When Magic is Useless

When Magic is Useless 9: Seating Plans and Ultimatums

Indus

*

"Mr. Weasley, it's been a while, hasn't it?" Sirius' voice was dry enough for it not to seem so odd that he was calling Bill by his last name. They had been friends and soldiers together, and just a decade separated their ages, but looking into the sardonic professor's face Bill felt as on edge as he generally felt with Snape.

"Sirius, how are you and Remus?" He countered, using the Transfiguration Professor and Deputy Headmaster's first names in a clumsy attempt to regain his footing.

"Very well, after the night we spent." It was said wryly, as on the day after the full moon, even with Wolfsbane and Padfoot, the werewolf always looked and seemed to feel (though he never complained) as if, as Ron had once remarked, a good hex would finish him off.

Bill sighed. He'd known this would be difficult, and there was a part of him that wanted to run away and hide again, and perhaps he would have if Remus hadn't seen him, and interposed his thin, bony frame between the two wizards.

"Bill, we need to talk," he said, foregoing a greeting. And if the latter had felt any desire to see how his youngest brother fared, it died when he saw the serious, pained expression on the prematurely gray-haired man, who was so rarely discourteous.

The two of them walked to Hogwarts Lake, quietly followed by a wizard who had known for some time his lover was keeping a secret from him, and had decided that he was done with secrecy. Sirius was very good at espionage, and though Bill was a well-trained member of the Order and an extraordinary curse-breaker he had no idea that the former fugitive was behind them. Remus didn't appear to know either, but subconsciously the wolf within him was rarely ignorant of the presence of his mate, and later he realized that a part of him must have needed to share what he knew with the one he loved most.

When they were far from the groups of students, Remus turned to Bill and told him what he knew of the young imposter calling himself Ash. "And so I agreed to keep the secret, but I think you should know. And quite frankly, if it weren't for all that was going on, I would have told them myself a long time ago."

Bill had listened to Remus in a daze. Though he was old enough to remember the last real miracle, when a baby boy had defeated a wizard who was considered the most fearful of all, the return of his nephew from the grave seemed beyond his comprehension. In comparison, Remus' last words were far more tangible, and he seized on them as if they were a lifeline, and he was going under for the third time. "What is going on?"

Remus bit his lip and looked out over the water, seeing things that were beyond his companion's reach. For the first time in a long while, Bill remembered that upon Dumbledore's death the phoenix and the order it represented had come under Lupin's leadership. When the werewolf spoke, his hoarse voice seemed to accentuate his inability to articulate what he felt. "I've been preparing, and yet I know not for what. I've sent spies, people who aren't Aurors or famous Order members, but rather the Fletchers of our world to see what they can overhear, and so far all we have are whispers. Something is coming, I know not what," he repeated.

Hearing him, Sirius shivered behind his tree. He knew of this second secret, for Remus would not have kept anything quiet regarding security after the decade they had spent apart due to mistrust and misinformation, but it seemed even worse to hear Remus discuss it with someone else. The other thing, Ash, he would not think about now. It was incomprehensible that the boy he had played with, watched grow and whose empty grave he had cried over, had been under the same roof for more than half a year.

Bill and Remus both stood there for some time, skin rising as the chilly breeze grew in strength, miles away in thought. Eventually Bill returned to the castle to meet his siblings, but Remus remained there, watching the squid Salazarily moving just under the surface of the water.

Sirius was still several feet behind, and hadn't made a sound, when Remus' voice startled him. "Hello, Padfoot."

His heart beginning to return to a normal rhythm, the black-haired wizard wrapped his arms around his childhood friend's narrow chest. "How do you know when I'm there?"

"I swore," Remus answered, his voice made grittier by the tears in his throat. And though that was not an answer to his question, Sirius understood.

"So many secrets, Moony." It was a gentle reproach, but Remus shuddered as if under a blow. "Sometimes I wonder if you would ever have told us if we hadn't guessed you were a werewolf," he continued, thinking of four boys that had once stood on that very spot. And though two of them were still there, Sirius sometimes felt as if all four had died that horrible Halloween, and Remus and he were completely different people.

He felt his lover's thin shoulders shrug slightly under his chin and arm. "I don't know. But I do know that the way you did, telling me it was all right in almost the same breath, was the greatest moment of my life."

Remus, in turn, felt Sirius nod against his back, but the Animagus's next words were not comforting. "Do you know what James and Lily's greatest moment was? The time they became parents, when Harry was born. Neither of us was destined to know that joy, that all encompassing moment when everything changes, and nothing will ever be the same. Perhaps that's why we've had so much fun watching other people's children grow in Hogwarts. But I've always recognized the importance, the strength, of the bond between parents and child, and as someone who actually had a family he loved, you should understand it even more. So tell me, Remus, how could you keep Hermione and Ron from their eldest child?"

The werewolf gathered his strength and wrenched out of Sirius' grasp. Forcing his body to ignore how much the exertion cost him, he glared back at his partner. "You tell me I should understand it more because I had parents who loved me? Did you ever think how that might change things? There are worse things than parents who hate you as much as yours did you, even harder issues to deal with than a mother and father you can only feel shame for, Sirius Black. There is the complete and utter agony of seeing those that love you most, and who you love just as overpoweringly, just as absolutely, suffer because of what lives inside of you."

Sirius was taken aback by his lover's vehemence. Standing with the lake behind him, clouds overhead gathering in the darkening sky, one could not see the ravages caused by the full moon, but the immense and constant strength that this man had possessed from a very early age, and that had kept his path clear and pure for six decades. When one just came into contact with the kindness and wisdom with which he dealt with his students, or the weakness caused by his lycanthropy, it was easy to forget that Remus had been fighting the worst of demons when most others his age were learning to tie their shoelaces without magic.

"It wasn't my right to make him reunite with Hermione and Ron," Remus raged on. "He had to be ready. It's not the same as you and Peter and James guessing! Merlin, it's worse because he's spent so much time with them and they haven't recognized him, which just confirms his belief that he isn't the boy they lost. And I can't blame him for that because when the wolf bit me, when I became Moony as well as Remus Lupin, I was not the same person I had been either. But that was the person you accepted almost three decades ago, and for all his faults not even Peter went back on that, not even the traitor who betrayed James and Lily to their deaths!"

Calming down slightly, as he saw Sirius' hands tremble at the reminder, he continued in a softer voice. "I wanted him to see that they could love him the way he was now. But I didn't remember the fear, the way it paralyzes you because the only thing worse than losing people to whatever lies beyond is having them leave you because of who you are. So now, later than I should have, perhaps, I'm forcing his hand."

This time, when Sirius reached for him, he didn't struggle but sagged into the familiar embrace, thinking that he didn't know how Dumbledore had stood under the burdens he had taken and had thrust upon him.

*

"Primor"-

"Shut up, I know what it bloody well says!" Ash interrupted, spinning around and slamming his hand into the nearest wall.

"Well, since we can't allow Ron Weasley to die because of a mistranslation, you are going to have to tell them, aren't you?" Salazar was stung into speaking plainly, but the only other person sitting at the library table was Art.

"I don't see why," Ash said slowly, his brain racing.

"Oh, Merlin!" This time it was Art who exploded. "What are you so bloody afraid of? That when your father gets cured from a terminal curse he's going to be upset that he is also regaining the child whose loss he's never recovered from?"

"He seems to have recovered just fine," Ash grumbled.

"Is that what this is about?" Salazar laughed sardonically. "Mummy and Daddy didn't leave the lights burning at home?"

"It was hell for them," Art said, and the somber, almost tearful tone was out of place coming from him. "They did the best they could in giving your younger and sister as complete a life as possible, but they're not the way they were."

"None of us are, and nothing I do or say will change that. Even if we could change time without seriously endangering everything and everyone, I don't want to be anyone but who I am. And I'm not who I was almost eight years ago either."

"None of us are," Salazar threw his own words back at him. "And I thought I liked the person you are too, until I found out you were considering letting your father die because you were too much of a coward to tell the truth."

"Don't be an idiot," Ash murmured. "I'm not going to let anyone die." Leaning over, he scratched out several words on the parchment in front of them, and then inked something new over them.

His two companions squinted at what he had written and then sat back, simultaneously releasing sighs of mingled frustration and exhaustion.

"I'm absolutely against this," Salazar spoke in a voice that was too weary to be passionate, and all the more final for that. "To publish a fraudulent cure for a terminal curse is dangerous, unethical and without a doubt, immoral."

Salazar wasn't given to pronouncing judgements, especially on morality, and the silence after his voice died away convinced Art that there was no need for him to add his opinion to the argument. Ash flushed as he took in the disappointment on their faces and he glanced away.

"I'm not looking to make this permanent," he hedged. "Once I tell them, I'll publish the authentic document. Anyway, it's only a little difference, isn't it?"

"A difference that could spell death for some poor bastard who gets hit by the same curse!" Art flashed, thinking of what Ron's suffering had done to his family, what something similar could do to someone else's family.

"Oh, because there are so many people dropping dead from the Crimson Death curse every day, right? Merlin, you two, for this to matter the victim would have to even have a similar story to my father's, and that is not bloody likely, is it? Even if two people are hit by a virtually extinct for centuries curse in the space of a year of so, the chances of their both having a firstborn child unknown to them are probably quite low, I would imagine!"

His argument was logical, and his companions were too tired to argue further. But when he had gone up to bed, Salazar turned to Art and asked if he thought Ash would ever tell his family who he was.

"I think so," Art replied. "He's afraid, and I guess I'd understand why if I went through..." Unable to articulate what his cousin and best friend had undergone, he gulped and passed over it. "But he's not a coward, and more and more people seem to have recognized him. This morning, at the castle, I felt that Uncle Bill and Sirius both knew. They were asking so many questions, and they weren't being subtle about him so I'm guessing it's only a matter of time before everyone finds out."

"They don't know how to be subtle," Salazar commented dryly, blowing out a candle and picking up two more for them to use to find their way to their rooms. "It isn't in them."

*

"So, what do you think?" Lily stood in the middle of the secret room, sleeves rolled up, wand at the ready and hair on end. Though just in training, and several months under twenty, she had participated gladly in the clean up with her trainer Nymphadora Tonks. Tonks was one of the most seasoned Aurors in the business, having assisted in the training of Lily's father and extended family. As she was also one of the most fun people Lily knew, she considered herself lucky to train under her.

"I think," Tonks said slowly, her hair a more sedate sky blue these days, "that this room might better have been left alone, but thank Merlin we found it first."

Kingsley laughed. The tall, black wizard was still handsome, though age was leavings its mark on him as well. He didn't consider himself vain, but he was conscious of a slight resentment that though he wasn't much older than his wife, she had the power to make herself look at least a generation younger, and she used it.

The three of them looked around, fairly certain there was nothing left to jump out at them, except for a boggart in a cupboard that Kingsley wanted to box up to take to Hogwarts. Remus requested them for the NEWT and OWL revision classes he oversaw near exam time. Still, the darkness of the room made their skin crawl, and no one wanted to remain in there much longer.

"So, these things are all meant to go to the Ministry, right?" Tonks asked, but didn't make a move towards them. Talented witch as she was, her clumsiness had not lessened with age.

"And those to Hogwarts," Kingsley added, pointing to items that had been placed against the opposite wall.

"Which leaves this wall, everything we can't identify," Lily finished. She shivered, thinking that an entire wall of objects that they, and Harry, Ron and Hermione, who had started this project, couldn't recognize had the potential to be problematic, to say the least.

"Which we will send over to the Department of Mysteries, and be done with it!" Tonks stated firmly. When she caught Lily's surprised glance, she smiled. "Are you afraid of a few books and dead body parts? If so, you should know it's better that we study them, so we know what they do, and what we can do if they are used. How much better would it be for poor Ron Weasley if someone had taken the time to study the Crimson Curse and written everything down, rather than burying it all under the proverbial rug? Yes, you've found the cure, and that's wonderful, but it would have been preferable if he and his family had been spared the last year."

Lily was silenced, but she couldn't help feeling that some stones were better left unturned. Of course, her uncle was worth a lot of future pain and sacrifice, but how much? Perhaps it was because she had had Harry Potter as a father, because she had always known the price her family had paid for peace, that she couldn't sanction this exposure of what had, for good reason, remained hidden for so long. For the ten years without violence that Tonks had grown to maturity in, Lily had lost her grandparents. And for the two decades of growth the wizarding community had known since the second war, Lily's father had had to take a life. And in many ways, he had been more lost to her than his parents because of that.

*

"So, how are you coming with the cure?" Hermione's bright voice caused Ash to jump, though he didn't know why he was startled. She was always popping up, trying to help; though there wasn't much she could do. Snape and he were more than capable of stirring a potion.

"As I said an hour ago, fine. This stage of the potion merely requires constant stirring, so we've set up shifts. This is mine, next is Professor Snape's, then Salazar's and so on."

"What about me?" Art piped in, from his seat in the corner where he was mixing up something he wouldn't discuss with anyone. He had to finish quickly; if Snape ever thought his classroom was being used for Fred and George's shop, he'd... well, none of them wanted to know what he'd do.

Even Hermione had to laugh. "Darling, how can I say this nicely? Never, that's when. You've been a lot of help but potions wasn't your thing, was it?"

"How much work does it take to stir?" Art scoffed, spooning his creation into a tube and then vanishing the contents of his cauldron with a wave of his wand. "You just take a spoon and"- he made a move towards Ash, but found himself stopped by a thin, bony hand.

"Mr. Weasley, while your views on a subject of which you know very little, as can be testified to by your abysmal potions marks, are fascinating, this isn't the time to put them into practice."

"Professor S-Snape," Art stammered, smiling greasily. "I- I didn't know you were here." Casting an eye in the general direction of the cauldron he had used, he was relieved to see that there were no signs of his unsanctioned work. "Well, if there's nothing for me to do here, I should be getting back to work. Uncle Fred mentioned that he might be coming by to stay if I could take his place for a few days."

"Oh, you won't be coming back?" Ash was surprisingly disappointed. The pesky thing about rebuilding ties, he thought-not for the first time- was that being alone became something one wasn't used to. And even with a castle full of people, Art's absence would be felt.

Hermione smiled. Though she would never admit it, Fred and George's spectacular exit from Hogwarts during her fifth year had depressed her, and she had missed their mad capers a great deal. Especially when the battles began, and the losses piled up. Art's presence had reminded her of those days before the war became something more than academic.

Art shrugged. "Who knows?" With that, he surreptitiously pulled his briefcase to him and almost ran out of the room.

"What is that boy up to?" Snape frowned after Art, and then began to examine his stores carefully. It wouldn't be the last time a Weasley would make him wonder why he had agreed to become a professor when Dumblefore had asked him four decades ago. Almost immediately he noticed a telling gap between two jars. "Why is the arrowroot out of place? That is not required for this potion! Where is that boy?" He stormed out, but Ash and Hermione, knowing how fast 'that boy' could be, merely shared a laugh at the thought of the howler Art would probably be receiving soon.

*

Hermione had long gone to bed, and Salazar was preparing to take over from Ash, when a slight cough made both of them jump.

Bill Weasley, short hair giving him a sinister look, stood near the door, his body half-hidden in the shadows and his face impossible to decipher. "How long have you been here?" Salazar asked, annoyed at the older man's theatrics.

"Long enough to be sure. I knew, but I needed to know," Bill answered enigmatically. He walked around Ash, as if examining him from every angle, then whistled. "You know, even an expert at misdirection like yours truly would have a hard time making out those glamour spells. You're very good at them."

It was useless to dither about; Ash was clever enough to know when he'd been spotted. "Is that how you knew?"

"No, Remus told me," Bill responded.

"He promised me!" Though he'd known the Deputy Headmaster wouldn't keep his secret forever, Ash was outraged. But Bill's next words shamed him.

"He seemed to think you'd let down your end of the bargain too."

Ash sighed, and studied the floor tiles for several long minutes. Finally, he raised his eyes to stare into his uncle's and asked him what he was going to do.

Bill had thought about it for some time, and finally come to a conclusion he could live with. "I'm going to give you more time to go to Hermione and Ron, but I will set a deadline that you are going to meet, or so help me I will tell them myself. Ash and Lily are planning to marry several days after the students return to their homes for summer vacation, and the potion you are making should also be ready by then. So, young Mr. Winton, you have until end of the semester to unveil your true identity. If you don't, then Hermione and Ron will be told the morning of the day your friends are bonded."

Feeling as if he had received an unexpected reprieve, Ash swallowed hard and nodded. Then, as Bill prepared to leave, he shouted, "Wait!"

Bill waited at the threshold, his back to the room.

"Do you know that I suggested going to Malfoy Manor, where we found the cure? I was led there though, by someone who is of some importance to you."

Bill was more than a little confused. "Really, who?" he asked doubtfully.

"Charlie," Ash said gently, but unable to soften the blow he knew his words caused the eldest of his uncles.

"That's impossible! Charlie is dead!" Bill snarled, drawing himself up and hand reaching for his wand.

"Yes, he is." The sincerity in Ash's voice calmed Bill down as his nephew explained how he had contacted the second of his father's brothers with the Progenitus spell. "He left me with a message for the family, especially you and Fred."

"What was it?" Bill asked, his throat dry.

"You need to move on, and be happy. It's not just that he thinks that's better for you, but that he wants it to happen. Oh, and he wants you to leave the museum and pierce something and grow out your hair," Ash added with a laugh.

Bill was on the verge of speaking, but found himself unable to verbalize his thoughts. Knowing the too-serious young man would understand, he swung around and strode back to the silence of his room, where he could be alone with his thoughts. For the first time, he wondered if his self-imposed solitude was, rather than a tribute, a source of sorrow and disappointment for the younger brother who had left him behind.

*

"Well, what do you think of this one?" Lily asked her fiancé, drawing his attention from the Quidditch pitch.

Reluctantly, he looked the seating chart over and sighed. "No, we can't do that one. My great-aunt Maude is a diviner, and if she's anywhere close to Uncle Bill or Harry she'll start screaming and ruin the entire wedding."

"A diviner?" Lily asked, hearing the term for the first time.

"It's like a seer, but someone who can only see the past. Total bollacks, of course, but she does love to do big parties."

Lily groaned. Two great wars in the past half-century made it unlikely that there was anyone safe enough to seat near great-aunt Maude. "Do we have to invite her at all?" she asked, not very hopefully.

For a second, Art was silent, and then he answered her with sobriety that all the more important for its rarity. "She's Grandmum's sister, you know, a Prewitt. As the eldest, she practically raised Gideon and Fabian Prewitt and put off getting married until they were adults. She was on the point of marrying when Death Eaters killed them, and she never recovered from what was done to them. There wasn't much of them left, and little more of her. After that... well, it's almost impossible to live with her, but we'll never let her feel unwelcome.

"You wouldn't be the family that you are if that wasn't true," she admitted, her eyes misting as she remembered the countless memories that the family had given her. Though Molly had been incredibly disappointed that Harry hadn't waited for her daughter, she had opened her doors and heart for Marcia and her children. Even now, though she was obviously disapproving of Lily's mother's decision to leave Harry, she wouldn't let one word of criticism leave her lips. Ginny too had been very understanding that though they had been together when Harry had left to fight Voldemort, the man he had become had been unable to return to the woman he had loved as a boy, and she and Marcia had grown close.

"Okay, I have an idea," Art said, his mind still on the seating chart. "Put her next to Uncles Fred and George. They know how to distract her; Grandmum used to do it all the time."

Lily looked at her fiancé suspiciously. "How will they distract her?" When he didn't answer, her voice raised several octaves. "What are they up to? Art, none of you had better try anything! This is my wedding!

"He he."

"Art!"

THE END, so far