Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

WHAT HAS BECOME OF THE BOY-WHO-LIVED?

By Dashiel Swann

October 10, 1998

Five months past the final battle of the Second Wizarding War, there’s one question on magical Britain’s minds: what has become of the Boy-Who-Lived?

Already notoriously secretive, Potter is now rumored to be a genuine recluse, rarely leaving his home in an undisclosed location. Few have seen him since the weeks preceding the final battle on Hogwarts’ school grounds.  Previous articles by the Prophet have covered, extensively, possibilities as to Potter’s whereabouts and current actions.

One wonders if Potter intends to rejoin society or take up real responsibilities anytime soon. Recently, when asked to say a few words at the recent Re-Opening Ceremony for the Improper Use of Magic Office, Potter reportedly told officials to-

The end of the final sentence of the third paragraph of the headlining article of this particular issue of the Daily Prophet would, as it turned out, never be read. It was obscured by a dollop of apricot jam, which had fallen from a spoon hovering over where it was strewn, a bit haphazardly, over a kitchen counter.

“Oops,” said Harry Potter, though there seemed to be no one near to hear him. Perhaps it was for the best – he didn’t come over at all convincing.

“Kreacher,” he went on – and a discerning viewer would now realize that there was, in fact, another party in the basement kitchen of Number 12, Grimmauld Place. A wizened house elf stood in the dark corner of the overlarge room, glaring – or perhaps that was just his usual face.

“Could you get me some more jam?” Harry asked, still holding the spoon precariously over the flour-smudged newspaper. “From the cupboard,” he added unnecessarily. “I would, but, you know. I’m all sticky.”

Though the house elf seemed not to move at all, an open jar of apricot jam appeared before Harry, just next to the crust he’d been battling with for half an hour. “Thanks,” said Harry, and Kreacher narrowed his eyes further and quietly stewed in the corner. “Sorry about the mess,” he went on, “I tried to keep it on the paper, but, well.” The newspaper-covered counter looked very much like a pastry shop had blown up on it.

He had just finished popping his crust back in the oven when a horrible sound drifted through the house and he instinctively cringed, covering his ears.

The doorbell to Grimmauld Place sounded, Harry had discovered, exactly like what he imagined the doorbell to hell might: cacophonous, soul-sucking, and dissonant.

“The door, master,” said Kreacher.

“Yes, I know,” said Harry. “As if it could be anything else, honestly.”

“Would master like—”

“No, I’ve got it,” Harry said hastily. “Keep an eye on the oven, please?”

Kreacher grimaced in a particular way Harry took to be acquiescence. Harry left the room and made his way quickly towards the front door, wondering who it might be. Grimmauld was no longer under the Fidelius, but very few people knew where it was.

He wasn’t overly surprised, then, when he wrenched open the heavy door, to find Hermione and Ron on his stoop.

“Harry! Sorry for dropping in like this, but an owl didn’t seem timely enough, and you still haven’t gotten your Floo re-connected, and—” Hermione, who appeared thoroughly distraught, still managed somehow to pause mid-sentence. “Are… you alright?”

Harry blinked, wondering why he wouldn’t be - well, aside from the usual. He glanced down as though he expected to see a previously undiscovered gaping wound.

“Oh,” he said. “Oh. Right.” His clothes were nearly covered in something thick and red and gelatinous. “It’s rhubarb,” he told his gaping friends. “I’m making a tart.”

“A tart,” echoed Hermione.

Ron perked up with interest. “Is it done?”

“Nearly,” said Harry. “Er – come through? You can wait in the sitting room, if you want, I’ll just be a minute.”

He wondered, as he transferred his crust to a rack to cool, what had happened now. He didn’t think anyone had died, at least – they hadn’t looked sad. Hermione had a glint of righteous indignation in her eyes, and Ron had looked like… Ron. The former could mean almost anything, but the latter was reassuring.

Eventually he ran out of reasons to dawdle and went to join them in the best sitting room, where they had been ushered, and where he spent most of his time. He found them both still standing, Hermione wringing her hands and Ron looking around the room skeptically.

Harry quickly nudged a dirty plate under the sofa but could do nothing about the stuffed head of what he thought was a Yeti that loomed over the fireplace and seemed to follow one with its glass bead eyes.

“Sit,” Harry encouraged, electing to let his friends have the sofa and sacrificing himself in turn by sitting on the knobby-legged armchair that was spelled with a posture-correcting charm he couldn’t quite get off. “What is it?” he asked, back straighter than it had any right to be.

Hermione pulled something from her jacket pocket – a copy of the Prophet. The latest edition, probably, not the one he’d just been dripping jam on. Harry made a little sound of relief. It was probably only another slanderous article about him.

Then he saw the headline: “DEATH EATER TRIALS TO TAKE PLACE”.

He blinked.

Right – that was bound to happen at some point. “I reckon I’ll have to testify?”

That was bad news, but he’d been expecting it to occur at some point. He should probably feel relieved to get it over with. Funny that it’d even taken five months, but then, there were so many funerals to hold and buildings to repair, and the ministry itself was hardly functioning, so it stood to reason. Hard to hold a trial without a building to hold it in.

“It’s not that,” said Hermione. “Read it.”

Harry skimmed through a few opening sentences – long-awaited, to finally stand trial – until he arrived at what he thought Hermione must be getting at.

 A select few trials of those charged with lesser sentences will be open to the public and call on special eyewitnesses. Those facing more serious charges, such as murder, will be judged in closed trials attended only by a Wizengamot jury.

The Ministry of Magic and Wizengamot have cited public interest in their decision to hold the majority of the trials in closed courts. “Many have been hurt by the heinous crimes of the accused,” said a Ministry spokesperson. “The Ministry has no desire to create a spectacle or draw trials out longer than necessary. Justice will be swiftly served.”

The accused, if convicted, face a range of sentences from a year in Azkaban to the Dementor’s Kiss, provided such a sentence can be administered. The Ministry claims to be working towards recovering the Dementors after the rare magical creatures were set loose during the events of the Second Wizarding War. If located, they will be reinstated at Azkaban prison.

The article ended with a list of Death Eaters and other associated war criminals set to go on trial, marking which would be open to the public and which closed.

Unfortunately, said the final line, the Prophet will be unable to report on any closed trials, as press is being denied access to these events along with the public.

Harry’s sense of unease grew as he read. “Huh,” he said finally. “Well. That’s – absolute bollocks. Just absolutely bugger all of that.”

“It’s like they’ve learned nothing,” Hermione said.

“The Ministry’s always been this way,” Ron shrugged. “I reckon it’ll take more than a war to make that lot come to their senses.”

“We should’ve let Voldemort blow up more of it,” said Harry.

“Harry!”

“Sorry, Hermione. I don’t mean it.”

“You do a little,” said Ron.

He did a little.

“Why are they so intent on repeating past mistakes?” Hermione said, ignoring them both. Harry assumed it was a rhetorical question.

“Most of the people on this list, though,” said Ron, “We know they were Death Eaters. We saw them at the final battle, or Harry saw them in that graveyard back in fourth year. It’s not really in question if they’re guilty.”

“That’s not the point.” Hermione looked at Harry in surprise after he spoke, and he realized he must have taken the words right out of her mouth. He shrugged. “Well, it’s not. The point is that they ought to know better. Not giving people trials, bringing back the dementors – do you think they’re even going to manage that last?”

“Even if they don’t,” said Hermione grimly, “the idea that they’d try it. It’s barbaric! The dementors’ effect on prisoners is certifiable torture. If we were muggles, the Ministry’d be defying the Geneva Convention. And did you catch the final bit? They’re denying access to the press. That’s textbook facism.”

“Our press is rubbish anyway,” said Ron.

“Obviously,” said Hermione, who had, after all, trapped Rita Skeeter in a jar once, “but it’s the spirit of the thing.”

Harry stared at the paper in his hands, and then back to his friends. “I have to do something,” he said finally, because that much was clear. “I have to talk to Kingsley, or make a statement, or – something.”

The thing was, he wasn’t very good at doing somethings that didn’t involve pointing his wand at someone. He’d done his best already – he did a few interviews with Kingsley, after he’d been named minister, and a select few Aurors. He’d explained to him his version of events leading up to the final battle and the battle itself, including testimony regarding Snape’s apparent loyalties and Narcissa Malfoy’s saving his life. He wasn’t sure how much good he’d done, but the Daily Prophet had done an article a few weeks prior about Snape’s career as a spy, and he couldn’t help but notice that Narcissa and Draco Malfoy’s names weren’t on the list in his hand. He supposed that counted for something.

But this – what was he meant to do? He wasn’t a politician. He was pretty sure he held sway, still, as the Boy-Who-Lived, as the defeater of Voldemort, but he wasn’t sure how far that sway would go. After all, there had already been articles in the Prophet questioning his loyalties.

He was pretty sure there would always be articles in the Prophet questioning his loyalties.

Hermione and Ron seemed to sense his doubt. “People listen to you,” Ron said simply. “I think you’ve got the right idea. Talk to Kingsley, see what he says.”

Hermione nodded emphatically and reached over to pat Harry’s arm. “He’s right, you know – people do listen to you. Remember the DA. You’ve got a way of convincing people to do the right thing.”

“Kingsley is the minister, though. He doesn’t need to listen to me.”

“No, but he needs you on his side – or at least, it’d be politically advantageous for him,” Ron pointed out.

“Kingsley doesn’t think like that,” insisted Harry. “I don’t think like that. I’m not going to stop supporting him if he doesn’t manage to fix this – I’m not going to threaten that. And for all I know, it’s over his head.”

“Of course not,” soothed Hermione. “But – well. That’s how politics works, isn’t it? You help each other. Within the bounds of your morals and comfort, of course,” she added hastily.

“I’m not a politician,” said Harry.

His friends exchanged a glance. He could imagine what they were thinking.

What are you, then?

And wasn’t that the question of the hour? Who was the Chosen One when he’d already done the thing he’d been chosen for?

-

Hermione and Ron left after more discussion, a cup of tea, and a slice each of the tart. Harry consoled himself with the fact that it had turned out nicely.

-

Here were the things that the papers reported Harry James Potter did after the Battle of Hogwarts, in order of how frequently they were mentioned:

1. Sulked, as his prophecy was complete and purpose fulfilled, and he no longer had an ongoing source of the fame he’d obviously grown used to.
2. Trained, in secret, to be some sort of uber-Auror, a dark wizard catcher extraordinaire.
3. Trained, in secret, to be the next dark lord.

Here were the things Harry James Potter actually did after the Battle of Hogwarts, after the last of the funerals, after Professor McGonagall had grown tired of his offers to help rebuild the parts of the castle that had been damaged and told him to “go home and get some rest, Potter”:

1. Moved his few belongings into Number 12, Grimmauld Place and began the long, painstaking process of trying to make home out of it.
2. Argued, at length, with an ancient house elf about the merits of home furnishings with associated blood curses.
3. Dreamt of the Room of Requirement, no longer burning, but now in the unchanging form of a long, dark corridor that stretched on endlessly with countless doors lining it. Behind one of these doors, he knew – as one knows things in dreams – was a mirror-image world of his own, where no battle had occurred, where he had never been marked. Behind every other door lay certain death. He tried a different door in every dream. He always died.
4. Developed insomnia (see above).
5. Read, and learned to tolerate Kreacher’s tea, and let a pile of unopened mail grow large enough to tower in the corner of the sitting room, and wondered what everyone else seemed to be wondering, to varying degrees: what now?

The rumors that he’d moved to the States, begun betting on illegal thestral races, and gotten a tattoo: all false. The rumor that he hadn’t been seen or heard from since his final public appearance was also, technically, false. He still had dinner at the Burrow on occasion, still answered correspondence from his closest friends.

The truth was, he wasn’t in hiding. He wasn’t training, or sulking.

He was only existing.

He had nightmares. He slept poorly and ate poorly and lost track of time. He jumped at loud sounds and once blew a hole in the wall of the dining room when Walburga Black appeared in a previously empty portrait frame and began shouting at him about sullying her once-noble home.

But it was getting better, day by day. He was nothing, after all, if not resilient.

-

And now there’s this, he thought, looking down at the copy of the Prophet Hermione had left him.

He sighed and cut himself a second slice of tart.

-

When he couldn’t avoid it any longer, Harry found parchment in his old school trunk, and a quill and ink, and began to write a letter.

Dear Kingsley, he began, then frowned. Maybe he shouldn’t be so familiar – not when this was, for all intents and purposes, an official request.

Dear Minister Shacklebolt, he tried again.

Could we meet? I’d like to discuss some things with you. It’s with regards to the upcoming trials.

Sincerely,

Regards,

Hope you’re doing well

Thanks,

Harry Potter

“Jesus,” he said, reading over the letter. “Well, it’ll have to do.”

It occurred to him then that he was lacking one of the essential components of sending a letter: an owl.

He groaned and rubbed his forehead. “Kreacher,” he called. Kreacher appeared with a quiet pop. “Please don’t bow,” Harry tacked on quickly, “Merlin, I can’t handle it right now.” While he was very, very glad that Kreacher had decided sometime during his stint at Hogwarts that he no longer despised Harry with every fiber of his being, subservience was bad for his headaches.

Harry brandished the letter. “Is there a way to send this?”

Kreacher frowned. “The post office in Diagon Alley rents owls,” he said, the “idiot,” implied.

“Yes, yes, excellent. Er. Could you – do that? For me? Take whatever money you need.”

Kreacher regarded Harry like he was very stupid indeed, but nodded and said nothing and with a snap of his fingers took the letter and then popped away.

I’m being pitied by a house elf, Harry thought. Good. Brilliant. Just where he’d wanted to end up in life.

-

In the time between sending off the letter with Kreacher and receiving Kingsley’s reply, Harry busied himself with another arduous task: bread.

Bread-baking, he’d found, was tedious. The actual work of it was simple enough: gathering ingredients, mixing. The baking bit, too, wasn’t so hard. But the waiting. There was so much waiting.

You had to let the dough rest, ferment, rise – proof, it was called, proofing – and this was Harry’s Achilles’ Heel. He was not a patient man. He never waited quite long enough. All of his loaves, so far, had been products of that impatience, tough-as-rocks results only Hagrid might’ve stomached.

He kept trying anyway.

The baking was a recent development. He’d taken it up because he found that he liked the practical application of his hands - and, sometimes, his magic - towards a tangible end. He liked the warmth and smells that filled the cold, dim room Grimmauld passed off as a kitchen. It reminded him of the Burrow – not as it was now, duller and quieter, but as it had been in all of his best and dearest memories.

Biscuits, he’d found, were easy enough, as were pies. His tart today had been promising. He hadn’t gotten to cakes just yet. Lots of cooling with cakes, wait time, layers. Bread first, he thought, and also, privately, I’ll make a cake when there’s something worth celebrating.

Kreacher disagreed, vocally and often, with Harry’s new hobby. His complaints were mostly on the basis of Harry being in Grimmauld Place’s kitchen at all.

“It’s improper,” he’d sniffed.

“Kreacher. Look. It’s my house. I’ll bloody well go into the kitchen if I want to.”

“Kreacher has never—”

“I know you’ve never, Kreacher, but think of all the things you have seen or had to do in this house. You can’t tell me it’s all been fun.”

“Kreacher is loyal to the house of Black. Kreacher does not care for diversion.”

“That’s not—” Harry sighed. “Go get me some more cookbooks from Flourish and Blott’s, alright? Normal ones. The ones in the library have all got weird things in.” He’d squinted at a recipe that called for bile extracted from the livers of muggle children. Balancing Your Humours, the book was called. “No humours,” added Harry.

“Master is choleric,” muttered Kreacher.

“GO,” said Harry.

After much debate, he now had a stack of refreshingly ordinary cookbooks that looked like something Mrs. Weasley might’ve used. The occasional wand movements indicated in the text were ciphers, but Harry found he was largely able to interpret or else ignore them, substituting instead things he’d learned from his Aunt Petunia on the rare occasion she’d done something in the kitchen that wasn’t shouting and brandishing cookware at Harry.

Now he finished folding his dough and looked at it without much hope. Then, just in case it sensed weakness, he smoothed out that expression and replaced it with a menacing one, frowning at the dough like he might will it into submission.

“Rise,” he commanded it. Then he realized he sounded like Voldemort, telling some robe-kissing servant to stand, and the idea turned his stomach. “Oh, bollocks, do what you want,” he said finally, untying his apron and tossing it over one shoulder as he left the room.

-

Kingsley’s reply came within a few hours. He was invited to see him the very next day.

Harry was aware, distantly, that your average witch or wizard could not write up the Minister for Magic, request to have a chat, and receive a personally penned invitation to his office all in twenty-four hours’ time. For once in his life, though, Harry found he didn’t mind the special treatment – his bread hadn’t worked out, and in what little waiting time he hadn’t spent sleeping, he’d irritably paced the halls of the draughty old house.

“So, the trials,” said Harry once pleasantries had been exchanged by the two men, neither of whom were very well-equipped with them.

Kingsley nodded solemnly. “I think I can guess your concerns,” he said.

“Can you?” asked Harry, then bit his tongue. He wasn’t a schoolboy in Dumbledore’s office any longer, he reminded himself. Sassing the Minister was probably not done.

Kingsley either pretended not to care or actually didn't - it was always remarkably hard to tell what he was thinking. “You’re afraid the so-called ‘secret trials’ are a sham," he said, without a trace of offensive or accusation. "That people will either be thrown into Azkaban without a chance to defend themselves, or else bribe their way out.”

“Again,” Harry pointed out, and then bit his tongue again.

“Yes,” said Kingsley, still seemingly un-offended. “Again.”

“And then there’s the thing with the press. And,” Harry added, unable to stop his expression of distaste, “the Dementors.”

“Those, too,” said Kingsley.

“…well,” said Harry. “So—”

“So – yes, Harry. I know. I’m aware this is dire, that we could easily slip back into the status quo. Things could return to the way they were after the first war – or,” added Kingsley, “they could become worse.”

Harry blinked. “Then—”

“Why don’t I do anything?” asked Kingsley. Something like amusement glinted in his eye, to Harry's immense surprise, and then, just as quick, snuffed itself out. He ran a finger around the edge of his coffee mug.

“Well, yeah,” said Harry, blinking slowly.

“Do you think I haven’t tried?”

Harry stared back.

Kingsley sighed. “How much do you know about wizarding politics, Harry? About the roles of the DMLE and the Wizengamot, specifically?”

Harry chewed on the inside of his lower lip.

How much?

Not much. Not much at all.

It grated at him, sometimes, knowing as little as he did. Sometimes, just when he felt like he’d settled in, like the wizarding world was really and properly home, he was reminded of his alienness. He was eleven, twelve, fourteen again, learning about Hogwarts, about owls, about the floo.

He’d learned about the world in which he lived in a slap-shod, trickle-down sort of fashion, little by little, as the need arose. Maybe if he’d been like Hermione, ready and able to devour books and every scrap of knowledge, he’d have a good grasp on things by now, but his time had never really been his. His summers had never really been his. He just hadn’t been – able. He’d entered a world unprepared to explain itself and he lacked the personal qualities that would’ve encouraged him to seek out that explanation, to interrogate it at wandpoint, as Hermione had.

“I’m not very familiar with it,” he said finally, tamping down his anger and uncertainty and everything else. “Can you – explain?”

Kingsley nodded, shifted in his seat. He looked uncomfortable in it – like he wasn’t meant to be confined behind a desk at all. The stillness didn’t suit him. “I’ll explain what I can. You understand how the Ministry is set up, roughly? The departments’ personnel answer to their heads of department, who answer to the minister’s department – to me.”

Harry made a sound to show he was following so far.

“Officially speaking, the DMLE exists to enforce wizarding law. The Aurors and hit-wizards do so in an immediate capacity, and the rest of the DMLE handle the day-to-day – policy, trials, sentencing. But not just the DMLE. Because there’s the Wizengamot. Tell me, what do you know about them, the Wizengamot?”

“Nothing,” said Harry. “No – wait. Dumbledore, he was head of it, wasn’t he?”

His chest felt a little hollow as he said the name, but not as much as it might have, once.

“Chief Warlock,” said Kingsley. “Yes. It’s an elected title. He was voted in after his defeat of Grindlewald. His election was… unprecedented, actually. He was the first halfblood to ever fill that role – but he was also very recently famous for defeating a dark lord, and a well-respected scholar besides. If you ask me, the Wizengamot thought it would make them look… progressive.”

“But they aren’t,” frowned Harry, remembering his brief experience on trial, how the Wizengamot had loomed in the stands, leering at him from the black stone benches like his potential expulsion and wand-snapping were matters of idle curiosity. No – they had not struck him as progressive. 

Kingsley snorted. “No. To be perfectly frank, if the rest of our world is old-fashioned, they’re draconian. And unfortunately, it’s difficult to do anything about it, because the seats are hereditary. Unless they inherit seats or marry into a family who holds them, muggleborn witches and wizards never enter the Wizengamot. Halfbloods rarely do. They are – and this does not leave this office,” he added, and Harry nodded his agreement, “they’re largely old, largely rich, and largely bigots. Unfortunately, they also serve as our court and parliament.”

“So why not do away with them? Abolish the whole thing, or something.”

Kingsley gave him a grim sort of smile. “They pre-date me. They pre-date the entire Ministry – well before we had a DMLE, there was a Wizengamot. There are laws in place to protect every aspect of their existence.”

Harry frowned. “What are you saying, then? That there’s nothing we can do?”

“Nothing I can do,” corrected Kingsley. “I’ve already done what I can to push for public trials of some of the Death Eaters. I’m delaying funding to the Auror teams who are supposed to be tracking down the dementors, and someone from the DMLE leaked the information you must have read in the Prophet. That, unfortunately, is the extent of my power. But I happen to know that you’re in the habit of doing impossible things.”

“I’m not sure what you expect me to do,” Harry said honestly.

Kingsley gave a noncommittal shrug. It, like the desk, looked funny on him.

“You should know,” he said, managing to make it sound as if it were a passing thought that had just struck him, “that the Potters hold a Wizengamot seat. Did you?”

“What? No. How—”

“I don’t believe your father ever took it. He was, understandably, busy when he came of age. But it should be open to you.”

“I can’t believe no one told me that,” said Harry, feeling a growing irritation, something like an itch behind his left eye. When will I stop finding out things people have forgotten to tell me?

“I’m sorry,” said Kingsley honestly. “You should have been told. Look into it, Harry – it’s yours if you want it.”

Harry grit his teeth. “Right. Thank you. This has been… enlightening.”

Kingsley gave him an inscrutable look. “Any time,” he said. “I was glad to hear from you.”

-

Harry considered his order of operations on the way to the Floo that would return him to the Burrow.

First: he needed to learn all that he could about the Wizengamot. That was clearly and urgently necessary. He needed to understand how it worked, and he hoped to be as expedient as possible about it. Probably Hermione knew. Probably, though, Hermione would pontificate, lecture, go on, add in lots of extraneous details. What he needed was a crash course. He could only hope that there was something like that in the Black family library, or else Flourish and Blott’s. He’d ask Kreacher and pray the elf deigned to properly answer.

Second: second. He wasn’t sure about “second” yet. He needed – he needed to know what he was working with, first. Never much of a strategist, Harry tried, instead, to picture his next steps as a sort of recipe in his mind.

First: Gather ingredients. That’s the knowledge – learning about the Wizengamot and whatever else.

Second: Prepare. Set things up, make sure I’ve got what I need, preheat the – well. Probably not that last.

Third: Mix.

Fourth…

The fourth, he supposed, depended on the recipe. If it were bread – and here he grimaced – fourth was wait. Fourth was be patient, and let the chemical processes already set up play out.

“I’ll figure it out when I get there,” reasoned Harry.

What he had was a start.

Chapter Text

On the third story of a London townhouse (somewhat decaying, larger on the inside than it looked) belonging to the Black family (most ancient and noble, etc.) Harry Potter stood facing something genuinely frightening (and coming from Harry Potter, that meant quite a lot).

It was not a dragon, or a chimera, or even a dementor (this being, after all, a London townhouse) but it was formidable just the same (and also, this house had once hidden a hippogryph, so perhaps the former remark shouldn’t count for much).

Harry, ever brave, steeled himself for what he was about to do. Took a step forward. Reached out—

-

He was facing, of course, the door to the library.

Here was the thing about the Black family library: Harry could’ve overlooked the fact that half of its books were terribly cursed. He could, even, have overlooked that at least a quarter of it was falling apart – rotting, infested, pest-eaten. Both of these were, after all, somewhat par for the course at Grimmauld Place.

What he could not overlook or forgive, after nearly half a lifetime’s worth of friendship with Hermione Granger, was how badly organized it was.

“How,” he had asked, just a few weeks prior, when he’d first gotten the urge to bake and found himself in need of recipes to bake with, “does anyone find anything in this bloody room?”

At that point, he’d searched two shelves: one had held books on calligraphy, cartography, and torture (he’d really been hoping he’d found a system until that last), and one had seemed divided between texts entirely in Latin and what were either children’s picture books, historical documents regarding the Black Plague, or, possibly and bafflingly enough, both.

(The illustrations were oddly simplistic and colorful; the text succinct. If he ever had the ill-advised urge to teach the subject to someone school-aged, he at least knew where to go).

Eventually he’d thrown up his hands, summoned Kreacher, and asked if he knew where the cookbooks were. Kreacher, after a brief argument, had produced a tall but unsatisfactory stack. His choices had included, of course, the book on humours and their various applications in cooking, but also a book on entertaining (for, from what Harry could tell, people you really didn’t like), one on meal-planning around the alignment of the planets, and a book full of recipes mixed with charms work which promised to imbue your children with desirable traits.

A red-inked notation in the last had been left by whichever Black had been brave enough to try “Pudding for Presentability” – “DIDN’T WORK”, it said. “Brandied cherries were nice,” they’d added just under, presumably as a concession.

One of the books Kreacher had brought him wasn’t even a cookbook at all, but instead a series of brewing instructions for poisons that could be easily concealed in foods. “Undetectable and delectable! The forty-four ingenious recipes you can’t live without!”

Harry rather thought he could live without it, actually, although he had to admit that some of the combinations therein were rather inspired.

After that, he’d given up, asked Kreacher to purchase ordinary books at the bookstore – or, at least, less murdery ones – and that was the last he’d tangled with the Black library. Until now.

-

“Okay,” Harry said aloud, trying to reason with the books on the off chance they held any sentience (not as off as one might think – the second-floor washroom had a bathtub that swore colorfully as you ran water in it). “Okay. If you could just – cooperate. Just help me out, here. Master of the house, and all that.”

“What, precisely, are you looking for?”

Harry startled, wondering if the books were sentient after all. Then he tracked the source of the voice – a portrait he’d never paid much mind to before, wedged between two overstuffed bookshelves. In it, peering out at him, was a girl of about Harry’s age. She had the dark curls and solemn gray eyes that he now associated with the Blacks, and wore high-necked burgundy velvet robes with ruffles that reminded him unfavorably of Ron’s Yule Ball outfit in fourth year.

“What?” he asked, eloquently.

“A book, I presume, as this is a library. But a particular volume? Subject? I’ve been in this library since I was painted,” she added patiently. “I ought to be able to point you in the right direction.”

Harry regarded the portrait cautiously but decided as she hadn’t shrieked at him or called him a half-blood mongrel yet, he may as well answer her question. “I’m looking for anything on the Wizengamot,” he said finally. “How it works.”

“Oh? Interesting,” she said, and gave him a look so calculating Harry wondered if he ought to start bracing himself for the shrieking. Then, finally, she said, “the back wall, second shelf, three rows down – the section on politics begins there, just beyond that awful vase with the dogs on.”

He blinked. “Thanks,” he said, and she nodded politely.

He located the shelf in question – the vase was awful – and began to scan the titles. He limited himself to books in English, being monolingual himself (the Blacks, it seemed, had had a penchant for texts in Latin and French). Then he narrowed his selection to things which seemed to pertain generally to wizarding law – he drew out a few that looked promising, with uninspired titles like Historie of Wizards’ Courts and Chief Warlocks 1500-1600. “Do you know if any of these—” he began to call over towards the girl in the portrait, but she vanished, stepping out of her frame. He sighed. So much for that.

“If any of those…?” came a voice from very near. Harry jumped, then spotted the source – a tiny oval frame, perhaps the size of his hand, on the shelf just to his right, perched precariously on a stack of texts on magical gardening. He hadn’t seen it before. The girl from the previous painting stood there now in miniature.

“Oh,” said Harry.

“Shouting over one’s shoulder won’t do,” she explained pointedly. “Anyway, Cordelia’s always off in Bertrand’s frame – he was her fiancé. This was painted for him, actually,” she said, casting a glance around the plain backdrop. “To carry in his robes. She died of dragonpox before they could marry.”

“Er,” said Harry. “That’s unfortunate.”

“Not really,” said the girl. “She’s awful. You should hear her drone on – the pox was a mercy. You were saying?”

Harry blinked and shook his head to clear it. “I – right. Whatever. Do you know which of these are any good? There’s loads of stuff on the Wizengamot. I just want to know – you know, the gist of it. I suppose things might’ve changed since your time, though,” he added as an afterthought, taking her rather old-fashioned robes into account.

“Hardly,” she said with a sniff. “I was painted in 1828, and the Wizengamot hasn’t changed since its inception. That was in 1544,” she added as an afterthought, giving him a curious look.

“Good to know,” Harry said.

“You really don’t know anything at all, do you?”

“No,” said Harry firmly, electing not to be offended. “I really don’t.”

“How funny,” said the girl. “You’re a Potter, aren’t you? You inherited the house.”

“Er. Yes?”

“The portraits talk,” she said, noting his confusion. “Though I can’t imagine why a Potter would be so clueless – they’re nowhere near the Blacks, of course, but they’re a respectable enough line just the same.”

Harry shrugged, deciding there was nothing for it. “I was raised by muggles.”

Her eyebrows raised nearly to the heap of curls on her head. “Really? How scandalous!”

He had no idea what to say to that.

“Imagine,” she went on, “Well, in that case, I’d go with Awarnach Nott’s Historie. It’s positively exhaustive. As was Nott, for that matter.”

The book in question was one of those already in Harry’s hand. It looked – lengthy.

“Is there anything… er, shorter? It’s just that it’s a bit of an emergency. Time-sensitive.”

“Why, are you taking your seat during the next Opening?”

“The what?”

“Oh, Merlin,” said the girl. “Well, there’s nothing for it - you may as well have a seat. Prop me on that table just there, will you? This is going to be interesting.”

-

Hesper Black – as it turned out the girl in the portrait was called – managed to cover much of the requisite background information on the Wizengamot in the two hours before a low chime echoed through the house.

“Sorry,” Harry said, blinking out of his daze. For a portrait, she was actually quite an engaging speaker. “That’s the alarm for my bread; I’ve got to go.”

“Bread?” she echoed.

He nodded. “I’m baking – well, I hope a loaf. They turn out sort of boulder-adjacent, usually.”

“Why?” she frowned. “Kreacher’s around, isn’t he?”

He shrugged. “Some things you just have to do for yourself.”

“Says the boy who’s had me lecturing like a Hogwarts professor the last two hours.”

“You’re not wrong,” he admitted, but given that his alternative had probably been asking Hermione as per usual, this still counted, in a way, as helping himself.

“Shouldn’t you see to your bread now?”

“Oh! Shit,” he muttered, springing up and running from the room. “I’ll be back!” he called over his shoulder.

“No shouting!” he thought he heard the portrait call back as the door closed behind him.

-

The bread was – chewy. Dense. A bit like gnawing on a kitchen sponge. Harry put it aside in case Kreacher had any use for it – croutons, maybe – and then set about making lemon-ricotta biscuits instead.

He wondered, while rolling his dough into balls, if he should write Hermione or Ron. He wasn’t much of one for written correspondence, generally, but Hermione was back at Hogwarts for the week and he couldn’t floo Ron ‘til his fireplace was reconnected.

He frowned, remembering he had meant to do that last week. He needed – a diary, probably. A schedule. It seemed ridiculous to keep a diary when he was both no longer a student and technically unemployed, but lately he had more on his plate. Figuratively and literally – Kreacher kept serving five course meals out of spite, or perhaps to prove himself.

Eventually he decided on a short note to them both to say he’d met with Kingsley and was working on something without going into much detail on what the something was – everything he was learning, after all, Hermione probably already knew and Ron might actually too, given that he was from an old pureblood family, whether the Weasleys generally acted the part or not.

Actually - he paused in his rolling – they might even have a Wizengamot seat themselves. He couldn’t know for certain, because Hesper only knew the members from her own time. Seats were added – by internal election – and taken away – because families had died out or otherwise disgraced themselves thoroughly – over time. She’d suggested he send a note to the DMLE’s Wizengamot Administration Services to request a list.

On second thought, he decided to add a postscript in his note to Ron – it couldn’t hurt to ask.

-

No one had expected Harry to return to Grimmauld Place after the war – not really. He could only wonder what they thought he’d do. Returning to the Dursleys was wholly out of the question – anyone with half a brain could see that, and anyway, when he’d said his final goodbyes, he’d meant them.

The Weasleys had, of course, offered him whatever space they could spare at the Burrow, and he had spent a few weeks there, after, but with Fred’s death looming large, it was unspeakably awful. The once-cheerful house was held something vast and formless and dark, like a cloud heavy with rain, the threat of some awful storm to come worse than the torrent itself ever could be.

In the middle of the third week, after the last round of funerals was finally over, Harry had thought to himself even Grimmauld couldn’t be worse than this and realized, then, that he was resolved to return to it.

It was only that he didn’t know quite what to do once he got there. He wasn’t quite sure what to do in general. Hogwarts had been closed then, was undergoing repairs with the intent to reopen in the fall, and he hadn’t really known if he wanted to return. Hermione had been certain she did. Ron was considering it.

Harry wavered.

His memories of Hogwarts were in near perfect dichotomy: a bright, warm light-suffused amalgam of every Snitch he’d ever caught, contrasted with curse fire, rubble, Dumbledore falling. The more he thought, the more something crept over all of it, insidious, like dread or mould or ivy.

September came, and he did not board the train at King’s Cross, though he did make an appearance to see Hermione and Ginny off. Hermione’s parents, while returned from Australia, were still struggling with their memories and with the reality of what their daughter had done. Hermione hadn’t asked them to accompany her to the station. She’d said they weren’t very keen on the subject of magic at the moment. Ginny, too, claimed she didn’t want her parents to have to return there – Harry suspected she didn’t want them to have to face all the wide-eyed first years, whose strange smallness made even him feel something sharp in his chest.

The older students had kept their distance, mostly. Luna appeared and stuck close to Ginny, and Neville gave them all stoic, patently un-Neville nods, although Hermione wrestled him into a hug anyway.

Ron – who had decided not to return, either, opting instead to spend time with his family – had somehow known exactly the right moment to tug Harry away.

There was talk of Auror training later – they, along with most of the DA, had been invited to join the academy with or without their NEWTS – but that wouldn’t be until January.

For now there was this - his uncertain occupation of the house, and his slow progress in reclaiming it. He baked, and sorted, and Kreacher made toast and tea and a show of clearing out rooms one by one. It was only that there were many, many rooms. Sometimes Harry thought they multiplied when he slept, and given the quasi-sentience of wizarding homes, the thought wasn't purely fanciful.

Ron visited when he could, and Hermione came by on weekends – Professor McGonagall had decided to give the repeat seventh years weekends off, if they wanted them - and Harry went to the Burrow, too, when he could stand it. The oppressive gloom was easing up little by little – he had the sense that there was nothing on this earth which could dim the Weasleys’ pervasive brand of cheer for good.

No one had expected him to return here, and no one seemed to know quite what to think of the fact that he had, but the house was his. It was the first thing that he couldn't carry in his pockets that had ever really felt like his, and it was his last connection to Sirius, for all the dismal memories the place seemed to hold like suspicious-looking stains on its wallpaper, and so here he was, and would remain.

-

“How did the bread turn out?”

Harry was back in the library, penning a letter to the DMLE under the watchful oil-painted eye of Hesper Black.  (“I am capable of writing a letter,” he’d said. “Are you, though?” she'd asked.)

“Not especially well,” he said. “But it wasn’t my worst.”

“Improvement, then,” she said. “That’s something to be proud of.”

Harry, who felt improvement at such a rate hardly counted at all, shrugged.

“Don’t do that,” said Hesper. “It’s plebian. Unsuited to a Black.”

“I’m not a Black,” he pointed out.

“But you’re all we have left, aren’t you?”

He thought about that a moment. Technically, there were Narcissa and Andromeda, and even Teddy. None of them bore the surname, but neither did he.

“If,” said Hesper, as though sensing his thoughts, “you have children, you’ll have to promise me to give one the name. It’s allowed, you know. You inherit that right with the properties – and technically, being your godfather, Sirius could have given you the name when he was alive, as well.”

Harry lifted his head in surprise. “You know about that? Sirius, I mean.”

“Mm, somewhat. I was around, you know, when all those people were here – your friends? They threw out some of the books. I was a little put out by it.”

“The Order,” said Harry, “yeah. And some of those books bit.”

“Well, so do toddlers and dogs, but I’ve never thrown one away. Anyway – I wasn’t overly surprised. I remembered Sirius. He wasn’t especially happy here. Very shouty, too.” She narrowed her eyes. “Is he the one who taught you to shout at things?”

Harry snorted. “Er. No – I only met him when I was thirteen. He was in Azkaban before that.”

“Oh, yes, I remember that—”

“Oh!” came a sharp little voice from the side of the portrait frame. “Well I never—”

“Sorry, Cordy,” said Hesper as she was edged out of the picture by a gaunt, pointy-looking woman with overlarge dark eyes. “I thought you were away – this is Harry Potter; he owns the house now. Harry, this is Cordelia Hibbert-Grose.”

“What an awful name,” sniffed the woman, who Harry thought was one to talk. “How common!”

“I’m sure he’s named after Hardwin Potter, which is perfectly respectable,” said Hesper very patiently. “Are you staying then, or…”

“I heard something about Azkaban,” said Cordelia with a hungry look. “Has someone been arrested?”

“My godfather,” said Harry, eyeing the newcomer suspiciously. “Ages ago.”

“For what?” she asked with what looked awfully like prurient interest.

“…murder.”

“Oooh,” she said, clasping a hand to her chest. “Of a lover? A nemesis?”

“A street full of muggles and his old friend,” frowned Harry. “But he was falsely accused—"

“Oh, muggles,” said Cordelia, seemingly disappointed.

“—and one wizard, but again—"

“In my day,” she went on, seemingly without hearing, “you’d have gotten a fine for muggles. Hardly Azkaban-worthy, is it?”

“I told you she was awful,” said Hesper in a stage whisper.

“I can hear you.”

“Oh, can you? Sorry. I’m not used to speaking in such a small frame.”

“At least I had an interesting death,” said Cordelia, which seemed to be a point of contention between them, because Hesper appeared suddenly upset.

“Oh, look at the time!” said Harry loudly, standing up. “I’d better go have Kreacher post this letter!”

-

Ron, to his surprise, answered his letter that very night and asked if he could come by the next day, and the ministry’s reply came in the morning while Harry was trying to do something about the Yeti head in the second-best sitting room.

He was still squinting at it when the doorbell rang, sounding roughly like the start of the apocalypse. “At least you’re not as bad as that,” he told the Yeti, who stared dolefully at him from over the mantle.

He let Ron inside, offered him some of the leftover biscuits, and asked if he knew any decorating spells.

“Er,” said Ron. “I’ll… ask mum?”

“Thanks, mate,” said Harry.

“These are good, actually,” said Ron around a mouthful of biscuit.

“Thanks,” said Harry again, fidgeting on the sofa. “So—”

“Oh, yeah. Right. So – the thing is, yeah, actually, the Weasleys do have a seat, but dad’s cousin’s holding it. Wyatt Weasley – you’ll have met him at Bill and Fleur’s wedding.”

“I'm not sure I remember-"

“Yeah, I know, they all run together. Why d’you ask, though?”

Harry went over what he’d discussed with Kingsley while Kreacher served tea, ending with his own research into the Wizengamot’s running and function, leaving out the bit where he’d learned most of what he knew from a chatty portrait.

“Wow,” said Ron. “So – first off, you know we didn’t mean to stick you with all the work. Right? We told you because neither of us has any real call to talk to the press or the minister or… anyone, really.”

Harry made to shrug, and then paused, thinking about Hesper’s remark, and wound up twitching instead. “Right,” he said finally. “I know. But Hermione has school and you have… family things. And I’ve got,” he waved a hand vaguely, “biscuits? So.”

“We’re five months out from a war, Harry,” said Ron, “and from you literally dying. It’s alright if you want to, dunno. Bake things.”

Harry scratched the back of his neck and twitched again. “I’m only saying—”

“And so am I. Look – Hermione already has, dunno, petitions written up, for all the good that’ll do. It’s SPEW all over again. She’ll be really pleased you tried.”

“I’m sure she- wait, what? ‘Tried’?”

“Yeah, I mean, talking to Kingsley and all – and mate, I have to say, it’s a little ridiculous you can see the Minister for Magic on a day’s notice—”

“No,” frowned Harry, “I mean – past tense. Tried? I’m not done yet. I haven’t even done anything, yet.”

Then it was Ron’s turn to frown. “I mean, Kingsley said it was out of his hands, didn’t he? And if the minister can’t manage it, what are we supposed to do?”

“Oh,” said Harry, blinking, realizing he had yet to get to his most salient point. “Er, right. Yeah. So – I’m joining the Wizengamot.”

“You what?”

-

In retrospect, it was perhaps not so surprising that Ron met his intention to claim his seat with disbelief – after all, there was no love lost between Harry and the ministry, or, for that matter, between Harry and laws.

“It’s just that everyone on the Wizengamot,” said Ron, “is about a hundred years old. Apparently when Dumbledore was made Chief Warlock there was a huge fuss about him being too young, and he was, what, sixty?”

“Well, that’s the point, isn’t it? If no one younger never comes in, they’re never going to change.”

“But you can’t tell me you want to do this. I mean, if anything, this is Hermione’s sort of thing.”

“I mean, no, not really,” Harry admitted. Because he didn’t want to, not at all – he could think of few things that sounded less appealing. But ranking lower in that list of things was the return of the dementors, and he said so.

“Harry,” Ron said, gentler than normal, “you know you aren’t really going to be able to – do anything, right? The trials begin in three weeks.”

He grimaced. “Maybe not. But – well. It’ll end up in the papers, if I join, and maybe it’ll start them asking what I think about the trials, and – I don’t know. I haven’t thought that far ahead yet.”

“They aren’t going to welcome you, you know,” Ron said. “Hell, most of them probably aren’t even all that grateful about your saving-the-world thing. They considered the war a sort of... dunno, nuisance to begin with. Aunt Muriel’s like that – she acted as though it was all a big bother that people couldn’t stop murdering each other and that everyone else couldn’t stop making a fuss about it.”

“It seems like it’s maybe not a good thing that wizards live so long,” mused Harry.

“No, seems like a mistake.”

In the end, though, what had been the most surprising was who Ron suggested Harry talk to about the sorts of things expected by someone taking a seat on the Wizengamot.

“Neville,” said Ron. “His grandmother’s holding the Longbottom seat now, but she’s been training him up to take her place for ages. I think she brings him along to sessions, sometimes.”

“Really?” asked Harry, surprised. He couldn’t recall Neville ever mentioning it, although he probably listened to the other boy less than he should. “How do you know that?”

“Ginny,” Ron said. “And anyway, it’s the sort of thing Augusta Longbottom would do. Ask him, see what he knows.”

“I will,” Harry agreed gratefully.

-

Here was what Harry knew about the magic court of law, now, after a few hours’ tireless instruction from the portrait of Sirius Black’s probable ancestor:

The Wizengamot held a flexible number of seats. The seats were hereditary, and could go vacant after someone’s death. Only twenty members were required to be present at any given trial legislative session, though there could be as many as fifty.

And there was this: in order to claim a vacant or dormant seat, one would generally attend an Opening, a start-of-season session where summaries and remarks regarding the upcoming year were given. It was, however, permissible to request the right to claim your seat at the start of any ordinary session, or even a trial, so long as the Chief Warlock allowed it. This last was what Harry intended to do.

“You’re going to take them by surprise,” mused Hesper. “Good.”

She seemed, oddly enough, to hold similar opinions to Ron’s own regarding the Wizengamot, re: their general age and stagnation.

“You were never a member, then?” Harry asked. He’d returned to the library after Ron’s departure to open the Ministry’s letter and have a look at the list they’d sent him.

“Oh, no,” she said. “I died just after this portrait was painted, actually.” She was back in her usual frame, which Harry now noted bore a nameplate with her name etched in gold. “I was eighteen.”

Harry blanched, glancing up from the letter he’d torn open. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”

“Oh, it’s quite alright,” she said, not looking put-out at all. In fact, her eyes seemed to be sparkling with something like glee, which surely had to be a trick of the light. “It was all very tragic and dreadful. My brother killed me, of course. Pushed me right down the stairs.”

“Jesus,” said Harry.

“I know what you’re thinking—”

“Yeah, that’s awful—”

“—what a mundane way to die.”

“I… what? No—”

“Cordelia’s not entirely wrong, though I still think dragonpox is much more plebian, honestly.” She sighed. “I’ll never forgive him. I didn’t even get to haunt the house properly – I’d always wanted to be a ghost, but the fall broke my neck, and my head would’ve been at a funny angle and I wouldn’t have even been able to talk. So that was right out - no one wants to haunt silently.”

Harry, at a loss for words, briefly wondered if there were any chance of ever introducing Hesper Black to Nearly Headless Nick.

“Mother was beside herself,” she said, a little wistfully. She seemed lost in memory for a moment. “She very nearly turned him into the Aurors.”

“…nearly?”

“Oh, of course she didn’t, in the end. They told everyone I fell. Licorus was the oldest, after all, and he wouldn’t do the family any good in Azkaban. Still - it’s the thought that counts, really. I always knew she liked me.”

“…Right.”

“It turned out for the best, anyway – they disowned Eduardus later and my sister Phoebe never married. Someone had to carry on the line.”

“Best it be the murderer, then, of course,” said Harry.

She sniffed. “Well, of the available choices.”

He swiftly changed the subject, holding the list aloft.

“Oh yes, show me!” she said, clapping her hands together. “Let’s see what a mess the world’s become in the last century.”

“Chief Warlock is…” Harry frowned. “Tiberius Ogden? I don’t recognize the name, except from the—”

“Whiskey? Yes, that’s how the Ogdens made their fortune. Hm. They were fairly apolitical in my time, but from what you’ve said of the recent… climate,” she concluded delicately, “That may be why he was chosen. Who else?”

Harry read the names off one by one, realizing as he read that he was familiar with most of them. Some surnames were his friends’ – like Longbottom – but many, too many, he recognized as belonging to associates of Voldemort’s. A star marked the seats that were empty, and he was gratified to see how many of the former Death Eater’s names fell under that category, but their presence still meant – something. It meant that until very recently, they had held power, a great deal of it. It meant that whatever laws were on the books now had been passed under their influence.

It meant, moreover, that many of the people on this list whose names he didn’t recognize had probably been their allies. Their friends, even. They’d had something in common. Perhaps they were less extreme in their beliefs, or perhaps they’d been clever enough not to get caught, but the fact remained that he was looking at a list of people who probably remembered Sebastian Selwyn as someone they’d had lunch with, rather than someone who once held a wand to a schoolgirl’s throat.

His throat suddenly felt very dry.

“What is it?” Hesper asked.

“Death Eaters,” he said, realizing belatedly that she might not know what that meant.

She surprised him. “Not that tacky little club Regulus joined?”

“You knew him?” he asked, sparing a moment to wonder what Voldemort would think if he heard her name for it.

“He spent quite a bit of time in this library. Poor thing – he only wanted to impress his mother, I think, and her thoughts were elsewhere." She leaned forward, resting her chin on her hand. "Those of us cursed with siblings," she said, "often grow to realize that our parents love our most difficult brothers the best.”

He wondered if she were thinking about her murderous one, and also, not for the first time, what was wrong with the Blacks. “He betrayed Voldemort in the end,” he said to her, an offering to someone he now thought might deserve it.

“Good,” she said firmly. “Serves Walburga right.”

He glanced around the room as if on instinct, sure that as soon as he agreed the woman in question would appear and start screaming.

“Oh, don’t worry,” said Hesper, correctly interpreting his actions. “She can’t come up here – the enchantments on her portrait only let her move about the main floor. She claims it was intentional, so that she didn’t have to mingle with the riff-raff in the attic or some rot. I still think the portrait artist did it in a stroke of decency. Or it might’ve been because she never paid him – she said he was off on her nose.”

“Er,” said Harry.

“I call it artistic license. It might’ve been a little too beakish, but if it looms like a vulture and shrieks like a vulture, well.”

Deciding that it was best to ignore that entirely, Harry began planning the letter he was going to write.

-

“I was surprised to get your letter,” Neville said later through the Floo that Harry had finally, finally managed to get reconnected. The paperwork, he suspected, had been pushed through - he'd written his name in very large letters - but it was another instance where he wasn't overly concerned by it. "I mean, happy to hear from you, of course, but..."

“Why’s that?” frowned Harry, shifting so that he blocked the footstool behind him from view. He’d only just realized as he bent down to answer the call that it had some sort of eyes clasped in the claws of its feet, and they were animated, rolling around to stare eerily at whoever was in the room. "Bugger off," he hissed at it from the corner of his mouth, but that only seemed to make the eyes roll more wildly. He gave it up as a bad deal and turned back to Neville.

“Well, seems like the sort of thing you’d ask – I dunno, someone else?”

“Ron said you would know personally,” said Harry, wondering if he’d made a mistake.

Neville blinked. “I – guess I do, yeah.” Finally Harry recognized his reticence for what it was – Neville’s general sense of inadequacy, which had never wholly gone away.

“I’d be grateful for anything you can tell me,” Harry said, trying his best to sound it, “I’m clueless, honestly.” That seemed to do the trick, because Neville started telling Harry everything he knew about taking up a Wizengamot seat soon after.

“Gran’s been pushing me to take over the seat since I came of age,” he admitted a few minutes in.

“Really?”

“Yeah,” said Neville. “She never really wanted it. My dad had stepped in, before—”

Harry winced in sympathy. “Are you going to?”

“I hadn’t really thought about it,” he admitted, “but if you are…”

“I would be,” said Harry, “really glad to have someone else there. I know there’s still Hogwarts for you—”

“Oh, they’d let me out for sessions, there’s a rule on the books for it – in the event of seventh years who are heads of house already.”

“…well, that’s—”

“Actually,” said Neville, seemingly lost in thought. “You know it’s not just me, right? There’s also Susan – when her aunt died, the Bones seat went to her. And Hannah, too – her parents haven’t taken theirs up because neither of them wants to deal with it. And—”

Neville went on naming names, and Harry, in his mind, matched them up with the ones on the list from earlier. Of course, he thought suddenly, wondering why he hadn’t considered it before.

The footstool rolled forward a little on its eyes and he kicked it away, thinking – there was something there, an idea forming.

The stool advanced again and he absent-mindedly shot a freezing charm at it. Yes. That just might work.

It would have to work. Step two, Harry thought.

“Neville,” he said into the fire. “All the people you just listed – can you get them to contact me?”

“All of them?”

“Yes,” said Harry. “Yeah. I’m going to need them.”

"Sure. For you, I'll see what I can do."

Chapter Text

“A soufflé? No. No, too ambitious. A quiche – I can do a quiche.”

“Kreacher will make a soufflé,” came a rattly voice. “Master,” he added, punctuating the word with a stab at the air, “will sit.”

Harry paused his pacing and ran a hand absently through his hair. “That’s nice of you, Kreacher,” he said, “It’s just – there are going to be a lot of people here. More people than there have been in a while,” more people than I’ve seen at one time in a while, “and I don’t want to—”

“Sit,” repeated Kreacher, his croaky voice managing to make it sound somehow like a curse.

Harry blinked. “Okay. Right. I’ll go – sit. I’ll be back,” he warned, calling over one shoulder as he left the kitchen, “about the quiche.”

In the library, Hesper Black spared an amused look at his general air of disarray – his hair stood on end, his clothes, which she deemed “unsuitable for company, or, indeed, anything else” in shambles.

“Why exactly are you anxious? I was under the impression these people were your friends and allies.”

“They were,” said Harry. “Are.” He paused. How did he explain the impulses that had driven him to move to his godfather’s home and then rarely leave it? “The last time I saw them,” he said finally, slowly, “we were burying other friends. We had just fought a war.”

“Then it sounds like you’re in need of a distraction,” she said, almost gently, “in case things veer towards the morbid. Have Kreacher make an exploding pudding, those always go over well.”

“This isn’t a party,” Harry frowned. Yes, he’d invited over everyone Neville had named, and to his surprise, they’d all agreed to come, and something had been arranged. But levity wasn’t the intention. “We’re meeting to plan,” said Harry. “Or, well, I’m meeting to tell them what I’ve planned and to hope that they’re willing to go along with it.”

“That sounds precisely like a party to me,” she said, smiling with too many teeth. Blacks, thought Harry with a note of despair. “But if that’s the case, perhaps have Kreacher make drinks, instead. Gin and political insurrection go well together, in my experience. Also, Kreacher makes a lovely cocktail.”

There were several layers to that last that Harry chose to ignore, but one implication he couldn’t let drop. “You mentioned Kreacher before, but has he actually been – alive? Since your time?”

“Of course,” said Hesper, waving a hand, “He’s been with the Black family for centuries.”

“—wait, what?” asked Harry, all his worries momentarily forgotten.

“Though, I expect he won’t last through your lifetime, unfortunately. More’s the pity – he’s quite loyal, and anyway, house elves are damnably expensive.”

“What?” repeated Harry, still stuck on the word “centuries”.

“Oh, I suppose you wouldn’t know that either. Yes, they cost quite a fortune,” she said, mistaking the source of his confusion. “Somewhere between a proper demiguise cloak and a herd of purebred abraxans.”

“That means,” said Harry, temporarily sidelined again, “and I say this quite literally - nothing to me.”

“Speaking of abraxans,” she charged on, though of course they were doing nothing of the sort, “did Cygnus’ daughter ever marry Abraxas Malfoy’s son?”

“—who? I mean, which – oh,” he said, after a moment, remembering something he’d seen on the Black family tapestry. “Narcissa? Yes.”

“Hm. Well, no accounting for taste.”

“But Kreacher,” Harry pressed on. “How old could he possibly be? I mean, there are other house elves’ heads, er – well, in the attic, now, I think, but—"

“He’s the last left,” she said simply. “And, well, I don’t know exactly - Do house elves even have birthdays? It seems unlikely we let them.”

He pinched the bridge of his nose. “More generally?” he asked.

She sighed and made a face that said she was humoring him. “Maybe five, six hundred?”

“What!?”

“Well, something like that. I suppose you could ask him, but it’s really not done.”

Harry’s growing existential horror at the idea of a six-hundred-year-old Kreacher was interrupted by his horror at another thing – the doorbell of Grimmauld Place ringing. Hesper wrinkled her nose again, which Harry felt was vastly understating the problem.

“Has it always sounded like that?” he asked mournfully as he collected himself to go answer the door.

“Like death is both imminent and desirable? Yes, since its creation.”

“I hate it.”

“I’d be worried if you didn’t.”

-

It was Hermione at the door, which he already suspected – she’d offered to come over early to help Harry prepare, and he’d accepted the offer, even though he suspected it was an unsubtle ploy to draw information out of him. She had apparated rather than try and commandeer use of one of Hogwart’s few floos, and he realized with distaste that most everyone else arriving that day would be doing the same. He wondered if there were a way to disable the bloody doorbell. There had to be, surely.

“So you’re joining the Wizengamot,” Hermione said without preamble as Harry ushered her inside, neatly avoiding the troll-leg umbrella stand that still took up too much space in the foyer and hoping against hope that Walburga Black’s portrait wouldn’t chose this moment to rear her dreadful head.

“Yes,” he said once they were safely ensconced in the hall beyond. “Are you,” he began, wavering as he tried to register her tone, “…upset?”

She looked surprised. “You mean – am I angry? No. If anything, I’m a little jealous.”

“Jealous?” Harry asked incredulously. It was difficult to imagine her jealous of anything, especially anything he held.

“Well, yes. I mean – the power the Wizengamot wields is… frustrating. But it’s enviable, too – and there’s nothing I could ever do to be part of it.”

“Not nothing,” joked Harry. “There are a probably a dozen wizards with seats you could marry. Some of them are even under eighty.”

She made an indignant sound. “Harry!”

“Well, unless you’re so set on Ron,” he teased. “I’m sorry,” he added more seriously. “It’s stupid. If anyone deserves to have a seat, it’s you. You’re the cleverest person I know.”

She sighed. “Cleverness doesn’t always amount to political acumen, you know. And anyway,” here she winced, “I do have a tendency to let power go to my head.”

“I know,” said Harry solemnly, “it’s one of the things I like best about you.”

“Harry,” she said again. “Look, it isn’t worth pining over – there are plenty of other ways I can make my mark, and I intend to.”

“I do also need your advice, probably,” he admitted.

“Of course,” she agreed readily. “Actually, I was surprised you—” she started, and then looked away, flustered. “Well, nevermind.”

“What, came up with an idea without you?”

“No! But—"

“I do have someone giving me advice,” admitted Harry finally. “Er – well, something,” he amended. “There’s a portrait in the library – you’d like her, she’s quite well-informed and vehemently defensive of the books.”

“One of Sirius’ relatives?” she asked, her curiosity clearly piqued.

“A ways back, yeah. She’s very tolerable compared to the other portraits and things – really helpful, too. She knows loads about the Wizengamot and society and…” he paused, waving a hand at the hall around them. “Well, this.”

Hermione’s lips pursed and he recognized the gesture for what it was – her distaste for the nuances of that this, the little details of the magical world that one was expected to know, that people like them needed to learn but felt uneasy learning, because learning them felt, in some way, like acquiescing to the wizards of Voldemort’s ilk’s insistence that they were superior, that their traditions were to be upheld without question.

“It’s awful, isn’t it,” mused Hermione, chewing at her lower lip, “wanting so badly to help a world that hasn’t really helped you. That wants nothing to do with you, even.”

Harry nodded his agreement.

“And it feels like we never really will fit in, or know everything we need to know—”

“But it’s home anyway,” Harry finished, looking around 12 Grimmauld Place. With that in mind, he headed towards the sitting room and beckoned for Hermione to follow. It was his – the yeti head and roving footstool and all, and if he wanted to complain, he would do so from the place he held.

“Sometimes,” Hermione said quietly, sitting on the more agreeable armchair he’d brought in recently and gazing around the room as though she saw what he saw, “I think of it like moving to another country. You would learn the language and customs, because of course you would. It would be rude not to. But what if their customs were…”

“Bad? Elitist? Based on people hating each other for stupid reasons?”

“Exclusionary,” she summed up. “And say you couldn’t just return to your home country—” And for Harry, of course, that had never been an option, because the muggle world meant the Dursleys. For Hermione it was perhaps more feasible, but he knew she would consider the idea of leaving behind something that had taken learning and that she was good at as nearly impossible.

“You couldn’t live with things as they were," she went on, "You couldn’t let other people, never mind yourself, be subjugated without doing something, but at the same time – at the same time, you would wonder if it were your place to try and change it. And at every turn there will be people to tell you that it isn’t, and suggest that perhaps you just don’t understand…”

“I think,” said Harry slowly, “that it became our place the minute we started thinking of it as home. And anyway, if its not your job to fight other people’s prejudice, it’s not your job to carry it out, either, and staying quiet is about the same thing, pretty much.”

Hermione looked relieved that he’d understood. “I like to remind myself, sometimes, that we were invited.”

Harry only nodded, because he’d always done exactly the same. He had kept his final Hogwarts letter, the one delivered to him from Hagrid’s pocket, for years now. It lay buried at the bottom of his old trunk, a reminder that once upon a time, someone had wanted him.

“This became maudlin,” said Hermione.

Harry agreed. “Maybe we should have Kreacher make drinks. Apparently he’s good at it.”

Hermione brightened. “How is Kreacher?”

Harry frowned, remembering his conversation from an hour before. “Old,” he pronounced finally. “Really, terrifyingly old.” He rose suddenly. “I,” he said, “am definitely going to need a drink, if I start thinking about this.”

He half expected Hermione to admonish him, but she stood with a quick nod of her own. “Yes, well, we’ll ask nicely, of course—”

“Which he will hate,” supplied Harry. In the hall again, he spared a glance at the paintings, the tapestries, the heavy oak furniture and ornately carved moldings.

The whole wizarding world, while quieter about it, was just like this house: foreign and full of unfamiliar threats lurking in nooks and crannies, fighting him off like an intruder even as he tried to restore it to its former glory - or some version of glory it had never held before, some version less tainted. Even though it had been offered to him – even though it was, in many ways, his birthright.

But he was staking his claim to both little by little.

-

In the end, Kreacher was nowhere to be found, and Harry didn’t feel like summoning him in front of Hermione, who generally frowned on the idea of him being at Harry’s every beck and call, so they located a bottle of whiskey, instead – the ordinary kind – and set about finding something to mix with it.

“Where did you get all these?” asked Hermione, stumbling over a pile of cookbooks. “I thought you hadn’t been to Diagon since…" She trailed off awkwardly.

“Kreacher,” said Harry quickly.

Kreacher appeared, then, in the kitchen. “Oh,” Harry said, glancing at Hermione and hoping she didn’t scold him for it. “Sorry, Kreacher. I wasn’t actually calling you.”

“Kreacher knows,” said Kreacher, who was giving the distinct impression of gritting his teeth. “Kreacher has come to defend himself.”

“Is something wrong, Kreacher?” asked Hermione, with the voice of gentle concern she reserved entirely for – well, for house elves, pretty much.

“Is something – wrong,” mimicked Kreacher, with a rising note of hysteria in his voice. “The master of the house is in the kitchen! Guests are in the kitchen! She asks if something’s wrong!”

“Er,” said Hermione, while also managing to look flattered that Kreacher had called her a guest instead of mudblood or intruder or some inventive combination thereof.

“Kreacher,” explained Harry, “doesn’t think it’s proper, me cooking. And technically,” he added, the latter to Kreacher, “We’re not cooking at all, we’re only looking for something to make drinks with.”

“In all of Kreacher’s years, he has never—” said Kreacher, who either hadn’t heard him or didn’t care.

“Mrs. Weasley cooked in here,” frowned Hermione, “when it was the Order’s headquarters.”

Harry grimaced at what was sure to come next. “Mrs. Weasley wasn’t the ‘master of the house’,” he said quickly, hoping to perhaps stave it off.

“—speak to Kreacher of the years when his sacred home was overrun with VERMIN—” Kreacher shrieked, among other things that were varying degrees of unsavory.

“HE DOESN’T LIKE BEING REMINDED OF THAT,” Harry explained over the racket.

“Oh, I’m sorry, Kreacher,” grimaced Hermione, hands over her ears, “I hadn’t thought…”

“—apologizing to Kreacher!” said Kreacher, who tended to grow steadily less able to form sentences the more upset he got.

“Oh, god,” said Harry. “Kreacher, out. Go – do something. Else.”

“DISGRACE,” shrieked Kreacher.

“That’s an order!” said Harry.

“Harry!” said Hermione.

“Kreacher never—” said Kreacher, but he popped away anyway.

“Sorry,” winced Harry, “but it’s better than letting him g- oh.” He trailed off as a bottle of something appeared silently on the kitchen table. “Er?” Two glasses popped into existence alongside it. “Well, I guess he’s not too mad. Or maybe he wants us out. Either way?”

“Thank you!” Hermione called out to the empty space.

Harry thought he heard a final indignant shriek as he quickly gathered up the glasses and swept out of the room.

-

By the time the others arrived Harry very desperately wished he had argued his way successfully into making something – soufflé or no. Maybe another loaf of bread. Bagels? He had yet to try his luck with bagels.

Kneading, incidentally, bordered on therapeutic. The idea that you could press something into being was novel, but it was the act of it that appealed to Harry. He liked the give of the dough between his fingers. The repetition. The way the floured dusted over his knuckles and turned up behind his ears, later, reminding him that he’d done something productive that day, that he’d made something which was ideally edible and if not, harmless.

It was too late now – there were people in his house, people who had never been there before, and who he felt he needed to explain himself to.

“That is – was, a troll, and – shut up, Walburga – sorry about the, er, dust – I MEAN it, Walburga! – well, come through, we’re meeting in the – I WILL BLOW YOUR FRAME RIGHT OFF THE WALL! -  sorry, again, about. All of it.”

“Do you,” said Neville, who had accompanied Hannah and Susan and a very confused-looking Ernie Macmillan, “need. Anything?”

“Sorry?” said Harry, who was flattening his hair with one hand and holding up the troll leg with the other.

“Like… houseplants, maybe. Just, er.”

“Something…nice?” offered Hannah as she gazed around the hall skeptically.

“Or a venomous tentacula, even,” said Neville. “To go with the décor – ow!”

“Which is fine,” said Hannah, who had just swatted Neville on the arm. “The – décor. It’s, ah, very—”

“Traditional,” offered Susan.

“Oh,” said Harry. “No, yes, I know, it’s incredibly awful. Want to join Hermione in the sitting room? I’ll wait for the others out here.”

That Neville was friends with the group of Hufflepuffs Harry knew from the DA wasn’t news, exactly, but Harry had still been surprised at how easily he’d managed to talk them into coming along. And then there was the issue of Luna Lovegood, who apparently had claim to a Wizengamot seat through her late mother. That had been news, and Harry didn’t know if he was more shocked by it, or by the fact that Luna seemed both willing and interested in helping Harry, or by the fact that she had gotten him in contact with another potential member of their group – an older girl named Elenore Moon, who was apparently a distant cousin of Luna’s and had a sister who’d been in Harry’s year. Elenore, in turn, had contacted Roger Davies, an old friend.

Luna wasn’t able to leave Hogwarts like the repeating seventh-years were, but Moon and Davies appeared soon after Neville and the others had gone off to find Hermione and, if the sound of the floo was any indication, Ron.

“Hello,” Harry said when the two former Ravenclaws appeared, even awkwarder than he’d been with the Hufflepuffs. “I’m sorry, in advance, about the—” he waved a hand generally over his shoulder. “I inherited the house, and, er—”

Elenore Moon, who looked unduly amused by that, let herself in and dragged Davies behind her. “Nice to meet you officially, Potter,” she said.

“Right,” he said. “And good to see you again, Davies—” He trailed off, trying to think of something they had in common that he could possibly mention which wasn’t having had a crush on Cho Chang, once. “Quidditch? I mean, have you played it, lately?”

Davies’ eyebrows drew together. “A bit,” he said slowly. “I work for my father’s company now, but I play in a recreational league.”

“Excellent,” nodded Harry. “Great. Well, the sitting room is this way.”

-

It actually did, thought Harry, seem a little like a party, or at least a reunion of sorts. Susan Bones seemed familiar with Elenore Moon, and Roger Davies and Ernie Macmillan knew each other from some sort of club. The group still at Hogwarts inquired politely after those who’d graduated or left, and they in turn asked delicate questions about Hogwarts’ rebuilding.

Kreacher brought drinks, unbidden – which everyone who wasn’t Ron or Hermione looked warily at, the general atmosphere of Grimmauld unusually paranoia-inducing – but eventually drank when Harry and his friends did.

All in all, Harry mused, looking around the room, having a nearly even balance between close friends, friends, and acquaintances (or strangers) seemed to work out almost as well as having a balance of Ravenclaws and Hufflepuffs and Gryffindors did. Neville and Hannah seemed to be close, and Hannah and Susan and Ernie certainly were, and their natural friendliness seemed to rub off on Moon and Davies, and Moon appeared to have at least a little of Luna’s odd brand of accepting congeniality, because she took in nearly everything around her with a cheerful grin.

Ron and Hermione, when they weren’t politely answering questions, watched everything around them with a sort of detached amusement, but Harry supposed that was to be expected.

Eventually, though, everyone was caught up with one another and there was nothing to do but get to the reason he’d brought everyone here.

He cleared his throat awkwardly. Hermione sat upright, and Ron leaned his elbows on his knees, and suddenly there came the alarming sensation of multiple sets of eyes on him.

“So—” he said finally. “I’m sure you’re wondering what this is all about.”

“The trials,” said Susan Bones succinctly. “Isn't it?”

“You talked with the minister,” added Neville, “and he…”

“Yeah,” said Harry. “He admitted the trials were a sham, pretty much, and that there was nothing he could do about it.”

“The people who supported You-Know-Who deserve to be locked up, to have the key thrown away,” Susan said firmly. “But,” she added, just as firmly, “it isn’t fair.”  

“Nor wise,” put in Elenore Moon. “Or especially legal.”

“It’s bullshit,” said Ron bluntly. “I get why people’d want justice – revenge, even. I get it. These people killed my brother,” he said acidly, and it was the first time Harry had heard him say it aloud. “But,” he said, sparing a glance at Hermione, who had reached over to touch his arm, “That doesn't make it... okay.”

“It isn’t about justice,” Hermione said. “And it isn’t even about vengeance. It’s about sweeping their mistakes under the rug. Half of the people on trial were suspected of crimes, or should have been, long ago, but because they were powerful or rich, the ministry ignored it. Some of them even had trials before, and they lied, and they were let go. For all we know, that might happen again.”

“And some of them,” added Harry, “might be wrongly accused. None that I know of, but—”

“It’s always a possibility,” agreed Hermione.

Harry nodded. “What I want to do,” he said, “is claim my seat.”

“At the next Opening?” asked Susan.

“No,” he said. “Next week.”

She paused and exchanged a glance with Hannah, who frowned. “But that’s—”

“A week before the Death Eater trials,” said Harry.

“I was going to say ‘really soon’,” she replied wryly. “But that, too.”

“Not soon enough,” said Harry, “just as soon as I can manage, I think.”

“Don’t you think it’s a little… late, to change anything about the trials?” asked Ernie candidly.

Harry shrugged. This was where the finer details of his plan came in, though, admittedly, they weren’t especially fine. “The point is to take them by surprise. The point is to have everyone here claim their seats, if you can, so that the balance in the court is shifted. So that it looks like the outcome of the trials isn’t as much of a given. Not,” he added quickly, looking around at the eyes of everyone in the room, “that I’d expect or want any of you to vote some Death Eater innocent. I just want the Wizengamot on their toes.”

“—and then…”

“There’ll be interviews,” surmised Hannah. “People will ask you what you’re up to, and you’ll tell them about your aversion to what’s going on…”

“That, and he’ll tell them what is going on,” said Hermione. “Part of the objective is having eyes actually on the closed trials, isn’t it?”

“That’s part of it, yeah,” agreed Harry. “So, to sum up – take them by surprise, and strength in numbers? If you’ll all agree to it.”

“I will,” said Susan firmly. “I intended to take my seat anyway as soon as I graduated – why not now?” Harry nodded gratefully. He was only passingly aware of her situation, but had been given the impression that she had lost more than her aunt in the war. For all he knew, she was the last of the Bones left.

“Me, too,” agreed Davies, who up to then had remained mostly quiet. “My dad,” he added, “doesn’t, er – have an interest in politics.”

“What he means,” added Elenore, “is that his dad is terrified of anything that has to be done sober and well-intentioned.”

“Elle!” he said.

“Sorry,” she shrugged. “Anyway, you can count me in.”

“Harry,” Neville said slowly, glancing around the room. “There are seven people here, not counting Hermione and Ron. There would be eight, if we had Luna.”

“Er – yes,” said Harry, having done the math already and wondering what Neville might be getting at.

“Oh,” said Hannah suddenly, eyes widening. “Oh. You’re right.”

“Right about what?” asked Harry.

“If we could get three more people,” Neville said, “we’d have eleven.”

Which, again, was simple maths, but before Harry could open his mouth to say so, the significance of the number came to him from through the haze of information Hesper Black had tried drilling into his head.

“Eleven,” he repeated. “Enough to form a party.”

Officially, there were two longstanding parties within the Wizengamot – at least, there had been for the last three centuries or thereabouts. Smaller factions appeared and disappeared again, but those two always remained. Confusingly, they seemed to have no names, although there was, Hesper had attempted to explain, a general sense of which was which based on who was leading each at any given time. In the way of such things, one was more conservative and one more liberal, and the smallish factions that appeared now and then were often born out of certain divisive issues.

Here was perhaps the most significant bit about this all: the named members of parties could allow their leader to vote in their stead, if necessary. If, for instance, those members had difficulties getting away from their duties regularly – duties like school.

As Harry recalled all this, he realized that if they could manage to form a party of their own and name a leader, that would be a significant help. And it would look significant, too – like they were there for good, and meant to actually accomplish something. “But,” as he said to Neville, “I thought this was everyone. Everyone applicable who’s of age. Where are we going to get three more people?”

Neville averted his eyes, leaning back in his seat. “I have an idea, but you’re not going to like it,” he said.

“I think I know where you’re going with this,” said Hermione, her gaze sharpening. “And no, he’s not going to like it at all.”

-

They were right. Harry did not like the outcome they’d arrived at. But here was the thing – he had done many things that he didn’t like before, and rarely were they as simple or straightforward as this. He listened to Neville and Hermione and saw something in what they said: a possibility. A chemical reaction, a series of alchemical events, an outcome. If he mixed the ingredients he already had on hand with those currently being suggested, it would produce – something. A tangible something.

The best recipes, he thought, had secret ingredients. They set up expectations – the cake looked like a cake, and so on – and then defied them. Something inside took the taster by surprise, and that sent awry the synapses which were already traveling down well-worn paths, rerouting them before the brain knew quite what was happening.

No, he decidedly did not like it, but he realized even before he had a chance to protest that that was exactly the point. No one else would like it, either. They would be surprised – and that would work in Harry’s favor.

-

Harry slid into the booth, cast a privacy ward, and let the invisibility cloak he wore fall around his shoulders, revealing just his head. He looked quickly around the Leaky Cauldron, trying to see if anyone had noticed. People seemed to be either suspiciously looking towards the person already at the booth, or pointedly looking away, but no one had the particular look on their face that said they’d just spotted Harry Potter, so he sighed and let the tension in his shoulders relax.

He hadn’t wanted to hold this meeting in public – hadn’t wanted to appear in public at all – but the alternatives had all been even more distasteful, so here he was, sitting in a booth across from someone who looked at him as though he were a sentient pile of dragon dung which had somehow maneuvered its way into the pub.

“Hello, Malfoy,” Harry said, trying for genial.

“What the fuck, Potter,” said Draco Malfoy, who looked exactly as much a twat as he always had, only more of a tired one. “You have ten seconds to explain what this is about.”

Harry frowned. His letter had been exceedingly... to-the-point, he thought – he hadn’t included any of the more controversial details of his plan, but he also hadn’t bothered concealing much, given that he rather assumed no one would intercept his mail to Malfoy. He rather assumed they wouldn’t suspect he’d ever write to Malfoy at all. “I thought you knew what this was about,” he said finally, still aiming for polite.

“No,” hissed Malfoy. “I unequivocally do not. If it has escaped your attention, somehow – I would be shocked, but then, your ignorance rather famously knows no bounds – I hate you. I would very much like to carry on hating you at a distance. In case the nuances of that have also somehow escaped you: leave.”

“I’m the one who invited you,” Harry pointed out evenly, finding it easier to do that he might’ve thought. Malfoy’s ire was harmlessly, familiarly unpleasant, like the headache he used to get when he stayed up until two doing Divination homework. All things considered, it took little effort to weather it.

Malfoy paled – if that were even possible, given his pre-eminently pasty complexion – and schooled his features into something like stone. “So that’s it, then,” he said. “You think I owe you.”

“I know you owe me,” corrected Harry evenly. “But no, that’s not it. If this were about calling in a debt, that’d be one thing, but I—” He paused, and frowned, wondering if it would give Malfoy the wrong idea if he said he needed his help.

“You,” Malfoy filled in, sparing him the choice, “want me to – what, side with you? In the Wizengamot. Publicly. You want me to join your party, and let me guess, use my family’s name and fortune to introduce some sort of muggle-loving, creature-loving legislature—"

“Well, the fortune wouldn’t hurt,” mused Harry. “But the name’s not worth much, currently.” Malfoy winced. Harry let himself revel in it, just a little, before coming to his point. “That’s a no,” he said, “on the legislature. I mean, maybe, yes, eventually, but for now, all I – all we’re – trying to do is undo something which is already on the books.”

“The foundations of our very society, likely—”

“The Death Eater trials,” cut in Harry.

Malfoy froze. “What?”

“The trials. They’re happening in two weeks? I’m sure you’ve heard—”

“Potter—”

“—sorry. Anyway – they’re a farce. The closed trials especially and specifically, and I think you’re well aware of that last, seeing as how your father’s set to have one.”

“You can’t possibly convince me you mean to – help – my- to help them,” said Malfoy, who sounded as if he had swallowed something bitter.

“Not help,” conceded Harry, his own face belying his disgust at the idea, “And it’s not for them. It’s for…” Sirius, he thought absently. “All of us,” he said finally. “Your father,” he said bluntly, “did terrible things. You did terrible things, if we’re counting – don’t think I’ve forgotten what you did to Ron or Katie,” he said, and raised a hand when Malfoy began narrowing his eyes. “But it sets a bad precedent. What happens in those trials matters. If we’re ever going to have anything like a decent government, a decent court – we can’t let what’s happening happen.”

“Why would I help you, then?” asked Malfoy stiffly. “If you still intend, I assume, for my father to go to Azkaban.”

“Well,” said Harry, “we’re going to speak out against the re-installment of the dementors, for one thing. Without them, Azkaban will be – not nice, I wouldn’t think, but not…”

“Hell,” Malfoy summed up curtly. At some point in the conversation, he’d crossed his arms over his chest as if shielding himself.

Harry really thought the family loyalty would do it, to be frank – the Malfoys, he’d noticed, were terribly loyal to one another in their own twisted sort of way, and talking to Hesper had reminded him that defending the members of one’s family, even when they did dreadful things, seemed to come to the upper caste of wizarding society as easy as breathing.

But now he couldn’t be sure that it was working – Malfoy looked torn, but seemed to be leaning towards unconvinced, and perhaps it was only out of instinct not to agree with Harry or perhaps Lucius Malfoy had crossed a line, at last, that couldn’t be un-crossed. If it were the latter, Harry felt a begrudging sort of respect towards Malfoy, but he also needed his cooperation, so he played the final card in his hand.

“If you do this,” he said as plainly as he could, being sure to imbue the words with the kind of surety that would make them seem like they made all the sense in the world, aware that that was one of his personal strengths, “you might convince people you’re really reformed. You would have a chance at restoring your family’s name.”

“Restoring our name with your lot,” said Malfoy

“Would you want to be welcomed back by the others?” Harry asked with false innocence. “I didn’t think you did – or could. It seems to me like my lot is the best you’re going to get.”

Malfoy’s expression of distaste rivaled any Harry had ever seen – rivaled, even, Kreacher’s upon finding him in the kitchen, or Hesper’s on finding out that he didn’t own any “court-appropriate robes”, whatever those were.

For a moment Harry thought he would disagree and damn his own father purely on principle. Then he inhaled deeply through his nose, once, and spoke, in a voice that said clearly this was costing him everything.

“Fine, Potter. What would you have me do?”

Chapter Text

Harry couldn’t sleep.

It was late at night, or early in the morning – one of those black, forgotten hours in which a person alone could easily believe that they were the last living thing on earth – and he sat awake in his bed staring out at the dark hole that was his room.

He thought about what he planned to do later that day and wished that it would come sooner. He wanted, he thought, a time-turner that went forwards. Something that would let him skip this stretch of nothingness.

If he could manage that, then maybe something that would let him skip ahead even further – weeks, months, years. He felt restless, and guilty, and guilty about feeling restless. He was distantly aware that he was supposed to be using this time to – heal, perhaps. Breathe.

Were his friends? He wasn’t sure. Hermione seemed to have taken up studying with renewed fervor, even though he couldn’t imagine anyone more prepared for their final exams. Ginny was captain of the Quidditch team this year, and Ron was working on something he wouldn’t talk about with George. Everyone seemed to be moving on in their own way, but it all felt so – strange. Surreal. Like a pause, a beat between words, something that couldn’t last.

He had only ever wanted to be ordinary, he thought, but he had very little sense of what ordinary people did. Did they stare at their ceilings, too? Did they have trouble sleeping? Did stillness frighten them, too? Did quiet?

Perhaps it wasn’t the same for the others. For some people, he thought – mostly free of bitterness, though he couldn’t help a little creeping in – the war was a recent event, a specific occasion. However horrible, there had been a before, just as there was now an after.

It hadn’t been like that for Harry. His life, even before Hogwarts, before magic, had been an escalating series of horrors. They had crept in little by little, and he’d learned to deal with them as they came, but they’d never been absent, not entirely, except perhaps in his first fifteen months, which he would never remember. Now with the cessation of them, he found he didn’t know quite what to do. Maybe that was why he’d thrown himself bodily into his plans. Maybe, if he kept moving forever, he wouldn’t have to think.

What would fix this? What could ever possibly help?

He wasn’t used to thinking of his own thoughts and feelings and help in the same sentence. No matter what angle he approached it from, he came up short. He imagined throwing things at walls, breaking some of Grimmauld’s precious and horrible antiques. He imagined clearing out the attic, swearing at pixies, having his clothes covered in dust. Tearing wallpaper off in strips. Getting drunk enough with his friends that he could talk about himself without wanting to bite his own tongue, or else finding a very high hill and screaming off it until his lungs gave out.

It was very late, or very early, and none of those seemed like things he could do at this hour, but he knew he was never going to fall asleep, so he rose, instead, and went to the kitchen, hoping Kreacher had remembered to buy more yeast. He would replace one impossible thing with another.

-

“Have you slept at all?”

“No,” said Harry, straightening his robes. “Merlin. You sound like Hermione.”

“I can tell by your hair,” sniffed Hesper. “I despair of it—”

Harry ignored her. “Can we go over my lines again?”

“It’s not a play.”

“It’s as good as,” Harry said, about to shrug until Hesper narrowed her eyes at him.

“Fine. ‘If it pleases the Chief Warlock—'”

“Do I have to lead with that? It sounds like a marriage ceremony.”

“Hardly, much less threat of bloodshed. Or would it be offer? Depends on the ceremony—”

“I really, really wonder about your family.”

“Stop distracting me. ‘If it pleases the Chief Warlock, I, Harry James Potter, would like to declare my intention…”

-

“…before this court of esteemed witches and wizards, to claim that which is my birthright.”

Harry stood, his back ramrod straight, before the entire Wizengamot. He was glad he’d eventually conceded to have Hesper teach him the posture-correcting charm applied to that awful chair in the sitting room. With the dozens of eyes boring into him, the instinct to slouch would have otherwise been irresistible.

Tiberius Ogden didn’t bat an eye, although the court around him broke out in a new wave of whispers. They’d begun whispering the moment the moment the clerk at the door announced his presence, but that, of course, had been his goal all along.

“The Wizengamot welcomes you, Harry Potter. You may claim your seat – unless the court holds any objections?”

Objections, he’d learned, were technically allowed, however rare. He couldn’t be stopped from claiming his seat outright, but with reasonable basis or proof, someone could call for him to have to prove his identity or his right to claim and delay him that way. Thankfully, no one did – a merit, he supposed, of everyone knowing exactly who he was – and so after a moment’s pause punctuated only by the odd whisper louder than the others in the room, Ogden waved Harry away, and he went.

When discussing this day with the others, the matter of seating had come up. Harry wanted to present a sort of united front, which necessitated his group sitting together, but doing so meant finding an empty block to occupy.

Luckily, there was Draco Malfoy (and there was a sentence Harry never thought he would think). Malfoy had no need to claim his seat with the others – he already had it. Apparently his mother had taken it on when Lucius Malfoy was sent to Azkaban two years prior and had never given it back, and she had passed it to Draco in recent months after their private sentencing with the Aurors and Minister for Magic had placed her under something resembling house arrest. He had explained to Harry through gritted teeth that his own current social standing (nonexistent) meant that he was given a very wide berth, and Harry took advantage of that now to sit in the veritable sea of empty seats around him.

He didn’t sit directly next to him – a few talks’ worth of reasonable non-hostility wouldn’t have him stomaching that – but he did sit a few seats just over, in the section to Malfoy’s left.

A new round of whispers broke out and Harry looked blithely around the amassed court as if he couldn’t possibly imagine anything strange about sitting a stone’s throw away from his known enemy. Malfoy, for his part, looked like someone had shat in his boots, which was of course so normal a look for him no one would notice a difference.

“If there’s nothing else,” Ogden said, voice magically amplified to speak over the susurrus of the court, “we’ll begin proceedings.”

“I’m afraid there is,” came a voice from the back of the chambers. “If I may have a word, Chief Warlock.”

The forty-odd heads of the Wizengamot seemed to turn as one towards the disturbance and Harry bit the inside of his cheek to keep from grinning. Ogden frowned, and a ripple of irritation spread through the Wizengamot, somehow palpable, however subdued. “You may,” the Chief Warlock finally allowed to the figure at the back, “Mr…”

“Longbottom,” Neville supplied, wholly unphased. Harry gave him a subtle look of approval. He glanced, too, towards the doors, where the clerk who had announced his presence had disappeared. No one else seemed to have noticed.

“Go ahead, then, Mr. Longbottom.”

Neville nodded, and taking several steps forward until he was at a respectful distance from the head of the court, began the same spiel Harry had given. “If it pleases the Chief Warlock…”

Ogden looked as though he might be catching on that there was something afoot, but he allowed it, giving the court the same moment to object and then waving Neville away. Neville, for his part, strode straight to Harry and took a seat at his right.

Harry spared him a quick grin. The court hadn’t erupted into shouting, yet, but everyone seemed visibly annoyed at the disruption. An elderly wizard Harry thought he recalled from his own trial was pointing animatedly at him and muttering something to the witch on his left, and Harry met his eyes and gave him the most innocent look he could manage.

“If the court could please regain its composure,” came Ogden’s amplified voice again, “We can—”

“I’m sorry to interrupt,” came a third voice from the doorway, “but I have a statement I’d like to make, too.”

“Don’t tell me,” said Tiberius Ogden, with a note of what was either exhaustion or amusement in his voice, “you wish to claim your seat, Miss Bones.”

“I do, yes,” said Susan, smiling politely. She had a calm, firm voice and seemed perfectly at ease – and she would, of course, be recognizable to most of the Wizengamot, given her aunt’s former position. That was why she’d come third: Harry was first, to throw people off-balance, and Neville was second, because he was so easily overlooked, and Susan would lull them back to a moment of complacency, because she looked and sounded as though she unquestionably belonged.

“Let’s get this over with, then,” Ogden said.

Ogden was taking this better than they’d accounted for, Harry thought. His most recent research had reminded him of where he’d heard the man’s name before – he was one of two Wizengamot members who’d stepped down when Dumbledore was removed as Chief Warlock and Fudge named Dolores Umbridge Hogwarts’ High Inquisitor. He’d returned after the war and, being one of the oldest members remaining, had been named Chief himself, which made sense given the Ministry’s general desire to pretend that nothing prior to these last few months had ever happened.

Considering that he’d taken the moral high ground once before, maybe it wasn’t so surprising that he seemed to be humoring their lot now. Harry wondered absently if he were opposed to what the Wizengamot was doing with the trials. The Chief Warlock served, largely, as an impartial body, so perhaps he did but couldn’t do anything about it.                     

“Now we can finally begin,” Ogden said when his back-and forth with Susan was complete. “Unless there’s anyone else coming forward to claim a seat—"

“Actually,” came the mild voice of Hannah Abbot from the back of the chambers. “There is.”

Harry had to bite his lip to keep from snorting at the double-take the court seemed to do, as a collective whole, when they realized that Hannah had come in, and with an entire group behind her, at that. Their attention had been so focused on Susan they hadn’t even noticed.

Harry thought he heard someone say “this is most unusual!” and Neville, from beside him, elbowed him gently in the side to stop him from laughing.

“Hannah Abbot,” said Hannah succinctly.

“Your seat is granted,” said Ogden, who looked rather tired. “Are these…”

“Would it be easier to list all our names at once?” asked Luna where she stood at the center of the chambers below, as if this were only concerned about any inconvenience their number might cause. Ogden said nothing, busily glaring around the court, whose noise level had risen well above a whisper. “I’m Luna Lovegood, on behalf of the Alchin seat, “and this is Roger Davies, Elenore Moon, and—"

“We know who they are,” frowned a woman in the second row.

In the chamber below, a dark-haired girl straightened her shoulders and tossed her hair over one, and the boy beside her examined his nails as though he was wasting his time entirely by being there. “Pansy Parkinson,” the girl said, “and Theodore Nott, Jr.”

“Ogden!” one of the elder wizards called out, “you can’t really mean to welcome in these – war criminals.”

Harry definitely heard a “well, I never!” that time.

“I was under the impression,” Harry said very clearly, with a voice that could cut through anything, “that this would hardly be the first time.”

“Must you?” muttered Neville under the rush of noise that followed as the Wizengamot made their protest clear.

“Can’t have them getting kicked out now,” muttered Harry back. “Anyway, it’s bloody hypocritical, isn’t it? One of the Averys is here, and Crabbe’s…mother?” He squinted at the last. Either Crabbe’s mother or a troll in a wig, but he was loathe to do much investigation.

“But Parkinson and Nott aren’t in the position to be paying people off, yeah, I know.” The suggestion to add Malfoy to their number had been Neville’s, but even he had been uncertain about agreeing to take in whoever Malfoy could rustle up, and for good reason – Nott was available because his father was in a Ministry holding cell, and Parkinson’s was, too, and her mother was unwilling or unable to join the Wizengamot when she intended to testify in his defense next week instead.

In reality, Harry found Parkinson intolerable and Nott unspeakably snotty, but their presence was suitably distracting, and then there was the issue of numbers.

“Consider your seats granted,” Ogden was saying over the chaos. “And please, before this court can be led any further astray, take them.”

“There is one more thing, Chief Warlock,” said Susan Bones, who had still not retired to her spot in the benches. “We’d also like to declare the founding of a party.”

“…your leader?” asked Ogden, who looked like he knew perfectly well what would come next.

“Harry Potter,” said Susan.

“You need eleven members,” said the woman to his right.

A delicate sound came – a cleared throat, a shuffle of robes – which somehow made its presence known over the rampant muttering. “I’m the eleventh,” said Malfoy from his seat. He looked as though he very much wished lightning would strike him down at the announcement.

What happened, instead, was that Tiberius Ogden shot sparks from his wand to quiet the growing uproar in the court.

Harry leaned back in his seat, giving in to his urge to laugh under his breath as the procession of new Wizengamot members made their way up the stairs.

“This is so much fun,” Luna whispered to him as she passed. “Let’s do it again.”

-

The meeting itself had passed without much else of note – discussion of the upcoming war trials was not on the agenda that day, but then, they’d known that going in. Harry could’ve brought forth a motion, if he wanted, to make changes to the decisions that were already in place, but he’d gone over that strategy and dismissed it. They didn’t have anything close to a majority. They’d be outvoted, and it wouldn’t serve any purpose except to prematurely show their hand.

What they’d done instead was cause so much chaos with their little parade that the members of the Wizengamot seemed unable to focus on those mundane matters that were up for debate that day - they kept breaking off to make over-loud comments or look at Harry like they thought they could set him on fire with their eyes.

“Really, I expected more decorum,” sniffed Parkinson, and for a moment she was almost bearable.

 And now, thought Harry, as the session adjourned, they go home and tell their families, who tell their friends…

Now, in other words, it was time to wait.

Proof.

And whatever rose out of this process was sure to be interesting.

-

He didn’t have to wait very long. It was just the next day when Malfoy, of all people, called him over the floo. He almost didn’t believe Kreacher when he announced it, but when he arrived in the sitting room, there indeed was his pointy head.

“Potter,” said Malfoy.

“Malfoy,” said Harry.

“Skeeter has contacted me asking if I’d like to give an interview to the Prophet about your stunt at the Ministry yesterday. I was surprised she reached out to me and not you or one of your minions. And—“ he trailed off. “You aren’t, clearly.”

Harry frowned. “No, it’s not exactly a surprise, considering – well. Hang on. Do you want to come through? I need to call Hermione.”

“Granger? What do you need the – fuck’s sake, whatever, yes. I’ll come through.” With a pop of flame and ash, Malfoy appeared on Harry’s hearth.

“Ergh,” he said, taking in the room around him. “I suspected you lived in a hovel, Potter, but really…”

“It’s the Black house,” snapped Harry back. “So it’s your mother’s family’s hovel.”

Malfoy wrinkled his nose.

“If you’re nice, I’ll have Kreacher bring us tea,” said Harry. “Sit down while I call Hermione.” He turned his back to do just that, stoking the fire and calling out for the Burrow, where he knew her to be staying.

“Remind me again why we need Granger?” drawled Malfoy, who’d sprawled out on the only good sofa.

“Skeeter,” said Harry. “She can handle her. Remember fourth year? When your little friends were giving her your crap interviews?”

Malfoy did not deign to reply, but Harry took the particular new scowl to mean “yes”.

“Well, Hermione – er, caught her at something, then. She’s sort of had a bit of leverage over her ever since. So Skeeter’s probably afraid of coming to us directly.”

“Harry?” asked Hermione, poking her head through the fire.

“Yeah. Can you come by?” he asked. “Malfoy’s here,” he added quickly.

“Coming,” she said, and Harry stepped back as she made her entrance. “Malfoy,” she said icily to the blonde barnacle on Harry’s sofa. He didn’t deign to reply.

“Malfoy’s just heard from Skeeter. She wants to write an article. We probably ought to, er, talk to her? To make sure it comes out how we want.”

“Skeeter has a mind of her own,” said Malfoy. “No matter what I say to her, she’s going to put her spin on things.”

“Oh, I think we can handle that,” said Hermione perfunctorily. “There’s just the question of what we want her to say—”

“Sorry,” said Malfoy, who didn’t at all sound it, “but could you tell me what exactly you’ve done that has Skeeter willing to listen to you?”

Hermione waffled. “Well, it wasn’t… I mean. I really didn’t intend—”

“Hermione trapped her in a jar,” said Harry, butting in, “and imprisoned her for a bit. She’s an illegal beetle animagus,” he added at Malfoy’s look.

“Well, again, I didn’t mean—” began Hermione.

“Granger,” said Malfoy slowly, rising from the couch, “don’t say anything. I almost respect you, right now, and for our working relationship I’d like to hold onto that.”

Harry ducked away before Hermione could voice her outrage, off to find a quill and parchment so that they could reply to Skeeter’s letter.

-

POTTER’S PLOTTERS TAKE WIZENGAMOT BY STORM

By Rita Skeeter

Dear Readers –

Those of you with friends and family among our esteemed Wizengamot may already have heard that the Boy-Who-Lived, Harry Potter, was recently named leader of a Wizengamot party after leading a group of fellow young people, aged 17 to 20, into an unconventional interruption of a standard session in which ten new members claimed their seats.  

According to esteemed Prophet correspondent, Draco Malfoy, their goals are noble: Hero Potter and his young friends want to ensure that the upcoming Death Eater trials are conducted fairly, and that justice is served.

“We’re also opposed to the re-introduction of the Dementors,” added war heroine Hermione Granger. “Their effects on the psyche are irreversible and cruel, and victims of the Dementor’s Kiss continue to occupy Azkaban cells and require use of other Ministry resources until their eventual deaths.” See more of Miss Granger’s research on Dementors on page 4.

Naïve? Perhaps. But one must wonder if Potter and his friends don’t have a point: after all, we’re only as good as our actions in the worst of circumstances—

“It,” said Ron slowly, around a mouthful of experimental pumpkin pie, “…could be worse?”

“She actually did manage to say what we wanted her to,” agreed Harry.

“Did Hermione really threaten to put her in a jar again?”

“Ron, I don’t know. She’s the craziest woman I’ve ever met. Never break up with her.”

-

It wasn’t always the first period waiting that got Harry, when he baked. It was the second period, the third, depending on the recipe.

Waiting after Skeeter’s article felt like that. There was another article by a second writer, a rebuttal of sorts, who called their incident in the Wizengamot a disrespectful disturbance, and an opinion piece, and a letter to the editor, but it was difficult to tell, at first, if anyone was taking them seriously.

Luckily, it wasn’t long before something happened to prove that people certainly were – although not at all in the way they’d planned or expected.

-

It was Saturday, and they were planning their actions at the start of the trials that coming Monday when a sharp voice came from somewhere in the shadows of the room.

“Harry!”

 He glanced around, confused as to its source.

“Er,” Ron said. “It’s that – painting? By the bookcase? There’s a girl—”

Oh, thought Harry, who turned and locked eyes with Hesper Black, who’d appeared in a picture which had previously been a landscape of heathered moorland. He approached it. “Um… yes?”

“There’s something happening at the Ministry,” she said. “I thought you ought to know.”

“The Ministry?” frowned Harry. “How do you—”

She cut him off impatiently. “Cygnus Black – one of many – is a former Minister; he has a portrait in the primary office. And Cygnus, of course, keeps up with Phineas – Phineas Nigellus? He was a Hogwarts headmaster.”

“Yes, we know,” said Harry. “I mean, we’ve met.”

“Mm, he did mention that, yes. Right – well, Phineas does update me, now and then. He’s heard of my recent political interests and thought I might want to know about this.”

“This being….”

“I was getting to that, wasn’t I? This being a disturbance in the Minister’s office this evening. They called an emergency Wizengamot session—”

“What?” That was Hermione. “But none of you were notified!”

“They don’t have to notify everyone,” said Susan Bones, who was now leaning forward with interest. “An emergency session only needs fifteen members.”

“That’s rubbish,” said Harry.

“Can I continue?” asked Hesper.

“Yes, yeah, sorry – go on. Emergency session…”

“With regards to the Minister,” she said. “They brought up the question of whether or not he had been compromised—”

“Wait, what?” asked Harry. Compromised wasn’t a word he thought of in connection with Kingsley.

“Oh no,” said Hermione quietly. She seemed to be catching on to something.

“There were records of him having met with you not long before your – ah, excursion in the court. And then, of course, there was his previous association with Albus Dumbledore, and a vigilante group. They asked if he could be properly considered neutral, and, if not, if he should be allowed to keep his post.”

“But that’s bullshit,” Harry said, “and they can’t just kick him out.”

“Yes,” said Hermione, “they can.”

“Because he’s an interim Minister,” said Neville. “She’s right – they can technically vote him out at anytime. He wasn’t elected by the public.”

“Was,” said Ron grimly. “Was an interim minister. Right?”

“Right,” said Hesper. “The vote was twelve to three. He’s out.”

Harry leaned back on the sofa, his head spinning. They didn’t need Kingsley as Minister – not for anything they had planned. But he felt overwhelmed and guilty at the idea that he might’ve lost the man his post. That had decidedly not been on the agenda.

“So what now?” Neville was asking from the other side of the room.

“It doesn’t technically affect what we’re doing,” Ron said, “but it’ll be chaos if your party’s blamed for it.”

The room fell into a hush as they contemplated Ron’s words.

“Why, exactly,” asked Hermione, who’d moved to stand near Hesper in the landscape, “does Phineas Nigellus Black come to update you on ministry goings-on?”

“Well, it’s the least he can do, isn’t it? His father did kill me.”

“What?” said Hermione.

“Oh!” said Harry, happy for the distraction, “Licorus!” Of course, he’d been Phineas Nigellus’ father, hadn’t he?

“You’re saying that Phineas Nigellus Black’s father…killed you?”

“To be more accurate,” said Hesper politely, peering out at a distraught Hermione, “he was my brother. Phineas is my nephew, of course – and he wouldn’t want it getting out about Licorus, you can’t imagine the shame on the family, so.”

“But he was a headmaster,” murmured Hermione.

“Oh yes, he went on to do great things – you see what I meant, Harry, about it being for the best Licorus wasn’t arrested. We’d never have had a headmaster in the family, otherwise.”

“I—” Hermione squawked.

“Hermione,” Harry said, “try not to think about it; it’s what I do.” He turned back to Hesper. “Thank you,” he said. “If he tells you anything else…”

“I’ll let you know,” she agreed, readily. “Best of luck,” she added, and then darted out of the frame presumably to speak with someone.

-

“If we can get the right angle on this,” said Theodore Nott, who had finally consented to come to Grimmauld Place now that things were – in his words – “getting good”, “then it’ll actually work out perfectly.”

“People hate when the Ministry seems to be overstepping its bounds,” agreed Parkinson. “You’re right – if we frame this correctly, they’ll riot.”

“I’m not sure we want a riot,” said Ron, who was watching their exchange skeptically. Hermione had had the idea to invite the former Slytherins over as they engaged in damage control. They seemed overall to be taking to the role.

“Don’t you?” asked Parkinson, turning to Harry. Nott, whose perpetual look of boredom seemed to have been replaced with one of vague amusement, snorted.

“Maybe,” said Harry, who was very tired, “a really small riot.”

“Then I think you ought to talk to Skeeter, again. Have Granger threaten her.”

“You know about that?” Harry asked her, glancing over his shoulder. Hermione and Malfoy had retreated to a corner to collaborate, which was frankly horrifying.

Parkinson sniffed. “I know all sorts of things. I know,” she added, with a bloodthirsty sheen to her eyes, “that it was really, really foolish of them to try and pull this.”

“I don’t know about that,” said Harry. “They’ve got Kingsley out of office – and he sympathized with me.”

“Shacklebolt,” said Parkinson, “has a seat that he hadn’t claimed – probably thought it was a conflict of interest, or some rot. And now that they’ve tossed them out on his ear, I’d bet anything he’s going to speak out at the trials. And anyway – as of now? We have no Minister. It isn’t wartime – they can’t install an emergency interim candidate, they’ll have to hold a vote. And that takes time, and energy—”

“Time and energy that can’t go towards doing anything about you,” said Nott.

“Oh,” said Harry.

“Oh, indeed. If you can get this into the papers by tomorrow morning, into the Sunday Edition—”

“Oh,” Harry said. “Yeah. We’d better hurry.”

-

Sunday morning rose and Harry regretted having cancelled his subscription to the Prophet after he’d gotten tired of them writing about him. He would, he thought, have to wait until someone called or appeared with their copy – but he had little doubt that someone would.

Ron and Hermione had stayed the night and were sleeping somewhere in the guest rooms of Grimmauld Place when the ungodly doorbell of the house rang out. Harry, who had woken up early and was in the process of making scones, put his work under a stasis spell and wiped flour on his apron as he made his way to the door.

“I’ve brought the post,” said the person on the other side, smiling.

“Luna?” asked Harry. She hadn’t been who he was expecting to arrive, certainly. “You’re meant to be at Hogwarts.”

“Oh,” she said airly, “am I? I do forget, sometimes – but now that I’m here, I might as well come in.”

“Might as well,” he agreed, and stepped aside to let her enter.

“I love what you’ve done with the place,” she said as she glanced around the receiving hall.

“Er – I haven’t really done much,” said Harry, scratching at his ear.

“I wouldn’t say that,” she said, smiling. “Are your scones ready?”

“How did you..." he began, before deciding it wasn't worth worrying over. "Let’s go to the kitchen.” He was impatient to see the paper she had tucked under one arm but knew it wouldn’t do any good to ask to see it until she was ready. Luna was unfortunately allergic to urgency.

He didn’t have to wait overlong, luckily – she handed him the paper in exchange for a warm scone.

PUBLIC OUTRAGE OVER MINISTER SHACKLEBOLT’S DISPOSAL, the headline read.

“Are they outraged, I wonder?” Harry murmured, scanning the article. He caught several phrases in it that had to be Hermione’s work. No one else used the words “overstepping” and “miscarriage of justice” that readily.

“People are very suggestible,” supplied Luna. There was clotted cream on her nose.

“Tell them they’re outraged and they will be,” he inferred.

“Mm – oh, and there’s this, of course,” she added, sliding him something else.

“What is it?” he frowned, finding his name in a messy scrawl on the front.

“A letter, I think,” she said, licking jam off the back of her hand.

“Yes, but – oh, nevermind,” he said, tearing it open.

Potter, it read.

Might’ve escaped your attention, but my brother had to have had a seat to be Chief Warlock. Meaning, obviously, that I have a seat now.

Fifty odd seats, forty that anyone bothers claiming, split three ways - and that means twelve can be enough to throw a vote. Not to say I’ll be the last to join you. I’d keep an eye out.

Oh, and Lovegood says you haven’t got an owl. Get one.

I’ll see you Monday.

-AD

Harry blinked as he finished reading the letter. “Sorry, did – Aberforth give you this?”

“Oh, yes,” said Luna.

“You talked to him.”

“Yes,” she said, blinking. “I find his floo comes in handy.”

“He’s – joining us?”

“I believe so,” she said. “About the owl…”

“I’ll... consider it,” he said, grimacing. The idea of replacing Hedwig burnt a hole in his chest, but he could see where it might be useful.

“Oh, no, I was only going to say that flamingos are often overlooked as post birds.”

-

Of all the letters he received that day – and there were, as Aberforth predicted, many; so many that Neville showed up with his own owl so that Harry could write replies – perhaps the strangest of all was hand-delivered by Malfoy himself.

“My mother,” he said, thrusting forth something on expensive-looking cream stationary, “asked me to give you this.”

He looked incredibly displeased.

“What is it?” Harry asked.

“Generally to find out the content of letters, one reads them.”

Harry rolled his eyes, but, of course, he did.

“…is she serious about this?” he asked a moment later.

“Unfortunately.”

“She wants to give me the Black seat.”

“Yes. You’ll have to have someone sit it for you, obviously; you can’t sit two seats yourself.” 

“Yes, no, I know that, but… why?”

Malfoy grimaced and inspected his fingernails. “Are you going to take it, or not? I assumed you’d elect Granger, or something—”

“What? Yes. Obviously I’m going to take it, I just…”

“Her cousin did leave you his properties. Her sister would be preferable, but she was legally disowned, which takes more time to reverse.”

Harry stared at the letter for a moment longer. “Tomorrow is going to be really strange,” he said finally.

-

Chapter Text

It was wildly, abundantly clear that the fifteen-member minority of the Wizengamot who ousted Kingsley had not expected Harry or any of the members of his party to find out before Monday. It was equally clear that they hadn’t expected the details of their emergency meeting to be made public on the Prophet’s biggest news day of the week. The anteroom outside the Wizengamot chambers was swarmed with reporters, all jostling one another and shouting as they asked the members present for quotes. Some of the stodgiest-looking members looked very flustered indeed, noted Harry, and Rita Skeeter looked like all her Christmases had come at once.

“I’ll bet they’re regretting starting with the open trials now,” said Susan with a note of amusement.

“They probably thought it’d comfort people,” shrugged Ernie.

“Or bore them,” said Neville.

Harry saw Hermione approach Rita with what looked like a textbook’s worth of notes in her hands. “I think it’s going well,” he said.

“Don’t speak too soon,” said Luna brightly. Harry jumped, not having noticed her come in. “There’s always time for it to descend into chaos.”

“You shouldn’t sound so pleased about that.”

“I thought we wanted chaos?” said Ginny, appearing behind him just as Luna had. Harry jumped again.

“Merlin, do you two trade tips?”

“Don’t be silly. Anyway, I’m quite pleased to be Ms… ah?”

“Thimble,” supplied Harry, who had already spent enough time thinking about the ridiculous name of the witch whose seat Ginny would be sitting by proxy. There were a number of people doing that, today. The letters kept coming in from witches and wizards offering up their seats for the – well, cause, even if Harry wasn’t sure quite what that was exactly. And it seemed not to matter – there were an apparently endless stream of people who were put off by the Wizengamot for some reason or another and out of spite or interest or sheer boredom were willing to let anyone Harry’s lot could rustle up use their seats.

“Thimble,” Ginny repeated, clearly trying her best to keep a straight face. “Right, yes. That. Do these robes make me look pretentious enough?”

“…Actually—” frowned Harry, squinting at them.

“Parvati lent them to me,” she said.

“Explains a lot.”

“’Lo, Potter!” said a cheerful Justin Finch-Fletchley, who was taking the seat of some obscure uncle of Ernie’s. “Zacharias is around here somewhere – I think he might be giving a word to the press.”

“Why doesn’t that surprise me?” muttered Harry darkly.

“And speaking of giving a word to the press,” said Hermione, suddenly.

“Oh, for- all three of you—”

“Rita wants to talk to you,” said Hermione, undaunted. “You did promise her a brief interview.”

 “I did,” agreed Harry grimly, steeling himself to speak with the woman in question.

“You defeated Voldemort,” Ginny reminded him pointedly. “She can’t possibly be any worse.”

“I’m not sure about that,” he replied, but he made his way over to where Rita and her omnipresent photographer stood.

-

“So, Harry,” Rita Skeeter purred, “I’ve heard you’ve added more members to your little party.”

“A few," he said, trying his best not to look as annoyed as he felt. "Some are claiming seats, some are just here serving by proxy. But yeah, our numbers have grown.”

 “And aren’t many of those serving by proxy are muggleborn witches and wizards still at Hogwarts?” said Rita, who Harry knew full well had a complete list, because he’d mailed her a copy when he mailed one to the Wizengamot clerk the previous night. He rolled his eyes. She seemed not to notice. “Are you worried about the… controversy?”

“No,” he said firmly. “I think they’ll add diversity to the court, which it desperately needs.”

“And what about some of the others – like Pansy Parkinson? She tried to turn you over to You-Know-Who during the Battle of Hogwarts, didn’t she?”

“Parkinson and I have talked about that,” said Harry, though they’d done no such thing. “She was frightened at the time and she acted under duress. I don’t hold it against her.” That, at least, was partly true – he wasn’t sure if he forgave Pansy Parkinson, exactly, but he also wasn’t interested in holding a grudge against a teenaged girl who’d, in the end, never so much as pointed a wand at him. Their issues, like those he held with Malfoy, were not to be solved in the court or the press. Maybe someday he’d speak with her. He only hoped she didn’t curse him when she saw this quote in the paper.

“And you aren’t concerned about her loyalty? Her father is facing charges, after all – as are the fathers of two of your other members.”

“They’d have the right to claim their seats with or without my party,” Harry pointed out as mildly as he could. “The way I see it, we’re just exploiting one of the Wizengamot’s biggest flaws.”

“And what is that, exactly?” Rita asked, leaning forward with her parchment and quill, eyes gleaming with the particular look of a predator about to bare its claws.

“That the seats are hereditary,” he shrugged. “It doesn’t matter what someone’s done – so long as they have the right name, they get to come in here and vote on legislature and decide the fate of accused criminals and determine the future of magical Britain. It seems to me that’s a privilege you ought to have to earn – it shouldn’t be a right just because you’re born into a particular family.”

“And what would you do to change that?” Rita asked. “If you could,” she added, with her saccharine smile.

“Either make it so that people have to be voted into their seats or do away with it altogether,” he shrugged.

“You’re suggesting abolishing one of our oldest institutions,” Rita said with false surprise. He knew it was false, because Hermione would’ve already gone over their agenda with her.

“I’m suggesting it’s due for a change,” said Harry, grinning in a way he hoped was daring but not over-threatening. Rita’s photographer snapped a picture. He blinked at the light of the flash, and then, sparing him further questioning, the court clerk announced that it was time for the Wizengamot to file into their chambers.

-

To Harry’s surprise, as they took their seats, something else become immediately clear: that Tiberius Ogden had not been notified of last night’s emergency meeting, either.

He knew that was a possibility, of course - the Chief Warlock, explained Hesper, with the odd comment from Neville, was not necessarily required to be present for motions to pass. He did not, after all, have a vote himself – his presence existed to ensure regular sessions were conducted smoothly.

And now the Chief Warlock, thought Harry, looked furious. He loomed at the front of the court, occasionally casting sharp looks at the woman who sat to his left, who seemed to be speaking to him, or perhaps summarizing – she held a sheath of paper.

Well. He could only hope that worked out in their favor.

In the brief pause before proceedings as the newest members claimed their roles, Harry allowed himself a quick headcount. They had over twenty people, now – a respectable number. Enough to throw votes.

Perhaps it was the tension from the upcoming trials, or Ogden’s obvious mood, or perhaps they were simply growing tired of interruptions, but those members of the Wizengamot who’d seemed outraged at their group’s first stunt in the court weren’t containing themselves to angry muttering, now. As what seemed like a quarter of the old DA filed in, the old witches and wizards who watched talked loudly amongst themselves and gave Harry dirty looks he met with a cheerful grin.

“What a nasty lot of wastes of magic they are,” snorted Aberforth Dumbledore as he slid into a seat at Harry’s right.

Harry blinked. “Didn’t see you come in.”

Aberforth shrugged. “Met with Tiberius beforehand. He agreed to let me take my seat privately. Not much of one for a fuss, if I can help it.”

“I didn’t know you two knew each other.”

“His family makes whiskey,” said Aberforth. “I sell whiskey.”

“…right. Well, er. Thanks for coming.”

“Still surprised?”

“A bit.”

Aberforth gave him a mischievous look, resembling his late brother very much for a moment. “Wouldn’t miss this for anything,” he said.

-

Harry was glad, in a way, that the trials were structured the way they were, with the people facing the lightest charges coming up first. It meant people like Amycus and Alecto Carrow were days away, and his friends had time to prepare before facing them.

On the other hand, it meant sitting through trials for people accused of things like selling a bit of information to a Death Eater during the war before they arrived at anything approaching interesting.

Then again, there were still opportunities in these for Harry’s group to make a nuisance of themselves.

“Do you have any evidence of this alleged conversation?” Hermione was asking the interviewing witch.

“Mr. Bole’s conversation with Mr. Harper—"

“I mean actual evidence, unless Mr. Harper is willing to show the court his memories or take a truth potion to verify his word.”

“Miss Granger has a point,” said a vindictive-looking Tiberius Ogden. “Madame Humphrey, do you have evidence to provide?”

Harry leaned back and watched bemusedly. He was pretty sure the man in question was guilty, actually – either that, or he was just naturally sort of unsavory looking – but at least they were being forced to prove it.

-

After four trials which went much the same as that first, the Chief Warlock called a recess. Harry stayed right where he was, afraid to leave his seat and run into the reporters once more. He busied himself tallying, instead. The last trial, where the claims against the accused had been proven with a testimony given under Veritaserum, had ended in a vote of 40 to 7, guilty to not. Most of them had been about the same. He was admittedly a little relieved that none of the attendees glaring daggers at his party seemed willing to vote contrary to clear evidence just to spite them. The given sentences had even been within the bounds of reason, so far – fines, probation, and a few brief Azkaban terms – though maybe that was only because Ogden loomed over the court like a wrathful god. Harry was privately amused by it.

At the last minute, just as the recess was officially adjourned, someone slipped up the stairs and into the section where Harry and his party sat.

“Oh,” said Harry. “Hello, sir. I wasn't expecting you."

By the new wave of whispers that went around the reassembling court, neither was anyone else.

“I ran a bit late,” said an entirely unruffled Kingsley Shacklebolt. “I had business to attend to. Do you mind if I join you?” Although they’d have had to add him to their list before the day’s session began to officially make him a member of their party, the gesture still spoke volumes, and Harry wasn’t quite sure what to say.

“Erm, no. Go ahead,” he said, finally. “Are you…alright?” He didn’t know how to phrase “I am very sorry if I had anything to do with your losing your job” politely.

“Oh, just fine,” said Kingsley amiably. “I just returned from a meeting with Gawain Robards.”

“The Head Auror?”

“Yes. He’s agreed to give me my old position back.”

Harry blinked slowly. He was sure that was significant, somehow.

“He’s also agreed,” said Kingsley, “that reinstating the Dementors would be a waste of Auror time.”

“How much of a waste?”

“Too much to be bothering with.”

Harry’s eyebrows shot to his forehead. “Oh. Wow. Well – thanks,” he said.

“Don’t thank me,” said Kingsley. “If I’d stayed on as Minister, I would’ve done away with those things entirely at some point.”

“I’m sorry—” Harry started.

“Don’t,” said Kingsley. “The people deserve a Minister they’ve elected, anyway. I’m glad we have a chance to do things the right way.”

“That’s very noble of you, sir,” said Hermione, who was watching their exchange with eagle eyes.

“Lot of that going around, these days,” agreed Aberforth.

-

The first day ended with six guilty verdicts and one not. The press in the stands reached a fever pitch as the proceedings continued – over Harry’s group calling for concrete evidence, and taking turns asking pointed questions – and the members of the court, there at the end, hadn’t been much better. There had been Aurors at the door to help usher the Wizengamot away at the end of the day, and one of them had caught Harry’s eye and winked.

Harry went home with his head still ringing. He felt full of adrenaline and something else – that feeling one gets when they stand on the edge of a precipice. If he were less used to falling off of brooms, he might not even have recognized it. As it was, he wondered what the precipice might be – or, perhaps, what lay beyond the fall – but he also recognized that as something that didn’t bear speculating on, yet, and so he headed to the kitchen and opened a cookbook to a random page: Bumbleberry Sponge.

“Kreacher,” he called out. The house elf popped into the room and scowled fiercely when he saw Harry’s reading material. “Whatever a bumbleberry is, could you get—” he glanced down, “—200 of them? And butter – I think we’re out.”

Kreacher wrinkled his nose and vanished again with a pop.

It took three tries to get the butter softened, but not melted, and his sponge collapsed twice. He learned a spell to reverse it.

Bumbleberries, as it turned out, were striped. They buzzed softly when you bit into them.

He felt a bit like Alice in Wonderland as he ate his cake. Sometimes he wondered at the fact that he lived in a world where berries could be bees, where you fell down rabbit holes, where logic twisted and turned and took strange new forms. He could only hope he was playing his game correctly.

-

“Maybe you shouldn’t have been so—blunt? With Skeeter, yesterday,” whispered Neville as they waited outside the courtroom. The headlines that morning had been sensational, all POTTER WANTS TO DESTROY THE WIZENGAMOT! and worse. A handful of smaller publications had run quotes from Zach Smith, all predictably terrible, but Hermione had approached just as many of them with an array of statistics on the makeup of the court, past scandals, and previous trial outcomes.

The Quibbler had run a piece on Harry’s quest to uncover the Rotfang conspiracy within the legislative system, which Harry was really starting to suspect was actually a complex metaphor for something.

“Well, we did plan it that way,” Harry whispered back. “People wouldn’t trust it if I were vague. They know I tend to—er.”

“Say everything that pops into your head?”

“Hullo, Ron. Didn’t know you were coming.”

Ron shrugged. “Still public trials, today. I’ll be in the viewing area – heard Nott’s father’s one of the ones going up today. Should be interesting.”

“Yeah, mostly on charges of – whatsit, collusion? And escaping Azkaban, of course. Apparently, he’s not accused of murdering anyone,” said Neville, “Fancy that.”

“Aiding and abetting,” recited Harry, “And I’m going to murder his son if he doesn’t show his smarmy face, soon,” he muttered, peering around the antechamber. He reckoned Nott was probably meeting with his father’s solicitor, or something, but this was the one day his not showing up would look bad on them. “Wait,” he said, squinting at a familiar figure, “is that – Professor Flitwick?”

Neville nodded. “He accompanied the lot coming in from Hogwarts – I believe Professor McGonagall’s exact words were ‘if Potter’s going to steal half my school, I’m sending a professor to chaperone them’.”

“Why is everyone blaming me?” asked Harry. “I haven’t approached anyone all week, they’re all writing and coming to me – Floo’s been going off the hook; I think Kreacher’s going to lose it.”

“Kreacher hasn’t got anything to lose,” said Ron. “And anyway, you’re the face of it, aren’t you?”

Hermione chose that moment to show up and give Harry an apprehensive once-over. “And the hair of it – Harry, honestly, could you—”

“Hermione. Leave it alone! Anyway, Hesper already made me try all the hair charms in the library. She’s convinced it’s a bloodline curse, now.”

“Sounds right,” said Ron. “Oh, look, it’s starting!”

They filed into the courtroom, Harry swatting Hermione’s hands away and nodding at everyone, members of his group and of the audience alike, that waved to him.

-

There was a decidedly different energy in the courtroom that day. If yesterday people had been vocal in their displeasure, now they were simply vocal, period. The attending audience shuffled in their seats and talked fervently amongst themselves, and the flashbulbs of cameras went off every few seconds, the press seemingly unable to contain themselves in response to the ever-growing crowd.

“It’s a bloody who’s who of wizarding society in here right now,” mused Neville from where he sat next to Harry. “Everyone and their auntie’s in the audience.”

Kingsley Shacklebolt had taken a seat next to Hermione, who seemed to be peppering him with questions, and Aberforth sat between Hannah Abbot and Luna, the former of whom seemed to be asking him about the ins and outs of running a pub and the latter of whom seemed to be talking at length about the ethics of using pixie dust as a food garnish. Ginny was absent, having traded off her proxy seat to a girl in her year Harry had never met, on account of there being a Quidditch game that day, although he couldn’t imagine, looking around the crowd, that there would be many seventh or eighth years left in attendance.

“But why are they all here?” wondered Harry. He noticed that even Narcissa Malfoy, who was under a glorified form of house arrest, was sitting in the crowd with her assigned Auror.

Neville shrugged. “Entertainment? We haven’t got a theatre, have we, and people need something to do with their time. Gran’s always said that was why we have so many wars. Speaking of, she’s here too.”

“Yeah, I saw her hat,” muttered Harry, because that always bore saying.

Well, they had wanted the public’s attention, he supposed. It seemed they’d gotten it.

“Order!” called Tiberius Ogden at long last. “ORDER! Be silent or we’ll be forced to use the silencing wards!”

“Oh, I’ve heard about those!” Harry thought he heard Hermione whisper excitedly.

“I, Chief Warlock Tiberius Ogden, call into session the Court on this day, October 31st, 1998.”

Harry leaned back in his seat, blinking. He hadn’t quite realized that it was Halloween. In the sea of people below, he spotted one head with bright red hair which turned to look straight at him. Ron, it seemed, was thinking the same thing. Harry offered him a quick nod in return, as acknowledgement, or perhaps thanks.

Perhaps, against all odds, this would be the Halloween that went well for him.

“Our first trial of the day is that of Alaric Bellamy, accused of financially aiding known war criminals and harboring wanted fugitives in his home. Serving as questioner will be my colleague, Madam Humphrey. Aurors, if you could bring in the accused, the trial shall now begin. As a warning,” Ogden added, glancing around the crowd, “if any Wizengamot members have a question for the court or the accused, they will raise their hand and wait to be acknowledge. All others present must remain silent during the proceedings or risk being escorted from these chambers.”

The court fell into a hush as the Aurors led Bellamy through and to his seat at the center of the room, although the hush felt less respectful and more…anticipatory.

The questioning began very generally, with Bellamy being asked his name, age, and occupation, and whether or not he was a marked Death Eater (he was not, apparently, which was easy enough to prove). The questioner seemed focused, after that, on showing that Bellamy had given funds to various unsavory people during the war. He claimed to have only given small gifts and loans to family and friends, and the questioner asked if those family and friends were Death Eaters.

“I don’t know,” said Bellamy. “Some might have been, maybe – I never asked.”

Hermione was the first of the court to raise her hand. “Are there Gringotts statements supporting Mr. Bellamy’s alleged financial support of Voldemort and his followers?” she asked when called upon.

Harry, for his part, couldn’t quite tell if people were more upset at the interruption or at the use of Voldemort’s name.

“It’s like no one here has ever heard of evidence!” he heard Hermione hiss, but the documents were eventually produced and then duplicated to be passed among the members of the court.

Susan was the next to raise her hand.

“Yes, Miss Bones?”

“So, to be clear, sorry, you can prove that Mr. Bellamy transferred money to – ah, Mr. Rowle and Mr. Avery, but do you have evidence to show that he knew they were supporters of… Voldemort… and that he intended the money to be used in the capacity you’re implying?”

“They’re known Death Eaters,” replied the questioner. “They’re both up for trial this week, and Avery was arrested after the ministry break-in of 1995 and was later broken out by You-Know-Who’s forces.”

Susan seemed undaunted by the rebuttal. “Mr. Avery’s affiliation we can assume was public knowledge after his 1995 trial and sentencing, but I don’t see any evidence here that the accused sent him any money while he was a fugitive – these transfers are all prior to 1995. And Mr. Rowle was never accused or apprehended for any crimes prior to this year, that I’m aware of, unless you can provide evidence to the contrary.”

“The court,” said the questioner through her teeth, “Has evidence that Mr. Bellamy allowed Mr. Avery to live at his residence while he was a fugitive, in the form of memories taken from Mr. Bellamy’s cousin, Alanna Travers.”

Susan nodded amiably. “Oh, good! Well, I’ll wait to see that, then.”

In the end, Alaric Bellamy was rather obviously guilty of the crimes he’d been accused of and sentenced as such, but Harry got the impression that his trial had been both longer and more thorough than it would have been without Susan and Hermione’s interruptions.

Theodore Nott Sr’s trial was next, and it was there that things began to grow tricky. Harry spared a glance at Nott Jr’s face as his father’s list of crimes was read, but he was doing his best impression of a wall, expression inscrutable.

Harry himself had evidence of Nott Sr. being a Death Eater if it had come down to it, but it hadn’t. The Aurors who made arrests after the break-in at the Department of Mysteries were easily able to verify that. He’d already stood trial once for those crimes and had been sentenced to ten years in Azkaban before his escape. The question was if he’d done anything else since, or if, as his solicitor argued, he ought to be allowed to carry out what remained of his sentence and nothing more.

“Escape from Azkaban,” said the questioner, “is its own, separate crime.”

“Not if my client was unaware at the time that he was being broken out of prison and did nothing to aid his own removal from Azkaban’s premises.”

“There is no stipulation—”

“The amendment which made escape from Azkaban a crime – an amendment which, I might add, was only written in 1995 – uses the phrase ‘willful escape’. My argument is that my client, already an elderly man at the time of his initial incarceration, was so weakened by the conditions of Azkaban and the effects of the Dementors that he was, at the time of his alleged break-out, in no mental state to know that he was being removed from his cell, and of course in no state to stop the people who removed him.”

Harry, looking down at the man shackled to the chair, could actually believe that – he didn’t even seem to be especially aware where he was now. He looked ill and tired and more like he should be in St. Mungo’s than a ministry holding cell.

He heard Hermione make a little sound, then, and sensed rather than saw her raising and waving her hand about as if they were in first-year potions again.

“Yes, Miss Granger?” asked the Chief Warlock.

“Can Mr. Nott’s defense provide evidence of his mental state? Testimony from certified mind healers, perhaps?”

The solicitor made a show of shaking his head. “Unfortunately, such evidence has never been used in trial before, and my client’s family was unable to obtain permission to have Mr. Nott assessed by any healers.”

“But that’s—” Hermione spluttered, and Harry, who sensed a fit coming on about barbarism and rights, turned around.

“Hermione,” he hissed.

 She frowned. “– right,” she said finally, turning back to Ogden, “in that case, would it be possible for you, Chief Warlock, to have the court hold a vote on whether Mr. Nott’s case may be postponed so that he may be seen by a mind-healer?”

“This is absurd,” said a woman from the Wizengamot section as Ogden seemed to consider Hermione’s words.

“Ms. Loewen,” said Ogden, “Please, no speaking out of turn.”

“This has gone on long enough! You can’t expect us to sit back while schoolchildren run rampant through the court!”

“They have as much a right to be here as you,” sighed Ogden, “and none of them are speaking out of turn.”

“What right? Half of them are proxies! They aren’t even from proper families!”

“Anyone can serve as a proxy, as you well know—"

“What, then, is the point of this court, if anyone can serve on it!”

The witch – Loewen – seemed to direct the last to Harry, or at least to his section, standing from her seat and turning towards him, seemingly ten seconds and years’ worth of propriety away from pointing an accusatory finger of him.

Harry blinked slowly. “I,” he said, before he could stop himself, “have been wondering the exact same thing.”

Beside him, Neville groaned and sank lower into his chair. Someone in the crowd shrieked in outrage, and he didn’t know if it was a member of the court or the audience.

“And that’ll be in tomorrow’s papers,” murmured Neville. The reporters present did all indeed seemed to be scrawling furiously, except Skeeter, whose Quik-Notes quill did the work for her as she focused her energies on looking around her, beady-eyed. Harry foresaw a request for another interview in his future.

“Nah. Late Night Special Edition,” said Susan cheerfully. “I’m calling it now. Two galleons on it.”

“I’ll take that bet,” said Ernie.

“I’ll pretend I didn’t hear you,” sighed Kingsley.

Meanwhile, Ogden was ordering Loewen to “sit down, or I will have you removed.”

“I’m removing myself!” the older witch huffed. “Consider me no longer a part of this court, until such time as it comes to its senses. I would beseech the rest of you,” she added, looking around her section, “to do the same!”

“Oh my god,” whispered Hannah Abbot from the row behind Harry. “I can’t believe it. She’s really walked out!”

“She might not be the only one who does,” said Harry, noticing the unrest as Madam Loewell marched out of the courtroom. Other members of the court were standing, too, and the press seemed to have forgotten their orders to be silent and were talking amongst themselves in their section and snapping photos like mad. Two people – a clerk and a member of the court, Harry thought – seemed to have gotten into a shouting match on the floor below, and the clerk was flapping a stack of papers which came loose from his grip and began fluttering around the room.

“QUIET!” shouted Tiberius Ogden over the noise, not even bothering with an amplifying spell on his voice. “I am calling,” he said, “a RECESS. The court is adjourned for twenty minutes, after which time we’ll take a vote on Miss Granger’s motion. I urge you all to take this time to collect yourselves!”

At a bang of sparks from his wand, the crowd in the room dispersed, still as loud as ever and with reporters milling among them scribbling wildly.

“I still can’t believe—” he heard Hermione mutter to herself as Ron used his over-long legs to stride towards them.

“Should we go?” asked Neville.

“I don’t think they’re giving us a choice, this time,” remarked Harry, who noticed an Auror ushering a group who’d stayed seated to leave. He rose from his seat and wondered if anyone would notice if he ducked behind Neville – against all odds, the other boy had grown up to be rather tall.

Just as they’d made it through the doors to the antechamber, though, Harry felt someone tap his shoulder. He bit back a groan, turning towards whatever reporter or crotchety old warlock it was sure to be.

As it turned out, though, while the warlock in question was old, he wasn’t someone Harry could dismiss. “Oh,” he said to Tiberius Ogden. “Er. Sir. Sorry about all the fuss in there.”

Ogden didn’t look especially angry, though – or at least, not at him. “We’re overdue a fuss, I think,” he said finally, ushering Harry towards a quiet corner of the room, if any of the corners could truly be called that at present. “Tell me – what exactly is your little group going to do when we come to our closed trials?”

“I’m not sure,” Harry said carefully. “I mean, we’ll attend, obviously…”

“And what will you do after?”

“I, er. I don’t…”

“Ah, but I can guess. You’ll turn around and offer the details of the trials to the press.”

Harry shuffled his feet and glanced away evasively. That was one of the tactics they’d considered, yes – so long as a verdict was reached, there was nothing anyone could do to stop a member of the Wizengamot from telling the press what had happened behind closed doors. They weren’t sworn to secrecy.

Ogden snorted. “Would you like a suggestion, Mr. Potter? The closed trials could be done away with altogether – what has been done can be undone – if, perhaps, it’s considered a matter of… urgency.”

“…you mean hold an emergency session,” said Harry. “But you’d need fifteen people, and they can’t all be from the same party.” They’d already considered and dismissed that option for that very reason.

“I don’t imagine your party are the only ones displeased by our current state of affairs,” Ogden replied ambiguously.

“Holding an emergency session’s going to upset people,” he pointed out. He wasn’t at all sure he cared about that, of course, but there could be backlash. “Look what happened last time.”

“If it upsets some people,” said Ogden mildly, “then I imagine they’ll want to do away with the emergency sessions, next. Don’t you?”

Harry was slowly catching on. “I’d guess so, yeah. So—”

“I’d talk to Madam Marchbanks, if I were you,” Ogden said, smiling. “Now, if you’ll excuse me…” He glided away to speak with someone else, and Harry was left blinking in his wake.

He looked around the antechamber for Griselda Marchbanks, the ancient witch who’d once served as an exams proctor at Hogwarts and who now, after her reinstatement in the Wizengamot, served as one of the two larger party’s heads. Harry was under the impression that the party she led was generally considered the more progressive one, although he wasn’t at all sure what her stance was on what Harry’s lot had been doing. When he caught the woman’s eye, though, she gave him a smug, knowing sort of look and gestured for him to come over.

Harry bit down on the amusement that wanted to cross his face. Had they planned this? And then he crossed the room, approaching Marchbanks, who waved away the reporter she was speaking with and met him with an expectant glance.

“Madam Marchbanks,” he said. “I was wondering if I might have a word with you at the end of the day…”

-

In the end, Nott’s family did get their permission to have him see a mind-healer, which might actually go down in the history of wizarding law, and Harry, for his part, got his meeting. That night the papers reported it, and the headlines, for once, weren’t even sensational: the Prophet’s read, simply, WIZENGAMOT DECLARES REMAINING DEATH EATER TRIALS OPEN TO PUBLIC, PRESS. FOUR MEMBERS ABANDON SEATS IN PROTEST.

If the sensible title hadn’t given it away, the byline would reveal it wasn’t even an article by Skeeter – Harry’s lot had had no say in it. And yet it had a few comments in their favor just the same – and one rather pointed remark about “doing the right thing” from Madam Griselda Marchbanks.

Harry found himself in an uncommonly good mood while reading it.

“Do we have any yeast, Kreacher?” he asked his house elf, ducking into the kitchen.

“Kreacher has hidden the yeast,” muttered Kreacher.

“Yes, I’d sort of suspected that. Can you un hide it? I’ve got a good feeling about this…”

Perhaps it was his quiet joy at the day’s little victory, or perhaps it was only a matter of practice finally making – well, not perfect, but something close to it – but Harry’s good feeling turned into his good luck. In the late hours of the night, or the early hours of the morning – which they were, after all, depended on your perspective – he cut a slice from a fresh-baked loaf of bread, and tore a chunk off, and placed it in his mouth, and chewed as thoughtfully as anyone could when they’d spent the last four hours alternating between baking and going over Hermione Granger’s derangedly detailed notes.

And then, after a moment, he took another bite. “I can’t believe it,” he said. “I don’t even like olives,” he told Kreacher, who’d appeared to stare woefully at remainder of the loaf. “But – look at it. It’s…”

“Terrible,” muttered Kreacher.

“You’re only saying that,” grinned Harry, “It’s great.”

-

epilogue

(or “eat”?)

“Good King Wenceslaus looked out—”

“Merlin’s saggy balls, if one of you doesn’t turn that thing off—”

“Oh, where’s your holiday cheer, Ron? It’s only a Christmas carol.”

“It’s a nuisance, is what it is. Anyway, what sort of carol is it? It’s all about… what, a bloke giving someone a bit of food and wood? Why didn’t he invite him over, if he’s that poor?”

“It’s about kindness and generosity and the Christmas spirit,” said Hermione.

“If it’s that cold why didn’t he carry the ruddy things himself instead of making the page do it?”

“It’s a metaphor!”

“He could cast the poor man a bloody heating charm!”

“Muggles don’t have—”

“Or whatever they’ve got, we were ‘round your parents’ just the other day, I know they’ve got heating…”

“Radiant heat wasn’t – the song is set in the 900s!”

“THOU SHALT FIND THE WINTER’S RAGE—” shrieked the radio.

“Merlin, it’s going off,” said Ron with dismay.

“Well, muggle electronics do around magic, eventually,” said Hermione.

“THEREFORE, CHRISTIAN MEN, BE SURE—” it carried on with an unhinged sort of warble. “WEALTH OR RANK POSSESSING—” at the last, it began to spark a little.

Harry, heretofore a quiet observer, had enough of it. “Silencio,” he cast at the blasted thing, and it exploded in a shower of sparks, Hermione squealing and Ron ducking just in time.

“Now you’ve done it,” said Hermione. “It’s broken.”

“Sorry,” Harry said unconvincingly. “We’ll turn the Wireless on. I don’t know any wizarding carols.” He didn’t especially care to, either – but he reckoned they couldn’t be half as bad as the deranged sounds the muggle radio had been making in its final moments.

“If I hear Celestina Warbeck’s ‘Gather ‘Round the Old Yule Log’ I’m blowing up that one, too,” Ron threatened.

Hermione only huffed once, loudly, and whisked away, presumably to find the magical radio and switch on the Wireless, or maybe just to refill her cup of eggnog from the crystal punch bowl Kreacher had unearthed from the attic.

Harry thought the thing looked vaguely cursed, but somehow Hermione had, possessing a newfound sway over the elf, managed to convince Kreacher to spike it, and so he found himself on his third glass, hoping it was only a balding curse, or one like he’d found on a suit of armor in a second-floor landing that spelled your toenails ingrown.

-

It was December. Christmas was fast approaching, and Hogwarts had let out for the holiday, and – at the start of the new year – elections for a new Minister for Magic would be held.

The lot of candidates was decidedly interesting. Things weren’t narrowed down quite enough yet to tell, but it seemed like there was a good chance they’d have someone under 30 as their next Minister.

In the past two months, Harry’s party had grown to 25 members, and he still attended every session he could. Soon they’d even be putting forward legislature – Hermione was working on drafting a bill, and Harry had a good feeling that it was going to pass. The Wizengamot, these days, still seemed to be holding on by a thread – nothing, Harry had learned, was more persistent than tradition – but it was not the organization that it once was. He had faith that before very long it would either be altered beyond recognition or eradicated altogether.

Either way, he wouldn’t be sorry to see it go, although the last two months had been… well, he hesitated to call them fun, but they’d served as a very welcome distraction. Between Hesper’s continued lessons, and the many trials, and the regular court sessions, Harry had been overwhelmingly busy. Some nights, when he fell asleep, he was too tired even to dream.

(Hesper had also taken to lecturing him about the International Confederation of Wizards, recently. Harry was doing his best to ignore her.)

And then there was the thing with Hermione – she’d held the Black seat for as long as it took for Narcissa Malfoy and Harry’s combined efforts (would wonders never cease?) to have Andromeda Black reinstated as an heir to the Black family, something which would – eventually – be passed to Teddy.

By then there were plenty of other seats Hermione could take by proxy, but Harry very much wished he could offer his friend something longer-term, because she’d taken to learning the ins and outs of wizarding law like… well, like she took to learning anything else, pretty much. The solution to his problem came with Tiberius Ogden’s assistant pulling him aside one day to tell Harry that he ought to look into a seat formerly belonging to a man named Gideon Vern, because that man had – as had a few people, as it turned out – willed the “Boy-Who-Lived” his entire properties upon his death.

And sure enough, there had been an unclaimed seat which Harry was able to give Hermione for good by gifting the sum of the Vern properties over to her.

It was clearly not a temporary situation – not like Hermione holding the Black seat had been – and was pretty much unheard of for someone to do for somebody who wasn’t their spouse or heir or secret lovechild. On that note, he asked Hermione and Ron, “Do you mind? People might think it’s a bit weird.”

“People already think we’re weird, mate,” said Ron with his usual pragmatism. “Have you never read the Prophet?”

“I actually have been reading it, lately – and it’s been surprisingly tame. Hermione, have you been threatening Rita again?”

She shrugged. “Only the usual. I’ve just asked that she write the truth.”

“Which is the worst thing you could ask her, I’m sure. Though she still does manage her… embellishments.”

Hermione grimaced. “Yes, well, it’s rather hard for me to prove your eyes aren’t ‘glowing emeralds’, or whatever rubbish. At least it’s complimentary.”

“You can’t have a free world without a free press,” Ron said sagely.

“Are you… quoting me?” Hermione asked skeptically.

“Have another slice of cake,” Harry had said to them both.

-

In the present, Ron was saying “SO HELP ME”, and trying to cover his ears while also holding a glass of eggnog, and it wasn’t going well.

“Because it’s that time of year, dear/To spread joy and cheer/And gather ‘round the old yule log,” Celestina Warbeck crooned back.

Hermione hastily switched the radio off before Ron could draw his wand.

Harry laughed helplessly into his glass and stumbled backward into a garland, which knocked itself loose and shed a few leaves into the drink.

“Don’t drink that,” Hermione said quickly. “You might check with Neville, but I think that garland’s poisonous.”

“That tracks,” nodded Harry, setting the glass aside without a bit of surprise. Kreacher had been decorating, lately.

Harry blamed Hermione – she had, in her last few visits, taken it upon herself to decorate the house for Christmas, but that hadn’t made Grimmauld Place at all cheerier. She was relying on her domestic charms, which were shoddy at best, and her attempts to charm things green and red often ended in them being lime and fuchsia instead.

When she inquired after holiday decorations of the Blacks’ as a last resort Kreacher had brought out an assortment of items that made it astonishingly clear to Harry that no one in the Black family had felt anything approaching joy for at least two centuries.

Hermione had conjured up tinsel to toss over everything in a last-ditch resort, and the result of their combined efforts led to what Harry was quite certain was a gold-and-silver wreathed iron maiden in the parlor.

They were waiting, now, for the rest of their friends to arrive for a sort of Christmas feast. “Shall we have a toast, then?” Ron asked, in much better spirits now that the wireless was shut off and Warbeck warbled no longer – or maybe it was just that he’d had too much eggnog.

Harry, who had a new glass, obligingly raised it. “To what?” he asked.

“To – things,” Ron said. Hermione, who must have had too much eggnog herself, collapsed in a fit of giggles.

“To things,” said Harry as solemnly as he could, tapping their glasses together.

“And to Hermione someday becoming Minister.”

“I would never—” Hermione began to protest, but then the sound of a minor explosion came from the adjoining kitchen. “Er – Harry?”

“Oh, right,” Harry said, waving a hand – the wrong one, as it turned out; his eggnog sloshed over – “That. Hesper asked Kreacher something about… exploding puddings? And I might’ve left a recipe for a Baked Alaska out, and I think he’s just sort of—”

Another, larger explosion rocked the room.

“Combined them,” finished Harry. “And he’s making up for lost time. Or proving something? I don’t know, but I think Hesper’s egging him on.”

“We’re all going to die,” said Ron, although he didn’t sound very put-out about it. “By pudding,” he added, which explained his tone.

“We might,” agreed Harry. “There are worse ways to go.”

-

Later, when everyone else had arrived, Harry looked around the table. It was laden with cakes and biscuits and bread he’d been baking up for weeks, and a salad Neville had brought made from things he’d been growing experimentally in one of Professor Sprout’s greenhouses, and a roast and mashed potatoes some of the Hogwarts elves had sent along when they heard, somehow, about the gathering. They’d even included a tray of treacle tarts and pumpkin pasties, which Harry regarded with fond nostalgia.

There was, too, at the end of the table, a Baked Alaska which seemed to be sparking ominously, shielded by a charm Hermione had thrown over it. Periodically, it burst into flames. If they tried, they might be able to roast chestnuts over it.

It had only just begun, really – but he had the sense that this was shaping up to be his best Christmas yet.

-

Sometimes, Harry had learned, to get better at something, or to make something better, you just had to show up – again and again – and work at it.

Harry believed in all sorts of things that other people thought were as impossible as Luna’s strange creatures – as impossible as he’d once thought dragons and flying brooms and magic wands were. He believed in justice, and fairness, and doing right by people. He believed, even, that Grimmauld Place might someday be a livable house.

And then there was this: he still desperately, fervently believed in the magical world. He believed it was beautiful. He believed it was worth saving. It was the first place he ever truly belonged, even if the belonging was a bad fit. He wanted it to be better, for its own sake, for his sake, for magic’s sake.

So he would keep working, for as long as he had to, as much as he needed to. And something told him it would, someday, prove worth the effort.