章 2245: 4 - ||
For a few moments his friends said nothing, all clearly thinking hard.
"My brothers, the twins," Ginny spoke up. "I can ask them about ways to sneak out… I'll say for Hogsmeade weekend. They must know a way, they've been sneaking out for years."
"If you give me a week's warning, I could have my parents pick you up in the car and drive you to your home and back," Hermione offered. "They keep telling me they want to meet you. You'd have to get to a Muggle area, though. I don't think they can drive into Hogsmeade."
"There's a Muggle village West of Hogsmeade," Neville volunteered. "I saw it when my Uncle Algie took me there on a broom. It's too far to walk, but if you take a school broom you could fly there from Hogsmeade."
"And if I do it on a Hogsmeade weekend, nobody will know to look for me all day," Harry concluded. "I just have to not be seen by any random Dementors or Sirius Blacks on the way…"
"How will you do that?" Hermione asked.
"It's only fair I use Potter's heirloom to avoid a Potter problem," Harry said with a grin.
He had never imagined things would come together so easily like this. His friends were brilliant.
The first leg of Harry's journey began at daybreak, when he snuck out to the Quidditch shed to nick a broom. Ginny came with him, under Potter's invisibility cloak, because she knew how to use magic to pick locks.
"I do this at home, my mum locks the brooms up at night," Ginny explained as she went to work in the frosty morning air. "There. You really don't know who gave you Harry Potter's invisibility cloak?"
"No, it came with a note but it wasn't signed," Harry explained. "I don't fly brooms very often," mostly because he didn't have the free time to join the Hufflepuff Quidditch team, he liked flying just fine. "Which one is best for long-distance trips?"
"They're school brooms, they're all bad," Ginny said disparagingly. "This Cleansweep will do." She took a broom off the wall and they left the Quidditch shed. "What will you do if you run into a Dementor?"
"Fly away like my arse is on fire, probably," he admitted.
Ginny snorted loudly enough that were the Hogwarts grounds not deserted at this time of morning, they would have been caught, invisibility cloak or not. "You do that. If you need to lose some weight to fly faster, remember that you crap yourself when you die so you might as well do it before they catch you, not after."
Harry almost fell over, he laughed so hard. He had no idea Ginny was willing to make jokes about things like that. The vulgarity sounded odd, coming from her. Odd and hilarious.
The second leg of his journey was one escorted by Ginny's older brothers, who met him next to a painting of a horse casting spells with a straightened hoof for a wand.
"You did our sister a good turn, so we're here to get you to your illicit fun in Hogsmeade," one of the twins informed him. "Keep this passage a secret, will you?"
"You have my word." Aside from Hermione, Ginny, and Neville, of course. They didn't count as needing to have secrets kept from them.
One of the twins kept watch while the other dragged a horseshoe shape with his wand over a lonely peg sticking out of the ground in the background of the painting. "Was a right pain figuring that one out, even with the hint," the twin muttered as they escorted him into a stone tunnel that had been hidden behind the painting.
Harry followed them as they led him deep under the school. The tunnel converged with several others at one point. "Here," one of the twins explained, his wand under his chin glowing to illuminate his face, "is the intersection. Five passages. Four go to paintings in the castle, one close to each common room. The fifth goes to Hogsmeade, coming out in Honeydukes' back room."
"So… was this some old fire exit or something?" Harry asked as they walked.
"What makes you say that?" one of the twins replied.
"One passage next to each common room… Sound the alarm, and if everyone knows about them you can have all the students leaving the castle without having to go out the front gate or being funneled through the castle to one central emergency exit." It made sense to him.
"You know, brother, he may be right."
"We ought to set something up. Leave an announcement charm in the Hogwarts alert wards or the like. It would be a shame if nobody knew about these and something happened where they could have saved lives."
"But that's for later. Right now, Hogsmeade!"
The second leg of his journey ended when the twins smuggled him out into Honeydukes proper and left him to go enjoy the village. He immediately threw on his cloak and stepped out into the village, unseen.
Harry met up with Hermione and Neville there. "Here," he said, tapping their shoulders as they stood looking into the Zonkos storefront.
"Broom?" Hermione asked without looking back.
"Got it." Thankfully it fit under his cloak.
"Know the way back through the secret passages?" Neville asked.
"Yup." Honeydukes didn't close until nine at night, and it was only eleven in the morning now. The car ride, based on the location of the Muggle village Neville managed to remember, would only take three hours each way, so he had plenty of time.
Hermione had muttered something about spatial warping and overlong train rides when she finally conceded Neville's memory and the map they'd found were accurate, but Harry was willing to take the gift horse without personally looking in its mouth.
"No sign of Dementors or Sirius Black, so you're clear for launch," Hermione muttered as she and Neville turned away from the joke shop. "Say hi to my parents for me."
"I will." With that, the third leg of his journey began. He made his way to the edge of the village, then awkwardly maneuvered himself onto the broom without ever letting either himself or the broom slip out from under the cloak's coverage.
He was reminded of Bilbo's ring, and how it always seemed to slip off at the worst time. His invisibility device wasn't malicious, but it was awkward enough to make up for that.
His mum had read The Hobbit to him. She was planning on reading him Lord of the Rings when he was old enough to appreciate the more mature story. He had avoided reading those books since coming to Hogwarts, though he knew for a fact Hermione and several other Muggleborn had copies he could borrow. That was a thing he and his mum were going to do together.
Harry took off on his borrowed broom under his borrowed cloak, and nobody but his co-conspirators knew he had ever left the castle.
The flight itself was boring with an ever-present undertone of fear. At any moment a Dementor could come swooping up out of the forest to chase him, or a mad wizard could inexplicably show up on his own broom. But the thirty minute flight was peaceful, and he saw nothing more interesting than a quartet of owls flying in the distance despite it being the middle of the day.
His mum always did say the owls were weird here in Britain. Now they knew why, at least. Apparently American wizards didn't use owls, or their owls were better at blending in with normal owls.
The Muggle village was small, and there were few cars out on the streets. Harry landed in the one big parking lot, that of a cozy-looking local restaurant, and stowed his cloak and broom invisibly in an alleyway before entering the restaurant.
Hermione's parents were immediately recognizable. Her mother had the same hair, and her father had the same thoroughly-engrossed look on his face as he read through the menu.
"Mr. and Ms. Granger?" Harry asked as he slid into the booth opposite them.
"You must be Harry." Ms. Granger smiled at him. "It's so good to finally meet you."
"Well worth driving for twelve hours on our day off," Mr. Granger mumbled, barely looking up from his menu.
Harry grinned. "You are so much like Hermione," he said.
After a brief, enjoyable lunch, the fourth and final leg of his journey began. It was the longest, and it felt the longest by far, even with the Grangers plying him with questions of all sorts as they drove. Three hours passed with glacial slowness, and then another half hour as they were caught in traffic not twenty minutes away from his house.
But finally, they were there. The car was in the driveway, and it was his mum's car, so she definitely still lived here. He had worried she might not; if Dumbledore could convince her to move somehow it would be the perfect way to keep Harry from finding her to disprove his lie.
"We'll just wait in the car, dear," Ms. Granger said. "Do come out and let us know if your mother wants to meet us, though."
"Good luck, kid," was Mr. Granger's contribution.
Harry smiled shakily and got out of the car, taking his cloak with him but leaving his broom in the backseat. The spare key was where it always was, and he let himself in with no trouble.
He knew, somehow, that the house was empty. But he looked anyway. She wasn't in the backyard, she wasn't downstairs, she wasn't in her room…
He checked, and the photo album with all the baby pictures of him was still on the bookshelf. Then he checked his room.
It was still there. Still exactly how he left it more than a year ago. But there was no dust. His mum had cleaned in here. Recently.
He waited. If she was out on a run, she might be back any minute. But though it broke his heart, he couldn't wait forever.
Bless Hermione, for making him plan for something like this. He didn't think he would be able to put his feelings into words here and now, when every little sound made him think his mum might come in the back door any minute.
'Mum,' the note he'd written days ago and kept in his pocket said, 'it's Harry. I don't know what's going on, why I never got any of your letters (I know you must have sent them, I have been sending letters every week and I don't know if they've gotten to you), why Dumbledore tells me you hate me and magic, but know I don't believe that for a second. He wont let me see you. I had to sneak out with my friends' help to get here today, and I don't know when I'll be able to do it again. Please, contact my friend's parents, the Grangers. They can pass a hidden message to Hermione and she can get it to me without anyone knowing to intercept it.'
'I love you, and I know you love me. But I would really like to hear it from you soon.'
He had included the address and phone numbers of the Grangers. This note was only supposed to be left behind if he saw some evidence his mum really wasn't crazy or magic-hating, and his carefully preserved room definitely counted, even if she wasn't here right now.
He left the note under her pillow, which he knew she regularly flipped over, and went out to the Grangers.
"She wasn't home, was she?" Mr. Granger guessed.
"No, but she cleans my room." He thought he would have to explain that, but–
"And she didn't touch a thing in it," Ms. Granger finished for him. "Not something someone who suddenly hates you would do."
They understood. "I left the note."
"We'll do our best to help her get in contact with you." Ms. Granger started up the car, and they drove away.
The ride back was mostly a blur. Harry tried to keep Hermione's parents entertained with stories of her – they especially loved hearing why he had sent her the book on lightning magic – but there was only so much he could tell before his thoughts of other things pulled him away again, and they didn't press him.
"Thank you," he said again when they dropped him off at the same restaurant as before. "You helped me a lot, even though she wasn't home."
"Thank you for being our daughter's first friend," Mr. Granger said seriously. "Take care of her. If she ever needs something like this from you…"
"I'll move heaven and earth to help her," he promised. "And our other friends will too."
"Good." Ms. Granger shook her head. "I have to say, this… It scares me. That us Muggle parents can just be shuffled aside and our children told we hate them and never want to see them again. It reassures me to know my daughter will have at least one person by her side if someone ever tries the same thing with us."
"Yeah." His throat closed up when he thought about this happening to someone else… Someone who didn't have the same certainty that it couldn't possibly happen that way. It would be horrible.
They said their goodbyes, and he took to the sky wrapped in his invisibility cloak once more. The trip back was as uneventful as the trip out, save for him seeing a few floating figures in a forest clearing once, and those from so far away he could barely make them out. A reminder that the Dementors did indeed exist, but no more.
Hogsmeade was still busy under the setting sun when he flew in, and he easily tagged along behind the crowds into Honeydukes. It was the work of a moment to slip into the back room, and then a long, final trek down through the tunnels.
He didn't fully believe he had made the entire journey in total secrecy, not even when he got out from behind the painting unnoticed.
His friends were waiting for him in the library, at what was fast becoming their usual table.
Ginny grinned when she saw him. Neville clapped him on the back, an unusually gregarious gesture from the usually reserved boy. Hermione smiled, but it was a tremulous, uncertain smile.
"Plan went off without a hitch," he reported once he set up the silencing ward. "She wasn't home–"
Hermione gasped.
"But I saw evidence that Dumbledore is exactly as full of shite as I thought," he said coarsely. "She still keeps the photo album and she keeps my room clean and everything. Like she's waiting for me to come home any day. I left the note."
Hopefully, sometime very soon he would receive word from her through Hermione. But even if he didn't, he knew better than to doubt the truth.
"Harry…" Ginny had waylaid him in a corridor, right as he was going to History of Magic. "Can I talk to you? You might miss class."
"It's History of Magic, I can read my textbook in my room tonight. Lead on."
"Isn't the textbook just goblin rebellions out the arse?" Ginny asked, leading him away from the busy corridors and into a less used part of the castle.
"My textbook. Hermione and I study different history things. Last week it was Roman magic." And last week's book of choice was also an object lesson on how some history books meant for adults were meant for adults, in that they felt no need to obscure certain things.
"Anything interesting?" Ginny asked.
"Yeah, but trust me when I say you would not want to be a magical Roman." He could never unsee some of the illustrations of commonplace rituals they used. Not only were rituals illegal in Britain nowadays, those rituals would be illegal anywhere, even if they weren't magical.
"Okay…" She led him into an unused classroom.
"Seriously. Don't ask why." He hopped up to sit on a desk opposite her. "What's on your mind?"
"Ever since you told us about your mum…" Ginny shrugged, her hand folded in her lap. "Did it feel better, having us know?"
"Way better," he answered. "Especially with how you all helped me so much once you knew, but even if that hadn't happened it still helped."
"I want to tell you what the healers at Saint Mungo's told me," Ginny said. "But please don't… hold it against me?"
"I won't." The worst thing he could think of that Ginny could possibly have to tell him was that she was still possessed and that the real Ginny was dead, which he could and would hold against the wraith piloting her corpse, but other than that he couldn't think of anything he might hold against her.
"The healers told me that the wraith, Tom, he was trying to make us the same," Ginny began. "That's how he was going to take my life from me. He was wrapping his self around my self so that when he pulled his self back it pulled mine with it."
"He did say something about that, but I was more interested in how to stop him than the mechanics of it all," Harry admitted.
"Oh. Well," Ginny hesitated but continued after a moment, "when you stopped him… You knocked him back into his book. But the transfer wasn't done, so he left some things behind."
She screwed up her face, staring into the space between them. "Like this," she said.
Harry waited, but she didn't do anything. "Like what?"
"Like this?" Ginny said again. "Am I doing it right?"
"Doing what right?" He looked her over. "Am I supposed to be seeing something?"
"Uh… no, forget it. Just take my word for it. I can still talk to snakes." She looked away, not meeting his eyes. "And Tom left… memories. His memories. All of them, or copies of them."
"Are you okay?" Harry asked. His first instinct was to say that couldn't be so bad, but then again, he had no idea who this 'Tom' fellow had been in life.
"They were so bad I had to be obliviated of them," Ginny said in a small voice. "But obliviation only removes the memories… I'm cruder now, and quicker to hurt people when they make me mad, quicker than before. I know things about magic that I don't know how I know. They're not… nice things. And I can talk to snakes sometimes. The memories are gone, but I'm not all… me. Anymore. The healers say I just have to live with that, because they got rid of all of him that they could."
"Oh, Ginny." Harry stood, crossed the distance between them, and pulled her into a hug. "That sounds terrifying. I don't know how it must feel. But if it's any comfort, me and Hermione and Neville, we know you as you are now, not as you were before. So we like you for you, including whatever little things Tom left you."
He wasn't sure if that was the right thing to say – did Ginny want him to claim she would be able to get rid of all of Tom's influence someday? – but Ginny laughed, a shaky little uncertain laugh, and he knew it was good enough.
The next one-on-one meeting Harry found himself in, a few weeks after that, was not nearly so pleasant, though it started much the same way.
"Mr… Harry, please stay behind today." Lupin patiently waited for the class to file out, though he seemed unprepared for the truly unimpressed look Hermione shot him as she made eye contact on the way out.
"Do you know why one of my star pupils seems to despise me of late?" Lupin asked once they were alone.
"She's gotten worse at hiding it over time?" Harry guessed. "Because she has disliked you since the boggart lesson." Politeness was for people he respected or needed to get along with. Lupin was neither. He was a good teacher when it came to his subject, but Harry could pass the class like he had the first two years of Defense, if necessary. Snape certainly knew by now that no matter how obnoxious he was Harry would persevere. Lupin would only be here for a year if the pattern held true.
"Yes, that…" Lupin straightened his shoulders. "I want to apologize."
"Go ahead, then," Harry said coldly.
"It's part of my job to protect my students, and that requires I be there when they face their boggart," Lupin explained. "But I should not have lied to you and said otherwise."
"You're not sorry you invaded my privacy, just that you lied to get me in a position where you could do it?" Harry translated.
"In a way," Lupin grimaced. "Especially as what I saw was… not what I expected."
"I think, were I to face a boggart again now, it would be what you expected the first time." He had proven that particular fear meaningless and untrue. It wasn't his greatest fear anymore, and he had no idea what might have replaced it, so why not Voldemort? "But I have no desire to actually do so." Once was enough. Not to mention Lupin would insist on watching again.
"Always be on the watch for your boggart's latest form," Lupin advised. "Careful wizards regularly approach boggarts when they do not have to, so they will not be surprised by a new worst fear in a dangerous situation."
"Right." He waved his wand about. "Are we done here?"
"Actually, there was another thing I wanted to talk to you about," Lupin said. "Totally unconnected to the boggart."
Harry nodded and waited.
"You may not be aware of this, but I was a close friend of your parents."
Harry refrained from smacking his forehead, smacking Lupin, or storming out, but it was a near thing. "Oh, you were?" he said instead, falsely cheerful. "My mum never mentioned you." He was not in the mood to play along with a Potter thing. He was never in the mood for that, actually, but right now he didn't much feel like setting Lupin down gently.
"I–" Lupin scowled. "Oh, that. Yes. Not her, Lily and James."
"Not my parents," Harry said flippantly.
"Yes, they were," Lupin growled. Actually growled. Harry was mildly impressed.
"See, people keep saying that," Harry retorted. "And they never have anything to back it up except how I look and that I have a scar and the same first name."
"And magic identifies you, and everyone who ever saw you as a baby knows your face, however aged you may be," Lupin shot back. He began pacing, clearly unable to stand still. "You even smell– well. It isn't a matter of evidence. I know. Others know. Why do you deny it? What do you gain from rejecting your own parents?"
"What do I gain?" he asked. It seemed blatantly obvious to him, could Lupin really not understand his perspective? "What would I gain from accepting it, if it were even true? Harry Potter has dead parents, maybe a vault somewhere, one nifty heirloom, and more fame than anyone could ever need. I have one very much alive parent, enough money to get on with, and blissful anonymity when people like you aren't trying to squish me into the uncomfortable shoes of Harry Potter." And the heirloom too, though he wasn't going to tell Lupin, a teacher, that he had his own invisibility cloak.
Lupin glared at him. "Your disrespect–"
"My disrespect?" Harry interrupted, now genuinely angry. "What about the disrespect towards my mum every time someone tells me my parents are James and Lily, huh? Forgetting who actually raised me my entire life, aren't you? Oh, but she's not the person you knew, she's not dead, she's not famous, she's a Muggle, so you can shove her aside and pretend she doesn't exist so you can reminisce uninterrupted."
Harry leaned forward and put both hands on his desk so he wouldn't be tempted to go for his wand. "I," he continued, his voice rising, "am sick and tired of people trying to shove James and Lily Potter in my face. Because every time they do, they're also trying to shove someone I love right out of my life and implying I should love two dead people I don't know more than someone I do know who is alive. Every. Single. Time. So if it's them or my mum, and it sure seems like it with the way none of you have ever asked me the first thing about her, James and Lily Potter can stay dead and I'll have my mum instead!"
Lupin looked stricken, his eyes bright with unshed… tears?
Harry scoffed and straightened up. "It started on my first train ride here, and it starts up again every time someone new brings them up. Maybe I would care if people didn't keep making me choose, but as long as arses like you do, I know who I want to be and it sure as hell isn't Harry Potter."
It felt good, telling Lupin off. That rant had been building since Ronald Weasley, Hermione, and Neville first cornered him on the Hogwarts Express, and thankfully Harry had finally let it out on someone he was pretty sure deserved it. Eleven-year-olds had the excuse of their age for being prats. Lupin was a grown man who seemed to fall into it without even thinking about what he was doing.
Harry settled into the rhythm of the semester after that, diving into his school work and spending time with his friends, the combination of which left him little time for anything else. He was taking Care of Creatures and Ancient Runes this year, along with Hermione, who had settled for Arithmancy, Ancient Runes, and Care of Creatures after he told her flat-out last year that if she somehow took all the electives she was going to explode halfway through the term and he wouldn't help mop up her remains. Neville was with them in Care, and Ginny joined them for all their study sessions, even when she had to work on her own lower-level work.
She also started offering impossibly insightful answers to their own higher-grade questions on occasion, which earned her very confused looks from Hermione and Neville, and knowing looks from Harry himself. He hoped she would explain herself to Hermione soon, just to satisfy her curiosity before it drove her to investigate.
Between them, they all managed good grades at everything they did without spending every waking moment studying, leaving time for extracurricular reading, games of various kinds, and the occasional spot of conspiracy.
Next Hogsmeade weekend was coming up, and Hermione's parents had yet to pass along any messages to her, so their group was in the beginning stages of planning another, more effective attempt to find Taylor without getting caught leaving Hogwarts.
It was one of these planning sessions that was interrupted by a curious and altogether unexpected intervention. Late one grim and foggy Monday morning, just before noon, a second-year Ravenclaw walked right up to their silenced table and leaned her head in over Neville and Ginny's shoulders.
"I have a secret message for you," she said in a dreamy voice. "The bug who borrowed my robes wants Bert to know she's here, in the Forbidden Forest with her dog and rat. She wants Bert to come see her. The Dementors don't patrol by the forest edge in the middle of the day."
The girl made to straighten up, but Ginny grabbed her shoulder and kept her down in the silenced space. "Luna, who sent you with this message?"
"The bug, for Bert," Luna repeated. "She took my robes, but she gave them back and let me watch many interesting things. I've never seen so many bugs in one place before. I wonder how she controls them with one arm? It takes two to direct an orchestra."
"One arm?" Harry asked. It couldn't be.
"She said… She still has a story to read you, but not when she's so close to Shelob in real life." Luna shrugged out of Ginny's grip. "I think I like her. She makes good riddles, and she is a riddle."
This time Ginny let her go. Luna skipped off, bright and cheery.
"She's always been weird," Hermione said thoughtfully.
"Luna isn't weird, she's…" Ginny sighed. "Okay, yes, she's weird. But usually she goes on about animals nobody else believes exist. This was a different kind of weird."
"It was a code." Neville shrugged when they all looked at him. "Bert? Hebert. Bug, I don't know, and the robes thing I have no clue. But one arm, plus wanting to see Harry, plus being out in the forest… It can only be one person, right?"
"But how is she here?" How could his mum possibly be here?
"Muggles can't even see Hogwarts," Hermione agreed. "Let alone find it! With Dementors all over the place, no less. It can't be possible."
"I can't just ignore it, though," Harry argued. "We've got to see what this is really about. We just have to be smart about it."
The sender of Luna's message had specified a time, but not a day. Harry and his friends spent the rest of the day planning, and the next day, they were ready.
Three of them would be skipping class, but nobody complained; for two of them it was History of Magic, and Neville got out of Transfiguration by claiming he was sick. It wasn't an excuse that would work twice, but he said McGonagall never called anyone out the first time, so he could just use his freebie. Ginny had a free period.
From the outside, it would look like Harry was coming with two friends. Hermione and Neville both had their wands out, as did he. Ginny trailed behind them under his cloak, and she brought with her four brooms and a selection of explosive joke products borrowed from the twins.
If they saw a Dementor, the whole thing was off. If they saw Sirius Black, it was off. If they saw anyone but Taylor, it was off.
As for who they would actually see…
Ginny had her bet on Sirius Black, despite the impossibility of the personal information and references Luna had passed on.
Hermione claimed that it would be Dumbledore, setting something up. Maybe they would 'see' Taylor, but it would be someone disguised to look and act like her. She had wanted to bring Veritaserum along to be sure, but Snape kept his locked up and Hermione balked at stealing… At least on short notice, with no plan. She had only rejected the idea on practical merits, which had surprised Harry.
Neville came out with the dark horse prediction; he said it would be Lupin, who had seen Harry's boggart and had been the target of Harry's rant. Further, he said Lupin would actually have Taylor with him, having sought her out and learned of the situation in an effort to prove Harry wrong.
Harry liked that theory, it felt more plausible than the others, but it wasn't the one he was betting on. As impossible as it was, he thought that this might be his mum. Just his mum, having somehow found a way to Hogwarts. If anyone could do it, his mum could.
Whoever it was, he and his friends were ready. To fight, to flee, to ambush, to defend… Whatever was necessary. There were four of them, and the enemy would only know about three at most. That had to be enough.
They entered the forest cautiously, alert for any sign of treachery. Harry had never actually been in the Forbidden Forest beyond the occasional field trip for Hagrid's classes, and it was a lot creepier without the enthusiastic mountain of a man and his dog leading the way.
A few minutes in, something moved up ahead.
Someone stepped out from behind a tree.
She was ragged-looking, like she hadn't had a shower in a week, and wearing witches robes hiked up at the knees, but Harry would know his mum anywhere.
Still, he only knew this person looked like her. "Prove you're really her!" he called out, Hermione's Polyjuice theory fresh on his mind.
"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," Taylor said with a sad smile. "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."
It was her.
Hermione put her arm out, but Harry rushed right past her and met his mum halfway, slamming into her with a relieved hug two years in the making.
Notes:
I really enjoyed working on this chapter. Quite a bit of it has roots in various cliches, and I could go on for thousands of words about the interesting inherent difficulties in averting the plots of years 1-4 with minimal butterflying (long story short the first four books being totally disconnected in terms of plot tends to render irrelevant any but the largest changes when it comes to the next year's plot), but a big part of this story was me doing things I found interesting and building up a butterfly world that's not that different on the surface, but becomes more and more unique as one looks past the obvious and realizes that ten years of ripple effect is a damn long time even before Harry came to Hogwarts to kickstart obvious changes. So I only averted the tropes I tend to dislike, while including ones with concepts I consider worth playing with in moderation.
So… yeah. Feel free to ask me anything; what's going on in the background with different characters, what happened here or there out of sight, whatever. So long as it's not something I intentionally left mysterious, or for a later chapter to cover, I've probably got an answer that only didn't make it into this chapter to keep some semblance of a plot progressing. Everybody has had their lives altered in some way.
Oh, also, Dumbledore's actions continue to seem inexcusable from a moral standpoint. What could that man be thinking? In what world is this a sane, morally upstanding path of action? Why this lie, specifically, if there had to be one at all? How could this possibly be resolvable to something reasonable? Even if it is reasonable, does that excuse the emotional harm he is doing in the process? What's his endgame? Does he really think Harry is just taking his word for it? For that matter, how close of an eye has he kept on Taylor? All very good questions.
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