February 1996, the fringe of the Forbidden Forest, Afternoon
For a long moment, nobody moved.
Hermione's forearm stayed barred across his collarbones; her eyes stayed six inches from his, blazing and brimming at once, and behind her the others held their careful ring — Draco with the confiscated wand, Astoria and Neville with theirs raised, Ron with the Cup under his arm and all the humour gone out of his face and Harry looked round at them, at the wariness of them, at the sheer organisation of their love, five people who had studied him, tracked him, waited for the match, laid the ambush, drawn lots for who apologised after —
and felt something behind his eyes begin, at last, to waver.
The business smile tried to assemble itself one final time. It got halfway.
"You're not alone, Harry."
It was Neville.
He said it quietly, wand still up, ears still scarlet — Neville, who had once been the boy nobody chose, who knew precisely what the word alone weighed, and said it now with the plain unanswerable authority of that knowledge and the half-built smile came apart where it stood.
Harry's shoulders dropped.
Something long-clenched in his face unclenched, and what surfaced beneath it — travel-worn, sheepish, red-rimmed, and real — was a genuine smile. Small. Wobbly. His. The first any of them had seen in three weeks.
"...Okay," Harry said. "Okay."
Hermione's arm withdrew.
The wands came down.
And the ring of ambushers became, by some unspoken rearrangement, simply a circle of friends in the dusk-lit fringe of the forest, settling onto roots and stones around him while the stadium's distant celebration murmured through the trees — and Harry Potter took a heavy breath, and talked.
He started with the kitchen.
Rolf — the whole of it: the pumpkin juice, the sunny rambling, and then the three blades in order. Dearest friend. The Mind Palace returning no record found. And the last one, the one that had done the lasting damage — the blast radius; the boy Voldemort wants dead more than anything alive; is the safest place in the world for Luna Lovegood at his side?
He told them about the connection, too — the visions, the corridor, the snake, the cliff at Ilvermorny — sketched fast for Astoria's benefit, since Hermione, Ron, Neville, and Draco had known the shape of it for weeks.
And he watched Hermione's face travel from listening to incandescent in the space of four sentences.
"You listened to — Harry, he was a rival clearing the field, of course he'd say—" she began, and Astoria was already inhaling beside her, thorns visibly extending —
"I know." Harry cut them off — not sharply; with a small self-deprecating smile that stopped them faster than sharpness would have.
"You think I don't know that? I told myself the same thing, that same night. He wants her; it's just words; consider the source. I had the whole rebuttal written by morning."
The smile bent.
"And then I thought back. Properly. And that's the problem, Hermione. Strip out who said it and why he said it — and he still had a point."
He looked round at them all, and began, quietly, to make the case he'd been making to himself, alone, for three weeks.
"First year." He held up a finger.
"I got you—" a nod to Hermione, Ron, Draco "—chasing a Dark wizard down a trapdoor. Eleven years old, all of us. Devil's Snare, the keys, that chessboard—" his eyes went to Ron "—you took the knight's fall, Ron. Bones in your leg fractured, Madam Pomfrey regrowing them for a week. Because you followed me.
"Second year." Another finger. "A Basilisk in the pipes. The whole school under a death sentence for months — and it wasn't the whole school that paid, was it? It was my circle. Hermione, petrified in the library. Ginny, cursed and brainwashed the entire year while we all missed it. And Luna—" his voice caught its first snag "—Luna went after Ginny, because that's what Luna does, and got taken down into that Chamber with her.
"Third year. Mordred. Pettigrew. A hundred Dementors on the grounds because of the history I'm attached to — and by the end of it, Remus, Sirius, and Ron had each been one breath from the Kiss. Each of them. I counted.
"Fourth year." His hand closed. "A Death Eater taught us Defence for nine months and none of us knew, because his whole errand was me. The maze went up in fire because the trap was built for me. And the graveyard—"
He stopped.
The clearing had gone very quiet.
The dusk had thickened a shade; somewhere far off, the celebration rolled on, absurd and golden and belonging to a different world.
"Cedric was standing next to me," Harry said, and his voice had gone dry and rough, sanded down to the grain.
"That's all he did wrong. He took the Cup with me because he was decent, he stood where I stood, and Voldemort looked at him and said—" the words came out flat, exact, seared in "—kill the spare. And the wand came up. And it was only — it was luck, and Dad, and half a second, that Cedric Diggory is still walking around this castle holding Cho's hand instead of lying under a stone in Hufflepuff's corner of the churchyard."
He made himself look up, made himself finish it. "That could have been Luna. Any of those years — the Chamber, the Dementors, the graveyard — swap the names and it's Luna. And now he's not hiding any more. He's started his war — you saw Ilvermorny—"
And there the circle's faces darkened as one, because they had.
They had all seen it — the foreign front pages, the photographs of the scorched courtyard and the circle of bare earth where three centuries had stood, the black-bordered notice for Vice-Headmaster Woodrow — and the first sight of it had shocked them cold, genuinely cold, in a way the year's abstract dread never had.
It had taken Robert's letters, arriving days later — we're all right, Selene's arm is mending, Howard was magnificent, we're all right — to let any of them breathe properly again.
A school. He had walked into a school.
"—and Britain's next," Harry said.
"Everyone knows Britain's next. Maybe Hogwarts itself — why not? It worked at Ilvermorny, and I'm here, and he's spent fourteen years wanting exactly one thing."
He spread his hands, and delivered the conclusion he'd been living inside for three weeks, the cold arithmetic under everything: "We have always been this close. Every single year. And we've been lucky — over and over, luck and rescue and half-seconds and... I'm scared."
The word came out cracked. "I'm really scared. That the luck's a stock, and we've spent it. That next time is the time it doesn't hold. That next time is somebody's last time — and whoever it is, it'll be because they were standing next to me."
Silence.
And it was a terrible, specific kind of silence — because every one of them had drawn breath to argue at some point in the recitation, and every one of them had felt the words stick in their throat.
Ron's leg had fractured. Hermione had lain petrified. The graveyard had happened. The ledger Harry had kept was accurate to the line, and they all knew it, and for a long dazed moment nobody could find the flaw in it — because there was no flaw in the facts.
Harry looked up at the sky through the black lattice of branches — the first stars arriving, cold and indifferent — and let out another heavy sigh, and said the last of it, the sediment at the very bottom:
"So maybe... maybe anyone near me just ends up hurt. Sooner or later. Maybe that's just what I am. And maybe I'm — better alone. Safer alone. Everyone's safer if I'm—"
And from somewhere very deep — a place he had bricked over years ago, a cupboard under a staircase in a house he had not thought of in a long, long time — the old words surfaced, unbidden, in a thick remembered voice: unnatural little omen — should've died with them — brought nothing but misfortune since the day you—
His face must have changed.
He felt it change — felt the spiral open under him, the old dark arithmetic reaching up out of childhood to co-sign the new — and around the circle his friends' lips had gone tight, five people watching him sink and groping for the rope —
THWACK.
Astoria smacked him on the head.
It didn't hurt. That was the strange precision of it — an open palm, briskly applied to the crown, calibrated exactly to sting nothing and interrupt everything and Harry's spiral snapped like a soap bubble, and he looked up, blinking, into Astoria Greengrass's supremely unimpressed face.
"Honestly," she said, with a little puff of exasperation, shaking out her hand.
"Do you hear yourself? 'Everyone near me ends up hurt. I'm better alone.'" She pitched it in a devastating mockery of noble gloom, one wrist pressed to her brow.
"The arrogance of it. The sheer vanity. You think highly of yourself, don't you, Potter — the sun of every catastrophe, the axis all our dooms revolve around. Newsflash: the Dark Lord was murdering people before you were born, and my family's neck was in his ledger before your parents ever met, and precisely none of that revolves around you."
Her eyes glittered. "And it's selfish, while we're at it. 'I'll suffer alone to keep them safe' — how convenient, that your grand sacrifice is also the one plan where you never have to have a difficult conversation. We don't get a vote? Luna doesn't get a vote? You'll just decide for the lot of us and call it protection?"
She sniffed. "Slytherins scheme, Potter, but at least we scheme with consent."
It was so exactly, mercilessly on target and so exactly Astoria — that around the circle, through the heavy air, smiles cracked one after another: Draco first, then Hermione despite herself, Ron, Neville, the tension breaking up like ice under a thaw.
And then they came at him in turns, the whole committee, each with their piece of it.
"She's right about the vote, mate." Ron dropped down onto the root beside him, Cup set carelessly in the leaves, and bumped Harry's shoulder with his own. "Nobody conscripted me down that trapdoor. I looked at a giant chessboard and I said — eleven years old, mind — I said 'I'll be a knight,' because my best mate needed to get across, and I'd say it again tonight, broken leg and all."
He shrugged. "That's what the word means, Harry. Friends. Voluntary. Every one of us, every year, eyes open. You don't get to rewrite us into your victims. We were never victims. We were there."
"And we don't leave people behind," Draco said quietly, from where he stood. "Whatever else my house gets wrong, I've learned that much from yours."
He turned Harry's holly wand over once in his hands, and then — deliberately, ceremonially — held it back out, handle first. "And think it through like a strategist for one moment, since none of you Gryffindors ever will. Say you vanish tomorrow. Cut every tie, go and be nobly alone on a rock somewhere. Does Voldemort stop?"
He let the question sit.
"His ambition predates you and it doesn't require you. The war comes regardless — to this school, this country, my family, Astoria, all of us — the only difference your absence makes is that we'd face it without you. We're in this together because we're in it anyway, Harry. You're not the cause. You're just the best thing we've got."
"And it was never only luck."
Neville said it — acutely, quietly, and it landed with the particular weight of a boy who never spoke first. "You keep saying lucky. Lucky at the trapdoor, lucky in the Chamber, lucky at the graveyard." He shook his head slowly.
"I've watched you for five years, Harry. The luck was never alone, was it? Every one of those times — someone had trained, someone stood their ground, someone was good enough to hold on until the luck arrived. Usually you." His ears were red and his voice didn't waver.
"Who drilled us all summer in a basement so we'd be ready? Who taught thirty students to cast a shield without a wand movement? Effort isn't luck. You've been making us safer the whole time you've been deciding you make us doomed."
And then Hermione hugged him.
She did it without preamble — dropped down and wrapped both arms around him fiercely, her face pressed briefly to his shoulder — and when she pulled back her eyes were streaming openly and she didn't care, and she took him by both shoulders and made him look at her.
"Cedric is alive, Harry."
Harry went still.
"You said it yourself and you heard it wrong," Hermione said, shaking his shoulders once, gently, urgently.
"'It was luck, and Dad, and half a second.' Listen to your own sentence. Whose Patronus knew where to go? Who wrote the letters all year that put your father in position? Who stood in that graveyard at fourteen and held, long enough for the half-second to matter? Cedric Diggory holds every day of the rest of that life he gets to live exists because you were standing next to him."
Her grip tightened. "That's the true ledger. Not the one you've been keeping alone in the dark. People are alive because of you — Cedric, Ginny, Mr Weasley, all those students at Ilvermorny who got minutes warning that came from your scar and your choice to run to your father in the night. You are not an omen, Harry Potter."
Her voice broke and carried on through the break. "You have never once been an omen. You're the reason."
Harry's eyes had gone wide.
He sat there under her hands with the whole architecture of weeks cracking quietly along every seam at once, and no words arriving to hold it together, and no wish left to hold it together anyway.
Astoria surveyed the ruin of his composure with professional satisfaction, and delivered the coup de grâce.
"And finally," she said, folding her arms, "the clinching argument, which I notice none of these sentimentalists has made: you are, on tonight's evidence, an absolute idiot."
She let it ring.
"A boy who can out-think Umbridge, out-duel seventh-years, and out-scheme the Inquisitorial Squad, reasoned himself into this with weeks of solitary brooding and one conversation with a romantic rival. That is what your own company produces, Harry. Which is precisely — in times like these, especially in times like these — why you cannot be trusted alone with your own head."
She sniffed. "Consider us your supervision. It's not optional. Slytherins don't do optional."
And then they closed in — all of them, in turn and together: Ron's arm slung hard around his neck; Neville's hand gripping his shoulder; Draco's brief, awkward, entirely sincere clasp of his arm; Astoria's brisk pat on the head, on the exact spot she'd smacked; Hermione simply refusing to let go at all — and Harry Potter sat in the middle of the fringe of the Forbidden Forest, under the first stars, buried in his friends.
"...Thank you," he managed, at last, into the middle of them. His voice came out wrecked and his eyes were red and he had stopped minding entirely. "Thank you. And — I'm sorry. All of you. I'm so sorry."
"Accepted," said five voices, in ragged, warm, immediate chorus.
They let him breathe.
The dusk settled; the distant party glittered on; somewhere in the trees an owl woke and asked its question of the dark.
And then Astoria smirked.
It was a different smirk from her ordinary armoury — slower, kinder, and infinitely more dangerous and Harry, attuned by now to Greengrass weather systems, felt the hairs on his neck rise before she said a word.
"Of course," Astoria observed, examining her nails, "you do realise that was the easy apology. Six of us, and none of us in love with you."
She let that detonate at its leisure.
"There's one more owing, isn't there? Rather more important than ours. To someone — how shall I put it... truly important to you."
Harry dazed at her a moment — his exhausted mind actually failing, for two full seconds, to process and then he caught the sound of Hermione beginning to giggle through her drying tears, saw the entire committee's faces arranging themselves into varieties of expectant delight, and watched Astoria lift one elegant finger and point, past his shoulder, at a broad old tree at the clearing's edge.
Harry turned.
And from behind the tree — where she had been standing, it was suddenly and retroactively obvious, for a long time; long enough; all of it, perhaps — stepped Luna Lovegood.
The dusk held her gently.
Her dirty-blonde hair was silvered at the edges by the last light, and there was forest-mud on her hem, and her wand was tucked behind her ear, and she was looking at him — straight at him, straight through him, the way she always had — with her gentle smile in its rightful place at last.
And her grey orbs were tinged with red, rimmed and shining, brimming exactly as full as his own — because she had heard, then; had stood in the dark behind the tree and heard the whole of it, the fear.
The clearing, the committee, the Cup in the leaves, the whole golden roaring distant world — all of it fell away to a ring of warmth at the edge of Harry's vision.
There was only Luna.