Ripples in the Pond

“Found anything yet?” came Ron’s voice as they took to the shelves of the Hogwarts Library, Restricted Section and all. It was uncannily easy to beg the new Headmistress for a pass to the Restricted Section, more so when Hermione had brought up the newest phenomena of him shrinking little by little each day. It was an almost mercifully slow process, and he had yet to experience another three-centimetre loss of height like he had the first morning he’d woken up shrinking. Yet he was still losing height – though the strangest thing had to be the fact that his weight was barely going down despite the fact he looked like he was losing mass.

“Nope,” he muttered, listlessly pawing through the sheafs of paper of the latest yellowing tome Hermoine had plucked from the shelves for their perusal.

“Nothing here on height loss following returning from limbo,” Hermione mumbled from next to him, and idly Harry listened as Ron’s footsteps became fainter – the redhead going to search the further recesses of the library – and he watched as Hermione sped-read her way through the book she had in her hands. Her bushy brown hair was a mess, unlike the careful curls she had managed only a matter of days before, and there were familiar blueish marks beneath her eyes from sleepless nights. “Yet there’s something in his book about the density of magic, and how certain magical creatures are able to store some form of unique spells within them. I feel like it could be relevant, but Merlin help us if anyone finds out…”

He glanced up from the fading ink of the book he was thumbing through. “Because it’s to do with magical creatures, not witches and wizards?” he questioned, wondering if he ought to feel more alarmed and wary than he did. He knew, after all, how the Wizarding World treated those who they didn’t view as human. He knew how badly it rankled Hermione, and he didn’t really want to think on the media storm which would follow the revelation that Harry Potter no longer numbered among those considered human anymore. Part of him wanted to think the thanks from bringing about a Dark Lord would make people think it was no big deal. Yet he still remembered the way the opinions of the masses had shifted with nothing more than a few articles portraying him in a negative light.

Then again, he knew he was human. He’d know if he was somehow, bizarrely, no longer human anymore. Wouldn’t he? He sucked in a soft breath, viciously trying to ignore the smidgeon of doubt which was clawing at the edges of his mind. He tried to come up with the reason why it felt like the world had suddenly shifted three steps to the left, coming up blank every single time.

“Well, yes,” Hermione remarked, making a face then. “People here have already showed how small-minded they can be at times,” she said, and he was reminded then of just how long Hermione had his back. Her very presence was like a balm to his mind, a knowing thought that she would somehow – no matter what – figure things out and pull him and Ron through with her smarts. “If they thought that you were no longer human… I don’t really what to think of what some people would want to do, even if you’re the Man Who Conquered these days.”

Harry blinked. “The Man Who Conquered?” he echoed, a frown creasing at his brow. “Seriously?”

Hermione snorted, eyes going back to the pages she was combing through for any fraction of a clue as to what was going on with him. “That’s right,” she said, flicking the page and scowling. “The only books which have even been remotely helpful are the ones with more… ‘dark’ and esoteric content,” she muttered. “The Hogwarts Library is brilliant… but there have obviously been purges of some content. Ugh.” She scowled. “I swear, if I found out who took those books…”

“Probably some poncy pureblood who they’d look better in their personal collection,” Harry said, resting his head on his hand as he peered at the gruesome illustrations penned in a hand which was just about legible, and that in itself was telling of just how old that book undoubtedly was. And the generally confusing explanations which no sane person could understand were probably the reason it hadn’t been stolen or burnt whenever someone had removed books from there.

“Personal collection…” she mumbled, looking eerily like Luna for a split second as she stared dreamily off into space. Harry wondered then if he’d have to warn anyone and everyone with a personal library to guard their hoard of books with all the zealous and possessiveness of a mother dragon guarding its clutch of eggs. And he knew firsthand just how zealous and possessive those dragons could be. “Harry,” she said, clarity returning to her, an increasingly maddening look shining in her eyes. “Grimmauld Place. The Black Library! We should see if they have anything too!”

“We should probably rest first – but yes. That’s a good call,” he said, idly wondering if he should be afraid of the sheer enthusiasm Hermione was showing despite being mildly sleep deprived in her quest to figure out exactly what was wrong with him.

“But every time you go to sleep you get smaller,” Hermione said frantically, tears biting at the corners of her eyes. She got to her feet, the chair skidding harshly against the floor as it was pushed back away from the table. Her hands slammed on the desk, curling into fists. “How are you not scared?” she demanded, turning to him then, and Harry could only blink once before her arms were wrapped around him and hugging him almost desperately. As though she was afraid he would vanish if she let go.

Harry smiled softly, tentatively, almost uncertainly returning that hug. It was like Hermione was unknowingly trying to make up for his childhood barren of hugs and any form of proper familial affection. Though she would never know that much. “I’ll be okay,” he reiterated, an eerie certainty that didn’t quite belong to him underlying his spoken words. “I always am – trust me.”

Hermione only sighed, pulling back to look at him with a mixture of fondness and uncertainty. “Okay. But we’re flooing over to Grimmauld Place as soon as we’ve finished breakfast tomorrow morning,” she declared, and Harry only looked at her and shivered as he thought he saw the first signs of Hermione coming to resemble Professor McGonagall in the mildest of forms.

Harry sneezed the second he was ejected from the floo, eyes wide as he took in the thin layer of dust which had settled on the floor and on almost every surface of the living room of 12 Grimmauld Place. Quietly, he wandered over to where the creaky staircase leading to upstairs, looking up at the railing they had once all congregated around and listened to what the adults were talking about through the handy invention called the Extendable Ears.

“What the bloody hell has Kreacher been doing?” Ron muttered, eyeing the remarkably clean drapes concealing Mrs Black’s portrait.

“I hope he’s okay,” Hermione murmured, glancing around then. “I saw him at the end of the Battle of Hogwarts, but I didn’t think to check on him afterwards… there’s been so much going on,” she said, looking mildly regretful.

“He’s just been away for a while, there’s no need to worry,” Harry said, going then to the cupboard under the stairs, knowing that was where the more mundane cleaning equipment was kept. The second cupboard beneath the stairs was where the old house elf had made his bed. “I should probably see if he wants to move into one of the bedrooms… Merlin knows I’ll never be able to use all of them… if I even manage to stay here,” he spoke, looking around the place, even as he retrieved the cleaning equipment.

It almost felt like Sirius would come out of one of the upstairs rooms and welcome him for a moment, even as Ron set about lighting the fire to give the somewhat dreary room some warmth and light.

“We’ll figure this out,” Hermione promised, even as she got started with cleaning. “We always do,” she said, looking more as though she were trying to convince herself than anyone else. “Let’s let Kreacher rest for a bit. He might even still be at Hogwarts making friends with the other House elves who work there.”

“Hermione, I don’t think that house elf would know friendship even if it dressed up in a pink tutu and danced rings around him,” Ron said, wandering over to peruse the bookshelves in the living room then. “I think the stuff we’ll want is in the actual library,” he said, glancing back at them before flicking his wand at the mop and bucket and bringing them to life to start sweeping the dust and clean the floors. “Huh… Looks like Mum’s cleaning charms are good for something…”

Distractions came to him easily, Harry found as he realised his feet had brought him to his late Godfather’s room. “Oh,” he murmured softly, remembering the one half of his mother’s letter he had found in that place. Idly, he wondered if he would find another snippet of the past buried in that room.

Curiosity overcame him then, and he nosed at the bookshelf in the corner of Sirius’s bright red and gold room. It was a sharp contrast to the rest of the dreary house, though Sirius clearly had never been overly fond of books if the sparseness of the shelves was anything to go off of. He hummed in amusement at that, wandering over to the large desk and pulling open draw after draw, eager to scrounge up something which would bring a smile to his face like his mother’s letter had not even a year ago.

There was a sheaf of parchment with unfinished summer homework on it, a good few inches taken up by numerous doodles. Then there was a small diary which he didn’t dare to touch. How he had missed that on his rummage before, he wasn’t entirely certain. All he knew was that he wasn’t ready to open those pages and read just yet. At least not without a bottle of Ogden’s Finest Firewhisky to hand. He plucked out the next piece of parchment, frowning when his eyes caught sight of the bottle green seal stamped on every official St Mungo's Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries paperwork. It was old, the wax having cracked and dried long ago, and Harry wondered if he was snooping through something he shouldn’t have been.

Then he spotted his father’s name on it.

He blinked, eyes darting to the date – a date which said his father could have only been sixteen when he’d been checked at the one and only British Wizarding Hospital that he knew of and St Mungo’s had informed him that he was infertile thanks to a potions accident.

Harry blinked once more, numbly watching as that parchment floated down, feather light though his fingers, to the surface of the desk. What did it mean? He could only wonder numbly, brain slowly trying to process what that bit of parchment from St Mungo’s had done to him. A reedy wheeze sounded, and it took him more than a few moments to realise that he was the one making that sound. Because apparently his father had become infertile at the tender age of sixteen, younger than he was right then and there. He blinked, staring at the red and gold drapes – the sight of them almost making him think he was back in the Gryffindor Dormitory for a moment instead of the dreary, dark Grimmauld Place.

Yet there he was in the Black property, ensconced in his Godfather’s bedroom, revelling in shock at what that bit of parchment was implying to him. And that opened up a whole another kettle of fish that he wasn’t quite certain was ready to be unleashed on the world. “What?” he asked the wall blankly, as though the drywall and plaster would have an answer for the madness which had taken hold of him only minutes ago.

“Harry!” Ron’s voice pierced through the haze, and it was only when his friend barged through the door that he realised he was sitting down in that office chair, feeling as though his world had been upended on his head. “Har—uh. What’s wrong?” Ron demanded, and he wondered if Hermione was rubbing off on him because their expressions of concern were nearly identical.

Wordlessly, he held out the St Mungo’s report, fingers scraping against the hard surface of the desk as he fumbled about with the thick piece of official parchment for a few moments. “Ron,” he muttered, his voice sounding ever so distant to his own ears. “What is that supposed to mean?” he asked, feeling as lost as a man could when a fact he had never thought of as even possibly incorrect suddenly was proven just that.

“Bloody hell,” Ron murmured, eyes darting frantically between his seated form and the contents of that document.

“Harry, Ron!” Hermione’s voice came from further in the house. “I found something!” she called, the sound of her voice growing closer by the second. Two books were stacked in her arms as she rounded the corner and bustled through the doorframe. “Well, it’s not a perfect match, at least I don’t think it—why do you both look like the fabric of the universe has just warped?” Hermione asked, setting the books down on the desk with a puff of dust from the sheer weight of the couple of thick tomes.

Ron held the parchment from St Mungo’s out. “James Potter isn’t Harry’s father. We think,” Ron tacked on the end, and Harry was reminded then that there was a slim chance that his parents had found some wild, wacky, magical way to conceive him.

He didn’t think that particularly likely.

“Oh,” Hermione said intelligently. “Bummer. That throws that idea out the window…”

Something like a biting chuckle built in his throat, a snort of almost morbid amusement escaping him then – because his name was Harry Potter, son of James Potter. That was a fact as clear as day – as sure as the fact that the sun rose in the east and set in the west. He looked like James Potter. He had his mother’s eyes.

Yet there in the dim lighting of Grimmauld Place, amidst the soft shadows and dingy glowing crystals, his eyes didn’t seem like the emeralds they’d often been compared to. He stared at the reflection of his face in the mirror above the desk, watching as those green eyes seemed to glimmer and glow faintly, the colouration far too vivid and a shade shy of something acrid, the pupils just a tad too elongated to be natural.

“Godric’s Hollow won’t have anything… which means the only answers we’ll be able to find will be… here,” Hermione said decisively, and Harry could only nod his head numbly, still reeling in the shock of their latest discovery.

James Potter was not his father.

That was the likeliest explanation. It wasn’t like any of them were well versed on other methods through which wizards and witches would procreate. It wasn’t like his father was around to get a sample of his DNA and perform a paternity test. Well, they could try and get a sample from a decomposed body which was probably just bones by that point, but that would involve exhuming a coffin or two – and no matter if he wasn’t his biological father James Potter had died for him. It hardly felt right to dig up a man and his wife who’d long since been lain to rest.

“Shame you dropped the Resurrection Stone,” Ron muttered, lacing his hands behind his head as they sat around the crackling fireplace. “Could really have done with some answers from the dead right now…”

“Maybe,” Harry mumbled, closing his eyes as he remembered those shades who had surrounded him before he had gone to confront Voldemort in the forest. Does it hurt? He remembered asking them, watching as his mother, his father, Lupin, and his godfather stood with him in the forest. Why? He wanted to go back and ask the shade of James Potter. Why didn’t you tell me that I wasn’t your son? Yet he couldn’t.

The bookcase in that living room rattled all of a sudden then, and he startled, wand at the ready in case a swarm of doxies were about. He still remembered the last time Mrs Weasley had them cleaning the place out – back when Sirius had been alive and as well-off as an Azkaban escapee could be. Yet instead of the swarm of fairy-like creatures with venomous fangs and tails like tiny whips, a book fell to the floor instead. It landed on the recently cleaned floor with a loud thud, and the three of them remained where they were, half crouched or seated and alert with their wands trained on the bookshelf’s vicinity.

Silence reigned for a few moments, only broken by the sound of crackling and popping from the logs as they burnt on the fire.

“Bloody hell, what’s with this house?” Ron muttered, lowering his wand as peace returned to the room and nothing lumbered out of the shadows to try and attack them.

“At least its not doxies this time,” Harry reminded, earning himself a quirk of lips as they almost fondly recalled their days of doxy wrangling.

“It’s just a book,” Hermione said, prodding the floored tome with her wand then, eyeing it as though it might suddenly come to life. Harry froze, abruptly recalling the Monster Book of Monsters, and the strange sense of logic there was to certain denizens of the Wizarding World. Hagrid had thought that evil, finger-chomping book was cute and adorable. “Here,” she murmured, picking it up off the floor, and Harry watched her, not thinking about stopping her even as Ron chimed in from across the room.

“Hermione, that could have been cursed!” Ron exclaimed, looking at her worriedly. “Have you forgotten this is a Black House?”

She opened her mouth, as if to contest that fact, only to stop halfway, evidently realising that she didn’t quite have an argument against that much. “Well,” she said after a moment. “They weren’t. Evidently. Here – it’s your house, technically, so it now belongs to you. Curses and all, whatnot.” She held it out to him, spine first, and Harry could only blink as something dropped out from its pages.

He leant forwards then, watching as Hermione set the book on the small coffee table between them all, all the while reaching out to pick up that slip of paper, blinking when he realised it wasn’t a bit of paper but rather two small relatively square photographs.

Curious, he looked at them, frowning when he spotted a pitch black, large egg speckled with green. He glanced at the next photograph, his frown only growing when he spotted an incredibly small and rather thin-looking baby, bare as the day it was born, sitting in the remnants of a black and green egg shell. Then he looked at the crossed out scrawl beneath the first photo, frowning when he read The Potter’s Mysterious Egg. Yet next to those scrawled out words were two very familiar ones.

Harry Potter, the labels on both photographs read, the latter marked with the date of his very birth. “Huh,” he muttered, mind feeling uncannily blank as he stared at those two bizarre photos.

“What is it, Harry?”

Harry blinked. “I think I might have hatched out of an egg,” he uttered, brain feeling as though it were full of candy floss as he struggled to understand what those strange photographs were implying.

“What the bloody hell is that supposed to mean?”