Ending Maker: Fate Wizardry
Chapter Intro:
This fic’s premise is inspired by the webtoon titled Ending Maker/엔딩메이커 by Chwiryong and their illustrator chyan. Please check them out.
Story Starts
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Ch 9.1 - A Series of Head-Related
Incidents and Indignities
The air hit him first.
Not the London smog he'd grown accustomed to over the past year, but something fresher. Cleaner. The kind of cold that scraped the inside of your lungs and left them raw and grateful. Scotland in September, the last stubborn warmth of summer retreating before autumn's advance, and the platform at Hogsmeade Station smelled of pine resin and wet stone and woodsmoke from somewhere distant.
Harry stepped down from the carriage and stood on the platform. He closed his eyes.
He breathed in.
The noise of the train—hissing steam, slamming doors, the chatter of a hundred-odd students spilling onto the platform in various states of excitement and terror—receded to a pleasant hum. Somewhere behind him, Hermione was saying something sharp. Somewhere further back, Ron Weasley was complaining about his trunk. A prefect was telling everyone to leave their luggage where it stood. None of it mattered.
His head was clear.
Genuinely, completely clear. The kind of clarity he hadn't felt since—he couldn't remember. Not since the forge, maybe, when the metal was hot and the hammer was falling and the world narrowed to a single bright point. But this was different. This wasn't focus burning everything else away. This was the absence of weight.
No Horcruxes to hunt. No Azkaban to breach. No goblins to negotiate with, no Black patriarchs to charm, no Jean-Paul Delacour measuring the distance between Harry and his daughter as though calculating a firing solution. The Dursleys were behind him—literally, geographically, spiritually. Sirius was recovering in France, attended by the finest healers Arcturus's gold could procure. Pettigrew was in custody. Two soul fragments had been reduced to slag.
And here he stood, eighteen years old in a body that had never known peace, breathing Scottish air on a train platform, about to attend a school of magic.
Even Voldemort—rootless, diminished, a parasite clinging to the back of a Defence professor's skull—couldn't touch this. Not tonight.
Harry opened his eyes. The sky above Hogsmeade was purple-black and thick with stars, more stars than London ever permitted, and the mountains beyond the village were dark shapes against the darker sky. Lanterns swung from posts along the platform, casting pools of amber light that the students moved through like fish through shallows.
'This is good,' he thought. 'This is—'
"Why are you still hovering around us?"
Hermione's voice punctured the moment cleanly, a needle through silk.
Harry turned. Hermione stood three paces behind him, trunk floating at her heel—she'd charmed it the moment they'd left the compartment, propriety be damned—with her arms folded and her chin tilted at the angle that meant someone had approximately four seconds to provide a satisfactory answer.
A prefect swept past—the same one who'd advised them all to change early—and paused just long enough to remind Hermione that trunks were to be left on the platform, the house-elves would see to them. Hermione lowered hers to the ground without breaking eye contact with her target.
The target of this attention was Sally-Anne Perks, who stood beside her own trunk looking not remotely intimidated, her hands clasped in front of her and her expression arranged into something that, on anyone else, Harry might have called guileless.
"It's a new chapter of my life, isn't it?" Sally-Anne said. "Everything's unfamiliar. I'm quite nervous, actually. Having a familiar face close by does wonders for the anxiety."
She glanced at Harry. The familiar face in question.
Hermione's eyes narrowed.
Harry turned back to the mountains.
He'd met Sally-Anne at the pub—the Boar's Head in Guildford, where her father Thomas Perks ran the kitchen and Harry sharpened the knives and took the odd shift besides, because the apprenticeship stipend was thin and the Dursleys had never given him so much as pocket money. Thomas was a broad, genial man who called his daughter Anne, always Anne, in a warm Surrey drawl. He'd lost the argument over her full name at the registry office and won the private war of daily usage. Her mother, who materialised during Friday and Saturday rushes to work the bar, called her Sally, exclusively Sally—as far as her mother was concerned, the matter had been settled at birth, whatever the certificate said.
Harry had spent his first week at the apprenticeship convinced Thomas had twin daughters. One who helped prep vegetables in the morning. Another who pulled pints in the evening. The revelation that Anne-who-peeled-potatoes and Sally-who-poured-lager were the same girl, hyphenated into existence by parental compromise, had arrived courtesy of the girl herself, delivered over a shared plate of chips—blunt and cheerful, the way she said most things.
She was good company. Straightforward. She laughed easily and without agenda and had strong opinions about life, which he found refreshing. She was also, as of this afternoon, apparently a witch—which neither of them had known about the other, and which she had greeted with open delight, as though she'd discovered an ally behind enemy lines.
Hermione had greeted the development rather differently.
Behind him, the two of them were still going.
"Nervous," Hermione repeated. "You don't look nervous."
"I'm very good at hiding it. Stiff upper lip. British virtue."
"You're clinging to my boyfriend's arm."
"Was. Past tense. I've let go. See? Both hands. Free and clear. I'm simply walking in the same direction as everyone else on this platform, which is—" Sally-Anne gestured broadly at the crowd streaming towards the boats. "That way."
And there it was. The headache.
Not a proper one yet—just the first faint pulse behind his right temple, the herald of what prolonged exposure to Hermione-in-a-mood promised. He'd felt its like a thousand times across two lifetimes: in Fuyuki, whenever Rin and Issei went to war over some fresh imagined slight; in London, whenever Hermione argued with shopkeepers and goblin directors and anyone else who failed to meet her exacting standards. The specific frequency of Tohsaka displeasure resonated in his skull like a tuning fork struck against bone.
He pressed his fingers to his temple and breathed.
Then two hands appeared. Not his own.
Cool fingers settled against both temples, and a soft, steady pressure began. Small circles, deliberate and firm, rolling against the pulse points where the ache had started to bloom. The pain didn't vanish, but it quieted, pushed back by the gentle repetition.
Harry opened his eyes.
Fleur stood before him, close enough that her face filled his vision. Her blue eyes held his with a calm, knowing look—the same steady gaze she'd worn across a hundred battlefields and a thousand council chambers, now directed at the rather less heroic spectacle of a boy with a tension headache on a train platform. Her lips curved. Just slightly. Just enough to say: I know exactly what's happening behind you, and I find it hilarious, and I will never admit that aloud.
She was almost his height.
The observation surfaced before he could stop it. In this life, in this body—the Delacour frame, long-limbed and straight-backed—Fleur stood perhaps two inches shorter than him. Her eyes were nearly level with his. He could look at her without tilting his head down, without the familiar geometry of—
Compared to the King of Britain, who had been—
A full head shorter than—
The fingers at his temples shifted. The rolling pressure became pointed—knuckles now, grinding into the bone with sudden and precise malice.
"Ow—"
"You were zinking somezing rude." Fleur's voice was perfectly pleasant. Her knuckles were not.
There existed, in the accumulated wisdom of two lifetimes, a short and inviolable list of subjects one did not raise with Arturia Pendragon. Her appetite—legendary and non-negotiable—was permissible ground, provided one supplied sufficient food. Her magical resistance—formidable beyond reason—could be discussed in tactical contexts. Her swordsmanship invited only reverence.
Her height was forbidden territory.
Her chest was a death sentence. He had once observed, in a moment of suicidal wit, that her Magic Resistance and her bust shared the same rank—A—and had spent the following spar learning, in great detail, what each of his ribs was called.
And any comparison between the two—any suggestion, however oblique, that the former might bear some proportional relationship to the latter—constituted an act of war against the Crown.
Harry had, across the span of two existences, made this mistake precisely twice. He had no intention of making it a third time, and he had not, technically, been thinking about her chest at all—but Arturia's danger sense for these matters operated on a frequency beyond mere thought. It detected intent to think. It punished the crime before it was committed.
"I'm sorry," Harry said.
"For what?"
"For the thing I was thinking."
"Which was?"
"Something rude," he said carefully, "that I will not be repeating, describing, or thinking again."
Fleur held his gaze for a long moment, weighing the confession the way she'd once weighed surrender terms. Then the knuckles softened back into fingertips, delivered one final forgiving circle each, and withdrew.
"Wise," she said, and the amusement finally broke through into a proper smile.
"It's good, though," he said quietly. "Being here."
Fleur's hands stilled. She searched his face for something—sincerity, perhaps, or the particular flavour of his contentment—and whatever she found there softened the last trace of mock severity from her expression.
"Yes," she said. "It is."
Across the platform, movement caught his peripheral vision. The Malfoy girl—Cassiopeia—stood near a cluster of first-years with her brother, her trunk at her feet, holding herself carefully still: observing, and not wishing to be observed doing it. Her gaze met Harry's. She held it for a beat, her expression unreadable except for the faintest crease at the corner of her mouth that might have been amusement, and then she looked away, drawn back into Draco's orbit as he launched into what appeared to be a lecture on the superiority of something or other.
A retching sound broke the night air.
Harry turned. Nymphadora Tonks stood six feet away in full Auror trainee uniform, her hair a violent red pixie cut that clashed spectacularly with her robes, her face contorted in an exaggerated pantomime of nausea. She had one hand pressed to her stomach and the other extended towards Harry and Fleur, fingers splayed, as though the sight of them might be contagious.
Fleur withdrew her hands from Harry's temples with unhurried grace.
Tonks gagged theatrically one final time, straightened, winked, and vanished into the crowd heading towards the upper-year carriages.
Harry surfaced from the moment and realised, abruptly, that they had been attracting attention. Students flowed past in a loose stream, and rather too many heads were turned in their direction. Some of the stares were aimed at Fleur—her allure was dampened but not dead, a bonfire banked to coals, and even banked it drew eyes. Some were aimed at Harry, though he couldn't fathom why until he remembered that his scar was visible and his name had been circulating the train for hours. And some—a fair proportion, actually—were directed at the space behind him, where the argument had not so much ended as evolved.
"—just saying," Sally-Anne was saying, her voice pitched in the register of sweet reason that was, in Harry's professional estimation, carefully engineered to infuriate, "I don't see the problem. Are you telling me any other claims would be subject to your approval?"
"Exactly."
"It sounds rather medieval. Should I expect a herald next? Perhaps a writ of ownership?"
Hermione's left eye twitched. Harry knew that twitch. It preceded spellfire in one lifetime and Reinforced punches in the other.
"Firs' years! Firs' years, over here!"
The voice boomed across the platform—deep and broad, the kind of sound you felt in your sternum before your ears caught up. Rubeus Hagrid. Harry knew the name the way he knew most of this world: secondhand, from pages read in another life. The voice needed no introduction at all. Lantern light swung somewhere ahead, a bright point bobbing above the crowd like a lighthouse.
Harry felt Fleur's hand find his. Her fingers laced through his own—cool and certain—and when he looked at her she was gazing ahead, towards the lantern light and the lake beyond it, towards the castle he knew waited in the darkness. Her profile was calm. Her jaw was set the way it always was before she entered somewhere new: the old instinct, buried deep, of a king crossing into an unfamiliar court.
He squeezed her hand.
She squeezed back.
They stepped forward together, into the stream of first-years following the bobbing lantern, and for a handful of steps the night was perfect—cold air and starlight and her hand in his and his head blessedly, mercifully clear—
"—and another thing," Hermione's voice carried from behind them, "if you think that ridiculous laugh is going to work on anyone with an ounce of—"
"Oh, this? Ohh-hohoho! You mean this laugh? I'm terribly sorry, I simply can't help it. It's a family trait—"
"That is clearly an artificial laugh—"
"Slander. Perks women are born with impeccable laughs. It's genetic."
'Or maybe not.'
A short, muffled boom sounded behind them. The prefect from earlier stood at the centre of a fresh crater of silence, wand out, having apparently reached the end of a very long evening. Around her, every trunk still being dragged towards the boats wrenched itself free of its owner and sailed into a neat pile at the platform's edge.
"Again—leave your—oh, damn it, I don't care anymore." She pressed two fingers to the bridge of her nose. "Merlin, I already have a headache. It's like this every year, and the other prefects are never, bloody nevermind—NO NEED TO BRING YOUR LUGGAGE. THE ELVES WILL HANDLE IT."
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Minerva McGonagall stood at the top of the entrance hall steps, hands folded, and permitted herself—for the first time in eleven months—to relax.
It was not a sensation she trusted. Relaxation, in her experience, was simply the interval in which the next crisis drew breath. But the great oak doors were shut against the September dark, the castle hummed with the particular contentment of a school about to be full again, and the secret that had sat behind her sternum like a swallowed stone since last year had, at last, stopped mattering.
Mr Potter was here. Enrolled, sorted-to-be, safely inside the strongest wards in Britain. Where the boy had spent the intervening year—with the Tonks family, of all people, having flatly declined to return to his aunt's house and asked her and Filius, with a politeness that had somehow made refusal impossible, to keep the matter to themselves—was no longer a question anyone needed to raise with the Headmaster. The living arrangements of an adult wizard were his own affair. She had told herself this in October, and in December, and at Easter, and on every occasion Albus had mentioned the boy with that fond, faraway confidence of his, and tonight, finally, it was simply true.
She had not enjoyed keeping it from him. But the boy had asked. And Minerva had known the Dursleys for what they were since the day she'd spent twelve hours on their garden wall as a cat. She had said as much to Albus at the time. She had been overruled. Seventeen years later, the boy's quiet refusal to go back had felt less like a secret and more like a verdict she'd been holding in escrow.
'Enough.' The stone behind her sternum dissolved. Term had begun. Her head, for one blessed evening, was clear.
And there was, she admitted privately, a great deal to look forward to. The Granger girl alone promised to make the next several years genuinely interesting. Minerva had sat in that tidy Bookham sitting room beside Filius and watched an eighteen-year-old Muggle-born demonstrate control that fifth-years would envy—family magic or no family magic, whatever the girl's careful phrasing had been—and had walked out having revised her expectations for the year upward by a considerable margin. Filius had talked of little else for a week. A mind like that came through perhaps once a decade.
And Mr Potter himself—here was the pleasant surprise. She had braced, frankly, for James. For a taller, greener-eyed edition of the boy who had once transfigured every inkwell in her classroom into a chorus of singing frogs, then flirted his way out of half the detention—and, over seven years, through roughly half the school besides. But the young man she'd observed was quiet. Courteous. Watchful in a way James had never been in his life. No swagger, no winking, not the faintest whiff of mischief about him.
Which meant—she indulged the thought fully, savouring it—that the Weasley twins would be her only headache this year.
Fred and George were a known quantity. A managed condition. One outbreak of regrettable creativity per fortnight, contained, punished, secretly graded on artistic merit. She could live with the twins. The twins were budgeted for.
A fist like a ham struck the oak doors three times.
Minerva drew her wand, straightened her hat, and swung the doors wide to Hagrid's lantern and the milling, damp, awestruck mass of first-years behind him—
"—was never yours to approve in the first place, that's rather my point—"
—and to two voices, mid-argument, cutting cleanly through the crowd. Neither speaker had lowered her volume for the castle. Neither showed the slightest sign of fatigue.
Minerva's eyes found them at once. The Granger girl, chin up, colour high, every inch the young woman who had engaged a Transfiguration mistress and Charms master on magical theory in her parents' sitting room. And beside her—matching her stride for stride, sweet-faced and utterly unbothered—a blonde girl Minerva did not recognise. One of Severus's introductions, then, from the Muggle-born visit rotation. Perks, she thought. The name floated up from the roll. Perks, Sally-Anne.
"I'm only saying a register seems excessive—"
"It is not a register, it is a perfectly reasonable—"
Minerva's gaze travelled, with a mounting sense of premonition, to the eye of this storm. Mr Potter stood between and slightly ahead of the two combatants, serene in the studied way of a man determined to be elsewhere without moving his feet. And on his other side, hand laced through his, stood the tall silver-blonde girl whose last-minute enrolment had come down from the Headmaster's office in August with Jean-Paul Delacour's seal attached—the paperwork for which Minerva had personally concluded across a table at the Three Broomsticks, opposite a girl of startlingly regal bearing who seemed like she was there to negotiate a treaty between nations.
Miss Delacour surveyed the entrance hall, the staircases, and the arguing pair behind her, and made no attempt whatsoever to hide that she was enjoying her evening.
"—my boyfriend's wellbeing is—"
Boyfriend. That much, at least, was not news; the Granger girl had made the attachment quite clear in the private room in the Leaky Cauldron, chin lifted, daring comment.
Minerva looked at the joined hands. Then at the arguing girls. Then at the joined hands.
Then Miss Granger—without pausing her argument, without so much as glancing over—reached across and claimed Mr Potter's other bicep with both hands, a manoeuvre executed with the fluency of established habit.
The joined hands did not unjoin.
Minerva performed the arithmetic twice and arrived at the same total both times.
Around the group, she now noticed, the other first-years had arranged themselves in a careful ring of vacancy—the instinctive wide berth of livestock giving ground to weather. Whether they were keeping clear of the Veela, the argument, or the boy at the centre of both, Minerva could not determine. Possibly the first-years couldn't either. Possibly it didn't matter.
Then the Perks girl caught Mr Potter's eye over Miss Granger's head and winked.
Mr Potter's composure cracked—only slightly, a flush and a rapid study of the ceiling vaults, but on that boy it read like a shout. Miss Delacour's serene expression acquired a distinct undercurrent of entertainment. Miss Granger bristled, audibly, mid-sentence, without losing her place in it. The ring of vacancy widened by a further respectful foot.
Somewhere behind Minerva's right temple, a small, familiar pressure introduced itself—politely, the way they always began—and settled in with the air of something intending to stay for seven years.
She revised the year's budget.
Merlin willing, the Hat would have the good sense to split those two girls between houses. If it delivered the entire arrangement to Gryffindor intact, she would be submitting a formal request for a reshuffling of Heads of House by Sunday—a request she already knew to be doomed, as she was the only professor on staff who had worn the red and gold. The system, she reflected, had never anticipated needing a substitute.
Minerva sighed. Internally. Where it counted for nothing.
"Welcome to Hogwarts," she said.
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The one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord approaches...
Albus Dumbledore had carried the prophecy for so long that it no longer felt like words. It had worn itself into the architecture of his thinking, a groove down which every plan eventually rolled. He was aware of this. He permitted it. Some weights were meant to be carried awake.
Above the staff table, the enchanted ceiling wheeled with stars, and below it four long tables of students craned towards the doors at the far end of the hall. Albus folded his hands and watched the doors with them.
They opened. Minerva led the first-years in—and there, half a head above the crowd, was the boy. Only one head in the procession rose higher: the Weasleys' youngest son, all gangling inches and no idea yet what to do with them.
Albus looked, and kept looking, and felt something in his chest unclench by degrees.
Harry Potter was tall. Broad through the shoulder, straight-backed, walking with the easy balance of a young man entirely at home in his body. Healthy. More than healthy—there was a settled quality to him, an absence of hunger in the way he moved, that no amount of wishing could counterfeit. Albus had feared—had spent seventeen years quietly fearing—what Petunia's household might have made of him. It seemed the fear had been unkind. The proof of the arrangement's success was walking up the centre of his Great Hall with colour in his cheeks.
And the arrangement, of course, still held. Albus had seen to that personally—the blood wards anchored for as long as he treated their house as home; he, of course, took into account that it would take a great hurdle for the blood wards to be rejected, like a formal declaration backed by intent. Seven more years of certainty. And a boy so evidently well treated would need little convincing to keep returning to Privet Drive each summer; gratitude, in Albus's experience, was the gentlest of tethers. Better still, a willing one. He would frame it as a request, not a requirement. People carried burdens so much further when they believed they had picked them up themselves.
And surrounded—Albus's beard twitched—by young women.
Two of them flanked him outright. On his left, the Delacour girl, silver and unhurried, drawing stares from every table and returning none of them. Albus had arranged that enrolment himself, over a long dinner with Jean-Paul that had been, he could admit, the most refreshing conversation he'd had in years—two old warhorses talking about anything other than committee procedure. Though he had not missed the small muscle that jumped beside Jean-Paul's eye each time Hogwarts was mentioned in the same sentence as his daughter. A father's arithmetic, Albus suspected, in which Beauxbatons had been a fixed sum for generations and had somehow, without consultation, been struck from the ledger. He sympathised. He had also signed the forms—and his Deputy Headmistress had finalised it.
Nearby, a redheaded boy—Molly's youngest, unmistakable at forty paces—walked in loose orbit of the group, and Albus allowed himself a small satisfaction at that. It was good for the boy to have company his own age. Wholesome company. The Weasleys were an open-hearted, loyal, uncomplicated family—precisely the sort of influence to anchor a famous young man against flattery, ambition, and all the other currents that might carry him somewhere unhelpful.
He had, admittedly, given the current a nudge. A visit to the Burrow in July, tea with Molly, a remark let fall in passing—that Harry Potter would be starting this year, poor lad, knowing not a soul. Nothing more had been needed. Molly had done the rest, as he had known she would, because her kindness was as reliable as sunrise. That was the art of it, really. One never instructed. One merely arranged for good people to have good ideas.
On Harry's right walked a girl with brown curls and a lifted chin, and as Albus's gaze reached her, hers met his.
She did not look away.
Most first-years, meeting the eyes of the Headmaster across the length of the Great Hall, blinked and dropped their gaze and studied the flagstones. This one held it. Held it, tilted her head a fraction, and raised one eyebrow—not rudely, not quite—in the manner of an examiner who has read one's published work and arrived with questions.
Granger, Albus thought, delighted. Filius had spent half the summer's staff meetings on the subject of Miss Hermione Granger, and Filius did not spend himself lightly. The brightest intake in a generation, he'd said. Possibly several. Albus inclined his head a courteous half-inch. The eyebrow came down—satisfied, or filed away, he genuinely could not tell which—and he found that he did not mind not knowing. It had been some years since a first-year had managed to be interesting from forty feet.
Though it did appear that Miss Granger and Miss Delacour had already struck up a friendship with Harry. A close one, by the look of it.
Albus frowned. Inwardly, where frowns belonged.
He had plans for Harry—for afterwards, should the boy survive what was coming—and those plans had been drafted around a particular shape of young man. A quiet boy. A boy raised beside a favoured cousin, accustomed to second place at his own table, hungry for the approval he'd never quite been given at home. Not mistreated—Albus had never intended that, and the evidence tonight confirmed Petunia had done her duty—but overlooked, in the mild and useful way of a spare child. Such a boy reached Hogwarts starving for exactly two things: belonging, and a wise hand on his shoulder. Albus had spent seventeen years preparing to supply both.
The young man crossing his Great Hall did not walk like a boy starving for anything.
Green eyes—Lily's eyes, so exact it still caught behind the ribs—swept the staff table and passed over Albus with the same mild, cataloguing courtesy they gave the floating candles. No flicker of awe. No searching for approval. A young adult, assembled and entire, who appeared to want nothing whatsoever from the man watching him.
Albus frowned again, inwardly, rather deeper this time.
Still. Workable. Everything was workable, given time, and time was the one currency of which he held a surplus. Though perhaps—just to know the terrain, nothing more, a glance at the surface thoughts, the sort of thing any careful shepherd might—
He reached out with the lightest brush of Legilimency.
Something sharp met him at the threshold.
Albus winced—managed, with sixty years' practice, to convert it into a thoughtful stroke of his beard—and withdrew behind his own Occlumency with his metaphorical fingers smarting. Extraordinary. Not shields; the boy could not possibly have shields. Something older and less polite. Lily's protection, perhaps, extending its remit to the mind as well as the flesh—sacrificial magic was notoriously expansive in its interpretation of harm. He would have to consult his notes.
He did not notice, some ten seconds later, a member of his own staff flinch and press two fingers briefly to a temple, having done the same thing he did.
No matter. Seven years stretched ahead—seven years of proximity, of small kindnesses, of good people having good ideas. The greater good had never required haste. Only patience and a longer view than anyone else at the table.
The crowd of first-years pooled at the front of the hall. Minerva set the stool down with a crack that silenced the last whisperers, placed the Sorting Hat upon it, and stepped back as the brim split and the Hat drew breath to sing.
Albus settled into his chair, folded his hands over his stomach, and let the old song wash over the hall. The boy was healthy. The boy was happy. The boy had friends, and—by every visible sign—an entirely ordinary head on his shoulders.
The prophecy could wait one more evening.
Neither could live while the other survives.
Minerva unrolled her scroll.
"When I call your name," she said, "you will put on the Hat and sit on the stool to be sorted. Abbott, Hannah!"
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End
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