February 1996, Professor McGonagall's office
Careers Week arrived, and with it the strangest ritual of fifth year: sitting across a desk from a professor and being asked, in so many words, what you intended to be.
Harry went to his session in the small hour between Charms and lunch, and found Professor McGonagall behind her desk with a stack of pamphlets, a fresh pot of tea, and — installed by decree in the corner, on a chintz chair that had certainly not been there yesterday, with a clipboard and a small cough — Dolores Umbridge, observing.
McGonagall ignored her with the totality of long practice, and poured two cups.
"Well, Potter. Have you given any thought to what you would like to do after Hogwarts?"
"Yes, Professor. I—"
But McGonagall was already away, briskly, down the well-worn track of her duty: "Because I'll tell you frankly, your options are broader than most. Your marks are consistently excellent across the board — you could pursue teaching, in time; Merlin knows the profession needs feeding. The Ministry proper would take you the day you left — half the departments would fight over the name alone, and the other half over the marks. Potions—" a rare dry gleam "—you have somehow contrived to earn good grades out of Professor Snape, which I regard as a qualification in itself, so a Potioneer's mastery is open to you. And of course there's the obvious road — Auror. The Office would—"
"I want to be an Unspeakable."
McGonagall stopped mid-syllable.
Her mouth stayed open a half-second, the word Auror still unfinished in it. Then it closed, and her eyebrows rose over her square spectacles as she looked at Harry — really looked — with genuine surprise.
And then something shifted behind the surprise.
Harry watched it happen: the recalibration, the of course, the memory arriving.
Her eyes seemingly clouded — went somewhere else entirely, decades back, down some corridor of recollection where a certain unbearable Ravenclaw was sitting twelve O.W.L.s under twelve borrowed faces and then Professor Minerva McGonagall, Deputy Headmistress, four decades of granite composure, giggled.
To herself. Briefly. Behind one hand.
Harry scratched the back of his head, ears going pink, feeling suddenly and obscurely shy — 'she's laughing? Am I—'
"Hem," said McGonagall — her own hem, a real throat-clearing, nothing pink about it and reassembled her composure piece by piece, though a suspicious warmth stayed in her eyes. "Yes. Well. I ought to have guessed, oughtn't I. Like father, like—" she stopped herself, mercifully, and squared the pamphlets.
"Very well, Potter. An Unspeakable. Tell me — what do you understand it to take?"
Harry opened his mouth—
—and McGonagall was off again before a word emerged, because Minerva McGonagall had been conducting these sessions since before his parents sat them, and rhetorical questions were merely her way of drawing breath: "It is not like other Ministry careers, understand. There is no application form on a rack. The Department of Mysteries does not advertise, does not interview in the ordinary way, and does not explain itself — the clue, Potter, is in the name. Candidates are as often approached as approaching. What is asked of them—" she ticked it off, crisp as wandwork "—is this. Outstanding N.E.W.T.s — a minimum of five, and Outstanding means Outstanding, they do not bend — with Charms, Transfiguration, and Runes effectively mandatory, Arithmancy strongly expected, and Potions never unwelcome. A demonstrated capacity for independent research — they want minds that ask questions nobody assigned. Absolute discretion, tested in ways I am not cleared to describe. And a background examination that makes the Auror Office's look like a Hogsmeade permission slip."
It was, near enough word for word, what Ethan and Uncle Sam had each told him, in their different registers, over the years — Sam with relish, Ethan with the dry footnote that the discretion test was "more entertaining than it sounds, and less survivable than it looks."
Harry nodded along, unsurprised — and undeterred.
None of it was easy. All of it was reachable. He could feel the shape of the road, and his eyes, fixed on McGonagall, had begun quietly to burn with it.
McGonagall observed the burn over her spectacles, and something in her stern face settled into deep satisfaction — a teacher watching ambition land on solid ground. "Good," she said simply. "Then we shall want your N.E.W.T. selection built around— "
"Hem, hem."
The chintz corner had activated.
"I merely wonder," said Dolores Umbridge sweetly, pen poised over her clipboard, "whether we are being quite responsible, Minerva, encouraging the boy toward the Department of Mysteries. A department of secrets — unaccountable, irregular, frankly overdue for review — hardly a suitable ambition for a young man with Mr Potter's... documented difficulties with authority and truthfulness. One would have thought something more supervised. I shall be noting my reservations for his file. The Ministry, I need hardly say, monitors very carefully who is admitted to sensitive—"
Harry didn't so much as blink.
He'd been expecting her since the cough, and he simply sat, hands folded, watching McGonagall instead — because McGonagall's eyes had begun a long, slow, magnificent roll toward the ceiling, arriving at the rafters with the weary completeness of a woman who had been interrupted by this particular voice one time past her lifetime allowance, and the sight of it put a genuine smile on Harry's face for the first time in days.
"Your reservations," said McGonagall, turning at last to the corner with terrible courtesy, "are noted, Headmistress, and will be filed with my own assessment, which is that Mr Potter is among the most capable students I have taught in forty years, that his marks and character qualify him for any career in wizarding Britain up to and including yours, and that he will make a superb Unspeakable if the Department has the wit to take him."
The clipboard pen stopped. "Hem, hem. I hardly think a student under multiple disciplinary sanctions—"
"Sanctions issued by the office holding the clipboard, which is not what the Muggles would call an independent audit—"
"I beg your pardon —"
"—and furthermore, Headmistress, this is a careers consultation, the confidential conduct of which between student and Head of House is protected under school statutes that predate your appointment by some five centuries—"
"—Educational Decree Twenty-Six expressly empowers me to—"
"—your Decree governs what teachers may say about matters unrelated to their subjects, and I assure you, Dolores, there is nothing more related to my subject than the future of my own students—!"
It escalated from there, gloriously.
Harry sat in the crossfire nursing his tea, watching the two of them go at it hammer and tongs across his head — McGonagall's brogue thickening syllable by syllable as her volume rose, Umbridge's coo shrilling toward its true register — until the exchange achieved genuine shouting, the like of which the office had surely never hosted, and somewhere in it McGonagall thundered the sentence that Harry intended to carry to his grave:
"—I will assist Potter to become an Unspeakable, Dolores, if it is the last thing I do! I will coach him nightly if I must — I will write to the Department myself — and I should very much like to see the Decree that stops me!"
Harry was, discreetly and efficiently, dismissed shortly thereafter — McGonagall breaking off mid-salvo to stamp his consultation form, press three pamphlets into his hands, and say, with warm ferocity, "We'll speak again properly, Potter — study your Runes—" before wheeling back into the fray — and he escaped into the corridor with the door shutting on the words "—well I have NEVER, in all my—" behind him.
His friends were waiting down the hall, five faces in a row, and all five had watched the pink shape barrel into the office midway through his slot.
"She crashed your careers meeting?" Ron demanded. "What happened? Are you expelled? Is McGonagall expelled?"
Harry gave them the highlights and by the end of it five deeply satisfied smiles had bloomed in the corridor, Lavender actually applauding softly, Neville breathing "nightly coaching," with reverence.
"But hang on — hang on—" Hermione had seized the essential thread, and there was a strange sudden agitation in her, a leaning-forward intensity that made Harry narrow his eyes at her. "The career, Harry. What did you tell her? What are you actually choosing? It's Auror, isn't it — after everything, all the training, it's obviously, it's got to be Auror—"
Harry regarded her — the over-brightness, the oddly invested delivery, the way Ron and Draco had both gone suspiciously still on either side of her — for one long, narrow-eyed moment.
"...Unspeakable," he said calmly.
Ron whooped. Draco's smirk unfurled like a banner.
Hermione darkened — comprehensively, from the hairline down — while Neville and Lavender dissolved into giggles at absolutely everyone, and Harry watched, shaking his head in slow bemusement, as Hermione Granger, prefect, top student of her year, scourge of gamblers, dug into her robe pocket with terrible dignity and counted out ten Knuts into Ron's waiting palm... and ten more into Draco's.
"You bet on my future."
"She bet on Auror," said Draco, pocketing his winnings with relish. "We bet on you."
...
Late that evening, the Gryffindor common room had emptied to embers and one armchair's worth of company.
The fire was banked low, and before it, entirely at his ease in what were unmistakably his most comfortable pyjamas — worn tartan, older than some students — sat Remus Lupin, tea in hand, having arrived through the Floo an hour earlier on Order business and stayed, as he put it, "for the superior armchairs." Sirius's head sat in the hearth among the coals, flickering green, midway through his third complaint about Kreacher. It was the warmest hour Harry had spent in weeks.
"...and the beautiful thing," Lupin was saying, with the deep contentment of a man describing a perfect crime, "is that he can't refuse it. Every form I forward is genuinely his to sign. Founder's authority — his own rule, his own charter, his own signature line. So."
He sipped. "Years that man has buried me in parchment. And now he's trapped at headquarters for weeks, and every morning, the whole day's filing arrives on his desk, forwarded — with my compliments — by owl relay."
He raised his cup an inch toward the fire. "I have never been happier in my professional life."
Harry laughed properly — it surprised him, the sound of it — picturing Ethan entombed behind the paper mountain he'd once banished to a corner with a wave.
But something in Lupin's account snagged his ear, and he tilted his head. "Wait — weeks at headquarters, though. Signing forms. That's..." Harry's eyes narrowed keenly. "That's not all of it, is it. Dad doesn't sit anywhere for weeks over filing."
Lupin's cup paused.
He frowned, slightly, into it — the frown of a man weighing a confidence and then sighed, and set it down.
"No. It's not all of it." He glanced at the fire, at Sirius, and evidently decided Harry had earned the truth.
"He's rebuilding the defences. All of them — and personally. He started with headquarters and he's working outward: every branch, every warehouse, every shopfront, here and abroad. Not inspecting — re-warding. With his own hands, adding layers I haven't got names for. He's at it fourteen hours a day... And that's the half of it. The other half is people. He's instituted self-defence instruction for the staff — all the staff, shop clerks and warehouse hands and the research floors alike. Duelling basics, shield work, evacuation drills. Rachelle's been a tremendous help — she's got a past that suits the curriculum, and the staff have taken to her."
Lupin turned his cup slowly. "And Harry... the employees aren't fools. Nobody's used the word to them. But you don't watch the founder personally raise siege-wards over your shop counter and organise shield drills on your lunch hour without understanding what he thinks is coming. The whole company can feel it. He's preparing Atid Stella for a war."
"Because there's a war coming," said the fire.
Sirius's flame-face had gone serious among the coals. "He's right to do it, Moony, and you know it. Every branch of that company is a target the day things turn open — it's the most visible thing in wizarding Britain that Voldemort doesn't control, it employs every kind of person the Death Eaters hate, and it belongs to the man who's been quietly ruining their year."
The green eyes flicked to Harry. "Your dad's doing exactly what the Ministry should be doing and isn't. Somebody's got to build the walls before the rain."
Harry nodded slowly, filing all of it into the growing picture of a world bracing itself.
Then the fire crackled, and Sirius's gaze, resettling on his godson, sharpened into something else.
"...You look terrible, by the way," Sirius said. "Has anyone mentioned? You look like Moony the week before the moon. What's going on with you?"
Lupin, Harry realised, had been carefully not-asking the same question all evening — he saw it now in the way the man's eyes came up, quiet and ready, the observation long since made and held gently in reserve.
And Harry — who had deflected this exact opening a dozen times in a fortnight, from Hermione, from Ron, from all of them — found that here, in the ember-light, with the two of them, one particular splinter worked its way to the surface ahead of all the others. Not Luna. He couldn't touch Luna. But the other thing —
"Can I ask you something?" he said, sheepish, to his knees. "About my — about James... my father." The fire went attentive. "In Occlumency. Last week. I saw... I ended up in one of Snape's memories. By accident."
He made himself say it plainly. "By the lake. Dad had him upside-down in the air in front of half the school — laughing about it — playing to the crowd — for nothing, as far as I could see. Because he existed. Because he was bored."
Harry looked up. "Was he like that? Really?"
The silence had a wince in it.
"...Yes," said Lupin at last, quietly, because he had never once lied to Harry and didn't start now. "At fifteen — yes, he could be. James was arrogant at fifteen, Harry. Talented, worshipped, and arrogant, and Severus brought out the very worst of it — the two of them were flint and steel from the day they met, and the sparks went both ways, but that doesn't excuse what you saw. What you saw was real, it was cruel, and I sat twenty feet away behind a book and let it happen, which I have regretted for twenty years."
"But hear the whole of it," Sirius said from the coals, and there was no mischief in him now at all.
"Because I was worse than James, and I'll own that — and here's the part that you might no know. People grow, Harry. James grew. Somewhere in sixth year the swagger started coming off him — your mum wouldn't look at him twice while he wore it, and losing her good opinion did what no teacher ever managed. By seventh year he was Head Boy, and he'd earned it — he'd stopped hexing people in corridors, he stood up for the younger ones, he was the first of us to understand what the war actually meant."
The green flames flickered low.
"The boy by the lake was real. So was the man who died on his feet, wandless, buying your mother time. Most people, if they're lucky, stop being who they were at fifteen. Your father did. Give him the whole of his life, not the worst afternoon of it."
Harry sat with that a while, the fire ticking.
It helped — some.
It gave the terrible frame a second frame around it.
It did not answer the other question, the one underneath, the one about a hook-nosed boy who had never got to grow past that lake because the lake had never stopped happening to him — but that question had no owner in this room, and Harry was too tired to carry it further tonight.
"Thanks," he said, and meant it, and gave them a smile — a real one, if a worn one. "Both of you. I'm — I'd better sleep."
He stood, and paused, and added, to the fire, "Don't let Kreacher win."
"Never," said Sirius, with feeling, and Harry went up.
...
The end, when it came for Fred and George Weasley, came in glory.
It came, specifically, in the form of a swamp.
The east corridor of the fifth floor was discovered, one Tuesday morning, to have become — comprehensively, convincingly, fragrantly — a genuine marshland: reeds, standing water, croaking things, a smell of honest bog, thirty yards of it wall to wall, and no classroom on the far side reachable except by an improvised punt. It was masterful magic; Flitwick was heard to say so twice. It was also, unmistakably, a signature — and the twins made no attempt to hide it.
They were caught standing beside their swamp with the satisfied air of landscape gardeners, because being caught, this time, was the entire design.
The school was summoned to witness discipline.
Umbridge, vibrating with vindication, filled the entrance hall with students and Squad, delivered her triumph — expulsion, prosecution, examples made — and sent Filch running for the confiscated brooms and the whips.
And Fred and George Weasley looked at each other, and grinned, and raised their wands.
"Accio brooms."
The crash from Umbridge's office was audible through six floors of stone. Her prized new security chain came through the wall still attached, whistling down the marble staircase behind two Cleansweeps like the tail of a comet, and the brooms slapped into their owners' palms in the middle of the packed entrance hall.
"We won't be staying to finish our education," Fred announced, to the hall at large, mounting.
"Feel free," added George, "to shop at our new premises — Weasleys' Wizard Wheezes, Number Ninety-Three, Diagon Alley — special discounts to any Hogwarts student who swears—" he raised his voice over Umbridge's incoming shriek "—to use our products on this old toad."
"STOP THEM!"
Nobody stopped them.
The Squad surged, slipped and grabbed at air; Peeves the poltergeist — to whom Fred, in passing, tossed a salute and the immortal commission, "Give her hell from us" — swept off his belled hat in the deepest bow of his afterlife; and Fred and George Weasley rose through the entrance hall in a spiral of speed, hung one moment framed in the great doors against the winter sky —
— and were gone, into legend, to the loudest cheer Hogwarts had produced in three hundred years.
The cheer did not stop.
That was the thing.
It rolled out of the entrance hall and kept going — down the corridors, through the courtyards, gathering students as it went, until by mid-afternoon the school was simply, openly, joyously in revolt: Whiz-bangs, bequeathed in bulk, it emerged, to the student body, blooming from every stairwell, nifflers loose in the Inquisitorial ranks' dormitories, the swamp defended by its new tenants like a nature reserve, and Peeves discharging his commission with the industry of a poltergeist who had at last found his life's work.
Harry moved through the middle of it with his friends, carried along on the noise — and it was there, mid-revolt, that Ron abruptly went pale.
"Mum." He stopped dead in the corridor, a firework blooming rose-gold behind his head.
Mum is going to — they've been expelled, they've — she's going to murder them. She's going to murder them, then me for watching, then send a Howler to the bodies —"
He seized Harry's arm, wild-eyed, fully in the grip of the family apocalypse. "What do we do, what do we even —"
Harry looked at Hermione. Hermione looked at Harry. Both of them, by unspoken agreement, looked at Ginny — who was strolling past at that moment with a Whiz-bang sparkler held aloft like a torch of liberty, thoroughly enjoying the revolution.
Ginny took in her brother's terror, and rolled her eyes with the weary completeness of the youngest sibling who has been the only observant member of the family for fifteen years.
"Ron. Honestly. Have you not noticed anything since summer?" She ticked it off on sparkler-free fingers.
"Mum's been looking at the twins differently for months — since the Tournament, since the shop money started being real. Not the old what-have-you-done look. The counting look. The proud-and-pretending-not-to-be look."
Another finger.
"And she spent half the summer in private chats with Ethan — kitchen table, heads together, tea going cold, every time the twins' shop came up. You think Mr. Esther partners with two teenagers and doesn't square it with their mother first?"
She patted her stricken brother on the cheek, with love. "The Howler will come, because it's Mum, and it will be magnificent. And then she'll cry a bit, and then she'll knit the shop a doormat. Keep up."
Harry and Hermione nodded along in solemn confirmation, and Ron stood processing this reordering of his universe as the revolution flowed on around them —
— and that was when Harry saw Luna.
She was down the corridor, in the thick of the carnival: walking with Astoria, and with Rolf, the three of them tracking a spark-dragon's stately progress along the ceiling — Luna's face turned up to it, lit silver and rose by the fireworks, delighted, at ease. Enjoying the revolt.
Rolf said something; she laughed.
Astoria was not enjoying the revolt. Astoria had already found Harry across the distance, and her glare arrived like a hex — a pointed, furious, look-at-this glare, her gaze cutting deliberately sideways to Rolf-beside-Luna and back to Harry with a message no cipher was needed for: he is right there, doing your job, because you have vacated it, you unbelievable coward.
And Harry — with Ron, Ginny, and Hermione now following the exchange, their revelry dimming into real, unconcealed concern — looked at Luna laughing under the fireworks with Rolf Scamander at her shoulder...
...and looked away.
He felt Astoria's fury spike from thirty feet. He didn't care.
He assembled the business smile — the pleasant, distant, load-bearing smile that had carried him through three weeks and began to turn, to swivel calmly out of the moment the way he had swivelled out of every moment since the kitchen, retreat masked as composure, one more successful withdrawal—
"Harry James Potter."
The corridor went strange.
It was Luna's voice — and it was not Luna's voice as anyone present had ever heard it.
The dreamy floating cadence was gone. The name came out whole, all three words of it, level, clear and carrying and Harry turned back around before his body consulted him, because some things bypass policy entirely.
She was walking to him. Briskly. Directly. And her eyes—
Her eyes were the thing. The wide grey dreaminess had burned off them like morning fog, and what was underneath was fixed on him, bright and level: determination, mostly.
And behind the determination, unmistakable, a small hot coal of anger — the first he had ever seen in her that was pointed at him and behind even that, doing all the actual damage, hurt.
For the first time in three weeks, Harry Potter looked at Luna Lovegood straight on.
The revolution, mercifully, had rolled onward — the crowds and the fireworks pouring away down the joining corridor, leaving this stretch suddenly quiet: just Harry; and Luna before him; and, frozen in a loose arc behind, Ron and Hermione and Ginny and Neville and Lavender, none of them breathing; and Astoria, arms folded, grimly satisfied that someone was finally doing it; and Rolf Scamander, a few paces back, watching with complicated eyes and saying nothing at all.
"Why have you been avoiding me?"
She asked it gently. That was the unbearable part — the anger stayed banked, and the question came out gentle, direct and completely without armour, in the way of someone to whom it had simply never occurred to protect herself from him.
"I've thought about it every day," Luna went on, steady, her grey eyes never leaving his. "I've gone over everything. Did something happen? Did I do something — say something wrong? Because if I did, I'd want to know, so I could mend it. And if I didn't..." her voice caught, only slightly, and steadied.
"It hurts, Harry. Watching you smile at me like I'm someone you met once. Whatever it is — whatever's wrong... you don't have to tell me today. But you should know that I'm here. I've always been here. I always will b—"
She reached for his hand.
It was instinct — pure, habitual, four years deep, the most natural motion in either of their lives — her small hand rising toward his exactly as it had risen a thousand times.
And Harry jerked back.
Sharply. Bodily. A full step, his hand snatched away before hers could land — the recoil of a man from a flame and the motion was done before any part of him that loved her could countermand it.
Luna stood with her hand still half-raised in the empty air, and her face went through something Harry knew he would see for the rest of his life: the gentle certainty simply stopping, like a clock struck. Dazed. Uncomprehending. Her hand slowly lowering.
And the thing Harry had been holding for three weeks — the sleepless nights and dreams of the worst of what could happened, of what had happened to Cedric could happened to Luna, the corridor-glances and Rolf's three blades and the grey water rising behind flawless walls — all of it, pressurised past bearing and given, at last, one instant of broken containment—
—came out wrong.
"You want to know what's wrong?" His voice didn't rise.
It went flat — cold and fast and stripped, the pent charge arcing down the only channel open, which was, because the universe is cruel, her. "Fine. What's wrong is that you don't understand. You can't understand — you drift through everything like it's all Snorkacks and moon-frost and nothing can ever touch you — you have no idea what I've had to carry, what I've seen — what's coming, Luna, what I've seen coming — and you stand there saying I'm here, I'm always here like that's a good thing, like that's not exactly the—"
He heard himself.
Somewhere in the middle of the sentence, Harry heard the words as they left him — heard the shape of them, the specific engineered cruelty of throwing her own openness back at her as obliviousness — and the horror arrived even before the sentence finished, his own eyes going wide at his own voice, 'stop, stop, that's not — that isn't what I —'
But sentences don't un-say. The corridor had gone absolutely silent.
Behind him, someone — Lavender — had actually gasped aloud; Hermione stood with both hands over her mouth; Ron's face was doing something Harry had never seen it do at him.
And Luna—
Luna's eyes were brimming. Standing full, catching the last firework-light, held by main force at the lashline — and Harry watched her look at him through them, watched the hurt finish arriving, and his own eyes were open wounds of regret and he could not make one single word come out of his mouth in time.
Then Luna Lovegood went cold.
He had not known she could.
It was worse than tears, worse than shouting — a stillness came down over her like frost over water, the warmth withdrawing from her face inch by visible inch until what remained was composed, and remote, and polite, and a thousand miles away.
"I see," she said.
Her voice was very quiet, and perfectly steady, and each word had a rime of ice on it. "Well. If that's what you think of me... then I'm sorry to have intruded on things I can't understand.... It won't happen again. Goodnight, Harry."
She turned — steady, unhurried, her chin level, her shoulders straight and the sadness coming off her in waves that no steadiness could disguise and walked away down the corridor.
Harry stood and watched her go, dazed, hollowed, his hand — the one that had jerked from hers — hanging at his side like something amputated.
He watched Rolf Scamander throw him one last unreadable look — not triumph; something more complicated and somehow worse and go after her, calling her name gently.
He watched until the corridor was empty of her.
SMACK.
Astoria's open palm arrived across the back of his head with the full snap of genuine fury — no play in it, a real blow that rocked him forward a step — and when he turned, her face was white and blazing, the thorny elegance stripped down to pure disappointed rage.
"You absolute — I defended you," she said, low and shaking. "For weeks. He's struggling, I said, he has reasons, I said, he would never hurt her — "
Her voice cracked on the last of it, and she didn't let it stop her. "She waited three weeks to ask you one gentle question, Potter, and you had a hundred kind answers and one cruel one, and you reached straight past all of them."
She stepped back, her eyes glittering. "I hope whatever you think you're protecting her from was worth teaching her that the most dangerous thing in her life was you."
And she was gone too, fast, after Luna, her footsteps ringing away down the stone.
The revolution thundered somewhere in the distant floors, fireworks booming faint and merry through the walls of a castle in joyous uproar.
Harry Potter walked back to Gryffindor Tower alone.
He passed Hermione, whose hands had not left her mouth; Ron, who started forward — "mate—" — and stopped, because there was nothing in Harry's face for words to land on; Neville and Lavender, stricken and silent; and none of them followed him, because some walks cannot be accompanied, and every one of them knew they had just watched something break that none of them knew how to mend.
The Fat Lady took one look at his face and swung open without asking for the password.