lomonaaeren

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Part Two

“We just wonder how you did it, that’s all.”

Ron smiled over the top of his Arithmancy book at the twins. He and Hermione had had to start really researching and understanding Runes and Arithmancy when they were coming back to save Harry, so he’d got into it in a way he never had when he was just a kid. And he’d taken the opportunity to pick those two classes instead of Divination and Care of Magical Creatures this third year.

Ron half-shrugged. “You can wonder.”

Fred and George exchanged glances for a long moment. Ron could sense Hermione moving towards him across the common room, and Harry coming down the stairs from the third-year boys’ dormitory. He remained relaxed, though.

The twins would never hurt him. Ron was far more likely to hurt them if they did something like hurt or frighten Hermione or Harry.

“What are you discussing?” Hermione asked, sitting down next to Ron.

“Something to do with Arithmancy?” Harry half-draped himself over the back of the couch. “I don’t know how you handle all those maths.”

“You could do it if you wanted to,” Ron said, grinning at Harry with his head tilted back. Harry was in Ancient Runes with them but had decided to stick with Care of Magical Creatures, mostly because of Hagrid.

Harry smiled and started to answer, but Fred interrupted. Ron was pretty sure it was Fred, anyway. “We were just asking how he knew that Sirius Black was innocent and how he figured out that Scabbers was Pettigrew.”

Ron half-shrugged. It hadn’t been possible to hide their involvement completely when Sirius was revealed to be innocent and the Ministry had to call the Dementors off. Especially because the Aurors asking where Pettigrew had been all this time had revealed the connection to the Weasleys.

“Ron didn’t know by himself,” Hermione said.

“We knew together,” Harry said, and his hand reached out and squeezed Ron’s shoulder.

Fred and George pouted. “That’s not an answer, you know,” George said.

Harry laughed a little. “You two give half-answers all the time. Get used to only getting a third of an answer for each of us.”

“See, you can do maths,” Ron said.

That set the twins off on an absurd ramble about which fraction of an answer they could get from each of Harry, Ron, and Hermione. Ron didn’t so much listen as nod along. His attention was on the way that Harry’s hand still rested on his shoulder, and Hermione’s elbow still pressed against his side.

He could count on them. He would always be able to count on them.

There were no words for that kind of maths.

*

“I would like to speak to you about the situation with the Dursleys, Harry.”

Dumbledore had told him that, and Harry had nodded and walked up to his office with Ron and Hermione. When he had asked them why they were coming, Hermione had looked at him steadily and asked, “Do you not want us there, Harry?”

“No,” Harry said quickly. “It’s—right that you be there.”

“Then why are you asking why we’re here?” Ron had said, and jostled him with an elbow.

“I knew it was right. I didn’t know if the two of you did.”

Ron and Hermione had nodded as though they understood perfectly, though, which made Harry relax, and made his knock on Dumbledore’s door firm.

“Come in!”

The Headmaster raised his eyebrows a little as they walked into his office. Harry looked around in curiosity, awed by the spinning silver instruments and the phoenix on a perch. Fawkes crooned at him. Harry smiled.

“Ah, yes, you were admiring Fawkes.” Dumbledore smiled at them from across the desk. He looked the way Hermione had said he always did when she talked about studying under him, kindly but powerful and a little overwhelming. “Do be seated, Harry. And while Miss Granger and Mr. Weasley are of course welcome, I confess to a little curiosity about why they have come with you.”

He was looking at Hermione as if he thought she would of course be the one to answer. That might have irritated Harry, but he knew that having Hermione answer would be the same as if he had answered himself, so he sat down happily enough.

Ron bounced a little on the squashy chair. Harry grinned and bounced, too.

“Where Harry goes, we go, sir,” Hermione said politely. Harry sneaked a glance at her and saw her sitting on the chair with her hands folded calmly in her lap. “And there are things about the situation with the Dursleys that I didn’t know if Harry would be up to telling you.”

“Ah. What things, Miss Granger?”

“That they abuse him.”

Harry drew in a harsh breath, but they’d discussed this. It was just different to hear it said aloud. Beside him, Ron looked at Harry and nodded a little. Harry nodded back.

“I—is that the truth, Harry?”

Dumbledore sounded stunned and sorrowful. Harry looked up. But Hermione had told him not to look Dumbledore in the eye, that the Headmaster was a Legilimens, and for all that Harry wanted to believe a Headmaster wouldn’t read the thoughts of his students, he trusted Hermione. He nodded. “It is, sir.”

“I—what do they do, Harry?”

“Call him a freak all the time,” Ron said, taking over. His hand was a pressure of warmth on Harry’s arm that seemed to make the whole world spin around them. “Lock him in a cupboard. Take food away from him. Make him do chores until he can barely stand. Let his cousin chase him and beat him up.”

Dumbledore looked ill. Harry relaxed some more. Hermione had had a theory that Dumbledore already knew about all of this, but it seemed he didn’t. That was good. Harry would have had a hard time restraining Ron and Hermione from their revenge.

“I did not know that would happen when I left you there, Harry,” Dumbledore whispered.

Harry swallowed. This part, he had asked Ron and Hermione to let him handle. They hadn’t wanted to, but they had moved reluctantly aside in their plans when they realized how serious he was about it.

“I know, sir,” Harry said, and looked up at Dumbledore while still managing not to look directly into his eyes. Hermione would be proud of him. And Ron would be proud of his strategy. “But that’s why I’m not going to stay with them anymore. It’s not worth the price.”

“You know that I have reservations regarding how fit Sirius Black is to assume custody of you…”

Harry nodded. Dumbledore had sent him and Sirius a letter about that a few weeks ago. “Yes, sir. And I would tell Ron and Hermione if something happened that I was upset about or if Sirius tried to hurt me. But I’m not going to stay with the Dursleys.”

“I made what I thought was the right decision at the time,” Dumbledore whispered. “But it turns out to have been the wrong one. I am sorry.”

“I know, sir. Thank you for the apology.”

Dumbledore tried to offer them some lemon drops and a little small talk about Fawkes, his phoenix—whose name Harry had known before Dumbledore said it—but it was awkward. Harry was glad when they left the office and were riding the moving staircase down.

“You’re free,” Hermione whispered to him.

Ron said nothing, but squeezed an arm around his waist. Harry leaned into both of them.

*

“Should I even ask what you’re doing?”

Hermione looked up from the book that she was studying in the Black library, her expression apologetic. “Not if you like answers.”

Sirius stared at her for a long moment, and then sagged against the wall. He looked a lot better in this timeline since he’d been declared innocent, Hermione thought critically. His face had more color and he smiled a lot more.

But he sometimes had a helpless expression on his face when he watched her or Ron or Harry. Hermione knew it bothered him—or had, once he’d thought beyond the immediate happiness—that they had found Pettigrew, drugged him into a coma, and known Sirius was innocent.

“Wormtail said at his trial that he hadn’t been at the house that night You-Know-Who killed James and Lily,” Sirius said abruptly. Hermione wondered idly if he realized that his face flushed dark and his hands worked back and forth as if strangling an invisible neck when he spoke of Wormtail.

“Yes, but he wasn’t under Veritaserum, was he?”

Sirius paused. “No,” he said slowly, and then stepped fully into the library. “I still think something was wrong.”

“Wrong?”

“I can’t figure out how you know some of these things.” Sirius’s eyes went to the book in her hand. “Why you’re researching some of the things you’re researching. Albus bragged to me about how far you were reading above the usual level of understanding for students your age…”

“Remember that I’m almost a year older than students ‘my age,’” said Hermione tartly. She remembered that that was something she would have cared about once, back before she cared about nothing but Ron and Harry.

Sirius didn’t smile. “It’s too much, Hermione. Come on, you can tell me, right? I don’t disapprove of whatever you’re doing—”

And then he caught sight of the book she was holding, and his face changed.

Hermione sighed and fired a Memory Charm at him before he could make a fuss about it. Sirius staggered a little and lifted a hand to his forehead as if he thought that he had hit it. “Hermione?” he asked uncertainly.

“Sirius,” Hermione said. “Did you need something?”

“I thought—I came down the stairs, and we were having a conversation—didn’t I?”

Hermione hated seeing the lost look on his face, but she would have hated having the conversation he’d obviously wanted to have more. “No,” she said gently. “You just came in. Are you sure…”

“Have I been getting enough sleep? Do I need to have a Mind-Healer check me over again? Yeah, maybe.”

Hermione felt like an arsehole, watching Sirius’s certainty about what he’d been doing crumble, but feeling like an arsehole was still nothing compared to what she was prepared to do. “No, you just came in and asked me what I’d like for dinner.”

“Dinner.” Sirius nodded determinedly, as if glad to have something to focus on. “I’ll make something. Don’t trust that little beast Kreacher worth a damn…” His voice trailed off as he went down the stairs.

Actually, he could trust Kreacher, since Hermione had wrapped the house-elf up in compulsion spells the minute she came to Grimmauld Place with Harry, and now he could barely breathe without her knowing about it. But that was another unpleasant conversation no one needed to have.

Hermione turned back to her book on human sacrifice. It was looking like that was the only way to break the wards around the Crouch home.

*

“Ron? Hermione?”

Ron’s face prickled with anxious heat, and he swallowed. He glanced at Hermione, but she only raised an eyebrow at him and said, “He has to know eventually, Ron.”

“Eventually isn’t right now,” Ron whispered, in the moments before Harry stepped into the clearing in the Forbidden Forest where they’d been taking apart the corpse of Crouch Senior.

Harry stared, and his face went pale. He leaned against a tree and slid down it with a thump, sitting there while he looked back and forth between them.

“What?” he whispered.

“You know how they had to hunt for Professor Moody when he didn’t arrive at the school on time?” Ron asked. Hermione was remaining suspiciously silent, and he suspected that she wanted him to pick up as much of this burden as she was.

“Yeah?” Harry’s eyes went back to the corpse. Hermione had cut the chest efficiently open and was sawing out the bones. Harry swallowed and averted his eyes.

“That was because this wanker’s son—” Ron tilted his head at the corpse “—had taken Moody down, Polyjuiced into him, and was planning to come to the school in disguise as him. Crouch Junior was a Death Eater,” Ron added, when Harry just stared at him blankly. “They managed to take him out and rescue Moody, but it was a near thing.”

“None of that actually explains why you’re butchering the Death Eater’s father.”

Ron grimaced at Hermione. She grimaced back at him and pulled the heart from the chest.

Ron sighed. “We knew this was going to happen, Harry. But Crouch Senior was keeping his son under the Imperius Curse in his heavily warded house, and we didn’t manage to break through the wards in time to stop his son from escaping.”

More like, we didn’t break through the wards in time to stop Voldemort’s spirit from possessing Crouch Junior and breaking him out of there.

“So…?”

“The wards that we did break must have picked up some trace of our presence. Hermione and I got an owl today from Crouch Senior telling us to come to the Forbidden Forest, or he would reveal everything to the Headmaster and our parents.”

Harry’s eyes widened. “I—would that have been so bad, when he was the one harboring a fugitive Death Eater in his house?”

Hermione stopped what she was doing. She and Ron looked at each other and had a whole silent conversation. Ron refused to speak this time. Hermione was the one who had been responsible for their delay in breaking through the wards. She had insisted that they find a murderer or rapist to sacrifice, and by the time they’d done that, Crouch Junior was gone.

Ron had been in favor of grabbing the first person they could find. Harry’s safety was worth more than anyone else’s life.

“We killed someone to break through the wards,” Hermione said quietly. “So yeah, we could have been expelled at the very least. They might have tossed us in Azkaban and snapped our wands for all that we’re underage.”

Harry squeezed his eyes shut. Ron waited, nervous. This might all be too much for him. And while they would never have to Obliviate Harry, because he would never betray them like that, it might be that they’d have to spend years winning back his trust.

“The Tournament,” Harry breathed. “You’re keeping me safe from it.”

Hermione relaxed. “Yes.” Ron ducked his head to hide his grin, glad that Harry’s memories had chosen today to reappear more strongly.

“But taking the body parts…”

“Waste not, want not,” Hermione said, and tucked Crouch Senior’s liver into a bag covered with Preservation Charms, smiling.

*

Harry still wasn’t entirely sure, as he lay on the lakeshore in the sunlight near the end of his fourth year, what finding Ron and Hermione with bloody hands and wands that day in the Forest had meant to him.

People were willing to kill to keep him safe. Well, two people anyway. Harry had known for years now that his mum and dad had died to keep him safe, but killing was something else.

Of course, Ron and Hermione would do that, he thought, rather than die for him. Well, they would probably die for him too if they couldn’t avoid that, but they would do everything they could to avoid it.

Because dying for him would leave him alone, the way his parents had left him alone at the Dursleys’ house without meaning to, and Harry knew Ron and Hermione knew that he thought that was the worst fate imaginable.

If they killed people and cut them up…

It had made Harry want to vomit, but also, he trusted them. They said it was for a good reason. They acted like it was for a good reason. That meant it was for a good reason.

“Harry?”

Harry leaned back on his elbows and smiled up at Hermione. She was standing on his right, and Ron on his left. Harry hadn’t felt them come up to him, even with his highly-trained situational awareness, but that was because he used that awareness to catalogue threats.

Ron’s skin was tanned and freckled, and he was smiling, one arm slung around Hermione’s shoulder. Hermione leaned into him, and the sun caught her hair and made little flashes of brown and gold and auburn show up in it.

Harry was struck by how beautiful they were, and wondered for a moment whether they would get together and leave him behind. But he scoffed at himself even as he thought it. They would never leave him behind.

It did make him wonder about something he’d never thought of before: What do they think I look like?

But it didn’t matter. Harry nestled back into the grass as Ron and Hermione sat down, one on either side of him. He knew that he could trust them, like he had known Padfoot’s name and Fawkes’s names before anyone told him, like he knew that he didn’t really remember Pettigrew at Godric’s Hollow that night but it was right that he be sent to Azkaban anyway.

“You know,” Harry said drowsily, “I had the strangest dream last night.”

Ron and Hermione came alert on either side of him. “Oh?” Hermione asked. Harry hid a smile. She thought she was being causal, but she was so bad at casual.

Or maybe it was just that she was acting like that to fool anyone else who might come out and wander along the lakeshore, chatting about things like Cedric Diggory’s victory in the Triwizard Tournament. That was more likely.

“Yeah,” Harry said. “It was like I was flying somewhere, but without a broom. And I was angry. I’ve never been so angry. I didn’t understand what I was doing, but I knew I was going somewhere very important.”

Hermione and Ron exchanged glances and nodded. Harry sighed. “This is about another thing I have to remember and which is going to be important and terrible, right?”

“Yeah,” Hermione said, taking his hand. “It is. I’m sorry that we couldn’t prepare you more for it, but we did think that we’d arranged things so that this wouldn’t happen.”

Harry breathed out and nodded. “Tell me.”

And so Hermione did, in a steady, calm voice, about the connection between him and Voldemort, and what they were going to do about it.

*

The connection between Harry and Voldemort was the problem they had never found a solution for, not in the years she and Ron had done the research to come back in time, not during the years they had been in this timeline and done research here.

Having Harry face Voldemort and die because of his Killing Curse was unacceptable. Dumbledore’s portrait in the first timeline had said that he’d thought Harry would survive it, that the Killing Curse as cast by Voldemort would destroy the soul-shard and not Harry himself.

But he had been wrong.

Never in Hermione’s experience, however, had she been desperate enough to think about having a Dementor suck out Harry’s soul.

She and Ron hurtled out of the Burrow and towards Harry, who was diving away from two Dementors on his broom above the Weasleys’ pitch. He could cast a Patronus, which Hermione had taken care of as soon as she realized that Remus was right there during their third year and could teach him more “naturally” than either she or Ron could have done. It was a shame Snape had still exposed Remus as a werewolf at the end of that year, something Hermione hadn’t thought to watch for.

But Harry couldn’t cast the Patronus wandlessly, and he couldn’t take his hands off his broom as he spun through crazy dives and twists and twirls. Hermione was the one who aimed her wand and called her otter.

In seconds, it was joined by Ron’s terrier, and the two Patronuses grew to enormous sizes and darted straight after the Dementors. Hermione heard their screams with grim satisfaction. Patronuses cast by people who wanted to keep Harry safe at all costs would utterly destroy the Dementors.

Ron, meanwhile, was fuming, his hands on his hips. “We planted that evidence to get Umbridge thrown in Azkaban years ago,” he snapped. “So who sent them this time?”

“I don’t know,” Hermione said, and ran forwards, Ron only a few steps behind her, to hug Harry as he landed. “But we’re going to find out.”

*

Ron had to admit he was kind of surprised that Hermione had asked him to be the one to take care of Cornelius Fudge, who had sent the Dementors after Harry for some Merlin-forsaken reason. But she was still busy teaching Harry Occlumency. Returning memories or not, he would never be great at it, but he could be good enough at it to shut Voldemort out.

Ron stepped into Fudge’s office and shut the door behind him. Harry had lent him the Invisibility Cloak, which Ron was grateful for. It had got him past wards that would probably have kicked him out of the Ministry otherwise. (Not that he couldn’t have broken them, but it would have been loud).

He’d wait for Fudge and use Legilimency on him, but since he was in the office anyway, Ron might as well look around and see what kinds of official secrets he could find.

Ron rummaged through the desk and the drawers without touching anything except his wand, and chuckled a little as he found some of the blackmail that Fudge had on people. Their secrets were so petty, most of the time. Ron found it hard to believe that people would pay Fudge to keep their affairs with other Ministry employees a secret.

Then again, he had never learned enough about the Ministry’s hierarchy to know how against the rules such affairs were. Possibly they were actually illegal.

Ron’s years after Harry’s death in the first timeline had been filled with Dark magic, sacrifices, ritual study, Runes, as much Arithmancy as he could cram into himself, and killing. Much more useful things to know than Ministry regulations, he had to consider.

The door opened.

Ron turned around, glad that the last drawer he had opened was sliding shut behind the invisible protection of his body. He raised his eyebrows when he realized that Fudge had come in talking to himself, waving his hands around.

“No, no, we can’t move that far or fast!” Fudge snapped, spinning around on his heel and pacing back and forth, almost bumping into Ron where he stood by the desk. “We’ll tip our hand if we do that!”

Ron wondered if the Minister was actually mental. He frowned as he thought about that. It would make reading his mind a lot harder, even though Ron was still the best Leglimens among the three of them.

Then a low, hissing voice answered Fudge. “We must move far and fast. We must kill the Potter boy before he can prove a problem.”

Ron froze for a long second. Partially it was concern that someone might sense him, but a lot of it was rage.

Fudge had sent the Dementors after Harry because Voldemort was possessing him.

Ron waited until Fudge had turned in his direction, and struck out with his magic through his gaze as hard as he could.

Fudge screamed as Ron tore into his mind, showing no mercy. Ron ignored the screams, glad that the Minister’s office had sound wards on it, and ripped and pried the memories loose.

He saw Voldemort’s spirit courting Fudge in his dreams, whispering of the power he could achieve if he only helped. And how there would be peace for the magical world, and Voldemort would leave after he regained a body and staged a mock battle with Fudge, and the people of Britain would praise Fudge as the best Minister who ever lived. He could be Minister until his death. He could have all the fame and money and power he wanted.

Fudge hadn’t taken long to be seduced.

Ron pulled himself free from Fudge’s mind, uncaring of the damage he did, and struck to kill.

Not the Killing Curse, which would set off innumerable alarms in the Ministry building, but a Blasting Curse targeted right to the heart.

Fudge fell. Voldemort’s spirit tore itself free of his body with a long hiss and surged towards Ron, but Ron’s utter rejection, his love of Harry and Hermione, formed a more effective shield than any Occlumency could.

“I know the feel of your mind. I will remember you.”

“Bring it, snakeface,” Ron snapped, and watched as the spirit blew through the opposite wall, regretting that they didn’t have any means to trap it yet.

After today, he would tell Hermione to make that kind of research a priority.