Harry rolled the McLaren into the lower garage, the engine's low growl echoing off the stone walls before settling into silence. Ninety-odd cars gleamed under enchanted lights, but tonight he didn't spare them a glance. He was too wired from the cross-Atlantic sprint, too ready to collapse onto his own bed after two weeks of sleeping in charmed tents and hotel suites.
He pushed the door open and called into the house without ceremony, "Mother, your favourite son has come home!"
His voice bounced up the staircases, down the hall and echoed throughout the place. But instead of Petunia's usual appearance, he heard her voice coming from the living room.
There was another person in here. The head of the Department of Mysteries. Which was odd considering there was no need for that man to visit them in anyway.
Harry stepped into the living room.
Petunia was on the sofa, looking at him with a smile but also a bit of fear in her eyes. Molly and Arthur occupied the loveseat; Dan and Emma Granger sat stiffly near the hearth. The Lovegoods, Parkinsons, Greengrasses, and Tonks family clustered in uneasy knots, all trying—and failing—to look casual.
And on the central couch, like an accusation spelled out in flesh and robes, sat Amelia and the Head of the Unspeakables.
Amelia looked exhausted. Her hair was pinned back hastily, and the set of her shoulders hinted at a week running on caffeine and political fires. The Head of Unspeakables, however, looked like a man dragged from the aftershock of an explosion—shaken, furious, and trying not to show either.
Harry stopped in the doorway, eyebrows lifting.
"…This isn't a normal visit, is it?" he said mildly. "Not with him here."
Amelia's eyes widened—only slightly, but enough. The Head of Unspeakables blinked once, sharply, as though recalibrating everything he thought he knew.
"You recognise me?" he asked.
Harry shrugged and dropped onto the sofa beside Petunia, handing her a rather delicious toffee the air hostess was kind enough to get him on the flight back. "Yes I do, Mr. Corvus Darius Thorne. The current Head of the Department of Mysteries and the only one in the entire Department to be knowledgeable in Tempo-Spatial Magic."
A stillness fell over the room—sharp, sudden, absolute.
Hours passed. Explanations piled over explanations, spiraling from one impossibility into the next until even the most politically seasoned witch in the country ended up leaning back with her eyes closed, silently questioning her life choices. Corvus listened, occasionally interrupted with a stiff, "Repeat that," or "Slow down," or "No, no, from the beginning." But mostly he looked like a man clinging to the last threads of sanity by formal training alone.
By the time the mantel clock chimed eleven, both Amelia and Corvus stood to leave, wearing expressions of people who had seen one truth too many.
After dinner both Amelia and Corvus left and then it was just them. Nexus. The clan, just sitting in the living room after dinner, each having a dessert of their choice while talking.
Harry slouched next to Tonks, a fork in one hand and a slice of treacle tart in the other. Conversations drifted around him—Molly fussing about his sleep schedule, Arthur asking if Corvus had really threatened to resign, Dan Granger laughing helplessly at the idea.
The atmosphere finally loosened into something warm, tired, familiar.
Halfway through dessert, Harry blinked and suddenly remembered. "Oh—guys, the ship. When are we launching?"
Percival straightened, pleased to be on a topic that didn't involve the theoretical collapse of magical civilization. "We've completed all papers and can launch anytime. We were just waiting for you guys to come back home from Hogwarts that way, you guys would be here for the launch."
Harry waved a hand. "No need to wait for summer. That's months of lost revenue. Launch this Sunday. I'll bring everyone home for the day."
The families exchanged looks—excited, nervous, a bit stunned. The Parkinson patriarch nodded. "Sunday, then."
Harry shifted, leaning lightly against Tonks, who was lounging beside him with the ease of someone who had decided Harry was a perfectly acceptable piece of furniture.
Tonks nudged him. "So, earlier you said every drop of knowledge you have came from books. So... exactly how many book are we talking about?"
Harry didn't even hesitate. "Two hundred, eleven thousand, one hundred forty-five."
Silence detonated around the room.
Tonks's jaw dropped. Molly choked. Arthur blinked like an owl in torchlight. Even Xenophilius, who claimed to have once debated a flobbermite about philosophy, looked stunned.
Petunia sat up straighter, her eyes going wide. "Harry James Potter. How—how on earth—"
Harry shrugged as though he'd admitted to rearranging the pantry. "I didn't read that many manually. I found a spell at Hogwarts that lets you transfer the contents of a book directly into your mind. I modified it to process multiples at once."
If the silence before had been stunned, this one was horrified.
Petunia stood, hands planted on her hips, every inch the furious mother. "You did what? That is unbelievably reckless! Absolutely forbidden, do you understand me?!"
Harry snorted, unbothered. "The first time I tried it, I ended up in the hospital for a day. But now I can scan an entire library at once and barely feel anything."
"Barely—Harry!"
He grinned at her, entirely too smug. "My occlumency is better now. Much better. I reinforce the pathways before pulling anything in, so the cognitive load distributes cleanly and—"
"Stop talking before I ground you until you're thirty."
Tonks was still staring at him as though he'd announced he'd memorized the planet. Then her eyes narrowed with interest—dangerous, delighted interest.
"Alright, Potter," she said, leaning forward. "Hand it over. The spell. The one-book one. I want to try it."
Harry didn't even stop spooning the treacle tart into his mouth. "I had already given everyone all spells that I came across when I gave my diary to you guys..."
"The spell is Cognitio Transcribere. That's the version for scanning one book," he said. "Practice until it feels natural. Once you can do it without getting a headache, I'll take you to a secret library in Hogwarts. There's a mind-magic tome there that will teach you occlumency and legilimency instantly."
Tonk's pulled out her copy of Harry's diary and looked at the spell as if it were Christmas, New Year's, and a week's paid vacation rolled together.
"And only then," Harry continued, "I'll give you the multi-book spell."
She nodded furiously.
Harry looked around the room. Everyone was watching him—hopeful, wary, eager in varying degrees.
He groaned internally. One person wanting the spell was manageable. A roomful of them was a bureaucratic headache he didn't feel like dealing with.
Then an idea hit.
"Actually," he said, sitting up straighter, "I'll just get everyone a copy of the mind-magic book. Then all of you can learn occlumency and legilimency instantly. Saves time."
Molly choked on her tea. Arthur coughed. The Greengrass sisters exchanged wide-eyed looks. Pandora Lovegood looked delighted at the prospect of reorganizing her thoughts for fun.
But Petunia—whose understanding of magical politics was just good enough to know trouble when she saw it—frowned.
"Harry," she said carefully, "why would everyone need to learn that?"
Harry blinked.
Then blinked again.
"I… don't know?" he said honestly. "Why wouldn't they? Learning new things is what makes magic fun."
There it was again—the casual irreverence, the way he spoke of magic not as a gift or a burden or a legacy, but as an endlessly moddable toy. Something to tinker with, reshape, break, rebuild. The adults exchanged glances, reminded abruptly of the simple, dangerous truth:
Harry didn't worship magic.Harry played with it.
And magic, for reasons unknown, played back.
Harry suddenly turned to Vernon.
"Dad," he said, "could you teach everyone the basics? I'm bored doing it. I've already taught the professors at Hogwarts, the seventh years, the sixth years, trainee Aurors… I'm not doing it again."
Vernon raised a brow—half amused, half resigned. "I was planning to, yes."
"Great," Harry said, satisfied. "Then it's settled."
The conversation drifted into easier waters—future plans, ship-launch logistics, enchanting upgrades, curse-breaking research, business expansions, ward revisions, and a dozen other threads of the Nexus Clan's steadily growing empire. Plates emptied, refilled, emptied again. Laughter mixed with tiredness. The house finally felt like itself again.
At some point, Harry's head dipped.
His eyes slid shut.
And the next second he slumped sideways—straight into Tonks's lap.
The room went still.
Tonks froze like a startled deer, cheeks flushing pink, then scarlet. One of her hands hovered uncertainly above his hair before she gave in and pinched his cheek lightly.
Harry didn't stir.
Tonks stared down at him—half flustered, half soft-eyed—and absolutely unaware that every single person present was watching her with varying degrees of amusement, bewilderment, and parental speculation.
Victor exhaled—long, weary, and bordering on existential—before leaning forward with his elbows on his knees. The firelight caught the dark circles under his eyes, making him look like a man twenty years older.
"Well," he said quietly, glancing at the sleeping Harry, "since he won't be able to defend himself… let me tell you what happened the very first day we landed in San Francisco."
The room shifted. People leaned in. Even the Lovegoods paused their soft conversation.
Victor rubbed his face. "He ate."
Percival blinked. "A lot?"
Victor looked at him with the hollow stare of a man describing a natural disaster.
"No. Not a lot. He ate constantly. For eleven straight hours."
Molly's teacup froze halfway to her lips.
"He finished breakfast on the plane," Victor continued, "and the moment we stepped into the airport he said—and I quote—'Victor, we're in America. We must honour their traditions.' I thought he meant sightseeing."
A murmur of amusement swept the room.
Victor shook his head slowly. "No. He meant food. And he ate enough to feed ten grown men. And that was before dinner."
Arthur nearly dropped his fork. Emma stared in disbelief.
Petunia groaned into her hand. "Of course he did."
Victor raised a hand dramatically. "First it was pancakes. Then waffles. Then 18 breakfast burritos. All of this on the plan. And then once we landed the very first thing he does is drag me to a burger joint to get cheese burger. He had 6 cheeseburgers alone. Not to mention all the other sides like fries, fried chicken, mac and cheese etc."
"Did that stop him?" Amaryllis chuckled.
"No!! After that he had milkshakes, corn dogs, funnel cakes, KFC, pretzels, pizza, more fried stuff... after a while I lost track and then he said—this is real—'I think I understand America now.'"
Sirius wheezed with laughter.
But Victor wasn't done.
"He made friends everywhere," he said, sounding half admiring, half traumatised. "He talked to strangers like he'd known them for years. People were handing him business cards, phone numbers, invitations. At one point he disappeared for ten minutes and came back with a plate of ribs, saying—casually—'We're invited to a cookout.'"
Pandora choked on her tea. Tonks snorted, trying not to jostle Harry.
"And not just any cookout," Victor added, pointing a finger at them all. "A proper family cookout. I didn't even know that was a thing you had to earn. But apparently he passed the vibe check so hard they invited him back."
Percival blinked. "That's… quite prestigious, I think?"
Victor nodded grimly. "It is now. They called him 'Little British Flame.'"
The room erupted into laughter.
Even Petunia, despite her lingering worry, cracked a smile.
"And then," Victor continued, "he somehow convinced an entire shopping district that he was the second coming of retail. People flocked to him. Store owners gave him discounts because he… complimented their interior décor? Strangers asked him for fashion advice. A tourist group asked him to join their photos."
Adorabella raised an eyebrow. "Did he?"
Victor nodded helplessly. "He posed like he'd been hired."
Andromeda covered her mouth to hide a laugh.
"And this," Victor pressed on, "this was the day before he started investing. This was him being—" he gestured vaguely at the sleeping boy, "—Harry."
Silence followed, the warm kind, the kind that bonded rather than shocked.
Then Sirius leaned back with a proud grin. "Ah yes. The full, unfiltered Harry Potter experience."
Victor slumped against the cushions. "I was not prepared...
The talks continued as Victor filled in everyone about the entirety of his and Harry's American adventure. And then Petunia, Vernon, Sirius, Molly and Arthur shared what they knew about Harry to the new guys. All while Harry continued to sleep with his head in Tonks's lap with her stroking his hair softly.
Victor was halfway through recounting the part where Harry somehow got adopted by a street performer troupe when Tonks, still absent-mindedly brushing her fingers through Harry's hair, felt him twitch.
Once. Then twice.
A small frown tugged across his sleeping face, smoothing in an instant into something cold, sharp, and predatory. Tonks blinked. "Harry…?"
His eyes snapped open. His pupils were blown wide, his breath slicing in fast; a hunter's instinct detonated through him.
Before anyone could speak, he vanished without a sound.
The air where he had been lying was still indented from the weight of his head when Tonks's hand closed uselessly on empty space. The room erupted.
Petunia shot to her feet. Sirius swore violently. Victor's blood drained from his face.
"What the hell?!" Vernon barked as everyone jumped up.
But Harry wasn't there to answer.
Because thirty minutes earlier, in the Forbidden Forest, five girls had wandered somewhere no sane person ever should: knees deep in greed, danger, and very expensive flora.
Moonlight filtered through twisted branches as Abigail crouched by a cluster of red bell-flowers. Each stem glimmered faintly like molten rubies. Daphne counted them with a merchant's hunger; Pansy already calculated the total value; Ginny whispered, "This is madness," even as she clipped another stem; Luna simply hummed cosmically, certain the forest was listening.
They had the ingredient they came for. They should have left.
But ten thousand galleons lying around your feet has a way of turning "should" into "just a bit more."
Abigail plucked another stem. Then froze.
Something in the air shifted: heat, pressure, the faintest scorch carried on the wind.
Ginny lifted her head. "Girls…?"
A massive shadow detached itself from the trees behind them.
A lion's head, eyes burning molten gold. A goat's body, horns serrated like jagged blades. A serpent's tail, uncoiling with a hiss that rattled bone.
A Chimera.
It inhaled, and fire roared forward like a collapsing sun.
The world should have turned white. But Abigail's pendant—Harry's last birthday gift—flared with a violent burst of azure, snapping a shield around all five girls. The flames washed against it in a wave of hellfire.
The girls screamed.
The pendant cracked.
And far, far away, Harry felt it break.
Harry landed in the Forbidden Forest, appearing exactly between the chimera's lunging jaws and the girl frozen behind the failing shield.
He didn't shout.
He didn't gesture.
He didn't breathe.
His magic reacted before thought.
A spherical barrier detonated outward, dense as a star, slamming into existence the instant he arrived. The chimera crashed against it mid-pounce, thrown backward with a snarl that shook the earth.
Another spell resonated from the shield, a single cutting spell so powerful that the chimera was instantly sliced into two halves.
The girls were on the ground, terrified, huddled together.
Abigail's pendant hung around her neck shattered.
Harry's voice cut through the chaos like a blade of winter.
"All of you, grab onto me. Now."
No questions. No hesitation.
They scrambled toward him, fingers clutching his robes, arms hooking around him with the desperation of people who understood how close death had come.
In a flash, the world dissolved into streaks of light and wind, the girls screaming until the pressure fell away and they tumbled onto solid ground.
They landed in the Moonstone Dunvegan living room. The girls scrambled up, hair disheveled, clothes singed. Harry was in the center, breathing fast and heavy, and behind him was two halves of a chimera's body.
Harry's chest rose and fell in uneven gasps, each breath a battle against the residual pulse of raw, untamed magic thrumming through him. He didn't speak. He didn't move beyond the slight quiver of his shoulders as his hands flexed at his sides, as if squeezing the world into obedience would somehow right the chaos.
The girls clung to one another, wide-eyed, faces pale but unshed tears betraying the shock of what had just happened. Their panic wasn't for themselves, exactly—it was a fragile guilt, a recognition that their pursuit of glittering gold had almost ended them. Abigail's hands shook as she touched the shattered pendant, her voice barely above a whisper:
"I—I wasn't thinking…"
Ginny pressed a hand to her lips. "We—We should've stopped. We should've—"
Harry didn't answer. He didn't even hear them. He was making use of every conscious will in his body to make sure that his magical energy didn't erupt from his body and flatten everything around him.
Everyone else had their jaws going slack. They stared at Harry and the girls. And then behind Harry, they noticed it.
Two halves of a chimera's body lay on the floor, impossibly intact, split perfectly as if by some precise, surgical magic. A collective intake of breath echoed through the room as they somehow made the connection of what had happened.
Every pair of eyes in the room fixed on the perfectly bisected chimera—on the scorched edges of the carpet—on the boy standing in the center like the eye of a barely-contained storm.
And then Harry vanished with a the soundless ripple of someone who could no longer trust themselves near anyone else.
One heartbeat he was there—chest heaving, magic clawing beneath his skin.
The next, he was gone.
Harry reappeared above an endless stretch of black water, not standing on anything, not even falling—his magic held him aloft in a reflexive surge, a desperate demand for distance.
He sucked in a breath that scraped against his lungs.
Too much. Too fast. Too close.
He had held himself together in the living room only because the girls had still been touching him, because every shred of instinct had been screaming at him not to let go until they were safe.
Now they were.
And the magic he'd clamped down on ripped out of him like a ruptured star.
A shockwave exploded in all directions—silent, invisible, but monstrous.
It seemed to want to flatten the sea itself. Harry stood above it, trembling, breathing like he had sprinted a hundred miles.
Only when the last of the magic bled away—when the roaring tide settled back into uneasy waves—did the ringing in his ears fade.
He stroke his hand through his hair.
I killed again.
The thought wasn't shocked or panicked. Just… there. Heavy as an anchor. He stared down at the churning water below him as if it could answer him.
The chimera's halves had been so… clean. So effortless. He hadn't even registered casting the spell. His magic had simply recognized a threat and erased it.
Just like Azkaban.
It wasn't the killing that haunted him.
It was the absence—the void where emotion should have been. No guilt. No revulsion. No pulse of triumph or anger. Nothing.
He had erased himself from Azkaban so completely that even the fortress stones would swear he had never existed. No wand signatures. No footprints. No magical residue. No shadows in the corners. Not even a displaced mote of dust.
There wasn't a single clue left in the entire fortress.
He had made sure of that.
And Bellatrix—
Harry closed his eyes.
Later.
He can worry about her later. Right now he needed other answers.
Anger flickered in his chest.
Not loud. Not explosive. But sharp and cold, coiling like a knife warming in his hand.
Ten thousand galleons. That was what their lives were worth to them? A number so insultingly small it made something inside him twist.
He disapparated back to the living room and the conversation died instantly.
The girls saw it first—the simmering tension in his shoulders, the too-even calm in his voice when he asked:
"Why," Harry said quietly, eyes locked on each of them in turn, "did you think risking your lives was worth ten thousand galleons?"
Harry's voice didn't rise. It didn't even waver.That was what made every girl's breath hitch.
"Abigail," he said first.
She flinched—not from volume, but from the quiet weight of her name. Harry never called her full name, he always called her Abby.
"What," he asked, "did you intend to do if I hadn't given you that pendant?"
She swallowed hard. Vernon's hand tightened on Petunia's shoulder; Molly reached for Arthur's; even Pandora's fingers curled around Xenophilius's sleeve.
"And," Harry continued, tone even softer, "if I had never put a tracking spell on it? If the danger wards hadn't alerted me? If I hadn't known where you were or how close you were to dying?"
Abigail's lips trembled. "We… we would've run."
Ginny nodded quickly. "We weren't planning to fight a chimera—"
"We're not stupid," Pansy whispered, pale. "We—We knew we couldn't win."
"But we could escape," Daphne added, voice tight but steady. "That part we were confident about."
Luna finished softly, "We didn't think we'd die, Harry."
For a long moment, Harry simply looked at them.
His eyes didn't blaze. His magic didn't crackle.
But something in the room shifted—an almost imperceptible tightening of the air, like the silence right before a storm decides whether to break.
"So," he said, calm as a still lake, "you were confident you could escape a chimera."
No one dared speak.
His anger flared—but inwardly, buried deep. The calmer his expression became, the colder the tension grew, until even the adults exchanged uneasy glances.
"I'm not angry that you wanted the plant," Harry said, his voice low and precise. "Ten thousand galleons is not a lot, but it would have given you a lucrative pocket money. And it is useful for potions."
The girls blinked—somewhat confused.
"Greed," Harry continued, "I can understand."
His tone sharpened—not in volume, but in clarity.
"What disappoints me," he said, "is your complete lack of situational awareness."
Their faces drained further.
"You didn't scan the perimeter. Not once.""You didn't sense the magical residue.""You didn't notice the footprints.""You didn't question why the air smelled wrong the moment you got there."
He looked directly at each girl—slowly, deliberately.
"You were fifty meters," Harry said quietly, "from a chimera's den."
The adults inhaled sharply, as they had thought that the chimera attacked them from nowhere suddenly.
"If you had scanned your surroundings for even five seconds," he went on, "you would have known. And if you'd known, you would have realized that the only reason it didn't find you immediately… was luck."
His calmness turned the words into knives.
"Luck," he repeated. "Not skill."
Abigail's eyes finally overflowed. Ginny's breath stuttered. Daphne and Pansy both bowed their heads. Luna's hands twisted in her lap.
Harry continued, unwavering:
"You were sloppy. You were careless. And you gambled your lives because ten thousand galleons looked easy."
Still quiet. Still gentle.Still colder than ice.
"And I can forgive greed," he said. "I cannot forgive stupidity that gets you killed."
Every adult in the room said nothing because they completely agreed with Harry. They too could understand the allure of 10k galleons that appeared suddenly in front of the girls, but they couldn't overlook the fact that these girls were so taken by that 10k galleons they didn't do a basic perimeter sweep before jumping in.
"Do you understand," he asked, "why I'm disappointed?"
The girls nodded, shaken to the core.
Harry didn't move for a moment. His anger had burned itself into control, but the edge of it still hung in the air like frost.
Harry exhaled—a long, tired sound that stripped the last edge off the air.Then he stepped forward and gently pulled Abigail into his arms.
The moment his hand settled on her back, her restraint shattered.
She buried her face into his chest, sobs bursting out in raw, hiccuping waves—the kind of crying she hadn't done since she was a small child clinging to him after nightmares. His first scolding—his real anger—had hit her harder than any near-death experience.
"I–I'm sorry," she choked out. "Harry, I'm so sorry—I wasn't thinking—"
"I know," he murmured, pressing his chin lightly to the top of her head. His voice lost its blade, softening into something warm, steady, and heartbreakingly gentle. "I know, Abby."
Her fingers fisted in his robes, clinging like she feared he'd disappear again.
The others didn't wait for permission. Ginny reached first, then Daphne, Pansy, Luna—until Harry found himself with an armful of trembling girls, all of them clutching at him as if afraid he would disappear again.
And because he wasn't made of cold magic and sharp instincts alone, he spoke.
"I'll always save you."
The words fell into the silence like a vow older than blood.
"I don't care if you're on the other side of the world," he continued, still holding Abigail close. "I'll get there. Every time. For every single one of you."
The adults exchanged subtle looks—shock, gratitude, and a dawning realization of just how deep Harry's protective instincts ran.
"But," Harry said, lifting his gaze to the girls, voice still gentle but firm, "that doesn't give you permission to be complacent."
They all lowered their eyes.
"You're not weak. None of you are.""You can duel sixth-years and win."
He tightened his arm around Abigail, grounding her.
"But today wasn't about strength," he said. "It was about awareness. And your carelessness almost cost you your lives."