lomonaaeren

Thank you again for all the reviews! This is the end of the story.

Part Three

“I must confess to being worried about you, Harry.”

Harry gave Professor Lupin a small smile and sat back in his chair with the cup of tea the man had handed him. It was weird, being back in Professor Lupin’s office. Harry would have thought that the Ministry wouldn’t allow Dumbledore to hire a known werewolf again, but in the chaos of Minister Fudge’s death and Minister Scrimgeour taking over, it appeared he could get away with it.

Still, Patronus lessons seemed a lifetime ago. And Professor Lupin’s smile was getting on Harry’s nerves. Maybe because it was nervous.

“Thank you for the tea, sir,” Harry said, and blew on it.

“No comment about me being worried about you?”

“I’m not sure why you are, sir.” So far, the term had been quiet, and having a reasonable Defense against the Dark Arts professor meant Harry was enjoying the class again. Although he did wonder what would happen at the end of this term to drive Professor Lupin out again.

“I think that perhaps your best friends have fallen into corruption.”

Harry blinked and stared at Professor Lupin. The man seemed utterly sincere. “What, sir?”

“I came across Miss Granger emerging from the Restricted Section with a Dark Arts book,” Lupin intoned gravely. “And I’ve seen Mr. Weasley studying runes—the sort of runes that no one would need to use unless they intended to cast ritual circles.”

Harry stared at the professor, sort of at a loss for words. Finally he said, “But Professor Dumbledore gave Hermione the Restricted Section pass, sir. I’m sure he knows what she’s reading. And there are lots of uses for runes beyond ritual circles. I’m in Professor Babbling’s class myself. Did you know—”

“Yes, Harry, I did. I have a NEWT in Ancient Runes.” Professor Lupin wasn’t smiling. “As for the Headmaster knowing what Miss Granger is studying…I think that we don’t always see eye-to-eye on how much knowledge is good for a child.”

“Oh.” Harry frowned at Professor Lupin. He supposed that the professor was seeing the very edges of what Ron and Hermione really were and deciding that he had to warn Harry, but it was too little, too late.

Or too irrelevant, too confusing.

“I know them, sir,” Harry settled for saying. “They’re my friends. My very best friends. They would never do anything without a good reason, and they would never turn against me because they were…corrupted, or something.”

“I’ve seen the toll that Dark Arts can take on people, Harry, even the ones that you assume would never betray you.” Lupin’s eyes were distant, his face haunted. “Even the ones you could have sworn were loyal to the end.”

Oh. This isn’t really about me or Ron or Hermione. It’s about Pettigrew. Well. Maybe himself, too.

Harry had enough memories by now of the first timeline to know that Lupin hadn’t lived through the second war, and that he had regretted, fiercely, running around as a werewolf when he was a student.

“How about if I tell you if I see any corruption, sir?” Harry settled for suggesting. “I’ll let you know right away if there’s anything that concerns me, and you can ask me if you see something that concerns you.”

Professor Lupin seemed to return to the real world, and blinked a little. “You would—do that, Harry?”

“Yes, sir. I trust you.”

Just not as much as Ron and Hermione. Never as much as Ron and Hermione.

His distraction tactic worked. Lupin picked up his teacup and acted much more cheerful, and Harry stepped out of the classroom and walked a few corridors, making sure to smile for the portraits, before he leaned his forehead against the wall and took a deep breath.

He knew now that Ron and Hermione had traveled in time. The memories had unfolded in his head of how he had lived, of how he had hunted Horcruxes with them, of how he had died. He knew that Ron and Hermione would never have let him go, and would have come back to protect him.

They’d done all they could to protect him, including keeping him out of a lot of their plans, and not asking him to kill anybody, and even refusing to teach him some Dark curses. But Harry was ready to learn them now.

He wanted to protect them as fiercely as they did him.

Decision made, Harry straightened up and headed for the classroom deep in the dungeons where Ron and Hermione were practicing the runes that Professor Lupin had noticed. They looked up when he opened the door, Hermione’s eyes wary, Ron’s wide.

“Lupin suspects that the runes and spells you’re studying aren’t all they look to be,” Harry said bluntly, shutting the door behind him. “We have to be more careful. And I want to learn.”

“Harry—”

“Mate—”

“I know what happened,” Harry interrupted harshly, panting. “I know what you came back to protect me from. I want to learn.”

*

Hermione took a long step back, finally relaxing her concentration. The Inferius she’d raised of Bellatrix Lestrange, which had been under her strict control, sagged forwards and collapsed to the ground.

It had already lasted longer and looked more like an ordinary human being than anyone would have thought with only an ordinary Hogwarts education, but that was what an accelerated education would do for you.

Harry and Ron stepped in beside her, wrapping their arms around her shoulders. Hermione leaned back a little into them. They were out in the Burrow’s gardens—risky, but not so risky as doing this at Hogwarts.

And Hermione had destroyed a Horcrux at the Burrow before, back the summer before their second second year. It was no effort to drop the cup on the ground, set up the triangle of wards that would contain the Fiendfyre, and set the Horcrux aflame along with Bellatrix’s corpse.

It screamed, as usual. Hermione ignored that, and Ron and Harry stepped up to her shoulders and stood staring down at it. It was the latest one to be destroyed, after Hermione had walked Bellatrix’s corpse into the bank to retrieve it. Hermione had taken care of the diadem in their first year back in time, she’d destroyed the diary the day Lucius Malfoy had given it to Ginny, Ron had destroyed the locket the first day they’d gained access to Grimmauld Place, and they’d gone after the ring together last summer and cursed it so sharply with Fiendfyre that they’d nearly burned Little Hangleton to the ground.

Voldemort was still a spirit, probably possessing someone right now, but unable to turn Nagini into a Horcrux. Hermione hadn’t even seen Nagini since they’d come back in time. It was possible that Voldemort had never found her. Right now, he was almost mortal.

Except for the one in Harry.

Hermione turned around and pressed her palm over Harry’s chest, where his heart beat. Ron took a step forwards and pressed his hand against Harry’s back, opposite hers.

“Is this the part where you tell me you can tear it out through my back?” Harry asked softly. “Or that you need to cut my throat and bleed me dry to get rid of it?”

He was smiling slightly as he said it. He knew that wasn’t it, Hermione thought, but he would also let them rip him open without a second thought.

Hermione’s own heart was beating too hard. When she and Ron had put the ritual in motion to come back into the past, they’d only thought of getting Harry back, alive, and then protecting him. But other thoughts were swimming around Hermione’s head right now.

She liked to think that she wouldn’t have entertained them if Harry had been, well, a child. But his memories had returned full force, and it was their Harry who looked out of his eyes now.

She leaned forwards and kissed him.

Harry made a shocked sound, but closed his eyes and swayed into her. Ron came around Harry’s other side, smiling. Hermione would have stopped kissing Harry if Ron had seemed upset about it, but Ron’s eyes met hers, and they communicated as easily as they had when they were getting the ritual ready to come back.

How could I be upset? He’s everything.

Besides, when Harry broke away and stared at Hermione for a moment with his chest heaving and his eyes wide, his next action was to spin around and haul Ron towards him, smashing his mouth messily into Ron’s for a kiss. Ron waved his hands and said “Mmmmph!” a lot, but he kissed back so eagerly that he and Harry toppled to the ground, laughing.

Hermione came over and crouched beside them, one hand on Ron’s shoulder, one hand on Harry’s, and watched as they kissed, and smiled as heat stirred between her legs.

And when Ron rolled over and looked up at her, she bent down and kissed him, as she had a literal lifetime ago.

*

Ron sat back and stared at the circle in front of him, his lips pursed in a soundless whistle. He and Hermione and Harry had all been working hard at Runes for the last few years, but in the last eighteen months, they’d had two big projects: find some way to trap Voldemort’s spirit, and get the Horcrux out of Harry.

It had been a lot harder than they’d expected to create the spirit-trapping circle, mainly because of the Horcrux. It was fairly straightforward to capture a normal spirit capable of possessing someone. But a spirit who had a tether to his mortal life was a different matter altogether.

And as for getting the Horcrux out of Harry, well, Ron and Hermione had looked around when they were preparing to come back, and the majority of their months in this lifetime, and never found anything.

But now Ron had pretty much stumbled across it by accident.

He looked up as the door of the Room of Requirement opened and Harry came through. He knelt down next to Ron and smiled at him. “You found something?”

“How do you do that?” Ron complained.

“Do what?”

“Somehow know when I’ve found something?”

Harry snorted as he sat down fully. “I’ve only done it two times.”

“Still.”

Harry snorted again and leaned over to kiss Ron. Ron fell easily into the kiss. If he had thought about doing this years ago, it would have been weird. But in their first lifetime, they’d been kids, and before Harry had got his memories back, he’d mostly been a kid, too. So now it wasn’t weird.

Harry broke the kiss to lean forwards and trace the line of runes that Ron had written on the floor. “So how did you find it?”

“See here?” Ron swirled his finger in slow spiral motions around the runes that he’d written in a spiral on the floor. “You said that the Horcrux in you feels like a sort of spiral shape, and that’s what I saw when I used Legilimency on you, too. So I reckon we come up with a ritual circle in the shape of a spiral and write it on the Horcrux, and we write one that’s a spiral going the opposite direction, and write it on Voldemort’s spirit, and the runes unravel each other, and there you are.”

Harry stared at him with his mouth open. Ron flushed, rubbing the back of his neck. “What? Do you think it won’t work?” It sounded as if it would work to Ron, but he’d also spent the last several hours staring at the figures. He didn’t know if he was missing some imperfections in them.

“You’re a bloody genius,” Harry breathed.

“Nah, that’s Hermione.”

“But you too.” Harry leaned forwards and framed Ron’s face with his hands, and Ron froze, staring at him. “I know that you think she’s a genius, and everyone thinks she’s a genius, and she is. But you are, too. And I don’t think that you get to hear it often enough.”

By now, Harry was leaning pretty close, and Ron’s breathing was fast, and Harry’s breathing was fast, and even though Ron didn’t know yet how they would draw the spiral figures on the Horcrux and Voldemort’s spirit, they rolled around on the floor a second later, kissing furiously, and it didn’t matter.

*

Harry stood on top of the Astronomy Tower and breathed out slowly. It was the end of his sixth year, and he remembered well, with the memories hitting him like punches, how that had ended the first time.

But it wouldn’t happen this time.

Dumbledore had given him a few lessons on Horcruxes, while Harry pretended, wide-eyed, that he’d never heard of them before, but he’d stopped early on last term when he had apparently gone to find the ring and come back empty-handed. It had disconcerted him, Harry knew, and from hints Dumbledore had dropped around Hermione when she was studying the books he recommended, he was now looking into alternate methods of immortality Voldemort could have used.

It didn’t matter.

It was time.

Harry turned and walked over to the spiral pattern drawn in runes and inlaid with jewels on the stones of the Tower, open to the sky. The jewels flashed in patterns that corresponded to several of the constellations overhead. Harry had wondered at first where they would get so many jewels, but it turned out that there were lots of purebloods at the school who had that kind of thing, and Hermione and her handy Imperius Curse meant they were eager to donate.

Harry stepped into the middle of the pattern and raised his arms.

On the stairs that led down the Tower was another pattern, with Ron standing guard. He looked up now, and across the distance between them, made possible by more runes drawn on his arms and Harry’s and Ron’s skill and Harry’s complete trust, he whispered Legilimens.

The Legilimency probe slammed into Harry’s mind, and he welcomed it, opened all his Occlumency shields to it, and pulled it in. He envisioned the spiral that the Horcrux made in his mind, and he imprinted the reverse spiral on it, until it felt as the inside of his head was inlaid with jewels and he was seeing shadowy floating runes out of the corner of his eye.

Hermione stood at the base of the Astronomy Tower. Floating in the middle of his detached world, Harry still knew when she raised her wand and performed the summoning that called Voldemort’s spirit, based on a modified demon-summoning ritual from a book in the Restricted Section.

Professor Lupin was right about the Dark Arts, Harry thought, distantly. But Professor Lupin had left at the end of last year, voluntarily, before the curse could force him out, and neither he nor Sirius were around right now.

It was only the three of them, as it should have been when Harry walked into the Forest.

Speaking of…

Harry smiled a little and watched the flight of a patch of darkness across the sky, like a dead comet, that meant Voldemort’s spirit was being flung into Hermione’s trap. Then he bent down and scooped a small pebble off the stones next to him.

The main problem with Ron’s ritual was that it would require a sacrifice of enormous power. Even a phoenix or a unicorn wouldn’t do, although they could have used that if they hadn’t cared about Harry’s survival. But to sunder a soul-shard from a living soul, and banish one from the world at the same time, demanded something more.

Luckily, they had retrieved the ring Horcrux before Dumbledore had.

Harry tossed the Resurrection Stone high into the air, and the power of the ritual caught and gripped the Deathly Hallow. Harry heard a distant scream. He thought it might be Voldemort. He thought it might be the Stone.

Harry smiled, even as he went to his knees. The spiral of jewels and runes in his mind had begun to move, unraveling the Horcrux.

Which was fighting.

It didn’t matter. Harry bore down with all his will against it, the will that had made him accept finding Ron and Hermione wrist-deep in the bloody corpse of Crouch Senior, and that had made him learn Dark Arts himself, and that had blossomed in him when his memories came back, and that made him love his friends.

In all the worlds, in all the universes, the only two people who would ever stand by him this completely.

I don’t want you. Go away.

The words reverberated down the spiral, as much rejection of the Stone’s temptation to summon the dead as rejection of the soul-shard in him. Harry felt the moment when the Resurrection Stone fractured, destroyed by the inevitable weight of the ritual, as even the strongest stone would be worn down by the sea at last. The Horcrux fractured, too, and screams sound from every direction.

The Hallow. Voldemort. The Horcrux. Me.

The screams raced towards each other, the spirals turning away from each other, reversed, undoing each other, and Harry collapsed forwards as the shriek coming from his throat changed into a cry of triumph.

*

“I don’t understand you.”

Hermione opened her eyes lazily. She had been lying on the lakeshore near what would never be Dumbledore’s tomb (although sometimes Hermione thought idly of killing and burying him there with all the questions he asked them all the time), and now she rolled over and looked curiously up at Lavender Brown.

“I don’t think I understand you, either,” Hermione said, with a shrug. It wasn’t like she had spent much more time with her roommates in this incarnation than she had the first time. Ron and Harry and she were all in all to each other. “But maybe we just aren’t meant to understand each other.”

Lavender sat down beside Hermione, casting a spell to keep grass stains off her robes. “I didn’t mean that.”

“Hmmm?”

“I mean that I didn’t understand you all these years because you didn’t care about the same things I did. And you thought Divination was bollocks.” Lavender twirled a curl around her finger, staring at Hermione.

Hermione blushed. She had been irritated about their failure to find a way to get the Horcrux out of Harry that day back in third year, and Lavender had said something innocent about Divination, and Hermione had gone on a rant that was unbecoming of someone who, by that point, had lived in the world for twenty-three years. “Sorry.”

“No, it’s all right. Now I don’t understand you for another reason.”

“What’s that?”

“Aren’t you—are you using illusions on yourself?”

“No?” By now, Hermione was thoroughly confused, which she almost enjoyed. There were so few new experiences when it came to interacting with other people, although every interaction with Ron and Harry was a new moment.

“I wondered, because you don’t look tired, but you must be tired.”

“Why?”

“Well, keeping up with two men like that—”

Hermione yielded to joy, and laughed.

*

“Mum said that she doesn’t know how to hold a wedding for us.”

Ron held his breath after he spoke, afraid that he might have upset either Harry or Hermione. They hadn’t even finished their seventh year—their new seventh year, an entirely new experience—at Hogwarts yet, and he was talking about weddings.

“You don’t need to look so nervous, Ron,” Hermione said softly, and reached for him.

Ron rolled towards her. They were on their bed in the Room of Requirement, the enormous one that they could all fit in. Harry sprawled naked and half-asleep next to Ron, and Hermione was next to him on the other side, naked too, and glorious with it. “I know, but—I’m kind of nervous, you know? It’s all new now. Before, we were sort of doing the same thing over again all the time, and now it’s new.”

“Sacrificing people is so routine now, huh,” Harry muttered.

“Shut up, mate.”

Harry laughed and opened his eyes. Part of Ron stabbed him with happiness under the ribs every time he saw Harry do that, those eyes that otherwise would have been closed forever. “Look, I don’t care if your mum wants to hold a wedding for each—couple of us. Or if there’s some ritual wedding we could use. What matters is that we’re committed to each other, in every way.” He leered at Ron and ran a hand over his leg, fingers dipping easily into Ron’s arse. Ron groaned and spread his legs.

“I was trying to have a serious conversation here,” Ron complained, but he was already being half-rolled and half-lured down the bed by the two of them. Harry sprawled on top of Ron and kissed the nape of his neck. Ron could feel Harry stirring back to life against his arse.

“You can have a serious conversation with my clit,” Hermione said, and spread her own legs in invitation.

Ron gave in and started to lick enthusiastically into her while Harry drove into him. Listening to their moans and sighs meant more to him than his own pleasure, than his own orgasm.

Not that it wasn’t nice when it happened, mind.

*

Harry did up the tie at his throat, which he thought was kind of a weird custom for a wedding where everyone would be wearing robes, but it was a Gryffindor tie that his dad had worn when he was in school. So that meant something.

“Harry.”

Harry turned around with a smile. Sirius was hovering outside the small tent where Harry had been getting ready. Now he came in with shaking hands and adjusted the tie for him. Harry wasn’t surprised that he had tied it wrong, at least according to Sirius.

“I remember when your parents got married,” Sirius whispered to him. “And now you’re marrying your two best friends, a Weasley wizard and a Muggleborn witch…” He laughed, a watery sound. “Merlin, if Lily and James could see you now.”

Harry leaned against Sirius, smiling. They would never have a normal godson-godfather relationship, perhaps. He had too many secrets from Sirius, and from the way Sirius spoke sometimes, he was aware that Harry had them, although not what they were.

But it was so much better than that other timeline, that other life. That other death.

Sirius was alive. And he turned and offered his arm to Harry in a mocking crook, snickering.

“I hope Hermione is recovered enough from her NEWT study to be of use to you tonight,” Sirius said, and waggled his eyebrows at Harry.

“Sirius,” Harry groaned, but he was laughing. And anyway, Hermione had been far more exhausted from the time they spent together in bed and out of it, celebrating their freedom, than she was by studying for exams she basically knew by heart already.

“Harry.”

Sirius sounded—serious. Harry stopped and looked up at him. Sirius locked his hands on Harry’s shoulders and stared searchingly into his eyes. It wasn’t intense in the same way Ron’s Legilimency was, but it was pretty close.

“I know that you have things you can’t tell me,” Sirius whispered. “But I can’t doubt that you’re going to be happy with them. And that at heart, you’re a person I’m proud to know. You did what you had to do to kill Voldemort. I love you.”

Harry lunged forwards and hugged Sirius much the way he had in Knockturn Alley the “first” time they’d met, when he hadn’t had all his memories back. Sirius gave a watery chuckle and hugged him back.

“I love you, too, Padfoot,” Harry whispered.

Then Sirius offered his arm again, and Harry took it and let Sirius escort him like a father out of the tent and into the Burrow’s garden.

In another lifetime, it had hosted Bill and Fleur’s wedding. Now Ron and Hermione stood waiting for him in robes of gold. Ron wore a Gryffindor tie that had belonged to Arthur, and Hermione a pearl necklace her mum had given her.

They both smiled at him, and Harry smiled back, and walked towards his future in the light.

The End.