Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

“You really should have worn your dress robes. It’s poor form to meet the Deputy Headmistress looking like you just rolled out of bed.”

Harry Evans finished off his pumpkin juice in one great gulp, head tilted back and mug perfectly angled to keep his father from catching him rolling his eyes. He reached for his napkin, dabbing at his lips, and was saved from saying something that would probably have earned him a stern look and an even sterner talking to by the timely arrival of one of their erstwhile innkeeps bearing a freshly charmed pot of tea. Harry hadn’t yet learned to love the stuff like it seemed everyone here did and was clinging with all his might to the comfort blanket that was a tall glass of pulpy, orange goodness to start the morning off right.

Remus eased aside the platter of toasted English muffins and placed the pot next to it, crooking a finger to beckon the sugar bowl and several tea cups to float themselves over from the cabinet. “Don’t be daft, Sev—no one wears dress robes to get Sorted.”

Severus Evans snatched a straggling tea cup from the air before it could join its companions on the platter Remus had prepared, reaching for the teapot. “Quite right, they wear school robes—which we might have had occasion to purchase in advance had someone not been two hours late picking us up from the Portkey Authority!” This last bit he practically bellowed in the direction of the hob, where Remus’s partner Sirius was presently babysitting a tart on Remus’s orders and was not to take his eyes off of it.

“Listen,” Sirius called back, “they changed your arrival point three times. It’s suddenly my fault the Ministry couldn’t find its own head if it was shoved up its arse? And anyway, if you were so fussed about the time, the Knight Bus was right there.”

“And there it was going to stay, because we weren’t going to let our dear companions wander around London all by their lonesome, now were we, Darling?” Remus smiled, all teeth, and Sirius wrinkled his nose. Remus turned back to them. “There’s no need for nerves,” he said, facing Harry but feeling like he was speaking to his father. “It’s just a quick bit of business, and then you can get on with what really matters.”

“Absolutely gutting Diagon of anything and everything red and gold and lion-themed!” Sirius crowed, and Remus rolled his eyes, adding with a meaningful look, “Getting excited for your first day of school.”

Harry ducked his head, feeling just the tiniest bit silly—after all, he was sixteen, not six, and while it was kind of sweet how everyone was so thrilled he was finally going to get the authentic Hogwarts experience his parents and their friends had enjoyed, he himself was honestly of two minds about the whole matter.

After all, he’d never been to school before. Not a proper one, at least. Far too dangerous, his father had said when the subject of Ilvermorny had been proposed, You’ll receive a perfectly adequate education here at home.

And he had, Harry thought, received a perfectly adequate education—his Brutally Exhausting Arcanum Review grades attested to this. Really, he couldn’t imagine any traditional schoolwork being tougher to get through than the assignments his father had set him. He could brew Pepper-up with his eyes closed, Banish a Boggart without breaking a sweat, and manhandle a Mandrake with one hand tied behind his back.

If Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry gave him half as much trouble as Severus Evans’s School for Boys Who Lived had, he’d count his blessings. At least the professors here weren’t liable to force him to talk through his Patronus for a week if he swished when he should have flicked in a Charms lesson.

Severus opened his mouth, likely to insist Harry make his way back upstairs and sort through his trunk for the set of dress robes he’d only had occasion to wear once before (the bat mitzvah of the daughter of a regular shop customer, attended under a Glamour so heavy Harry hadn’t looked quite himself for a week after) when the doorbell to Number 12 gave an ominous clang, announcing a new arrival.

“I’ll get it!” Sirius called—but he was waylaid by Remus, waving him back.

“The hell you will, you’re on tart duty—I won’t see my hard work burned just so you and James can get a headstart on behaving like twelve-year-olds.”

“How do you know it’s James?” Sirius grumbled, shuffling back to his position in front of the oven, when the doorbell began to clang again—and again and again and again at a rapid-fire pace. Remus only crossed his arms, lifted a brow in Sirius’s direction, then headed up the stairs for the entryway.

“Still his doormat, even after all these years? I distinctly recall the Hat saying something about Gryffindors being brave of heart?”

Sirius threw Severus a dark look, showed him a couple of fingers before stowing them in a pair of oversized oven mitts, and snarled, “Fuck off."

“Language,” Severus chided as he took a careful sip of his tea, and Harry didn’t miss the way his lips curled in amusement around the rim. It was odd, really, seeing his father in a rare good mood. Smiling. He wasn’t a terribly dour sort on most occasions, but he was generally pretty serious. Maybe this move would wind up being good for him. Reconnecting with old friends—maybe meeting new ones. Yeah. It might not be so bad.

Of course, whether or not it would be ‘not so bad’ for Harry was another matter entirely.

It was only, this was a lot of ‘new’ in a short span of time.

When his father had sat down at breakfast two months ago and informed Harry that they would be moving from their cosy little apartment in San Francisco all the way to England, where Harry would at summer’s end go on to attend his parents’ alma mater for the next year despite having been home-schooled his entire life, he’d nearly choked on his toast. After all, there was a reason Harry had grown up soaking in the California sunshine and not under the perpetually grey skies of the British Isles, and he’d been under the impression, courtesy of his father’s paranoia, that daring to tread on these shores would be tantamount to suicide.

But when he’d brought up these concerns, Severus had been uncharacteristically curt in his response, noting only that new regulations set down by the British Ministry of Magic meant that all native-born witches and wizards of the United Kingdom were required to complete at least one year of schooling locally or risk losing their privilege to practise magic. That sounded like a crock to Harry, but his father remained adamant that there was nothing to be done about the matter. “Circumstances have flown beyond our control, and we’re obliged to make this journey. We will go, because we must, but we will not be stupid about it, we will not be naïve about it, and we will not be caught off our guard, am I understood?”

And Harry, who had spent fifteen years living under the same roof as Severus Evans, was anything but stupid, naïve, or liable to be caught off his guard. His father had ensured as such, after all. When you had a magical, murderous madman after your head—even if he had been brought low and run to ground ages back—a healthy amount of paranoia was kind of a necessity. He’d heard every gory detail of Voldemort’s rise and subsequent fall since he’d been old enough to actually comprehend the gravity of what had happened, like the world’s most depressing bedtime story, and Severus had taken every conceivable measure to ensure that he would not lose his son as he had his wife.

For Harry, though, it was all kind of a distant, dull ache. He’d heard the story so many times over, he could practically recite it rote, yet stepping out of the Portkey Authority into the terminal of the British Ministry of Magic and seeing everything seem so…well, normal—it was kind of difficult to credit it. His father’s dire words and penchant for privacy seemed now less like sage advice Harry ought to make his own and more mild psychosis brought about by a decade-and-a-half spent living in secret, apart from most of the magical world at large and tucked away under countless Glamours and carefully cast Notice-me-nots and two different Fideliuses.

Lily Evans had surely been a wonderful person, but his father never wanted to talk about her and kept all memory of her close to his heart, warded against even his own son who really would have liked to have known, well, anything about her beyond her name, that she’d had green eyes like Harry’s and hair of deep auburn, and that her Patronus had been a doe. As it was, he counted himself lucky to know that much.

She was too much a mystery to him for him to miss her very much, so he was content to sit here in the kitchen of Number 12 Grimmauld Place, wolfing down his breakfast and awaiting his fate.

For today, he was to be Sorted.

Now, honestly, Harry didn’t really understand what that meant. He heard the capital-S when his father and these fine folks he had been informed were his godparents said the word, but whenever he asked what Sorting actually involved, no one seemed able to give him a straight answer.

“You learn who your peers will be,” his father had said, and, “You learn who your friends will be,” Sirius had said, and “You learn who you’ll be,” Remus had said, and honestly, it all sounded a bit too precious for his taste. They all of them spoke of Hogwarts with this wistful gleam in their eye, like they really truly envied him about to strut through those evidently hallowed halls, and Harry supposed it was just something you had to experience first-hand to truly understand.

And that time was nearly nigh. In fact, glancing at the clock hanging over the mantel, it was fifteen minutes to nigh.

“I haven’t missed it, have I?” James Potter came scrambling into the kitchen like a tornado, hair askew and glasses askewer, and his prominent grin widened when he caught sight of Harry and Severus. “Wotcher, Harry.”

“Woh-ah,” Harry said around a mouthful. He didn’t know half the slang these folks used, his father evidently having been too proper to use such colloquialisms himself, but they certainly sounded fun enough, and Harry had resolved to adopt a few into his own vocabulary before this diversion was over and done with.

James slid into the chair between Harry and Severus, reaching for a muffin with one hand and the coffee carafe with the other. Harry liked James—he wasn’t half as staid as his father or Remus, and he always seemed to either be coming from or going to some place fascinating. Harry had met him on three separate occasions thus far, and each time he’d stayed for all of twenty minutes before he had to be ‘off’ somewhere. Harry thought he must have a very important job, but his father assured him this was not the case, that was just, quote, “how rich arseholes are.” Harry didn’t really know what that meant, and though it didn’t sound like a very nice thing, it did nothing to diminish James’s standing in Harry’s eyes, such that he was still pretty sure that, of his three godfathers, James was probably his favourite.

Which helped, since apparently he was going to be Harry’s actual father when it came to school records.

See, the problem was this: Harry was kind of a big deal. Famous and infamous in turn. His father said that was what happened when you sundered a dark lord into a million little pieces before you were out of nappies—though Harry couldn’t remember doing that, and he’d grown up having to hide it, so what use was celebrity to him, when it came down to it?

No use whatsoever—so for his own safety and security, he would doff his family name of Evans and don that of Potter. “Why Potter?” James had asked when the proposal had first been put to him, and, “Because you’ve slept with half of London while your better halves here breed pedigree racing hippogriffs, so it stands to reason you’re the one who’d have illegitimate get wandering around,” had been the response. Harry didn’t know how he was supposed to feel about being someone’s ‘illegitimate get’, but playing at being ‘Harry Potter’ for the next nine months would be easy enough, he supposed, so he really didn’t care if his schoolmates thought him the late-blooming result of a serial philanderer’s one-night stand with a No-Maj.

Severus drew his wand, sending the teacup he’d stolen winging its way to the sink. “Haven’t missed it—but it’s a near thing. We still need to Glamour him, after all—and it’s a much easier task with his ‘father’ here.”

James ducked his head, swallowing a bite of toast. “Sorry, sorry—but I forgot my old pair of glasses and had to zip back.” He reached into a pocket and handed Harry a pair of folded up wire-frames. “I’ve de-spelled the lenses, so it won’t muck up your eyesight wearing them for long periods.”

Harry frowned as he took them, testing their fit on his face. A little big, but Harry would manage. “Are you sure I need them?”

“Trust me, men in my family’ve needed their eyesight corrected going back, like, fifteen generations—Harry ‘Potter’ would definitely be sporting a pair of these babies.”

Severus tapped Harry’s shoulder with his wand for his attention. “Chin up, eyes forward, and hold still—these are fine adjustments I need to make, and ones you’ll be living with for the next nine months.” Harry did as instructed, watching his father’s gaze flit back and forth between Harry’s face and James’s as he pinched and poked and tweaked Harry’s outward appearance enough that people wouldn’t do a double-take when told he came from Potter stock.

His soft, dark hair with auburn highlights that fell nearly to his nape in a single gentle wave frizzed up, curling in on itself and blackening like someone had just set fire to it, and his skin tone darkened a touch, less the pale, milky complexion of Severus Evans and more the brawny tan that born-and-bred outdoorsman James Potter looked like he’d cultivated.

He could also feel the skin over his forehead knitting together to hide the spangling lightning-bolt scar where, he’d been told, a deadly curse had struck him as a babe and then rebounded upon its caster, ending the reign of a mad dark lord before it had even truly begun. When Harry had asked how such a thing had been possible—he’d learned about the Unforgivables years back and knew you didn’t just shrug them off—Severus had only frowned and said he wasn’t sure and switched subjects. That he hadn’t subsequently dived into a complicated discussion of the prevailing hypotheses told Harry his father had a pretty good idea of how it had happened and just didn’t want to talk about it. Lots of topics drew that sort of response from him, Harry had learned, and they invariably involved his mother, so he’d learned to take ‘don’t press your luck’ for an answer.

When Severus tapped Harry’s nose next, James gave a cry of protest. “Aw, come on! It’s not that big—leave off.”

“How will anyone ever be expected to believe he’s your offspring if he doesn’t have a nose the size of the Knight Bus hanging off his face?”

“Well if it’s anatomical features you’re wanting to enlarge to make sure everyone knows he’s mine, then why not start with his di—”

The doorbell chimed again in a fortuitously timely moment, and Severus hissed under his breath. “Damn, that will have to be good enough—your hand, Harry. Quickly.”

Harry rolled up his sleeve and bared his wrist for his father—the Glamour would have to be anchored to something on his person if he didn’t want to have to keep re-upping it every twenty-four hours, and the bracelet his mother had Charmed for him as a baby was never removed, so it would do just fine.

James watched them work, elbow on the table and head resting in his palm, all arguments from mere seconds ago seemingly forgotten. “Damn. Still a dab hand with your Charmwork, aren’t you, Snivellus? Ten points to Gryffindor.” Well, perhaps not all arguments.

“We’re nearly two decades out of school, Potter—I really wish you’d leave off with the childish names.”

“Easy enough—if you’d finally up and become an Animagus like the rest of us, we’d be only too happy to bestow upon you a new one!”

Harry perked up but was careful not to jostle his wrist. “You’re an Animagus?” James only waggled his brows invitingly, and Harry turned back to his father. “Can I become an Animagus too?”

“Sure!” James said, just as his father cut in with a curt, “Absolutely not.” And before James could start another argument, Severus directed himself at Harry. “Animagecraft is for those who have nothing better to do with their time than stand around with mandrake leaves in their mouth for a month before running through an open field in the nude hoping to be struck by lightning—and that is not you, Harry, are we understood?”

Harry nodded, resolutely not looking at James, who was presently looming over his father from behind, shooting him a double thumbs-up while he mouthed Summer hols!

Another few moments passed, breath held all around while Severus concentrated on completing the Charm as the soft, muffled drone of conversation filtered down from the floor above.

“You know McGonagall doesn’t like being kept waiting,” James said, still watching Severus’s work intently.

“I expect she’s even less fond of knowing she’s going to be teaching your offspring. Let’s spare her the trauma as long as possible.” And with a final tap of his wand against the bracelet, it emitted a soft blue glow that rapidly dissipated, and Severus drew back. “There. Don’t go wandering around any anti-magic fields for the next nine months, and you ought to be dandy.”

Harry reached up to pat his hair, frowning at its springiness. “…Feels like a birds’ nest.”

“And it looks like one too.” Hey! James protested, and Severus nodded to Harry’s plate. “Finish up, smartly now. As your ‘father’ said, we mustn’t keep the Deputy Headmistress waiting.”

Harry wolfed down the last of his breakfast and took a final swig of his juice just as a sharp DING sounded. All heads turned as Sirius gave a sharp whoop: “Tart’s done!”

And that meant it was time to get Sorted.

Typically, he’d been told, Sorting happened in the Hogwarts Great Hall, where new First-years would be escorted to a dais, made to sit upon a stool in front of the entire school, and told what sort of person they were destined to be by a ratty old hat placed upon their heads. Harry had thought his father had been making a rare joke when this story had been told, only to have Sirius and Remus corroborate it. “A hat? A hat tells you what House you’ll be part of?”

“It’s a very smart hat,” Remus had said, and this had not instilled in Harry an ounce of confidence, who had honestly already been a little bit disappointed to learn he would be meeting with the Deputy Headmistress and not the fabled Dumbledore, the principal—Headmaster, he corrected himself—of the school and someone apparently his own father looked up to quite a lot. His godparents all assured him McGonagall was a ‘good egg’ (he assumed this was a nice thing to say about someone), but Albus Dumbledore had been the lone member of the magical community Severus had kept in regular contact with over the years, and that told Harry he knew rather a lot about rather a lot. He might be the key to unlocking all the mysteries Harry’s father never seemed to want to delve into—and here he’d missed a chance for a face-to-face meeting.

Ah well, surely they’d cross paths at some point in the next year, right? Of course right.

James clapped him on the shoulder and dragged him from his chair bodily, directing him to the stairs while Severus helped Sirius wrangle the piping hot tart under control. His ‘father’ would be expected to accompany him for this important moment, and Harry was silently grateful for the extra bit of familiarity in his corner.

“Gryffindor, yeah?” James said as they mounted the staircase.

“That’s where you all were, right? It’s the best one?”

James gave a little shrug. “Feels a bit biased—but yeah. Or at least the most fun one. Ravenclaws are fuddy-duddy bookworms, Hufflepuffs are all right but a little too stuck in their ways, not very adventurous. Anything but Slytherin—pit of snakes that, and no one you’d want to consort with.” This last bit Harry had heard at length over the past few days. Sirius seemed quite proud of being the first in his line for as long back as had been recorded to not have been Sorted into Slytherin House, as it was evidently where all the wrong sorts went. Remus had been a bit kinder in his depiction of the House, describing its students as ‘focused’ and ‘ambitious’, but Harry’s father had reminded him darkly that this was the House Voldemort had been Sorted into, where he’d roused a following, and where he’d learned all the darker magics he’d used to terrorise the wizarding world, and that had firmly decided Harry.

Remus was engaged in quiet conversation with an older witch when Harry entered the parlour, and they turned as a pair to greet him, with Remus standing to beckon him closer while the witch—presumably Deputy Headmistress McGonagall—took a good long look at him, as if appraising an art piece she was looking to collect. He couldn’t quite place her age, but she was considerably older than his father and godfathers, her face lined with wrinkles and skin holding that parchment-thin glow that suggested she was really getting on up there in years. Her expression was guarded, but he thought he detected a few smile lines around her presently pinched lips and hoped that boded well. She wore a wide-brimmed pointed hat of velvety black fabric upon her head, and Harry wondered if this was the hat everyone was so excited about.

“Excellent timing there, Harry—I was just telling Professor McGonagall here how excited you were to start your Hogwarts education.” He gestured to the loveseat. “Why don’t you have a seat, then? I’ll go check Sirius hasn’t Transfigured the tart into a tortoise while you and your dad get down to business.” He made his quiet apologies to the Deputy Headmistress, who nodded politely, waited for Remus to clear the threshold, and then clasped her hands together and turned to Harry.

“Well, Mr. Potter. It’s a pleasure to finally meet you.” She had a soft, reedy voice with a very thick accent, and Harry was grateful for the slow cadence with which she spoke, or else he might not have been able to understand her. She’d clearly been teaching a while—probably longer than Harry’s father had been alive—and knew how to make her meaning known. “I understand you’ve been living in America your whole life?”

Harry nodded. “With my mother, yes. But—” He nodded to James. “Dad came to visit, when he could make it out. He’s looked after me, in his own way.”

“Hm,” was all she said, lips thinning, and Harry was getting the impression this woman was not all that fond of James Potter. Maybe he would have been better off claiming to have been cooked up in a cauldron by Sirius and Remus. “Would you mind if I asked how familiar you are with the wizarding world, Mr. Potter? Were you much involved with your local magical community in America? As I understand it, your mother is a Muggle, yes?”

“A—Muggle?”

“No-Maj, bud,” James reminded softly, and Harry quietly cursed himself—lucky his father wasn’t around to rap his knuckles for that careless slip-up. “And yeah—but she’s been really understanding about, well, everything, and they play a bit faster and looser with the Statute of Secrecy over there these days. It’s not the 20s anymore!”

“I’m sure,” McGonagall drawled. “But to my question: have you had much of an education thus far? Only, I noticed you weren’t on Ilvermorny’s roster, and I was under the impression most North American magical children took their schooling there.”

Harry ducked his head; no more slip-ups. They’d rehearsed this bit often enough he ought to sail through. “My mother was…a bit overprotective. It didn’t sit right with her, my going off to a school so far away, not being able to see me nine months out of the year. I’ve mostly had private tutors—but I’m confident I’ll be able to stand alongside my peers at Hogwarts when it comes to magical know-how.”

And for the first time, McGonagall smiled, reaching into a pocket to withdraw a thick sheaf of parchment that she began to rifle through, gaze scrawling over the contents. “That much I can see for myself—as I understand it your B.E.A.R.s are held earlier than our O.W.L.s, and I confess I’ve never even heard of a P.O.S.SUM, but this equivalency report suggests you’ve earned high marks in all areas but Transfiguration—only an E equivalent.” She tutted softly under her breath. “Not to worry, though; we’ll whip you into shape before the year is out.” She gave him a knowing little wink. “Hopefully Hogwarts will be able to teach you something in the coming year.”

“I’m sure it will, Deputy Headmistress.”

“I’d ask you to call me ‘Professor’, but I recognise we haven’t reached the part where you’re actually ready for classes yet. Let’s rectify that.” She bent down, picking up her handbag, and thrust her arm into what to Harry’s eye seemed a cavernous void—before pulling out a ratty old brown hat that looked like it’d been around since Hogwarts’ founding, so much wear did it show.

McGonagall grasped it gently by the brim, holding it up meaningfully, and nodded at Harry. He took the hint, lowering his head, and held his breath as the hat settled around his crown, sliding down until his eyes were covered and everything went black.

“Well, you certainly aren’t a First-year.” No, indeed he was not, and the hat’s raspy voice (or was it even actually speaking at all, and this was merely in Harry’s head?) tickled Harry’s mind. He could feel it, he thought, poking about within him. Looking for something, and making itself quite at home in Harry’s headspace. “Can’t remember the last time I Sorted anyone this late—though I know Dumbledore is of the opinion that I Sort too early as it is.”

Harry didn’t honestly care that much about the timing—he mostly wanted to get this over with, because the Hat was very itchy, shifting about on his head as it was, and the mind-probing bit was uncomfortable as well. Just Sort me, he thought at it, Anywhere but Slytherin will do, if it’s all the same.

He imagined he heard the Hat scoff. “Why is it there’s never any two ways about it, hm? Either they’re desperate to be placed in Slytherin or desperate not to!”

And that just boggled Harry’s mind; who on earth would want to be placed in Slytherin, when he had it on four different authorities that it was about the worst place you could want to spend your time at Hogwarts?

“Well why shouldn’t they want to be placed there? It’s a noble and ancient House that has given birth to witches and wizards capable of great acts—occasionally terrible ones, yes, but great all the same.” That sounded like as backhanded a compliment as Harry had ever heard. “It is a House for Dreamers, for Visionaries, for those who see in themselves a purpose beyond that laid out neatly before them. A Ravenclaw will meet his future well-prepared, a Hufflepuff will take his future as it comes and be happy all the same, a Gryffindor will beat back whatever challenges his future may throw his way, but a Slytherin will make his future what he wishes it to be. But beware—” Beware? As if Harry hadn’t been warned against this House enough already. “Slytherin is not for the weak-willed or weak-minded. Those who most prosper within its walls are those made of stern enough stuff to beware its pitfalls—for the road to greatness is paved with them. Best not to travel it alone.”

Well, the thing was, Harry wasn’t all that interested in greatness. He had no particular ambitions, no ‘dreams’ or ‘visions’. He didn’t see any grand purpose for himself—and he was pretty comfortable, he figured, letting his future come as it would. That sounded like perhaps a Hufflepuff frame of mind, didn’t it? Yellow wasn’t really his colour, but he could deal with it for a year or so.

“Alas, Destiny doesn’t always listen to what we might want—it simply is, and we cannot avoid being swept along with it, to whatever fate may await us. The child who felled the Dark Lord may find keeping a low profile and ‘letting his future come as it would’ a challenging task.”

Now hold up, how did this thing know who he was? Was it really poking into his most private of thoughts? Surely that was against some sort of regulation. His father ought to sue— “I know rather a lot about you now, Harry Severus Evans, and one thing of which I’m quite certain is that you’ll find your true friends while wearing the colours of SLYTHERIN!”

This last bit Harry heard ringing in his ears, audibly bellowed for all and sundry to hear. The Hat was abruptly yanked from his head, and Harry blinked as the warm morning light of the parlour brought everything back into focus. His real father had joined the pretend one, along with Remus and Sirius and the still-steaming raspberry tart fresh from the oven, hovering between them. And all of them—McGonagall included—were wearing identical expressions of bald-faced shock.

“Well—I mean—obviously there’s been some sort of a mistake,” James began, and his stammering protests were quickly rejoined by Sirius who huffed, “That’s ridiculous. There’s no way in hell James-bloody-Potter’s son got Sorted Slytherin.” Remus had one hand on his partner’s shoulder, reminding in quiet tones that Harry was certain were meant for the rest of the room that, “It’s entirely possible—you bucked a long line of Slytherins yourself to get Sorted into a completely different House, if you’ll recall.”

Severus only sat there in stoic silence, lips pressed into a thin line and brow furrowed; he didn’t look angry—more pensive. Worried. Paranoia creeping into the cracks beginning to line his face and digging its roots in deep. Harry swallowed and turned to McGonagall. “Is it…is it a mistake? I mean—I don’t think…I’m all that suited for…”

McGonagall shook her head, slipping the Hat back into her bag. “The Hat doesn’t make mistakes—it can’t. It simply reads what’s there and reports which House you’re the best fit for. If it says you’re a Slytherin, then I’m afraid that’s precisely what you are.” She seemed to catch her wording, straightening in place and making an obvious effort to soften her features as she reached forward to pat Harry’s knee. “The Hat sees the bits of us that we might not even be aware exist ourselves, and it would not give you a challenge it didn’t feel you were in a place to meet. There are no good or bad Houses, regardless of what you may have heard.” She quickly scanned the room, her frown turning chiding as her gaze fell upon Harry’s guardians in turn. “Only good and bad students. And I expect you will prove quite a boon to your new House.”

Her words were kind, but Harry still couldn’t help but feel like he’d let everyone down, just a little bit. They’d been so very excited, and he’d siphoned a bit of that excitement for himself. Now, though…he didn’t really know what to do with himself.

Sirius sighed, though, doffing the oven gloves he still wore on his hands, and scrubbed at his face. “…Well, I reckon we can at least go through Regulus’s wardrobe for hand-me-downs.”

Remus jumped to his aid. “Yes—yes, that’s a very good idea. Why don’t you and Severus take Harry upstairs while Professor McGonagall goes over the fine details with James here?”

Harry mutely let himself be shuttled back to the stairs, head still whirling, and he took the steps in a daze. He only snapped back to himself when they reached the landing and Walburga Black’s portrait began shrieking, “FILTH! BLOOD TRAITORS! DEFILING MY FAMILY HOME WITH—”

“Pipe down, Mum,” Sirius groaned haggardly, waving her away. “He got Sorted Slytherin.”

“Oh, well goodness me, finally some fine news!” The faded portrait of Sirius’s late mother batted her lashes at him, cooing as he continued up the stairs past her, “Do drop in on holidays to share the latest gossip, won’t you, boy? Mine’s nearly a century out of date! Be a dear and find out if the merfolk still teach the Firsties naughty words in Lorelei in exchange for leftovers from the Kitchens.”

They continued up the stairs in silence, and if Harry’s father was coming up with them as Remus had suggested, Harry could not see him. By the third floor, the awkward tension became nigh unbearable, and Harry said, “…I did ask it not to place me there. But it went on some rambling monologue about my future and purpose and something about a path to greatness…” He wrinkled his nose. “Even though I told it I wasn’t interested in greatness.”

Sirius sighed, glancing back at Harry over his shoulder. “No one’s angry with you—or disappointed. Don’t feel too bad. It’s just shock—we’ll get over it quickly enough. You’re still you, and that’s all anyone within these walls cares about.”

Harry frowned. “…And outside of these walls?”

“Well, I won’t claim no one will judge you for what House you fell into while at Hogwarts, but that’s just the way folks are. We’re tribal by nature. The ones that matter won’t care what colours you wore, only what sort of person you turned out to be. The Hat knows what it’s doing, I reckon. Best to just roll with it.” They reached the fourth-floor landing, and Sirius drew a skeleton key from his pocket, muttering something under his breath as he slipped it into the lock and gave it a sharp turn. “In the meantime, let’s get you outfitted in the finest of Slytherin fashions—well, finest circa 1970 or so. If you want anything more modern, you and your dad—well, James—will need to pop down to Diagon and raid Madam Malkin’s sometime between now and the 1st of September.”

Sirius waved a hand to his brother’s wardrobe, inviting Harry to piece through his late brother’s schoolboy regalia. Harry wasn’t all that keen to start picking out his new robes just now, but he reckoned this was Sirius’s way of dealing with the shock, as he’d put it, and made motions of appraising Regulus Black’s hand-me-downs. Sirius didn’t like to talk about Regulus, in much the same way Harry’s father didn’t like to talk about his mother, though he at least still seemed willing to explain which pieces had been part of the daily school attire and which pieces had been formalwear and which pieces had been part of Regulus’s ‘Quidditch’ uniform—a sport Harry had heard of but not yet had occasion to witness being played. He was under the impression it was a cousin of Quodpot, which honestly sounded boring as all get-out.

“Do you have to wear a tie every day? I don’t think I even know how to tie one…” Harry muttered half to himself as he drew out a long green-and-silver striped bit of fabric that had a polished silver tie clip in the shape of a—good god, was that a Morsmordre?—still fastened to it. Harry surreptitiously unclipped it and tucked the thing into the pocket of one of the sportscoats he was most definitely not going to be wearing. It wasn’t polite to speak ill of the dead, but Harry was beginning to reconsider his decision to accept some of these hand-me-downs, even out of pity.

“You’ll catch on quickly enough—we’ll be sure you’ve mastered it before you’re off on the Hogwarts Express. There’s spells that’ll do it, but I always figured I’d never get the chance to teach it to a son of my own, so if you’ll oblige me, I’d enjoy passing down the knowledge.”

And that sounded like a quick and easy way to balance their accounts without having to accept old clothes from what Harry was beginning to realise had been a Death Eater-in-Training. “Yeah, I’d appreciate that, thanks.” He closed the doors to the wardrobe and turned around—to find Sirius slowly circling the room, staring at the wallpaper. Except it wasn’t wallpaper—it was paper paper. Newspaper clippings, magical ones, that even without getting too close Harry could tell included articles describing Voldemort’s reign of terror. Still thinking about the tie clip, Harry sincerely doubted Regulus had collected these clippings out of disgust with the acts described therein.

After an uncomfortable beat, Sirius spoke in a soft, serious tone. “…Be careful while you’re there, yeah? I meant what I said—none of us gives two figs what House you’re Sorted into, even if we might’ve been a tiny bit more excited to kit you out in Gryffindor regalia. You’re Sev’s and Lily’s boy, and that’s all that matters. But…” He shook his head. “That place. That House. It’s got a way of…of bringing out the worst in people. It does something to people too weak not to be swayed by others. Turns them into something you wouldn’t recognise. It’s a cutthroat place, everyone out for himself. So just…” He turned to Harry, forcing a smile. “Don’t let it get to you. Don’t let it turn you into something you’re not.”

Well. That might be harder than it sounded. Harry made a face, turning away from the horrible headlines blanketing the walls. “The Hat made it seem like I was meant to be there because…I dunno, I was meant for something…more. Something great, or terrible. Or greatly terrible. And I—” He shook his head. “I don’t want that. I don’t want to be anyone here. That’s the whole point of it all, isn’t it? Not to be special, not to stick out, not to prompt questions. I just want to get through this year and then…get back home. No offence to you and Remus and James, I mean. You’re all swell, but…Dad always said it was dangerous, being here.”

Sirius shrugged. “It’s dangerous being anywhere, you being you.” He stepped over to the wardrobe, piecing through it with a discerning frown before eventually pulling out one of the sets of day-to-day robes, holding it up against Harry and giving him a once over. “…At least the robes look good on you. The colours bring out your eyes. Though these are admittedly a bit out of fashion.” He replaced the robes and reached for the tie—sans clip—hanging on its rack. “The tie should still be useful, at least. Here, let’s see it on you.”

He beckoned Harry over to stand before a full-length mirror and hung it around his neck, proceeding to tie it from behind. Harry watched carefully, trying to memorise the movements, though he got well and truly lost about three loops in.

“It’s custom, see,” Sirius said as he finally fashioned the knot, “for members of my family to have some sort of heirloom on them when they head off to Hogwarts for the first time. Regulus won’t be needing this back any time soon, so I reckon you should have it.”

Harry frowned at Sirius in the mirror. “But—I’m not related to you?”

“Well, no. Not by blood, sure.” He shrugged. “But Lily—and all right, Snivellus, too—was our friend. Is our friend. So you’re, you know. A friend-in-law. Step-friend. Something like that. And unlike the rest of my family, I’m not gonna burn you off the family tapestry just because you got Sorted into a House that doesn’t deserve you.” He clapped Harry on the shoulder. “There, looking quite sharp if I do say so myself. Haven’t had occasion to tie a tie recently, but I reckon I did a fair job of it.”

“One would hope you’d finally learned to manage it after, what, two and a half decades?” came a voice from the door, and Harry only now caught the reflection of his father behind them in the mirror, arms folded in the doorway as he took in the room. Was he, too, suppressing a shudder? Had he already known the dark deeds that Regulus Black had dabbled in before his untimely—or perhaps timely—demise? A part of Harry wondered if Regulus had had a hand in Lily’s death—but he quickly decided he didn’t want to know. He liked Sirius too much to think of his brother every time they interacted from now on.

“Piss off. I’d learned to do it for myself by graduation.” He winked at Harry. “I mostly let Remus do it so I’d have an excuse to be close to him.”

“Perhaps the Hat should have put you in Slytherin, then.” Severus sidled closer, giving Harry an approving glance. “…At least the colours suit him.”

“That’s what I said. Silver linings. Or, silver and green, rather.” Sirius nodded to the door through which Harry’s father had just strode. “They still at it downstairs?”

“Mm. Your better half is making sure Harry’s ‘father’ doesn’t stick his foot in his mouth while wrapping things up with McGonagall.”

Sirius gave a mock gasp. “Our James Potter? Say something he shouldn’t? Perish the thought!”

“Also, your tart’s been a smash hit—between the three of them down there, it’s nearly gone.”

“Oh—what! Dammit, I wanted to try some. You two just—” He waved around the room, and Harry wasn’t quite sure what that gesture meant, but Sirius was already out the door and thundering down the stairs before he could ask him to finish his thought. From the way Severus watched him go, a calculating gleam in his eye, Harry wondered if he hadn’t made the whole thing up, just to get a bit of privacy between them without having to tell the owner of the house to get lost. Maybe this was where the Slytherin bits of him had come from.

Severus sighed, taking up Sirius’s recently abandoned post behind Harry, a hand on each shoulder. “…I’m not disappointed in you, you know.”

Harry nodded. “I know. Sirius said you weren’t, and I didn’t figure you would be.” He met Severus’s eye in the mirror. “But?”

“…But: things will be trickier now. Not a few Death Eaters had children, and they’ll be students now, around your age—most if not all Sorted Slytherin. They’ll be looking for you, or at least keen to report any strange new transfers to their parents. It’s a den of snakes. You’ll need to be on your guard—at best they’ll see you as a target ripe for their puerile pranks, and at worst…well, the brightest brains tend to be Sorted Ravenclaw, but even the dimmest of Slytherins will surely be able to put two and two together, given the happy timing of your arrival amongst their ranks, and suspect you of being you. Dumbledore has made some mention of ‘decoys’ amongst the student populace, other ‘new transfers’ returned to their native shores, but expect there to be eyes upon you at all times, regardless.” He squeezed Harry’s shoulders, impressing upon him the gravity of his words. “The Dark Lord may have been run to ground, but we must never think him defeated—his most loyal followers certainly don’t, and they’ll be only too eager to strike down the Boy Who Lived in his stead to demonstrate their unflagging faith in their master’s eventual resurrection.”

Harry wanted to think Severus was being paranoid, simply an overprotective father imagining Death Eaters lurking around every corner—it was an easy enough thought to entertain, after all, having lived halfway around the world most of his life, cloistered away, never knowing greater danger than that one time he’d nearly been bitten by a very large dog when he was four and run bawling back to his father’s side after accidentally wild-magicking it into a teacup. There’d been a lot of Obliviating that day.

But he knew his father better than anyone else in the world, of this he was confident. Severus Evans was a smart man—and a calculating one. It wasn’t that he didn’t take risks, he just didn’t take unnecessary ones. He’d trained Harry well, or as well as he could on his own, and Harry knew he wasn’t paranoid. It was a bone-deep surety that there truly was someone out there, some thing, that wanted him and would, if it found him, tear him to pieces. That Severus had brought Harry all the way to England as he had, to the land where his wife had been murdered and some magic too old to have a name had spared his son, that he’d enrolled Harry in a proper school…

There was ever so much more here than met the eye, machinations whirring away under Harry’s nose, of which he was keenly aware but could do nothing to avoid or circumvent. He couldn’t stop this, whatever this was—he could only nod his head firmly and resolve to do his very best to be as absolutely unremarkable as possible for the next year or so.

By the time he and his father returned downstairs, McGonagall had packed her things—the Hat nowhere to be seen now—and seemed to be making ready to leave. Her brows lifted in amusement when she saw Harry, still wearing Regulus’s old tie, and she gave him a polite nod. “I shall see you in two months’ time, Mr. Potter,” she said, pinching the brim of her hat in farewell. “Pray don’t give me half the trouble your father did, and we’ll get on quite well.”

“Oh, she likes you,” James said once she’d left. “Dunno what I did to deserve that comment, but at least you’ll get off on the right foot with her.”

“Maybe it was the time you turned a rat into a flying phallus instead of a quill and inkwell like we were meant to be doing,” Remus said, sending the plates and teacups back down to the kitchen, as Sirius, polishing off the last piece of his tart, chimed in with, “Or the time you Transfigured her lips into an arse and she had to talk out of her shit-hole for a week before she managed the counter-curse.”

Oh, Harry was going to have to step very carefully around his Transfiguration professor, it was sounding like.

James was off again once McGonagall had left, professing more errands to run (“Lady friends to harangue, more like it,” his father muttered), and they made vague plans to meet up again in the coming week so that James could take his ‘son’ shopping for the rest of his school supplies. “I’m gonna get reimbursed for letting your rug rat raid my vaults, aren’t I?” James asked Severus. “I haven’t got mokeskin pockets, you know.”

And Severus rolled his eyes. “Yes, you’re just absolutely strapped, as I hear it—didn’t the goblins have to open up another vault just to hold your fortune?”

James winked at Harry. “What can I say? The people love Playwizard.”

“What’s Playwizard?” Harry asked, and, “None of your concern,” Severus said while Sirius mimed a pair of voluptuous breasts from behind him, burying his head between them until Remus rapped him sharply on the crown in reprimand.

They passed the rest of the morning, lunch, afternoon, and even dinner discussing the many—many—shenanigans Remus, Sirius, and James had gotten up to during their time at Hogwarts, his godfathers only too happy to share stories that Harry’s father had never been obliged to. When he asked if they had any stories about Severus, they proceeded to regale him with three separate occasions where their escapades had been interrupted or else thwarted entirely by either or both Severus and Lily, who had been, in their words, “Pompous shits who deserved each other.”

Severus had only sipped his tea pleasantly. “Perhaps if you and Potter hadn’t been so enamoured with violating curfew nearly nightly, you might have been in the running to be Prefects yourselves.” He’d then nodded to Remus. “Lupin might have managed it, if he hadn’t been wrestling a literal beast.”

“Well I was wrestling a beast of my own,” Sirius had said, one elbow on the table and bushy brows doing acrobatics in Remus’s direction, who favoured him with a fond look—then rolled his eyes.

“Try not to fall in love with one of your dormmates, Harry,” Remus had warned as he stood from the table and made for the chill box to retrieve dessert: an ice cream dish flavoured with something called ‘treacle’ that sounded like it would gum up his teeth terribly but be absolutely worth it. “It’s more trouble than it’s worth. I speak from experience.”

Harry didn’t think he’d have much difficulty on that front, but honestly, Remus wasn’t making a very compelling argument.

Sleep came to Harry that night rather more quickly than it had the one before—in large part because he was no longer burdened with nerves about his upcoming Sorting. It was over and done with now, and all that was left was to accept it, deal with it, and move past it once this business was finished.

When he woke the next morning, he was feeling much more like himself, the veil of sleep having done wonders to refresh his outlook on the whole matter, but he did still give a start when he caught himself in the mirror, forgetting for a moment that he’d been Glamoured to look less like the offspring of Severus Evans and more that of James Potter. He reminded himself to don his glasses so he’d get used to having them on, or else he was liable to blow his own cover the very first day of school.

Remus appeared to be the only one up when Harry trundled downstairs to the kitchen, and he offered Harry a sleepy smile as he twirled his wand, directing a chair to pull itself out from the table and offer itself to Harry. “Any requests? I’m not as dab a hand in the kitchen as Sirius, but I can probably manage.”

“Er, just some coffee to start off with, I think. I’ll have a better idea once I’m a bit more awake.”

Remus laughed and then pulled a mug off of a hanging rack, pointed his wand at it, and muttered something under his breath. A stream of fragrant brown liquid came shooting out, filling the mug, and Harry’s brows rose as Remus offered it to him, smoky tendrils now curling from the liquid’s surface. “Best I can do on short notice—I’ll make a note to grab some grounds from the shops later.” Harry gingerly accepted it, unsure how he felt about drinking magically produced instant coffee. The nonmagical stuff was barely passable—would this be better, or ten times worse?

It turned out to be neither; Harry’s palate was hardly sophisticated enough to tell the difference, and it was enough that it did the trick of perking him up while Remus turned his focus back to a pair of pans and a carton of eggs (Chicken? Cockatrice? Impossible to tell really) that would, it seemed, constitute the impending breakfast Remus was threatening to make.

Harry let him fret for a silent moment, nursing his mug and wondering why British wizards didn’t just prepare their leaf water using whatever modified version of Aguamenti that had to have been. Actually—he could hazard a guess, as they seemed terribly finicky about the stuff. Remus would probably have a fit if he so much as a suggested such sacrilege. He kind of wanted to ask just to see what happened—maybe he was meant for Slytherin after all.

Which reminded him: “…So, are you gonna tell me to be on my guard, too?”

“Hm?” Remus said, distracted by the sniff test he was currently applying to a loaf of bread he’d found in their cupboard. Belatedly he realised that Harry had actually asked a question that probably merited a response, and he turned around, bread loaf in one hand and oversized knife that was entirely inappropriate for slicing bread in the other. “Sorry—be on your guard…?”

Damn. That had come out all wrong. Harry was trying to be okay with this whole mess, if only because there was nothing to be done about it, though also because everyone else was trying to be okay with it too, but even he could hear the petulant little pout in his tone, making him sound years younger than he was. He shook his head. “Never mind—was just trying out a joke. I don’t think it quite landed.”

Remus’s brow furrowed, and he set aside the knife and bread, drawing out a chair at the table to sit across from Harry. “You know, I was almost Sorted Hufflepuff. I asked the Hat to put me there, actually—I thought it was the place I was likely to stand out the least, because there’s nothing a werewolf trying to hide his curse wants less than attention. The Hat then promptly reprimanded me for likening Hufflepuffs to unremarkable wallflowers and banished me to Gryffindor as punishment. I suppose it knew best, though, in the end—there’s no better place to pass unnoticed than while surrounded by the truly outstanding and ostentatious.” He leaned forward, “And if the Hat hadn’t put me in the very last place I’d wanted to be Sorted, I would never have met these louts who became my lifelong friends and closest confidantes. Severus saved my life, more times than I can count. So don’t walk into there, thinking the worst. You’ll get out of that place what you put into it—don’t close yourself off to every grand, new experience that may be headed your way just because you’re frightened. Severus is smart, as cunning as any Slytherin out there—but I worry he’s too caught up in his past to let you live your own present, free from prejudice and bias. Don’t be afraid to let Slytherin surprise you. You may find you’re more suited there than you expected. Than any of us expected.”

Harry mulled over what he knew to be very good advice, but something still niggled. “…Sirius said not to let it turn me into something I’m not.”

Remus nodded sagely. “And right he is. Don’t let it turn you into something you’re not. Instead, let it turn you into what you’re meant to be. That’s what school ought to do, after all.” He reached a hand over, covering Harry’s, and gave a squeeze—then pushed back from the table and returned his attention to what Harry hoped was French toast, or some iteration thereon.

Somehow, the bean water tasted just a little bit more like proper coffee now.

Through their combined efforts, Harry’s real father and godfathers managed to pin down his fake father long enough that they were able to plan an outing to shop for school supplies in a place called ‘Diagon Alley’, a name which Harry had thought at first was a joke but turned out to belong to a rather popular wizarding shopping district.

It was decided that Harry and James would go about as a pair, while Severus—under a Glamour of his own—would shop with Sirius and Remus. James and Harry would gather those items that merited a more personal touch, while Sirius, Remus, and Severus would take care of the general basics.

First up on the list: a new wand.

Harry had been using his mother’s for as long as he could remember, and he’d objected sternly when his father had suggested he procure a new one. But reason had won out—he would soon be an adult, a grown wizard, and he needed a wand of his own, not a family heirloom, no matter how dearly he cared for it. Besides, there was every chance the wrong sorts might remark the swishy willow wand that had belonged to Lily Evans, so there was no helping it if Harry wanted to keep as low a profile as possible.

Garrick Ollivander of Ollivander’s appeared to have been in the business of uniting wands with their bearers for the last two millennia—and he looked like it, too. His deeply lined face and harsh, raspy voice said he took his craft very seriously, and indeed, he spent nearly thirty minutes muttering to himself as he puttered about his shop after having taken Harry’s measurements—why his inseam length mattered for a wand assignment was beyond him, but James didn’t seem to find this odd—before he finally set three boxes of different colours and sizes on the counter for Harry’s perusal.

“Well go on,” he urged Harry, a bit impatiently. “Give them a test swish.” When Harry evidently didn’t act quickly enough for Ollivander’s taste, he began removing the tops from the boxes and giving a breakneck rundown of each wand’s pedigree, from its core to its wood to its precise length down to the quarter-inch. His mother’s had come from this shop too, as he’d heard it, so at least it seemed Ollivander knew his stuff.

He tested the first one—a willow one, like his mother’s, but with a core of horned serpent keratin (“An import, but fine quality—such wands are favoured by the particularly paranoid.”) instead of unicorn hair—but it felt dead in his hand, his movements stilted with a distinct lag in the casting time as his magic struggled to push itself through the wood veins.

The second one—a cypress one with a dragon heartstring core—wasn’t a much better fit, and Harry wondered what could possibly have prompted Ollivander to choose these wands, thinking they’d suit him. Certainly Harry would never presume to know a wandmaker’s business, but these were so wide of the mark it was almost laughable. Maybe he would stick with his mother’s wand, his father’s paranoia be damned.

But when he reached for the third wand—an unassuming holly one whose core was simply labelled Fawkes on the placard—he felt it almost rise to meet his grip, like it had been waiting most impatiently for Harry to work his way through the pretenders before finally settling upon the wand that was meant for him. When his fingers brushed the shaft, Ollivander inhaled sharply, and he caught, just out of the corner of his eye, James’s previously bored gaze turn sharp, fixing on Ollivander with mistrust.

Harry was captivated, though—too caught up in this thrill rushing through him as he curled his fingers around the haft and lifted the wand into a ready position to much notice anything else around him.

“What is it?” he heard James ask, from far away and distant.

“Oh, no, it’s only—” Ollivander paused, and Harry felt his magic connect with the core, lighting him up like a Christmas tree and setting every nerve on fire for a millisecond before the energy subsided to a pleasant warm buzz. Oh yeah, this was definitely his wand. “That wand’s core… It’s a phoenix feather. One of only two donated by this particular creature. A very difficult core to come by, dearly precious—and generally quite finicky in the witches and wizards it connects with. I only brought the wand out on a whim…”

“Mm…” James said, absently, and he craned his neck to peek through the glazed glass of the front windows at the passersby scurrying through the cobbled streets of Diagon Alley.

“And this core…this particular wand’s brother, if you will… Well, you see, it belonged to…” Ollivander dropped his voice to little more than a whisper. “You-Know-Who.”

Harry felt as if a bucket of ice-cold water had just been dumped over him, and he straightened, snapped instantly from his stupor. “It—who?” His fingers tightened around the wand, knuckles gone white.

Ollivander recoiled. “I daren’t speak his name—it’s Taboo.”

“I’m sure that’s just superstition,” James chuckled, flashing a disarming smile that seemed to settle Ollivander’s nerves a bit, but Harry didn’t miss it this time: the way James’s shoulders were a tight, tense line, the sharpness in his eyes, hidden behind his glasses, and the too-smooth way he corralled the conversation away from discussion of curious connections with Harry’s wand toward instead discussions of compensation and would a lump sum do or were there payment plans available?

Harry had known—well, heard rather—that his parents and their friends had belonged to some manner of secret wartime society that supposedly went around making life difficult for Voldemort and his Death Eaters. As his father told it, Voldemort had been convinced by some mad prophecy that Harry, nought but an infant at the time, would lead to his downfall, and his paranoia and desperation had led him to his parents’ doorstep, where despite their very best efforts to beat him back, his mother had met a brave end, protecting Harry with her very life as some magic rose up unbidden from Harry himself and shattered the would-be Dark Lord into a million pieces.

So he’d had some idea that, once upon a time, Sirius and Remus and even James here had been spies and soldiers and everything in between, working to stop Voldemort before he could rise to real power. But there was a difference between hearing old stories that honestly sounded only about 20% true—and seeing in his fake-father’s eyes a cold, calculating cunning he’d only ever seen in his real father’s eyes before. A brutish desperation honed by years of hunting and being hunted, painted over with a bright, winning smile and roguish flirtation so you never suspected just how dangerous this man could be until it was too late.

They quickly completed the purchase, and James pressed the shopping bag and its precious cargo into Harry’s grasp before laying a hand at his back and steering him gently toward the door. “Wait for me outside, won’t you, Harry? I just need to have a quick word with Mr Ollivander here about getting my own wand serviced.”

And before Harry could object, James had shoved him out onto the street, slammed the door behind him, and pulled the shade.

When he exited five minutes later, he was all smiles once more, as if nothing were amiss. “So, shall we see about getting you an owl now? Dead useful creatures, owls. Every boy ought to have one of his own before heading off to school.”

Harry didn’t dare ask what had happened with Ollivander. He could imagine what his real father would have done to wipe their tracks clearly enough.

Perhaps sensing Harry’s discomfort with whatever had just transpired, James tried to distract Harry by regaling him with tales of his own first trip to Diagon Alley and the handsome eagle owl that his parents had bought for him. Harry didn’t quite understand the fascination with owls these British wizards had—most American wizards favoured mage-bred pigeons these days, being relatively ubiquitous and much more likely to pass unremarked by No-Majs than any other flying creature. He supposed owls were a sight more regal when they swooped in bearing a letter or package or even just the morning paper, but they were hardly subtle.

But they probably didn’t sell mage-bred pigeons anywhere around here, and besides, Harry didn’t really want a pigeon. Or an owl. Or a frog, as was apparently another approved pet students were allowed to bring along with them to Hogwarts. You couldn’t cuddle owls and pigeons and frogs. Well, you could try, but it wouldn’t be the same as—

“And he was a stocky beast, let me tell you—a good hundred and fifty centimetres, wingtip to wingtip! Never struggled one whit with any package he came bearing, winging along like it was nothing at all. You’ve got to make sure you pick one that’s going to be able to handle the—Harry? Harry? Shit—”

James eventually found him, his nose pressed up against the glass of a shop called Magical Menagerie as he ogled the most absurd-looking, hideously adorable creature Harry had ever laid eyes on.

“Good gad, is that a house-elf?” James gasped in mixed horror and scandal. “What’s wrong with it?”

“I don’t think it’s a house-elf,” Harry said, tapping gently on the glass to get the creature’s attention—and it responded by toddling over to him, a bit wonkily, like it hadn’t quite learned how to use its feet properly just yet. “I think it’s a cat.”

“Is it diseased? Why on earth would they put a sick one on display like that? It’s cruel.”

“Nah, that’s just what the breed looks like I’m pretty sure.”

“They breed cats to look like house-elves? On purpose?” James gave a shudder. “Who on earth would pay money for such a creature?”

Who indeed? “…I kind of want him.” He glanced up at James, who looked like he’d just swallowed one of the toads Harry could spot resting on a log by the register inside. “Surely no one else will take him—look at him.”

The cat—at least, Harry was mostly sure it was a cat—had wandered away from its playmates to paw at Harry through the window. It really did look like a house-elf, with its wrinkly flaps of skin and oversized bat-like ears, but it had the biggest green eyes Harry had ever seen, its whiplike hairless tail lashing back and forth as it mewled pitiably at him from beyond the thick pane of glass.

“Wh—but we were just on our way to get you an owl! You’ll need one! Else how are you going to write us letters every week, telling us about all of the fascinating new ways you’ve found to skirt the rules and begging us for copies of our old parchments to crib for your essays like any good Potter?”

“Surely they’ve got school birds you can borrow, right? And the list said you could bring a cat, if you wanted.”

“A cat, yes, but not a—whatever that thing is. Are you certain it’s meant to look that way? Perhaps it’s got feline dragonpox—it’s been known to jump species, you know, and I doubt you were properly vaccinated against it in that barbaric country you grew up in. It took my parents, before you were even born, and I’m all but certain it came to them through their Puffskein colony.”

Harry didn’t know what a Puffskein was, but he’d made up his mind. “I came here with a clean bill of health, cats are clean animals by nature and surely a hairless one is doubly so, and I’ve already given him a name, so really we kind of have to get him now.” When James still seemed to waffle, Harry delivered the killing blow: “Please, Dad?”

And so, they returned to Number 12 Grimmauld Place with a new wand, a handsome trunk, and ‘Kreacher’, who turned out to be a ‘Sphinx cat’ and not, as James had feared, a disease vector for some violent new strain of Spattergroit.

“‘Kreacher’?” James had asked, nose wrinkling. “Dare I ask why?”

“‘Cause he reminds me of Sirius and Remus’s old house-elf—don’t you think?”

“Why on earth you’d want to be reminded of that blighter is beyond me…”

His godfathers and real father were all equally confounded by Harry’s choice of pet, but as it was his pet and not theirs, he didn’t see it was any of their business—and they seemed content to leave him to get to know his new companion while they huddled with James in the library, door actually warded against intrusion, no doubt to discuss the business at Ollivander’s. Harry tried to search his father’s face when he finally emerged for some sign of how the conversation had gone—if there was actually any real danger, or if this was just a matter of making sure the wandmaker didn’t run around blabbing about the wand he’d just sold this kid that was twin to the Dark Lord’s own. Severus had always been a difficult read, though, even for his own son, and tonight was no different.

When it came time for James to head back to his own flat after dinner, he ruffled Harry’s hair fondly and told him he was turning into a right proper Slytherin for all the cunning he’d practised that afternoon, and as he lay in bed that night, Kreacher—the cat, not the house-elf—curled up on his chest and purring loudly, he supposed this Slytherin business might not be so bad after all.

The next few weeks passed by in a flash, and before he knew it, it was his sixteenth birthday—the first he’d ever celebrated with so large a gathering. Granted, ‘large’ was relative in this case—but ‘five’ was definitely more than ‘two’, and that meant more presents than he’d ever received before (not that he’d been counting). James presented him with a beautiful cloak made of a strange fabric that flowed through his fingers like water and splintered the light whenever it hit. When he donned the cloak at James’s urging, he was shocked to find he could no longer see himself in the hallway mirror (which of late had taken to encouraging him to try an industrial-grade detangling potion for his hair).

“Are you at all certain that’s a wise gift?” his father had asked, deep frown indicating this was a rhetorical question, but James had waved him off.

“Let him live a little, Snivellus. Besides, how could you possibly object to my giving him a way to escape notice whenever he pleases?”

And this had placated his father somewhat, but though Harry appreciated the thought, he wasn’t quite sure what use he’d have for such a gift. “I mean, it’s lovely, truly it is—but…what am I meant to use it for?”

“Well,” Remus stepped in, clearing his throat and nudging Sirius. “We thought perhaps you might use it in conjunction with this.”

And here, Sirius straightened with a soft Oh! and scrambled for a little paper bag at his feet, stuffed full of tissue paper and bearing a label that simply said Happy 16th, Harry! Love, S & R. He accepted the parcel, digging through the tissue paper until his fingers brushed across—

“…A pamphlet?” He frowned turning the folded parchment over in his hands—but it seemed blank. Old and yellowed, it showed quite a bit of age and wear, but there was no writing on it, even when he opened it. “I…I don’t get it?”

Remus gave a superior little grin, reached his wand over, and tapped the opening folds: “I solemnly swear that I am up to no good.”

In an instant, thin lines of deep green ink began to spider across the parchment, winding around the borders and forming fancy curly-cues in the corners before spiralling into the centre to spell out in bombastic fashion:

Messrs Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot, and Prongs
Purveyors of Aids to Magical Mischief-Makers
are proud to present

THE MARAUDERS’ MAP

“Oh good gad,” his father groaned, grimacing as he brought his fingers up to massage his temples. “You can’t be serious…”

“Serious about what?” Harry asked, still taking in the fantastic magic being wrought before him. What a clever little…greeting card? Or what was a ‘Marauders’ Map’? Was it yet another British convention Harry hadn’t yet been familiarised with?

“This, Harry my boy,” Sirius said, tapping the parchment with a finger, “is going to be your new best friend. It helped us become the enterprising rapscallions we were always meant to be in our youth—and now, we bequeath it to you, in the hopes that it will aid you in similar endeavours.”

“No—no, none of this ‘we’ business,” his father said, waving a hand. “I want no part of this. And Harry will have no part of it either.” He reached forward, as if to snatch it from Harry, but as his hand approached the parchment, the beautiful scrollwork vanished, and the parchment folded in on itself, over and over and over, until it was the size of a business card and quite out of his reach.

On the face of the card-sized parchment, new writing now began to blossom: ‘Mr Padfoot bids Snivellus keep his greasy paws to himself.’ And then: ‘Mr Wormtail quite concurs.’

Sirius snorted most inelegantly and had to turn away, and this only piqued Harry’s curiosity further. “What is this thing?”

At his question, the parchment opened itself once more, only this time, instead of the simple but elegant decorative border, a drawing began to reveal itself—no, not just a drawing, a…blueprint. A layout of a building, some several storeys tall, with a dozen-plus dots moving about inside it. And over each dot, Harry could see as he leaned in close, were words. Names. People.

It was, as it had presented itself, a map. Of what, Harry couldn’t quite tell—until at the very bottom of the parchment appeared an impressive seal bearing the name HOGWARTS SCHOOL OF WITCHCRAFT AND WIZARDRY.

Harry’s head shot up, looking to Remus and Sirius to explain their gift. “Wh—this is the castle? It’s a map of the castle?”

“Not just any old map,” James said, leaning forward onto his elbow to admire the parchment with a fond, distant glimmer in his eye. “The Marauders’ Map—”

Severus pounded the table, shaking a finger at James. “You aren’t giving that to Harry—I’ll not have him getting involved in the sorts of daft mischief you lot got up to in your time there! I’ll allow the cloak, but I fail to see any legitimate use for this—this—”

‘—bit of fantastic magical theorem-turned-practical achievement! Mr Moony appreciates Snape’s astute observation,’ was newly scrawled across the edge of the map now, and Harry didn’t think he’d ever seen his father turn that shade of red before, nor that particular blood vessel begin to pulse at his temple.

“Oh come off it, Snape,” Sirius said, grinning. “You know precisely the legitimate uses this thing has—else you wouldn’t have helped us fine-tune it in the first place.”

“And I did so to help save that one’s hide!” He pointed now at Remus. “Not so you could sneak about breaking curfew and getting drunk on elf wine on top of the Astronomy Tower!”

“And we’re not giving it to Harry so that he can go make mischief—” Remus started, before he was interrupted by Sirius’s sputtered, “What? The hell we aren’t—”

“Undue mischief, then,” Remus continued. “But it can’t be a bad idea, surely, him knowing a few of the less-well-trafficked routes in and out of the castle, don’t you think, Severus?” His brows lifted meaningfully. “And Harry’s a good lad, I’m certain he won’t abuse it.”

His father’s lips thinned into a tight, unhappy moue, before eventually twisting with a grousing grumble. “Fine. Fine.” He shook a finger in Harry’s face. “Only for emergencies, am I clear? You weren’t Sorted Gryffindor, so there’s no sense in you playing at one like these fools did for seven years.”

Harry ducked his head, quite unsure what had ticked him off, until Sirius’s phrasing struck him: “‘Wouldn’t have helped us fine-tune it’—you made this? All of you?”

James gave a shrug that attempted—but failed—at modesty. “Group project, you could say. The Charms weren’t all that difficult—the hardest part was digging up the original blueprints for the castle. Your mum helped with that bit—there wasn’t a bit of forbidden knowledge she couldn’t get her hands on, that one.”

“Sometimes I think she spent more time in the Restricted Section than out of it,” Sirius laughed. “Probably wore James’s Invisibility Cloak more often than he did.”

“Which means she would’ve wanted you to have it!” James clapped a hand on Harry’s shoulder. “Carry on the family tradition, and all that.”

Harry studied the parchment once more, tracking the little dots as they moved about. One dot he saw bore the name Minerva McGonagall—and another Argus Filch. “Are these all teachers?”

“Mm, likely—there won’t be any students there just yet, and—oh, yup. Yup, that’ll be Filch, the school’s caretaker. You’ll want to steer clear of him; he always had it out for us, and I don’t expect he’ll treat you too kindly once you waltz in bearing the name ‘Potter’.” James tapped a finger in the lower right-hand corner. “That’s the entrance to the Slytherin Common Room there; maybe you can study this up a bit and get the lay of the castle before you even set foot inside.”

It was a fine idea—Harry didn’t much like the thought of being late for his very first day of classes just because he couldn’t find his way. A surefire way to invite unwanted attention, that. “So if you all created this map, who are these people?” He tapped the names that had first appeared when Remus had activated it. “Moony and Prongs and all.”

Remus gave a mock bow. “Mister Moony, at your service.”

Sirius gave a salute at his side. “Padfoot, ready to rock.”

James bumped Harry’s shoulder. “Prongs, the pretty one.”

Harry’s attention shot to his father, expectant. “So you’re ‘Wormtail’ then?” It didn’t sound like a very complimentary nickname, but then his godfathers seemed to have had an odd relationship with his parents, so what did he know?

There was a long, awkward beat of silence, though, and none of them seemed to want to meet his eye.

At length, Remus cleared his throat softly and simply said, “…He’s not with us any more.”

And Harry, who’d grown up with a man whose sacred motto seemed to be, “I don’t wish to discuss it,” knew that meant the conversation was finished.

In a bid to dispel the tense atmosphere that had settled over the group, Harry’s father next presented him with his own birthday gift: a brand new potions set with silver-tipped knives and a cauldron made from solid gold, which he was informed was fit for absolutely any brewing he might attempt. “So you won’t have any excuse not to score an O on your eventual Potions N.E.W.T.”

Harry rolled his eyes, just as the still-unfolded Marauder’s Map scrawled out in bright-green ink, ‘Mr Moony has a fantastic idea for where Snape ought to shove his stirring rod.’

Remus coloured, quickly tapping his wand over the parchment and whispering Mischief managed! He offered Severus an apologetic little shrug before turning to Harry, chagrined: “What can I say? We were rotten little scamps and hadn’t yet learned what a joy your dad is to be around.”

After dinner, James bid his goodbyes and readied to head out, with plans to meet again come the 1st of September to make their way to King’s Cross Station together and see Harry off. Before he stepped out, though, James leaned in close to Harry, gave a wink, and said, “We expect a full report on the Map’s utility when you’re home for the hols. Mark any bits where we need to update the layout, yeah?”

The last few weeks before start of term passed by in a blur as they finalised preparations for the school year. Harry received a handsome hand-me-down trunk from Sirius—which he was much more pleased to take to Hogwarts than anything more of Regulus’s—that had several magically expanded compartments to store his school supplies, clothes, and of course the new potions set he’d received for his birthday. The Invisibility Cloak from James was tucked away safely behind his underwear, where hopefully no one would dare try to dig it out.

He practised a bit with his new wand as well, and while it performed admirably, he did notice his father and godfathers giving him odd, pensive looks whenever he drew it, though they quickly looked away if they saw they’d been spotted. Harry supposed he understood their concern—he himself was of two minds about using a wand with such a connection to his mother’s murderer—but it wasn’t as if this was that wand, and his father had always told him that there was no such thing as ‘good’ or ‘evil’ magic, only good or evil wizards who used the tools at their disposal to their own ends. This was a fine wand, a wand clearly meant for him, as evidenced by the pleasant thrum that surged through him every time he picked it up, and that was all there was to it.

The morning of the 1st of September arrived much like any other, though Harry could not say he rose with much shine. He’d barely gotten a wink of sleep, equal parts nervous and excited about the whole matter by this point.

Nervous, because he’d never really consorted with kids his own age before, certainly not a whole school full of up-and-coming witches and wizards, and what if he said or did something wrong or off-putting? There was really no chance he was getting through this school year without some cock-up involving either having never gone to a proper school of any sort before or—if not that—being an American transplant in a British boarding school. He still didn’t like the hot tea his father favoured—though he did appreciate the concept of ‘tea time’—and likely this was going to make him the target of an Unforgivable before his first day was through.

But excited as well, because this would be his first time away from his father for such an extended period of time. He loved Severus, truly he did, and Remus and Sirius were great, but out from under their protective wings, he was finally starting to get an eyeful of the world at large, and gods he really wanted to explore it, all on his own. Make his own mistakes (and dodge the aforementioned Unforgivables), see what was what through his own eyes—or well, James Potter’s hand-me-down glasses—rather than as his father might have wished to present it.

He was actually looking forward to being Harry, just Harry, for a bit—not Harry Evans, the Boy Who Lived, but Harry Potter, sheltered offspring of a rakish lothario with poor eyesight and terribly messy hair.

“And you’ve stowed a change of robes in your pack, yes?” Severus asked for about the thousandth time as their party stumbled out of the public Floos near King’s Cross Station. It was already uncomfortably crowded here in the landing zone, between witches and wizards of all ages hauling around massive trunks topped by cages housing owls and cats and toads and even some creatures Harry had never seen before, and Harry could only imagine how much worse it would be once they reached the station proper. “There’ll be an announcement at twenty minutes out to allow students to change into their uniforms, and your trunk will be in the luggage car, so you won’t be able to—”

“I’ve got my robes, Da—sir. I’ve got the robes, the sandwiches Remus made, my books, my wand, and—” He lifted his own carrier. “Kreacher.” The poor thing was yowling in a low, plaintive voice that suggested he was not enjoying having been rousted from his favourite snoozing spot in the puddle of sunlight on the back porch and shoved into a tiny little cage. Harry had tried to explain to him that he’d be allowed the run of the castle once they arrived, but Kreacher either didn’t understand or didn’t care. Harry worried what he might find left in his shoes in retaliation once they were settled into their room.

King’s Cross Station was, predictably, even more crowded than the Floos had been as hundreds of No-Majs bound for their own destinations joined the magical families rushing for Platform 9¾. Kreacher’s yowling grew even louder, earning them more than a few dirty looks, as their unit was jostled about by the throng of humanity crushing around them, and he barely caught Remus’s, “There’s the barrier! Just ahead!” over the deafening hum of a busy Sunday morning in London.

A pair of hands came down on his shoulders and gave a shove, sending Harry stumbling luggage-cart-first into the stone support between platforms 9 and 10—until with a soft pop, he was suddenly tumbling out the other side, into a scrum just as crowded but at least marginally more well-organised, as a magically amplified voice boomed, “Students are asked to board the train promptly and find their seats; family members may see off their charges from the viewing platform. Please DO NOT DAWDLE in front of the barrier, move smoothly to the nearest compartment to board.”

“Look sharp there, Harry,” Sirius said as he nudged Harry forward, and Harry turned now to see the rest of his family struggling to exit the barrier behind him. “Head towards the rear; we’re right behind you.”

He did as instructed, relieved to see that many of the carts crowding the platform on this side of the barrier seemed to budge up just enough to let him squeeze through when by all rights there ought not to have been sufficient room. Really, he didn’t understand how this many people had made it onto the platform to begin with—it was worse than Independence Day on Pier 39½—but whatever magic had been worked into the bricks and mortar here certainly seemed to be doing its job.

He finally found some breathing room near the entrance to the second-to-last car, and he collapsed onto his trunk as he waited for his father and godfathers to work their way through the mass of humanity. With less of a crowd toward this end, he was able to take in the Hogwarts Express for the first time. He’d never ridden a train before, magical or otherwise, nor seen a steam engine (or at least what looked like a steam engine) up close. It was a handsome thing for sure, with its ruby-red livery and cosily curtained viewing windows riding above massive wheels of black iron and already spewing billowing white steam onto the tracks. Inside, he could spot students milling about, engaging in rapt conversations he couldn’t hear from outside the car but imagined involved what they had gotten up to over the too-brief summer break.

“I certainly haven’t missed that,” Remus huffed as he drew up alongside Harry. “Are there more people here than usual this year? It feels like half of London turned out!”

“Nah, it’s always been a madhouse,” Sirius said, twirling his wand about his fingers as a breeze from nowhere whipped up to fan his face. “You just always boarded as fast as possible and missed it.”

“Well someone needed to save us seats.” Remus crossed his arms. “Blessings of having no one to see you off, I suppose.”

“And grateful we were for it,” James said, presently arriving with Harry’s father. “Imagine if I’d gotten stuck sitting next to Snape the whole way! I think I’d have just jumped out the window over a gorge.” He threw an elbow up onto Severus’s shoulder, leaning into him. “Whatever happened to that fellow? Think maybe the grindylows finally dragged him back where he belonged?”

“Impossible to be sure,” Severus grit out through clenched teeth—today he was Glamoured as a distant cousin of Remus’s, lank blond hair falling in his eyes and stiff, stooped posture making him seem smaller than he really was. “But I did hear—oh my. Potter, are you…is that a grey hair?”

“What?” James shot straight up immediately, patting his hair wildly in a manner that rendered it even more unruly than before. “The hell it is—someone get me a mirror. No, never mind, I’m sure I brought one.”

While James set about frantically digging through his satchel, Remus turned to Harry, wand raised. “Sirius and I will get your luggage sorted—why don’t you get started on your goodbyes and then hop on-board to find a seat? Else you might be stuck sitting next to a Snape of your own.” He then pointed his wand at the trunk and flicked it in the general direction of the luggage car, looping one arm through Sirius’s as he levitated the trunk to its final destination.

Harry turned back to his father, giving a nervous little shrug. “…Guess this is it.”

Severus thrust a hand out, grabbing Harry’s and giving it a rough squeeze. “Well, good luck, boy.” He then inclined his head to James. “I reckon your dad’ll miss you.”

“Oh,” Harry said. James had Transfigured a compact into a full-length mirror and was presently picking through his hair like a monkey, nearly twisting himself entirely around as he struggled to find the grey hair Severus claimed to have spotted. “Yeah—what’ll you do with yourself without me around, Dad?”

“Hm?” James glanced back Harry’s way and then gave a little Oh! when he caught Severus’s sharp gaze boring into him. He hastily Vanished the mirror, clapping a hand on Harry’s shoulder. “I’m sure I’ll manage—but trust it will be a challenge.” His expression then softened. “…Your dad’s definitely gonna miss you.” He lifted a brow. “Will you miss him?”

Harry felt his throat tighten, and he swallowed. “Of course.”

“You sure? ‘Cause I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t. Your old man can be quite a chore to be around—”

“Stow it, Potter,” Severus grumbled from under the impressive moustache he was presently sporting. “Let’s see your son off—he’s got a long train ride ahead of him.”

“That he does.” James pulled Harry into a deep embrace, squeezing tight as he whispered into Harry’s hair, “Just hug me like I’m Sev and I’ll be sure to pass it along to him once we’re back at Number 12.”

Harry squeezed with all his might.

After reassuring the both of them that he would absolutely write as soon as possible—and yes, he’d studied the Marauder’s Map enough he knew where the Owlery was—he was ushered into the nearest carriage just as Sirius and Remus came jogging back down the platform after seeing off Harry’s trunk. More goodbye hugs were had, candies were tucked into his pockets, and he was urged to make friends with one of the Elves working in the Kitchens as soon as possible, as they would be a reliable source of midnight snacks when he inevitably found himself wandering the castle after curfew.

With one last glance behind him before he stepped into the carriage, Harry gave a final wave to his father and godfathers—and then ducked inside before the lump in his throat and heat rising behind his eyes could turn him into a mess before his new peers.

Goodbyes were over—now it was time for hellos.

Still feeling a bit too intimidated to join someone else’s compartment, he found one that was still empty, sat himself down, and waited for whatever was to come. He’d forgotten to ask how long the ride would be, but it was sure to go by more quickly if he had someone to talk to. Would they be other Slytherins? Or was it common for the Houses to mingle? His godfathers’ reactions to his Sorting suggested no, but maybe traditions had changed in the years since they’d graduated. Some of the students were already wearing their robes, so ought he to put his own on now, instead of waiting for the announcement?

But though several students peeked into his compartment to check if it was occupied, no one bothered to join him once they realised they didn’t recognise the face inside. Maybe they thought he was a First-year, maybe they just didn’t feel up to meeting the ‘new kid’ just yet. Harry decided he wouldn’t let it get to him, either way, and tried to occupy himself reading the fresh copy of Hogwarts, A History his father had bought for him, advising him to get up to speed on the castle’s history, as it would do him well in the coming year.

The text was a bit too dry for his tastes, though, and he wound up nodding off as the train picked up speed, the gentle drone of the engine sending him right off. When he woke, it was to a pleasant voice floating through the train, warning students that they were twenty minutes out from Hogsmeade, where Harry recalled he was to disembark and take a carriage up to the castle proper.

He found he was still alone, no other students having joined him in the interim, and he pushed his glasses up enough to rub at his eyes with one hand as he groped for the change of robes in his pack with the other. He’d allowed Remus to teach him to knot his tie in their brief time together—though he’d also allowed Sirius to teach him the spell for it in case he managed to cock it up. He Transfigured the window, beyond which he could see vast stretches of the verdant countryside whipping by, into a mirror and made one last, final attempt to tame the bird’s nest that was his hand-me-down hair from James, but there was just no helping it. And besides, if everyone avoided him on account of his hair, well then all the better. He was supposed to be keeping a low profile, right?

Students began to flood the aisle outside his compartment as Harry felt the train begin to slow, and with a final glance to be sure he had everything—his satchel and his wand he kept on himself, Kreacher and his trunk would be delivered to the dormitories for him—he tugged on his lapels, whispered to himself, You’ve got this, Evans, and whipped open the sliding door as he flung himself into the milling scrum of young wizards and witches.

On the bright side, no one gave him a second glance when he exited his compartment, everyone too focused on gathering their own belongings and gossiping about their summer holiday to pay Harry much mind. Everyone probably assumed he was an older or younger student if they didn’t recognise him as one of their own, and Harry let himself be blithely buffeted along as the other students pressed and pulled and squeezed and squished to be sure they managed to get seats in carriages with their friends. Harry wondered if his carriage-mates would be inclined to start a conversation with him—and if he even wanted them to. Now that it was finally here, his first proper interaction with wizarding kids his own age, he was starting to get nervous again.

Would they make fun of his accent? He knew he had an American twang that was particularly pronounced around his vowels, despite his father’s best efforts to instil in him the “mother tongue”, and though it had never really bothered him before, he found himself feeling just a bit self-conscious of the fact that his lingo was a whole generation out of date. Did people still claim to be ‘skill’ these days? Well, he was about to find out.

The train finally came to a hissing, jerking halt, and suddenly it was chaos as everyone shoved their way out onto the platform—which was, to Harry’s great relief, much more spacious than King’s Cross Station had been, on account of the lack of family and loved ones milling about to see off their charges. Harry let himself be carried from the car by the wave of humanity spilling from the train, hoping the swell would take him at least in the general direction of the carriages. Farther up on the platform, towering over the students rushing to disembark, loomed a brick wall of a man nearly twice Harry’s height, holding a lantern that was already gleaming brightly in the failing afternoon light and bellowing, “First-years, this way! This way, First-years! Carriages are for older students only—if you’re a First-year, gather round this way and we’ll head down to the boats!”

“Think the squid’ll grab one this year?” he heard a boy in a red-and-gold tie ask one in a yellow-and-black tie, ribbing his companion with an elbow as he nodded in the general direction of the man attempting to corral the First-years. “I heard they give you passing marks in all your classes if one of your roommates gets dragged into the lake, on account of the trauma.” He sighed loudly. “Some folks have all the luck.”

Shortly, the shuffling mass of students began to coalesce into two queues that snaked in on themselves several times, and craning his neck, Harry could see that the head stopped just before a horseshoe court where a slick, black self-driving carriage was presently picking up passengers before rolling off to be replaced by another equally slick, black self-driving carriage, and then another and another and another. Remus had told him these were not actually self-driving, that there were invisible horses holstered at the front, but Harry would believe it when he could literally see it.

The lines moved rather more quickly than Harry would have expected given all the students needing to be carted up to the castle, and the skies overhead were still bright with fading pinks and oranges and purples by the time he made it to the front of his line. He was the first to climb in when the next empty carriage pulled up, and he was intrigued to see the carriages were much more spacious on the inside than they seemed at first glance, able to hold nearly a dozen students if needed. He pressed himself up against the far side of the carriage, turning to give a smiling nod to the witch who settled in next to him—but he was met with a bushy brown head of voluminous curls that nearly smothered him.

“—don’t understand how you can believe in that sort of hogwash when there’s absolutely no credible evidence of these creatures’ existence!” Bushy Hair was presently well into an argument with one of the other passengers, a girl whose face Harry could not see but who had a soft, lilting voice and did not seem in the least bit bothered by Bushy Hair’s rather exasperated squabbling.

Across from Harry sat a boy in a red-and-gold tie who gave Harry a polite nod but engaged no further, and Harry resigned himself to spending the rest of the carriage ride quietly tucked away in the corner, inhaling the lingering aroma of Bushy Hair’s floral shampoo and watching the castle in the distance loom larger and larger before them as the carriages trundled up from Hogsmeade.

He’d thought, the first time his father had informed him he’d be going to school in a castle, that Severus had been exaggerating. And even after receiving the Marauder’s Map and seeing for himself the layout of the place, a part of him had still thought the notion of attending classes in a draughty stone fortress ridiculous—this was the 20th century! They didn’t do that sort of thing anymore, surely not even in Europe.

But there really was no other way to describe the massive structure, several storeys tall with multiple towers and dozens of windows dotting its façade, all brightly gleaming with warm light, beckoning students inside. It was both imposing and inviting at once, a queer paradox that Harry didn’t dislike. Even Bushy Hair had dropped her argument with what had turned out to be a loopy-looking blonde girl in a tie of blue and bronze to crane her neck enough to take in the castle’s courtyard as their carriage drew up to what Harry took to be the front entrance.

The carriage doors creaked open, and everyone began hopping out, adjusting their robes once more and trading hushed whispers of excitement before they made their way up the stone steps as a group and through the massive double-doors fronting the castle’s entryway.

This next bit would be easy—he’d already been well briefed on what to expect: follow the crowd into the Great Hall and bank left, as that was where the Slytherin tables would be. At least, that was where they’d been twenty years ago. What if they’d moved the tables around? Or what if the long bench tables had been traded out for smaller, more intimate circular tables? It would be the train compartment business all over again!

To his relief, though, the seating arrangement of the Great Hall did not seem to have been altered much in the two decades since his father and godfathers had last sat here, and over each of the four long columns of tables hung vibrant banners proudly announcing which House supped beneath them. Harry threw one last longing glance toward the Gryffindor tables, where students excitedly welcomed the new arrivals to sit amongst them, and made his way to the rather more staid (he would not use words like gloomy or dour, not on his first night, no) Slytherin tables on the opposite side of the Hall.

Several of his new Housemates jostled past him, bumping his shoulder in their rush to claim seats next to their friends, saved for their arrival. As no one had saved him a seat, naturally, he grabbed a spot of open bench at the far end. The student nearest to him—a dark-skinned girl with a wary look in her eyes—gave him a polite nod, much like the boy in the carriage, and then turned back to engage the girl next to her in quiet conversation Harry couldn’t pick up. Were they talking about him? Or were they—as was more likely—simply catching up with each other, trading tales about their summer break that didn’t involve Harry at all? Why had no one told him that being a Slytherin came with pride and ambition, sure, but also a heaping helping of paranoia and nerves?

The other students who slid onto the bench after him also gave him a wide berth, and Harry resigned himself to a quiet dinner of minding his own business and trying to keep a low profile. The point of this year wasn’t to make friends—it was to get through it alive, without blowing his cover. And the fewer people he had to perform for, the easier that would be.

But the ‘keeping a low profile’ bit, he was realising, would probably be tricky to manage.

Once all of the returning students had made their way to their respective House tables, the Sorting Ceremony began for the First-years, which Harry was relieved to see briefly distracted his Housemates from the stranger worming his way into their midst. He joined them in clapping loudly for each new warm body sent their way, clinking glasses when prompted and doing his best to blend in.

But the excitement brought about by the arrival of bright-eyed new recruits to the House was quickly subsumed by the welcome speech delivered by the Headmaster—the ‘Dumbledore’ he’d heard so much about. He reviewed the school rules (many of which Harry was now realising had been routinely broken by his godfathers back in the day—they’d made it sound like the Forbidden Forest had been their private getaway and not home to multiple Class Quintuple-X magical creatures and the last known location of several missing students over the years!), reminded students who were of-age that alcoholic beverages would not be tolerated on the premises outside of staff-chaperoned functions, and then topped it all off by wishing all present a year full of learning, both magical and mystical—“including our several new transfers, returning to us from points near and far. Please, everyone, welcome them warmly, as I’m sure we have much to learn from one another.”

Dumbledore then raised his goblet to each table, receiving responses in turn from students scattered amongst the benches—the ‘decoys’ his father had spoken of, then? Harry he greeted last, and his gaze seemed to linger, eyes twinkling knowingly behind half-moon glasses. Harry politely returned the gesture with a thin smile. So much for keeping a low profile. It was nice the Headmaster wanted others to be friendly toward him, but now he had even more eyes on him than before, which was less than ideal. Even the staff were sizing him up, and he winced under the targeted glare he was receiving from the Potions professor, a corpulent older man with thin, greying hair and a broom-bristle moustache who looked like he ought to be very jovially mannered but was presently frowning right at Harry. Perfect, just perfect.

He kept his head down—literally—for the rest of the meal, monotonously spooning peas and mash into his mouth and wondering if this was really worth the trouble after all. If it was just a matter of ensuring his magic stayed functional, then he could have just moved to Fiji or somewhere equally tropical and remote and lived happily, beachcombing and practising magic as he pleased. Surely they couldn’t actually prevent the Trace from breaking, and who’d travel that far just to arrest him when it was just Harry, coconut drinks, and white sandy beaches as far as the eye could see?

“Potter, wasn’t it?”

It couldn’t be more dangerous than actually coming back here, where people had tried to kill Harry—where people had killed his mother. There was a festering little bit of mould in his chest, nestled behind his ribcage, at the centre of his heart, that was starting to take root already, he could feel it—the urge for vengeance. He hadn’t really known his mother, but he’d known her love. He’d known the love his father had for her. And while he wasn’t yet ready to hare off into the night on the hunt for the last straggling members of the Death Eater cult that had taken her from them, the longer he dawdled here, the more ingrained it would become, he feared.

“Potter, I said.”

He didn’t want to be the kind of person whose grief became their entire personality. It was why he never really let himself think about his mother too much. He’d seen what mingled sorrow and paranoia had done to his father, and while he was grateful for the sanctuary Severus had given him, for the two-fold love he’d shared with Harry to make up for Lily’s passing, he didn’t want to open himself up to all of that.

They really shouldn’t have come back. Severus knew they shouldn’t, even—so why had they?

Why had they come all this way just for—

Someone grabbed him roughly by the front of his robes, jerking him around and up onto his feet. “Are you deaf as well as dumb, Potter?” they snarled in his face, and Harry’s fake glasses slipped down his nose.

It was a boy. A very angry boy. A very angry pointy boy with white-blond hair that had probably been carefully coifed only moments ago but, in the course of this interaction, had now become mussed, a few strands flying free to dangle in front of sharp grey eyes. He had a gleaming badge on his chest that proudly pronounced him a PREFECT, and he seemed to be expecting an answer.

“Oh, er, yes. Potter—that’s me. Harry Potter. Sorry—” Angry Blond Prefect shoved him away with a scoff, and Harry made a mad grab for the table so he didn’t go tumbling onto his ass. “S-sorry, I was—thinking.”

Angry Blond Prefect raked him with a withering glare. “Of that I have my doubts.” He crossed his arms over his chest. “Are you quite finished stuffing your face?” He inclined his head to the massive double doors at the head of the Great Hall. “My bad luck, I drew the short straw and got stuck having to escort you to the Dungeons.”

Harry boggled, grip tightening a bit on the edge of the table. “Wh—Dungeons?” Surely he hadn’t already been found out, right? His father had warned him you couldn’t Apparate on Hogwarts grounds, but if his life was on the line, he was willing to give it his very best shot regardless.

Angry Blond Prefect rolled his eyes dramatically. “Our Common Room, you dolt.” And oh. Right. He’d known that. He’d even memorised the route on the map, so he probably could have made his way there on his own, but saying so would probably have just made Angry Blond Prefect even angrier—and probably a little suspicious about how the New Kid already knew his way around the castle. “Well?” he snapped when Harry failed to respond as promptly as he would have liked. “I’m not standing here for my own health.”

“Right—right, sorry.” Harry hastily snatched up a napkin and wiped his mouth and hands, shimmying out from the bench. He could feel dozens of eyes on them as he followed Angry Blond Prefect down the rows of tables. Was this sort of attitude out of character for Angry Blond Prefect? Was he generally a gentle soul, loath to so much as harm a fly, and that Harry had managed to draw such ire from him surely evidence he was a shady sort who ought not to be trusted?

“Malfoy,” Angry Blond Prefect said once they’d left behind the cheery warm comfort of the Great Hall—as well as all of its prying eyes.

“What?” Harry said, distracted by the massive hourglasses filled with what looked to be hundreds of rubies and emeralds and diamonds and sapphires. He’d somehow missed them coming in, and every couple of seconds, one or two would gems would be sucked back up into the upper bulb.

Angry Blond Prefect turned sharply on his heel, rounding on Harry, and Harry nearly smacked into him. “I’m missing dessert for you, you realise? Blaise has said he’ll sneak me back a slice of pie, but he and I both know he won’t. He’ll think about it, but then he’ll catch a glimpse of his reflection in the underside of his spoon, and that’ll be that. So seeing as I’m sacrificing a much needed sugar boost to hold your hand and show you where you’ll be resting your weary little head for evenings henceforth, I would very much appreciate it if you’d fucking pay attention.”

Oh. So maybe he was better mannered when properly fed, then. Harry resolved to try and mend this relationship before it flew further off the rails. “…Yes. Of course, I’m sorry. Thank you. It’s just been a bit of a whirlwind is all. I do appreciate you showing me to the Common Room, really.” Perhaps he could find a way to get Sirius to bake another tart and Owl it to him—they did say the way to a man’s heart was through his stomach, after all. “Er—Malfoy?” It sounded like a name.

Angry Blond Prefect glared down his nose at Harry, which was a difficult thing to do, seeing as Harry was only a few hairs shorter than him, so he had to throw his head back a bit to achieve the effect. He sniffed. “Draco Malfoy. One of your Prefects, as you can see.” He tapped the badge on his chest. Oh, so it was a name, and a rather extravagant one at that.

“Ah, nice to meet you.” Harry extended a hand. “Harry. Potter. Harry Potter. That’s my name.”

Malfoy’s lip curled at the proffered hand, and he narrowed his eyes. “…You’re certain they Sorted you Slytherin?”

Harry gave a sheepish shrug. “Afraid so, it seems.”

“Why afraid so? Got something against our House? Where are you from? You sound like you’ve got a mouthful of marbles.”

“Wh—no, I mean, it was a surprise is all. My dad’s Gryffindor. I guess he thought I’d take after him.” He decided not to touch the question of his origin for now—too much improvisation and he’d never be able to keep his story straight, and Malfoy seemed like he was ready to pounce on the tiniest little chink in Harry’s armour.

Malfoy’s eyes narrowed further. More of this, and he was just going to close them altogether. “The Potter line’s produced nothing but Gryffindors since the 17th century.” He raked Harry from stem to stern. “What makes you so special?”

God, this one wasn’t going to give up easily, was he? Harry was now beginning to suspect that Malfoy’s attitude on the usual was a rather surly and pompous one, pie or no pie. “…Couldn’t tell you, sorry.”

Malfoy released a little grunt of annoyance, features screwing up, and then he turned and began marching once more, snapping his fingers when Harry didn’t immediately step to it. “You’ll be rooming with the other Sixth-year boys—Zabini, Crabbe, Goyle, Nott, and myself of course. The dormitories aren’t meant to house more than five to a room, so thanks so very much for the tight squeeze we’ll all have to endure for the next nine months.”

As if this were Harry’s fault. He was liking this Malfoy character less and less the deeper into the bowels of the castle they descended. “Er, I’ll try not to be too much of a bother—”

“Too late,” Malfoy sighed. “Shower shifts are separated by year—Sixth-years are scheduled for 8:00 to 8:15, mornings and evenings; if you need the facilities outside of those slots, a Freshening Charm is your new best friend. Curfew is at 10 PM sharp, lights out at 11—if you’re caught outside your room after curfew and embarrass our House, you’ll wish getting points docked was the worst you had coming.”

They finally arrived at a handsome black door with a silver knocker and handle, and Malfoy tapped the keyhole with his wand, whispering Merlin as the door opened on its own for them. The room was softly lit but very elegantly appointed, and it reminded Harry starkly of Number 12. He recalled that all of Sirius’s family members had also been Slytherin students and wondered if such taste in design was innate to the House or just happy coincidence.

One entire wall was fully glassed in, and Harry supposed that the dark void that stretched beyond was the depths of the Black Lake. Malfoy followed his eye: “And don’t tap on the glass. It annoys the merfolk.”

Harry nodded. “I heard they’ll teach you naughty words in Lorelei if you sneak them food from the Kitchens—is that true?”

Malfoy boggled, the expression rather out of place on his otherwise polished features. “I—what?”

Harry supposed that meant he’d have to try it out himself and hope Sirius’s mother hadn’t been having him on. Perhaps Malfoy thought Harry was having him on too, for he shook his head and moved on, continuing their tour.

Malfoy pointed out the study nooks (“They are to be used for studying and nothing else.”), the laundry chutes (“Deposit your unmentionables promptly; ask Nott what happens if I should find your dirty underwear lurking under my bed.”), the Wireless (“You’ll need a Prefect’s permission to change the channel, though—touch that dial during League Cup matches and you’re liable to get your arm Hexed off.”).

“And should you have any further questions…” Malfoy shrugged. “Ask another Prefect. Or Professor Slughorn, our Head of House.”

They’d finally reached their room’s floor, six levels down. It was a pleasant enough descent, but Harry wasn’t looking forward to having to mount those stairs back up to ground level every morning. “Not you?”

“Not me,” Malfoy said pointedly, and Harry wondered how he’d gotten this Prefect position at all. Were they not elected? Did you just get picked at random, or had he greased a staff member’s palm to get his badge? “Also, you’ll be in charge of your own schedule from here on out—that includes waking up in the morning, getting to your classes on time, and attending meals. None of us is going to hold your hand—if you want that sort of treatment, you ought to have been Sorted Hufflepuff.” Well, it wasn’t like Harry hadn’t tried that. “We’re all nearly adults here and ought to be managing our own affairs.”

And that made sense, but did Malfoy have to say it like that? Gods, this was going to be a long year…

When Malfoy at last escorted him into their room, Harry found his luggage had already been delivered, along with Kreacher, who was presently giving himself a bath atop what Harry hoped was his bed and not Malfoy’s.

“Good gad!” Malfoy stopped short, recoiling. “What is that thing?” He squinted. “They let you bring a house-elf?”

And Harry had to chuckle at that, shuffling over to drop his satchel onto the mattress and giving Kreacher a few welcome scritches. “Of course not. This is my cat, Kreacher.”

“…Why does it look like that? It’s not diseased, is it?”

Malfoy would probably not find it amusing he was asking all the same questions James had, but Harry did. “It’s just his breed. I read that they originated in Egypt and used to be companions to Pharaohs.” Harry did not actually believe this claim, suspecting that the employee at Magical Menagerie had only been looking to make a sale, but Malfoy did at least seem mildly more intrigued now he thought such cats were associated with royalty.

“…Well,” Malfoy wrinkled his nose and turned away from Harry’s corner of the room, “if I find it’s shat in my loafers, don’t think I won’t dock points from my own House.”

Harry did not doubt that he would, rapidly realising that Malfoy was the sort of prickly knob who enjoyed a good power trip. Under most circumstances, Harry might have been tempted to go out of his way to piss him off—maybe the Potter name did suit him after all—but he could already hear his father admonishing him to check his temper and keep his head down. Summering with a bunch of Gryffindors had left him with some bad habits that were liable to get him in trouble if he didn’t watch himself, and apparently as a Slytherin, he was supposed to be cunning and calculating and stuff, so he should probably get on that.

This seemed to be the end of the tour, and Malfoy left Harry to his unpacking while he departed for the baths (“We Prefects have our own private facilities—you won’t catch me within ten feet of the rancid, mould-ridden cells you lay folk have to use.”) before the returning students mobbed them. And right on schedule, Harry found himself joined by the rest of his dormmates returning from dinner only moments later. He was relieved to find that Malfoy was the testiest and surliest of the lot, with the others—Vince, Greg, Theo, and Blaise—actually turning out to be rather decent sorts. Greg and Vince didn’t talk much after giving Harry a cursory palm brush by way of a handshake, but he was assured that this was just because they were heading for a food coma after overindulging at dinner, a favourite pastime of theirs, and it wasn’t as if they generally had much to say anyway.

Theo too was decent, and Blaise was even decent-er, overly garrulous and not prickly at all, unlike Malfoy. When Harry related the rather tense tour he’d been treated to, Blaise had just laughed merrily. “Oh, he’s always like that. Someday St. Mungo’s will figure out how to remove that stick up his arse, surely.”

Harry wasn’t so sure. It sounded like an integral part of Malfoy’s personality now—removing it might have disastrous consequences.

He resolved to be in bed and on his way to sleep before Malfoy came back from his bath, in case he wanted to start round two of ripping on Harry, and turned in early. He had a big day come morning, after all, and he released a long, soft exhalation as he slowed his thoughts, Kreacher curled up next to him purring softly to lull him to sleep, and wondering if Blaise had remembered to bring Malfoy that slice of pie in the end.