Chapter Forty-Four of 'For the Game'

[lomonaaeren]

“Mr. Potter! We meet again!”

It had actually taken the Aurors escorting Harry a little while to find the Minister. First they’d had to go to a large tent, and then over to a second one that seemed to be where Ministry workers slept, and then into the woods. Harry was tired and irritable and showing none of that. Sirius was maybe half as tired and irritable and was actually pouting.

But the expression cleared off his face when Shacklebolt and Tonks brought them into a clearing and Sirius saw the thing above them that seemed to be made of green stars.

“The Dark Mark,” he whispered.

“Recognize it, do you, Black? I shouldn’t be surprised.”

Harry glanced over his shoulder. Bartemius Crouch, who had been sitting a row behind them in the Top Box, had appeared behind them again. He had his wand aimed at Sirius and a thoroughly unpleasant expression on his face.

“You probably put it up there! Once a Death Eater, always a Death Eater!”

“I was never a—”

Sirius stopped, because Harry had reached out and put a hand on his arm. After a single glance at Harry, Sirius seemed to silently agree he was the best one to handle this. He stepped back, and Harry stepped forwards.

“It’s not a surprise that you would say that, either, sir,” Harry told Crouch, his voice glacial, “when you were one of the people involved in shoving Sirius into Azkaban without even checking if he were guilty.”

Crouch’s face turned red in a wave, and he pointed his wand at Harry. “Who are you to be questioning me?”

Either Crouch thought Harry could be intimidated, or he honestly hadn’t recognized him or seen the scar in the shifting light of Lumos Charms and the Dark Mark and fires in the distance. Harry took a step forwards and lit his own wand, fairly certain that performing underage magic would go unnoticed right now. Crouch turned pale.

“Harry Potter,” Harry proclaimed. “The Boy-Who-Lived.”

The words tasted like ashes in his mouth, but so what? Right now, they might protect him and his godfather, and that was the important thing.

The snake wriggled out from under his robe collar at that, and hissed emphatically at Crouch. The man promptly spun to point his wand at it. Harry shifted so the snake would be shielded behind his neck if it came to that.

“I do not like this man, his taste or his smell.”

“The boy’s a Parselmouth! A Dark wizard!”

“I used my Parseltongue to intimidate Dark wizards and send the Death Eaters who were tormenting that Muggle family running tonight,” Harry said, raising his voice slightly. “What did you do to serve the cause of justice, Mr. Crouch? Point your wand at people and accuse them of recognizing something that every magical person over the age of thirty would recognize?”

“Shut up!” Crouch screamed, foam flying from the sides of his mouth.

Harry turned to Minister Fudge, who was clutching his bowler hat, and did his best to wear an expression of wounded dignity. “Sir, your Aurors should have told you about what I did to help people. And Mr. Crouch is accusing me of being Dark and my godfather of being a Death Eater? It’s very vexing.”

“Oh, I agree, I agree!” Fudge blurted, probably because the words had reminded him of how this might look in the papers. “No, shut up, Bartemius,” he added, when Crouch tried to say something. “And Black was with Harry, of course he couldn’t be responsible for the Dark Mark.”

“Then who was?” demanded Auror Tonks.

“We’re trying to determine that,” said a voice behind Harry.

He glanced over his shoulder and blinked when he saw Mr. Weasley. Ron and Hermione and the twins were behind him, the twins frowning and Ron and Hermione looking pale and scared. Harry nodded to them. “Hello, sir,” he said to Mr. Weasley.

“Hello, Harry.” Mr. Weasley looked tired. Ron and Hermione crowded forwards and over to stand beside Harry without a word. Mr. Weasley turned to the Minister and Crouch. “We know that the Dark Mark was cast before Mr. Black and his godson ever came near the scene. So we know it wasn’t them.”

“It could have been! It could have been!”

“Sir, we found something!”

Harry turned his head and watched as two more Aurors dragged a small figure into the light. A house-elf. He blinked and felt his heart speed up, wondering for a second if it was Dobby.

But no, it wasn’t. This was a female house-elf, who clutched a wand in one hand and began to wail about not betraying her master the minute the Aurors dropped her on the ground. She was apparently Crouch’s elf.

Harry felt a surge of mingled contempt and unease strike through him. He thought house-elves should be free, but he couldn’t imagine the kind of mindset that would make one of them praise Crouch in the first place.

Or the kind of treatment. You would have praised the Dursleys to whoever listened, once upon a time.

Harry swallowed and stood a little straighter. Sirius was immensely quiet beside him. They watched as Crouch screamed at the elf and dismissed her from his service, ignoring the way that she tried to clutch at his feet. Her name was Winky, apparently.

“Make them stop with the vibrations,” the snake said, curling out from under Harry’s collar again. “And get me my baby birds.”

“They won’t let me leave to get them yet. When they do, then I’ll give them to you.”

Everyone in sight flinched at the sound of Harry’s Parseltongue, but the Minister immediately started to babble about how Harry had used it to stop Dark wizards attacking Muggles that night. Harry smiled tightly and glanced at Mr. Weasley, who was pulling on his robe collar.

“Did you have to, mate?” Ron asked, not quite under his breath.

Winky, meanwhile, had frozen and was staring at Harry with big, terrified eyes. Harry glanced away. He supposed that some house-elves had reason to be afraid of Dark wizards with Parseltongue, but he still didn’t like scaring them.

He started to ask Sirius if they could leave, but suddenly Winky squirmed her way through the leaves and started bowing to him, which was more like little push-ups since her nose was already in the dirt.

“Please, Master Harry Potter be taking Winky with him,” she gasped.

Harry stared at Winky, then at Sirius. Sirius gave a huge shrug, his face locked in a grimace. Harry knew that he didn’t like house-elves or understand them. Not after Kreacher.

And Harry wasn’t sure that he did, either. He did manage to find his voice before someone could start yelling again, though, like Crouch. “Why do you want to come with me? I thought you were scared of me?”

“Master Harry Potter will defeat the bad wizards! And Winky can be telling him how to do so!”

“Winky,” Crouch said, his voice as cold as the grave. “I forbid you to tell him any of my secrets.”

Winky shot Crouch a trembling glare, which was probably the strangest expression that Harry had ever witnessed on someone’s face. “Master C-Crouch cannot be t-telling Winky what to do when he g-gave her clothes,” she declared.

Crouch stared at them both with a poisonous look on his face, one that made Harry grip his wand and Sirius step in front of him. The snake reared up, hissing. Crouch fell back a step, and the Minister started blustering something about how there was no need for violence.

Crouch was staring at Harry as if he thought there was. Harry lifted his chin and tried to show Theo’s blank coldness.

Maybe it worked. At least Crouch turned away, and Sirius muttered something, and then finally they could get out of the group and the forest and walk back towards the tents. Winky followed them with a death grip on Harry’s robe. Harry didn’t even think about asking her to let go, since it didn’t seem like it would work.

Hermione only asked one question on the way back, while Ron walked in brooding silence. “You attacked the ones who were attacking the Muggles?”

Harry glanced at her. “Yeah.”

He thought she would ask why, or maybe why he was the only one, but she lowered her eyes to the ground and fell silent. Harry sighed a little and kept walking. Maybe this part was a Slytherin friend thing.

“You are away from them now. Where are my baby birds?”

*

“Winky could get chickens!”

Harry glanced up from the conversation he’d been having with Sirius about obtaining baby birds for the snake. It was the morning after the World Cup, and they’d been dancing around the subject that Harry knew Sirius really wanted to talk about for hours now.

Harry had just been about to give in and bring it up when Winky appeared in the kitchen. Sirius jumped and nearly spilled his teacup all over the table. Harry sighed. He’d hoped that Winky had given up and moved on.

“What, Winky?” he asked, as kindly as he could.

“Winky could get chickens! If we raised chickens in the garden, then we would always have baby birds for the master’s snake!”

Harry glanced at Sirius. Ultimately, Grimmauld Place was his house. And he was the one who had grown up with a terrible house-elf. He was the one who had to make the decision now.

Sirius blew out his breath and shrugged.

Well, all right, so Harry would have to make the decision. He turned back to Winky with a smile he knew was strained. “You’d be able to purchase the chickens and take care of them, Winky? All of them?”

“Winky could! Winky can!”

Harry nodded slowly. “All right. Then go buy some chickens—” He glanced at Sirius. “Is there a special account that house-elves can use?”

“Yeah. I can make sure she has access to it.”

Harry nodded again. “Go buy some chickens, Winky. Laying hens and a rooster and some chicks.”

“Yes, Master Harry!”

Winky vanished with a pop. Harry leaned back and shook his head. “I suppose at least a devoted house-elf is better than one who’s trying to murder you on the regular.”

Sirius gave a strange croaking laugh. “Yeah, she might smother you with affection, but at least she won’t take a cleaver to you in the night.”

“I know I killed that Death Eater.”

All the mirth left Sirius in a rush. He leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes, but not before Harry saw tears leaking from under his eyelids.

“I know it wasn’t ideal,” Harry snapped. “I know that I should have done something other than set the snake on them. But—”

“Oh, kid, it isn’t your fault,” Sirius said, opening his eyes and sounding so startled that Harry stopped mid-rant. “I’m not upset at you. I’m upset for you, that you had to do something like this at such a young age. Or any age, really. I did hope—I hoped the war was over, and they’d never come back.”

Harry swallowed. That hadn’t occurred to him, even though he knew that Sirius cared about him and wanted to keep him safe. “Oh,” he whispered.

“Those bastards,” Sirius said, pounding a fist on the table. “And those bastards,” he added, pointing vaguely over his shoulder in a direction Harry thought was supposed to be towards the Ministry. “Always relying on a teenager to save them. Crouch accusing us of casting the Dark Mark.” He shook his head. “There’s nothing we can do about them seeing you as a savior, probably, but it’s disgusting.”

“I could become a Dark wizard, and then they would probably stop seeing me that way?”

Sirius snorted with laughter and ended up with a large gout of tea coming out of his nose. Harry cleaned it up for him with a wave of his wand, half-laughing and half-disgusted himself. Sirius sat back and sighed at the ceiling.

“Oh, kid, you’re the best thing in my life.”

Harry swallowed, but at least he managed to do it so that it was over by the time Sirius looked back at him, his eyes shining.

“I wish you hadn’t had to kill,” Sirius said softly. “But I don’t blame you for it.”

“Or the snake?”

“Or the snake. Who needs a name.”

“It doesn’t want one.”

“Fine, fine,” Sirius muttered. “But it deserves all the baby birds for keeping you safe. And I need to write a letter.”

“Who to?”

“Lucius Malfoy.” Sirius’s eyes were glinting as he stood up. “I want my dear cousin Narcissa to understand what will happen if we cross paths again and Lucius even thinks about hexing you. Or cursing you. Or doing anything to you other than nodding politely and walking away very fast.”

“Narcissa…she’s your cousin?”

“Didn’t you see that part on the family tapestry?”

“I reckon I didn’t pay attention.”

Sirius shrugged. “We’re first cousins, for all the good it’s done me. She never came to visit me on Azkaban even to congratulate me for supposedly killing thirteen Muggles. And her offspring is pretty intolerable, you’ve said.”

“He’s trying to make himself more tolerable. He’s lost duels to me before.”

“You didn’t say that, Harry!”

“Well, in our first year he threatened Hedwig, and I might have lit him on fire a bit…”

They went upstairs, with Sirius laughing so hard at Harry’s stories of what he’d done to Draco that he started to cough. Harry gave him an incredulous little smile and turned away to hide it.

Every time he thought Sirius had come to the end of ways to surprise him, the man managed to find more.

“Where are my baby birds?” The snake poked Harry so hard in the cheek that his skin dimpled. “I want them.”

“The elf who followed me home went to get them.”

“They are to be proper baby birds. With no feathers on.”

Harry rolled his eyes. At least he’d managed to look up a spell last term that would remove all the feathers on a bird.

It says something that that’s the kind of spell I looked up, before the sort of defensive curses that Sirius has been having me learn.

But maybe it said something good.

*

“Baby birds!”

Harry snorted as he watched the snake slither after the second set of chicks that Winky had bought. They were outside in the garden, he and Theo and Blaise and the snake. The sun was bright overhead for once, and Harry leaned back and stretched.

He looked up to find Theo and Blaise holding another silent conversation by glances. Harry sighed a little. He didn’t mind when they did that, not exactly, but he wished he could be included.

“Where’s your godfather?”

“Off preparing my birthday party for this afternoon.”

Theo and Blaise exchanged a loaded glance again. Harry didn’t try to figure out what it was about this time, and just turned back to watching the snake unhinge its jaws around yet another frantically peeping chicken. Maybe it should have bothered him, but, well, it didn’t.

“And that’s why he agreed to let us come over.”

“Yeah.”

Harry lay there with the sun on his face, fighting to keep from smiling. He could feel both Theo and Blaise staring at him, but honestly, their being taken by surprise that he had invited them and not Ron and Hermione to his birthday was not his problem. They could figure out what they thought about it.

“Good thing they had the Quidditch World Cup a little early this year,” Blaise drawled at last. “Leaves you more time to get spoiled by your godfather.”

“Exactly.”

Harry thought he might have drifted off to sleep listening to the snake’s chatter about how warm and full it was, but he opened his eyes in a hurry when someone tapped his shoulder. His wand was in Theo’s throat before he consciously realized what he was doing.

Theo blinked at him, and then again. “Good reflexes,” he said weakly.

“You could make some fucking noise once in a while,” Harry retorted, and sat up. “What is it?”

“We know that you killed that Death Eater at the World Cup.”

Harry wasn’t going to try and say it was the snake, even though that was technically true. He cocked his head. “Yeah. Not a cousin of either one of yours, was he?”

Blaise choked a little. Theo’s eyes widened, and he stared at Harry long enough that Harry reached up and waved a hand in front of his friend’s face.

Theo scowled and slapped Harry’s hand away. “You don’t need to do that.”

“Yes, I do. What is it?”

“Um. Nothing,” Theo said, and at least this time he stared at the ground instead of Blaise, which satisfied Harry for some obscure reason. “The thing that matters is that I thought you heard your godfather calling for us. And Blaise and I have your birthday present.”

That was slipped in so casually that Harry had stood up before he realized what he’d heard. Then he blinked and pivoted around to face Theo. “What?”

“Blaise and I,” Theo said, enunciating as carefully as though he thought Harry had cast a Deafening Hex on himself, “have your birthday present.” He took a box from a robe pocket that resized the moment it was in the open air, to reveal a heavy dark wooden box with a strange rune circle carved on the front.

Harry stood up and took the box, staring. The runes swam in front of his eyes. They might have been ones he knew, but from the way the circle shifted continuously, he couldn’t be sure.

“Theo—what is this?”

“Your birthday present.”

“Wanker.”

“What dearest Theo means,” Blaise interjected, with a shake of his head that looked like it might translate into a cuff on the side of Theo’s head any minute, “is that once you bleed on the lid of that box, anything you put in there will be completely safe. No one else will be able to open that box. Or destroy it, for that matter, with anything less than Fiendfyre.”

Harry had read about Fiendfyre. He found his breath coming a little short as he looked at the box.

“Are you going to say something?” Blaise prompted him.

“Harry!” Sirius called from inside the house.

“Thank you,” Harry whispered, choked-up enough that he didn’t think he could speak louder, and looked up at them.

He looked up with a smile that he hoped was all right, because both Blaise and Theo froze when they saw it, and exchanged glances. But then Blaise stepped forwards to put a hand on Harry’s shoulder, and Theo tapped Harry’s free hand with a closed fist.

“You’re welcome. Now, come on, and let’s go enjoy the cake.”

Harry was happy enough to follow them inside, but he did wonder about the way they’d stared at him, and how their eyes had gone all weird and heavy-lidded.

Hopefully it was fine.

And anyway, the box was brilliant.

And so were they.