[From Samhain to the Solstice]: The Answer Is Silence, gen, R, 4/6

[lomonaaeren]

Thank you again for all the reviews! And yes, for the people who were predicting this: this story has now grown to six parts. You’re very clever. Shut up.

Part Four

“You need Scabbers? Why?”

“I’ll show you in just a minute, Ron, if you’ll go and get him.”

Ron had stared, shrugged, and went and got Scabbers. He was warm and sleepy in Ron’s hand, and Ron cradled him protectively as he went back down the stairs and towards the portrait hole. At first he’d thought Hermione’s brute of a cat might eat him, but Crookshanks seemed to calm down about halfway through the year, and he had kept his distance from Scabbers whenever he, Ron, Hermione, and Ron’s rat were all in the same room.

Harry straightened up when Ron came out of the portrait hole with Scabbers in hand, and his face frightened Ron for the first time since they’d become friends. Harry looked as if he was going to kill Scabbers right there.

“Harry?” Ron asked warily, and held Scabbers close as he blinked his eyes a few times.

Harry hit them both with a silent spell. It just washed over Ron with a tingle of blue-silver power, but it concentrated around Scabbers, and he squeaked horribly as suddenly he was heavy and grew—

Ron was holding a man. Ron dropped him in instants, and Harry cast several spells fast and silently. Ron recognized one as a Stunner and the one that had bound the man as Incarcerous, but he had no idea what the others did. Made it harder for him to escape?

“What in the bloody hell is going on?” Ron yelled.

Harry tilted his head at Ron and gave him a smile that Ron thought was meant to be reassuring, although he never took his eyes from the man on the floor. “Meet Peter Pettigrew, Ron, the man supposedly killed by Sirius Black all those years ago. The man who really betrayed my parents.”

Ron didn’t faint, but it was a near thing.

*

Albus controlled the temptation to put his head in his hands, and instead sat down at his desk, motioning Sirius forwards. The man had apparently sneaked into the school—how, Albus didn’t know, but the Marauders had known about all sorts of secret tunnels that even the professors didn’t—and told Harry the news about Peter Pettigrew a few days ago. And Harry had believed Sirius without question, at least enough to find and stun the man who had been hiding as Ron Weasley’s pet rat.

Albus locked his hands on the desk so they wouldn’t tremble, either, and stared at Sirius with guilt swirling through him. “My dear boy, I am so sorry,” he said hoarsely. “I—I never realized that there hadn’t been a trial—”

“I know you didn’t.” Sirius sounded somewhere between tired and smug. He looked much better than Albus would have expected of a man who had escaped Azkaban recently, whose escape the Ministry had hushed up, but then again, he had been innocent, and that had to make a difference in how he reacted to the Dementors. “I don’t think anyone except Crouch realized there hadn’t been a trial. They thought there was proof of my guilt, and they could just throw anyone they wanted into prison…” He trailed off and shook his head.

“And how did you know Peter Pettigrew was still alive?” Albus asked. To him, that was the most shocking part of the whole thing. Sometimes he had thought Sirius might be innocent of betraying the Potters, but still guilty of murder.

“Saw him in the newspaper.” Albus could feel his eyes going wide, and Sirius just grinned at him. “Harry’s friend Ron Weasley, his family? They won that Daily Prophet money and took that holiday to Egypt. The rat was photographed right on the front page, along with them.”

Albus smiled a little. “And by such chances are plots undone.”

“Yeah.” Sirius took a deep breath. “Thanks for your support for a trial. I know that right now, I’m not supposed to technically be at Hogwarts, but—”

“But you have been for the last several days,” Albus completed the sentence, and nodded. “Yes, I know. Harry told me that he had been meeting with you in secret, and that you convinced him to listen to how you knew Pettigrew was alive.”

Sirius licked his lips for a second. “Yes.”

He sounded as if he might be lying, but Albus was inclined to let it go. The man had enough reason to keep his secrets close to his chest, Merlin knew, and it was a hopeful sign that Harry had listened to him instead of striking Sirius dead right away for the murder of his parents. “Did Harry tell you where he has been living?”

Sirius blinked a little. “No. But Remus said something about him staying with the Dursleys for the first several years of his life?” He stared at Albus accusingly.

“I truly did think he would be safe there.”

“Being abused doesn’t make him safe.”

Albus swallowed as the suspicions he had tried to ignore coalesced right above him and crashed onto his head. “They—they hurt him?”

“Yeah. Starved him and made him sleep in a cupboard, from what Harry said. He did say that it got a little better right before he left. But once he made friends with a house-elf and got confirmation that he could live on his own in the wizarding world, he left without looking back.” Sirius shrugged.

“And you had no concerns about such a young boy living on his own?”

“I thought it was better than being in an abusive household, if that’s what you’re about to say.”

Sirius’s cold words stopped any that Albus might have uttered in his throat. He stared at Sirius, and the sharp glitter in his eyes, and realized he might have lost the man’s trust forever when he hadn’t realized his lack of a trial.

Albus nodded slowly. “Yes, I suppose that’s true. I simply wondered and worried about him disappearing with a strange house-elf when I had no idea who it belonged to and was unable to trace it.”

Sirius shrugged. “Well, whoever they are, they raised someone compassionate and strong enough to forgive me for abandoning him when he was a baby and chasing after Pettigrew.” He blew out a sigh. “Now, can we discuss how we’re going to handle my trial through the Ministry?”

Albus smiled, and settled down to help Sirius with something he was good at.

*

Peter crouched down in his cell and shivered. It was only a cell on the very outer fringes of Azkaban, not in the middle, and so the Dementors rarely came by. He would be moved to a cell in the center if the trial went against him.

It would, of course. They had all the evidence they needed, and no one cared that he’d lived as the Weasleys’ pet for the last twelve years and never made an attempt to hurt anyone. Why would they care about that? They’d already made up their minds about him.

They painted themselves as heroic and forgiving, but they weren’t, very, Peter thought, sniffling.

A bright silver glow came down the corridor, and Peter jerked his head up. For a moment, he thought it was a guard coming by with an unusual lantern, or some kind of new Dementor. But then it turned out to be a huge, jaguar-shaped Patronus, gliding softly as someone followed it. Peter expected to see an Auror, or maybe Dumbledore, although the last he knew, Dumbledore’s Patronus had been a phoenix.

It was Harry Potter, his smile grim and delighted as he stood beside the Patronus and stared through the bars at Peter.

“Harry,” Peter whispered, feeling his heart rising in joy and relief. Harry was forgiving, wasn’t he, since he’d forgiven Sirius the minute he heard the truth? He could forgive Peter, couldn’t he? “You’re such a good boy. Do you think you could see your way clear to—”

“Where did you put Voldemort’s wand?”

The Dark Mark on Peter’s arm flared wildly at the sound of the name. He whimpered and clutched it. Although he’d stayed in his rat form through the last decade to minimize the chances of being caught as a human, he’d also done it to keep the Mark from paining him. It did so at random times since the Dark Lord’s fall, but especially when someone said his name.

Then the question Harry had asked actually registered, and Peter flinched back.

“How did you know that?”

“Answer the question.” Harry’s jaguar Patronus, twice as tall as he was, bared its teeth, and Peter gave it a nervous glance. He remembered reading or hearing somewhere that jaguars were man-eaters.

“I didn’t take it. I’m not responsible. No one else had it. Maybe someone else found it and took it. You can’t make me tell you.”

Harry’s smile slanted more towards the side of delighted. “Oh, that’s where you’re wrong, Peter fucking Pettigrew. Imperio.”

*

Remus wavered slowly up the steps to Grimmauld Place, a house he had never thought Sirius would willingly return to.

But then, so many of the things he had thought about Sirius had turned out to be wrong.

Tears blinded his eyes as he knocked on the door. It flew open before his hand could hit it, and Sirius beamed at him from the middle of the frame.

“Padfoot,” Remus whispered.

Sirius simply held up the paper, the same one Remus had seen a few minutes before. SIRIUS BLACK CLEARED OF ALL CHARGES!

Remus fell into his old friend’s arms and wept.

*

Bartemius Crouch glanced around the room uneasily, his wand in his hand. He was sure that he’d heard someone in the house the past two nights, but he couldn’t decide who it would be. His wards wouldn’t give him any notifications, which meant someone couldn’t have come in from the outside. And if Junior had got loose…

Well, he would probably be dead now.

Finally, Bartemius sighed and slid his wand into its holster. Fine. There was no one here, and the slight noises he’d thought he’d heard were his own imagination. He would go to bed and have Winky bring him a Dreamless Sleep Potion.

He started towards the steps, and then the fireplace sent a long, human-shaped shadow flaring out from the stairwell that definitely hadn’t been there before. Bartemius flinched back and drew his wand again.

“Who-who’s there?” He hated the way his voice shook, the reminder of a stutter that he’d long ago tried to shed with the rest of his youth. But he couldn’t help it.

Silence answered him.

Bartemius took a step back, hoping to put his back against the fireplace and be able to ensure that at least an enemy wouldn’t come from behind. The Floo was closed, and always was except when he used it to return home from work near the end of the day. Mr. Crouch did not receive visitors, everyone knew that.

A flicker of blue-silver light came from behind him, and Bartemius jumped and swung around. He felt more perplexed than frightened when he saw what it was, though. What was a Patronus doing here? Granted, a Patronus large enough to eat his head in one bite, and definitely corporeal, when Bartemius thought he had known the name of everyone in Britain who had one, but just a Patronus.

The jaguar stared at him, and then the sound came from the bottom of the stairs again and once more Bartemius turned around.

Walking towards him was a teenage boy with dark hair and brilliant green eyes, glowing with the light of his Patronus. It took Bartemius what felt like endless minutes, but could only have been a few seconds based on the child’s rate of walking, to recognize him.

“Harry Potter!” His voice was a low squeak. He put his wand down on the table next to him and folded his arms, frowning at the troublemaker. He had to be a troublemaker, to be here at this time of night. “What are you doing here, frightening innocents?”

“A man who denied my godfather a trial, authorized the Aurors to use the Unforgiveables, and kept his own son imprisoned in the cellars for over ten years is hardly innocent. I think most people would agree.”

Potter’s voice was a whisper, and his eyes blazed with hatred that scared Bartemius down to his soul. But his shock swept it away as his eyes widened. How could Potter know about Junior? No one did!

“What are—what are you—”

“Don’t worry, it’ll be quick,” Potter said, and shook his head. “And I’ll kill your son quickly, too. I can’t have him running around, and it would be too cruel to return him to Azkaban. But I wish he could have had a different fate. He was a cruel fanatic, but he didn’t deserve what you did to him.”

“You think I do?”

Bartemius knew his voice was too loud, but Potter only raised an eyebrow slightly as he glanced up to him.

“You don’t deserve unjust imprisonment for a decade, because no one does,” he said. “But you deserve death, yes.” And he moved his wand in what seemed to be a beckoning gesture, although Bartemius had never seen the spell before.

Bartemius stiffened his shoulders. He was still an experienced former Auror, a master duelist, and this was just a boy. No matter what spell Potter tried to use on him, he would be able to counter it, and then he would take Potter back to Hogwarts and tell Dumbledore—

The jaws that came from behind and bit through his skull were, indeed, quick.

*

“Are you all right, mate?”

Harry leaned back in his seat, and Hermione saw the way he smiled, as they watched the Triwizard Champions all enter a small room off to the side of the Great Hall. Hermione didn’t think it was her imagination that Harry had been tense until the Goblet of Fire had gone completely dark. He hadn’t even reacted like that when the news of Bartemius Crouch’s gruesome death had hit the papers and there had been a flurry of concern that Hermione now understood meant some people had thought it would delay or cancel the Tournament.

“Yeah, fine.” Harry picked up a goblet of pumpkin juice and drank, ignoring the glares of some of the Gryffindors. He ate about half his meals with them, and Hermione couldn’t say she minded. Some of her Housemates still weren’t used to the system, though. “A bit sorry for those idiots who decided to risk their lives for eternal glory. How many people have even heard of one of the previous Champions?”

“I have,” Hermione said, because sometimes she felt Harry deserved taking down a peg. He just grinned at her. “Bathsheba Arnold. She became Minister for Magic about twenty years after she won the Tournament.”

“But did you know about her because she won the Tournament, or because she was Minister for Magic?”

Hermione sighed loudly. “Well, all right, the second. But I did see that she’d won the Tournament when I looked her up, and that means that I knew what it was before anyone else did!”

Harry toasted her with his goblet. Then he turned to listen to Ron complain about how there wouldn’t be any Quidditch this year because of the Tournament, and how it was unfair that the Goblet had chosen a Hufflepuff instead of a Gryffindor to compete for Hogwarts.

Hermione frowned at the back of Harry’s head. He had told her a lot of secrets once she’d sworn her oath, including that he was friends with the Headmaster’s phoenix and that was how he had managed to get into and out of some pretty strange places. But every time she thought she had reached the end of his secrets, or that she knew the majority of them already, something else showed up to baffle her.

Hermione looked back and forth between Harry and the dark Goblet. This was another mystery.

But one she would figure out. As Harry had said to her more than once, she was Hermione bloody Granger. No mystery was proof against all the brainpower she could throw at it.

*

“Diggory! Wait up.”

Cedric turned around with as much of a smile as he could muster, which frankly wasn’t much of one right now. It wasn’t that he disliked or distrusted Harry Potter. It would be like disliking or distrusting a distant mountain. Potter hadn’t affected him one way or the other in their Hogwarts career so far, any more than that mountain. And if certain strange rumors sometimes swirled around him, well, in the end they all came to nothing.

Potter slowed to a halt between them now and fired a quick spell at the portraits in the corridor, which promptly froze. Cedric stared at him. He didn’t know that spell, and wasn’t Potter only a fourth-year?

Silent casting, too. Cedric himself was currently struggling with that, and dreading the day it would be required on the NEWTS.

“What is it, Potter?”

“The First Task,” Potter said, panting a little with how hard he’d been running, and Cedric wondered what Potter was going to ask for. An autograph? For Cedric to do well because he’d put a bunch of Galleons on him?

Potter shocked him utterly when he looked him in the eye and said, “The First Task is dragons.”

“What?” Cedric croaked, and at once was glad that Potter had silenced and frozen the portraits. He put up a quick Silencing Bubble around them, a charm he did know how to do wordlessly, and he should have done that from the beginning. “How do you know?”

Potter snorted a little. “I have trouble sleeping. I was wandering around in the corridors outside the Slytherin common room and saw Karkaroff herding Krum off. I wondered where they could be going in the middle of the night, so I followed along.” A small, smug smile curled his lips.

Cedric did have to smile. “And they—what? They showed you dragons out of the goodness of your heart?”

Potter shook his head. “They never saw me. Believe me, I was very certain of that. And when I lingered to watch the dragons some more—I mean, come on, how brilliant is that?—I heard Hagrid showing them to Madame Maxime. That means Delacour will know, too.” Potter shrugged. “I don’t think it’s fair if everyone knows except one contestant.”

Cedric found himself moved, and flushed a second later when he figured out why. He didn’t expect fair play from a Slytherin, not after the amount of times he’d seen their Quidditch team cheat. But that was unfair in and of itself. The Quidditch team wasn’t the whole House.

(As Cedric himself had cause to know, after the amount of time he’d had to dedicate to break up couples snogging in truly stupid places).

“Thanks, Potter,” he said, and squared his shoulders to look Potter in the eye. “You’re a decent bloke, and those rumors that circulate in my House about you being the next Dark Lord or something—”

Potter snorted and waved his hand. “Don’t worry about it. I have Hufflepuff friends, and they’re the only Hufflepuffs I would be upset about believing that nonsense.”

“Still,” Cedric insisted. “I’m going to protest them when I hear them.”

“You’re a decent bloke, too, Diggory.” Potter seemed to hesitate for a second. “Do me a favor? Don’t die.”

Cedric burst out laughing. “Put a lot of Galleons on me after all, did you?”

“Something like that.”

The haunted look in Potter’s eyes remained with Cedric as he said farewell and returned to the Hufflepuff common room. He thought about it, but he really couldn’t see any reason why Potter would care about him in particular when they’d never spoken before. Was he rooting for a Hogwarts student against the students of the other schools? Then again, Krum was an international Quidditch star and Delacour had Veela heritage. Reason enough for a Hogwarts student to be their fan instead.

Cedric shook his head as he entered the common room. Well, whether Potter wanted an older Hufflepuff friend or not, he had one, and Cedric was going to squash any weird rumors about Potter (such as that he should have defeated Voldemort by now if he wasn’t a Dark Lord) the minute he heard them.

*

Fleur Delacour crumpled onto the shore of the lake, sobbing into her hands. She knew it was Gabrielle down there, she knew it! But she couldn’t get down to rescue her, and the merfolk were keeping her, and what if she drowned? What if they scared her? What if Gabrielle suffered just because Fleur had decided to enter this stupid Tournament on English soil?

A loud screech came from in front of her.

Fleur looked up in dread, thinking that one of the merfolk might have come to the surface and decided to taunt her. Instead, she saw a streak of light plunging down into the water, so fast that she had no idea what it was. It looked arrow-shaped, but that didn’t tell her anything.

Everyone was stunned silent for a moment. Then Ludo Bagman, who was acting as the announcer, said, “There is—another Champion in the Tournament?” He paused, and then said in a mutter that proclaimed he’d forgotten he had a Sonorus Charm on, “Not that I can tell what the hell it is.”

Fleur clenched her hands, staring down at the water. Diggory had already made it back with his hostage, a black-haired girl, and Krum wasn’t here yet, but he had Transfigured himself halfway into a shark and had a lot more skill than she did. She hoped that the streak of light was there to help her, and Gabrielle.

There was a long, tense series of moments that always felt years long to Fleur when she remembered them later. And then the streak of light rose from the water, shaking itself off, and floated towards the shore by beating its wings.

Fleur stared at it with her mouth open. It took her a long moment to recognize it, despite her good marks in Magical Creatures, because she had never seen one in this state.

But yes, it was a phoenix. Not one who was about to burn or who had just burned, but what they must look like when their flames had been quenched. The bird chirped dolefully, its feathers were the color of ash, and it slowly climbed out of the water hauling something attached to its tail, but it was a phoenix.

And attached to its tail was Gabrielle, bound by the ropes that had been holding her in place against the rock.

Fleur just stared for a longer moment than she would have thought she could. Then she ran forwards and rescued her crying little sister from the water—she seemed to have come awake the minute she reached the surface—murmuring to her in French.

“It’s all right. It’s all right. You’re safe. The phoenix saved you.”

“Phoenix?” As Fleur had hoped would happen, the strange idea distracted Gabrielle from the notion of crying, and she turned her head to stare at the bedraggled bird. “How could a creature of fire survive the water?”

“I don’t know, but they are immortal.” Fleur held her closer, refusing to listen to the furor that had erupted before her. Madame Maxime was already screaming that Dumbledore owned a phoenix and had probably sent the bird into the water to disrupt the Beauxbatons Champion’s chances of winning the Tournament.

Fleur had wanted to win, still did, but not if the price was a moment of her sister’s discomfort. And she owed a debt to someone she didn’t think was the Hogwarts Headmaster, no matter how likely it seemed.

She glanced at the phoenix. “Can you tell me who sent you?” she whispered.

The phoenix gave a musical chir. The charred color of its feathers was already beginning to turn scarlet and gold again. But from the way it looked at her, friendly but motionless, Fleur didn’t think she would be getting an answer to her question.

Fleur sighed. Perhaps the phoenix would like some fruit later?

*

“Why did you interfere in the Tournament, Fawkes?”

Fawkes cocked his head to the side and sang the same triumphant ditty he’d been giving whenever Albus had asked him that question in the past two days.

Albus shook his head. He didn’t think that Fawkes was disloyal to him. He still stayed on the perch on Albus’s office and rubbed his head against Albus’s cheek whenever he saw him again after a separation. He had fluffed his tail and sung a soft song when Albus had managed to send away Karkaroff and Maxime without breaking anything. He still accepted food from Albus’s hands.

“But someone else asked you to do something, and you did it,” Albus summarized.

The phoenix gave a long trill and shook his tail with the air of someone settling an argument.

“But you do know that this Tournament is important to international magical cooperation, don’t you?” Albus whispered. He hated the pleading tone his voice had taken on. The Prophet was full of story after story about how Hogwarts had violated the Tournament, how Albus himself had ordered Fawkes into the lake, and how this would damage the reputation of Hogwarts in the international community.

Fawkes glanced at him and seemed to consider for a long moment. Then he held out a claw, standing on the other one on his perch.

Albus stood up at once, after a bout of staring that he knew had lasted too long when Fawkes warbled at him. Fawkes had only offered this twice before, once when he became Albus’s companion and once in the war with Gellert when Albus had been afraid that he might be sliding too far down the path of forgiving his former lover. Albus walked over and touched Fawkes’s claw.

He was enveloped at once in a golden world of pure warmth, the power and purpose with which a phoenix moved through the world. Fawkes turned around and looked down at the lake, which was far below where he soared on strong wings.

Words echoed in Albus’s memory, although he didn’t recognize the voice that spoke them. The tone sounded flat. The little girl has a heart condition. It won’t be diagnosed until she’s older, but if she’s under too much stress, then she could come near death. And Veela have a natural resistance to being put to sleep like she does. She could wake up earlier.

Fawkes pulled his claw back then, and Albus stood there, shaken, his hand hovering in midair before he dropped it. He shook his head slowly.

“I didn’t know,” he whispered. Then he swallowed back the desire to sigh and asked, “Who told you? How could they know?” The only one he could think of with any kind of Seer talent in the castle was Sybill, and she certainly wouldn’t have cared about a young Veela girl’s heart condition.

Fawkes looked at him and crooned gently.

“But if someone is out there—someone who can make prophecies, who can help us in this war—”

Fawkes gave a sharp shake of his wings at him. Albus stopped. That only happened when the phoenix was displeased with something he was saying.

Albus replayed his own words in his head, and sighed. Yes, all right, he supposed someone whose prophecies were limited to small and specific things like diagnosing heart conditions wouldn’t help them that much in the war.

“But you don’t like this person more than you like me?” Albus asked, in the tone that he would only use before his phoenix.

Fawkes shoved his head under Albus’s chin and let out a warble that made him smile and filled his body with cheerful warmth. Then Fawkes tucked his head under his wing and went back to sleep, which Albus knew he needed. He was recovering only slowly from his immersion in the lake.

Albus would just have to wonder to himself about someone whose prophecies were so small and focused on the personal scale, but who still had the ability to call on a phoenix to help them.

*

Viktor glanced around uneasily. Since he had entered the maze, he’d had the feeling that someone was shadowing him. He thought it was probably one of the other Champions, or a stalking monster.

He didn’t know why they wouldn’t attack him or come out of hiding, however. This waiting around made him miss the open competition of Quidditch.

“Come out and face me!” he called in Bulgarian, then repeated it in English, and stood with his back against a hedge maze for a long moment.

There was silence that continued until Viktor was almost sure he had imagined the person stalking him. And then there was a shriek and the sound of someone screaming in pain, in a tone that seemed different from the first voice.

Viktor hesitated, then forced his way around the hedge from behind which the scream seemed to be coming. Ludo Bagman was lying on the ground, clutching his arm, which appeared to be broken, and sobbing. He looked up at Viktor with glassy eyes.

“Viktor, Viktor, help me,” he whimpered. “He came out of nowhere and broke my arm and stole my wand.”

Viktor slowly scanned the maze, his own wand gripped firmly in his hand. The hedge maze was silent now—or at least as silent as it could be, with the distant sounds of beasts fighting and the crowd cheering or screaming. He shook his head.

“I do not think he is still here,” he told Bagman, and then realized something. “Why are you in the maze?” The maze was only supposed to contain the three Champions, from what Viktor knew.

Bagman started whimpering, but Viktor wasn’t in the mood to listen to his excuses. He cast a shield over the man that should protect him from the beasts that were roaming there, and then turned and made his way further between the hedges.

He had a Cup to find.