The first snow of the year was falling. Flakes whipped past Harry's office window. If you listened, you could hear the wind scraping the stones of Hogwarts. Only if you strained your ears, though. Otherwise, it was drowned by music.
Harry's magic-proofed projector hummed, spitting Disney's Beauty and the Beast onto a canvas screen. Harry tuned out the belting songs as his quill scratched across homework assignments. In a plush wingback chair procured for her benefit, Daphne was curled up with her sketchbook open on the armrest. She watched the movie with the eyes of a critic but bobbed her head, ever so slightly, in time with the songs.
Daphne had been watching for over two hours— impressive, in a way, since that was longer than the movie's runtime. Every few minutes she would pause the scene and study that frame. She'd hunch over her book and practice something she'd seen until she was satisfied. Only then would she press play.
Eventually, as sleet pinged against the window, the credits rolled. Daphne watched the names for a moment.
Harry lifted his eyes from his work. "Was it good?"
"I'm still learning," Daphne said. High praise, since she'd confessed gradual improvements were the only kind she believed in. "It is impressive how many Muggles work on a single piece of art."
Harry checked the credits, seeing that they were still playing.
"Teamwork is an area where Muggles excel. We wizards aren't so different. There's a reason the Unspeakables have an entire department."
Daphne allowed the point without objecting. She flipped through the pages she had been drawing on, inspecting her most recent work. Once or twice, she stopped on a page and started scribbling, correcting details that caught her ire.
"How is Defense Against the Dark Arts going?" Harry asked.
He generally kept his nose out of his students' business. But having been present when Neville invited two Slytherins to Dumbledore's Army, Harry would be lying if he pretended he wasn't curious about how it turned out.
"Positively," Daphne said. She set her pen down and studied the underside of her hand, noting that it had become smudged with ink. As she took a handkerchief from her robes to clean up, she elaborated. "I believe my O.W.L. marks will be better than they would have been otherwise, without certain extracurricular involvements."
"A study group?" Harry said, his voice hinting that it wasn't much of a question.
"You know of it?"
"Of course I don't. Groups like that are in direct violation of an educational decree. It's too bad, but I'd have to report any students who were filling in gaps in their knowledge on their own." Harry waited exactly five seconds before he added, "If such a group existed, though, do you think you'd find it fun?"
"It's possible I would appreciate it more than expected," Daphne said. "Someone hotheaded with a passion for dueling, such as Blaise, might exhibit a stronger reaction."
"Good to know," Harry said.
Daphne nodded. With the movie finished and the hour getting late, she gathered her things to leave. When she walked toward the door, a book floated into her path.
Daphne wrapped her fingers around the cover and read the title. An Introduction to Animation.
"It's not exactly like your dream, but I'm sure it can explain the Muggle approach better than I did," Harry explained.
Daphne tucked the book under her arm. "Appreciated. Good night, Professor."
"Night, Daphne."
Harry graded three more papers before giving in and standing up. He stretched, approaching the window, and laid his fingers on the cold glass. His reflection looked back at him, juxtaposed over a view of the Hogwarts grounds settling beneath a layer of white. Harry's fingers slid down the glass. He turned away, heading to bed.
O-O-O
Despite its backwards slip-up for which Harry was both victim and beneficiary, time moved forward. Weeks had ticked by. Harry was no longer nervous about his lessons. He was getting used to this teaching thing, a fact he was increasingly proud of. The Grimmauld Place trap still weighed on his mind… But there was little he could do about it. There had been no signature left on the ambush. Harry's best theorizing had gotten him nowhere. Meanwhile, Voldemort's forces were slowing down. The two Order meetings since Tonks's introduction had been uneventful. Amelia Bones was whipping her Aurors into shape and exerting harsher pressure on the rabble-rousers Voldemort had been using indirectly. Instead of escalating, something that would risk discovery, the Death Eaters chose to lay low.
Things were even going well inside of Hogwarts. Suspecting the existence of the DA, Dolores Umbridge went to Slytherin to find allies. It hadn't gone nearly as well for her as it did in Harry's time.
The exact details were blurry and reduced to rumor, but gossip had it Draco Malfoy, the Slytherin spokesman, refused to work for a lowly half-blood. If you believed everything you heard, he'd even told Umbridge that she could work for him if she wanted anything approaching a partnership. Harry thought there was likely some truth to this, because Umbridge had taken a hundred points off of Slytherin in one morning. It took Snape an entire week to push them back into the race for the House Cup. Since then, Harry had caught him giving Dolores some nasty glares.
Harry ate a delightful breakfast seated between Septima and Filius. It tasted especially heavenly because Umbridge was boycotting most meals, hiding in her room away from the rumors about her parentage. These days, she only came out to teach or to roam the school, punishing anyone she could dredge up the smallest infraction against.
Septima shivered as she finished her food. "It's getting cold."
"We're a week into December," Harry said. "The weather was bound to turn."
Septima made an unhappy, non-verbal noise deep in her throat. Dumbledore turned to Harry (effortlessly looking over the head of the diminutive Filius Flitwick between them) and smiled.
"Don't forget our meeting tonight," the headmaster said. "I confess that I'm looking forward to it."
"I wouldn't forget this one," Harry said.
He hadn't forgotten any of them, but he especially wouldn't be missing the one tonight. He, Dumbledore and James had done enough Pensieve trips to reach the climax of the war. The Horcrux hunt had been covered a few nights prior, meaning that tonight's meeting would be watching the Battle of Hogwarts.
Dumbledore's dejection at seeing how low Britain fell had only been matched by his grim, academic curiosity. For a man who had spent years imagining what a war would look like and how it could be fought, watching Harry's past was better than a prophecy. Already, Dumbledore was altering plans and drawing up new ones based on the things he'd seen.
Harry was less eager. He lived through it all. The deaths they were seeing were memories to him. They were real, even if he'd been given the chance to stop them from happening again.
If there was a silver lining, it was that the Pensieve wouldn't really make anything worse.
Harry could see that day clearly with or without a magical tool.
O-O-O
"We found him."
James arrived in Dumbledore's office less than four minutes after Harry, exactly at seven o'clock, the time they had set. He was very punctual. Harry wondered if that had always been a trait of his father's, or if it came with age.
"Pardon? Who was found?" Harry asked.
James hung his long coat over the back of the chair that was waiting for him. He sat down a second later, pivoting to face Harry.
"The last time-traveler," he said. "We were missing one."
The first time that James joined in on their memory viewing, he'd noticed that eleven men came back in time with Harry, but only ten were captured. James had been poking into it on the Ministry side of things ever since. Harry honestly thought he might have dropped it by now. But no, it had just been a matter of waiting for a breakthrough.
"He's at St. Mungos," James said. "The others were sent to Azkaban swearing that they were thirty years younger than they were and that they had no idea how they got into the Ministry. Your memory charm must have done an extra number on the last one, though. He can't even answer a simple question. The most he can do is groan and babble like an infant. They put him in the St. Mungo's mental ward because throwing him to the Dementors seemed too cruel."
There was a reason that Obliviating was handled by professionals. Tweak the mind in the wrong way and it's liable to break. Considering that Harry had been working under time pressure, it wasn't shocking to hear that he'd overdone it. A pragmatic portion of his brain whispered that this was better than underdoing it.
"At least we know where he is," Harry said.
James patted Harry on the forearm. Harry hadn't necessarily been drowning in guilt, but he smiled at the gesture all the same.
"Well, let's get into my head!" Harry said.
He extracted the memories for the night with his wand, feeding the silvery substance into the Pensieve in a way that was becoming second nature.
They took the plunge, leaping through time to watch a war reach the gates of Hogwarts.
The three of them didn't talk much. You could see more in retrospect than Harry noticed at the time. Dozens of duels were going on all over the place. Even though Harry had seen them, he only caught flashes on the day itself. Now, you could watch everything. You could see Lavender Brown fall under Greyback's lashing claws. You could see Oliver Wood trading fire with a cloaked Death Eater, a spell taking a chunk out of his thigh, before he managed to hurl the enemy into a wall, snapping his neck in one swift pop. Students were killing and worse, students were dying. Remus Lupin squared off against Antonin Dolohov. Harry watched James flinch every time a spell came close. When a green light struck Remus, James lost the ability to look at anything else.
"He… Was that…?"
"We lost a lot," Harry said quietly.
Dumbledore was outwardly calm. Too calm. He had taken to turning in circles to see everything. He looked even harder than Harry and James and never turned away, not even once. There were no strangers to him in this battle. He'd known every Death Eater as a student and cherished every resistance fighter— as beloved pupils, coworkers, or even friends.
Harry's memories diverged from the worst of the fighting. They watched the process of finding the diadem's location and the confrontation with Malfoy, which ended in Crabbe's Fiendfyre consuming him, along with the Horcrux and the room. Since Ravenclaw's Diadem was safely disposed of, this mattered less than the rest of the memories. They moved swiftly on.
Next was Snape's death. It was an odd experience. Harry hated this memory as much as the others because, in the end, Snape made the right choice. That meant Harry had to mourn him. It was a tad bitter.
"Poor Severus," Dumbledore said.
By now, Nagini's fangs were deep in the man's neck. His thrashing against the snake was the futile struggle of a dying man. James' face was indecipherable.
"I never imagined his death would look like this," James said.
Harry held back from pointing out that, with that wording, it was clear James had imagined his death before. Just not this scenario.
James perked up when a familiar silver substance leaked out of Snape's dying body once Voldemort left the Shrieking Shack. "Is that…?"
"Pensieve fuel," Harry said. "Do you remember when I said that I learned what I had to do through memories from the headmaster? Those are them."
"Quite the delivery method, Albus," James said.
Dumbledore smiled— not remorsefully, not excusingly, yet abashed.
"Times had grown quite desperate," he said.
James and Harry didn't fault that. All three of them had watched it, together, as things continued to get worse. It was miraculous these memories got to Harry at all.
The trip back was nearly as painful as watching the battle. The rows of corpses were just beginning to be sorted. So many familiar faces, marred by unseeing eyes. When younger Harry ran to the Headmaster's office, they couldn't see what he experienced, only the act of him placing his face in the Pensieve and coming out. There was no way to recreate Pensieve memories while in a Pensieve yourself.
"It was a lot of Snape's past," Harry explained. "I said the memories were from Dumbledore, but technically, they came from Snape. He shared the explanations that Albus gave him. That I was a Horcrux, and in order for Voldemort to die, I had to do it first. Can you see the realization?"
The seventeen-year-old Harry had dragged his head out of the Pensieve. He was as still as a statue and paler than marble. Watching his past self, Harry mused that when you focused, you could almost hear his heart beating.
"What did you do?" James asked.
"Well, you'll see, but I walked," Harry said. "I went down the stairs, and out the door, and across the grounds over bodies of people trying to kill me and past the bodies of people who died for me— right in front of the forest, I decided to talk to you."
It happened exactly as he said. In the shadow of the Forbidden Forest, the young Harry opened the Snitch left to him by Dumbledore with the password. "I am about to die."
James actually glared at Dumbledore, as if this version was the one who chose it. He might have said something, too, if Harry didn't pluck a familiar dark stone out of the snitch.
They came then, the specters. There was Remus and Sirius, both returned to the prime of their lives in death. Next to them was James, the half-ghost spirit appearing younger than the real one next to Harry.
In the middle of them all, James' arm over her shoulder, was Lily.
"You've become so brave," Lily said.
The real James almost lost his footing on weak knees.
"L-Lils?" he asked.
It was an echo of an echo of her, separated from him by both death and time, yet it was her in some form. Harry didn't begrudge him the tears that formed.
When the young Harry asked in a quavering voice, "Does it hurt?" even Dumbledore averted his eyes.
The ghosts followed Harry to Voldemort and the Pensieve trio followed them. James walked close to the fragment of Lily, staring at the back of her head with enough desire to fuel a miracle. Harry thought James wouldn't look away until the memory ended, but he was wrong.
As soon as Harry's seventeen-year-old version stepped in front of Voldemort, James didn't look anywhere but at his son. James was breathing in a measured way. His hands spasmed as he fought the urge to do something, knowing he was only an observer here.
The killing curse hit the way it was destined to.
Curiously, the train station and Harry's conversation with Dumbledore were missing. It, like Pensieve memories, was beyond recreation. Harry explained it to the best of his ability.
"It was all strange. It looked a lot like King's Cross, as if I was seeing it in a dream. You were there, Albus. It was you who explained that Voldemort only destroyed the fragment he left in me. I had a choice to leave the world… Or go back."
James wanted to say something. Harry could tell from how his lips parted long before he forced the words out.
"Were you… tempted?" James asked.
"No," Harry said. "No, I don't think I was."
"Even with who you'd seen?"
Who was the word James used, not what. He wasn't even referring to himself. He was thinking of Lily— and, more likely than not, what he would do if he were thrust into Harry's shoes. Just because it was impossible didn't mean it wasn't worth thinking about.
"They wouldn't have wanted me," Harry said. "They all died too early… But they weren't the kind to want me to follow them. If they said as much, I'd know the Resurrection Stone isn't as honest as it claims to be. I have wondered about that, actually. It seemed like the spirits wanted me to die. Good encouragement when I had to die, but long-term… dangerous."
They were past the worst of it. For the rest of the session, they watched Neville behead Nagini, Flitwick slay Dolohov in retribution for Lupin, and Molly Weasley outduel Bellatrix Lestrange. James laughed incredulously.
"Maybe we have a replacement for Sirius on the dangerous missions," James said.
Harry smiled. "Molly would never agree. She'd burn dinner if she had to fight Death Eaters while it was in the oven."
Finally, Voldemort's spell rebounded following Harry's grand reveal. The Dark Lord fell to his own killing curse. The war ended in cheers surrounded by rubble and bodies. At the time, Harry recalled only relief. Now, the scene elicited a bittersweet tang.
The Pensieve memories faded. When they returned to the office, the men shared minutes of silence as they grappled with what they'd watched.
James broke the silence by hugging Harry.
It was the most decisive thing the man had done since the reveal that they were almost-family. Surprised as he was, Harry managed to hug back.
James cleared his throat, right in Harry's ear. "You've… been through a lot."
"Yeah. Yeah, I guess I have," Harry said.
They separated. James found words slowly but surely.
"I— Or your dad, if he had been alive… If he'd been able to see what I just saw… I think he would've been proud," James said.
Harry's eyes pricked slightly. Tears had already been close after the events they'd seen. "You think so?"
"I would've been. I… am."
Harry swallowed, and James nodded at him, running out of steam. He left it at that, but he'd said enough. Despite blinking away a couple of tears, Harry was smiling.
"What a lovely place to adjourn for the night," Dumbledore said. "For what it is worth, Harry, I believe that you navigated my messes as well as anyone could have. It was an admirable example of fortitude, and perhaps the best display of bravery I have ever seen. Before we part, I have just one final suggestion. If you're willing, I'd like to see what came after the war. How the Ministry changed and the resistance those changes faced could tell me a great deal. I'm certain, given the things I have seen from you, that your adventures did not end with what we just watched."
Harry didn't respond, not even offering a twitch, until the second-hand on Dumbledore's grandfather clock had completed a quarter rotation.
"Sure, I'll show you, if you want to see," Harry said. He lowered his voice to a whisper as he muttered, "It might be for the best…"
"I didn't quite catch that," Dumbledore said.
"It's nothing. Let's do it."
The trio split up. James surprised Harry again by giving him a second hug. Soon, Harry was descending the stairs from Dumbledore's office. He went straight for his quarters, ready for a deep sleep that he suspected would be marred by bad dreams.
It was minutes to curfew when Harry got to his room. The last thing he expected at such a time was to have students waiting for him— but there was Daphne and Blaise. Auror skills that usually lay dormant came alive, activated by a strange tension in the air.
Harry took in the scene in under three seconds. Blaise's eyes were cold. Daphne wasn't meeting Harry's gaze. Blaise was standing slightly in front of her, his shoulder positioned ahead of hers. Daphne's left palm was over the back of her right hand, blocking a view of anything from the wrist to the knuckle.
"What do you need?" Harry asked softly.