Switched

The Daily Prophet, front page, 7 June 1992

BREAKING: YOU-KNOW-WHO CAPTURED!

By Barnabas Cuffe, Editor in Chief 

Well, my dear friends, readers, citizens of our fair Britain, sometimes the title really does say it all. 

There can be no burying the lead on this one: 10 years, 7 months, and 5 days after my predecessor, Editor in Chief Kelsey MacDougal, announced the downfall and disappearance of the terrorist styling himself “the Dark Lord V—” on the front page of this very journal, it is my honour and my distinct pleasure to announce that the threat of his possible return, upheld by the persistence of his mark on the arms of those unfortunate wizards ensnared and enslaved to his dastardly will, has finally passed.

I dare say that most readers will already be familiar with the events of the end of what has been dubbed the worst British civil conflict since Cromwell’s attempted overthrow of the Wizengamot in the Seventeenth Century. For those who were small children, living in a hermitage, or in a coma in November of 1981, or who have suffered a terrible obliviation accident in the years since and somehow happened to miss our ten-year-anniversary article last November and the entirety of our coverage of Lord Sirius Black’s recent trial, we shall, however, provide a brief recap:

On the evening of the 31st of October 1981, the self-proclaimed Dark Lord travelled to the home of Lord James Potter, his wife Lily, and their son Harry, a modest cottage in the Godric’s Hollow enclave. 

Lord Potter was, at the time, an active member of the Auror Corp, while Lady Potter pursued a healer’s apprenticeship through Saint Mungo’s Hospital and volunteered as a front-line healer on the occasions which the Ministry and You-Know-Who clashed openly. After falling pregnant, she retired from both the battlefield and public life, apparently due to threats on the life of her unborn child. Both were well known and outspoken supporters of the Light; it is hardly surprising that the Death Eaters would use such dishonourable tactics to attempt to silence them.

Why the Potters chose to abandon their ancestral manor for the relatively unprotected house in Godric’s Hollow will, perhaps, never be known. Close friends and associates have suggested both that Lady Potter, with her common background and muggleborn sensibilities, preferred a smaller, less ostentatious home, and that the Potters considered the relative anonymity of the Godric’s Hollow cottage to be safer for themselves and their son than the obvious target which was the manor. The Death Eaters had, after all, managed to compromise the security of Rock on Clyde and murder the previous Lord and Lady Potter, Charlus and Dorea, only a few short years before.

Certainly none of their neighbours in Godric’s Hollow were aware of their presence there, thanks to the Fidelius Charm placed by His Excellency, Albus P. W. B. Dumbledore (who charmingly prefers to be addressed with the title "Headmaster") in June of 1980, and renewed by Lady Potter some months later.

The D.L.E. crime scene report leaked to this paper in November of 1981 tells us that Lord Potter’s body was found near the front door of the home, apparently killed in an effort to delay You-Know-Who’s advance long enough to give Lady Potter a chance to escape with little Harry. She fled with the babe to the nursery, where she made her final stand. Her body was found between the door and the crib, from which little Harry was removed on the orders of the Chief Warlock when he was alerted by a Dead Man’s Trigger that Lord Potter had crossed the veil. 

Forensic trace magic analyses of the site indicated that the Unforgivable Killing Curse was cast three times that night. The third deadly curse, intended for young Harry Potter, appeared to have rebounded on its caster, destroying his body as well as the majority of the first floor of the small house.

The first investigators to arrive on the scene found You-Know-Who’s wand, which was considered to be incontrovertible proof of his downfall, if not his demise. The wand in question was taken into the D.L.E. as evidence, and “went missing” in the chaos of the transition from Director Bartemius Crouch to Director Adamant Smith. It is presumed to have been stolen, but has never resurfaced. 

Extensive blood traces were found on the debris, and there were no wounds on Lady Potter’s body. It is uncertain whether the rebounding curse destroyed You-Know-Who’s body so thoroughly that there was no corpse to find, or whether he was merely wounded. While the optimistic chose to believe that he was gone for good, there were those on both sides who insisted that You-Know-Who had taken precautions against even such an eventuality as his body being entirely destroyed, somehow anchoring his soul to the mortal plane, and that he would certainly return at some point in the future.

While it seems time has proven them right on the former point, the latter is now categorically impossible. 

How?

Well, settle in for a shocking tale, my friends!

(Continued, page 3)

The Daily Prophet, page 3, 7 June 1992

You-Know-Who Captured (Continued from page 1)

The story of You-Know-Who’s capture begins with a young wizard named Quirinus Quirrell.

In the spring of 1990, Quirrell, age 44, had been the Muggle Studies professor at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry for twelve years. As readers may or may not be aware, it is the school’s policy to allow its professors every thirteenth year of their employment as an optional sabbatical, a paid period of professional development during which they are expected to engage in research, publishing papers, and other such academic pursuits. 

Quirrell, we are told, intended to travel throughout the muggle nations of Eastern Europe referred to as “the Eastern Bloc”, exploring the political shifts surrounding the (now former) Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and familiarising himself with changes in muggle technology over the past thirteen years.

As he travelled through Romania, however, tragedy struck. Quirrell, feeling adventurous, spent a night with a vampire. Several weeks later, he began feeling poorly, and was diagnosed with terminal wractitis, contracted on that fateful night.

Most British mages, I can only assume, have never heard of this particular disease. I myself certainly had not, nor had Headmaster Dumbledore when Quirrell explained his misfortune to his employer.

In vampires the condition is a mild annoyance at worst, and entirely treatable. In humans, however, the contagion makes its way into the brain, and is invariably fatal. I immediately wondered if perhaps the vampire had passed the disease to Quirrell deliberately, as an act of malice, but the Headmaster assured me that the disease is normally so mild for vampires that it often goes entirely undiagnosed, and that any vampire who might pass it to an “adventurous” human is far more likely to do so in complete ignorance — a harsh reminder of the dangers inherent in cross-species relations, but not an act of deliberate violence.

Wractitis, according to Healer Myron Patton, Saint Mungo’s Hospital’s expert on rare infectious diseases, is a disease of the brain. Mental deterioration leads to tremors, twitching, stuttering, and difficulty walking which grow more pronounced as the disease progresses. Lesions can form within the brain, causing all manner of additional symptoms. In the later stages, it may resemble dementia, affecting an infected wizard’s memory and ability to think clearly and regulate his emotions, as well as his ability to channel magic, all of which become increasingly erratic. Death most often comes when the systemic dysregulation results in heart failure or a fatal accident.

As Quirrell told Headmaster Dumbledore, on receiving the news that he had at most two years left to live, perhaps six months before the disease rendered him noticeably infirm, decided to do all the living he could in that time, abandoning his plans to instead embark on a grand adventure, the likes of which would put Ciardha Monroe to shame. At the end of his sabbatical, with his symptoms becoming more apparent, he returned to Hogwarts to live out his final days in comfort.

Headmaster Dumbledore, on receiving this news, asked Quirrell to make the ultimate sacrifice in his remaining time: take the Defence Against the Dark Arts post, which is widely believed to be cursed. No instructor has managed to hold the post for more than a single year since 1962.

Quirrell agreed, beginning the new year in a new classroom, his shaved head covered with a noticeably pungent tonic intended to slow the progression of the disease and hidden by an eccentric purple turban, an object of pity and admiration among his peers, and of concern and scorn among his students, who were not informed of his condition. Wractitis can only be passed through intimate contact, so there was no danger in allowing him to continue working as long as he was able to do so, but the school administration feared a panic if it were to become widely known.

His condition deteriorated over the course of the year, as expected, but he refused periodic tests to determine the extent and rate of advancement of the damage, telling anyone who asked that he preferred not to know.

"It's not uncommon," says Madam Poppy Pomfrey, the Hogwarts Healer, "for terminal patients to prefer not to dwell on their impending deaths." She also assured this author that the records Quirrell brought back from the Albanian Healer who supposedly diagnosed him were apparently legitimate. "I can only assume that the Healer was somehow compelled to cooperate. The deception was very thorough, we had no reason to question his condition, especially as his illness progressed as expected."

Yes, dear reader, you read that correctly: deception.

Quirrell’s symptoms and deterioration were suspiciously similar to those one might expect to see in a victim of major possession. 

Indeed, both Healer Pomfrey and Potions Master Severus Snape admitted that they would have suggested possession as the more likely condition, had documentation not been provided. 

A possessed person would exhibit major personality shifts long before a wractitis victim would suffer the same due to brain damage, and likely severe disfigurements and deformations...but then, a man who has recently learned of his impending death and come to reevaluate his life might also experience a major personality shift, and glamours he claimed to be using to prevent his students from realising how unwell he truly looked could just as easily hide the increasingly obvious physical indications of possession.

Master Snape, a well-known legilimens and expert on the maleficia, added that Quirrell’s paranoia about his privacy, a trait of which his colleagues were long aware, also helped him to avoid anyone noticing his odd behaviour. He habitually wore anti-scrying and mind-shield amulets, and was a shy, awkward man, not known to be particularly sociable before his sabbatical. 

“I make it my business to notice Defence professors acting oddly,” Master Snape noted, “but I believed that Quirrell had somehow discovered that Flamel’s Stone was in the Castle for several months, and was simply attempting to steal it, in the hope that the Elixir of Life could cure him.” 

(I could hardly fail to ask about the Stone, given how little is known about it and how protective Master Flamel is known to be of it. When questioned, Master Snape’s only comment was: “It’s gone back to the Flamels now. I believe Dumbledore requested its use to test a particularly obscure theory which would take far too long to explain, so don’t ask.”)

This, however, was not the case.

As best Headmaster Dumbledore has been able to reconstruct, Quirrell encountered You-Know-Who’s wraith early in his travels. A wraith, I am informed, is an incorporeal remnant of a once-living wizard bound to the mortal plane which, unlike a ghost, retains the ability to perform some magics including possession and may, through the darkest of arts, be re-embodied. The wraith most likely attached itself to Quirrell by using compulsions while he was particularly vulnerable — bathing, for example, without his protective amulets — to manipulate him into allowing the wraith to share his body.

“I knew Quirinus well,” Headmaster Dumbledore stalwartly insists. “And the Quirinus I knew, whom I worked with, who lived here at Hogwarts for twelve years— He found muggle cultures fascinating, endlessly fascinating, and abhorred everything Lord V— stood for. I am certain there was some coercive dark magic involved in his apparent decision to join the Dark, for he never would have done so of his own volition.”

But coerced or not, join the Dark he did!

You-Know-Who has lived and worked at Hogwarts disguised as Quirrell since September. He was by all accounts reclusive and unsociable due to his “illness”, so did not spend much time with students outside of lessons, but the school urges any parents who may be concerned to take their children to a mind-healer to ensure that he did not establish compulsions in any of their minds.

So how was You-Know-Who finally detected and captured?

I spoke with Harry Potter, in his first-ever public interview, to get all the details:

Daily Prophet: I do want to talk about you, I’m sure our readers have a thousand questions about you and where you were raised and how you’ve been doing in lessons and so on.

Harry Potter: Oh, I think I’m doing well enough, though I suppose exams will tell.

DP: I’m sure you are. And rumour has it you were raised by muggles?

HP: (nods)

DP: Fascinating! But we’ll get to that. First, tell us about You-Know-Who.

HP: Well, first off, his surname was originally Riddle, so you can stop it with that You-Know-Who crap. I guess he also called himself de Mort back in the day.

DP: Riddle, then.

HP: Right, so. Everyone’s known there’s something wrong with Quirrell since school started. Older students say he used to be, you know, not all stuttery and twitchy, and I heard a bit of gossip — can’t say from whom — in the first couple of weeks saying that he’d gotten an S.T.D. [Sexually Transmitted Disease] from a vampire, but to be honest, I sort of forgot about that until I was prepping for this interview. There was a lot going on at the time. New school and all that.

DP: Of course. So what was the first real clue that something was amiss with Quirrell?

HP: Probably the troll thing? Yeah, I think it was the troll thing. People know about that, right? That someone let a troll into Hogwarts on Samhain?

DP: Yes, we did an article reporting it. I understand the school administration believed it to be the result of an incredibly un-funny Hallowe’en prank, though they were unable to identify the culprit.

HP: No, before we caught him, when he was doing his evil monologuing, Quirrell, or possibly Riddle, I’m not sure who was running the show, honestly, took credit for that. In the context of all the ways he’s tried to kill me this past year — I guess I annoyed him by not noticing—

DP: You didn’t notice him trying to kill you?

HP: Well, I would have if he’d asked me to stay after a lesson and tried to stab me or something, but he was trying to do [things] that would look like an accident, wasn’t he? Cursing my broom and compelling creatures to attack me out in the Forbidden Forest, things like that.

DP: Why were you out in the Forbidden Forest? Isn’t it forbidden?

HP: Yeah, why do you think I wanted to explore it? All the most interesting stuff is always forbidden. It also tends to be dangerous, though — for other people, I mean — so it wasn’t really a surprise that something tried to kill me out there, and it wouldn’t have been suspicious if it’d worked. I wouldn’t recommend anyone else go out there alone unless they’re prepared to defend themselves from five-X creatures trying to eat them.

[A brief aside: Harry Potter is a short, skinny boy who appears to be even younger than he truly is. No one who has simply seen a photo of him or met him in passing would expect him to be able to defend himself from an angry doxy, much less a creature classified as 5-X. After speaking with him for some time, however, it became clear that his appearance belies his intelligence and a command of magic well beyond his years. I simply couldn’t bring myself to doubt his claim, or his warning to others that the Forest is indeed forbidden for good reason.]

Anyway, the first clue that Quirrell wasn’t simply ill, the first really odd thing about his behaviour, was that he came running into the Great Hall at the Hallowe’en Feast shouting about a troll in the dungeons and then fainted, and of course there was a huge uproar and everyone had to evacuate, but no one went to help Quirrell, which my friend Danny — Danny Tonks, that is — thought was odd, and then he saw Quirrell sneaking away in the chaos — we assume he used some sort of Notice-Me-Not spell that didn’t work on Danny for whatever reason. We tried to follow him, but we lost him, and then we were caught by another professor and sent back to Ravenclaw.

DP: I should hope so!

HP: I imagine that’s because you're a responsible adult. We did still get in a fight with the troll. It had one of the first-year girls cornered — I guess she went to use the loo and wasn’t in the Great Hall when we evacuated — and we heard her screaming on our way up to the Tower. We couldn’t just leave her, so I distracted the troll while Danny got her to safety. Then some of the professors showed up and distracted me, so I sort of got batted across the corridor and slightly knocked out, and they just went ahead and stunned it while I was unconscious.

Quirrell tried to take credit for that as one of his attempts to murder me, but I don’t think it counts. He clearly let the troll in as a distraction so he could try to steal the Philosopher’s Stone from Dumbledore. Well, clearly in hindsight, I should say. At the time, we had no idea what he’d sneaked off to do, but it was definitely suspicious behaviour.

DP: I would certainly say so! What was the next clue?

HP: Well, he declined pretty obviously and severely over the course of our first term, to the point that my friend Hermione — Hermione Granger, she’s brilliant, if a bit of a swot about it — was wondering what would happen if he didn’t make it to the end of the year, so I asked Professor Snape about him after Yule. He told me that Quirrell had picked up a parasite which could only be spread through intimate contact, and not to spread it around because students weren’t supposed to know. Which I guess was even true, if you think about it. I mean, the wraith was a parasite, and inviting it to share your body is pretty intimate.

DP: So you think that’s how he avoided detection from truth spells and so on? Telling the other professors that, rather than giving specifics?

HP: Honestly, I don’t think anyone was suspicious enough to question him under a truth spell. I mean you have this guy come back from a year-long holiday and he looks like a bloody cancer patient and can’t get two words out without stuttering and shows you his medical records, what are you going to do? Say, ‘oh, I don’t believe you, even though I have no reason not to,’ and force him to answer a bunch of questions under a truth spell? 

No, of course not. You feel sorry for him, and also maybe see this as an opportunity because if he’s already dying, maybe he’ll take the Defence post so many people are afraid is going to kill them, and say, ‘oh, god, I’m so sorry, yes, of course you can come back and spend your last months here, Hogwarts is your home, blah, blah, blah.’ Or I guess for the other professors, he’d just say he didn’t want to talk about it, and they’d have to let it go if they didn’t want to be complete sods. I mean, they did think he was dying, hassling him about it wouldn’t be on, would it?

DP: I suppose that’s reasonable enough under the circumstances. But then, how did you and your friends discover that he was possessed, not ill?

HP: Well, maybe it was easier to believe if you knew him before this past year, but we had a hard time believing that any self-respecting vampire would shag Quirrell. So that was the second clue.

DP: (laughing) What was the third?

HP: Danny wrote to his sister who’s an auror, asking what she thought his symptoms added up to, and she said it sounded like it might be major possession. At the time, Hermione, Danny, and Blaise — Blaise Zabini, that is — thought we should check out the possession angle — not that we really had any idea how to do that — and I was the only one who thought that was ridiculous, surely the professors would have checked if he was actually ill or noticed him acting oddly because he was possessed. I asked my guardian over Easter and she said the S.T.D. thing was plausible, which swayed Blaise over to my side, because Druella knows literally everything.

DP: She? We — I and the public at large — were under the impression that Headmaster Dumbledore was your guardian. There’s been some discussion about how likely it is that your godfather [Lord Black] will ask the Headmaster to relinquish you to him, but who is Druella?

HP: Magistra Druella Rosier. I visited the Zabinis for a few days over Yule, and Mirabella introduced us. When Dru realised I’d been raised by muggles and didn’t know anything about history or politics or the laws and government of Magical Britain, she offered to take on my guardianship and spend the next few summers bringing me up to speed so I’ll be able to properly revive my House when I come of age. 

This was before we knew about Sirius getting a trial, obviously, so I said yes. Dumbledore took a little convincing, but he agreed as well, and signed me over to her on Christmas. Sirius says he isn’t exactly prepared to be a good parental figure at the moment — I guess Azkaban will do that to you — so Dru’s going to continue being my guardian for the foreseeable future.

DP: I see. What happened next, with Quirrell?

HP: Oh, well, this was sort of in the middle of the last bit, after we knew about the supposed wractitis, but before Easter. And to explain why I was involved in the first place, we’ve got to go back to mid-October, before anything else. I’d been caught exploring out of bounds for the fifth time in three weeks, and the Headmaster decided I clearly had too much free time on my hands, and suggested that I should assist Mister Hagrid, our groundskeeper, with whatever tasks need doing outdoors, and I’d get to learn all about the Forest and the creatures that live there under adult supervision.

Hagrid doesn’t get on with the centaurs very well — he thinks they’re deliberately trying to confuse him with their celestial metaphors, and they just don’t think much of humans — so I’ve been liaising with them on behalf of the school, which is really a fancy way of saying I’m their bloody post owl. I didn’t mind, though. I spent a lot of time last term just hanging out with the wilderfolk, anyway.

DP: With the wilderfolk? You do know what wilderfolk...are, don’t you?

HP: Sure, but being half-wolf just makes them more fun to hang out with, really. They don’t talk much, at least not with words, but I like the way they live and the Pack is very...inclusive, I suppose, might be the word I’m looking for. It’s easy to belong there, if you want to. Well, once they get used to you. It took months for them to trust me enough to let me get anywhere near them.

Anyway, just before Easter, I was hanging out with the wilderfolk when we were attacked by a mob of megaformics — giant ants — which is unusual behaviour for the species. They can prey on small mammals, but usually they eat magiflora and other insects, and stay away from anything bigger than a squirrel. 

Later that day, the centaurs asked me to tell Dumbledore that something had been killing unicorns. Hagrid had just found out from one of the other intelligent species in the Forest that the ants had been sent after us — after me, specifically — by a human with a stick. Quirrell, obviously. 

Oh! He also cursed my broom in Flying Class before Yule, but I didn’t even break an arm or anything, and everyone figured it was just a malfunctioning old Cleansweep Five that should’ve been retired years ago. Forgot about that one.

Anyway, Hagrid told Dumbledore about someone using giant bugs to try to kill me and they brought that to the same meeting that the centaurs wanted to talk to them about the unicorns. Unicorn blood can be used to sustain a person’s life even if they’re on the verge of death, so everything sort of just clicked together, that there’s only one person who’s been clinging to life for the past ten and a half years who might want the Boy-Who-Lived dead.

We assumed that the unicorn blood was probably all that was keeping him alive at that point — no one resorts to unicorn blood unless they’re desperate, because if you take it for selfish reasons, you’re cursed for the rest of your life — and that he was in the Forest to collect enough of it to sustain him while he searched for a more permanent solution to being half-dead, and that trying to kill me was probably a crime of opportunity. 

DP: But what did they do about it? Certainly no one told the Ministry — they could have had aurors combing the Forest—

HP: We didn’t have any proof, and aurors would have scared him off. This was the best opportunity anyone had had to kill him for good or at the very least capture him since he disappeared, so Dumbledore decided to set a trap for him using the Philosopher's Stone as bait. It didn’t work, presumably because Quirrell had already been trying to steal the Stone and figured out that it was a trap as soon as Dumbledore moved it.

I told Dru about it over Easter, and she said he was probably possessing someone, because his own body was definitely destroyed back in Eighty-One, and if he was the unicorn killer, the blood would be to keep the person he was possessing alive in spite of the side-effects of major possession. She did point out that we had no evidence that the unicorn killer and the person who’d tried to kill me were the same person, so we shouldn’t use that as the basis for speculating that it was Riddle, but admitted that if they were one person, that would be the most parsimonious explanation.

I was an idiot, not making the connection between Riddle probably possessing someone and Quirrell possibly being possessed right then and there, but I didn’t even consider it because I fell for the wractitis deception.

DP: Along with all the adults in the school, so I shouldn’t judge myself too harshly, if I were you.

HP: Yeah, well. The next thing that really clued us in that Quirrell wasn’t what he seemed was, Dora, Danny’s auror sister, sent him an amulet for his birthday at the beginning of May. It’s enchanted to grow warm if the wearer is in imminent danger, but we don’t know how, so we were fooling around with it one day before Defence, trying to see if it could predict when I was about to throw a stinging jinx at him and [things] like that, or if it’s more like detecting hostile intent, and he forgot to take it off, and it got hot as soon as we walked into class. I wore it to dinner to see if it was just Danny’s suspicions about Quirrell setting it off, or something, and it about burned a hole in my robes the second Quirrell spotted me. 

I had previously believed Quirrell to be about as dangerous as a flobberworm, and there was absolutely no reason for Quirrell to register as dangerous if he was slowly dying from wractitis, or for him to want to kill me, so however that thing works, we realised then that he had to be possessed by someone who did want to kill me.

That was when I knew that it was time to call in the real Harry Potter.

[I, dear readers, was as completely thrown by that statement as I can only assume you all are at this very moment. You must forgive me for presenting it thusly, but it seemed the only way to capture the truly shocking effect of the news.]

DP: The real Harry Potter?

HP: Well, yeah. Just to be clear, the real Harry Potter was involved in this operation. He was instrumental to its implementation and success. But now that we’ve managed to neutralise Riddle, it’s time to admit that I’m not actually him.

DP: Well— But— Then who are you?

HP: Oh! I’m James Black, Sirius’s son. I guess he had a fling with my mother during the war. She died when I was small, though. I ended up being raised by her muggle sister. That really was a convenient parallel for the cover story, that Harry has a muggle aunt, too.

DP: So...the real Harry Potter...wasn’t raised by his muggle aunt?

HP (JB): I thought everyone knew he was raised by monks in Nepal.

DP: But—

JB: I’m kidding, obviously. That’s from one of those silly kids’ books. I don’t think he’s ever been to Nepal. He was actually raised by ninjas in Japan.

DP: What? Are you serious?

JB: No, he’s my father, and I’m sorry, but he would’ve been horribly disappointed in me if I hadn’t made that pun. 

Yes, I’m serious. Harry’s my godbrother. I volunteered to lure Mouldy Voldy out of hiding and pretend to be him so he could do a total ninja takedown on the undead wanker. There was some unfinished prophecy business, I guess. The details aren’t really important because it’s over now, but we knew he had to be the one to strike the decisive blow in defeating Riddle for good.

DP: So you’ve been in contact with him? with the real Harry Potter? What’s he like? And where is he now?

JB: Sure. He’s a genuinely nice bloke. He can defend himself just fine, but he doesn’t like violence or causing harm to others. He doesn’t really like the idea of being famous, either — they’re really very humble, ninjas — so he just went home when Voldy was taken care of. 

DP: But— Why ninjas? In Japan, of all places? Why would he [Headmaster Dumbledore]— What about House Potter?

JB: To the best of my understanding, Dumbledore wanted him to be somewhere he could learn to defend himself and prepare for his inevitable showdown with the undead wanker. He knew someone who knew someone connected to the ninjas — benefits of being big in international politics, I guess — and figured that the Death Eaters who hadn’t been caught would never find him on the other side of the bloody world.

He doesn’t give a damn about the Noble House of Potter. It’s gotten along just fine for the last ten years, and if there’s one thing he’s learned from the ninjas, it’s to avoid acting in haste — ninjas are also very zen like that — so he’s just going to let it keep gathering dust for a while and decide what to do with it when he’s, you know, not eleven. He asked me to tell people, if anyone asked, that he’s currently not planning on coming back to Britain. It’s possible he’ll change his mind, but definitely not until he’s old news.

Also, don’t bother looking for him. A ninja is invisible until he strikes, and he’s serious about avoiding his fame, so trying to find him is only going to inconvenience and annoy him. Everything else is classified.

DP: Invisible?

JB: Not literally, they just hide in plain sight. Like, the entire time he was at Hogwarts, he just wore a Ravenclaw tie and everyone assumed he was one of the quiet kids no one ever really takes any notice of. It’s insane, really, how well it works. We used a little blood magic ritual to switch our eye-colours and really sell the idea that I was him, and that was his only really notable, identifying feature, so he could be anyone.

DP: But how did you find him in the first place? How do you contact him?

JB: That’s classified and double classified. I have nothing more to say on the subject of Harry Potter. Well, I guess aside from: I’ll keep answering to the name until everyone gets used to calling me Jay. But the real Harry Potter, he’s done with us, and we’re done with him. Move on.

DP: “The entire time he was at Hogwarts,” you said. How long was that, exactly?

JB: Just long enough for us — the two of us, Blaise, Danny, and Hermione — to set up our own trap and lure Quirrell into it. We exorcised the wraith and trapped it in a soul jar, then handed it over to Dumbledore. It’s currently stored in an undisclosed location while the Wizengamot argues about what to do with it. Probably nothing until they figure out why he didn’t die when Lily Potter blew him up, and if throwing it through the Veil or feeding it to a dementor would work, or if he could still come back somehow or you’d just have a possessed dementor on your hands, you know?

DP: A possessed dementor? Perish the thought... Wait a moment, though. I was under the impression that Headmaster Dumbledore’s trap captured him. Are you saying it was really just five schoolchildren? How?

JB: Well, four schoolchildren and an eleven-year-old ninja. I don’t really think Harry counts as a schoolchild. And I think our success can largely be attributed to the element of surprise. Everyone always underestimates kids. Someone like Riddle would never expect a bunch of firsties to be able to come up with a trap that could hold him, or that he could be tricked by a bunch of eleven- and twelve-year-olds. I mean, you clearly think it’s absurd and impossible that we managed it. Just imagine how he feels.

DP: But it must have been terribly dangerous! Even if Quirrell was clearly unwell, he was still a fully-qualified adult wizard, with the added threat of the wraith’s unknown abilities. Why didn’t you ask the Headmaster for help? Or any adult, for that matter?

JB: Ah, well, that’s the one thing the books got right about Harry: he prefers to solve problems himself, when he can. Self-reliance is another good ninja trait. Plus there was the prophecy business. We decided it would be best for the purposes of fulfilling it if Harry engineered the entire plan to take down the wraith, as well as literally casting the curse that captured him. He did have help getting here, and Dumbledore did know that he was in the building and generally what we were on about, but he knew he couldn’t interfere without risking the prophecy going unfulfilled, i.e., Riddle escaping again.

DP: But wasn’t he going to try to trap the wraith himself?

JB: I’m pretty sure he didn’t expect to take Riddle out permanently. He was just hoping to delay his return to an embodied form long enough for Harry to grow up and defeat him properly, but we had an opportunity so we figured, why wait?

DP: Remarkable. Truly remarkable. I’ll be speaking to Headmaster Dumbledore after our interview, and we are going to need to wrap it up shortly if I’m going to make my deadline, but we do still have a few minutes left, so tell me, what do the other adults in your life make of all this? Lord Black and your guardian — is she your guardian, if you’re not really Harry Potter?

JB: She is, yes. Technically, Dumbledore was my guardian in Magical Britain, though because I was a muggle-raised orphan and a student, so he’s the default, not because the Wizengamot decided to give me to him like they did the real Harry Potter. He did have the authority to pass me off to Dru, though, and Sirius doesn’t think he’d be a better parent for me than he would if I were really his godson Harry, so I’m still staying with her.

She thinks that the whole exercise is absurd. If anyone had asked her ahead of time, she would have advised against the ruse, and she’s pretty sure the prophecy was already fulfilled when Lily blew Riddle up. She’d happily see him wandering the world as an impotent wraith for the rest of eternity — she knew him as de Mort and says he’d consider that a fate worse than death — but since Dumbledore insisted that it wasn’t done yet and Riddle was still technically capable of returning if he got really, really lucky, she understood why we wanted to take him out for good. As for the switch and using me as bait, she’s confident enough of my abilities to not have intervened when she found out.

Sirius thinks it’s hysterical — switching places just to mess with people is the sort of thing he and James Potter would’ve done for a laugh, though James probably would’ve had a conniption over the idea of the two of us taking on Mouldyshorts. Sirius, on the other hand, is well aware that insanity runs in our family and telling me not to do something mad like helping Harry trap the undead wanker would just be wasting his breath. Besides, if it’s Harry’s destiny to face this thing, there’s not a damn thing he can do to stop it, so we might as well help. His exact words were, “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” which as far as I’m concerned is pretty much a blank cheque.

He’s a little cut up over Harry not visiting him while he was here — he is his godfather, after all — but he understands it’s sort of awkward getting to know someone just because you think you ought to, and he wants Harry to be happy and safe more than anything, so if he’s happy and safe with the ninjas, Sirius isn’t going to try to force Harry to let him into his life. I’m sure it’s nothing personal, honestly. Like I said, Harry’s a nice bloke, it probably just hasn’t really occurred to him that Sirius would want to hear from him because he really doesn’t think of himself as Harry Potter. Sirius is still really hoping that Harry will write him a letter or something, though, so Harry, if you read this article, be a mate and send my dad an owl.

DP: Well, I think that covers all of my questions about the You-Know— Riddle situation, though I’m sure you understand I have about a thousand more about you and where you came from, how you came to be in contact with Harry — it sounds as though you have been for some time, even before you switched places — and your plans now that everyone is going to know you for yourself. We are, however, out of time, so those will have to wait. At the moment, I think we’ll leave it at: Do you have anything fun planned for the summer holiday?

JB: Well, I’m not sure anyone else would think so — I’m probably going to spend most of it reading history and learning about the Blacks’ business interests — but I’m looking forward to it, and I’m sure Sirius has a few things planned. He mentioned checking out a professional stunt-flying competition. Oh! And I’m planning on joining a duelling gym. I’ve never tried it, but I caught part of the I.D.L. Open in Charing last summer and it looks like a lot of fun. Other than that, I’ll probably have my friends from school around — Sirius wants to meet them — and spend some time visiting people I know from outside of Hogwarts. 

DP: Visiting people in Japan, perhaps?

JB: (laughing) No, not in Japan. Just normal kid holiday stuff.

DP: If you say so. 

[I assure you, dear reader, that watching young Mr Black attempt to say that he intends to spend his summer doing “normal kid holiday stuff” with a straight face, you, too, would believe that nothing could be further from the truth.]

DP: Well. Thank you for your time and for agreeing to speak with me, Mister Black. It’s been a wild ride, if not quite so wild as your first year here at Hogwarts seems to have been, but it has also been a pleasure.

JB: Oh, the pleasure was all mine. 

So, dear readers! There you have it! The Boy-Who-Lived has done it again! This time, the Dark Lord V— truly is vanquished, and in a twist which proves that life is sometimes far stranger than fiction, it seems the young wizard we’ve all been calling Harry Potter for the past ten months isn’t Harry Potter at all, but the heretofore unknown James Black — a revelation which raises far more questions than it answers!

For now, however, those questions can wait. In the words of my predecessor: 

Rejoice, my friends, for You-Know-Who has gone at last! 

Today, we celebrate the long-awaited return of peace and order to our fair Britain, and as we do so, I propose a toast! Let us all raise a glass (once again) in honour of Harry Potter, the boy who lived! 

There was, Harry thought, an awful lot of staring and muttering going on today, even taking into account the publication of Cuffe’s article in the morning Prophet. Even more than those first weeks, before the shiny had worn off “Harry Potter” standing in their midst, and directed not only at him, but at Blaise, Danny, and Hermione as well. 

Theo had escaped only because he asked Harry to keep his name out of it. He was bloody well terrified of what his father might do if he realised that Theo had been involved in preventing the Dark Lord from ever returning, much less doing so with the help of a muggleborn. It was bad enough he was going to know Blaise had been involved. Theo probably wouldn’t be allowed to visit him at all for the entire summer. He might not even be allowed to visit anyone all summer, which was a prospect he was clearly absolutely dreading. 

Somebody, Harry thought, ought to do something about Cadmus Nott. No kid should be that afraid of his own father. Unfortunately, he had a suspicion that kidnapping and murdering the head of a magical Noble House without getting caught might be a little more difficult than finding a muggle lech in a bar and just apparating away with him. He’d ask Tom if he had any ideas, he decided. The horcrux had hinted none-too-subtly that he would be willing to teach Harry how to worship the Dark, and if they were supposed to sacrifice people it would like, Cadmus seemed like the type, at least from what Theo had told him.

Harry had also kept the acromantulae out of it, for the same reasons he’d been reluctant to let Danny report them to the Ministry. The centaurs and wilderfolk still weren’t ready, at least as far as he knew. He’d find out later tonight, he supposed. Dumbledore had put it around that everyone was to attend dinner, as he had some announcements to make, and then Harry was going to go tell Bane that the unicorn killer had been caught — Dumbledore had asked him if he wanted to do the honours, and of course he’d said yes — and try to convince him to un-exile him. 

Blaise, of course, put on a flawless show of neither noticing nor caring that everyone was watching them. Danny was annoyed and embarrassed, and a little anxious, worried that someone was going to peg him as Harry Potter, because are you insane, Harry? No one’s going to believe the “real Harry Potter” was raised by bloody ninjas in bloody Japan, or that he dropped in for a couple of days, put on a Ravenclaw tie, and people just didn’t notice him, or that he went straight back to Japan because they’re really very humble, ninjas?! Really, Harry?! which was just ridiculous, because of course they would. How many people had asked Harry if he was really raised in Nepal? (He hadn’t counted, but it had been a lot.)

Hermione, by contrast, was just extremely annoyed because, “Why did you have to tell them I was involved, Harry? Exams are one week away and I haven’t been able to get five minutes of revising done all day!”

“Well, you did say you wanted all the credit.”

“That was a joke, Harry! A joke!”

“And it was very funny. I laughed, didn’t I?” He was pretty sure he had. “But if you’re going to be annoyed at me for mentioning you or annoyed at me for not mentioning you, which you know you would be, don’t lie, you might as well get some credit.”

“Do you know how many people have asked me if I’ve met the real Harry Potter, Harry? Twenty-seven! Since breakfast!”

He sniggered. That was more than had asked him, for sure. “I’ve only had twelve. What’ve you been telling them?”

“Yes, and he seemed nice enough, but no, I didn’t talk to him much because I don’t speak Japanese. Or sign language, which is how you were talking to him.”

“Psh, boring. I’ve told people the ninjas did teach him how to be literally invisible, actually; that he’s a metamorph and actually prefers to go by Harriet; that he has bright red hair like Lily Potter and it sticks up like the Potters’ so he basically looks like one of those Japanese cartoons, and if they didn’t notice him here last week, they must be blind; that we’re actually twins — we do have different fathers, we assume ritual magic was involved — and we communicate telepathically with that weird twin bond thing; that he has bright red hair like Lily Potter and has been disguised as Ron Weasley all along; that Lily dedicated him to Death when he was a few months old and he’s not actually killable because he’s not properly alive — Persephone destroyed Voldie back in Eighty-One for daring to try to kill her son— Honestly, Hermione. The possibilities are endless! And you went with, I didn’t talk to him because I don’t speak Japanese?”

“Well, I’m not you, Harry! I can’t just come up with these things!”

“Sure you can. Just look around and find something to take inspiration from, like...” He spotted one of the ghosts drifting through the corridor ahead of them in full plate. “Oh! A suit of armour — he should have a sword! ...He carries a katana and has a scar through his left eyebrow from a training accident when he was five. See, easy. Also, you should start calling me Jay. Just to minimise confusion.”

“Oh, like you really care about minimising confusion. Pull the other one, Jay.”

He grinned at her. “You know me, always trying to maintain peace and order in our fair Britain. Let’s raise a glass, one and all!”

“Do you ever stop taking the piss, Jay?” she demanded, stalking through the door to the Great Hall, throwing an angry basilisk glare at the first person who looked like he might want to ask her anything. 

Because that person was Neville Longbottom, it actually deterred him, and they were able to take a seat before that second-year Gryffindor whose cat ate Weasley’s rat asked, “Hey, Potter— Er. Black. Whatever your name is. Is it true you talked to the real Harry Potter?”

“No, never met him,” he responded, with an impressively straight face, in his own opinion. 

“Then where’d all that shite in that article come from?”

“Got me. I did hear someone saying that the real Harry Potter’s a metamorph, so maybe he impersonated me and did the interview himself.”

“Huh. Thanks, Potter. Er. Black?” 

“Black.” 

“Right, thanks.” The Gryffindor actually seemed to believe him, nodding to himself as he went back to report to his friends, who were all leaning back on their bench at different degrees to watch him ask.

“You. are. incorrigible!”

“You think I’m funny, admit it.”

Blaise saved her from having to do any such thing, dropping into the seat on her other side. “Are you two flirting again?”

Hermione smacked him in the shoulder. “No!”

“Ow! Violent heathen child! Jay! Help! I’m being assaulted!”

Hermione hit him again. Before Jay could stop giggling too hard to grab her wrists and hold her back, Dumbledore stood, calling for them to quiet down.

“Where’s Danny?” Hermione hissed.

“He’s been hiding in the Library under the Invisibility Cloak since lunch,” Blaise whispered back, quietly enough that they were probably the only two who heard, despite the noise level around them dropping precipitously. 

“Very good, very good,” Dumbledore began. “Thank you, your attention please... Yes, eyes up here... So, as I believe most of you are aware, unless you have suffered a terrible obliviation incident since breakfast and have somehow avoided speaking to any other students today—” 

He paused to allow the laughter to die down.

“Lord Voldemort has indeed been captured!”

Cheering, much louder than Harry really thought was warranted. It wasn’t like any of them had been old enough to actually remember anything that happened in the war.

“But, I believe there has been some confusion surrounding certain other details of the article in the Prophet this morning. So, to set the record straight — or at least firmly crooked:

“Yes, the first-year Ravenclaw we’ve all been referring to as ‘Harry Potter’ all year is, in fact, Sirius Black’s son, James. As for where he came from and how he got here, I’m sure you’ll all find out from him in good time.

“Yes, I have known since the beginning of the year that James was not the boy born to James and Lily Potter; ‘the real Harry Potter’, as I believe you have all taken to referring to him as, is safe and well, in the same situation I placed him in so many years ago. He has requested that his current identity be kept secret for the sake of his privacy.

“Yes, he was here at the school, and he was involved in the capture of Lord Voldemort’s wraith. He and Mister Black did collude to lure Lord Voldemort out of hiding — how and when they first contacted each other, I must admit, I am uncertain — which plan I did not endorse. It placed a great deal of unnecessary danger on Mister Black, and it was highly risky for Mister Potter to confront Lord Voldemort, young and untried as he is. I could not, however, interfere without putting both of them and their co-conspirators in greater danger. It is an enormous relief to me that their plan succeeded without any major injuries to any of them.

“Yes, there was a prophecy, the full and exact wording of which may never be publicly known, fulfilled though it now appears to be.

“Yes, the Philosopher’s Stone was here at Hogwarts, and yes, it has since been returned to the Flamels. For any of you who are wondering, my experiment was, fortunately or not, successful in disproving the theory I intended to test.”

Since Jay still wasn’t sure what that theory had supposedly been, he wasn’t sure what was being implied, there.

“I cannot confirm or deny whether Mister Potter currently resides in Britain, or any plans he might have regarding House Potter and its estate. He is, after all, only eleven, and will not be expected to begin engaging in such decisions for at least another year and some months.

“I can deny the existence of a cult of magical zen ninjas somewhere in Japan,” the Headmaster said, Very Seriously, then added with an innocent smile, “I have, in fact, been asked specifically to do so by the magical government of Japan. You may draw your own conclusions.”

Jay found himself laughing so hard it was difficult to breathe, as murmurs of speculation and shouted questions rose around them. Out of all the shite I said in that interview, that’s the one part I thought for sure he would shoot down! he thought at Blaise.

I don’t know why, it sounds like exactly the sort of thing he’d come up with himself...

Yeah, well, for all he could be an enormous prat sometimes, like when he was sending Jay off to live in Little Whinging for ten years or letting Fluffy drown him in slobber or arguing that Dru wasn’t qualified to be his guardian, Albus Dumbledore was also genuinely hilarious sometimes.

“On a more serious note, I have received some inquiries about Professor Quirrell. He was evacuated to Saint Mungo’s Hospital after the exorcism was performed. Unfortunately, he was unable to survive the corrupting transformative effects of such long-term possession. Indeed, according to the Healers, it is a minor miracle he survived the exorcism — one which can almost certainly be attributed to the fact that, yes, Professor Quirrell was drinking unicorn blood to sustain himself, a dark act which would have thoroughly doomed him even if he had not suffered so extremely from the possession. He was once, however, a good man. A memorial service will be held for him the Saturday after examinations are complete. 

“I have also received inquiries about the supposed curse on the Defence position. To the best of my knowledge, no, there is no curse on the position. Professors Babbling and Vector, along with myself and every other Runes and Arithmancy professor to have worked here since Nineteen Seventy have attempted to find any trace of such a curse, and have been unable to do so. Unfortunately, the reputation of the position, gained throughout the Sixties after three unfortunate accidents — all several years apart — and half a dozen instructors who chose to resign after a single year for personal reasons or because they found that teaching at the secondary level was not their cup of tea and decided to take a position elsewhere, has, I think, discouraged potential applicants for some time, resulting in a pool of poor applicants with an unfortunate tendency to engage in activities which result in dismissal or death by misadventure, and so reinforce the idea that there is a curse. 

“I am happy to announce, however, that I received an owl only hours ago from a cursebreaker who happened to see the article this morning, and who may be interested in taking the job next year.

“I would also like to reiterate that the Forbidden Forest is indeed forbidden to all students, not only because of its many dangers — giant ants really are the least of it — but also because a significant portion of the valley does not belong to the school, but to the centaurs who inhabit it. Those lands are theirs by treaty, and they hold the right to punish trespassers according to their own laws, which do not look kindly on such matters. 

“And on that note, I believe it is time for dinner!” he declared, knocking on the table as a signal to the elves to send up the food.

Jay wasn’t particularly hungry, and was eager to get on with his mission to convince the centaurs he wasn’t actually dangerous to them, even if he was clearly a creature of darkness who found the taste of absolute corruption to be absolutely intoxicating. He grabbed a roll and tore it in half, sticking a few slivers of roast in the middle as a makeshift sandwich. 

“And on that note, I’m off to go trespass and hope I don’t get shot for returning from exile. Wish me luck.”

“You’re going to what?” Hermione said, startled. “Why would you be shot?”

“Er, because they have the right to punish trespassers according to their own laws, and they don’t look kindly on such matters?”

“Harry—”

“Jay,” he corrected her.

“Fine, Jay, you know what I meant!”

“I did, and I didn’t answer the question, so what does that tell you?” Blaise, will you please tell Hermione that I can’t explain this in the middle of the bloody Great Hall?

Sure. I’ll even explain it for you, if she doesn’t flip out at me over the telepathy.

Cheers. “I’ll see you later. Probably. Assuming I don’t get myself shot.”

Good luck.

He was probably going to need it.

“Hold there!” a sentry ordered him from the trees, leaves rustling and sticks crunching beneath her hooves as she picked her way closer. 

Jay froze, hands in the air. “I come bearing news!” he said quickly. “Please don’t shoot me. Or, if you have to shoot me, could you shoot me non-fatally? I mean, I’m not actually on your side of the boundary-line yet, so...” Oh, he actually knew her, he realised, as she stepped out onto the path, bow half-drawn — a dark-bodied mare in her late teens or early twenties, with a notably round face, made more-so by the way she plaited her hair into a crown. “Hi, Selene.”

“Potter? What on Earth are you doing here? You know you were banished,” Selene reminded him.

“Yes, I know, that’s why I was concerned about you shooting me.”

“I should shoot you. You’re a corruptive entity, a danger to us all by virtue of your mere presence.”

“I really don’t think I am, though. I mean, look, the plants aren’t wilting around me like they do around dead unicorns. The bugs certainly don’t think it’s a bad idea to bite me,” he added, swatting at a mosquito on his right hand. “It’s not like everyone around me has suddenly come down with bad luck or anything, either. Kind of the opposite, actually. We just caught the unicorn killer, and the plan went off bloody perfectly.”

“It has been caught? As in captured?”

Jay nodded. “Not like just, just, I guess. Wednesday, so a few days ago now, but I wanted to wait until Dumbledore’s latest trial wrapped up so I could tell you about that, too.”

The centaur worried her bottom lip for a moment, then aimed her bow at the ground, loosing her arrow at a spot about a metre ahead of him. “That’s the border.” He was closer than he’d thought, but then, it had been the wolves who had pointed out the place where human land ended, and they weren’t as precise about that sort of thing as the centaurs. “Wait here,” she instructed him. “I will bring my father to speak with you.”

She wheeled around and cantered off toward the village without another word. 

“Well, okay, then,” Jay muttered to the trees and the bugs, wondering exactly how long it would take them to get back. It would take about fifteen minutes for him to jog there, but the centaurs could move a lot faster than him when they wanted to...but then, it would probably take a little bit for Selene to find Bane and explain what was going on, so...

About twenty minutes later, Bane skidded to a halt beside the arrow, rearing and agitated, Selene trotting along behind him looking less angry and more conflicted. Jay was guessing this wasn’t good. 

“No!” the centaur said firmly. “You are not welcome here, Harry Potter! Be gone with you!”

“But I have news!”

“I do not care to hear it! Your words cannot be trusted, and your presence here cannot be borne! Go, before we are forced to kill you.”

“Please, Father, can you not at least hear him out?” Selene asked. “He is only a child!”

Her father rounded on her, a fore-hoof pawing at the leaves, but she held her ground. “You know nothing of it, Lena! You were not there! You did not see him, revelling in corruption and death, partaking of it with shameless abandon and when we tore him from it, thinking that he knew not what he had done, begging us to let him have more!”

“Yeah, I stand by that,” Jay said, despite knowing that it probably wouldn’t help his cause. “The damage was already done. But I wasn’t in my right mind, Bane! I lost control of myself, and— You think the only reason I’ve stayed away the past month is because I was afraid you’d shoot me?” 

Bane spun to snort-scoff at him, a very horse-like, slightly disgusted, well, yeah, obviously sort of sound.

“No!” He was afraid they would shoot him, too — if he’d thought they were bluffing, he wouldn’t have bothered trying to get permission to come back — but that wasn’t nearly as big a concern as, “I didn’t want to stumble across another one! I don’t like what it did to me, what it made me, in the moment, and I didn’t want it to happen again! But we caught the unicorn killer, it was one of the professors, possessed by a wraith, and the professor’s dead now and the wraith’s trapped in a muggle torch, so I’m not going to run into another one, and as long as it’s not right in front of me I know it’s not the most important thing in the world and I can control myself, I’m not going to go kill one myself or anything, I just want to be allowed to run with the Pack again! I miss them!”

“It is not the concern that you will become a desperate, mindless thing and kill another unicorn to sate your need to seek out darkness and evil which makes you a danger we cannot abide, Harry Potter! It is that you are contaminated! You have touched the essence of corruption, taken it into yourself. It is a part of you, and you, therefore, are of it, spreading it in word and deed, where you walk, to those you speak to— Only those who serve evil are so unaffected by its presence!”

“Yeah, I tried to explain last time but I was half out of my mind drunk on that shite — yes, I do serve the Dark, and yes, that’s probably why the unicorn blood affected me like that, but it didn’t make me more evil or contaminated than I already was. If I hadn’t already been a creature of corruption and death, it wouldn’t have been appealing to me in the first place, would it?”

“This isn’t helping your case, Harry,” Selene warned him. Not that he needed the warning, he could see Bane’s face just fine himself, his glower growing deeper and more serious by the second. 

“I know, but it’s not fair!”

“Fair?” Bane repeated, his voice shaking with incredulity and rage. “It is not fair?! In what way is it unfair, Harry Potter? Tell me, please!”

“It’s not fair because I haven’t corrupted anyone, damn it! Look around! I’m not killing things just by being here! I’m absolutely a creature of the Dark, I would never deny that, but I accepted ichor from the veins of an avatar of the Dark Itself over Yule, and unicorn blood may be the most delicious thing I’ve ever tasted, but it’s sure as hell not as strong or corrupting as that! I won’t say it hasn’t affected me, it has, but it hasn’t affected people around me! If it had, if I were actually contagious, you would have noticed well before May, I’m sure of it! Hell, if I were a danger to others, spreading corruption everywhere I went, Dru probably wouldn’t have let me come back here at all!”

That actually seemed to give the shaman pause. Selene seemed to sense it, too. “Perhaps, Father,” she suggested gingerly, “we could treat him as we would a werewolf. He surely must be corrupted himself, a creature of the Dark by his own admission, but it is possible that he does not spread his corruption continuously.”

“He is not a werewolf! The threat posed by a werewolf is as predictable as the waxing and waning of the moon! We do not know what conditions may cause the boy to become a danger, Daughter.” As in, he was admitting that Jay might not actually be a danger all the time? That was progress, right?

“You do not truly believe that the Lady would send doom to fall upon our Forest, Father,” Selene insisted, referring to Dru with a degree of respect bordering on reverence (which was, on the one hand, sort of funny, but on the other, totally understandable).

“I do not believe that the Lady would wish to send harm upon us, no, but even Outsiders cannot see all there is to see, Lena. They cannot know all there is to know, and They, more than any of us, hold the potential to disrupt the music of the spheres with a single careless note.”

Selene crossed her arms, giving her father a very unimpressed look. “While in the general case that may be so, Father, I do not believe that this particular Outsider has ever done anything careless in Her entire life, and we were not speaking of unintended consequences, we were speaking of whether the boy is currently a corruptive influence on the world around himself, which She would surely notice. She has taken responsibility for him, and as such, I cannot imagine She has not examined his future nor that She would have allowed him to return here after the students’ holiday, knowing that he would become a danger to us all.”

Bane was wavering, Jay could tell.

“If it helps, she does know about the unicorn, and she didn’t say it was a problem,” he volunteered. 

He’d written to her about the whole episode, mostly complaining about Bane banishing him, but also sort of trying to ask for advice on...how to not have that happen again, the completely losing control of himself thing, without letting on how much it had freaked him out.

Of course, he was pretty sure she knew anyway, but still. He didn’t like actually admitting he was scared of something (even, or possibly especially, if that something was himself). She’d said that she wasn’t surprised that he was affected like that, which made one of them. She didn’t think he needed dark magic specifically in the same way he needed magic period and felt like he was being deprived of something essential to his being when there wasn’t enough of it, but he was a child of the Dark, which was only being slightly poetic about it — he’d always been a questionably sane demon-child and his magic had always been heavily dark-polarised, even before he dedicated himself to the Dark and became shadowkin — of course he would find the corrupted magic of the unicorn to be overwhelmingly appealing. He probably would have been drawn to it even if he hadn’t dedicated himself to the Dark, in the same way the bookshop’s binding magics had felt really, really good, even before Yule.

Supposedly it wouldn’t have been so overwhelming if he were accustomed to being around that kind of darkness — living within the Blacks' wards, for example — in much the same way his first little glimpse of Outside (and his first trip outside, for that matter) had been completely mind-blowing because he’d never experienced anything like it before. And part of the reason he’d completely lost control of himself was probably that he wasn’t used to resisting the influence of the Dark, which was inherent in anything as magical and corrupting as a dead unicorn. Its presence tended to make people more short-sighted and impulsive (as well as more selfish, more prone to violence and destruction, more likely to escalate conflicts rather than attempt to resolve them diplomatically, and so on). Jay, having dedicated himself to it (and also not having great self-control to begin with), was even more susceptible than most people to its influence.

Theoretically it should get easier with practice. Jay was somewhat sceptical about that, and not eager to test it. Tom reportedly said that learning how to do occlumency properly would help, too. Learning more advanced occlumency was already on Jay’s list of shite to do because it sounded awesome being able to do multi-part spells (or multiple spells that needed to be maintained after they were cast) and improving his memory — which he thought was actually pretty good, as in, he didn’t forget things all that often, it was just sort of...scattered, so someone had to remind him about a thing before he would remember that it was maybe relevant to the situation at hand — and ability to focus on a single thing for more than five minutes at a time sounded like they would make his life much easier and less frustrating for everyone involved (including Jay, but especially Dru, she’d been hilariously insistent that he should learn). If it could help him avoid that ever happening again, it was now at the top of the list.

She’d also explained where the centaurs were coming from, and had been pretty bloody clear that he couldn’t actually blame them for not wanting him anywhere around their home. It sounded like leaving a dead unicorn unpurified would poison a huge track of the Forest, and even when the plants and shite did start to recover, the magical character of the area would still be affected for years. That (among other dark influences) was how somewhere like the Hogsmeade Valley became something more like the Cursed Forest in Transylvania. In some ways, it was worse than the spiders for the ecology of the Forest. At least they just killed everything. They didn’t affect the magic of the place directly. (Though introducing species which completely destroyed the natural ecology was also a thing that could affect the magical character of the place, too.) 

And if anyone who wasn’t thoroughly enough aligned with the Dark for their body and soul to fully accept and integrate the corrupted magic of the unicorn had touched it, or worse, drank the blood, they would have been horribly, painfully transformed (physically mutated, like Quirrell’s second face) or lost their minds and went on a killing spree or something. They would also bleed off the corrupting magic to affect anything they touched and anyone they spoke to, spreading it like a disease, because most people simply wouldn’t be able to assimilate that kind of magic and make it a part of themselves. 

So, fine, yes, he got it, they were afraid he was going to completely ruin everything. If he were anyone else, he probably would be exactly the kind of danger they thought he was.

He wasn’t actually cursed, though, or spreading corruption around or anything. His presence did leave a little more of an impact on the character of the ambient magic of a place than the average twelve-year-old, but that was because he had a somewhat higher resting channelling rate than most twelve-year-olds, was more aware of the ambient magic than most people regardless of their age, and did big magics with it, and that impact wasn’t significantly more corrupting than anyone else’s. He would still “corrupt” the magical atmosphere of Dru’s cottage in the sense that his presence would affect it at all, but he had a suspicion that was more like a pillow smelling less hers because he had slept on it than anything harmful or likely to cause long-term changes to anything.

“It’s been over a month, Bane! If I were more of a corrupting influence now than before the unicorn, it would be really bloody obvious, wouldn’t it? But none of my friends have had bad luck or gotten ill or gone mad—” Except Hermione, and that was definitely just exams, nothing to do with Jay. “—and Fawkes hasn’t attacked me and tried to drive me out of the Castle—” Dru had said it was possible Jay wouldn’t notice if he were corrupting people around himself, it could be subtle, but the phoenix’s reaction would be a sign even he couldn’t possibly miss, and he’d even been in the same room as the phoenix when they’d captured the wraith. “—and leaving dead bodies around to rot can corrupt your water and make people ill, but you wouldn’t consider a crow to be corrupting just because it eats carrion, would you? I’m not hurting anyone just by existing, I promise!”

That really gave the shaman pause — not the crow thing, that Fawkes hadn’t tried to kill him. He gave another disgusted little snort and ground out, “Very well. If the phoenix has allowed you to remain in the school with the human children, I must admit you probably do not present a danger to the Forest by your presence alone. You may once again hunt our lands and associate with the wilderfolk, if they will have you, and you may speak to the adults of my tribe if you must, to pass on news from the humans and other matters of import.” 

“Yes!” Jay grinned, much more relieved that the centaur had accepted that argument than he had expected to be. “Thank you!” Finally...

Bane wasn’t done, though. “You will not enter our villages, speak to our children, or touch any of my people directly, with hand or with magic. We will see, in time, whether you can again be trusted.”

“Yessir. Got it.”

“Mark my words well, Harry Potter! We will grant you one more chance, and only one! If you flout these rules, you will no longer be welcome in our lands, now and forever! Do you understand?”

“Yes. No visiting the villages, don’t talk to the kids—” which shouldn’t be difficult, since they mostly stayed in the villages, “—and no touching any centaurs, or I’m banished again, no third chances. Yes, I’ve got it,” he repeated. “I’m not Harry Potter anymore, though. That’s one of the things I was coming out here to tell you. I’m James Black, now. Jay, if you like.” He hadn’t wanted to correct the shaman while he was still on thin ice, but now that his banishment had been (sort of, provisionally) lifted, it really was sort of jarring hearing Bane call him Harry like that. Oddly so, maybe, since practically no one had caught on to calling him Jay yet except Dru, Sirius, and Blaise (and Hermione, as sarcastically as possible), but.

Both centaurs froze, their eyes flicking up to meet each other’s, then back to Harry, before Bane asked, “You have changed your name?” weirdly intensely. “When? And how?”

“Er. Since today, officially, and...I dunno, Dru said I should be called James Black after Riddle was dealt with, and now he’s captured, so there’s not much point in me being Harry Potter anymore. I told that bloke from the Prophet and his article just came out this morning, so now everyone knows. Is there more to it than that?” 

There was paperwork and stuff for the Ministry and officially recognising him as Sirius’s kid — Sirius had been working on putting together all the background shite to support the idea that he had a kid with a muggleborn back in the war and that Jay had been living with a muggle aunt who just died about a year ago — but Jay didn’t really think any of that was important in the sense of like, real people who actually mattered knowing who he really was. And the centaurs wouldn’t give a damn about the human government’s paperwork, either, he was pretty sure.

“Do you think it is possible,” Selene asked her father, “that it was Harry Potter alone who was tainted by his evil deeds?”

“It would explain why there is no obvious trace of the curse upon him,” Bane agreed, nodding slowly. “Venus is still herself in the morning and the evening, but Phosphorus and Hesperus are, for certain purposes, distinct. When we mortals take a new name, we become slowly enough that such a curse would follow, but when one such as She bestows a new identity upon one... It...is possible, I think, yes...”

“Er. Does that mean you’ll call me Jay, then?”

“It means, James Black, that Harry Potter is no more,” the shaman said firmly. “A line is drawn, his words and deeds and story left with him, and so too the evil with which he tainted himself. It means that you are free to move on and discover the person of James Black unencumbered by the mistakes of Harry Potter. A new life is a gift not given lightly, even to a changeling child, and it is one you would be foolish to squander.”

“O...kay?” Jay said, not entirely certain what that meant, exactly.

“In light of this new information, we will set aside all which has gone before. Harry Potter was banished from our lands for his trespasses, but the Lady has spoken, and you are not he. Your face is familiar to us, but James Black is a new person, untainted by Harry Potter’s actions. As such, we may safely offer you the hand of friendship and welcome you into our home.” He solemnly held out a hand to shake, bowing a few inches so it wouldn’t be completely uncomfortable for Jay, having to reach up above his head to take it. 

Jay wasn’t entirely certain if this was some sort of trap or trick, testing whether he was going to follow the no touching rule or not, but...he was leaning toward no? Silly and superstitious and downright weird as the whole name-change/new-person thing seemed, that had felt like a pretty legitimate oh, well, that changes everything moment. 

He took the hand.

“Good. Well met, James Black. Come, I will introduce you to the village.”

...Well, okay, then? 

Whatever, not questioning it, he decided. A second chance was a second chance, and he wasn’t going to screw it up by asking what the hell was going on, here. He was sure Dru would explain it when he finally remembered to ask her about it. For the moment he was just pleased that he wasn’t getting shot.

“Okay. But I was coming down here in the first place to tell you that we caught the unicorn killer, and Dumbledore’s latest generation of spiders seems promising — the average clutch size is only eighteen, and the offspring are actually viable, though we’re still waiting to see if they’re fertile, and if the alteration carried through...”