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A loud crash, followed by a string of unladylike curses, floated through the kitchen window.
"Cupcakes, 2. Hermione, 0." Ron sat back on his heels and wiped the sweat from his brow. "You do realise that you may not have a kitchen anymore by the time she finishes up?"
Kneeling on the grass a few metres away, up to his elbows in a overturned dirt, Remus grinned. "No great loss. We're hardly gourmet chefs ourselves." His grin faded abruptly, and he pulled back, dragging a knobby root out of the ground. The root twisted and curled away, trying to escape his grasp. "Ron--"
Ron scrambled to his feet and hurried over. Raising the hatchet above his head, he said, "Look out. One--two--three!"
Ron brought the blade down with a swift chop. The woody root stopped twitching, but the trees around the garden shivered, branches scraped the first story windows the cottage, and the damp earth in the flower beds rolled gently. Remus tossed the dismembered root onto the growing pile by the shed and eyed the surrounding trees warily. Slowly, the leaves stopped rustling and the trees were still.
With a sigh, Remus look across the garden at the cottage with its neat lines and crisp white paint. "It was such a good deal," he said, shaking his head.
Ron snickered. "It's always a good deal until the garden starts to fight back."
"It's too ridiculous for words," Remus insisted. "Nobody has haunted trees. Nobody."
"You do. Haunted trees and flowers." Ron grinned and waved the hatchet, sweeping it to encompass the quaint garden. "It would make a bloody brilliant story, wouldn't it? The Man-Eating Tulips of Marchwood End."
Remus rolled his eyes and began to dig again.
-
The editors at The Daily Prophet knew a good story when they saw one. They knew how to turn a rumour into a headline. They knew their readership. The wizarding world thrived on stories.
The hook: It was a dark and stormy night.
The truth: It was a dark and stormy night--somewhere, probably, what with winter weather patterns and global warming and all. It didn't happen to be dark and stormy in the nondescript village of Little Hangleton on 3 January 1997, but that was a minor detail.
It was a battle that had been more than a decade in the making. The confrontation between Harry Potter and He Who Shall Not Be Named was written in the stars, spoken by the prophets, woven by Fate, inevitable, unavoidable. There was no way around it. The brave young man would face his enemy and only one of them would walk away. Witches throughout England gripped their handkerchiefs in fear. Wizards muttered and worried. The Ministry was helpless. The world held its breath.
The best anybody could do was to train the lad and hope for the best. The boy had mentors, he had a spiritual guide, he had allies and enemies and symbols and signs and everything that a hero could possibly need to make his story last.
And when the time came, armed with only his wand and his wits, the plucky teenager faced his enemy.
And the boy emerged, scarred but triumphant.
It made a bloody brilliant story.
It made a hero. And the wizarding world loved nothing more than a hero.
Heroes, after all, made wonderful statues. Erks and Ecks, Sculptors Since 1876, Number 17 Diagon Alley, had been saving a very fine piece of marble for sixteen long years.
-
Even though it was quite warm for the Easter holidays, the woods were cool in the early Spring morning. Harry inhaled the damp, earthy scent of the forest, listened to the breeze in the leaves and the birds singing, stepped slowly over a fallen log and tried to identify the strange, warm, not-quite-unpleasant feeling in his chest. It was like he couldn't breathe, except that he could; it was like his heart wasn't quite steady, except that he wasn't the least bit uneasy or nervous.
Bloody hell, Harry, you really are as dense as they say you are. The voice in his head sounded suspiciously like Ron Weasley. You're happy, you tosser. Happy.
Harry laughed out loud before he could stop himself.
"What is it?" Sirius looked at him, smiling uncertainly.
"Nothing," Harry said quickly. "I just thought of something funny."
Sirius' smile widened, but he didn't ask for an explanation.
They turned right when they reached the brook and continued walking slowly beside the gurgling water, not speaking, not stopping, not worrying. Harry had no idea where they were, but he didn't care. There was nothing menacing in this magical wood. Sometimes, on warm sunny mornings, he felt that there was nothing menacing left in the world at all.
Then he felt like an soppy, soft-headed idiot and pushed the thought from his mind.
-
The truth and the story didn't always overlap.
In a smoke-filled wizarding pub outside of Glasgow, a man with a drooling mastiff by his side approached a mild-mannered man in shabby robes. "Alright, Lupin," he growled. The mastiff growled, too. They sounded exactly the same. "We're tired of this miserable bloody game."
In the depths of the Ministry of Magic, a group of four or five Unspeakables huddled together in a stone chamber. A gentle breeze flowed through the room, shifting the wispy strands of cloth that hung in the archway. "Maybe," one of the wizards said, not daring to raise his voice above a whisper, "maybe we've been wrong about it all along?"
At a secretive meeting one December night in an old London townhouse, a young Auror with bubblegum pink hair tipped her chair back on two legs and said, "Fuck the prophesy. I have a plan."
A house on a hill outside the village of Little Hangleton blazed. The villagers approached cautiously, pointing and staring and muttering. "Always knew it was a bad place," they said. "Always knew something else would happen there." Snow fell through the night, but the fire did not stop until the house was no more than ash.
A story is not the same thing as a sequence of events.
-
In theory, Hermione thought, cooking was not all that different from potions.
Ingredients, quantities, order, result. She had only to imagine that Professor Snape was hovering in the kitchen like an overgrown bat, and there was no difference at all. It should be simple.
It would be simple, if only she could read the recipe.
Rubbing the tears furiously from her eyes, she shoved the tattered paper aside and took several slow, deep breaths. She leaned on the edge of the sink, looking into the back garden where Ron and Professor Lupin--who frequently reminded her that he wasn't Professor Lupin anymore--were laughing as they attempted to coax some biting tulip bulbs out of the ground. One of the bulbs caught Ron's finger; he yelped and shook his hand wildly, and Professor Lupin laughed even harder.
Two days ago, at a big, noisy Easter dinner at Ted and Andromeda Tonks' house, Hermione had stood in the doorway to the dining room, watching silently as Sirius and Professor Lupin taught Harry and Ron how to charm the dinner rolls to do a perfectly synchronized tapdance across the table. Andromeda had come up behind her, touched her shoulder gently, and said, "That's better, isn't it." Hermione hadn't said anything.
She picked up the recipe again. Her mother's nearly illegible handwriting scrawled across the page. Ordinary lined paper, ballpoint pen, "Birthday Cupcakes" written across the top and underlined twice. Her mother always did that, underlining twice when something was important, and sometimes when it wasn't. The letters Hermione used to get at school were full of underlines and exclamation points, with the occasional heart-shaped doodle in the margin. She used to tease her mother: Do you write your patients' charts like that? Hearts and smiles all over?
With a deep breath, Hermione set the recipe down on a clean spot on the counter. She looked at the scattered mess of flour, eggs, bowls, spoons and cups. That morning, when they were finishing breakfast, she had been very insistent: "I'm going to make them the Muggle way." When Ron had frowned and asked why on earth she'd want to do something like that, she replied, "That's the proper way to make these cupcakes."
But that wasn't what she meant to say. Somewhere between scraping up the last of her eggs and setting the dish in a sink full of warm, sudsy water, the real answer had stuck in her throat. Ron didn't notice and Harry and Sirius weren't paying attention at all, but Professor Lupin just looked at her steadily and told her that the large bowl was on the bottom shelf in the pantry.
Because that's the only way my mother knew how.
Alone in the kitchen, Hermione brushed the flour from her hands. "This," she said aloud, tracing a finger through the spilled sugar on the tiles, "is not working."
Cooking, she thought, is not so very different from potions. And Hermione knew well enough that there was a limit to what potions could do. Professor Snape might go on and on about stoppering death and bottling happiness, but there was always a catch, the magical version of fine print, a sacrifice, requirement or wager bound up in the fluid and fumes that roiled from the cauldron. There was probably a dusty book hidden somewhere in the Restricted Section of the Hogwarts Library that listed the precise ingredients and careful steps required to brew a moment-memory-or-somesuch-potion, a concoction that would capture the essence and the feel of bright Saturday mornings long past, of her mother scraping the bowl in the kitchen, the warm scent of baking, her bare feet on the wooden floor, her father's booming voice singing along with Verdi somewhere in the house.
But, for the first time she could remember, Hermione had no desire to find that book and start reading.
The thing her parents had never understood, when they asked about her schoolwork and listened eagerly to her answers, was that magic made things different, but it didn't always make things easier.
She folded her mother's recipe into a neat square and tucked it into her pocket. Then she drew her wand and tapped it thoughtfully on the counter, considering.
-
After the Ministry finally acknowledged that He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named had returned, The Daily Prophet began to report casualties in the lefthand column of the second page. When there was nothing to report, the same space was occupied by an advertisement for Mrs. Cavanaugh's Self-Steaming Cookware and Pre-Charmed Kitchen Supplies.
The Prophet shared out letters of the alphabet as though they were Galleons, developing a shorthand, not unlike the code used for Quidditch scores, to describe who, what, when, and where in as few spaces as possible. H. Grivelson, Lo., d., 13-9, unk.. Herbert Grivelson of London was killed on 13 September, assailants unknown. Sometimes there was an M., which stood for Muggle, or a k., which meant dementor-kissed.
The news and society pages occasionally contained more useful information. A full-colour, two-page spread revealed to the world that Andromeda Black Tonks and Narcissa Black Malfoy both attended their eldest sister's funeral; they stood on opposite sides of the grave, their heads held high, and they did not cry. An expose printed parallel reports about the confirmed good works and rumoured evil deeds of suspected Dark families. One lucky reporter uncovered He Who Shall Not Be Named's true identity, and the wizarding world was instantly abuzz with the tale of a Muggleborn orphan who became the Head Boy that everybody liked--and then the Dark Lord that everybody feared.
And tucked into a corner below an extensive article about the Boy Who Lived's friends and family, there was a helpful box explaining just what Muggle dentists did, and why they, like all other Muggles, were unable to protect themselves from magical attacks.
-
"No way. Smyth can fly circles around McCloskey."
"When McCloskey's concussed, maybe, but not in a match. Just look at--"
"Concussed my arse. The only reason McCloskey ever scores is because the shine from his teeth distracts the Keeper."
"The only reason Smyth ever scores is because the Beaters are afraid of breaking his frail old bones."
"You're saying that age has something to do with Quidditch ability?"
"Yeah. That's what I'm saying."
"Really. We may have to put that theory to the test, kid."
"Just name the time and the place, old man. I'll teach you a few things about flying."
Sirius stopped walking and crossed his arms over his chest. "That," he said, "is no way to talk to your spiritual guide."
Harry broke a twig from a bush and threw it at his godfather. "Aww, did I hurt your feelings?"
"No, but I'm going to hurt considerably more than your feelings when I get--"
Harry jumped away, nearly tripping over a log, and laughed. "You can't do that. You're a wise mystic now. Physical violence isn't allowed."
"Shows what you know. Wise mystics get to make their own rules, thank you very much. It goes with the territory of being wise and all-knowing and spiritual and stuff."
Harry snorted and rolled his eyes toward the sky in disbelief. "Like having nothing for supper but pumpkin pasties and peppermint humbugs for two days in a row? Or charming the neighbour's cat to meow 'Ode to Joy'? Or stealing Mrs. Freusome's pants from her clothesline and hanging them in Mr. Porkton's garden? Very spiritual and wise, you are."
"The pants were Remus' idea."
"You always say that."
With a dramatic sigh, Sirius threw his arms out in exasperation. "It's always true! But nobody ever believes me. Besides," he added, after a moment's thought, "Mr. Porkton deserves all the old lady pants he gets."
"I won't argue with that," Harry conceded. "But it is very tempting to tell Mrs. Weasley what rotten adults you two are, just to see her scold you. It's worse than living with Fred and George. At least Fred and George act their age--sometimes."
"We're making up for lost time," Sirius said airily.
Harry felt a sudden, sharp pang of guilt; he clamped his mouth shut on his joking reply. He slowed his pace a bit to let Sirius pass through a narrow space between two trees, then followed, the bubbling laughter draining away like water through a sieve. No matter how resolutely he looked forward rather than back, no matter how bright the world looked when there was no Dark Lord, no impending battles, nothing at all to worry about except homework and holidays and bickering over whose turn it was to do the dishes, Harry couldn't ignore the shadows. Like thunderclouds just over the horizon, they were always there, just out of sight, skittering away when he turned his head quickly. The shadows were there when he went downstairs in the morning and knew at once that Sirius had been plagued with nightmares all night again. The shadows were there when he saw Mrs. Weasley cast her protective eyes over her brood and hesitate, for just a moment, when the count didn't add up to seven, when Hermione hung back from a laughing group rather than joining in, when he caught himself looking longingly at the photographs on the mantle, staring at the messy-haired boy who playfully tickled the red-haired girl, wishing that they weren't strangers and hating that they could never be anything else.
He nearly walked straight into Sirius, who had stopped in the middle of the path and was looking at him knowingly.
Sometimes, Harry thought, it was really annoying having a godfather who could practically read his mind.
Without a word, Sirius put an arm over his shoulder, and they started walking again.
Other times, Harry thought, it wasn't so bad.
"Being wise doesn't make you a better Quidditch player," Harry said finally, making his voice deliberately light and teasing.
"No, but being dead might."
"C'mon, you're--"
"Hey, if the Ministry says I'm dead, I must be. The Ministry is never wrong."
Harry smiled crookedly but did not respond. He had mentioned to Remus, a couple of months ago, how much he disliked Sirius' jokes about being dead. Remus had just smiled in that peculiar you-have-no-idea sort of way he had and said, "I hate it, too, but I think he needs to do it. He'll stop eventually." Harry had no doubt that Remus was, as usual, perfectly right. Sirius was alive. He was flesh and blood and and breath and hair that always needed cutting and endless plans to steal Mrs. Freusome's underpants and a barking laugh that scared birds from trees. So Harry let it go.
"You'll need more help than a mysterious spiritual existence to win against me," Harry retorted, lifting his chin in mock arrogance.
"I'll need a rickety old Cleansweep and one hand tied behind my back, maybe. And--" Sirius stopped abruptly, his eyes gleaming. He dropped his voice to a whisper. "Look!"
They had come to the end of the woods, where the path intersected the narrow lane that wound back to the house. The last house on the lane before Sirius' and Remus' belong to Mr. Porkton, a cranky old Muggle with a perpetual scowl and a lengthy list of complaints about unruly teenagers and punk-rock hooligans. ("I beg your pardon," Tonks had protested, insulted, "I prefer the term 'punk-rock aficionado'.") Mr. Porkton had also been in the habit of griping to the local shopkeepers about the dangers of disgusting men who lived sin, but he had recently fallen silent on that particular topic. ("What on earth did you say to him?" Mrs. Relton, the butcher's kindly wife, had asked Remus the last time they were in town. "Nothing," Remus replied innocently. "Nothing at all. I just smiled and nodded.")
Mr. Porkton's house and garden were immaculately groomed. The unpleasant old codger himself was currently in the back garden, spreading some sort of rabbit-repellent over the flower beds.
The door into the house was wide open.
Near the corner of the fence, there was a loose board.
Sirius grinned wickedly and whispered, "I have an idea."
Harry stifled a groan. He should have known. A small part of him wished that adults would always be adults so that kids could always be kids, but he knew that it rarely worked out like that.
Sometimes, Harry thought, it was a little annoying, having a godfather who was no better than a mischievous teenager.
Sirius pointed at a large white sign with black letters, pinned to Mr. Porkton's garden fence. NO DOGS.
And sometimes it was the best thing in the world.
-
The Department of Mysteries hadn't issued a press release since October of 1963, when a swarm of Dirge Demons escaped the research facility and all of England was in a panic. The general consensus, both within the Department and without, was that it wouldn't be properly mysterious if they simply wrote up everything in the Prophet, now would it?
On 23 July 1996, the Department of Mysteries issued its second press release in forty years. It was very carefully written, with a lot of technical-sounding words, citing centuries of research from the experts in the field of mortality magic, offering plausible theories and sensible speculation. It was very professional. Nobody understood a word it said.
Two days later, in an interview with a reporter from the Prophet, a junior researcher in the Department offered a layman's explanation. "We have no bloody idea," he said. "For as long as anybody can remember we've thought the Death Room was for studying, you know, death. Nobody ever bothered to test the theory, though. Why would we? If it's called the Death Room, how could it be anything else? But now...now we're kind of wondering where all those experimental subjects have gone."
-
The tangle of roots by the shed had grown considerably, as had the pile of biting tulip bulbs. Ron flung another bulb into the fray and watched while the others pounced. Dirt and fibers flew every which way, though the battle was eerily silent. Biting tulip bulbs had teeth but no voices. Somehow, that made watching them even worse.
"What are we going to do with those?" Ron asked warily.
Remus was methodically jamming a pitchfork into the flower bed, searching for any bulbs they might have missed. He leaned of the wooden handle for a moment and looked at the restless bulbs. "There's a shop in Knockturn Alley that would give us a few Galleons for that bunch."
Ron didn't bother to ask how Remus knew that; he had long since ceased being surprised at the things Remus knew. "What sort of mad nutter lived in this house before you?" he wondered aloud.
"A librarian, I think."
They continued working for another few minutes. The sun was high in the sky now, and it was quite hot, but Ron didn't mind. It was strange, he thought, but if he'd been at home for the Easter holidays, his parents would have had to drag him kicking and screaming out to the garden for a day of work. But he didn't mind so much here.
Hermione's voice broke through his thoughts. "Oh. No--that's--"
Ron looked toward the open kitchen window. "Alright, Hermione?" he called.
"Yes--yes, I'm fine." She sounded slighty preoccupied.
Ron shrugged and went back to digging. A moment later, he looked up again at a shout of laughter. Harry came sprinting around the side of the house, jumping easily over the low fence, followed by Sirius--in dog form--carrying something in his jaws. They both skidded to a halt in the centre of the garden. Sirius trotted over and dropped a glass bottle into Remus' hands.
Remus raised a single eyebrow. "Dare I ask where you found this?"
Harry bent over, breathing so hard he could barely answer. "Fence--Porkton--door--fence!" He collapsed on the ground, laughing.
"You stole a bottle of Glenfidditch from Mr. Porkton?" Remus asked, frowning disapprovingly.
Sirius wagged his tail.
Remus examined the bottle. "He didn't have anything better?"
Sirius shifted smoothly into his human form and reclined on the grass. His proud human grin looked no different from his proud canine grin. "No," he said, shaking his head. "Mr. Porkton is a whiskey heathen. Appalling, really. If I had known I wouldn't have risked life and limb--"
"And tail," Harry interrupted, still laughing.
"--and tail to storm his parlour. Remus--you don't understand. He has pictures of ducks in his parlour. Framed pictures of ducks on the walls."
"A sure sign of a disturbed mind," Remus said with satisfaction. "Here, take this inside. We're almost done out here."
Sirius took the bottle, jumped to his feet, and started toward the house. "If Mr. Porkton comes by later to complain I'm going to let you talk to him. He's scared of--oh, Hermione. What's wrong?"
Hermione stood in the doorway, her wand clutched in one hand, her hair a frizz of curls around her face. She had flour on her jeans and t-shirt and hands and nose and--well, just about everywhere that Ron could see. And she looked, he thought with alarm, like she was on the verge of tears.
"I--I think I made a mistake," she said shakily. "In the kitchen."
"What is it?" Sirius stepped past her and into the house. A second later, his voice rang through the open window. "What the fuck--oh, bugger--what did you do? Finite incantatem! No, no, stop...!"
Ron scrambled to his feet and followed Remus and Harry into the house. All three stopped abruptly in the doorway of the kitchen, gaping.
Every single surface in the kitchen was covered with cupcakes. Table, counters, shelves, there were cupcakes everywhere.
And they were multiplying.
A single cupcake with pink frosting split into two with green frosting, and the two with green frosting split into four with white frosting. They soon overran the countertops and began to crowd the floor.
"Help me stop them!" Sirius shouted. He pointed his want at a quivering cupcake. "Finite incantatem!" The cupcake exploded in a shower of pink crumbs.
Without hesitation, the others drew their wands and plunged into the battle. There was a furious ten minutes of spell casting, during which more than a hundred cupcakes erupted violently, four dishes were broken, seven cabinet doors were splintered, the curtains above the sink were stained with frosting, and Harry collapsed in a sugary heap when Sirius' Stunning Spell ricocheted off the refrigerator.
When the crumbs finally settled, dozens cupcakes remained and all four men were sticky with pink and green frosting from head to toe.
There was a quiet sniffled from the doorway. Ron turned. Hermione stood with her hand over her mouth, her cheeks red and her eyes damp.
"I was--I was just trying to make them--like my mum used to," she said, her voice tiny, her lip trembling. "I wanted to make them because she always made them and I wanted to do it the Muggle way because that's the way she did, but then I thought why should I do it the Muggle way because it's not like that ever--it's not like she--it didn't help them in the end, did it? Not having magic. If only they'd--but they were only Muggles--so I thought I'd make it a magical recipe but I think--I think I made a mistake."
She fell silent. A single tear rolled down her cheek, tracing through the flour.
"I'm sorry," she whispered. "I didn't mean to make--so many."
Without stopping to think about it, Ron stepped over quickly and pulled her into a tight hug. "Don't be ridiculous," he said. "We love cupcakes."
Hermione made a noise that something between a laugh and a sob.
"Yeah," Harry agreed quietly. "Love 'em."
"You can never have too many cupcakes," Remus added.
"I have an undying passion for cupcakes," Sirius said solemnly.
Hermione's shoulders began shaking, and she buried her face in Ron's shoulder for a second before pushing away. He saw then that she was laughing. There were tears running down her cheeks, but she was laughing and shaking her head.
"You're all mad," she said firmly. "Absolute madmen."
A single cupcake on the floor trembled. Hermione looked down, lifted her foot, and stomped on it.
-
April 1997. Excerpt from interview with Harry J. Potter, the Boy Who Lived, conducted by Witch Weekly reporter Mirabella Warbler:
MW: You've been very quiet about your plans for the future, Harry. Do you have any idea what you want to do?
HP: I still have another year of school, of course. After that, I don't know.
MW: Any chance of playing professional Quidditch?
HP: Maybe. I don't know. I don't know yet. It would be fun.
MW: And, of course, the readers of Witch Weekly want to know--is there a special girl in Harry Potter's life?
HP: Oh, uh, no. Nobody. I'm just--no, nobody.
MW: Well, some of our younger readers will be happy to hear that! On a more serious note, though, all of England has been celebrating and getting back to normal. How do you feel about living in this brave new world you brought about? The whole world and your friends and family now safe?
HP: I think--I think we'll be alright. We'll be okay.