Getting off Lightly
Bellatrix Lestrange was very lucky to be a free woman. Her master, Lord Voldemort, met his demise when he attacked Longbottom Manor, and his curse rebounded when he tried to kill the Boy-Who-Lived, Neville Longbottom.
Hoping to find information on what had happened to their master, a group of Death Eaters attacked the Potter Cottage in Godric's Hollow, its location revealed to them by their spy, Peter Pettigrew.
Bellatrix was supposed to be a part of that group, but she stayed behind on a tip from Snape, one of Regulus' old friends, that they would not find what they were looking for at the Potters. Instead, Rodolphus and Rabastan Lestrange, along with Crouch Jr., mounted the attack on their own, and killed James and Lily Potter before backup could arrive.
Bellatrix's husband and brother-in-law were convicted, along with her dearly departed cousin's oldest friend, while she walked free under the imperius defence which she had borrowed from her other brother-in-law, Lucius Malfoy.
As she was constantly reminded, she was very lucky to be free.
But she didn't feel lucky.
Sirius was in prison for a crime he did not commit and, although she hadn't much liked her oldest cousin, he was the only one she had left, and now he was rotting in Azkaban undeservedly.
The worst thing, though, was that there was nothing she could do about it. For all intents and purposes, Sirius was guilty for the thirteen murders of which he was convicted, because no-one else knew that Pettigrew had been the secret keeper, and she couldn't expose the truth without implicating herself as a willing Death Eater.
Pettigrew had disappeared to parts unknown, so the only proof she could offer without consigning herself to Azkaban was out of reach, meaning Sirius was, until further proof showed itself, locked up for life.
For the first time in living memory, Bellatrix was all alone. Sirius and Rodolphus were in Azkaban, Andromeda was not on speaking terms with her, and Narcissa was far too busy raising her little boy to spend any real time with her oldest sister.
She was not welcome at home - ‘You’re no daughter of mine,’ had been the last words which her father had spoken to her, after she had taken the Dark Mark - and great uncle Arcturus rarely had time to see her with his duties as Lord Black.
The closest thing she had to a friend nowadays was Severus Snape, and what a sad reality that was, seeing as the greasy-haired man had only ever been a mutual acquaintance through Regulus.
Still, being somewhat-friends with Dumbledore’s Death Eater lapdog certainly had its benefits, even if alleviating the crushing loneliness she felt now that the war was over was not one of them; the man was far too occupied with his duties as the new Hogwarts potions professor for that.
No, the thing about Severus Snape was that he had all the juiciest gossip - or, as he would have phrased it, pertinent information - which she had once relied on Narcissa for, fed straight to him by Dumbledore. After a few firewhiskies - for that was one of the few things they had in common, a love for the drink - he was more than willing to spill the latest news, and Bellatrix always lapped it up.
Call her sad, but with no family left to speak of these conversations with Severus were the highlight to her otherwise terribly mundane life, and she simply couldn’t get enough of them. Well, that was true, until a certain conversation during the summer break of 1987.
Bellatrix was sprawled on the couch at Spinner’s End, a bottle of firewhiskey held loosely in her hand as she half-listened to Severus talk about Dumbledore’s latest kooky ideas. An absent sort of smile played at her lips as she took another swig from the bottle before handing it over to Severus, interrupting his story.
Neither of them were particularly mad about that - Bellatrix hadn’t been paying particularly close attention anyway, fast approaching the sloppy stage of drunkenness as she was, and Severus seemingly had a better story to tell, judging by the way a slight light seemed to have illuminated his normally cold, black eyes.
He drained the last dregs of the bottle, setting it down on the floor and brushing off some invisible dust from his black button-up; the man never seemed to dress down, even when unwinding as he was now. Bellatrix was faintly annoyed that there was no more to drink, but she figured she had probably had enough anyways, and it was all the better that she wouldn’t be distracted for this story - it looked to be a particularly good one, if the way Severus was building up for it was any indication.
“Did I ever tell you about Lily’s sister, Petunia?”
Bellatrix instantly felt herself sober up at those words. Severus never talked about Lily, even when the firewhiskey had him at his most loose-lipped. Wherever this conversation was heading, it was clearly important. Slowly she shook her head.
“Mmm. Thought not. Beastly woman, the worst type of muggle imaginable. Even when we were kids, she was always yammering on about ‘freaks’ and that sort of thing.”
Bellatrix said nothing. Severus rarely bothered with preamble, but that was clearly what this was. There was a slightly crazed look to the light in his eyes now, which reminded her rather pointedly of herself. It looked deeply unnatural on the face of Severus Snape, and she made a motion with her hand for him to continue, eager to see it gone.
“Dumbledore left the Potter boy with her. I don’t know where she lives now, but she grew up here in Cokeworth. Do with that what you will.”
Bellatrix didn’t think she was imagining the way Severus’ mouth was curling upwards ever-so-slightly, as though he knew what he had just set in motion; she wouldn’t have expected everything else from the man, embodiment of Slytherin cunning that he was.
Bellatrix was a lot of things, many of them unsavoury, but someone who was willing to sit by and let child abuse happen under her nose she was not. She knew the monsters which a bad childhood could make, and she would give anything to save the baby who her husband had orphaned from that fate. No matter what people said about where Bellatrix’s loyalties lay, there was a reason she had never petitioned for Rodolphus’ release, and it wasn’t because she knew it was a hopeless endeavour.
"Oh, I- *hic* - know just what to do with that information, Severus, thank you very much," she said, slurring her words slightly as she got to her feet in a very ungainly manner, whipping her cloud of curly black hair up into a storm around her as she fought to stay upright.
"Before you go running off on whatever mission you've just decided to assign yourself, go into the kitchen and get yourself a sober-up potion, Bella. You'll thank me for saving you from the embarrassment of stumbling around the muggle world like some sort of loon. I'm told they're more tolerant of that sort of thing than our kind, but it is still not a flattering look."
Bellatrix gave the sallow man a mock-salute before stumbling her way into the kitchen, where there was indeed a sober-up potion waiting for her. She pressed it to her lips and tipped her head back, draining the little vial in one go, shuddering slightly at the bitter taste.
She imagined that it was probably engineered that way to encourage people to consider their drinking habits, but Bellatrix didn’t particularly care as long as it got the job done, which it was currently doing most effectively.
The warmth of the firewhiskey was leaving her at a rather uncomfortable rate, and she shivered at the sudden cold. At the same time, the pleasant dulling of the senses which the firewhiskey brought on was also leaving her, and with her hazy awareness quickly sharpening she was beginning to feel something slightly manic rising up inside of her.
What business did Dumbledore have meddling with the custody of Harry Potter? By right, the boy was a Black, with no Potter relatives left to take him in and a grandmother of the House. Oh, she knew perfectly well why Dumbledore wouldn’t have favoured that option, the son of two war heroes being raised in a family with a reputation like the Blacks, but to actually abscond with the boy and leave him in the custody of muggles…
That just wouldn’t do. Bellatrix did not hold well with things which were not as she believed they should be, and Harry Potter living with muggles was certainly not the way she thought things ought to be.
She was building up to a storming temper, and she knew it. However, that wouldn’t be beneficial for anyone, so she tried to push past it. She flounced back into the living room and shrugged into her furs, which had been discarded on the sofa, and pulled her high heels back on, which she had abandoned after the fourth round of firewhiskey, as they had become too difficult to walk in.
“You’re headed off then? On some pigheaded mission to save the Potter boy, I assume?”
Bellatrix gave a jerky nod, and was about to Apparate, when Severus grabbed her arm.
“Good. I’d have done it myself, were he not the spawn of James Potter. You do good by that boy, Bella. He can’t grow up to become another Regulus. Another me.”
Bellatrix nodded again, although her pointed chin was wobbling slightly at that. Regulus was still a very raw subject for her, even eight years after her baby cousin’s death, and Severus’ mention of the less than stellar upbringing he had received under the dubious care of Walburga Black was enough to have her coming undone as though it was still that fateful night in 1979, when her little cousin had met his end.
The last two words which Severus had spoken were lost on her entirely as she bit back tears, turning on her heel and Disapparating without so much as a ‘goodbye’ to her only remaining friend.
She had not come very far at all since the Dark Lord fell, even with the significant amount of time which had elapsed since the ill-fated attack on Longbottom Manor. Perhaps Harry Potter could change that.
-oOo-
Petunia Dursley was a very difficult woman to find. However, it was by no means a Sisyphean task. While there had clearly been some tampering with records in order to obscure the woman’s identity, likely courtesy of Dumbledore, it was not done with the precision necessary to wipe someone’s records completely in the much more robust muggle system.
With the help of some private eyes - for Bellatrix was not so crude as to wade through muggle records herself - she had procured a marriage certificate between Vernon Dursley and Petunia Dursley née Evans, apparently an archive of a record which no longer existed.
Regardless, with that information, the family became exceedingly easy to find. Muggles apparently had a document called a ‘phone book,’ which made the address of anyone whose name you knew and could be bothered to look up freely available.
It seemed queer to her that such a thing existed - she certainly wouldn’t like anyone who knew her name being able to find her address - but she supposed that muggles did a lot of things which could be considered queer.
In any case, she now knew that the Dursleys lived at Number 4 Privet Drive, and had Harry Potter with them. It would have suited her just fine to simply break into the house, take Harry from them by force and leave it at that, but she had a feeling that that might upset the boy, so she would have to try a gentler tact. Not much her style, but she wasn’t a Slytherin for nothing.
She Apparated to Number 4 Privet Drive, but did not enter. Instead, she placed a tracking charm on their car, and Disapparated shortly after. Now all she had to do was wait, something she was infamously inept at doing, with her hair-trigger temper and paper thin patience. Still, for Harry, she managed it.
About two weeks after she had placed the charm, the Dursley’s car finally went somewhere other than St. Grogory’s Primary School or Grunnings. She followed its little dot on the map she had anchored the tracking charm to, and saw it finally come to a stop outside of a fancy restaurant.
Pop!
Bellatrix appeared in an alleyway, within walking distance of the restaurant. After assuring that she had not been seen, she briskly made her way over to where she knew the place was, guided by the magical compulsion of the tracking charm.
Once there, she loitered inconspicuously outside the front of the restaurant, covertly peering through the windows as she tried to find the Dursleys. After some looking, she eventually identified Mr. and Mrs. Dursley and their son, but, suspiciously, no Harry.
She felt something dangerous rising up in her as she saw that. Her original plan had been to get Harry on his own if he ever got up to use the restroom, but evidently that was not going to work.
She moved back over to the car and peered into the window, her irritation mounting as she realised that he was not in there either. Obviously, she had known that Harry was likely not loved as he should have been in this family, or she wouldn’t be trying to separate them - even if she did find the idea of a wizarding child growing up with muggles very distasteful.
However, she hadn’t expected them to hide him away in the house while the rest of the family went out. Bellatrix was familiar with abuse - having experienced it first hand from her mother, and having observed it when they went over to Grimmauld Place - but she had never experienced this particular flavour of it.
While aunt Walburga had been perfectly content to scream herself hoarse at Sirius and Regulus and shoot hexes at them behind closed doors, when they were in public she never failed to bring the two boys along with her, proudly showing off her perfect pureblood sons.
Actually hiding your child from the world was not something she had ever really imagined being done. That dangerous feeling in her chest was reaching a crescendo as she Apparated into a phone booth near Privet Drive, and she quickly made her way to number four, all the while that rage continued to bubble up within her.
As she approached the front door of the house, it unlocked itself with a muted click . She thought distantly that she was much too old for that sort of accidental magic, but she couldn’t bring herself to care as she pushed the door open, looking around for any sign of life.
The ground floor seemed deserted, but just when she was about to check upstairs a voice called out from somewhere in the house.
“Aunt Petunia, is that you?”
The voice had clearly come from the floor of the house that she was on, but she still couldn’t see any movement, and she couldn’t figure out where it had come from.
“I’m not your aunt Petunia, Harry. I’m here to speak to you. Could you tell me where you are?”
There was silence for perhaps a minute, and Bellatrix began to worry that she was going to have to go tearing through the house looking for the boy, when the voice spoke up again, so meek that she almost missed it.
“Under the stairs.”
Bellatrix’s breath caught, and for a moment she was no longer at Number Four Privet Drive, but at Grimmauld Place.
She was seventeen, and Sirius was nine. Regulus was seven, soon to be eight, and they were just coming off of a family dinner. Regulus had been conspicuously absent, but Orion had said that he had come down with a cold, and was staying in his room.
Bellatrix hadn’t thought much of it, even with Sirius fidgeting nervously throughout the entire dinner. After the dinner, Bellatrix had remained behind for a bit to look around in the library for some books on curses, as the library at Grimmauld Place was much more expansive than the one at home.
“Bella?” Sirius had asked tentatively, his voice barely above a whisper. “Bella, can you come with me, please?”
Bellatrix had obliged, bemused at Sirius’ uncharacteristic shyness and manners - she didn’t think she had ever before heard him use the word ‘please’ with her before.
“You can’t tell mum and dad that I took you here,” he had pleaded with her after leading her to an inconspicuous door under the stairs. He had then knocked on it, and, to Bellatrix’s horror, Regulus’ voice came from the other side.
“Mother, is that you?”
“No, it’s Sirius, Reg. I brought Bella, too.”
There had been an indistinguishable sound from the other side of the door, and Regulus’ voice returned, slightly louder this time.
“Bella! Please, can you let me out? Mum and dad locked me under the stairs because they cut my hair and I made it grow back, they said- said I won’t be coming out until I learn to respect my betters! Please, please, please can you let me out?”
Bellatrix hadn’t been able to let Regulus out that day. She had taken it up with uncle Orion, making it sound like she had happened upon the cupboard by chance, but he had told her in no uncertain terms that Regulus wasn’t coming out of the cupboard until the next morning. She didn’t even bother trying her luck with aunt Walburga, knowing that if Orion had told her no then her aunt would curse her for even asking.
She had failed Regulus then. She wouldn’t fail Harry now.
Wordlessly, she advanced on the cupboard. It was locked, but with her emotions running unchecked as they were, that didn’t mean much at all. At her touch, there was a click, louder than there had been at the front door, and the cupboard swung open.
Inside, Bellatrix felt her heart fracture slightly as she looked at the sight in front of her. Harry looked an awful lot like Regulus, with that skinny, underfed look, pallid skin and a head of jet black hair, although Harry’s was more matted and untamed looking than Regulus’ had been.
Then, he looked up at her with Lily Evans’ piercing green eyes, and a tightness in her chest which she hadn’t realised was there disappeared. Those eyes were enough to separate him from her baby cousin, who had inherited the grey eyes which ran in the Black family - it would have been hard for him not to, with his parents being cousins and all.
“Come sit with me in the living room, Harry. There’s some things I’d like to talk about with you.”
Harry nodded slowly, and got to his feet without making a single noise. Bellatrix twitched slightly at that, but said nothing. Regulus had, too, been possessed with an innate ability to make himself blend into the background with his silence.
Still, Bellatrix made her way into the living room, and patted the seat next to her. Harry looked at her hesitantly, and made no effort to sit down. When Bellatrix asked him to sit down with her, he shook his head.
“Aunt Petunia says freaks aren’t allowed on the sofa, miss.”
Bellatrix’s nostrils flared, but she quickly schooled her face into a mask of neutrality. It wouldn’t do to have Harry think that she was angry at him, and not his brutish family.
“Well, your aunt Petunia isn’t here right now. I am, and I say that you’re allowed on the sofa. Sit with me, please, Harry.”
Harry seemed emboldened by that. He still looked apprehensive, but he gave her a firm nod and climbed up onto the sofa, a look of grim determination on his face as though he had just committed to some herculean effort. Bellatrix supposed that he probably had in his mind, judging by how badly restricted the boy’s life seemed to be.
“Why does your aunt think you’re a freak, Harry?” she asked, deciding that was as good of a segue as any into what she wanted to talk about. Harry shuddered slightly, and looked away from her.
“I don’t-” he began, but before he finished his sentence he looked up at Bellatrix, seemingly looking for something. Whatever it was, it appeared that he found it, as he bit his lip before continuing.
“It’s ‘cause freaky things happen around me. I was in my cupboard instead of being at Miss Figg’s because I grew my hair back after aunt Petunia cut it,” he whispered, sounding as though he were confessing to some great sin.
Bellatrix also didn’t miss the way that he referred to the cupboard as ‘his’ cupboard, although she decided that she would leave that be for now. Best not to poke when it wasn’t absolutely necessary, considering the hesitancy he had already shown to open up to her.
“That’s what I wanted to talk with you about, Harry. Those things aren’t freaky. They’re magic,” she said, withdrawing her wand as she spoke. Harry eyed it cautiously, but with something she wouldn’t hesitate to call hope flickering in the back of his eyes.
“Would you like me to show you?”
Slowly, he nodded. Bellatrix gave her wand a wave, and a bouquet shot out of the end, full of narcissi. It was subconscious, something she had learned to do when she was younger to impress her youngest sister, who was named after the flower; still, it still elicited an uncomfortable squirming within her stomach at the reminder of the sister who she had seen with such infrequency since the fall of the Dark Lord that she could likely count how many times they had seen each other in the past six years on one hand.
“Woah,” Harry breathed, snapping her out of her musings. She gave him a strained smile, which grew stronger when she saw the wonderment on his face. She had feared that he might be scared of magic, with his family’s clear prejudice against it, but evidently she needn’t have worried.
With another wave of her wand, the bouquet was vanished. She didn’t particularly care for the reminder of her sister, and she figured another display of magic likely wouldn’t go amiss. Indeed, Harry’s eyes widened once again in amazement, even if he didn’t vocalise it this time, and she gave him another smile, wider than it had been before.
“How would you like to come with me, Harry? I can teach you magic, and you’d never have to see your aunt and uncle again.”
She realised even as she said it that she probably sounded absolutely insane to Harry, who had been raised a muggle, and probably taught to be wary of people who said things like that. However, much to her surprise, Harry’s face lit up, and he straightened up to peer right into Bellatrix’s eyes, a brilliant light dancing in his own as he did so.
“Really? You’d take me away from them?” he asked breathlessly.
Bellatrix didn’t like how eager he was. There wasn’t the slightest bit of hesitation in that statement, as though there was nothing of value to be left behind in the house. Even Sirius, who had run away from home for good at sixteen and had made several attempts prior, wouldn’t have jumped at the chance to leave with a perfect stranger as Harry was doing right now.
She had expected some sort of fight, even if it was only a token one, but to receive absolutely no pushback…
Still, there was no time to think about that. This just made her job easier, and in any case Harry was awaiting a response.
“Of course! How could I leave a magical child with muggles ? They could never appreciate the gift they have been given in being able to raise you,” she said scathingly. Strangely, Harry did not seem assured by this, only confused.
“A… gift, ma’am?” he asked. Then, after a heavily pregnant pause, he elaborated, “Uncle Vernon said… says I’m a burden, and I ought to be grateful for the clothes on my back, the roof over my head, and the food in my stomach, that no-one else would even bother with- with a freak like me.”
That dangerous feeling which had been creeping around in Bellatrix’s chest since she had seen the Dursleys on their own in the restaurant finally came to a head at those words. The Black Madness, it had been dubbed, although people less invested in creating traditions may have called it what it really was - mania, whether hereditary or the result of the Black family’s particular brand of child-rearing.
When combined with the proclivity for sadism which the Black family cultivated in their children, the mental illness which seemed to run in the family typically produced people who took delirious pleasure in harming others. Bellatrix had certainly been that, at one point. Ever since she had been a little girl, her mother had encouraged her to lean into that euphoric pleasure in the suffering of others, offering up her rarely given affection whenever Bellatrix was particularly callous.
Cygnus had disapproved, but had been too cowardly to do anything about it, and too scared to face what his daughter had become when she took the Dark Mark, disowning her - in spirit, for the power to adjust the tapestry remained with the Lord of the House - rather than facing the monster which had grown under his neglect.
However, since the Dark Lord had fallen, things had changed. Her mother had died shortly beforehand due to complications from her alcoholism, and the circle of Death Eaters who had continued furthering her sadistic tendencies in her mother’s stead had fallen to the wayside, either incarcerated or disgusted that she had not gone down honourably like her husband.
Her husband. The thought of Rodolphus stoked the flames which were burning within her. He was the reason she was here right now, why Harry Potter was growing up with muggles. How she had ever fallen for that fool, she would never know. The pureblood supremacist, whose actions caused the child of a Noble and Most Ancient House to spend his formative years in the care of muggles. She snorted involuntarily at the thought, although she was anything but amused.
Yet, she was not angry. Manic, certainly, but something had changed from how it used to feel. She did not want to hurt, but rather… protect.
“He’s wrong, Harry. Wronger than he’ll ever know. There are many people who’d be delighted to have you, me chief among them,” she said, not mentioning why those people would be delighted to have him, or her own, admittedly not entirely selfless reasoning.
Slowly, she reached out to hug him. She wasn’t entirely sure of the mechanics - her parents had never hugged her, and neither had Rodolphus - but she felt that she knew enough to guess how it was supposed to work, and it just seemed like the right thing to do.
Harry, for his part, seemed to find the contact as foreign as she did. He stiffened up like a board when she reached out, as though anticipating a strike, but when it didn’t come he let out a strangled sob and wrapped his arms around her tightly, knocking the wind out of her for a moment with the force which he had moved with.
“Please take me with you, miss! I want to go now, before they get back,” he choked out. Bellatrix, entirely out of her depth at this point, nodded slightly, giving Harry what she hoped was a reassuring squeeze. She got to her feet, with Harry still clinging to her front, and found that he was remarkably light. He hardly had any weight to him at all, unlike his walrus of an uncle and his beach ball of a cousin.
And somehow, she figured that he and his aunt were skinny for entirely separate reasons.
“You’ll never have to come back here, Harry, I can promise you that,” she whispered, thinking privately that she would sooner butcher the entire family than allow them to get their hands on this precious, powerful little boy again,
And oh yes, Harry was powerful. She had not mentioned it, not wanting to unload more information on the boy than she absolutely had to, but Harry carried a magical aura with him which hung like a cloud in the air around him, thick and tangible to those who knew how to look.
“I’m going to take us away from here with magic. It’s going to hurt, but once it’s done you’ll never have to come back here again. Are you ready?”
At Harry’s jerky nod, she began counting down from three to prepare for their departure. Briefly, she wondered where she was going to go. She didn’t have a home to speak of, usually crashing at Spinner’s End while Severus was at Hogwarts or staying in the Leaky Cauldron, but neither of those places were particularly suitable for Harry.
She still wasn’t welcome at her father’s house - or so she assumed, she hadn’t bothered to visit and he had never deigned to send a letter rescinding her disownment, so she assumed their previous relationship held true - and Grimmauld Place was surely inhospitable for anyone, let alone a seven-year-old, after spending six years under the management of aunt Walburga and two more completely abandoned.
As she reached the end of her countdown, she realised it came down to two possible choices - great uncle Arcturus, and Narcissa. It shouldn’t have been a difficult decision, really.
Narcissa had been scarce since the fall of the Dark Lord and, during their last visit, had told her in no certain terms that she was not welcome in Draco’s life. Bellatrix hadn’t visited again in the two years since that incident, deeply hurt by the insinuation that she wasn’t to be trusted while Lucius, who had been higher in the chain of command than her, somehow got a free pass.
Meanwhile, great uncle Arcturus, while perpetually busy, was never adverse to a visit from her, and was the only person in the family who she still had any sort of functional relationship with, even if Bellatrix only dropped in on occasion.
The decision should have made itself, but yet she still deliberated. Some small, selfish part of her wanted to flaunt Harry in Narcissa’s face, show that she had been wrong, that she could be trusted after all, but she knew that would only make things worse.
Still, she did not make the decision to go to great uncle Arcturus’ as quickly as she should have done. She was vaguely aware that she had reached the end of her countdown and she still had not Apparated, but she didn’t pay it that much mind. There was a battle going on in her mind over where to go, and the tides were slowly turning in favour of going to Narcissa.
“Umm, miss, I thought you said we were leaving,” Harry said nervously, cutting into her thoughts. Wordlessly, she nodded, the scales finally tipping in the other way.
She would go to great uncle Arcturus, it was the only right decision. There was still a deep-seated desire to show Narcissa up burning within her, but it simply wasn’t safe, with her husband being who he was. This was the right decision, loathe though she was to make it. She would do it for Harry’s sake.
She turned on her heel, and they were gone, Apparating not to the gates of Malfoy Manor, but to those of Blackwood Manor, the ancestral home of the Lord of House Black.
Albus Dumbledore was none the wiser, while Severus Snape felt an imperceptible loosening on his magical core, an easing of a compression that he hadn’t realised was there prior. Briefly, he wondered why, and then he remembered the vow he had sworn after Lily’s death to protect her son.
If he was honest with himself, he knew that he had been rather derelict in that duty up until this point, and his magic had evidently known before he did. Now, however, his debt was paid. He sighed contentedly, leaning into the comfy armchair in his Hogwarts quarters. Whatever the consequences, he had done what he needed to. Now he could sit back and watch the fire burn.