[From Samhain to the Solstice]: The Answer Is Silence, gen, R, 2/4

[lomonaaeren]

Thank you for all the reviews! I’m glad people are enjoying this story.

Also, this is now going to be four parts. Goddamnit.

Part Two

Albus rose to his feet as he watched the children stream into Hogwarts. He had already received word from Remus, who had ridden the train at Albus’s request, that Harry Potter was supposedly on the Express—but Remus hadn’t actually seen him. Albus couldn’t help straining forwards across the professors’ table as he watched the group of first-years gather at the front.

Minerva wasn’t doing much better with holding back her curiosity, Albus saw, given the quick glances she kept sending towards the first-years. But she did a good job of clearing her throat and pretending that she cared about the whole Sorting as she began to read the list of names.

The Sorting passed slower than any other had in Albus’s long experience. But at last Minerva announced Harry’s name, and the Great Hall erupted in whispers and chatter and whoops.

“Did she mean—”

“He’s been found!”

“Where do you think he’s been the last few years?”

That is what I would like to know, Albus admitted to himself as he watched the boy walk towards the Hat. He was smaller than Albus had thought he would be, but he had the wild black hair, the green eyes, the glasses.

Albus craned his neck, and then scowled at himself for imitating one of his students and sat down. But it was the truth that it was hard keeping his eyes off Harry Potter, and wondering what had happened since he had seen the boy as an infant, or since Severus had been to the Dursley home and reported Potter leaving with a house-elf.

Albus had debated keeping the secret as he’d kept it during the first fortnight after his devices tied to Harry’s life-force had alerted him that the blood protections on the Dursley home were no longer active. But he had too many duties, and so did the people he trusted most, like Severus and Minerva. He had to let people know Harry Potter was missing so they would look for him.

And still, no one had found him. Albus had thought that surprising. Yes, the boy had had a house-elf with him, but that just meant some purebloods had probably taken him. A lot of pureblood families would have flaunted the Boy-Who-Lived if he was with them. Others would have kept him prisoner and not allowed him to attend Hogwarts.

But his Hogwarts letter had gone out, although with only Harry’s name and no address on it, and now he was here.

Harry walked forwards with a tired expression on his face, as if this was boring for some reason, and put the Hat on his head. It promptly yelped as though Harry had lit it on fire.

“WHAT!”

“Just Sort me,” Harry muttered, and swung his legs back and forth. His feet did reach the floor from the stool he was sitting on, at least, Albus thought. Petunia could not have treated him as foully as Albus had feared.

The Hat mumbled under its breath, possibly about all the revelations it was finding in Harry’s head, but then finally gave a long sigh and said, “Slytherin,” in a casual sort of tone.

“No,” Severus said from beside Albus.

“What?” half the students demanded.

“My decision is final,” said the Hat, although it sounded scandalized. Probably about putting a Potter in Slytherin, Albus thought, a little scandalized himself, as he watched Harry take off the Hat and walk towards the table.

Draco Malfoy immediately tried to corner him. The boy had been indulged outrageously by his mother since the mysterious death of his father, and even Severus had told Albus he dreaded having the boy in his House when he thought he was the center of the universe.

Harry turned his head and looked at Malfoy. The boy paled and cringed away.

Albus gnawed his lip, a little concerned. The child’s placement in Slytherin was no surprise given the way he had probably been treated by the Dursleys, plus the pureblood family who might have taken him in, but the way the boy looked at his peers with a curled lip that kept most of them from speaking to him was…

Like Tom Riddle.

You already know, or feel you know, what Tom left in him that night, Albus reminded himself, and pasted a pleasant expression on his face as he stood. He would do his best to make sure that the magical world would not suffer under two Dark Lords. Including killing Harry himself, if he had to.

But he would do it mercifully if he had to do it. The way he should have put down Tom Riddle years ago. The way he would have finished Gellert if his own failed love had not stayed his hand.

“Welcome to Hogwarts!”

*

Ron Weasley sneaked a look over his essay at Harry. The boy was sitting on the other side of the library table, furiously reading a book that had nothing to do with their homework, as usual.

Ron still wasn’t sure why the most famous boy in the world had come up to him the day classes started and insisted on becoming his friend. Ron hadn’t been upset, despite Harry’s placement in Slytherin, so much as bewildered. Other than them being the same age and both liking Quidditch, Ron had no idea what they had in common.

Except that Harry liked him. And listened to him. And lost chess games to him with good cheer. And told Ron over and over again that he was worth something, that he could stand clear of the shadow of his brothers if he wanted, that just because he had trouble with schoolwork didn’t mean he was stupid.

No one else in Ron’s life had ever said those things to him. His parents had never implied that he was stupid, of course, but they—well, they were busy, Dad with his job and Mum with all his other brothers and sister.

He’d been Just Ron, just another Weasley, just another Gryffindor in a family that always Sorted Gryffindor. Until Harry had come up to him and marked him as special by holding out his hand and smiling and asking for his name.

“We’re going to be best friends, you’ll see,” he’d added, as Ron struggled to get over his own gaping and shake Harry’s hand.

And somehow, they were. Ron had thought at first it would be a one-sided friendship. Harry could help him, but Ron couldn’t help Harry. He wasn’t anybody special. Harry should have become friends with the twins or Bill if he wanted someone special.

But then it turned out that Harry liked Ron’s jokes, and liked being beaten at chess, and even liked it when Ron lost his temper and snapped at him. Maybe it was because someone was treating him normally, not special, the way that so many people at Hogwarts did.

That was a new revelation to Ron, that someone could get tired of fame and just want to be around someone who treated them like everyone else. But the more he watched Harry, the more he was convinced that fame wasn’t that great.

People came up and tried to talk to Harry when he was eating, for Merlin’s sake. Ron couldn’t think of anything that was worth that.

Except the chance to follow Harry on some new adventure, maybe.

Harry had already shown him how to get into the kitchens, how to break into the shed where the school brooms were kept, and how to slip through a secret passage that led straight to the Honeydukes cellars. He didn’t say how he knew these things when Ron asked, just grinned.

“I know them,” was what he said, and then he’d gone swooping away on a broom, whooping in a way that didn’t go outside the bubble of the Silencing Charm he also knew how to cast for some reason.

Harry Potter was the best natural flyer Ron had ever seen. And he did well in his other classes, too, always with the right answer when a professor asked him, or at least an answer. He wasn’t as good as Hermione Granger, but who was? Ron liked that Harry was ordinary in some ways, and able to do well but not too well.

And he always helped Ron when Ron struggled, somehow teaching in a way that made everything make more sense than Snape or Sprout or Flitwick did. He wasn’t quite as good as McGonagall, but it turned out that Ron was better at Transfiguration than he’d thought he’d be.

And Harry was a much better Defense teacher than Quirrell.

Harry looked as if he was constantly on the verge of rolling his eyes whenever they were in the garlic-smelling classroom with Quirrell stuttering at them. But then he would take Ron to a private alcove not far from the common room and teach him hexes and jinxes and even a few mild curses.

Ron had used one on Fred one evening, who had thought it was George and fought with his twin for the first time ever.

That was pretty bloody great.

And if Harry acted weird sometimes and seemed to know things he shouldn’t know, like the location of all those secret passages, who cared? He was friends with Ron. He enjoyed Ron’s company. He invited him along on these journeys that never seemed to have anyone else along on them. He had confessed to Ron that he couldn’t actually stand most of their peers.

But he liked Ron. Ron would follow him into the Forbidden Forest, or to the bottom of the lake, or even down the third-floor corridor if he had to.

Harry had a friend for life, whether or not he wanted one.

*

Hermione Granger looked down the table at Weasley and his Slytherin friend, Harry Potter, and did some serious thinking.

She had known there were bound to be people at Hogwarts who could challenge her in the classroom. The older students knew ever so much more, of course, and there were students who would have lived in the magical world since they were born. And Professor McGonagall, who had visited Hermione’s house to introduce her to magic, could do so much! It would be years before she could rival Professor McGonagall in practical Transfiguration, Hermione was certain.

But that had just made her more determined to catch up, and work until she was back in a position where she could show what she was capable of.

She had never expected to encounter someone who appeared able to do all the work, but wasn’t interested in it. Harry Potter wanted to spend time with Ron Weasley, and explore the school, and take advanced books out of the library, and apparently ignore the vast majority of his actual Housemates. He wasn’t interested in marks or academic competition, either, not the way Hermione was.

She had confronted him the other day in the library, after a confusing Halloween night (Professor Quirrell had come running into the Great Hall to report a troll, but then no one had been able to find it, and some people had suspected the Defense teacher of playing a prank).

“Why are you reading about trolls?” she’d demanded, pointing to the book Potter was putting back on the shelf.

They hadn’t spoken before outside of a few words when Professor Snape had paired them one day in Potions, but Potter gave her a friendly smile. “I wanted to know how you put one out of commission,” he said casually, and slid the book in among the others.

“Were you going to try to take down the troll yourself, Potter?” Hermione had hissed, scandalized, and looking over her shoulder in anticipation of a reprimand from Madam Pince that never came. “That’s so dangerous! You should leave that for professors to handle.”

“Okay.”

“Okay, what?” Hermione eyed him suspiciously. “Do you agree with me?”

“No, I’m placating you,” said Potter, and grinned at her squawk of outrage. He shrugged. “Yes, I agree that professors should take care of threats like trolls under normal circumstances, but Halloween wasn’t normal. Either a troll really did get in and then someone else removed it before it could attack anyone or even be seen, or one of the professors thought it would be a great idea to play a joke.”

“It must have been a joke,” Hermione said, but uncertainly. It was true that Professor Quirrell, as she’d overheard the Weasley twins discussing, didn’t seem like the type to play jokes. “I don’t know…”

“Well, sometimes someone has to do what other people should do but won’t.”

Potter’s back was straight, and his eyes were blazing in a way that Hermione had never seen anyone’s blaze. Well, no, that wasn’t true. Her dad had got angry once about people bullying her for her teeth and his eyes had shone like that. But not anyone her age.

“What did you do, Potter?” Hermione asked, sure that it had been something, although she hadn’t the faintest idea what.

Potter considered her for a long moment, and then grinned. “Maybe I’ll tell you if you prove that you can keep secrets.”

“I can keep every secret someone gives me!” Hermione protested, and then reconsidered. “I mean, if it doesn’t hurt someone, or it doesn’t break the rules, or it doesn’t get me in trouble.”

Laughing, Potter winked at her and shook his head a little. “Then I’m afraid that you’ll have to wait for a bit. This is definitely something that breaks the rules and would get you in trouble. As for whether it hurt someone, that depends on your definition of someone.”

“What do you mean, Potter?” Hermione asked, but he’d already wandered off among the shelves, probably to rejoin his friends. Ron Weasley was his closest friend, but Potter seemed to study with anyone from Ravenclaw or Gryffindor or Hufflepuff who asked. Sometimes even older Slytherins, although he avoided the ones in his own year.

“Potter!”

But Hermione didn’t dare raise her voice in case Madam Pince came around the corner, and Potter didn’t look back. It was frustrating. Hermione tossed her hair and went back to her own table, mind boiling over with plans to make Potter tell her everything.

She disliked it when people kept secrets that they whispered about behind their hands, but before today, she hadn’t even thought Potter was keeping one. And she needed to know.

Well, first she would just try to find out on her own. But if she couldn’t, then it might be time to go to Potter and demand he tell her.

If it broke the rules…

Hermione frowned mightily. Well, that might be okay as long as no one found out.

*

Minerva slowly stepped back from the body and closed her eyes. She hadn’t been the one to find it—that had been Severus—but he had fetched her at once, as if he had worried that Albus or an Auror would accuse him of making away with Quirinus if he went to them first.

And, for a mercy, it wasn’t in a public place. In fact, the body was sprawled in one of the side dungeon corridors where no one except Severus and perhaps some of the Slytherin prefects or students ever went. His throat had been slit, and to Minerva that appeared the cause of death, but there was also an unsightly wound on the back of his head.

Severus had already used magic to turn Quirinus over. Stifling the impulse to tell him that he’d probably ruined a few important clues, Minerva studied that other wound. It looked as though someone had pulped Quirinus’s skull with a Blasting Curse.

Minerva tried to decide if there was some other curse that could have been used, but her days of service in the Department of Magical Law Enforcement were long behind her. With a sigh, she turned to Severus.

“Do you think any of the students saw anything?” she asked.

Severus shook his head. His face was pale, and for some reason, his hand kept straying to his left arm. Minerva supposed it wasn’t impossible that a Death Eater could have got into the school and done this, but it seemed so odd, especially in their choice of victim, if they had.

“No,” he whispered. He cleared his throat. “I do not think they could have stopped gossiping about it, if they had. And the body has not been here long enough to decay.”

“Time of death?” Minerva murmured.

“I would think you would know about such things better than I would.”

Minerva bit back her own impulse to give a sharp retort. That was true enough. Of the two of them, she was the one more used to dealing with dead bodies after the fact, though perhaps not to creating them.

Shaking the uncongenial thought out of her head, Minerva knelt, groaning a little as the stone ground against her knees. She studied Quirinus again, from as close as she could make herself go, but it was clear that she wouldn’t learn anything from that. Quirinus had died with a blank expression on his face. Not even surprise had registered enough to show.

Something occurred to her, and she looked up at Severus. “How did you find the body? Do you normally come down here?”

“There was a note folded and put under my office door,” Severus said, his voice flat in a way that Minerva knew meant he had retreated emotionally to handle the situation. “It said Quirinus has been taken care of. Find him in the corridor with the tapestry of daisies.” With a jerk of his head, Severus indicated the incongruous tapestry of white daisies in a green field that did indeed hang on the wall nearby.

Minerva sighed. She had no idea who would want to kill Quirinus, other than the vampires he had angered, and they certainly wouldn’t have wasted all the blood.

“Well, then I suppose we might as well report this to Albus.”

Severus nodded in a way that made Minerva think her first suspicions had been right, and he was afraid of being accused if he took the report to Albus himself. Well, Minerva didn’t mind standing beside him, not when she didn’t think for a moment that Severus had done this.

Not that that gave them any answers as to who had.

“Do you still have the note?”

“I am not a complete novice, Minerva. I did preserve it.”

They began the walk that would take them to Albus’s office, although Minerva put a Blanking Charm on the corridor first so that no students would notice it or wander into it while they were gone. She took one glance back at Quirinus’s body before they left, and shuddered at the pale flash of exposed brain and bone.

Whoever did this must have hated him with a passion.

Which still didn’t explain why.

*

Pomona Sprout folded her arms and stared at Albus evenly. “I’m sorry, what did you say?”

“The Devil’s Snare that you put into the maze at my request has been completely destroyed,” Albus mumbled.

At least he mumbled. And looked at the wall of the greenhouse after he said it, as if completely fascinated by the mandrakes she had growing in pots there.

Pomona sighed. She supposed that she couldn’t expect much more guilt over the death of “just a plant”—it would be “just a plant” to anyone but her—but she had expected its presence to be worth something. Instead, someone had broken into the maze while leaving Fluffy intact and unwitting in the room off the third-floor corridor, destroyed her Devil’s Snare, and apparently walked away with the Philosopher’s Stone.

“You don’t think that the person who took the Stone was You-Know-Who?” Pomona asked. She had to ask, even though she was privately skeptical that You-Know-Who was still alive. He wouldn’t have waited this long before trying something if he was.

“No,” Albus said, and turned back to her, a strange look in his eyes. He was apparently less guilty now that his apologies were out of the way. “That’s the oddest part. I got an owl from Nicholas today. He said that the Stone was sent back to him in a box with a note in handwriting he’s never seen. Take care of it this time.”

Pomona shook her head, baffled. “If someone wanted the Stone for themselves, why give it back to Nicholas? If they didn’t want it for themselves, why break into the maze in the first place?”

Albus nodded. “And unfortunately, since we have no idea when it happened, we don’t have any way to trace the magical residue of who it might have been. I did try. I received no answers that made any sense.”

“But you did receive an answer?” Pomona pressed.

Albus was silent for long moments. Then he said, “The person whose wand was used, assuming that I cast the spells to trace the wand’s signature the right way, is dead.”

“But someone else could have easily picked up and used their wand,” Pomona insisted. “Come, Albus, tell me who it is.”

“I think it best that I keep that knowledge to myself for right now, Pomona. Besides, I recovered the wand at the scene. Whoever broke in and used it left without it.”

Pomona asked a few more questions, trying to make them as prying as she could, but Albus only shook his head mournfully and kept silent. Pomona finally threw up her hands and went to tend to her mandrakes, while he left the greenhouse. Sometimes the man was infuriating.

Her poor Devil’s Snare. None of her babies was getting used in another of Albus’s plots again, no matter what he said.

*

Myrtle peeked slowly out of her cubicle. She knew that the sink had opened before, the night she died, and that was why she had dived into her toilet and fled through the pipes to the Prefect’s bathroom the minute she saw it opening again.

But it had closed again right away. Myrtle hovered next to her loo, indecisive. On the one hand, maybe this was the same Heir of Slytherin who had opened the Chamber and let out the monster last time, and she should go tell one of the professors before they killed someone else.

On the other hand, no one had cared when she died, did they? They didn’t close the school. They didn’t even send the one they said was responsible to Azkaban. They just expelled him and let him live close to the school all the time!

Myrtle felt her eyes welling up, and didn’t try to stop them. Well, they could keep their stupid caring! She didn’t care, either! She would just stay here, and if another beast came up and killed someone else, they weren’t going to share her bathroom!

She was only a little dissatisfied when the sink never opened again.

*

Albus stared down at the willow wand on his desk, and shook his head. There was no doubt that it was Lily Potter’s. And it was true that he never had found Lily’s wand in their house that night, although it had been easy enough to assume it had been destroyed with the collapse of part of the roof, or by the backlash of the Killing Curse.

He reached tentatively towards it, and sighed when he felt nothing but cold wood when he touched it. He had hoped, given the note that had been left with it, that he might have been able to use it.

The note, lying beside the wand at the foot of the shattered Mirror of Erised, had said simply, In fair trade.

Albus closed his eyes. He did not consider it fair trade, actually, for the vanished Sword of Gryffindor, the Invisibility Cloak that had disappeared out of the drawer he had it in, or the Elder Wand that he missed like a limb.

But it was what he had. And despite the discreet watch that he was keeping on Harry Potter, he did not really believe the boy could have been behind all the thefts, mysterious house-elves and mysterious pureblood family helping him or not. Advanced magic and great power had torn apart the Devil’s Snare, killed the trolls—both the one at Halloween and the one in the underground maze—got past the anti-theft and anti-intruder wards on his office, and shattered the mirror.

Harry Potter, when Albus had cast simple detection charms at him, did not show that level of power. He was a bit above average, but not as strong as Albus or Tom Riddle or even Severus.

And that had not disappointed Albus, he told himself sternly. It wasn’t sheer power that would defeat Tom, or Albus would have been able to manage it himself.

Yes, it was all to the good that Harry was a talented student but not the best one, a Slytherin but close friends with several Gryffindors and several Ravenclaws, a blending of the traits of his parents but not the same as them. He would, in time, do what was expected of him, Albus was certain.

Hopefully, he would do it without dying.

*

George exchanged a glance with his twin. Fred nodded back, his eyes sharp and narrow in the way that only George ever usually saw them. Most of the time, it paid to smile and act as if you didn’t have a thought in your head but the next prank.

This time, though, they did. They had prey.

Someone had been sneaking in and out of Gryffindor Tower with what had to be an Invisibility Cloak, given that George knew a Disillusionment Charm would have yielded to his and Fred’s Finites (the first spell they had learned to perform silently). Someone had been teaching Ickle Ronnekins spells that he shouldn’t know yet. Someone had been getting books out of the Restricted Section, as Madam Pince had revealed when she’d yelled quite spectacularly under the impression that it was them.

And now someone had been coming up on the seventh floor and disappearing behind a door where no door should be. George wished they could be sure who it was, but someone had taken their Map early on this year.

Now, he and Fred tensed together as the door opened.

The same someone under the Invisibility Cloak, which they could see as an odd shimmer now that they were looking for it, stepped out, and the door shut. George held up his fingers in a silent count of three, and Fred nodded. They whipped their wands out and shouted the Summoning Charm as strongly as they could. “Accio Invisibility Cloak!”

There was a slight tremble, but the cloak didn’t come flying towards them. Instead, there was a loud sigh, and a disembodied voice they didn’t recognize spoke out of the air. “What are you two doing here?”

“Trying to find you!” Fred said immediately.

George saw the tactic they were going to adopt and took it up smoothly. “You’re the most fascinating person in the castle, person who has a cloak like that—”

“Person who gets into Gryffindor Tower—”

“Person who took our map—”

“Person who’s probably the reason the professors cleared that third-floor corridor out and pretended they’d never said it was dangerous?”

They hadn’t been sure about that last one, but the voice gave a little chuckle. George and Fred both bowed in its direction. George added, “Person who could teach us all the tricks that we need to know to thrive in the world?”

The person beneath the cloak seemed to think about that for a bit. George and Fred waited patiently. George knew what people said about them—that they weren’t capable of doing anything that didn’t involve loud bangs and making someone yell or run in circles—but he and Fred had to have patience to brew all the potions they needed and work towards the money they wanted to get to open their joke shop.

“I can’t teach you everything about me,” the voice said at last. “But I could use a few more people to help me. It was sometimes touch and go this year finding what I needed to find and not getting caught. If I hadn’t had some, um, flying help, I might have got caught when I raided the Headmaster’s office.”

“You raided the Headmaster’s office,” whispered George, feeling nothing but awe.

“Teach us, teach us, teach us,” Fred begged, clasping his hands together.

“I’m going to need a Vow from you first.”

George exchanged a glance with Fred, eyebrows raised. Their parents had told them about vows, and the world of trouble they could land people in. They had been sure to stress to Fred and George to always let them know if someone else tried to make them swear a vow.

But on the other hand, they had never said anything about people who raised the Headmaster’s office and stole things undetectably, probably because they had never thought there was anyone who could do that.

And George knew, as surely as his twin, that they needed to know.

“Do we need a witness?” George asked, as he drew his wand. Fred was a moment behind him.

“Not for the kind of vow that I want you to make,” said the voice.

And they didn’t. And the vow had pretty serious consequences if they tried to betray the voice or tell his secrets to anyone, like losing their magic or their tongues falling out. But why would they ever want to betray him? George could hear Fred asking silently, and he returned an assurance. They never would, not someone who could teach them so many things they needed to know and involve them in serious adventures.

That the voice pulled back the hood of its cloak a few minutes later and revealed Harry Potter was only a tiny surprise. And from the way he faced them, eyes glittering, wand raised and ready, he was no ordinary kid.

Well, neither are we, George and Fred thought, and they set themselves to learn.