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Chapter Text

James and Sirius are already together when they get the summons from Dumbledore. It’s strange because they’re not scheduled for back-up duty tonight, nor are they important enough to the Order to be roped into specialized projects.

Well, until now. Maybe this is their big break. A chance to prove themselves.

They bow out of Pub Night, bidding giddily nervous goodbyes to Lily, Moony, and Wormy, and apparate to the designated safehouse. Dumbledore is already there, along with Moody (James still can’t bring himself to think of the man as Alastor) and McGonagall (ditto about Minerva), which is the second strange thing about tonight because McGonagall is very rarely involved in Order affairs while Hogwarts is in session. James blinks at her, mentally confirms that it’s barely May, and, yes, May is during the school year, and greets her with a puzzled smile.

“Thank you for coming on such short notice,” Dumbledore says, ushering them inside. They’re at the Devon safehouse, a plain two-storey home mostly filled with bedrooms, medical supplies, and a potions lab. Oh, and its secret dungeons are the securest the Order has.

James is suddenly less excited about this mysterious chance to prove himself.

“Our Hogsmeade patrol responded to a burst of potent magic earlier tonight and happened across a pair of unusual wizards,” Dumbledore explains. “They’re still unconscious at the moment but we are having trouble identifying them.”

James blinks and re-assesses the assembled Order members. Two long-time teachers at the only magical school in the Isles and the Head Auror, unable to identify someone? Perhaps they’re foreign wizards, except that wouldn’t explain why James or Sirius would somehow be able to accomplish what their elders can’t.

“How do you think we can be of assistance?” Sirius asks smoothly while James is still just processing, like an idiot fresh out of school— which, well, he likes to think that a whole year of adulthood is enough to disqualify him from that category, but these days in the Order, it doesn’t always feel that way.

“We’ve determined that they’re not under the influence of polyjuice, glamours, nor human transfiguration. Usually we can assume unrecognizable wizards might be foreign-born or educated abroad, but they bear none of the usual signs. For one, their shoes and clothes, though somewhat strange-looking, all carry labels of British sellers.”

James and Sirius exchange a glance at Dumbledore’s fashion assessment— he’s one to talk— but allow him to continue.

“Strangest of all, both bear a shocking resemblance to well-established British wizarding families, but neither Minerva nor I can ever recall meeting them.”

Finally, it starts to make sense. “You think one of them’s a Potter?” he clarifies.

“And one of them’s a Black?” Sirius adds with audible distaste.

“Perhaps not a Black but a Malfoy. Alas, you are the most closely related to the Malfoys of anyone else in the Order, so I am going to have to ask you to bear the mantle of Malfoy Expert for us, for the moment.”

James doesn’t even have to look to know the kind of grimace Sirius is making at that. But, “fine,” he says, and Dumbledore leads them down the hallway towards the dungeon stairs.

Behind them, James hears McGonagall decide she’s no longer needed and take her leave. Moody grunts an agreement but is clearly sticking around for back-up around two unknown prisoners.

Their steps echo strangely on the damp stone stairs to the dungeons. Sirius descends them almost silently, which makes James all the more self-conscious of every thump he makes. It’s a bit strange how nervous he is, because it’s not even like he knows for sure the prisoner’s a Potter, but his parents just died less than a month ago and anything to do with family is a bit of a touchy subject for him these days.

They reach the bottom of the stairs, which turns left into a short hallway between two rows of stone cells. Only one of them appears to be in use, so they all gather in front of a heavy oak door that Dumbledore spells transparent.

Inside are two boys bound to chairs. It’s hard to see their faces, because both their heads are sagging down towards their chests, but honestly, the hair alone is enough to justify Dumbledore’s suspicions. The boy to the left has ink-black hair the exact same length as James’ — the only length his locks have ever deigned to grow out to— and it sticks up at odd angles. The boy on the right is a silky platinum blond, a dead-ringer for the Malfoys.

The Potter-haired boy is wearing strange muggle clothes (fine, Dumbledore might have been right about that). Which, yes, Potters generally have no qualms about dabbling in muggle fashion, but these clothes are definitely not fashion. They’re dirty and torn— and charred?!— in places and seem to swamp the boy’s small frame. The Malfoy-looking boy, at least, has robes made of expectedly fine, expensive material, if in a slightly unusual cut. Now that James is looking, though, his robes, too, look a bit big on him, like they might have been well-tailored before he lost a stone or so.

It’s utterly bizarre because the boy’s too young and skinny to be Lucius; and the one on the left is clearly not James, although he’s the only known Potter under the age of 87 these days.

“Blimey,” Sirius whispers. James can only nod dumbly in agreement.

“Why would anyone try to pose as members of such well-known families?” James mutters. It just doesn’t make sense; it’s a stupid disguise when you could go for non-descript instead, especially when anyone would be suspicious to see a Potter and a Malfoy together, this far into the war...

“Are they Marked?” Sirius asks.

“The, well, for lack of a better identifier, the Malfoy boy is. The Potter one isn’t,” Dumbledore says.

Some tension that James didn’t even realize he was holding in his gut releases at that. Not that the lack of a Dark Mark automatically means he’s not a Death Eater, but, still. Small mercies.

“Malfoy hair, Malfoy allegiances…” Sirius shrugs. “Looks like a Malfoy to me. Can’t say I’ve heard of any Malfoys disowned in recent memory, though, which Aunt Druella definitely would’ve ferreted out before she let Narcissa get married. So that’s strange.”

Disowned? James frowns, but he follows the thought. Potters haven’t been very big on disownment of family for, well, living memory, although technically, these days, living memory just boils down to James and his senile Uncle Charlus, who probably isn’t much longer for this world. Still, though, for a kid this young, James would imagine he’d have heard something about a schism in the last few generations, or maybe a child born out of wedlock. Or even a squib. Although maybe he’s the son or grandson of an older Potter squib whose family line they lost track of?

Regardless. He feels like he should have come up with some kind of idea of who this boy is. “You’re sure they’re not wearing disguises?” he says doubtfully.

“I checked quite thoroughly.”

James frowns and squints harder at the Potter-haired boy. From this angle he can just glimpse the black frames of glasses, which also hints at the accursed Potter eyesight. But wigs and specs are easy enough to fake without magic, aren’t they? Unless Lily was having a go at him again?

“Have you checked his glasses?” he asks Dumbledore.

“His glasses?”

“I mean, are they prescription? If I was a non-Potter trying to pretend to be a Potter, I’d go around in frames filled with regular glass lenses.”

Dumbledore hums thoughtfully. “I found no charms or other spells on them but I’ll admit I did not test their efficacy myself.”

Before he’s even made the conscious decision, James has spelled the door open and is walking inside.

“Prongs!” Sirius hisses.

James waves him back absently. “They’re unconscious!” he whisper-yells back. Dumbledore doesn’t protest, so James figures he’s alright to just check those specs real quick.

He bends down slightly to tug the glasses off the boy’s face and catches sight of a fresh shiner blooming on the boy’s cheekbone. Ah, well; he’ll only worry about that if the kid turns out not to be a Death Eater after all.

One glance through the glasses confirms that they are (1) prescription; (2) of a strong enough prescription to fall within the particular Potter range of visual impairment; and (3) as dirty as the rest of him. James wrinkles his nose and clumsily wedges the frames back onto the boy’s head.

The boy seems to stir at the contact to his face, so James wastes no time in high-tailing it back out of the cell and shutting the door behind him. The clang of the lock seems to jolt the boy the rest of the way awake, because his head pops up and James finds himself staring into an eerily recognizable face with incongruously green eyes.

His breath catches. Those eyes, they look so familiar but for some reason he can’t place them when they’re set in his own face—

“Bloody hell,” Sirius murmurs. “He looks just like you, James.”

James can only nod.

The boy has started struggling against his bonds and looking frantically about the room, swearing vociferously. His gaze lands on the blond boy next to him. “MALFOY!” he yells. “YOU BASTARD!”

“Well,” Sirius mutters. “As if we had any lingering doubts about that.”

“MALFOY!” the boy yells again. He looks much less like a boy now that he’s awake and furious, though. Those eyes alone could age him a decade; they look exhausted.

The Malfoy boy starts to stir, now, too; his impatient companion scoots his chair slightly to the right to kick at his ankle with one bound leg.

“Where the fuck are we, Malfoy?”

Malfoy finally pulls his head up with a grimace and blinks uncomprehendingly at his surroundings. “Potter?” he mutters, sounding genuinely confused.

James is also genuinely confused. He thinks a part of him is excited to meet a new, unheard-of Potter, although his familiarity with a Death Eater is slightly concerning. Then again, the familiarity does not seem very friendly, so perhaps there’s hope. James glances at Dumbledore and Sirius, both of whom seem equally content to sit back and see what they can learn by observing them through the door.

“This thing’s only transparent one-way, right?” James murmurs.

“Naturally,” says Dumbledore.

Good. James returns his attention to his strange green-eyed relative, who seems to be on the verge of panic.

“Where the fuck are Ron and Hermione?” he snarls.

“I don’t even know where the fuck we are, Potter!” Malfoy returns. “Give me a bloody minute— I don’t remember how we got here.”

“Oh yeah right, because I’m just tied up in a dungeon somewhere and you and your daddy’s Death Eater buddies had nothing to do with it.”

“He even sounds like you,” Sirius murmurs.

“What? No he doesn’t.”

“He does. Well, his voice sounds like yours. Accent is terribly common, though.”

James has no response to that.

The Malfoy boy, at least, sounds like the proper rich ponce he’s expected to be. “Honestly, Potter, the last thing I remember is tracking you through Hogwarts to get my wand back.”

Potter stills, suddenly, and squeezes his eyes shut. “We were in the Room of Requirement?”

“What in Merlin’s name is the Room of Requirement?”

“Oh come off it, like you didn’t spend all your free time in there last year fixing your precious vanishing cabinet,” Potter spits.

“The Room of Hidden Things?”

“Yeah, whatever." Potter's shoulders suddenly tense, and his eyes narrow. "You jumped me trying to get your wand back,” he accuses.

“You stole my wand!”

“Your family was trying to kill me!”

“I stalled as much as I could,” Malfoy retorts. “Fat lot of good that did me.”

Potter sighs. “The Room is the last thing I remember,” he says despondently.

“Me too.”

“Fuck, but— RON! HERMIONE!” he bellows. Malfoy winces deeply. “RON!! HERMIONE!! ARE YOU HERE?!”

Malfoy groans. “Shut the fuck up, Potter, I think I hit my head.”

“—MIONE!!— What?”

“I think I hit my head,” Malfoy repeats with audible impatience. “You shouting a foot from my ear is not bloody helping!”

“Oh, god forbid I give you a headache when you’ve gone and gotten us captured,” Potter snarls.

“Muggle-raised,” Sirius murmurs.

James jumps, startled to be pulled out of this strangely riveting melodrama and back into his own surroundings. He finds himself leaning against the door, face and palms pressed to the transparent wood like glass in a window. “What?” he mumbles.

“He said god forbid. He must be muggle-raised. Can’t really be a Potter.”

“Could be descended from a squib Potter,” James offers.

“Have there been any squib Potters in the last century?” Dumbledore asks curiously.

“Not that I know of, but,” James shrugs. “Can’t figure out how else— who else he could be.”

Nobody seems to have additional thoughts at the moment, so they turn their attentions back to the cell. Malfoy seems to have convinced Potter not to shout for his mysterious companions any longer, but they’re only yelling at each other now instead.

“As if my father would leave me locked up in a dungeon if we were captured by the Dark Lord’s forces!” Malfoy is protesting.

“Come off it,” Potter says. “He knows you could’ve identified me back at the Manor and you didn’t. You might as well be a blood traitor now.” He sounds both pitying and vindicated by this. James only feels increasingly more lost.

Malfoy is swearing profusely under his breath. “No,” he finally decides. “We were obviously both knocked out in an altercation in the Room of Hidden Things. Vince and Greg both think I was hunting you down to turn you over to the Dark Lord. That I didn’t manage it makes me a failure, not a traitor.”

“Like Voldemort cares about the bloody difference,” Potter mutters.

James sucks in a shocked breath. Few people these days are brave enough to say the full name. He glances at Dumbledore, who looks equally surprised at this development.

Malfoy swears some more.

“Look, Malfoy,” Potter says wearily. “If Ron and Hermione—” his voice cracks slightly. He tries again. “If they made it out alive, then they’ll be coming for me, and they’ll probably call in the whole Order.”

James feels his eyebrows creeping up his forehead. Who does this kid think he is that he and his absolutely unheard-of friends could mobilize the entire Order of the Phoenix at the drop of a hat?

“Bully for you,” Malfoy mutters.

“Malfoy,” Potter repeats, more urgently. “I know you hate being a Death Eater. I know you’re not cut out for torturing people and I know you’ve been punished for it.”

“How do you—?!”

“Don’t worry about it. Listen. If you help me escape right now, I’ll make the Order take you under their protection.”

Malfoy sneers, but it doesn’t completely mask his uncertainty. “How do I know you’re not some trap set by my aunt?”

“How do I know you’re not some trap set by your aunt?”

“Because the Dark Lord wouldn’t bother? He’d have already killed you himself.”

Potter hums. “Good point, yeah,” he says. “Dunno why he'd have me taken somewhere else when he had a whole army already in place. Unless he decided to go gallivanting across the country checking again on all the ho— things I stole from him.” He turns pensive while Malfoy gapes. “You’d think by now, actually, he’d have heard of my capture.”

“Maybe he’s just on his way.”

“Well yeah, but I’d have felt it.”

”Felt it?”

“Yeah, I get— You know what, don’t worry about it. The point is, this obviously isn’t a trap for me, because why bother, and this is obviously not a trap for you, because nobody would consider using me in any scenario to trick you when I could be much more lucrative turned into Voldemort himself, yeah?”

“Unless you’re not actually Potter, in which case, it very well could be a trap for me.”

Potter sighs heavily. “Okay. Erm. Ask me something only I would know then.”

There ensues a silence that only grows more awkward the longer it goes on.

“Bit hard to do when we hate each other and only interact in public, huh,” Potter eventually says, which draws a mean snicker from Sirius.

“There’s nothing only you’d know that other people don’t,” Malfoy agrees.

“Okay, well, how about I just start talking and you let me know when you’re convinced?”

“Alright then,” Malfoy says doubtfully.

Potter draws in a deep breath. “The first time we met was in Madam Malkin’s and you asked if my parents were both magical and then said the ‘other sort’ shouldn’t be allowed in, and then you saw I was there with Hagrid and insulted him too—”

Malfoy interrupts with a gasp. “That was you?”

For a moment, Potter looks genuinely taken aback. “Who else did you think I was?”

“I don’t know, some other random boy! Why would they send that oaf Hagrid, of all people, to Diagon Alley with their precious saviour?”

James blinks. Saviour? At eleven??

“See, Malfoy,” Potter says bitterly. “This is why you’re such an arsehole. Ingrained blood purism aside, Hagrid was my first friend and you insulted him right to my face and you were such a stuck-up self-important eleven year-old that you didn’t even bother asking the name of the kid you were talking to.”

“Or maybe that wasn’t Potter at all and you’re the actual boy I met at Madam Malkin’s posing as him.”

“Oh, for— fine. D’you really want me to go into the time you tried to crucio me and I almost killed you in that lavatory?”

Malfoy turns grey in the face and shakes his head, then winces. “No. But Snape was there. Try something else.”

Potter rolls his eyes dramatically. “Speaking of lavatories, d’you remember when you were hanging out with Crabbe and Goyle in the common room during Christmas Hols second year, and they asked you what you knew about the Heir of Slytherin and then ran off with stomachaches?”

“What the hell, Potter?” Malfoy asks with narrowed eyes. “How do you know about that? And what does that have to do with lavatories?”

“It was actually me and Ron under polyjuice that Hermione brewed in Moaning Myrtle’s loo,” Potter says with vicious glee.

“Absolutely not. No way.”

“Yes way. You found us wandering aimlessly around the dungeons and brought us into the common room— the password was pureblood, which, eurgh— and then when you said you hoped it would be Hermione who died, Ron got so angry I had to suggest it would be better if the monster killed me instead.”

“YOU IMPERTINENT, SCHEMING BASTARDS!” Malfoy yells. He starts writhing in his ropes.

Potter sits back within his bonds, looking extremely pleased with himself. “Of course, you’ve no proof that was really me, either, but if you’re still not convinced, I can continue—”

“NO, FUCK YOU, POTTER! No one else could possibly possess such disregard for the rules and the hallowed sanctity of the Slytherin common room—”

“Third year, Hermione punched you in the face and called you a ‘foul, loathsome, evil little cockroach,’” Potter continues with a contented sigh, ignoring Malfoy’s blustering rage. “I remember every detail of that moment, I assure you; it was the best day of my life.”

“Fine!” Malfoy yells. “Fine, Scarhead, you want to prove your identity? At the beginning of last year, I caught you snooping under your invisibility cloak— eurgh, you really have no respect for other people’s privacy, what the fuck— and then I broke your hand. Where did I leave your invisible, helpless, petrified body to be found?”

Potter scowls darkly. “The Hogwarts Express, and you know as well as I do it was my nose, and fuck you again for that, you prick.”

“Seems like you are Potter after all,” Malfoy says with a poisoned-honey smile.

“Bloody great. Can we get back to the real problem now?” Potter grumbles.

“Right.” Malfoy huffs out a steadying breath as his eyes rove the walls of their cell. “I don’t recognize these dungeons. Might be some unfortunate group of snatchers too dumb to recognize either of us?”

“My sodding face is plastered along every free wall in Diagon Alley. It’s not even swollen this time.”

This must be at least the third time by now that Potter has suggested the entire wizarding world is supposed to recognize him on sight, and James is getting so dizzy trying to keep up with this absolutely bonkers conversation and also try to process the facts in a way that makes sense because you’d think, if everyone knew who this Potter was, then surely James should know him too?? There’s something not adding up but he can’t figure it out and they just keep talking, he wishes they would just give him a few minutes to think—

“Yeah,” Malfoy sighs. “Also, anyone desperate enough to be a snatcher wouldn’t have access to an actual dungeon.”

“Is snatching only for the lower-class, then?” Potter sneers.

“Usually,” Malfoy answers, ignoring the vitriol in the question. “It’s an opportunity for people to try to worm their way up the Dark Lord’s ranks and into power. But anyone wealthy enough for dungeons has much easier ways of ingratiating themselves with him.”

Potter frowns in an eerily familiar manner that communicates that he can't argue with the logic, but he's not happy about it. “Alright then. I'm out of ideas."

“Never mind,” Malfoy says. “It doesn’t matter why we’re here. If you can get me out of these ropes I’ll mastermind your escape, since clearly your three Gryffindor brain cells don’t have the capacity.”

“But we would’ve definitely seen him if he was a Gryffindor?” James protests weakly. Sirius grunts in agreement beside him.

“Three whole brain cells? That’s practically a compliment from you.” Potter wriggles his arms. “I’m pretty sure if I just dislocate my shoulder a bit—”

“What?!” Malfoy splutters. “Merlin, Potter, are you insane?”

“You’ve seen me on the quidditch pitch,” Potter returns cockily. The look on Malfoy's face suggests that Potter’s behaviour on the quidditch pitch does, in fact, support the diagnosis of insanity. “Don’t worry, I’m an old pro at popping it back into the socket— just gotta—” he shifts around on the seat some more and starts straining his shoulders.

“Dumbledore!” James hisses, pushing himself back and off the door. “Don’t you think it’s time to step in?”

“Do you think so?” Dumbledore says mildly. “Hmm. Yes, I suppose.” He waves his wand at the door. “Stay out here for now.”