Reading Time: 98 Minutes

Title: Half the Sunrise
Author: Lomonaaeren
Fandom: Harry Potter
Genre: Action Adventure, Drama, Fantasy, Romance, Slash, Time Travel
Relationship(s): Harry Potter/Theodore Nott
Content Rating: NC-17
Warnings: Violence – Graphic, Violence – Domestic and/or Against Children , Character Death- Temporary, Child Death- Temporary, Sex- Explicit, Prejudice- Discussion, Grief/Mourning, Angst, Death- Minor Character, Discussion- Child Abuse, Discussion- Murder, Discussion- Domestic Violence
Author Note: Warning for a very intense beginning, including the temporary character deaths. The minor character deaths warning refers to different, antagonistic characters. The discussion of domestic violence is of hypothetical domestic violence only.
Beta: Linda and Karen
Word Count: 49,951
Summary: The magical attack that causes the death of Harry Potter’s best friend and son, and Theodore Nott’s wife, can be repaired with time travel. Harry and Theo enact the ritual, believing their lives are the price—only to find out that this is true in the most twisted of ways. Suddenly trapped in a world where they are the only ones who remember what happened and are no longer recognized by anyone, while replicas of themselves replace them in their lives with their friends and families, Harry and Theo wrestle with being strangers to everyone but each other.
Artist: Mizu Sage

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Chapter One

The front of Quality Quidditch Supplies blew out as they were passing it.

Harry was already moving as the window exploded, raising a shield that spread rippling along the line of his family. Ginny ducked, her arms winding around Jamie and Lily, while Hermione shouted as she raised a shield herself to protect Rose and Hugo—

The explosion spread further, faster, than their shields. Harry, his heart pounding furiously in his ears, spun around in time to see Ron drop with his arms wrapped around Al. Both of them had been lagging at the back of the line, arguing furiously over the new Levinbolt broom as they peered into the window.

Harry knew what would happen as soon as he saw them.

He couldn’t take it in.

He ran towards them, his pulse so fast that it felt as if he was running on top of his heart, and dropped to his knees next to Ron and Al. Ron lay motionless, his head tipped to the side, a jagged shard of glass implanted in his throat. Al lay on top of him, as still, another shard of glass through—

Harry couldn’t take it in.

He cast a diagnostic, then again because his hand was shaking too badly to complete the spell the first time. There was blood on his fingers. He didn’t know where it had come from. He could hear shrieking, screaming, weeping. He didn’t know who was making the sounds.

He stared at the diagnostic that finally rippled into being above Ron’s and Al’s bodies, dark blue letters. The color told him the message before he ever got to read it.

Mortal wounds. Breathing: None. Heartbeats: None.

“Ron,” Hermione breathed as she dropped to her knees beside him. “Ron.” She couldn’t say anything else, and when Harry looked at her, her face was as empty of reflections as the shard of glass jammed into Al.

Harry reached out and caught her hand. He raised another shield, this one to hold back Ginny and his daughter and his older son as they tried to approach the body—

His only son, now.

His own shard of glass felt as if it was jammed through his belly, but Harry kept his voice as calm and steady as possible. They needed him to not break like the window had. He couldn’t, not now. “Call the Aurors!” he roared. “Fetch the Healers!” and heard running footsteps he presumed had gone to do his bidding.

Then he looked back at the bodies, and grief flowed in in an endless tide.

– – – –

“I’m sorry, Auror Potter. They’re gone.”

Harry shut his eyes. It felt as if the ground beneath him had been washed away and he was floating on a deep, dark ocean.

Ginny was home with James and Lily. Hermione was home with Rose and Hugo. They’d both asked him to come to St. Mungo’s and be the one to hear the news, asking without words for him to bear it first.

And Harry was happy to do that. If nothing else, he was the one who had known that Ron and Al were dead the minute he saw them sprawled on the pavement. There was no way that he could fool himself with false hopes.

“All right, Healer,” he whispered, standing up from the chair in the private waiting room they’d given him. He hadn’t wanted that, but it was one of those concessions to his fame that people made anyway. “Thank you for telling me.”

“Mr. Potter, if you need to talk to a Mind-Healer…”

I need it not to have happened!

But that wasn’t something he could yell at a Healer. Harry just nodded and accepted the Floo address and name on a piece of parchment he gave them. Then he took a moment to settle himself, shoulders and magic and aching head and all, before he went home.

He Apparated into the entrance hall and saw Ginny and Hermione immediately coming down the stairs. There was no sign of the kids. Harry hoped that meant they’d been sent to bed.

Harry caught their eyes and slowly shook his head.

Ginny closed her own and stood there with her arms shaking, which progressed to her whole body shaking. Hermione didn’t move, but her face grew whiter and whiter as Harry watched.

Harry went up the steps two at a time to take them in his arms, his wife and his best friend, and hold them while the world crumbled around them.

– – – –

There’d been a thorough investigation done, but it had been unsatisfying more than anything, Harry thought, as he flung the Daily Prophet down. Just two idiot teenagers who had started to duel each other over who would get the last Nimbus 2015 in the shop, and one of their Shattering Curses had hit the window instead of someone else’s bones.

Nothing to prosecute, no Dark wizard to hunt down. Just…stupidity.

Harry glanced again at the paper. They had published the full list of victims, in alphabetical order except for Ron’s and Al’s names at the very top. So many people that Harry hadn’t even realized had died at first, but Diagon Alley had been crowded that day. Elizabeth Nott, Theodore Nott’s wife. Torrance Keller, a second-year Muggleborn on his way to do school shopping. John Dawlish, one of Harry’s fellow Aurors who had been there just to pick up some ink and quills.

Harry shut his eyes and stood there for a long second. He was glad, at the moment, that Hogwarts wouldn’t start for another two months. Maybe Jamie would be all right to go by then, but right now, he needed to be home with his family around him.

Maybe he won’t be.

Harry nodded. All right. He would live with that. They would live with that. Harry had so far spent time with Ginny talking quietly about Al, and conjuring little targets for Jamie to blow up with his wand, and cooking with Lily, because that was what she wanted to do right now.

He spent time with Hermione and the Weasleys, too, but there was more talking there, and yelling. Harry had had to prevent George from hunting down the names of the two teenagers who’d been dueling in Quality Quidditch Supplies, which the papers hadn’t released. He’d held Molly as she cried, and arranged Ron’s funeral with Arthur, and tried his best to explain the deaths to Louis, who was too young to really understand but kept asking questions about them. At least he seemed to understand at the end that Uncle Ron and Cousin Al wouldn’t be coming back anymore, and that was all Harry could hope for.

I’ll have to live with this.

– – – –

Harry couldn’t.

He didn’t know why. He’d never lived through something as bad as this, true, but he’d gone to gather Ginny up and deliver her back to the school right after killing the basilisk and the diary, and he’d only been angry enough to smash up Dumbledore’s office on the actual night of Sirius’s death. He’d endured then. Why couldn’t he endure now?

But somehow, he couldn’t. He kept forgetting that Al wasn’t there anymore and opening his mouth to call him down for dinner, then remembering. He kept thinking of something he needed to tell Ron and then feeling it like a stab in the soul when he remembered he couldn’t.

He began to dream of both Al and Ron being stabbed to death by those pieces of glass, and he woke screaming to the point that he and Ginny had to sleep in separate beds, and Harry had to put Silencing Charms around his own. He couldn’t make things worse for her, but they weren’t getting better for him, either.

Harry drank diluted draughts of Dreamless Sleep Potion when he could, but it couldn’t be taken every day, and it didn’t help with the grief. He spoke to his superiors, and they made sympathetic noises but pushed him to come back to work, talking about all those crimes that only Head Auror Potter could solve. Part of that work was reassigning files and projects that Ron had been working on when he—

Harry had walked out of one meeting like that, and used the Floo address the Healers had given him to set up an appointment with a Mind-Healer.

Except the Mind-Healer was no better. She spoke gently, but firmly, about how Harry wasn’t the only one suffering and he needed to be there for his children and his wife. She pointed out that while Harry was having problems with his job, Ginny had quit hers, as a Quidditch reporter for the Prophet, altogether. She said that James would need more support to begin Hogwarts than Harry was offering him right now.

Harry agreed with her aloud, but he burned with anger both against her and against himself, that he couldn’t snap back from this the way he had so many other things.

He didn’t seek out a Mind-Healing session again.

– – – –

A letter arrived via a barn owl that Harry didn’t recognize one day when he was discussing options for keeping Jamie out of Hogwarts for a year with Ginny. Harry mechanically cast detection charms on it and set it aside. It was probably going to be either something from the Aurors or another meaningless set of condolences, and he had other things to talk about right now.

“I think Jamie needs as much support as possible,” Ginny whispered, dragging her fingers through the ring left by a mug of—something. Soup, Harry thought. He thought they’d had soup for lunch.

“I know,” Harry agreed. That was something they’d both said over and over, and of course it was important. “I just want to figure out what it looks like. He said that he wanted to go to Hogwarts, but then he said he didn’t. Do you think we should try to talk to him about it again?”

“You know that every time we talk to him, he cries.”

Harry closed his eyes and rested his forehead on his hand for a minute. “I know, Gin,” he whispered. “But Hogwarts starts in a fortnight. Should we—we need to talk to him. I don’t want to just make a decision for him that he doesn’t want, but I don’t know what he wants, either.”

“You want to take him away from me?”

Harry started up, because that was a new tone in her voice. He stared blankly at Ginny, who was staring back at him, shivering. Harry had the brief idea that her anger was the only thing propping her up.

“Gin, what—”

“He should stay here,” Ginny snapped, and her face was harsh and unyielding, a stranger’s. “He has to stay here. If I can’t help him, Harry, I don’t know how I’m going to survive myself.”

“But is that best for him?” Harry asked as carefully as he could. “Would he find the most support staying here, or being at Hogwarts?”

“With children who would constantly ask him about the accident, and about Al and his uncle?” Ginny’s shoulders hunched again. “I can’t believe that we’re discussing this. Of course he’ll stay here. I shouldn’t have allowed you to believe that I would ever consent to him going to Hogwarts.”

Harry opened his mouth, then closed it. He thought of what the Mind-Healer had said, about how he wasn’t the only one suffering. Jamie was, too, and Ginny. And Lily. And Hermione, and Rose, and Hugo, and the other Weasleys.

“Of course,” he said quietly. “I’ll owl Minerva and make the arrangements for taking Jamie out of Hogwarts for this year.”

“You do that.”

Ginny stared off at the window at the far end of the kitchen, where Al had liked to sit and eat breakfast while laughing over the pages of some book. He had mostly done it because they had forbidden books at the table—

Harry remembered.

He turned and left the kitchen for the owlery before his magic, which was making the table creak, splintered it.

– – – –

“Auror Potter, got these scrolls for you.”

Harry hid a sigh. Being back at work was horrendous, but so was being at home with Ginny and Jamie and Lily, where he would say the wrong thing no matter what he said. Lily wanted him there but would also cry any time he so much as picked something up, because she could remember Al picking it up, too, and Harry looked so much like Al. Jamie was furious that he wasn’t going to Hogwarts but also didn’t want to go, and he had screamed at Harry until his voice was hoarse. Ginny had turned into someone Harry didn’t recognize, a spun glass statue with only grief to light her up.

They were both saying things they didn’t mean, because somehow cruelty was better than sitting in silence.

Harry took a long, wavering breath, and unrolled the scrolls that Auror Holden had dropped on his desk.

They’d been confiscated from a Dark wizard, Harry reckoned, after he’d read through them a few times. Probably that smuggler of unicorn blood Holden and Gorgeson had finally run to earth in Knockturn Alley. Harry wrinkled his nose at the contents, which were mostly rituals that no one in their right mind would perform, almost all of them involving unicorn body parts. But it was his job as Head Auror to revise them, partially so that they could judge whether their possessors should get the Kiss or Azkaban or some lesser punishment.

Harry paused when he reached the end of the third scroll. The circle there was insanely complex, but the handwriting above it was clear enough, and the list of ingredients didn’t seem to involve unicorn blood.

A ritual to change the course of time.

Harry swallowed. The click of his throat sounded loud to him, and he discovered that he was looking around as though someone would observe him, even though he had a private office. Harry waved his wand to lock the door, cast another charm that would make a memory retrieved from his head for the Pensive look blurry, as though seen underwater, and plunged into the scroll.

The circle was complex, yes, but the scroll also didn’t say that it had to be made of jewels or five different kinds of metal or crushed shells from extinct crabs, the way that some Harry had seen did. It simply said that it had to be drawn, in chalk, on or near the site where the creator wanted to travel back in time, and it required the sacrifice of a life.

Harry felt a sharp smile flicker across his lips. That was no problem. Right now, he didn’t think his life was much worth living anyway. And he was sure that his family could cope with his death better than they could with both Ron’s and Al’s. Until last year, when he’d become Head Auror, they’d had to accept that he had a dangerous job and might die at any time. This would be a continuation of that, not different.

He spread the scroll out, weighted it with the kinds of crystal globes that people thought were good gifts to give him for some reason, took out a fresh piece of parchment of his own, and began to fill it with notes.

– – – –

The more he learned about the ritual, the more Harry felt as though ice had settled into his bones. He lay awake the night after he had finished his notes, arms folded behind his head as he stared out through the window next to their bed. Ginny was already asleep, and Harry would move to the guest bedroom soon, so that his nightmares wouldn’t disturb her. But he had thought it might comfort him to lie next to her for a while, since he would be gone in such a short amount of time.

It didn’t work. Ginny’s body was cold and stiff next to him, as if she was the corpse that Harry planned to become.

Harry breathed out slowly. The ritual notes said that the willing sacrifice of a life was enough to make sure that he could go back any length of time, at least up until a year and a day had passed. He would arrive back in time and make sure that his family and Ron and Hermione’s took another road than the one in front of Quality Quidditch Supplies, by force if necessary.

Then he would fade out of existence, and there would be one corpse left, his, lying on the ground.

Harry closed his eyes. He didn’t want to die. But neither did he want to live without Ron and Al, and it was rapidly becoming clear that no one else did, either. Lily had started asking questions about death that made Harry—more than afraid.

He stretched his hands out in front of him and wondered what it would be like to watch them fade, the way the ritual notes said he would. It would look like that to him, not to anyone else. He would probably die in the same way that the deaths he wanted to prevent had happened, the ritual had suggested. So they would see him pierced with glass and lying there…

Harry shivered. It would be horrible for them, yes. He could acknowledge that. But less horrible than two deaths. Less horrible than the death of a child and the death of someone whom Harry knew, based on Fred’s death, would cope with grief using more grace than Harry could.

I’m so bad at it that I’m practically running away.

Harry glanced over his shoulder and saw Ginny still curled in a tight position. And, come to think of it, her breathing was a little too fast for her to be asleep. Harry sighed and stood up to go to the guest bedroom.

He was terrible at knowing what would comfort his wife and children. That was only one reason among many that it would be better if he went back far enough to prevent them from needing comfort at all.

He was good at saving people, after all.

– – – –

Harry stepped slowly back from the circle he had drawn in chalk on the ground and nodded. It was two in the morning right now, and he was standing in the section of Diagon Alley right in front of Quality Quidditch supplies where the accident had happened. As nearly as he could make out, Harry was on the spot where Ron and Al had died.

Chills crept up his spine. Harry ignored them, his eyes focused on the shop. It had a new window, and Harry turned his head away, fighting the impulse to smash it.

He bent over the chalk circle, checking the placement of the smaller circles along the boundary, but already he knew he had done something correctly. He could feel the sharp nip of a chill wind along his hands and on the side of his neck, which meant magical power was gathering. And he had already written the day and time that he wanted to go back to, an hour before the accident.

“You’re an idiot, Potter.”

Harry leaped and came down still within the circle. He hadn’t damaged it, thank Merlin. The wind continued to bite at him, and a small golden tornado appeared in the center of the circle with him, but Harry couldn’t take his eyes from the cloaked figure who had appeared at the corner of Quality Quidditch Supplies.

At first, Harry thought it might be an Unspeakable. It would be just like one of them to sense the power and come to interrupt him. But then the person pulled his hood back, and Harry recognized the pale face and tumbled dark hair after a moment of squinting.

“…Nott?”

“No other.” Nott strode towards him, but paused outside the smaller chalk circles and looked them over. His eyebrows went up—Harry could see that much by the light of his own wand and the tornado of gathering magic—and he whistled a little under his breath. “I should have known this is what you would make of it.”

Harry snarled softly but said nothing. He didn’t know what Nott was talking about, and he was going to play as dumb as he could until Nott went away. By the time he tried to report to the Ministry that Harry was using Dark Arts, Harry would already be gone, and time would have reversed, and Ron and Al would be safe.

“Did you even have a plan?” Nott asked, straightening up again and raking his gaze over Harry. “Or were you just going to go back in time and die and trust that everything would work out for the best?”

“Better one death than two,” Harry said. He worked hard to make sure that his voice wasn’t breaking apart in front of Nott. He could expose some weakness to an enemy, but this would have been too much. “And Ginny and the rest knew that I might die someday, because of the nature of my job. This will be easier for them to move on from.”

Nott rolled his eyes. “Or you could adopt my solution and have a far-superior result that wouldn’t require them to undergo grief at all. Just you.”

“I could do that if it worked,” Harry said. “But I don’t trust you, Nott, and I don’t trust you if you’re going to actually tell me that you’ve discovered a form of time travel that doesn’t have a price.”

“It does have a price,” Nott said. He walked a little to the side, bringing his face more clearly into Harry’s wand-light, and Harry swallowed at the fanatical gleam in his eyes. “But not a death that would leave your family grieving.”

“And you care about that?”

“The ritual requires too much magic for one wizard to perform alone. I thought if I could get you to do it with me, Potter, we’ll both gain what we want. Your son and friend will be alive.” Nott’s face twisted. “And so will my Elizabeth.”

Harry nodded slowly, remembering her name from the list that had been published in the Prophet. “And they won’t grieve? Why? Will they forget—us?” Odd to have another pronoun to put in place of me.

“In a manner of speaking.” Nott looked up and down the Alley for a moment. “If you’ll erase those circles so that no one gets the wrong idea, and come with me, I believe that you’ll find the scroll I have in my flat interesting.”

Harry glanced down at the circles at his feet, but the golden glow was gone, probably because he hadn’t been focusing on increasing or harnessing it. He swore softly and irritably as he began casting the charm that would erase the chalk lines. “This had better be fucking worth it, Nott.”

“Believe me,” Nott said, and his voice sounded as guttural as if he was speaking through a mouth of rocks, “I wouldn’t bother with it if it wasn’t.”

– – – –

Harry studied the ritual circle sketched on the enormous piece of parchment that Nott had pinned to the wall in his study, walking from point to point in front of it. He could see the similarities with the circle that he had been constructing, but also the differences.

Enough to make hope fill his chest as it hadn’t even when the scroll with the ritual he had been considering had crossed his desk.

He cocked his head towards Nott. “Where did you find it? And why did you know that I was doing something like this tonight?”

“It only now occurred to you to question that?” But Nott’s voice was amused rather than scathing. Not that Harry even knew if he was scathing, really. They’d largely ignored each other at school, having a more neutral relationship than Harry had ever enjoyed with the other Slytherins. Nott leaned his hip on his desk. “But I could feel the power gathering, and I’ve spent long enough immersed in the study of this ritual that I could feel what it would be like. I suspected it was you. You’re the only other one who lost people that day and who would be powerful and desperate enough to try something like this.”

Harry nodded, and his gaze went back to the ritual. “It takes our lives in a different way,” he murmured.

Nott nodded back. “We sacrifice our connections to other people and our places in their hearts, for the privilege of saving them. And, if I’m right…” He crossed the room to stand at Harry’s side, tapping his wand up and down a section of the parchment and making it flash with blue light. “It also creates copies of us that blend seamlessly into our lives. There’ll be no reason for Elizabeth to mourn. Or your Weasleys, either,” he added, after a moment.

“But won’t they notice that there’s two of us running around?”

Nott shook his head. “Not if I’m right.”

“If you’re right.”

Nott ignored that. “They’ll be able to see us and interact with us, and so will other people. But no one will react to us the way they would to Harry Potter and Theodore Nott. At most, if you struck up a friendship with, say, Weasley, he might think it’s a little strange that he has two friends named Harry.” Nott turned his head, and Harry saw the glitter of his eyes from close. Yes, Nott was as determined as Harry was to travel back and save them. “We’ll be on our own, and we won’t be able to slip back into the places we held or make anyone remember us. We won’t have anything except the clothes on our backs, the wands in our holsters, and whatever else we bring with us. No Gringotts accounts, no homes, nothing but our own memories for satisfaction.”

“I don’t give a shit about those things.”

“Neither do I.”

“No offense, Nott, but why?”

Nott offered him a smile that was ghastly enough to make Harry flinch away from it. “Why am I doing this when I’m a spoiled little rich pureblood Death Eater’s son? How can I not care about the big vaults and the mounds of Galleons and the grand house I’m losing?”

“Yes.” Harry lifted his chin and refused to flinch away. If he was going to do something as mental as this, he did have to understand where Nott was coming from.

Nott nodded and slowly turned back to face the parchment on the wall. His eyes went so vacant that Harry had to control the temptation to flinch.

“All my life,” Nott said softly, “I didn’t care about anything very much. I didn’t want to be a Death Eater, but that’s because it looked like it involved pain and obedience, neither of which appealed to me. Not because I had an attack of morality. Not because I was an especially good person. I assumed it would be the same thing when I got married and had children. I wouldn’t feel much for them. I would get a kind of distant affection, maybe, the kind that I had for my father.

“And then somehow, Elizabeth broke through that.” Nott drew a shuddering breath. “She saw that I could become someone better, and she reached out to that potential man within me and drew him to the surface. Suddenly I found that I cared about someone, and it was—it felt good, to not be alone in the center of my universe.” Nott shivered and closed his eyes. “I didn’t even want to have children with her right away, because I was afraid of how they would alter the balance between us. And she was content to wait. We were all in all to each other.”

His voice died into silence. Harry didn’t know what it would be like to experience that, but he could imagine, he thought, just from the pressure of Nott’s words. He reached out, hesitantly, and placed his hand on Nott’s arm.

Nott started and turned to stare at him. Harry cleared his throat and looked back at the parchment. “You didn’t answer my question about where you found this ritual.”

“In the same place you found yours, I imagine.”

“What?” Harry turned back with narrowed eyes. The smugness in Nott’s voice was unmistakable.

“The same treasure trove of scrolls from the unicorn smugglers?” Nott gave a vicious grin that made Harry glad they were working together in this. “I got there before your Aurors did. I’d cast a Seeking Spell that would lead me to something that might allow me to undo Elizabeth’s death. I had the time to see the ritual scroll that you must have looked at, but I could tell that it wasn’t powerful enough to be what I wanted. I don’t desire Elizabeth to suffer a moment’s grief. I took mine, and I was fairly sure that the other one would cross your desk and attract your attention.”

“You planned for me to be involved in this?”

“I thought it likely. I didn’t know for sure that it would happen. But when I felt the magic gathering in Diagon Alley tonight, I knew.”

Harry nodded slowly. “And you think our combined magic will be enough to do this one?” He stared again at the insanely complicated circle on the parchment. It was really a series of circles, one which made the small series of different ones he’d drawn in Diagon Alley look like a child’s toys.

A child. Al. Jamie. Lily.

Harry breathed out shakily. He would be leaving them behind, losing all connection with them. But that was better than leaving them to suffer the way they were now.

“Your strength and mine? Your uncommitted magic to my Dark?” Nott nodded so slowly that Harry could only make it out by the way that the outline of the desk disappeared behind the line of his neck. “Oh, yes, Potter. Yes, indeed.”

Harry nodded back.

– – – –

It took longer to arrange matters for Nott’s ritual than it had for Harry’s. Harry had to become used to the drawing of the complex circles, and he had to buy half of the crushed opals that the outermost oval would be made of. He had to hide things from Ginny and Hermione and Jamie and Lily and the others.

Hermione was waking up enough from her numb grief to question him about how he was doing. In fact, Rose and Hugo seemed to be recovering faster and better from the loss of their father than Jamie and Lily were from the loss of their brother.

Harry took the point. He should have been able to give his children as much peace as Hermione was giving hers, but he couldn’t. Which meant he was beyond a failure as a father.

But not as a savior. He had died and come back. He could do the same thing again, with the dying only being metaphorical and emotional.

It would hurt to watch Hermione frown questioningly at a different version of Harry Potter, and Ginny and the children love him, and Ron laugh and put his arm around his shoulders. But what did that matter? Ron and Al would be alive to do it, and the others wouldn’t suffer a second of debilitating grief. They wouldn’t even remember it. Harry and Nott would be the only ones who did.

So Harry evaded Hermione’s questions, and haunted Knockturn Alley to buy the crushed opals and snake scales they needed, and closely read the books Nott lent him on what he could do to help the ritual as a Parselmouth, and impatiently awaited the full moon they had decided on for the casting of the ritual.

– – – –

Harry stood impatiently next to Nott on one end of meadow near Nott’s manor that they had chosen. This particular ritual didn’t have to be conducted in the middle of Diagon Alley, which by itself would have made it superior as far as Harry was concerned. But it did have to be at night, and the only light that shone down at the moment was that of the full moon, ascended nearly as high as it would get, and the light of their sparkling candles, fixed in the earth at either end of the space that the oval would occupy.

Harry’s whole being was fixed on Nott, even the thoughts of resurrecting his loved ones and easing their grief driven to the back of his mind. He saw the moment when Nott inclined his head perfectly.

Harry lifted his wand and cried, “Inicio!”

The magic snapped out of him, not a specific spell but an intent-directed invocation, and seized the crushed opal dust. Nott had cast at the exact same time, and the sparkling motes whirled and began to dance into place, laying out the huge oval that would contain the inner circles, over such an expanse of grass that they would take ten minutes to cover.

Harry didn’t need to pay attention to the opal dust from now on, as the magic kept flowing by itself and steadily draining from both him and Nott. He glanced at the second bag by his feet, that of shed scales from thirteen different kinds of snakes, and hissed, “Begin as I command you.”

The bag tore open, the gathering, heavy magic in the air doing it of its own will, and the scales spilled out.

“Boomslang,” Harry called. The dark green scales whirled away and moved into position, creating the first of the thirteen inner circles inside the oval. Nott stood by, watching quietly. He couldn’t help since he wasn’t a Parselmouth, but he would be the one making sure there were no disruptions and lending the bulk of the passive magical support for this next ten minutes while Harry did the active one.

“Black mamba.”

Dark shed scales joined the green ones, and Harry heard a voice hissing softly, not speaking words but simply imprinting the sound of the deadly snake’s voice into the ritual. He kept from sighing with an effort. It was working.

“King cobra.”

As another set of scales moved and poured into position, Harry critically examined the circles that the boomslang and mamba scales were constructing. They needed to be perfectly circular and to span the exact same amount of space, with a thin thread of grass between them, and their outer edges touching the oval at top and bottom. In addition, the circle of boomslang scales needed to rest against the nearer side of the oval, which the opal flakes had luckily already put in place.

“Banded krait.”

Nott made a swift gesture. Harry looked at him, but he gave a reassuring nod, and Harry returned to what he was doing, deciding that whatever minor magical fluctuation Nott had sensed had been handled.

“Fer-de-lance.”

On and on it went, the chant of serpentine names, the pour of serpentine scales, and the falling-into-place of the opal flakes. Already, Harry could see the gathering flashes of red and green and blue and purple above them, and only didn’t nod in satisfaction because it might disrupt his incanting. That was why opal flakes were necessary for this ritual, because they were the most changeable of gems and wielded the power to change time itself, if used properly.

The last circle of scales, that of the blue krait, settled against the far side of the oval, the one near Nott. Harry drew in a hoarse, whistling breath. Savage magical exhaustion dragged at him; he could feel his lungs laboring.

But he couldn’t lie down yet. And his determination when he remembered Ginny’s face, Hermione’s, Lily’s and Jamie’s and Rose’s and Hugo’s and Molly’s, drove him on.

He reached out and laid his right hand over his left wrist. He could see Nott clasping his right wrist with his left hand on the far side of the oval. Harry nodded and focused on the sides of the oval.

The magic was rising, but so thickly that it seemed sluggish, without any outwards manifestation as yet. Harry leaned forwards slightly, focusing on the oval and the circles of snake scales, chanting softly under his breath. Nott had said that the ritual didn’t care what they chanted at that point, so Harry simply recited the names of the snakes whose scales he had used in the center circles. The important point was to stay focused, so that the magic could act through them and manifest—

There.

The snap of golden light along his side of the oval was matched by a heavy surge of dark green along Nott’s side. And then the manifestations Harry had been told about appeared. A hippogriff made of shining yellow light paced along the oval next to him, a slow, measured walk, while an emerald dragon flew above it on Nott’s side.

Harry met Nott’s eyes. They were shining with feverish excitement. Harry nodded, and clamped his fingers down on his left wrist. If they had done it right—

They had. His fingers parted the skin of his left wrist as though they were made of steel. The blood sprang forth, and Harry directed it to drip carefully on the opal flakes and the pacing hippogriff image. Nott would be doing the same with the dragon on the other side.

At the first fleck of blood, the hippogriff halted, wings fanning back. It turned to glance at Harry, and there was something sharper than the blades that had parted his skin in those eyes. It prowled towards him without leaving the oval, “skin” of light bulging and rippling. Something was breaking through.

Harry kept his eyes on the hippogriff, and the way that murky tentacles spread out from it, and scales coiled and danced into the air, as if he were looking at a segment of a snake without an end. Noting mattered except that he stand firm.

“What is your desire?”

Two voices spoke at once, one from the transforming hippogriff and one from whatever the dragon had become on Nott’s end, in perfect harmony. Harry felt his ears begin to bleed from the effort of hearing it.

He ignored that. He spoke at the exact same time with Nott, something they’d practiced until it came naturally. “To return to two minutes before noon on the fifteenth of July, 2015, in Diagon Alley.” The accident had happened at two minutes before one.

“What is your second desire?”

“To keep our memories intact,” Harry chanted in time with Nott, “and know exactly what we must do to stop the accident from killing our loved ones.”

“What is your third desire?”

“That the intent of the ritual be fulfilled,” Harry and Nott said in time, “with our connections to others as the price, and exact replicas of ourselves be created to take our places in our loved ones’ lives, leaving us alone as the only ones who remember the past.”

The images pacing the oval, which now looked nothing like the hippogriff and dragon that had technically birthed them, stopped and pulsed in silence. Harry struggled to avoid looking at Nott. In the end, these Dark creatures had to be the ones to accept the price and grant what they’d asked for, or not. As far as Harry could tell, they’d done everything perfectly up until this point. They just had to wait.

“Granted.”

Harry felt the iron grip of the magic that had been hovering above the ritual space, and held his breath to avoid screaming. It felt as if pincers were grabbing his chest, twisting, and wrenching him through space—

Nott screamed, and the world seemed to spin sideways into a long, slanting corridor of black light. Harry dived down it, and on the other end of the tunnel were light and stone, growing nearer and nearer.

Chapter Two

Theo blinked slowly, striving to focus his eyes. It felt as if someone had drenched him in a barrel of Firewhisky, and his arms were trembling. He tried to stand, and stumbled.

Someone gripped his arm and hauled him upwards. “Come on, Nott!”

Potter. Theo banished the impulse to simply crumple again, and rushed after Potter as they turned a corner and moved towards the center of Diagon Alley. Theo hadn’t known exactly what would happen if the ritual was successful, if they would step into the bodies of the replicas with the replicas taking over afterwards, or—

“Theodore! There you are.”

Or if we would seem to disappear and then come back to take our place one last time. Theo reached out his hands and clasped Elizabeth’s, drinking in her face, the fine blue eyes and high arched eyebrows and dark hair that she kept in a long sweep draping down her back. This was the last time he would touch her like this.

It was worth it, to keep her from becoming the bloodied ruin he had sat beside for hours in the dark the afternoon it had happened.

“Yes, here I am, darling,” he said, and held out his arm for her. “I’ve decided I don’t fancy shopping in Diagon Alley this afternoon. Would you like to go home early?”

“Does this fancy have to do with hearing something?”

Elizabeth’s voice was still the same low, thrilling contralto, but her eyes were locked on Theo’s face. He nodded. “It may have.” There were still people who believed that Theo had been a Death Eater like his father, never mind his lack of Mark or even an arrest after the war, and attempted to ambush him in one way or another.

Elizabeth nodded back, her face grim. “Then let’s go.” She grabbed his arm, and Theo led her to the nearest Apparition point, trying to memorize the warmth of her fingers on his skin.

It occurred to him that it was profoundly unfair that Pensieve memories wouldn’t preserve physical sensations like this.

When they’d Apparated to the front gates of Nott House, Theo held her in his arms for a moment, drowning in the scent of her, the feel of her hair around his hands, the warmth of her body and the way she clutched at him. He was tempted to spend the fifty-five minutes he had left making love to her, trying to absorb absolutely everything he could one last time.

But he drew back with a shake of his head. If he did that, he would lose track of time, and he couldn’t bear to see Elizabeth’s eyes go cold as she stared at him and saw a stranger. He was trying to spare her pain, not give her a different kind.

“I’m going back to Diagon Alley,” he said quietly. “I need to make sure that no one else gets caught up in whatever plot McLaggen is trying this time.” Cormac McLaggen couldn’t let it go that Theo had patented a potion they were both working on first, and was always trying this kind of thing. It was a believable excuse. “Promise me that you’ll stay behind wards in the house?”

“Theodore, what is going on?”

“I promise I’ll tell you later,” Theo said softly. He could only hope that the replicas would have all the necessary memories. But if they didn’t, well, there would always be a possible handy excuse, like Theo having been hit by a Confundus Charm. He traced Elizabeth’s cheek with one finger. “Promise me?”

Elizabeth stared at him hard, and then sighed. “All right. I promise.” She lifted herself on her tiptoes to kiss him.

Theo embraced her one more time, with an arm around her waist and one hand on the back of her neck, and watched until she was behind the gates and had waved to him. Then he turned and Apparated.

He needed to make sure that Potter kept his family and friends safe. He owed him a debt—he would never have been able to come back to the exact time and with the exact requirements of the ritual granted if not for Potter’s strength in magic and his Parseltongue—and what he owed, he paid.

– – – –

Theo found Potter again at twenty minutes after noon. And because he was married to a Weasley, of course, Theo also found him in the middle of an argument.

“Harry, I am not going home now! We haven’t got half of Jamie’s school supplies yet!”

“Gin, all I’m asking you is for us to go to Hogsmeade—”

“No!”

That seemed to be a chorus of several voices, probably not only Potter’s wife but all his children. Theo grimaced, braced himself, and turned the corner.

Potter was standing in front of his family, looking harassed. Weasley—both the man and the woman—were glaring at him, their faces red. His three children were gathered around their mother, all frowning so hard that Theo felt their frowns as a force of their own in the discussion. Granger stood a little way behind them with her own children, her gaze intent on Potter.

Theo didn’t think there was any way she could figure it out, not in the limited time she had, and he was about to introduce another wrinkle to the situation that should puzzle everyone further. “Potter,” he said briskly.

Potter swung around to face him. His cheeks were red, too, but something like relief flashed in his eyes as he caught sight of Theo. He nodded. “Nott.”

“Thank you for the warning,” Theo said, keeping one eye on Granger and one on Potter. He would have to hope that Potter picked up on his diversion tactic fast enough to play along. Well, at least Granger was the only one they really had to worry about figuring it out. The Weasleys were too thick, and the children too young. “If I’d known what Cormac McLaggen intended, I never would have brought my wife here today. As it is, I’ve escorted her safely home.”

“You’re welcome, Nott,” Potter said, and gave him a small smile.

“What? What warning about McLaggen?”

There. Granger was helping them rather than hindering. Theo half-turned towards her, then glanced back at Potter. “You didn’t tell them?”

“I didn’t think it was worth bothering about, since he isn’t targeting my family.”

Oh, very good. “I have heard some rumors swirling about how he hates you, too, though. Something about Hogwarts and feeling like he was tricked out of the Gryffindor Keeper position?” Theo shrugged and arranged an expression of concern on his face. “Of course, his hatred for me is deeper, but I think that you would do well to tell them.”

“Harry James Potter, you tell me right now.”

Weasley the younger’s rage was also easy to direct, Theo thought, at least when she thought someone else had done something wrong.

Potter turned to her, the picture of contrition. Theo nudged his estimate of the man’s acting abilities upwards. “I really thought it wasn’t worth talking about the rumors, Gin. You know that McLaggen’s always been a bit of a git. I just thought—well, better safe than sorry, you know?”

“You wanted us to go to Hogsmeade without telling us why.”

“Well, yeah—”

“You could have told us why.”

“And you should have trusted me!”

Theo could see this becoming the kind of argument that would last past the point that they had to change the timeline, so he intervened. “We heard that McLaggen was planning an assassination at least,” he said coolly. “Of my wife. And while there was nothing so specific when it came to what he was planning to do to Potter’s family and friends…I do agree with your husband, Mrs. Potter, that it would be better if you went to Hogsmeade.”

Weasley turned away from glaring at Potter and glared at him. Theo bore it well enough, because no one in the world except Elizabeth mattered to him, and she wasn’t here right now. Weasley examined him minutely, and then glanced back at Granger. “What do you think, Hermione?”

“I think that I don’t want to stand around here arguing all day when we could be buying Jamie’s school supplies and then going to have lunch,” Ron Weasley interjected. “Let’s go to Hogsmeade. Maybe this rumor is real, maybe it isn’t, but there’s no reason to keep standing here and arguing about it.”

Theo didn’t so far forget himself as to smile at Weasley, but it was definitely the cleverest he’d ever heard someone from that family be. “Remember that I thought it credible enough to take my wife home,” he said lightly.

“And then come back yourself?” Granger demanded.

“The rumor said he was aiming to harm her, not me.”

“And the same about you, Hermione, and Gin and the kids,” Potter put in, gesturing with one hand. “Come on. Yes, maybe it’s nothing, but do we have to parade around Diagon Alley and act as though we don’t care about painting targets on our kids’ backs merely to spite McLaggen?”

“No one ever tries to paint a target on my back,” Ron Weasley complained.

Granger was glancing at her children, and her face softened, Theo was glad to see. “Yes, well, McLaggen was rather an—unpleasant to me during our sixth year,” she admitted. “I have a hard time believing his grudge would take the form of murder, but there’s no point in taking a chance. Come on, Rose, Hugo. Let’s go to Hogsmeade.”

Her children groaned and complained, but Granger was already shepherding them towards the far end of the alley where an Apparition point awaited. Theo was immensely relieved to see Ron Weasley going with them.

He turned to Potter and his family.

“We are going to have words about this later, Harry, and why you didn’t tell us,” Weasley muttered, but she turned and followed in Granger’s wake. Jamie, the oldest and the one who would be going to Hogwarts this year, if Theo remembered correctly, trailed her, also complaining. His little sister skipped along in his wake.

Meanwhile, Potter fiercely hugged the second boy, the one with wild hair like his who had died in the attack. “Follow your mum, Al. I’ll catch up in a minute. I just need to talk to Nott here.”

The boy cast Potter a skeptical glance so perfect that Theo felt his lips twitch. It seemed that he had got all the intelligence and Slytherin traits in that family. But he nodded and went after his mother and siblings.

Potter straightened and shook his shoulders, seeming to settle invisible ruffled feathers. Then he turned and nodded to Theo. “Thanks, Nott.”

“I thought you might need help,” Theo said quietly, and tried his best not to sound condescending, because Gryffindors were sensitive to that kind of thing. “Is there anything else that you’re going to do?”

“I don’t know everyone who died in that incident,” Potter said, and turned and headed for Quality Quidditch Supplies. “But I owe it to them to at least warn the shop owners about that stupid duel.”

Theo inclined his head. “I’m going back to spend the last twenty minutes or so I have with Elizabeth.”

“Understood, Nott.”

Theo watched Potter’s back for a moment, and contemplated the self-sacrificing idiocy it would take to give up the last minutes one would ever have with one’s family for the sake of strangers. Then again, that was why Potter was an Auror and he wasn’t. Theo backed up until he was at an Apparition point and Apparated home.

– – – –

When it was one minute to the point that he would be replaced by his replica, and the air around him was starting to feel stretched and expectant, Theo managed to convince Elizabeth he needed to use the loo and stepped out of the sitting room where they’d been. He did go into the small bathroom on the first floor and leaned against the wall for a second, closing his eyes.

The shine of her eyes, the feel of her hand clasped in his, that he would never see or feel again.

And the sounds of the old house around him, the memories of chasing flying horses from portrait to portrait, the smell of books in the library, the feel of carpet beneath his feet…

Theo shuddered. There was an enormous drain of magic from him, and he had to go. He would be a stranger in the house to Elizabeth and his other self in a moment, and he still needed to gather a buried cache of Galleons from the edge of the grounds, one of the many his father had established for the sake of a rainy day.

Now, it’s flooding, Theo thought, and cast a Disillusionment Charm on himself before he slipped out of the bathroom. He could hear soft voices coming from the sitting room, his own and Elizabeth’s, entwining as they laughed.

You made your decision. There’s no going back.

Theo nodded, and walked out of the house, unstopped by wards or house-elves, which at least for right now seemed to confuse him with his double. The edge of the grounds backed up on a small wood that filled with blossoms and light in the spring. It had been the one indulgence his father had ever allowed himself. Theo thought it was because the wood had reminded his father of Theo’s mother.

Theo knelt and unburied the Galleons, slipped them into an expanded robe pocket, and looked back once. Nott House shone serenely in the sunlight, home to someone else now. From this moment forwards, what “Theodore Nott” did would belong to his replica, and Theo’s actions would be those of someone else, unremarkable to anyone even if they noticed the coincidence of the name.

He was no longer Elizabeth’s husband. He was no longer a Death Eater’s son.

Theo nodded and decided that no matter how he ultimately came to feel about those, it was worth it to also have given up being Elizabeth’s widower.

– – – –

He had arranged to meet Potter in the alley nearest Quality Quidditch Supplies, although part of Theo had been convinced that Potter wouldn’t show up. Perhaps he would try to stay with his wife and children after all, despite the fact that as far as they were concerned, after two minutes to one this afternoon, he would be a stranger.

But Potter was waiting for him, his head lifting as he spied Theo. He nodded to him and fell into step beside him as they walked into the main alley.

“Successful, then?” Theo murmured, and felt like smacking himself a second later. Obviously Potter had been, or the portion of Diagon Alley in front of Quality Quidditch Supplies would have been littered with glass and the screaming and dying. But just as he had left behind the Theodore Nott who was a Death Eater’s son and a Slytherin and who had to judge every weakness he revealed by that, perhaps he had left behind the one who had to scold himself for stating the obvious.

That felt as if that could be…very freeing.

“Yes,” Potter said, and gave him a half-smile. He was looking around them as they walked down the street, but Theo didn’t know how much of that was paranoia about another possible accident happening and how much was because people might have mobbed him if they still thought he was Harry Potter. “I explained to the owners that I’d overheard two teenagers talking about a plot to steal one of their Firebolt Sevens and cause a diversion with a duel to accomplish it. After that, they were watching every kid who came in there like a hawk.”

Theo bit back the correction “like an Augurey” that had risen to his lips. He didn’t have to do that anymore, either. “What do you want to do now?”

Potter sighed a little. “I have enough Galleons with me to pay for food and rent for about a month, assuming that we find a flat in Knockturn Alley or the like. I’m not sure what to do long-term, though. Being an Auror is all I ever trained for.”

“And I haven’t had to work, given my money.”

Potter started to answer, then glanced at him. “That’s not the same as your not having worked.”

Theo felt a smile stretch his lips that he didn’t try to stop. At least he wasn’t stuck with someone who was utterly oblivious. “Yes, well, I did brew and sell some potions. And I have a few caches of Potions ingredients stored here and there under Preservation Charms, ones I doubt my other self will miss or check at all. I can start making and selling them again.”

“I never knew you sold potions.”

“Not the kind that were taught in Snape’s class.”

Potter went from casually striding to walking on what seemed to be his toes in seconds. His eyes cut sideways to Theo. “Dark ones, then?” he asked, in what might have been a casual tone if you were deaf, ignorant of the politics in Britain during the last twenty years, and distracted by a chattering child.

“Dark ones, yes.” Theo tilted his head at Potter, wondering if they were going to be the ones dueling now. “The Draught of Living Death, the Instant Alteration Potion, Veritaserum Maxima, Eternal Insomnia Draught—”

“Wait,” Potter interrupted, looking confused. “None of those are illegal.”

“I think you need to learn the difference between illegal and Dark.” Theo shrugged. “The Draught of Living Death can be fed to someone against their will and put them to sleep for months. The Instant Alteration Potion can be used by the drinker to change something about themselves that they don’t like, of course, but can also be used to change someone else. There’s an antidote, or I think that one would be illegal. Veritaserum Maxima lasts for days. Eternal Insomnia is often used as a curse on an enemy.”

“Why aren’t they illegal, then?”

“Powerful people find them convenient.”

Potter frowned some more as they walked towards Knockturn Alley. Theo thought Potter was right that they would stand the best chance of finding a flat they could afford for rent there. Maybe even a small house, although from what Theo knew of houses in Knockturn Alley, they tended to be ramshackle affairs assembled from larger buildings or old places that were too much trouble to knock down.

“I—I don’t want you brewing potions like that anymore if we’re going to live together,” Potter said, clearing his throat noisily as they rounded the first corner that separated Knockturn Alley from Diagon Alley.

“That’s one of our few reliable sources of income cut off, then,” Theo said, as neutrally as he could. “What would you think should replace it?”

Potter narrowed his eyes at him. “I have extensive experience in the Aurors—”

“Which you can’t tell anyone about here. Unless you know a way to fake paperwork from another country’s branch of the Aurors?”

Potter ran a hand through his hair, which did absolutely nothing for it. “No. I don’t have any idea how to do that.”

Theo nodded and looked around. They were attracting some attention, although at least, thank Merlin, Potter wasn’t wearing Auror robes, which would have guaranteed all sorts of unfriendly attention right away. Theo fixed his eyes idly on one of the hags who was staring at him, and she decided to find something else to look at.

“There are businesses here that would pay you to act as a skilled dueler,” Theo said casually. “Either teaching people who aren’t allowed to enter the Aurors for some reason, or who failed out of Hogwarts. Or young children the basics of Defense, before they go to Hogwarts.”

“And is that the only thing someone might ask me to do?”

Potter was better than Theo had thought at noticing lies of omission. He turned his head and looked at him. “No. Someone might also ask you to curse someone else that they can’t, or hurt them with offensive spells because they enjoy it.”

“What?”

“I know, you’re going to say in a minute that you don’t want to be an assassin, and—”

“No, no. The last part.” Potter was flushed from the bottom of his throat to the top of his forehead, and Theo suspected the blush extended much further down. “Someone would—there are people who enjoy that kind of thing?”

“My wife enjoys that kind of thing.” Theo laughed at the expression that twisted Potter’s face then. “Poor, sheltered, naïve little Potter.”

“I never—I just—I don’t—” Potter stopped and visibly struggled to find words. Theo stopped beside him and hoped that he didn’t have to do too much protection of Potter from the unsavory elements of Knockturn Alley.

“I’ve just seen so many people hurt by those spells,” Potter whispered, “that it’s hard for me to understand how someone could want to undergo them willingly.”

Again, Potter had surprised Theo. That was both more measured and more sensible a reaction than he would have thought. He eyed him, and then nodded. “Fair enough. And I’m not saying that someone definitely would ask you to do it. Just that it might be a natural consequence of being known as a skilled dueler in Knockturn Alley.”

Potter nodded back. Then he said, “And do you have skills beyond Potions?”

“Of course. I also have some Galleons that I dug up from one of the caches that I buried near Nott House. My replica won’t have need of all of them. I know where a few others are that my father left behind, as well.”

“I didn’t ask if treasure-hunting was one of your skills.”

“I can duel about as well as an average person in their thirties, I suppose. I’m good at telling spoiled Potions ingredients from fresh ones. I like to catalogue things. I might look for a job in one of the bookshops here.”

Theo wondered for a moment if Potter would object to that, too, seeing as the bookshops probably sold some Dark Arts texts. His jaw firmed for a moment as if he were going to. Then he shook his head and visibly restrained himself, maybe because he remembered that he had been the one to suggest a Knockturn Alley flat. “All right. Let’s see what there is.”

“Agreed. And it would be best for both of us if you let me be the one asking the questions, Potter.”

After another moment, Potter grudgingly nodded.

– – – –

“And you expect us to believe that this sofa was not Transfigured from a pile of rags?”

Theo could almost sense Potter’s urge to shout from behind him. He probably assumed that bargaining with the person who would potentially rent a flat to them was supposed to be more polite.

But Theo knew how these things worked. He might not be much like his father, but that didn’t mean Theo couldn’t learn from him. And if they didn’t bargain over obvious scams like this one, there was every chance that they would look weak to people on Knockturn Alley, and would have to spend weeks fending off attacks and raids and other nonsense.

Theo twitched a hand to Potter behind his back and smiled at the hag who had shown them this flat. “Well?”

“I expect you can put it right again when it reverts.” The hag’s eyes darted to the wand strapped to Theo’s arm.

“I expect you expect that,” Theo agreed. “But, of course, you should also consider what I’m capable of doing to you.”

It sounded as if Potter was actually taking a breath to shout this time, but the hag cackled with appreciation, and the breath apparently came out in a whoosh. Theo ignored that as best he could and continued bargaining.

When he finished, the hag had agreed to rent the flat to them for one Galleon per fortnight, provided that Theo and Harry provided their own security. Theo was glad enough of that; the pathetic lock on the door wouldn’t stand up to a determined third-year Hufflepuff, and there were no wards currently. The hag could claim that was for “the convenience of people moving in and out” all she liked. It was an open invitation to robbery even more than the lock.

Theo paid the hag the first month’s rent and then stood there looking around as she stumped out the door. The flat was a dim, poky set of three rooms: one a bathroom, one a rudimentary kitchen, one a large room that had obviously been divided into partitions with curtains or the like in the past, given the hooks Theo could see in the ceiling. The cabinet doors were crooked. The loo worked, but begrudgingly. There was a bathtub with feet that looked as if they might come to life and rake them like a cat’s claws, but no shower. And the walls looked as if a dragon had thrown up on them.

“This place?” Potter asked.

Theo glanced over his shoulder. Potter was still a little red in the face, but Theo supposed he should count his blessings. It had probably been years since Potter had had to resist shouting when he saw something that upset him. “You have a better idea?”

“No, but I thought…” Potter shook his head. “Never mind.”

“Thought it would be bigger?” Theo asked sweetly as he cast Reparo at a few of the cabinet doors. They shimmered and rearranged themselves to actually show a smooth front to the world instead of bare shelves. Then he turned to the walls. “Nicer?”

“Maybe.”

“Are you any good at Color-Changing Spells? Come here and help me with this.”

– – – –

Despite the inauspicious beginning, Potter had calmed down by the time that Theo led him out to get food. They walked down the middle of Knockturn Alley with their wands in their hands and their hoods pulled up. As impossible as it would be for someone to recognize their faces and connect them to Theo Nott or Harry Potter given the way the time travel ritual had functioned, Theo wasn’t eager to stand out by walking around bare-faced.

Then a scrawny girl darted out in front of them, cupped her hand at Theo’s wand, and hit him with a blast of wandless magic that nearly pulled it free.

Theo closed his hand around the wand and held steady, giving her a cold, unimpressed look. Admittedly, the way the hood was pulled up somewhat muted the impact of that, but it did make her pale and step back a little.

Potter was fumbling at what was probably his coin purse. Theo stepped on his foot.

“What?” Potter asked from the corner of his mouth.

“She came after my wand,” Theo said, watching the girl. She had already turned and limped towards a gap between shops where a smaller alley wound off Knockturn. “Not my money. She’ll only respect strong targets, and if you give her money, you’re marking yourself as softhearted and a fine target.”

Potter blinked, but his hand dropped away from his coins, and he had the sense to argue with Theo in a low voice. “I am compassionate.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s the right bloody thing to do, Nott!”

Theo shook his head and continued to lead Potter in the direction of the small market he remembered being held in Knockturn on Saturdays once he was sure the girl didn’t intend to come back and didn’t have compatriots. “It was the right thing for someone who was powerful and respected and rich and went shopping in Diagon Alley to do. It’s not right for someone who lives in Knockturn Alley, where no one even knows who he is.”

Potter once again drew in his breath to argue and then said nothing. So he can be taught, Theo thought, but had the sense not to say it aloud.

– – – –

Potter seemed both horrified and captivated by the market, which was a series of booths sheltered, at the most, with a few curtains and some wards on the money. There were animals crouching in cages, bubbling cauldrons of stew in which multiple people dipped long wooden spoons, fruit speckled with flies and worse, trays of toenails and fingernails and hair clippings, and a smell that Theo had to cast a charm on his nose to make himself ignore.

“What are they doing with the puffskeins?” Potter said in an undertone as Theo stuffed the peaches he’d bought—after cleansing them and checking for common diseases—into a small bag. Potter nodded at the cage a few stalls down, where the small creatures crouched together.

“Guess.”

“I—they can’t be eating them.”

“Stewing them. I understand they’re quite good.” Theo smiled at him over his shoulder and led the way to the next stall, where one of the cleaner vendors waited behind a set of trays crowded with slices of meat.

“That’s…” Potter’s voice trailed off.

Theo shrugged at him. “Some people like them, and some people need them, and some people eat them because they don’t have the money to afford much else. I understand that the Ministry barely ever sent you into Knockturn Alley unless it was to investigate Borgin and Burke’s or locate a place where some high-profile criminal was hiding?” He made sure to keep his voice down. Talking about the Ministry in the middle of Knockturn Alley would get too many ears listening to them, and while Theo wasn’t above making some alliances here, he didn’t want the wrong kind of attention.

Potter was quiet. Theo nodded and faced the butcher again. The old man, a warlock with more tufts of hair left than he had teeth, sneered at him. “What you looking at?”

“Testing,” Theo murmured, and swished his wand. The meat on the tray lit up with a variety of colors: blue for beef, red for chicken, yellow for rat, and several others. Potter was staring at him. Theo nodded to the single slice of beef and one of the few chicken pieces. “We’ll take those.”

“Two Galleons.”

Theo leaned in. “And how much is it if I tell your potential buyers what that is?” He nodded at the piece of meat in the bottom lefthand corner of the tray. Physically, it looked identical to the piece of beef Theo wanted to buy, but it sparkled white under the spell.

The butcher swallowed and looked for a second as if he might try a plea for sympathy, but he lowered his head. “Fine. Eleven Sickles.”

Theo paid and walked away with the beef and chicken. He weighed the bag in his hand for a moment and decided they had enough for today. Neither of them would be eating as well as they had for a while, and honestly, establishing a reputation as wealthy and well-fed wasn’t what you wanted in Knockturn Alley, anyway.

“What was it, Nott?”

“The meat on the tray?” It took Theo’s mind a moment to return to what Potter probably meant; he’d been thinking that it was too bad the butcher hadn’t had duck. Theo would have enjoyed that. “Unicorn.”

Potter stopped walking, from the sound. Theo snorted a little and kept moving. He could understand Potter’s disgust, but he wasn’t about to stand out here in the middle of the crowd waiting for him to digest a revelation.

“That’s disgusting,” Potter whispered, catching up again.

“Why do you think I didn’t buy it?”

“No, I mean—” Potter swallowed and cleared his throat. “Not disgusting to eat, disgusting to contemplate.”

Theo nodded. He never particularly liked to think about the ways that unicorns were slaughtered. “Anyway, let’s get home.”

“Shouldn’t we let someone know…?”

Theo stopped and turned around. Potter had his hands clenched, and his eyes were red-rimmed. That surprised Theo a little. He had expected to at least notice if Potter was weeping.

“Who?” Theo asked gently. “We don’t have any information about who slaughtered the unicorn, or who sold it to the butcher. It might be the butcher himself, but we don’t know any details. And what would be your instinct, as an Auror, if someone came out of Knockturn Alley and reported a crime like this?”

“I didn’t know crimes like this happened!”

“Come on, Potter, you know well enough what I mean.”

Potter set his jaw, and Theo concealed a loud sigh. Life would be so tedious if Potter acted as though everything had to be literal for him to understand it. But a man with that little mental flexibility would never have had the courage to contemplate the time travel ritual that had brought them here, Theo knew.

Finally, Potter nodded.

“You don’t have the standing with law enforcement that you did before, either, to be automatically believed,” Theo said. “You know you don’t. And that loss of power and influence is something we’ll both have to get used to, along with the loss of…other things.”

Potter glanced away. But he didn’t balk at following Theo back to the flat, and at the moment, considering everything, Theo was prepared to be grateful for that level of cooperation.

Chapter Three

Harry lost control in bed that night.

Their “beds” were simple pallets made of Transfigured, broken chair legs and covered with their robes. Nott had said it would do until they could get something else, and Harry could see that. He’d slept on less comfortable things, certainly, even in the past few years, when he’d had to spend the night somewhere on a case.

Harry lay beneath his own outer robe, covered with a Warming Charm, and swallowed back the sobs again and again. He hardly thought Nott would be a sympathetic audience. He just had to get used to what had happened. At least Al and Ron were alive again, and that was all he could ask for.

Even more than that, they wouldn’t even have the sense that anything was lost. Harry had seen his replica forming to accompany Ginny, the kids, and Ron and Hermione in Hogsmeade, after he had stayed as long as he’d dared. He’d stepped out of the way into an alley and heard nothing but Ginny chattering away about whether Lily needed new robes.

And he’d heard his own voice, low and tolerant and amused, answering.

No one would notice any difference. Ron and Hermione would still have their best friend, Ginny her husband, Al and Jamie and Lily their father. Nott had assured him that the replica would form with perfect memories, too, never noticing a gap between the entrance into Diagon Alley and their decision to go to Hogsmeade.

No one would, except them.

Harry rolled over and buried his head in his robes. It didn’t matter. The sobs were working their way up his throat, and the tears crawled down his cheeks. He held his breath, and tried to stutter out the weeping to make it sound like he was just breathing normally, sleeping. Nott was just on the other side of the curtain they’d conjured and drawn across the middle of the room. He could still be awake.

If he heard…

Harry wasn’t sure what he would do, but he curled up tighter anyway, and did his best to weep into his hands.

He didn’t know how long that had continued before the curtain went reeling back on the hooks they’d strung it on. Harry turned on his side, groping for his wand on the floor next to the pallet. If Nott had come with scorn or taunts, then Harry would hex him and at least manage to feel a bit better.

“It’s all right, Potter.”

Nott’s words were almost emotionless, blurred as they were with sleep. But he dropped into a crouch next to Harry’s pallet, and reached out to lay a hand on Harry’s shoulder.

Harry lay there stiffly beneath it. He had never been good at this, he thought. Even Ginny knew better than to touch him after he’d had a nightmare or a bad case. He would go and sleep in their guest room, the way he had in those terrible days after Al’s death, and meet her the next morning with a cheerful smile.

But Nott didn’t try to come up with soothing words or pretend nothing was happening. He sat there, yawning occasionally, hand locked on Harry’s shoulder. Even when Harry bunched his muscles and rolled a little, Nott didn’t release him.

It was as if Harry had been drifting in a sea of black water, and seen a sturdy rock in front of him. He reached out and grabbed it, and then he wasn’t drifting anymore.

Nott remained sitting there as Harry stopped shaking. He lay still, and finally, Nott stood up with a gesture that might have been a nod or a wave, and then slipped back to his pallet on the other side of the room. With a wave of his wand, the curtain between them drifted up and hung back in place as if it had never been removed.

But Harry knew it had been. And that made all the difference.

– – – –

“I was thinking that we could begin scouting the alley today,” Nott said over breakfast, which was toast and marmalade and scrambled eggs. Nott had made sure the eggs were actually from a chicken using some spell that was like the one he had cast at the butcher’s, and Harry had cooked them. Merlin knew he felt pretty useless otherwise. At least the walls of the flat were a mixture of dark greens and blues now.

Harry nodded. “You want me to look for someone who would hire me as a duelist or a teacher?”

“If you can, without giving yourself away.” Nott sat back and gave him a long, critical glance over the cup of the tea that they’d also bought in the market. “If you can, try to look less like an Auror.”

Harry bristled a little. “I only had the one set of robes when we came back, but they’re not Auror robes—”

“I didn’t mean that, Potter. I mean that you walk as though you’re ready to pounce on someone, and you stare at people like you’re expecting them to break a law in front of you at any second.”

Harry blinked. “I don’t know what you mean by that, either, so I don’t know how to stop it.”

Nott gave a slight grimace that Harry supposed might mean he was thinking. “Well, not all of it’s a bad idea. You need to know how to protect yourself in Knockturn Alley, so you can retain that stride, I suppose. But you have to stop glaring at people. Learn to avert your eyes, mind your own business. And can you do something about your cloak?”

Harry stared at him. “What cloak? I didn’t bring one.” He would have slept under it last night if he had.

Nott’s eyes widened a little, but he wiped all expression off his face in the next moment, so Harry supposed that he hadn’t meant to look as surprised as he did. “You haven’t heard the term cloak used for a wizard’s power before? It—goes behind you, mostly. It’s invisible, but people who are sensitive or alert or paranoid can sense it. Yours streams. If you could mask that, you’d have more of a chance to pass through the alley safely.”

Harry felt extraordinarily stupid. “I thought I was sensitive to magic, but I’ve never felt something like that.”

Nott drew his wand. Harry tensed against the immediate impulse to draw his. Nott hadn’t actually been a Death Eater, he reminded himself, and he had helped Harry. It would be stupid to get upset at him now.

“If you’d permit me, I’d like to cast a spell on you,” Nott said. “May I?”

“Your word that it won’t cause me more than slight pain.”

Nott eyed him again “It won’t cause you any pain.”

Harry nodded, and watched as Nott sketched his wand through patterns in the air that were completely unfamiliar. Harry frowned. Damn, he really had thought he was smart, but maybe he had only been educated in certain channels…

Nott watched as the spell, whatever it was, presumably surrounded Harry with some kind of visible effect. Then he sighed and put his wand away, pinching his nose.

“You’ve never sensed it because your cloak goes in front of you,” he said flatly. “It attunes you to smaller manifestations of magic than normal, like a…” He waved his hand.

“A spell being cast to silence someone or block a sound,” Harry said, because that was an example from the last case he had worked. The last case he ever would work, as an Auror.

He swallowed against that realization and kept focusing on Nott. He really did need to learn this stuff. Letting his own sorrow blot it out would be stupid.

Nott bobbed his head slowly. “And that means that you don’t feel other people’s cloaks, because you sense the smaller spells before their power would reach you, and you can’t easily control your own.”

Harry licked his lips. “Sorry?”

“It might work to our advantage. Give me a moment to think.”

Harry allowed him that moment and more, sipping his tea and trying not to think, himself. He had to survive in a new world, without Ginny and the kids, without Ron and Hermione, without the comforting routine of the Auror department that he’d wrapped around himself like a—like a cloak for nearly twenty years now. And he had to figure out facts that were apparently second nature to people like Nott and key to surviving in Knockturn Alley, which had an extra level of difficulty to them because Harry was, once again, a freak.

At least I’m not alone.

“All right,” Nott said at last. “We don’t go looking for trouble, but we also don’t try to hide the way I was planning on. If you have it…” For a moment, a smile like a ghost of pain crossed his lips. “Flaunt it, as my Elizabeth would say. So we’ll put up heavier wards around this place, and make it known that a pair of predators live here.”

“Wouldn’t that possibly draw attention we don’t want, too? From the Aurors?”

Nott shrugged. “It might, but honestly, how much did your lot bother about Knockturn Alley when you were part of them?”

“Not much, you’re right.” For the most part, Harry could only remember organized raids into Knockturn Alley when they’d received word that some large smuggling operation was happening there, or when there were reports of a notorious criminal like Fenrir Greyback in the area. Rumors of unknown powerful people, no matter how intriguing they might be, wouldn’t be enough to make the Aurors show up.

Another idea occurred to him, and he glanced at Nott. “How much power would it take to make people’s mouths shut completely? To make sure they weren’t spreading rumors?”

Nott sat back and considered him, putting down his empty teacup next to his plate. “Normally, I would say there’s no amount of it that would be enough. Make people fear us to the point of terrified silence, and someone would get resentful eventually and talk. Money would be better, but we don’t have enough.”

“I meant,” Harry said, and struggled to keep the snappish tone from his voice, “doing enough favors for people in Knockturn that there’s no way they would want to betray us to the Aurors because they don’t want to lose their source of help.”

Nott’s eyes widened a touch. Then he nodded slowly. “That might work,” he said, with a wealth of doubt in his voice.

“With the amount of power I have?”

Nott analyzed him from the corner of his eye, then again with his head tilted and an openly appraising look on his face. Harry waited it out. They still didn’t know each other very well. Old ideas from school were probably still operating, and he suspected Nott was struggling not to tell him that he was a Gryffindor softhead.

“I think so,” Nott said finally, and smiled.

– – – –

Harry stepped out of the flat and noticed the way that heads snapped around on the street, staring at him.

Harry ignored the stares as best as he could—it was easier now after years of being Head Auror—and walked down the steps. By the time he reached the pavement, heads had appeared at windows, too, and people were leaning out of shops down the alley to stare.

Harry stood there and let his power, what Nott had called his cloak, flare out around him. He actually hadn’t done that often, although not because he’d known about things like people able to sense him coming. It had just seemed like bad manners.

But now, he permitted it to flow out around him, and saw more than one person sigh, more than one head lift and pair of nostrils wrinkle. He supposed that werewolves, or people with more-than-human senses, living in Knockturn Alley wasn’t much of a surprise.

“I wanted to say that I’m new here,” Harry said, “but I know already that I can’t really hide from you. So I’m willing to trade magic for favors. If you have a wound you can’t heal yourself, or you need wards put up on a building and can’t afford the prices that everyone else charges, come to me. I’ll take payment in information as well as favors. And certain foods are better than others.”

He heard a low-voiced buzz of speculation arise from some of the spectators. Nott had warned him he would. This was Knockturn Alley. People’s minds would go to the blood requirements of a vampire or the raw meat requirements of a full Veela before they would turn to simply preferring one of kind of food over another.

And so Harry had phrased it that way deliberately, as self-protection.

Someone stepped forwards to confront him. Harry watched her in interest, especially the way she walked. She had the hooked nose and warts of a hag, but her stride was light and balanced, making Harry suspect she was hiding more than just a hunchback under those baggy black robes of hers.

She halted near him and stared at him with watery blue eyes—well, one watery blue eye. The other was brown and glowing. It didn’t move, but Harry would have wagered a small amount of money that it was a magical eye like Moody’s had been.

“Why d’you make the bargain?” she demanded, in an accent thicker than Hagrid’s. “When y’could take what y’want?”

Harry shrugged. “I need allies to defend my back, and my neighbors not to try and betray me to the Aurors because they’re angry about what I took,” he said flatly. “Power isn’t everything. It’s just another bargaining chip. You don’t have to participate if you don’t want to.” He kept his voice as calm as possible, so that he was both telling the truth and making it clear that he didn’t need any one person in particular to ally with him.

The hag, or whoever she really was, squinted at him again and moved her hand a little. Harry tracked the movement in case she was going for a wand. On the other hand, he made out the claws on the tips of her fingernails and thought she probably wasn’t.

“A test? What d’you say to a test?”

“As long as it’s a test that pays me whether I succeed or fail,” Harry responded. He had already hardened his heart to the necessity of this. Nott had warned him that he couldn’t go around doing favors for free or people would just take advantage or strike at the perceived weakness. And come to that, doing something like this was much better than becoming an assassin or the—other possibilities Nott had suggested.

The hag, or whoever she was, studied him with both eyes for some moments, then snorted and turned on her heel. “Come with me, yer.”

Harry followed, ignoring the way that the some of the people behind him closed in. According to Nott, most of the people living here were those who had no right or ability to use wands, or were legally outcast, like werewolves, or on the run from the law. Harry wasn’t truly worried about a strike to the back.

He kept his stride unhurried and confident as he and his guide turned down a few of the smaller alleys that ran off Knockturn. The place she led him to was unexpectedly bare and open, a space of dirt and a few weeds where Harry had so far seen nothing but streets and buildings. He cast a glance at the hag.

She gestured with one clawed hand at the barren space. “Was cursed,” she said shortly. “Nothing can build, nothing can grow. Remove the curse.”

Harry took a deep breath and resisted the urge to protest that he wasn’t a Curse-Breaker. He had set himself up for this. He crouched down and studied the soil, drawing on his magic-sensing to figure out what was going on.

It was—

It was spoiled.

Harry rocked back on his haunches and then scrambled to his feet, only not covering his nose because he had an audience. He made a face, half-spitting out the musk that crawled along his tongue. It was the—the olfactory equivalent of biting into a mushy apple, he thought.

“What happened?” he whispered.

“Cursed the ground,” the hag said unhelpfully. “Nothing can build, nothing can grow.” She folded her arms and tapped her claws against her elbow. “Going to do something about it, yer?”

Harry nodded slowly. He wanted to demand more details, but that would probably also make him look weak in the way Nott was talking about. Not a great beginning to the new career and network of alliances he was hoping to establish.

He drew his wand, which produced the noise of scuffling from behind him. Harry ignored it, since it didn’t seem to be coming closer. He crouched down again, ready for the smell that met him this time, and darted his power out in little probing tests of the curse. The sensation of spikes came back to him. This curse had been settled in the ground a long, long time, and it guarded its heart.

Harry paused. Now that was an odd thought. And he had found that odd thoughts, at least when dealing with curses and ancient artifacts and the kind of rituals that mad wizards and witches tried to practice, were valuable.

Harry prowled along the borders of the spoiled piece of ground, a square about twenty paces on a side. He glanced at the weeds that were growing in it, wondering why they were there if the hag was right and “nothing could grow.” He bent down near one and sniffed and watched as it moved slowly back and forth, in air with no wind.

Harry combined that with the thought he’d had about the heart and nodded. He gestured to the hag, who had followed him. “You’ll want to stand back.”

She peered at him and uttered a liquid chuckle. “Long, long time since someone cared for old Min’s safety.” But she moved until she was standing a good three meters back from the spoiled ground, after which she didn’t seem inclined to move any further.

Harry shrugged. It was her funeral.

And yours, if you don’t do this right.

Harry aimed his wand straight at the center of the spoiled ground and spat between clenched teeth, “Diffindo!”

Someone made a noise behind him that might have been a shocked gasp or the beginning of a contemptuous laugh. It didn’t matter, not when Harry’s spell sliced straight into the middle of the ground and struck a target.

There was a hoarse sound, and all the “weeds” convulsed and waved at once. A blunt worm-shaped head clad in what looked like scales the color of shit jerked up through the ground. The weeds, splayed feet or maybe tentacles, waved back and forth and then rolled as the beast tried to get them beneath it. Harry aimed his wand at it and once again cast towards what he thought might be the heart.

Grey sludge began to run from the cut, but its body was still hidden under the dirt, and Harry couldn’t see what he’d hit. He thought someone might be screaming, but he heard nothing but the ringing that filled his ears whenever he was in the midst of battle. This time, he aimed his Cutting Curse for the head.

The worm-like creature flowed or rippled towards him. He hadn’t wounded it yet. Harry pushed away a brief temptation to use the Killing Curse—what was wrong with him?—and hit it again, this time with a Blasting Curse.

That opened a rent in its back, and at last the thing seemed to collapse into two halves. Harry still couldn’t see its whole body under its long cover of dirt, but the head was drooping and seemed to be tilted in a different direction than the tail that he could see like a hump pressing against the surface.

Harry took a deep breath and shook his head. He’d seen that kind of creature before, but he hadn’t recognized the smell. The one he’d seen might not have been as far gone as this—thing—rotting as it slept.

“What is it?” Min demanded, coming back towards him and crouching for a moment as if she would touch the thing. Harry shook his head, and she backed up, but continued to stare at the creature. “What’d y’do?”

“I don’t know what they call themselves, if they even speak,” Harry said. “I call them rotworms. I’ve seen them several times in the—in the job I used to do.” No good spoiling everything now by saying that he’d been an Auror. “They come from another realm, I suppose you’d say. Through magical gates. They make a lair under any place where magical creatures or people live and start draining it of life by sucking the magic into themselves. I’ve never seen one like this, but I suppose someone must have cursed it to sleep at some point. And then it started spoiling the ground, since it couldn’t reach anything else.”

“How’d you know what it was?” called someone from their audience.

Harry turned around and saw what seemed to be half Knockturn Alley there. He ignored the way his skin crawled. No one had cursed him in the back, after all. “I saw its legs sticking through the soil, and I thought it was odd that weeds were growing in a place where supposedly nothing could grow.”

“And that was it?” Min wrinkled her lips at him in an oddly cat-like gesture.

“I got you the results,” Harry said, and gestured at the dead rotworm, which was already beginning to dissolve into the same sludge that its wounds had let go. “Are you going to argue with how I did it?”

There was a sweep of muttering back and forth, but no one actually showed up to say they would argue. Harry turned to Min. “I passed your test. What information or favor do I get in return?”

“An alliance, with old Min.” Min dipped her head, the glowing magical eye fastened on Harry while she turned her head slightly to watch the crowd with the ordinary one. “That enough for you?”

“Yes,” Harry said, and smiled.

Chapter Four

“I think we could use space for a shop.”

Potter looked up and considered Theo thoughtfully. It was late September, and their flat would have been considerably colder if not for the Warming Charms that they’d tucked into the corners and around the window. Potter was leaning back in his chair across the table, reading a week-old copy of the Daily Prophet that Min had given him.

Theo would be the first to admit the old creature-blood was a valuable ally, although it drove Theo silently mad that he couldn’t figure out if she was a human under a curse, a human who had deliberately chosen to dabble in Dark magic, a hag with Veela blood, or something else entirely. In Knockturn Alley, it was never easy to tell, and the questions weren’t asked.

But she had made sure that they had a regular source of news if anything unusual rippled through the Alley, and the other inhabitants were much more eager to come to them and hire Potter for curse-breaking projects and Theo for his potions with Min’s word behind them. So Theo kept his curiosity private.

“I can see why it would be useful for you to have a bigger space to brew,” Potter said. At the moment, Theo’s makeshift Potions lab—which he had promised he wouldn’t use to brew illegal potions—occupied one half of a small building in the alley that was mostly given over to a menagerie filled with scabby animals. “But where are we going to get the money? And what contributions do you think I could make to the shop?”

“You don’t think it would be good to have a place for people to hire you that’s more impressive than this flat?”

“Where are we going to get the money, Nott?” Potter simply repeated, as patient as steel.

“Min told me about someone she wants dead.”

Potter immediately dropped his feet from the table legs, ignoring the way that the chair screeched as it fell back to the floor. “Are you insane?” he asked flatly, his magic coiling in close to him and then streaming out again. It still fascinated Theo, both the way that it traveled, which was so different from any other person’s magic he’d ever seen, and the way that Potter had remained unaware of it for so long. “I told you I wouldn’t be an assassin.”

“You didn’t ask who it is.”

“It doesn’t—”

“It’s Fenrir Greyback.”

Potter’s eyes widened, and for long moments, the dance of his magic went still. Then he said quietly, “But he would be ancient by now, even for someone who isn’t a werewolf fugitive. There’s no way that he’s still alive.”

Theo smiled, enjoying the impact the revelation had on Potter. “The only werewolf you knew well was one who fought his curse. The ones who embrace it, who let some traits of the wolf pass into their human bodies? They can easily double their lifespans. And you know that they gave up the hunt for him years ago.”

Potter nodded, his eyes gazing past Theo. Theo took the moment to just look at him, and luxuriate in the fact that someone who had been such an enemy of everyone Theo had once been—Slytherin, morally flexible person, Death Eater’s son—could listen to him and trust him the way Potter did.

Of course, the circumstances were hardly normal. But it also hardly mattered.

“All right,” Potter whispered. “Does she have any certain information about him?” His eyes focused again, snapping back to Theo. “And will we be able to withstand the scrutiny if we collect the bounty on him?”

Theo half-smiled. “They’ll likely be embarrassed that someone who wasn’t an Auror or part of the Ministry captured him, Potter. And you can claim the bounty anonymously. I don’t think they’ll be spreading the word of what we did around any time soon.”

“Except to the people who matter.”

The ones in Knockturn Alley, he meant. Theo nodded. “Exactly.”

“All right.” Potter seemed to have chilled and coiled sometime in the last few minutes, perhaps gathering his magic into him. “Let’s do it.”

– – – –

Min’s information had them starting near the northern end of Knockturn Alley, where the buildings petered out into shacks and temporary constructions held together with magic. Theo swallowed a potion that would make him far more sensitive to the scents of wolves and tilted his head up. His nostrils twitched and fluttered, sorting the messages from the air.

There. He touched Potter’s shoulder and pointed down a path—you could call it that, if you really stretched the meaning—that ventured between piles of rubbish. Potter nodded and took the lead.

Theo walked behind Potter, thoughtfully touching his wand and then one of the three potions slung across his chest in an old warmaster’s bandolier that had been buried with the cache of Galleons he’d taken. He hoped he wouldn’t have to use them, because he couldn’t easily replace them, but needs must when hunting an ancient, insane werewolf.

Potter, who had been walking cat-soft in front of Theo, abruptly lifted a hand. Theo froze obediently. Potter swirled his wand in a deft pattern, using a wordless spell that channeled the air current towards them. Theo thought at first it was in deference to his temporarily enhanced sense of smell, but then he heard the voices speaking, low and rough.

“—don’t believe you can find anyone here who wants to be a werewolf.”

“There’s always the desperate.”

Theo snarled silently at the sound of that thick voice. He saw tension invade Potter’s frame ahead of him, and although he didn’t move, his magic gathered close around him and grew claws that Theo could feel.

“And once someone’s a lycanthrope and they realize that not even the dregs of Knockturn Alley will accept them,” Greyback went on, “you’ll see what I can do with them.”

Potter’s jaw had firmed. Theo knew that Potter had still harbored reservations about this plan, and probably would have preferred to capture Greyback instead of kill him. But his intending to turn people and possibly raise a werewolf army changed things.

“Especially if I turn their children.” Greyback gave a hoarse, heavy laugh, and then there was the sound of claws clicking on the stone. “Although the two waiting to start some kind of fight with me aren’t children.”

Theo was already moving, dodging to the side to avoid either a charge from Greyback or, as it turned out, the Cruciatus that came flying down the middle of the path. Potter had leaped out and was trading spells furiously. Theo wasn’t sure if that was with Greyback or whoever he had been talking to.

Time to even the odds. Theo reached up and removed the stoppered potion from the highest pouch of the bandolier, uncapping it and whispering, “Harry Potter,” then tossing the flask into the air.

It didn’t really matter where it landed. The power of this potion lay in the fumes, not the liquid, which faded more rapidly than dew as it fell. The fumes lashed out and encircled Potter, lending extra speed and power to his limbs.

Theo emerged from the path and saw the man who had been helping Greyback, a short, sandy-haired wizard, on the ground and bleeding from a wound that crossed most of his torso. Potter and Greyback were trading blows so fast that Theo could hardly see them, and he exhaled a little in relief. He hadn’t been sure the potion would make Potter fast enough to match a werewolf’s strikes, but it seemed it had.

Theo stalked slowly around the outskirts of the battle, waiting for a chance to use a spell himself. As it stood, he would have too much chance of hitting Potter if he cast blindly.

At last, Potter and Greyback broke apart from each other. Potter breathed as if he had plague, his eyes wide, his face red. The potion did sometimes have that side-effect, but it shouldn’t be anything permanent, Theo judged. And Greyback was in much worse shape, with one hand gone and his right hanging from a strip of skin and blood flowing from a dozen small cuts and nicks.

Theo cast at once, a spell that would entangle Greyback in a net and bind him to the ground. In deference to Potter’s sensibilities, he really would prefer to capture the werewolf. And there was a bounty for delivering Greyback alive, too, although not as much as the one for delivering him dead.

Greyback spun towards Theo with a roar, so that the net missed, and charged him.

Theo raised a Dark Shield in front of himself without a thought. It deflected any attacks back on the attacker, and Greyback screamed as he hit it and it filled him with the kind of pain that he would have caused if he’d slammed into Theo.

Potter hit the werewolf with a curse from the side. Theo stared with his mouth open as Greyback sprawled on the ground with blood running out of his sides and chest. He had never seen something like that before.

He was just turning to ask Potter what that was when Greyback heaved himself back to his feet.

Theo backed up, his shield floating with him, and maintained his concentration as fiercely as he could. Greyback didn’t pay him the slightest best of attention, though. With things Theo didn’t want to think about sliding out of his belly and tripping him up, he lunged at Potter with his mouth open.

You have to stop him! Theo shrieked in his head, thinking of what it would mean for Potter to be turned into a werewolf. But he didn’t even know whether he was shouting at Potter or himself.

As it happened, it didn’t matter. Potter hit Greyback in the side of the neck with an overpowered Cutting Curse. Or, at least, it must have been overpowered, the way it decapitated Greyback and made his head fly to land, bouncing, a few meters away.

The clearest and most ringing silence Theo had ever heard descended.

He let go of his Dark Shield with a grimace and a flex of his hand. Potter considered him for a second, but didn’t say a word about the spell. Then again, the curse he’d used to cut Greyback open was Dark Arts if Theo had ever seen it. “Do we take the whole body to the Ministry? Or just the head?”

“The head…ought to do.” Theo fought off the temptation to be sick, and the next temptation, and the next one. He bent over, dry heaving, hands clasped around his stomach, wand poking him in what felt like the liver.

Potter’s hand fell to rest on his shoulder, heavy and warm. He said nothing, but turned so that he was positioned between Theo and Greyback’s remains. Theo gagged, but got himself under control and managed to stand up, blinking and nodding.

“I don’t know why I reacted so badly to that,” he muttered, irritated with himself. “I’ve seen decapitated creatures of all kinds before. Some of them I’ve used as Potions ingredients.”

“Did you ever decapitate them yourself? And were any of them humanoid?”

Theo focused on the rock-dry tone in Potter’s voice to ground himself. He shook his head and opened his eyes. “No,” he said, keeping his gaze firmly away from the corner into which Greyback’s head had bounced.

Of course, that left him little to look at other than Potter, but Potter didn’t sneer at him or make any reference to his weakness, the way Theo had thought for sure a battle-hardened Auror would do to anyone less hardened. He simply nodded, squeezed Theo’s shoulder once, and stepped back. “Do you want me to take him in?”

“Yes.” Theo didn’t add the word “please,” because there were some levels he wouldn’t stoop to, but Potter just nodded again.

“Okay.” He turned away, then paused. Standing with his back to Theo, he said, “I didn’t react well, either, the first time I cast a spell that took a human being’s life. She would have killed the child she was using as a hostage and probably Ron, too, but…”

He didn’t finish the sentence, striding over and muttering a charm that Theo recognized as a Preservation one, followed by one that would create a stasis box of sorts around the head.

Theo said nothing until he saw that Potter was getting ready to Apparate. Then he forced his lips to work and muttered, “Thanks.”

Potter glanced back, nothing in his eyes except understanding, and nodded, then vanished with a crack.

When he stepped around him, Theo saw that Potter had cleaned up Greyback’s body, too, and presumably taken Greyback’s injured accomplice with him. There was nothing Theo had to do except go back to their flat and wait for Potter to arrive with the bounty money.

Surprisingly, Theo found that he entirely trusted Potter to do that.

Chapter Five

“So, about that shop.”

Harry snorted a little as he glanced up. It had been three days since the battle with Greyback, and Nott had been quiet and mostly avoiding Harry. Then again, it hadn’t been difficult. Nott had been brewing, and Harry had a few regular clients who’d asked for dueling lessons, more than ever now since he’d taken down the rotworm and he and Nott had taken down Greyback and his accomplice in public.

And Harry had understood why Nott might have hesitated. Sure, he was the son of a Death Eater, and not inexperienced with the seedier side of life in Knockturn Alley, as he’d proven. But he hadn’t the kind of violent life or training that Harry had, and often it took people time to become used to the fact that Harry was, in some ways, a trained killer.

Or an Auror, which sometimes is the same thing.

“We can have one if you want,” Harry said. “But I think it would be better if it was just for your potions.”

“Why?” Nott leaned forwards over the table and stared at him. Dinner was duck tonight, which Nott had been delighted to find in the market. “You fought equally to earn the gold. You should get equal return from the investment.”

Harry paused. He hadn’t expected Nott to be so invested in the idea of fairness.

“I know we’re different people,” Nott said, impatiently, probably catching that pause. “I also know that we only have each other.”

Harry nodded. That was true enough. He had sometimes ventured to the edge of Diagon Alley with the idea that if he could catch a glimpse of Ginny or the kids or the Weasleys shopping, it wouldn’t be the same as creepily stalking them. But he had always turned away before he’d waited five minutes.

The other Harry Potter was with them. They hadn’t suffered any loss. His wound might still be healing over, but theirs had never existed, and he had no right to inflict his presence on them.

“I wouldn’t really be able to use any shop space. It’s not as though I’m going to be selling anything to anyone. I don’t make wands or dueling robes.”

“And you couldn’t use a space that you could outfit to your own needs for a duel? I heard you muttering the other day about how little and cramped some of the spaces they expect you to teach them in are.”

Harry hesitated. Yes, that was true. Some of the flats he was called to made his and Nott’s look spacious. And when he wanted to teach someone to run and dodge and shield and cast countercurses, it was worse than useless if they were upset about their curtains getting scorched or their floor pockmarked.

“You know we can afford it,” Nott said, and leaned forwards with his hands flat on the table, his eyes glinting. “We could afford one of the nicer spaces right on the edge of Diagon Alley, even.”

“We could also afford a larger flat,” Harry said, meeting and holding Nott’s eyes.

Nott blinked and sat back a little. “Yes, of course we could,” he agreed a second later. “I hadn’t thought of that. Do you want one more than a shop space?”

Harry gave it serious thought, looking off to the side so that he could just gaze at the blank walls they hit with regular Color-Changing Charms. Looking at Nott often made him unable to make a decision like a regular person. The man was…intense.

And, well, this deserved consideration. But Harry didn’t want to move to a larger flat simply to have more space. He had lived in many places more cramped than this, spent almost ten years inside one in particular. Nott hadn’t complained. Harry assumed he could live with it.

But he should ask to make sure. He hadn’t known Nott at all before they stepped back in time, after all.

“Are you getting tired of living on top of me?” he asked, turning around in the chair again. “I assumed you were. I know you must have had plenty of space in the house where you did live.”

Nott’s eyes widened a little. Then he said, “Too much. Elizabeth and I barely used a quarter of it.”

“But still more rooms than here.” Harry spun his hand around his head. “If you’re cramped or want more, just tell me.”

“What about you?”

“I can live with it.”

“So can I.” Nott shrugged, perhaps because he thought the shrug in his voice hadn’t come across clearly enough. “Honestly, I think we should acquire the shop space so we can acquire the Galleons to acquire a much nicer flat, not one that’s merely a little bigger.”

Harry half-smiled. “All right. That makes sense. I just wanted to make sure that you weren’t getting sick of sharing bedroom and bathroom space every day.”

“Bedroom space? With our magnificent curtain hung between us?”

Harry laughed, one of the first times he could remember really doing that with wholehearted mirth since they’d come back to the past. Nott’s eyes widened a little. Maybe he hadn’t thought the joke worth that response.

Harry shrugged off that suspicion. He and Nott were getting along perfectly well, he thought, better than Harry would ever have suspected for two people who had barely known each other before traveling back. So long as they continued getting on well, there was no reason to change the way he acted.

“Whatever you want.”

– – – –

“Is something wrong, Nott?”

Nott had acted as though something was wrong ever since they entered the potential shop space that might become theirs. The space worked well enough, to Harry’s eyes. It was in a building perhaps a stone’s throw from Diagon Alley, not far from Borgin and Burke’s, and was entirely made of stone except for the single window. It felt cavernous without anything except a counter in the back, but Harry suspected they would fill up the space soon enough with cauldrons, finished potions, ingredients if Nott wanted to sell those, and the division they would need to make between the potions portion of the shop and the dueling room.

Nott, though, had been looking continually at Harry during the tour. Harry wondered if there was some feature the building was lacking that Nott thought Harry wanted, but it was hard to say anything in front of the owner going on and on about how wonderful things were. At least the woman had backed out a little to give them room to consider the purchase.

“You haven’t said whether this suits you.”

“Oh. Sorry. Yeah, it does.”

“But you don’t want…” Nott trailed off. Harry watched him, puzzled. He had the odd feeling that Nott was searching for words, and he didn’t think it was because Nott didn’t know the names of the technical dueling apparatus Harry might have considered if they were richer.

“Just a wall between the spaces, and sound-proofing so my students and I don’t disturb your brewing,” Harry said reassuringly. “Maybe some extra insulation so if we slam into the wall, that doesn’t disturb your cauldrons, either.”

Nott folded his arms. “Do you ever demand anything for yourself, Potter?”

“I just did?”

“That’s for your clients, for the shop to make money, for you to be sure that you’re not disturbing my brewing. Not for you.”

Harry frowned, truly perplexed. “And the improvements and modifications you’ve been talking about to this space aren’t for you?”

“They…look, Potter, some of the things I want just because they’ll make it more convenient, all right? Like the counters and tables I was talking about with sunken spaces for the cauldrons to sit in. They’re not technically necessary to get the brews right. I just like them.”

“But that will still make the shop better and make you more likely to earn money.”

Nott stared at him in what seemed to be sheer frustration. Harry stared back. In general, he tried to be as accommodating as possible, and he thought he and Nott had got along better than a lot of pairs who might have had to tolerate each other in such a difficult situation. But he truly didn’t understand what the problem was now.

“Never mind,” Nott snapped, and spun around to call the owner of the shop back in.

Harry rolled his eyes at Nott’s back and went to investigate the floor and ceiling at what he thought must be the halfway point of the shop, to see how easy it would be to install a partition between the spaces.

– – – –

The owl that landed on their windowsill that evening made Harry instantly cautious. Not only was it a much more distinctive bird—black with dashes of white—than the anonymous barn owls and tawnies most people in Knockturn used to send post, the parchment it bore was sealed with some kind of golden seal Harry didn’t recognize.

Nott entered the flat to find Harry casting detection spells at the letter. “What’s going on?” he asked, sitting down at the table and watching. The owl clicked its beak at Nott in annoyance, as if it had thought Harry was living alone and didn’t want an audience for whatever would happen when he opened the letter.

“This owl delivered this letter, and it has a seal on it. And the owl isn’t going away.” Harry glared at the bird just in case that had stopped being true, only to get a twist of its head and another click.

“How many detection spells have you tried?”

“All the standard ones. There’s nothing.”

“Probably safe to open, then.” Nott’s voice was distracted as he sorted through a sheaf of parchment he’d brought in with him and laid on the table. “Probably…someone who’s trying to puff themselves up by using formality where informality would do.”

That relaxed Harry a little. Hell, for all he knew, this was still someone who lived in Knockturn Alley, but was a recent exile, like them, and hadn’t realized it was a bad idea to use their own distinctive owl and seal. Harry reached down and picked up the parchment, one eye on the bird’s beak and talons. The owl just leaned a little forwards as if it could will him into reading the letter faster.

The bottom fell out of Harry’s stomach.

To the Defeaters of Greyback:

I am writing this letter out of desperation and in hopes that my owl can deliver it without a formal name. I have nowhere else to turn.

I am an Auror who has always had trouble with the practical aspects of the job, but I managed the wandwork and the like until I was cursed. The curse was slow-acting, and I didn’t notice it at first. Then I thought it had only affected the speed of my spells. It’s become obvious that it’s affected my ability to cast offensive and defensive spells, too. I can manage ordinary household charms and the like with my normal level of power, but no shields, curses, or countercurses.

Please. I have always wanted to be an Auror. This is the only thing I do want. And people who might have helped me if I wasn’t Muggleborn have turned me away, citing my lack of money and—although they don’t put it this way—my lack of connections.

You defeated the undefeatable when you brought Greyback in. Perhaps you can defeat this curse, too. At least try. I can’t pay you in money, but I’m happy to offer you whatever favor you wish.

Dennis Creevey.

Harry swore under his breath and held out the letter to Nott when he extended a hand. Then he turned and stared out the window at the run-down buildings of Knockturn Alley, ignoring the owl’s impatiently clicking beak.

Dennis.

He had become an Auror because Harry had. Oh, he had talked about wanting to honor his brother, since Colin had talked about being an Auror, too, but the way he’d looked at Harry every day during his training had told Harry the truth. Harry had tried to walk the line between friendship and favoritism until Dennis was trained, and then he had done the best he could to support him.

Now, when Dennis would look at him and see a stranger…

Harry closed his eyes and rubbed a hand over his face. He might have told himself that he hadn’t tried to go into Diagon Alley or get a job at the Ministry because he didn’t want to stand the chance of confusing other people, but that wasn’t the truth. He trusted Nott’s calculation that no one would be able to recognize them as who they had once been. The replicas created by the ritual had fully taken their place.

He hadn’t done it because he was afraid of getting hurt, of feeling so much pain when he met old friends’ eyes and his family’s eyes and saw nothing but politeness there that he wouldn’t be able to breathe.

“It’s a bit irritating that he doesn’t say which curse,” Nott muttered. “That would make this easier.”

Harry jerked himself back to the present, beyond grateful for Nott’s practical clear-headedness. It grounded him like a splash of cold water. “I know. But he might not know. That would fit with his not knowing how to cure it.”

“Then you want to meet with him?”

“I can’t do anything else. But I’d appreciate some tutoring in any knowledge you have on curses before I go.”

Nott stared at him so long that Harry thought he must have offended his prickly pureblood pride for some reason. But then Nott said, “We’re both going, Potter.”

“What? But you didn’t know Dennis. He wasn’t your friend.”

“You’re going,” Nott said, his voice low and inflexible as iron. “I don’t want to be separated from you. Besides, it’ll be easier to help him if we’re both there.”

Harry found it oddly hard to breathe. He stared at Nott, who stared back and looked a little bored. Maybe he was. Maybe this didn’t matter to him for the reasons Harry had thought it did, or maybe he didn’t know or remember that Dennis was Muggleborn.

Or maybe, they were closer than Harry had thought.

Harry took a deep breath and said, “You know what’s ridiculous?”

Nott arched an eyebrow.

“We’ve spent months together in a world where we’re the only two who really know who we are—were—and we’ll probably spend years like that. And neither of us is charging off to get his own space, and we fight well together, and—look, what I’m saying it’s that it’s bloody ridiculous for you to go on calling me Potter. Call me Harry.”

Nott sat up and stared at him. Harry met his eyes and tried to look as encouraging as he could.

Nott half-shook his head, but not in denial, and said softly, “Call me Theo.”

Harry smiled, and it felt like the most sincere smile he’d given in a long, long time.

Chapter Six

It was still hard to think of “Potter” as “Harry,” but Theo was learning.

Among other things, “Harry” had a brilliant smile that he turned on Theo half the time now, as though he approved of Theo a lot more when he had permission to use his first name. And “Harry” would slump half-asleep in his chair before tea in the mornings, and woke Theo from nightmares, and laughed at Theo’s jokes without the sharp reluctance he’d shown before, as if laughing at the jokes of a Death Eater’s son would corrupt him.

“Potter” was the persona who still appeared sometimes when he wanted to brood on things, or the passive martyr who tried to delegate all decisions about the shop to Theo. To Theo’s delight, “Harry” was willing to argue with him.

“You don’t need that big a space for a cauldron, Theo, Merlin.”

“If you could see some of the cauldrons I intend to purchase, you wouldn’t say that.”

Harry crossed his arms and frowned at Theo. Theo grinned back. He thought he saw an answering grin tug at the corner of Harry’s lips for a second before he shook it away and focused on Theo.

“What will you use cauldrons that large for?”

“Brewing a major batch of a potion that takes a long time, mostly, so that we’ll have it on hand when someone comes and asks. A potion like Veritaserum or Felix Felicis,” Theo added, when he saw Harry open his mouth. He had known that Harry would demand specific examples.

Harry paused. “Selling Veritaserum is illegal without a Ministry license. And I think they passed a similar law for Felix Felicis a few years ago. Admittedly, I wasn’t really paying attention at the time…”

Theo leaned forwards a little and smiled at Harry. They were standing on either side of the newly-installed Potions table from each other, and Harry was staring at him as if he thought Theo would come springing over it. “Oh? And are you going to go to the Ministry about it?”

There was a long moment that sang with tension, at least in Theo’s blood. This was the test. Would Harry manage to overcome some of the prejudices in favor of legality that he had acquired over the years? Or would he fall back into the routine and demand that Theo not brew some of the potions that could make them the biggest money?

Harry rolled his eyes. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

Theo felt his smile widen. Then he said, “I might get a cauldron even bigger than this, actually,” and spread his arms as wide as he could. “Big enough for someone to fit in—”

“As long as you don’t use it for a resurrection ritual.”

Theo blinked in shock, and then realized what Harry must be referring to. He hadn’t known a huge cauldron was part of it. He paused for a moment, and then inclined his head. “I’m sorry you went through that.”

“It was a joke. I have to be allowed to joke about my own past, or who’s going to do it?” Harry shook his head and walked towards the point they had decided would divide Theo’s brewing section from Harry’s dueling one. “I have to admit that we still need someone to cast the soundproofing charms. I tried them myself, but I wasn’t great at them.”

“I thought you were great at all kinds of magic. That’s certainly what the Ministry put about.”

Harry laughed softly and glanced over his shoulder at Theo. Theo felt a little shuddery shiver of warmth move through him. Was it happiness? It felt a lot like happiness.

“They just said that to terrify the Dark wizards I hunted. I’m better at the big flashy things than the tiny charms that need a lot of finesse.”

Theo opened his mouth to say that Harry had his own kind of finesse, but ended up closing it again. He had to admit he didn’t know why he had almost said that, and he didn’t know what he would have meant.

“Theo?”

Theo shook his head and stepped forwards. “I can handle some of the soundproofing charms myself, but we’ll look into hiring someone for the more delicate work. Probably someone outside Knockturn Alley. Are we going to meet with Creevey tonight?”

Harry’s eyes darkened, which was like the sun going behind clouds, as far as Theo was concerned. “Tonight, at eleven.”

Theo had known that, but he had wanted an excuse to concentrate on something else, to knock his mind away from his own unanswered question. He wished now he hadn’t asked, given the intense, haunted expression in Harry’s eyes as he turned to stare at the wall.

But he had spoken, and apologizing for it would be stupid. Theo began casting the soundproofing charms.

– – – –

“Auror Creevey?”

Harry’s voice was too low and empathetic, as far as Theo was concerned. He nudged Harry with an elbow in the side. Harry didn’t seem to feel it, concentrated as he was on the pathetic figure who huddled under a cloak near a little-used entrance of the Ministry.

The figure started and looked up at them. Theo saw how pale his face was and had to swallow.

“The defeaters of Greyback?” Creevey whispered. Theo hadn’t been worried about Creevey recognizing him, even without the time travel magic, but a jolt of relief went through him when Creevey stared at Harry without recognition. “You came to help me?”

“We did.” Harry gave Creevey a caring smile that Theo never would have been able to pull off and sat down on the small stone bench across from his. Theo hovered next to Harry. “You mentioned a curse.”

“Yeah.” Creevey bit his lip. “Can you cast the Potentam Revelio charm?”

Theo drew back with a startled hiss. Both Harry and Creevey turned to stare at him.

“That—that shows someone’s magic,” Theo said. He knew his voice was shaking, hated it, and still had to speak. “That’s more intimate than sex for a lot of purebloods.”

“Yeah, well, I’m a Muggleborn,” said Creevey, eyes narrowed. “Unless you have some kind of prejudice you want to tell me about?”

“No one here is going to let prejudice stop us from helping you.” Harry had drawn his wand. “I do know the charm, but Th—my partner is right that it’s intimate and I need consent from you to cast it. Do you consent?”

“I do.”

Harry nodded and began to move his wand in the patterns of the spell. Theo glanced away, unable to watch even though he thought he probably should to help figure out what was wrong with Creevey.

But it was just—

There were some things that were modest, and some that weren’t.

As it turned out, Harry didn’t need his help. Theo saw the golden-white glow of the image forming and squeezed his eyes shut, and heard Harry hiss. “That’s the Magic-Devouring Curse, Auror Creevey. You’re sure you don’t know who cast it on you?”

“I think I might know,” Creevey said hoarsely. “But she’s dead. And I didn’t think it could be the Magic-Devourer. I mean, it’s advanced so slowly…”

Theo took a deep breath and turned around, bracing himself for the sight of something he normally never would have looked at. He had to face it, so that he could help Harry figure out how to cure what sounded like a variant of the curse.

He stared when he saw it. The pattern of Creevey’s magic had manifested as a picture of golden-white mountains, and the pattern of the curse was laid over them as a chunky grey cloud, eating pieces of the mountains from the inside out. One “peak” was almost gone.

Theo’s breath came short, and Harry glanced at him in alarm, starting to rise. Theo shook his head at once, eyes locked on the image.

“Are you all right?” Harry asked quietly. He had shifted as if to partially block the image from Theo or maybe Theo’s face from Creevey, and Theo appreciated that more than he could say, while not being able to accept the gift.

“You’re sure the caster is dead?” Theo asked Creevey.

Creevey frowned. “Yeah. She was Alecto Carrow, and she ran from us for years, but we got her in the end. Surely you must have seen the articles?”

Theo had, actually, although they were from before the accident in Diagon Alley and he hadn’t paid that much attention. Carrow had never been an associate of his father’s. It made no sense that she would know how to cast a curse that, as far as Theo knew, only his father had known how to cast. The Magic-Devourer was something Aurors learned about since Theo’s father had used it in the first war with the Dark Lord, but it was entirely theoretical for most of them.

His father had known it—and one other person.

Theo closed his eyes and took a deep breath. Then he opened them and asked Creevey, “May I cast the charm myself? I know a variant of it that will probably display some of the colors more prominently.”

Creevey seemed to waver for a second, but then thrust out his jaw, maybe because he wanted to prove that he didn’t have problems with the charm. “Yeah, sure, go ahead.”

Theo had to pause for a long moment to make sure his mind was clear and his wrist relaxed. It didn’t help that Harry leaned towards him, eyes wide with the concern that Theo knew he wouldn’t speak in front of Creevey.

Theo gave him a tight smile and moved his wrist carefully, speaking the charm aloud. He hadn’t cast it often enough to be sure of doing it well wordlessly.

For a long moment, he thought nothing would be the result. Then the golden-white image of mountains being eaten by a grey cloud flowed forth from Creevey again, and Theo gritted his teeth against the impulse to look away, stepping forwards so he could stare into the heart of the thing.

Yes. There it is.

Theo waved his wand again, and this time cast a charm that his father had also invented, one that amplified the picture caused by the Magesight Charm until it was nearly as big as the alley behind the Ministry. Both Creevey and Harry gasped as the picture blew up, and Theo stepped back and forth until he could see the almost invisible image hiding behind the grey cloud.

Relief slammed into him. The image wasn’t the one he had thought he would see after all, the image of his other self split by the timeline. Instead, it was an image of Carrow after all.

Theo closed his eyes. His father must have taught her the curse. It wasn’t a comfortable legacy to carry, and less comfortable than ever now that he knew he couldn’t hide at home and would need to be out in Knockturn Alley and other common areas of the magical world among the people that his father had hated for the rest of his life.

But it at least it meant that Theo himself wasn’t part of that legacy.

Harry’s hand grasped his right arm above the elbow. “Theo?” he murmured into his ear.

Theo turned towards him without opening his eyes. “I thought it might have been my father or an associate of his,” he murmured.

Harry seemed to understand without needing to ask for more details. His hand tightened briefly, and then he squeezed Theo’s arm and stepped away.

“Can you cure me?” Creevey asked, raggedly.

Theo opened his eyes and realized that Harry was looking at him. He conjured a smile with some difficulty and turned back to look at Creevey.

“I know the counter,” he said quietly. “I knew the inventor of the spell.”

Creevey’s eyes went wary at once, and he leaned away. “And you think that it’s a good idea for you to cast on me? A pureblood who associates with people like that and probably hates Muggleborns?”

“I’m a pureblood,” Theo agreed quietly, “but I don’t have any particularly strong feelings on Muggleborns.” It was true. He had done what he must to avoid becoming a Death Eater. He hadn’t thought much about Muggleborns from day to day, although he’d snickered when Granger got something wrong in class or Creevey’s older brother had tried to use a camera to take pictures of Harry.

On something like this…

He would never be an Auror, but he felt a compulsion to try and help Creevey as strong as anything that Harry could probably feel, because his father’s spell creation had caused this.

“If he knows, it’s more than what I do,” Harry said quietly when Creevey turned towards him, probably to get some reassurance. Theo wondered idly what kind of aura Harry exuded that made people trust him even when they didn’t know who he was anymore. “I can promise that I’ll be right here and adding my strength to the spell.”

Theo twitched. He wondered for a second if he had betrayed that he wasn’t strong enough to take down the curse, or if Harry would have offered the gift of his magical strength anyway.

The latter, Theo decided, after looking at Harry for a second. Harry’s eyes were mild, but his jaw was clenched.

“Okay,” Creevey said. He sounded tentative now, reeling, and Theo realized abruptly that Creevey had never held much hope when he had committed to asking them. Perhaps he had still thought he would die, and this had been a move born of desperation. “Are we going to—right here? Do I need to lie down?”

Harry glanced at Theo. “Can you start the cure here? Or do we need to take him elsewhere?”

Again Theo was caught by surprise; he had thought Harry would insist on taking Creevey back to their flat. But perhaps he didn’t want to expose their own private place to someone else, even someone he had known in his pervious timeline.

Or maybe he had wanted to ask Theo first.

Theo didn’t particularly want Creevey in their Knockturn shelter unless Harry would give his permission for Theo to Memory Charm Creevey afterwards, which he probably wouldn’t. Theo didn’t want a stranger seeing the smallness of the place where he lived with Harry, or their personal possessions. So he lifted his wand.

“We can do it here,” he said. “Please stand by to lend your strength to the spell.”

Harry closed his eyes. After a moment, he nodded, and a sparkling mass of light that made Harry look like the center of a firework unfolded from him and reached out to skim across Theo’s skin.

Theo choked at the rush of power that filled him, and had to lower his wand hastily so that he wouldn’t just let it splash out onto Creevey and maybe hurt him. It was like riding on a restless Granian, one that wanted to tear the reins out of his hands and gallop away to fulfill what it thought were Theo’s goals.

How did Harry master this all the fucking time?

After long moments during which Theo breathed heavily and he was aware of both Harry and Creevey staring at him with varying degrees of concern, he got his eyes open and the rush of magic under control. He nodded at Harry, said, “That should be enough,” and then turned to Creevey.

His father had designed the curse to need to be peeled away, which was probably why the Healers would have been able to help Creevey. They were used to spells that could either be ended or couldn’t, and when their first efforts had only removed a first layer or so, they had shrugged and given it up as a bad job.

With Theo’s knowledge and Harry’s magic working together to one purpose, it didn’t even take as long as Theo had envisioned. In perhaps ten minutes, cracked shards of grey cursework, looking like frozen paper, were lying on the ground around the bench, and Creevey was doubled over and gasping. Even as Theo straightened and opened his eyes, Creevey passed out.

“Is he all right?” Harry asked sharply as he took a step forwards.

Theo swallowed down the temptation to be sick and nodded. “Yeah. Just magically exhausted from that.”

Harry slumped a little and then glanced at Theo. “And you?”

“It was a powerful magical working.” Theo shrugged a little as he leaned against the wall of the alley. “I’ll recover with a good night’s sleep and a full meal.”

He grunted as Harry got his shoulder under Theo’s arm almost before Theo could finish the sentence, and turned him towards the entrance from the alley. “Then let’s not waste any time getting you that.”

“What about—Creevey?” It was more effort to speak than it should have been, but shock had made Theo ask the question anyway. It seemed unlike Harry to walk away and just leave someone lying there who was asleep and perhaps vulnerable to anyone who happened by.

Harry turned and tossed a casual Shield Charm towards Creevey. It glittered and formed in the air, hovering above him in a wide, half-curved dome. “That will hold long past the morning and ought to protect him. Now, let’s go.”

Theo didn’t object, either to Harry Apparating him back to the stairs to the flat—now that they had proper wards around the whole thing, they couldn’t just pop in and out anymore—or escorting him up the stairs, or getting out the ingredients for a hearty sandwich. Harry did ask, as he was standing by and watching Theo devour the whole mass of pickles, ham, beef, and cheese, “Why didn’t you suggest charging Dennis for the cursebreaking?”

Theo blinked and licked his lips, looking up. Harry was staring at him as if Theo was a fish he was considering having for dinner. Theo tried to sit a little more upright and look less like prey, but it was hard with how exhausted he was. “I—I knew you wouldn’t like it.”

“That was the only reason?”

Theo shrugged, nodded, and went back to eating. Harry continued watching him with silent curiosity, but didn’t act as if he was upset, which Theo counted a win.

Honestly, he never remembered going to bed that night. He just knew that one moment he was eating, and the next moment, he was waking up on his pallet with sunrise streaking in through the windows.

Harry was asleep on his own pallet, although he’d forgotten to pull the curtain that they usually used to divide the sleeping part of the room into halves. Theo rolled over and lay there watching him for a long time.

– – – –

“Did you not suggest charging Dennis for the cursebreaking because you felt guilty?”

Theo turned around in annoyance. “Harry, I’m working with a delicate potion here. Can you warn me before you startle me like that?”

“I waited until I saw you put down the stirring rod,” Harry said. He leaned against the newly installed wall that had gone between Theo’s brewing portion of the shop and Harry’s training portion, arms crossed. “And I know that you don’t start the next stage for five minutes. I just want to talk to you.”

Theo sighed. “Look, I—not exactly. I don’t have the same morals that you do. I know you know that.”

“Right. Which is why I want to know if you didn’t suggest charging Dennis for the cursebreaking because you felt guilty about your father having invented that curse, or taught it to Carrow, or whatever it was he did.”

Theo blinked a little. Then he folded his own arms. “What if I said I didn’t want to talk about it?”

Harry took a step back, as if he thought Theo’s face would look better from another angle. “All right. I’d respect that. Is that what you’re saying?”

Theo stared at Harry in silence. Harry stared back. Every line of his face was familiar after all the hours, days, months they’d spent together in this strange new world where they were the only ones who truly knew each other’s history. And every line was stubborn and infuriating.

Theo’s other friends would have assumed they knew the truth, like Draco. Or tried to pry it from him, like Pansy. Or already been in such tune with him that they would know without having to be told, like Elizabeth.

Elizabeth…

Theo closed his eyes and took a deep, hot breath. Harry retreated a little, from the sound of his footsteps. He would leave if Theo stood here much longer with his eyes closed, Theo knew. Apologize for stepping on a sore sport, turn around, and go.

But Theo didn’t want him to.

Maybe it was because they were the only two people stuck here. But maybe it was also because Harry didn’t know, was bold enough to admit it, and cared enough to ask anyway.

He opened his eyes. Harry was hovering near the door into his part of the shop, but he relaxed and nodded encouragingly when Theo looked at him.

“I had no knowledge of my father having taught that spell to Carrow,” Theo said softly. “My first thought was that my alternate self had cursed Creevey and had become…someone I strove to avoid being.”

“Oh.” Harry hesitated, then crossed the space between them and put his hand gently on Theo’s left shoulder. “I’m sorry. That must have been hard.”

Theo leaned briefly against his touch. He wouldn’t have done it with other Slytherins around, or people like Weasley and Granger, but none of them were here, and none of them ever would be again.

“It was relief that made me decide not to suggest charging Creevey. Not guilt.”

Harry nodded, squeezed Theo’s shoulder once, and turned around to go back into the dueling part of the shop. A second later, Theo heard the door there open, and Harry’s cheerful voice welcoming whoever had come in.

Theo sighed, and stood there in silence for a long time before he reached for his stirring rod again.

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