Reading Time: 99 Minutes

Title: Unheard Voices, Open Ears
Author: vamprav
Fandom: Harry Potter, The Untamed
Genre: Crossover, Established Relationship, Fantasy, Fusion, Pre-Relationship
Relationship(s): Wei Wuxian/Lan Wangji
Content Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Major Character Death. Discussions of: war and trauma
Author Note: MCD refers to Cedric Diggory’s death in canon and in the fic.
Word Count: 50,223
Summary: When the corpse of Cedric Diggory sits up in Hogwarts’s hospital wing and begins attacking people Dumbledore seeks out the only necromancer in the world he knows he can trust. Wei Wuxian was not prepared for the cluster fuck of a situation his fellow ICW member had so kindly dumped in his lap but he was even less prepared for a dementor attack while retrieving the erstwhile Harry Potter. Harry is just glad to be away from the Dursleys and with an adult that was finally listening to him for once even if his world view was shaken up in the process.
Artist: Westwind

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Chapter 9

Harry was actually a rather good study companion, quiet and minding his own side of the table, occasionally asking questions. Wei Wuxian paid half a mind to him as he went over the notes he’d been writing when Dumbledore had first apparated into the rose bushes.

He was the first to admit that he wasn’t always the most coherent in his brain dumps but the fact that it had been over a week wasn’t helping matters. There were really interesting leaps of logic he’d run down that made absolutely no logical sense on the right side of dawn with tea and actual food in his stomach.

Wei Wuxian was almost done with the puzzle that was a half finished equation when there was a knock at the door. He looked up, realizing that hours had past over the course of what felt like only a handful of minutes.

“Come in!” He called, pitching his voice to carry but not outright yelling.

There was no excessive noise in the Cloud Recesses, a rule he’d hated when he was an idiot kid but had immediately felt bad about violating as soon as it had been explained to him. There was a section of the Lan disciples that were more nocturnal than he could ever hope to be and another section that was made up of incredibly traumatized people that Wei Wuxian had never dared ask the trauma of. Both groups needed the quiet to maintain any semblance of their sanity.

Uncle Qiren opened the door, a faint pinched expression on his face as he took in the room, only softening slightly when he caught sight of Harry. Old Lan Qiren had always had a soft spot for the kids who were obviously injured.

And Harry was so obviously injured if you knew what you were looking for, if you were actually paying attention to his behavior. Lan Qiren was many things but above all he was intensely focussed on the well being of every student that came through the Cloud Recess whether they were there for a week or their entire lifetime.

“Wei Ying, you forgot to turn in your lesson outline for the year,” Lan Qiren called, eyes flicking between the two of them.

“Uncle Qiren, meet Potter Harry, he’s staying with us for the summer, Britain imploded,” Uncle Qiren snorted in derision because they’d all been waiting for that to happen. “Harry, this is Lan Qiren, he’s Lan Zhan’s uncle and currently in charge of the education portion of the Lan Sect.”

Harry waved at Uncle Qiren, small and hesitant, eyes full of wary alertness that made Wei Wuxian smile sadly. He’d been that wary once, before he’d been taken into the Jiang Sect and for a good year after, had hidden it behind smiles and shenanigans that had always gotten him in trouble.

“Uncle Qiren, I’m waiting to hear back from the ICW before I settle on any plans, they’ll want Lan Zhan to lead the investigation but they might want me on call as well,” Wei Wuxian said.

Uncle Qiren huffed in irritation, reaching up to rub at his beard. “Europeans, always waiting until the last second to make a decision.”

“Jin Zixuan is on the council as well,” Wei Wuxian pointed out.

Uncle Qiren huffed, clearly that didn’t make any difference to him, and since he’d been the one to teach Jin Zixuan during the Guest Disciples’ study period Wei Wuxian could exactly blame him. Jin Zixuan may have been a somewhat decent person who loved his wife with the devotion of a true lover but he wasn’t exactly the smartest of people and a somewhat rigid thinker.

Sometimes it shocked Wei Wuxian that he was actually related to Meng Yao and Mo Xuanyu, let alone being their half sibling. Then again, Jin Zixuan had only been exposed to the vipers nest of Koi Tower court for the briefest time at that point and his parents’ had participated in outright and cripplingly coddling.

“They might send me into Hogwarts,” Wei Wuxian offered, like some sort of peace offering. “I’m the least bad option as far as I know, considering a good fourth of that school is one bad day away from tripping off the side of the crooked path.”

At least if any of those kids snapped he’d be able to tell if they would be able to handle the implications of walking the darker road. From what he’d been able to research western mages were less likely to go stark raving mad when they turned to the darker side of magic for the comfort that light magic would never be able to offer but there was still the possibility that they could.

It took a certain kind of person to come out the other end of that particular trial by fire, mostly sane rather than cracked down the center like a badly shaped crystal. Wei Wuxian, by pure, dumb luck had been that kind of person and Mo Xuanyu might be as well but they wouldn’t know until Wei Wuxian gave in and let them follow him onto the path of Yin cultivation.

Wei Wuxian was dreading that day, a bit, he’d never forgive himself if the younger cultivator lost their mind to the shadows. He’d have to kill them if that was the case, or hand him over to the Jiang or Nie for rehabilitation, which wouldn’t be pleasant for anyone involved and only resulted in a fifty fifty success rate.

Harry might actually do well on a shaded path, floating in a shade of gray, the European way of doing magic had those, considering the fact that he’d had a shard of incredibly dark power in his head for years and had never fallen prey to it. Wei Wuxian would never suggest it, not unless Harry brought it up first but it was an option open.

Uncle Qiren sniffed again, this time with a tiny smile of approval creeping across his face. Harry blinked at them both as his mouth crept open in a silent exclamation of shock.

“You might be our new DADA professor?” Harry asked.

Wei Wuxian raised an eyebrow. “You already know what position they’d be offering to me?”

Harry nodded. “We haven’t been able to keep a Defense Against the Dark Arts Professor for longer than a year in over a decade. People say that Voldemort cursed the position when Dumbledore denied him the post.”

Wei Wuxian blinked, waiting for the punchline and then groaned when it became clear that it wasn’t, in fact, a joke. He leaned forward to lay his head against the cool wood of the table.

“I thought European magic users were supposed to be civilized,” he bemoaned. “Why? Why would they leave a curse on the facility that provides their children’s only source of magical training?”

“I told you they had less common sense than the Jin,” Lan Qiren said.

Wei Wuxian’s head came up and he gaped at Lan Zhan’s uncle because the man had said that while drunk. Wei Wuxian didn’t even realize that Lan Qiren had remembered that conversation, Lan Zhan certainly didn’t remember what had happened the one time someone forgot to label which pitchers went to the Lan tables at a Discussion Conference.

Granted all he’d gotten up to was draping himself over Wei Wuxian’s shoulder and glaring at anyone who even looked like they were going to talk to Wei Wuxian but still. Wei Wuxian had spent most of that night trying to keep the Lan as a whole from embarrassing themselves out of polite society, at least that had gotten the worst Jin cousin kicked out of his sect when he’d tried to take issue with the Lan leaving early.

“Uncle Qiren!” Wei Wuxian exclaimed.

“Honesty is the heart of virtue,” Lan Qiren quoted at him. “Keep me updated, we have another two weeks before the new disciples will be ready for preliminary talisman training.”

And with that the indomitable Lan elder left, Wei Wuxian staring at the door where he had been standing mere seconds before. There was silence for a long moment as Harry and Wei Wuxian took in the words.

“I like him,” Harry decided after a minute.

Wei Wuxian broke down in peels of laughter.

*****

The letter Wei Wuxian had been waiting for showed up in the middle of dinner preparations, flashing into existence right on top of the cutting board Wei Wuxian had been about to use. He sighed, setting down the onion he’d just picked up and ripping the envelope open to read through the text.

It was from Jin Zixuan, his calligraphy as annoyingly perfect as ever, and said exactly what Wei Wuxian had expected it to. He pulled out the pencil he had tucked behind his ear to scrawl a reply and bit into his thumb to smear a character onto the sheet under it.

The letter vanished in a flash of fire and Lan Zhan reached out to catch his wrist, sending a spark of spiritual energy through the contact in order to heal the miniscule wound. Wei Wuxian went back to cutting up the onion for the soup before stepping back and letting Lan Zhan take full control of the kitchen, which was his preference to begin with.

“A-Niang?” A-Yuan asked from where he was reading over Harry’s notes at the table.

Wei Wuxian smiled at his little radish and their incredibly red house guest. It was adorable how blatant Harry’s crush was and how hard he was trying to ignore said crush. He was failing miserably but Wei Wuxian was the first to admit that Lan boys had an unfair advantage in the looks department.

Wei Wuxian had done some spectacularly stupid things when he was younger in an attempt to get Lan Zhan’s attention. And that was before he’d even realized that what he was feeling was the beginnings of romantic interest rather than a minor platonic obsession.

“They’re asking me to keep order at Hogwarts this fall, just in case one of the kids trips down the path towards darker magic, they have a dark leaning mage there but he’s got a slave brand on his arm that no one’s been able to remove in the nearly two decades since its been placed,” Wei Wuxian said. “You were right, they asked me to be your Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher.”

That last bit was directed at Harry who had a tiny furrow between his eyebrows as he stared at Wei Wuxian. He waited patiently for the young boy to spit out what was bothering him.

“Why would they ask you to keep an eye on the Slytherins if they need a dark wizard to make sure they don’t go evil?” Harry asked.

Those dots had connected faster than Wei Wuxian had expected, really, Harry was quite bright, just had the tendency of hiding that light under a bushel. Wei Wuxian crossed his arms and raised an eyebrow, waiting for Harry to put that statement together with the logical conclusion.

Green eyes widened a bit and Harry shrunk in on himself a bit, ah, right, Wei Wuxian had forgotten about that little bit of prejudice. No matter how many times the European mages were faced with perfectly sane practitioners of the darker arts they always insisted on assuming every dark mage in existence had been put on the earth as some kind of moral test of fiber.

“But you aren’t evil,” the young boy said after staring at him for a long minute.

“No, I’m not, no matter what Jin Guanshan liked to think while he was alive,” Wei Wuxian joked. “And that tells you what?”

Harry hesitated. “That you’re not a dark wizard?”

Wei Wuxian sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose before throwing himself to the floor in a dramatic sprawl. Cedric, who’d been minding his own business on the porch up until that point, howled with ghostly laughter, tipping over on his side to roll around in the air.

Wei Wuxian shot the ghost a glare as he reveled in Wei Wuxian’s exasperation. He couldn’t exactly blame the boy but, well, it was the principle of the thing. He was the fucking Yiling Patriarch, most ghosts were terrified of him on pure principle.

“Oh no, Harry, A-Niang is a yin cultivator, he’s walked the ghost path for almost as long as I’ve been alive,” A-Yuan said. “It’s just that he’s mentally stable and never wanted to launch into world domination as a career to begin with.”

“It’s not about the magic, Harry, it’s about intent,” Cedric piped up. “Plus the ministry labels random spells as dark magic all the time without any indication as to why or any real reason behind it, half of them are actually light spells. That’s why blood magic has a blanket ban on it, because they couldn’t be bothered to sort out the rituals that were beneficial from the ones that were terrible.”

“Well, that’s getting fixed as soon as the inquest is over,” Wei Wuxian grumbled.

Honestly there were a good couple dozen healing rituals that required blood at some point during the proceedings.

Harry was staring at all of them now, clearly suffering from a bit of shock as he watched them all casually mention the fact that Wei Wuxian was the Yiling Patriarch. Wei Wuxian was starting to suspect that the British Ministry didn’t actually explain what the difference between dark and light magic was beyond their obvious stance of dark magic bad.

He straightened and looked Harry in the eye, gods the kids eyes were impossibly green, they nearly glowed with it. Harry stared right back, clearly struggling to maintain eye contact but determined in his struggle.

“There is a difference between what people call dark and light magic but it isn’t what most people would say it is,” Wei Wuxian said. “It isn’t about good and evil, not at the heart of it. As far as we know, as far as our kind of magic works it’s a question of control versus effort when you boil it down, also aptitude but that’s secondary.”

“Mn,” Lan Zhan piped up from the kitchen. “The sword path and meditation take time to develop, like pearls or plants, growing from a small seed into something vast over the course of years, decades.”

“Yin cultivation, demonic cultivation, ghost cultivation, whatever you want to call it, the distinctions don’t really matter,” and that actually hurt to say because the distinctions mattered a lot when you were talking theory and what was most likely to drive you stark raving mad if you weren’t careful about it, “they’re more like a river in the spring floods, it’s a lot of power flooding over a lot of ground that isn’t ready for it. And if you’re not careful, which most people aren’t…”

“You drown,” Harry’s voice was thick as it slipped past his lips.

Wei Wuxian nodded. “You drown, of course there are also people who can control it but decide to revel in the feeling of letting it rule them instead but there are people like that everywhere and not all of them would qualify as a dark wizard.”

“Just look at the Jin,” A-Yuan muttered under his breath, just loud enough that Wei Wuxian could have pretended he hadn’t heard that if he’d wanted to.

“Aren’t the Jin one of your great Sects?” Harry asked.

“The Jin are…” Lan Zhan trailed off. “Very wealthy.”

And then he stopped, like that was all he could think of to recommend that particular Sect. Sometimes Wei Wuxian really loved how snarky his husband could be with just a handful of words and a pointed silence.

Harry made a tiny choked laughing noise before reaching up to cover his mouth with one hand. It didn’t do a lot to hide the massive grin on his face but there was still something in his eyes, something warry and a bit scared but that was quickly fading.

Wei Wuxian huffed. “A-Ling is a perfectly respectable cultivator. Don’t bad mouth my nephew.”

Lan Zhan raised an eyebrow at him. “Jiang Yanli.”

Wei Wuxian considered that for a moment but couldn’t think of how to protest that without disparaging his sister. Because of all the people in the world that could have married into the Jin and survived it, his Shijie would be the only one who would manage to give Jin Zixuan a halfway decent son.

Jin Zixuan had been a little shit when he was younger and it had taken years before Wei Wuxian would admit, at least to himself, that he in any way deserved to marry Shijie. But she’d wanted him, she’d loved him for longer than Wei Wuxian cared to remember, loved him with an almost Lan like determination and so they’d let him marry her.

Jin Ling was worth it, Shijie’s new daughter was worth it, even if Jin Guanshan had needed to be removed from his throne shortly after A-Ling’s name day. No one wanted that man to sit on his throne long enough to start turning his eyes toward his son’s wife.

Wei Wuxian had never asked and Jiang Yanli had never told him who, exactly had been responsible for the poisoning because it sure as fuck hadn’t been Xue Yang, that boy had been far too brutal for something so subtle as poison.

Chapter 10

Harry had never really been able to fall asleep as quickly as his dormmates did, he often spent an hour or two staring at the ceiling and listening to them snore quietly. It was actually incredibly infuriating on the few nights when he couldn’t fall asleep no matter what he did.

Normally it was just insomnia, just his body being ready to sleep while his brain spun itself down into a semblance of rest. Occasionally he’d end up actually thinking about something, unable to let go of an idea until it had been completely processed and looked at from every possible angle.

Mr. Wei was a dark wizard.

Mr. Wei was nice, kind in a way that Harry had never really experienced before.

Mr. Wei just let him exist, didn’t demand anything of him, had let him make his own decisions on his homework when he’d posed questions, had offered opinions without demanding he listen to them.

Mr. Wei was trusted by the ICW and by Dumbledore, enough to retrieve him from the Dursleys and to keep him safe during the rest of the summer.

Mr. Wei was a dark wizard, a dark lord really, if the Patriarch title meant what it implied.

Harry turned over onto his side, the various pieces of thought running through his head like mice scurrying out of sight of a cat. He couldn’t make them stop, couldn’t distract himself with other thoughts.

It was just… no one had ever told him that dark wizards could be kind, could be gentle, could be anything other than monsters wearing a facimile of humanity. But Mr. Wei was gentle and kind and Harry couldn’t think of any reason the man would ever hurt him.

He probably shouldn’t be so certain of that fact, especially given that it had only been two days, not even since the man had sat next to him in the park. There was something about him though, something that made Harry think that he was the safest person in the world, that standing behind him was the only place where he’d never have to worry about being put in danger.

It was a bit unsettling to be honest, Harry had never trusted an adult this deeply so fast before except for maybe Sirius and he was old enough to admit to himself that that attachment was partially an act of desperation.

Harry stared at the painting on the wall, at the painting that he knew in his bones despite only being in the Jingshi for two days. The figure standing beside the grave was just… he didn’t know, it felt a bit like looking at himself, not the idealized version everyone wanted but the scared kid, the mourning teen that no one wanted to see.

Except Mr. Wei hadn’t seemed to care about Harry’s nightmare when it had woken him up, had just made them both tea and talked until they’d both calmed down enough to go back to sleep. It didn’t make sense, not with the image of dark wizards Harry had built up in his head.

Harry sat up and glanced around his room, looking for something to distract himself. His textbooks were neatly stacked on a shelf that sat under the window and his notes for his essay were on the desk but he didn’t think he had the brain power to do school work.

School work that Mr. Wei had helped him with.

School work that Mr. Wei would be assigning in a few weeks because he’d been given the DADA post.

Two of Harry’s DADA professors had turned out to be Death Eaters over the last four years, one of those had had Voldemort sticking out of the back of his skull. That wasn’t exactly a ringing endorsement of the kinds of people who typically ended up as the Hogwarts Defense Professors but Mr. Wei was supposed to be part of the solution to the problem that that problem was anchored in.

Harry had stopped trusting adults a long time ago, not counting his first year at Hogwarts when he’d thought that people would actually listen, but Mr. Wei didn’t act like any single adult Harry had ever interacted with.

Mr. Wei wasn’t trying to force anything on him, even Mrs. Weasley forced things on him, albeit in a well meaning way that was harder to say no to than when people did it in a mean way. It was weird, as soon as Mr. Wei had given him his own space it was like Mr. Wei couldn’t cross into that space.

Couldn’t cross the doorway to his room or step an inch further into Harry’s personal space than was polite. He even asked to see Harry’s notes after Harry had already told him he could look at them.

“Harry?” a voice asked from his door.

Harry jumped and turned to look at Cedric, who had poked his head through the wood and rice paper to look at him. It was weird seeing Cedric like this, dead but still so very there, especially since he’d died so recently.

“Hey, Cedric,” Harry said.

“You alright? Not having nightmares?” Cedric frowned at him.

A bitter smile caught at the corner of Harry’s mouth. “I’ve always had nightmares but no, that’s… not tonight.”

Cedric tilted to the side, his entire body slowly shifting rather than just his head. “We can have tea again, that seemed to help last night.”

Harry considered that for a moment, the tea had helped last night and the blend Mr. Wei had given him wasn’t the caffeinated stuff the upper years drank at breakfast. He’d even fallen back asleep once he’d finished the cup, a rarity on nights where he woke up screaming.

*****

They had tea, or well, Harry had tea, Cedric had just sort of floated there while Harry had made it and then sat down next to him while he drank it. It was a comforting kind of quiet, the silence between them, punctuated by the sounds of the forest at the edge of the compound.

“What’s bothering you?” Cedric asked.

Harry breathed in, the steam swirling off his cup of tea filling his nose with floral scents. It was a nice smell, far more natural than the chemical scent of Aunt Petunia’s perfume or the cleaning supplies his elementary school had used.

“Mr. Wei is a dark wizard,” Harry said after a long moment. “He’s a dark wizard and he might be the nicest person I’ve ever met!”

“Kind,” Cedric said.

“What?” Harry asked.

“Kind, not nice, nice is different, Harry,” Cedric said. “Kind means he actually cares, nice is… saying the right things to the right people at the right time. Nice is performative, it’s pleasant, it’s paper thin. Kind… well, you don’t need to be nice to be kind.”

Harry stared at him for a long moment trying to piece that together. He thought he understood what Cedric was saying, though he’d never heard it described like that before.

Aunt Petunia was nice, the perfectly pleasant, perfectly normal housewife of a businessman. She did all the right things, went to all the right places, talked to all the right people but she was only ever like that on the surface. Only normal people got the nice treatment and even then she picked apart every little thing they did wrong behind their back like a child pulling legs off a spider.

Mr. Wei on the other hand was dramatic and flashy and took clear pleasure in stepping over every social norm Harry had ever been introduced to. It was mostly the stupid ones though, the ones that Harry had never really seen the point of when he was younger.

Mr. Wei had stood up in front of the ICW with Cedric at his side and had told them exactly what he had seen without an ounce of mercy for how stupid the Ministry was being. Mr. Wei hadn’t called him stupid when they were talking about the Charms assignment even though Harry knew some of his questions had been dumb.

Mr. Wei hadn’t touched him. Everyone touched Harry, none of them ever asked permission but Mr. Wei hadn’t been the one to initiate a single touch even when they’d taken the transportation talismans to and from the ICW building.

Harry kind of wanted to ask him why but Mr. Wei was asleep right now.

“I think…” Harry hesitated. “Why hasn’t he touched me?”

Cedric blinked at him. “What?”

Harry took a long sip of his tea. “Why hasn’t he touched me? Everyone does, it’s like they can’t help themselves. The first time I was in Diagon Alley it was like everyone wanted to touch me, like no one could get enough of me, like they all wanted…”

“Like they all wanted a piece of the Boy-Who-Lived?” Cedric asked.

Harry hadn’t wanted to put it like that, it sounded a bit rude when you said it that way but it was what he’d been thinking, what he’d been trying to put into words for years now. No one wanted Harry, no one ever wanted Harry, all everyone ever wanted was The-Boy-Who-Lived, at least at first.

“Yes,” Harry finally managed after a long moment.

Cedric sighed, long and low, like he was utterly exhausted. “Well, I can’t say you’re wrong about that. But you also haven’t considered something, Harry, a couple of things actually.”

Harry frowned. “What?”

“Wei Wuxian isn’t European,” Cedric said.

“Oy,” Harry yelped. “What’s it matter that he isn’t European?”

“Oh for,” Cedric gave him a deadpan look. “Voldemort didn’t have much influence outside of Europe, still doesn’t and he especially doesn’t have any kind of influence in the Great Sects. They’ve always been isolationist, for better or worse, and they had their own war at the same time that he was really coming into his power.”

“Okay, you might have a point with that,” Harry said.

“Second point, he’s dealt with traumatized war veterans before and at this point you count,” Cedric said.

Harry stared at him, turning that over in his mind along with the definition of war that Mr. Wei had posed the previous night. He could see why Mr. Wei would fall back on old instincts in this situation.

Cedric raised a ghostly eyebrow and Harry realized that he was waiting for an answer. He flushed and nodded before draining the rest of his tea.

“The third thing you haven’t considered,” Cedric’s lips twisted up into a wicked grin. “Is that Mr. Wei could eat Lord Voldemort alive without a single ounce of effort.”

*****

The next morning Harry woke up later than usual, having managed to actually go back to sleep and stay that way. He stumbled out of his room, stomach growling unhappily at him to find Mr. Wei sitting at the table.

Harry’s gaze narrowed in on a bowl of rice sitting across from the man and made a beeline for it. Mr. Wei smiled at him briefly before going back to whatever he was working on as Harry inhaled his breakfast.

“Long night?” He asked once Harry was done.

“Couldn’t sleep,” Harry admitted.

“Ah, insomnia, my eldest enemy,” Mr. Wei hummed. “It doesn’t get easier when you get older, let me tell you, you just stop being able to function on less sleep. Which is bullshit if you ask me.”

Harry stared at him, unable to help himself, the older man just looked so… innocent, sprawled across the floor like a teenager. He didn’t look like a Dark Lord, didn’t act like one either and Harry could feel something in him relax.

“You can ask if you want,” Mr. Wei said.

“How did you-” Harry stopped himself before he could finish that sentence.

It was probably a rude one, how did you ask someone how they’d ended up as a Dark Lord? Especially since Mr. Wei didn’t seem like the kind of person who would actively seek that kind of thing out.

“How did I end up with the glowing red eyes and the shiny new title?” Mr. Wei smirked at him.

Harry nodded, hesitantly, not liking the expression. It looked painful, like a mask that sat wrong on his face, drawn taught and fraying around the edges.

Mr. Wei straightened, expression turning serious and Harry’s spine straightened on instinct. He examined the younger man for a moment before nodding to himself and reaching out to pour himself tea out of the pot that was already set on the table.

“Well, I told you about having my golden core ripped out the night before last, right?” Mr. Wei waited for Harry’s nod before continuing. “Being tossed into a pit of chaotic dark magic after going through an incredibly traumatic event like that isn’t advisable, for reasons that are likely obvious. And the Burial Mounds… the land is sentient, they’re alive in a way land really shouldn’t be.”

Harry frowned. “How?”

Mr. Wei took a long drink from his cup. “The Burial Mounds are old and steeped in magic, they were highly magical even before a couple armies decided to have a battle on top of it. The deaths, the pain, the ghosts that arose because no one wanted to try and purify a battlefield that large, all of that contributed to the… corruption.”

Mr. Wei frowned at that last sentence. Harry reached out to pore himself a cup of tea as Mr. Wei seemed to struggle with the wording of what he was going to say next.

“That is the right word, I think but the negative implications are… unhelpful,” Mr Wei concluded. “The Burial Mounds were supposed to be a node of Yang energy but all the… everything that happened on the land, it was converted into a Yin node. The fact that the ghosts blended together with the blood and magic that had seeped into the soil didn’t help any and by the time anyone realized that something was wrong it was already too late.”

Too late for what?

Harry cocked his head to the side in question before gesturing for Mr. Wei to go on. Mr. Wei drank more tea and reached out to grab a handful of nuts from the bowl by his elbow. They were bright red, just like the rice from the previous morning and Harry had no illusions about his own ability to eat them without immediately bursting into flames.

“The fact that the Burial Mounds is alive means it can get lonely,” Mr Wei sighed. “Which was why going in there was considered a death sentence for a while there, they’d eat whoever showed up. Not because they wanted to but because they couldn’t help themselves, didn’t realize what they were doing. When I got tossed in It was a choice between letting it do the same or taking the flood of power it was throwing at me and doing something with it. I will admit that the Wen actually did me a favor when they removed my golden core before tossing me into the hungry, lonely, half-mad realm made of chaotic darkness, it let me stuff bits and pieces of yin energy in the gaping hole they left when they tore my magic out.”

Harry took a moment to process that and blanched. That sounded like a horrifying experience, like the moment before the gillyweed had finally kicked in when he’d been breathing water into still human lungs.

“I’m not saying that I didn’t go a little mad for a bit but I survived and once I was able to get out I made them regret every single thing that they did to me and mine.” Mr. Wei smiled, it wasn’t exactly a nice smile. “Lan Zhan overreacted a bit when I reappeared but once the healers were able to verify that I was in my right mind again everyone calmed down. I’ve been with the Lan ever since, Lan Zhan proposed the moment I was healthy enough to hold my sword again.”

Harry smiled as Mr. Wei’s face softened with the last sentence. He looked down into his tea cup and swirled the liquid around for a moment, trying to figure out how to phrase his next question.

“You don’t seem like someone that would go looking for that kind of power, why did you keep it?” He asked.

Mr. Wei’s smile turned melancholy. “Because sometimes when you discover something the knowledge can’t be lost or when someone else uses the knowledge against you, you don’t know how to counter it. That was why Xue Yang ran so rampant before we could stop him.”

Chapter 11

Wei Wuxian had had to wait a week before he could get down to the Lan’s ritual space and start laying out the circles that would keep Harry alive and safe while he tore the vile bit of blackened magic out of his forehead. It had been set up for a cultivation ritual for a childless couple when he’d gotten back and he wasn’t about to delay that ritual any longer.

The two women had waited long enough to be able to perform that ritual, Wei Wuxian wasn’t going to keep anyone else from the joy of their own children. A-Yuan had been the only thing keeping him going some days, back when he’d still been dealing with the worst of the trauma from the war.

Unfortunately, the elders of the Lan Sect didn’t exactly agree with him so most couples who couldn’t produce children naturally had to deal with constantly getting pushed to the back of the long list of people requesting to use the space. Wei Wuxian had delayed rituals in the past to allow those couples access to the room and he’d do it again.

Harry was stable at the moment and Wei Wuxian had needed to do research into people who had lived through the extraction of a Soul Tether. The ritual wasn’t urgent, wasn’t going to fail because Wei Wuxian had spent extra time making sure Harry would be safe through the whole process.

“Wei-laozu,” a familiar voice called from the edge of the first circle he’d laid.

Wei Wuxian looked up to smile at Mo Xuanyu, who looked so much like him there had been questions as to their bloodline, even after the blood tests had proved otherwise. They were related, through their mothers but that connection was at least three generations back.

Still, they had the same silver eyes and midnight hair, the same nose and a similar enough build. Their cheekbones were different, jawline too but people still confused them if they dressed similarly.

Luckily, A-Yu wasn’t normally in the mood to fuck with people, they enjoyed the finer things in life, silk robes and elaborately painted fans and delicately done makeup. Wei Wuxian, when not being forced to dress up for a state function or an ICW meeting, was happy to lounge around his house in his under robe or a pair of sweats and a giant sweater.

He especially liked wearing the sweater, it made Lan Zhan’s eyes burn with want whenever he saw the wool falling oh so delicately off his shoulder. Wei Wuxian loved when Lan Zhan got that look in his eyes, it meant fun things for later.

“A-Yu! How was Koi Tower?” Wei Wuxian asked.

Mo Xuanyu smiled at him, flicking a fan open to hide the expression and the faint blush spreading across their cheeks. “Yiling Loazu’s Shijie is a most gracious host and this one’s nephew has improved his attitude since we last spoke. I believe Meng-ge had a talk with him… and removed the influence of those who were causing problems.”

Wei Wuxian winced because the last time Mo Xuanyu had talked to their nephew he had been the kind of Jin brat that Wei Wuxian had only seen come out of his father a handful of times. And that was only after the peacock had been handed to the worst tutors the Jin Sect had to offer.

One of the few good things about the war was the fact that it had knocked that attitude out of him quickly, Meng Yao would not have been gentle in his admonishments. He might not be a member of the Jin Sect but he still had influence there and whoever had been corrupting Jin Ling to the worst of the sect’s habits would have been removed with great prejudice.

“Good for him, what brings you down to the Lan Ritual Room?” Wei Wuxian went back to inking the section he’d been laying out before Mo Xuanyu had arrived.

“This one heard that Wei-laozu had taken in a new ward and would like to be introduced,” Mo Xuanyu said.

Wei Wuxian paused and looked up, raising an eyebrow at the being who had been asking to be taught Yin cultivation since they’d realized it was a possibility. “Oh? And how did you hear that? Gossip is forbidden after all.”

Mo Xuanyu’s eyes twinkled at him and they shut their fan with a flourish. “Ah, but that is not gossip, that is news. He is one of the reasons the younger of the Jades of Lan is leaving to investigate one of the European Sects is he not?”

Wei Wuxain rolled his eyes. Lans, so very good at making rules, so much better at bending them to their will. If anyone had told him how good Lans were at squirming around their three thousand some odd rules when he’d been here for the Guest Lectures he would have asked if they’d managed to rationalize sneaking Emperor’s Smile into the Cloud Recesses and if he could have some.

There was a vast difference between the Lan Sect that everyone outside the Cloud Recesses saw and the Lan Sect that Wei Wuxian was now acquainted with. For instance, he had never seen anything more petty than two Lans listing rules at each other only for a third Lan, who’d been watching the argument for half an hour, to break in with one particular rule.

It had taken Wei Wuxian a moment to realize that the third Lan had just undercut both of their arguments in one foul swoop. The whole group had nearly come to blows over the whole thing but Violence was Forbidden and all that.

Lan Zhan had once stared his uncle dead in the eye as he reached up to untie his ribbon and wrap it around Wei Wuxian’s wrist during an not quite arguement. Uncle Quiren had turned a fascinating shade of purple before he’d had to go and have a lie down.

That had been at the very beginning of their engagement, before Lan Quiren had found out about Wei Wuxian’s lack of golden core and the Burial Mounds subsequent co-opting of his lower dantian. Uncle Quiren’s only point of reference for him back then had been as the boy who was making his nephew lose his mind on a regular basis during the guest lectures, Wei Wuxian couldn’t exactly blame him for the hostility.

Lan Zhan certainly had though and Wei Wuxian had secretly enjoyed watching his husband be the pettiest bitch possible at every given opportunity.

“Lan Zhan is investigating the British Ministry of Magic because they have been mishandling multiple aspects of their responsibility for years, along with ignoring the possible return of a Dark Lord, and they stole a Chinese Fireball’s clutch,” Wei Wuxian clarified.

There was a long stretch of silence.

“Has anyone told Meng-ge that yet?” Mo Xuanyu asked. “And if they haven’t, can I watch? I want to see his face when you tell him the news.”

Wei Wuxian finished the section of circle he was sketching out and snorted in amusement. Yeah, he kind of wanted to watch the fallout of that too, Meng Yao might have cultivation unsuited for the sect he belonged to and was a vicious little snake but he was their viscous little snake and watching him be set loose on unsuspecting idiots who took liberties was fun.

Wei Wuxian stood and eyed the circle with a critical eye, nodding to himself when he found nothing wrong. That was the last set of lines he’d have to draw before Harry joined him down here.

“We can go meet Harry now if you want,” Wei Wuxian changed the subject.

Mo Xuanyu cocked their head, analyzing the circle with a single pass of their gaze. It was a rare talent, reading a circle at a glance, one that Wei Wuxain couldn’t wait to cultivate into something more but he still hadn’t given up hope of turning Mo Xuanyu off the path of Yin Cultivation.

“What is this?” They asked. “I can read what I think it is but you wouldn’t need a circle to rip someone’s soul out… and protect them from having their soul ripped out at the same time. Wei-laozu, this one is confused.”

Mo Xuanyu glared at him and Wei Wuxian grimaced. He’d been hoping he wouldn’t have to explain what a soul tether was to his erstwhile apprentice but, well, maybe it was better this way.

What better way to determine if A-Yu had the stomach and spine to survive the transition away from traditional cultivation? A Soul Tether was one of the worst things they would ever encounter out in the wild, the Burial Mounds was probably worse but Wei Wuxian had them well in hand and he didn’t think there was another sentient nexus of yin energy and chaotic magic just laying around.

“I’ll explain on the way, come along,” Wei Wuxian said.

*****

By the time they got back to the Jingshi Mo Xuanyu had ranted about the idiocy of leaving a Soul Tether in a baby, bitched about the decision to make a living thing a Tether in the first palace, and insisted on helping Wei Wuxian pull the thing out of Harry with the kind of wide eyed mania Wei Wuxian had learned not to argue with after the first time Nie Huisang had turned the same look on him.

Harry was in the living room, he’d taken to kneeling at the low tables that were ubiquitous around Cloud Recesses and most of the Great Sects with ease, working on his essay. Wei Wuxian had walked him through the basics and reviewed the outline before praising the kid.

Harry had stared at him for a long moment with giant green eyes and Wei Wuxian had abruptly wanted to punch everyone who had ever yelled at the kid in their entire face. Seriously, no teenager should look so shocked and awed at someone telling them that they’d done a good job on an essay outline.

“Harry! I’ve brought someone to meet you!” Wei Wuxian called as he opened the door.

Harry looked up at him, a small smile teasing at his lips before he caught sight of Mo Xuanyu and had a moment of clear confusion. Wei Wuxian couldn’t exactly blame him, based on the neighborhood Harry had been living in A-Yu was probably even more unorthodox than Wei Wuxian.

“A-Yu, meet my newest ward, Harry Potter.” Wei Wuxian gestured between the two of them. “Harry, my apprentice, Mo Xuanyu, they use they/them pronouns.”

“Hello,” Mo Xuanyu flicked open his fan and fluttered it in front of his face. “It’s a pleasure to meet you Potter-gongzi.”

“H-hi,” Harry stuttered out.

Wei Wuxian glanced between them and absently wondered if he was going to get to watch Harry flail around at A-Yu as well as A-Yuan. They were both a bit old for him, four years wasn’t really that big of a gap once you hit your twenties but before that things were a bit…

“A-Yu has agreed to help me with removing the horcrux out of your head, after that, if they still want to be a Yin Cultivator I’ll be helping them make the transition,” Wei Wuxian said.

Mo Xuanyu’s face lit up like it was New Years and they started bouncing on the balls of their feet in excitement. Harry just nodded, not looking too concerned but a little warry, which was an improvement from the confused panic over Wei Wuxian’s own status as a ‘dark wizard’.

“So, I’ll be seeing a lot more of them? If they decide to keep going?” Harry paused. “Wait, when are we getting the horcrux out of my head?”

“Tomorrow, or the day after if I can’t get Xuanyu up to speed by tomorrow night,” Wei Wuxian said.

Harry nodded, licking his lips and tapping his pencil against the paper in front of him. Wei Wuxian had given that to him when he noticed the kid didn’t actually have normal stationary.

Ink and brush were all well and good but they were rather permanent and had a tendency to smear everywhere if you weren’t paying attention. Wei Wuxian had managed to ruin a very nice set of Lan robes before he’d realized that nice clothes and messy research notes weren’t exactly a great mix.

He’d invested in pencils after that, the old fashioned wood ones, not mechanical, the lead on mechanical pencils frustrated him to no end. It kept breaking on him and he ran through them so fast that it was impractical to use them.

The bouncing next to Wei Wuxian abruptly stopped and he blinked, turning his head to look at the narrow eyes look that had painted itself across Mo Xuanyu’s face. He recognized that look, the last time he’d seen it Nie Huisang had dragged a somewhat bedraggled group of juniors into a hot spring with all the insistence of a territorial mother dragon.

Wei Wuxian inched back away from the younger cultivator as that look was oh so slowly turned to fix on him. Mo Xuanyu had never been scary, not really, even though Meng Yao had taught them a lot of underhanded tricks. Mo Xuanyu had always been the delicate little sibling that Wei Wuxian had never had.

That was not the case right now, Wei Wuxian had known Nie Huisang too long to underestimate the look of someone that was about to be indignant about clothing. Really, Wei Wuxian should have noticed the state of Harry’s clothes earlier but in his defense, he’d never really noticed clothes the way other people did and there had been more important things to worry about.

“Wei-laozu,” Mo Xuanyu practically purred. “Care to explain why your newest ward is so poorly dressed?”

“We haven’t had the opportunity to head down to Caiyi Town yet,” Wei Wuxian offered.

Mo Xuanyu’s fan snapped shut and they sniffed in indignation before stepping into the room and folding them down next to Harry on the floor. Harry stared at them, wide eyed, like he had absolutely no idea what to do with this person that had abruptly decided to wander into his personal space.

Wei Wuxian sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose, he was not going to win if he decided to argue with A-Yu about this. And even if he did, Mo Xuanyu would just abscond with the western wizard as soon as Wei Wuxian’s back was turned.

“I’m being serious, A-Yu, I’ve been researching how to remove that thing from his head all week and getting Harry clothes is going to take half a day at least, none of the shops have his measurements and he doesn’t have even the basics when it comes to our kind of clothing,” Wei Wuxian said. “And I refuse to leave the Sect until we get that thing out of his head which means we can’t visit a western style clothing store.”

And he wasn’t going to give the boy hand me downs, they might be of a higher quality than what he was currently wearing but they’d still be hand me downs. Wei Wuxian wasn’t going to be the last person in a long line of people to saddle this child with someone else’s clothing rather than letting him buy his own.

Harry might not have minded, Wei Wuxian didn’t actually know as he hadn’t asked, but it would have bothered Wei Wuxian to no end. Using clothing that had once been your mother’s, father’s, sibling’s, cousin’s, ect could be incredibly comforting, Wei Wuxian had a robe that had been his mothers, she’d left in the Cloud Recesses by mistake at one point but for Harry…

Harry’s blood relatives couldn’t exactly be called family, now could they, and Wei Wuxian refused to remind Harry of them even obliquely.

“I’ll take him then,” Mo Xuanyu declared, eyes never leaving Harry’s face. “He’ll look divine in robes. Those eyes would be a true gem to highlight, they’re like emeralds.”

“A-Yu, he’s fourteen,” Wei Wuxian scolded.

Mo Xuanyu waved their folded fan at him. “I know, Laozu, but I can still appreciate a crystalise before it becomes a butterfly now can’t I.”

That wasn’t actually a question even though it was phrased like one and Wei Wuxian sighed heavily. Really he should have learned not to argue with either Nie Huisang or Mo Xuanyu by now.

“Harry, are you comfortable going clothes shopping with Mo Xuanyu while I finish up with preparations here?” Wei Wuxian asked.

Harry’s eyes flicked between the both of them a few times before he nodded. “Can we take Cedric?”

Mo Xuanyu glanced at Wei Wuxian, clearly a touch confused at the name. Wei Wuxian considered the request for a moment before nodding in acceptance and pulling out the tiny charm he’d tied the young man’s ghost into.

Cedric materialized at Harry’s side, opposite of Mo Xuanyu and the young cultivator’s eyes went wide in astonishment. The ghost paid him no mind though, just grinning down at Harry in clear mischievous delight.

“Keep the charm with you or he’ll dissipate, I’ve made it so that only you, Lan Zhan, A-Yuan, or I can hold it for extended periods of time.” Wei Wuxian held out the tiny bauble and Harry took it.

“Why?” Harry asked.

It was Mo Xuanyu who answered. “Because not everyone is as moral as Wei-laozu.”

Chapter 12

Harry didn’t know what to do with Mo Xuanyu, for one he wasn’t actually able to tell if they were a man or a woman before Mr. Wei had told him that they preferred they/them. Which probably meant that the answer to that question was a blanket no, either that or something more complicated that Harry didn’t have the experience to imagine.

Mo Xuanyu was pretty, pretty like Lan Shizui was but had clearly put more effort into highlighting that natural beauty with their makeup and clothing. The fan also added to that, though Harry couldn’t for the life of him figure out how or why he kept following it with his eyes.

They were also incredibly stubborn and had dragged Harry down the mountain and into Caiyi Town without so much as a by your leave to anyone, not ever Mr. Wei. Cedric seemed to find the whole situation hilarious for reasons probably related to how confused Harry was.

“Alright, robes first and then we’ll see about jewelry, your neck and ears are criminally bare, Potter-gongzi,” Mo Xuanyu said.

“Oh, no, that’s fine, I don’t have money on me, you don’t have to bo-” Harry started to say before the fan was being waved at him.

“Nonsense,” Mo Xuanyu said. “While you are here you’re Wei-laozu’s ward, which means he’s responsible for your upkeep which includes clothes. The man is hopeless though, if he did not have to keep up appearances he would wear nothing but threadbare robes too big for him and oversized sweaters.”

Which was pretty accurate from what Harry had been able to see so far. Other than the first day, when Mr. Wei had been somewhat put together so that he could come pick Harry up without getting too many side eyes, the silver eyed man hadn’t worn anything meant even slightly for going out in public.

Most of it was the cultivator version of pajamas as far as he could tell, or the European version when Mr. Wei was actually wearing pants. A fact that Harry was vaguely jealous of actually but the ingrained habit of getting up and immediately getting dressed was going to be a hard one to break.

Before he could think up another reason to protest the situation he was being pushed into a clothing store, Mo Xuanyu calling out for the proprietor. After that he didn’t really have time to protest through the flurry of fabric and people speaking in a dialect Mr. Lan hadn’t included in his translation charm.

Mo Xuanyu clearly knew it though and their speech had a rapid, musical property to it that Harry enjoyed. It did make him nervous, though, not being able to tell what the people around him were saying.

Which Mo Xuanyu caught onto the first time he flinched when one of the shop assistants tugged a piece of fabric into place without warning. Their eyes flashed in recognition before gesturing one of the assistants away so they could murmur a translation in his ear.

When it was all said and done Harry ended up with about five under robes, a few pairs of pants that weren’t anywhere near what he was used to, and two over robes. The over robes were his favorite even though he was certain that their price would have made him wince if Mo Xuanyu hadn’t directed the people in the shop to add the expense onto Mr. Wei’s account with them.

The first one, the one he was currently wearing, was a deep, forest green with a beautiful feather pattern printed on the lower half in white and gentle gray. The cuffs and collar were embroidered with dragons in black, silver, and gold.

The second one was a rich red, darker than the gryffindor red he was used to wearing but no less vibrant for it. The embroidery was simpler but it took up more room, not only running over the cuff and collar but all the way up the arms to the elbow and there was a giant tree running over the back between his shoulder blades.

“Why dragons?” Harry asked as Mo Xuanyu led him along the side of the river that ran through the center of town.

Mo Xuanyu didn’t even attempt to play dumb. “Because you are a Dragon Friend and while the dragon would not mean much to those outside of our community it does much to protect you from those who would take exception to your presence. The Sects and the people who tend to their lands do not have a good history with foreigners and there are those who would think to use you to exercise their frustrations.”

“So it’s protection,” Harry paused for a moment. “Being Mr. Wei’s ward wouldn’t stop them from trying to hurt me?”

“Not if they aren’t aware that they would be crossing him,” Mo Xuanyu replied. “This is a fast way to ensure that they don’t have to be reminded of their manners.”

Harry suspected that being reminded of their manners was the least of what Mr. Wei would do to them. He should feel bad about that but Harry had never had an adult willing to march to defend him from people being mean before, they all just seemed to think he should grin and bear it until the people trying to get a rise out of him went away.

“Ah, there’s the restaurant,” Mo Xuanyu called.

They gestured Harry through the crowd to a food stand that had a handful of stools set out in front. Mo Xuanyu had ensured they got there in time to commandeer two as their occupants slid out of them.

Mo Xuanyu ordered for them and two plates of steaming buns were placed in front of them. Harry blinked at them, they were white and round and clearly stuffed with some sort of meat that smelled divine.

Harry poked at one and picked it up in one hand just as a scroll poofed into existence at Mo Xuanyu’s elbow. The older teen shoved half of one of their buns into their mouth before picking it up, chewing thoughtfully as they read over it.

“What is it?” Harry asked, tentatively taking a bite of the soft bun.

“Wei-laozu was summoned back to the ICW for a consultation, if he returns later than dinner the ritual will be taking place tomorrow evening rather than before lunch like he had originally planned,” Mo Xuanyu said.

“Is it anything serious?”

“No, it shouldn’t be.”

*****

Wei Wuxian stretched as the effects of the transportation talismen faded, shaking out one leg to try and maneuver the sock into a more comfortable position under the leather of his boot. It didn’t work so he ignored it and turned to stride down the corridor and into the meeting room the letter had directed him to.

A few people were already there, most he recognized but the man that had been handcuffed and was now lounging across a plush armchair with a manic grin was completely unfamiliar.

“Hello, who’s this?” Wei Wuxian asked.

Jin Zixuan stared at him with an incredibly tired expression that gave the impression that the only reason there weren’t bags under his eyes was the fact that he was a first rate cultivator. Wei Wuxian had to hold back a tiny grimace at the sight, Shijie was going to be up in arms if her husband didn’t make it back home soon.

“This is Sirius Black, Lord Presumptive of the Black Family and Potter-gongzi’s Godfather,” Jin Zixuan said. “He was imprisoned for betraying the Potters to the so-called Lord Voldemort by giving up their location when he was the secret keeper of their Fidelius ward.”

Wei Wuxian’s eyes narrowed as he took a second look at the man who had presumably doomed his ward to life as a living soul tether. He wasn’t as old as he looked, either being on the run or his imprisonment had aged him prematurely but his dark hair was washed and his gray eyes were free of madness.

“And he’s sitting in a chair here rather than a cell?” Wei Wuxian asked. “He should be being held until his trial, right?”

“Because he wasn’t actually given a trial,” Jin Zixuan said. “And Albus Dumbledore has given testimony that there was another given the secret shortly after the Fidelius was cast, a change he was unaware of until last year. Unfortunately for everyone in that country Ex-Minister Fudge is a moron as well as a coward and refused to believe the children when they informed him that there had been a miscarriage of justice, a claim backed up by Dumbledore himself. Since the headmaster has testified under truth spell we have no need to keep him.”

“Which is why Cornelius wanted the Tournament in the first place,” Sirius Black spoke up for the first time. “He needed a smoke screen to hide the fact that he’d not only surrounded Hogwarts in dementors for no good reason but also the fact that I was no longer in the country.”

That made a disturbing amount of sense actually, from what Wei Wuxian has been able to put together that tournament wasn’t particularly well planned. Their tasks had been completely disorganized and asinine.

Oh, and they hadn’t gotten the proper paperwork in order to take the Chinese Fireball and had the dragon had ended up crushing most of its clutch and abandoning the rest when a contestant had blinded it. Wei Wuxian wasn’t sure if they were going to charge the Champion with anything or if their presence in the Tournament meant that the game master was the only one who would be considered responsible.

“You confirmed that with him under truth spell?” Wei Wuxian gestured at Sirius Black.

Jin Zixuan and his compatriots nodded in affirmation.

Wei Wuxian nodded back before staring Sirius Black dead in the eye. “Were you aware that there was a horcrux in your godson?”

The man’s eyes went wide and he struggled into a sitting position as horror filled his expression. “The noseless bastard did what to Harry?”

He didn’t shout but it was a near thing as the horror on his face turned into pure, unbridled rage. Wei Wuxian watched the anger play across his face as he drew in a deep breath and tasted the magic in the air.

There was a hint of darkness there, not like his and not like any uncontrolled dark magic user he’d ever encountered. It was more of a stane than anything else, like the man in front of him had used dark magic in the past but hadn’t liked it.

“His magic’s clear, he’s used some dark spells but not enough that I’d want to do a deeper examination,” Wei Wuxian told Jin Zixuan. “It’s long in the past. What have you decided to do about him?”

“He’s going with you,” Jin Zixuan said. “If you’re willing of course. He can’t have full custody of Potter-gongzi until he’s gone through some therapy and a major healing work but he won’t be a danger to anyone as long as his godson is safe, or that’s what our personality evaluation told us at least.”

And since they were working inside of an ICW investigation that personality test was backed up with magic. Noninvasive magic but those spells were hard to fool, harder still to fake when you had the kind of damage several years in close proximity to soul eaters did.

“Voldemort did what to Harry?” Black repeated.

Wei Wuxian twirled Chenqing between his fingers and grinned at the man in front of him. He tried to keep it as friendly as possible but the presence of the Horcrux made him just as furious as it was probably making Sirius Black at the moment.

“He accidentally, it had to have been accidental considering the contents of the prophecy made about the two of them, placed a horcrux in Harry when he attempted to kill him,” Wei Wuxian said. “I’m in the process of removing it but considering the fact he made it accidentally there have to be more, which isn’t my job to worry about but might be relevant for the future because he’s not going to be dead until all of them are taken care of.”

Sirius Black blinked. “They can be removed?”

There was a tentative spark of hope in his eyes and Wei Wuxian wanted to sigh in relief and exasperation. Was Europe so completely oblivious to one of the most heinous acts a magic user could perform that they weren’t even fully aware of how to destroy the things?

“Yes, it takes a ritual and either a yin practitioner or someone so entrenched in yang cultivation that nothing could tempt them off the righteous path,” Wei Wuxian had to hold in his eye roll at that distinction. “But it can be done.”

Sirius Black’s lips twitched. “I take it you’re the dark mage type then?”

That startled a laugh out of him. “How’d you guess?”

The European mage just grinned at him and tapped one of his temples. Which was incredibly unhelpful but there was no real stopping the other man from being cryptic so Wei Wuxian just shrugged and waved his hands in the air.

“So, are we getting those cuffs off or what?” He asked.

*****

“I have a few rules before I let you go in there,” Wei Wuxian said.

They were standing outside of the Jingshi, listening to Harry chatting happily with Lan Yuan and Mo Xuanyu. The two older children had been fast friends and they seemed to be dragging Harry rapidly into their group dynamic.

Wei Wuxian was looking forward to the inevitable flailing and blushing fits that were going to follow this development. He had a sneaking suspicion that this was the first time that Harry had had a chance to act like a normal teenager in a long time.

“Rules,” Sirius Black prompted. “I’d be surprised if you didn’t have them, I’ve not had a trial yet.”

“Oh no, the interview they ran you through counts as your trial, they just need to do the paperwork to go through and the funds for your wrongful imprisonment to clear,” Wei Wuxian told him.

That got him a shocked look and a completely dropped jaw. Wei Wuxian held in a cackle and twirled Chenching through his fingers one more time before tucking his instrument away.

“The rules have more to do with making a safe place for a thoroughly traumatized and abused child,” Wei Wuxian waited patiently for the explosion, better Black had it out here where Harry couldn’t hear him.

“Abused!” Sirius growled in fury. “Who dared touch my godson?”

“The Dursley family weren’t exactly ideal guardians, for any child, let alone one that was never going to fit in with their version of normal,” Wei Wuxian told him. “Now onto the rules.”

Sirius fumed quietly for a moment, rage still glinting in his eyes before he nodded for Wei Wuxian to continue. Good, the man still knew how to regulate most of his emotions like any sane adult would, he might be less damaged than Wei Wuxian had thought.

“Rule one, don’t yell or shout, I’m not entirely sure what his reactions are like right now but that’s a good one to start off with,” Wei Wuxian said. “Rule two, no one goes into anyone else’s room without knocking and being invited in, not even if they’re having screaming nightmares, that boy hasn’t had his own space since he was given to that family and I refuse to let him feel unsafe in the room I gave him.”

He waited for Sirius to nod before listing the other rules, that second one was normally the one people had a shit time wrapping their heads around. But the man immediately nodded, which told Wei Wuxian a lot actually.

“Rule three, don’t comment on when he eats, he’s been using his magic to fuel his metabolism because he hasn’t been getting enough to eat. Rule four, answer his questions, hell, encourage those questions,” Wei Wuxian continued. “And rule five, don’t touch him unless he is fully aware you’re going to, I’d rather not trigger any kind of fight or flight reflex, I don’t honestly know which would end worse.”

Sirius frowned. “Those are simple, how many people ignore those?”

Wei Wuxian sighed heavily and pinched the bridge of his nose. “You’d be surprised.”

A lot of people felt entitled to children’s space, their time and attention, Wei Wuxian had never been able to figure out why that was but it was fuckign terrible. Sometimes Wei Wuxian wished he could just grab adults by the scruff of their necks and shake them until some common sense fell out.

He gestured the man towards the door and the mage stepped forward, hesitating a moment before he opened it. Wei Wuxian came up behind him and watched in amusement as the man stepped into the main room of the house.

“Pup!” Sirius called.

Harry’s head jerked up from where he was doing his homework and he was on his feet in a matter of seconds. He stared at Sirius Black for a long moment before pure joy stretched across his face, the smile so wide that it had to be hurting his cheeks.

Wei Wuxian took a moment to take in the robes Mo Xuanyu had bought for the kid. They looked expensive but he hadn’t been expecting anything less from the little fashionista but they were good quality, complemented Harry perfectly, and had the dragon motif that would tell everyone in the Sects that Harry was a dragon friend.

“Sirius!” Harry called out.

The teenager was across the room in five quick strides and was in his godfather’s arms, his own wrapped tightly around the older man’s waist. Sirius Black sighed and lay his head down over the top of Harry’s head and closed his eyes, a world of tension bleeding out of his shoulders and back.

And now Wei Wuxian had two incredibly damaged European wizards to attempt to nurture back to health. Lan Zhan was either going to be ecstatic or incredibly cross with him.

Chapter 13

“Wei Ying,” a voice said from above and a kiss was pressed into his shoulder.

Wei Wuxian grumbled to himself, burrowing further into his nice soft bed, clinging to sleep with his fingertips. Lan Zhan made a tiny amused noise from somewhere above him and the bed shifted under his weight until Wei Wuxian was being lovingly crushed under his husband’s weight.

“Wei Ying,” Lan Zhan called again.

“Nooo,” Wei Wuxian whined. “It’s sleep time, Lan Zhan.”

“Wei Ying, why is there a European mage passed out in our main room?” Lan Zhan asked.

Wei Wuxian cracked open an eye to glare at his husband, curse him for having sensible questions when all Wei Wuxian wanted to do was sleep. But it was too late to curl up and pretend this was all a dream, wakefulness was already stirring in the back of his mind.

Other things were stirring too, Lan Zhan was currently sprawled out across him after all. Wei Wuxain pushed that aside and tried to push through the fog of his still half asleep mind to find the answer to the question.

“Wa?” He finally settled on.

Lan Zhan huffed a laugh. “European mage, main room?”

“Oh, oh, right,” Wei Wuxain grumbled. “That’s Sirius Black, he’s Harry’s godfather, he was wrongfully imprisoned and only escaped during the summer of Harry’s third year. He’s staying here until he can get to some good healers.”

“Council request?”

“I suggested it, originally, Harry needs more friendly faces that he knows instead of being surrounded by strangers. And he’s going to obey the rules, he asked me why people couldn’t.”

“Mn, main room.”

Wei Wuxian snorted, remembering the argument that had preceded that decision. “I offered to open up one of the dimensional pocket rooms we have for when the Juniors were over but he seemed a bit freaked out by that. He decided to sleep in the main room instead.”

Lan Zhan laid a kiss on his forehead and slid to the side so he was lying next to Wei Wuxian. Wei Wuxian rolled over to face him, one hand settling under his cheek and the other reaching out to cup the side of Lan Zhan’s neck.

They stayed like that for a long moment before Wei Wuxian leaned forward to kiss his husband. It started out as a light peck but quickly turned more urgent, Lan Zhan deepening the kiss until Wei Wuxian had thrown one leg over his hip and they both needed to breathe.

“I take it I’m forgiven,” Wei Wuxian said.

“Wei Ying was never in trouble,” Lan Zhan said.

Wei Wuxian smiled like the wolf in sheep’s clothing he was, not pulling on his magic, the magic that had belonged to the Burial Mounds before he’d even been born. He stayed fully human, not that Lan Zhan would have objected to his not so human form, he’d let Wei Wuxian fuck him like that before.

Tonight wasn’t for that though, tonight Wei Wuxian needed Lan Zhan to remind him that he wasn’t only the thing that the Burial Mounds had made him. Wei Wuxian was going to kill a shard of a truly evil wizard’s soul tomorrow, which was a task in and of itself.

“Want to fuck me until I can’t remember my own name?” Wei Wuxian asked.

Lan Zhan hummed, deep in his chest, the sound rattling around his eardrums pleasantly. Wei Wuxian squeaked as he was rolled onto his back, Lan Zhan settling over him, a comforting weight that Wei Wuxin would recognize anywhere.

“Wei Ying deserves nice things,” Lan Zhan hummed. “But you have a long day tomorrow. Ritual work is tiring.”

And Wei Wuxian knew that Lan Zhan was right, they both knew that Lan Zhan was right. But Wei Wuxian wanted to get laid and he wanted Lan Zhan to be the one to fuck him until he couldn’t remember his own name anymore.

“Wei Ying deserves your cock,” Wei Wuxian protested. “What happened to everyday?”

“Therapy,” Lan Zhan replied with his typical dry humor. “Don’t need everyday, this Lan Zhan knows Wei Ying loves me.”

Wei Wuxian melted under those words, heart going all gooey at that. There had been a time when he and Lan Zhan had first gotten together, after the war when Lan Zhan had been absolutely terrified that at any moment Wei Wuxian could disappear.

Because while the Lan were cursed with love at first sight, the edges only softened by the fact that they could only fall in love with their soulmate. Lan Zhan had known that Wei Wuxian was the other half of his soul during the lectures but Wei Wuxian hadn’t had the same knowledge until after he’d become the Burial Mounds hands and eyes.

And even then he’d been too emotionally compromised to fully process what the Burial Mounds was telling him. Granted, they could have been more helpful and explained rather than insisting Lan Zhan was theirs, loudly and repeatedly, but they were also a sentient piece of land that had been shoved into a pocket dimension for ages.

Wei Wuxian had unknowingly given Lan Zhan several heart attacks over the course of their recovery by just vanishing out of their bed in the middle of the night. He hadn’t actually figured that out until he’d said something about Lan Zhan holding Wei Wuxian’s soul in his chest – something he’d thought would be either received as a romantic gesture or a joke – and the line had sparked a mild mental breakdown.

Which was when they’d both decided, or well, Wei Wuxian had concluded and Lan Zhan had agreed, that they needed therapy. It had been a bit rough for the first few weeks but they’d both been better for it, even if Lan Zhan was able to resist him when he wanted to be fucked now that they were both relatively stable.

Wei Wuxian sighed and went limp beneath his husband, pouting up at the gorgeous face that had been his only love for longer than he was willing to admit. He had only realized what his emotions meant when the Burial Mounds had pointed it out to him but he’d been in love with Lan Zhan for a long time, maybe even as long as Lan Zhan had been in love with him.

“I still wanted to get laid tonight,” Wei Wuxian grumbled.

Yes, he was fully aware he was acting like a petulant toddler in want of a sweet and no, he didn’t particularly care.

“Wei Ying can get laid tomorrow night,” Lan Zhan told him.

“Wei Ying will be tired enough to keel over into our bed and pass out tomorrow night,” he grumbled.

That earned him a raised eyebrow, like he’d just said why they couldn’t have sex right now out loud and Lan Zhan was just waiting for him to realize that fact. Wei Wuxian stared at his husband for a long moment before recognizing the trap he had just blindly walked into as calm as you please.

“Lan Zhan is so cruel to his Wei Ying,” Wei Wuxian whined, squirming in protest.

“Lan Zhan can stop,” his husband offered.

“Lan Zhan will do no such thing.” Wei Wuxian leaned up into a tender kiss.

Lan Zhan melted into it, letting it linger for a few moments before pulling away so he could roll off of Wei Wuxian and onto his side. Wei Wuxian followed him, turning over so they were facing one another on the bed.

They stayed like that for a long moment, just staring into one another’s eyes as sleep tried to creep up on them both. Cultivators could go without sleep for a while, were trained to do so if they were going into the field as a Night Hunter and most scholars trained themselves for it but Wei Wuxian had always taken sleep when he could get it and Lan Zhan was, well, a Lan.

“Do you think that A-Yu is going to be able to handle tomorrow?” Wei Wuxian asked.

“Mn,” Lan Zhan hummed.

“I mean, I know they’ve been preparing and begging for this for years but… I’m letting them go up against a horcrux. Isn’t that a little… much for a first timer?” Wei Wuxian asked.

Lan Zhan contemplated that for a second, hand coming up to tangle fingers in Wei Wuxian’s hair. “Wei Ying was thrown into the Burial Mounds, most yin cultivators start small, maybe the difference is more than temperament.”

“And A-Yu has the temperament in spades.” Wei Wuxian flipped his lip up between his teeth and started biting at it.

Lan Zhan let out a tiny noise of protest and used his thumb to pull Wei Wuxian’s lip from between his teeth. Wei Wuxian snorted a laugh and leaned forward to nuzzle their noses together.

Lan Zhan used the opportunity to pull Wei Wuxian closer, tucking their bodies up against each other. Wei Wuxian smiled from where his face had been smooshed up against his husband’s throat.

This was nice, not as nice as getting fucked into next week would have been, but cuddling with Lan Zhan was never a bad experience.

“A-Yu will be fine, tomorrow will be long, rewarding,” Lan Zhan said.

“I certainly hope so,” Wei Wuxian said.

*****

The next morning was interesting to say the least, but everyone had at least managed to sleep through the night. That would make things easier, a full night’s sleep meant that the horcrux would have less of a foothold to take advantage of.

That didn’t mean that Wei Wuxain didn’t want to immediately turn around and leave the moment he saw Sirius Black shift his shape. Wei Wuxian had never particularly liked dogs, he’d had a few encounters with strays when he was younger and while he’d never developed a full blown phobia he still had brief flashes of adrenaline whenever he saw any dog larger than a corgi.

Lan Zhan had just raised his eyebrows before wandering into the kitchen. Mo Xuanyu squealed, high pitched and eager, before wrapping their arms around the scruffy mutt and clinging for dear life. A-Yuan just smiled pleasantly and went back to the conversation he was having with Harry about the embroidery that they were all wearing.

“Most of it is for aesthetics,” A-Yuan said. “Some people use them to send messages but there’s a handful of patterns that no one in their right mind wears unless they can actually back up the message the thread is sending.”

A-Yu sighed dreamily. “I’ve been waiting ages to wear the crow pattern hanfu I bought two years ago.”

They ended that sentence by sending a baleful glance Wei Wuxian’s way. Wei Wuxian just snorted at him, taking a long sip while staring his soon to be apprentice dead in the eyes.

They both knew why Wei Wuxian had been trying to find A-Yu something other than yin cultivation to focus on.

A-Yu just pouted at him before whining, “Wei-loazu.”

“So crows mean… yin mage?” Harry asked, voice hesitant as he sounded out the unfamiliar terminology.

“Yes,” Wei Wuxian said. “All black birds are yin cultivators, I’m the only one who wears them at the moment. Dragons are for Dragon Friends and each sect has their own symbol that they embroider on their cuffs and collars. Silver or gold detailing of those symbols means their part of the ruling line.”

Wei Wuxian paused. “Unless you’re at an official event, then the lines get a touch blurry.”

“Mr. Lan’s embroidery is silver,” Harry pointed out.

“Brother is the Sect Leader,” Lan Zhan spoke up as he took the lid off of a pot of congee. “Sizhui, congee is perfect.”

A-Yuan smiled to himself, a tiny flush blooming in the apples of his cheeks, no matter how old he got A-Yuan still loved it when someone praised him for the simplest things. It was down right adorable and it always made Wei Wuxian feel all gooey inside.

“Huh,” Harry said. “Is there any other embroidery I need to keep my eyes out for or is that it?”

“Well, there’s two that I can think of.” Wei Wuxian shook out his sleeve before pointing to the tiny silver flutes that were woven in with the black crows flying across his hem. “This is the symbol for the Burial Mounds.”

He was glad he’d actually gotten dressed that morning, even if he hadn’t done his hair yet. This would have been harder to explain if he didn’t have an example on his body to fully explain what the embroidery meant.

“And that-” A-Yu reached out to tap his nail against the intricately detailed crescent moon on Wei Wuxian’s collar. “-is the indication of an immortal.”

Harry’s eyes went wide. “Immortal… Like, like a philosopher’s stone?”

“Well, that’s one way for it to happen but blood stones are rare and nearly impossible to craft,” Wei Wuxian said. “We’re not entirely sure the specifics of how I did it but the healers say that the Burial Mounds forced it, which is why I don’t look a day over twenty even without a golden core.”

“Wei Ying was chosen,” Lan Zhan broke in. “We have records. It has happened before, many ascend to a higher plane.”

“And you didn’t?” Harry asked.

“I have all I need right here.” Wei Wuxian shrugged. “And I don’t have a successor, when I do the Burial Mounds might let me go but until then I have nothing to worry about.”

“But-” Harry stopped eyes flicking between all four of them as a frown crinkled up the skin between his eyebrows.

There was a quiet thunk as Lan Zhan set the pot of congee down in the center of the table followed quickly by individual bowls to eat out of and toppings. Wei Wuxian immediately snatched up the chili oil, which got him a horrified expression from Sirius as he shifted back to human.

“This one is also immortal,” Lan Zhan said.

“And I’m working on it.” A-Yuan laddled congee into his own bowl. “A-Yu…”

“I don’t need to live forever,” A-Yu said. “It sounds like a nightmare if you ask me. I don’t care if I’ll stay forever young, if I even would, forever is…”

“Forever?” Harry asked.

“Exactly.” A-Yu smiled at him.

Wei Wuxian was again treated to the sight of Harry flushing a bright red before the boy shoveled food into his face. It was still hilarious and Black seemed to agree if the toothy grin he was sporting was any indication but the man didn’t say anything about it, which was probably for the best because if he had Wei Wuxian would have had to do something about it.

“Wei Ying,” Lan Zhan said.

Wei Wuxian turned and grinned at his husband, receiving a raised eyebrow and a significant look towards his bright red congee for his trouble. Ah, right, food was important, he needed to keep his strength up for the ritual that they were going to do after lunch.

Wei Wuxian took a spoonful and shoved it in his mouth, maintaining eye contact with Lan Zhan the entire time. The corner of Lan Zhan’s mouth pulled up the slightest bit, a movement most wouldn’t catch or would have dismissed as a facial tick.

He’d always recognized that little twitch as a smile even if he’d always dismissed the intense look in Lan Zhan’s eyes as disapproval rather than lust. At least, that had been his mindset before he’d come out the other side of the Sunshot campaign.

Lan Zhan went back to his own breakfast and Wei Wuxian turned back to the teenagers sitting on the other side of the table. Mo Xuanyu was grinning at him and as soon as they locked eyes they waggled their eyebrows at him, Harry just cocked his head and watched with open curiosity.

Wei Wuxian rolled his eyes and started shoving food into his face to avoid either of them saying something about it. Sirius was too wrapped up in his food to really notice and A-Yuan was just used to his parents being domestic around him.

“So, when are we getting Voldemort’s soul shard out of my head?” Harry asked.

Wei Wuxian set his bowl down and swallowed his mouthful. “We have the ritual room all day, you can pick when we do it. I’d give it, oh, half an hour after lunch but other than that…”

He trailed off, looking at Harry, the kid was wearing a slightly surprised expression before he managed to hide the emotion away. Wei Wuxian absently wondered how long it had been since an adult had asked Harry to make his own decision about something.

“As soon as possible,” Harry finally settled on. “I want him gone as soon as possible.

Wei Wuxian nodded in approval before returning to his breakfast.

Chapter 14

Harry stepped down the last few stairs and openly gaped at the room in front of him. It was huge, about the same size as the Great Hall at Hogwarts with two distinct sections, one that looked like the prefect’s bathroom with a giant tub in the center and another that was nothing but flat, open space with intricate runes sketched out in concentric rings.

“Wow,” he breathed as his gaze roamed over the walls.

They painted and carved with intricate symbols and beautiful mosaics of dragons and other magical creatures. They looked so real that Harry thought they had to be enchanted at first but after a moment of looking he realized none of the animals were moving.

“You don’t need to get in the bath, if we were doing a yang ritual you would need to cleanse yourself properly, you’d be surprised how much random energy an aura can collect,” Mr. Wei said. “But since we’re pulling your uninvited guest out of your head like a parasite I’d prefer if you didn’t, we’re going to need the leverage any surface contaminants can give us.”

He had changed the robes he was wearing, they weren’t his normal style of robe though, they were white, pure white with a thick band of protective embroidery around the cuffs. Mo Xuanyu was wearing a similar outfit, the only difference they had was the fan that they were carrying with them and that was white as well.

It should have made them look plain, like one of the middle class but not well off kids that lived on the edges of the Dursleys’ neighborhood. Mo Xuanyu looked stunning, Harry suspected that they could make a burlap sack look like high fashion, and Mr. Wei had a certain dignity to him that had been completely absent from his posture before.

Harry frowned. “How does that work?”

“Well, the horcrux is a nasty bit of magic but it’s slippery, if I don’t have something to hold on to, the ritual will take longer than necessary and that is going to hurt. Luckily, for the both of us, whatever protection spell your mother performed before she died has kept it contained and if I can use some of the negative energy floating around in your aura then I can bully it out of there and get my own energy around it to finish the process,” Mr. Wei said.

Harry nodded, frowning a bit as he walked on the edge of the rune circle and stared down at completely alien characters. He could recognize a lot of western runes thanks to Hermione’s homework efforts but these didn’t look anything like those, not in the slightest.

He bit his lip as he stared at it, at the thing that was going to haul a shard of Voldemort’s soul out of his head. Or, atleast, help Mr. Wei and Mo Xuanyu keep them all in one piece while they battled with Voldemort’s soul shard.

“Do you want us to explain what it does?” Mo Xuanyu asked.

Harry nodded, he couldn’t talk right now, if he tried to do it his voice would come out like a mouse’s squeak rather than actual words. He didn’t know why staring at the circle of runes and lines was making his skin crawl.

“The outer circle is a containment field, it will keep everything that happens magically in the circle as soon as it’s activated,” Mo Xuanyu began. “Those two circles on the inside lip are where Yiling Laozu and I are going to stand, at first, Wei-laozu will join the horcrux in the inner circle once we have it out of you.”

Harry took a deep breath and toed off his shoes, a pair of slipper like things rather than his ratty trainers and holey socks that were at least a half size too small by now. He took a ginger step into the circle, the floor cool under his bare feet.

Something inside him twisted, not quite in pain but close enough for him to tense up in discomfort. It felt like the beginning of the flu, the full body kind that didn’t just have you nauseous but aching all over.

“The outer circle of runes is meant to help expel curses and such from whatever they’re attached to,” Mr. Wei picked up from where Mo Xuanyu had left off. “The very inner circle is where you’re lying down because you might pass out during this.”

“I might what?” Harry asked, pausing halfway to said innermost circle.

“Harry, this is an intense ritual that is going to hurt a bit and cause an imbalance in your magic,” Mr. Wei paused, making a face. “That isn’t the right phrasing.”

“Rebalancing,” Mo Xuanyu corrected. “It’s going to rebalance your magic, having a curse attached to you for years causes your body and qi to become unbalanced as it tries to work around the blockage, curse, damage, whatever it is.”

Harry licked his lips and nodded.

“That last line of runes, the ones running from your circle to A-Yu’s, that’s going to be the path between them so he can help guard your mind once we get the horcrux out,” Mr. Wei said.

“And after?” Harry asked.

He carefully sat in the inner circle, arranging his robes around him nervously. Harry had noticed himself doing that now that he’d settled into the Jingshi, he’d thought he’d broken himself of the habit.

“After?” Mr. Wei asked.

“After the horcrux is gone,” Harry clarified. “Am I going to need to guard my mind after this is over.”

“Huh,” Mr. Wei said. “That… I hadn’t considered that. A-Yu? You have any idea?”

“Maybe.” Mo Xuanyu’s fan snapped shut and he tapped his lips with it. “We can check in a couple of weeks but your magic should fill in the gaps the removal will leave behind. You could have a natural defense against mental attacks, you could be more vulnerable, or it might not matter.”

Harry nodded and laid down. “Right, let’s do this, then.”

Mr. Wei let out a tiny laugh and Harry could hear the rustling of fabric as the other two took up their places in the ritual space. He kept his eyes fixed on the ceiling above him as he shifted, trying to get into a more comfortable position, that flu-like feeling becoming more and more prominent.

It was the image of two men, or Harry assumed they were men, it was hard to tell given how old the artwork was. Realism hadn’t really been a priority when this portrait had been made, the features of the two subjects ill defined, and the overall image more focussed on color contrasts than anything else.

The first man was holding a sword, his dark hair bundled up into a simple bun on top of his head as he faced off against an ill defined threat somewhere in the distance, represented by a mass of red and gray clouds. The second was kneeling in front of a glowing instrument, fingers on the strings, white hair left loose to cascade around him in beautiful waves, a shining contrast to dark blue robes.

“Harry?” Mr. Wei called.

Harry turned his head slightly, his gaze flicking over to meet Mr. Wei’s own. The man looked relaxed and confident, like he did this every day, like pulling a soul out of someone’s head was absolutely nothing unusual.

“You ready to start?” He asked.

Harry nodded and turned back up to staring at that ceiling.

There were a lot of tiny details that you wouldn’t notice at first glance. The dark haired man had an incredibly subtle dragon pattern printed into his dark brown robes, not anything embroidered with gold or silver like some of Harry’s robes had

The white haired man had clouds, tiny white clouds around his cuffs and collar. There was a tiny animal of some kind hiding in the folds of his robes as well, something with a pointy snout but not defined enough for Harry to actually see.

There was another rustling sound and then a handful of haunting notes floated into the air around them. It had been over a week since Harry had last heard it but the sound of Mr. Wei’s flute was instantly recognizable to him.

It made him relax, cased all of the tension out of his muscles without any kind of conscious thought on his part. Harry took another deep breath and let himself sink into the music, the rich, soothing notes washing over and through him in a wave.

Harry blinked, limbs feeling heavy, and when he opened his eyes the painting he had been staring at was partially obscured by a barrier. It was slightly opaque and tinged red, black swirls of power floated through in mesmerizing patterns.

That was the Burial Mounds’ influence, Lan Sizhui had explained about colors and shades of magic after the first time Harry had stared for a touch too long at him activating a talisman. Harry hadn’t exactly been staring at the color, too busy wondering how anyone’s hands could be that pretty but he remembered the explanation.

There was a twinge in his forehead, not exactly on his scar but close enough for him to tense up a bit. The feeling vanished, fast enough that Harry thought it might have been his imagination

And then…

“Who’s there?” The words weren’t exactly… audible but they were there, suddenly hanging in the space without a voice or a body to match them.

“Who dares?” It was no less unnerving the second time around.

There was another twinge, another prod of power as Mr.Wei’s music swirled around him. He could vaguely tell what Mr. Wei was trying to do now that it had progressed a bit.

Harry could feel the edges of his own magic and the edges of Mr. Wei’s power, which was alien in a way he couldn’t quite describe. The red power wasn’t malicious though and Harry’s own magic didn’t try to push it away, didn’t lash out in defense.

“Leave!” The horcrux, because that’s what it had to be, shrieked.

And then it moved.

Harry felt his magic react, felt the moment when it finally registered the treat inside his own body. He could feel the horcrux now, not like it had just appeared but like it had always been there and Harry had forgotten its existence.

It was like suddenly noticing a bruise when you’d been going all day not noticing it. The abrupt ache, the briefest spark of pain, and the unadulterated confusion as you tried to figure out where you’d gotten the injury in the first place.

Harry’s magic bucked, writhing in fury as it tried to remove the intruders from Harry’s body violently. Mr. Wei’s music stopped, an indelicate high note making Harry wince as the sound grated against his eardrums.

“That’s it, Harry!” Mr. Wei called. “A-Yu, be ready to support him when this is over.”

Harry didn’t quite know what he was being praised for, his magic was doing all of the work, well, and Mr. Wei who had dug his own power into the edges of the little nook the horcrux had made for itself.

It was angry at that point, making some sort of high pitched noise, faint enough that Harry could only just hear it. It was trying to do something else too, the ache of it gathering behind Harry’s sinuses like a bad cold.

There was an itching sensation, a scratching that rubbed tight up against the inside of his skull and Harry’s stomach rolled as Mr. Wei pressed just a touch too deeply. The magic in Harry’s body convulsed in a parody of nauseous gagging and he had to swallow down a cry of distress.

“Everyone brace, here he comes, and he’s pissed,” Mr. Wei called out, his words breaking through the near blinding pain in Harry’s scar.

Harry took a deep breath and bared his teeth through the pain, refusing to let his eyes fall shut even though they were leaking rivers at this point. And then, it was like a splinted being yanked out of his brain, most of the pain vanishing as a thick black mist flowed out of Harry’s forehead.

There was a sharp tug and Harry choked on his next exhale.

Chapter 15

It hurt, it felt like the horcrux was trying to drag him out of his body with it as Wei Wuxian pulled it free. It felt like it had its magic wrapped around something vital, something that Harry would never be able to replace if it was torn free of him.

Tears gathered in his eyes and Harry managed to get out a high pitched whine past his empty lungs, eyelids rapidly beating in an attempt to drive out the searing acidic sensation. There was a lull in the pain, enough that Harry could take a breath, could savor a moment, a fraction of a second of reprieve to take in another lungful of air that was suddenly the temperature of the coldest days of Scottish winter.

Through the haze of pain and fear and about every nasty emotion he had ever felt, would ever feel, Harry could make out the blurred form of the horcrux. It looked like Tom Riddle, or at least he assumed it did, it was certainly human shaped with long dark hair tumbling down its back.

“Why do you care? What makes you so concerned about this boy who’s never done anything for you?” It asked.

Its voice was… its voice was wrong somehow, worse than it had been inside his head, but Harry couldn’t figure out how, it sounded normal enough to his ears. Except it wasn’t a normal voice, it creeped over his skin and into his mind, slick and dark and cloyingly bitter sweet.

Harry could feel it twisting in there, turning back on itself like one of those snakes eating its own tail, writhing and undulating through his thoughts. He wanted to cover his ears, close his eyes, do something to block it out but Harry couldn’t move, not a single inch, not even a twitch of his toes.

Mr. Wei didn’t seem at all fazed and just raised an eyebrow at the thing standing in front of him.

“A-Yu,” he called.

“Done, Laozu,” Mo Xuanyu called from somewhere on the other side of the circle.

They sounded different than they had earlier, more manic and their voice had gone up in pitch a bit, like it had while they were talking with the tailors yesterday. Harry wondered what that meant in a moment of clarity before the fog of the horcrux’s influence crashed over him again.

Mr. Wei smiled, slow and predatory, lips peeling back from his teeth in a somewhat unsettling display. The horcrux floated back a bit, its influence retreating again, like the tide drawing back from the shore until something else slipped in to fill its place.

It wasn’t a bad something else, it was just warm enough to be comforting and its presence in his mind was gentle, familiar even. Harry blinked, once, twice, three times until the fog of fighting the horcrux receded and he could mostly remember what Mr. Wei had told him before they’d entered the ritual room.

That was Mo Xuanyu in his head, sliding over his mind to guard his thoughts from the horcrux’s back blows and whatever after effects it would try to inflict once it realized it was cornered. Which made him tense even further as he waited for his magic to react, to lash out in an attempt to get rid of the new, foreign presence.

It didn’t, instead, slowly unraveling from its tensed up defensive coil under the weight of Mo Xuanyu’s own power. Harry relaxed and then his gaze fell on Mr. Wei’s smile.

There were too many teeth in that smile, sharp, needle teeth that looked like they could cause a lot of damage if he turned them on a person. His eyes had gone red too, shining with the power that Harry knew belonged to something far greater than every single person in the room with them.

His posture had changed, shifted until Harry almost couldn’t recognize the person standing on the edge of the circle as Wei Wuxian. This wasn’t him, not the Mr. Wei he had met, it was a different version of him, a version Harry thought he might know the origins of.

The man before him was dangerous and terrifying and most of all, hungry in a way Harry could never relate to. This was the thing that the Burial Mounds had made of the man before him, the man who carried around a piece of land that had gone so mad that it had done nothing but scream in pain and fury before he’d been tossed in.

This was Yiling Laozu and Harry never wanted to be on the receiving end of that hungry, tooth filled smile. This was the face of something that wasn’t quite human anymore but close enough that it made your skin crawl with horror.

The horcrux seemed to realize what had happened a handful of seconds after it had and shrieked in indignant fury. It turned and rushed toward Harry, Harry didn’t even have time to tense in fear.

It bounced off an invisible barrier that flashed bright, fiery red mixed with flecks of brilliant gold. Gryffindor colors and why Harry was thinking about that in a time like this was beyond him.

Maybe it was because he was safe and in the aftershocks of the pain the horcrux had inflicted on him. Maybe it was an attempt to dissociate from the sight of Mr. Wei looking so very inhuman as the horcrux turned on him instead.

“You dare,” it whispered.

“I dare?” Mr. Wei asked.

“You dare!” The horcrux roared. “You dare to rip me from my rightful place!”

Mr. Wei just smiled wider and tilted his head, a ripple of red light shining on the sharpened points. He took a step forward, out of the protective circle that he’d been standing in and the air abruptly went heavy.

“Who ever said that you were where you belonged? You told you that taking up residence inside of a child’s head was your rightful place?” Mr. Wei asked.

The horcrux tried to back up, tried to move but it didn’t get far. Mr. Wei moved in a blur, faster than Harry could track. One moment he was just outside the circle and the next he had one hand wrapped up inside the swirling smoke of the horcrux.

It screamed, its voice losing the human-like quality it had had mere seconds before and reverting to something not unlike the whistling of a teakettle. Harry whimpered low in the back of his throat as his magic rolled under his skin in protest.

Mo Xunayu murmured a curse under their breath and the layer of power guarding Harry’s mind thickened, darkened until it was less of a fence and more like a wall around Harry’s mind.

Harry could feel himself fading out, the exhaustion of his magic fighting so hard, in a way it never had before catching up to him. He blinked, eyes staying closed for a touch too long as sleep dragged at his lashes.

He managed to get his eyes open again, just barely and just long enough to see Mr. Wei lean forward and bury those inhuman teeth in the horcrux’s shoulder. It screamed again and Harry’s mind decided that it was done with literally everything.

Harry closed his eyes and the darkness reached up to pull him under the surface and into unconsciousness. He barely heard Mo Xuanyu curse under their breath before everything was gone, washed away in a wave of sleeping shadow.

*****

Wei Wuxian sank his teeth into the horcrux, heard it scream as the taste of rotting magic and an impure, shattered soul burst across his tongue. It would repulse anyone else, quite honestly it would repulse him if the Burial Mounds hadn’t taken up residence in his bones.

He sucked, drawing more of its power into him before swallowing. The horcrux screamed louder and writhed under his teeth, nearly ripping itself free from his teeth. Wei Wuxian’s claws slid into existence and he sank them into its shoulder and side, pinning it in place as he drank down the corrupted magic that made up its being.

He hears Mo Xuanyu curse under their breath as he takes another long pull out of what passed for the horcrux’s veins. It goes down easier this time, the smokey magic flowing faster now that he has some of it spooled around the piece of the Burial Mounds he carried with him.

“Wei-laozu, he passed out,” Mo Xuanyu called.

Wei Wuxian closed his eyes and growled, deep in his throat as anger welled up in his blood at the thought of Harry being so vulnerable right now. The horcrux wasn’t quite dead even though he had it pinned and it could still try to break through the circle he’d laid down.

It was stronger than he’d expected it to be, it was smaller too, smaller than he’d thought it would be. Voldemort appeared to have been a paranoid asshole on top of being the kind of dark mage that made grown magic users lose their minds worse than a newborn with colic.

There was a reason for that fear, Wei Wuxian could see that now. For the horcrux to be this strong even after years fighting against its host’s magic…

Voldemort was strong, strong enough that if he hadn’t given into his darkest desires he would have been the kind of mage that could change societies. Granted, the man had tried to do that, he’d just tried to burn it all to the ground at the same time.

Wei Wuxian swallowed, pulling more of that horrible, rotting magic into himself, the soul shard screaming with the kind of fear you can only feel once in your life. The Burial Mounds rose in his blood, unfurling in his body like it hadn’t since the Sunshot Campaign.

He let it, he let it reach out through him to take a hold of the twisted thing desperately trying to pull itself free of his teeth and shredding itself on his claws as a result. It grabbed hold of the horcrux, wound itself through the rope of power Wei Wuxian had already pulled into himself and pulled.

It happened in a matter of moments, one second the horcrux was still screaming fit to shatter the stone under their feet and the next it was gone, disappearing into Wei Wuxian. Through Wei Wuxian, the Burial Mounds took it and made quick work of ripping it apart, turning it into nothing more than a dozen or so packets of power.

Wei Wuxian stopped paying attention to what was happening with that situation and raised Chenqing to his lips. The song to bring down the wards and end all the spell work inside of it was simple enough but Wei Wuxian felt every single note like it took an age.

As soon as the last note left his lips, Wei Wuxian was stowing Chenqing up his sleeve and striding across the room to kneel next to Harry. He checked the teenager’s pulse with careful fingers and then ran a power laden hand across his forehead to check the magic there.

Harry’s magic was surprisingly open to him, swirling welcomingly under his own power. It was still agitated, unbalanced as it tried to find an equalizing point now that the horcrux was gone but it wasn’t as bad as Wei Wuxian had been worried it would be.

Wei Wuxian breathed a sigh of relief before prodding at the magic and it automatically raised a shield. Which made him smile in delight, if Harry’s magic was already reacting to intrusions defensively then they wouldn’t have to worry about him being open to intrusions.

They still needed to get Harry back to the Jingshi so he could rest though.

He slid his arms under Harry’s body and picked him up as carefully as he could manage, turning to the door. Wei Wuxian paused as he caught sight of Mo Xuanyu.

Their eyes were wide, pupils blown wide in a way Wei Wuxian vaguely recognized from when using the Burial Mounds’ power had still felt like the best kind of high. They were breathing steadily but every inhale hitched a bit.

“A-Yu?” Wei Wuxian asked.

“I’m okay, Wei-laozu,” they murmured. “That was just… keeping his mind safe felt good.”

Oh thank every single higher power out there. Mo Xuanyu finding the horcrux at all appealing would have been a disaster and Wei Wuxian would have had to kill them right then and there.

As things were he just needed to figure out what part of protecting Harry’s mind had been appealing to Mo Xuanyu but this was a starting point.

He turned back to the door, whistling a sharp note to remove the chalk circles from the floor. Harry was light, too light for a boy of his age and Wei Wuxian barely had any trouble carrying him up the steps and through the open door.

Wei Wuxian stepped out of the building and into the sunlight, carefully readjusting Harry’s weight in his arms. Lan Zhan turned from where he had been staring into the sky, ostensibly cloud watching while Wei Wuxian ripped a horcrux out of a fourteen year old’s body.

“Lan Zhan!” Wei Wuxian called.

“Wei Ying,” Lan Zhan replied. “Harry?”

“Safe, sound, and sane. He wasn’t even awake for most of it,” Wei Wuxian told him.

“Mo Xuanyu?” Lan Zhan asked.

“Here.” Mo Xuanyu stepped around Wei Wuxian and smiled at Lan Zhan, their fluttering fan the only real indication of how unsettled they were.

Lan Zhan nodded and gestured for them to proceed him down the path back to the Jingshi. Wei Wuxian took the offered invitation, striding along the path as quickly as he could, Harry was likely to wake up as soon as his magic finished equalizing and he doubted that Harry would want to be in the middle of Cloud Reccesses, surrounded by strangers when he did.

It didn’t take long to get back to the house but Harry had started to stir when the were about halfway there and had opened his eyes the moment they’d rounded the corner of the path. His eyes were… greener if that was even possible and Wei Wuxian had a moment of mild panic as he just stared down into them.

“Mr. Wei?” Harry asked.

“Hey, Harry, what do you remember?” Mr. Wei asked.

Harry’s eyebrows drew together into a frown. “You… You ate it…”

“Wei Ying,” Lan Zhan scolded.

“What?!” Wei Ying exclaimed. “It’s the easiest way to get rid of it. I filtered it back to the Burial Mounds and it tore it to shreds before it had time to retaliate.”

“Oh,” Harry said. “Can you put me down now?”

His tone of voice was vaguely shell shocked but he didn’t look scared. Harry was just staring, like he couldn’t quite believe where he had ended up.

Wei Wuxian gently set him back on his feet and waited patiently for the boy to stand on his own, for his legs to stop trembling like a newborn baby deer’s. Then they made their way down the path to the Jingshi and toward the smiling face of A-Yaun.

Chapter 16

Harry dreamed.

They weren’t nice dreams but Harry hadn’t exactly expected to have nice dreams that night, it had been years since he had had a nice dream. There was just so much material to have nightmares about, some of it a result of the horcrux that had been lodged in his skull but most of it not.

Harry hadn’t been expecting good dreams, but he hadn’t been expecting exactly how bad the dreams were going to be that night. The entire ritual to remove the horcrux had been pure nightmare fuel but it was over, it was supposed to be over.

Harry couldn’t move, couldn’t react, couldn’t breathe. Something else was doing it for him, someone else was in his body, his body wasn’t his anymore.

“Harry!” Hermione called.

Green. So very, very green, a toxic mix that looked like the hazardous wastes in muggle cartoons.

Hermione dropped. Then Ron, the twins, Sirius.

Fear climbed up his throat and wrapped around his tongue. He couldn’t move, he couldn’t move, he couldn’t-

“Hello, Riddle,” Mr. Wei’s voice calls out from behind him and oh gods, it’s over, let it be over, please.

His body turned and he could feel his lips pull up into a rictus grin of mocking joy. Mr. Wei had a bored look on his face, eyes shining a luminescent silver, he was calm, deathly calm.

Harry’s wand was raised except it wasn’t his wand, it had the same core but it was the brother that his fingers were curled oh so casually around. Mr. Wei didn’t look at all concerned with the wand pointed his way.

Harry’s mouth opened and what came out was a mocking refrain, a repeat of what he had heard in first year, spoken in the same sibilant voice. “Join me, join me and I will show you power unimaginable.”

Mr. Wei smiled and for the first time since Harry had met the man that smile scared him. Because it was directed at him this time, at the thing that had taken up residence in Harry’s body, was warping him to its will like wet clay.

“No.”

And then Mr. Wei opened his mouth wide, wider than any human could ever manage and Harry tried to fight, tried to regain control, tried to-

Harry woke up screaming at the top of his lungs, sitting bolt upright with the force of his terror. He was breathing like he’d just finished a marathon and his heart felt like it was trying to escape his chest.

“Harry,” Mr. Wei’s voice called from the door.

Harry turned wide, panicked eyes on him, at the man kneeling outside of his bedroom, waiting patiently for a reaction. Padfoot was there too, lying on his stomach and whining quietly into his crossed paws.

“Why?” Harry asked.

“Why what?” Mr. Wei said.

“Why won’t you come into my room? You haven’t done it since the first day and you’ve never said why,” Harry managed to get out.

“Because it’s your space and you should be in control of what goes in your space,” Mr. Wei’s voice was still so calm, even while he watched Harry trying to hyperventilate himself to death. “It’s a courtesy, everyone gets to set boundaries, everyone.”

Harry licked his lips and swallowed. It was still odd, how conscious everyone here was of his personal space when no one ever had been before. And this was just one more layer on top of that.

“I think I need tea,” Harry offered.

Mr. Wei nodded and stood. “Come out to the main room when you’re ready.”

A little while later Harry was half way through his second cup of tea with Padfoot’s head in his lap and Mr. Wei’s silent presence sitting across from him at the table. Harry took a deep breath and put both hands on Padfoot’s head, fingers tangling in his fur as he scratched behind his ears.

“You alright?” Mr. Wei asked, then made a face. “Of course you aren’t alright, the last few weeks have been an upheaval and you went through a hellish dark ritual barely a month ago. Better question: what, specifically, is wrong right now?”

Harry considered that question for a moment because once he actually thought about it there were a lot of things wrong. So many he didn’t even have the mental faculties to name all of them at the moment.

But there was one that stood out more than the rest at the moment, the nightmare, the feeling of his body moving without him being the one to direct that movement. The image of that horrible green spell killing people who had stood by him, people he cared about, people he’d tried so hard to save.

“It’s over, it’s gone, I shouldn’t be having nightmares about it.” Harry’s hands tightened in Padfoot’s fur.

Mr. Wei sighed and set down his tea cup with a gentle click. He leaned back, both hands coming up to run through his hair, fingers getting hopelessly tangled in the dark strands for a long moment before he tugged them free.

“Okay, no one has actually explained to you how trauma works have they?” Mr. Wei asked.

“Noooo,” Harry drew out the word, slightly confused as to why that was at all relevant.

“Alright.” Mr. Wei jerked himself up into a posture of authority. “Here’s the thing about traumatic experience, your brian and, since we have it, your magic protects you from the worst of the effects in the moment. Because while trauma is happening the only concern that either of those things have is your survival and your relative sanity.”

He paused, waiting for any indication that Harry was hearing him. It was nice, having an adult besides Sirius who actually checked to make sure that he was understanding the words being tossed at him.

Harry nodded before reaching out to pick up the slowly cooling cup of tea. It’s good, even mostly cold, unlike most of the tea he drank at Hogwarts or occasionally at Mrs. Figg’s place.

“That’s why DID happens, you don’t have that, which is one amazing plus of this whole situation, you were definitely young enough for that to have been a possibility, especially with another presence already crammed inside your soul, and that thing would have definitely tried to take over one of those personalities if it did happen,” Mr. Wei said.

He trailed off and then shook himself, a look of horror flashing across his face. Harry took a moment to contemplate that particular situation and shivered.

“Anyway, your brain protects you from trauma, walls it off, shoves it down, does anything it can to keep you functional. It’s in survival mode, it keeps you functioning until you get to a point where you’re safe,” Mr. Wei continued. “But once you are safe, it knows you need to process what happened. That’s why you’re having nightmares, your brain is trying to process everything that happened to you.”

“But, if the nightmares are my brain trying to process what’s happening then why now? Why not at Hogwarts?” Harry asked.

“Harry, when was the last time you actually felt safe at Hogwarts?” Mr. Wei asked.

Harry opened his mouth to protest that he’d always felt safe at Hogwarts, that Hogwarts was the safest place in the world before he stopped. When was the last time he’d felt safe at Hogwarts?

He’d had to fight something or other every single year he’d been there. Quirrel in first year, the basilisk and Tom Riddle in second, the whole cluster fuck with Pettegrew in third, and the Tournament, the fucking Tournament that had ended with Cedric’s death.

Hogwarts was supposed to be safe.

But when had Hogwarts ever been safe for Harry?

It never had, even if he hadn’t been aware of that fact before the end of his first year. Pettegrew had always been there, sleeping in the same dorm room as him and while the man was a coward he could have killed Harry at any moment up until he fled Hogwarts in their third year.

“I see what you mean,” Harry finally settled on.

Padfoot whined from where he was lying in Harry’s lap, big puppy eyes staring up at him in clear distress. Harry scratched him behind one ear and got a reluctant tail wag in response.

“And it might not even be that,” Mr. Wei said. “You had a foreign piece of someone else’s soul, a soul that belonged to a man that wanted you dead, in your forehead up until yesterday. Your magic was focusing resources on that scar of yours the entire time and your magic plays as much of a role in trauma survival as your brain does.”

“That makes sense.” Harry took a large gulp of his tea.

“I’m not going to lie.” Mr. Wei leaned forward so that his arms were braced against the table in front of him. “The next few weeks, the next few months, maybe the next year or so, are going to suck. You’re going to have trauma responses coming out your eyeballs but, hopefully, by the time you go back to Hogwarts you’re going to be on an even enough keel that you’ll know how to handle those responses.”

“And what if I don’t? What if I never do?” Harry asked.

“You will,” Mr. Wei’s voice was firm on that fact. “You’ll have ups and downs but you will. I lived through hell when I was barely five years older than you are now. I know what it’s like to go hungry, I know what it’s like to have a hostile force surrounding you on all sides. It will take time and probably therapy, at the very least talking all of this out with someone you trust, but you will get better. I did and you don’t have the trauma of having your magical core ripped out to deal with on top of anything else.”

Harry bit his lip. “But Voldemort’s still out there, I’m still… I’m still at war.”

Mr. Wei sighed and reached out to offer a hand. Harry blinked at it for a minute before reaching out to take it, Mr. Wei’s hand was gentle and he had calluses on his palms, probably from the sword he carried.

“Harry, you’re fourteen, it isn’t your job to defeat that fucking idiot, it never was,” Wei Wuxian said. “It was the adults’ job to keep you safe, to train you so you could survive if, all gods living and dead forbid, he managed to get past the front lines to try and kill you. Or, lived long enough that you were an adult and could face him on your own two feet.”

And they failed you.

The words weren’t spoken but they hung in the air around them as clearly as if they had been. They were heavy but they were true, every single one of his teachers had failed him in some way, every single one and the Ministry in general had been exactly zero help.

And then there was Sirius, who was trying but had been on the run from the Ministry until he’d shown up at the Jingshi with Mr. Wei.

Harry’s free hand stilled in Padfoot’s fur because there were a few other adults that hadn’t failed him, one of them was sitting across the table from him, another was sleeping under the same roof. Then there was Mo Xuanyu and Lan Sizhui, who were both teenagers like him even if they were technically adults, they’d been supportive and helpful and…

It was kind of sad actually, the fact that the only adults that had in any way done right by him were his godfather and a handful of mages who he’d met barely a week ago. It was kind of funny too, the dark kind of funny, the kind he couldn’t actually share out loud without getting alarmed looks from other people.

Something hot and wet trailed down his cheek and Harry reached up to touch the tear that had slid down his face. His eyes hurt and he was only just noticing that, that and the catch in the back of his throat.

“Oh, Harry,” Mr. Wei sighed. “I wish your life could have been easier.”

Harry tried to hold back the crying fit he was about to devolve into, he wasn’t a little kid, he was about to turn fifteen for fucks sake. He shouldn’t be crying about the fact that his life had been hard, a lot of people had hard lives, it wasn’t like he was special or anything.

“Harry,” Mr. Wei whispered into the space between them. “It’s alright to cry.”

And Harry couldn’t stop himself anymore.

The first sob sounded like it had been ripped out of the bottom of his lungs in a keening call of despair. Tears cascaded down his face to hit the table like tiny droplets of before he leaned forward to rest his forehead on the polished wood.

Harry cried.

He cried for the innocence that he’d lost, for the innocence he’d never really had thanks to the Dursleys. He cried for the fact that no one had stepped up to tell him that it wasn’t his job to defeat Voldemort. He cried for the broken little shard of hope that had nearly shattered in his chest but was now digging in deep within his bruised heart.

He cried for Cedric, for his parents, for every single person who had died because people hadn’t listened to him when he told them the truth. He cried for every child in Hogwarts who would one day soon realize that the Ministry had never been on their side and that their school had never been safe.

And Harry cried for himself too, for the fact that, for some ungodly reason he had been the one chosen to sit at the center of this entire web of brutality and pain and he was only now being offered a way to possibly survive it.

*****

Once Harry had cried himself to sleep at the table, Wei Wuxian carefully tugged his hand free of his wards hand and stood to grab a blanket. Black shifted, from melting from that of a large black dog into the form of a slightly bedraggled European mage.

“None of the adults at Hogwarts have tried to help, have they?” Black asked.

“From what I’ve been able to tell so far, no, and most of them didn’t even realize that there was something he needed help with,” Wei Wuxain said. “The fact that he could practice inedia by the time he arrived at their gates didn’t help anything but it’s mostly the fact that he’s able to keep up appearances really well.”

“Petunia,” Black growled.

Wei Wuxian carefully laid the blanket over Harry’s back before walking back around the table to settle into his seat. Black looked vaguely like he wanted to murder someone and Wei Wuxian couldn’t exactly blame him but the man was on probation.

“I suspect as much, and given that he almost immediately got tangled up in a troll attack in his first two months of being there…” Wei Wuxain raised a hand to pinch the bridge of his nose. “People are idiots sometimes, and the fact that they thought he was being raised in the lap of luxury paired with that probably started him off with a lot of intrinsic bias. I suspect that after Minerva Mcgonagal was proven wrong at the end of that year she would have listened in the second but she’d already proven herself untrustworthy by mistake and then Lockheart…”

“And then Lockheart,” Black agreed. “After that I’m not surprised he never went to an adult about last year’s situation.”

“Part of that is him being a teenager,” Wei Wuxian countered. “But, yes, since his friends proved to be far more reliable and actually listened to him while others didn’t…”

“We’re changing that, aren’t we?” Black asked.

“Yes, yes, we will be,” Wei Wuxian paused and stared out the front window for a long moment. “I’m his Defense instructor next year, hopefully I’ll be an adult he can learn to trust… the Slytherin’s too, the ones teetering on the edge need an actual role model, not a slave master, or a double agent who’s trying desperately to keep his head above water.”

Black’s grim expression and short nod seemed to agree with him on that point. Wei Wuxian reached for the third cup he’d set aside and filled it with tea before pushing it across the table to the other man.

They stayed there for an hour or so, calmly drinking tea and listening to Harry’s breathing. When he didn’t wake up screaming again, when sleep seemed to even out, to stay in the deep quiet of the truly unconscious, Wei Wuxian stood up and nodded towards the hall.

Black nodded and shifted back into his giant dog form so he could lie down against Harry’s back. Wei Wuxian was so very glad that Madame Yu had forced him to get over his fear of dogs when he was younger or he’d be losing his mind right now.

Wei Wuxian smiled and turned down the hallway. There was a lot of work the lot of them had to do, a variety of things that were going to be a complete headache for everyone involved.

But the least they could all do right now was get a decent night’s sleep, a concept that Wei Wuxian was fully aware he defined far more loosely than anyone else in the Cloud Recesses.

Chapter 17

It was strange, being on British soil for the first time in months, being on Earth’s soil again for the first time in months. Harry hadn’t thought it would be all that different from the pocket dimension that Gusu resided within but he’d been mistaken.

There was a smell, some lingering bit of pollution that lingered even inside the wizard space that platform 9 ¾ resided inside and the light was different. The air was ever so slightly harder to breathe and there were so many people crammed into one place all at once.

Harry was immensely grateful that Mr. Lan had dropped him off early so he could find a seat on the train before the station got too packed. He did not want to deal with the amount of fussing that the Weasleys and various classmates would fall into once they saw him or the staring that everyone else would do.

The compartment was quiet as he carefully flipped through a book Sizhui had recommended he read. It was good, an adventure story about a cultivator who had been inadvertently plunged into another world and been tasked with the teaching of a young half demon who knew nothing of his own heritage.

Reading about Shen Qingqiu as he repeatedly and fantastically failed to register the fact that his student practically worshiped the ground he walked on was utterly hilarious. Lan Sizhui had also promised that the larger conflicts in the book couldn’t just be solved with magic, like the handful of wizarding novels Harry had picked up had resorted to.

He was just getting to a part where Shen Qingqiu was tied shirtless to a house’s support beam when the door to his compartment opened. Harry looked up, blinking at the face of Hermione as she stared at him in complete and utter shock.

Silence filled the room, dragging uncomfortably across the back of his mind as Hermione just kept on staring.

“Hermione?” Harry asked.

Hermione blinked for what felt like the first time in a full minute. “Harry? Is that you?”

Harry grinned at her and stood up, throwing his arms open a second before his best friend was barrelling into him, nearly knocking him over. His arms curled around her as she babbled into his shoulder, near hysterical with whatever emotions she’d let eat her up on the inside all through their summer break.

There was a yelp of statement from the doorway and Harry looked up to see Ron standing there, staring at him. Harry grinned as he took a few steps back, enough that his other best friend could slide into the compartment and shut the door.

He and Hermione were quickly wrapped up in a bigger hug as Ron squeezed them tight enough that Harry almost couldn’t breathe. Hermione made a tiny protesting noise in the back of her throat.

Ron laughs and lets them go. “Harry, you look like Charlie did the one time he got called home all the way from Asia. Where have you been all summer?”

“Asia,” Harry said. “Sit down, I’ll tell you about it.”

They settled in to listen to Harry talk about Mr. Wei and the Court and going off to Gusu Lan for the summer. He didn’t tell them about the horcrux, Mr. Wei had told him that everyone needed to be screened before they were told. There were some kind of people who really shouldn’t know about that kind of thing and you never knew who they were unless you got a look at their magic.

The sweats trolley came by at some point, Harry wasn’t paying much attention to it, he’d gotten onto the topic of Mo Xuanyu and Lan Sizhui. He might be talking about them a bit too much, considering they were friends and… yeah, Harry had nothing.

Hermione was starting to smile, she looked a bit like a tiger. Harry was debating stopping, debating whether or not it would be worse to attempt to segue out of the grave he is currently digging for himself or not.

Which was when Malfoy showed up, Harry biting off a corner of a chocolate bar to interrupt his tirade just as the door to the compartment was shoved open. He glanced at the door, mouth full of chocolate and had to take a moment to throw a mental tantrum.

He didn’t want to deal with Malfoy, not here, not now. It was just… Harry was tired of the childhood rivalry, it had started stupidly to begin with and had only really gotten more petty as time went on.

He’d talked to Mr. Lan about it, well mostly talked at, but it had been good, figuring out that there were more important things than a rival. Malfoy was just a tiny blip in the grand scheme of things even if he was the son of a Death Eater and Harry shouldn’t have to have to deal with him.

“Hello, Potter,” Malfoy sneered at him.

Harry looked him over, his clothes were perfectly tailored as always and the colors matched him perfectly. His hair had a touch of gel in it, not as much as he had had for their first two years at Hogwarts but enough to keep it in an understated style.

It was a good look on him… and damnit, Harry hadn’t needed to know that he found Malfoy attractive.

Harry sighed. “What do you want, Malfoy?”

Malfoy bristled like an offended cat and Harry knew that that had been the wrong thing to say. He’d known that the moment he’d finished saying it but he hadn’t been able to stop himself.

“Careful how you speak to me, Potter,” Malfoy snapped. “I’m a prefect. I could leave Gryffindor with a point deficit before we even get to Hogwarts.”

Harry stared at him for a moment before he glanced across the compartment to look at his friends. Ron was so red that he looked like he was about ten seconds from exploding. Hermione wasn’t much better, she had that hunting cat look in her eyes, the same one she’d had right before she’d punched Malfoy in his face.

He turned back to face Malfoy, whose expression was slowly turning into one of smug fury. Harry sighed and set down his chocolate bar, uncrossing his legs in case he needed to move quickly.

“There are scarier things out there than you, Malfoy,” Harry said as evenly as he could, trying to avoid drawling sarcastically.

It was the truth, there were far scarier things than Malfoy out there, deadlier too and Mr. Wei was one of those scary, deadly things. Harry didn’t have a single thing to worry about where Malfoy was involved, he was a fifteen year boy, just like Harry was, a somewhat attractive one too.

Harry had a moment of abrupt despair that he quickly shoved into the corner of his mind and locked up behind a door. He didn’t need a crush on Malfoy of all people to deal with, Malfoy was a baby death eater and he’d never hear the end of it if he admitted to falling in love with the enemy.

Maybe Mr. Wei would be able to redeem him, maybe not, but Harry wasn’t thinking about that right now.

Malfoy drew his wand and pointed it at Harry, a spell barely resting on his lips before Harry was surging up and grabbing Malfoy’s wrist. He thrust the wand toward the ceiling and stepped right into Malfoy’s space, green eyes meeting wide blue ones as his other hand slammed into the frame of the compartment door.

“I wouldn’t try to do that again if I were you, Malfoy,” Harry said.

He half expected the blonde to pull away, to retreat like a wild animal that had just been spooked but that wasn’t what happened. Malfoy seemed transfixed, staring into Harry’s eyes like they were the center of the universe, lips parted to reveal a flash of pink tongue.

Harry ignored that, or at least tried to ignore that fact, Malfoy was the enemy, even if he was just another kid trying to live up to his father’s wishes. Malfoy had proved himself to be Harry’s enemy again and again over the years and with Voldemort back that animosity was only going to get more deadly as time went by.

Malfoy swallowed thickly and Harry could feel a slight tremble in his hand, making him fully register the fact that the other boy wasn’t going to move until Harry did. Harry had never seen anyone react quite so much like prey before, it was incredibly disconcerting to witness in real life, especially aimed at himself.

Harry lifted his free hand and pushed, gently enough that it wouldn’t send Malfoy tumbling onto his ass. He let go of the other boy’s wrist as he did so and watched as Malfoy stumbled out of their compartment door way before reaching out to slam the door shut behind him.

With a quick yank he closed the curtains and turned to smile at his friends. Ron was staring at him, jaw nearly on the floor as he stared, and Hermione was watching him with narrowed eyes.

“So, Exploding Snap?” Harry offered.

Ron choked on his next inhale before devolving into a coughing fit. Hermione turned to him in an attempt to help but he waved her off with one hand as he pounded his chest with the other.

“Harry,” Ron started after his fit was over. “Harry, what the actual fuck?”

“What?” Harry asked.

“I think what Ron meant to say was that is the first time we’ve seen you de-escalate an interaction with Malfoy before you were rolling around on the floor like a pair of toddlers,” Hermione said.

Ron pointed at her. “That, what Hermione said.”

Harry sighed and slid right back into his seat, picking up his discarded candy bar. “Mr. Wei and Mr. Lan talked with me a lot over the summer, them and Sirius. Sirius… Sirius actually had some good advice for stuff like this. Did you know he almost killed Snape in their fifth year? Like legitimately nearly killed him and he used to be a friend of my mothers before that, Snape I mean.”

“Professor Snape, Harry,” Hermione corrected on reflex.

“Wait, Snape was friends with your mom?” Ron asked.

Hermione sighed and stared at the ceiling for a moment, like she was dying a little inside. Harry wasn’t certain why she kept trying to correct them, they’d been dropping the honorific ever since their first year.

“Yeah, it was part of why their whole thing started. My dad was in love with her from like the moment he saw her and Mom didn’t want anything to do with him after he insulted Snape the first time,” Harry told them. “But, it kept escalating over the years until, well, the shrieking shack. Sirius nearly killed him and he knows it, now that he’s older at least. They warned me that that might be where me and Malfoy are heading.”

And Harry really hadn’t wanted it to head that way, even before he’d realized that the reason he wanted to punch Malfoy was because he wanted to kiss his stupid face.

“But he’s a death eater, Harry, his father gave my sister that stupid diary in second year,” Ron protested.

“Ron,” Hermione sighed. “We don’t know if he’s a Death Eater yet, you have to be seventeen years old before you can take the mark. Sixteen if your parents approved it.”

“So what, we know he’s a dark wizard,” Ron said. “He’s a Slytherin, his father’s a Death Eater, his mother’s a Black.”

“Sirius is a Black,” Harry pointed out.

Well, Harry’s instinct to avoid telling Ron about Mr. Wei’s status as an actual dark lord was validated now. He’d been hoping that he wouldn’t have to hide that fact from either of his friends but now he knew he would.

Ron backtracked. “Well. Well, Sirius is a Griffyndor and he was friends with your dad. So he clearly isn’t a dark wizard.”

Except, Sirius was a dark wizard, by British standards anyhow. Mr. Wei had explained it to him, that there were certain spells that immediately classed you as a dark wizard in the British Ministry’s eyes even if they only made your magic gray.

Harry didn’t say that though, didn’t want to add to the startling amount of prejudice that he was only just realizing his friend had.

“He’s still only fifteen, Ron,” Harry said instead. “And I don’t want to try and kill him, or him to try to kill me. Just… we’re fifteen, we’re not supposed to be involved in a war, not until we’re at least seventeen.”

Hermione let out a sigh of relief and nodded in agreement, a small smile spreading across her face. Harry smiled back at her, he’d expected her to agree with that sentiment but it was good to have confirmation.

Ron was frowning at him though. “But, Harry, you’re the Boy-Who-Lived. You have to be involved.”

Harry could feel a stone forming in his stomach. Yeah, the two of them weren’t going to be friends for much longer, now were they?

“Not yet,” Harry finally said after a long pause. “We’re kids, Ron, we shouldn’t have to participate in a war, the adults should be trying to protect us from what’s going on. We’re still in school, we should get to go to school without worrying about stuff like this.”

“But you’re the Boy-Who-Lived,” Ron repeated.

“And that shouldn’t matter, Ron!” Hermione broke in, a look of exasperated anger on her face.

Ron turned to her, opening his mouth to start an argument that Harry knew wouldn’t end until Halloween, at least. Harry didn’t have the mental bandwidth to deal with that right now.

“Exploding Snap?” He offered again.

His two friends turned to blink at him and he smiled awkwardly at them. Hermione was the first to have any kind of reaction, sighing as she reached into her pocket to pull out a pack of cards. Ron took a bit longer but not much longer, relaxing as Hermione started dealing out the cards.

Harry had no illusions about that argument starting back up the moment Mr. Wei started his lectures on the differences between light, dark, and gray magic users but for now it was on the back burner. Harry really hoped that Ron could get over his prejudices about dark wizards but he didn’t have much of that hope and it was being whittled down steadily by the moment.

That was for future Harry to worry about though, right now all he needed to worry about was catching up with his friends and not losing Exploding Snap. At Least until they got to Hogwarts and had to deal with the rest of Gryffindor at the Opening Feast.

The End

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