[Children of the Sun]: A Door Into Hope, gen, PG-13, 9/?
Chapter Eight.
Part One.
Title: A Door Into Hope (9/?)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairings: None among main characters, background Lucius/Narcissa and Arthur/Molly
Content Notes: AU, angst, some violence
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Harry is mustering more and more support for the changes he wants to make in the wizarding world as he returns to Hogwarts after his first Christmas holiday. But as some people begin to believe he can make those changes, others see him as a threat.
Author’s Notes: This takes place in my Children of the Sun series after “The Secrets of Longbottom Manor.”
Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Nine-Misplaced
“Thank you agreeing to speak with me, Ms. Jordan.” Minerva made sure to keep her voice soft and professional as she glanced through the parchments in front of her. In fact, many of them had been arranged only as cover for her interview. She wanted to try and pretend this wasn’t something on which several important decisions could ride.
“If you’d state your business and make it so that we can get on with it, Headmistress? Reporters have deadlines, you know.”
Minerva glanced up and nodded. Claire Jordan sat near the edge of the chair in front of Minerva’s desk, although not in a way that would make Minerva think she suspected the truth and wanted to leave. Her mare stood at her shoulder. Tin, yes, despite her name.
And now that Minerva was looking, or rather watching the way that Malkin was staring fixedly at Silver’s Whisper, she could see ways in which the mare was different from ordinary familiars. She barely moved. Her tail swished only now and then. Her eyes blinked sometimes, but didn’t have the lustrous depth that Minerva associated with horses.
“Headmistress?”
“There are concerns, based on some of the papers that he left behind, that Hogwarts’s former Headmaster did not behave appropriately with students,” Minerva said, and left the words to lie in the middle of the floor to see how Jordan would respond to them.
Jordan’s eyes widened before she laughed. “Are you trying to ask if he made any sexual advances towards me, Headmistress?”
“Well, yes. I suppose I am. I didn’t know for sure if that was what had happened based on the notes he left, which were rather obscure, but...”
Jordan shook her head, her dark hair bouncing around her face, her smile supremely confident. “The Headmaster only spoke with me privately two times, once to welcome me to the school shortly after I was first Sorted, and then once when I’d got in a fight with two of my Housemates that was so bad there was talk of my expulsion. He certainly never made an advance to me. Besides, wasn’t he gay? I’m sure I heard that rumor.”
“His former relationship was part of the gossip,” Minerva agreed, which was as much as she was willing to get into it with someone who might be an enemy in ways she didn’t understand yet. “But can you describe the meeting he had with you after you were Sorted? Some of his alarming notes came from those meetings.”
In seconds, Jordan’s shoulders were tight and rising, and Silver’s Whisper nosed forwards until her head was practically draped over one of those shoulders. Jordan gave Minerva a single, wild-eyed glance, then managed to bite her lip and glance down. “I don’t want to discuss that meeting.”
“Ms. Jordan, please. I know that it might hold very painful memories for you, but-”
“He did nothing to me. I want to leave now.” Jordan stood up, her robes swishing around her.
“It was more based on what he might have said. That’s what I was trying to figure out from the notes, if he said something that made students feel less welcome at Hogwarts.”
“Your investigative techniques need work,” was all Jordan said, her face blank and hostile, and she walked over to the door and let herself out. Her familiar moved behind her, legs almost mechanical. Minerva knew that wasn’t usual, either. She would have expected at least a backwards look from a familiar whose wizard she’d irritated.
She turned to Malkin. Malkin immediately walked over to the ledger that was part of the notes Minerva had left out, and which she had intended to read from if Jordan had been more cooperative, and pawed at it.
“What is it?” Minerva tilted it open and let the pages fall past until Malkin’s paw slammed down again. Yes, there it was, the page that described Albus’s meeting with Claire Jordan. Minerva studied it again.
Nothing that she hadn’t already seen, though. The description, the notes on Jordan’s House placement and familiar. If she hadn’t seen the birth certificate that declared Jordan a Squib, she wouldn’t have thought anything was out of place at all.
Malkin tapped insistently near the bottom of the page. Minerva looks at it and frowned. “What? The only thing there is Albus’s signature.” It had become more and more flowing over the years, although so covered with flourishes that Minerva personally found it difficult to make out each individual letter.
Minerva peered again at the signature. Now that Malkin pointed it out, there seemed to be an extra A at the beginning, as if Albus had started to sign his name in one place, then changed his mind and started over again elsewhere.
Curious now, Minerva glanced at Malkin and his switching tail. “Have you seen that in other places?”
Malkin promptly yowled, and Minerva turned the pages until she reached another person whom Albus had identified as having a familiar and whose birth certificate listed them as a Squib. Yes, the A was there, too. And on the pages of a few people whose familiars Albus had listed as “unnatural,” but not on all of them.
“Great. Another mystery,” Minerva told Malkin. But Malkin, looking as smug as though he had just solved one, curled up and went to sleep on top of most of the papers on the desk. Minerva said. She supposed it was fair that he leave his human to figure out what was going on this time, when he’d already helped.
*
“I wish you would be more careful, Mr. Potter.”
Harry glanced up with a blink. He’d been packing up his books to leave Defense, and Golden had Harry’s bag looped around his neck, wanting to carry it, the way he sometimes did. “Why? Has something happened, Professor?”
Professor Quirrell sighed. He was petting Alanna, the way he usually was. Then again, Harry thought it was probably pretty weird to have your familiar possessed at the same time you were possessed yourself, and so you’d want to touch them all the time. “Come with me, Mr. Potter.”
Harry put the last books in the bag Golden was holding, curious now, and went across the corridor with Professor Quirrell. They were in a small room that looked as if it had once held storage, but it was empty now. Professor Quirrell cleared away the dust with a sweep of his wand and then touched his wand to the enormous crystal globe sitting on the table in the center of the room.
It began to glow and spin. Harry laughed in surprise. Professor Quirrell blinked at him.
“It looks like a Muggle disco ball, Professor.”
Maybe some people wouldn’t have known what Harry was talking about, but Professor Quirrell used to teach Muggle Studies, he knew. He smiled thinly. “Yes, I understand. But I need you to watch the memory that it captured from last week, Mr. Potter.”
Harry obediently leaned in. He saw a corridor that he’d thought was empty. He was meeting with Curtis, the bronze peacock who was Wychard Medwyn’s familiar. It was last week, just like Professor Quirrell said. Then again, Harry had known that.
“What did you want me to look at, sir?”
“Watch and learn.”
Harry obediently turned back to the globe, just as Curtis got nervous and ran away again. Harry sighed a little. Curtis had tried to tell them some more about the “vessels” that the Medwyn family wanted to use their familiars for, or make them into, or whatever was really going on, but he had still been scattered. And Golden said he didn’t want to betray his wizard.
But just as Curtis fluttered away, someone moved in the memory near a doorway. Harry leaned in and squinted. Yes, it was Medwyn there, Curtis’s wizard. And he looked so upset that Harry was actually surprised he hadn’t come out right then and confronted Harry and Curtis and Golden.
Instead, he turned and stormed away. Harry shook his head. That meant there was a Medwyn who knew about them. That could be bad.
Professor Quirrell ended the memories that were dancing in the disco ball. Harry looked up. Professor Quirrell was grim, and Alanna was sitting on his shoulder and watching them with such twitchy ears that Harry thought she resembled Curtis. “What are you going to do now?” Professor Quirrell asked.
“I suppose that we’ll talk to Professor Snape about this. And probably the Headmistress. I can’t really do anything else until Medwyn comes and talks to me, sir.”
Professor Quirrell tensed. “You seem very calm about this.”
“I mean, I wish he hadn’t found out, and I don’t want him to mistreat Curtis. But you think-you think something else is going to happen, sir?”
“I was anticipating an attack on you.”
Harry looked at Professor Quirrell thoughtfully. “I understand, sir. But I don’t think Medwyn is really like that. He’ll probably either yell at me, or he’ll stay in the background and write to relatives of his. It could be worse if he does that, because I think he has relatives in the Ministry who could make trouble. But I’ll have Golden with me, you know. And we can probably deflect most attacks.”
“You should not be so calm. You should realize that you are attempting to upset the hierarchy, and there are people who take that very seriously.”
“I mean, I know, sir?” Harry was a little puzzled, not sure what Professor Quirrell wanted him to say. “But I can only keep on going. And someone was going to find out what I was doing at some point.”
“You should stop.”
“Stop what, sir?”
“Getting in the way. Upsetting the hierarchy.”
Harry tilted his head a little. “I don’t think I can do that, sir. Not when there are familiars who are being ignored and mistreated and made into vessels of some kind, and not when there are people with tin and copper familiars who are treated the same way. And not when people want to kneel to me as a lord.”
“What does that last have to do with it?”
“Because there are people who would always treat me like I mattered more than they did. And that’s not true. So I have to make it stop being true.”
Professor Quirrell closed his eyes for a second, and his hand tightened on Alanna until she squirmed uncomfortably. Then he released her and said, “But it makes it sound as if you will go against the stated wishes of people who make up the hierarchy to do so.”
“Some of them, yes, sir,” Harry agreed, thinking of the Malfoys. Well, not Draco, who was great if uncomfortable around Hermione sometimes, but Mr. and Mrs. Malfoy. “But they’re already going against the stated wishes of a lot of people, like the ones with tin and copper familiars. So I have to accept that.”
“Accept what?”
“That a lot of people are going to be upset with me.”
Professor Quirrell bowed his head. “You saved my life and sanity,” he said, his words blurring the way Dudley’s sometimes did when he got really upset. Harry wished he could do something, but he didn’t think he could. “I would not see any harm come to you.”
“I wasn’t the only one who was there for the ritual, though,” Harry told him. He really wanted Professor Quirrell to remember that. Sometimes he thought Voldemort had managed to get control of Professor Quirrell because he was so lonely and didn’t have lots of friends. “So please remember that you have other people who can help you.”
“I can’t convince you to turn your back on this.”
“You mean to stop trying to figure out what people are using their familiars for? No, sir. Sorry.”
Professor Quirrell lifted his head. “I didn’t really think I could,” he admitted, and next to him, Alanna shivered in what looked like relief. “So the important thing will be to make sure that you’re protected as you intervene in the hierarchy.”
“How are you going to do that, though, sir? I mean, it’s dangerous enough for us to be fighting the hierarchy in the first place.”
“I-have some memories from my possession.” Professor Quirrell shuddered a little. “The Forbidden Arts that Voldemort studied, but also some magic he studied that’s not illegal or immoral, just little-known. I’d like to start teaching that to you. You have the power necessary to use it. You should be able to defend yourself.”
Harry found his face softening. “You don’t have to do that, Professor Quirrell. I mean, if it makes you uncomfortable.”
“No. I can hardly let you face this alone. And you’re a golden wizard who barely has any idea of what he can do.” Professor Quirrell ignored the way that Golden straightened his neck and looked very offended. “I want to do what I can to help.”
“All right,” Harry said. “So in the meantime, do you know anything about the Medwyn family? Or what it would mean for someone to turn a familiar into a vessel?”
Professor Quirrell licked his lips. “Not directly. I’ll have to study a little and get back to you. But in the meantime, I want to show you how to take a mobile Shield Charm with you.”
“Isn’t the Shield Charm a fifth-year spell, sir?”
“It can be learned by lower years in extreme circumstances. And I think yours qualifies.”
Harry nodded, feeling a little impressed and a little depressed. Professor Quirrell really did think people were going to attack him just because he wanted some things to change. The silver witches and wizards didn’t even have to lose very much! They just had to think and talk and listen!
But some people, Harry knew from just knowing the Dursleys, hated to do that. So he supposed it made sense that he would have to learn magic to defend himself until they would instead.
Chapter Ten.
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