The Muggle sirens painted the night in pulses of red and blue as Amelia Bones picked her way through the debris.
Aurors fanned out ahead of her, slipping notice-me-not charms over Muggle paramedics and firefighters, nudging attention away with the subtle precision of long practice. To most eyes, it would look like the emergency crews were simply choosing not to approach the heart of the crater yet.
At the very lip of that crater stood Albus Dumbledore.
His silhouette was unmistakable: tall, slightly stooped, robes falling in dark folds, silver hair and beard catching the strobing lights. Fawkes perched on his shoulder, wings half-spread, the phoenix's feathers a bright, unreal flare of color in the gloom.
Amelia came to a halt a few paces away, boots grinding on broken brick.
"Headmaster," she said, her voice clipped.
Dumbledore turned. His eyes were not the usual twinkling blue she saw in Wizengamot chambers or at Hogwarts feasts. Tonight, they were old, pale, and tired.
"Director Bones," he replied quietly. "I had hoped you would arrive."
She took in the set of his shoulders, the tightness around his mouth. Behind him, the crater's edge fell away into darkness and twisted wreckage. Magic hummed up from it like heat from a furnace.
"You're not on the roster for Accidental Magic response," she said. "How did you know to come here?"
A sliver of wryness ghosted across his face, there and gone. "Let us say I have…redundancies. Monitoring charms linked to certain wards. When they reacted, Fawkes was kind enough to provide transportation."
Amelia's gaze sharpened. "Wards. On a Muggle house in Little Whinging, that you personally tied to Hogwarts' headmaster's office."
His eyes met hers. There was no flinch, no evade—just a quiet acknowledgement. "Yes."
"And I'm supposed to believe that's entirely academic?" she asked. "No special interest in this particular residence?"
A muscle moved in his jaw.
"Number Four Privet Drive," he said. "The house of Petunia and Vernon Dursley. The home, until approximately—" his gaze flicked to the devastation "—thirty minutes ago, of their nephew. Harry James Potter."
The name hung between them like another explosion.
Behind Amelia, Robards swore softly under his breath.
"Potter," Amelia repeated, her throat suddenly dry. She'd seen the files, of course. Everyone in the Department had. The boy-who-lived, orphaned in Godric's Hollow, placed…somewhere safe, Dumbledore had said. Protected by ancient magic. No details volunteered, none requested. War had left them too busy, too grateful he was alive at all.
And now here was the answer, staring at her from a blasted Muggle street.
Her hand tightened around her wand. "You left him here."
His shoulders dipped, the faintest sag. "I did."
"In a house that just tried to turn itself inside out from magical overload."
"Yes," he said. "Though I would phrase that rather differently."
Anger flared hot behind her ribs, sharper even than the dread. A child—this child—left in a place like this, powerful enough to trip the Muggle Exposure Alarm. What had he been living with for seven years to burst like this?
She opened her mouth.
Then she saw it.
Under the guilt in Dumbledore's eyes—something he wasn't bothering to hide—there was a hard, focused rage. Not directed at her, but turned inward and outward at once, a blade with two edges. Whatever he'd expected from his grand plan for Harry Potter's childhood, this was not it.
Snapping at him now wouldn't pull a boy out of rubble any faster.
Amelia swallowed the first words that tried to come out and forced her voice flat. "Explain later. Right now: is Harry alive?"
"I believe so," Dumbledore said. "There is…something of him still bound to this place. And something else, wrapped tight around him." He nodded toward the crater. "I was waiting for your people before going down. This is your jurisdiction."
She almost told him that jurisdiction didn't mean much when an uncontrolled surge like this was at play. But the words he'd used stuck.
"Wrapped around him?" she repeated.
He nodded once. "Raw magic. His own and more besides. Protective. I have not yet attempted to breach it."
Fawkes ruffled his feathers, giving a low, impatient trill.
Amelia blew out a breath. "Right. Let's go find your boy-who-lived."
They moved together to the edge of the crater.
Up close, the destruction was even worse. The neat little garden had been scoured away, lawn torn down to bare earth. The house's foundation lay like a broken jaw, teeth of concrete jutting at odd angles. Twisted metal—the remains of kitchen appliances, perhaps—glinted dully under the harsh artificial lights.
Magic clung to everything. Not like a Dark curse—there was no oily wrongness, no whisper of malicious intent. This was harsher, cleaner. The crackling aftertaste of a natural disaster.
"There," Dumbledore said quietly.
At first, Amelia saw nothing. Then, as she narrowed her focus—not with her eyes but with her Auror's instincts—she saw it: a faint distortion at the very center of the crater, as if the air itself were thicker there, warping what lay beyond.
"Cloaking field?" she murmured.
"No," Dumbledore said, just as softly. "Nothing so refined. This is…unshaped. Instinctive." His voice dropped further. "This is what happens when magic loves a thing it refuses to let go."
The words jolted her.
Magic loves—
She pushed the thought aside and slid down the slope, boots sending little avalanches of loose brick and plaster ahead of her. Dumbledore followed, sure-footed despite his age. Above, one of her Aurors laid a quick discreet charm to nudge Muggle gazes away from the crater's center, just in case.
As they approached the distorted air, the feeling grew.
It pressed against Amelia's skin like heat from a forge—intense but not burning, wrapping over her like a blanket just shy of stifling. The closer she came, the more it reminded her of childhood: the suffocating hug of an overprotective aunt, arms locked tight, refusing to let go.
Except this was not a person. It was the world, folding in.
Fawkes suddenly launched himself from Dumbledore's shoulder.
With a crack of wings, the phoenix shot forward, a streak of red and gold plunging into the shimmering pocket of air. He vanished from view, swallowed by the distortion.
Amelia cursed under her breath. "Tell me that's normal."
"Fawkes often knows better than I what is needed," Dumbledore said. His hand, she noted, was white-knuckled on his wand. "But no, I would not call any of this normal."
They took another step.
The air thickened. Amelia felt resistance now, as if each pace was against a gentle but insistent current. Her instinct whispered that this was the point where sensible people stopped and reassessed.
She kept walking.
The moment she crossed an invisible line, the world changed.
Sound faded—the distant wail of sirens, the shouts of Muggles, even the murmur of her own Aurors' charms. In their place came a muted, thrumming pulse, slow and steady, like an enormous heartbeat.
The rubble inside this boundary looked…disorganized in a different way. Shards of brick lay in curves around an empty space, metal beams bent not randomly but in arcs, as if they'd been redirected mid-fall.
At the center of those arcs lay a small form.
Harry Potter looked even smaller in person than on the baby photos that had been passed around the Ministry after Voldemort fell. Seven years had stretched him, but not filled him out; his limbs were thin, his clothes too big and hanging wrong in ways Amelia had seen in too many neglected children.
He lay on his back on a slab of half-intact flooring that hovered just above the ground, floating on nothing. His glasses were gone. Blood had dried in a rusty streak from his forehead, down the side of his face. Dust coated his hair and skin.
Fawkes crouched on Harry's chest, talons careful on the threadbare fabric. The phoenix's wings were half-open, his body angled forward, eyes blazing. As Amelia and Dumbledore drew closer, Fawkes let out a low, warning hiss, feathers flaring.
The message needed no translation: Mine. Do not come closer.
Amelia stopped dead.
Dumbledore did too, though every line of him strained forward.
He closed his eyes briefly, then opened them. "Harry," he said, voice barely above a whisper. "It's Albus. I…we would like to make sure you are well. That is all."
He wasn't talking to the unconscious boy.
The magic responded.
It wasn't sight, exactly, but both Amelia and Dumbledore felt it: a pressure, cool and vast, turning toward them. For an instant, the heavy warmth around Harry tightened, as if bracing.
Then something brushed Amelia's mind.
Her Occlumency barriers sprang up reflexively, polished by years of interrogation training. She'd held Death Eater Legilimens at bay with those defenses, had shoved back probing thoughts with hard-edged mental walls.
The thing that touched her didn't even slow.
It wasn't like a person rummaging through a filing cabinet. It was more like a wind blowing through an open house—passing through every room in an instant, registering everything without stopping to examine each piece of furniture.
She had a split-second impression of her own self as seen from far away: intentions, loyalties, scars. The shape of her promise to Susan to make the world safer. The line she'd drawn, again and again, between protecting the vulnerable and wielding power like a cudgel.
Then it was gone, already moving.
Dumbledore's face went still, eyes unfocused. He, too, felt the brush: across his guilt, his justifications, his regrets. Over memories of a baby left on a doorstep, of blood wards constructed in haste, of years of trusting numbers on parchment instead of the messy reality of a child's life.
The pressure lingered a moment longer on that last piece, like fingers pressing a bruise.
Amelia drew in a shaky breath she hadn't realized she'd been holding.
She'd expected intrusion to feel violating. This didn't. It was too impersonal for that. There was no greed in it, no prying curiosity—only an immense, dispassionate assessment: threat, not-threat.
Whatever this was, it was not human.
The warmth around Harry loosened a fraction.
Fawkes's feathers slowly flattened. The phoenix's gaze lost some of its fierce, razor focus. He looked from Harry to Dumbledore, then to Amelia, as if confirming what the greater current of magic had already decided.
With a soft, mournful trill, Fawkes bent his head.
A single, clear tear welled at the corner of the phoenix's dark eye, swelled, and then fell.
It landed directly on Harry's broken scar.
The reaction was immediate.
Light flared where the tear touched, soft and white-gold. For a moment, it seemed to soak into the jagged, blood-crusted line of the scar, tracing it with a glow that pulsed in time with that deep, unseen heartbeat.
Then the light sank deeper.
The raw magic wrapped around Harry surged inward, flowing through the phoenix's tear as if it had been waiting for a path. Amelia felt it—not in her mind this time, but in the air: a rush, a drawing in, like wind spiraling down a funnel.
Harry's breathing hitched.
The dried blood on his forehead began to flake away, crumbling into fine dust that lifted off his skin and drifted upward, dissolving into the shimmering air. The torn skin of the scar knit visibly, the angry red edges smoothing, the tissue beneath reshaping.
Dumbledore swallowed, eyes locked on the boy.
"That should not be possible," he murmured, half to himself. "Phoenix tears do not normally…seep so deep."
Amelia watched, lips pressed thin, and said nothing. She was still trying to reconcile the reports on her desk—"basic health within acceptable range"—with the reality of how small and hollow Harry looked, even as his body healed.
Bruises faded under the layer of dust, yellow and purple melting into normal skin tone. A nasty swelling along one thin wrist went down, bone subtly shifting back into a proper alignment. Scratches, cuts, the small scrapes of a life of petty neglect—all of it smoothed away under the combined work of phoenix magic and that vast, impersonal force.
Not fixed, she thought, staring. Not really. There was still thinness that meant years of underfeeding, still the faint curve of a spine used to curling in on itself. But the worst was being peeled back, one layer at a time.
Fawkes cried again, softer this time, and another tear fell, joining the first.
Harry's face, under the grime, relaxed. The tightness around his mouth eased. His breathing deepened.
"Look," Dumbledore whispered hoarsely.
Amelia saw it then—the difference in the scar.
She'd seen it once before, on the night the potters died. It had been fresh then, angry and inflamed, but even after healing she remembered the way it had felt when he'd lifted the fringe of baby hair: a faint, crawling wrongness, like standing too close to a closed door behind which something unpleasant waited.
Now, as the last of the blood flaked away, the skin was a clean, pale pink, still in the shape of a lightning bolt but…quiet. No shadow lurked beneath it. No sense of something listening.
Empty.
The hollow absence from the destroyed soul fragment was still there—but that space, too, was being filled. Not by anything dark, but by the steady radiance of raw magic settling into its new shape. A knot had been cut loose, and the threads were reweaving around the gap.
Amelia let out a breath she hadn't known she was holding.
"So the monitor was right," she said. "Your tracking spells, too. Whatever foreign magic was in him—it's gone."
"Yes," Dumbledore said. His eyes glistened behind their half-moon spectacles. "At a cost, it seems."
He looked around, at the crater, at the shattered remains of the house that had been Harry's "safe" home. His hands shook, just a little.
"I placed him here," he said quietly. "To protect him. To keep him away from the worst of our world until he was old enough to face it. I told myself that anything was better than the madness of fame. That Lily's blood, Petunia's roof—" he swallowed "—would be enough."
Amelia's gaze stayed on Harry's too-thin form. "You were wrong," she said, not unkindly.
"Yes," he agreed. "I was."
She could have pressed the advantage. Could have flayed him with questions, accusations. Why didn't you check? Why didn't you visit? Why didn't you see?
Instead, she asked the only question that mattered right now.
"Can you move him safely?"
Dumbledore straightened a fraction. "With Fawkes' help and the magic here…yes, I believe so. Hogwarts' infirmary is prepared for unusual cases. Poppy will know what to do with phoenix-augmented healing."
Amelia nodded once. "Do it. I'll handle the DMLE side. We'll classify this as an extreme accidental event and work out the paperwork later. But understand, Albus—" Her eyes cut to his, hard and clear. "This isn't going away. When he's safe, when he's stable, there will be questions. From me. From the Board. Possibly from the Wizengamot."
His smile was bitter and small. "I would expect nothing less."
The pressure of raw magic around them eased again, just slightly, like a mother loosening her grip but not fully letting go as strangers approached her child.
Dumbledore stepped closer to Harry, moving slowly, telegraphing every motion as if the force around them could understand care. Fawkes watched, then hopped lightly from Harry's chest to his shoulder again, though he stayed angled protectively toward the boy.
Gently, Albus slipped his arms under Harry's slight frame.
The magic surged, a final testing wave, like a hand hovering over his, ready to snatch the child back if his intentions wavered.
They didn't.
Satisfied, it settled.
Harry, cradled against Dumbledore's chest, looked impossibly small. But his color was better now, the lines of strain smoothed, his chest rising and falling in a steady rhythm.
For a heartbeat, Amelia saw something in the old wizard's posture—a mixture of fierce protectiveness and crushing guilt—that made her look away.
"Fawkes," Dumbledore murmured. "If you would be so kind."
The phoenix's talons flexed on his shoulder. Fire burst upward, golden and clean, wrapping around man and child both.
For an instant, the crater was lit from within.
Then the flames collapsed inward, taking Albus and Harry with them.
When the light vanished, Amelia stood alone at the center of the ruined house, the echo of that deep, impersonal magic still humming faintly in the rubble around her.
She took one long breath, filling her lungs with dust and smoke and the metallic tang of spent magic.
"All right," she said softly, to herself, to the ruined foundations, to the empty air that somehow felt less empty than before. "Time to clean up your mess, Potter. And yours, Dumbledore."
She turned and climbed back toward the edge of the crater, where Aurors and Muggles and a thousand questions waited.