

Bed Sheet was, again, overzealous with his grip, effectively swaddling Harry as though the Lethifold could sense his growing unease.

While watching and not hearing, he decided Crux made him feel less than himself. Like he was an impostor in his own life. Almost as though Crux was Harry Potter, and he had become himself only by living the life meant for someone else, an amalgamation of experiences that had lost their anchor point.

He knew it wasn't true. But he felt it.

Watching his Horcrux interact with their parents—invisible and all but strangers to him— was more than enough to make Harry hold his breath. Dizzy before he realised he wasn't inhaling. Crux's shoulders bounced when he laughed; though Harry couldn't hear him, he could tell. A flash of a grin was visible when he turned his head just right. Tears in his eyes that went ignored.

Harry let the minutes tick into an hour and wondered if he'd ask what they'd talked about. On one hand, he was desperately curious; the yearning for his parents was no less aggressive no matter how many years separated them from him. On the other… He was nursing a growing fear that it would be different. That if he could build a relationship with his dead parents through the ring, the discrepancies between him and Crux, the choices he'd made, would alter their perception.

That the love he'd ached for—awake night after night in the cupboard under the stairs imagining scenarios where his parents might spring out of the shadows and announce themselves not dead, simply hiding—was never meant for him.

He couldn't picture himself laughing with them.

"The Weasley guy wants to talk to you."

Harry hadn't registered Crux standing before him, held in his thoughts like a vacuum. At least four seconds were required to understand what he'd said.

"Ron?"

"Yeah. I coulda kept that to myself, but I didn't, so, you're welcome. Are you crying?" Crux dropped the ring in his waiting palm, and Harry caught his hand.

"Are you?"

"No?" A plain lie.

Or he hadn't even noticed.

When Harry got to his feet all his blood flooded his legs and he swayed on the spot. He hadn't considered the possibility of Ron.

Bliss tingled up his fingers through his forearm, and all he wanted at that moment was to sleep for a week under the heavy weight of contact. Instead, he let Crux go and turned the ring three times in his palm before the tired fear froze him solid.

"Hey, mate." Incorporeal, dressed in the robes he wore that day, precisely as Harry remembered him. Ron. "You got the Invisibility Cloak with you?"

"I… What?"

Ron, standing next to Crux until his Horcrux took the free armchair—his eyes burning holes in the side of Harry's head, white-knuckle gripping his seat, but Harry couldn't focus on him for long—Ron, who Harry hadn't thought of in conjunction with the ring, which felt so stupid. And everything that had happened since that night at the Ministry flashed through his mind like an ultra-high-speed showreel.

Hermione, Ginny, the Weasleys. Each and every one of them devastatingly impacted by Harry and his choices. And though he'd kamikazed down this path without control, that it felt like there was nothing he could have done differently; he couldn't envision Ron seeing it that way.

Despite Harry's disjointed train of thought, his best friend seemed serene. Focused. No anger on his face, waiting for the answer to his odd question.

"Uh… It's in my pocket?" He made sure it was still tucked in his robes, Lethifold flared on his shoulders.

"And the Elder wand?"

"What's in your pocket? What's he talking about?" Crux asked.

Harry finally realised Ron was asking after the Deathly Hallows and that he was alarmingly close to a panic attack.

The Elder wand was locked in a chest beside the Dark Lord's bed. It wasn't the wand he wanted to use—didn't want to push limits with his broken magic. The Dark Lord had deemed his quarters safe enough for the holly and yew, and Grindelwald's hookah; all sat on the mantle under stasis charms, so he'd figured it was good enough for the Elder wand.

Numb legs took him to the chest, and Tom unlocked it with the Snakewood. There wasn't much sensation in his hands as he rummaged, mind almost entirely blank.

"…You'll want to put the cloak on. Over the shoulders is fine." Ron told him once he'd found it, silvered eyes on Harry's Lethifold, "You should leave Bed Sheet."

"Leave?" Harry repeated, and Crux shot upright. "I can't leave him here." He didn't mean his Lethifold.

His Horcrux wasn't the unsupervised type. He let Bed Sheet off, fished the cloak out of his pocket, and Tom enlarged it to regular size.

"Leave? What does that mean? Where's a ghost going to take you?"

"Here," Ron said, pointing at Crux's forehead, "Put your hand here, with mine."

Harry did, a quick motion because he wouldn't have made contact otherwise—his hand inside Ron's—and immediately Crux slumped into the chair he'd left, unconscious.

"…He won't be asleep long," Ron said when Harry frowned—words tangled in the back of his throat, no idea when or how to say them.

If anything was plain on his face, Ron ignored it, "Best put the ring back on."

Again, he did as suggested, and Tom was rapt. Unshakeable attention paid to the spectre before them. Once the ring was on his finger—cloak on his shoulders, wand in his pocket—he was told to hold his breath.

Harry didn't hold his breath. Howling as every atom of himself was shredded, pulled and snapped like threads of dough forced through an extruder. Screaming even though his mouth was rendered spaghetti. Lost in a light show he could scarcely comprehend, a rainbow spectrum shooting past at the speed of light. Blinding and barely visible.

When his feet hit the ground he fell forward, braced on cobblestone he didn't recognise, fighting to keep his lunch on the inside. Skin aflame with the nausea, clammy enough to wish he was naked on the cold stone—an odd sensation in his head, as though his brain had been reassembled backwards.

"Sorry about that, mate. No sense warning you."

"No sense warning me?" Harry pressed his forehead to the stones and swallowed another round of metallic spit.

"Really, it's your fault. You collected all the Hallows. And snogged Voldemort."

Harry pushed himself off the street—no easy thing, but he was familiar with Herculean effort. Unprepared to defend those choices to Ron. But he didn't sound offended. Or disgusted. He was factual. And to Harry's confusion, amused.

Tom was more concerned with their surroundings. The same as any other street, but not. Like he'd put on strange-hued glasses.

Ron was closer to solid—the slightest hint of colour about him, a tint to his hair and robes.

He could tell night was falling, but the sky was unnatural shades of green and gold. He couldn't see the sun, hidden behind the buildings that blocked in the narrow cobblestone street, but Harry had to assume the star was emerald green.

He saw two children at the end of the block, far enough that he wouldn't have noticed if his eyes hadn't been trained on that corner. They peeked past the bricks and vanished back wherever they'd come from. A brief flash. They couldn't have been older than ten, and they were dead.

"What is this," Tom turned back to Ron.

Another pair of ghosts walked through the door just behind him before he answered, two men chattering to each other, passing close enough to hear.

"—Married that absolute harlot the second the dirt hit my coffin, and no later. Mark my words; I'll have their first brat born a squib…"

"Welcome to the other side, Harry."

That was exactly what it looked like; the longer he watched the more dead there were. Filtered out through doors and occasionally rising out of the ground. He saw people, too, the first living people he'd found by pressing his face hard against the nearest window, where an older couple squabbled over the proper amount of pepper.

And though Harry had squashed his entire face to the glass in full view of the strangers—in retrospect, a creepy thing to do—they didn't look his way.

"What…?" Harry spun to face Ron and found him grinning.

"There's so much I want to show you, but we've got our main concern."

Harry didn't need to think hard to guess, "Ginny?"

Ron nodded and pointed at a row house across the street, "this is the first place."

"Can you go anywhere like this?" Harry wondered, his eye caught by three younger teens—dead—sprinting down the cobblestone in fashion that had to be at least ten decades old, shrieking laughter.

"Anywhere in the world? Yeah. Can't go to space, though. I still reckon they should sort that out."

"…They?"

"Yeah. Them. They. I dunno."

"I don't understand." Harry didn't mean the 'They' thing.

"You get some perks with the Hallows. I don't know everything, but I do know I can bring you here, and I can tell you whatever I want, no restrictions. Would have been good if you'd picked up the ring sooner; I've had this sorted for ages," Ron rolled his eyes, and Harry was finally struck by reality.

A strangled laugh-sob caught in his throat, and words were stuck behind the sound. Ringing in his ears, growing louder, fuzzing almost all other sounds to a pin-drop.

The sky had turned deep yellow. Almost gold but tarnished black, and he knew that because he was on his ass. Legs unable to hold him, numb with vibrating panic. Head fallen back, hyperventilating. His eyes wild in their sockets, thoughts spinning off their rails, overlapping, a cacophony in his head.

"Ah. Bugger."

Ron's voice only made it worse. The reality of hearing him, seeing him, had been a slow rising tide set on silently drowning him.

When Tom summoned the darkness—a successful effort to get Harry to inhale correctly—it felt the same, but it was different. Jagged, solid edges that warped aggressively. Sharp and snapping angles that mimicked the colour of the sky.

"…What is this?"

"I dunno. No one uses magic here. Not like wizards do, anyway." Ron leaned over him, brows quirked, nearly frowning. "I know this is a lot to get your head around, mate, but you've got to do it fast. People talk, especially the dead."

The pain went some ways in holding him together, but he felt like an unsewn sack of potatoes, insides rolling out.

At least twenty silver-hued dead wandered the road, a number of them in robes. They were indeed staring and whispering as they passed, pointing at Harry—still on the ground and only partly invisible.

The sun had set, and the sky was moonless, but the street remained lit. Multifaceted and writhing shadows bounced in all directions, though there was no source of light.

Tom had already recognised the street as a small Wizarding settlement near London, his attention only slightly derailed by Harry's threatened meltdown. And he agreed with Ron. Whatever information he wanted to give, Tom wanted to take. Immediately. And then he had questions.

"This one?" Tom asked, gesturing with his head at the building Ron had pointed out and pushing off the cobblestone toward the front door before he'd answered.

Harry didn't have questions. He had statements. Apologies. Regrets. Doubts. Fears. A reaching, angry exhaustion that made itself known nearly every waking moment. He didn't let the weird-looking darkness go; it was the only thing that kept him tethered to the Earth, hidden under the cloak.

"Try walking through the door?"

Harry pressed his hand to the entrance and was met with predictably solid wood.

"Oh. There's got to be a way to do this without being obvious."

"Ron, listen, that night at the Ministry-"

"Gonna stop you right there. Sorry. I love you, Harry, but you're wasting your breath. I know you're sorry. I know you think this was your fault. I was there when you said exactly that, repeatedly, to Ginny. And she was right. If you'd gone alone, you'd have died. None of us should have been there, but that's the gift of hindsight, eh? My sister needs you to listen to me now. We can do apologies later, if you really want."

"But I-"

"Harry," Ron snapped his semi-solid fingers before Harry's face, "I know. Behind this door is one of the three people Ironwood used to shackle Reed in her head. I'll show you where to find all three. But we can't open this door. Focus."

"…Why can't we open it?" Tom asked, barely a whisper.

"See that guy?" Ron pointed at an older man half a block away, alive, reading a newspaper by wandlight, though his eyes wandered to them enough for Harry to know he wasn't taking any words in.

"Can he see us?" Harry asked.

"No, the living can't see the dead. But he'd see a door open. Ironwood's people are crawling all over these three."

"But I'm not dead?"

"That's just details."

"Why would Ironwood… It would make more sense to keep these people close?"

"They don't remember what they did. Obliviated. But everyone around them is brainwashed to guard them. This one's a witch. Her husband and son are set to blow the whistle if anything happens here."

The warning was clear. He'd lose all three if he messed up his shot at one.

While Harry mulled it over—far slower than Tom did, brain suspended in molasses—Ron scoped the windows like a burglar.

"Alright. I guess we make it up as we go along," He picked up Harry's arm—pulled out of the cloak—and they were both shocked it worked.

Ron felt more solid than he looked, and so they blinked at each other for at least ten seconds before Harry yanked him into a crushing hug. The overwhelm burned up his spine and burst from his eyes in the form of tears, rushing as though they had somewhere to urgently be. Hyperventilating again when he couldn't get air in through his blocked nose. Curse present and briefly irrelevant.

Ron squeezed him back as tightly as Harry held him, but he said, "I think we're causing a scene, mate," before he pulled back and put Harry's hand on the door to fall through it. "…Thank Merlin's pants because I had no other ideas."

Led, bewildered and snuffling, into a jarringly regular living room. He'd felt the wards on entry but knew he'd triggered nothing; he was almost a ghost.

A middle-aged woman in a nightgown hummed while she rearranged her bookshelf at wandpoint, pondering to herself aloud whether she should arrange them by colour or title.

When Ron said 'Son,' Harry assumed he'd meant an adult. Maybe a teen. Not a boy of around seven. He hung his head off the armchair with his legs on the headrest, stringing a Christmas garland with popcorn and cranberries. Poorly.

"Oh. Yeah," Ron said when he saw Harry's face, "Age doesn't matter to Ironwood, but none of it ever mattered to any of them, anyway, has it?"

Obvious he was talking about Voldemort's lack of scrutiny. And he wasn't wrong.

Tom held the serrated edge of guilt at bay and asked, "What needs to be done? How were they used?"

"I wasn't there when Ironwood did it. I was with Ginny, I don't know how. But I know what Ironwood doesn't want to happen: spontaneous death. And I really mean well-timed death. All three together."

Again, the darkness on his arm wasn't enough for an instant, a cold sliver of panic rising like a yawn. Ron, his best friend, his dead best friend, wanted him to kill three strangers. Murdering people he'd never met had become hardly a blip on Harry's radar, but the request coming from Ron was altogether something else.

And though he was Ron, mannerisms unmistakable, death had altered him.

"…You're different." Unable to articulate how he was different and exactly the same, like everything else he'd seen on the other side of life, like a place he'd been countless times and never once.

Ron looked him up and down with a raised eyebrow, "So are you."