Reading Time: 99 Minutes

Title: Hidden Resources for Young Men of Quality
Author: MeyariMcFarland
Fandom: Harry Potter
Genre: Contemporary, Family, Fantasy, Humor, Paranormal/Supernatural, Urban Fantasy
Relationship(s): Gen
Content Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Major Character Death, canon child abuse and war, grief and mourning, mental breakdown, Dumbledore bashing
Word Count: 115,299
Summary: Six years into Hogwarts and Harry was well used to being shuffled off to Privet Drive for the summer. Oh, traumatic things happened, great events going on, be a good boy and go back in your fetid little box. Not a lot that Harry could do about it yet, but still looked like Harry had yet another miserable summer aimed right at him. Until a letter came by courier from beyond the grave.
Artist: ani

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Part Two: Arrival of the House of Peverell

10. One Should Always Verify Expectations Have Been Met

One lesson that Anthony Black, soon to be Anthony Peverell if Harry agreed to the protective spell that Chieftain Ragnok had planned, had learned very, very young was that different people had different pain thresholds. Anthony’s tended to be rather high. He’d broken his arm once and not realized that it was broken-broken. Hurt? Of course. But broken? Nah, couldn’t be. It didn’t hurt that much.

A lot of the other kids at Beauxbatons tended to have incredibly, ridiculously, stupidly low pain thresholds. Like, stub a toe and need to go to the infirmary low. Some, like Lacey, had a pain threshold so high that it was terrifying.

No one, no matter how fierce they were, should be able to take a knife to the gut and just be annoyed about their blouse getting bloody.

Of course, Lacey was Lacey and Anthony was always and forever on her side in all things, but she was still terrifying when it came to pain.

Harry took it to a heart-breaking level.

Gringotts’ hospital, not that it was generally called that, was the best place on the planet to receive treatment. The floor gleamed. The white bedding Harry lay on was pristine and completely sterile. Every one of the healers was a dab hand at pain management, sterilization and emergency treatment of every kind of injury or illness.

The Goblins knew that they had to treat their own people, after all. The doctors at St. Mungo’s would’ve curled a lip and walked through puddles of blood rather than treat a Goblin. So, the gently lit hospital room Harry lay in was as state-of-the-art as anything you could find in the Muggle world or in Asia. Unsurprising. The Goblins did learn from the best, always.

Didn’t make it any easier to lean against the smooth-finished gneiss stone wall while watching the Healers murmur over Harry who slept through it all.

“He’ll be all right,” Anthony murmured to Amal who was one of the fretting over a paper cut types. “The potions you insisted on helped. They cushioned him until he could get back. I think he collapsed specifically because he was so exhausted, and it was all over. He finally could.”

In fact, Harry had arrived in an ocean wave, laughed, and then flopped down with a tired groan that turned into true unconsciousness so fast that Anthony’s heart had all but leaped out of his throat.

“That boy,” Amal complained. “I just… He’s been through too much, Anthony. We have to make sure that it doesn’t happen anymore.”

“Agreed,” Anthony said. “Look, I’ll watch over him while the healers work on him. You and your secretary Emily work on gathering up what he’ll need, both on the paperwork side and things like clothes. We’re definitely not letting him keep wearing those rags. Lacey’s already working with the Goblins to create the false trail to show us all arriving in Britain days ago to handle vault issues so that no one will connect us to the great Potter escapade.”

“Good,” Amal said.

Still took another twenty minutes and about a dozen reassurances before Amal could tear himself away from Harry’s bedside. Anthony sighed and stared at their very young, very dramatic, very self-sacrificing new “Lord Peverell”.

Hopefully.

Chieftain Ragnok’s offer, given as he stared at Harry’s sleeping form shortly after Harry got back, had been a surprise.

Every Magi on the planet knew of House Peverell. They were rich. Powerful. Wildly inventive. Hugely gifted magically and generally so quirky that people assumed that they were half-mad. Not like the Blacks, of course.

Blacks were mad-dangerous. Peverells were mad-creative, mad-exciting, mad-look-out!

Which…

Harry Potter fit with perfectly.

He could be a Peverell-born.

Wait a tick. Were there any born-Peverells around anymore? On the Magi side, that is. The Muggle side had died out during WWII, killed by the Nazi’s, though their company continued on offering up wildly inventive new things every few years.

Not… that Anthony could remember. You heard stories. There were always stories of the Peverells. But it was “my cousin’s best friend’s sister’s boyfriend’s uncle” instead of firsthand accounts of interacting with Peverells.

And now, Anthony could become a Peverell instead of a Black. His magic seemed, well, not conflicted. He wasn’t conflicted about the idea of joining Harry in whatever madness he came up with. No, if anything, his magic seemed delighted by the idea of following Harry into Peverell-ness.

Notoriety was no issue. Anthony had carried the name “Black” without the backing of the family magic since he was born. Switching from “probably evil and going to go crazy” to “creative, exciting and dangerous” was fine, just as long as he and Lacey were safe.

Along with Harry, who was going to be so well protected and so loved that he never did that horrible stretched-smile thing while being painfully cheerful. Not happening. Anthony wasn’t going to allow it.

A few days ago, Anthony would’ve said that there was no way that Harry James Potter, Heir Potter and Heir Black, would ever be important to him. The only person that Anthony had was his wonderful, terrifying, threateningly competent wife Lacey. That was fine. After his dad died, well, Lacey was enough until Anthony managed to find a way to contact a Black who had the authority to bring them into the family magic.

Which, well, not easy given that Sirius Black was the heir and he’d been locked up in Azkaban and then been on the run.

And then Sirius Black died.

All chance of him and Lacey getting brought back into the Black family died with Sirius.

The pull to find Sirius hadn’t stopped. It’d been there since Anthony was a little boy. According to Dad, Marius Black, he’d never felt that pull but then Dad had been a squib. He’d been thrown out of the Black family, removed from the infamous tapestry and the family register, at eleven.

No magic, not a Black.

That’s how it had been for the last half-dozen generations. Unfortunately for Anthony, or maybe fortunately, Anthony had been born with magic burgeoning in his soul. He’d been as magical as Dad wasn’t. And he’d been drawn to the Black Family every single day of his life, while being blocked in every single way from contacting them.

Between Dumbledore’s machinations to keep unaffiliated Black relatives and other so-called “dark” kids out of Hogwarts and the Black family member’s very well-known prejudices, Anthony had assumed that he’d never be brought in.

No way. Wouldn’t happen. Just have to deal with the pull on his soul every single minute of every single day. He’d learned to cast with a bit of a twist to his spells because otherwise they went awry, pulled out of true by his magic yearning towards the nearest Black family member.

Anthony’s magic didn’t twist anymore.

It pointed straight at Harry.

Harry had bruises on his arms. He’d clearly fallen multiple times on his portkey adventure across the countryside. Those bruised wrists were so thin, as delicate as twigs with skin stretched paper-thin over wiry muscle and too-brittle bones made chalky by malnutrition and abuse.

“He will survive,” Healer Bannet said eventually. “I’ve taken the liberty of filling his belly with every nutrient and healing potion possible. You’ll want to feed him extensively. Carry food around and just put it in his hands at every opportunity.”

“We will,” Anthony promised. “Emotionally?”

Healer Bannet sighed.

For a Goblin, Healer Bannet was remarkably unattractive. Small pert nose, a mouth with only a couple of fangs instead of all his teeth being sharp shark teeth. Even his hair and his ears were more human than Goblin, legacy of his human mother. By comparison, he made a striking but still not very attractive human.

None of which appeared to matter to Chieftain Ragnok, who’d wooed the man, won the man, and proudly married the man.

Anthony respected that kind of dedication and knowledge of yourself. When you found the right one, you had to grab them and hold on so that no one and nothing could tear you apart.

“He’s entirely too resilient,” Healer Bannet finally said.

“…What?”

Healer Bannet waved a hand at Harry. “Mentally and emotionally, he’s… stable. Confident, excited. Tired, yes, but he knew that was happening. Even asleep, he is focused on the future and all he hopes to build, not on the past and everything that he has endured. You should expect him to bounce back emotionally far more quickly than any of the rest of you.”

“We’re traumatized,” Anthony said because the four of them absolutely were to one degree or another. “He’s… fine?”

Healer Bannet wobbled one hand. “The boy has a great many triggers and issues left behind from his abuse. But they have not broken him. They haven’t come close. He will bounce back. Probably as soon as he wakes up. I would suggest planning for that, frankly.”

“That’s just…. Right,” Anthony sighed. “Thank you, Healer Bannet. How long should we expect him to sleep? When will he be released?”

According to Healer Bannet, three days of sleep seemed unlikely even if that was what Harry desperately needed, but then Harry had pushed himself to his absolute limit. He wouldn’t be released until, at minimum, Healer Bannet had gotten three more nutrient potions into his belly. That was a full 24-hour thing. Healer Bannet fully intended to do everything he could to ensure that Harry got his three days of total rest.

He just didn’t think it would work.

Which was fine. Totally fine. Completely fine. Gave them time to get things working.

Lacey took one look at Anthony a couple hours later and shook her head. “Quit panicking.”

“I’m not panicking,” Anthony protested. “Everything’s fine.”

“It actually is,” Lacey confirmed in that “you’d better believe me” tone that always calmed Anthony down. She hummed as she checked on Harry and then nodded. “Much better. I’ll keep watch. Go eat. Silverclaw and Amal need some input on where we’ll go. I’ve made my opinion clear. They want yours, too.”

Anthony blinked. “My opinion is your opinion, love. I thought everyone knew that.”

Lacey’s quicksilver grin brightened Anthony’s mood the instant she flashed it at him. “They haven’t figured that out yet. Go let them yammer at you for a bit and then agree with me. The options are… very clear.”

Lacey graced Anthony with a quick kiss. Anthony laughed and pulled her into his arms for a half-dozen more kisses. Healer Bannet opened the door and pointedly cleared his throat before they could switch over to longer, deeper kisses, which was annoying but understandable.

Harry was sleeping right there.

The first time Anthony had tried to navigate through Gringotts on his own, he’d gotten horribly lost. Totally turned around, frustrated nearly to the point of tears. It was, according to Lacey and her coworker Bill Weasley, a rite of passage for those who worked or lived in Gringotts.

All the tunnels looked the same.

“Nonsense,” Anthony muttered.

He made his way from the gneiss-walled tunnels around the hospital to the granite-walled tunnels that marked the main thoroughfares through Gringotts. Just as London and Paris had streets, neighborhoods and homes, so Gringotts did, too.

The weavers worked out of tunnels carved from sandstone and reinforced with marble. The smithies were down deep, closer to the heat of the molten core where the stone went metamorphic with grand, twisted swirls in the walls. Up near the surface you always had clear chisel marks because no one bothered smoothing the walls out for Magi who didn’t appreciate such things.

The tunnels and levels didn’t have names, exactly. His and Lacey’s home was in the residential sector that Anthony privately referred to as Red Brick Lane. Silverclaw’s office was two floors up from the Gneiss hospital in the Schist block of offices.

Not that Silverclaw was in his office when Anthony went looking.

He found Silverclaw, Chieftain Ragnok and Amal down deep in the oldest Quartzite block of vaults near the smithies. Silverclaw had his normal sneer on, aimed firmly at Amal who fretted and gnawed on his lip as he looked over the folders on their potential hide-out vaults.

“What’s up?” Anthony asked Chieftain Ragnok. “Lacey said that we have a couple of choices.”

“Two choices,” Amal said before Chieftain Ragnok could even open his mouth. “We have two choices. One is to take a quiet little suite up in the guest section near the hospital. The other is here.”

“Deep is probably good,” Anthony said which automatically rejected the guest suites. “Much more secure.”

“True,” Chieftain Ragnok agreed before Amal could do more fussing. “This is the other option.”

“Emily thinks it’s the best option,” Amal said, gnawing on his lip again. “I’m not so sure. Lacey is certain that it’s right. So, um, we’ll go with whatever you think, Anthony. You and Lacey are going to be Harry’s de facto parents.”

Seriously, Anthony hadn’t expected Amal to be a total mother hen, but he was to a surprising degree. He looked so utterly disappointed that Harry wouldn’t be calling Amal “Dad”, as if the kid wasn’t a couple of years away from being an adult.

“Can we see it?” Anthony asked, casually waving away Amal’s offer of the information packet. “I’d like to see what it feels like.”

“Certainly,” Chieftain Ragnok said as he gently rolled the boulder that functioned as the door of the vault aside. “It’s a very old vault complex with… everything that I think our new Lord Peverell might want.”

The smell of water and green growing things wafted out.

Anthony breathed deep before slowly walking inside to…

…paradise.

Quartz veins spider-webbed through the roof of the absolutely massive cavern, shimmering with magical light that made the cavern look as though it was lit by daylight, not magical light. There was a small lake or a very large pond off on the far side of the cavern. He could just make out what looked like entrances to further caverns beyond the lake.

They weren’t the only ones. There was a sort of balcony along the left side of the cavern that had a series of tunnel openings. Underneath it was wider openings, maybe six meters or so across. Not to mention that there were more openings along the right side of the cavern near to the entrance, all of them dark as night even though they were right there, within easy peeking.

This cavern was filled with a gently rolling meadow with heather and gorse, wildflowers and patches of iris, roses, and what looked like brambles of raspberry and blackberry. There was a thicket of aspen along the edge of the lake and one huge elm in the middle of the room. Its highest branches were dozens upon dozens of meters below the ceiling.

Anthony nodded, heart singing with a sort of relief and joy that he hadn’t expected.

“Here,” Anthony said. “We’ll settle here. Harry will adore it.”

“Done,” Chieftain Ragnok said so smugly that Anthony almost looked away from their new home.

Almost. Yeah, Harry would love this place. Better still, Anthony could see raising kids and grandkids here, living and loving and growing old. It was perfect.

For all of them.

11. Ensuring That All Paperwork Has Been Processed is Vital

Lacey strode calmly through Gringotts’ upper levels with several stacks of paperwork that had to be hand-delivered. Generally, it wasn’t a task that Lacey would take on herself. As a highly skilled curse breaker, she was normally exempt from such menial labor. Her time was always better spent working to remove curses from the items brought in for purification.

No one was doing any proper curse breaking at the moment.

Chieftain Ragnok had thrown not just Gringotts of London but every Gringotts on the planet into a frenzy the instant that Harry portkeyed away on his mad, ill-conceived plan to lure attention away from them. That whole day had felt like chaos. Changing orders, messages flying through the hallways like eagle owls with legal notices to deliver, and unasked questions on every lip.

The lobby was… normal.

Too many arrogant British Magi sneering at the Goblins who held and controlled their money. The flickering candles of the massive crystal chandeliers highlighted every sneer, every pursed set of lips, every look of disdain sent the Goblin’s way.

So stupid. Lacey ignored Gringotts’ customers as much as she could as she strode out the front door and headed down Diagon towards the Ministry. Outside, it was much the same, as it was in the Ministry, too.

“Things have gotten busy over at Gringotts,” Daniel, the Department of Records clerk on the front desk, commented. His face was a shifting mass of features that didn’t quite fit together properly.

“You’ve no idea,” Lacey sighed as she passed over the carefully organized and magically dated records. “So much going on. You’ll want to note that these were filed late with Gringotts. Actually completed today but Gringotts was notified of the situation a bit ago.”

“Situation?” Daniel asked as he flipped open the top folio. He started, suddenly manifesting batwing ears and an elephant’s trunk for a nose, both of which disappeared a moment later. “Oh, goodness. Really?”

“Really,” Lacey confirmed. “House Peverell has some transition issues with the new Lord. They need the specialties available at Gringotts London, so they’re all moving here.”

Daniel, whose nametag now said something indecipherable in a language that hurt Lacey’s brain just to look at, shook his head. “Wow. That’s going to be amazing. Are they good at paperwork or terrible?”

Lacey laughed and flipped a hand at the stack of “overdue” paperwork as if that was a self-evident question. Thankfully, Daniel took it that way which let Lacey escape from the Department of Records without bleeding from the nose, eyes, ears or mouth.

She really didn’t enjoy visiting the Department of Records. Needs must, though. Having all that paperwork in the Department of Records ensured that, when the Ministry and Dumbledore came looking for connections, they would find that House Peverell had been moving for a good month before Harry disappeared.

Hopefully it would be enough.

Lacey made her way on shaky legs back towards street level. Slowly. No reason to waste a chance to listen in on what people were discussing in the Ministry. While Fudge and his cronies were endlessly clueless, a great many of the lower-level employees were sharp as a tack. They frequently knew things long before anyone in power got a whiff of something going on.

“Well, you look like something the cat dragged in,” Gladys from the Aurors support crew commented when she joined Lacey in the elevator.

“Department of Records,” Lacey said, leaning against the back wall and letting her head thunk back. “Managed to avoid a nose bleed but I’ve the devil of a migraine now.”

“Oh, ouch,” Gladys commiserated. “I had to spend a solid twenty minutes talking to one of the clerks last month. Spent three days at St. Mungo’s and then needed another day off lying flat on my back in bed afterwards.”

There were a number of employees that Amelia Bones kept on that Lacey had… questions about. Mad-Eye Moody, for one, should have been retired years ago after the loss of his leg and his eye. But he wasn’t the only one. Several of the Aurors who had desk jobs exclusively really, honestly, should not have been on the payroll.

Like Gladys who spent her days gossiping and officiously ferrying paperwork around the Ministry so that she could ask people questions and then breathlessly share the latest rumors.

“I’m tempted to go have a little lie-down,” Lacey admitted with a wry smile. “Can’t take the time for it, unfortunately, but still very tempted.”

Gladys took the hook like a starving fish. “Are there so many major cursed items to work on right now, then? I’d not heard anything from Arthur.”

“Oh, not at all,” Lacey said as the elevator opened, and they spilled out into the lobby. “All curse breaking has been put on hold. No, there’s a client coming in with a monstrous amount of work for us. The Chieftain is re-prioritizing all our work until we have the initial bow wave under control. It’s already been a bit but I’m hopeful that I’ll get back to my actual job in a week or so.”

“Well,” Gladys breathed, eyes wide. If she’d had a cat’s tail, it would’ve been twitching with curiosity. “Good luck with that.”

“Mm, thank you,” Lacey said.

As Lacey strode off towards the exit to Diagon, she heard Gladys breathlessly gossiping about “huge changes at Gringotts” with Umbridge and one of the Unspeakables. Lacey didn’t smile. Not with the sunshine stabbing through her skull like an ice pick to the brain.

Instead of turning right and heading straight back to Gringotts, she turned left towards Scribbulus. And Slug and Jiggers, of course. Amal had been quite concerned about making sure that Harry had all the nutrient potions he needed to heal up properly.

Brewing them was easy enough. Anthony was a dab had at brewing. The only issue was a sad lack of corks for their rather obnoxious supply of potion vials.

“Didn’t expect to see you out and about at this time of day,” Wesley called from the top of the ladder behind the counter where he looked to be restocking the purple goose quills.

“Big project at work,” Lacey said as she gave the never-ending journals a once-over. “I need a journal specifically for it. Do you have any in dragon hide? Preferably with cotton rag or linen rag paper.”

“Oh, tough one,” Wesley said as he slid down the outer rails of the ladder to thump heavily into the floor, thankfully without tipping backwards onto his arse because that would’ve cracked his skull against the counter. Again.

Lacey sighed. “Already raided?”

“Yeah,” Wesley said with a shrug. “I’ve got a sturdy Ox leather with hemp-rag paper but it’s not so much for notes. The ink bleeds rather badly.”

“No, that won’t do,” Lacey complained. “Drat. All right. What’ve you got left in loose paper? I can bind it up later if I have to.”

That certainly wasn’t ideal given everything they had going on, but Lacey would take it for now. Her folio was a nice dragonhide with all the privacy and preservation spells she could ever need. It would suffice for the moment.

Or until Lacey got a chance to go into Muggle London to raid a stationary store. Spelling endless pages into a properly bound Muggle journal was easier than working with hemp-rag paper that bled every time a drop of ink touched it.

“Got linen, cotton and a nice 60/40 blend of linen and cotton in the loose paper,” Wesley said happily enough that Lacey resigned herself to paying a premium for it. “Cream, bright white and a dove grey that’s quite easy on the eyes.”

“Hm.” Lacey checked them over and then chose a nice sixty pound linen paper that was designed to prevent ink bleeding and show-through. “I’ll take… make it a hundred sheets of the cream and fifty of the grey.”

“Really?” Wesley asked, staring at the grey. “Wouldn’t have thought you’d go for that.”

“They’re for my husband,” Lacey said with her very best smugly pleased smile. “You know Blacks and their grey.”

Wesley laughed and nodded. Packaged the paper up properly before watching Lacey tuck it way into her bag with a look like he wanted to ask a million questions. Rather than coax the man into asking, Lacey raised an eyebrow challengingly.

Not all men responded well to Lacey challenging them. Blacks did. Every single Black, male or female, that Lacey had ever interacted with got starry-eyed and addlepated when she challenged them.

“Sorry,” Wesley said, cringing because he very much did not have any Blacks in his bloodline. “Just wondering if all the rumors about Gringotts knowing where Potter is are true. I mean things are so crazy up there right now.”

Lacey looked at him flatly. “I’ve no idea what Potter is up to right now. I’m far too busy with the client that’s coming in this week. That’s what everyone’s scrambling to prepare for. I won’t be curse breaking for at least a month, possibly longer, just to handle this… person’s… requirements.”

The stern tone and the flat stare had Wesley apologizing as though his life depended on it. Lacey strode off to Slug and Jiggers to repeat the process of making a small commonplace purchase that allowed for gossip. She had a small collection of potioneers for her scolding of Mr. Slug for assuming that the Boy-Who-Lived was in any way important at Gringotts.

“He’s set foot in Gringotts a grand total of three times that I’m aware of,” Lacey said with a disapproving sniff that made Mr. Slug flinch. “Too good for the Goblins, I assume. Really, you should know better than to assume a schoolboy is in any way something for us to fuss over. We leave that to Fudge, the Ministry and Dumbledore.”

Lacey couldn’t, if she was being at all in-character, comment on the “big job” that had come in. No one on Diagon Alley would believe her gossiping. Scolding them for asking Anthony to come and tell tales about Lacey’d work?

That was exactly what they expected so Lacey delivered it with glares, snide comments and then stalking out like she was going to duel someone if they got in her way.

Once back in Gringotts, in Harry’s room where Emily sat knitting a pair of socks with little yellow ducks chasing little green frogs around the arch of the foot and all up the calf, Lacey sighed and rubbed her hands over her face.

“Any change?” Lacey asked.

“Not a bit, dear,” Emily said. “He’s just sleeping away. Healer Bannet said that he’s healing up well. We’ll pump him full of more nutrient potions shortly, though. You can always ask when they come back. You were gone longer than I expected.”

“Laying groundwork and taking the temperature of the Alley,” Lacey said with a shrug as she studied Emily’s knitting needles.

They were wands. Not crafted as wands, but of wand wood with wand cores. Lacey hummed approvingly because with those knitting needles, Emily could weave some truly terrifying defensive and offensive spells. Said a lot about what Amal and Harry’s ancestors had gone through that the Seneschal’s secretary was a battle-hardened warrior who carried weapons constantly.

“Moody would approve,” Lacey quipped.

Emily laughed. “He did, last time he saw me knitting. I made him a pair of mitts, just to make him twitch.”

Lacey laughed with her before going to report into her boss. Yes, very shortly, things would be different. Lacey and Anthony were going to “transfer to the Paris branch” just before Harry woke up. Right now, though, Lacey wanted to make sure that things went exactly as they should.

And if that meant doing paperwork and dealing with nosy questions about why she’d want to leave Britain, well, that was fine.

Most of her human coworkers had not one single clue just how much better life was on the Continent. Lacey had no issue… educating them… on all the things they were missing out on because of Dumbledore and the Ministry’s stupidity.

12. First Hand Accounts Are Invaluable During Investigations

“Bloody hell, I hate being re-prioritized,” Bill grumbled as he waited his turn at the public Apparation point just outside of Gringotts.

“You’re telling me, mate,” Ivan groaned right behind him. “Why’s there so much paperwork in all of this?”

Both of them promptly shut their mouths when Lacey and Anthony Black looked over their shoulders to frown threateningly and raise a not-amused eyebrow, respectively, at the two of them for actually talking about the chaos that had descended on Gringotts while not actually safely behind Gringotts’ wards. Bill grimaced and sketched a bow of apology. Then sighed with relief when the two of them apparated off to have a date together.

Last thing either he or Ivan needed was Lacey “I’m always right” Black reporting them for loose lips spreading gossip off hours.

But seriously, two solid days of running around on errands instead of doing his actual bloody job. Normally, Bill regretted not taking the Goblins up on living quarters under Gringotts. It would be nice not to have to get up that little bit extra early, make the trek to work, and all that.

Right now?

Bill was desperately happy he’d chosen to live at home for at least the summer. The Burrow was so much quieter and calmer than the madcap chaos of Gringotts with House Peverell looming over them.

When he’d made the choice, he’d assumed that he would be staying at Grimmauld Place with the twins, Ron, Ginny, and their friend Hermione. He’d assumed that Harry would show up about halfway through the summer as he usually did, after which point Bill would be on call for babysitting duties which were getting a little insulting given how old all of the kids were now.

Hadn’t happened that way.

Grimmauld Place had sealed itself the instant that Sirius died. They’d all been ejected, things tossed into the street. No amount of shouting or spell casting had gotten them back into Grimmauld, so everyone was back at the Burrow while Professor Dumbledore sorted out just why they’d lost access that way.

Probably Kreacher, frankly. Once they had Harry at the Burrow, it would be simple enough for Harry to summon Kreacher, give him the order to open Grimmauld up again, and things would be back on track.

Hopefully not tonight, though. Bill just wanted to go faceplant in his bed. He gave Ivan a casual, exhausted wave before it was his turn, getting an equally exhausted nod in return.

“Home, sweet home,” Bill murmured as he pushed the front door open, yawning.

“But he has to be safe!” Mum wailed at frequencies that should shatter glass. “Where could he be?”

Bill staggered as he stepped inside to an eruption of shouts, crying, Mum’s screeching wails, and Dumbledore looking grave and worried in a way that looked almost real. Not the normal “I suppose I must mirror your emotion to get you to do what I want” but an actual “this is very Not Good and unfortunately I have to allow other people to realize fully just how Not Good it is”. Rather than catch everyone’s attention when, seriously, he just wanted to flop in bed, Bill looked around for Dad.

Hermione in the kitchen, pacing and chewing on her thumbnail. Ron with his shoulders hunched and arms crossed over his chest looking as guilty as it was possible for a teenager to look, which in Ron’s case was stunningly guilty. Probably meant that Ron had nothing whatsoever to do with whatever this was. Ginny over by the fireplace sobbing on Percy’s shoulder while Percy vibrated with nerves so badly that he didn’t even register that Bill was there. Dumbledore and Mum, both of them, soundly ignoring everyone else in the room.

Ah, and Dad, off by the back door looking like he’d like to just back right out and run away to his shed.

They exchanged a quick look and then did exactly that. Dad went out the back door, quiet as a mouse. Bill went out the front door and then scarpered around the house to meet Dad in the back yard next to the cabbage patch with about four gnomes working together to steal an especially round and lovely cabbage.

Bill started tossing them out of the garden automatically. “Dad, what’s going on?”

“I’m sure you’ve heard,” Dad said with an exhausted sigh.

“No,” Bill said slowly. “I mean, not if you’re talking about something other than House Peverell.”

“Who? What?” Dad said, shaking his head and blinking repeatedly in confusion. “No, not at all. It’s Harry. He’s gone. Went out to get some paint to fix a smudge on the wall and then never came home. It’s been more than twenty-four hours apparently.”

Bill tossed the last gnome over the fence and brushed his hands off. “Seriously? No, I’ve heard nothing about that. Everyone in Gringotts is too busy with the big Peverell project. They literally shut down all curse breaking activities for at least another week so that we’re fully prepared for when House Peverell arrives.”

Which was much, much more than Bill should say. If anyone else were to hear that he’d spilled that much, he could get fired. Probably not. The Ministry had to be aware of House Peverell’s upcoming arrival. It might not have spread freely if something was up with Harry, but Bill knew that Lacey had delivered all the overdue paperwork to the Department of Records today.

“I thought they were all dead,” Dad said with his best puzzled frown that meant he was thinking extra hard but didn’t want his intelligence to show.

“Most, apparently,” Bill said. “We’re not expecting many people. Just… lots of stuff. Which is about all I can say, honestly.”

“No, no, that’s fine, Bill,” Dad said with a reassuring pat on Bill’s shoulder. “I totally understand. Still, I have to wonder if someone took advantage of the situation to get at Harry.”

“Possible,” Bill said. “Just as possible that Harry took the chaos as a chance to make a runner on his own. I mean, we all know that he’s not happy at home.”

It was something that Mum had never agreed with. She was all on Dumbledore’s side, downright stupidly in Bill’s opinion, that Family Came First. As hard as Mum fought with her Aunt Muriel and as much as they loathed each other, you’d think that Mum would understand that family sometimes were your greatest enemies, not the ones who protected and loved you.

Dad and Bill had tried to do what they could to influence both Mum and Dumbledore. They’d failed. So had Shacklebolt, Tonks, Moody, most of the Order and all of Harry’s friends. The twins regularly tilted at that windmill both with serious comments and outrageous jokes. Hadn’t worked.

“What are you two doing outside?” Mum said from the backdoor.

“Saving the cabbages,” Bill said, pointing down at the one that’d almost gotten stolen. “Think the gnomes might’ve already uprooted this one.”

“Oh, those little stinkers,” Mum huffed. “Well, bring it in, Bill dear. I’ll make stuffed cabbage for dinner tomorrow. Fred, George! You need to do a better job on the gnomes tomorrow! They almost made off with a whole cabbage!”

Dad laughed into his fist, admiration in his eyes at the way Bill had distracted Mum. The cabbage was fully uprooted. Rest of them were fine, thankfully. Bill cleaned it off with a quick wave of his wand and then set it on the counter in the kitchen.

Thankfully, the house was somewhat quieter, though it couldn’t possibly be silent with the twins protesting that vehemently that they weren’t the ones assigned to gnome duty and Ron swearing up and down that they’d agreed to take his turn for the week in exchange for Ron helping Ginny with her fence repair project.

“Home, sweet home,” Bill murmured to Dad.

“Never a boring moment, eh?” Dad agreed.

His laugh wasn’t at all what it normally would be. Dumbledore sighed as the two of them entered the living room. Hermione came over, still chewing on her thumbnail, with Ginny, still crying, at her side.

“Did you hear anything?” Hermione asked Bill and Dad.

“Nothing from the Ministry,” Dad said sadly as he hugged both of the girls. “Sorry. The gossip is raging, but there’s no news.”

“I had no idea that anything had happened with Harry,” Bill admitted.

“One would have thought that the Goblins were aware,” Dumbledore huffed.

“Sorry, everyone at Gringotts is all wrapped up in a big project,” Bill said. “I haven’t heard anything other than that for, oh, at least the last day? Closer to two days, I think. The upper management kept the project mostly under wraps until all the paperwork was signed. Now we’re all scrambling to be able to be ready.”

“Ready for what?” Percy asked from the sofa.

“I can’t say much,” Bill said warningly directly to Mum because she never respected his employment contract’s privacy requirements. “But. Well, it’ll be in the news soon, I’m sure. House Peverell’s new Lord has apparently got a vault problem so they’re transferring everything to Gringotts London to get it sorted out.”

“What kind of “vault problem” would require transferring branches?” Hermione asked as her fingers twitched for a quill and paper to take notes.

“The sort where the previous lord apparently had some form of dementia before he died,” Bill said, picking his words carefully. “He, from what little I’ve been told, condensed thirty or more vaults into one vault which… did not have a current, active or accurate inventory spell on it.”

Even Mum’s jaw dropped open in horror. Dumbledore shuddered as he took his glasses off to polish them with a look of acute pain on his face. Dad made a sound like a squeaky duck getting stepped on while the twins whistled and Percy paled on the sofa.

“That’s a bloody mess,” Ron said with a grimace.

“Enough of one that the Chieftain is taking charge of the account personally,” Bill agreed. “I truly can’t say much more. I don’t know much more. But, well, it means that absolutely no one at Gringotts would’ve noticed if Harry came in. Not if he came in willingly or if he came in under someone else’s power. We’re simply overwhelmed. Even the spell work on the wards has had to be adjusted given House Peverell’s… normal behavior.”

That set Dad to chortling. He’d told Bill, Charlie and Percy endless stories of House Peverell’s adventures back when they were little and Mum was busy dealing with the twins. Two colicky babies at once had been a bit much for Mum, so Dad had taken over with the three of them for bedtime, baths, getting up in the morning. All the normal stuff.

“Oh, that’s sure to be exciting, sorting out a vault full of that much stuff,” Dad said with a true grin. “Almost makes me wish I’d gone to work for Gringotts instead of the Ministry.”

“I’m wishing the opposite tonight,” Bill confided with a grin that made Mum huff a little laugh. “At any rate, I’m sorry, Sir. I’ve got no news at all about Harry. I doubt you could even get an appointment with his account manager right now. Last I heard as I left tonight was that all appointments scheduled with account managers were being moved out a month unless there was an emergency.”

“This is not good,” Dumbledore said, slow and grave like that would have any effect other than making the Goblins curl a lip at him. “We must find out what happened to Harry as soon as possible.”

“I’ll do a bit more investigation in the morning,” Dad promised. “Ask a few questions, poke around a bit. If you need, I can make a trip to the Department of Records, see if anything’s been filed automatically for him.”

“Thank you, Arthur,” Dumbledore said with Approving Smile Number Three, the “Good Minion, thank you for doing what you’ve been trained to do”. “I appreciate it. There’s no point to going to the Department of Records, though. I’ve already been. Twice. There was nothing to be found.”

Discussion devolved into fretting, worried tears, and Dumbledore doing his best to look authoritative and wise. Bill stayed for exactly five minutes and then escaped to the stairs so that he could keep that appointment with his bed.

He stood on the stairs for a moment, studying Dumbledore silently.

Bill would bet a week’s wages that Dumbledore had not actually gone to the Department of Records. He wasn’t sure, of course, but there was a good chance that Dumbledore would be going straight there after he was done reassuring everyone.

The question was what Dumbledore wanted to keep other people from seeing in those records. Any other day, Bill would’ve made a point of going to check on his lunch break. Now? Bill didn’t think he was going to have enough free time to even have lunch tomorrow. Checking on whatever records existed on Harry would have to wait until Gringotts calmed down.

He would just have to trust everyone else to find Harry and make sure that he was safe.

13. Private Individuals Should Not Exert Authority Over Governmental Policy

“Don’t worry, Mollywobbles,” Arthur said as the floo flared green next to him. “We’ll find Harry. I’m sure it’s not a big deal.”

“I just… I’m so worried about that boy, Arthur,” Molly said while wringing her poor apron like a sopping wet rag. “He’s been through so much and now this? We’ve got to find him. My magic is so sure that he’s not safe.”

Arthur gave Molly a hug and a kiss before heading through the floo to work.

Her magic was so sure.

Really, as if Molly had the least link to Harry Potter or the Potter magic. What she was, instead, was wound up by Dumbledore’s grim expression and his grave pronouncements. Arthur loved Molly, he truly did, but sometimes her dramatics got to be a bit much.

Given everything that Bill had not said last night, Arthur wasn’t at all surprised to find that the Ministry was in even more of a flutter than they’d been when he went home. Memos flying at breakneck speed through the hallways, heads together as people gossiped, and Gladys from the Auror secretary pool in her element as she chattered away at anyone who’d stand still long enough.

“It’s so surprising,” Gladys said coaxingly to Arthur as they shared an elevator down to his level. Which Gladys had no reason whatsoever to visit. “I mean, I never would’ve thought it.”

Arthur blinked at her with his very best befuddled look. “I’m so sorry, Gladys, but I’ve no idea what you’re talking about. Had a quiet night with the family last night, don’t you know. What’s going on?”

Gladys beamed, those beady ice-blue eyes lighting up with delight as she rubbed her hands together like Ron getting a treat just for him. “You haven’t heard? Goodness, Arthur, you’ll never get a promotion if you don’t pay attention to what’s going on. Well. From what I’ve heard, House Peverell has kidnapped Harry Potter and they’re looking to get a ransom for him.”

Arthur stared at her flatly. “Gladys.”

“Well, it could be true,” Gladys protested, color sweeping over her cheeks. The color went from pink to rose to a blotchy deep red as Arthur kept on staring even as the elevator arrived at his floor. “Fine. You’re right. There’s no link between Harry Potter and House Peverell. But it would be so amazing if there were!”

“Gladys,” Arthur scolded her as he punched the button for his floor again as they’d swept on to other floors during the staring match.

“You’re no fun at all, Arthur,” Gladys complained. “Right. Well. Harry Potter is still missing. We’ve loads of reports of a young man out and about who might be him, though only a few glimpses of his face in pensive memories. None clear enough to be sure. And House Peverell apparently has been planning this whole…” she waved her hand dismissively, “thing for at least a couple of months. The Goblins just kept it a secret until a couple of days ago.”

“Bill admitted that they were coming last night,” Arthur confirmed. “Really, no clear views of the young man?”

“Not a one so far,” Gladys said much more cheerfully than was appropriate for a missing child case. “The aurors are still out questioning people, though, so hopefully we’ll find him soon.”

The elevator door opened on the Auror’s floor, which meant that Arthur shooed Gladys out so that she could do her job. He stayed very firmly in the elevator because Amelia Bones was right there in the middle of a knot of people that included both Fudge and Malfoy.

Thank you, no, not going out there. Not with Fudge in a dither that would rival his Mollywobbles on a tear and Malfoy doing his best to look like an ice sculpture of a man instead of the sweaty, nervous mess he actually was.

Which, actually? That was interesting.

Instead of heading for his office, Arthur headed down to the level with the Department of Child Protective Services and the Department of Records. Dumbledore might have wanted to keep any of Harry’s records private, but well, there was no harm in Arthur seeing if he could check on Sirius’ affairs.

That they were also Harry’s affairs was neither here nor there.

The best way to deal with the Department of Records was to never, ever look the clerks in the face. All of the distortions, the confusion about names, the way that their voices and bodies shifted about was still there, but if you focused on filling in your name and department, well, you could more or less ignore it all.

Arthur had always been good at ignoring the things he didn’t want to pay attention to.

The Peverell Archive lay behind three doors that led, respectively, to a nebula where you walked on fizzing stars, a deep tunnel that you skidded down while trying not to fall face-first, and a perfectly ordinary door that led into a vast vault complex made entirely of what looked and felt like pink gelatin.

Interestingly, the Potter records room could be reached through a side door with only a short, three-step path over the top of logs that stretched down into infinity.

Arthur started with the Potter records, of course. No reason not to as he had so little to look for.

“Now, what records do we have for Harry in the last week?” Arthur asked as he hummed and thumbed through the file cabinet marked “Potter, Harry James”.

There were Muggle cleaning fluid receipts. A broken calculator that showed the total of four pounds, ninety-seven for who knew what. A duplicate of a train ticket showing that Harry had taken the train from Surrey to London, getting off not too far from the Leaky Cauldron.

“Huh,” Arthur said, studying that ticket. “Went on his own, then. Interesting.”

Molly wouldn’t like that. Neither would Dumbledore, but then Dumbledore never liked it when people deviated from his carefully elaborate plans.

The last folder in Harry’s file cabinet held a slim little folio from Gringotts.

A portkey folio.

He’d seen thousands of the things over the years. The Ministry made automatic copies of portkey receipts, filing them away in your personal record so that if something happened, they could track you down and fix whatever had gone wrong. Not often that something did go wrong. Portkeys were one of the very best and most secure ways to travel.

“Oh, Harry, what did you do?” Arthur whispered.

Arthur’s breath caught under his breastbone as he slowly opened the folio, unwinding the black leather string from around its double-buttons made of leather. Once open, the folio revealed a stack of portkey receipts for… most everywhere in the world.

Dozens across Britain. Ireland, Finland, several for Asia, Africa, the Americas. There were portkeys all over the place and not one of them would ever show which was actually used.

Every single portkey receipt was marked “Prepaid Privacy Enforced” which meant that the only thing that the Ministry got was the initial purchase receipt. Instead of the receipt marking when it was used, these would stay just as when they were purchased.

“Oh, dear,” Arthur murmured as he flipped one over and saw the “Repeat Use Enabled” marked on the back.

Every single one of the thirty or so portkeys was reusable.

Arthur had to sit down on the floor for a good ten minutes before his hands stopped shaking too badly to put the records back where they belonged. Eventually, though. He carefully closed the file cabinet, then made his way to the Peverell file room with its gelatin walls and its bouncy bookshelves full of bound records stretching back oh, easily several thousand years.

“How do they do that?” Arthur asked as he found more and more bookshelves holding records going further and further back into antiquity, far longer than the Ministry or even Magical Egypt’s records had existed.

He could’ve just… wandered off through those records back beyond human record. It was one of the things that they warned you about when you started working at the Ministry. Instead, Arthur determinedly turned to the latest records which showed slapdash partially complete requests for Gringotts to help the new Lord Peverell sort out a true vault disaster going back about two and a half months.

“Goodness, that’s a horror. No wonder Bill looked so exhausted,” Arthur said as he looked at the list of approximately sixty distinct vaults that had been casually all tossed together into one vault with a notation on the final request that was properly filled out that the inventory spell was over three hundred years old, improperly maintained and inaccurate to boot.

No details of what was in those vaults, obviously. Gringotts security wouldn’t allow that. Arthur didn’t need to know anything more.

“Well, I’ll have to tell Mollywobbles that we’ll be seeing little of Bill for a bit,” Arthur said as he put the book back on its gently bobbing shelf. “Poor boy. They’re going to run him ragged for sure.”

Arthur took a different route out of the records, heading for the Wesley records room which had lovely solid walls and floor, and then up into the main records room, even though that path always left him with a twenty minute walk to get back to the front desk and the door out. Better than scrambling across odd pathways and hauling himself up that slippery slope by his fingernails.

If he’d known that he’d be facing a path like that, he would’ve transfigured some crampons for his shoes before he went into the Department of Records. Once you were in, transfigurations never held for more than a few seconds, so a long walk was definitely the better choice.

“You’re a bit late, Arthur,” Perkins said when he finally made it to his desk.

“Ah, had to hit the Department of Records quick-like,” Arthur said as he hung up his robe and rolled up his sleeves to get to work. “Not that it’s ever quick going in there.”

“Oh, Merlin’s pants, better you than me,” Perkins said with a heartfelt and dramatic shudder. “Nothing serious?”

“Mm-mm,” Arthur hummed. “Just a quick check followed by a very long walk. The Weasley records room always throws me out a good twenty minutes walk from the front desk.”

Perkins snickered over that, shaking his head at Arthur even being willing to go in there. Either way, they got down to work unlike most everyone else in the Ministry. Sounded to Arthur like it was one of those days where everyone lost their bloody little minds as they dashed about, flailing for something to do instead of putting their heads down and doing their literal jobs.

Not that Arthur could blame them. The memory of all Harry’s portkeys lingered behind his eyes. Along with the idle curiosity if Harry had heard about House Peverell’s impending arrival and used that as a cover or if it was pure coincidence that they were arriving at the same time that Harry took a runner towards a happier, safer, quieter life.

Honestly, the likelihood of them being related was pretty much nil.

Harry had so little contact with their world during the summers. Whatever Dumbledore’s real reason for shuffling Harry off to Privet Drive, it effectively boxed him up as tightly as if he’d been in Azkaban.

Except now Harry had escaped.

Like Sirius’ escape, Harry was in the wind, running for his life. Arthur stared blindly at the latest report to come across his desk, turning those portkeys over and over again in his head.

Good on Harry.

That was all Arthur could think in the end. Good on Harry for taking care of himself. Good on Harry for finding a way to get free. Good on Harry for winning his way to freedom.

Come what may, Arthur was happy for him.

He might, just possibly, tell Molly and Dumbledore nothing whatsoever about his little trip into the Department of Records. Let someone else find those portkeys. Madame Bones would surely search them out. Possibly Malfoy, if he could bestir himself to do something other than sneering at people.

Yes, let someone else bring that news to the Order.

Arthur was more than happy to give Harry as much of a head start as he possibly could. The boy deserved a real chance at freedom.

14. Proper Channels Should Always Be Used For Communicating Vital Information

House Peverell.

Amelia stared down at the very thin report on House Peverell’s upcoming move to Britain. As far as she could see, it was a simple matter of needing the specialties that only existed at Gringotts London. Yes, obviously, it was a sad matter that the previous Lord had destroyed the vault tracking by collapsing all the vaults into one. Certainly, the Goblins who’d allowed it without the Heir’s permission should have faced consequences.

More than likely had faced draconian consequences. The Goblins did not mess about when faced with such incompetence.

It wasn’t important. Not for Amelia. Not for the Ministry. Certainly not for Fudge who’d been in and out of her office twenty times so far and it wasn’t even lunch yet.

Irritating man. Every time he showed up, huffing and spluttering about “risks to the Ministry” and “duty to the public”, Amelia reconsidered her determination not to run for Minister. Most anyone could’ve done a better job than Fudge.

An overripe cabbage could’ve done a better job, frankly.

Which was irrelevant, in the final analysis. No matter how many times Fudge came to demand that she find out just what the new Lord Peverell wanted from the Ministry, actually from Fudge himself, there simply wasn’t anything to find.

Nothing about the move had a single thing to do with the Ministry.

Or with Harry Potter, despite Dolores Umbridge’s three visits so far this morning. How a grown woman could dress that way and simper like a little girl Amelia didn’t know.

Just… ugh.

“Amelia,” Dumbledore said as he swept into her office as if he owned it. “Goodness, I hope I’m not interrupting anything important.”

“No,” Amelia drawled as she watched Dumbledore plant himself in her visitor chair with a swirl of lime green robes. “Not at all. Just checking some records for the Minister.”

“There is sadly nothing to be found on Mr. Potter,” Dumbledore said so promptly that Amelia frowned at him. “I’ve already checked, I’m afraid.”

“Well, given that I wasn’t checking on Mr. Potter, I suppose that’s fine,” Amelia said. She flipped the folio shut. “Why were you checking on Mr. Potter? I’d thought he was off enjoying his summer hols, like Susan and her friends.”

“Well.”

Dumbledore’s smile went brittle.

Wary. Watchful in ways that reminded Amelia of the war. While Dumbledore had never been a general who led from the front, he’d participated in his share of battles. He was a good dueler, fast and vicious even if he favored techniques that incapacitated instead of eliminating threats.

She’d never seen him shiver this way before.

Odd.

For all of Dumbledore’s vaulted confidence and his deep control of Occlumency, his knees trembled under those lime green robes. When he brushed his fingers over his beard and then down his thighs, his fingers vibrated with nerves.

Amelia sighed. “Headmaster, I am a very busy woman. Made more busy by the nonsense going on with House Peverell. Fudge has been in and out of my office twenty or so times just this morning alone. What exactly do you want from me?”

She didn’t meet his eyes. He didn’t meet hers, either. Neither of them was that foolish, given how well trained they both were.

Dumbledore’s bottom lip quivered as if he’d just barely suppressed the urge to bite it. “I’m afraid that I’ve had some rather worrying news about Mr. Potter. I was hoping that you could either confirm or deny it.”

“I’d have to know what that news was,” Amelia said as she used her wand to close her office door and set privacy wards that should, hopefully, keep anyone from listening in.

Dumbledore shut his eyes as he breathed so slowly and carefully that Amelia found herself somewhat concerned that this was a real issue instead of one of his normal attempts at manipulation.

“He’s missing,” Dumbledore said so baldly that Amelia reared back in her chair. “Two days ago, shortly before dinner, Harry Potter left his family’s home to pick up a pot of paint from a Muggle store. He never returned. His family said nothing until yesterday evening, late, when I was informed. I checked his family’s home. There is no sign of coercion or violence by any Magi. He simply… walked away… with five pounds in his pocket.”

Amelia noted that Dumbledore did not say that Harry Potter was safe from Muggle violence. She’d already had several long talks with Susan about the quite obvious abuse that Potter had endured. Neglect, too, given that his so-called family hadn’t cared that the boy disappeared instead of coming to dinner. Hadn’t cared for a full day, even.

“…Did he take his wand with him?” Amelia asked after a long, considering stare at Dumbledore’s shaking knees.

Dumbledore sighed and actually bit his bottom lip. “Yes. Also his trunk. His owl has disappeared.”

“Took a runner, then,” Amelia said, leaning back in her chair. “Can’t say that I blame the boy. After the Tournament, he’s entitled to it if he wishes. The Ministry made him an adult by forcing him to participate.”

“Ah,” Dumbledore said only to stop after just the one, pained syllable.

“No one told him,” Amelia said, staring at Dumbledore much more intently.

“No.”

“Did anyone inform him that he was Black’s heir?” Amelia asked. She snorted when Dumbledore started and stared at her in horror. “Please. That’s been established since before the boy was born. Black and Potter discussed it in their second year, swore oaths about it in their third in front of the entire school. Everyone our age knows that Harry Potter is Sirius Black’s heir.”

For a fraught second, Amelia thought that Dumbledore might try to slam a Legilimency probe straight through her shields. The way his hand twitched for his wand was rather revealing. He didn’t, though.

Good choice on his part. Amelia’s office had enough runic and alchemical wards that there was no way he would succeed. Even if he tried, her wards would record the entire encounter into evidence that would see him bounced right out of Hogwarts, the Wizengamot and the ICW.

Pity he didn’t make the attempt, actually. Might have made Amelia’s life easier.

“I wonder if Black informed him,” Amelia mused purely for the joy of watching all the blood fade out of Dumbledore’s face. “Timed message sent by a courier would do it nicely.”

The blood didn’t fade. It drained so fast that Dumbledore wheezed and grabbed the arms of her visitor chair to keep from passing out right there.

“No, he wouldn’t have,” Dumbledore gasped.

“I’ve no way to confirm it, obviously,” Amelia said with an unconcerned shrug, “but it’s just the sort of thing that Black would do. Probably consider it to be great prank.”

Someone knocked on Amelia’s door, a rapid patter that meant Fudge had come back for yet another round of dithering and wearing on Amelia’s very last nerve. She bobbed an apologetic look at Dumbledore who was too busy panicking about his overly elaborate schemes collapsing about him, and then dropped the privacy ward.

“Amelia!” Fudge squeaked only to stumble to a stop as he stared at Dumbledore. “Oh. Huh. That was very good of you. I was going to ask you to summon the Head Warlock.”

“…Why?” Amelia asked.

“Oh, well, there’s reports that Potter’s been seen wandering all over Britain,” Fudge said, while huffing and glaring at Dumbledore in preparation for one of their ridiculous little spats. “We need to get a handle on that. The boy can’t be allowed to just wander about. Who knows what kind of trouble he’ll get into?”

For once, perhaps the only time that Amelia had ever seen it, Dumbledore just sat there and nodded his agreement with Fudge. More than anything else, that proved to Amelia that the issue with Potter was a real one. She’d never in her life seen Dumbledore miss an opportunity to pull out the kindly grandfather who knows so much more than you do nonsense.

“Or what he’d say about your many campaigns to discredit him?” Amelia muttered at the same time that she waved Percy Weasley to bring his stack of reports in for Amelia to look at.

“Timeline’s on top,” Percy murmured to Amelia. “It’s um, potentially serious, actually.”

She raised an eyebrow but looked over the timeline that Percy had prepared. Neat, tidy, very clear timestamps for each encounter with a person who was, more than likely, Potter. Somewhat fuzzier timestamps for places where people saw someone who “looked kinda like the Boy-Who-Lived in good clothes”.

And one very worrying report from a trio of Magi up on Yell Island in the Shetlands that they’d seen a young man on a very old, very hazardous looking broom who had flown straight out into a storm. With an invisibility cloak.

Given that Harry Potter had, according to Susan’s gossip, an invisibility cloak and the report said that they saw his scar clearly before he hid his face, this might be truly serious.

“Dumbledore,” Amelia said, startling Fudge into stopping the ranting that she’d utterly ignored and Dumbledore into blinking at her with a confused frown. “Did Potter have an invisibility cloak?”

“His father’s, yes,” Dumbledore said. “…Why?”

Amelia shook her head. “Mr. Weasley here has done some fine work on a timeline. I think Mr. Potter might actually have taken a runner straight into the storm up on the Shetlands.”

Dumbledore snatched the timeline out of Amelia’s hands. That was fine. She had a huge stack of reports to skim over for greater details.

Sometime, maybe when Amelia ran for Minister of Magic which looked more and more likely by the moment, she was going to steal Percy Weasley to do her paperwork for her. The young man was brilliantly organized and obsessively detailed. Truly a marvel at getting things done.

Spotted on the train to London. Glimpsed working his way through the Leaky by multiple people after the big game. Spotted going into Gringotts and then coming out of Gringotts about half an hour, not quite three-quarters of an hour later. Seen looking for an address on Direction Alley and then going into an flat there. Spotted sneaking upstairs into a completely different flat and then not coming out.

Except that he was seen a couple of hours later both at the Next Step out in Wales and at the Harvest Lane shops. And then other places, just brief glimpses, as he portkeyed all over Britain.

“The Shetlands?” Dumbledore said, voice rising in pitch as his eyes went wide with horror. “What earthly reason would Harry have to go there?”

“He um,” Percy winced when both Fudge and Dumbledore whirled to glare and stare, respectively, at him. “He seems to have flown into a storm. On a very old broom. Madame Bones has that report. It’s… it’s kind of frightening, actually. I don’t see how he could’ve survived a storm like that.”

Amelia opened the final report, the one from Yell Island and silently read it. Thankfully, neither Fudge nor Dumbledore attempted to steal it out of her hands. She might’ve hexed them into oblivion if they attempted it.

“All right,” Amelia said once she read the last page. “We’re going to the Goblins. He used portkeys. They must know where Mr. Potter went. I can’t imagine that Mr. Potter has such a death wish that he would truly go into a storm like that, so he must’ve had a way back to Gringotts.”

Because if he hadn’t?

Harry Potter, the Boy-Who-Lived, was dead. That storm was one of the worst that the Shetlands had seen in generations. It had driven straight over the islands, barely brushing over Scotland before it barreled on towards the continent where they were struggling to cope with its power and fury even now.

Amelia didn’t want to believe that Potter would commit suicide. He must have had a plan, some way to escape. Logically, he had to have bought the means to escape from the Goblins.

They would just have to go and… see if they could bluster, cajole or politely request an honest answer from the Goblins.

Given the chaos that House Peverell had unleashed on Gringotts, though, Amelia had little hope that they would get much more than a brief admission that Potter had paid for a handful of portkeys before being sent on his way.

15. Supervision of Subordinates Can Take Vital Time Away From Other Projects

In all his years, Albus had rarely ever seen Gringotts in such a tizzy. The normal lines of customers waiting their turn at the tellers were gone. Not one Magi appeared to be there looking for their gold or their account managers.

Instead, the tellers were all busy setting up tables and sorting stacks upon stacks of paperwork that Albus assumed would have something to do with House Peverell’s ill-advised move to Wizarding Britain.

When he got a chance, he was going to have a kind word with the latest Lord Peverell. Surely he could impress on the young man that it was better for everyone if House Peverell stayed well away from Britain. They were, to a cosmopolitan house such as Peverell, practically a backwater. Nothing of interest, obviously.

Frankly, if House Peverell did actually stay in Britain for any length of time, it would overturn so many of his plans. They couldn’t afford that, not with Tom working his way back to full strength in the shadows. They could afford it even less if Harry had decided to run away like a foolish child. The horcrux in Harry’s scar was their only chance of defeating Tom, but only if things played out exactly as Albus had planned out.

It wouldn’t work if Harry wanted to live. It couldn’t. The prophecy was so very clear that it was one or the other. Only by ensuring that Harry wanted to die could they be certain that both of them died in the final confrontation.

Albus shoved the entire train of thought down and away, locking it behind one of his many mental doors.

This was not the time for fussing over the prophecy or the horrible things he’d had to arrange for Harry.

Amelia strode right past Albus during his moment of abstraction. She flagged down one of the Magi working at Gringotts, keeping the flustered young woman there despite the way she fidget and stared over her shoulder towards a Goblin who looked utterly unimpressed with the delay.

“I have a missing child,” Amelia announced. “He appears to have purchased a number of portkeys from Gringotts. I need to know how many and where to.”

“Oh, Potter, right,” the young woman said. “Yeah, he did. They’re all reusable so I don’t know what good tracking them will do you. There’s a flat that he rented, I think. My boss would be better able to tell you more. I’m sorry, Madame Bones, but I really do have to get back to work. House Peverell will be here tomorrow, the next day at the very latest. We have far too much to get done in much too little time.”

Amelia let her go, striding away from Albus without the grace of even glancing his way to confirm that it was the right choice.

Worse, the young woman bobbed a disrespectful little nod towards Cornelius while utterly ignoring Albus himself. Really, young people these days. Albus strode after Amelia with Cornelius on his heels muttering and fretting about not just where Harry had gone but also about House Peverell’s impending arrival.

The young woman’s boss appeared to be a Goblin who visibly sighed at spotting the three of them bearing down on him.

“What?” the Goblin demanded. “Can’t you see that we’re busy?”

“Missing child case,” Amelia said before Albus could do more than open his mouth. “I’ve reports that Harry Potter came in and bought portkeys. And apparently that he rented a flat through Gringotts. We need to track him down, make sure that he’s safe.”

The Goblin sighed. “Yes, he did. He’s legally an adult. You lot declared him as one when you put him through that Tournament. As such, Gringotts was under no legal obligation to do more than report his portkey purchase or register the flats he rented.”

“Plural?” Albus spluttered.

“One to be the official residence under the assumption that he would be noticed and his identify figured out in fairly short order,” the Goblin said as he waved a hand to summon a simple blue leather folio that he passed over to Amelia, not to Albus or Cornelius. “One floor up to be the actual residence. Heir Potter-Black wanted to get away from his relatives. He’s an adult. He has the right to do so. He also mentioned doing a spot of traveling before school started, with an intention to do it all in disguise, purely physical instead of charmed illusions.”

The Goblin seemed to admire that, as if wearing one of those ridiculous plastic noses was an effective method of hiding one’s appearance. When Albus tried to take the folio from Amelia, she scowled at him and batted his hand away. She also leveled a near-lethal glare at Cornelius when he tried to read over her shoulder.

“Thirty,” Amelia commented before passing the report to Fudge who promptly gave it to Albus to peruse. “He bought thirty reusable portkeys. Even one is more than he should have been able to afford.”

The Goblin’s lip curled back in a truly angry sneer. “Given that Lord Sirius Black closed every single vault, sold every piece of property that the Black family had, and then gave it all to Heir Potter-Black to remove from Gringotts, we were more than happy to keep whatever small portion we could. There are reasons that Gringotts is determined to ensure that Lord Peverell is pleased with our service.”

The report fluttered out of Albus’ slack fingers. Fudge caught it, yelping about laws this and inappropriate that, only to get shut down by the Goblin.

That was… the Potter account manager, wasn’t it? Albus rarely paid any attention to the individual Goblins that he had to deal with, but he remembered the fluffy white hair and the way other Goblins stared at the Potter account manager. They were doing that to this one, too.

“And the Potter vaults?” Albus asked, barely keeping his voice from shaking despite imposing the most stringent Occlumency measures on himself.

“Closed,” the Goblin said, long silvery claws gouging tracks out of the table between them. “All properties sealed or closed. Heir Potter-Black made it quite clear that he had no interest in remaining for the coming war, as he put it. Had quite the rant about people expecting a toddler to save them instead of taking action to save themselves.”

Oh.

Oh, no.

Amelia’s sharp questions barely penetrated the fog of horror blanketing Albus’ mind. Harry couldn’t have. He wouldn’t.

Except…

Sirius had been the one person who promised Harry a life of his own, home and hearth, happiness and laughter. His friends were, sadly, not terrifically supportive of Harry’s freedom and interests. Yes, it had taken quite a bit of careful sculpting of the information they received for Ron and Hermione to take Albus’ side over Harry’s, but he’d thought that he’d done it well enough that Harry would be just isolated enough, but not so isolated as to run.

And Sirius!

When had he had the time to escape from Grimmauld Place? This had to have been set up in advance. It… how could Sirius have done this? Why? He’d seemed to understand the need to keep Harry isolated, to keep him safe. This went against everything that Albus had planned…

…and there was no way to fix it.

The Goblins must have told Harry that he was legally an adult. Sirius probably did as well in whatever message he left behind.

Now Harry knew that he didn’t need to listen to Albus, he knew that he could go anywhere in the world, and he had the resources to utterly disappear.

“This can’t be legal,” Fudge squawked as he shook the folio at the Goblin. “Portkeys are tracked!”

“The purchase of portkeys is tracked,” the Goblin agreed. “You have the tracking paperwork right there. It was properly submitted to the Ministry and filed in the Department of Records. Usage of repeatable portkeys is not tracked. Legally, they are considered no different from personal Apparation. The Ministry put that law into place not eight years ago.”

Albus shivered.

He’d pushed that law through. Amelia had fought it tooth and nail, arguing that it allowed the richest of society to evade the rule of law. Which had been true. But it had been necessary to ensure that no one tracked his movements as he worked to bring the Order of the Phoenix back to full power.

A tool that he’d implemented to ensure that he could maintain total control of Harry’s circumstances had turned against him.

“What of… what of the entailed items?” Albus asked. “Surely they could not be removed from Gringotts. His trust vault. There were strict rules about it’s usage and what could be removed.”

The Goblin nodded that Albus had a point, but his sneer strengthened. “Valid. Had Heir Potter-Black remained a minor, legally. As a legal adult, he had the absolute right to close every vault. And Lord Black ensured that he could do it by setting up an infinite storage trunk with everything that Heir Potter-Black might need.”

“Everything,” Albus said as the hubbub around them faded down a long, echoing tunnel that terminated at the Goblin’s furious sneer.

“Everything,” the Goblin confirmed. “I would be astonished if anyone sees Heir Potter-Black at any time in the next twenty years. He has food, clothing, supplies, shelter and all the books and money a young Magi could ever want. He’s gone. Gringotts resents the loss of his business. Magi mismanagement of his life caused him to flee Britain. None of which matters now. We have work to do. Good day.”

The Goblin turned away from them, snapping orders at his subordinates who scurried away to do his bidding.

Albus blindly followed Amelia and Cornelius out of Gringotts.

They were doomed.

Everyone in the world was doomed. If Harry did not meet the prophecy, Tom would automatically win. The entire magical world would fall to him and then he would take the war out into the Muggle world. No one there had any capacity to handle Tom.

All of Albus’ careful plans had just collapsed like a house of cards.

He’d thought he had a solid foundation. He’d worked so hard to ensure that the prophecy was met exactly as it stated. All his pawns were in place. All his work, everything…

Doomed.

“All right,” Amelia said once they were back in her office. “I’ll do some more investigation to see what I can find. Fudge, you need to go back to your office. Keep Umbridge from doing anything. The woman is a loose canon with a grudge and now she’s nowhere to point that grudge. She could go off at you, the Wizengamot, anyone at all.”

Cornelius grimaced. “Ah. Good point. Yes, you’re right. I’ll… find some time-consuming project for her, insist that she give me a report in a day or two.”

“Have her research House Peverell,” Albus suggested. “Their history. Current members. Locations. That sort of thing.”

“Oh, that’s brilliant,” Cornelius said, waggling a finger at Albus as he brightened and nodded. “I want to know that anyway. Right! I’m off. Let me know what you find out, Amelia. Dumbledore.”

He strode out, leaving Albus standing there awkwardly as Amelia shook her head and then sat behind her desk.

“Was there something else?” Amelia asked with that pointed glare of “you’re wasting my time”.

“No,” Albus sighed. “I’m just… worried about the boy, Amelia. He said nothing. Not one hint. No messages, not letters, not even a patronus call. I don’t know why he would do this.”

Amelia snorted as if she thought he was being ridiculous. “Well, I’ll spend some time to try and figure it out. Now get out. I’ve too much work to do for you to stand there looming. Make yourself useful somewhere else.”

“Of course,” Albus said.

He attempted a genial smile. It felt wrong, stiff and awkward, so he stopped. Albus nodded to her and then left, closing her office door behind him.

Where would Harry have gone? He had no ties to anyone outside of Britain. He’d never expressed an interest in traveling to other countries. Would he have gone to ground here?

No.

In his heart, Albus knew that Harry was gone. Britain would never see their Boy-Who-Lived again. As he flooed back to Hogwarts to call the Order together, Albus mourned for the boy who had been his very best tool to save the world.

Come what may, he would have to find another way to save them all.

Though Albus had no idea how he could do that without Harry as his suicide soldier to fling against Tom.

16. This Meeting Could Have Been a Letter With an Attached Report

As much as Molly enjoyed it when her house was full, this was not an Order meeting that she wanted to attend, much less host. Frankly, she’d rather like to bounce every single person flooing in right back out of her fireplace and her house.

Harry was missing.

Missing!

He’d left his home and run off who knew where for no good reason at all. Molly could just scream. Harry had been told how dangerous it was for him to be anywhere else. He knew that You-Know-Who was hunting for him.

And yet he left home, went haring all over the countryside with not a single care in the world. It was just so frustrating that he didn’t, hadn’t, couldn’t see what it was doing to them all. As much as she loved Harry, and Merlin, she truly did, she just wanted to shake him until he saw sense.

Not that she would. Poor Harry was always so skittish and eager to please. If he came through the floo, all of her worry and her fear would collapse. Molly just knew it.

The floo flared, sending Molly’s heart into her throat.

Tonks stumbled through the floo and landed flat on her face.

Molly did not yell at her. Or at Arthur for going to help Tonks up. Or even the twins who had snuck back down the stairs to listen in on the gossip going on in the living room.

The entire Order milled about. Minerva had found a place tucked in a corner with Hestia Jones. The two of them had their heads together as they murmured something with stern frowns on their faces. Bill and Fleur had claimed Shacklebolt’s attention while Dumbledore sat at the dining table with a blank expression that almost worried Molly more than anything else.

Hagrid hadn’t come yet, thankfully. He was a dear but he took up half the room all by himself. With Arabella crying into her hankie as Remus and Aberforth tried to comfort her, there just wasn’t space. Especially not with Moody taking up half the dining table as his eye whirled and his fingers twitched on his wand like he expected one of them to attack at any moment.

Charlie shuffled in from the back yard, nodding to the twins and then scooting over to talk to Arthur while the twins defiantly stood on the stairs and glared at Molly.

“Mum,” George huffed when she glared and pointed up the stairs.

“Be serious,” Fred continued.

“We know a lot about Harry’s so-called home life,” George insisted with a scowl towards Shacklebolt that Molly definitely did not approve of.

“We should be here,” Fred said entirely too seriously for Molly’s already fragmented self-control. “Now, I know you don’t want Ron or Hermione or Ginny here. Fine. We’re adults. We shouldn’t be thrown out just because you’re in a snit, Mum.”

“I am not in a snit!” Molly hissed at them. “This, this, there is no reason for Harry to do this.”

“Other than Harry’s cousin breaking six of his ribs summer before second year,” George said so flatly that Molly’s heart skipped a beat.

Unfortunately, George said it during one of those lulls in the conversation where the noise level dropped from a dull roar to a quiet murmur. George’s voice carried through the entire downstairs, snapping every head around to stare at the three of them at the base of the stairs.

“My dear boys,” Albus started to say only to freeze when George and Fred scowled at him.

“We’re not your “dear boys”, Headmaster,” Fred snapped. “We used the first aid spells we learned from Madame Pomphrey to help Harry stabilize his ribs when he got to school. He refused to go to the infirmary.”

“Said that there was no point,” George drawled, hands clenched into fists. “No one cared before. Why would Madame Pomphrey be any different?”

Molly sucked a breath between here clenched teeth, ready to shout that it couldn’t be true. It just couldn’t! But Tonks shuddered and grew about six inches, shifting from a delicate young woman into a sturdy young man about the same height as Remus, just with several more inches of muscle at the shoulder and bicep.

“We… did get called out to his relatives’ place an awful lot,” Tonks said as her hair drooped from bubblegum pink to a muddy sort of puce. “No matter how many reports we filed, no one ever went to check on him. I followed up dozens of times.”

“On what?” Molly exclaimed.

Thankfully, Arthur had his wand out to bring in the tea and treats that Molly had made earlier. She was much too rattled to do it herself. No one took tea or grabbed any of the cookies. Even Mundungus just sat there staring at Albus and Molly and Tonks and the twins like he was afraid to so much as twitch lest attention fall on him.

“Physical assault,” Tonks said, counting on her fingers so grimly that Molly shuddered. “We’d gotten a couple dozen reports through the Muggle aurors that he was beaten up with fists, a belt and various other implements. We got reports that he was being starved.”

Both Fred and George nodded entirely too seriously.

“We got reports that his aunt chased him outside while waving a cast iron frying pan at his head,” Tonks said, hair going flaming red as she hissed the words. “Fifteen reports of that on different days, over years and years. With sightings of bruises on his face that suggested that she’d connected quite a few times.”

“Rags for clothes,” Shacklebolt sighed as he pulled off his daishiki and rubbed the back of his head. “Those awful trainers. Glasses that don’t appear to have ever been updated to his prescription. Molly, I know you want to believe that his family cared about him, but every bit of evidence that we have says that they tolerated him at best and wanted him dead at worst.”

“That can’t be true,” Molly whispered as Arthur came to lead her over to her rocking chair. “It can’t be. Albus, tell them.”

Albus sighed as he stared at his own hands.

His trembling hands.

“I’m sorry, Mum,” Bill said as Fleur rubbed his back sympathetically. “I checked on it in the Department of Records. All those reports are there. And more than that. From what I could see, Harry was systematically starved, beaten, and abused in his relative’s house. House elves are treated better in Dark households, frankly.”

The room blurred as tears welled up in Molly’s eyes. She joined Arabella in crying into her hankie. Everyone talked over her head as she sobbed.

Beatings. Starved. Threatened. Treated like a criminal. Denied any clothes or toys or even the comfort of a bed of his own.

And then he’d apparently been through horrors at Hogwarts, too?

Albus sat silent and shaking as story after story spilled out of the twins. When Hermione and Ron came down, Ginny on their heels, Albus did nothing. He wouldn’t so much as look up to meet anyone’s eyes.

The tears slowly dried up. Somewhere about the point where Ginny told them all about Rita Skeeter spying on Harry specifically so that she could report horrible lies against him, Molly realized that she was angry.

No. Not angry.

Furious.

Incandescently incensed that Albus had nothing whatsoever to say about all the horrors that poor Harry had gone through, all because Albus hadn’t paid full attention.

If a very small part of her understood that her rage came in part from Molly’s guilt for never accepting or believing the evidence before her eyes, well, that was neither here nor there.

Albus put Harry there. He should have monitored Harry. He should have known. He should have fixed it before Harry ran away.

“How do we find him?” Molly asked during an exhausted lull. She stared right at Albus when she said it.

He flinched.

“Albus,” Molly said.

The entire room, Moody’s whirling eye included, went dead still.

“Albus, how do we find Harry?” Molly asked in her sternest, most implacable Mom voice.

“I fear… that it is already too late,” Albus said in a reedy, exhausted tone that would normally have had Molly feeding him tea and biscuits.

He pulled a shattered chunk of wood out of his sleeve, laying it in the middle of the dining table. It was about two feet long, including the dangerous-looking splinters at one end. The intact end had the look of a roughly whittled club, maybe? Perhaps an antique broom handle, though it wasn’t like the ones that Molly had seen before.

Molly frowned. What in Merlin’s name did a shattered chunk of wood have to do with finding–?

“That’s a broomstick handle!” Ginny exclaimed. She stepped over to poke at it with a frown. “A really old one. Headmaster, where’d you find it?”

“It was found washed up on the shore in Finland,” Albus said even more quietly, defeat adding a century or so to the lines on his face.

“Wait, what?” Moody snapped. His eye focused on the shattered broom handle. “Bloody hell, you mean Potter was riding that when he took his runner?”

“What runner?” Shacklebolt demanded. “I haven’t heard anything.”

“Neither have I,” Tonks said though she leaned into Remus’ side instead of joining the other aurors at the table to look at the broom handle.

All eyes settled on Albus once again. Molly’s heart beat in her throat as she watched Albus very delicately run one finger along the vicious ten-inch-long splinter that pointed straight at his heart. She’d never seen that expression Albus’ face before. He almost, not quite, looked as though he wished that the broom handle would stab him straight through.

“Our best guess,” Albus reported quietly enough that everyone held their breath so that they could be sure that they would hear him, “is that Harry bought reusable portkeys which he used to muddy his trail. He traveled all over Britain and perhaps to Ireland and Scotland. Then, as a massive storm bore down on the Shetland Islands, a young man who was most certainly Harry pulled an invisibility cloak around himself before flying into the teeth of the storm. On this broom.”

Bill’s breath hissed between his teeth. “He did buy portkeys. Thirty of them. I heard it through the grapevine at work. They’re all reusable. He could, well, maybe? Maybe he used one to escape when the storm hit?”

“Bloody hell, no,” Moody said with a very real shudder. “You don’t want to portkey from a moving broom, lad. You think splinching is bad. The added velocity and vectors screw the portkey right up. Even walking while triggering a portkey can be a messy death.”

Hermione hiccuped as tears began to flow down her cheeks. “We told you. We told you and we told you that he wasn’t safe. We told you that he wasn’t happy. We told you and now Harry is… Harry is..!”

Ron, face as pale as Molly’s hankie, pulled Hermione into his arms. She started sobbing into his shoulder, occasionally thumping a fist against his shoulder that Ron didn’t appear to notice. Bill looked just as pale and ill as Ron did while the twins had gone ruddy with rage that Molly couldn’t help but agree with.

“Albus,” Arthur said quietly but oh, so firmly. “Leave. Now.”

“We must make plans,” Albus said even though he nodded and stood, brushing shaking hands over his too-bright robes. “With Harry gone, there’s…”

“Leave,” Arthur repeated. His chin came up. His wand dropped into his hand, sparking with the rage that Arthur was always so careful not to show.

“If you don’t get out of our house right now,” Molly said in a voice that she didn’t recognize even though it came from her own throat, “I’m going to execute you, Albus.”

Albus paled before he rushed to the floo.

The rest of the Order stood and sat silently staring at the broom that may or may not have been the end of Harry’s too-short life. Molly sighed and stood, dashing the tears away. All eyes turned her way.

“Fred, George, please take Ron, Hermione and Ginny upstairs,” Molly ordered. It was not a request. “There are spells that we need to cast that are hazardous to underage Magi.”

“Right,” Fred said as he grabbed Ginny, picking her up bodily enough that normally she would’ve yelled and hit him.

Ginny curled into Fred’s arms, burying his face in the nook of his shoulder while shaking with silent tears.

“On it,” George agreed as he pushed Ron and Hermione towards the stairs. “We’ll ward the upper floors to keep all the magic away from them. Thanks, Mum.”

She nodded, waited until the private family wards snapped into place, and then sighed as she turned to Moody and Bill.

“Bill, I hate to do it, but can you please check the Potter records room?” Molly asked him. “If Harry actually is dead, the Department of Records will have something there.”

“I can do that, Mum,” Bill agreed. “They’re open all hours. I’ll floo over directly.”

“Moody,” Molly said as tears and rage welled up inside her. She shoved it all back down. “You found my brothers’ bodies after they were killed in the first war. All you had was a piece of Gideon’s broken broom. Can you do it again?”

“Takes a bit of preparation,” Moody said with a nod, magical eye locked on Molly’s face, “but yeah, I can. I don’t want to believe the boy would commit suicide. But… taking a risk that didn’t work out? I can see it.”

“He would,” Remus said, almost as thin and reedy as Dumbledore. It looked like Tonks’ embrace was the only thing keeping him conscious. “He’d take a wild, insane risk if he believed that he had a chance of freedom.”

Molly shut her eyes and breathed for a moment.

“Right,” Molly said, opening her eyes again. “Well, let’s see what we can find out. The Potters had a seneschal, Amal Swashlin. Tonks, please go contact him and see what he has to say. Shacklebolt, please talk to Amelia. Someone needs to question those Muggles he was living with. Arabella, we’ll need you to tell us everything that you saw. Even the things that Albus told you to keep secret.”

“Gladly,” Arabella huffed, wiping her tears away to reveal eyes glittering with anger. “I tried to get him to save poor Harry for years. Years! That poor boy. That poor, poor boy. The things he went through.”

“Use my workshop for testing the broom,” Arthur called over his shoulder as he followed Bill through the floo. “I’m going to check at the bank. Silverclaw likes me. He might tell me something… maybe.”

Molly settled down to hold Arabella’s hand as she started talking. She’d made a huge mistake trusting Albus, obviously. Even now, her gut wanted to believe that they were wrong, that Harry hadn’t been abused, that there was a logical explanation for everything.

She didn’t.

Albus’ too-pale face and shaking hands made everything she’d ever believed into a lie. If he’d lied about that, what else had he lied about? Well. She’d find out and then they’d take real, proper steps to take You-Know-Who down.

For their own sake. And for Harry’s.

17. Proper Questioning Techniques Begin With Why

It was a rare thing when Kingsley Shacklebolt asked Amelia for a favor. Kingsley had never been one to wheedle favors or offer them. He was a politician at heart. If Amelia did follow through on her plan to run for Minister of Magic, her most likely competition would be Kingsley, not Fudge.

“You know how I hate asking for favors,” Kingsley had said after he slunk into her office with grey-skinned exhaustion and horror haunting his eyes. “I need… Can you please go interview Potter’s Muggle relatives? We…”

“What?” Amelia had asked when Kingsley’s voice tapered off into nauseated silence.

“Albus found a broken broom handle,” Kingsley whispered, glancing towards the closed door as if he expected someone to fling it open and start blasting the two of them with hexes. “I checked. There are reports of a young man fitting Potter’s description putting on an invisibility cloak and riding off into the Shetland Islands storm on a ratty old broom. The handle…”

“Matches,” Amelia breathed as she realized what Kingsley was having such a hard time saying. “You think he might’ve died in the storm.”

“No clue, Amelia,” Kingsley whispered. “Moody’s trying some old tracking spells. Worked during the war. Might have some evidence, might not. We just. We have to cross all the T’s and dot all the I’s on this. If Potter took a runner because of abuse and died, that means that the person who put him there is guilty of murder by proxy.”

The person who put Harry James Potter with his Muggle relatives was Albus Dumbledore. Amelia’s breath had punched out of her. Then she’d nodded.

Privet Drive had changed not one whit since her last visit. It remained exactly as it had been on the first visit, even now on her twenty-seventh visit to the neighborhood. Exact duplicate houses with exact duplicate lawns sporting only the most minor variations of flowers in their exact duplicate flower beds.

The ministry self-driving car she’d checked out slowly rolled up Privet Drive, letting Amelia study the place without reservation. Her black sedan was nothing special. Apparently, on Privet Drive, it was cause for curtains to twitch wildly and suburban housewives to put their heads together in urgent, excited gossip.

Thank goodness for deciding to dress in a proper pantsuit before coming here. Amelia didn’t want to know what they would’ve made of her normal auror’s uniform.

The ministry car parked precisely in front of Number Four Privet Drive. Amelia got out leisurely. Shut the door with a casual shove of her hand. Then turned to study Harry Potter’s hopefully former home with a studied eye as Vernon Dursley came out to stand huffing with outrage on the front step.

There were remnants of wards over the place. Shattered by something. Amelia couldn’t venture a guess what. The thing that bothered her was that the shattered bits that remained along the sidewalk were pale, wan things that wouldn’t have kept out a doxy, much less You-Know-Who.

Blood wards, indeed. Dumbledore’s lies always layered hip deep.

“Mr. Dursley,” Amelia said crisply as she strode up the walk. “Let’s step inside. I have a couple of questions for you.”

“Whatever it is, we don’t want it,” Vernon Dursley declared though he scrambled backward remarkably quickly for such a corpulent man.

“Rugby?” Amelia asked, recognizing the footwork and the way Dursley hunched his shoulders and readied his hands.

“Ah, yes,” Dursley said, blinking at her in surprise and not even commenting on her shutting the door firmly behind her. “You know rugby? I thought your lot had that stupid game.”

Amelia shrugged. “We do. Doesn’t mean that I can’t recognize a rugby man when I see one. I’ve questions for you. They will be answered, one way or the other. I would prefer not to press charges against you, but I will if I need to.”

Inside, Number Four was as regimented as outside. Amelia had, of course, been there before. Twenty-six times. She’d spoken to Vernon Dursley, endured his threats. Listened to Petunia Dursley’s endless complaints of how she didn’t want and had never wanted to raise her late sister’s son.

Amelia had dismissed those complaints because she’d believed Albus when he said that it was what James and Lily wanted for their son. She’d believed Albus when he claimed that it was the best, safest, place for Harry to grow up.

Now, standing in this house that reeked of a magical child’s misery, Amelia had to wonder just how many spells Albus had cast to suppress that echo of Harry’s pain.

“What’s the boy done now?” Petunia snapped as she emerged from the kitchen with a damp dish towel in her hands.

“Died,” Amelia said.

Both Petunia and Vernon froze. The shock was very real. Clearly, neither of them had ever expected that Harry would die and “free” them from his unwanted presence.

“What?” Petunia asked, one hand going to the little golden lily pendant that she wore on her thin neck.

“We believe, though we have not yet proven it, that Harry Potter is dead,” Amelia said. “That’s part of why I need to ask you questions. The wards here are broken, if you didn’t realize it. There are no protections left over this house. What little is left doesn’t look like it would ever have protected you from attack.”

“Then what the bloody hell did it do?” Vernon spluttered as he staggered backwards to flop into the closest armchair in the living room.

Amelia stared at the cupboard under the stairs that radiated such fear, loss and loneliness that it was making her queasy. She’d never felt it before. Not once in all of her visits to Privet Drive. There’d been some mild anger. The normal sort of emotional wash that you got from upset Magi kids who’d argued with their parents.

Not this.

“I believe that it was designed to hide Harry,” Amelia said. “To hide his fear. His pain. To make people forget anything that he did.”

Petunia flinched. “That Man said that he had to be here. We never wanted him. I’ve told you and told you that. Every single time you came out to deal with the messes that the boy created, I’ve told you.”

Her grief and anger didn’t budge. Petunia Dursley stood there radiating an unchanging mix of emotions that no human could feel constantly. The human body simply couldn’t sustain emotions at a steady level, much less the human mind.

And yet, Petunia did.

So, for that matter, did Vernon Dursley.

Oh, there was so much more going on here than she’d thought when Kingsley asked for his favor.

“And I remember thinking that they were nothing more than the normal shenanigans that young boys get into,” Amelia agreed. She nodded towards the cupboard under the stairs. “I never felt that. I never felt your rage, Dursley. Or your grief. Your loss, Petunia. None of the emotions that are so clear right now existed. The wards hid it all, convinced any Magi who came that no, nothing was wrong.”

Neither Petunia nor her husband so much as blinked at the reference to Harry’s abuse in this home.

Petunia huffed. “Just like That Man. We told him outright and he made it impossible for us to get rid of the boy. Always causing trouble and embarrassing us.”

“I need do some diagnostic spells,” Amelia said before Petunia could go off on her overfamiliar rant about the “failings” of one Harry James Potter, aka The Boy-Who-Lived, aka Freak. “What’s left of the wards may have damaged both of you. And your son. They’ll certainly need to be purged from the building. Broken wards can have… deadly… side effects if left to rot.”

Dursley made a strangled sound of rage that cut off when Petunia glared at him. She nodded to Amelia which was more than enough permission for Amelia to deploy her best and most powerful evidence gathering spells.

Not just on Harry’s treatment in this house, but on the spells warping the other residents of Number Four. And, potentially, everyone living on Privet Drive.

It took eight and a half tense minutes for her diagnostics to gather everything that Amelia needed.

“I’m going to tear every single hair out of his beard, one by one, and then paint him blue,” Amelia announced as her diagnostics transferred the results to a piece of parchment that she kept in her pocket for occasions just like this.

“What did he do?” Petunia asked in nearly the exact same frustrated, exhausted, so-very-done voice as Amelia.

“There were wards here,” Amelia said as she knelt down to open the cupboard door. “Harry’s Room” scrawled on the wall in a childish hand stared back at her. “They were cast by Lily, well before either Harry or your son were born. They’ve been obliterated by the modifications and other spells that Dumbledore cast.”

“…Lily?” Petunia whispered, one hand on that pendant again. “I… she visited when we were both about six months pregnant. Stayed for several days while Vernon was off on a business trip. She never said…”

“The Lily I knew wouldn’t have,” Amelia said as she stood back up. “Did Dumbledore spend some time here? Probably shortly after he placed Harry in the house?”

“A whole damned day,” Dursley grumbled from where he sat pale and queasy in his armchair, puffing far too much for a man not that much older than Amelia. Even his extra weight wasn’t enough to explain his obvious ill health. “Threw us out of our own house, told us not to come back until after dinner. Kept the boy with him.”

“And didn’t change the boy all day, I might add,” Petunia said, sniffing in disapproval. “Expected me to clean him up even as we tried to insist that Harry couldn’t stay with us.”

Amelia shut her eyes. As much to deal with her own rage as to allow herself to focus on the broken wards over Number Four. It was all deliberate. Harry’s infant pain and confusion, his hunger and fear on the day Dumbledore’s wards mangled Lily’s protective wards, had carried over into the way Dumbledore’s wards worked.

“I need access to your attic,” Amelia said, opening her eyes to confusion on Petunia’s face and disapproval on Dursley’s. “Lily’s ward was centered here. Dumbledore apparently put his up in the attic which is just… outright foolishness. Wards need to go low, not high.”

“Follow me,” Petunia said.

The attic could only be accessed from a pull-down ladder at the end of the hallway right next to the door that must have been Harry’s actual bedroom, what with all the locks and the cat flap on the door. Amelia didn’t comment on that. She didn’t say a thing as she climbed the ladder after Petunia.

Both of them had to crouch up in the attic. It was barely high enough in the middle for a short woman to stand. Around the edges of the “room”, the sloped ceiling met the plywood-covered floor with piles of dust that told tales about how long it had been since anyone had spent time up here.

Three cardboard boxes full of Christmas ornaments sat next to the ladder. Two broken chairs, cheap metal and plastic ones that you’d expect from 1960’s Muggle homes lay halfway across the room.

And a ward array drawn in blood that had gone brown and flakey a decade and more ago sat near the northernmost wall.

Amelia did another series of detection spells on it. “That bloody idiot. Too proud to ask an expert and so sure of his own superiority that he couldn’t conceive of making a mistake. You can’t live in this house, Petunia. Not for a day longer. It’s killing all three of you.”

“What?” Petunia squeaked at the same time Dursley barked the word from the base of the ladder.

“The wards are so badly set, so poorly designed and now so broken,” Amelia explained without all the swearing she wanted to do, “that your husband will be dead in a month if you stay. It’s got to have horrific effects on your son. And you’ll waste away if you stay.”

“Where will we go?” Petunia asked.

She clambered down the ladder and leaned against Dursley, both of them shaking. Amelia sighed once she was down the ladder. There really wasn’t much of a choice.

“I’ll buy the house from you,” Amelia said. “It’s evidence, one way or the other, but I can’t as an officer of the law let you keep living here. Be like letting someone go on living in a house with a slow gas leak or arsenic in the water. Get a hotel room, preferably in London proper. Actually, I’ll set up a place for you. All three of you will need specialized healing.”

“I don’t want—!” Dursley blustered only to snap his mouth shut with both Amelia and Petunia glared at him. “But Pet…”

“The wards here are influencing your mind, Dursley,” Amelia snapped at him. “The way you can’t breathe? The endless hunger? That’s the wards feeding on you. You’ll have healing if I have to knock you out and keep you in stasis until it’s done.”

“Shut up, Vernon,” Petunia snapped at him, too. “We’re doing it. And… call Grunnings. Tell them that you’ll take the position in Ireland after all. If the boy’s dead, we’re not trapped here any longer.”

“Oh,” Vernon breathed, beady eyes going wide. “Oh! Right you are, Pet. I’ll go call them right away.

He thundered down the stairs, leaving Petunia to stare at the locks on Harry’s bedroom door. The house creaked in uncomfortably threatening ways. Amelia had heard moans, cracks and creaks like that from abandoned houses that she’d hunted fugitives to. She’d never heard it in a house that should, logically, be architecturally sound.

Another sign of the mess that Dumbledore had made, obviously. It smelled, too, every so faintly of wet rot. She’d only smelled that when she’d visited really old manor houses that the pureblood idiots had failed to keep up properly.

Specifically, the ones where the wards were rotting away.

“You really think that he’s dead?” Petunia whispered, too-thin fingers clenched around the lily pendant.

“I don’t know,” Amelia admitted just as quietly. “I’ll find out eventually. In the meantime, you need to pack. I can summon a house elf to pack everything, send one of my people to find your son and bring him back. The sooner you’re gone, the better off you’ll all be.”

Petunia breathed in, held it for a few seconds and then sighed. “Do it. I always knew magic would be the death of me. Always. But I won’t let it be the death of my Dudley or my husband, not if there’s anything I can do about it.”

There was a lot to unpack there, on top of everything else, but it wasn’t something that Amelia had the time to dig into now.

“Done,” Amelia said, waving her wand to summon a patronus. “Let’s get this taken care of.”

18. When Unexpectedly Questioned, Be Sure To Demand a NDA in Writing

Getting an appointment with Silverclaw hadn’t been easy. Arthur had never in his life seen Gringotts in this much of a kerfuffle. The tellers hurried about, shouting to each other in Gobbledygook with accents that Arthur couldn’t manage to follow. He’d learned the basics of Gobbledygook, of course. One had to if one worked for the Ministry in a junior position.

Did him exactly no good understanding the tellers right now.

Which was fine. Everything was fine. He just…

…needed to stay calm and reasonable and not start shouting at everyone rushing around him that they needed to help find poor Harry who was still missing on day three. Almost day four, actually, if what Shacklebolt had reported to him privately was true.

“Account Manager Silverclaw can spare you five minutes,” one of the human employees of Gringotts announced as Arthur wrestled with his worry and urgent need to do something.

“Ah, thank you, Ms.…”

“Lacey,” the stern young woman said with a scowl that would make Amelia Bones and Dowager Longbottom nod approvingly. “Follow me.”

“Thank you so much,” Arthur said. “I’m so sorry to interrupt the work. My boy Bill works for Gringotts and he said that there’s a huge customer who’s upset the cart entirely. Not that I need to know anything at all about that!”

Arthur threw his hands up to ward off Lacey’s razor-sharp glare. She snorted at him as she strode up the hallway with Arthur hurrying at her heels. Away from the chaos of the lobby, the sound and the urgent rushing weren’t much less.

The hallway they walked through had a constant stream of Goblins carrying stacks of files, piles of account books, artifacts and buckets of gemstones. Not a one of them paid Arthur any attention as they passed other than to glare at him for being in the hallway, in the way.

“Sir,” Lacey said as she tapped at the open doorway into Silverclaw’s office, “Arthur Weasley is here for his appointment.”

“Of all the…” Silverclaw snarled and showed off his very white, very sharp, very long teeth.

The eight other Goblins in the room promptly went cow-eyed at him, not that Silverclaw noticed at all. He waved for them to leave. They hurried out taking eight big iron bins full of leather-bound folios that Arthur didn’t dare glance at for fear of being fined for knowing things that he shouldn’t.

“You have precisely five minutes, Magi,” Silverclaw snapped at him.

“I just…” Arthur shut his mouth and breathed through the need to beg. Get on his knees and just beg for Silverclaw to confirm that Harry wasn’t dead. “Sorry. I’m a bit overwrought, I’m afraid.”

One bushy white eyebrow slid up as Silverclaw stared at Arthur with blatant disinterest in everything that might ever had upset him.

“We found a broken broom that we suspect might have been Harry’s,” Arthur explained. “You’re the Potter account manager. I. I don’t need to know anything about what he did with his vaults. I don’t care. I’ve always hated the way Harry was treated. It’s not right.”

“Interesting,” Silverclaw said as he moved around his massive marble desk to sit in his chair. He waved for Lacey to stay at the door. “You have three minutes left.”

“Hah, right,” Arthur said with a sigh that felt like it came form his heels, not his lungs. “Well. I just… can you please tell me if the last Potter is still alive? Don’t tell me where he is, alive or dead. Don’t tell me what he did or did not do. I don’t care. Unless he needs to be rescued in which case I’ll gladly go right now. Just… is he alive, Silverclaw? Is he alive or has the Potter line finally gone extinct?”

That seemed to rock both Silverclaw and Lacey back on their heels. After a moment which took perhaps twenty seconds of Arthur’s remaining two and half minutes, Silverclaw sighed. He waved for Lacey to close his office door, which guaranteed that no one would hear what Silverclaw had to say.

“I’ll… wait outside to escort him back to the surface,” Lacey said.

She didn’t look like she wanted to, but she closed the door so that Arthur was utterly and completely alone with Silverclaw. Silence echoed in time with the hammering beat of Arthur’s heart in his ears.

“House Potter is gone,” Silverclaw finally said in an almost-gentle tone. His hands lay gently on the smooth marble of his desktop. “Not dead, exactly. But subsumed. House Black consumed House Potter when they claimed Harry James Potter as their heir. And now House Black is… nearly extinguished. I cannot and will not tell you whether the boy lives. But House Potter is gone.”

Arthur stared up at the ceiling.

Stone.

Why was he staring at a stone ceiling? What in the name of Merlin had…?

“Oh!” Arthur sat bolt upright as the last few minutes (?) rushed back into his mind.

He nearly headbutted Lacey who had been leaning over him to check his condition. She jerked back, snarling at him with her wand at the ready in a lovely European dueling grip that could’ve pitted his eye at two hundred yards.

“Sorry, sorry,” Arthur said, scooting backwards on his arse as Lacey stood back up and glared at him.

Silverclaw sat behind his desk wearing that Deeply Unimpressed expressions that Goblins always got around Magi who were being bloody idiots. Like Arthur. Who had, apparently, passed out cold with the revelation that Harry was gone.

No.

Wait.

Silverclaw hadn’t said that Harry was gone. He’d said that House Potter was gone.

Arthur’s hearing had gone all echoey and strange, sending Silverclaw’s words into a sort of tunnel that must have been the shock overwhelming him. He… sort of… remembered something about House Black? Maybe?

“I… think I missed much of what you just said,” Arthur said to Silverclaw. “I um, apologize. I’m. Well. Stressed. Very worried about Harry. And um. What all did you say? House Potter is gone. That I got. But there was more, I think.”

Lacey sighed as she tucked her wand away into her wrist sheathe. “I cannot believe that he just sits right up and starts again.”

“Um.” Arthur blinked at her. “I assume I was only out for a moment? I mean. Silverclaw is busy. If I’d gone over the time, I’d have been removed?”

“You are over time,” Silverclaw said, laughter in his eyes even if it wasn’t in his voice. “I will repeat myself just the once. House Potter is gone. It was subsumed into House Black when Heir Potter became Heir Black. With Lord Black gone and Heir Potter-Black… gone… both House Black and House Potter teeter on the edge of oblivion.”

“Gone,” Arthur repeated.

“Precisely,” Silverclaw agreed.

“Okay, that’s… that’s enough,” Arthur said with a sigh of relief. “Gone is not dead. He may never come back. He may think of us all with hatred and disgust. But if he’s not dead, that’s enough for me.”

Arthur pulled himself back to his feet, brushing his hands over his pants and then settling his robe properly. From Silverclaw’s raised eyebrow and the fierce frown on Lacey’s face, neither of them had expected his response. Arthur waved a hand at them, brushing their concern off.

“My oldest son Bill works for Gringotts,” Arthur explained. “No one who has family that works at Gringotts expects to get full, detailed explanations. Bill has had to sign so many nondisclosure agreements. So many! My Molly doesn’t like it, but she understands it. And I fully expect that both of you, perhaps the entire bank, had to sign one for Sirius. Probably for Harry, too.”

“Hm,” Silverclaw hummed as the other eyebrow rose, giving him the appearance of a mildly startled snow-covered dandelion. “Surprising.”

“I know,” Lacey said, shaking her head sharply. “I’m not used to British Magi having common sense.”

“Oh, goodness, never expect that,” Arthur said so automatically that he blushed. “Sorry, it’s just. We’re a bit daft here, frankly. At any rate, thank you for seeing me, Silverclaw. I truly appreciate it. I’ll get out of your office so that you can get back to work.”

Silverclaw nodded, flicking his claws at Arthur and Lacey in dismissal.

The hallway was just as busy as before. The Goblins hurrying by were every bit as annoyed at having a non-Gringotts employee cluttering their hallways. The Magi employees frowned at Arthur as if simply breathing their air made their jobs harder.

Who knew? He might.

“You truly expected nothing else,” Lacey murmured once she’d escorted Arthur right back to the front doors of Gringotts.

“Bill is my son,” Arthur said with a helpless little shrug. “I know better than to expect anything more.”

Lacey shook her head as if she was surprised that Arthur understood proper nondisclosure agreements. Given how few of his coworkers and friends, and Molly of course, understood them, her surprise was understandable.

“Thank you for your assistance,” Arthur said. “Good luck with your work. I hope it goes well.”

“I’m only filling in until my husband and I transfer to the Paris branch later today,” Lacey admitted with a hint of a shrug. “But thank you. Good day.”

She strode off, leaving Arthur to slowly make his way down the stairs and up Diagon towards the public Apparation point. He spotted Tonks moving through the crowd more by the way people started and cursed than by seeing her. Surprisingly, she had her own face on though she’d transformed her unruly curls into a blindingly bright ice blue.

“All right there, Tonks?” Arthur asked as he steered the two of them off Diagon and up Vertic Alley where the crowds were less. Their Apparation point was never that crowded.

“You done with work?” Tonks asked far too tensely for the genial expression she tried to make.

“Headed home, actually,” Arthur confirmed. “You should come by for dinner. I believe Molly was planning on making stuffed cabbage rolls today. The gnomes almost made off with a whole cabbage the other day.”

Tonks’ tension bled off into amusement as Arthur chatted about the whole “who’s duty is it this week?” argument that the twins and Ron had gotten into. Sure, she’d been there for it. Arthur had the impression that Tonks hadn’t noticed it. Too upset and worried about Harry to snicker over Arthur’s sons and their many ways of trying not to do chores.

The Burrow loomed overhead when they arrived at the edge of the yard.

“Whoa,” Tonks breathed, shoulders taking on breadth as her voice dropped into a more masculine tenor.

“That’s… a surprise,” Arthur said as he escorted Tonks through the Weasley war wards. “I wonder what Mollywobbles has heard that she’s raised the wards this way.”

Inside, the Burrow stood still and silent, sentinel for whatever might come their way. Molly moved about the kitchen as she washed the teapot and shaped dinner rolls by magic. She carefully made stuffed cabbage rolls with her hands.

“I’m home, Mollywobbles,” Arthur announced because if Molly was cooking with her hands, she had too much of her magic bound up in the wards and various attack spells to startle her with a kiss to the back of the neck.

One only made that mistake once.

“Arthur, Tonks,” Molly said, studying both of them with that stern look that had made her such an effective general during the war. “The kids are all off visiting Luna. What have we learned?”

“House Potter, as an entity, was subsumed by House Black when Sirius adopted Harry as his heir,” Arthur reported. “Now that Harry’s the heir for the combined House Potter-Black, there’s… well. House Potter is gone, Molly. It no longer truly exists. House Black is nearly gone, too. Harry closed out all the vaults. Every single one of them. He removed it all from Gringotts which means that both House Potter and House Black no longer exist as legal or political entities in Britain. They’re gone. He’ll need to take steps if he doesn’t want to lose the votes in the Wizengamot, of course, but for all practical purposes, House Potter and Black are gone.”

“Bloody hell,” Tonks breathed as she tilted her head back and sighed. Her form didn’t change at all. “Right. Well, he took everything for House Potter with him. Amal Swashlin, his secretary Emily Sutton and her whole family are gone. Houses cleaned out, purged of all magical traces, and every contact warned that they wouldn’t be back ever.”

Molly breathed, slowly and carefully as she nodded as if that was what she’d expected. “I see. We’re waiting on the results of Moody’s tests. You might as well stay for dinner, Tonks, dear. The kids should be back soon. We’ll discuss whatever information we have after they’ve all gone to bed.”

19. Meeting Agendas Should Be Clearly Stated and Communicated Ahead of Time

The wards on Arthur’s workshop were surprisingly robust. Better than what Moody had expected when Arthur had given him permission to work out there. The man gave the impression of being distracted, undereducated and a bit foolish, but the wards he had on his workshop showed that to be a carefully crafted lie.

Nothing that happened in this workshop had the potential to spill outside. Arthur’s frequent nonsense questions about rubber ducks and “tellyophones” clearly were lies as he had a fully functional computer, several voltmeters and an motorized lathe that he could use for either metal or wood turning. Not to mention that his wards had gloriously detailed diagnostics built in so that Arthur could deconstruct what had happened on any of his experiments.

Instead of turning those off, Moody had turned them up to their strongest levels before he set to work. No reason not to take advantage of what Arthur had so graciously offered.

“Interesting,” Moody murmured as his best and most illegal detection spells crawled over the old broom handle.

It was old. Bloody damned old. The kind of old that meant that Potter must’ve gotten saddle sores from riding the thing. He didn’t need to see the twigs or straw at the end to know that it would’ve been a rough ride.

That handle was too raw for any level of precision in flight. Hell, the spells that lingered on the shattered handle were several centuries out of date and not professionally cast even then. This was a hobbyist’s broom, not one that a properly trained broom-maker had crafted.

“You keep your secrets well,” Moody told the broom handle. “I’m barely getting a thing from you.”

It was soaked in Black magic, not as in Dark magic or the kind of deep-black evil that You-Know-Who got up to, but the sort of magic that House Black had been known for a few generations back.

Wild. Pure magical intent poured into a physical container and then set loose on the world. The broom that this handle had been the core of clearly would’ve been one of those brooms that kept you up in the air, on your way to your destination, even if you’d had a piercing hex straight through the gut and passed out mid-flight.

Feral was a good word for it.

Also deeply satisfied with itself. Whatever Potter had said to the broom, always presuming it was actually Potter who’d ridden it, the broom had imprinted on him to the point that no one else was ever going to get anything from it.

“Well, that was worthless,” Moody said once his diagnostics returned a big fat nothing. “Good on you. Keep your rider’s secrets. But I still have to see if you’re connected to the Potter boy, broom. We’ve got to know if he’s alive or dead or what.”

If the broom hadn’t retained any usable traces of the Magi who last rode it, then maybe it retained some traces from portkeys it had been through. Not many people other than professional quidditch players realized that brooms picked up portkey magic. No reason why they would’ve. It could make a professional quidditch broom glitchy and prone to unexpected sideways jerks at high speed, but for most everyone else, going that speed wasn’t going to happen so they didn’t ever learn to isolate their broom when they portkeyed somewhere with one.

“And… that’s a no, too,” Moody commented as his spells came up null. “Totally isolated. Interesting. That’s hard to accomplish.”

Moody would’ve had a hard time doing it. If Potter managed to totally isolate the broom, that was quite a surprise. Not a skill that he should’ve known existed, much less known how to do.

“Right.” Moody hummed as he used every single scan built into his magical eye. “Not a damned thing. Smug little shard, aren’t you?”

But then that was an answer in and of itself, wasn’t it? Whoever had used this broom last was strong. Stronger than most Magi. They’d used it over the North Sea in the middle of the Shetland Islands storm. Somehow, the broom had been broken, either during the storm or after it.

The broom was not linked to the rider.

Loyal, absolutely. The broken broomstick held more loyalty in its ancient wood than most modern wands gathered up over the course of a lifetime of serving their Magi.

“Black work,” Moody said because the broom definitely was House Black spell work. “It has to have been used by someone from the Black family magic well. That’s a really damned small number of people.”

Over the course of his decades as an auror, Moody had accumulated magical impressions for every Black alive. Most of the dead ones, too. He started through those impressions, not to confirm but to rule out.

“Not Narcissa,” Moody muttered as he worked. “Not the Malfoy boy. Not Lord Arcturus, should he actually be alive and not dead. Not Tonks, clearly. Not her mum.”

Moody checked off each Black family member out to the sixth remove, going through all of them other than Harry Potter. The broom had faint hints of Sirius Black’s magic on it but that was only the lightest touch of his magic, like he’d summoned the broom and then set it right back down.

By the time Moody ran through all his Black family imprints, he eliminated everyone. Literally every single Black other than Sirius and Harry James Potter.

Moody drummed his fingers on the workbench as he stared at the broomstick. Albus had never let Moody get an imprint of the boy’s magic. Said it was too dangerous to Potter to allow such things to happen. More likely, Albus had been keeping secrets and didn’t want them blown open.

Again.

The man got so wrapped up in his intricate plans and plots that he lost all common sense. Moody had seen it happen multiple times. Usually only ended when someone got killed because Albus forgot that human beings were human. With flaws and foibles and mistakes that couldn’t be anticipated.

Moody left the broomstick behind so that he could stomp his way back into the Burrow.

“Did you find anything?” Molly asked, whipping around to stare at Moody like a sight hound spotting a pheasant.

“Not yet,” Moody said. “Broom was isolated, completely isolated from all magic, up until the moment it was used. Checked magical imprints and I’ve got exactly two traces on it. One is Sirius Black, but only a glancing touch. Other is unidentified. I need something that’s been touched by the Potter boy’s magic to see if I can match that.”

“Of course,” Molly said, eyes distant as she wiped her hands off on a stained dish towel. “Let’s check with Ron and Hermione. They may have something.”

Upstairs, the kids had curled up together in Ron’s orange explosion of a bedroom. They all looked up when Molly knocked on the door. Moody could see the hope in their eyes, followed by crushing disappointment when he shook his head at them.

“Any of you have something that’s been touched recently by Potter’s magic?” Moody asked.

“Um,” Ron went wide-eyed and blank.

“Yes,” Hermione said as she started rooting through her bejeweled handbag. “I do. Harry had this on when we went to the Department of Mysteries. It’s got some of his blood but he used a lot of magic while he wore it. It should have some traces left, hopefully.”

“It” turned out to be a red necktie. Muggle thing, made of cheap synthetic silk, but the lining was a good solid linen that’d held a nice imprint. Moody nodded as he turned it over in his hands, poking at the lining and using his eye to check for traces that would muddle things up.

Lots of dark magic cast around the thing, obviously, but for once Moody got lucky. The synthetic silk had done a great job rebuffing the dark magic. Little clinging traces remained on the outside of the tie, but the lining interfacing held a good pure imprint of Potter’s magic.

“Yeah, that’ll do nicely,” Moody said as he held the tie in one hand and then carefully collected the imprint with his wand.

Normally, he’d’ve just done it but with the kids watching and Molly’s hands tying her apron into knots, doing the thing right was a good way to keep them all from flying apart at the seams. Moody stored the imprint in a crystal he’d had stuffed in his pocket.

“Did… did it work?” Hermione asked when Moody passed her the tie.

“Quite well, actually,” Moody said. “Synthetics tend to rebuff magic. Would’ve been worthless except that it’s got a good linen stiffener inside and that took a good imprint of the boy’s magic. I’ll just go finish my tests and see what I can come up with.”

“Would you… sense anything if Harry was behind wards?” Hermione asked once she tucked the tie away. “Very solid ones, I mean.”

“…Depends,” Moody replied even though Molly glared like she didn’t think he should answer the girl. “If he’s behind them willingly, with full welcome of whoever holds the wards? Nah, wouldn’t get a thing which is an answer on its own. He’d be safe, then. If he was being held against his will, a boy like Potter will throw off enough magic that traces would get through. That I’ll be able to detect. I might not be able to tell where he is, but if he’s held against his will, I’ll know.”

Molly sagged, blowing out a breath as if she’d been afraid that Moody wouldn’t know. Couldn’t. Silly of her. She’d watched him do the spells before, but then Molly was a dueler and a potioneer, not an auror. She didn’t have the skills needed for this kind of work.

Back out in Arthur’s workshop, Moody set to work with his new imprint of Potter’s magic.

“How the bloody hell do I get nothing?” Moody asked after he did the spells six times with no valid results.

Not a no. Not a yes. Not even a “you did that wrong”. Null response.

Moody paused before doing a seventh test. “Wait. Two checks.”

First was the worst one: Is the owner of this magic dead?

It’d been a decade since Moody had had to cast this particular spell in the field. Since the end of the war, he’d always let someone else do it back in the office because getting that “yes” answer was like getting your spleen ripped out through your bellybutton. Always horrible, always gut-wrenching.

Null answer.

“Oh, bloody hell, boy,” Moody whispered as he stared at the broomstick which had an air of “don’t know nothing and you can’t make me talk” now. “What did you do?”

Null answer wasn’t dead. Also wasn’t alive. A null answer meant that something had rendered the magical connection invalid.

Or you were an idiot and had the wrong sample of magic pointed at a completely different person.

Second test was one that he’d only had to do three times in his whole life, all three for women who’d escaped from murderous and abusive husbands by sacrificing their magic and their names to join a completely different House under a totally different name.

Is this person no longer Harry James Potter, heir of House Potter and House Black?

Moody rocked back on his heels. “Yes. Ah, hell, lad. I wish you’d asked for help before you went and did this.”

Harry James Potter of House Potter and House Black no longer existed. Any magic that he had used prior to the change would no longer point at him.

House Potter was gone. House Black, too.

Unless they’d been secretly and magically subsumed into some other House, both Potter and Black had been obliterated when Harry Potter took a new name.

“He’s someone else, now,” Moody whispered as he let one hand rest on the broken broom handle. “There is no Harry Potter, Boy-Who-Lived, anymore.”

Yeah. Molly was going to lose her mind at Albus. Frankly? Moody would help. Abandoning your family name and your magic that way was something that only the most desperate people did. Albus was the one who put Potter in that house on Privet Drive. He was the one who’d set up every single thing in Potter’s life.

If Potter ran away this thoroughly, it was on Albus’ head. Every bit of it.

Moody took the broom handle and stomped his way back into the Burrow. Time to tell Molly and those kids what he’d discovered. It wouldn’t help the kids grief and worry. Nothing but time would.

Dealing with Albus would be the next step. All of this started from Albus and all of it would end with him, too.

20. Sometimes, Despite All Efforts, The Worst Happens

Hogwarts, during the summers, was a quiet place.

During the school year, she hummed with life and magic, full of voice, laughter and excitement. The castle itself had a sort of life. It had been warded for so long and held so many lives that it had grown into a person over the centuries.

Not like a human, obviously, but still alive in its own way. Her way. Hogwarts was mother to everyone who lived in her embrace.

Albus had forgotten what it was like to have his mother stare disapprovingly at him. She’d died when he was a teenager. That weight of her pursed lips and shaking head was a thing that he’d allowed to slip away into the distant past, no longer an issue to be concerned with.

Hogwarts’ disapproval weighed on Albus now.

She wasn’t happy with him. He’d come back from the Order meeting where Molly and Arthur had sent him packing to Hogwarts humming with outrage. Anger. Disapproval so thick that he could taste it coating the back of his tongue like moldy treacle dripping down his throat.

Hogwarts had reacted with that metaphorical thousand-yard stare that told him to rethink his attitude at once lest there be unpleasant consequences.

He’d promptly stumbled and then applied all his Occlumency to ensure that he didn’t continue to offend Hogwarts. One only had to have those consequences land on one once or twice to realize that one did not wish to do it again.

And then he’d sat down to try all his trinkets, tracking spells and tricks to find where Harry had gone.

He couldn’t be dead.

He just couldn’t. The prophecy was so clear…

“I thought it was the right thing to do,” Albus whispered as he stared at the little trinkets he’d spelled to track Harry’s life, his magic, his location and his heath.

All of them stood idle. The magic that kept them dancing had failed sometime during the day. Albus had no idea when. He would’ve asked Fawkes, but Fawkes had taken one look at Albus after he flooed back home and flamed away who knew where.

Albus had the impression that Fawkes would not be back. Ever.

The trinkets still worked. They sprang back to life when Albus switched their focus to Ron Weasley, to Neville Longbottom, to Hermione or Ginny or even to himself. When he set them to focus on Harry, though, the spells went idle as if there was no person known as Harry James Potter.

“I thought it was the right thing,” Albus insisted to the trinkets, to Hogwarts, to himself. “With a horcrux in his scar, there was nothing that could be done to save him. He was… he was always doomed. The prophecy, it ensured Tom’s destruction, but only if poor Harry died too.”

Except obviously that couldn’t be an accurate interpretation of the prophecy because here Albus sat, staring at all of his magical trackers sitting idle because there was no such person as Harry James Potter anymore.

Albus ran his hands over his beard as he fought the rising panic down so that he could shove it behind one of the thousands of doors he’d constructed in his mind. A door for memories he didn’t want to relive. A door for sensations that distracted him. A door leading to a library full of every spell and magical book he’d ever seen so that he could go study anything by just closing his eyes and focusing.

Then thousands upon thousands of doors behind each to lock things he didn’t want to deal with deeper and deeper away.

His floo flared bright.

Albus sucked a breath through his teeth as he, purely instinctively, stood in hopes that it would be news of Harry.

Molly strode through, barely breaking her stride as she arrived. Alistair spilled through after her, stomping and furious as his eye whirled violently in his socket. Then Arthur came through with an expression that exactly mirrored Hogwarts’ disapproval and Albus collapsed back into his chair.

“Molly,” Albus said, hating how reedy his voice came out but too exhausted all of a sudden to do anything about it. “Alistair. Arthur. Is there news?”

“Just a moment,” Arthur said instead of answering.

The three of them waited, watching the floo. Thirty seconds passed. Then a full minute. At two minutes, Bill spilled out into Albus’ office with a stack of records on his arm. He looked as grim as the others did.

One of the folios in his arm was emblazoned with the Potter seal.

Oh dear. They’d gone to the Department of Records, even though he’d told them there was no point. That… was not going to be good.

“Well,” Albus said only to find himself without a single thing to say after that one word.

What could he say? Molly had her dueling stare on, the one that had scared even Bellatrix during the war. Her eyes were cold, calm, utterly calculating as she studied Albus’ features and then noted the idle trinkets arrayed across his desk.

Arthur, of course, had already nodded at the trinkets. An inventor such as he knew what each of them was. They’d chatted about Albus’ methods many times.

“All right,” Bill said before Alistair could do more than hum threateningly at Albus. “We have… a situation. The House of Potter is gone. The House of Black is in abeyance. It may yet be resurrected if a distant member of the family manages to pick up the family magic in time. Or, you know, Harry passes them on to someone else~. I wouldn’t guarantee it.”

“You’re sure?” Alistair asked.

“Completely,” Bill said.

He flipped through the folios and pulled out one to show them all the records from both the Ministry and Gringotts that showed that he was right. ”No known members exist” for House Potter and ”No known Lord” for House Black.

Albus’ hands shook as he read the records. Multiple times. While wishing desperately that the words written there would twist into something, anything, else.

“Yeah,” Alastor said before taking a sip of his nerve-soother. “That’s about what I found. Molly asked that I do the old searching spells, Albus. They turned up nothing. The boy’s gone.”

“I think… that he must have sworn to another family,” Bill said carefully as he pulled a different folio from the stack. “You see, Mum sent me to go talk to the Potter Seneschal, Amal Swashlin. He wasn’t home. He wasn’t in his office. Everything in both places was gone. And…”

Bill licked his lips as he passed the opened folio to Molly, not Albus, first.

Oh, dear.

This was even worse than he’d thought. Molly was deposing him. Had already deposed him. Albus no longer lead the Order of the Phoenix.

Molly did.

“Who is Emily Sutton?” Molly asked only to start when Albus smacked a hand to his desk instinctively.

“Amal Swashlin’s secretary and a damned powerful dueler,” Alastor told her. “Also a terrifying magical crafter. Those mitts you commented on a year ago? Emily made ‘em. Purely to make me twitch, far as I can tell.”

“Oh, those were brilliant,” Molly murmured. “She’s gone, too. Oh, dear. Her entire extended family is gone, too?”

“All of them,” Bill confirmed. “I haven’t asked anything at the bank. I don’t dare. But the only logical answer is that Harry fled to the continent and brought both Amal and Emily along with him. Emily wouldn’t leave her family behind, obviously, so they came, too. And… well.”

There was only one place that they could have gone.

Potter Sanctum, in Italy.

The hidden island fortress with wards so ferocious and ancient that no one in history had ever so much as dented them. Hannibal had thrown his army at them. Alexander had. Grindelwald’s forces had tried to take the Sanctum for him so that he would have an invulnerable fortress to retreat to.

They’d all failed.

“I suppose,” Albus said, hating how weak his voice was, “that means that Mr. Potter is safe, for all that he is no longer named “Potter”.”

“We have to assume so,” Arthur agreed with a long sigh. “I begged Silverclaw to just tell me whether Harry was alive. He didn’t, of course. But he did tell me that Harry took literally everything from the Black vaults and everything from every Potter vault with him. It’s how he afforded the portkeys he used. He’ll be… well supplied, I suppose.”

“Thank you for finding all of this,” Molly said as Albus sagged in his chair. “I’m glad that we have this much reassurance. I mean, I’d rather be able to hug the stuffing out of him and scold him for making us worry, but he’s safe and that’s what matters. Now. Albus, you’ve got to take on You-Know-Who.”

The businesslike tone didn’t disguise Molly’s simmering anger at him. Albus had to be grateful for his beard for hiding the extent of his jaw-dropping shock. He sat up a little straighter, studying Molly with the old “I know better” twinkle.

It bounced right off Molly.

“You’re the only person that You-Know-Who fears, Albus,” Molly said. “You’ve fought him. You’ve studied him. You know more than literally anyone alive about You-Know-Who. We need to find out where he is, how he came back, and how we can kill him properly this time.”

Albus gaped.

Honestly and truthfully gaped at her in utter shock.

“I beg your pardon?” Albus ventured finally when Molly just stared at him with those steely dueler’s eyes.

Molly sighed as if he was a stubborn first year refusing to do his homework. “I thought I was perfectly clear. You have to take You-Know-Who down, Albus. Don’t worry, we’ll all support you, just as we’ve done our best to support Harry all these years. Minerva’s already been confirmed as the new Headmistress. You’re not the Chief Warlock anymore, so you don’t have that weighing on your time. And you certainly should talk to the ICW to see if they can offer us any help or suggestions.”

The phrase “catching flies” drifted through Albus’ head.

“I… don’t… think that will work, Molly,” Albus said. “And, wait. What do you mean, Minerva’s going to be Headmistress? There’s no reason…”

Molly waved hand to dismiss Albus’ rising irritation. “You certainly can’t be Headmaster if you’re hunting You-Know-Who.”

“Too dangerous for the kids,” Alastor agreed.

“The Goblins have already said that they’ll help,” Bill said, offering Albus a different folio marked with Gringotts’ seal. “They’re willing to waive their normal fees. There are apparently several tracking spells that can be done for a construct like what Harry described of You-Know-Who’s body. And they think they might have methods to deconstruct it at a distance. Either way, they’ll help. You just need to go talk to them about it.”

“He took steps to make himself unkillable,” Albus said slowly. “And there is a prophecy that says that only a specific person can take him down.”

Alastor nodded thoughtfully. “Might want to check and make sure that it’s still valid, then. Because if you’re thinking that Potter’s the only one who can do it, that prophecy can’t be valid anymore. Potter’s gone, Albus. He’s gone and you’re our only hope of defeating You-Know-Who once and for all.”

The utter gravity with which Alastor said it sent a chill of ice down Albus’ spine.

This wasn’t…

It wasn’t a mistake.

They weren’t confused or misguided. Albus literally was the last hope of the Wizarding world.

Harry James Potter was truly gone, which meant that the prophecy that Albus had followed for so long could no longer be valid. It’s orb in the Department of Mysteries must have gone dark, though Albus would logically have to verify that.

“I see,” Albus breathed.

He had never felt this old before. Or this fragile. Albus sat and listened as Molly gave the others their marching orders. Where Albus felt as thin as fine tissue paper damped by a mist, Molly was bright, strong, determined.

In less than five minutes, Molly had them out of Albus’ office and on their way to doing what needed to be done.

Albus shut his eyes and put his face in his hands.

It had all fallen apart. His plans to get Horace Slughorn back, the careful dance of keeping Harry just hopeful enough that he would try and not so hopeful that he would flee. Marshaling the Order and shaping the Wizengamot. Seeing that the children learned only what they should, not anything which might lead them to the Dark path.

It had all fallen apart around him.

Albus sighed and dropped his hands to stare at the idle trinkets. They didn’t move or chime at all.

“Well,” Albus murmured as he creaked his way upright, “I suppose I’d best go find Minerva to see… to see if she wants me to teach. If not, I’ll need to, well, find somewhere else to live.”

None of the portraits of the other Headmasters and Headmistresses met Albus’ eyes. Of course. He sighed as he shuffled out of the office.

How could it all have gone so wrong?

And what in the name of Merlin was he going to do now?

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