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With his wand gone, Sirius dropped to all fours and instantly transformed into a massive black dog. He bared his fangs and let out a low, rolling growl.
Harry startled and took an instinctive step back.
"You'd better let us go!" Harry shouted, his voice bold and his heart anything but. "When Hermione finds out about this, she will never let you get away with it!"
"No one knows you're here," Sirius growled.
Then Scabbers leapt out of Ron's arms and hit the ground. The rat twisted its body in a way no rat should ever be able to twist.
Under Harry and Ron's horrified stares, Scabbers swelled and warped,
And in the blink of an eye, a short, sallow, balding man stood before them.
Peter Pettigrew.
Peter snatched the fallen wand off the ground, leveled it at Sirius, and let a vicious grin spread across his face. "That's right. No one knows you're here. That's just perfect."
He turned to look at Harry and Ron. Madness flickered behind his eyes. "Yes, I was the one who sold out Harry's parents. And to keep that secret buried, I have to kill all of you."
"I'm sorry, Ron. I'm sorry, Harry." His voice was almost regretful. "Once you're gone, everyone will naturally assume Sirius took you. No one will ever know otherwise."
Ron's eyes went wide. His lips trembled like he was trying to form words, but nothing came out.
Harry's heart dropped straight to the floor.
Sirius roared and lunged, and Peter's wand snapped up, holding him in place.
Peter's grin turned smug. He raised the wand high, and his voice went shrill.
"Avada Kedavra—"
BOOM.
The curse barely left his lips before a blinding green light erupted from the wand, only it didn't travel toward Sirius.
It slammed straight back into Peter.
The grin froze on his face. His body folded like a puppet with its strings cut, and he crumpled silently to the floor.
Harry and Ron stood frozen, unable to move, unable to speak.
Wand backfire?
But why?
"This..."
They looked at each other. Completely blank.
Then the world around them began to unravel. The darkness peeled back like a curtain, and the familiar vaulted ceiling of the Hogwarts Great Hall materialized above them.
Dumbledore. Severus Snape. Lupin. Hermione. A cluster of Ministry officials. And what looked like every student in the school, all of them standing in a wide ring, watching.
Sirius's voice carried through the stunned silence.
"This was an illusion set up jointly by Miss Granger and Headmaster Dumbledore. In reality, we never left the Great Hall."
"Truth's out." Hermione gave a breezy wave. "The first installment of the Hermione Granger Directorial Debut has officially wrapped. The Ministry's footing the bill, so everyone head back and collect your catering."
Ethan Hunt smiled warmly. "All thanks to Lady Witch. Sirius's name has been cleared. I'll be reporting everything to the Ministry personally and having his arrest warrant rescinded at once."
Sirius crossed to Hermione's side and murmured his thanks, quietly, like someone who'd known what was coming all along.
"So..." Harry scratched his head. His expression was the face of a man whose brain had simply stopped working. "What exactly just happened?"
Ron looked exactly the same.
"Simply put," Hermione said, shrugging like it was nothing, "yesterday, while you were in Hogsmeade making eyes at Malfoy, I happened to run into Sirius."
"After that, the three of us, Sirius, Headmaster Dumbledore, and me, put this whole 'draw the snake out of its hole' plan together."
The moment Hermione mentioned his "warm interaction" with Malfoy the previous day, Harry's face went a very interesting shade.
All thoughts of Sirius evaporated instantly. "There's nothing going on between me and him! It was just, "
"Alright, alright. I know."
Hermione waved him off and cut him short with the serene confidence of someone who absolutely did not know and absolutely did not care.
She arranged her expression into one of profound, compassionate understanding.
"Every country has its own culture. Britain's no exception." She nodded sagely. "I get it. Completely."
"Besides, we're not going to judge anyone here, are we?"
She looked around at the surrounding students.
The students who, just moments ago, had been standing in silent shock over the revelation of Peter Pettigrew's guilt, every single one of them was now wearing a deeply peculiar expression.
Their eyes moved back and forth between Harry and Malfoy.
Knowing.Understanding.Ohhhh, so that's how it is.
A small cluster of Gryffindor girls had already bent their heads together, whispering furiously, punctuated by a string of very meaningful little laughs.
"Of course not, of course we wouldn't, pfft, " The students around them were holding on by a thread.
Harry and Malfoy. Of all people. Pfft,
"Then why are you all LAUGHING?!" Harry bellowed.
"Ahem." The Weasley twins cleared their throats in unison. "We are serious wizards who have undergone rigorous magical training. No matter how funny something may be, we will absolutely not laugh." A beat. "Unless we can't help it."
Harry looked like he was about to explode.
Hermione held up her hand and began counting off on her fingers.
"First: I had to wait until you lot were sound asleep, then get Headmaster Dumbledore to open the boys' dormitory for me."
"Second: I had to cast Sleeping Charms on all of you, move you to the Great Hall without waking anyone up, and pre-set the entire illusion so you'd believe you'd left Hogwarts entirely."
"Third: I had to specially craft a backfire wand, one that rebounds any curse the caster fires directly back onto themselves."
"Fourth: I had to negotiate with the Ministry bureaucrats and get them to cooperate with the operation without leaking a word."
She planted both hands on her hips and looked around with the unmistakable air of someone to whom a very large debt was now owed.
"In short, I worked extraordinarily hard for this plan. You're welcome."
"And once he believed 'no one knows you're here,'" she continued, "that rat confessed to everything on his own initiative and immediately tried to silence you permanently. If he'd chosen literally any other curse, he would have survived. But he insisted on the Killing Curse. Nothing to be done about that."
So utterly ruthless, everyone thought, in near-perfect unison.
Harry and Ron finally pieced it together. The whole thing had been a stage, built specifically to make Peter confess of his own free will.
Ron felt the room tilt. Dark spots were crowding the edges of his vision.
He genuinely wished he could have just done what he'd done in previous years and passed out at the very beginning.
At least then he wouldn't have to stand here under the gaze of half the school, all of them silently rearranging their understanding of his sleeping arrangements for the past several years. All of them remembering that he'd pulled his wand out to defend the man.
Ron had never wanted a floor to swallow him so badly in his life.
It was nominally a public execution of Peter Pettigrew.
In practice, it was a public execution of him and Harry.
Severus Snape was looking at Sirius. His expression was complicated in ways that would have taken a Legilimens to fully catalog.
Lupin, by contrast, looked like he might cry from sheer relief. He grabbed Sirius by the shoulder and kept shaking it, saying over and over, "I always knew. I always knew you weren't like that — I knew it—"
Harry crossed the distance between himself and Sirius in two strides, and they held on to each other.
His godfather. Returned. Real.
Harry was crying before he fully realized it, the helpless, unguarded kind, the kind that only comes when something you'd stopped letting yourself hope for suddenly lands in your arms.
He was no longer alone.
Dumbledore stood a little apart from the others, his hands folded, a gentle smile on his face. He watched the two of them and said nothing, stroking his beard with quiet contentment.
After a long moment, he turned.
"Miss Granger," he said warmly. "We truly owe you a great deal."
➤ Next: The Aether
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