18th December 1995, Gryffindor Tower, deep night
Harry was the snake.
That was the horror of it, afterwards... not that he had seen the attack, but that he had been inside it. The dream had no edges of a dream. He was low to cold stone, gliding, his whole long body a single muscle, and the corridor around him was dark and lined with doors, and the world came to him in smells and heat, and there was a man ahead, slumped against a wall, dozing at his post...
...and the man stirred, and began to rise, and Harry felt himself strike. Once. Twice. A third time, the fangs going deep, the hot blood, the man crying out and folding...
...and it was Arthur Weasley's face.
Harry woke with a scream half-swallowed in his throat, bolt upright, drenched, his scar prickling, his heart slamming so hard he could hear it. The dormitory was dark and ordinary around him. Ron's snores. Neville's steady breathing. Dean's poster shifting faintly.
'A dream,' he told himself. 'Only a...'
But he knew it wasn't. Every trained instinct he owned was ringing like a struck bell. The stone had been real stone. The pain in his scar was real pain, fading now but sharp as a brand a moment ago. And the man on the floor of that corridor was bleeding, now, somewhere real.
He sat in the dark for the space of ten heartbeats, forcing the blue-moon calm over his panic, thinking.
Then he crossed the room and shook Ron awake.
"Wuzz... Harry? What..."
"Ron. Listen to me." Harry kept his voice low and level, and something in it snapped Ron fully awake. Neville stirred and sat up in the next bed. "Your dad. I saw... I dreamed it, but it wasn't a dream. A snake attacked him. A huge one. Somewhere in the Ministry, a corridor full of doors... he's hurt, Ron, badly, and it's happening now."
Ron went white in the darkness. Neville was already out of bed.
"We have to tell someone," Neville said. "Dumbledore..."
"Dad's closer," said Harry. "He patrols. Come on."
They went down and out through the portrait hole in dressing gowns and bare feet, the Fat Lady spluttering behind them... and fortune, for once, was kind. Not thirty yards along the corridor, two figures stood in quiet conversation by a torch bracket: Argus Filch, lantern in hand, and Ethan Esther.
Ethan turned before they'd made a sound.
Whatever he saw in Harry's face, it was enough. "Argus," he said, without taking his eyes off his son, "you'll excuse me."
"What did you see," he said to Harry. Not what's wrong. Not why are you out of bed. Just that.
Harry told him, fast and exact, the way he'd been taught to report: the snake's-eye view, the corridor of doors, the strike, Arthur's face, the scar. Ron stood shaking beside him. Neville had a steadying hand on Ron's shoulder.
Ethan listened without a flicker. Then he drew, from his waistcoat, a slim silver pocket watch on a chain, and let it hang from his fingers, and went very still.
"Is Arthur Weasley in mortal danger," he murmured to it. "Is Arthur Weasley in mortal danger. Is Arthur Weasley..."
The watch hung dead a moment. Then it began to swing... clockwise, a slow deliberate circle, gathering speed but never racing, turning and turning at a grave, steady rate.
Harry watched his father read it the way other men read print.
"Alive," Ethan said quietly. "Hurt badly... critically... but alive, and not slipping. Not yet." The watch stilled; he closed his hand over it, and just for an instant Harry saw the cost cross his face, a faint greyness there and gone, the price of a true asking paid on the spot without complaint. Then Ethan was moving. "Filch... good night to you. Boys. Back to your tower. Now."
"Dad..."
"Harry." Ethan's hand landed on his shoulder, and his amber eyes were steady as bedrock. "You did exactly right, and fast, and it will matter. Now let me do my part. I have this."
He looked at Ron, and his voice gentled. "Your father is alive, Ron. And people who love him are very close to him. Hold to that. Go."
And he was gone down the corridor at that deceptive unhurried pace that ate distance like a storm front.
The three of them went back to the dormitory because they had been told to, and sat on Harry's bed in the dark, and did not sleep at all.
The Ministry of Magic, the same hour
Samantheus Faramundo worked late as a rule; the Department of Mysteries kept no honest hours. He was crossing the level-nine corridor with a docket under his arm when he found the blood.
He followed it at a run and found Arthur Weasley folded against the wall not fifty feet from the Department's black door... grey-faced, soaked dark to the waist, breath coming shallow, the wounds in his side and shoulder still welling in slow pulses. Snakebite.
Sam had seen enough venoms in his life to know it at a glance, and to know the size of the thing that had delivered it, and to feel his blood go cold at the mathematics of both.
He did not waste a second on the mathematics.
His Patronus went out in three directions at once to the Order members he knew were in the building; his hands, in the meantime, did what could be done... pressure, a staunching charm, a murmured stabilising working that bought minutes.
When Kingsley arrived at a dead run with two others behind him, Sam gave orders in the flat calm voice of a man who had triaged worse in worse places: hold the venom's spread, that charm, renewed every ninety seconds; St Mungo's, the emergency floo, go.
They went, bearing Arthur between them.
Sam stood alone in the empty corridor, looked at the blood on the stone, looked at the sealed black door of his own Department fifty feet away, and his face settled into something old and hard.
Then he began to investigate.
Hogwarts, the Headmaster's office
Dumbledore was not asleep. He was at his desk in dressing gown and nightcap, and McGonagall stood across from him with a sheaf of notes, the two of them working through her term's report on the exchange students... doing rather well, on the whole, she was saying, young Scamander in particular had... when the door opened on Ethan Esther, and both of them read his face and stopped.
Ethan told it plainly: what Harry had seen, from inside the snake's own skull; the corridor of doors, level nine by every detail; and his own divination laid on top of it. "Critically wounded. Alive. Sam will have found him by now or will inside minutes; he was in the building." A beat. "It was no dream, Albus. The boy was behind its eyes."
Dumbledore was already up. "Phineas," he said sharply, to the portraits, "your other frame is at Grimmauld Place; rouse the house. Everard, Dilys... you have frames at the Ministry and St Mungo's; go, watch, report." The painted figures were gone from their canvases before he'd finished. The whole office had come awake, instrument by whirring instrument.
McGonagall had a hand at her throat. "A snake... in the Ministry itself? Albus, what serpent on this earth walks into the Ministry of Magic, past every ward, to the door of the Department of Mysteries, and..."
She stopped. Because neither man had answered her, and their silence was an answer.
Dumbledore's gaze and Ethan's had met over the desk, and in both faces was the same knowledge, cold and settled: whose creature hunted on a leash of that length; whose errand would send it to that door of all doors, in the dead of night, to the thing that waited behind it.
"Minerva," said Dumbledore quietly, "would you see to it that the Weasley children's Heads of House are informed. They will be leaving us for a few days, I think."
19th December 1995, morning
They left before the castle had properly woken.
Ethan gathered them in an empty classroom off the entrance hall... Harry, Ron, Fred and George, Ginny, all five pale and quiet and packed... and produced, from his coat, an old kettle. "Term's loose ends are handled," he said, in the tone of a man for whom loose ends simply ceased to exist. "Dumbledore and Professor McGonagall have squared everything. Your work will keep. Your father won't wait." He held out the kettle. "Everyone touch. Three... two..."
The hook took them behind the navel, and the world became a howl of colour, and then the dim hallway of Number Twelve, Grimmauld Place assembled itself around them, smelling of dust and pine.
From somewhere deeper in the house came a familiar duet: Sirius's voice, exasperated... "it is TINSEL, Kreacher, it is festive, it is not 'defiling the ancestral hall'..."... against a low counter-drone of muttering. Then footsteps, and Sirius rounded the corner mid-argument, saw them, and stopped dead.
His eyes went across the five Weasley-and-Potter faces, and understanding arrived in them all at once, and every trace of comedy dropped away.
"He's alive," Sirius said, before anyone could ask, crossing to them fast. "First thing, before anything: your dad's alive, and he's stable, and he's going to stay that way. Word came through Phineas's portrait in the night and again an hour ago. St Mungo's has him. He's all right."
He gripped Ron's shoulder, and Ginny's, and looked round them all. "Breathe. All of you. That's it."
The five of them sagged as one, the night's terror going out of them in a rush that left them swaying.
"Kreacher... tea, and don't poison it," Sirius called over his shoulder, and the muttering receded.
Ethan, setting down the kettle-Portkey, glanced round the dusty hall with its half-hung tinsel and said, mildly, "I'd suggest we all stay here for the holidays. It's warded to the rafters, it's close to the hospital, and..." a small dry look at Sirius "...the host could plainly use reinforcements against his own staff."
"The host," said Sirius with feeling, "accepts."
They went to St Mungo's that afternoon in a body: Ethan, Sirius as an enormous black dog, to the visible delight of two children in the waiting area, Harry and all the Weasleys, with Mad-Eye Moody stumping ahead and Tonks... hair a subdued mouse-brown for the occasion... bringing up the rear.
Percy and Bill were already there, and had been all night, rumpled and red-eyed in chairs either side of the bed; Sam had arrived a little before the rest, and stood at the window with his arms folded and the look of a man who had spent the morning asking hard questions of hard people.
And Arthur Weasley... propped on pillows, bandaged thick from ribs to shoulder, a goblet of Blood-Replenishing Potion at his elbow that a Healer refilled on the hour... looked up as his family poured through the door, and beamed.
"There you all are! Molly, dear, I'm fine... ow... mostly fine..."
There was a great deal of weeping, embracing and Molly alternately kissing him and threatening him, and it was some time before anyone could speak in sentences.
The ward held two other patients: a grey-faced man in the next bed who flinched from the window's daylight, bitten, the whispers went, by a werewolf three nights past; and beyond him a woman with her leg swathed to the hip who refused, with mulish fury, to tell the Healers what had taken the chunk out of it... which refusal had the whole ward staff darkly convinced she'd been keeping something highly illegal in her garden shed.
It was when the adults gathered close around Arthur's bed and lowered their voices that the children were shooed to the corridor... and it was in the corridor that Fred produced, from inside his coat, with a magician's flourish, a flesh-coloured string.
"Extendable Ear," he murmured. "Never leave home. Budge up."
Six heads bent over the string.
"...and I'm telling you it wants thinking about," Moody's growl came through, tinny and terribly clear. "The boy says he saw it from inside the snake. INSIDE it, Esther. You know what that could mean as well as I do. If You-Know-Who's found a door into the lad's head... if he's riding him... possessing him, even, and the boy none the wiser..."
In the corridor, Harry went cold to the soles of his feet.
Ginny's hand found his sleeve. The twins had gone still. And then, through the Ear, came Ethan's voice, unhurried and even, and the corridor's six eavesdroppers held their breath.
"No, Alastor."
"You can't just..."
"I can, actually, and I'll tell you why."
A pause; the faint ring of a teaspoon.
"You all know what saved Harry as a baby, even if none of you can write the equation for it. Lily Potter's protection. Ancient magic... the oldest there is, paid for in full, worked into the boy's very blood. It unmade a Killing Curse from the most powerful Legilimens alive. It has never stopped working."
The voice cooled a degree. "A protection like that does not leave the back door open. Voldemort cannot sit in that boy's head like a squatter; the ground itself would burn him. What Harry has is not a possession. It is a... leak. A connection neither of them chose, through which things sometimes spill. And I'd remind the table that last night the thing that spilled through it saved Arthur's life."
The teaspoon rang again, gently. "So we will not be treating my son as a suspect for the crime of being a window. Are we agreed."
It was not really a question, and the silence that followed was agreement.
"...aye," Moody grunted at last. "Constant vigilance cuts both ways, I suppose. No offence meant to the lad."
"None taken on his behalf," said Ethan pleasantly. "Sam. Tell them what you found."
Sam's deep voice, grim: "The snake didn't break in. It was carried in. There's no breach in the Atrium wards, no forced entry anywhere on the visitor routes... but there's a signature gap on one of the staff channels, the kind you only get when someone with clearance brings something warded through under their own pass. Which means..." he let it land "...someone inside the Ministry is Voldemort's. Placed, trusted, and willing to smuggle his creature to the very door of my Department."
A low sound of dismay round the table. In the corridor, Percy... who had slipped out to join the children moments before, and bent to the Ear with the rest... had gone dark in the face, his jaw working; Bill's hand came up and gripped the back of his brother's neck, gently, and Percy breathed.
"And the snake itself is wrong," Sam went on. "Arthur fought. I found his spell-scoring on the walls... he hit it, more than once, squarely. Any natural serpent that size sheds scale and skin under fire; it's how they're made. There was nothing. No scale, no blood, no shed. As if the thing... doesn't shed at all. As if it isn't entirely...an animal any more."
Harry, listening in the corridor, thought of the great coiling shadow at Voldemort's feet in the graveyard, and said nothing, and filed it where he filed the things that frightened him.
But Moody's words had gone in like a splinter, and would not come out.
...
Back at Grimmauld Place, Harry went quiet. He sat through dinner answering in monosyllables, and afterwards took himself up to the room that had been made his, and shut the door; and when Ron rose to go after him, a hand came down lightly on his shoulder, and Ethan shook his head once.
"Let him," Ethan said. "He has checking to do, and he has to do it alone. He'll surface."
Alone in the dark, Harry closed his eyes and went inside.
The Mind Palace received him as it always did: the long moonlit halls of it, blue and still, the archives of everything he had ever chosen to keep. He walked them for what might have been hours, methodical as his father had taught him, opening room after room... his memories laid out whole and orderly, the last weeks, the last months... searching for anything wrong. A door he hadn't built. A shadow that moved against the light. Footprints not his own in the dust of his own thoughts.
There was nothing. Every hall was his. Every room held only what he had put in it.
At the end of the last corridor, he stopped.
The door was there. The one at the deep end, the one that led further in... down past memory, to the place Ethan had spoken of only once and warned of always. Don't go deeper, kiddo. Not alone. Never alone. Harry stood before it in the blue stillness a long moment, and thought: 'if he were anywhere, he'd be through there,' and his hand half-rose...
...and he let it fall. 'Never alone.' He turned and walked back up through his own bright halls and opened his eyes in the dark bedroom, no wiser and no easier.
He kept to the room most of the next day too, coming down only for meals, speaking mostly to Ethan when he spoke at all... and a dozen times he came to the very edge of asking, how do you KNOW, Dad, how can you be sure I'm not, and a dozen times the question died in his throat, because some part of him was afraid of watching his father hesitate before answering.
Ethan, who missed nothing, let him carry it, stayed near, and waited.
20th December 1995
Rescue arrived on the doorstep at eleven o'clock, in the form of Hermione Granger with a carpet bag and Viktor Krum carrying everything else.
Sirius, forewarned and gleeful, threw open the door himself. He gave Hermione a warm one-armed hug and his nod of approval... then turned upon Viktor and looked him up, and down, and up again, slowly, with the narrow-eyed thoroughness of a man appraising a horse he suspected of being sold above its worth, while Viktor... international Quidditch star, teaching assistant, veteran of a Triwizard maze... stood on the step and visibly wilted.
"So," said Sirius. "You're the famous..."
"Sirius," said Hermione, and hauled Viktor past him into the hall.
The Floo flared green twenty minutes later and delivered Ethan, returning from an errand, with Luna Lovegood stepping out of the flames after him, serene amid the soot, a wrapped pudding under one arm.
The new arrivals found the Weasley children in the drawing room... and Arthur with them, discharged that very morning, installed in the best armchair under three blankets and Molly's standing guard, waving off all concern... and there were greetings all round, until Luna, having distributed hers, looked about the room and asked the obvious question.
"Where's Harry?"
Ron's face fell, and he sighed, and told them: the Extendable Ear, Moody's possessed, and Harry gone quiet ever since, a full day now, holed up in his room and barely speaking. "He thinks... you know. That it might be true. That he might be dangerous to be around. It's rubbish, but he won't hear it from us..."
Hermione's eyebrows rose through her hairline. Then they came down again, into a configuration that made Ron take an instinctive step backwards, and she said, in a voice of terrible sweetness, "Oh, he won't, won't he," and took Luna by the hand and marched upstairs.
They knocked. "Hah-ree?" Luna called, gentle as falling snow. "It's me."
Under his blanket, Harry's eyes lit at the voice... and then dimmed, the splinter turning. 'What if it isn't safe. What if I'M not...' But he couldn't leave Luna on a doorstep. He shuffled over and opened the door a careful six inches, arranging something like a smile on his face. "Hey, Luna, I was just..."
He saw Hermione's smile.
Harry had faced a resurrected Dark Lord across a graveyard. He knew mortal peril when it smiled at him. He tried to close the door.
Hermione's foot met it first... a flat, textbook, side-on kick that took it out of his hand and swung it wide against the wall... and then she was on him, and Harry Potter, survivor of the Killing Curse, went down under five feet and a bit of furious best friend, caught in the grip Ron had long ago christened the Friendly Strangle, while she admonished him at close range and full volume: "...a whole DAY... sulking under a blanket... you absolute... after everything we... if you EVER shut us out like that again, Harry James Potter, I will..."
The doorway filled with delighted spectators. Ginny was doubled over. The twins were taking notes. Ron laughed so hard he had to hold the doorframe. Luna beamed upon the violence like sunshine. And Viktor, arriving last, took in the scene, shook his head with deep bemusement, waded in, and simply lifted Hermione bodily off her victim from behind, still mid-lecture, her finger still jabbing the air where Harry had been.
Harry sat up, retrieved his glasses, straightened them sheepishly... and looked around at them all. At all of them. Laughing, exasperated, entirely unafraid, crowded into his doorway exactly as they had always crowded into every doorway of his life. Not one of them looking at him like a suspect.
Like a window something dark might climb through.
Luna knelt, and put her arms around him, and held on. "It's all right," she said into his shoulder, simply, as though reporting weather.
"She's right," Ginny said, from the doorway, and something in her voice made everyone quiet. She came and sat on the end of the bed and looked at Harry steadily. "You forget... I have been possessed by him. Really possessed. Second year. I know exactly what it feels like... the missing hours, the waking up somewhere with no memory of walking there, the fog." She held his eyes. "Have you lost time? Found yourself somewhere you didn't walk to? Woken with something done that you didn't do?"
"...No," Harry said. "None of that."
"Then you're not possessed," said Ginny, with the flat authority of the only expert in the room. "Trust the one who'd know."
"Also," said Fred, "if You-Know-Who were possessing you, mate, we'd have noticed, because you'd have become interesting..."
"...whereas you spent all of yesterday under a blanket," said George, "which is the least Dark Lord behaviour ever recorded..."
"...honestly, if that's possession, he's really let himself go..."
And Harry, buried under Luna's hug and his friends' laughter, felt the splinter draw out of him at last, and laughed with them, and came downstairs, and rejoined the living.
Christmas at Grimmauld Place gathered itself person by person.
Percy went out on the twenty-third and came back with Charlie, fresh off the Portkey from Romania and smelling faintly of dragon... and the two of them walked in wearing, side by side, their Weasley jumpers, the lurid P and C blazing proudly, and Molly took one look at her third and fifth sons in her own knitting and had to sit down and be handed a handkerchief.
Bill arrived on Christmas Eve, and he did not arrive alone.
Fleur Delacour came in on his arm out of the swirling snow, silvery and glowing and entirely unbothered by the dour old hallway, and Bill introduced her to his parents with his ears rather red... and Arthur and Molly shared, over the young couple's heads, a long look in which surprise and delight and I told you so were about equally mixed.
Fleur greeted the whole room with warmth and kissed Hermione on both cheeks and was frankly delighted to discover Harry... "'Arry!"... and Viktor among the company; the Triwizard's three surviving champions' circle, half-reassembled around a Christmas table.
Sirius, upon grasping that an actual part-Veela had entered the House of Black, rose magnificently to the occasion and produced, from some dusty internal reserve, the flawless manners of the aristocratic host he had spent his whole life refusing to become, to the open hilarity of everyone who knew him.
And last of all, on Christmas Day itself, Sam arrived through the Floo towing Remus Lupin... who had the wild, blinking look of a man physically extracted from beneath a paperwork avalanche, still brushing memo-confetti from his shoulders, and who fixed Ethan, across the crowded warm kitchen, with a stare of such long-suffering, murderous eloquence that Ethan raised his glass to him without a flicker of shame.
The Christmas meal was Molly's and Ethan's together, and it was tremendous... the great table groaning, the crackers snapping, Kreacher lurking at the door muttering but noticeably not leaving, within reach of the smell of it.
"Draco sends his best, by the way," Hermione reported over the pudding. "He's spending Christmas on the continent... some villa. With his mother, and the Greengrasses."
"The Greengrasses," said Ron, with enormous comic disdain, around a mouthful. "A villa. In Europe. Of course he is. Probably has a fountain. Probably skis." He pointed his spoon. "Some of us holiday in a haunted terrace with a screaming portrait, Malfoy. Some of us are authentic."
"And Neville's away too," Hermione went on, ignoring him, and her voice softened into something warm. "Travelling. With his gran... and his mum and dad. All four of them, all over the country, everywhere Frank and Alice ever wanted to go." She smiled down at her plate. "Making up the time."
The table went quiet a moment, in the best way; glasses were lifted, without anyone proposing it, to absent friends.
...
The holiday ran its course in warmth and snow, and ended, as terms must, on a violently purple triple-decker bus.
They went back by Knight Bus... Harry, Luna, Hermione, Viktor, and the whole Weasley delegation... lurching and banging through space while armchairs skidded and Stan Shunpike narrated, and it was on the pavement before boarding, in the cold bright morning, that Ethan drew Harry aside for a last word.
"About the visions," Ethan said quietly. "Since I know you never did manage to ask me." Harry flushed; Ethan's eyes only crinkled. "Your Occlumency is sound, kiddo. Better than sound. The Cogitation you've built... four years of it... is proof against possession of any stripe, mind or spirit. Nothing wears you that you don't consent to. Keep practising, keep the water calm, and that will never change. You have my word on it, and you know what my word is worth."
Harry nodded, and felt the last of the splinter's ache dissolve.
"But," Ethan went on, and his voice took on the precise, careful weight it carried when the lesson mattered, "understand what the visions are. The connection runs both ways, and it is a kind of legilimency... subtle, unchosen, a thread between you and him that neither of you spun on purpose. Through it, things spill. Last time, what spilled was true, and it saved a good man's life."
He held Harry's eyes. "But a thread that carries truth can be made to carry other things. If he ever learns the thread is there... and he may... then what comes down it will no longer be things he doesn't know you're seeing. It will be things he wants you to see...."
Snow settling on the brim of his hat.
"So mark this, and keep it: the visions might not always be true. Weigh every one. Verify before you act. And tell me. Always tell me."
"I will," Harry said. And meant it, and mostly understood... and filed the warning, vaguely, where he filed things whose shape he trusted before he could see their whole outline.
"Good lad." Ethan knocked a knuckle gently against the top of his head, the old gesture, and stepped back as the great purple bus banged into existence at the kerb. "Go on. Term waits. And Harry..." the amber eyes curved, warm in the cold "...happy Christmas, kiddo."
The doors hissed shut, the world snapped sideways, and Hogwarts came to meet them.