14th January 1996, the Hogwarts kitchens,evening
Harry followed Rolf Scamander down to the kitchens in a silence with a temperature.
The great vaulted room received them in its usual warm bustle... a hundred elves at their pots and fires, the smell of bread and stew, the clatter and steam of a castle being fed... and then, as the two boys settled at a small table by the hearth, the bustle seemed to reorganise itself politely around them, and the corner became something like a café.
A café containing exactly two customers of profoundly opposite weather: one boy sunny, open, entirely at his ease; and one boy sitting across from him with the courteous, arctic stillness of a drawn blade in a velvet case.
Rolf asked an elf for pumpkin juice, and thanked her by name... he had apparently learned her name and struck up a small cheerful conversation about the evening's menu while she beamed and bowed.
Harry asked for the calming tea he had come for in the first place, after an hour of Snape picking at the seams of his skull, and said nothing at all, and watched Rolf over the rim of the cup with a gaze that could have frosted the windows.
Rolf appeared magnificently unaware of it. He drank his juice. He complimented it.
Harry breathed out, slowly, and let the tea do a little of its work. 'Fine. He asked to talk. Let him talk.'
Rolf talked.
"I knew about you before I ever knew Luna, obviously," he began, easy and unhurried, turning his glass.
"Everyone does. The story's everywhere... it's famous at Ilvermorny too, you know. Properly famous. The Boy Who Lived... we did you in History of Magic, third year."
A small self-deprecating laugh.
"Strange, probably, hearing that. Being a chapter."
"Mm," said Harry.
"So when word came about the Tournament... that there'd be a real one again, five schools, and Ilvermorny was in... half my house went mad with excitement. I was desperate to come, even just to watch." He shook his head at the memory, glowing. "Never managed it. Watched the mirror-casts like everyone else."
'He was desperate to come,' Harry noted, sipping, cold and clinical behind his eyes, 'and it doesn't seem to have once crossed his mind WHY there was suddenly a five-school Tournament, or what happened at the end of it, or what crawled out of that maze. The world's on fire at the edges and he's talking about mirror-casts.' He filed it, and nodded, and said nothing.
"And then the exchange programme." Rolf's whole face lit. "I couldn't believe my luck. Hogwarts! The castle, the grounds... you've got a Re'em in Britain now, did you know, there are rumours in the journals... and, well." He went slightly sheepish, rubbing the back of his neck. "You'll have heard the name. My grandfather. Newt. Everyone brings him up before I can, so I've learned to just... get it out of the way. I grew up on his field journals. It's the whole reason I am how I am about creatures."
Harry nodded, coldly. The tea was very good. He held onto that.
"But honestly," Rolf went on, and here his tone climbed into something brighter, warmer, entirely unguarded, "the best thing about this whole year... better than the castle, better than any of it... has been Ravenclaw. Being in it. And..." the warmth crested "...being friends with Luna. She's... I've never met anyone like her. Anywhere. She sees things sideways-on to the whole world and she's nearly always right, and she doesn't perform for anyone, and she knows more raw magizoology than students three years up, and..." He laughed, helpless, open. "You know. You know her. She's extraordinary."
Harry's teeth met, very quietly, behind his closed and pleasant mouth. 'Blatant,' he thought, with something surging up his spine that he still refused to give its proper name. 'He's not even hiding it. He's sitting in front of me ADORING her out loud...'
"She talks about you all the time, you know," Rolf said.
"Does she," said Harry, and allowed himself, for one warm second, a small proud lift of the eyebrows. 'Of course she does.'
"All the time. Harry this, Hah-ree that." Rolf smiled... and something in the smile had shifted. The warmth of it was still entirely real; that was the strange thing, the thing that caught Harry slightly flat-footed. The warmth stayed, and underneath it something cooled, the way water cools under an unchanged sky. "Her dearest friend," Rolf said.
"That's what you are. It's how she says it. Her dearest... friend."
The word landed twice, deliberately.
Harry went very still.
"I did wonder, at first," Rolf continued, conversational, turning his glass. "Watching the two of you. I assumed... well, everyone assumes, don't they. But I like to be sure of my ground, so I asked around, carefully. And I got lucky... Sue Li. Do you know Sue? Course you do, she's M.S.S..." he caught himself smoothly "...she's in your study circle. She's also, as far as I can tell, the only real friend Luna had in Ravenclaw before I came. Years of watching Luna, from about two feet away, and fond of her, and honest."
The glass turned.
"I've heard a great deal about you from Sue. All of it good, incidentally. She thinks the world of you."
"Get to it," said Harry quietly.
Rolf looked up, and the sunny face and the cool water under it were both, fully, looking at him now.
"You've never asked her," Rolf said. "That's the it. Four years... five? Sue wasn't sure... of being the most important person in Luna Lovegood's life. Walks, letters, whatever it is you did all summer. Her hand in yours, half the school assuming. And in all of it, not once... not once, Potter... have you actually asked her to be anything. She is not your girlfriend. She's never been your girlfriend. You've never said the words, to her or anyone. She is your dearest friend..." the phrase again, gentle as a stiletto "...because that is precisely, and only, what you have ever asked her to be."
Harry's pupils contracted.
And the terrible thing... the thing that held him rigid in his chair while his tea went cold... was that he was already searching, fast, through four years of a Mind Palace that forgot nothing, hunting for the moment. The asking. The words. Hogsmeade, the fierce hug, the platform, a hundred hours side by side, Xenophilius's beaming approval... everyone, everyone, all of them had assumed, and Harry had assumed hardest of all, had somewhere along the way simply taken it for granted... that Luna would be there, was his, belonged beside him, always... and in all those bright catalogued rooms of memory there was no moment, not one, in which Harry Potter had ever actually asked.
The Mind Palace returned its result with pitiless administrative neutrality: no record found.
"So," said Rolf Scamander, and drained his juice, and set the glass down, and smiled at Harry with genuine, luminous, infuriating friendliness. "I thought it was only fair to tell you to your face, because you seem like someone who'd rather have it straight, and because I think... I hope... we could actually be friends, after. I like her, Potter. Truly. Not sideways, not secretly. And since she is, by the only measure that counts, not spoken for..." he stood, unhurried, and shouldered his bag "...I intend to pursue her. Openly. Starting now. May the better suit win."
Harry gazed up at him with a face gone entirely cold and found, for the first time in a long time, that he had absolutely nothing to say.
Rolf paused at the kitchen door. And here his voice changed a third time... the sunniness banking down, something older and more serious underneath, and he said it without turning fully around.
"One more thing. You lot... Hogwarts, Britain... you have a way of assuming the exchange students are tourists. Sweet, oblivious. We're not. Ilvermorny reads the foreign press; MACUSA briefs our seventh-years now; we know what's loose in the world, and we know it has a name, and we know..." a beat "...that its oldest and most personal hatred is for you. Specifically. There's a war coming, Potter, and you are its favourite target, and everyone standing close to you is standing in the blast radius."
He looked back then, and there was no malice in his face at all, which somehow made it worse. "So it's worth asking... isn't it... whether the safest place in the world for Luna Lovegood is at the side of the boy Voldemort wants dead more than he wants anything alive."
The door closed softly behind him.
And Harry sat alone in the warm bright kitchen with a cold cup of tea, dumbfounded, outflanked on ground he hadn't known was contested, and could not decide which of the three blades Rolf had left in him was sunk the deepest.
15th January 1996, the Great Hall, morning
Harry came down to breakfast looking like a boy who had lost an argument with the night.
He had, twice over. What sleep the kitchen conversation had left him, the dream had taken: the corridor again, always the corridor... running down it this time, urgent, the torches streaming past, the black door swelling ahead, his hand on it, pushing, the wanting roaring in him like a furnace... and the door not opening. Never opening. He had woken at four with his scar prickling and Rolf's voice in his ears... never once have you actually asked... and given up on sleep entirely.
...
Hermione took one look at him across the table and put down her fork.
"Harry, you look dreadful."
"Thanks."
She darted a questioning glance past him at Ron and Neville... what happened?... and got two baffled headshakes in return.
Whatever it was, his dorm-mates didn't know either. Her frown deepened.
Draco arrived, dropped a thick volume titled Hereditary Maladies of the Sacred Lines on the table, took one look at Harry, and went straight into what Ron had christened his Healer Voice.
"Pallor, periorbital shadowing, tremor in the tea hand." He slid into his seat, radiating clinical delight. "Snape finally cracked you, didn't he. Go on, describe the symptoms slowly... my mind-healing module starts practicals this month and I have been praying for a test subject..."
"I will pay you," said Harry, "to fall in the lake."
Ron and Neville snickered into their breakfasts. But Draco's smirk faded fast, and he and Hermione leaned in together, and their voices dropped, serious now. "Really, though," Hermione pressed. "What's happened? You were fine at dinner and now you look like... Harry, what..."
"It's..." Harry took a breath. "Last night, I..."
"Good morning," said Luna.
She had arrived with Astoria, book bag over one shoulder, serene as sunrise, and she came round the table and sat down beside Harry exactly as she always did.
And Harry went cheerful.
It happened like a mask going on... between one heartbeat and the next, the grey exhaustion smoothed over, the smile arriving bright and easy: "Morning, Luna! Sleep all right? Astoria." He passed the toast. He asked about her ritual-magic reading. He was, to every outward measure, entirely his usual self.
Except that he did not shift closer to her.
It was the smallest thing in the world.
Every morning for a year, without ever seeming to notice he did it, Harry Potter had drifted the last two inches along the bench the moment Luna sat down, closing the gap to shoulder-brush distance as automatically as breathing.
This morning the two inches stayed. He sat precisely, politely, carefully where he was.
Luna, reading her book, buttering toast, appeared to notice nothing at all.
Astoria noticed. Her eyes narrowed a fraction over her goblet, tracked the gap, tracked Harry's too-bright smile, and slid sideways to meet Draco's glance, and then Hermione's, in a silent three-way exchange of are you seeing this... while Ron and Neville, with the blunt instinctive kindness of boys who could smell a wrongness without wanting to dissect it, struck up a loud and cheerful conversation about Quidditch to carry the table over it.
Viktor arrived mid-rescue with a stack of newsprint under his arm... foreign papers, and on top, unmistakable in its lurid cheer, The Quibbler.
"You vill vant to see these," he said, dealing them round. "The world press on the breakout, and on the... response."
The coverage abroad was blunt: Voldemort was arming, recruiting, moving between continents; the Azkaban ten were loose; the war was assembling itself in plain sight. And The Quibbler, bless it, had produced its own analysis... a gleefully savage piece dismantling the Minister's grand strategy, mocking, with lethal courtesy, the proposition that "the harmless wandering criminal styling himself Lord Voldemort" would be dealt with diplomatically; that the International Confederation of Wizards could be marshalled into a single unified global response; that the combined might of the I.C.W., properly convened, minuted, and sub-committee'd, would address the crisis cleanly, internationally, properly... the article inquired, in a footnote, whether the Dark Lord would be sent an agenda in advance, and whether Dementors counted toward quorum.
The table's reaction was warm and immediate... Ron cackling, Hermione and Draco trading dry appreciations of Xenophilius's editorial knife-work, Daphne, who had also arrived shortly and joined the chat, observing that mockery this precise did more damage than a dozen sober editorials...
...and Harry laughed a half-second behind everyone else, each time, with eyes that weren't in it.
Even Luna looked up at that. She studied him, sideways, a small crease of genuine worry forming... and Harry, catching it, smiled wider and pivoted hard.
"Anyway... Occlumency's going better," he announced, too brightly. "Actually, listen to this... last lesson, when Snape came at me, I pushed back down the connection. Legilimency runs both ways if you're quick. I got in." A beat for effect. "Into Snape's head. Only a second... I saw a corridor and a slammed door, and then he threw me out so hard I sat down. But in. He was furious. It was the best moment of my term."
That did the trick. Ron demanded a full reenactment; Neville was torn between horror and awe; Viktor and Daphne wanted the technical mechanics of a reversed probe; and the talk swept off into the M.S.S.G. and the next meeting's plans, Harry riding the current of it, animated, deflecting, safe...
...while at the quiet end of the table, Hermione, Draco, and Astoria exchanged one more long, level, three-cornered glance, and came silently to committee consensus: something happened, he's hiding it, and we are going to find out what.
...
That night, the dream was different.
No corridor. Wind, instead... high, cold, enormous wind, and Harry stood on the lip of a cliff at night with the sea crashing far below, and he was tall, and his hands on the stone parapet were white as bone, and the wanting in him was banked tonight, cool, replaced by something worse: satisfaction.
He was not alone.
"...Bode was always the wrong instrument," said the voice beside him, young, warm and amused, and Harry turned Voldemort's head and looked at Mordred Slythra... older than Harry remembered from the mirror-casts, or perhaps only easier, leaning on the parapet with the wind in his hair like a man on holiday. "You know that, my lord. A Ministry man under Imperius, sent to take it... the thing is warded precisely against taking. It let him touch it and then it unmade his mind, and the Devil's Snare in the ward was only the mercy stroke. Avery's plan," a soft laugh, "was Avery's plan. Its failure was arithmetic."
"Avery assured me," said Harry's own mouth, high and cold, and the fury under the words was a live wire, "that Bode could retrieve it. He will learn what my assurances cost when they are broken. Slowly."
"Of course." Mordred's tone was soothing, easy, utterly unafraid... and Harry, riding behind the red eyes, understood with a small distant chill that this creature was the only being alive who spoke to Voldemort like a colleague. "Punish Avery; it's good for the others' posture. But don't mourn the plan. It taught us the thing's true nature... it cannot be taken. It can only be given, or fetched by the ones it concerns..." the wind screamed. "What you want in that Department will be yours, my lord. I've already begun arranging the fetching. Give it till June."
"June," Voldemort repeated, tasting it.
"But that is there," said Mordred, and pushed off the parapet, brisk, bright, a man returning to today's business, "and we are here, and here is better. Shall we?"
"You are certain of the location." Not a question; a blade laid flat.
Mordred smiled.
In the dream's darkness it was a sinister and shining thing, the smile of a boy showing a parent a perfect exam.
"I divined it to the foot, my lord. Cross-checked three ways against their own wards' hum. It's there. It has been there for more than three centuries, and its keepers have grown exactly as complacent as three centuries makes anyone."
"You do not disappoint me, Mordred," said Voldemort softly, and the pride in the cold voice was a real and terrible thing. "With it in my hand... even Dumbledore is only an old man with a stick. Even Dumbledore is soon dead."
And the two of them turned, together, to look out from the cliff's edge at what lay ahead across the night... and Harry, helpless behind the red eyes, looked with them.
Far below and away, folded into the black shoulders of a mountain above a river of cloud, stood a castle. Granite-grey, many-towered, its windows burning warm against the dark, a shape Harry had seen and had been there.
Ilvermorny.