Chapter Text
It’s a sweltering August day in Diagon Alley, and Harry is losing the will to live.
Clinging to the rapidly fraying threads of his patience, he weaves around chattering clusters of Hogwarts students and their families, with the single-minded goal of getting his own school books and going home as quickly as possible. He’s done this six times before and the new-term excitement wore off two or three Augusts back.
That’s also, incidentally, around the same time that his guardian decided Harry could handle his own back-to-school shopping and stopped coming along. So, unlike most of his peers, Harry is on his own and doing his best to take advantage of not being slowed down by the presence of other people.
Get in, get out, go home.
With a not inconsiderable amount of effort, he finally manages to maneuver through the mob all the way to Flourish and Blotts . . . where there is a queue out the door, spilling onto the pavement.
So much for that post-war population crisis the Daily Prophet has been going on about for at least as long as Harry has been old enough to read a newspaper.
Harry looks at the queue. Then he looks down at his shopping list. Then he looks back at the queue, in despair.
And then he takes a sharp turn down a side street, in the direction of Knockturn Alley.
Forget the school books. There’s another errand he can run first.
Borgin and Burkes is the opposite of Flourish and Blotts: quiet, dimly lit, and almost entirely devoid of other customers. Harry enters just as a tall, slender witch with long blue hair is leaving, and goes straight for the books without exchanging any words with the man behind the counter, bypassing magical artifacts of dubious providence and cursed objects he knows better than to even think about touching. The sort of things that were illegal not even twenty years ago, controlled now by a different sort of monitoring and regulation. With a healthy dose of fear for good measure.
But Harry doesn’t need paperweights that may or may not make his fingernails fall off. He’s on a mission.
The book shelves here aren’t very expansive and the Arithmancy section is smaller still—it isn’t a Dark Art and all the commonly used texts can be purchased back in Diagon Alley. Harry, however, has all of those already and is looking for something beyond the standard curriculum.
And there it is, at the end of the second shelf from the top, like it was placed there to wait for him: The Geometry of Curses.
He’s just reaching for the surprisingly slim midnight-blue book when a long, pale hand intercepts him and plucks it off the shelf before he can get there.
“What an intriguing choice of reading material,” a smooth voice, just a touch too close to him, says in an idle drawl. Harry looks over and up to find that he’s being observed by a tall man with jet-black hair, standing, yes, just a touch too close. No one Harry has ever seen before, though there’s something . . . no, probably nothing. Just annoyance playing tricks on him.
“Arithmancy is kind of what I do,” he says, swallowing as much irritation as he can. But not enough to stop him from holding out his hand, palm up. “And I was definitely here first.”
The man’s thin lips quirk into a peculiar smile that isn’t quite a smile at all, his dark eyes locked on Harry’s face with a focus Harry refuses to find uncomfortable. He looks like he’s maybe in his mid-thirties, dressed in crisp pinstripe trousers and a shirt made of a green silk so dark it’s almost black, under an open robe that looks expensive. But appearance doesn’t mean much, does it?
“Is this what they’re teaching at Hogwarts these days?” He holds the book just out of reach and Harry could try to take it from him—he has the reflexes for it—but it’s not smart to be any more confrontational than he already has been. “I see my generation was robbed.”
“It’s more what I’m interested in than what the school’s teaching,” Harry says, shifting his weight back slightly, so the man isn’t towering over him so completely. “Is that a problem?”
“Of course not.” The strange not-quite-smile lingers. “I was fond of Arithmancy, myself, when I was a student. But it’s an unusual passion.” With an elegant flourish, he offers Harry the book. “If you don’t mind indulging a stranger’s curiosity for a moment: what are you hoping to do with it?”
Not knowing who this man is, it’s a somewhat risky question to answer. He could very well work for the Ministry, in the department responsible for sanctioning advanced magical research. Harry could be on the verge of fucking himself over, if he’s not very careful. But the man’s interest is a palpable thing in the dusty air between them, and Harry doesn’t get asked this question very often.
Oh, fuck it.
“Magical research, if I can,” he says, accepting the book and holding it close to his chest. “Arithmancy isn’t being studied as much as other disciplines right now.” Not since the war, when public interest swung dramatically toward the Dark Arts. “I think there’s a lot that no one’s looking at.”
The man’s eyebrows raise ever so slightly. “Oh?”
What’s that Muggle expression? In for a . . . penny? Or something related to money, at least, he’s pretty sure. So Harry shrugs and says, “It’s all been the same formulae and charts for decades—centuries. And I’m not going to say they don’t work, or anything like that. The math still holds up, most of the time.” Except for when it doesn’t, but that’s a different conversation entirely. “But—”
He cuts himself off. He’s being too reckless, going into any kind of detail about his future aspirations, in the middle of Borgin and Burkes, of all places. But the man is nodding encouragingly, like this is the most interesting conversation he’s had all week. “Don’t stop there, please. I don’t ask questions I don’t want answered.”
Is Harry imagining the implicit threat there? That when this man asks questions, he expects them to be answered? Looking into his eyes, Harry would bet that he is not imagining anything. But it’s too late to worry about that now.
“There’s a lot of potential,” he says carefully, “for a predictive model that reliably works. Divination is pretty much useless—interpreting pictures in tea leaves and all that. Even when a seer pulls a true prophecy, they don’t remember enough afterwards to verify anything.” He should probably do a better job at hiding his disdain for interpretive divination, but he’s apparently decided to just botch this entire conversation. The man is nodding again, though, so Harry swallows and gets to the point. “A true predictive model would be . . . it could change everything.”
It’s a thought experiment that has, more than once, kept him up at night. How many people might have survived the war if there had been a better way to choose which path to take? To know what turn would lead to the least bloodshed? To predict which choice would stave of utter catastrophe?
Even if the ultimate outcome had been the same, how much might have been saved?
“You’re far from the first to make that observation,” the man is pointing out mildly.
“I know.” Harry lifts his chin. “But I want to be the one to pull it off.”
That wins him a laugh; it sounds surprisingly real. “In that case, there’s another book you should read.” He reaches out, over Harry’s shoulder, to pull a heftier volume off the shelf before offering it to him like a gift. “I think you’ll enjoy this one.”
Harry looks down at the book. The black cover is blank—no title or author. He opens it to a random page and finds himself looking at some kind of cypher, letters to numbers, but at a glance not one he’s encountered before.
“Thank you,” he says slowly, eyes still on the table. There’s a text explanation on the facing page, but he doesn’t read it. He’ll need to start from the beginning to get anything out of it.
“My pleasure.” When Harry looks back up, the man is watching him with the same intensity that began this conversation. “I look forward to hearing more about your research someday.”
So Harry smiles at him, because what else is he supposed to do here? If this man is someone significant, he might as well try to leave him with some kind of positive impression. “You will.”
The man nods once before passing Harry with a glancing brush of a hand across the top of his shoulder, too slick to be anything but deliberate. And with that, he’s gone, Apparating away in a blink.
Harry stares at the place where the man was for a few seconds, realizing belatedly that they never exchanged names and he still has no idea who he was talking to. But rather than dwell on his mistakes, he shakes the weird encounter off and heads for the register to pay for his new books instead. The world is a strange place and there’s no point overthinking it.
If he starts in on that, he’ll never do anything else again.
When Harry gets back to the quiet West London terraced house he’s lived in since he was a baby, he locks the door behind him and calls out a perfunctory, “I’m back.”
“And were you successful?” a voice calls back from the sitting room.
Harry sets his bag of books on the floor of the foyer, at the foot of the stairs, and pokes his head through the sitting room door to find his guardian lying on the sofa with a book in his hands. Simon Glass, the man who raised him. By certain values of “raised.”
“More or less,” he says, leaning against the doorframe.
“Good.”
Simon is watching him upside down, ashy brown hair hanging over the edge of the sofa. He’s a slight man, pale in that way people get when they don’t spend enough time outside, and quite possibly the least paternal paternal figure Harry could have ended up with.
Harry has never, in almost sixteen years now, managed to get a proper answer as to why Simon took responsibility for him in the first place, when he could have gone to a Pureblood family with more than one surviving member. Or, more likely, one of the then-new group homes for Muggleborns. At least a few of his fellow war orphans were sent down that path and, considering who Harry’s parents were, it was the obvious choice for him, too. How he evaded that fate has always been something of a mystery.
But it’s also been a pretty good life, on the whole, and the older he gets the more he appreciates Simon’s laissez-faire approach to parenthood.
“Diagon Alley was ridiculous.” Harry comes into the room to take over the armchair adjacent to the sofa. He kicks off his shoes to curl his legs up. “Mobbed. You would have hated it.”
“That’s why I don’t go.” Simon sits up so they’re looking at each other properly. “Just keep whatever money you didn’t spend.”
“I spent most of it,” Harry tells him. “I went to Borgin and Burkes, too.”
Simon smiles. “Anything interesting?”
“Two new Arithmancy books.” Harry smiles back. “Applying numerology to curses.”
And whatever the book the stranger told him to buy actually is. But that’s more of a story than he feels like disclosing right now. He’ll tell Simon eventually and Simon won’t care that he had to wait for it because Simon never does.
Simon, who is nodding. “A good next step—do let me know if there’s anything else you need. You’re going to have to make some decisions soon, for the future, and I won’t see you held back by something I could have done differently.”
“Thanks,” Harry says, choosing to ignore the implication that anything that holds Harry back is entirely on his own head and Simon will make sure he knows it. “I’ll have to read the books first.”
“Obviously,” Simon says flatly before changing course. “Are you hungry? I hadn’t planned for dinner, but I have every confidence in our ability to figure something out.”
“Yeah,” Harry says, stretching his arms up over his head lazily. “You remember that thing I said about Diagon Alley being mobbed? The restaurants were worse.”
“Well then.” Simon unfolds himself from the sofa in a sudden burst of movement. He and Harry are approximately the same below-average height and Harry is pretty sure that alone has served as a shield against invasive questions from nosey strangers, over the years. “Let’s see what wonders the kitchen holds, shall we?”
Harry follows him. “If nothing else, there’s always toast.”
“We do have raspberry jam,” Simon agrees easily. “There are eggs, as well, I know that much, and milk. French toast?”
French toast for dinner. A staple meal in the Glass household, going all the way back to Harry’s earliest memories. He looks back on those dinners fondly, though he knows now that they were mostly because twenty-year-old Simon was somehow allowed to take custody of a very young child without knowing how to cook.
It’s amazing they survived those first years relatively unscathed.
Harry catches up and the lights in the kitchen come on as they enter. “French toast it is.”
King’s Cross on 1 September is largely the same as ever, but Harry finds himself watching his fellow Hogwarts students with more affection than he felt for them in Diagon Alley. Maybe it’s the fact that this is the last time he’ll ever do this, offsetting how annoying it is to battle his way through yet more crowds.
Beside him, Simon sighs. “Off you go. Free me from this torment, please, before I do something inadvisable.”
“You didn’t have to come,” Harry points out. Simon wouldn’t actually do anything more hazardous than complain, but even if he was never a Death Eater, he was on the winning side of the war. Harry has no illusions about his overall moral character. “I do know how to get here. I’m not eleven anymore.”
“That’s beside the point.” Simon sniffs, visibly affronted. “We’ve been doing this together since the beginning and I’m seeing it through to the bitter end.”
“I’m shocked you haven’t won any parenting awards,” Harry says dryly. “Truly.”
“Unbelievable, isn’t it?” Simon smiles at him and takes Harry’s hand for a brief squeeze. “I’ll see you at Yule, hmm?”
“Obviously.” Harry squeezes back, then lets go to grab the trolley holding his trunk. “Don’t kill anyone on your way home.”
“I promise nothing.”
Harry half-turns back to offer Simon a wave, then sets off in the direction of Platform 93/4 where he can see a few of his housemates still lingering on this side of the barrier.
“Harry!” Neville says when he catches sight of him. “Good summer?”
“Hey, mate,” Ron adds casually before he can answer. “Didn’t see you in Diagon Alley this year.”
Harry shrugs one shoulder. “It was pretty much the same as always. Simon tosses money at me one day with no warning and kicks me out of the house to go do my school shopping. It was mad on the day I went, so I tried to make it quick.”
“Your guardian’s weird,” Seamus says. “You know that, right? You have to know that.”
Seamus, more than any of Harry’s other close housemates, knows something about the guardianship system. He’s been living with some of his father’s relatives ever since his magic manifested. It’s not a true guardianship, not like Harry’s, but he at least has enough of an idea of how it is to make commentary.
Harry has wondered before if Seamus doesn’t secretly wish he hadn’t inherited his father’s magical abilities. If he wouldn’t have been better off left in the Muggle world, away from all of this.
He has never asked and never will.
“Eh.” He waves a hand ambivalently. “I’m used to it.”
They pass through the barrier to where the train awaits. But just as they’re boarding, halfway down the platform, a voice Harry would know anywhere says coolly, “Glass.”
Harry rolls his eyes, but acknowledges the greeting anyway: “Malfoy.” He smiles a smile to match Draco’s tone. “Nice summer, was it?”
“Passable.” He tilts his head. “I heard you were hanging around Knockturn Alley—finally taking your future seriously?” He casts Ron, Seamus, and Neville a disdainful look. “Or just trying to make better friends?”
“Worrying about my social life?” Harry says sweetly. “I never knew you cared.” Draco takes that as his turn to roll his eyes, before pushing past Harry to climb up the steps and into the train. To his disappearing back, Harry calls, “May the best House win!”
“I don’t know how you can stand to talk to that git,” Ron says, as they find an empty compartment.
Harry shrugs and stows his trunk. “We’ve known each other forever.” All the kids from the Dark Lord’s side of the ideological divide do and, despite his origins, Harry Glass does fall into that category, if only by a technicality. He was never in the core group of children, but he’s been to more than his share of birthday parties. “Honestly, it’s all just kind of a script at this point. Keeping it going on sheer bloody principle.”
“Were you really hanging around Knockturn Alley?” Neville asks.
Harry settles in, crossing one leg over the other. “Just buying some books.”
“More of your numbers?” Seamus lounges back in his seat opposite Harry. “You’re like a Ravenclaw with that shit. What are you going to do with it, anyway?”
It’s the second time in as many weeks that Harry’s been asked that question and he looks at Seamus for a few seconds, not sure how to answer this time. Finally, he goes with, “Seventh year, right? Just thinking about the future.”
“Maybe you should’ve taken Divination for that.” Seamus grins at him cheekily, missing the opportunity for a more pointed joke. “Good luck with the whole research proposal thing, if that’s what you mean. Did you know that they sometimes make people present in front of”—his voice lowers to a whisper—“the Dark Lord?”
“You ever met him, Harry?” Ron asks, propping his shoulders against the window and opening a chocolate frog.
“Aside from the obvious time?” Harry says dryly, but Ron just grins at him, unbothered.
“Your guardian’s close with that lot, isn’t he?”
Harry doesn’t argue. “I met him once, a long time ago. He came to the house and Simon had me greet him before I got sent upstairs. I was . . . five or six, maybe? But that’s it.” He looks around the compartment. “Simon was never a Death Eater, and I’m . . . me, so we’re not exactly inner circle material.”
But Ron is leaning forward, speaking in a low voice. “What would you do if you met him now?”
This is a stupid, dangerous conversation and Harry frowns at him. If the old Order of the Phoenix was anything like this, it’s no wonder they lost the war. “I’d greet him properly because I have fucking manners, Ron. The hell’s wrong with you?”
It isn’t even an evasion: that is exactly what Harry would do because Harry is neither colossally stupid nor suicidal. The real question is how he would feel about it and the truth is . . . he doesn’t know.
“Oh, come on,” Ron says, trying to egg him on. “You wouldn’t be a little tempt—”
Harry has his wand out before Ron can finish. “Silencio,” he hisses. “And I say again: what the hell is wrong with you?”
The way Ron is acting, all cheerful bravado with only a train door separating them from any number of opportunistic would-by spies, Harry has to wonder what he got up to over the summer—and who he got up to it with. And if Harry is already wondering, it’s inevitable that someone else will, too. Someone whose response will be harsher than a silencing charm.
“Yeah, Ron,” Neville is saying, quiet and shaky. “Harry’s right—we shouldn’t joke about that stuff.”
So whatever Ron got up to, Neville was there, too. Harry knows it with a sudden, unshakable certainty, and he could curse them both for their carelessness, letting even a hint of it show here. He’s not surprised that he has not been brought into the loop; he might have been born to James and Lily Potter, but that isn’t the world that raised him.
Nature vs. nurture. That tedious age-old question.
“I would never repeat anything I hear to anyone,” Harry says, voice very low as he lifts the silencing charm. “You all know that. But you have to be more careful.” He looks from one face to the next. “No matter what you may or may not have done over the summer.” Ron opens his mouth and Harry holds his hand up. “Don’t. This conversation never happened. I am going to forget everything that was said after we got on this fucking train.”
It’s a touch dramatic, a dash of hyperbole to really drive his point home, but he wants them to understand. Harry considers himself their friend, and he would never knowingly betray them, but there is a reason he’s on the outside of whatever subversive activities the remains of Albus Dumbledore’s Order might one day decide to entertain.
It doesn’t matter who his parents were—Harry is not, and never has been, someone they should fully trust.
The sorting ceremony—like Diagon Alley, like King’s Cross—proceeds in much the same manner as usual. There’s one new face at the Muggleborn table, a girl with dark skin and tight curls, who looks terrified and proud in equal measure. But Muggleborns don’t get a sorting; only the best of the best are allowed entry to Hogwarts at all, and they’re kept apart in their own house, to educate them in the ways of proper wizarding society without burdening the Purebloods with their presence.
It’s something like that, at any rate. Simon explained it to Harry once, but not in much detail because he’s a terrible teacher when he doesn’t care about the subject.
Hermione Granger is welcoming the new girl, with an arm around her shoulders. Harry doesn’t know Hermione very well, but from all of their past interactions he does know that she’s clever and capable. In another world, she might have been Head Girl.
As the sorting itself commences, Gryffindor picks up two more students, Ravenclaw four, and Hufflepuff three. The rest go to Slytherin.
The Slytherin crest carries a lot of weight these days.
But then something else happens. Something different, finally, to break the monotony of a year that otherwise was looking like all the other years before it, since Harry’s very first in this hall.
“I have one last announcement,” Headmistress McGonagall says crisply. She’s a straight-backed, dignified woman, though she walks with a slight limp from whatever she experienced in the war. “The Ministry has decided to give our seventh years a special opportunity: a distinguished guest will be joining us to evaluate you for particular talent and promise.” Her gaze sweeps the room, steely, and even the Slytherins are quiet in the face of a woman who, despite her past allegiances, has been the headmistress here for more than fifteen years. “I expect that all of you will cooperate with the Ministry representative as befits your status as Hogwarts students.”
She has barely finished speaking when the doors to the Great Hall open dramatically and a man walks in, tall and loose-limbed, elegant in an open, fluttering robe.
Harry turns to look and, for the briefest of moments, he and the man lock eyes.
It’s the stranger from Borgin and Burkes.