The garden behind Grimmauld Place had never looked like much. Kreacher had spent most of July muttering about it and doing absolutely nothing to fix it, which was fairly typical. Mrs. Weasley had gotten involved afterward, and within four days the overgrown patch of weeds and dead rose bushes had turned into something that actually resembled a place where a wedding could happen.
Harry stood near the back of it on the morning of the first Saturday in August, adjusting his collar for what felt like the tenth time.
“Stop fidgeting,” Daphne said beside him. She looked comfortable in her pale gold dress robes that complimented her blonde hair really nicely. Of course she did. After all, she’d attended more formal events in her life than Harry had attended birthdays. “You look fine.”
“I feel like I’m being strangled.”
“That’s just what a properly fitted collar feels like,” Gabrielle chuckled from his other side. “You’re used to your casual wear. This is different, and honestly, what clothes should be like.”
Daphne nodded, completely in agreement, and Harry rolled his eyes.
“Wonderful. I hate it.”
They smiled slightly and let it go.
Around them the garden had filled up with rows of white chairs, charmed to stay dry despite the grass still being faintly damp from the morning. A small arch stood at the front, wrapped in white flowers that Neville had apparently helped select, on the grounds that if anyone present actually knew what they were looking at botanically, it should at least be accurate.
The guest list was short and had been kept so on purpose. Sirius had been firm about that from the start, and Amelia, after several weeks of the Ministry trying to turn her wedding into a state occasion, had been even firmer. No press. No Wizengamot members beyond the handful who counted as actual friends and were members of the Order. No photographs beyond what Colin Creevey, sworn to unusual secrecy for a boy his age, would take for the two of them to keep.
Susan sat in the second row next to Hannah, dressed in robes a shade of blue that made her look older than her age. She kept glancing toward the house, watching for her aunt.
“She’s not going to appear early,” Hannah told her. “That’s not how it works.”
“I know how weddings work.”
“You’ve been checking the door for ten minutes.”
“I have not.”
Fred and George sat a few rows back, both of them for once in robes that fit properly and behaving themselves. Their mother must’ve threatened them with something specific that had worked. Their oldest brother Bill sat beside them, his long hair tied back, an earring catching the light.
Kingsley stood near the edge of the garden rather than sitting, doing a slow, careful scan of the wards every few minutes. Tonks sat with her hair a soft shade of brown for the occasion, which was the most she could go for being formal.
Moody had come, though he remained standing near the back wall with his magical eye doing most of the work as usual, and he’d made it extremely clear that he considered himself on duty rather than a guest.
Cyrus sat toward the front with Evelyn, looking around every so often. He understood exactly how much political weight this particular wedding carried, but he’d set those considerations aside for one afternoon and simply be pleased for two people he liked.
Dumbledore arrived last, his robes a deep midnight blue rather than his usual eccentric palette and took a seat near the back. He caught Harry’s eye once and gave him a small, warm nod.
Soft music started playing a few minutes later, coming from nowhere in particular. Sirius walked out from the side of the house first, and Harry, standing beside him as the closest thing to a best man the occasion offered, felt something tightness and warmth in his chest at the same time.
Sirius looked genuinely nervous, which Harry hadn’t expected. He’d seen Sirius face down Dementors, duel Death Eaters, and argue policy in front of the entire Wizengamot without so much as a raised pulse. Standing at the front of his own wedding, he kept adjusting his sleeve and glancing toward the house every few seconds.
“You’re allowed to breathe,” Harry told him quietly.
“I am breathing.”
“You’re doing it very loudly.”
Sirius shot him a look which Harry merely smirked at, and the doors opened at that very moment. Amelia stepped out, and Sirius stopped looking at anything else at all.
She wore ivory robes, simple and well cut, with none of the ceremonial excess the Ministry would have insisted on if they’d been given the chance to plan any of this. Her hair was down, which Harry realized he’d genuinely never seen before. She looked unburdened, having decided to do away with all the pressure that came with her office for this one afternoon.
Work and responsibilities were constant but today deserved some respite from everything.
As she emerged, Susan made a small sound that wasn’t quite a sob and pressed a hand to her mouth. Hannah put an arm around her shoulders.
Amelia walked the short distance to the arch alone, which had apparently been her choice and not an oversight. She reached Sirius and looked at him properly for the first time that day, and the garden grew a little quiet as they gazed at each other with emotion and understanding.
The officiant was an elderly witch known to everyone. Madam Griselda Marchbanks was older than even Dumbledore and was also an old friend of the Bones family who had married three generations of them and had insisted on officiating this one as well. Her voice, when she started, was steady and carried without needing amplification.
“We are gathered,” she said, “in circumstances rather more private than either of these two would have chosen, had the world allowed them the choice. That it did not is, I think, all the more reason to make what time we have here count.”
She ran through the traditional words, the binding of intent, the joining of magic that Wizarding weddings required in place of the simple exchange of vows Harry vaguely remembered from Muggle films Aunt Petunia used to watch. Sirius and Amelia clasped hands, and a thin gold light wound around their joined wrists, settling into something that looked, for a moment, like a physical thread before sinking into their skin and vanishing.
“Do you, Sirius Orion Black, take this woman, in war and whatever peace may follow it, for as long as your magic allows?”
“I do,” Sirius said, and contrary to what his hands had been doing a minute earlier, his voice didn’t shake at all.
“And do you, Amelia Susan Bones, take this man, in war and whatever peace may follow it, for as long as your magic allows?”
“I do.”
The light flared once, bright enough that several people in the front row shielded their eyes, and then settled into a soft glow around both of them before fading entirely. Griselda smiled, having done this often enough to still find it moving every time.
“Then by the authority vested in me, and by the magic that just made its own opinion rather clear, I now call you husband and wife. Sirius, you may kiss your wife before she changes her mind.”
Sirius didn’t wait to be told twice.
The applause that followed was loud enough that Kreacher, watching from an upstairs window with a surprisingly approving look on his face, actually cracked something that might, under extremely generous interpretation, have been called a smile.
The reception moved indoors and out onto the newly tidy back terrace, tables set with more care than Grimmauld Place had probably seen in decades. Molly Weasley had overseen the food personally, which meant there was three times more of it than the guest list required and every bit of it was excellent.
Harry found himself standing with a glass in his hand sometime later, having been informed by Sirius that yes, he was in fact expected to say something.
“I didn’t prepare anything,” Harry told him.
“Neither did I, and I’m the one getting married. Improvise.”
Harry looked around the terrace, at Susan laughing at something Fred had said, at Gabrielle deep in conversation with Bill about something involving curse work that had both of them gesturing enthusiastically, and finally at Daphne who was watching him with a slightly amused look on her face. She knew what he had to do was slightly awkward for him and was ready to enjoy it either way.
He tapped his glass, and the conversation quieted.
“I’ve known Sirius for what feels like much longer than I actually have,” Harry said. “For some of that time he was hiding, being hunted by the entire Ministry for a crime he didn’t commit, and generally having what I think it’s fair to call a difficult time of things. When he finally got his name cleared, I assumed the hard part was over.”
Sirius, beside him, raised an eyebrow.
“It wasn’t, obviously. Turns out clearing your name doesn’t fix twelve years, and I watched him work through that the hard way, slowly, without much fanfare, mostly by throwing himself into things that mattered. The Wizengamot. This house. Me.” Harry paused. “And then Amelia.”
He looked at her.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen Sirius approach anything as carefully as he approached this. Which, if you know him, tells you something, because carefully isn’t usually a word associated with Sirius Black.”
A chorus of laughter echoed, and Sirius muttered something under his breath that Harry chose to ignore.
“Amelia’s been running a Ministry that’s fighting a war on two fronts, with people trying to kill her, and doing it in a way that’s kept the rest of us believing things might actually turn out all right. I don’t know how she does both. I don’t think either of them fully knows how they’re going to keep doing both. But I know that whatever’s coming, they’re better facing it together than either of them would be facing it alone.” He raised his glass properly. “To Sirius and Amelia. Took you both long enough.”
“To Sirius and Amelia,” the terrace echoed, glasses lifting.
Sirius clapped him on the shoulder hard enough to stagger him slightly. “That was better than I expected.”
“Low bar.”
“Very low bar. Still cleared it.”
The afternoon wore on into evening, filled with calmness and warmth that had been absent for months. Susan eventually cornered Harry near the edge of the terrace, watching her aunt dance badly with Sirius while everyone pretended not to notice how bad it actually was.
“Thank you,” Susan said. “For what you said. And for, I don’t know. Being the reason any of this happened in the first place, probably, if you go back far enough.”
“I didn’t do anything. They did this themselves.”
“Sure. But you’re the reason Sirius got out of that house and started living something like a normal life again. And you’re the reason my aunt’s had someone steady standing next to her instead of doing this completely alone.” Susan shrugged. “That’s not nothing.”
Harry didn’t have a good answer for that, so he didn’t try to find one. He just nodded, and the two of them stood there for a while, watching two people who’d survived a great deal separately finally get to survive something together instead.
By the time the last guests left, well after dark, the garden had gone quiet again, the chairs still arranged in their careful rows, the flowers on the arch beginning to droop slightly in the cooling air. Sirius stood at the back door with Amelia beside him, watching Harry and the others head inside.
“Good day,” Sirius said, mostly to himself.
“Very good day,” Amelia agreed.
Kreacher appeared briefly to collect the last of the glasses from the terrace, muttering something about the state of the silver and the indignity of hosting Weasleys in the family garden. He paused at the door and looked back at the two of them for a moment longer than strictly necessary before shuffling off inside. Sirius watched him go with an expression that looked suspiciously like fondness.
“He’s warming up to you,” Harry said, coming back out to fetch his own jacket. “In his own way.”
“That elf hasn’t warmed up to anyone in his life,” Sirius said. “He’s just decided the alternative to me is worse, and Amelia apparently passed whatever test that involves.”
“High praise, from him.”
“Don’t tell him I said that.”
Neither of them moved to go inside for a while longer.
XXXXX
It was the last week of August, which meant it was time to go and buy the school supplies. Under ordinary circumstances, that would have meant an unremarkable trip to Diagon Alley with a list and a bag of Galleons. These were not ordinary circumstances, and everyone involved in the planning of the trip knew it.
Kingsley organized the security personally. Six Aurors, positioned to cover the length of the Alley from the Leaky Cauldron to Gringotts, with two more stationed inconspicuously near the side entrances. Moody came along as well, joining Tonks and Kingsley, and they walked with the group directly rather than at a distance. Bill tagged along as well, allegedly to help Ginny with her shopping but actually there for the same reason everyone else with any sense was there.
The group that set out from Grimmauld Place that morning was larger than any single family’s supply run would normally be.
“This is either extremely sensible or a very obvious target,” Blaise remarked as they stepped through the Leaky Cauldron and out into the Alley itself.
Diagon Alley itself looked different than Harry remembered it looking in previous years. Fewer people were out shopping, for one thing, and the people who were there moved briskly, in and out with their purchases rather than lingering.
Several shopfronts had reinforced their windows with visible warding runes, an addition that hadn’t existed the year before. A poster near the entrance to Gringotts, put up by the Ministry, advised citizens to travel in groups and report suspicious activity immediately.
They split loosely into smaller clusters to get through the shopping faster, though never far enough. Susan and Hannah went to collect potion ingredients. Neville and Tracey headed for the Apothecary, arguing amiably about whether powdered dragon liver actually made a difference in a Draught of Peace or whether that was an old wives’ tale that had survived several centuries of nobody bothering to test it properly.
Harry, Daphne, Blaise, and Gabrielle ended up walking together toward Ollivander’s, since Harry needed a replacement holster for his wand and Blaise wanted to have his looked at after a summer of heavy use had left the grip slightly worn.
The shop looked exactly as it always had, narrow and dusty, lined floor to ceiling with thin boxes. Ollivander himself was somewhere in the back muttering to a stack of wand cores that he seemed to be having a private conversation with. He emerged when the bell over the door rang, peering at the four of them with that particular unblinking intensity that had never stopped being slightly unsettling.
“Mr. Potter. Miss Greengrass. Mr. Zabini. Your wands are holding up well, I trust? Ash and dragon heartstring tends to run hot in the grip after extended use, though I suspect you already know that.”
“It’s fine,” Blaise said. “Just wanted the fitting checked.”
“Of course, of course. Come through.”
Next door, Fortescue’s had set out its usual outdoor tables despite everything, a small act of stubbornness that people appreciated more than they expected to. Florean Fortescue himself was behind the counter, doing brisk business with the handful of families still willing to let their children sit outside for twenty minutes and eat ice cream like the world wasn’t currently trying to end.
They were still inside Ollivander’s shop when it happened.
XXXXX
The first sign was the sound, a deep concussive crack from somewhere further up the Alley, followed almost immediately by screaming.
Ollivander’s head snapped up. “Get down,” he said, with none of the vagueness that usually colored his voice.
The front window of the shop exploded inward a half second later. Not from a curse aimed directly at it, Harry realized as he threw himself sideways and dragged Daphne and Gabrielle with him, but from the shockwave of something detonating in the street outside. Glass sprayed across the shop floor, boxes toppled from their shelves, and through the ruined window Harry could see the alley outside had gone to chaos.
Black-robed figures were moving through the crowd, at least eight of them that Harry could see immediately, their wands out and firing indiscriminately. Two more shopfronts down the street had already caught fire. People were running in every direction, some toward the Leaky Cauldron and some simply away from the nearest threat without much thought for where that led them.
“Mr. Ollivander, stay down,” Harry said, already moving.
“This is my shop, Mr. Potter, I hardly think---“
“Stay down,” Harry repeated, and didn’t wait to see if the old man listened.
Outside, the aurors were already responding. Kingsley’s commanding voice cut across the noise, directing two of his people toward a family that had gotten pinned down behind an overturned cart. Tonks was already in motion, her hair having gone bright red with the adrenaline, shielding a group of younger children while returning fire.
Harry burst out through the shattered door frame with Daphne right behind him and Blaise a half step after that. Gabrielle came out the other side, already casting.
The scene in the street was worse up close than it had looked through the window. A Death Eater in a skull mask was advancing on Fortescue’s, their wand raised, and Florean Fortescue himself was trying to get the last of his customers, three children and an elderly woman, out from behind the counter and toward the alley behind the shop.
Daphne threw up a powerful shield between the Death Eater and the fleeing group just as a curse cracked against it, absorbing the impact with a shudder that Harry felt through the ground.
Harry didn’t waste time on a shield of his own.
His spell caught the Death Eater square in the chest and dropped him where he stood. Two more came around the corner immediately after, apparently drawn by the noise, and Blaise and Gabrielle moved to meet them without needing to be told, spells flying in both directions. Harry only had half his attention on the exchange because further down the street, near what remained of a shopfront that had been Twilfitt and Tatting’s an hour ago, something else was happening.
Neville and Tracey had arrived from the Apothecary, their wands out, standing together and holding off three attackers with a coordinated defense that was the result of weeks of Moody’s drilling. Ginny came tearing around the corner from the Weasley twins’ new shop a moment later, Fred and George flanking her, and the three of them tore into the fight viciously. Tonks’s assessment from earlier in the summer hadn’t been an exaggeration at all.
Susan and Hannah appeared from the direction of the Apothecary as well, moving fast, and Susan’s first spell dropped a Death Eater who’d been about to hit Neville from behind.
“Nice shot,” Tracey called, not looking away from the three she and Neville were still holding off.
“Focus, you!”
The Order and the aurors were spreading out to cover the length of the alley, Kingsley barking coordinates that made no sense to anyone who wasn’t an Auror, Moody moving through the chaos grimly, having fought exactly this kind of engagement more times than he cared to count. Bill had a curse-breaker’s toolkit of spellwork that Harry hadn’t seen before, cutting down two attackers with something that looked like it had been adapted from tomb-clearing work rather than combat dueling.
For a few minutes it looked, against every expectation, like it might actually be contained. The Death Eaters were being pushed back toward the top of the alley, outnumbered now that the DA, the Order, and the aurors were fighting back, and Harry allowed himself a fraction of a second to think that maybe this would end with everyone accounted for and the damage limited to broken windows.
Then the temperature dropped.
It happened all at once, a wave of cold that swept down the Alley, and every wand in the street seemed to hesitate at the same moment as if some part of every witch and wizard present recognized what was coming before their conscious mind caught up.
Voldemort appeared at the top of the alley, near the entrance to Gringotts, without any of the theatrical build-up that a lesser threat might have bothered with. One moment the space was empty. The next he was simply there, tall and skeletal in dark robes, his wand already raised, and the effect on the fighting around him was immediate. Death Eaters who had been retreating stopped and turned to look at him with something between relief and terror. Aurors who had been advancing froze.
“Everyone get back,” Kingsley shouted, his voice carrying an authority Harry had never heard him use before.
Harry didn’t get back.
He was moving toward the top of the Alley before he’d fully decided to, Daphne’s hand catching at his sleeve for half a second before he pulled free.
Voldemort’s red eyes found him across the distance.
“Harry Potter,” he said, his voice carrying down the Alley without any visible effort, cutting clean through the noise of the fighting still going on further back. “How considerate of you to attend.”
“Wasn’t really planning on it,” Harry said.
“No. I imagine not.”
Neither of them said another word after that, and neither of them needed to.
Voldemort’s wand moved, and the paving stones between them didn’t simply crack, they came alive, wrenching upward into a row of jagged stone spikes that tore toward Harry in a line fast enough that a shield alone wouldn’t have saved him.
Harry didn’t try to block it. He dropped low, driving his own wand into the ground and felt the answering pull as the same stones under his feet liquefied and swallowed the incoming spikes whole, the street rippling like disturbed water before hardening again.
He came up already casting, a compressed lance of pale fire that didn’t behave like an ordinary spell. It moved in a straight, controlled line and held its shape instead of dispersing, more like a blade than a curse. Voldemort tilted aside from it, and it struck the front of a boarded-up shop instead. The wood didn’t simply burn, it turned to ash in the shape of the spell’s passage, a clean scorched line drawn straight through solid timber.
Voldemort’s eyebrows lifted a fraction. It was the closest thing to genuine surprise Harry had ever seen across that face.
“Interesting,” he said.
The next exchange happened too fast for anyone watching from further down the Alley to follow properly. Voldemort’s wand carved a silent arc through the air and the shattered glass littering the street rose in a glittering cloud, thousands of razor fragments hanging suspended for the space of a heartbeat before they hurtled toward Harry from every angle at once. Harry didn’t have time to shield all of it. Instead, he transfigured the air itself directly in front of him, thickening it in a dense arc that the glass shredded against and lost momentum in, most of it dropping harmlessly to the cobblestones, the rest deflecting wide enough to miss.
He felt the effort of it immediately, a deep, dragging pull somewhere behind his sternum that told him exactly how much that single piece of magic had cost him. He didn’t have time to dwell on it.
Voldemort came forward now, and the ground beneath him seemed to ripple, cracks spreading outward from his footsteps in dark branching lines that pulsed faintly, as though the street itself had become an extension of his will. Harry felt the change in pressure before he saw the spell, some instinct honed by months of training to feel magic rather than just watch for it, and he threw himself sideways as a column of black flame erupted from the cracked stone exactly where he’d been standing, roaring upward with a heat that scorched the air a dozen feet away.
He came up out of the roll with his wand already tracing a shape in the air, and a curved wall of solid ice tore itself out of nothing to intercept the second column of flame Voldemort sent after him. The ice held for exactly as long as it needed to, the flame boiling straight through it in a violent burst of steam that filled the street with white mist, and Harry used the cover to close the distance rather than retreat.
He came out of the mist already casting, a compressed sphere of pure kinetic force that hit the ground at Voldemort’s feet and detonated outward, throwing up a wave of shattered cobblestone and dust that forced Voldemort to erect a shimmering dome of his own a half second before it would have connected.
For a moment neither of them moved, the dust settling slowly between them, and Harry felt something that was almost pride fighting through the exhaustion already building in his limbs. He had made Voldemort actually defend.
“You have grown,” Voldemort said, and there was no longer anything idle in the observation. “More than I anticipated.”
“Wait until you see the encore.”
He didn’t get the chance to deliver one. Voldemort’s wand swept in a single motion and the remains of a nearby lamppost tore itself free of the ground, twisting and elongating in the air until it had reshaped itself into something with too many joints and no recognizable purpose beyond destruction. He sent it hurtling toward Harry with unnatural speed.
Harry transfigured the cobblestones beneath it mid-flight, warping them upward into a barrier that met the thing head on, and the impact sent a shudder through the ground hard enough that he felt it in his teeth.
The barrier held for one second. It did not hold for two. The twisted metal construct tore through it and caught Harry across the forearm before he managed to wrench himself out of its path entirely, a line of white-hot pain opening along his skin that told him it had been closer to a killing strike than a glancing one.
He answered without thinking, intent driving a spell that ripped the water clean out of the air itself, dozens of shopfronts’ worth of ambient moisture and the lingering steam from his own earlier ice condensing all at once into a spear of solid water that punched forward hard enough to crack stone where it missed and struck the front step of Gringotts instead. Voldemort turned aside from it at the last possible instant, and for the first time in the entire exchange, he did not immediately follow with something else.
“Bombarda Maxima!”
The spell came from behind Voldemort, Kingsley finally in position to strike, and this time it landed clean across his shoulder before he could fully turn, the force of it staggering him half a step. His expression didn’t change, but something in the air around him did, a pressure building that made the surviving windows along the street groan in their frames.
“Enough of this,” Voldemort said, his voice flat and final.
He didn’t retaliate against Kingsley directly. Instead, he drove his wand down toward the ground between himself and both of them at once, and the entire section of street erupted upward in a wall of stone and fire fused together, a barrier twenty feet high that neither Harry nor Kingsley could see through or safely cast past. By the time it collapsed back into rubble three seconds later, Voldemort’s attention had already moved on.
His gaze flicked toward Ollivander’s, where two Death Eaters had broken away from the fighting and were dragging the old wandmaker out through the ruined shopfront, his protests cut short by a silencing charm.
“I believe our business here is concluded,” Voldemort said.
“You’re not walking away from this,” Harry said, forcing himself upright through the ringing in his ears, his wand hand shaking slightly now with the cost of everything he’d already thrown, blood running freely from the cut along his forearm.
Voldemort looked at him for a long moment with nothing but coldness and patience in his eyes. “I am not walking away, Harry Potter. I am choosing to leave, which is a considerably different thing, and one you would do well to understand the distinction of before you next assume otherwise.”
His eyes swept once more across the wreckage of the street, the fires still burning in two shopfronts, the bodies of the fallen scattered across the cobblestones, some in Death Eater black and at least two in the robes of Ministry Aurors.
“Today was never about winning this street. It was about proving I could take exactly what I wanted from it, in front of you, in front of all of them, and walk away regardless of how hard you made me work to do it. You have made that harder than I expected. Remember that, the next time someone tells you what you are and are not capable of.”
He turned his wand toward the Death Eaters still dragging Ollivander between them, and all three vanished with a crack sharp enough to rattle the remaining windows along the block. A moment later Voldemort himself was gone as well, the cold receding from the air as suddenly as it had arrived, leaving the alley in a stunned, ringing silence broken only by the crackle of fire and the distant sound of someone still screaming.
Harry stood there for a long moment, breathing hard, his forearm still bleeding freely, before he made his way back down the street.
XXXXX
The aftermath took hours to sort through properly.
Fortescue’s was a smoking ruin, the outdoor tables where families had been eating ice cream twenty minutes earlier reduced to splinters and ash. Twilfitt and Tatting’s had lost most of its front half to a curse that had apparently missed its intended target and taken out the shop instead. Ollivander’s stood open to the street, glass scattered across its floor, wand boxes crushed underfoot where the fighting had spilled through it, and the old man himself was gone.
Three civilians were dead. Two Aurors had been killed in the fighting near Gringotts, and four more were being treated for injuries serious enough that Madam Pomfrey, summoned directly from Hogwarts, had set up an emergency treatment station in what remained of the Fortesque’s shop. Six Death Eaters had died, and five had been captured, unconscious or restrained, and were already being processed for transport to the Ministry’s holding cells. An unknown number had escaped in the chaos of the retreat.
Harry sat on an overturned crate outside what used to be Fortescue’s, Madam Pomfrey’s healing charms still working on the burn across his ribs, while Daphne sat pressed against his good side, saying nothing, her hand gripping his tightly. He could tell how frightened she’d been without any words being said.
Kingsley found them there some time later, his robes torn and one sleeve burned through, his expression grim in a way Harry hadn’t seen from him before.
“How many did we lose?” Harry asked.
“Five confirmed dead. Could have been much worse.” Kingsley crouched down to their level. “You did well out there, Harry. All of you did. If you and the others hadn’t held that line while we got civilians clear, this would have been a massacre instead of a tragedy.”
“He took Ollivander.”
“I know.”
“Why Ollivander?”
Kingsley’s jaw tightened. “That’s the question, isn’t it? Wand knowledge. Something about wandlore he wants and thinks Ollivander can give him. I don’t know the specifics yet. Dumbledore might have thoughts on it, once he’s had time to look at everything.”
Harry looked down the length of the Alley, at the smoke still rising from shopfronts, at the aurors moving methodically through the wreckage cataloguing damage and casualties, at the civilians being escorted home in shaken clusters by whatever Order members and aurors could be spared for the task.
“He wasn’t even trying that hard,” Harry said quietly. “Not really. I mean, he was, but it felt like he had more.”
“He probably did,” Kingsley said. There was no comfort in the way he said it, just plain fact laid out because Harry deserved to hear it plainly rather than have it softened. “He didn’t come here to win a battle in the middle of Diagon Alley in broad daylight with half the Auror office in attendance. He came here to prove he could, and to take exactly what he wanted while he did it, and then leave whenever he chose to. That’s not the behavior of someone worried about what happens if the fight goes on too long.”
Daphne’s grip on Harry’s hand tightened further.
“That’s the part that should scare people,” Kingsley continued, straightening up and looking out over the ruined street. “Not that he attacked. He’s always going to attack. It’s that he did it here, today, in front of witnesses and aurors and didn’t care in the slightest who saw it happen. A year ago he was hiding. Now he isn’t bothering.”
Nobody had an answer to that. Somewhere behind them, one of the Auror teams was still working to put out the last of the fire in what remained of Twilfitt and Tatting’s, and the smell of scorched fabric and stone dust hung over the whole street in a way that Harry suspected he wasn’t going to forget for a long while.
Further down the street, Susan was helping Hannah bandage a gash along Neville’s forearm while Tracey hovered nearby, her usual sharp humor entirely absent. Fred and George sat close together, uncharacteristically quiet, Ginny between them staring at the wreckage of Fortescue’s. Blaise stood a little apart from them, and for once, he wasn’t saying anything clever at all. Gabrielle leaned against the wall next to him, her wand hand still trembling slightly even though the fighting had stopped.
The sun was starting to go down by the time the last of them were cleared to leave. Sirius was waiting at the door when they arrived, having clearly heard already, and the look on his face when he saw the state of them told Harry everything about how close this had come to being much worse.
Nobody spoke much that evening. There wasn’t really anything left to say, and everyone in that house understood, without needing it explained to them, that whatever came next was going to look very different from what had come before.
To be continued...