Chương 2249: 6 - ||
The day had finally come; the trial of Sirius Black, but really Peter Pettigrew, was set to begin in half an hour. It was going to be held in the Wizengamot chamber, and the Wizengamot themselves would be serving as the jury.
However corrupt that arrangement might be when trying members of high society – very, based on Taylor's view of people – it would serve fine for indicting Peter Pettigrew today. He was by no account an important person on either side of the political divide or the last war. His fellow Death Eaters who had escaped prosecution would probably throw him under the bus, and those on the side of the light would be offended by him turning out to be a traitor.
No, she wasn't worried about the trial's outcome. That was all but set in stone. She was still here in the Ministry, though. Aside from wanting to see the spectacle first hand, like many of the Witches and Wizards crowding into the public viewing stands up above the floor of the chamber, she had promised Sirius she would be there to intervene if something went horribly wrong.
How she would intervene went unsaid; Sirius apparently trusted her to come up with something. Personally, she thought she was here more to provide moral support and peace of mind than any concrete escape plan. There were hundreds of magic users here, in the seat of their magical government. One handicapped Witch was not going to be enough to free him if all of those people decided he was guilty. Maybe she could precipitate an Arcadia confrontation for him if the crowd was in his favor, but the Wizengamot ruled otherwise.
Taylor came in after the bulk of the eager crowd, and as such had to pick a seat from the scant few still available. There was a gap on either side of an ugly old woman near the back, and another empty seat at the end of an aisle, next to a grizzled older man who looked like he had been put through a meat grinder.
The old lady shifted and the bugs nearest her caught a, to them, enticing smell. The reason for the empty seats to either side of her became clear; even if magic could clear the air, nobody wanted to have to be waving their wand every five minutes to avoid suffocating.
Faced with a choice between a gassy old lady and a probable war veteran, Taylor chose the war veteran. Even when his – apparently magical – eye swiveled over to glare at her, she still thought she had made the right choice.
"Interesting wand," he grunted.
She hadn't taken her wand out of her sleeve. The conclusion was as obvious as it was disturbing. "You had better not be looking under my robes with that magic eye," she whispered.
He turned to face her, his face an example of what not to do when dealing with a malfunctioning blender. "It only works on magical objects."
She decided to take that as the truth, for her own peace of mind if nothing else. "Is it disorienting?" she asked.
"Wear it for a few weeks and it's disorienting not to have it," he said in a low voice. "You ever thought about replacing that arm?"
"I've looked into it." As far as she could tell, magical prosthetics more advanced than the Muggle one she had now were not commonly made. "Where would you suggest I get a replacement?"
"Bulgaria," he said. "You need some strong blood magic to make a working prosthetic worth its salt. They're illegal to make, sell, or buy here in Britain, but not to own. The vampires over in Bulgaria specialize in it. Takes a long time, though, and they're not so good in a fight."
"I'll pass." At least for now. Between her wand and her bugs, she was only mildly inconvenienced by not having two arms these days.
"Aye, same decision I made." He kicked his peg leg out so she could see it. "Can't 'finite' a wooden stump. What's your wand made of? Looks proper powerful."
"Cactus and Hydra," she answered. "What about yours?"
"Don't remember," he said with a grin. "I go through them pretty quick."
"Sure looks like you would," she retorted.
"I think I like you, lass," he chuckled. "Here to see the show?"
"If Black is innocent I'm going to have to deal with him sooner or later." She already had to deal with him, but she would have to deal with him in public, too. The more people knew her or at least recognized her as a witch before someone revealed that she was supposed to be the Muggle adoptive mother of Harry Potter, the easier her false backstory would be to sell.
"Me, I'm here because I fought by his side in the last war," the man said seriously, turning to look out at the Wizengamot chamber. The Lords and Ladies of the Wizengamot were filing in now. "Thought he'd turned traitor because of his dark family, didn't think anything more of it except to be glad the bastard was in Azkaban. If I was wrong, least I can do is be here to see for myself."
Dumbledore walked in through a side door, taking up his place at the podium as the Chief Warlock. He shouldn't be a problem, but Taylor wished someone else was taking point on conducting the trial. She had little reason to trust Dumbledore to do the right thing, whatever his public persona might be known for.
Sirius and Pettigrew were brought in, both with their hands chained and guarded by Aurors. Sirius looked mildly ragged, having only been in a holding cell for two days. Pettigrew was a sniveling wreck.
"Settle down, everyone," Dumbledore boomed, some pre-established magic amplifying his voice. "Let's get this started. This is technically the trial of Sirius Black, and I say trial instead of retrial because there appear to be no records of a trial back when he was first incarcerated."
"'Course not, we only kept ahold of Death Eaters we did get because old Crouch pushed through that emergency measure to get them slung in Azkaban as fast as possible," the old man groused under his breath. "That doesn't mean anything."
"I take it due process of law is more of a suggestion than a rule around here?" Taylor whispered. She was familiar with the concept of an inescapable prison and people easily escaping from pretty much everywhere else, but that didn't make it right. Especially not as Azkaban was specifically designed to ruin the people imprisoned there, and served as the jail, not just the worst-case deterrence.
"Law breaks down when the buggers terrorizing the country are also in the jury and bribing the guards," the old man retorted. "They were all supposed to get trials after the war was over, though… Most of 'em did, I'm sure of it."
As they were talking Dumbledore continued to wade through the official opening of the trial. Taylor listened with one ear on the old man and one thousand insect ears on Dumbledore, but of the two she found the old man's comments to be more interesting. It wasn't until the prosecutor, Amelia Bones herself, started her opening argument that Taylor went back to paying full attention to the proceedings.
"The details of the original crime are thought to be well known," Amelia began, striding confidently across the open space between the podium and the ledge upon which the Wizengamot seating began. She was forced to look up to meet the eyes of the many jurors, but she acted as if this wasn't even an inconvenience. "The Potters were in hiding, under a Fidelius charm. They selected a secret keeper, as one must to activate the charm. The secret keeper, bound by magic to never reveal the secret under duress, must necessarily have turned traitor, as the Potters were slaughtered in their home. Following this, Sirius Black was seen to accost Peter Pettigrew in the Muggle world, and in the aftermath a dozen Muggles were dead of an explosion, and Peter Pettigrew presumed dead. Black was taken in, and as he was known to be the secret keeper and a murderer, sent to Azkaban. Last year, he escaped and proceeded to disappear, making no confirmed appearances in either the Muggle or Wizard world."
"This does appear to be a self-consistent narrative," Amelia continued, her voice sharp and clear. "Until one also considers that Pettigrew was recognized in Diagon Alley, called out, and subsequently revealed to be a marked Death Eater only a few months ago. This was grounds to arrest and question Pettigrew."
Amelia gestured to the two men on trial. Aurors brought Peter Pettigrew forward and sat him in an up until that point empty chair next to the Chief Warlock's podium.
"That chair ought to be spelled to prevent lying outright, but some buggers in the Wizengamot always block any attempt to get it set up right," the old man whispered. "Veritaserum is regulated, but a good old-fashioned blood-based truth compulsion would do the job, and no namby-pamby wiggling out of it to boot."
"Veritaserum has been authorized for this trial," Dumbledore announced. "For both Pettigrew and Black. Proceed, Amelia."
A few drops of a clear potion were administered, and Pettigrew went slack in his chair. Amelia went through a few questions obviously designed to prove the potion was working, then got to the heart of the matter. Yes, he was the secret keeper. No, it wasn't Sirius. Yes, he worked for the Dark Lord of the time. Yes, he faked his death to incriminate Sirius as well as get away himself.
It was all very dramatic, but Taylor had heard it before, from the sniveling rat himself. None of this was a surprise, and Amelia didn't even ask what Pettigrew was doing in Diagon Alley. The same went for Sirius when it was his turn to be questioned under veritaserum; he corroborated the truth, as well he should, and it couldn't have been clearer who was the actual criminal.
Then came a question Taylor had expected, but hoped would not be asked. "Did you encounter Pettigrew at any point between escaping Azkaban and coming to turn yourself in at the Ministry a few days ago?" Amelia asked.
"Yes, many times," Sirius answered tonelessly.
"What's this, now?" the old man muttered.
"When and where, and with what purpose?" Amelia pressed, unsurprised. This was definitely not the first time she had asked these questions.
"I was hunting him down to kill him and prove myself innocent," Sirius admitted. "I found him at the train station, hiding with the Weasleys as a rat, but he got away. I found him at Hogwarts, and we took him to the Shrieking Shack. I kept him prisoner until we had worked out a plan to make sure nobody could deny he was alive and a Death Eater, and so no politician could keep it quiet. I saw him in Diagon Alley after we obliviated him of everything after the train station, and accused him of being a Death Eater."
Taylor wished there was some way to avoid all of that coming out, but she had yet to master the obliviation charm for one simple reason; she had nobody she cared little enough about to practice on. She could ruin a life with a single word, and she had no guarantee that her power would ever be able to effectively perform the magic with only her thoughts to guide it.
This was the lesser evil. Letting the truth come out. It shouldn't invalidate anything; Sirius had only conspired to prove himself innocent in the most thorough possible way.
"You accused him." Amelia sounded as if she had just worked something out, though of course that was far from the truth. No prosecutor would come into a case expecting to learn the truth alongside everyone else. "Was that you with the hat who confronted Pettigrew in the Alley?"
"Yes," Sirius confirmed.
"You spoke of others working with you," Amelia said. "Were they, to your knowledge, criminals?"
"I thought so at first, but it turned out they thought I was a criminal and would only help them if I thought they were too… Nobody who helped me has a criminal record."
Taylor was immensely thankful Amelia had not asked whether she had committed any criminal acts; her animagus-equivalent curse wasn't legal, and breaking into Hogwarts had to be trespassing at the very least. She probably had to assume the interrogators in the Ministry knew of those things, whether or not they brought them up here.
"Then this is beyond the scope of the justification for veritaserum verification," Amelia announced. "Aurors, administer the antidote."
"Bloody fools," the old man said. "That's part of the stupidity that got Malfoy off. She had him under, she should have pressed even if he and his friends are innocent. They've nothing to fear if they are."
Taylor agreed in theory, but in practice that sounded far too much like a witch hunt to her. And not just because it would end up revealing far too much about her if Amelia had forced Sirius to tell everything he knew.
After that, the trial was all but over. Amelia summarized what they had learned, gave her professional opinion that Sirius was not in fact guilty, and Dumbledore put it to a vote. Sirius was exonerated and mildly fined for being an unregistered animagus. Pettigrew, in a subsequent sentencing, was remanded to Azkaban for the remainder of his natural life. No chance of parole, no appeals process. The trial was over.
Taylor was not impressed by Magical Britain's haphazard, somewhat unfair judicial system, but that was another problem for later. She would just have to be sure to never stand trial for anything.
"So," the old man said as they stood, "what business do you have with Black, now that he's a free man?"
Taylor considered the pros and cons of telling the old man the truth, and decided on part of it. "He owes me one for helping him catch Pettigrew," she said in a low voice. "But don't spread it around."
The old man squinted at her, his magic eye whirling unsettlingly quickly. "You knew all along what was going on."
"Yes, but I'm less than impressed with your justice system," she admitted.
"It could use some work, but all the good men and women in the government are busy preventing it from degrading any further," he admitted. "Can't say I blame Black for going about it like he did. You must have some interesting stories."
"I could say the same of you." The old man seemed like a goldmine of insider information. He knew how the last war had gone, he was there. That could prove useful if the same elements causing trouble back then were around today, inherently biased against her.
"Moody." He held his hand out. She shook it with her good hand. "Alastor Moody."
"Taylor." Just Taylor. Her last name didn't need to get out yet. Let people get to know her first.
Dumbledore might just find, sometime in the future, that she was no longer an unknown Muggle. Recognition was a line of defense, one she was going to cultivate.
Harry knew it was going to be a serious conversation when Taylor, as Hissy, found him on a Wednesday morning and asked him to get away from the Weasleys and into the village. His suspicions were confirmed when Taylor directed him to an out-of-sight alleyway and changed back then and there, which she never did. It was actually the first time he had seen her transform.
It looked painful, but his mum was his mum again, seemingly no worse for the wear. She was dressed like she was going to work, looking every inch the relatively young librarian. She even still had her keys, he noticed.
"I asked off work for the morning, but I'll be going in after lunch," she explained. "There's a little breakfast place down the street, the Weasleys never go in there. Let's get something to eat."
Harry waited until they had ordered to ask. "What's going on?"
"Sirius is a free man," Taylor explained. "He's going to want to meet you, and I'm inclined to let him. I know you don't like the Potter stuff," and she was right, "but it's getting to a point where it needs to be dealt with."
"What do you mean?" he asked.
"Not that you should claim to be Harry Potter," she assured him. "But it's time we figured out exactly what the truth is, and what we want everyone to believe it is, so that we can keep our stories straight going forward. People are going to know both of us soon, and if we contradict each other it will be noticed."
Harry understood that… and he did have some lingering questions that only his mum could really answer. "Okay. Do you know what the deal is with Potter?"
"I think I've pieced it together, and I know I had more information to work with than you." She smiled apologetically. "But I don't know for sure about some things."
"Did you actually, you know, have me?" Harry asked, lowering his voice so that nobody could overhear. The restaurant was a sleepy little place and the nearest person was three tables over, but still.
"No," his mum said. "But don't for a second think I don't love you like you came out of me."
He sighed. That was… probably the best he could expect to hear. It was reassuring, at least. "Am I Harry Potter?"
"I think you were," she said. "I was never told your last name, or who your parents were, or what had even happened to them. Just that you were mine, and that all the paperwork would say you always had been."
"Wait…" He had thought, when he thought about it at all, that maybe that she got him from an adoption agency or something, and never told him. Legally. This did not sound legal. "How did you get me?"
"That's… complicated." His mum looked over his head at something, then returned her gaze to him. "I knew a woman. We were not friends, we weren't even on good terms, but I did something for her that she couldn't do herself, and she decided to pay me back. This was right after I lost my arm. I was still being weaned off the painkillers when she showed up in my hospital room one night with you and a stack of paperwork that said you were mine, along with our house and our car and quite a bit of money to get me started in Britain."
Harry blinked. Twice. Then again, because he had no idea how to fit that into his understanding of his mum's history. "But… She… didn't you get those from your parents? Grandpa Danny?"
"No." She looked uncomfortable. "Harry, I don't think I can tell you everything. What I've told you about my parents and the little things about my childhood are true, but there are some things I don't want to talk about until you're much older."
He had never heard the 'until you're older' excuse before. This was uncharted territory. His mum had explained sex right before he went to Hogwarts, and he still didn't think that was all that interesting. What else could there be? "Why?" he asked.
"Because there is more to the world than magic and normal life, and some things are too horrible to burden anyone with unless they absolutely must know." His mum reached across the table to grasp his hand in hers. "I didn't even come to Britain by choice, the woman who wanted to do me a favor took me here while I was unconscious. She gave me a fresh start, and she didn't take no for an answer. It was good for me, once I decided to take it for what it was worth. You were good for me, and that was the reason she gave you to me at all."
"I was meant to…" He tried to find the words. "Make you happy?"
"Yes," his mum said with a little smile. "The woman, she was… odd. I think she called you the 'optimal baby' at one point. I was still a little loopy."
Harry had passed the point of being surprised by these revelations. He was just grateful they were weird, not necessarily bad or life-altering in a bad way. "This woman… what? Took me?"
"This is where I have to start making assumptions and educated guesses, because I wasn't there and I never saw her again after that night," his mum explained. "I learned from the history books that James and Lily Potter died when you were about a year old, they had a baby about your age, and if we assume you and he were one and the same, the timeline fits. Sirius Black knew you, I've checked that myself. When they died, he went after Pettigrew, and somehow in the space of twenty-four hours you went from the wreckage of a magical home to being left on a porch somewhere in the middle of the night. But by who, and why, I have no idea except to assume Dumbledore was involved. The woman didn't even tell me you were from a magical family, or that magic existed, and I'm not sure if she knew about any of it herself."
"Some random crazy lady picked baby me up off a porch and decided she would give me to her injured… pet project… and forged all the legal work to make it look like I belonged with you." Harry was so far beyond the realms of surprise that he didn't think he knew the way back.
"Yes." Taylor gently squeezed his hand. "If I had just adopted you normally I would have told you long before now, but that's… not really a story you tell a little kid and expect him to keep secret."
"I get that." He really did. He would have spread his mum's crazy stories to everyone who would listen. Everyone in their neighborhood knew his mum lost her arm in a car accident, and that was mostly due to him spreading the word whenever anyone showed the slightest bit of interest. He had gone through a talkative phase. "So I really am him. Harry Potter."
Taylor frowned. "I can't be sure, but everyone thinks you are him and the dates line up almost perfectly. Add in the scar everyone somehow knows about…"
"Hey, yeah!" he exclaimed. His scar! "They say he – I – got it from the Dark Lord that night, I know that, but how does everybody know? Who told them? Whoever did had to have seen me between the attack and that lady picking me up."
"I… don't know." Taylor looked thoughtful. "It wasn't Sirius, I don't think. I'll have to ask him. It's a mystery, for sure."
A mystery… A Potter mystery. He was Potter. "I kind of knew I was him," Harry admitted. "After second year, at least. But I didn't want to be. I still don't want to be."
"You don't have to." Taylor shook her head. "But now you know the truth of it."
"It's good to know." If only to remove any uncertainty when he denied it. He knew who he was, and he knew who he chose to be. "What about your magic? You said the woman didn't tell you about magic… Did you really not know?" He had thought so, but now he wasn't sure.
"Harry, I promise I had absolutely no idea magic existed until you started doing impossible things, and even then I wasn't sure what it was until we were told outright." She looked him in the eye, and he knew she was being truthful.
"Good." He didn't want to think his mum had been lying about something as big as that. "But… how?"
"How do I have magic now?" She squeezed his hand again. "That's partly tied to the things I don't want to talk about today. It's not a bloodline curse, I got that idea from the wand maker when he assumed that was what was wrong with me. I know what it is, I understand why I can do some magic and why it's not like it is for others, but for me to explain requires a lot of context I don't want to give you until you're old enough to handle it."
"Is this a sex thing?" he asked.
His mum laughed, but she looked sad. "No. It's not about magic, either. Just… Something else. Something that happened to me, something that's still with me to this day. I will explain, I don't like keeping secrets from you, but not until I know I won't be traumatizing you by talking about it."
Harry wanted to say that it couldn't be that bad, that he could handle a story no matter how scary… But then he thought of Ginny, who needed to be obliviated by doctors to protect her from just memories the wraith had left her, memories of real things. Ginny was strong, stronger than almost anyone he knew, and if she couldn't handle some things then he probably couldn't either. He was only fourteen.
"I understand, mum," he said.
"I wish you didn't," she said quietly. "But… thank you. For not making this harder than it had to be. You're a good son."
"You're a great mum," he shot back. "I didn't want to be Potter anyway, so I'm glad you didn't know who I was either."
The waitress walked out of the kitchen with two plates that looked to be the food they had ordered, so Harry let go of his mum's hand and said nothing more until she had dropped off their food and left.
"Do you know why Dumbledore hates you?" he asked.
Taylor shook her head. "No, and I'm not sure enough of his motivations to say he hates me at all. But I think, and Sirius agrees, that it will be easier to go around him than to confront him. He's powerful, magically and politically, and I'm not up to beating him with either of those. I could remove him," and something about how she said it made Harry believe she could, "but that would make things even messier."
"Is there a plan?" he asked, picking at his sandwich.
"Yes. It starts with you meeting Sirius and seeing if he is tolerable or not. If you like him, we can go ahead with one plan. If you don't, we'll go with another. It's up to you." She smiled. "No pressure. Really."
"I guess I can give him a chance," Harry conceded. He just hoped Black was nothing like Lupin. "When can we meet?"
"I suggested you go out to a bowling alley or something similarly simple," Taylor huffed, "but he's got his heart set on taking you to the Quidditch World Cup."
"The World Cup sounds good, I was going to go with the Weasleys anyway," he quickly volunteered. Hermione had been invited, the Weasleys were of course all going, and it sounded like it was going to be great fun.
If Black was tolerable, he might make it even more fun. If he wasn't, Harry could ditch him early on and still enjoy the day. It was a win-win scenario, and he said as much as they both finally set about eating.
"If you sabotage me, I'll transfigure you into a bedpan," Sirius threatened.
"If you turn me into a bedpan, I'll tell everyone about how you shrieked when you found that house elf dead in its cupboard," his bowler hat retorted.
Sirius had absolutely no idea what he had done to the hat's enchantments when he was fiddling with them in Diagon Alley, but something had gone very, very wrong. Or right. The enchantments on it were all individually simple, and there were less than a dozen in total, but three of them had melded together and he couldn't separate them to study exactly what about a voice charm, a recall charm, and a perception charm twisted together turned a simple enchanted item into a mouthy, blackmailing self-aware hat. It shouldn't be possible.
"You're going to behave for my godson," he said firmly. "He's smart and he takes Runes, he'll like looking at your weirdness. I swear to Merlin, though, you make a good impression or I'll throw you away!"
"Think of all the good times we've had," the hat pleaded. "Daddy," it added dryly.
Sirius felt his left eye twitch. "That's it, you're not coming." He tossed it on the troll-leg umbrella stand, smoothed out his robes, and–
"Take me or I'll yell at your mother's portrait and rile her up the entire time you're gone," the hat threatened.
"Go ahead!" He cast a silencing charm on the hat and left. It would wear off before he got back, but he could deal with his mother's portrait screaming when he was blackout drunk and ready for bed. It would be better than tolerating the hat's antics. However it had achieved either sentience or a reasonably complex imitation, it was clearly patterned off of someone a lot more annoying than he could ever be.
He did his best to get the hat off his mind while he apparated to the gathering point and waited for his scheduled portkey. The hat was a side project, nothing more. It might even be haunted or possessed. Maybe Peeves had snuck out of Hogwarts…
No! No thinking about the hat! He took his portkey, stepped into the riotous camping ground set up outside the stadium, and made a beeline for the Weasley tent. Harry would be there, he was staying with the Weasleys.
Sure enough, there was a whole gaggle of children outside the partially-erected tent, waiting for the adults to finish setting it up. Little Ginny, immediately recognizable as the only female Weasley under forty, shot him a glare he almost found intimidating when she noticed him coming. There was a girl who knew her hexes. Probably.
Harry himself wasn't there; the children were all Weasleys aside from Harry's brainy friend. Arthur Weasley came out of the tent, Molly Weasley behind him, and there was Harry, carrying an armful of tent stakes.
"Right, let's get this set up!" Arthur Weasley proclaimed. "Then you can all go explore – Sirius Black!"
"In the flesh," Sirius confirmed. "I'll be borrowing Harry for a bit, like we agreed." Taylor was the one with authority over Harry, in his mind, but not according to the Weasleys, so he'd arranged this little outing twice over. Once with Taylor, and once with Arthur.
Mrs. Weasley had not entered the equation at any point, and it seemed she was only now realizing she'd been left out of something. Arthur winced as she turned on him. "What did we agree, now?" she demanded.
"Simply to let Harry spend some time with his innocent, legally appointed godfather," Arthur explained.
While they were distracted, Harry dumped the tent stakes at the feet of Fred and George, saying "I know you two can do this faster than us doing it by hand."
"Oh yes," Fred said with a grin. "We mustn't waste time. Dad can't complain about the Muggles noticing if he doesn't notice…"
"Now?" Mrs. Weasley demanded. "With no supervision? He's liable to be a–" She glanced over at Sirius, who was watching with no small amount of amusement. "Lovely influence, I am sure, but this is not how things are supposed to be done!"
Harry waited until Arthur said something and distracted Molly, then waved goodbye to his friends and snuck over to Sirius. "She'll be going on about it for an hour, let's just go," he said.
Sneaking away? Sirius could get behind that! He ducked behind the next tent in the row and casually walked away from the ongoing debate.
"Hey, kid." Sirius never suffered from the tongue-tying affliction the less suave were often plagued with, but he also knew when not to say anything important. "How about we go find the craziest tent here and laugh at it?"
Harry shrugged his shoulders. "Sure."
So that was a no for leaping straight to humor. Fine. It took all types. "The enchantments on these tents get exponentially more complicated as they get bigger, you know," he offered, trying a different approach. "Space doesn't like being stretched. Have you ever gotten a look at the runework on a big tent?"
Harry's answering smile was as curious as it was genuine. "No, what's it like?"
"More than I can wrap my head around, that's for sure," Sirius admitted. "I can't even figure out a talking hat."
Harry asked about that, and Sirius jumped at the chance to tell the story of the spur-of-the-moment hat purchase, modification, and subsequent baffling evolution. It was a good story, even if he didn't have the accompanying prop. "Little bugger mouths off too much to take out anymore," he explained.
They wandered out of the tent section and into the vendor area. Crazed – another word for 'properly enthusiastic', in Sirius' opinion – fans of both Bulgaria and Ireland ran around half naked and screaming. Men and women hawked junk, high quality merchandise, and the former disguised as the latter. Foods made of magical creatures and food made of far too much bread and alcohol spilled over the ground and out of already drunken hands. Children ran around, unattended and having the time of their lives.
And here Sirius was, walking around with a kid he didn't know, trying to compete with all of this entertaining insanity. "Your mum was right, this was a bad idea," he admitted. "Should have gone somewhere less… busy."
"It's cool," Harry objected. "I've never seen any of this stuff." His head involuntarily turned to follow a trio of young women who ran by wearing nothing above the waist but thick paint in the Bulgarian team's colors, and his face reddened. "That, uh, wasn't what I meant."
"Still," Sirius insisted. "If you were a few years older I'd take you to get drunk and we'd hash it out that way, but… Butterbeer?"
"Sure." They stopped at a stand and bought two of the sweet, deceptively non-alcoholic beverage, and then kept walking.
"Quick question," Sirius blurted out. Something had just occurred to him. "You're not carrying Hissy around right now, are you?"
Harry shook his head. "Ginny has her," he said. "She and Hermione are… right there!" He pointed at a line snaking out from a booth that was selling Quidditch flags. The Weasley girl and Harry's bushy-haired friend were waiting in the line, and Hissy's black head could be seen waving above the girl's shoulder.
"Good. Your mum is great, but this is awkward enough without her listening in," Sirius admitted.
"You think so?" Harry asked.
"That it's awkward? Bloody hell yes, I haven't seen you since you were small enough to toss like a Quaffle." Plus he'd spent more than a decade with the Dementors in Azkaban as his only regular conversational partners.
Harry frowned, and Sirius suspected the only way to take his foot out of his mouth was to shove it in further, first. Or maybe he was just an idiot; he wouldn't know until he tried it and found out. "If that was you," he continued. "Now, me, I think my memory is pretty good, but all that time in Azkaban… You say it wasn't, and I'll have no choice but to believe you. Alternatively, you let me think what I want and I'll keep my mouth shut about it on the assumption that you've got some damn good reasons for denying it at every opportunity. What do you say?"
Harry turned to look at him. He was still frowning, but it was a confused frown, not an annoyed one, so Sirius thought he might be making progress. "Good reasons like…" he prompted.
"Keeping all of Wizarding Britain's tossers from discounting your mum?" Sirius guessed. "Avoiding the fame? Keeping your head low so former Death Eaters don't want to make your life difficult or nonexistent if they get the chance? Wanting to make a name for yourself on your own merits? Sticking it to the Purebloods who say lineage is everything? Setting up a decade-long prank where once you've convinced the entire world you switch it around and start claiming you have no idea who Harry Hebert is?" He could think of a thousand reasons for Harry's stance. Admittedly, most of them required a lot more cunning and foresight than any eleven-year-old boy would be capable of, but he wasn't trying to be realistic here.
Harry looked away, and Sirius realized the joke approach wasn't really working. That was a problem, because he was nothing if not a joker at heart, but he could muster up the willpower to be serious for a second. Not even a pun. "But to level with you, kid, I think it's just that even if you were Harry Potter, you'd had a decade of being Harry Hebert, and you care more about that. No skin off my back if you do. James was one of my best friends and Lily was a fine gal when she let her hair down, but they're gone, and they're not coming back. If it was me, I'd pick the mum I know who is still around, too. If people forced me to choose one or the other. I won't do that. Force you to choose, I mean."
Harry nodded. Only a nod, but Sirius knew he'd passed the test, after almost failing with his jokes, even though they carried the same sentiment buried under levity. Harry definitely wasn't James; James would have taken the joke explanation and accepted it.
"Did my mum coach you on that?" Harry asked.
Maybe Sirius hadn't passed the test quite yet, after all. Thankfully, he had a good answer. "Nope," he said truthfully. "The only advice she gave me was 'don't be an utter prat, Harry will drop you like a sack of rotten potatoes if you piss him off by talking about the Potters.'"
Harry's eyes bulged. "I don't believe my mum said a word of that," he exclaimed.
"Not in those words, but you've got to translate for some people," Sirius admitted. "Word for word, it was something like, 'Harry is a smart, kind boy who has had entirely too much pressure heaped on him to conform to a folk legend that happens to involve people you knew, don't add to that and you'll either sink or swim on your own merits.' But the real message was implied."
"That still doesn't sound like something she would say." Harry stopped to look at a stand Omnioculars. Sirius, remembering where they were – talking seriously really took the wind out of his sails, he had totally forgotten to keep an eye out for more topless women! – stopped to look too. He'd never seen this model. Understandably, they were far more advanced than the ones he remembered from back in his day. These had slow-down features, as well as a small recording capacity and zoom functions.
"Two, please," he ordered. "These are great for all manner of things," he told Harry. "Fiddle with the spells–"
"No fiddling with the spells, please," the vendor remarked. "They're liable to collapse on each other and break."
"That's what they want you to think," Sirius agreed, much to the vendor's dismay. He handed over twenty galleons, a truly exorbitant fee, and took the two devices the vendor reluctantly handed over. "And I'll admit anti-tampering spells have advanced since my day. But you can pull some remarkable little tricks off with an exterior spell that triggers the others at a set time…"
"So you can spy on someone?" Harry asked, eagerly taking his pair of Omnioculars.
"Without even needing to be there." Sirius considered Harry, and the way he had reacted to the fangirls earlier, and decided to hold off on any tales of his exploits with his own pair of Omnioculars. Taylor would neuter him if he corrupted her son.
Besides, Harry looked to be well on the way to replicating Sirius' own line of thought without any outside intervention–
"These would be great for looking at Dumbledore's office," Harry mused. "I could spend hours just looking at all of the things he has in there…"
Or maybe not. Taylor would be proud. Harry got a new spying device and his first thought was for actual espionage, not his increased potential as a Peeping Tom.
Was it corruption if Sirius just nudged him in the right direction? More importantly, was it corruption in Taylor's opinion if he did such a thing? And did he want to risk her likely amusing and certainly painful wrath?
Sirius decided on a middle path. Innocent uses of Omnioculars that happened to involve girls. "You know, your friends might like it if you got some Wizarding pictures of them with those," he suggested. "They're not made for taking pictures but you can modify them to do it. Girls like pretty pictures of themselves."
Harry put the Omnioculars up to his eyes and looked around as they continued on through the crowd. Sirius had to take him by the shoulder to steer him around some fat blokes who would probably bounce him off their jowls if he walked into them, and he barely noticed.
"Luna might like a camera," Harry said after a moment. "She can take pictures of the things she's always telling us about."
"There you go!" He would take it.
It was an unlikely comparison, but Taylor thought Hermione and Ginny reminded her a bit of Dragon and Armsmaster.
This was, on the surface, a completely ridiculous idea. Dragon and Armsmaster were Tinkers, one was an AI and one was an adult man, both were hardened parahumans, and both would likely either explode or go into a Tinker frenzy at the mere implications of magic. Ginny and Hermione were, in terms of personality and background, absolutely nothing like them.
But the dynamic between them was very much like that of two Tinkers, one with an intuitive understanding of things, and the other with a relentless drive to improve. They were also much like Tinkers in that even now, at a big sporting event, they were talking shop. They browsed stands of self-waving flags and pastries and sporting apparel and expensive brooms, but they spoke of enchantments, bouncing ideas back and forth about how things were made and how they could be made better. Ideas that, to Taylor, sounded an awful lot like Tinker babble.
Everyone in this world, with practice, could understand and make things like the self-unfolding chairs and the explosive mini-firecrackers that reset after every boom. It was more akin to mundane science than Tinkertech. But to Taylor, right now, it might as well be the latter, and hearing them discuss things with vocabulary she was only starting to grasp in her own studies put her in mind of Armsmaster and other Tinkers she had witnessed Tinkering. They collaborated as Tinkers did, and as Taylor only really knew one Tinker duo who commonly worked together, she thought of Armsmaster and Dragon.
In between talking about things that occasionally had passerby staring incredulously at them when they got too loud, Hermione and Ginny bought bags of flavor-changing popcorn, picked up a free pamphlet on the history of the World Cup that was sitting on a massive, untouched pile, got a flag each, and explored the grounds around the stands, which to Taylor resembled a massive international fairground without the rides or the games.
They didn't wander at random, though. Taylor, riding on Ginny as a snake, happened to notice Sirius and Harry nearby far too often for it to be coincidence. She had not asked the girls to spy… But she would admit she was a little worried, so she wasn't going to pass up the chance to observe from afar.
They seemed to be getting along well; Sirius was showing Harry how to work a pair of magical binoculars. Taylor hoped that meant Sirius had addressed the elephant in the room right away, instead of just ignoring it. She wanted them to get along. It would make things a lot easier, both for their plans for the future, and for her own peace of mind. She liked Sirius, and it would be good if Harry did too.
Taylor's view of the two was abruptly knocking to the side as some idiot shoved right past Ginny, chasing after the topless trio who had been running around all morning. He was either a person with some authority trying to get them to stop streaking, or a smitten fool not thinking straight.
Ginny scowled at the man as he ran. Hermione did more than scowl. "Furnunculus," she muttered, discreetly waving her wand. A bolt of magic shot through the crowd, striking the man who'd shoved Ginny in the back. Just as he finally caught up to the women, his entire head broke out in boils. One of them shrieked as she turned and got an eyeful of his lumpy, boil-covered face, and shoved him away. He fell butt-first into a display of self-waving flags, all of which immediately started battering him.
"Good spell choice," Ginny said. "But aren't you worried about–"
"Underage magic?" Hermione frowned for a moment, then smiled. "No. Didn't you see those kids levitating a ball back and forth? There's so much magic going on here that they can't possibly track it all."
"Uh, sure…" Ginny looked up at the sky. "We'll know for certain if you don't get an owl, but I don't think that's how it works. They weren't even British kids, the rules don't apply to them."
"Well, you get at least one warning anyway," Hermione said, a telltale blush creeping up her cheeks. "And I… might not have really thought about underage magic when I did it? Oh, look, there's your brother!"
"Which one?" Ginny asked, thoroughly distracted.
"Ronald, he's coming our way." Hermione pocketed her wand. "If he saw–"
"Ron's no snitch," Ginny laughed. "Hey, prat, what's that you've got?"
"Some guy just gave me a signed Krum poster!" Ronald was clutching a rolled-up poster to his chest to protect it from the crowd, and when he reached Hermione and Ginny he held it between the three of them to protect it from even the slightest possibility of damage. "Said he's got a source if I want to buy more on the cheap and sell them to everybody in Gryffindor this fall. Either of you got a few galleons so I can go get them before he lets somebody else take them?"
"Can we see the poster?" Ginny asked.
"Oh, blimey, yeah, I've got to see it myself," Ronald agreed. "Here, just…" He unrolled it. "Cor, an actual signed poster…"
"Uh…" Hermione craned her head to look, as Ronald had unrolled it facing himself. "Ron?"
"It's great," he said.
"Ron, it's signed 'Vickor Krumb," Ginny pointed out.
"He's Bulgarian, English probably isn't his first language," Ron agreed.
Hermione opened her mouth to object, but Ginny shook her head. "Wait for it…" she whispered.
Ron squinted at the poster. "Or it's not really his signature," he concluded. "Eh, whatever. It was free! Oh, before I forget, mum says it's almost time to go to the stands. She's going to be looking for you if you don't head up there now."
"How does she expect to find us?" Hermione asked.
"Tracking charm, she hit all of our robes with them before we left." Ron disappeared into the crowd.
"Oh, brother," Ginny sighed once he was gone. "At least he's happy. An actual signed poster would be at least a galleon. I'll try to get him one for his birthday or something. Please don't think he's an idiot, Hermione. He had to grow up with the twins, it's their fault."
"You'd think constantly being pranked means he's more likely to catch on to future scams," Hermione said as they headed for the Quidditch stadium.
"It means things that don't explode, turn him into a canary, or sing in Russian every time he opens his mouth all seem reasonable," Ginny explained. "The twins aren't malicious. Mostly. By the way, thanks for teaching me that Muggle trick with the coin. He thinks I can do wandless vanishing charms now."
The girls navigated the crowd, aiming for the Quidditch stand. It was, by Taylor's estimate, some time yet before the game would start, but she supposed Molly Weasley wanted to give her children time, and to save some time for herself in case she had to track them down. As such, once Hermione and Ginny got into the stands, they didn't have to deal with crowds anymore.
There were bugs everywhere, of course. For Taylor, outside of places like Hogwarts, this was a constant not often worth remarking on. She did the early-arriving Quidditch fans a favor and co-opted their attending flies as she came into range, taking them away from the tantalizing smells of food and out to fly on standby, keeping track of people but otherwise making themselves unobtrusive. Her range was strange within the Quidditch stadium; it didn't stretch as far as it should. More space-expanding magic, she assumed, but not like she had felt before.
Her power radiated annoyance. It was, Taylor theorized, not happy that magic was curtailing her range. Or it was annoyed by something else entirely, or just wanted her to think that it was annoyed… She could never be sure.
Mr. Weasley, by some stroke of bribery, good luck, or plain old-fashioned bootlicking, had managed to get seats for everyone up in the VIP box. Hermione and Ginny trekked up what had to be ten stories of space-extended stairs, passing hundreds of rows of seats, to get up to the top. Inside–
"The first of the rugrats arrives," a posh man muttered to his wife.
Inside were a very small sampling of Britain's magical elite, a mere six individuals. There was a fat man who was probably the Minister of Magic, an Auror on either side of him. Off to one side Taylor recognized the posh man as Malfoy and the woman with him as his wife, by association with his less composed son, who sneered at Ginny as she glanced over at him. She and Hermione took their seats down near the bottom of the box, deigning to ignore the aristocrats.
Taylor, in sweeping her flies through the empty space of the mostly-empty box, noticed something else, beyond the obvious. Specifically, something invisible. Somebody invisible, sitting in the row behind where the rest of the Weasleys, Sirius, and Harry would be sitting. They were under a cloak, like the one Harry had, and big enough that they had to be an adult. There was a child-sized figure next to them, too.
Invited guests who despised publicity, a duo of secret security guards, thrillseekers, or would-be assassins? They could be any of the above. One of those possibilities was dangerous.
"Ginny," Taylor hissed, "ask the Malfoys if they brought security along with them, to protect them from the riff-raff."
"Why?" Ginny hissed back. She was quiet, but the high-pitched noise cut right under the murmur of the crowds below.
"I told you, father," Draco whispered.
"It means nothing," the older Malfoy retorted, his hand tightening on his cane.
"Because it is important," Taylor replied. "There is someone invisible behind and to your left. Two someones. We need to know who they are and whether we should reveal them."
Ginny stiffened, then twisted around in her seat to look at the Malfoys. "Scared enough of me to bring bodyguards?" she asked.
The Malfoys replied with a lofty, dignified silence. Taylor didn't need their denials; the way the hidden figure failed to even twitch implied they were not secretly a Malfoy guard. It told her precious little else, though. There was nothing for it; she was going to have to stir the pot and see what happened. "Be prepared to duck and run," she told Ginny. "Our invisible presence is about to attract a curious bee."
Bugs were such useful minions… People expected them to be creepy and crawly and to go where they weren't supposed to be. One bug was not enemy action. Taylor flew in a fat bumblebee that had been molesting a child's ice cream, steering it's awkwardly rotund form to land on the bench next to the invisible observers. Getting it under the cloak from there was easy; it was only as heavy as normal cloth. From there, she sent it to the larger person's side.
Then she thought better of her plan. If she ruined an assassin's cover, he might try to complete his mission immediately, going loud and potentially hurting people in the process. "Go to the bathroom," she told Ginny. "Leave the VIP box."
"Let's go find my brothers," Ginny told Hermione, standing from her seat. "They should be here already."
"But–" Hermione looked at Ginny, and she must have seen that there was more to this than Ginny was saying, because she stood and followed her.
Once they were out of the VIP box, Taylor dropped off of Ginny onto the steps. "Ginny, tell Hermione what I told you," she said. "Stay out of the way. This could get violent."
She slithered off to find a dark spot large enough for her human form. Her bugs had already scouted one out for her, a space under a section of stands that had a trapdoor for maintenance purposes, little more than a wrought iron catwalk that led directly under some glowing runes carved into the stands themselves. She went down, changed back, and took out her wand.
Up above, in the VIP box, she sent a wasp to the Malfoy boy. He needed to be taken out of the firing line, if it could be done. His parents would be able to take care of themselves, and the Minister had his Aurors, but he was still a child.
She stung him on the ankle. He yelped, crushed the wasp with his other foot, and proceeded to complain loudly about the bugs. His father said something scornful to the Minister, who blustered…
All worthless minutia. The boy didn't leave his seat.
Time was running out. She would only have more potential bystanders to protect if she waited until the Weasleys and Sirius arrived with Harry. Hopefully Draco had good reflexes.
She set a butterfly down on the top of the invisible head, rather than stinging the hidden observer. This way, if the Aurors had a modicum of good sense…
It took a disappointingly long time, but eventually one of the Aurors noticed the bug perched on nothing. "Hey!" he yelled, completely wasting the element of surprise and fumbling his wand. "You!"
The figure moved fast. He lurched forward and rushed out of the VIP box, ducking under a duo of badly-aimed stunning spells. Taylor, though, was not so easily surprised or evaded; he rushed right by her, invisible but not to her, and she hit him in the center of his form just as he reached the top of the stairs.
"Master!" a high pitched voice cried out, and the invisible wizard's body cracked out of existence an instant after his head hit the steps in the beginning of an out-of-control tumble.
Taylor squinted at the place the wizard and his accomplice had disappeared from. That voice… an elf. They could do teleportation, too.
Stupid. She should have accounted for that.
She returned to the maintenance catwalk, turned back into a snake, and slithered back to Ginny. "Invisible wizard driven off, he got away, but he didn't hurt anyone." Not the best outcome, but it also wasn't entirely her problem. This was a job for those Aurors, not her. She was going to have to keep a very close eye on the VIP box with her bugs for the rest of the day, for her own peace of mind, but beyond that it was their responsibility.
When Ginny and Hermione returned to the VIP box, they were met by two very sullen Aurors, both of whom waved them through without bothering to check them. The Minister and Malfoy were arguing about something – rather, Malfoy was berating the Minister with smooth, cutting remarks, and the Minister was agreeing. That stopped when other people started showing up, but it gave Taylor an even more jaded look at exactly how the balance of power worked here in magical Britain.
The Weasleys arrived soon afterward. They said hello, Ginny and Hermione told Ron all about what happened…
Taylor paid them little mind. Her bugs were canvassing the area for a wizard and his elf, who might have popped up somewhere nearby, but that was a mostly futile gesture. She was also arranging strategic reserves of her faster, more dangerous insects all around the VIP box.
She had been lax, thinking that the most important political figure in the country would of course have security sorted out. That illusion had been thoroughly dispelled.
It did not, however, seem that his would-be attacker had planned ahead for being caught with his pants down. She found no signs of any backup plans, such as a magical bomb under the VIP section or the like. By the time Sirius and Harry came in, the last to the VIP box which was still only half-filled, she was certain there was nothing else planned. As certain as she could be, anyway. Certain enough to not insist everyone evacuate immediately.
Harry sat next to Hermione and passed her his magical binoculars. "These are really good," he told her. "They can take magical pictures and play them back." Sirius took a seat in the row behind and above them, next to Arthur Weasley. He was sitting where the mystery assailant had sat, prior to Taylor driving him off. She was glad she had done so, now; who knew what might have happened had Sirius accidentally sat in the invisible man's lap. Knowing Sirius, she suspected he would have gotten off at least one startled line of innuendo before all hell broke loose.
Hermione ran her fingers over them, peering intently at the surface of the etched metal binoculars. "Ooh, that's really compact… I wonder why nobody has made Wizard video cameras yet, if they already have these?"
"What's a video?" Ginny asked.
"Many pictures in a row, with sound," Taylor hissed from her position coiled around Ginny's neck and shoulders. "Explained another way, wizard pictures that don't repeat for hours."
"Too much magic," Ginny promptly explained. "You can't put too many pictures in the same place. They get all fuzzy because the magic is too similar. It's the same reason pictures can't capture more than a few seconds at a time, it's too similar and the magic can't tell the difference between one moment and the next when there are enough of them."
"I guess Muggle film wouldn't work, then," Hermione mused.
"There are pensieves, though," Ginny added. "Those work like long pictures with sound, but with a memory and you can walk around in it."
The game had been in the process of starting while they talked. Taylor didn't really care about Quidditch, and thanks to the spatial warping her range didn't reach the field, so all she really saw out of the corner of her less than excellent snake eyes was a line of blurry cheerleaders dancing around on the field, standard fare for sports events.
Standard fare, except for the reactions the cheerleaders drew from the VIP section. Of the people Taylor had come with, only Arthur Weasley, Molly Weasley, Sirius, and of course Taylor herself were unaffected. Ronald was trying to climb the thankfully charmed guard rail, the twins were pulling fireworks out of their pockets – and immediately having them confiscated by their mum – and even Ginny was staring with wide eyes. Hermione flushed and turned away, muttering about "compulsion magic" and brushing a few errant sparks out of her hair, which told Taylor more about what was going on than anything else.
Harry half rose from his seat, but Sirius grabbed his shoulders and held him down. "Girls like a guy who doesn't make a fool of himself over Veela," Sirius advised. "And that includes Veela."
Veela… She didn't know what those were. Another big gap in her knowledge.
The cheerleaders went away, and Harry pushed Sirius' hands off his shoulders. "Thanks," he said.
"No problem." Sirius winked at Taylor. "Only the most suave and worldly of men can resist their call."
"I once saw you trying to sniff your own butt," Taylor remarked. In dog form, admittedly, but she didn't know if that made his actions more or less weird.
Ginny and Harry both almost choked laughing, much to Sirius' confusion. Then money was raining from the sky, and soon after a game of death-defying broomstick-riding stole everyone's attention.
Taylor kept watch, with her bugs and with her own snake eyes. Her son and his friends could enjoy the game. She was going to make sure nothing happened to them in the meantime.
The Quidditch game was, according to Sirius, 'legendary'. Legendarily uneventful, from Taylor's perspective. She wanted to be able to enjoy, if not the sport, then the spectacle, but that just didn't happen. Same for the after-game party and powwow around the fire; every firecracker in the distance had her flinching, and every flash of light in the dark was an attack.
She was too wound up to relax, and too stressed to have any fun sitting around as a snake. Instead, she left Sirius to entertain Harry and the others, slithering away to change back to her human self and wander the campground. If she stayed, she would only worry him with her sourceless agitation.
That unnamed, unknown wizard and his elf accomplice weighed heavy on her mind. Them getting away worried her. That she had absolutely no idea why they had been there, or what they had wanted, worried her more. Innocent people did not duck and run when someone noticed them lurking invisibly, they had been there for a reason they didn't think the Aurors would approve of. But was it as simple as trying to sneak a better seat in the private VIP booth, or was it sinister? She didn't know, and she had almost sent a man tumbling headfirst down a magically-extended flight of stairs regardless.
She was supposed to be better than that. Either better at managing the situation, or better at not going for the most violent possible option. One or the other. This incident, on top of other little things, made her worry that she had lost her touch. She wasn't making the best decisions. She was missing things. She was making stupid assumptions, like with the Floo.
A group of drunken wizards waved at her from a roaring bonfire in front of a ratty old tent that on the outside looked big enough for one person if they weren't picky. She ignored their catcalls.
It was hard to tell if she really was less effective now than before. Ten years was a long time, and this world was not comparable to her old one. The people here were softer. Social conventions were less harsh. Magic made everyone potentially versatile beyond belief, and the magical world was steeped in it, throwing surprises at her from every direction even when witches and wizards weren't directly involved.
Maybe even Skitter in her prime would have had trouble adapting to such a complicated world. Or maybe she would have long since rolled over the country, exploiting everything she could to fight her way to the top of this softer, unprepared pile of mostly normal people who used extraordinary powers to do things that passed for normal in their world.
The tents were getting more obviously expensive as she walked; if the campground had a rich side, she was entering it. The sights were interesting, and working her bugs into them was a challenge, so she kept walking.
The world she worked within had changed, but she had changed too, and she couldn't blame her feelings of inadequacy solely on the former. She was softer. Kinder. Less willing to be brutal, less certain that she wanted to go all-out. She wasn't a criminal or a hero waiting for the doomsday clock to run out. The pressure wasn't there, and the precedent wasn't either.
In its place? Worry and discontent, but stifling things that had no clear outlet, nothing to attack. Dumbledore, the country's hero who opposed her for unclear reasons from a position of immense power. Nobody else, save for that faceless, nameless wizard and his elf, who she would probably never see again. She didn't know what she could do about Dumbledore, and she was still struggling to pull herself up to a level of basic competency with magic.
Her power was silent on the matter, not weighing in with even a vague emotion-based opinion.
Then there was Harry. He didn't want Skitter or Weaver. Didn't even know who they were. He only knew her. Taylor. She couldn't go back to acting like them, either of them. That wasn't who she was anymore, and it wasn't who he needed… Unless he was in real danger, in which case hell would fall upon on anyone who threatened him. If she was still truly capable of that.
She couldn't be both herself and who she used to be, but depending on what happened, Harry might need one or the other. She might not be the one he needed when that time came.
Yelling in the distance made her flinch, again. Another change in her powers that she had only recently noticed; she was no longer as capable of redirecting her reactions to things into her bugs. No longer willing to, either. Becoming some outwardly emotionless stoic woman would do nothing but drive a wedge between her and her son.
The yelling continued. She turned toward it, sending her bugs out to investigate. The source soon became clear, as things began to happen elsewhere within her range.
Three wizards in masks were levitating a family of four, floating them high off the ground and laughing. Four more were fighting with bystanders. Two were cutting into a tent with their wands. One was throwing fire charms around with wild abandon.
This was not normal, innocent revelry. Ten thugs had come out to cause chaos, and coordinated well enough that they all started at roughly the same time.
It was nostalgic. The way they acted. The way they were completely and utterly unprepared for her.
Nine murderous idiots learned that their masks were good for hiding their identity, not for protecting the face underneath. The tenth was no more protected by his mask than the others, but he was casting fire at everything that moved and burning her bugs by sheer coincidence, roasting them before they could pass or fly over his ring of flames.
She slithered down between two tents to approach the pyromaniac without presenting something to throw fireballs at, then countercursed herself back to normal under the cover of darkness and rapidly spreading panic. The tenth Death Eater – for what else could they be, wearing those well-known masks? – she would deal with herself, before he burned someone instead of just tents that rapidly emptied of their occupants before they fully caught on fire.
She was the first one on the scene, so long as she did not count a wizarding family of three apparating away as their tent was bombarded with fire curses. "Aguamenti," she cast, flicking her wand to send a jet of water streaming over the flames licking at the grass and onto the Death Eater himself. Water was a good immediate dampener of heat, but wet cloth conducted heat a lot faster than dry cloth, and the idiot was surrounding himself with fire.
In the moment, it got his attention. "Burn!" he screamed, spinning around to send a fresh wave of flames at her.
Fire powers were some of her least favorite powers to fight as Skitter and later as Weaver, but basic Incendio blasts were nothing compared to the terrible versatility of someone like Burnscar, and she wasn't relying solely on bugs anymore. With someone this stupid… She dodged the plume of flame, dropped low to duck his next blast, and summoned a tent stake out of the ground from behind him with a simple series of Accio charms, pulling it to her and by extension directly into the back of his leg, just above his knee.
Tent stake met thin robe and weak flesh, and tent stake won so thoroughly that she heard the crunch of it pulverizing bone head-on. He screamed, and she stunned him.
Even the stupid thugs in this world could have power. That didn't make them smarter.
Aurors began apparating in, appallingly late to the scene of the crimes. Taylor left the pyromaniac with the stake still in his leg, reasoning that it would do to keep his blood inside his body until he could be recovered by the magical police. She had a son to protect, and babysitting a criminal did not take priority over that. She had wandered far enough that Harry was outside her range.
As she moved, her bugs moved with her. She came across three more masked figures causing chaos, these engaged in pitched battles with Aurors. She helped where she could, but didn't stop for them. The Weasleys' tent was abandoned, their campfire put out and the flap left open. Somewhere nearby, a wizard screamed about anti-apparition wards, meaning no more teleportation.
The woods weren't far, as the Weasleys had pitched their tent near the edge of the campground. Sirius knew how to hide in the woods, he would have led them there, if teleporting out wasn't possible.
"Miss." The high-pitched voice was accompanied by a pop as an elf burst into existence in front of her. "Miss is having a very distinctive wand," the elf said, wringing her spindly fingers nervously. "Master wants that wand."
Taylor knew that voice. "Master who?" she demanded, a stunning spell on the tip of her tongue.
"Master wouldn't want Winky to say," the elf replied. "Master wants your wand. Master sent Winky to find your wand. Give it to Winky."
"Bring your master, and I'll give him the wand," she said.
"Wait here!" the elf said, before teleporting away. It seemed the wards that stopped one form of teleportation didn't necessarily stop others. It further seemed that elves were not necessarily the brightest creatures. Nor were their masters, who would send elves capable of identifying themselves to the enemy to take their wand.
The elf and her master popped back into the world a short distance away, behind a tent. Clever, to approach from behind, but not nearly clever enough to actually get the drop on Taylor.
The meter-long stake of corrugated stone that the wizard drew from the ground with a wand of his own, pointed her direction, and flung, on the other hand, was a very good opening move.
Taylor threw herself to the side, narrowly avoiding being impaled. She whipped three stunners into the shredded remnants of the tent between them, while also bringing insects in to gather on the wizard's robes, awaiting a critical mass to overwhelm him all at once. Ten, fifteen seconds, maybe.
He shot two eerie green curses at her, ducking and dodging her less lethal returning fire. There was no advantage to using a killing curse over a stunner in a fight like this, no advantage except showing his hand and his intent, but he did it anyway. He stepped onto the shredded tent and into her field of vision, backlit by the remnants of the pyromaniac's fires in the distance.
"Winky says you stunned me," he growled, the bangs of his sandy hair dripping with blood from a sluggishly bleeding gash on his forehead. "Thank you. I'll take your wand now."
"Stalling for time only helps me," she retorted. Her insects attacked from his robes, converging on every inch of uncovered flesh they could find. He screamed, smacking at his body and instinctively ducking behind a more intact tent, but it would do him no good–
She tried to stun the elf when it appeared again, but she wasn't in the right position to hit it. The elf vanished every insect she had on her attacker, instantly negating the force she'd built up to subdue him. Then it vanished itself, disappearing before she could attack it. She was forced to abandon her position, momentarily blind to her enemy's plans. Two bright green curses pierced the darkness where she had stood only moments before.
This was going to be tricky. The Aurors weren't close enough to help in a timely fashion. This wizard was more competent than the others, forewarned, using lethal force, and aided by an elf who could teleport and take bugs off him with a snap of its fingers. He wanted to take her wand and possibly her life, and his elf had found her once already, meaning she couldn't count on being able to hide for long.
It was time to find out whether she was still capable of fighting her own battles, let alone defending the people she loved.
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