2nd January 1996, Number Twelve, Grimmauld Place, evening
The children were barely an hour gone on the Knight Bus when the house began to fill again.
They came in ones and twos through the Floo and the warded front door — Tonks first, shaking snow from mouse-brown hair, then Kingsley Shacklebolt in his Auror's travelling cloak, then Moody, stumping and growling, magical eye already sweeping the hallway for assassins among the coat pegs.
Others followed: Bill, Charlie, Percy and Arthur, the latter still moving carefully, one hand pressed unconsciously to his bandaged side, waving off every offer of a chair until Molly put him in one, then it was Sam, Lupin, Ethan.
Last through the door came Minerva McGonagall, Severus Snape and Albus Dumbledore behind her, and Sirius — host, restless, glad beyond concealment to have his house full of purpose again — pulled the great doors of the drawing room shut and sealed them.
The Order of the Phoenix sat.
It was Kingsley who opened, and he opened grim.
"He's getting bolder." The deep voice filled the room without effort. Kingsley laid a sheaf of newsprint on the long table and began dealing it out like a hand of ill-omened cards — foreign mastheads, French and Bulgarian and Egyptian, and one that made several people round the table stiffen: a Muggle newspaper, garish and smudged.
"Overseas coverage. What the Prophet won't print, the rest of the world is shouting." He tapped the Muggle sheet. "This one's from Cairo. Tomb desecration at a famous site — they're calling it vandalism and gas hallucinations, their government's smothered the rest. But Muggle tourists saw something at that tomb, and what they describe is him." A pause. "He didn't trouble to hide. That's the change. He no longer troubles to hide."
"The bounty?" Bill asked quietly.
"Raised again. Tripled since autumn." Kingsley's face was stone. "And it's done nothing but feed him. Hit wizards have gone after it in teams — good ones, veterans. The African Ministries have stopped publishing the casualty lists because the lists were becoming recruitment material for the other side. He kills bounty hunters the way other men answer letters."
He drew a breath. "And the Muggle deaths continue. A few at a time. Careless — no. Not careless. Contemptuous. Every one of them is a message to the African Ministry of Magic: you cannot touch me, and I will not even pretend to respect your Statute. He is spitting in their faces and daring them to answer."
He laid down the last article — fresher than the rest, the ink barely set.
"And this came in yesterday. MACUSA bulletin. He's been sighted on their soil now — him, Pettigrew, and the Slythra boy. The entire American magical community has gone to highest alert."
Kingsley looked round the table. "Asia. Egypt. Africa. Now America. He is drawing a line around the world, and everywhere he touches, he takes something or leaves bodies. This is not hiding. This is a tour."
The silence that followed had weight.
"Kingsley," said Dumbledore at last, quietly, "you will continue as you are — the Ministry work, and your foreign Auror contacts. What the Prophet buries, we must dig up ourselves. Every sighting, every pattern. Thank you."
Kingsley inclined his head and sat.
Charlie went next, and his news was no warmer.
"Recruitment abroad is... poor." He said it flatly, a man reporting failure without dressing it.
"Romania, the Balkans, the eastern communities — they remember the first war as Britain's war. Sympathy, yes. Commitment, no. The line I keep hearing is 'when he crosses our border, we'll fight him — until then, he's yours.'"
Charlie's jaw tightened. "But there's something else. I've kept an ear on the rougher communities out there — the dark markets, the wild wizards, the hedge-folk the Ministries don't count. And there's a pattern moving through them."
He leaned forward. "Invitations. Quiet ones. Dark wizards, wild ones, the skilled and the hungry — being approached by someone, offered a meeting with some shadowy group. No name that anyone will say. And the ones who go..." he spread his hands "...come back changed. Not marked, not that anyone's seen. But paid. A little wealth, if wealth was what they wanted. A piece of rare knowledge, if knowledge was their hunger. Whatever they desire — a taste of it. And afterwards they don't talk, and they wait."
Sam and Sirius had gone still at the same moment, and now exchanged a look across the table — the look of two men from very different worlds arriving at the same address.
"That's not recruitment," Sam said slowly. "Not yet. That's option-buying."
"Old pure-blood trick," Sirius agreed, grim. "My family did it with half the Wizengamot in the old days. You don't ask a man to kneel — kneeling frightens people. You give him a gift. Small. Exactly the thing he wants, so he knows you know what he wants. And then you go away."
His mouth twisted. "And he spends every day after wondering when you'll come back, and what you'll ask, and whether the next gift will be bigger — and by the time you finally do ask, he's spent so long imagining serving you that it feels like his own idea. You're not building an army, you're seeding one. Across a whole continent."
"Mordred," said Ethan quietly, from his place near the fire, and it was not a question.
"It has his shape," Sam said. "Patient. Bespoke. Nothing you could arrest anyone for."
The Order's faces, around the table, had darkened by degrees.
Percy and Arthur reported the Ministry, trading the account between them like men carrying a heavy trunk.
"Stalemate," Percy said crisply. "The two factions have fought each other to a standstill. The Minister spends his days on international liaison and — " a thin pause " — messaging. Reassurance. The situation-is-in-hand apparatus runs at full capacity; I should know, I draft some of it."
His distaste was surgical and unconcealed. "Meanwhile Madam Bones prepares for war as though war were scheduled. She has the DMLE on a footing I've not seen in my time there — leave restricted, training doubled, the Auror Office squeezed until it creaks."
"It creaks," Tonks confirmed, with feeling, from her corner.
"I've done more combat drill since October than in the whole of my training year. Double shifts, readiness inspections, the lot. And I'll tell you what, though —" she pushed her hair back, and her face, under the tiredness, was entirely serious "— she's not wrong, is she? I've seen the same reports Kingsley just dealt round. Whole ministries — Egypt's, half of Africa's — standing flat-footed while he walks through their countries like a landlord. I don't want that here. If it takes Bones wringing us out like dishcloths so that when he does turn this way there's something ready to meet him — then wring away. Half the department grumbles and drills harder, same as me. She's got us convinced, extreme or not."
"And there is this," Arthur said.
He'd been quiet, grey-faced still from his convalescence, but his voice was steady. "Amelia knows about us. Has done for some time, I suspect — she's Amelia. And her view of the Order, passed to me through exactly the sort of deniable channel she favours, is that we are —" he produced the words with a wry care that suggested direct quotation "— 'well-meaning, well-informed, and far too passive.'"
A dry ripple went round the table.
"But. She implied — more than implied — that when it matters, she will side with us. Openly, if it comes to open. Her quarrel is with our patience, not our purpose."
Something in Dumbledore's shoulders eased, fractionally — the relief of a man who had been carrying a question for months and just felt it set down.
"That," he said, "is better news than most of tonight's. Amelia Bones is worth a great deal more than a department. Thank you, Arthur. Percy."
"Goblins are holding neutral," Bill added, briefly, into the pause. "Firmly. After the Bagman affair they trust neither side, which — given who the other side is — counts as good news. Gringotts will bank for anyone and fight for no one. I'd not ask for more; I'd only watch that nobody on our side gives them a fresh grievance."
"And so," said Dumbledore, and his voice gathered the room, "to the attack."
The table stilled.
"We have learned some things at a bitter price. We know now that Voldemort's design has three fronts, not one. Abroad — the armies Charlie describes, seeded and waiting. The weapon — the thing he seeks that he did not have before, wherever his tour of tombs and old places is meant to lead him."
Dumbledore's blue gaze moved to Sam. "And now a third: something within the Department of Mysteries itself. Whatever sent his serpent to that door in the dead of night was not opportunism. He wants something behind it."
Sam took the room.
"The investigation's closed on the how," he said. "I've identified the traitor — the staff pass, the warding gap, all of it lines up on one man. Bratchett. Maintenance clearance, level nine, twenty-two years' service."
A muscle moved in his jaw. "And he's gone. Left the country within hours of the attack failing — a prepared exit, Portkey chain, cold trail by the time we confirmed him. Which tells us he was handled by someone competent, and that his extraction mattered more to them than his usefulness."
He looked round. "One traitor, found and flown."
"There will be more," said Ethan.
He said it without emphasis, the way he said most true things, and it landed on the table like a dropped stone.
"One inside man is a coup," Ethan went on. "Voldemort has never in his life been satisfied with a coup where an infestation was available. Bratchett was the one spent. The ones being saved are still at their desks."
Sam nodded, slow and grave, a man hearing his own worst assessment spoken aloud.
"Well, here's a thought," said Sirius, tipping his chair back with elaborate unconcern, though his eyes were sharp. "We've got the mightiest True Seer in recorded history sitting by my fire drinking my tea. Ethan — why not just divine them? Every traitor in the building. Line the Ministry up, open the Sight, point. Save us all a war of paperwork."
A few tired half-smiles went round; Ethan chuckled, low.
"Because Divination is not omniscience, Sirius, however it's advertised." He turned his teacup slowly. "The Sight answers questions — and it exacts a price for each, and the price scales with the asking. Is this man a traitor — once, about one man, with cause — that I can pay. Show me every hidden traitor in a building of thousands — that is not a question, that is a demand that Fate unroll itself for my convenience, and Fate does not." He set the cup down, and his voice cooled. "And there is the other thing. Mordred."
The name changed the air in the room.
"He knows what I am — has known since the Tournament, if not long before. And Mordred Slythra is precisely clever enough to understand what that means and to plan against it. Wards against scrying are old magic; misdirection is older. A mind like his will have salted every important secret with decoys, cut every plan into pieces no single vision can assemble, and taught his people to believe false things so that even a true reading reads false... I have tried, since the summer, to look at him directly three times. Each asking cost me more than the last, and each returned less. He has made himself expensive to see. That is not an accident. That is a countermeasure, built by someone who studied for it."
Ethan's amber eyes moved round the table. "So no — I cannot simply point. Where Mordred has touched, my Sight is a lamp in fog. We will do this the slow way, with Kingsley's contacts and Sam's ledgers and Arthur's ears. Lamps in fog still matter. But nobody at this table should believe I can end this with a pocket watch."
The silence held a moment, sober.
"Which brings us," growled Moody, "back to the boy."
Heads turned. The magical eye had fixed on Ethan.
"I said my piece at the hospital and I'll say it once more where the whole Order can weigh it. Potter saw that attack from inside the snake. Inside You-Know-Who's own creature. That's a connection, Esther — a live one, running both directions for all any of us can prove. You say the mother's protection bars the door. Maybe it does. But 'maybe' isn't a wall I'd sleep behind, and if there's even a chance the Dark Lord can ride that link into the boy's head — read us through his eyes, steer him, wear him —"
"He cannot," said Ethan.
"— then we'd be fools not to test it," Moody finished, undeterred.
"For once," came a silken voice from the shadowed end of the table, "Moody and I are in agreement."
Severus Snape had spoken very little all evening. Now he leaned into the lamplight, and his black eyes glittered with something that was not quite malice and not quite anything else.
"I have heard a great deal tonight about the boy's remarkable Occlumency. Trained from childhood, we are told. Proof against possession, we are assured."
The sneer was delicate, almost scholarly. "Forgive me if I decline to stake the Order's security on a father's assessment of his own son. Doting is not data. I have taught Potter for four years; I have seen arrogance in that family mistaken for ability before —"
Sirius's chair came down on all four legs with a bang. "Say James's name, Snivellus, go on —"
"— and I merely observe," Snape continued, with the serene cruelty of a man who has landed his hit, "that an untested shield is a decoration."
"His shield stopped a Dark Lord's leavings cold when he was fourteen, which is more than your —"
"Gentlemen."
Dumbledore did not raise his voice, but the word ended the exchange as a hand ends a metronome.
He looked, over his half-moon spectacles, down the table.
"Ethan. It is your son, and your training, in question. Your view?"
And Ethan — to the visible surprise of half the table and the visible suspicion of Snape — smiled.
"I think Severus should test him."
Sirius's head whipped round. Snape's eyes narrowed, hunting the trap.
"Regularly, in fact," Ethan went on, pleasantly.
"Call it Occlumency instruction; heaven knows the cover is respectable, and heaven knows Severus is qualified — there are perhaps three Legilimens in Britain worth the name, and one of them is sitting at this table being insufferable about it."
A dry glint.
"Let him probe the defences properly. It answers Alastor's concern with evidence instead of assurances. It gives Severus the satisfaction of being thorough. And —" the glint warmed, and sharpened at once, into something every parent at the table recognised and Snape plainly did not enjoy "— it will be excellent training for Harry. A boy should test his walls against a real siege engine now and then. I built those walls, gentlemen. I am entirely content to have them inspected."
The confidence in it was quiet, and total, and somehow more cutting than any boast: do your worst; you'll blunt yourself on my son.
Snape's lip curled. "How touching. Very well."
The disdain was intact, but underneath it — unmistakable to everyone who knew him — something had kindled. A challenge, accepted. "I shall inspect... thoroughly."
"I'd expect nothing less," said Ethan, and raised his teacup to him.
"Then it is settled," said Dumbledore, and there was, buried deep beneath the gravity, the faintest suggestion that he was enjoying himself. "Severus will instruct Harry in Occlumency upon the term's resumption. Minerva, you'll arrange the timetable cover."
He rose, and the meeting rose with him. "Thank you, all. Watch, work, and be careful. The year has begun as it means to go on."
8th January 1996, Hogwarts
The first week back had, Harry reflected, exactly one consolation, and her name was Dolores Umbridge.
Or rather — the new, reduced edition of her.
The High Inquisitor still patrolled, still coughed, still sweet-talked the exchange students at every opportunity, Rolf Scamander, Harry noted with mixed feelings, remained her favourite target, and bore her attentions with a wry, trapped politeness that Harry refused on principle to sympathise with... but around everyone else she had gone strangely bloated and closed, a puffed-up creature keeping to its own perch, issuing no new Decrees, picking no new fights.
Knowing her place.
It was, the whole school agreed without knowing why, really quite nice.
The consolation was necessary, because the week's other news was Snape.
"Occlumency," Ron repeated at breakfast, with the reverent horror of a man reading a friend's death sentence. "One on one. With Snape. In the dungeons." He put down his fork, reached across the table, and gripped Harry's hand solemnly. "Mate. I'm already praying for you. I started last night."
"It won't be that bad—"
"It'll be worse," said Neville, with a small shudder, gone slightly grey at the mere architecture of the idea. "An hour. Alone. With him looking at you. On purpose."
He shook himself like a wet dog. "You're the bravest person I know, Harry, and I mean that."
"The subject's fascinating, though," Hermione put in, entirely missing the room.
"Legilimency and Occlumency — the theory's barely written down anywhere, it's all master-to-student transmission, there are maybe four reliable sources in the whole library — Harry, you must take notes, I have questions about whether the intrusion presents visually or—"
"He's not doing it for your bibliography, Granger," said Draco, sliding into the seat opposite with his tea.
"He's doing it so the Order can sleep at night." He sipped, and his eyes glinted over the rim. "Look on the bright side, Potter. I've taken up mind-healing this term — genuinely, it's the coming field. And if Snape cracks you open like a breakfast egg, I'll have the perfect practice subject. First patient. I'll waive my fee."
"Draco."
"Family rates."
Harry glared. Ron howled.
Harry, with the fluid economy of four years' training, picked up a sausage and inserted it into Ron's open laughing mouth, which converted the howl into a muffled, outraged choking that satisfied everyone.
"I think Harry vill do vell," said Viktor simply, when the table had recovered. He said it the way he said most things — as a settled fact requiring no defence. "I have felt vhat his teaching is like. The foundation under it."
He shrugged. "Professor Snape vill find the visit... educational."
"He will," Luna agreed serenely, buttering toast. "Harry's mind is one of the loveliest I know. All that moonlight."
She said it exactly as another person might praise the weather, and went back to her toast, and Harry went scarlet from collar to hairline while Hermione and Draco exchanged a slow, deeply entertained roll of the eyes across the table.
...
The dungeon office was cold, and smelled of preserved things, and Severus Snape stood in the middle of it with his wand already drawn.
"The Headmaster believes — and your father insists —" the word carried a full cargo of scepticism "— that your Occlumency is adequate. I am here to determine whether that is true, or whether it is the usual Potter mythology. The discipline is simple. I will attempt to enter your mind. You will attempt to prevent me. Fair warning is a courtesy the Dark Lord will not extend; I extend it once."
The wand came up. "Prepare yourself. One... two... Legilimens."
The world tilted—
—and Harry stood on dark water.
That was the shape his walls had grown into, over four years of Ethan's teaching: a vast still ocean under a night sky, black and calm to every horizon, and above it, enormous and serene, a blue moon — full, cold, luminous, its light lying on the water in one unbroken road.
Cogitation.
The calm was the wall. There was nothing to grip, nothing to pry; an intruder arrived into stillness and found the stillness looking back.
He felt Snape hit the surface like a thrown spear — a black, precise, ferociously disciplined pressure, nothing like the crude battering Harry had practised against. The water dimpled. Held. The moon poured its cold light down, and the pressure slid away along the surface, finding no purchase—
—and came again, angled, clever, riding in on a hook of memory: your father is not here, boy, you are alone in a dungeon with a man who hated him — a barb of feeling meant to make the water ripple—
The water rippled.
For half a heartbeat the calm broke, and through the crack came the dungeon, doubling — and an image tore loose and flashed between them before Harry could seize it: a dark corridor, lined with doors, torchlit, ending in a plain black door that filled him with wanting—
Harry slammed the calm back down. Moonlight. Still water. The crack sealed.
Across the office, Snape had lowered his wand an inch. His face was, as ever, a closed ledger — but he was looking at Harry with a stillness that had not been there before.
"Again," was all he said.
It went on for an hour. Snape came at the ocean from every direction a mind could be approached — grief, anger, embarrassment, the graveyard, his mother's name, each probe more refined than the last, the work of a genuine master throwing his whole craft at a fifteen-year-old's walls. And the walls held. Not perfectly — twice in the hour Snape found a seam, twice the water broke and a scatter of images escaped, the corridor again, both times, always the corridor, always the black door, before Harry wrestled the moon back over the water. Twice, in a full hour, from one of the three best Legilimens in Britain.
By the end Harry was drenched, shaking with the particular marrow-deep exhaustion of mind-work, his shirt stuck to his back, his breath ragged — but on his feet, and behind his eyes the ocean lay calm again, patrolled, his.
Snape lowered his wand.
For a long moment he said nothing at all. The black eyes moved over Harry with an expression Harry could not name — because it was several expressions, in careful layers: the top one disdain, worn like a uniform; and beneath it, tamped down hard where it thought it couldn't be seen, something that was unmistakably, corrosively frustrated.
An hour. His full craft. Two seams.
"Adequate," said Severus Snape, in a voice like a door closing, "is perhaps... not a wholly inaccurate description. Same time Thursday. You will be better by Thursday."
A pause, and the silkiest of afterthoughts: "Do give my regards to your father's architecture."
Harry got out before his legs could disgrace him.
He made it two corridors before he let himself slide down the cold stone wall and sit, and breathe, and think — and what he thought about was not Snape, and not the frustration Snape imagined he'd hidden.
It was the corridor.
The corridor — the one that had torn loose through both cracks, the one he'd been dreaming in fragments since before Christmas. Dark. Torchlit. Lined with identical doors. And at its end, the plain black door, and the wanting that came off it like heat off iron — a longing that was not his, had never been his, wearing his mind like a borrowed coat.
He knew where it was, now. He'd stood outside its real twin in July, with Sam holding the door to Courtroom Ten. Level nine. The Department of Mysteries.
'The connection runs both ways,' his father had said, in the snow, by the purple bus. 'What comes down it will no longer be things he doesn't know you're seeing. It will be things he wants you to see.'
Harry sat in the cold corridor, fifteen and bone-tired, and got out parchment then and there, and began — as he had promised, as he would always promise — to write to Ethan.
Dad. Two things. Snape's lessons started — walls held, mostly, he got through twice, I'll tell you properly when I see you. But the important thing is what got loose when he did. It's the corridor again. The one from the dreams. I know where it is now, and I think I know what's behind the black door is what the snake was sent for, and Dad — the wanting isn't mine. It's HIS. He's dreaming at me.
What do you want me to do?