章 2243: 3
Chapter Text
As it turned out, finding Hogwarts was trivial when one was an actual, bona-fide wizard who had graduated from there. Not because of some arcane magic they only taught at the school, or some secret knowledge Taylor wasn't privy to, though. No, in truth it was much simpler than that.
Sirius Black, escaped Death Eater convict, could do side-along apparition, the act of teleporting himself and another person. Further, while one could not apparate to Hogwarts, one could apparate to Hogsmeade, the magical village adjacent to Hogwarts that was only reachable through such magical means.
Magical means that were frustratingly out of reach for Taylor. Apparition and the Floo both, as she understood it, required magic and had potentially fatal side-effects to failure. She was not going to try to learn either with her trial and error method, not when learning normally involved losing pieces of one's body and stepping or pushing one's face into a fire, respectively. As far as she knew, those or brooms – which would require she know where she was flying – were the only forms of magical transportation. Hence her failed plan to use tracking charms to figure out where Hogwarts was.
She maybe could have finagled her way into someone magical taking her along, but that would run into the opposite problem: once she had Harry, how would she get back? Relying on a random good Samaritan or someone there under false pretenses just wasn't feasible. The tracking charms were a better plan, though they had failed almost immediately.
But side-along apparition just required that she let the Death Eater hold onto her arm after waiting a few days for him to regain some of the strength Azkaban and being on the run conspired to keep from him. She bought her passage to the outskirts of Hogwarts with cheap sandwiches and the occasional thinly veiled threat to his life. The way back, ideally with her and Harry, would be the same. Assuming she couldn't secure an alternate means of exit in the meantime.
She had prepared for an extended stay in Hogsmeade and the surrounding area, knowing that she would be relying on an unreliable fugitive for any back-and-forth transportation. Thankfully, she had vacation time aplenty saved up at work – a positive consequence of her nearly two years of befuddled aimlessness – that she set out to use, all at once. She also dipped into her savings to secure a room in Hogsmeade on a weekly basis, so that she wouldn't have to camp out.
From there, things got harder. The Forbidden Forest was a huge swath of hostile territory that bordered Hogwarts on one side, and crucially it was the only place one could approach the castle on foot without needing to get through the front gate or over other physical defenses, because nobody had bothered to extend the perimeter wall into the deepest parts of the forest.
The giant spiders, hostile centaurs, and other assorted nastiness that lurked in the forest were supposed to be enough of a disincentive.
Black was crazy enough to go in anyway, and Taylor followed. The forest wasn't actually that bad, when one had three blocks worth of forewarning for the bigger creatures.
The Dementors were the real problem.
Taylor huddled beneath an earthen overhang, her robes muddy at the hems and her breathing ragged. All around her, the forest shuddered with subtle terror. A chill graced the air, one not borne on the wind, a radiating, unnatural cold.
The Dementors were above the trees, this time. On the last rotation, they had flown between the trees, gliding from trunk to trunk and checking around every corner, morbid seekers looking for prey.
She was reminded, more and more, of Ringwraiths and Shelob and gibbering goblins, of Tolkien's works. The books existed here, too, and she had read them in both worlds. They were remarkably close on several different 'fantasy' creatures. The similarities to Dementors and Acromantula and the like would have had her believing Tolkien was a wizard who drew inspiration from the world he knew.
But it couldn't be; he had written exactly the same on Earth Bet, and Earth Aleph. There was no magic there. There were no Dementors there.
The chill passed. She made note of the approximate time between passes with a shaking hand. Their aura was a dark inverse to Glory Girl, wide-ranging and creepingly subtle on the outskirts. Though at this distance, according to Black and her guide to Britain's magical creatures, she shouldn't have been able to feel it at all.
A dog bounded into view, shaggy and wild. It shifted to a man, a fellow conspirator. "I counted five," he reported.
She made a note of that, too. They both had their strengths. He was good for visual assessments, unafraid of being noticed, one more animal in a forest full of them. She was good for spatial awareness, the Dementors' aura of depression leading to terror ineffective on insects, but their cold entirely trackable.
She didn't attempt to place insects on the dark creatures. Not to track them, and not to explore their contours and what lay under their cloaks. The one time she tried, the cold killed her bugs just as the Dementor stopped and looked directly towards her, despite being at the very edge of her range at the time.
They were very much like Ringwraiths to her Frodo; dark specters capable of seeing her influence when it was at its most invisible to everyone else. Her power resented them, but it was a resentment tempered with caution when conveyed to Taylor.
The chill returned, coming back around and passing over her bugs. "More," she whispered.
The man gave way to the dog, while she hunched beneath the earthen overhang, ready to run if the Dementors began to close in.
This time, the Dementors were on the ground; running might be necessary. They moved in pairs, floating a meter off the ground.
Two came her way. She ran well before they were anywhere close, retreating deeper into the forest. They never saw her, not with how thick the forest was, and in truth she had fled well before they were actually a threat, but her breathing still came in short gasps for more reasons than just the sudden exertion.
Only her range made such risks palatable. The Dementors did not move at a pace above that of a fast walk, not when they were simply on patrol. Observing their patrols to see if there were noticeable patterns or gaps came with little direct danger, save for that of repeatedly being exposed to the edges of an aura that should not have had the effect it did.
Black, the dog as of that moment, ran past her, then circled back around, shifting in form. "Running away again?" he asked, leering rudely.
She knew what was required of her; Black would pounce on any sign of weakness. "If I can feel them, they may be able to feel me," she said coldly, speaking with a formal air she thought made her sound more highbrow. "It's your soul they seek, not mine, but I don't doubt they would take mine if they knew it was available." She let her wand slip out of her sleeve and into her hand, the tip visible to him. It was a bluff, in the event of a fight the real threat would come from all around him, but it might ward him off for now.
"Not how it works," he told her. "They can't feel you, they have to see or hear you to know you're there."
"Not how it works for you," she retorted. "But you evade them by being uninteresting. You cannot feel them from so far out. Don't assume it works the same way for others with different tactics." Put that way, her vulnerability – and it was vulnerability, there was no doubt in her mind about that – could be cast as a strength. Or at least a double-edged sword, an advantage and disadvantage intertwined into one.
"You can't be that dark, if they bother you," Black challenged. If he were any more direct, she might think he was overcompensating for something, but as it stood he just seemed to be a stereotypical evil thug.
"Stare into the darkness for too long and it will stare back," she retorted, hoping he wouldn't recognize what she was almost certain was a bastardization of a quote he would consider Muggle.
Instead, he shuddered and turned away. "Don't tell me you've done any staring," he muttered. "Some things aren't meant to be disturbed."
Ringwraiths, Shelob, goblins, and now hints that there might be more esoteric things in the depths… It was too bad all of Tolkien's prescience seemed centered on the bad things inherent to the real-life fantasy world. She would have appreciated a few hobbits or ents right about now.
She would appreciate not being under the lingering aftereffects of Dementor exposure more. Her hotel room in Hogsmeade looked awfully tempting…
But they needed more information on the Dementor patrols. She, and Black, would be back at the edges of Hogwarts' grounds by nightfall. Harry was in the castle, and the Dementors defended the castle. She needed to find a time and place where they wouldn't be if she was to get in. She held no illusions as to whether she could face one up close.
The guidebook to Britain's magical creatures that she had bought said Dementors dragged up bad memories and amplified the feelings associated with them, the worse the memory the more effective. Taylor understood why she was particularly vulnerable and thus particularly sensitive, but it wasn't something she could fight.
Especially as her power had flat-out failed to learn the specialized counter-charm, the first time that had ever happened to her. The pain associated with failing to cast the charm even stopped, like he power wasn't trying anymore.
So… patrols. Probing the defenses for a crack. An unbeatable enemy needed only to be outmaneuvered to be ineffective…
And she thought she was beginning to see their patterns. There were only so many of them.
The Dementors had patrol routes. Unerring, irregular in the short term but reliable in the long-term. They flocked to a particular clearing deep in the forest during the witching hour. Between the late morning and early afternoon they retreated, stealing away to hover, as best Taylor could tell, in the clouds. If there were no clouds, they haunted the castle's exterior, perching like gargoyles under outcroppings of masonry. At all other times they made sweeping passes of the grounds and the borders of the forest, never leaving any given location alone for more than an hour.
It took weeks of tracking their movements, weeks of recurring dark thoughts and subtle outside influence on her mind, but she and Black confirmed these habits, quantified them, made schedules and plotted out potential routes.
There were almost a hundred Dementors around Hogwarts, but they were predictable, and that made them avoidable. Once they were confident they knew the Dementor routes and times inside and out, Black sprang the next complication on her.
"We can go in at these times without having to worry, and if we spend less than an hour inside, we can get out before the opening in their coverage closes again," Taylor concluded. She stood opposite a fallen log, looking down at their Dementor tracking notes scratched in the dirt.
Black, who looked slightly better than he had when she first met him, but still gaunt and grubby, jabbed his toe at their sketch of Hogwarts, digging it into the Quidditch field. "Good. Next problem. The map."
"Map?" she asked, subtly augmenting her voice with insects. Their chirping and clicking always unnerved him. For a terrorist who considered her an ally, he was remarkably uneasy around her. Then again, that might just have meant he was not stupid. Semi-unhinged, immoral, murderous, but not stupid or oblivious.
"The Marauder's Map, and the Marauder who watches it." He looked up, his eyes bright with some unspoken emotion. "Pettigrew has it."
"He's dead," she asserted. That was all she knew about Pettigrew, and even that was only from the newspapers with their sordid gossip-mongering. She had been under the impression he was on the side of the light in the last war.
"I didn't kill him back then, and he's still here, I saw him," Black objected. "He's a rat. Like I'm a dog. He's living with the Weasleys, hiding out, and if he has the map he'll see us the moment we step onto the grounds. We need to eliminate the rat and make sure the map is out of play before we go after Potter."
This map was some kind of live security camera… Yes, she could see why it had to go, and this neatly explained what Black was doing at platform nine and three-quarters attacking a boy and his pet rat. "A two-pronged strike? I take the boy, you take the rat and map at the same time?" That might do nicely.
"No, we need to deal with Pettigrew first," Black objected. "Go in at night when he sleeps, get him, take him out and interrogate him to find out if anyone else knows about it. We don't know who he told about the map or where he keeps it, or when it's likely to be watched. If we don't find that out first, we can't be sure we'll get Potter on our first try. They might raise the alarm the moment we step onto the castle grounds."
There were some holes in Black's reasoning, but he was at least a little crazy and definitely evil, and his plan worked with her true motivation, so she nodded. "Yes. The rat first. Then we go for the boy."
If she happened to find Harry while in the castle, before they had the map? Well, the distraction of Sirius Black being captured breaking into Hogwarts could cover for any number of things.
Pretending to be a Death Eater was surprisingly, unsettlingly easy. Sirius had plenty of material to crib off of, hearing the yells and tormented cries of actual Death Eaters for over a decade, but he had expected more of a challenge even so. Having to talk his way out of some recreational Muggle-hunting, or at least some Pureblood bigotry gossip around the campfire. Bluffing his way through talk of evil deeds and accomplishments. Fending off probing questions about how, exactly, he had served their dark lord in the past. He was apparently famous for that, though he'd be damned if he could figure out how everyone had gone from 'one instance of betrayal' to 'Voldemort's most trusted right-hand man' while he was sitting in Azkaban, doing nothing, with only three – falsely attributed – magical kills to his name.
Instead, the woman who had allied herself with him was quiet. Still. Unnaturally so, some of the time. No gloating, no prying, no casual racism…
It was possible, he realized after a week or so, that she wasn't a Death Eater. There were other kinds of dark criminal scum in the world, after all. Not just Britain's homegrown variant. She didn't even sound British.
This possibility made her, if it was possible, more dangerous. Especially as she had so willingly shown him her face. Either she was confident he wouldn't betray her to the authorities… Or she expected him to learn nothing from seeing the face she wore. Maybe Polyjuice, maybe a Metamorphmagus. Maybe an intent to kill him once the job was done. He knew nothing about her.
As such, after he sold her on getting Pettigrew – a brilliant piece of motivated reasoning, if he did say so himself – he knew his time to figure out her deal was growing short. He had to start digging. Metaphorically, that was.
"We get Pettigrew, we get the map, we get the kid," he opened, using his 'gruff Death Eater scum' voice. They'd just hammered out the final infiltration plan, and barring one little detail – one hilarious little detail he was going shout to the rooftops once this was all over – they were ready. It was late, and his campfire was dying. She would be tired, just like he was, and feeling confident. A good combination. "Then what?"
She sat, her legs mostly covered by her robes but showing bare skin from the shin downward, on a rotten log. The bugs from its wet core streamed out and around her, crawling over her robes and across her legs, ants carrying maggots and larger stick insects in a little flood of chitinous bodies. Her face was drawn, her overly wide mouth set into a distant frown, and her hair was tied back. Her wand, brown with unsettling glimpses of red within, tapped absently on the back of a fat glimmer-beetle. If someone came across her like this without him or his campfire, they would assume she was a denizen of the forest, some sort of corrupted tree nymph, never mind that such creatures no longer lived in Britain.
'Unapproachable' was a good single-word description of her, but he pressed on anyway, running his mouth without a care for her lack of response. "There's only one of him, you know. Might be our intentions conflict. What do you want with him? Me, I'm not sure. Finish the job," by protecting him like a godfather should, "or just squeeze the little bugger," in a hug, "I'll figure it out in the moment," once he had this dark witch dealt with. Pettigrew first, then her, then Harry. Harry was on his list now; poor kid hadn't been back when he first got out of Azkaban. Sirius hadn't been right in the head then. Now, either, but more so then. He'd probably still be single-mindedly tearing off after Peter if it were just him on the hunt.
"I'll do what I've been waiting two years to do," the witch said softly, her voice creepily pleasant.
That told him nothing, but it gave him a terrible feeling of foreboding nonetheless. "And what's that?" he demanded. "If you're going to try and spirit the brat away the moment we get him, I'm going to have a problem with that."
She looked up. Something moved around her neck; a spider. Her eyes bore into his own, and he instinctively looked away, hoping she didn't know legilimency. "Are we going to have a problem?" she asked.
"Share the work, share the spoils," he protested.
"You'll get what you want," she assured him. "I'll get what I want. So long as we cooperate."
She still hadn't told him what that was, though. She seemed more interested in acting the playground for her insect minions than in the conversation.
"Plenty of people who'll pay good money for the Boy-Who-Lived over in America, then?" he asked, abandoning subtlety altogether. "Or are you being paid by someone closer to home?"
"Close to home," she said, actually answering his question. "Do you need to… deliver him to someone?"
Assuming she wasn't working for You-Know-Who, which was a somewhat safe bet given the bastard was dead… "Malfoy might want him," he said conversationally. "You know, if I don't kill him outright."
"Malfoy?" she asked.
"Yeah. Right old rich bastard, up there in the ranks, puffy peacock with a hair fetish?" he said. "Ringing any bells?" He didn't know every Death Eater, but Malfoy was one of the ones who should have been in Azkaban right next to him. Everyone knew he was a Death Eater, it was the worst-kept secret in Britain.
"Has he put out a price?" she asked, something in her tone chilling him despite the smoldering fire separating them. Not Malfoy, then.
"No?" He didn't think so, anyway. He wasn't connected to Britain's underworld, not actually being a criminal.
"Good." She closed her eyes and looked away. "We will discuss how we intend to… split the prize… once we have him."
He had no intention of letting this witch anywhere near Harry, so that was fine by him. His prize, the one he still wanted her help getting, was the next step on their master plan. Harry would be safe in the castle–
But perilously close to where they were going to be. "You know, we can't risk grabbing Potter and Pettigrew at the same time, no matter how easy it might seem," he cautioned.
"Easy?" she asked.
"With them being in the same dorm room," he clarified. How had he not thought of that? This was bad. It would have been worse if she noticed Potter in there when they were actually there, grabbing Pettigrew, but he didn't know how he was going to talk himself out of this one–
"The rat is with Weasley," she said. "You said the Weasleys are all Gryffindors."
"Yeah? What's your point?" He knew that. The Weasleys all went to Gryffindor, stalwart blokes, the lot of them. Blokette, too, now. Potters did too, so they'd be in the same dorm.
"Potter is Hufflepuff," she informed him. "They will not be in the same place."
"That's not right," he objected. Harry was a Gryffindor if ever he'd seen one. Admittedly he'd last seen the tyke babbling and cheering over taking three consecutive steps, but still.
"It's just a house." She sounded outright disinterested, now. "A group of children among groups of children in a building of children."
"He ought to be in Gryffindor," Sirius argued.
"It only matters in that it determines where in the castle he can be found," she said. "And how hard it will be to reach him once the map is out of play. If we even need bother with that at all." The glimmer-beetle under her wandtip moved forward, ambling in a wide circle around the fire.
"You've not told me your name," he retorted. "The map will tell anyone who looks who you are, magical disguise or not. Want to take that risk?"
"We will be taking it regardless, going for Pettigrew."
True, but he needed Pettigrew, not Harry, and he needed her to believe that it was better to do them one at a time, Pettigrew first. Also, it wasn't a risk for him, he was a known fugitive. He tried to come up with something to say, something clever to persuade her anew–
"But it makes no sense to rush, so close to the end," she said, more to herself than to him. "The plan works best if we go for the rat first."
He exhaled, thankful he wouldn't need to muster up a convincing argument. They'd go after the rat. They'd get the rat. Then he would get rid of her, well before she would expect betrayal. She thought Harry was his prize, and that he needed her to get to him. Neither was true.
The glimmer-beetle crawled over his shoe. He'd not even noticed its approach. He looked up at the witch, but she was imitating a stone statue, her eyes fixed on a point behind his head as two centipedes dangled from her hair, in front of her cheeks.
He shuddered. She couldn't be any more creepy if she tried.
There was something magical in the Forbidden Forest.
This was a given, but more specifically there was something magical that her power was still working on figuring out. The telltale throb of a magic headache kept Taylor company as she waited in the trees for night to fall. It was stronger than when she was in Hogsmeade or Diagon Alley, almost as strong as when she tried to use her new wand on a spell she hadn't already practiced until her arm hurt.
She suspected she knew what it was. There were giant magic spiders lurking in the depths of the forest, but not once had a giant spider fallen under her control, though several had skirted around the borders of her range. If she knew her power, which she did, it was working on that. The persistent feeling of annoyance coming from her power implied that the magic spiders were not an easy nut to crack.
Not that anything magic was easy. Taylor could, with her power's assistance, do magic. But each individual spell took her days of concentrated effort and crippling headaches to learn, no matter how simple. Her first-year textbook said Wingardium Leviosa was easy enough for eleven-year-olds to learn in one or two class sessions, but it had taken her several four-hour practice sessions in the Leaky Cauldron to get her apple to move at all, and another handful of sessions to perfect it.
It didn't hurt much to cast Wingardium Leviosa now, so long as she used her wand, and it took absolutely no mental or physical effort from her, much less any sort of 'magical charge' from some hypothetical reservoir – that part came from her power if anything, as best she could tell – but getting the spell into her repertoire was a long, hard process.
She had forced herself to learn a few more out here in the Forbidden Forest, prioritizing by usefulness. Not all were first-year, but they all took the same unreasonable amount of effort to figure out. Incendio, Accio, Aguamenti, Diffindo… Versatile charms that she could exploit in any number of situations.
Each one was moderately useful, by her standards. Any single charm of the ones she had learned could have made up the basis of a power back on Earth Bet. Throwing plumes of fire, directional telekinesis, spraying water, and that wasn't even getting into how Diffindo was a watered-down Jack Slash kit without needing a blade to start with. With more than a dozen semi-power capabilities in addition to her bugs, she was objectively more versatile and dangerous than she had ever been as Skitter or Weaver.
But the enemies here, in this world, were all budget Eidolons. They all theoretically had access to hundreds of powers, and that was just charms. Transfiguration eluded her, Potions required materials and skills she didn't have, and then there were the magical plants and animals she barely knew anything about that lurked literally everywhere in the magical world, just to start. Every eleven-year-old witch and wizard in Britain was taught these things, so every adult should be capable of using them.
Everyone could pull out miniature flamethrowers if they thought to. Everyone was a fire cape, a Blaster, a Master, a Shaker. Some were Changers, like Black, and some were almost certainly Strangers if they wanted to be, or Strikers or Brutes. Tinkers abounded, and their work was replicable, easily purchasable. They were all Trumps, too, capable of varying their approach based on what they wanted, and drawing on a deep well of theoretical knowledge that even Eidolon didn't have. Many of his powers put magic to shame for sheer versatility or lethality, and many more were simply more thorough when it came to the intensity of the effect, but Eidolon was overkill anyway.
Taylor, even with a bit of magic, was a small fish in this big pond. That wasn't going to change anytime soon. She had to be careful.
A many-legged thing lumbered by below her tree, never looking up. She had absolutely no idea what it was, except that it wasn't an insect. There was a reason she kept her vigil in the trees, not on the ground. Away from notice until the day came when she knew enough to protect herself.
There was one thing she and Black agreed that they needed, if they wanted to get in and out of Hogwarts without being detected, and that thing was a Hogwarts uniform. Taylor wasn't a known fugitive, so she could get the Gryffindor guard painting – which was a strange concept she pretended to have already known about when Black brought it up – to let her in if she gave the right passphrase. But she had to pretend to be a student for that, and that meant she needed the correct robes.
Frustratingly, Hogwarts uniforms were out of season. Magic could repair most anything, it seemed, at least for a time, so the used clothing market was nonexistent in the wizarding world. Taylor had placed an order for an out-of-season Hogwarts robe at Madam Malkins, but it was going to take a month to be finished, as there was a long queue she was at the back of.
Black couldn't just magic up a Hogwarts robe from any set of robes, either. That apparently needed a fine touch and his touch was anything but fine after Azkaban. He could hit her with a very weak disguise charm to make her look vaguely like a child, and he could resize robes if he had to, but he couldn't make or aesthetically alter them.
She was forced to take him at his word for all of that. Her excuse for not being able to do any of those things was to have spiders weave webs between her fingers and glare at him when he asked, before insisting they could wait for the robe she had ordered.
Their plan was probably a little too complicated and stupid, but she didn't want to push the crazy murderer too far. He was surprisingly easy to be around most of the time, aside from when he randomly seemed to remember he was a Death Eater and should act like it, but she knew what he really was, and how fragile her mostly unspoken cover story was. If she pushed, he might push back, and of the two of them she was the one who was lying about almost everything. She needed his expertise and willing assistance, not his suspicion, and that meant playing along. The plan didn't have to work perfectly. It just had to get her closer to Harry. She was going to play it by ear once they got into the castle anyway.
So she compromised with him and settled for fixing only the obvious, untenable flaws in his machinations, letting him take the lead. Meaning they needed a Hogwarts robe, or for her to suggest something better that they were capable of doing immediately.
Then a Hogwarts robe wandered right under her nose.
There were a few magical creatures in the Forbidden Forest that Taylor liked. Not the Acromantula; her power seemed to have stamped its metaphorical foot in frustration and given up on those. But the unicorns, real genuine unicorns… those were a given, although they stampeded the moment she came within a hundred feet of them, so she had to settle for watching them from afar. The Thestrals, as Black had offhandedly called them, were the opposite. Bony skeleton horses, they liked her. There was a clearing they spent the nights in, one she often set up near during her Dementor stakeouts so that she had something pleasant to look at while her bugs waited for the telltale chill.
She liked Thestrals. They were calm, gentle magical horses that only looked terrifying. As it turned out, she wasn't the only one who liked them. She watched from her perch in a tree one evening as a little blond-haired girl skipped among the Thestrals in their natural habitat, having for some reason dared going into the forest, with Dementors around, to visit them and throw around apples and raw meat from a basket.
She was an ethereal little thing. She couldn't be very smart, based on her being where she was now, but children sometimes weren't very smart when it came to safety. Her robes said she was a Ravenclaw.
Those robes would do nicely. Taylor carefully descended from the tree, drew her wand, and approached from behind the girl.
She had yet to master the stunning spell – in fact, that was the one she was currently throwing herself at whenever she had some time and felt she could stand the resulting headache – so her approach was going to be a bit messier than she would have liked.
She stole up behind the little girl, the Thestrals whickering pleasantly at her, and grabbed her from behind, snatching the wand from her pocket before wrapping her arm around to pin the girls' arms to her side.
"Oh!" the girl exclaimed, dropping her basket. "Who are you?"
"Someone who doesn't mean you any harm," Taylor said in a low voice. "But I need your robes."
"I need robes too," the girl said. "Will you give me yours?"
This was suspiciously easy… Taylor let go and frisked the girl, but she didn't seem to have another wand on her. In fact, she even raised her arms to make herself easier to search.
"Daddy always says to help strangers in need," the girl told her. "But it is cold out here."
"Your daddy probably should have put some qualifiers on that advice," Taylor mused. There was a fine line between helping someone and being taken advantage of by them, and she was definitely doing the latter.
She considered taking the girl back to Black, then immediately discarded that as a terrible, completely despicable idea. She was not going to bring a Death Eater and a child together when the child was going to be vulnerable. And wearing robes that didn't fit her. And possessing less common sense than a brick.
"Your robes," Taylor insisted.
"Okay…" The girl shucked her robes off. Thankfully she was wearing a very old-fashioned one-piece slip under them, so it wasn't like she was stripping down to her skin in the middle of a cold, open field. "Will you give them back before I have to go back to the castle?"
Shit. Taylor couldn't let her go back to the castle. She also couldn't let her stay here, and she definitely couldn't have Black babysit her. Where could she safely stow a child for a few hours? And even if she and Black went in tonight to get the rat, wouldn't the teachers notice the girl was missing?
She hadn't thought this through. She blamed the intermittent Dementor influence.
"It's okay, the Nargles make me absent-minded sometimes too," the strange little girl assured her.
She ended up putting the girl, whose name was Luna, in the Shrieking Shack, a conveniently empty building Black had pointed out as being unoccupied except for when there was a full moon. Luna, who continued to be cooperative and somewhat chatty throughout her extended mugging and detaining, assured Taylor that the professors never checked whether she was in bed at night, and that she often wandered the castle until dawn instead of sleeping. Also that it wasn't a full moon until next week.
Taylor hadn't asked about any that, or dropped any hints that she was thinking about it, but Luna told her so anyway.
It wasn't on the top one hundred list of terrible things Taylor had done in her life, but she definitely didn't feel good about locking the girl in an old, creepy shack dressed in oversized robes for what was probably going to be an entire night. Not that Luna seemed to mind that much.
Black, though? She had assumed he wouldn't like it, or worse that he would in all the wrong ways, but his actual reaction was surprisingly placid.
"Wait, let me get this straight," he said as he waved his wand over the small Ravenclaw school uniform. "You mugged a little girl, stripped her of her robes, stuck her in the Shrieking Shack, told her she would be there overnight, and all she did in response was ask you if you would leave her some water and a sprig of mistletoe?"
"Yes."
Black looked up from his work. "Is this your way of not saying you killed her and hid her body?" he asked, deadly serious.
"If it was I wouldn't have spent ten minutes looking for mistletoe on the off chance it will keep her from trying to escape," she retorted. "We don't need the heat for killing a kid before we've got Potter. You can wipe her memory and we can put her back tomorrow."
"Based on that story I don't think I'll have to, she's clearly batty," he muttered. "Engorgio, come on, engorge you stupid cloth, yes, now the chest…"
The robes expanded and tightened in different areas.
"Still got it," Black panted once he was done.
It might have forced this ridiculous plan, but she was comforted by how far he still had to go to recover from Azkaban. A weak ally would be an easily defeated ally when the time came to turn on him.
And she was not sympathizing with him. He and his defeated terrorist group were not the Undersiders or Harry. She was not going to fail to follow through on betraying him. He could be as moderately pleasant as he wanted; he intended to hurt her son and belonged to a group who tortured and killed as standard operating procedure. She would feel no regret when it came time to betray him.
That night, an hour after midnight while the Dementors swarmed in a single clearing well out of the way of anything important, they took a secret passage Black knew into the castle.
The paintings, the walls, the moving staircases… The castle was everything the little girl in Taylor would have wanted from a magical mansion, and then some. But it was a dangerous place for her now, and she stuffed that amazed little girl version of herself away to focus on getting in and out undetected.
Her insects, all brought in from outside the castle as there didn't seem to be any living inside, were godsends in keeping them from being spotted. Black was somewhat inconspicuous as a dog and had good instincts for sneaking around, but it was Taylor who had them turning away from long, narrow corridors well before they would have been forced to turn around or find somewhere to hide from a wandering student or patrolling teacher.
They made it to the Gryffindor painting without issue. There, it was up to her to play the part in her enlarged – but not quite correctly-proportioned – Ravenclaw robes and vaguely younger face.
"I need to check on a student," she told the fat painted lady, bold as brass. Black crept along the base of the wall as a dog, out of the field of view of the painting. "Let me in."
"Missy, it is one in the morning and you are not of my house," the painting huffed. "Are you even a prefect?"
"Yes. Hifflegard."
There was a momentary pause, in which Taylor lamented having to rely on a crazy prison escapee's memory of prefect passwords from a decade ago. She had yet to find Harry within her range, though, so she had to continue playing along.
"So you are, then," the painting said as it swung aside. "Don't forget your badge next time, and make it quick."
It had actually worked. Taylor was amazed; it looked like the backup plan of 'Black jumps up and drags his nails through the painting before it can sound the alarm' wouldn't be needed.
She and Black entered through the cramped passage, and just like that they were in the Gryffindor common room. It was a nice place, if gaudy, but they didn't stop to sightsee. Black led her up the right staircase, and then stopped to let her do her thing. She had already worked insects into all of the dorm rooms, but she took the opportunity to muster her personal defense force of wasps, and to send another set of stinging insects into the room as insurance.
"Rat's there," she reported in a hoarse whisper. It was sleeping on the redheaded boy's chest, which was troubling, if it really was a man in disguise. She had her own reasons for wanting to interrogate the rat. "Remember. In, change, stun the rat, stun the boy, look for the map."
Black nodded, and Taylor carefully cracked the door open. Black went in, and she followed, her wand trained on the other beds. The boys were all asleep, but that could change at a moment's notice.
Black changed, his gaunt form looming menacingly in the moonlight, and leaned over the bed and boy Taylor silently pointed out. A whispered "Stupefy" sent a spiral of red light to strike the rat, and then a second stunning charm hit the Weasley boy before he could do more than snort in his sleep.
Taylor grabbed the rodent and stuck it in her robe pocket, and they quickly retreated the way they had come when it became clear they wouldn't find the map without tossing the room, at the very least.
"Sorry for bothering you," Taylor told the painting as it closed behind them.
"Manners will get you far in life," the painting said absently.
She didn't let her guard down until they were safely in the tunnel leading out of the school and even then not entirely. "Are you sure this is him?" she asked.
"Oh, that's him," Black snarled. "He's missing a finger, see? Bastard cut it off to make them think he was dead."
There was clearly no love lost between these two. When Black held his hand out for the rat, Taylor instead tucked it back into her robes. "Let's get him up into the Shrieking Shack and at wandpoint before we do anything else." She would do it in the tunnel, but it was too narrow to properly put the rat's back to a wall, and if he managed to scurry away she and Black would be tripping over each other trying to recapture him in the tight space.
"Fine." Black scowled and turned back into a dog, loping up ahead. Taylor quickly lost sight of him, but the flies she had to place anew every time he changed told her he was just running ahead.
He really was like a dog sometimes.
He stopped by the trapdoor to let her go first, because for some reason he didn't want to change back, so she stepped by him to push it open, idly noting that Luna was sleeping on the floor up in the room above–
Black changed and attacked too quickly for her to effectively counter, leaping up to slam her head against the side of the tunnel with the full weight of his body. The forewarning her flies gave her was just enough that she cushioned the impact with her arm, but she still bounced off solid stone, and he was pawing at her robes for the rat and grabbing her wand, his foot on her arm.
He was also an idiot, because he didn't immediately stun her. A small horde of wasps struck at his wand hand, stinging incessantly, and he cried out and tried to stomp on her chest, but by then her physical combat training was kicking in full force and she twisted to deflect his kick with her shoulder, before pulling her leg in to kick the back of his knee and force him down to her level.
She slammed her forehead into his nose, and blood sprayed over her face as he recoiled. Flies divebombed his eyes and crawled up his broken nose and into his ears, and then he passed the critical mass of insects that took him from struggling to fight her to struggling to get them off and out of his face.
She felt the rat stirring in her pocket, because of course he would start to wake up now.
"You had to make this difficult," she coughed, turfing the rat out of her pocket to the floor. Strategic guards of wasps, flies, and cockroaches surrounded him, and more hovered over Black's face.
That was the situation as Taylor straightened up, standing right beneath the trapdoor. She pocketed Black's wand, putting it next to Luna's, and kept her own out.
"Black," she said coldly, "I will stop shoving flies in your eyes and nose if you lie still. If you attack me again, I will set them to eating your eyes, and even if you kill me they won't stop until they're done. Are we clear?"
"Crystal," he groaned, still swiping futilely at his face. She tentatively withdrew the many invaders, and though his face was puffy and red and his nose was broken, he wasn't seriously hurt. The fight had been stung right out of him, though.
"I'm not going to let you hurt him," Black choked out.
Taylor noticed that the rat was awake, though it was feigning unconsciousness on the ground. "The same goes for the rat," she announced, putting all of her irritation and adrenaline aside to sound as brutally calculating as she could. "If it makes one false move it will be eaten alive."
The rat tensed.
"Now, that said... Pettigrew." Unless Black was lying about everything, the map was real and the rat was a man. "Keeping in mind that I can have your eyes eaten out of your skull just as easily if you are a rat, I want you to change back. If you do not, I will kill you. If you pull your wand on me, I will kill you. If you do anything besides sitting on your ass and throwing your wand down the tunnel, I will kill you. If you change back into a rat at any point, I will kill you and my insects will strip your flesh from your bones." She had no idea what kind of man Pettigrew was, but she was betting that he would cooperate if the alternative was certain death.
If Black was lying about everything and the rat was just a rat, well… At least some of her bugs would be well-fed in the next few minutes.
The rat sat up on its hind legs and morphed into a fat, beady-eyed man. His hands were up, and the first thing he did was throw his wand as hard as he could down the tunnel.
The second thing he did was prostrate himself. "Mistress, I serve our dark lord!" he babbled fearfully.
"Course you fucking do," Black muttered.
"Where's the map?" she asked Pettigrew. "Answer me."
"The Weasley twins have it," Pettigrew immediately replied. "I can get it for you. I serve our Dark Lord, don't listen to Sirius, he doesn't! I framed him!" He reached up and pulled his sleeve down, showing an ugly faded tattoo of a skull and a snake.
"I'm going to kill you, Peter, I'm going to murder you and use your guts for floss," Black snarled.
"Shut up! Both of you." She had her bugs buzz ominously. Both men paled.
This was not what she had expected. If she was putting all of these things together correctly… The conclusion seemed laughably contrived. "Pettigrew. Who is your master?"
"Our lord…" He winced. "Or you, if you do not serve him. I can serve you!"
"Right." Once again, her bugs came in handy for the terror factor alone. And for how everyone who had seen them seemed to assume she was some sort of terrifying evil witch with a spell they had never seen before."Black. Who is your master?"
"I don't fucking have one," Black snarled.
"You didn't work for Voldemort," she asserted. The lack of the brand, the way Pettigrew was turning on him at every opportunity… That didn't speak of Voldemort's right-hand man, or even just his favorite lackey.
"No." He glared at her despite his puffy eyes. "You won't lay a finger on my godson, I'll stop you."
"Harry." Harry Potter. Probably her Harry, if the Potters were his original parents; she wasn't entirely convinced of that yet, but the coincidences meant it bore serious consideration. "You were framed. By Pettigrew. You came out here with me to get him, not Potter."
"And to stop you from hurting Harry, which I will," Black claimed.
"You're not getting out of here alive," Pettigrew told him.
Black growled at him.
She already had a magic-induced headache, but if she hadn't she would be developing one purely from annoyance. "You, Black, are not a Death Eater. You, Pettigrew, are. Black came here to get Pettigrew. Black, you told me you wanted Harry so that I would help you."
"Yeah." Black moved to cross his arms, but a wasp flying by perilously close to his eye had him putting them back where they were. "What of it?"
Here she was, threatening him with being eaten alive, and he had the petulance of a toddler. She almost liked Pettigrew better, if it wasn't for him sleeping with a prepubescent boy and being a murderous Death Eater in hiding.
"God damn it," she said, finally coming to the conclusion that it all made a twisted, stupid sort of sense. "Black, I only told you I was here to kidnap Harry because I thought you were a crazy Death Eater!"
"Pull the other one, it's got bells and a funny hat," Black snarked.
"Pettigrew, my terms for how you avoid death still stand." She pulled the bugs away from Black. "Black, get up. We're on the same side."
"I don't believe you," Black said as he stood.
He didn't believe her, but he would take the chance to move into a slightly less disadvantageous position. He was probably going to try and snatch her wand or take his own back if he continued to mistrust her. "I'm here for Harry, yes," she said, "but not to hurt him!"
"Then what the hell are you doing recruiting a Death Eater to break into the castle and kidnap Harry?" Black demanded.
"It's…" She glanced over at Pettigrew. "You know what, no, not in front of the actual Death Eater. Here." She took his wand out and held it out for him to take.
He stared at her. "This is a trick."
"Stun him and give me a damn chance to explain, I'm giving you way more of a chance than you deserve and the least you can do is hear me out," she said sternly.
It was admittedly a trick, or at least a calculated ploy, but he had no way of knowing that now that she was forewarned, in a small confined space, he couldn't get off a spell faster than she could fill his mouth with insects currently lurking in the collar of his robes. Giving the wand back was a test of his sincerity. At worst, he would try to kill her or Pettigrew, and he would fail.
"Fine." He took his wand and sent a quick stunning spell at Pettigrew, who didn't even try to move out of the way. Taylor suspected Pettigrew preferred being unconscious to thinking about the fate awaiting him if he made a false move.
That done, and seeing that Black wasn't turning on her, she felt tentatively free to tell the truth. It made way too much sense that Black was innocent and just an unhinged idiot with the wrong impression inconsistently aping the part of a grizzled Death Eater. Pettigrew's existence, dark mark, and claims to have framed him all but told the story on their own, and she had never personally witnessed Black doing anything more evil than her own attempts at seeming intimidating and dark.
"I'm here for Harry because I haven't seen him in two years and every time I try Dumbledore attempts to obliviate me of even remembering he exists." That would do for a start. She had never hidden her identity from him, aside from not giving her name, so it was nothing he couldn't theoretically put together if he asked the right people.
"Dumbledore obliviates you," Black repeated, one eyebrow lifting dramatically despite the pain facial movements probably caused his broken nose.
"Yes." She scowled at him, letting some of her frustration through. If Black was innocent… Wasn't he supposed to have been close to the Potters? Not having betrayed them, that would make them genuinely some of his best friends, or something like that.
"I can see why," he said bluntly, rubbing at his cheek and gingerly feeling for his nose.
"I raised Harry, I changed his diapers and read to him at night and threw his birthday parties," she retorted. "He's a good kid, and I haven't done anything wrong. Dumbledore had no right to interfere!"
"Prove it," Black said quickly. "I know baby Harry. What does he do if you show him a broom?"
"Tries to ride it. He grew out of that after I taught him what brooms are actually for, though." This coming from a wizard did lend a lot of evidence to the 'Harry is Harry Potter' theory, and it definitely recontextualized that bit of cute baby behavior. "What was his favorite color?"
"Red," Black answered. "But if this is a trick question, he always liked green and silver, too. It's hard to tell with a baby. Was he scared of the bath, yes or no?"
"No, but he didn't like it, either. Favorite animal?"
"Grim, or any black dog, or any dog at all," Black said promptly. "I used to give him rides around the living room. Was he ticklish?"
"On the stomach, yes."
Black grimaced. "Okay. I can concede that you definitely know baby Harry. Who are you, and how did you end up with him?"
She too had to concede that Black knew baby Harry's quirks… Though that was never in question. "Long story, and I didn't even know he was Harry Potter until… Well, I'm pretty sure now." She waved her wand around aimlessly. "Magic is new to me, believe it or not. I've apparently got a curse on me that makes me the next thing to a squib." He was not getting the truth on that matter. Nobody was.
"Ten thousand spiders say otherwise," Black deadpanned.
"That's my one special skill. Do you believe me or not?" She wanted to get past the 'waiting for betrayal' stage of things, even if she did decidedly have the upper hand. This wasn't going anywhere constructive.
"It's no crazier than my story," Black admitted. "You being his adoptive mother wouldn't be the weirdest possible explanation, and if you were dark you'd be eating my brain right about now. But I don't get why Dumbledore would obliviate you."
"I don't understand either, but he keeps doing it or having the Aurors do it, so I can't exactly ask him, can I?" she snapped. "It almost destroyed my life the first time. The second time they added a compulsion to make me move back to America. I don't want to know what they'll do if they realize I've remembered again. I just want to see Harry."
"I want to see him too." Sirius gestured to Pettigrew. "I also want to kill him, so if you don't mind…" His tone implied he didn't need to ask for permission, but his hesitant movements said he remembered the horsefly that made it past the blockage of his broken nose, and wanted to avoid a repeat of that at all costs.
"Isn't he the only evidence you have of your innocence?" she asked. "I think I believe you, but I want to have someone pump him full of truthtelling potions and question him before I let him die." If that was feasible. She had looked into it; the truth potion wasn't sold in apothecaries. She'd have a vial on her person at all times for situations just like this, otherwise.
"You're cold." Sirius grinned. "But you're right. We won't kill him. I want to see Harry and have him confirm you are who you say you are. He would know, wouldn't he?"
"He had better, because if Dumblefore obliviated him too I'm going to find that old man and shove cockroaches down his throat until he drowns on dry land." She had done it before.
"So we get Harry in to back you up, then we get Pettigrew drugged to the gills to back me up, and we both agree until then to not point our wands at each other," Black proposed. "And you stop the insect thing."
"It's not something I can stop, any insect close to me is automatically under my control, even if I'm unconscious. If I die they carry out my last orders." Let him chew on that. She didn't think he was going to betray her again, but he would definitely think twice if he thought he would have to deal with homicidal tides of bugs even if he succeeded.
"You're a walking nightmare, you know that?" he asked.
"I spent time perfecting it for maximum effect," she retorted. "So yes, I know."
"I think you're too interesting to be scary."
They both looked up to see Luna peering down at them from the trapdoor. "This is all so very entertaining," she continued in a dreamy voice.
Taylor was sure of it, now. Her current headache had nothing to do with magic.
Getting to Harry, now that Taylor tentatively believed she didn't have to work around Black, and Black tentatively trusted that he didn't have to work around her, turned out to be much simpler than getting to Pettigrew.
Oh, it didn't seem like it would be easy at first. They would have to sneak in, find the Hufflepuff dorms, find Harry, wake him without waking his roommates, and sneak him out of the castle. It would be at least as difficult as getting Pettigrew, with the added complication of Harry not being rat-sized to easily stun and transport.
"I can take Harry a secret message," Luna volunteered.
And so the new plan was established, in which they sent Luna back into the castle to tell Harry that Taylor was there, and had him come out to meet her.
Taylor wasn't entirely happy with that plan either, but Luna had been nothing but cooperative and promised she could do it. It seemed a small risk, what with half of the things Luna said being seemingly meaningless; nobody but Harry would take her seriously without any proof, and Taylor only told her a few things that Harry, and only Harry, would recognize as such.
Also, Taylor considered herself a fair judge of children after a decade raising Harry and interacting with his friends. Luna radiated sincerity like a little sun of helpfulness. "This is much more exciting than exploring the castle," Luna had said when Taylor asked her why she was willing to help, and that seemed to be her entire opinion on the subject. It wasn't the most altruistic motive, but it would do. Luna might not even be aware that there were other things she could theoretically do with the knowledge she carried around in her head.
Sirius in dog form escorted Luna through the tunnel to the castle, to further ensure that helping them was indeed more interesting than any other course of action, and then all they had to do was wait and wonder whether she would actually deliver the message.
It was awkwardly tense between them, even by Taylor's rather low standards. Especially when Harry didn't come the first day. But the Dementors stuck to their patrol routes, and the castle didn't go into lockdown, so it seemed Luna had yet to tell anyone what had happened.
The next day, a group of students, three with an invisible fourth only detected by collisions with her bugs, ventured out into the woods during the hour the Dementors spent avoiding the sun. One was instantly recognizable.
"Prove you're really her!" he called out.
He was so much taller, and handsome, and it really hit her that she hadn't seen him in more than two years. "The morning after you first grew your hair back with magic, I sat you down and asked you where I had failed as a mother," she said, feeling utterly melancholic. "I had completely the wrong idea about what was going on, and couldn't understand when you insisted the only thing wrong in your life was that you didn't have a television in your room."
The girl on her son's right put her arm out, but Harry rushed right past her, and Taylor met him halfway, sweeping him into an embrace that told her Harry had missed her just as much as she missed him.
Notes:
Next time, an extra-long chapter and my favorite of this entire story: Harry's side of things!
Also, for those who complained about the misunderstanding that set Taylor and Sirius up to work together under false pretenses; it lasted less than a full chapter and provided some amusing spice to a set of otherwise bog-standard scenes. A little bit of trust, please?
On that note: let it be known that I'm not doing Dumbledore bashing or 'manipulative-Dumbledore' in this story. I'm a bit annoyed I have to say so, given that the ambiguity and how it looks are intentional at this stage, setup cheapened by me saying otherwise, but with the amount of worry and preemptive disapproval even his minor appearance in the first chapter received, I feel it's necessary to say so now before his appearances next chapter: There is something more going on. He's not an evil caricature scheming for the sheer joy of ruining lives, or even 'the Greater Good' (which is a horribly overused line in any case). By the time you get the full story, the idea is that it'll all make sense and not in the 'he's a bastard / senile / stupid / amoral mastermind' way. I've dropped plenty of hints and details indicating as much, but I'm also stating it outright here so that people don't drop the story under false assumptions.
Seriously. Nobody's getting more than minorly mocked by this story. I'm not going to treat everybody with reverence, because part of a butterfly AU is some things getting worse due to the changes, not better, but the point of this story is to explore interesting, plausible things, not to dunk on a fictional character.
That said, I do have a proven tendency to take beloved characters and AU them into genuine villains (my first ever fanfiction did this, actually, and I've even done it with the protagonist on occasion), so my definition of bashing here is 'mocking, flanderizing, or sabotaging a character for the purpose of making them look bad as an end goal.'. Dark Lord Remus, to propose a totally random example, could theoretically happen. But if it did it would at least attempt to make sense, and he would be a genuine threat with genuine reasons for his competent actions.
Anyway. Next time, we get into Harry's head and find out what his number-one pet peeve is! Also, we learn exactly what he does and does not know, and not just about the obvious things. And where he's been spending his summers. (Hint: Not the obvious evil-Dumbledore answer to that question.)
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