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Chapter Text

The lost city of Atlantis was probably the most famous of the lost cities, among muggles at least, but it certainly wasn't the only one mysteriously lost to the sands of time.

Some of them had been muggle-cities, others had been magical ones. In the end, death and destruction to the point of a city completely disappearing overnight wasn't all that unusual, especially when Dark Lords were involved.

Sometimes it was a ritualistic sacrifice for something, other times it was an attack that went far beyond sense, and sometimes it was an accident or experiment that went out of control. A few times however, it was to hide or protect something.

The tombs of Egypt were a variation of the last category, having been designed as a final resting place that no mortal should ever be able to disturb. More often, the last category was used to imply that someone had gone to a lot of trouble to hide away treasure behind an army of undead, or used a genocide to fuel the defenses in some non-inferi way.

Had Voldemort not been so insistent to work from the shadows, perhaps he would've hidden one of his horcruxes in such a manner. But, whether he'd suspected that it would draw too much attention to the horcruxes he'd wanted to remain secret, or if he just doubted that even sacrificing an entire muggle-village would be enough to stop Dumbledore if he had a vague idea of where to look, Voldemort went for a much more clandestine approach.

Nobody notices a few hundred muggles disappearing, as long as it's spread out over a big area and time-frame. And certainly, nobody would be guessing from those mostly-unnoticed disappearances that someone had set up a lake filled with inferi somewhere. But a small village disappearing without a trace? That'd be more than enough to pull in the attention of anyone who'd know what to look for.

Harry wouldn't have had the faintest idea of where to start looking if Voldemort had been that blatant, back then. Dumbledore might still have figured it out, but honestly Harry was pretty sure that Voldemort would've won if he'd just been a little less insistent on being perfectly hidden.

It's pretty easy to find where someone is hiding 'important stuff' if all you have to figure out is how a person thinks. At least, as long as you know the person in question. If Voldemort had instead just picked a small town at random and turned it into an inescapable death-trap? As long as he'd made sure that the town was randomly picked, and that nobody really knew where to start looking for the 'missing town', then he would've been in the clear.

It'd taken Harry the better part of a decade to reach the point where tracking down lost cities was normal, and if Voldemort had capitalized on Harry's inexperience with Curse Breaking back then, they would've lost.

Still, what was done was done, Harry wasn't really the type of person to dwell on things that could've been. He'd lived his entire life as an orphan, and he'd learnt to not let it consume him.

Things had happened the way it'd happened, and whilst he couldn't exactly say that it'd ended happily for everyone, it could've ended a lot worse.

Harry was content with his job, as awkward as it was to refer to his sporadic trips across the globe as a 'normal job'. And even if it hadn't worked out with Ginny, they were still good friends.

His only real bitterness with how things had happened during Voldemort's second rise was that Teddy was an orphan. Harry tried to be there for him, but with a job that took him all across the world for months on end, that wasn't the easiest thing to do, though he supposed that Teddy was old enough by now to not be all that distraught about it. Teenagers and their need for independence and all that.

Thankfully, Curse Breakers could kind of choose their own hours. It wasn't like a ward that'd remained standing for hundreds of years would suddenly disintegrate itself within the month. So Harry could usually make it back to things like birthdays and Christmas.

And even if Harry was sure that Teddy would've appreciated being able to spend at least a Christmas or two at Hogwarts, the boy really hadn't wanted to leave Andromeda alone. He was really too sweet for words some times.

Harry tried to curl up in a ball in the cold, but couldn't. It was too heavy, and he couldn't breathe.

Eyes snapped open from restless sleep, Harry still couldn't see anything at all. It was just blackness and pressure and no air and-...!

Magic exploded outwards, and the pressure gave way to a biting cold wind as Harry breached the surface of-... Of a graveyard?

He was shivering from the cold, he didn't have any clothes, and he-...

Harry stared at the gravestone in front of him, trying his best to ignore the feeling of winter-rain on naked skin, still shaking from the adrenaline of clawing his way out of the dirt.

Rose Jessica Potter
1980-1981
Beloved daughter, and dearly missed sister.

There were no other 'Potter' names that Harry recognized around him, but when he pushed himself up on shaking legs – absently noting that something wasn't quite right about that – he managed to find a nearby gravestone.

Remus John Lupin
1960-1981
Beloved friend and brother

Which was-... Harry wasn't entirely sure what the hell that was, but it definitely hadn't been what had been on Remus Lupin's gravestone last time Harry had seen it.

Right. No. First things first.

Harry took a deep breath. A wave of his hand weaved a makeshift umbrella of magic over him, keeping the rain off. He was still naked and-... Was he literally a prepubescent girl? Another wave of his too-small hand gave him a robe that at least covered him up enough that he didn't need to think about that.

A wandless 'tempus' told him that it was January of 1993, which was absurd, because last he'd checked it'd been 2015. So either he was completely insane, or he'd somehow traveled back in time.

Except the gravestones didn't make any sense whatsoever, because Remus didn't die until 1998, and Harry was pretty sure he would've known if he'd had a sister.

But then again, this did look a bit like Godric's Hollow, which would've meant that his parents should've been buried here. And since they weren't, that probably meant that they were still alive somewhere.

Regardless, Harry had woken up inside of Rose's grave, which didn't make any sense-...

Wait, no, that wasn't entirely truthful. There'd been that one scrawled warning that'd been translated into something about trespassers being 'banished from life'. Which had sounded kind of very peculiar in the phrasing.

There certainly weren't any signs of anyone from this side of things summoning Harry here, so he must've been 'pushed' here by something from his side of things. Though how the hell he managed to survive what likely amounted to being banished from reality was vaguely terrifying.

He'd always joked that his specialization with Curse Breaking was surviving it, but this was a whole new level of crazy.

There weren't even any traces of magic, beyond his own desperate attempt to dig himself free of the cold earth.

No, he needed to-... He needed to get a wand, and clothes, and money for food. But first-... First, he kind of really needed to find a newspaper to prove that his 'tempus'-spell hadn't malfunctioned somehow.

XXX

The newspaper unfortunately proved Harry's 'tempus' perfectly accurate.

It didn't actually tell him anything about any of the questions he'd had about the Potter-family. And it still didn't give him any idea of what the hell he was supposed to be doing.

He'd ended up taking a detour on his way to Gringotts, in order to skim through the history-books of Flourish and Blotts. They proved slightly more enlightening than the newspaper, mostly because they were all too happy to regale the reader about the mysteries surrounding the Boy-Who-Lived, and the fateful Halloween night that'd given him that monicker.

The Potter family had had twins, a boy and a girl. On Halloween 1981 they'd been betrayed by a trusted friend, and attacked by Voldemort. However, the only ones there at that time were the twins and a family-friend who'd been babysitting them. The exact events after that is unknown, but as a direct result, Remus Lupin died attempting to defend them, the daughter died as well, and the boy miraculously survived, whilst Voldemort was vanquished.

Considering what Harry knew of how he himself had survived-... There was no way that Remus would've been given the opportunity to 'step aside', the way that Lily once had been. So even if Remus had sacrificed his life in their defense, it wouldn't really have mattered. The condition was always 'the opportunity to survive' and 'the willingness to sacrifice themselves', and without the first, the latter didn't really matter for the kind of magic necessary to turn away the Killing Curse.

No, more likely, Voldemort had killed Remus, told the girl to get out of the way, and then killed her when she didn't, before failing to kill her brother. The question then became 'why had Voldemort been willing to let Rose live'?

In all likelihood, the prophecy surrounding Voldemort would've mentioned a 'he' as the person capable of defeating Voldemort. Otherwise Voldemort wouldn't have hesitated to kill the girl as well, regardless of anything else.

But even then, Voldemort wasn't the kind of person to offer a chance to step aside to just about anyone. No, there had to be a reason. And, wouldn't you know it, the history-books provided a rather good reason, when it touched on some of the details of who'd betrayed them.

Peter Pettigrew was Rose Potter's godfather.

So Pettigrew likely made a simple request to spare the child he was responsible for, in return for offering up the Potter-child that Voldemort wanted dead.

Harry doubted that any request like that would've been made with an actual belief that Voldemort would follow through with it. And he would've been an idiot to believe that inviting a mass-murdering madman into a place where children lived would've ended happily for the children.

No, if Pettigrew made that request, it likely would've been because of fear. And the simplest explanation for Pettigrew to be afraid of causing Rose Potter's death, was that sometimes being named 'godfather' came with certain responsibilities.

As in, it was entirely possible that Pettigrew had entered a binding magical contract designed around the idea of keeping Rose safe. And if he'd renegaded on that, he could've easily been killed as a direct result. Those contracts had fallen out of favor centuries ago, but it was entirely possible that war-time had made people a bit more passionate about the safety of their children. So, he made a token request to Voldemort to not kill Rose, likely fully expecting that she wouldn't make it through the night regardless.

Except Voldemort had decided to honor that request enough to give Rose an opportunity to stand aside. And Rose hadn't taken it.

She would've needed to understand what Voldemort was saying for the sacrificial requirements to be acceptable, and she'd still done it. Only a bit more than one single year old, and she'd given her life for the safety of her brother.

Harry had definitely done some very brave and very stupid things over the course of his life. But he'd done them after being conditioned to never be able to simply step aside. He'd seen so many people step aside when he'd grown up with the Dursleys, that the idea of doing the same himself was abhorrent.

And even then, he hadn't exactly been happy about being the only one available to step up and save the day. So the idea of a girl who wasn't even a toddler, willingly sacrificing her life for the sake of her brother-...

It was humbling.

Regardless, Peter Pettigrew was in Azkaban, and Sirius Black – the godfather of the Boy-Who-Lived – was working at Hogwarts as the Defense Professor. Lily and James were still alive, and apparently mostly doing magical research or something, the book wasn't very clear on that.

And that was about the end for Harry's ability to skim through history-books without having the owner of the store beginning to badger him into buying the books. And he still didn't have the money to pay for basic necessities, let alone books.

So, onward to Gringotts.

He needed money, and Harry had never been all that good at picking pockets.

It was just too bad for Gringotts that their warding-systems didn't technically require someone to use a wand in order to access the vaults. It normally didn't matter much, because nobody was crazy enough to try robbing Gringotts, even with a wand.

They had some of the most vicious wards in the entirety of the modern world. A result of having nearly completely unrestricted access to a lot of lost knowledge, thanks to their division of Curse Breakers.

However, Harry had been a Curse Breaker for over a decade, and had long since made a name for himself as one of the most competent ones in his field. There were still a few specialized Curse Breakers who could talk rings around him about whatever they specialized in, but they were a dwindling breed.

And that wasn't just a morbid joke about the sudden spike in Curse Breaker death-rates, in the wake of Gringotts uncovering Yharnam. Harry only knew of a handful of people whose work he couldn't quite figure out, dead or alive.

In the wake of the Battle of Hogwarts, Harry had done a lot of work with the aurors, to the point where he'd somehow become internationally responsible for dealing with Dark Lords who were causing a fuss.

He hadn't minded that terribly. It'd been unpleasant, and he hadn't exactly enjoyed it, but it'd been rather satisfying to know that another Voldemort wouldn't be able to pop up on his watch.

That'd continued until he'd nearly lost an eye in one of the fights, and Ginny had very pointedly reminded him of the fact that he wasn't immortal. And that the bad guys only needed to get lucky once.

Considering that Harry and Andromeda were the only family that Teddy still had, Harry had been very easily persuaded into finding a different career.

However, after a very unpleasant stint as Defense Professor at Hogwarts – during which he nearly killed himself from the stress of being responsible for a whole bunch of blissfully unaware children how to survive – Harry had to give it up.

He'd seen the world at its worst, and he'd come to expect things to try and murder him on a regular basis. The idea that a child could believe that they'd spend their entire life perfectly safe from monsters was so mindboggling to Harry that he'd nearly had a nervous breakdown.

He'd been expecting the adoration, he'd been expecting the constant badgering for stories about his many famous exploits, he'd even kind of been expecting the celebrity-crushes. He hadn't been prepared for a complete disinterest in their own survival.

He'd barely lasted to the end of the year.

He'd been twenty-three when Bill had invited him to a dig, because he'd needed an extra wand in case some of the locals decided to ignore their government's authorization of giving Gringotts access to the dig.

It wasn't exactly common, but it also wasn't unheard of. And some areas of the world were more prone to those kinds of disagreements than others.

It'd turned out pretty calm however, and Harry had spent most of it just looking over Bill's shoulder and being generally fascinated by Curse Breaking in action. And of course, that fascination convinced him to get himself invited along to any other dig he could get access to.

Needless to say, when a famous Dark Lord defeating wizard with a lot of money, decides that he wants to be part of a dangerous expedition? A lot of people were perfectly happy to have him.

He'd never really been employed by Gringotts, but Gringotts didn't really care how its employees decided to divide their salaries, and so had been perfectly willing to let Harry come along for the ride. As long as Gringotts' cut of the earnings wasn't affected, at least.

His constant fascination with the subject had also caused him to start investigating various dead languages, which had finally frustrated him to the point of digging up a certain Stone that he'd dropped nearly a full decade earlier.

He'd been twenty-eight when he'd finally gone completely blind in his right eye, and at that point he'd been trying to find a good hiding-place for the Stone for the better part of a year.

Harry was never going to admit to anyone that he'd gone looking for the Stone, because his friends were all very well aware of how the ghosts of the dead lured the living to join them. Whether through actual malice or through the longing of dead loved ones, the end result was the same.

So, with nobody even being aware of the Stone, Harry had no choice but to figure out how to transfigure the Stone into a functional eye all on his lonesome. Let alone doing the surgery by himself, just to make sure that nobody thought there was anything suspicious with his new eye.

It'd worked like a charm, for all that it'd taken Harry well over a week to get used to how different the world looked when seen through one of the Deathly Hallows.

Still, with the Stone at his side, he'd managed to find out a lot of how various bits of magic worked. To the point where he'd ended up being forced to write it down, just to keep it straight.

And alright, so the Ministry hadn't been very happy with him when he'd started writing out horrific rituals that resulted in thousands of dead, but considering that the book he ended up publishing had also included the way to counter those rituals – oftentimes very easily, and usually not taking much longer than a couple of hours, in comparison to the years it took to set up – they'd been willing to let it slide.

He'd been thirty by the time he'd published that book. And after that, a lot of governments had been willing to pay him to look into certain digs by himself, without going to Gringotts. And that was where things had started to come to a head.

Yharnam had been discovered in 2011, six months after Harry published his book. And it'd started to kill Curse Breakers, a lot of them.

Gringotts had been furious with Harry for basically stealing their monopoly on international Curse Breaking, and had decided that Harry was no longer allowed on their digs. Even if he wouldn't be making any money.

And so, when Yharnam happened and their Curse Breakers died by the hundreds, Gringotts had stubbornly dug in its heels, and refused to let one of the most famously competent and survival-prone Curse Breaker in the world help.

In the end, more than undercutting Gringotts prices for Curse Breaking, more than Harry cheaply selling back artifacts from the digs to the people they belonged to rather than to the highest bidder, that was the true end to Gringotts' monopoly on Curse Breaking.

Once the Curse Breakers realized that Gringotts was treating them more like disposable pawns than competent personnel, they started to look elsewhere. And so did the governments that'd been employing Gringotts with the assurance that they were the most competent in the world.

It'd been a scandal all around, for all that Harry had mainly just thought of it as a miserable waste of human life.

However, that was nearly twenty years from now, and Harry shouldn't be dwelling on it.

Right now, he needed to break into Gringotts for money. But he wouldn't necessarily need a lot of money, and if he ought to rob anyone, then it ought to be someone who deserved it. And who would deserve it more than someone foolish enough to store a horcrux in their vault?

However, that brought up the interesting question about what he was supposed to do about Voldemort. He probably shouldn't just ignore the horcruxes completely, but Harry didn't really want to try breaking into Grimmauld Place and confront Kreacher over the Amulet, and if he wasn't willing to go that far, then was there any point in going after the horcruxes at all?

He'd still deal with the Cup, because it was in between him and a bunch of galleons, which he'd need to pay for a wand and some clothes and whatever else he might need. And he'd still deal with the Ring, because the Stone was his, and he'd be damned if he let it slip through his fingers.

But beyond that, Harry didn't particularly want to break into Hogwarts to take care of the Diadem, let alone try figuring out who to steal the Diary from, or how to set up a very complicated cleansing-ritual on the scar of the Boy-Who-Lived when he was a functional unknown and would likely need to kidnap him.

No, he'd deal with the Cup and the Ring. Everything else could damn well wait until he had some time to sort out what the hell he was supposed to be doing now.

He could set up an official identity as a muggleborn with Gringotts in exchange for a handful of galleons. He wouldn't be able to claim relationships with any purebloods, unless he could prove it without a doubt, and that'd require the Ministry to get entangled, but a muggleborn identity was fine.

It shouldn't take them more than five minutes or so, as long as Harry could think of a consistent name and age for his new body. His new, female, prepubescent body.

Actually, there was no way in hell that Harry would be willing to set up an identity that would classify him as anything but an adult. He'd suffered through being treated as a child too much to be willing to go back to that time. And that meant he needed to be convincingly at least a few years older than he currently looked.

So he was going to need some kind of aging-potion as well. Preferably a permanent one.

Life sure was complicated when you woke up naked in a different body, buried in a graveyard, in an alternate time-line.

XXX

The first thing a person needed to do in order to rob Gringotts was to gain entry into the bank itself, then from there, to move into the tunnels underneath the bank. After that, it mostly came down to navigating your way to the correct vault, without running afoul the various traps and complications that the goblins had scattered around the place.

Harry honestly kind of missed his Cloak, but then there were a number of equally effective ways to hide something away. Not wanting to make it any more complicated than it needed to be, and not having access to dragon-blood or equally awkward-to-find ingredients, Harry settled for a much older variation of the Disillusioning charm.

It wasn't anywhere near as convenient as the more modern and popularized version of it, but it also didn't have any specific counter-spells that anyone sane would've bothered to try implementing in an automatic defense.

After that, it was mostly just a matter of avoiding having people walking into him, and that was also fairly easy to fix with a very weak 'wizard-repellant'-charm to convince everyone to give him a bit of space, without being powerful enough to be noticeable. Which left Harry to try and find his way to the Lestrange's vault. A task that would've been momentously difficult, if Harry hadn't known that they had a horcrux in their vault.

Whilst tracking down a horcrux over a large distance, or one that belonged to a specific individual wasn't really something that was possible without an active horcrux to resonate the tracking-spells with, there were limits to the things you could hide away without very specific wards to cloak the magical wavelength surrounding it.

Harry couldn't exactly detect horcruxes from a distance, so much as he could wander around aimlessly until he stumbled across a ward with the telltale signs of having had a horcrux pushing up against them for a long enough time.

A perfect hiding spot a vault might be, but only for a year and some change, after that horcruxes and the like tended to start leaving impressions in the magic that surrounded it. Not that most people had really seen that happen, let alone knew what caused it, or what to do about it.

It still took him the better part of a day, wandering around the tunnels, before he came across the vault in question, but it was a hell of a lot better than trying to coerce a goblin to take him there. And actually breaking through the wards on the vault was-...

There were a few personal additions to the inside of the vault, and the general Gringotts-wards weren't exactly harmless in their own right. But the wards kind of relied on various triggers to allow for a safe passage, and all Harry really needed to do was convince them that they'd already granted him safe passage.

A bit like a very narrowly applied Confundus spell. Though describing it like that would've probably caused Filius to pull his hair out in outrage. Mainly because he didn't like Harry explaining complicated magical phenomena as if a twelve-year-old could manage it with the right tools.

An attitude which had left Hermione writing the man a very pointed letter about academic elitism and its harmful effects on their surroundings. Which Filius had responded to with an exasperated letter on how it was very easy for her to complain about his opinions on the matter, when she wasn't the Head of House for Ravenclaw, meaning that she wasn't responsible for every single curious twelve-year-old who of course should be able to bypass complicated and lethal wards, because the books said it was easy.

Hermione had responded by sending Filius a bottle of high-quality whiskey, and her most sincere apologies.

Regardless, tricking his way through the wards wasn't overly complicated. Finding the cup was also fairly simple, what with actually knowing what he was looking for this time around. Unwrapping the dangerous traps surrounding that thing – which very much weren't designed to give anyone 'safe passage' – was a bit more difficult, but again, hardly rocket-science.

The fact that Harry still didn't have a wand didn't matter much in light of that, considering that ritualistic magic generally didn't need one. In fact, when dealing with the kind of nasty magic that Voldemort had left behind on his horcruxes, being predictable with your counter-spells was basically a death-sentence, and Voldemort had very much expected wands.

If Voldemort had waited to travel the world and discover lost magics, until after Harry had spent a decade rediscovering them, perhaps he would've been suspicious enough of Harry's somewhat famous grasp of strange pre-wand magics that he'd set up defenses against it. But he didn't, and so he hadn't.

There were different ways of unraveling a horcrux that didn't necessitate the use of things like basilisk-venom or Fiendfyre. Most of the other things were about equally as pleasant to mess with, but there was a kind of exorcism that did a pretty good job at it. As long as you made sure that no magic was lingering around to wreak havoc on it.

Honestly though, it was only really useful if you desperately wanted to preserve what the horcrux was attached to. And for all that Harry appreciated history, he didn't actually care if the Founder's ancient artifacts somehow remained pristine.

Well, alright, so he cared a little bit. But he certainly didn't care enough to risk a greater demon landing in his lap. Especially considering that any charms on the artifacts would disappear along with the horcrux anyway.

There was a reason for it having been outlawed by the Aztecs. A good reason, even.

Harry preferred a more direct approach of disintegrating the whole damn thing with a very controlled cascade-failure.

He'd have to wait to do that until he was far away from Gringotts, unless he wanted to risk having the cascade-failure spreading across every single vault and likely wipe all of London off the map as a result.

There was a reason that cascade-failures were generally considered a bad idea to play around with.

XXX

Despite what the purebloods would have you believe, nobody really cared about proper lineages. As long as you didn't claim to be a member of an 'Ancient and Noble House', you could pretty much call yourself whatever the hell you wanted.

Oh, without a 'proper pureblood'-name, a person's employment-opportunities dropped like a rock, but that was just a mixture of classicism and racism. Nobody actually cared how far removed you might be from the 'main line' of a family, and if you weren't even in an important family they couldn't care less who your parents or your grandparents were.

Unless they were planning on getting into your pants, anyway. Purebloods intermarried often enough that it was kind of really important that nobody was 'too related' to each other.

That said, establishing an identity was really quite easy – as long as you didn't mind being a non-pureblood. You gave a few galleons to a goblin, and if you were too old to be a new-to-the-magical-world-muggleborn, simply told them that you'd been home-schooled – which was obviously bullshit, but would absolutely hold up in court unless they could track you down to a different identity – gave them your name, and opened a vault with another few galleons.

The Wizarding World couldn't really afford to make the process of establishing an identity any more complicated than that, due to their constant influx of fresh blood into the system in the form of muggleborns wanting to attend Hogwarts.

There was enough of an influx of them every year that they would've ended up causing horrific queues at Gringotts, since the treaty that'd established the bank technically didn't allow for people to trade their currency unless they owned a vault. And since they needed an identity in order to open a vault, any process that would've made that more difficult had been frowned heavily upon even by the most isolationistic purebloods.

After all, if there were queues all over Gringotts of muggleborns trying to get the money they needed to buy school-supplies, then the purebloods would have to spend time in queues with muggleborns and even muggles.

It was kind of racist, but it made it easier for everyone, so nobody minded it too much.

Harry had still needed to kind-of-swindle a permanent aging-potion off of a place in Knockturn Alley, but he'd paid well, and the man hadn't really seen his face. So the odds of anyone tracking that down to himself were slim to none.

Then he chugged the damn thing in a well-hidden corner, muffling his screams as his skeleton was rearranged. He would've loved to use some kind of pain-numbing spell, but that could interfere with the aging-potion, and he really didn't want to 'grow up' into being a walrus or something. Stranger things had happened.

After that, he'd redone his makeshift robe to fit better, and stumbled a bit drunkenly into the closest place that sold clothes that wasn't Madam Malkin's. She was the kind of woman to remember a face, not to mention that she focused more on fancy clothes than clothes that would survive having an inferi clawing at them.

Considering that Harry's next stop after leaving the country would probably be-... Actually, wait.

He'd originally been planning on just finding a simple dig to poke at whilst he got his head together and figured out what the hell he was supposed to do with his life. But most digs out there required some kind of agreement with the local government to participate in the dig. That's why Curse Breakers who wanted to go international all flocked to Gringotts.

There were a few exceptions, where the dig was technically a separate country from whatever nation it was located in. Hidden away so thoroughly that no nation had really been able to lay claim to who was the 'rightful owner' of it.

Or places like Atlantis, where the city had simply sunk into the sea, leaving nobody able to claim much of anything at all.

But digs like that weren't exactly common, and even then they tended to be hotly disputed between nations, to the point where Gringotts usually worked as a neutral party for handling it.

There was really only one place that Harry knew of that'd been hidden enough and separated enough from the rest of the world that nobody had managed to locate it accurately enough that anyone could claim that it existed in their country, and that'd been indisputably self-governed enough that nobody would dare kick up too much of a fuss if someone went there without permission.

Yharnam was probably not a good option as a place to get his head screwed on straight, because it was more likely to tear it off. But it was the only one that fit his criteria as a British non-Gringotts-associated Curse Breaker.

But yes, if he was going to be personally visiting Yharnam for the first time in his life, he wasn't going to be doing so in clothes that weren't very practical.

Then, once that was over and done with, Harry went back to thinking about what the hell he was supposed to do about his name. Her name, now, he supposed. Harry didn't really feel like bothering with a potion-regimen that spanned over the course of about two years, and which was pretty darn expensive outside of a school-environment.

Not only would it be an expensive hassle, considering Harry's dark hair and green eyes, the odds were pretty good that he'd end up looking an awful lot like Harry Potter. Combine that with the Potters likely discovering someone unearthing their daughter's body sooner or later? Harry really didn't want to deal with the Potter-family, even if they might've kind of been his family.

He'd lived his life as an orphan, and he'd been pretty happy about how his life had turned out. Trying to replace that with a sort-of-biological family that would probably end up either hating him or walking on eggshells around him? Harry would rather kiss Dumbledore straight on the mouth, than deal with that shit. At least Dumbledore would make a really funny face.

Harry had never really wanted to turn into a girl, but then he wasn't all that shook up about suddenly becoming one either, and certainly not to the point where he really wanted to bother with doing something complicated and expensive to fix things. He might reconsider that in a few years, but he'd burn that bridge when he got to it.

No, the only thing left to do was think of a decent name. And that took him about an hour of second-guessing himself, until he finally settled on being 'Harriet Azalea'.

That way, he could excuse reacting to 'Harry', and there was still a distant kind of connection to his mother, what with the flower-name. It was an easy enough name to remember, and it didn't step on any toes that Harry-... Harriet, didn't want to step on.

After that, all she needed to do before fetching her Stone was picking a wand. Which turned out to be both easier and more awkward than last time Harry had been at Ollivander's. On the one hand, there was less grand-standing about Voldemort and the mystical properties of wand-craft; on the other hand, there was a lot of staring and doubtful hemming about where her wand might've disappeared to.

Ollivander wasn't a stupid man, and though he didn't really bother with asking questions that he no doubt already knew wouldn't be answered, there was a thoughtful curiosity in his eyes that left Harriet rather wary.

She didn't introduce herself, and he didn't ask for a name. She asked for a wand, and he peered at her whilst making annoyed noises about what she might've been up to that her entire wand had disappeared.

Now, if Magical Britain was more worried about crimes, Harriet showing up without a wand to track would've been ringing alarm-bells everywhere. But the purebloods hadn't wanted to let the Ministry regulate wands too harshly, because that might've made it more difficult for them to dodge the law whenever they decided to do a bit of illegal muggle-baiting for sport.

If Harriet showed up and asked for a wand, regardless of her name or nationality, or even if she was a Dark Lord, Ollivander was still expected to sell her a wand. As long as she paid, of course.

And so, despite the suspicious faces the man made at her, he provided her with a wand.

Harriet supposed that she ought to be more upset at how corrupt and pointlessly stupid many pieces of their legal-system was, but it was what it was. And this time it played into her hands, so she really oughtn't complain.

After that, there was a brief jump and a skip to get to a certain ramshackle house, and reclaim something that'd belonged to Harry for a long time.

Both of Harriet's eyes were perfectly fine, to the point that she didn't even need glasses – which was weird – but she felt kind of naked without the silent chill of the Stone in her eye-socket. Mad-Eye would probably have understood perfectly, if Harriet had talked to him. There was just something for being able to see things in a slightly different way than they ought to be seen that left a kind of longing for its return.

Ripping out her own – perfectly functional – eye in order to redo the whole operation was probably beyond stupid. But nobody had ever exactly called her clever, either, so that was probably fine.

She might give up her gender without a fight, she might not bother with permanently aging herself beyond sixteen when she'd already reached thirty-five, she might have left her faithful old wand behind, but the Stone was hers.

Perhaps it could be interpreted as some lingering curse of greed from the Hallows, but it was more that it was one of the few things that Harriet could look at and say that it undoubtedly belonged to herself. A rock to cling to in an ever-changing world, that kind of thing.

Permanently transfiguring the Stone into an eye that matched her other one, without using any of Mad-Eye's old motion-detection charms to ruin the charade by causing it to spin wildly, Harriet breathed a sigh of relief as shapes and colors snapped into place in a way that she couldn't ever quite explain.

The Stone was... always surprisingly enthusiastic about becoming an eye, and regardless of how Harriet charmed it, there was always a certain feeling of content curiosity tinting the world in ways that made it sometimes disturbingly easy to see through things that people would rather hide away.

Since she didn't need glasses, she didn't even really need to transfigure and charm them to match the different capability of her different eyes, this time. Though whether that weird side-benefit was because the male genes of the Potter family were defect in the eye-area in comparison to the female side, or if it was a matter of her strange summon-reincarnation, was anyone's guess.

And with that, and cleaning up after the controlled cascade-failure that'd returned the Stone to her, Harriet was finished with Britain. And, rather than spend a lot of money making herself noticeable to the wizards who were understandably monitoring international travel, Harriet simply covered herself in a weak Confundus and took the muggle-route to Italy.

After all, that was where Yharnam was, geographically. However, even if the Italian Ministry of Magic had been told about it, they would've still refused to acknowledge any claim to the city.

This was because Yharnam had once been the near-failure-point for the Statute of Secrecy, and even if nobody had dared to outright ostracize the city and its Church of Blood-Healing, that'd been purely down to the miracles it'd performed with magical medicine.

Those methods were long since lost to time, and also generally distrusted to the point of it being seriously illegal to experiment with their methods. After all, the city had abruptly disappeared in a manner that made it obvious to everyone involved that blood-magic was definitely bad news and would inevitably do horrible things to entire countries.

In other words, if Italy admitted that Yharnam was a part of Italy, most every country in Europe would start to give Italy some suspicious looks. Not to mention the fact that a large portion of Italy simply wanted nothing to do with a place so steeped with superstition and rumors of monstrosities as Yharnam had been.

No, even if Harriet were to somehow miraculously clear out everything that made Yharnam such a dangerous place to be, no country in the world would dare to declare that she should've made a deal with them beforehand.

As far as Harriet knew from what she'd read about reports and rumors about the place. Once upon a time, someone had been doing experiments with lycanthropy. Whether it'd been to cure it, or to worsen it, or to do something else entirely, was anyone's guess.

There'd never been any signs of anything Other lingering in Yharnam, despite their supposed worship of things that sounded an awful lot like something that might exist outside of reality.

Generally, it was assumed that that worship was more related to how the magical population kept the muggles in line, whispering more about 'miracles' than of 'magic'. But that assumption had been well-established even when Yharnam had still been around, so how much of it was politics and how much of it was truthful was hard to say with any true certainty.

Especially since most of the city's libraries had been consumed with Fiendfyre during the Curse Breaker's attempts to clear the city of the 'beasts' that roamed it. 'Beasts' that in many cases clearly appeared to have been human once, and which had been preserved by time well enough that it was hard to classify their state as 'undead', so much as 'hibernating'.

It was undoubtedly true that something had gone terribly wrong in Yharnam, beyond the beasts that roamed its streets, but if whatever that was had been anything other than an experiment gone wrong, they'd never managed to find any real trace of it.

Normally when a city was sealed away like Yharnam had been, it was either because someone had just turned the population into inferi – and nobody wanted to go in and clear up the several thousand citizens – or a plague had struck which nobody trusted to not spread to their own cities, or it was to hide away some horrific sin that a few important people had committed.

Yharnam was... all three combined, basically. Except, unlike in most of those cases, Yharnam was sealed away from the inside, and instead of a few inferi half-disintegrated from centuries of exposure, it was packed full with feral wild animals.

Nobody knew exactly why the people had turned into beasts, but the best theory they had was that they'd used blood-magic to simulate a werewolf's ability to heal during a full moon, and that whatever method they'd used for it had resulted in some version of the lycanthropy-disease spreading to those who'd been healed by it.

Beyond that, the founding of the Church of Blood-Healing, and Yharnam's incredible and explosive rise to fame and fortune were both reasonably well-documented.

Some more digging had proven that their self-inflicted plague had been something that'd been developing over time, with more and more of the citizens being infected. The church's actions in response to the plague however, had come as something of a shock to the Curse Breakers who'd discovered it.

The church had created a division in its clergy specifically for 'hunting beasts'. As in, people whose only job was to hunt down and kill those infected.

Unfortunately, with most of the beasts being resistant to magic, wands didn't really do much. And so they'd resorted to axes and swords and spears and various other specially modified weapons.

Which in turn led to the unpleasant discovery that these 'hunters' were often wounded in the line of duty, and so needed ever more of the 'blood-healing', until they themselves turned into the beasts that they'd been hunting.

Their best guess for why Yharnam had been sealed away when it had been, was that the non-violent divisions of the clergy had themselves finally started to turn, and that'd been the final straw. Though the exact details had been long since lost to both time and the desperate fire-magic that many Curse Breakers had resorted to before they'd died.

Chapter Text

It was weird, not having the lightning-bolt scar on her forehead. Not to mention her sudden lack of upper-body strength, though that at least was being rectified. Her height was unfortunately a lost cause, but then she'd never been much taller than 'average', so she hadn't lost that much.

Though there was still the possibility that she'd manage to squeeze a few more inches out of it, seeing as she was biologically closer to sixteen, than the eighteen that her legal identity claimed. Permanent aging-potions were finicky things, and it was best not to skip any more years than absolutely necessary.

As for Yharnam, it'd been three days, and Harriet had reached the point where she felt she had a pretty decent grasp of what to expect.

The beasts were numerous and made Aragog and his brood seem like nice and friendly members of society. The beast-hunters that could still move around were unchanged enough to be identifiably human, and were all stark-raving mad when they were capable of speaking at all. And the weapons and armors that the beast-hunters were using had definitely been enchanted somehow, to the point where the blades would cut through stone and their clothes would deflect a lot of the curses unless hit dead-on. The fact that they were also capable of moving at speeds that Harriet would've more commonly associated with vampires was just icing on the cake.

Harriet wholeheartedly understood why so many Curse Breakers had been of the opinion that Yharnam should've just been burnt to the ground, instead of explored.

She didn't really agree, but she definitely understood them.

She'd had plenty of too-close encounters with werewolves and other magical monsters over the years, but nothing quite prepared you for the madness of Yharnam. Nothing quite prepared you for the stench of blood and rot, for the labyrinthine layout of the city, for the frightened screams of things that'd once been human, and for a lot of sharp teeth attached to things that moved so fast that Harriet barely registered them moving at all.

If she'd entered Yharnam with a team of Curse Breakers, she would've probably retreated a long time ago. But Harriet's specialty was surviving, and whenever she stopped to think about what was going on, she'd end up thinking about the fact that everyone she knew and loved were lost to her.

That Hermione and Ron and Bill and Fleur and the Weasleys and Andromeda and Teddy, all might as well have been dead-... No, that wasn't true. They were still living happily in that world, it was just Harriet who'd gone and gotten herself killed. Except she hadn't even died properly, so she wouldn't be able to meet all the people she'd lost in the war against Voldemort.

Harriet side-stepped the charge of a rat-like thing the size of a horse, lashing out with her wand to make sure that it wasn't alive enough to attack a second time, and scrambled on top of a nearby roof.

The beast-hunter took that as an opportunity to strike, and Harriet rolled away from the sledge-hammer that cratered the shingles where she'd been moments before.

She wasn't a very good duelist, in truth. She didn't know nearly as many spells as Hermione, and she didn't have the smooth transitions between attacking and defending that Ron did. She didn't have the creativity with her spells that Luna did, or the frantic maneuverability that Ginny had.

All that Harriet really had was experience, and the fact that she hadn't actually specialized in any one thing. Hermione always fumbled between attacking and defending, worrying about which spells to use. Ron was too predictable with his small collection of spells. Luna got so caught up in creativity that she didn't think far enough ahead to plan. And Ginny usually exhausted herself with her constant movement.

It didn't really matter how magically resistant the beast-hunter's cloak was, when Harriet turned the roof underneath their feet into quicksand. They tried to dodge to a part of the roof that was untouched, but that just meant that they ran straight into a piercing-charm designed to punch through armored tanks.

There was a moment of flailing from the beast-hunter as most of their head disappeared, either magic or biology causing the body to nearly brain Harriet with their hammer. But she'd expected as much. The beasts of Yharnam never died easily.

Harriet glanced around the rooftop that she found herself on, trying to fit her position into a mental map of the city.

You'd think it'd be easy enough to guess where you were when you were standing on a rooftop, but of course Yharnam's architecture was about as consistent as the Burrow had been. Less in the sense that only magic could possibly be holding the shambling mess together, and more in the sense that Harriet was standing on a rooftop that was also a stairwell to a bridge the was a house, and to her left was a cathedral that might be a warehouse leading into the sewers.

Quite frankly, whoever had designed the sprawling madness that was Yharnam, they definitely deserved whatever ungodly thing might've happened to them in this city.

It was still beautiful, with its grand spires and foreboding gargoyles, with its sheer depths and terrifying heights. Though it was kind of obvious that – for all that it'd once been as modernized as it got – the sewer-system of the city was more than a few centuries woefully out of date.

XXX

Yharnam had originally been hidden from the inside, and Harriet wasn't entirely sure how they'd managed to create a ward that covered the entire city, when the city was already overrun.

She had a suspicion that it had something to do with the clergy-members, but no Curse Breaker in her own time-line had really solved that mystery. In fact, there wasn't much of any kind of mystery that they'd managed to solve about Yharnam.

After the first few dozen Curse Breakers died, the following ones adopted a scorched earth protocol, and a lot of things were lost as a result. It saved a hell of a lot of lives – comparatively anyway – but it left them with a lot more questions than answers.

There weren't really any wards worth speaking of, but there were a lot of things that didn't quite die. Clinging to life even when they'd been reduced to nothing more than bone and dust. And that made her wonder if there was some kind of animation-curse over the whole city.

In fact, it was possible that someone had built the entire city as a ritual of sorts. It'd explain why the alleyways were so confusing, if they'd been partially designed like that to convince its residents not to pay too much attention to the exact nature of the layout of the streets.

They did know that at some point or another the Church of Blood-Healing had poisoned the water-supply, likely as a way to make sure that the citizens willingly participated in the experiments with healing magic that they were doing.

But, considering how the wards surrounding the city seemed to have been set up by a single individual rather than a group of people, there was definitely something strange going on with Yharnam.

Even if Yharnam hadn't been a plague-ridden wasteland of murderous beasts, the idea of a single person setting up wards like that was-... It was possible, technically, but it'd likely take them years upon years to do, and would likely unravel as a result, since they wouldn't have been made already weaved-together, which was kind of an important thing to do with wards that you wanted to last.

Still, if the layout of the city was somehow involved, Harriet needed to make a map. A proper and very detailed map.

And she needed to do that, and take the measurements she needed to, all without getting herself killed when a nearby pile of bones sprung to life and started trying to tear her limb-from-limb.

Which was why she'd had to rethink her clothes, since she'd be wading through the sewers as well. And that had led her to thinking about the fact that she was a young woman now, instead of a nearly-middle-aged man.

It hadn't been too difficult to get used to thinking of herself as Harriet Azalea instead of Harry Potter. In fact, it'd been suspiciously easy ever since someone had done some kind of magic one evening that'd left her writhing in pain as if her blood had been on fire.

She'd never experienced it before, but she was pretty sure that that'd been Rose Potter being disowned from the Potter family, to make sure that nobody used her blood or body against her remaining family-members.

It was common practice when purebloods were exposed to grave-robbers or people were confirmed dead without an available body to bury.

There were a lot of things a person could do to someone if they had access to their unresisting blood-relatives.

Still, it'd only been when she'd been forced to take a break from her constant life-or-death fights with the beasts in order to make a map, that Harriet had started to realize that she wasn't an old man anymore.

As in, she wasn't capable of growing a beard anymore, so she didn't have to worry about stubble. And apparently, she actually got her period and all of that nonsense as well.

Thankfully, despite ending up in a different body, Harriet still knew herself well enough to be perfectly aware that she had no interest in being a parent. She'd had her child already, and Teddy was already old enough that he was probably graduating from Hogwarts right now.

That already stung more than enough for her, without being constantly reminded of the memories she'd already made raising Teddy.

No, Harriet had no interest in having children. And so very sensibly reacted to her first period by setting up a magical ritual designed to basically completely remove her womb and all its associated organs.

It'd originally been a kind of punishment in some distant part of India, designed to completely remove a woman's ability to have children. Considering that that particular area had at the time been of the belief that having children was a woman's entire purpose in life, it'd been considered a form of torture, despite the process itself being relatively painless.

It'd fallen out of use since then, whether that be due to women actually beginning to be treated like human beings, or because that particular civilization went and dropped a mountain on top of themselves. It was really all the same for Harriet's purposes.

She didn't want children, and she didn't want to suffer through periods, so now both of her problems were solved.

That still left her with mapping out Yharnam however, and for all that its insane layout made it feel as if they'd crammed all of Manhattan into the space of a suburban backyard, Yharnam really wasn't a small city.

XXX

Whatever it'd been before it'd transformed, now it was the size of a giant, and looked a bit like a cross between a deer and a werewolf.

It'd been nearly three months since Harriet had slipped through the wards surrounding Yharnam, and she'd made a pretty good approximation of a map for most of the city. The city was still completely overrun with beasts, and her measurements were likely inaccurate, but there were definitely patterns emerging.

It wasn't like any ritual she'd seen before, but it was deliberate enough that Harriet had been forced to start trying to brute-force the arithmancy for it.

Someone had made the city as a sort of gigantic focal-point for what looked vaguely like a vision-amplifying ritual. Considering that one of the religions Yharnam was based around seemed to reference 'the formless Oedon', Harriet was willing to bet that the religions really hadn't been about keeping the muggles from looking too deeply into the truths of the Church of Blood-Healing.

Someone with a lot of knowledge about magic seemed to have been trying to commune with a god. Though, Harriet was willing to bet that whatever this 'Oedon'-thing was, it was more likely to be an Other, which was an entirely different can of worms.

Why anyone would want to worship a creature so out-of-touch with reality that it literally warped reality around it until it started to dissolve, Harriet didn't know.

People were weird about religion though, and it was entirely possible that the Church had decided that they needed to 'ascend' into whatever hellish nightmare of unreality existed beyond their own dimension.

It wouldn't be the first time, and it probably wouldn't be the last. Though it made Harriet wonder about how truthful the theory of Yharnam experimenting with lycanthropy really was.

And if they hadn't been experimenting with werewolves and blood-magic in order to accelerate healing, then what the hell had they been experimenting with and why had they all turned into monsters?

It was also interesting that it seemed as if those who'd been part of the clergy turned into bigger and more monstrous creatures than the ordinary citizens.

The reason that Harriet had approached this particular antler-wearing specimen of warped biology, was that she had a theory about exactly what'd been done to seal away Yharnam.

For a single person to be able to set up a ward that covered that kind of distance, they would've needed to have something to resonate against. A kind of echo to carry the wards into the place where they needed to be.

A good example would be someone using warning-beacons in old times to act as a relay from horizon to horizon. Except it was less someone at the next beacon setting their own one alight when they spotted the other, and more someone using the presence of the beacons to determine how high they'd need to aim a fireball-spell in order to light the next one.

Basically, it was finicky and extremely inefficient, but it was the only way Harriet could imagine a single person setting up a ward like this without somehow being in multiple places at the same time.

And whilst Yharnam didn't really have any conventional ward-stones surrounding it, it was built as a ritual circle of a sort. However, that still shouldn't have been enough, unless there was something inside of that circle that could be used to resonate against.

Which had been the reason she'd started tracking down what might've been some of the anchoring-points for the original ritual – whatever it had truly been meant to do. And that had in turn led her to this creature.

Now, if Harriet's guess was correct, the wards were staying up and somehow helping to reanimate even the beasts that Harriet killed, and they were being held up by the presence of these truly monstrous beasts.

In other words, if she wanted to avoid burning the entirety of Yharnam to the ground with Fiendfyre, she was going to need to destroy all of these anchor-points. Which sounded all nice and simple when she'd been imagining that the anchor-points had been some kind of religious artifact or whatever, but it looked as if it really was blood-magic to the core, and that it'd tied itself to the life-force of the giant monsters that'd once been clergy-members.

For all that Harriet had a lot of confidence in her ability to survive almost anything the world could throw at her, she really didn't want to rush into combat with something werewolf-like that was the size of a giant.

She'd much prefer to just hide in the rafters and set up something that would kill it before she had to fight it.

And there was that Mongolian siege-spell that she'd been thinking of trying out.

XXX

It'd taken her five months since entering Yharnam to get to the point where she could properly unravel the wards covering the city.

Most of the anchor-points had been unpleasant, but one in particular had been very disturbing.

Harriet didn't have a phobia for spiders. A certain trained wariness of them, after her encounter with Aragog and his brood, but not a phobia. But there was something about a giant spider with hundreds of eyes, constantly conjuring more – if smaller – spiders into existence, that kind of just made her very aware of the damn things.

As far as Harriet could tell, that anchor-point in particular hadn't so much been at the edges of the magical circle that was Yharnam, as it'd been slap down in the middle of it. Which would imply that, whatever their actual goals with the ritual they'd built the city for, the result they'd ended up with was a giant spider with hundreds of eyes.

Considering that she'd run into some texts in a lecture-hall that seemed to imply that their goal was to increase their own enlightenment by 'lining their brains with eyes', Harriet was willing to bet that it'd been something of a monkey's paw.

There'd also been a few mentions of somebody or something called 'Rom', and considering that it had at least at one point been used in conjunction with 'spider', she was guessing that that'd been its name.

She wasn't really sure what she ought to do with that information, but it was there.

Actually unraveling the wards however, required Harriet to get to the place from where they'd been made. Which had taken a lot of searching, because the caster hadn't exactly been in the center of Yharnam's magical circle at the time.

There might be plenty of reasons for that, but Harriet's general assumption was that it was because it was either locked off from the caster, or he just hadn't wanted to deal with trying to keep Rom from murdering him for long enough to actually set up the wards.

Still, in comparison to the several years it'd taken Curse Breakers back in her old world to break through all of the wards and clear out Yharnam, she was making ridiculously good time. Obviously, she hadn't died and been forced to replace herself without having taken any notes or given the newer her an idea of what she'd be up against, so that it'd taken the Curse Breakers as long as it had was perfectly understandable, considering the circumstances.

In the end, the caster turned out to have been an old man in a wheelchair. She'd found him in the middle of a graveyard, surrounded by beautifully blooming wild flowers everywhere you looked, and next to him was a human-sized doll that Harriet suspected had at some point been able to move.

From the small workshop not that far from it, Harriet was fairly certain that this was where they'd been burying the beast-hunters. And the fact that it seemed to be filled to the very brim with gravestones, painted a somewhat horrifying picture of how long and how extensively they'd been operating.

There wasn't much left of the man, in truth. There was the wheelchair, and the peg-leg that was likely the reason for it. And there was the hunter-quality armor that looked faded and worn with age, even beyond what had happened to the beast-hunters still roaming the city.

Harriet didn't know how involved the man had been with the experiments of Yharnam, but considering that he'd managed to tap into the obscure magical circle in order to set up the wards, Harriet sincerely doubted that he'd been oblivious to it.

It didn't look like he'd actually survived casting the spells however, because even now he was slowly withering away before Harriet's eyes. He'd likely been preserved by the anchor-points, and without them around, the wards were destabilizing to the point of using his flesh as a sacrificial battery of sorts.

But for those wards to be able to do that, he must've used a magical ritual fueled by his own life-force in order to set up the wards in the first place.

In other words, even if he'd participated in the rituals, even if he'd participated in the experiments, it was obvious that he'd attempted to repent somehow by forever sealing away the horrors of Yharnam from the outside world.

And, as Harriet carefully brought the final ward down to make sure that it didn't trigger a cascade-failure, she was left to see as the last remnants of the man's body turned to dust in the breeze. And for a moment she could've sworn that she'd seen a relieved smile on his lips, even when he'd been nothing but a corpse.

XXX

One of the problems with Yharnam was that Harriet couldn't just donate the dig back to the people it ought to belong to.

In a way, that was why she'd gone looking for it in the first place. It'd been politically and culturally disowned by literally every country in Europe, mere weeks after its reported disappearance. In fact, it'd been the main contributor to all blood-magic in Europe being banned practically overnight.

Yharnam had not been a popular city-state. It'd been hated for its meteoric rise to fame and fortune, and it'd been hated for its ability to perform miracles with healing that had left even their magical neighbors in awe, and it'd been hated for its constant disregard for the Statute of Secrecy.

The only reason it hadn't literally been invaded was that its neighbors were too terrified that the other neighbors would gang up on the instigator in order to protect Yharnam, and possibly annex it outright for the sake of defending it better.

In other words, Yharnam's miraculous abilities with healing magic had left its neighboring countries unable to really do much about its policies. And they'd hated it for that too.

No, unless Harriet wanted to adopt the Gringotts-policy of selling everything in the dig to the highest bidder, she was in a bit of a rough spot.

When Harriet had started to go on digs by her lonesome for the first time, she'd decided that it was more important to give back the cultural heritage to the people who'd lost it, than it was to make more money for herself. She'd had plenty of money in the bank, after all, more than enough to live comfortably until her dying day.

That situation was a bit different now, seeing as she'd used up pretty much all of the money that she'd stolen from the Lestrange's vault, but by now it was a point of pride for her.

She wouldn't sell history to the highest bidder. She wouldn't let some rich snob fill their private library with things that the public ought to have access to. She wouldn't.

So, if she wasn't able to sell it cheaply to whatever people it ought to belong to, and she wouldn't sell it to the highest bidder, that left her with two options.

One, she could try to sell it as a shared academical thing to several of the magical schools and universities in the neighboring countries. Or two, she could try to sell it to the ICW.

Considering that the European part of the ICW had very explicitly tried to force bans on blood-magic on the rest of the members ever since it'd been created, there was a distinct chance that the ICW would react to the idea of owning Yharnam by gleefully figuring out an excuse to quarantine and burn the entire city to the ground.

Which left somehow brokering a united sales-pitch to several rival universities and schools, and not have them laugh her out of the room.

Then again, she could maybe just donate it outright, instead of trying to get some kind of money for it, and then just use the fame she made from that to promote her book. Which was-... It was a lot better of an idea than the other options, but it also reminded Harriet that she'd need to rewrite her entire book from scratch, which sounded like a tragedy all by itself.

She didn't think she'd need to actually publish it before she donated Yharnam away. Just-... She'd need to write it out properly before her name completely faded out of memory, which likely meant that she still wouldn't have a lot of time available to do it.

Thankfully, she'd kind of burnt several pieces of the book into her brain word-for-word, thanks to a note-taking spell that she'd resorted to after a few mishaps where all of her previous notes had been destroyed. And it seemed as if those notes hadn't faded from her memory during her entry into this new world.

So she'd probably manage to get it published before the end of summer. It wouldn't be a pleasant experience, but then very few large projects were remotely pleasant to actually work on. Relieving and satisfying, yes. But not exactly the kind of thing that was just pure enjoyment.

So, after having gone through several weeks worth of paperwork to make sure that none of the rival academical institutions decided that they had somehow 'more access' than the others. She really hadn't wanted to stick around any longer than absolutely necessary, citing that she was writing a book and really needed to get back to her own academical pursuits, before legging it out of the country.

Which was why, by the time July rolled around, Harriet found herself back in Britain.

It was mostly down to habit, but there was a certain familiar comfort with being back in the country of her birth, even if it was in a different world. Though she hadn't quite expected what she'd found on her return.

Now, she'd known that the Potters had realized something had happened to their daughter's grave. What with the experience of being forcibly disowned from her blood-family. But she hadn't really expected them to take up arms about it.

Except, that was clearly what had happened.

Lily and James Potter had spent the last several months all but holding the Dark families of Magical Britain at wand-point, demanding them to confess whom among them had desecrated their daughter's grave.

Needless to say, none of them had confessed to anything of the like, and there was a lot of political unrest as the family of the Boy-Who-Lived started picking fights with a lot of very highly esteemed Noble Houses.

The Ministry was floundering between of course being on the side of the Potters, because necromancy was Dark magic and anyone employing it ought to be sentenced to Azkaban, especially if using it against a pureblood family. On the other hand, they were very keen on being able to continue to enjoy the various bribes paid to them by the Ancient and Noble Houses, and were very offended on their behalf that the Potters could accuse them of such a thing.

Theoretically, Harriet could put a stop to all of this chaos by admitting that the reason why Rose Potter's grave had been desecrated was down to it serving as some kind of landing-place for Harriet after her tumble through unreality. However, that'd likely raise a lot of flags, and might very well lead to her being strapped to a table deep down in the Department of Mysteries, as everyone poked and prodded at her.

So, obviously, she was going to keep her mouth shut and pretend as if this wasn't any of her business at all.

Apparently though, the Potters had recently shifted a bit of their offense towards Dumbledore.

Turns out, when your first-born son and only remaining child ends up facing off against a thousand-year-old basilisk, you tend to hold a grudge against anyone who was even remotely responsible for things reaching that point.

They hadn't been part of influencing the Board of Governors into sacking, but they had proven instrumental in making sure that he didn't get rehired as the Headmaster of Hogwarts.

It was kind of weird, trying to imagine what having actual parents would've done to Harriet's many memories of adventures through her time in Hogwarts. But she couldn't really fault them for interfering.

If Teddy had gone through half the troubles that Harriet had, she would've probably arrived at Hogwarts to have a talk with McGonagall at wand-point. As it was, all he'd ever really done was somehow land Fleur's eldest daughter as a girlfriend.

Which, whilst both hilarious and the sort of thing that made Andromeda very skeptical to his good sense, it hadn't turned out all that bad. Oh, so Victoire had been a bit of a 'bad influence' in how he dressed, and she was absolutely unapologetic about snogging him silly in public, but they were happy together.

And really, that was infinitely more precious than anything else.

So, even if Harriet had some difficulties trying to imagine that the Harry Potter of this world was a child with parents who'd pick a fight with Dumbledore in his defense, it probably shouldn't have been as surprising as it had been.

XXX

With Harriet visiting in mid-July, Flourish and Blotts were still a month off from actually ordering the books for the next school-year.

This was quite noticeable in that there were a wide variety of books but very few actual copies of the books in question. It was actually pretty ideal, seeing as it made browsing for books a lot easier than it would've been if half of the shelves were shock full of Hogwarts books, but it left the store feeling oddly hollow.

Grimacing slightly at catching a glimpse of Gilderoy Lockhart's collection, and remembering uncomfortably that the man wouldn't have revealed himself as a fraud in this world, since he wouldn't have spent the last few months masquerading as Hogwarts's Defense Professor, Harriet tried to focus on something else.

She still wasn't actually done with rewriting her book, though she'd managed to produce the rough draft. Mostly, she was here because she'd reached the point where a part of her absolutely loathed her own writing and the awkward phrasing and complicated summaries.

It wasn't a feeling that she hadn't had before, and the easiest way of dealing with it was to remember that everyone else were even worse than she was. So she was paging through countless books held in high esteem, and trying to suppress the urge to strangle the author for being such an incompetent bastard that even she could've written it better.

Arithmancy wasn't even her field and she still wanted to kick the author of 'Numerology and Grammatica' in the crotch.

'A History of Magic' was quite possibly the most limited overview of a book that could be imagined. It was a book entirely focused on the development of Magical Britain, with a few grudging nods towards things that only indirectly affected the country, such as Nicolas Flamel who was too French to properly brag about – but who taught Albus Dumbledore, who was as British as they came.

It was... decent enough at what it did, Harriet supposed. However, it never actually specified that it was supposed to only include things that directly affected Magical Britain, and which they could brag about, so it still annoyed her to no end.

If you were looking for an overview-book of the history of the magical side of the British isles? It really was quite excellent for that. If you were looking for an overview of the magical history of the world? Toss it in a fireplace and go back to digging through bookshelves.

It inflated Magical Britain's importance far too much for it to work effectively as anything beyond a reference-book, and considering how very lackluster the structure of the whole thing was? You could probably have a library worth of books, where every book included some kind of detail on a 'special occasion in history' and it would still be faster to dig through the library than trying to track down the information in 'A History of Magic' unless you'd memorized every page.

Harriet wasn't the kind of person to send howlers to people. If she wanted to yell at someone, she wanted to watch them suffer her anger properly. But, well-... if Bathilda Bagshot hadn't died during the war, Harriet would've probably been willing to make an exception.

“A history-buff, hmm?” The manager peeked over her shoulder, apparently far too bored to leave a witch alone to her browsing. “Every school-year Professor Binn asks for that book.”

A chill went down Harriet spine. A sudden keening hatred towards the state of the world.

She'd completely forgotten about Binns. He'd either finally moved on during the Battle of Hogwarts, or he'd been part of what had ended up consumed in the Fiendfyre. Neither Harriet nor anyone else had really been interested enough to investigate the details.

He'd been gone, and nobody had really mourned him-... Actually, that wasn't entirely true. When Harriet had finally discovered history as a subject outside of the ghost's classes, she'd been a bit sad to realize that she couldn't go back to Hogwarts and spend a few hours screaming at the ghost for being a useless teacher who could make so many interesting things sound like wet cardboard.

And she was being forcibly reminded of that uselessness right now. Any history professor worth their salt should look at this book and cry, not demand that every single student – regardless of year – bring it to their lessons.

But that wasn't the fault of the manager, he only ordered what he knew Hogwarts demanded. Harriet sent a strained smile his way. “Sorry, but do you have a history-book that's actually worth the ink it's printed with?”

The manager's jaw dropped open, but even after he recovered from the shock, he didn't really have any recommendations worth to be called such. So Harriet smiled politely and got the hell out of his store.

She'd come to be reminded that she wasn't the most awful author in the world, but there was a difference between being reminded that a long-published author was shit at writing, and being forcibly reminded that the subject that she loved with all of her heart had been turned into a mockery by a professor who refused to even have the decency to keel over dead.

Clearly, something needed to be done about that.

XXX

Since she was breaking into Hogwarts anyway, Harriet decided to be productive by dealing with the Diadem at the same time.

Thankfully, because it was already late July, the school was pretty much completely abandoned, so she didn't need to dodge any hordes of students.

As far as she understood how things had changed without Dumbledore being allowed back as Headmaster of the school, McGonagall had become the new Headmistress. Which likely meant that she was keeping herself busy with looking for a new Transfiguration Professor.

Considering that she'd been Head of House as well, she'd probably need another Head of House for Gryffindor, along with someone else to step into the position of Deputy. Though, if things followed Harriet's memory, she'd also be trying to accommodate for Hagrid as the new Professor for Care of Magical Creatures.

As far as the newspapers had been concerned, Dumbledore's only real comment on his sacking had been to admit that he would miss the brightness of so many youngsters running around underfoot, and that he wished McGonagall all the best.

Harriet distinctly remembered what Hogwarts had been like under McGonagall during that mess of a year that she'd been the DADA Professor. Admittedly she'd mostly suppressed it for the sake of her stress-levels, but it'd clearly been ticking along just fine without Dumbledore around to keep it afloat, so she wasn't overly worried about it.

Also, she'd only seen it with her own eyes from the perspective of a Professor, and from what she'd heard circling back to her from Ron and Hermione's kids – because Teddy was a proud Hufflepuff and didn't exactly frequent the Gryffindor common-room – McGonagall had been a lot less involved in the life of her House than most.

If Harriet were to guess, the woman had been juggling what probably amounted to several full-time jobs at once. Head of House wasn't necessarily a full-time commitment, but it definitely ate more than a few hours. Professor was very much a full-time job. And whilst Deputy Headmistress might not sound like it was all that much more work than being Head of House, she'd been working under Dumbledore, who Harriet was pretty sure ended up sticking her with doing most of the paperwork – because he was busy trying to keep the politicians from thinking up new and corrupt ways to ruin the lives of muggleborns and muggles everywhere.

From what Harriet remembered of her own school-days, it hadn't been too bad, and they'd all been more-or-less autonomous thanks to the efforts of the Prefects – and McGonagall's much-appreciated ability to actually give that kind of power to people who didn't abuse it. But when comparing notes with the other Houses, and her successor? McGonagall had been a very distant figure.

It did make Harriet wonder who'd end up as the new Head of House for Gryffindor though. Tradition dictated that it needed to be a Gryffindor alumni, and that they were already an established professor in Hogwarts. Unfortunately, the only one of the current professors whom Harriet could say with certainty had actually been in Gryffindor, was Sirius Black.

And the idea of Sirius Black being left alone with a whole slew of young and impressionable children was-... Harriet honestly wasn't sure if it was hilarious or terrifying. Either way, she could imagine that similarly conflicting feelings were running through McGonagall at the thought of it.

Regardless, with Hogwarts closed down for the summer, breaking in was easier than ever.

In truth, breaking through the wards of Hogwarts generally translated into simply walking through them and not throwing any Dark magic at the castle or its inhabitants. And even then, it was more that the wards would start causing a great big ruckus for everyone to notice that someone had in fact used Dark magic, and that somebody should get on that and deal with it.

The only reason anyone could call Hogwarts 'the safest place in Magical Britain' was because of its staff-members. Never underestimate a master of a craft, who's then spent years teaching others in that craft and slowly accumulated even more creatively destructive ideas from their students.

But as long as you didn't arrive at Hogwarts with Dark magic, or with malicious intent towards its students or staff, the wards didn't really care more about you than they did about mosquitoes.

Certainly, someone could've tried turning Hogwarts into a fortress, and it did have some good defenses in the case of an outright war breaking out, but Hogwarts was first and foremost a school. And schools needed to be able to accept new students, and guests, and new staff-members, and-...

It was possible to simply screen everyone entering and leaving the castle's wards, but with how many people that amounted to, it wasn't exactly a painless procedure. And it would probably need to be updated regularly, weighing in between making sure that it allowed students to return from Hogsmeade weekends, and that it wasn't completely ineffectual at stopping graduated alumni – which would be most every wizard and witch in the country.

The basics of it translated into the idea of trying to frisk anyone stepping onto King's Crossing. Sure, it'd make everyone 'safe', but it'd cost a hell of a lot of time and effort, be hilariously inefficient, be a massive inconvenience for literally everyone involved to the point of violence, be highly likely to be abused for the sake of molestation or blackmail, and maybe stop a 'danger' once every decade-or-so since the people actually introducing the dangers would know to think of a way to bypass being frisked.

In short, Hogwarts had a lot of holes in its wards, because it was a school. And nobody was crazy enough to think that making it into an authoritarian fortress would be a good idea.

In Harriet's case, this meant that she basically had free rein to do what she was there to do. She was there to remove a Dark artifact before it could hurt anyone, and to save the students from an incompetent instructor. The fact that she was planning on saving the students by exorcising their professor into moving on into the afterlife, why she might even phrase that as a favor which she was granting him.

Not that she was going to do that. In fact, if she could've found an exorcism that was deliberately more painful for the ghost, she would've picked it without hesitation or guilt. She was really rather cross with the professor.

Still, there was no point in wandering through the corridors when she knew exactly how to get to her target from the outside. So, first things first, Harriet used a variant of a sticking charm in order to climb the outer walls up to the seventh floor, and then used a lock-picking charm to get through a window. After that, she walked back-and-forth a few times in front of a certain painting, and entered the Room of Requirement.

Harriet didn't really want to carry around a horcrux anywhere, because they were nasty and she didn't like them. However, she didn't actually know the location of the Amulet, and wasn't sure if Nagini had been turned into one yet.

The Ring, the Cup, and the Diary were all accounted for – considering the fact that the Chamber of Secrets had been closed again. But with Sirius Black alive and well, who knew where the Amulet had ended up after Regulus's sacrifice, and Harriet really didn't fancy the idea of trying to break into Grimmauld Place for no reason. So, Harriet needed something to help pinpoint it, which was where the Diadem came in.

All horcruxes were connected to the soul who'd made them, and that soul was in turn connected to all those horcruxes. Highjacking that connection to locate the others wasn't exactly easy, nor without risks, but Harriet would rather try doing it with the Diadem than with the Boy-Who-Lived's scar.

If the Diadem accidentally melted-... Well, Harriet didn't really want to kill a kid, so that was preferable.

Said and done, after getting a bit of clear space for herself in the Room, Harriet took a deep breath and started with the ritual.

Divination was a woolly subject, and shouldn't really be wholeheartedly trusted. However, magic was what it was, and like called to like.

A few checks with a mapping-spell, and Harriet nodded. The Amulet was in London, except obviously not, because it wasn't anywhere in London. Which meant that Grimmauld Place hadn't lost its rather impressive collection of wards. A loose-floating spirit was hiding away somewhere on the continent, another horcrux was straining helplessly against wards it couldn't overcome, and there wasn't a single trace of anything else.

The Cup, the Ring, and the Diary, had already been destroyed. Which left the Diadem in her hands, the spirit of Voldemort floating freely, the scar on the Boy-Who-Lived's forehead, Nagini not-yet-created, and the Amulet in Grimmauld Place. All seven accounted for.

With that over with, Harriet hurriedly destroyed the horcrux.

Theoretically she might succeed at saving the Diadem from destruction, but she didn't really feel like it'd be worth summoning a greater demon to ruin the country-side should she get it wrong. And even if she succeeded, it'd just end up being an old Diadem with some fancy jewels on it, the magic that would've made it so precious being washed away along with the horcrux.

So, with that over and done with, all she needed to do was track down Binns.

Which was really easier said than done, but honestly not that big of a deal. Behind a few layered invisibility charms, and with the Stone as an eye, hunting down the lingering dead was really not all that complicated.

She finally found the ghost in an office that might've been his when he'd been alive, and which he clearly still considered to be such. She even found out how he'd been grading the students' assignments, what with the long-suffering house-elf with a pen who was also present. It wasn't like a ghost would be able to write down the grades on his own, let alone turn the page.

A quick sleeping-spell sent the house-elf into a comfortable sleep, and then Harriet threw up the first ward to keep Binns from running away. The second ward, for making sure that no outsiders interfered, soon followed. The third ward was probably superfluous, as it was only there to stop creatures like Peeves from attacking the exorcist, but Harriet was nothing if not thorough about her work.

By now, Binns was starting to realize that something was wrong. And so Harriet turned to the main focus.

After a long day of breaking-and-entering and horcrux-hunting, Binns' ghostly wails of pain and terror were like music to her ears.

XXX

“What the bloody hell do you think you're doing?!”

Harriet blinked dumbly up from where she was cleaning up the traces of the exorcism, more than a little bit startled to see Minerva McGonagall in the doorway. The fact that the woman looked furious enough to chew nails didn't exactly help matters, Harriet had been a Gryffindor once after all, and McGonagall's temper was rather intimidating for a young person.

Still, Harriet had never allowed herself to be intimidated into silence before, and she wasn't about to start now. “Right at this moment, or life in general?”

A wand came up as McGonagall clearly decided to hex the answers out of her, but even if Harriet was more interested in Curse Breaking than dueling, she wasn't exactly-...

Quite frankly, the idea of a lone person surviving through Yharnam without a scratch on them, foreknowledge or no, was insane. That place could turn a giant into mincemeat within an hour, and could do much the same to a squad of hit-wizards. Dumbledore would've probably survived, because he had some really good instincts and a lot of experience, but there was a big difference between honorable duels to the death and a gigantic chimera of blood and horror tearing its way through solid rock in order to tear you limb-from-limb.

Basically, Harriet's wand was already up and casting the moment she noticed McGonagall move, with no time in between to actually react to it.

Harriet did try to limit herself to nonlethal options, but trying to keep herself from using downright impossibly-obscure spells was a lost cause from the get-go. And McGonagall reacted rather sensibly to having spells of unknown purpose aimed at her person, and fought with about equal viciousness as she would've displayed against a Death Eater.

Which meant that Binns' old office went up in smoke. Then the hallway was covered in smoke that'd been animated to trap all who passed through it, and a couple of windows shattered completely.

A sticking charm for climbing, and Harriet grabbed the window-frame and disappeared further up the outer wall. Only to have an animated collection of glass-shards take chase after her. Followed by McGonagall on a broom, still furiously casting.

Harriet spent a few precious moments carefully disassembling the construct of glass-shards before it managed to grab her, avoiding the various traps hidden in it that would've meant that actual violence against it would've left her bombarded with thousands of glass-shards. But that gave McGonagall an opportunity to bring the gargoyles into the fight as well.

A brief spell to undo magical charms to fly, and the gargoyles went spiraling down, though McGonagall's broom was still fine. It was an obscure spell, true, but the tampering-protocols of a commercial broom was more than up to the job of countering it.

Harriet honestly wasn't entirely paying attention to the continuous barrage of random nonlethal spells she was sending McGonagall's way. She didn't really have time to think about anything complex, and there wasn't really any point in trying to do anything more complicated than herd her away from a position to counter-attack effectively.

She really should've remembered that the Headmistress would be stuck at Hogwarts, and even if the wards didn't react in outright alarm at anything Harriet had done, the fact that Binns had suddenly disappeared from the wards would've probably been enough of an alert to make McGonagall suddenly very suspicious.

Oh well, what was done was done. Besides, Harriet really had needed to clean up after the exorcism, because a few of those traces would've likely been traced back to an obscure ritual in her book when she published it. So she'd be found out if she didn't clean it up, and now she'd instead been found out in the middle of cleaning up.

A gargoyle's spiraling flight ended in a crash into a wall, and the rock-dust that resulted was again animated into something nasty. This time Harriet cut off McGonagall's control of it, rather than disassembling the creation outright, and then sent it to intercept a bunch of birds with some pretty vicious-looking claws.

Harriet sent a quick hex at McGonagall's broom to overpower the way its charms were balanced, making it buck and writhe underneath McGonagall's grip. McGonagall still managed to keep it reasonable steady with a single hand though, and continued aiming spells and transfigured constructs towards Harriet with her wand.

The birds were killed, but the rock-dust was transfigured into flour and a spark turned the rooftop of the tower they were currently on into a massive fireball. Harriet melted her way through the actual roof, with an interesting transfiguration that turned it briefly liquid, and then legged it for the nearest window as McGonagall split open the ceiling above her in order to be able to properly see and animate all of the furniture in the unused classroom.

A quick oxygen-deprivation curse kept any of the lingering fire from spreading – Harriet had seen Hogwarts go up in flame once, and that'd been more than enough – and Harriet briefly charmed her robes into a kind of flying carpet to get her safely back to the rooftops beneath the tower.

McGonagall didn't send her animated furniture after her, allowing them to remain in the tower, instead animating a few more gargoyles to go after her, now that they wouldn't need to fly in order to get to her.

A bit of creative transfiguration turned a spot of moss into a tree with an awful lot of roots, cracking one of the gargoyles into pieces, and catching another in its branches. Another application of the rooftop-to-liquid transfiguration to catch a gargoyle advancing on her, and there was plenty of room for Harriet to reapply her sticking-charm and start climbing another tower.

Just in time, as McGonagall swooped down on the scene, conjuring more birds to harass her, as the gargoyles had been left in the dust.

A mist cursed to erode magic took care of the birds in an instant, but that didn't actually do much of anything to the broom barreling through at high velocity. Transfiguring the mist into becoming a spiderweb of rope instead, Harriet disappeared behind a corner just in time to avoid the whip of slicing fire that made short work of the rope-trap, and which would've probably split her in half if it'd connected.

Harriet couldn't remember McGonagall being quite this vicious before. She'd admittedly been going up against Death Eaters in defense of her students, and she might've been trying to avoid collateral damage, but still.

Much like most members of her House, Harriet had always taken a vicious sort of pride in having a woman as fierce as McGonagall as their Head of House. And as McGonagall rounded the corner surrounded by birds made of shattered glass and sharpened stone, Harriet couldn't quite help a grin from splitting her face.

This was kind of fun.

Chapter Text

“Alright, so why did you do it?” McGonagall glared at her, still looking a bit worse for wear.

It was close to midnight, and Harriet had been discovered before noon, and basically all the time in between those two moments had been spent having a running battle all across Hogwarts. Harriet was feeling pretty frazzled herself.

“He was using 'A History of Magic' like a textbook!” Harriet exclaimed, still more than a bit outraged at the idea of using that book for anything more than a quick guide to finding out if an inventor was British or not. Rule of thumb was that if the book treated them as if they didn't exist, even if their inventions did, then they weren't British.

McGonagall clenched her eyes shit and pinched the bridge of her nose. “You killed my History Professor, because you didn't like his choice in required literature?”

“Exorcised! I exorcised your History Professor.” Harriet corrected her. “And if he was using a book like that, to teach History, then he was either pathetically incompetent or a nationalistic buffoon.”

“And, pray tell, why would that be?” McGonagall returned to glaring at her.

“It's-...” Harriet made a helpless gesture with her hands. “It basically refuses to admit that France is a thing, except for a few mention of wars, which includes an extremely abbreviated footnote to admit the existence Beuxbatons, in order to mention that Hogwarts is better. It mentions Germany only in direct conjunction with Grindelwald's rise to power, a rise which is basically two sentences long, only to conclude the war in three paragraphs dedicated to Dumbledore's final duel against him, and six pages of British recovery in the aftermath.”

Harriet took a deep breath, vaguely satisfied to see that McGonagall was starting to look like she was having an inkling as to why Harriet was so outraged.

“If an invention was British, it receives a page worth of description. If an invention wasn't British, it's only included if a British inventor invented something further on it, otherwise it never happened.” Harriet shook her head. “That book is a giant 'long live the British for we're the only ones who have ever made anything worthwhile' pat on the back, and anyone who'd think to use it as a textbook for impressionable children deserves a prison-sentence.”

McGonagall was quiet for a long moment, clearly considering that, before speaking again. “So you killed my History Professor for being an incompetent buffoon who should've been fired well over a century ago, and for poisoning our youth with his foolishness.”

Harriet nodded, not entirely sure if McGonagall was agreeing with her, or if she was planning on going for her wand again. She probably wouldn't, considering that they'd more or less fought themselves hoarse a few hours ago, and had only continued fighting past that through sheer inertia and foolhardy stubbornness.

McGonagall made an aggravated noise, before summoning a bit of paper and a quill and writing something down on it. “Welcome to Hogwarts, Professor.” She glared at Harriet when her jaw dropped open. “I really don't have the time to try and find a new History Professor when I already need to find a Deputy Headmistress and a Transfiguration Professor. Not to mention the rest of this-... this mess.”

She didn't actually motion towards the aftermath of their great running battle, so she didn't seem to be thinking about the collateral damage.

“Umm, 'mess'?” Harriet had been pretty sure that Dumbledore had let McGonagall handle most of his paperwork, so there really shouldn't be any worries about a faulty filing-system or the like.

McGonagall's eyes sharpened, and she was silent for a bit, before relenting with a sigh. “Well, you're the new History Professor, and the rest of them will find out before the beginning of term anyway.” She shook her head. “Tradition dictates that the Deputy is a Head of House, or of similar standing in the school, before they become such. Unfortunately, Filius and Pomona both refused, citing academics and Head of House duties, respectively.”

Harriet frowned, not entirely liking where this was going. The only other Head of House was-...

“I've never been on good terms with Severus. But then, I'm a Gryffindor, and he's a Slytherin, and it wouldn't be the first time a rivalry got to my head.” She took a deep breath. “So, I looked into his records to make sure that I was just being foolish, and then-...”

She made a gesture that was eerily similar to Harriet's own previous helpless gesture of frustration.

“Then I find out that he's been using his position to bully his students. To taunt them, to be cruel to them, to mock them, and to punish them for things he had no right to punish them for. And Albus had been-...” McGonagall's voice wavered slightly, a righteous kind of fury in her eyes. “Albus had been covering it up, letting it slide, all the while reassuring us that it was exaggerations from excitable children, and that nothing was happening.”

Oh. Harriet had always wondered about that. Snape had known his craft, yes, but he'd never really taught it. He'd acted more as an inspector, looming over them and demanding perfection, instead of sitting them down to explain why things worked certain ways or to give them advice on how to perform the process, beyond the instructions he'd written on the board.

Dumbledore covering up his indiscretions with taking points for 'breathing too loudly' and similarly outrageous things? That sounded very much like Dumbledore with his great many plans. Keeping a loyal man close enough that he would never be able to slip his collar, in order to use him to the utmost he could be used, without stopping to consider exactly what he was destroying in the process.

It also explained why no professor ever seemed to make a case about it. If they didn't know the details, and Dumbledore reassured them that it was just hyperbole, then that was probably what it was. They were overworked enough as it was, without going digging for trouble that Dumbledore assured them was not there to be found.

McGonagall was silent for a long moment. “I-... I would dearly love to fire the man for that. But who would I hire to replace him? Head of Slytherin? Potions Professor? Oh, perhaps if I could drag Slughorn out of retirement, if that could be managed. But I can't.” She made another helpless gesture. “So I have to put him on probation instead. Any sign that he's acting out of turn, I can toss him out. But that's it. So he'll be bitter and meaner than usual, and he'll undoubtedly act out of turn within a few months, so I'll have to find a replacement anyway, but there isn't one!”

“Don't look at me. I barely scraped by an OWL in Potions.” Which wasn't entirely true, but it wasn't like Harriet had ever actually gotten a NEWT in anything, technically. Hermione was the only one of the three of them who'd properly graduated from Hogwarts, and she never let them forget it.

“Which is why I hired you as the bloody History Professor!” McGonagall huffed, before taking another calming breath. “So, instead of having to find a Deputy and a Transfiguration Professor, or getting Hagrid ready for his responsibilities as a Professor in Care of Magical Creatures, I also have to look into replacing both my Potions Professor and the Head of House for Slytherin.”

Harriet glanced at her face, and grimaced. “Let me guess, no other Slytherins on staff?”

“None.” McGonagall barked a bitter laugh. “Several Ravenclaws, a few Hufflepuffs, and two Gryffindors, but not a single Slytherin.”

“What about hiring a Slytherin Transfiguration Professor, pretending like your Potions Professor will correct his ways, and then sticking them with Head of House the moment he backslides?” Harriet suggested, feeling a bit guilty at watching her old Head of House so clearly upset.

McGonagall stared at her for a long moment, and then made an expression that was probably the scariest approximation of a smile that Harriet had ever seen in her life. “That would solve a few of my problems, wouldn't it? And if it's like that, I'm sure I could convince Filius to spend a few months as an intermediate Deputy until things settle.”

Harriet wasn't sure exactly how much evil scheming was running through McGonagall's head at the moment, but that was mainly because she'd never seen her old Head of House scheme before. McGonagall wasn't really the type of person who lent themselves to schemes much more complicated than finding a good time and place for bashing in someone's head.

Harriet had always considered the woman as something like the epitome of Gryffindor-like qualities.

XXX

It'd taken Harriet more time than she'd like to admit, but she'd finally tracked down a History-textbook that'd be worthy of being called such. 'The Magical Historian' wasn't exactly renown for its accuracy, but it definitely covered the basis of a time-line a hell of a lot better than 'A History of Magic'.

Mainly, its problem stemmed from being a summarization of history, meaning that it ended up skipping a lot of details in order to properly cover the bigger events. It also tended to be pretty vague about the aftermath of certain events, but it'd definitely be a very good primer for teaching students that a world existed outside of Britain.

Once Harriet had hopefully countered the worst of Binns' teaching, she should be able to start the latter years on more detailed but less 'overview-centered' books. She already had a few she was considering, but she probably shouldn't get ahead of herself.

As for Harriet's own book, she'd finally managed to get it completed. She'd had to edit out a few things from what it'd used to contain, since she couldn't reference a few digs that hadn't happened yet, but then she could fill the empty space with all of the things she'd uncovered or encountered in Yharnam, so it hadn't been too much of an issue.

Actually getting it published also wasn't that hard. Most of the academic institutions of the world were starving for good books on Curse Breaking, since Gringotts tended to keep most of the 'trade secrets' locked behind 'employees only'-signs.

It wasn't completely terrible, seeing as most anyone who wanted to be a Curse Breaker needed to join Gringotts anyway if they wanted to actually be able to access a dig. After all, no government would really be willing to meet with a single unknown individual over getting the rights to start messing around with dangerous magic within their borders.

Not unless that individual was filthy rich and willing to spread the money around to grease the wheels, or if they were ridiculously famous and regarded as highly competent at what they did. The latter of which having been how Harriet had managed to start competing with Gringotts over dig-sites, much to their offense.

Regardless, getting her book published – especially in the wake of official proof that she was indeed the Curse Breaker who'd been clearing out Yharnam – was fairly easy. Now that it was written, anyway.

Which meant that she didn't really have anything to focus on except for being introduced to her fellow staff-members. Though, thankfully, she wasn't alone in being new.

Between the always-undeniable presence of Andromeda Tonks, and Snape's half-snarling silence in regards to his new probational status, when McGonagall pointed at Harriet and declared that she'd be the new History Professor, everyone just kind of rolled with it.

Harriet noted that McGonagall very blatantly didn't mention what happened to Binns, or why the barely-out-of-her-teens Harriet Azalea ended up as his replacement. She was introduced as merely another addition to the changing staff, where the main focus of the meeting was the teeth-gritting realization that they'd allowed a bully of children to linger in their midst for years without anything keeping him in check.

Pomona spent most of that meeting taking long deep breaths, and sending a few plastic smiles of welcome at the newcomers. Sirius spent it silently clenching and un-clenching his fists, keeping them carefully away from his wand. Filius looked bitterly disappointed, but not surprised, having already heard the gist of it when he'd been badgered into temporarily accepting the position of Deputy Headmaster.

Hagrid looked furious, but also clearly hurt, likely having issues imagining Dumbledore deceiving them about it. Andromeda kept herself politely neutral, even though Harriet was willing to bet that she'd already caught on to the fact that she was the only other Slytherin in the room, and what that likely meant for the man's position as Head of House.

Everyone else appeared to be some version of silently scandalized and bitterly unsurprised.

It was a very somber kind of gathering, and Harriet basically tipped her hat towards them, and then shut herself in her rooms until the students arrived nearly a full week later.

Seeing Sirius and Andromeda and even Hagrid face-to-face was-... It was both easier and harder than she'd imagined. Her godfather had been dead for two decades by now, and the memories had faded into shadowy shapes of a good man too tormented by Dementor-exposure to be entirely sane.

This Sirius had none of that. He was clean-shaven and for all that he was clearly furious with Snape over what he'd done, there was a certain settled stability that Harriet would've never expected from her godfather.

Andromeda was a different can of worms entirely.

She looked so young, even when it was clear that she was closer to McGonagall's age than Harriet's own. The war and the losses it'd brought with it had been hard on her. And even if Teddy had brightened the woman's world, Harriet had never really been able to forget that she'd been hurting.

Seeing both of them, so untouched by the war, by the horrors and loss that'd held true for so many people-... It was-... Harriet didn't have the words for it.

She wanted to scream, she wanted to laugh, she wanted to cry.

This was the first time she'd really met people that she'd loved in her own world.

McGonagall she'd been fond of, but for all that she'd respected her, there wasn't quite that same feeling of knowing her.

Hagrid and her had grown distant as time had passed, their interests only rarely overlapping, and both of them too busy to really find the time to talk about old memories. Oh, they could still talk about Teddy, but her godson hadn't exactly been the second coming of Charlie Weasley and his mad passion for dragons, so even with that there was a distance.

It was painful to see him look at her and not recognize her, but for all that she'd considered Hagrid one of her oldest friends, Andromeda and Sirius were family .

And seeing both of them, so completely unaware of her own memories of them-...

She needed that week to get her head back on straight.

After all, in this world, she was a young woman named Harriet Azalea, and she had no personal history with any of these people. And her precious godson would never be born, because the man who'd fathered him had died nearly two decades before Teddy's birth.

And it hurt.

XXX

“So... whatever happened to Binns?” Sirius asked, sounding a bit more awkward than what Harriet would've expected from him.

It'd been a very long time since the last time Harriet had seen the Sorting of the First Years, and she'd probably been a little bit too wrapped up in nostalgia to think too carefully about where she'd decided to sit.

Or perhaps Sirius had just wanted to speak to the new member of staff that wasn't an already-known relative of his. The staff-member who'd been isolating themselves in their room for the past week.

Regardless, now she was stuck next to him, and even if the food had been distracting, it clearly wouldn't be distracting enough to keep Sirius from trying to strike up a conversation.

Still, for all that Harriet was silently hurting from the man not knowing who she was, there was no need to take that out on Sirius by being rude.

“He considered 'A History of Magic' to be a suitable history-textbook for all ages.” Harriet answered perhaps a bit too sharply than she'd intended.

Sirius opened his mouth, then hesitated with his eyebrows scrunched together, before slowly closing it again.

“He had it coming.” Andromeda said primly from Sirius' other side, as she took a perfectly measured sip of her tea.

Harriet's lips twitched slightly, because of course Andromeda would understand. She might be a wonderful person, but she could get vicious when someone insulted something she was fond of. Whether that be a person or a skill.

Thankfully for Harriet, the only insult she'd ever offered the woman had been her desperate attempts to cover up exactly how much trouble toddler-Teddy had managed to get into when Harriet had been babysitting.

By the fifth time, she'd started to learn wandless-magic, purely to make sure that the woman wouldn't be able to guess what had happened by checking Harriet's wand for repair-spells. Teddy had thought that it was all great fun, but then Teddy hadn't actually been face-to-face with Andromeda as she stared her down.

The little sneak had just been peering at Harriet's painfully contorting face with the innocent glee of someone who had no idea about what's going on.

Thankfully, by the time he got old enough to go to Hogwarts, Andromeda had stopped putting all of the blame for Teddy's antics on Harriet. Which meant that Harriet got to sit back and watch with not-so-innocent glee as Andromeda expressed her opinions about his taste in fashion.

Harriet didn't particularly care what Teddy wore, as long as he didn't walk around naked in public, but she sure as hell wasn't going to defend him from Andromeda's wrath over it.

Sirius glanced between them, looking a little bit as if he was trying to guess if he was now a witness to a crime and needed to tell someone, or if he'd be silenced before he made it away from the table.

Considering that he wasn't actually doing anything except looking like a deer watching an oncoming train, Harriet decided to just ignore him and continue drinking her tea.

Instead the blissfully awkward silence was interrupted by another voice.

“Oh yes, 'The Magical Historian' was it?” Filius joined the conversation, sounding like he didn't at all think there was anything wrong with Binns' mysterious disappearance. “I'm guessing there'll be supplementary reading as well?”

“Of course.” Harriet nodded. “It's a good summary, but it's too simplistic in regards to a lot of what it covers. I haven't quite decided which books I ought to be recommending to which years, though.”

Filius smiled brightly at her. “I'm sure it'll come to you after you've been through a few classes.”

And that was true enough. It'd been what Harriet had already decided on herself. She'd need to see how rooted her students were to Binns' ideas of Britain being the be-all-end-all of magical history, and she'd have to pick books going from there.

“And you, Andromeda? Any last-minute worries?” Filius asked, still sounding cheerfully helpful.

“Thankfully, my predecessor was at least competent in her work.” Andromeda's lips twitched in amusement. “Though I do wonder at why her notes on her grading-system involved so many spells for removing whiskey-stains.”

“It's vital for the process.” Harriet defended McGonagall with a small smile of her own. “Merlin knows that I certainly drove my Transfiguration-teacher to drink.”

It hadn't actually been because of her grades, so much as that McGonagall had been nominally in charge of Harriet when she'd run off to her many dangerous adventures. And the stress and worry of that had driven her into a bottle more than once.

Filius chuckled good naturedly, and then paused. “Oh, speaking of driving poor professors to drink, I trust that you will take responsibility for what will happen to my Ravenclaws, Harriet?”

Harriet blinked, turned to stare at Filius in confusion, and then rapidly paled. “Filius. The book is in the Restricted Section, surely I can't be held responsible for what students who are allowed to enter there might try doing?”

Filius smiled, but there was nothing kind about that usually genial expression. “Unfortunately, Madam Pince doesn't have that much control over exactly which books are being read or not. Nor what the students who enter might decide to share with their housemates.”

Harriet felt a little bit like the floor was crumbling underneath her feet. “Filius, I make several mentions of how dangerous Curse Breaking is.”

“And yet it's written as if a second-year could manage the same with a flick of their wrist.” Filius said, still smiling that cold smile. “And I'm really quite busy, what with my new duties as Deputy Headmaster.”

Harriet felt something cold and dark slipping its way down her spine, and swallowed dryly. “Right.”

Maybe she shouldn't have written that book, after all?

XXX

Had it been anyone other than Filius, and had Filius not recently been promoted to Deputy Headmaster – no matter how temporarily – thus severely limiting the man's time for dealing with the antics of his House, Harriet would've probably assumed it'd been a joke.

Unfortunately, for all of Filius inherent cheerfulness, the Ravenclaw Head of House didn't really joke about the safety of his students.

Considering that, Harriet had concluded that she needed to take precautions. And the easiest way of doing that – without outright removing the book, and draw the ire of a Madam Pince on the warpath – was to make her way into the Restricted Section and use a somewhat obscure variation of a contamination-charm for that copy of her book.

Certainly, there was a chance that a student simply bypassed the Restricted Section by outright buying the book from a bookstore instead, but that was a bit less immediately worrying than someone stumbling across it in the library.

The contamination-charm wouldn't stop someone from reading it, but it would leave a sort of 'smudge' on the aura of the individual who'd come into contact with it. A smudge that would only really be apparent to a person who had some type of magical sight, which had been part of the charms that Harriet had included on her Stone-eye.

It wasn't a perfect solution, since someone who'd read the book could end up teaching its content to someone who hadn't ever touched the book itself, but it would at least give her a heads-up on whether the book had been read by her students or not.

It wasn't exactly what Harriet wanted to do before breakfast on her first proper day as a teacher, but the world had never really bothered to care about what she wanted before, and it certainly wasn't the worst thing she could imagine doing.

The library was empty, the Restricted Section was emptier, and Harriet was done in just a few minutes.

Arriving at the Great Hall with no signs of having taken a detour on her way to breakfast, Harriet was treated to a few stares as the students were suddenly reminded of the fact that Harriet was their new History Professor.

There'd been a lot of whispers after McGonagall's brief speech of introducing the new teachers, but most everyone had probably been too tired and too full of food to bother much with curiosity. In the light of day, that curiosity reared back up, and Harriet-... Honestly, Harriet was so used to people staring at her that she barely even noticed it.

That's the kind of stuff that happens when you grow up as a famous person. And Harriet had never really stopped being famous, back in her old time-line, what with defeating Voldemort – and several other Dark Lords, in the few years she'd been active in that line of work – and then jumping straight into Curse Breaking.

The weirdest thing about the whole scenario was how the blatant curiosity wasn't accompanied by semi-fanatical awe. And Harriet couldn't say that she particularly missed that part of it, so it all worked out.

The various Head of Houses spent large portions of the morning handing out schedules, whilst most of the rest of the staff leaned back and enjoyed the fact that they didn't have to do it. The notable exception being McGonagall who kept glancing over towards Sirius, likely wanting to make sure that he didn't screw it up, but also looking weirdly nostalgic about the whole thing.

Andromeda also glanced over at Snape, but it was more... calculating.

As far as Harriet knew, McGonagall hadn't shared with anyone that Andromeda would likely end up the new Head of Slytherin, but it certainly seemed like Andromeda had her suspicions. She'd always been a ruthlessly practical kind of woman, and she looked like she was in fact keeping an eye on the entirety of Slytherin House.

Cataloging how they interacted among themselves, with the other Houses, with their own Head of House, and how their Head of House interacted with them. From her perfectly neutral expression, Harriet was guessing that she was either refraining from direct judgment, or she'd already come to a conclusion that she didn't particularly wish to share.

Harriet was willing to bet that it was a mixture of both. Andromeda having made some conclusions that painted them in an unfavorable light, but which she'd allow them to remain ignorant of in the hopes that they'd prove her wrong at a later date.

Harriet hid a smile behind her tea. Andromeda would be good for Slytherin.

Or she'd tear it down completely and dance upon the ashes, but that was just the kind of woman that she was.

XXX

With a wave of a wand, Harriet wrote down event after event on the blackboard underneath the much larger words 'magical history', before finally stopping and turning to her class. “Alright, can anyone tell me what this is?”

A long moment of silence as the various students eyed each other, all of them likely having their own guesses, but also not being certain enough in them to blurt out a guess without some certainty of success.

A hand was raised, and at Harriet's nod they spoke. “The curriculum?”

“Of the late Professor Binns, indeed.” She smiled wryly at the student. “Though that wasn't what I was going for.” She made a bit of a show of glancing around. “Anyone else care to take a guess?”

Another uncomfortable moment of silence, as the students silently weighed their luck.

And then another hand rose. “Umm... It's historical events that have affected Britain?”

Harriet's smile turned a bit warmer. “Ten points to Hufflepuff. That's exactly what it is.” She made a show of turning a bit to stare at the blackboard. “Now, can anyone guess what's missing from these events? Broadly, not specific details.”

This time a hand rose almost immediately. “Things in history that didn't effect Britain?”

“Ten points to Ravenclaw.” With a flourish, Harriet added 'of Britain' to the blackboard's title. “And unfortunately, here we run afoul a rather disturbing blend of nationalistic pride and sheer ignorance.”

Several of the students blinked to attention, a few in offense, a few in intrigue.

“The history of one place is rather impossible to untangle from the history of another place. As an example, one can't outline the history of the British isles, without also including the history of Rome to which they once belonged, or the Saxons they fought numerous times after Rome's fall.” With a wave of Harriet's wand, the blackboard that had already been filled with events took to the sky, only to grow smaller as it rose.

With another flourish of her wand, two new blackboards appeared. The first one she wrote a quick 'magical history of Rome' as a title to, and the second one she wrote 'magical history of the Saxons' on instead. Harriet turned both those blackboards airborne as well, shrinking them too, in order to keep things from getting too crowded.

She noticed more than a few wide eyes in her audience, but was willing to bet that it had more to do with the unexpected nature of using magic in the History classroom, rather than anyone actually being all that impressed with the magic in question. She was only using it to prove a point, and she was pretty damn sure she'd seen Filius use this trick several times in the past.

“And if we're looking into the history of Rome, then we need to look into the histories of the various peoples it ruled over.” Nearly a dozen other blackboards were conjured and sent into the air to join the first three. “Not to mention the outside influences that finally brought the crumbling empire to its breaking point.” And even more shrunken blackboards took flight.

By now, things were starting to get more than a bit cluttered, even airborne and shrunk as the blackboards were.

Harriet allowed everyone a long moment to take in the complicated mess of shrunken blackboards drifting around and occasionally bumping into each other, before she continued.

“History is fascinating in how it reflects the societies it springs from. And sapient life has always been interconnected.” Harriet gathered up the free-floating blackboards and vanished all but one, the original one, which she instead erased all of the text on. Before again writing 'magical history' in big letters. “So, rather than attempt to summarize all of recorded magical history, when this class will never have the amount of time necessary for doing that, we're going to have to learn to prioritize.”

Now the students were looking confused, which was only to be expected. Start off by telling them that it was impossible to write out the history of one place without entangling yourself in the history of another, only to then immediately dismiss that as being impossibly cumbersome. Harriet would've been confused too.

“In more blatant words, the victor writes the history books. And though I hope you'll keep that in mind when handling the records of 'justified' wars and incidents, the victor is generally the one with the most profound effect on history going forward.” Harriet smiled another wry smile. “Grindelwald's World War is a good example. Had he been victorious, things would've been massively different from what they are today, and though the scars of the war and his ideals can still be easily seen if you know where to look, they're only scars. Had he won? Those scars would've been open wounds, and the scars to be seen would've been the traces of everything Grindelwald's many enemies united to protect.”

Harriet let that settle for a moment, before nodding and continuing.

“All of history is entangled, and there are multiple viewpoints on any given moment of history, but trying to account for all of them would translate into trying to explain the viewpoint of every single individual alive at the time. And that's impossibly complex, and largely pointless.” Harriet shook her head with a weary smile. “It wouldn't do to lose sight of the forest for all of the trees, and that's a fine line to walk. But never forget what a forest is made of.”

It honestly felt more like a philosophy-lesson than a history one, but philosophy wasn't an actual subject in Hogwarts, and the intricacies and complications of social sciences were largely unheard of from the rest of the Hogwarts curriculum.

If a potion did one thing, then it did that thing. If it was created one way, then it was created that way. If any of those things happened differently, then your information was either incorrect, or you were failing at translating it properly.

History could say two completely contradicting things, and have both things be true. That was the wonder and frustration of a social science. And it meant that being critical to your sources became suddenly a lot more important, since you couldn't simply 'try it yourself' and see if you received similar results.

Certainly, if you followed faulty instructions to making a potion, you might kill yourself and your surroundings. But at least you'd be able to prove the author wrong.

XXX

By the end of the week, Harriet's new students were clearly anticipating some of the twists-and-turns of her lessons, meaning that she was very much part of the rumor-mill.

Harriet didn't particularly mind that, seeing as the more her students talked about how she went on and on about how complicated and twisty history was, the more they also helped remind themselves of that same fact. Repetition was the key to memorization, and though Harriet wasn't overly fond of people just repeating the same thing over and over again without thinking about what it meant, she could appreciate that memorizing at least the core philosophy of social sciences wasn't a bad thing.

Unfortunately, the fact that her students now sort of understood the point she was trying to make before she ever stepped inside of the classroom, meant that her students ended up asking questions that were unrelated to the actual lecture.

Where had Professor Binns gone? Why did Harriet become a History Professor? Not to mention the way a few more nationalistic brats kept trying to trip her up with demands for trivia-questions to prove that she obviously didn't know anything about magical history if she didn't consider Magical Britain to be a perfect entity of the only true history of the world.

Now, Harriet's subject had never really been History. She'd been a Dark Lord vanquisher, and then a Curse Breaker, with very little actual recent history involved. But when you went looking for lost civilizations and places, the best way to know where to look was to try to read between the lines of as many historical events as you could get your hands on.

So, by trying to trip her up with bizarre and largely-unspoken trivia, her students actually helped her out. There was no real point in reading the 'common' stuff when you were trying to find obscure things, after all.

Basically, her students grabbed one of the few fields that she'd actually read enough on the subject of to be considered an expert in. Obscure history-trivia.

The fact that she was able to also defunct a lot of the theories that those nationalistic students spewed at her was just an added bonus. After all, the main reason that she'd managed to memorize most of them was that she'd personally investigated if they were false or not, both by more mundane means, as well as by her Stone-eye.

As for the other questions about how Harriet ended up a History Professor, Harriet generally deflected by saying that History was something of a dying subject on the British Isles, and that their Headmistress had been rather desperate to find a new History Professor when Binns suddenly moved on.

Obviously, whenever someone brought up how Binns might've 'moved on', Harriet did the sensible thing and blatantly lied that she didn't have a clue.

Now, it should probably be mentioned that Harriet wasn't the best of liars. Sometimes she managed to hit the nail on the head, but generally her ability to lie or bluff was dubious at best. Thankfully, all she really needed to do was to deny knowledge and immediately continue with her lecture.

Whether they believed her or not, it wasn't like they had any way to prove that Harriet had been involved in the matter.

No, rather than covering up her own exorcism of their previous professor. The true awkwardness of the situation had been seeing her old friends looking so much younger than she remembered them being. And having Hermione ask her questions rapid-fire, eyes aglow with the kind of demanding and half-worship that she'd looked at authority-figures, way back when. That'd been surreal.

Except, then of course came Luna.

And if Harriet had never even known her name before then, she'd probably have fallen in love with the adorable little weirdo on the spot. Even if she did end up asking questions that made it very obvious that either herself or her father had in some way heard of some of the particulars surrounding the Yharnam-dig.

It'd been a bit like being interviewed by a reporter, which Harriet supposed that Luna technically counted as. Except with less talk about if Harriet was going to get married and have kids any time soon, or if perhaps there was a lucky woman among her known friends.

Harriet didn't particularly like reporters. Back in her old world, they'd kept asking her pointless questions, when they could've been asking her about things like at what frequency you needed to resonate the magical tuning-fork in order to bypass the wards of that one dig in Tibet. That'd been one hell of an interesting collection of wards, both in how it worked and how it was designed to be bypassed, and how it was possible to bypass that bypass by following along with that built-in feature.

Harriet could've talked about magical tuning-forks and the implications for hours. Instead, all anyone ever seemed to want to talk to her about had been about if she'd been dating anyone recently.

Harriet had stopped dating people when she and Ginny had broken up, way back in the day. The reason had simply been down to neither of them being particularly suited for long-distance romantic relationships, and the fact that for all that both of them traveled in their work, they never quite traveled to the same places.

Ginny went to international quidditch-games in busy magical areas, Harriet went to random places out in the middle of nowhere to poke at rocks for days on end. And it'd become obvious fairly quickly that Ginny wanted someone to come home to, and Harriet was about as likely to be at home as she was to be halfway across the planet.

Ginny had gone on to date a collection of people before mostly settling down – Harriet didn't exactly keep tabs, but she seemed happy enough – and Harriet unofficially married her work.

Oh, she still made time for Teddy, but the only reason Harriet really kept in touch with anyone at all – beyond Ron and Hermione, who didn't count – was because Bill bribed her into Weasley-reunions with stories about some obscure thing he'd stumbled across and refused to tell her about in the field.

Also, to gossip about how completely smitten Victoire and Teddy were. But that'd only really started to happen the last couple of years.

Harriet supposed that she might've tried dating someone else, but she was always really busy. Maybe if she could've found an attractive Curse Breaker who could go on digs with her, but that still sounded like it'd be really awkward. Just... in a different way.

Harriet had liked the constant competitions that Ginny and her had come up with, and the idea of having a Curse Breaker following in her wake like a puppy wherever she went sounded like-... It was weird and probably a bit too stalker-ish for Harriet's comfort.

So Harriet had never bothered with dating anyone new, and she'd been pretty okay with that. It'd nearly driven Mrs Weasley to tears, but that was because Mrs Weasley was a big believer in love somehow making life worth living. Which was ridiculous, because if Harriet died, she wouldn't be able to find any more cool magical rocks to poke at, and that was more than enough reason to live.

In comparison to those kinds of questions piled on top of her by reporters however, Luna's questions actually were about Harriet's work as a Curse Breaker.

It also included questions about whether or not she'd run into any obscure magical creatures in her travels. Or if she'd found proof of some conspiracy-theory that she might as well be inventing on the spot for all that Harriet had heard of them, which was still a hell of a lot more interesting than someone trying to get Harriet admit that she had some kind of secret love-life to be uncovered to the public.

Though Luna's question did end up meaning that her classmates ended up taking notes on some of Harriet's personal history of Curse Breaking, and then built on that for the sake of the rumor-mill.

It was a bit awkward to have students start making very accurate guesses about Binns' sudden demise, coupled with Harriet's ability as a Curse Breaker, but it was still a hell of a lot better than everyone whispering about which other Hogwarts Professor she might have the hots for.

Sirius was a weird version of her own godfather, Andromeda was a younger version of the woman who'd taught Harriet how to change a child's nappies, and everyone else were people she remembered as being old when she was still just a kid.

Sure, Harriet might be more their age than she was her students' age – at least in her mind, her body was technically probably around seventeen at this time, even if she was legally nineteen – but they were still people that she simply considered old , because that's what they'd always been to her.

XXX

Not long after the inevitable rumors about Binns sudden disappearance took to Hogwarts, Harriet ended up being approached by a few of the ghosts.

It was less that the Hogwarts ghosts were scared of being exorcised, and more that they wanted some kind of ground rules to be established between them. And they all seemed satisfied once Harriet admitted that she'd only ever exorcised Binns because he was hurting people both directly and indirectly with his shitty teaching.

Basically, as long as none of the other ghosts took up teaching a subject Harriet cared about, and tried to run it into the ground with incompetence and prejudice, Harriet didn't really give a damn about what they got up to.

Unfortunately, the ghosts weren't terribly concerned with subtlety on the matter, and so obviously everyone took the figurative conga-line of ghosts wanting to talk to Harriet as proof that she had indeed offed her predecessor. It wasn't a false thing to assume of course, just inconvenient for her.

Sirius seemed to be straddling the line between a classical Ron Weasley of 'she's bloody scary' and a Weasley-twin impression of 'this is hilarious'. Harriet wasn't entirely sure which side was winning out, and Sirius seemed just as uncertain on the matter as she did.

Andromeda just nodded, as if she'd known this all along and was satisfied with everyone else for finally figuring it out. Though she did ask Harriet to keep any exorcism-material away from the students, lest they do something regrettable to Hogwarts' ghost-population on some fanciful whim, which was reasonable enough.

Minerva finally convinced Harriet to refer to her as 'Minerva' instead of by her surname or title, but otherwise showed enough blatant disinterest in the rumor that everyone immediately figured out that she'd known about it all along. As a result of that, Sirius spent the better part of a week pretending at great offense over not being told.

Filius hummed and reiterated Andromeda's note about children in the proximity to exorcism-rituals, but it wasn't like Harriet hadn't already done what she could about her book, so that was somewhat moot.

Pomona kind of glanced around and realized that the rumors were true, admitted to being shocked, made sure no other ghost was on their way to the metaphorical chopping-block, and then disappeared back to her greenhouses. Hagrid did something similar, though he looked a bit warier about it.

Snape just continued glaring, having at some point after being put on probation become nearly completely non-verbal in his seething outrage. A situation that wasn't being helped any by the fact that his various students were already beginning to pick up on something being very different in Snape's ability to torment his students.

Had it just been Snape stewing in his bitterness over being unable to bully the children under his care, Harriet would've given him good odds for lasting possibly even for as long until the next school-year. Unfortunately, with the man de-fanged and surrounded on all sides by children whom he'd been cowing into obedience with nothing but threats? Harriet doubted he'd last until Christmas.

The kids were smelling blood in the water.

And with the kids circling, Snape's temper would only wind itself tighter and tighter until he eventually snapped. And then he'd be thrown out on his nose by Minerva for violating his probation.

Listening to, and being targeted by, the rumor-mill wasn't the only thing Harriet was doing with her time however.

It'd be safer for everyone if Voldemort was removed from Mr Potter's scar before the Amulet was destroyed, because doing otherwise could potentially result in some hiccups. Which meant that Harriet needed to get access to Mr Potter without alerting everyone to the fact that she'd been hunting down the horcruxes and destroying them.

This meant that she couldn't exactly walk up to Mr Potter and ask him to let her help him with his cursed scar. It also meant that she should probably avoid giving him a detention and then performing an exorcism with him knocked out, since that could be traced back to herself.

That left kidnapping, and randomly breaking into his dorm in order to perform the exorcism there. Technically, she might be able to have someone else work as an intermediary for doing it, but unless it was done perfectly there was a high-chance of them taking out not just Mr Potter, but the whole castle along with it. So it wasn't much of an option.

Kidnapping would probably be awkward, unless she could ambush the boy when he decided to take a walk under the Cloak one evening. And ambushing him in his dorm ran a high chance of being interrupted or found out, both of which would end badly.

Harriet would've loved to set up an alert-ward for children running out of Gryffindor after bedtime, but it wasn't like she could be certain she could make it remain undetectable for possibly months. And considering how she was the one person really good with making and breaking wards, she'd be the first suspect.

Unless-... Well, they were all expected to catch students who were up after hours, and it wouldn't surprise anyone if Harriet just... decided to cheat, a little bit.

If she set up the alarm-wards around all of the Houses, and then included a pathetically weak tracking-charm that'd barely last two hours? Enough time to leisurely make her way over and decide what to do about the rule-breaking?

Why, that was practically admirably industrious of her, wasn't it?

Not to mention that it would give Harriet an excuse to spend most of her 'patrol-nights' comfortably in bed, rather than wandering around cold corridors at night for no reason.

Harriet briefly considered the idea of sharing the wards with her fellow teachers, before shrugging. Alert-wards might be easy enough to set up for her, but that wasn't necessarily true for everyone else.

Oh, most anyone could set up a basic alert-ward. The problem came in trying to set up a ward that would only react during a specific time of day – after curfew, for example. Not to mention the difficulties of combining it with an open-ended tracking-charm, no matter how light the actual charm itself might be.

Setting up more classical house-wards was very different from setting up open-ended wards that were supposed to 'stay connected' to the person using them. Sure, Harriet might've been able to simply modify her idea to allow for someone to make the wards capable of being 'tapped into' instead of being forcibly kept active by a person's input.

But that would likely require her to fix the wards to Hogwarts's wards, which meant that – even should anyone decide that it was an inappropriate breach of privacy – nobody would be able to remove them. And that also ran the risk of her work being used to support an Umbridge-esque takeover of the school at some point in the distant future.

The other possibility was to try to keep them separate from Hogwarts's wards, but in that case it'd likely degrade every time it decided to track someone, until it unraveled. Which could take everything from a week to a few months. But mainly, it'd leave it very open for being tampered with, which might not sound so bad, until you realized that it was a ward designed to make something happen when someone passed through it.

The possible uses of a ward like that could range from someone changing the hair-color of everyone passing through, to having them puke rainbow-colored slugs, to having to be sent off to St Mungos after being turned inside-out.

Basically, to set the wards up separately and reasonably easy to tamper with, was a disaster waiting to happen. Just one clever prank-move from the Weasley-twins could result in having to send every First Year in Gryffindor to St Mungos, if anyone decided to take too much offense in their retaliation. And that really wasn't something that Harriet wanted to be responsible for.

Now, it was entirely possible that someone might be able to modify a ward that was still 'attached' to its creator, but the odds of someone pulling that off without also alerting said creator that something was wrong was-... In Harriet's old world, Bill and her had spent more than a few evenings arguing about if it was even theoretically possible, let alone something that school-children might figure out.

So, whilst Harriet wouldn't mind the other professors following in her wake and setting up their own versions of alert-wards, she knew the complications behind it well enough to guess that it was unlikely that anyone – excepting maybe Filius – would be able to set it up.

No, a much more convenient solution for the more general public would be something like the Marauder's Map. And if Sirius didn't have a version of that thing hidden away somewhere to help him during his own patrols, then that was really nobody's fault but his own.

Beyond the more practical concerns however, there were a few ethical concerns as well. Beyond just risking turning Hogwarts into a police-state.

See, teenagers didn't deserve to be constantly monitored for the slightest insubordination. And, considering that Hogwarts was a boarding school out in the middle of nowhere, they were in fact directly responsible for the mental and emotional well-being of their students.

Which raised the question of 'how much was too much', because they still needed to enforce the rules that they set. A certain amount of disobedience wasn't really appreciated, but it was kind of to be expected.

Students caught sneaking out to the kitchen after dark for a snack, students sneaking out to meet with friends, or to meet with lovers, or even students who'd stayed out until well after curfew because they'd forgot the time. Denying them all the ability to do those kinds of things was a bit like denying them the opportunity to grow up.

An interesting side-note to Harriet's hope of being able to completely ignore her patrol-schedules, and instead sit with a nice cup of tea whilst waiting for someone to break curfew, was that those students who didn't return to their dorm in time for curfew, wouldn't be tracked when they then left it afterwards.

Meaning that if the Weasley-twins wanted to perform a prank, all they needed to do was find some way to trick – or simply distract – any prefect who might think to check on them, and then make sure not to enter Gryffindor tower until they'd already finished their prank. Though that would still make it very obvious to Harriet who'd been outside during curfew, since her ward would allow her to track them back to their dorm. Though, again, since it wasn't an identifying ward, she'd likely need to investigate the incident in person in order to be able to blame anyone.

In the end, she'd simply settled for popping up in the aftermath of whatever adventure they'd been on, and scold the individuals depending on their reasons for breaking curfew.

Pranksters lost House-points and received detention, with the exact amount largely related to repeat-offenders and what kind of pranks were being set up. The hungry kids lost a few House-points and received a semi-stern word or two about being out after dark. And the lovers-... Well, Harriet figured that the embarrassment of being found out by a professor was probably more punishment than anything else she could think of, but she was still expected to take House-points, and so she did.

It was a bit mean of her, to stop their excursions dead like that, but it wasn't like she was going to do it until they were done with it. Give them their outlets, and then have them deal with the consequences of their actions.

And if she made the embarrassment of the lovers worse by mentioning the various ways to 'keep safe' in those kinds of situations – making it all the more obvious that she knew exactly what they'd been up to – then it was better than the alternative of either side remaining in the dark about that kind of stuff. Best to have both parties know what they're doing.

However, even with all of those limitations and self-imposed rules, it became clear very quickly that her catch-rate was abnormal.

By the beginning of October, Harriet had become somewhat infamous in certain circles of students, and when the other staff-members had finally found out how and why she'd suddenly become the boogeyman of the curfew-breakers?

Well, the reactions were somewhat mixed. Sirius and Pomona were both clearly envious of Harriet's ability to set up those kinds of wards, whereas Filius was more intrigued about the magic involved.

The one to bring up the ethical concerns was Hagrid, actually, and she wasn't entirely sure she managed to reassure him about some of her personal self-imposed rules. But with Hagrid bringing it up, Sirius started to re-imagine his own school-days with an inability to break curfew without getting caught, and then he spent the rest of the talk struggling with the fact that he'd become an adult at some point.

Minerva pinched the bridge of her nose for a long moment, and declared with a perfectly straight face that if she ever found out that Harriet was neglecting actually doing the patrols that she'd now so conveniently bypassed, Minerva would personally wake her up with a bucket of ice-water.

Andromeda seemed to be of a similar opinion, though Harriet was willing to bet that the woman would be looking into the possibility of replicating the wards for herself. Not that she'd probably need it. Andromeda could read a guilty conscience from a mile away, and she had plenty of ways to make people talk.

And whilst Harriet had nothing but the utmost respect for Andromeda, Harriet sincerely doubted that she'd be able to replicate the ward.

It wasn't necessarily a complicated one, in the sense that it didn't do much, and it didn't have a lot of variables to keep track of. It didn't exclude anyone from being 'tagged', or from triggering the alarm. It, in fact, didn't actually care about if it was night or day, only if the ward itself was active or inactive.

Which did mean that she'd need to activate it by the time curfew came around, but considering that the wards connected to the dorms were partially 'anchored' in herself in order for the tracking-charm to work for her, it'd take her maybe five minutes to set all of them to 'active'.

Of course, a student could also just tear down the ward, without getting tagged themselves, and then just leg it before Harriet managed to show up, but they were fairly light wards with very little attached to them, so that shouldn't be too much of an issue if it happened.

At the most, Harriet would be arriving to the scene of a flash-bang having gone off. And whilst that wouldn't be a fun thing to experience for whoever managed to bring the ward down, it'd give her plenty of time to get there.

Then again, if the students ever reached the point where they'd start to be able to disassemble her wards – no matter with how much brute-force or finesse they used to get there – Harriet was going to need to sit a bunch of them down and talk to them about the dangers of cascade-failures.

It was fine if they disassembled a tiny ward that did virtually nothing, but if they then brought that ability with them in order to start poking at actual house-wards designed to keep intruders out and the like?

That was very much the kind of thing that could kill you.

XXX

“Miss Granger, I asked you for ten inches of writing, not nearly two feet.”

A very young-looking version of Hermione was squirming in the chair in front of her, clearly feeling a lot of conflicted feelings. Her desire to defend her own academical brilliance, fighting against her desire to obey authority-figures, and probably some other stuff mixed in as well.

Not particularly wanting to make the girl squirm, Harriet continued. “Had I asked for 'at least ten inches', the blame would've been on me. However, whilst I wouldn't blame a student for writing out eleven or even twelve inches, any more than I'd blame someone for writing out nine-and-a-half, yours is nearly twenty-three inches long.” Harriet paused to let this sink in. “Considering this, I'd guess that you missed some of the point behind this assignment.”

Miss Granger didn't quite give an outraged gasp, but from the way she bit her lip, it was clearly a very conscious decision.

Harriet had expected this younger version of Hermione to be somewhat awkward to teach, but she hadn't really considered that it'd be because the girl tried to 'outdo expectations' in all of her work. Whilst it was an admirable quality, it seemed that she'd ended up not comprehending what classified as that, and what classified as misunderstanding the assignment.

“Miss Granger, the essay I asked you to write isn't just a-... A test, or an exam, where you have to prove everything you've ever learnt about anything related to the subject. It's a way for me to evaluate not just your knowledge, but my own ability to teach you my subject.” Harriet reached into a desk-drawer, and pulled out a gigantic stack of parchment. “If some events are never mentioned in close to every essay my students write me, then I need to go back and perhaps solidify the importance of the event in question.”

Miss Granger nodded quietly to show that she understood, but still very obviously didn't see where Harriet was going with this.

Harriet motioned towards the giant stack of parchment she'd placed down on her desk. “I'm sure you've read books thicker than this, Miss Granger, I know I have. But there's a big difference between reading a book, and reading several hundred essays all repeating the same events over and over again.” Harriet allowed herself a small rueful smile. “They do tend to blend together after a while. And whilst I do try to space the assignments out so that I'm not overwhelmed, I'd like it if my students didn't give me more writing to analyze and grade than what I asked of them.”

Miss Granger's eyebrows scrunched together a little bit, and Harriet could almost hear her old friend complaining with great offense about how Harriet's work-ethic was getting in the way of her grading. Best to nip that in the bud.

“I believe I made myself rather clear during our first lesson, no? Miss Granger, you've written a wonderful account of trees, with a great amount of detail, when I asked for a forest.” Harriet shook her head, feeling a little nostalgic. “It's a fine line to walk, Miss Granger. Trust me, it's a balancing-act that you never quite outgrow, but it appears that this is a balancing-act that you haven't yet quite grasped. Details and trivia are all well and good, but if you can't summarize it properly within the allotted time or space, you'll have to learn to pick and choose which parts to keep and which to discard.”

Miss Granger looked suitably outraged at the idea of discarding any knowledge whatsoever, no matter how unimportant, but she remained obediently quiet. Harriet's old friend would've probably started hexing her by now, though whether that difference was due to their informal friendship, or because Harriet's old friend was a trigger-happy madwoman who'd barricaded herself in the Department of Mysteries for the better part of a week in order to not be interrupted in her research, who could say.

“It's part of why your textbook is so dreadfully lacking in details, for all that it's a very good summary of events. It's in fact so dreadfully lacking that it's considered somewhat infamous in how inaccurate it is.” Harriet suppressed the urge to smile at how Miss Granger's outrage nearly started to overflow into a proper tirade about the importance of good books. “But when it comes to summarizing events? It's quite literally the best one in its field.”

The girl paused at this, clearly thrown for something of a loop at the idea that an inaccurate book was still the best there was at being accurate.

“Now, back to your essay.” Harriet motioned towards the giant pile of parchment again. “Just this one time, I'm going to grade it as if it's thirteen inches long and simply written with very small letters, but I trust that you'll manage to keep it to the limit for the next time?”

Miss Granger nodded stiffly, and they said their goodbyes.

Hopefully, she'd learn from this, instead of just making the text so small it was nearly unreadable. But Harriet wouldn't exactly count on it. Hermione had always been a very opinionated individual, and she was kind of recklessly blunt in how she dealt with much of any issue she found herself faced with. Harriet wouldn't in the least put it past the girl to do something like that to spite Harriet's apparent dismissal of important things, like cramming more knowledge into a piece of parchment than it really ought to hold.

Chapter Text

When Harriet tracked down an unusually meandering Ravenclaw after dark, on a weekend in late October, she didn't expect to run into Luna Lovegood.

She also didn't expect Miss Lovegood to not be wearing any shoes.

In a distant way, Harriet had always known that Luna was being bullied by her housemates. The woman hadn't ever seem inclined to consider it 'bullying', and honestly cared very little for how other people thought of her, but that didn't mean that 'borrowing' someone's things and scattering them across the castle wasn't bullying.

When Harriet had first met Luna, in her own time-line, she hadn't really been able to do anything. She'd barely managed to keep afloat in the eyes of public opinion as it was, trying to do more than simply giving Luna a place to be away from her housemates had simply been beyond her. She'd never been able to do anything about the bullying directly, and she doubted that Luna's friendship with Harriet had been enough to stop the bullying from continuing elsewhere.

All in all, Harriet had been far too busy feeling sorry for herself – and suffering from PTSD in the wake of the civil war starting up silently in the background of the school – to spend too much time thinking about people that hadn't been herself. And by the time all of that had settled, they were all long-past school and whatever bullies there might've been there. As a result, whilst she'd always known about Luna's situation, she'd never really... connected the dots, in a way.

Miss Lovegood was twelve years old and wandering the drafty hallways of Hogwarts at night, in late October, without any shoes.

Apparently, she was in fact looking for her shoes, as they'd been what had gone missing this time.

Never anything like homework, or assignments or anything. For all that Ravenclaw wasn't filled to the brim with overambitious students, Filius would've absolutely noticed if one of his Ravenclaws repeatedly failed to turn something in, and he would've come down on the perpetrators with fiery wrath, even with minimal proof.

A loner in Ravenclaw? No big deal. A Ravenclaw who forgot their personal affects in random places around the school? There were plenty of scatterbrained students. A Ravenclaw who, despite Filius' constant attempts to drive home the importance of academical hard work, refused to actually turn in their assignments on time? No, that was a red flag for something going on.

Even if Filius might end up having suspected that Miss Lovegood was being bullied, he couldn't really do anything unless the perpetrators were caught red-handed. And he couldn't catch them red-handed without enough surveillance that he'd end up violating everyone's privacy. So all he could do in that situation was to have a word or two with his Prefects about taking care of the younger years, which would obviously not have any effect if the Prefects were busy with other things, or if they were sympathetic to the bullies.

So the bullies stayed far away from things like homework, and went for personal effects instead.

Unfortunately, much the same rules that bound Filius' hands on the matter, also bound Harriet's. With the added exception that Harriet wasn't able to talk with Prefects or show up in the common room and stumble across them red-handed by accident.

Fortunately however, Harriet could do something else. Which was why she gave the girl a pass to the Restricted Section, and commented absently about a certain book in there which included a great many ways to convince people that it wasn't worth taking things away from a place or individual. And that, should Miss Lovegood be unsure of exactly how to go about setting something like that up, then Harriet was always more than happy to explain some of the intricacies behind the process.

She included that last part mostly as a way to hopefully prevent Luna from laying a full-blooded Aztec curse on her housemates. There was one in particular mentioned in that book which turned the thief into what was basically a living inferi, damned to wander eternally without any satisfaction of flesh, unless they returned what was stolen along their own blood. And that was quite a bit too far in retaliation for stealing someone's shoes. Even if it was too bloody cold to wander around in just your socks.

What actually happened as a result of this interference however was that – when Miss Lovegood appeared on her doorstep a few days later – Harriet was presented with a very different curse than what she'd originally worried might've been an easy way to solve the problem. Instead, the curse that'd caught the girl's eye was one that stole the memories of everyone attempting to reach for the object that it was protecting.

Miss Lovegood's idea went somewhere along the lines of combining that forgetfulness-ward with a notice-me-not spell that was easily overcome by a determined individual. Which meant that someone would have to be actively looking for Miss Lovegood's things in particular, in order to trigger the ward. And, should they be truly determined enough to steal her things, there was a very distinct possibility that they'd probably lose a day or two of time, as their mind was constantly reset into a 'what was I doing'-state whenever they remembered that they were trying to steal her things and reached for them again. Which was hopefully not what would happen, because that amount of exposure to the ward wasn't exactly healthy.

Harriet had considered including a 'walk away'-effect on it as well, but when she'd suggested it to Miss Lovegood, the girl had simply tilted her head for a moment and then continued on with what she'd been doing as if Harriet hadn't said anything.

In some way, that should really worry Harriet, because there was a possibility that someone could end up hurt from that kind of thing. But unless those people were left in that loop for a very long time, it shouldn't be a problem. And considering that Miss Lovegood kept her things in the same dorm that she slept in, the odds of that happening without anyone interrupting it before it got that far was slim to none.

It was actually a pretty logical step to take, if she wanted to make sure that the bullies by caught red-handed. And Harriet could admit to finding a certain appeal in particularly malicious individuals trapping themselves in an endless loop of attempted-theft.

Not to mention that it'd be a good way to make sure that the bullies didn't simply shift their attention to an easier target. So Harriet didn't bring it up again, and with a few explanations from Harriet on the intricacies of the process, Luna spent the afternoon developing her new security-ward for her personal effects.

Harriet didn't know the details of what had happened after that, but she supposed that it was out of her hands by now.

And really, it'd been so peculiar that several of Filius' Ravenclaws didn't even show up for the Halloween Feast. Someone really ought to be investigating where they'd run off to, shouldn't they?

Harriet was pretty sure that Andromeda saw straight through her, but then Filius was already off to look into it, so Harriet simply hid her smile behind her tea and continued to feign ignorance.

XXX

“Whilst I'm sure that Miss Lovegood did indeed create an adaptation of the ward by herself, I would very much appreciate an explanation.” Filius said simply as he sat down.

Harriet could guess that it was simply the fact that Miss Lovegood really wasn't the type to lie. She could bend her words into pretzels in bizarre enough ways that the person listening would assume something completely unrelated to what she was saying, but she didn't really lie.

“I found her wandering the hallways in the middle of the night, without any shoes.” Harriet started. “Not like we can really do anything without proof and a perpetrator though, so I gave her a pass to the Restricted Section and mentioned the book.”

Filius' eyes narrowed dangerously for a moment, but then he just pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed. “And since you didn't want her to use something terrifyingly lethal, you asked her to discuss the content with you, correct?”

Harriet nodded. “From an academical stand-point, her choice in ward to alter, not to mention what she altered it into, was very interesting.” She smiled a little bit helplessly. “I tried to make sure that it didn't brute-force the memory-loss, because that can get nasty, and otherwise guided her through making a ward without blowing up the Ravenclaw tower in the process.”

Filius paused. “A small ward like that shouldn't have enough power to cause that kind of destruction.”

“Well, yes.” Harriet blinked. “It's designed like that. But if you get the feedback-loop of a self-sustaining ward wrong, especially in an environment with as high of a concentration of magic as Hogwarts? It'll unravel, and most of those times it just kind of sputters and dies, but sometimes it gets pretty violent.”

“How violent?” Filius now appeared thoroughly distracted by academical trivia, and hopefully he'd remain interested enough in the subject – as Harriet tried to explain how much things had to go wrong for a cascade-failure to happen – to let the whole Lovegood-incident drop.

She already knew that things were going to escalate in regards to her book's presence in the Restricted Section. Before this, it might've been an object of interest to anyone who recognized Harriet's name on the cover, or people actually interested in wards and old curses.

Considering how the Restricted Section was indeed rather restricted from casual browsing, and that people with interests in old curses generally were known as being crazy enough that most teachers with any sense would refuse to give them a pass? The book had lived a solitary existence in the Hogwarts library, until Miss Lovegood had touched it.

However, with Miss Lovegood having shown the school that exciting things could be done with wards made even by a second-year? The interest in the subject would explode, and odds were good that they'd manage to find out which book Miss Lovegood had read to do what she'd done.

From there, it was only a matter of time.

Students would read it, and probably experiment with it in ways that Harriet – or anyone sane – wouldn't recommend, before anyone managed to catch them. The incidents from this would inevitably lead to more students wanting to read the book, which would escalate with even more incidents for others to be inspired by.

All in all, Harriet really should've been a lot more careful in considering to give Miss Lovegood that pass than she actually had been.

Still, she didn't regret it. Miss Lovegood had a defense against her bullies, her bullies were too busy being under scrutiny to target anyone else, and Harriet had been allowed to follow through the girl's unique thought-process as they'd worked out an altered ward together.

It'd only been a few months since she'd left Yharnam, and Harriet was already missing the constant unraveling and puzzling with wards that was Curse Breaking. She didn't mind teaching, and she'd absolutely take the position rather than let some loon like Umbridge waltz in and use the position to spread propaganda, but she still missed the more 'hands on' part of her passion.

So, being allowed a moment's reprieve to discuss wards and how they could and would interact with things was a welcome breath of fresh air. The fact that it was with Miss Lovegood, whose understanding of common sense was something so bizarrely warped that Harriet had never quite managed to figure it out, just made it all the more entertaining.

Which she supposed was a good thing. At least Harriet now knew for sure that she had a favorite student. With that in mind, she could compensate for that favoritism to make sure it didn't affect her other students negatively.

A good outcome all around, really.

XXX

True to expectations, Harriet spent the better part of November desperately trying to keep the student population from doing anything suicidally stupid with the very frank and easy-to-understand explanations of her own book.

It'd been written mainly aimed at people who'd already completed their OWLs and had put some thought into becoming Curse Breakers on top of that. But well, Harriet disliked making things more complicated than they ought to be, and it was perfectly possible for a second-year to pull off some of the things she described. In theory, anyway.

There was a big difference between managing to cast the spell, understanding the theory of what it was doing to the ward, and mastering how the spell interacted with the ward.

Wards were notoriously finicky about a great many things, and if you introduced magic to it in a way that the ward managed to recognize as magic? There was a reason that Harriet didn't exactly just waltz into digs and start unraveling wards without carefully puzzling out what the hell they actually did first.

No Curse Breaker did stuff like that and lived for long enough to be any kind of role-model.

Unfortunately, the subtleties between an ability to understand the theory and an ability to actually perform what was necessary, were hopelessly lost on teenagers. Not that Harriet could really point fingers about that. She hadn't figured any of that stuff out until she'd been well into her twenties, let alone when she'd still been in school.

And she would've absolutely tried to do it anyway, just because it'd be cool. Not that her friends would've been far behind her, what with Hermione's fanatical obsession with knowing more things, and Ron's inability to talk himself out of getting dragged to the library if they ganged up on him.

Ron would've honestly been the only one of the three of them who would've said a few sensibly hesitant words about experimenting with wards before being overruled, too.

Harriet had a lot of sympathy for the poor sods who'd been trying to keep her alive all those years. Admittedly, they'd been godawful at it and should've probably have ended up on some kind of list in regards to child-endangerment of some degree. But Harriet had definitely not been an innocent victim in how often she'd stumbled across some new exciting way to get herself killed.

The trick to Curse Breaking generally came down to convincing a ward to unravel itself, without doing so explosively. And then making sure that none of the wards connected to that ward, or indirectly neighboring that ward, or any wards that were sympathetically linked through various other potential anchor-points, or that were simply used as support for a ward that linked them together-...

Basically, the trick was to make sure that the unraveling was contained to only the single ward, usually by untangling it from its neighbors, and then making sure that nothing horrifically exploded, and that no other ward reacted quickly enough to realize what was happening and trigger a 'violent defense'-part in retaliation.

Warders tended to be just as knowledgeable about Curse Breaking as most Curse Breakers, and so they always made sure that the 'easy solution' was the wrong option to pick.

It was a bit like telling everyone that fire was the best way to fight inferi, and then expecting the guy raising inferi not to make the inferi either fire-proof or place them in a chamber filled with flammable gases.

If you went to the effort of raising an inferi, it only made sense to look into how people disabled them, and then figure out some way to counteract that. Whether that meant hiding them in sea-water until they were soaked in water to the very bone, or by hiding napalm inside of their lungs, that was entirely up to the inferi-raiser's discretion.

Needless to say, Harriet was very grateful that most of her students were at least sensible enough to use the most basic of the 'identify and stop'-type wards that she'd described for their experiments. It meant that when they inevitably failed to break through it with what should've been a simple spell to confuse it, and instead had it blow up in their faces? Well, even if Harriet didn't manage to catch and stop them in time, a quick visit to Madam Pomfrey was enough to grow their eyebrows back.

That however, didn't stop Pomfrey from glaring at Harriet every time a new student showed up at her doorstep with ward-related injuries.

So the day when Hermione Granger inevitably showed the undeniable signs of the contamination-charm that Harriet had set up around the book? Harriet did the sensible thing and literally gave her detention on the spot.

Hermione was exactly the kind of person who'd jump in the deep end of creating an extremely complex ward, because it'd be very interesting to see how she could alter it. And then, once she'd finally satisfied herself with setting up a near-impenetrable ward, she'd cheerfully decide that it was time to learn how to break through the ward, starting – of course – with the potentially-lethal thing that she'd just created.

And even if Miss Granger broke away from that habit of hers, by having a smidgen of self-preservation in the pursuit of knowledge, and actually set up a basic ward? She'd be going in and out of the Hospital Wing so many times that they might as well set up a revolving door with her name on it.

Miss Granger was nothing if not stubborn to a fault. One failure with a ward would leave her convinced that she'd only missed that one thing that made it blow up, and then she'd convince herself that maybe it'd been another thing this time.

Harriet didn't doubt that the girl would absolutely learn how to do Curse Breaking with that kind of stubborn approach to things. But she'd also quite possibly end up looking like the second coming of Mad-Eye Moody, and that was an explanation that Harriet really didn't want to have with the girl's parents.

Miss Granger was – perhaps understandably – appalled at being given a detention for no reason at all. To the point where she very nearly spontaneously combusted on the spot out of sheer indignation.

Thankfully for Harriet's plans, rather than have the girl start screeching at the top of her lungs that she was innocent of any wrong-doings and that Harriet was deliberately harassing her, Mr Weasley smacked his hand over her mouth, said that she understood, and then dragged her off around a corner.

Left behind in Mr Weasley's sudden retreat, Mr Potter spent a few long moments glaring suspiciously at Harriet, before nodding with stiff politeness and disappearing off after his friends.

She was really going to have to clear that mess up before those three lit her on fire during a quidditch-game.

Harriet was far too fond of quidditch to have it be interrupted like that. Even if it was a pretty neat spell.

XXX

Miss Granger's detention went about as well as Harriet had expected it to.

The girl sat very rigidly in her seat and pretended to be above Harriet's extensive lecture about the safety-precautions of Curse Breaking.

Miss Granger was under the impression that she wasn't anywhere near reckless enough for there to be any reason for someone to lecture her about safety and common sense. She also considered herself amazingly clever, and a book had explained things very easily to her, so obviously it wasn't a complicated process.

This was the kind of shit that'd turned Harriet into a stressed-out wreck after a single year of teaching DADA.

The worst part was that she couldn't even do the old-people-thing and complain about the youth of today, because she was literally complaining about her own generation. Time-travel was horrible.

Then Harriet very carefully walked Miss Granger through a few simpler wards, and a few simpler ways to bypass those wards. Before finally giving up on the idea that Miss Granger could be convinced to only do these kinds of thing under the supervision of someone who actually knew what they were doing.

Instead, Harriet made her follow her down to the lake. It wasn't the best of spots, but for all that the wards of Hogwarts covered both the castle and the grounds surrounding it, the lake was a bit of a dead zone.

It helped that – since water was constantly removed and replaced, due to evaporation and the like – magic became a lot less saturated in the presence of big reservoirs of water. This having been known even during the founding of Hogwarts, the Founders had done the sensible thing and made sure that the wards were comfortably distant from the lake.

Which made it the only spot within Hogwarts ground where the odds of a minor cascade-failure transforming into a cascade-failure big enough to vaporize all of Hogwarts in an instant was basically nonexistent.

After that, Harriet demonstrated a slightly different and more complex ward, and then had Miss Granger try to break through it with some of the methods she'd learnt from the book.

Needless to say, not having any real 'feel' of how the magic interacted or resonated, Miss Granger was woefully under-equipped for disassembling the ward in question, despite its seemingly simplistic nature.

And so, for the first time in what was likely well over a century, a cascade-failure was triggered on Hogwarts's grounds.

Which promptly woke up literally the entire castle, because it was about as subtle as a few stacks of dynamite.

So, obviously, lots of people showed up to complain about it.

Pomona yelled at Harriet for worrying everyone, and then hurried back inside to calm down the students who wouldn't know what had happened. Sirius carried a mostly shell-shocked Miss Granger back to her dorm – after first making sure that she was uninjured – an expression on his face that promised further discussion when he returned.

Sybill made a brief appearance to rant about how thunderous explosions were a sign that someone would end up dead before the end of the day, before disappearing back into the castle. Hagrid poked his head out of his cabin, and then disappeared into the Forest, likely to make sure that they hadn't spooked too many animals.

Andromeda and Filius seemed about equally unimpressed, which was vaguely terrifying, because Harriet hadn't actually seen Andromeda make that face since Teddy turned eight and the birthday-party got a bit out of hand.

Snape basically appeared in the doorway, sneered in a way that was actually visible even at that kind of distance, and then swooped away to stew in his continued outrage by his lonesome.

And from the way Minerva's hands were twitching, she was either trying to keep herself from strangling Harriet on the spot, or she was considering going for her wand.

Which... was fair enough, Harriet supposed.

It wasn't quite up against curfew yet, but it wasn't all that far away from it – trying to first educate Miss Granger into submission had taken its time – and she'd set off a cascade-failure within Hogwarts's wards.

Not actually in an area that even remotely brushed up against the wards, or that was surrounded by magic that led to those wards, but very much still within the wards of the land.

Yes, she'd made sure that it was as small-scale as it could possibly be, and she'd taken various precautions to 'dampen' the risk of it expanding further, and to keep any shock-wave from causing undue damage to anything inside of the lake.

But there was a reason that cascade-failures were the kind of things that Curse Breakers told horror-stories to each other about.

Harriet could still very distinctly remember going down into the valley in order to fetch some supplies, and nearly being knocked off her feet when the mountain-top she'd just been on vanished without a trace. She could vaguely recall the aftermath of trying to explain what little she'd seen about what had happened to the magical government, and she was aware that they'd ended up explaining it away as a volcano-eruption, but the memory was hazy from the stunned horror of it all.

That image of a mountain without a mountain-top would likely haunt her for the rest of her life.

So yes, she wholeheartedly understood why Minerva and the rest might have some serious issues with Harriet playing around with cascade-failures in a place filled with people. On the other hand, Miss Granger was exactly the kind of person who'd be trying to do everything by herself, until she couldn't.

And if Harriet had to traumatize that girl a little bit, in order to convince her to not experiment with wards without supervision, in a place where she could kill off hundreds of innocents in the blink of an eye?

She didn't like it, but she'd made harsher sacrifices for the greater good than that.

XXX

In the aftermath of what became known as the 'Granger incident' – though the main instigator had been Harriet herself, technically – Harriet came to an unfortunate realization. Or rather, she came to a realization that had some unfortunate implications.

Harriet had originally decided to set up the warning-system on the dorms as a way to hopefully catch Harry Potter after dark, where nobody would be the wiser if she exorcised his scar and pretended as if she hadn't done anything at all.

Unfortunately, for that idea to work, she would need to actually knock out and temporarily kidnap one of her students.

Harriet had done a lot of things she weren't proud of over the years. But ambushing and magically attacking one of her own students, even if it was done with their best interest at heart? No, that was definitely crossing a line that Harriet didn't even want to come close to touching.

So she needed to actually tell Mr Potter what she was doing and why. Which meant that she'd need him to agree with her. Which meant that she needed to come off as wholeheartedly trustworthy in regards to the safety of her students. Which meant that she probably needed to give him time to think about it, and probably contact his parents for advice.

In other words, if she went after the horcrux in Harry's scar, she'd very much run the risk of becoming 'the one who vanquished Voldemort' in the eyes of the public. Even if Mr Potter didn't blab, his parents might, and even if they only told someone trustworthy – like Dumbledore and his Order – Harriet had about as much faith in the Order's ability to keep secrets as she had that a sieve suspended over the Daily Prophet printing-press would be enough to keep the manure they called reporting off its pages.

As in, if Harriet wanted to help Mr Potter with his scar, then any attempt she made to remain out of the public eye in regards to Dark Lords was doomed to failure. And even if it wasn't, she'd definitely be put under the wary gaze of Dumbledore's constantly twinkling eyes.

Admittedly, the man had lost a lot of clout when he'd been fired from his position as Headmaster, but Harriet sincerely doubted that that had in any way stopped his tendency to scheme.

Harriet had had an... awkward and very complicated relationship with the Albus Dumbledore of her own time-line. He'd been a grandfather-figure she'd desperately needed, and he'd given a lot of good advice that she still kept close to her heart. He'd also been a manipulative bastard, raising her for the sake of a suicide-attack on Voldemort, with so many goddamn layers mixed into it all that Harriet really couldn't tell how deeply his plans ran and how much had been pure luck and coincidence that the man had played off as being perfectly within his calculations.

He'd been a complicated man, Dumbledore. And though Harriet had mourned his passing bitterly, she'd also at times been very tempted to dig up his grave just so she could punch him in his rotting face.

Considering all of that, she really didn't want to end up under the man's scrutiny. Perhaps he would manage to figure out where she came from and how she was related to the prophecy with the Boy-Who-Lived, perhaps he wouldn't. Either way, it sounded like it would definitely be a bad time to be Harriet Azalea.

Still, she couldn't in good conscience leave Mr Potter's scar alone.

She needed to exorcise the scar, but in order to do that, she needed to have a heart-to-heart with Mr Potter somewhere where nobody would risk interrupting them. Hopefully, also somewhere where nobody would wonder exactly what she'd been talking to him about, if Mr Potter came back to his friends looking like he had a noose tied around his neck.

In other words, the plan to ambush him after dark was still her best chance. She just needed to ambush him with a conversation, rather than stunning-spells.

After that, she needed to impress on his overly dramatic head that she could very much fix the scar, and that he was free to take the details of the ritual to his mother. She was even willing to accept that the boy's parents were informed of who'd told him about it, but that if they reached out to professionals of either Curse Breaking or exorcism or soul-magic in general, that they keep her name out of it, and play it off as something that Mr and Mrs Potter had discovered on their own.

In other words, she needed to tell young Mr Potter about his scar being a horcrux, reassure him that it was entirely possible to get it out of his head without killing him, slip him a piece of paper with the full extent of the ritual, and then tell him to go talk to his parents about it with the caveat that they not spread her name around.

She was really grateful that she'd actually planned that out beforehand, because it meant that she could mostly ignore the way the boy's face drained of color when she pointed out that the Dark magic surrounding his scar was something a little bit more than curse-residue.

Ignore it and focus on what mattered. Reassurance and an appeal to go talk it over with his parents so that they could decide whether she was full of crap or not. Then she patted him on the shoulder and aimed him back towards the Gryffindor dorms.

Why, it barely took her five minutes to completely shift the boy's world-view and send him spiraling off into making exactly the kind of expression a kid who'd just lost a lot of House-points might wear upon their return to their classmates.

Boom, perfect cover.

Maybe there really was something to this 'planning ahead' crap?

XXX

Honestly, she'd actually ended up missing Snape's final inevitable breakdown entirely.

She'd been in the middle of reading through Mr Malfoy's newest essay on why Harriet didn't understand anything at all about history. This time, rather than tell her that pureblood society was something that someone not of the Ancient and Noble families could ever understand, he'd gone the route of instead proclaiming that women couldn't comprehend the importance of what the men of history had achieved.

Harriet was sincerely tempted to mail a copy of the essay straight to Mrs Malfoy and let the woman sort out her son's apparent burgeoning misogyny. Harriet was very curious whether or not it would result in the woman actually lowering herself to using a howler.

Then again, she wasn't sure whether or not it would be against the rules to share a student's essays like that, whether those rules be legal or cultural. She'd probably have to talk with Filius about it before deciding on anything, but it was definitely an entertaining image.

By the time she'd made it out of her classroom and down to the Great Hall to catch the tail-end of dinner, the whole thing had already finished.

The basics of it was that the twins had pulled another prank, this time with Snape as the target. Harriet had wondered what they'd been up to yesterday when she'd given them detention for wandering around after dark, after the usual half-hour chase through tunnels that was them trying to use the Marauder's Map to dodge her. As a result of the prank, Snape had been colored bright pink for a few moments until he'd figured out how to reverse it, having gone through a veritable rainbow before succeeding at it.

He'd been able to guess that it was the Weasley-twins that'd been responsible, and had perfectly sensibly giving them detention for a week. It wasn't like Snape wasn't allowed to give students detentions, he just needed to have a good reason, and this was definitely that.

Unfortunately for Snape, things didn't stop there.

With his temper already up in flames, he'd started taking points from everyone who'd laughed and jeered at him whilst he'd been trying to reverse the spell-work. Which escalated into him giving detentions and yelling out point-losses to completely uninvolved individuals who'd stumbled onto the scene after he'd already turned back to normal.

Snape might've been able to save himself if he'd settled for giving detentions to the students who laughed, since they were technically mocking a Professor. But going after even complete innocents, just because his temper was already running high?

No, Minerva had gotten called to the scene and had more-or-less thrown the man bodily out of the school, with his belongings packed up in a trunk and dumped by the house-elves next to him mere moments later.

It'd been quite the impressive spectacle, and Harriet was a bit upset that she'd missed it.

The Weasley-twins got another week's worth of detentions in the aftermath, mainly because Minerva caught them celebrating Snape being thrown out. They might've had good reason to celebrate, but Minerva clearly hadn't been very successful in trying to find a new Potions Professor, and didn't appreciate that her attempts to stall for time had been foiled by their newest prank.

It was... maybe a bit hypocritical? To demand that Snape have a good and sensible reason for giving out punishments, and then giving two students a full extra week of detentions because their prank had inadvertently given her a headache.

The twins didn't seem to mind, and nobody else were really going to bother bringing it up. Minerva had been running herself ragged trying to keep up with all of her duties, even if she seemed to be doing well with the general paperwork. It all came down to the bunch of extra-duties of things like keeping an eye on Snape, keeping an eye on Filch – after a few disturbingly honest-sounding comments from the man about how they should bring back flogging as a disciplinary measure – keeping an eye on Sirius to make sure that he didn't somehow run Gryffindor into the ground as the new Head of House, dealing with the remaining political fallout of Dumbledore being fired, and various complaints from 'traditionalist' purebloods who very much didn't approve of Harriet changing the History-curriculum.

Harriet had offered to deal with the complaints about her teaching-methods on her own, but Minerva had nixed it after Harriet reluctantly admitted that she'd probably resort to breaking-and-entering and some really obscure ancient curses.

Apparently, undoing people's ability to speak in any recognizable language – until St Mungos managed to actually hire someone capable of breaking the curse – for their own inability to proclaim that their accomplishments were without parallel, was frowned upon.

Which was kind of unfair, because Harriet had made sure to tone down Babel's curse enough that it only limited itself to the idiots actually spewing the garbage, instead of targeting literally everyone in the country at once. It was a massive improvement, but Minerva wouldn't hear it, and had sent Harriet to talk 'ethics' with Filius in the aftermath.

It wasn't that Harriet didn't understand that she couldn't curse everyone who disagreed with her, but rather that the idea of allowing another Binns to take up the position of History Professor was very much the kind of thing that could motivate Harriet into setting up a few 'accidents' for the instigators to stumble across. Permanent accidents.

Filius listened to that for barely five minutes, before telling her to go talk to Pomona instead, because she was giving him ideas and he didn't appreciate the temptation.

By the time Harriet ended up drinking tea with Andromeda and explaining about why several of their colleagues had made her wander around the castle talking about ethics, her own initial feelings of horrible vengeance against anyone attempting to reinvent Binns had mostly faded. Which was probably a good thing, because Andromeda just raised an eyebrow at her, and then told her that ethics only mattered if you got caught.

Which... definitely sounded like the kind of thing she'd expect from the woman who in one time-line had taught Harriet how to change diapers by blackmailing her into it.

Regardless, by the time the winter-exams rolled around, Snape was gone, and Poppy Pomfrey was briefly shanghaied into grading the Potions exam. She was very vocal about refusing to actually become the Potions Professor however, and so Minerva's frantic search continued.

XXX

“Whilst her son still studies here?” Andromeda raised an eyebrow at Minerva, sounding highly skeptical.

“To hell with tradition, it's an emergency, and she could do it!” Minerva argued.

Andromeda didn't lower her eyebrow. “Despite being 'Mrs Potter' she's still a muggleborn, Minerva.”

Pomona bristled in the background. “What has that got to do with anything?”

Andromeda let her face slip back into a more neutral expression. “The Board of Governors might be willing to let it slide, considering that it's an emergency. But for a muggleborn? They'd make our dear Headmistress pay through the nose for it.”

“But the Headmistress is the one responsible for hiring new teachers!” Pomona frowned at her.

Harriet very deliberately didn't make a noise, having long since learned to stay the hell out of anything with even the vaguest inkling of being a political discussion. The last time Hermione had managed to catch her in one of those, Harriet had ended up punching a Wizengamot-member in the face.

She'd had to go through all of the wards on their summer manor in order to do so too, and had only really gotten off from legal measures on the technicality of nobody being entirely sure if there was anyone around who actually could arrest her.

Ron had spent the next three months cracking up whenever he saw her, and Hermione had hesitantly admitted that in hindsight perhaps she shouldn't be trying to get Harriet to actively participate in the political process. Didn't stop her from complaining endlessly, but at least she didn't expect Harriet to do anything about it, so that was something of a 'win' at least.

“Politics.” Sirius agreed from his own chair, sounding very much like it was the swear-word that it ought to be classified as.

The Board might not be able to stop Minerva from hiring whoever she pleased, but they could definitely express their displeasure by making her work a lot harder in a lot of other ways.

“Maybe talk to the schools on the continent? See if they know anyone who might classify?” Harriet suggested, hoping to steer the conversation away from the unpleasant game of political compromises.

Much like Binns had scared off students from History, Snape had done his very best to scare students away from Potions. Or perhaps he'd done it accidentally, Harriet couldn't actually tell if the man just simply enjoyed being a sack of hateful pus, or if he was trying to accomplish anything with it as well.

Either way, finding a Potions Master capable of becoming a teacher from after Snape had taken over teaching Potions at Hogwarts? There weren't any. And of the ones who'd been around before Snape had appeared? Either they were retirement-age, or happily employed with very good job-security, or were about as bad as Snape had been with children, or they'd been killed during the war, or they'd left for the continent.

Trying to recruit a foreigner as their new Potions Professor was probably going to go over about as well as recruiting Lily Potter, as far as the Board was concerned. And there was definitely a language-barrier, not to mention whatever cultural practices might end up being included in the mess of it all.

But, considering how many people had simply run away from the British Isles during Voldemort's rise to power, there was a good chance that a few of the magical schools might know of a British Potions Master who'd be capable of working as a teacher.

“Already tried.” Minerva slumped back in her chair. “The few who might be suitable would demand a hell of a lot more than we'd be capable of offering. And even the ones we don't want would've demanded a longer time to prepare for the position than what we have available.”

“Grab Lily anyway and take the hit from the Board?” Sirius suggested, looking vaguely dubious.

Everyone knew how hard Minerva was already working. Trying to imagine what the Board might try to pour onto her plate in petty retaliation for an old tradition being discarded? It didn't sound like it would end well.

But what other options did they have?

XXX

Miss Granger's essay-writing had improved substantially.

Her essays had always been highly informative in their own ways, but they'd finally reached the point where they could be considered as a to-the-point analysis of historical events. Which was a massive step in the right direction, considering how disjointedly rambling and shock-full of trivia that they'd used to be.

Before, Harriet could've honestly said that Miss Granger had read the course-material to the fullest. Now, Harriet could say that she'd actually absorbed and sifted through the course-material for the arguments that would allow her to make her point in the best manner possible.

Another few years more of practice, and Miss Granger would easily be the best essay-writer in school, unless something unexpected happen.

Miss Lovegood had made a very compelling argument about the Rotfang Conspiracy having existed since the early seventeen-hundreds, and Harriet had made a copy of it as a keepsake. Though she wasn't a believer of it – and she wasn't entirely sure if Miss Lovegood was either, or if she just enjoyed messing with people – Harriet couldn't deny that some of the girl's logic and chosen events were lining up rather well with both reality and the ideas behind the conspiracy.

It was utterly delightful, and Harriet told the girl as much, though she was unfortunately forced to mark it down slightly on behalf of a few rather insubstantial pieces of evidence, as well as some of the circular logic in her assuming that the Ministry couldn't actually be corrupt and incompetent enough to have been doing some of the 'signs' of the conspiracy for centuries.

Harriet had met several politicians in her lifetime, and they absolutely could be incompetent and corrupt enough to keep doing the same stupid things for centuries, no extra conspiracy-theory required.

The youngest Mr Weasley scraped by, as was his usual habit, though there were some clear hints that – even if he'd been thinking on his feet and likely flying by the seat of his pants – he definitely understood how events could've spiraled in certain directions. A very good grasp of analysis and empathetic thought, but clearly lacking in the coherent factual information he would've had if he'd actually read what he ought to.

The twin Messrs Weasleys both had a rather disappointingly one-track mind, in that they tended to focus on interesting inventions through the ages. It wasn't too bad, and they could usually bend it either towards what had caused those inventions to develop, or what those developing technologies had done to change society in their wake. Good things to be aware of for two burgeoning inventors, but perhaps not the supposed full extent of the actual curriculum.

Miss Weasley had done some good work with quidditch being the main focus, which Harriet was willing to let slide considering that she was only in her second year. She did make a note that perhaps Miss Weasley ought to avoid focusing so heavily on sports in historical context for future essays, at least until she graduated and could write her own book on it, since the curriculum of the class was supposed to be rather a lot wider in scope than that.

Mr Malfoy had finally grasped onto some of the bare-bones of lying through statistics, and Harriet wasn't sure if she was proud or disgusted by it. She did however leave a note praising him for making use of muggle-technology in order to prove a point about how muggles were useless. Beyond that, she marked him down for the usage of 'mudblood' in his text, and went off to complain to Andromeda about the horrendous state of Slytherin of today.

Mr Crabbe and Mr Goyle had literally copied each other's texts, and it was-... She didn't know which one had actually written the 'original', but either way it was about as godawful as she could imagine any text to be. Had it been spelling-errors she might've traced it down to dyslexia, but it was just-... really badly written. It might still be dyslexia, just displaying itself in how they were so focused on trying to write that they couldn't concentrate on thinking about what they were writing, but Merlin's soggy underpants .

She gave them both extra homework, and told them to talk to her before leaving for Christmas. Silently resigning herself to dig up a brief lecture on dyslexia, and then grill the both of them into figuring out if they actually had a learning-disorder, or if they were simply inbred idiots who considered racism to be a charming character-trait.

It could really go either way.

And those were basically the highlights of her History-exam, which had mostly consisted of asking them to write an essay about certain moments in history. And Harriet was still amazed that Mr Malfoy had managed to spin that into racism, but there had been a few laws pushed through the Wizengamot about muggle-hunting during the set time-frame, so he wasn't violating that at least.

It was definitely a bit creepy to think about why a thirteen-year-old might have reason to know about a law against muggle-hunting back in the sixteen-hundreds – let alone be able to accurately date it – but at least it didn't contradict the assignment outright.

Thankfully, Andromeda was going to be taking over as the new Head of House for Slytherin, so if anyone needed to contact Mr Malfoy's parents over his conduct and classwork, it wouldn't have to be Harriet. Which she was grateful for, because Harriet had never been all that good with polite correspondence, and sending Mrs Malfoy a howler about at least keeping their appallingly rampant racism behind closed door – so that they could at least pretend to be 'civilized folk' – was probably not socially acceptable.

Funny? Absolutely. But probably the kind of thing that convinced Minerva to take shots of whiskey whilst glaring at her from behind a mountain of paperwork again.

That'd been a really awkward three hours.

XXX

Harriet had been keeping herself busy.

First, there'd been Yharnam and writing out her books, then there'd been Binns, then she'd needed to work on a lesson-plan, then she'd needed to deal with her students, then she'd been thinking and worrying about the whole Voldemort-issue.

It'd been nearly a full year since she landed herself in this world.

It was Christmas Day. Most of the students had packed up and left for the winter holiday, and several teachers had followed them out.

It was perhaps quieter than what was normal for Hogwarts, but that wasn't necessarily saying much. In comparison to the amount of students, Hogwarts was at times hauntingly large, and for all that its thick stone walls didn't do much to keep out the cold, they did a much better job at muffling whatever was happening behind them.

But Christmas Day was one of the few times of the year where Harriet inevitably found herself in Britain for long enough to spend the day with her godson. And that was even before she'd switched careers into Curse Breaking, at which point-... Well, digs didn't exactly run away, so if you needed to take a few days off from work?

For all that her schedule had become even more prone to leaving for places unknown at the drop of a hat, she'd become near-impeccable about making time for Teddy around holidays and other big events.

So now she was sitting in Hogwarts, in her somewhat cozy bedroom, staring at the foot of her bed.

Usually, she started Christmas Day by having Teddy bother her into waking up. Though he'd somewhat thankfully grown too old to be gleefully jumping up and down in her bed, yelling about presents, before finally resorting to brute force to push Harriet out of bed when she loudly proclaimed that she was planning on sleeping until New Years.

She kind of missed those days of childishness, now that Teddy was old enough that he was sneaky enough to simply bring in a bucket of water with him. He hadn't managed to empty it over her yet, but then he hadn't really been trying. He was a sweet kid, even if he'd inherited some of his grandmother's sense of humor.

By now, Harriet's and Teddy's confrontation over Harriet waking up for Christmas Day was a time-honored tradition, and Harriet was endlessly fond of it.

The foot of her bed was empty.

Normally, there'd be half-a-dozen presents scattered all across it. Books from Hermione, interesting junk from Ron, a sweater from Molly, some kind of rock from Ginny – who petulantly refused to acknowledge that geology and archeology were different fields of research – something hastily-wrapped and probably-dangerous from Hagrid, a polite card from Percy, something obscure and also-possibly-dangerous from Bill and Fleur, supposed evidence of conspiracies from Luna, something thoughtfully useful from Andromeda, and whatever bizarre thing had caught Teddy's eye for that year.

It wasn't so bad, not receiving gifts. For all that she'd arrived in this world with not even the clothes on her back, she had enough money by now to buy herself most anything she needed, and for all that it wouldn't be surprising to do it herself, she wouldn't even have minded if the lot of them had sent her boxes upon boxes of socks.

No, the problem was that-...

It was easy to forget things in day-to-day life. She spent a lot of time away from her friends and family, and for all that some of her students shared the names of her friends, they were very different people. Certainly, they reminded her of them constantly, but she'd met plenty of people on her travels that reminded her of her friends. It was easy to ignore it, especially when she kept herself busy with work.

Logically, she'd even expected it. It wasn't like she'd gone out to buy presents for Teddy, after all. For all that they were separated, Teddy was still alive and so were all of her friends. The one who'd died was Harriet, though the technicalities of that might be up for debate.

Was it possible to mourn someone who wasn't even hurt? Because this feeling was very similar to those days she'd spent staring at the ceiling on Privet Drive, remembering Sirius's surprised face as he slipped and fell through the Veil.

It was so ridiculous to think that accidentally stranding herself in a different world and time-line should be as bad as mourning the death of a loved one.

But Christmas was when they all gathered back together.

And the emptiness of her bedroom was heartbreaking in a way that she couldn't describe.

Chapter Text

“A horcrux, huh?”

Harriet sighed slightly, having mostly expected this to be the man's reason for seeking her out in her quarters, but still not exactly delighted to have her suspicions confirmed.

Harriet hadn't really interacted with Sirius. Some of this could be traced to the fact that the man had spent the last few months trying to sort out what he actually needed to be doing as the new Head of House for Gryffindor. Some of it could be traced to the fact that Sirius enjoyed more active pursuits than drinking tea and making polite small-talk about grades, or arguing about magical theory. Some of it could be traced to Harriet semi-actively avoiding the man who reminded her so bizarrely awkwardly of the hollowed-out shell of a man that had been her beloved godfather.

However, apparently the Potters had either decided to share Harriet's name despite her urging, or Sirius had figured out that neither of the Potters had been behind the discovery about young Mr Potter's scar. After that, it would've probably been easy for him to guess that the discovery had instead come from young Mr Potter's side of things, except the boy wasn't big on researching horrifically Dark magic. Of course, this aimed suspicion towards the new adults in the boy's life, one of whom was one of Sirius's own cousins who avoided Dark magic as much as she avoided most pureblood-things, and the other whom was an avid researcher of ancient and best-forgotten magics.

In light of that, perhaps it shouldn't have come as much of a surprise that Sirius confronted her about it.

“Sealed by blood-magic, it seemed like, but yes.” Harriet agreed, reaching for her tea. “I can only assume that it belongs to a certain Dark Lord, and much as I don't want to get involved, the boy is a student of mine.”

“So you dump the knowledge that he has a piece of You-Know-Who's soul in his forehead on him, right before his exams?” Sirius stared at her, a wary expression on his face, for all that he kept his tone light. “Classy.”

Harriet frowned. “He's a third-year and it's not even the end of the year. The exam-results don't actually matter. Especially in comparison to his health.”

Sirius took a sip of his own tea, still watching Harriet warily. “And why are you so determined not to get involved?”

Harriet paused, not entirely sure how to explain it without coming off as crazy. A large portion of it simply came down to Harriet having a lot of feelings about being in any way involved with Dumbledore's plans for the future. Having lived most of her childhood in the man's manipulative shadow, she didn't have any real desire to go back there.

She'd forgiven him for his actions, true. But forgiving was very different from forgetting, and just because she was willing to allow bygones to remain bygones in her old world, that was a very different situation. For one, Dumbledore was dead; for another, the war had been won, in large parts due to the man's constant scheming.

This time-line hadn't even reached the point where Voldemort fought his way back to having a real body, let alone restarting the war. And Dumbledore was perfectly healthy, even if he'd lost his position as Headmaster.

Harriet was willing to forgive the man of her memories, but she didn't trust that man – or this alternate version of him – as far as she could throw him. And if Harriet started taking clearly-observable steps to vanquish Voldemort once and for all, Dumbledore would absolutely want to meet her. Meet, and likely find some way to manipulate her.

So, in order to avoid exposing herself to the man who could make her life a pain in the arse, she was willing to leap through more than a few hoops.

But trying to explain that to Sirius – who'd at least in one time-line been part of the Order, and had worked under Dumbledore in this world for several years – wasn't exactly the easiest thing. At least not without also confessing a lot of truths that Harriet would rather not have people know about.

A different approach would be needed.

“I'm an archeologist, not a hit-wizard.” Harriet made a motion towards herself. “Could I survive a bunch of people wanting to kill me for bringing down their Dark Lord? Probably. Do I have any interest in being chased around the world and ambushed randomly whilst I'm in the middle of messing around with highly volatile magic? No.”

“You're scared?” Sirius sounded like he wasn't quite sure if the notion of fear was distasteful, or if he simply blatantly doubted Harriet's supposed motivation.

Harriet shrugged at him, turning back to her tea. “There's always going to be a new tosser wanting to take over the world. I'd rather prefer if the government did their job in dealing with them, but I've also long since sworn off ever entering politics, so my hands are a bit tied on the subject.”

“You don't think you could make a difference-?” Sirius started, more than a bit outraged at the idea. Likely because of the political mayhem that'd been the Potters furious search for a necromancer for the last year.

“I'm not a patient woman, Sirius.” Harriet interrupted him, tone a bit sharper than she probably should've allowed. She paused, sighing again. “Politics is a slow process. Magical Britain is certainly corrupt enough to make anyone doubt the system, but that's really not the point.”

“Then what's the point?” Sirius asked, leaning back in his seat with a skeptical look on his face.

“The point is that if I addressed the Wizengamot? I'd be doing it with a wand aimed at their face and a list of demands to be met within the hour.” Harriet shook her head. “And whilst it'd be immensely cathartic, and surprisingly likely to end with them actually meeting the demands, I'd rather not deal with the inevitable consequences.”

Sirius's jaw dropped slightly, clearly not having expected that particular explanation.

“So, rather than be declared a 'new Dark Lord' by whatever news-outlet dared to speak my name, I promised myself that I would never get involved in politics.” Harriet gave the man a wry smile. “And defeating a Dark Lord? Discovering the truth behind the scar of the Boy-Who-Lived? Giving the Potters the means to save their son?” She shook her head. “They're all certainly very noble goals, but they're unfortunately close to being outright political ones too.”

There was a long moment of silence, as Sirius processed that, before he spoke again. “So why did you do it?”

Harriet didn't bother looking up from her tea. “Because he's my student.”

And she owed the boy's sister at least that much.

XXX

Minerva actually did end up choosing to risk a grudge from the Board by inviting Lily Potter to teach Potions. However, Mrs Potter turned her down, stating that she was currently embroiled in a rather important and time-essential project and would be unable to teach much of anyone at all for several months, let alone be able to suddenly establish the curriculum for seven years worth of students within the span of a few weeks.

Mrs Potter gave a few suggestions, not the least of which being to find something to bribe Slughorn with to get him out of retirement. Unfortunately, the only thing Minerva could really offer on that front – beyond the obvious act of reinstating the somewhat infamous Slug Club – was to hint that he would be teaching the Boy-Who-Lived.

In Harriet's old time-line, that would've worked splendidly, for all that Dumbledore had probably offered it as something halfway to being a threat. In this time-line? Well, Lily Potter had been a member of the Slug Club when she herself had been a student at Hogwarts, and had actually been rather fond of the man.

A fondness which would easily allow Slughorn a bit of leeway if he ever really had reason to ask for assistance with something vaguely related to the Boy-Who-Lived.

Slughorn might never be able to truly bring the young Mr Potter under his wing. At least not without his mother having some very pointed words with him on the subject. But he could easily swing a few autographs, or a few friendly words and handshakes. And when dealing with a famous young man?

There were plenty of reasons for Slughorn to actually avoid trying to tie himself too tightly to the Boy-Who-Lived. And so his current position of not being the boy's teacher was likely far too convenient for him to be tempted into picking up his old position at the school by Harry Potter's name alone.

Needless to say, Minerva didn't actually manage to recruit Slughorn either, despite hinting that he'd likely be doing Mrs Potter a favor in doing so as well.

The Christmas holidays were nearly over before Minerva finally threw down her hat and admitted defeat in finding an adequate professor for the position. And immediately the Ministry sent her an owl about how they'd be perfectly willing to provide a good Potions Professor, for a few months at least.

Harriet was fairly skeptical of the idea that the Ministry had anyone with a Potions Mastery in it, let alone anyone capable of teaching school-children. But when Minerva had given up finding a good replacement, she couldn't exactly reject an offer from the Ministry of Magic, even if she looked about as thrilled about it as the rest of the staff-members.

Considering the last time that Harriet could remember the Ministry interfering with the appointment of Hogwarts staff-members? Harriet was sure she could excuse her own doubt that 'helpfulness' was in any way a motivation in the Ministry's decision.

At the same time, it was a very different situation than what it'd been like in Harriet's own time-line.

There was no brewing civil-war suddenly bursting into well-hidden embers, and there weren't any children forming ranks behind Dumbledore's name – not that either Umbridge or Fudge had likely anticipated that particular turn of events.

It was the difference between a Ministry desperately trying to keep a lid on what it assumed was a brewing rebellion – because the wonderful purebloods, who put coin in their pockets, assured them that this was the case. In comparison to a Ministry perhaps deciding to check for ways to influence and exploit the change in leadership at Hogwarts for future gain.

Harriet couldn't really tell. At least not without actually going around and digging into the politics of it all, and she really didn't want to do that.

If she saw Umbridge's name on some official piece of legislation, Harriet was pretty sure that the paper would burst into flames under her hand before she'd finished reading the damn thing.

There was a reason that Harriet had happily watched the woman be shipped off to Azkaban.

Even if, admittedly, Hermione had been a much more enthusiastic supporter for the mental and emotional torture and imminent death that Umbridge would undoubtedly suffer at the hands of the prison's many Dementors.

Hermione had always been rather ruthlessly vicious when she decided to hold a grudge against someone. Much more so than even Harriet, who'd spent the trial swinging between righteously furious and grimly satisfied.

So, of course, the person that the Ministry sent to be the new Potions Professor of Hogwarts, was none other than Dolores Umbridge herself.

What a time to be alive.

XXX

By the time February rolled around, the already-lukewarm – if polite – welcome that Umbridge received upon arrival had already frozen stiff around the edges.

To start things off, she'd asked Minerva to change the assigned reading, which would've perhaps been reasonable if she'd done so during the summer when her students could actually be expected to purchase new books. Minerva had said no, citing both the out-of-season shopping, and the fact that Umbridge was only supposed to remain until the end of term – and they shouldn't waste their students' money demanding books that they might never open again afterward.

Then her actual teaching-methods seemed to rely entirely on demanding that her students read a book in class.

Sure, Snape had been a bit thin-on-the-ground as far as theory was concerned. The man had used class for practical brewing, and then demanded homework on the theory of it. A setup which hadn't been unreasonable, except for how he taught more by berating his students for their mistakes, than by guiding them into learning to do better.

Considering that, it was definitely sensible to have a few classes where the teacher went further in-depth on explaining the reading-material, and possibly even having the students collectively re-read certain passages in their books.

But that's not what Umbridge did. She told them to read the book – which was Snape's assigned book for the class, and which mostly amounted to a very long list of recipes rather than any coherent theory – and then sat watching them to make sure they didn't try doing anything else.

Now, considering that it kept the students occupied, it could've simply been treated like most of the professors had treated Binns' complete uselessness over the years. Especially since it was a very pointedly short-term solution.

However, Umbridge insisted on being a part of the faculty at every opportunity. And whilst some of that focus was in trying to butter-up the other professors in the same way she would've buttered up politicians – which was already a mistake, because politicians and professors generally had very different temperaments and values – most of that time Umbridge spent proving to them all why she was really there.

Harriet had quickly taken to picking whatever seat was furthest away from Umbridge, and yet still the woman tracked her down and tried to drag her into a conversation entirely designed to be patronizingly helpful.

After all, Harriet was so young, and since she hadn't been to Hogwarts as a student herself she was likely woefully uneducated, so perhaps she ought to just marry someone – maybe a muggle, since she was supposedly muggleborn – and leave teaching to people who understood the true value of history.

Very deliberately unspoken was that the only 'true history' worth speaking of in Umbridge's mind was whatever racist propaganda she could manage to shove down someone's throat at any given time.

It'd become very obvious very quickly, that Umbridge was there for two reasons. To try and get some kind of 'in' with Minerva, now that Dumbledore was gone; and to get Harriet fired for something scandalous enough that her teachings died with her.

Normally, Harriet didn't particularly mind people wanting to kill her off. It made her feel weirdly nostalgic – and Hermione and Ron had refused to let her out of their sights for days after she'd admitted that, back in her own world. But there was a difference between wanting to kill Harriet for some reason, and completely stomping across her academical integrity for the sake of racist agendas.

Which was why Umbridge had woken up this morning completely covered in honey, and found herself completely unable to spell or wash herself clean.

Harriet knew this, because the woman had stormed into the Great Hall, still covered in it.

It'd been very dramatic, the way the toad-like woman huffed and puffed, red in the face, and skin glistening disgustingly in the morning light.

Of course, Minerva and Filius both tried to help her out with a few cleaning-spells of their own, without any success. Which was why Harriet had used that particular necromantic ritual in the first place. It would hardly do to go to all that effort of making sure the honey covered Umbridge completely, if she could simply spell herself clean before it drove her completely mad, even if Harriet had been forced to spend hours adjusting the ritual to stop the honey from coating all of her internal organs as well.

Honey was remarkably useful for preserving things, and if Harriet had to swear off the stuff because she'd seen it be used to preserve inferi, then the rest of the world deserved to suffer equally.

Andromeda didn't seem to approve though, and even if the Weasley-twins had been both implicated – before being defended by Sirius, when no proof could be found of their involvement – she was clearly aware of where the suspicion ought to be aimed.

“Really, Harriet?” She raised an eyebrow at her across her cup. A cup of tea which very deliberately didn't contain any honey today.

“She called the sackings of Cordova a 'trivial anecdote'.” Harriet fought down the urge to sneer.

Andromeda paused, then motioned Harriet to continue. “I don't believe I've heard of it.”

Harriet wasn't surprised, considering that Andromeda learned history from Binns. “Cordova was the capital of a country occupying the area that today we call Spain, before it was sacked by the Berbers in the eleventh century.” She took a deep breath. “For the muggles, the history continues with the country separating into city-states without a common leader, before slowly being overrun by Catholic expansion, with the Islamic side joining forces with the Berbers to fight them back. They lost, in no small part because they openly abandoned the freedom of religion that the original country had preached for so long. Upon winning, however, the Catholics decided to eradicate Islamism in return, which ended with the creation of the infamous Spanish Inquisition.”

Andromeda nodded along to show that she was listening.

“The magical side of things never really took part in the religious wars however, and instead continued to function as city-states, though with their population it was more 'village-states'.” Harriet amended wryly. “They argued about everything, and kept demanding that the others fall into line behind themselves, because clearly they were the only true heirs of the fallen might of their country.” Harriet shook her head. “This continued for over two centuries, until their complete refusal to work together was destabilized even further when the muggle-side of things went off to colonize the New World. And then in the eighteenth-century Napoleon happened, and despite his defeat, Magical Spain refused to give up their new unification under Magical France, and remained a puppet-state. Up until Grindelwald managed to convince the younger generations to make a proper bid for independence.”

Andromeda made a thoughtful noise, before finishing Harriet's inevitable point, proving that Binns hadn't completely ruined her education. “Resulting in one of the bloodiest massacres in magical history.”

Harriet sighed, slumping back in her chair. “It's like-... She doesn't want to learn, so nobody else is allowed to learn.” She picked up her own cup of tea from where it'd been neglected, feeling far too tired for it to be this early in the evening. “I wouldn't mind so much if she wants to stew in willful ignorance under a rock somewhere. But no, she wants to stuff everyone else in under the rock with her, because they couldn't possibly want to know and understand anything about what the world has to offer. And if they want to know, then it's only because they're children who don't understand that they actually don't want to know.”

Andromeda made a face, clearly agreeing, even if she wasn't going to say it out loud.

They sat in silence for a bit, before Andromeda took a sip of her honey-less tea and winced, sending Harriet a frown. “But really, Harriet? That was disgusting.”

Harriet snorted a laugh. “Yeah, well at least you didn't have to see her in her nightie, with the honey making it cling everywhere.”

Andromeda made a disgusted noise, glaring at her for making her imagine it.

Harriet grinned back.

XXX

“That one seems more like their style.” Harriet admitted absently to Sirius as Umbridge was tarred and feathered by a rather impressive set of spells.

She'd be willing to put money on the 'tar' being some kind of Potions-run-off, and the feathers sparkled in a way that made her pretty sure that they'd been dipped in something spell-resistant. Which made it all the more impressive that they'd managed to set up a trap specifically for Umbridge to pass through.

The easiest way of doing that would've been to have a remote trigger of some sort, rather than an integrated trigger for Umbridge herself to set off. Normally, that would only be possible to accomplish with a good view of the action, but apparently the twins weren't quite willing to suffer the woman's presence.

Considering Harriet's past nightly chases of the twins whenever they broke curfew, Harriet was fairly certain that the twins had the Marauder's Map, which would easily explain how they'd managed a remote trigger. Still, to set up a containment-unit that'd survive both the tar and feathers, and to not have the trigger compromised by their presence, or to randomly explode? Not to mention the fact that they'd managed to hide it too.

It was all really quite impressive.

Not exactly NEWT-level, but clearly a very good foundation, and it said promising things about their future OWL-results next year.

However, Harriet really hoped that they'd managed to render their ingredients in this prank properly inert, because if Umbridge ended up in St Mungos because of them, they might not be able to get away with a simple slap on the wrists.

Harriet sincerely doubted that it would come to that, considering the way that Umbridge was throwing cleaning-spells around and screaming about detentions, but it was always a possibility with these kinds of things.

“Less likely to put me off my appetite too.” Sirius agreed, a wry smile on his face.

“You don't think honey-glazed toad is appetizing?” Harriet asked the man innocently.

Sirius choked on air, coughing helplessly for a moment, before turning to give her a withering glare. “That's disgusting.”

“I'll have you know that it's considered a delicacy in many cultures.” Harriet's lips twitched.

Sirius continued to glare at her for a long moment, clearly not amused.

Which was fair enough.

They hadn't quite made it into March yet, and the last month had seen a steady ramping-up of hostilities against Umbridge from the entirety of Hogwarts. This wasn't the first time the twins had pranked the woman, but up until now they'd clearly been limiting themselves to using more commonly available materials.

Perhaps it might be seen as proof of restraint, but Harriet was guessing that in reality it was simply economics. The twins couldn't exactly get their materials from nowhere, and apparently this had been what they'd been building themselves up towards.

However, even outside of the Weasley-twins, Umbridge had started to completely alienate the students under her.

Ravenclaw loathed her because she didn't teach them anything at all, and refused to even be distracted into talking about interesting anecdotes on the subject, forcing them to read through a recipe-book as if it explained everything that they'd ever need to know about the theory behind it. All things which greatly upset their easily-distracted sense of curiosity.

Hufflepuff was objecting on pretty much the same grounds, but more because it was very difficult to 'work hard' when all you were allowed to do was read a recipe-book, and were closing ranks to avoid talking to the smarmy woman any more than they absolutely had to.

Gryffindor hated her too, though less because of her curriculum and more because of her clear antipathy to the Weasley-twins, along with the way she clashed with their Head of House, and the disturbingly close eye she kept on Mr Potter at all times. Less of an academical disagreement, and more that Gryffindor just couldn't stand her.

And Slytherin looked at what she was doing and saw – thanks in no small part to their new Head of House's open disgust for the woman – political suicide in action. So they were very clear in not showing anything even vaguely resembling support for her or her policies.

The faculty's main objection to Umbridge was that they had to actually talk to the woman. Or rather, having to listen to the woman simpering as she injected herself into every conversation as if she belonged there, despite being clearly unwanted.

The only one happy to see Umbridge was Peeves, and that was because nobody was particularly bothered by him bombarding the woman with dung-bombs. In fact, Harriet had it on good authority that the twins had gone out of their way to ensure that Peeves had a steady supply of them.

Apparently, accusing the twins of doing something that they'd been innocent of was paramount to a declaration of war. The fact that Sirius – who might very well have been the duo's favorite teacher, even before he'd become their Head of House – had stepped up to defend their alibis as reliable, and Umbridge had refused to back down? That was just insult to injury. The twins wanted blood.

And as the tarred and feathered Umbridge ran screaming back to her own quarters, Harriet supposed that they'd gotten what they'd wanted.

Time would tell if Umbridge managed to survive long enough to return to her regular duties as Senior Undersecretary come summer.

Harriet doubted it.

And that made her feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

XXX

Neither Mr Crabbe nor Mr Goyle had dyslexia. They were just stupid.

Harriet would've blamed inbreeding, but at this point she was seriously wondering if one of their ancestors might actually have been a troll. It would certainly explain their handwriting.

In comparison to that, Mr Malfoy was a breath of fresh air. He'd finally stopped sending in borderline misogynistic rants about women knowing their place, and had instead returned to simply decrying muggles and muggleborns for being too stupid and vulgar to properly conform to the rules of the magical world. In other words, back to the basic racist propaganda, which likely meant that Andromeda had finally managed to contact Mrs Malfoy about her son's attitude towards women.

Harriet still marked it down for completely baseless claims of superiority, since he was unable to leave any kind of reference that wasn't from 'The Mud Amongst Us'. And, well... as far as books were concerned, he would've been better off trying to pass 'Mein Kampf' off as a scientific paper on political suppression. It was honestly that bad.

The book focused entirely on how magic was 'declining' and how that was the fault of muggleborns diluting the gift of magic, and that they were stealing the magic from squibs. It went on to describe how you ought to be drowning your squibs at birth, so that your magic wouldn't be stolen from your future children as well. And it basically went on like that for quite some time, never presenting any kind of evidence for its assumptions or 'solutions', simply demanding that it be followed for the 'Greater Good' of magical society.

If Harriet was a proper historian, she might be able to track down exactly how the Statute of Secrecy had affected the birth-rate of squibs, and to what extent inbreeding was the true culprit on the matter. But she was a Curse Breaker first and foremost, and it wasn't like she'd be able to convince the purebloods even if she uncovered some kind of undeniable proof, so she was leaving that to someone else to deal with.

More importantly to herself, young Mr Potter was returning home during Easter-break, and Mrs Potter wanted to pick Harriet's brain about something in person during that time.

The implication was blatantly obvious to anyone who knew about Mr Potter's scar, and how that knowledge had come to Mrs Potter's attention. Lily Potter had finally made a decision about how to deal with the horcrux, and she wanted to properly talk it over with Harriet.

Likely, by the time they made it back to Hogwarts at the end of those two weeks, Voldemort would be dead and gone forever.

Harriet wasn't overly thrilled with the idea of meeting this time-line's counterpart to her own mother, but this version of Lily Potter was well over a decade older than Harriet's mother had ever become and Harriet had already gotten pretty used to both Andromeda and Sirius since her arrival. It'd be uncomfortable, but it wouldn't be the end of the world.

Perhaps it'd be a bit worrying if James and Lily figured out that she was inhabiting a body conjured into existence through necromancy and soul-magic, using their dead daughter as a base. But for all that Harriet's eyes were green and her hair was a wild mane of black, she was a decade older than what they would've expected their daughter to be, and technically had no blood-relation to the Potter name – on behalf of being magically cast out by their reasonable precautions.

She also would've shown up as 'Harriet Azalea' on any glimpse of a Marauder's Map, because that's what her magical signature was registered as under Hogwarts' wards. Not to mention that she couldn't ever really consider herself 'Harry James Potter' any more than she could consider herself 'Rose Jessica Potter' – in no small part because she'd literally been disowned from the Potter-family – which left her with a great big hole in the 'True Name'-department, except that she'd gone ahead and filled that by grabbing a new name and sticking to it.

As far as magic was concerned, her name was and always had been 'Harriet Azalea'.

So really, for all that it was technically a possibility that Lily and James would look at her and think that she looked a bit like they could've imagined their daughter to grow up looking like, the odds of them actually connecting the dots and managing to prove that to themselves or their surroundings? Yeah no, it wasn't really a big concern, unless Harriet completely blew her cover and started calling them 'mom' and 'dad'.

Which would've been ridiculous, because Harriet had literally never gotten into the habit of calling anyone that. It kind of came with the territory of growing up as an unloved orphan, for all that the Weasley-family had decided to unofficially adopt her before ever actually meeting her in person – not that they'd been willing to 'un-adopt' her once they'd been properly introduced.

Molly was just like that.

XXX

Harriet had spent the last few weeks being forced to listen to Umbridge ranting in her general direction about how 'slovenly' it was for a professor to up and leave in the middle of the term. Never mind that almost half of their students would be doing the same – Easter wasn't nearly as popular to go back home during as Christmas was, but it still happened.

It was the kind of holiday where the professors spent most of their time connecting with family and friends, but following a loose schedule over who got stuck with keeping tracks of the remaining students.

In fact, Sirius was going to be visiting the Potter-household himself on repeated occasions during the week. And he was the Head of Gryffindor, reasonably new to that position though he might be.

It wasn't exactly unusual for a professor to follow the students to King's Cross during Easter, but it didn't really happen every year either. Harriet herself would've stayed at Hogwarts if not for Mrs Potter's invitation, and she imagined that other professors had had similar reasons to leave in the past.

No, the reason Umbridge was making a big deal out of it was that she was constantly trying to find any kind of fault with Harriet's personality or teaching-methods. Everyone had kind of learnt to tune her out, by now.

But, proving that 'operational security' wasn't exactly Sirius's middle-name, Sirius had let it slip that Harriet would be visiting the Potters. Which obviously made Umbridge even more annoying, because she was very upset with the Potters over their 'unfounded attacks' at the purebloods during their manhunt for whoever had desecrated their daughter's grave.

She didn't technically say that out loud, but it was easy enough to read between the lines. Instead, Umbridge tried to bring new focus and whip up outrage towards Harriet, by talking very obviously about favoritism and how it had no place in the classroom.

Considering that Harriet actually remembered what Umbridge had been like when she'd been able to assemble the vaguest foundation of suck-ups in Harriet's own time-line? It was hypocrisy and projection, plain and simple, but it was still annoying to have to listen to her constant yammering.

It didn't help matters that the only thing Harriet could offer as her reason for visiting the Potters was that Mrs Potter had asked her for advice on one of her current projects. And certainly, advice like that shouldn't take more than a simple afternoon, right?

Except it was less advice and more of a crash-course, and less project and more the how-to-guide for how to avoid summoning a greater demon when using an exorcism designed to destroy fractured souls.

As in, Harriet wasn't letting Lily Potter anywhere near the practical applications of it until the end of the week, and even then she'd make sure they didn't do it anywhere remotely populated. The chance of an actual failure was... honestly pretty unlikely. For all that Harriet liked to consider it a 'lesser' chance of failure when you knew what you were doing, rather than being 'failure-free', that mostly came down to having the good sense to be very cautious about any optimism she might feel.

The Aztecs had banned the exorcism for a reason. It was still a highly useful one, and there were plenty of cases where they'd bent their own laws on the matter themselves, but it was very much a last resort, and it should always be treated as such.

There were probably safer ways to destroy the horcrux in Mr Potter's scar, but in this case 'safer' generally meant 'safer for the surroundings' rather than 'safer for Mr Potter'.

Harriet could think of half-a-dozen different exorcisms that would all amount to leaving behind a slightly prettier corpse than what would've been left if Harriet had slammed a basilisk-fang into the boy's forehead. And been about equally dangerous to the people around him.

No, if they wanted the boy to have a decent shot at surviving the process? This was the way to go.

Harriet didn't doubt that Mrs Potter had come to a similar conclusion, considering some of her phrasing in the invitation. And didn't it look kind of mightily suspicious that Harriet just happened to have the spell available that would be the boy's best chance for survival?

Harriet knew perfectly well that it was because she had a ludicrous amount of spells crammed into her head from a ludicrous amount of ancient cultures. And that among those many spells, this particular exorcism had caught her eye because she'd once been a living horcrux herself, and risking accidentally summoning a greater demon seemed a lot more sensible than taking a second Killing Curse to the face in order to get rid of it.

But, obviously, Harriet wasn't going to touch that potential conversation with a ten-foot pole.

Her back-story was flimsily absurd enough as it was. And she really wouldn't appreciate having it come crashing down around her ears.

XXX

Harriet honestly wasn't sure what she'd expected.

James and Lily Potter greeted her politely on the platform as they picked up both herself and their son, and the house they brought them to looked... normal.

Not 'normal' in the sense of how Privet Drive was normal, but just... average. There wasn't any of the hodgepodge madness of the Burrow, none of the stylistic oddness of the Lovegood's Rook, none of the half-maddened paranoia of Grimmauld Place, and none of the pointlessly lavish grandeur of Malfoy Manor.

Harriet supposed that she shouldn't be so surprised that they lived in a comfortable-looking cottage not too dissimilar from what their hiding-place in Godric's Hollow had once looked like.

And that was strange too, if she was being honest. Even if logically she'd understood that the Potters had decided not to live in the house that had been demolished during Voldemort's defeat, and could perfectly understand why they might decide to forgo trying to repair the place where their best friend and only daughter had died, emotionally was a different story.

In some way, she'd always expect her parents to live in Godric's Hollow, if they'd been alive.

Being shown to a guest-room by a much older version of her deceased father was also a bit of a surreal experience.

But things came down to business pretty quickly, with Harry being distracted by James, and Lily pulling out her great many notes on the subject.

“I understand that it's a risk, but why is it a risk?” Lily asked, sounding far too annoyed and human-like for the endlessly-fond shade of a dead woman that Harriet had once met.

“It's designed to punch a hole through the laws of reality, and have the magic 'bleed out' into nothingness. Great for dealing with something magically attached to someplace where it doesn't belong, but the exact coordinates for what the hole leads to can leave some things to be desired.” Harriet pointed at some of the arithmancy involved in determining how that worked. “And then there's the actual size and location for the hole itself. Make it too big, and everything in the area will instantly die as it starts doing more than just removing magic. Make it too small, and there's a risk that it'll be small enough to remain stable for long enough that something on the other side notices that it's there, and though it's not exactly guaranteed to be an actual greater demon, the technicalities of how that's determined are pretty arbitrary.”

“Arbitrary how?” Lily glanced up at her, even as she took notes.

“It's a bit-...” Harriet wriggled her hands awkwardly. “If the thing on the other side makes it through, it doesn't really matter if it's classified as a greater demon or as a god or just Other. Everything in the area will die either way, even if it's not directly malicious to humanity.” She shook her head. “It's a bit like worrying over the exact temperature of the Fiendfyre that someone just shoved down your throat. You're not gonna live long enough to think too hard about exactly how dead you are.”

Lily looked a bit on the pale side, so Harriet tried to reassure her.

“The hole wouldn't be enough for them to fully pass through, so they'd basically try to use it as an opening to pry open further. And then it obviously becomes 'too big' and kills everything in the area before instantly collapsing in on itself.” Harriet gave a wry grin. “Why, it practically has safety-measures built in.”

Things continued on like that for a while, with Lily coming up with questions upon questions, and Harriet doing her best to explain the risks and technicalities involved in how the ritual was actually supposed to work.

It didn't really take a turn for the strange until James called them to dinner, and temporarily banned arithmancy-discussions at the dinner-table, instead trying to do the polite thing and ask Harriet about how she'd ended up teaching at Hogwarts.

“Minerva recruited me at wand-point.” Harriet said bluntly, politely pretending not to notice James staring at her in disbelief. “Something about how she was already running low on professors, and didn't appreciate having to go looking for a new History Professor as well.”

“So you did kill Binns!” Harry exclaimed, sounding gleefully satisfied, and completely missing the way both of his parents suddenly looked more than a bit worried.

Harriet shot him a glance. “Of course not. He was a ghost.” She said, a bit exasperated. “He passed on to the great beyond. It's quite different.”

“Did you have a wand aimed at him?” Harry asked, eyes narrowed suspiciously, in a way that reminded Harriet oddly of Teddy when he was at his most doubtful.

“No?” Harriet would've tried for innocence, except she'd never really been able to pull that off, and instead went for confusion. And she really hadn't been. The exorcism had barely required any wand-work at all. “Why would I aim a wand at him?”

“Because you think his curriculum is shite.” Harry answered bluntly.

“That's hardly a reason to kill someone.” Harriet argued, despite the fact that it was indeed a perfectly adequate reason for forcefully-passing-on a particularly stubborn ghost.

“Is it perhaps a good enough reason to forcefully convince a ghost to pass on?” James asked, apparently sharing some of his son's doubt on the matter, but sounding more dryly amused than anything.

Harriet ignored that comment as she chewed, before turning to the man with a polite smile. “This tastes really good, James.”

Lily snorted into her glass at the blatant changing of the subject, but nobody argued about it.

XXX

Sirius's arrival saw the first real question about how Harriet had ended up figuring out that Harry's scar was a horcrux.

The real truth of it was artfully dodged with a half-truth about how Harriet had found the Diadem when looking around Hogwarts in the wake of Binns' sudden and completely coincidental passing-on.

Being the Curse Breaker that she was, she'd spent quite some time poking at it with a wide variety of magic. One of those was the soul-resonator that'd proven that only the Amulet and the scar remained, except obviously Harriet only told the Potters – and Sirius – about what she'd managed to glean from the actual spell itself.

Namely, that there were two other horcruxes still in working condition; that one of those was buried and inactive underneath some heavy blood-sacrifice wards, and that the other one was somewhere in London but not in Gringotts or anywhere nearby, and surrounded by wards that were definitely on the paranoid side of the spectrum. The second horcrux was also surrounded by a background-hum of a lot of very Dark magic, in a way that made it very likely that it'd been left unchecked for quite some time by whomever owned the place the horcrux was hidden in.

Considering that she'd found one horcrux in Hogwarts, she'd decided to set up a few wards around her classroom to see if anyone else had come into close-contact with a horcrux, only to have it get very enthusiastic about Mr Potter's arrival. Which lead to more investigating into why the hell Harry Potter might've been in contact with a horcrux recently, when a certain Ginny Weasley – who'd been a blatant victim of a Dark artifact last year – hadn't had more than vague traces of it. Which had in turn lead to more investigating about what the hell could be done, which then lead to Harriet finally explaining the matter to Mr Potter in person.

As for the other horcrux being in an at-least-partially abandoned place filled with Dark magic? There was a big difference between Dark magic that had a clear purpose of stopping trespassers or just generally killing people, and Dark magic that just... 'rotted' was probably the best word for it. Without a proper aim, it tended to spread like a particularly unpleasant smell, and it lingered and penetrated everything in the vicinity.

After that, it was just a matter of asking the Potters if they knew of any Dark families who lived in London, but who might've allowed their old wards to run wild in their absence over the last decade-or-so.

Harriet herself knew that Grimmauld Place wasn't the only available option, but it'd be one that Sirius couldn't exactly avoid checking, considering that he had easy access to it. And once he checked it with a few of the spells specifically designed around finding maddened ghosts and other semi-fractured souls? Horcruxes always lit up like beacons when exposed to those.

No, the Amulet would be found, and would be taken care of. Harriet wouldn't even need to break in and dodge Kreacher to keep the house-elf from identifying her.

After that, it was back to explaining the details of the ritual to Lily, as well as explaining to everyone involved that it'd be best to avoid destroying any more horcruxes until Harry's scar was dealt with. It was a matter of magical leverage, really.

As long as the Amulet was active and functional, Voldemort's remaining spirit wouldn't suddenly start leaning exclusively on the blood-sealed horcrux. Which was the kind of scenario that could lead to everything from splitting headaches, to draining the boy's energy to the point of death, to literally having his head explode in a mess of gore.

Generally, all of those scenarios were to be avoided, and since Harriet had never personally experimented with this kind of situation it wasn't like she could really rule out any one of them. For all that horcruxes weren't as uncommon as Voldemort really wanted to believe, he'd been the only bastard crazy enough to make several of them, not to mention attaching one of them to a living person who then had the damn thing sealed by sacrificial blood-magic.

It was all a bit of a complicated mess of a situation, and there weren't really any precedents. Harriet herself had kind of received a Killing Curse to the noggin and decided that her own mess of coincidences was something she didn't need to remember ever again, before promptly suppressing the hell out of it and pretending as if it'd never happened.

It hadn't been the most healthy of responses then, and it wasn't the most healthy of responses now, but it hadn't given her nightmares for several years now so it was probably fine. It wasn't like she'd piled on even more things to willfully suppress since then, like the fact that she hadn't heard the voices of her best friends in over a year, or that her godson had likely graduated from his final year at Hogwarts and she wouldn't be there to welcome him home.

Everything was just... peachy.

XXX

“Why can't you do it?” Mr Potter complained after another day where his mother spent all of her time doing arithmancy, instead of paying attention to him.

Harriet glanced up from some homework that she'd brought with her to grade over the holiday. “Trust, mainly.” Harriet made a face when the boy looked confused. “Right, how to explain this?” She took a breath. “Would you trust Madam Hooch to perform a potentially-lethal spell on Mr Weasley for the sake of saving his life?”

“No?” Mr Potter just looked more confused.

“It's basically that.” Harriet turned back to her grading, not particularly enthusiastic about the subject.

Going from being one of the foremost authorities in her field, to being a no-name upstart who'd written a book and ended up as a professor instead of working in her chosen career? At this point, all reminders of people not putting a lot of faith in her abilities with ancient magic was salt in the wound.

“But you know a lot more about magic than Hooch!” Mr Potter glared at her.

“Well, yes.” Harriet admitted, sighing as she turned her attention back to the boy. “But your mother doesn't really trust that a random History Professor would know more about spell-creation and arithmancy and obscure ancient magical rituals than herself.” She made a vague motion with her hand. “Which is perfectly reasonable, as she's a very competent witch, and Magical History is a theoretical field rather than a practical one.”

“But you used to be a Curse Breaker.” Mr Potter pointed out, having apparently remembered that tidbit, not that Harriet was at all surprised. Most of her students remembered that, largely because of how well it played into the rumors of her killing off Binns.

“Well, yes, but I was never hired by Gringotts, because I don't really get along with the goblins or the way they do things. So my credentials are basically nonexistent, with the only exception being an obscure dig in northern Italy, where I worked entirely by my lonesome.” Harriet shrugged. “Who knows how competent I needed to be to survive that. Perhaps I just needed to stumble down a hillside and stuff my pockets full with gold, perhaps I needed to fight an army of inferi for several days on end. There's no record of whatever happened. So, whatever it was, it might as well not have happened in the first place.”

“So she doesn't trust you not to be a sham?” The boy narrowed his eyes. “Then why have you teach her in the first place?”

Harriet made a thoughtful noise. “It's a lot easier to bluff that you understand how to do something in practice, than it is to bluff the ability to teach theory to someone competent in how arithmancy should work.” She gave the boy a wry smile. “I remember having someone vanish all the bones in my entire arm, when he tried to fix a small break. But if someone had started badgering him on the details of what he planned to do? More likely than not, they would've figured out that his understanding of the spell was bad, and even if he somehow managed to get it perfect in theory, having someone clearly competent perform the spell properly from that perfect theory instead, means that we could've removed his potential incompetence from the equation entirely.”

“So mom is learning how to do it, because even if it works the way you say it will, she doesn't trust that you could actually do it?” Mr Potter asked.

“Yes.” Harriet nodded.

Mr Potter leaned back in his chair, and made a loud groaning noise that spoke of how his entire world was suffering.

Harriet's lips twitched upwards. For some reason, it was startlingly easy to find similarities between the boy and Teddy, and she couldn't help but wonder if it was genetic through the Black family that they shared in the most tangential manner possible, or if Harriet had had the exact same mannerisms herself, and had just rubbed off on her godson from long-time exposure.

Still, as amusing as the boy could be, and as sympathetic to his many plights as Harriet was, Miss Lovegood was still Harriet's favorite.

Chapter Text

It was all fairly undramatic, in the end.

The Potters took a bit of a field trip to an abandoned rock in the middle of the ocean, to limit the damage should Lily fail, and then – once that was over and done with – Sirius burned the Amulet he'd found with a bit of Fiendfyre.

Harriet had destroyed the Cup hours into arriving in this world, quickly followed by the Ring, young Mr Potter had destroyed the Diary with his own two hands in the Chamber of Secrets, Harriet had destroyed the Diadem during his exorcism of Binns, Lily had taken care of the scar, and Sirius had destroyed the Amulet.

Of course Harriet had used the Amulet to make sure that Voldemort hadn't managed to create a new horcrux in the meanwhile, but he hadn't, and so the Amulet had been promptly destroyed.

Now, there were theories that implied that horcruxes were less anchors in the mortal realm, and more a 'safety net' in the mortal realm. A difference that amounted to allowing Voldemort's body-less spirit to roam until he was killed once more, or having him simply disappear between one breath and the next.

From what Harriet had seen on the matter, she was willing to bet that it was more an anchor than a proper safety-net, in the sense that they were always actively keeping Voldemort alive, rather than that they kept him from entirely dying in his moment of death. Of course, had Voldemort had a proper body then the argument would've been moot, because he would've been able to sustain his own life, but he didn't have one of those, so it didn't matter.

Voldemort was entirely vanquished.

Not that the Potters were planning on shouting that from the rooftops, since acknowledging the existence of horcruxes was nearly Dark enough to have the Ministry start muttering about Azkaban, all on its own. Never mind the idea of their son having had one in his forehead.

Really, it was better for everyone involved to just... let Voldemort's name fade away, and pretend at ignorance if anyone confronted them with the idea that he could still be out there.

That was what Harriet was planning on doing, at least.

Still, with that thankfully undramatic conclusion to the problem, Harriet spent another day going over various notes and thoughts that Lily had had about the ritual, now that she'd performed it herself.

It didn't exactly shine brilliant light upon thousands of problems and ways to improve the process, but there were definitely some interesting ideas, even if half of them were unlikely to leave anyone the ritual was performed upon alive.

After that, Harriet said her polite goodbyes, and went back to Hogwarts a few days early.

Which she instantly regretted with surprising bitterness due to two factors.

One, she'd nearly forgotten how much she hated Umbridge, and how much the loathsome woman refused to leave her alone. Apparently, without classes to keep them otherwise occupied, Umbridge had a lot more time on her hands to harass Harriet about how she was teaching History.

Two, with nearly three days until classes started back up, Harriet received a letter.

Technically, she received lots of letters, usually amounting to some pureblood parent writing about how dreadful of a teacher she was, if she couldn't understand how to teach History like a proper witch. But this was a letter that was actually important.

They'd found something in Yharnam.

They weren't sure exactly what it was that they'd found, but whatever it was, it seemed to be a heavily-warded entrance to something else. Something beneath even the city's labyrinthine sewers.

Harriet hadn't ever heard of anything like that back in her own time-line, but then the Yharnam expeditions had always been... somewhat understaffed, and more than a bit terrified of the thought of digging deeper into the city's nooks and crannies.

Three years of horrifying casualty-numbers, followed by some very enthusiastic use of Fiendfyre and similarly collateral-damage heavy spells? The Yharnam of Harriet's time-line had been known as the bane of Gringotts, for a while there. When it wasn't referred to the Curse Breaker graveyard, at least.

Some digs killed Curse Breakers, everyone knew that. For all that it was a tragedy when it happened, it sort of came with the territory. But, independent though she might've been, Harriet had ended up working as much as a trouble-shooter as she'd been a Curse Breaker, and the idea of Gringotts constantly endangering their employees by refusing her access to even take a look and see if there was an easier and less dangerous way to set up the dig?

They'd lost a lot of favor back then, and a lot of governments had noticed the disgruntlement in the business and used it to their advantage when arguing contracts with Gringotts. Normally, Gringotts portrayed itself as the only really viable option a government might have of uncovering ancient relics lost to time, without accidentally releasing plagues that wiped out their own citizens. So if the government wanted a Curse Breaker to look into something, they had to simply grin and bear whatever cutthroat details might be found in the Gringotts contracts.

In the aftermath of Yharnam, however, that monopoly of negotiations had started to unravel, with a lot of Curse Breakers deciding to strike out on their own, rather than swear themselves to an organization that threw away their lives in order to make a point about the personal policies of one of the foremost experts in the field.

The idea that whatever entrance had now been uncovered had either been accidentally blocked, or even purposely sabotaged into inaccessibility as a way of getting back at Gringotts, was perfectly plausible.

And Harriet now desperately wished to immediately rush over and start prodding at whatever wards were involved. Which she couldn't do, because she'd come back to Hogwarts before the holiday had even ended, like an idiot. Not that she would've had enough time to actually do anything, but it was the principle of the matter.

The letter was directed her way both as a courtesy for her very generous way of giving the various academical institutions in the area access to the dig, and as a polite inquiry as to her availability for coming around and seeing what was inside.

Harriet had documented the dig as much as she felt she reasonably could, and even if some parts of the community likely thought that she was lying through her teeth about some of the stuff she'd found, there was a chance that she hadn't been. And if there was half the nastiness underneath the city in these newly uncovered catacombs as what Harriet had described finding above-ground, then they'd really appreciate having someone around who at least claimed to be competent enough to survive it.

There was also the fact that she was likely a lot cheaper than whatever Gringotts would've been demanding.

Rather glumly, Harriet responded to the letter that she was currently working a History Professor at Hogwarts and that it was in the middle of the semester, but that she'd be available to look into it come summer, if they were willing to wait that long to investigate it.

Their response back was that they'd happily wait until summer, and Harriet couldn't help but breathe a sigh of relief at that. She didn't really want to weigh her current duties as a teacher, to the possibility of people dying if they tried to explore a part of Yharnam unprepared. She wasn't sure which side of things would emerge victorious, but it'd leave a bitter taste in her mouth regardless.

XXX

“In her defense, she would have plenty of time to fulfill her duties, since she doesn't actually do any teaching.” Harriet piped up, a placidly polite smile on her face that belied the fact that she'd insulted the woman right to her face.

Pomona turned her face away, shoulders shaking in a way that made it blatantly obvious that she was trying not to laugh. Filius was inspecting the ceiling and pretending at deafness. Sirius had a much less polite, and much more shark-like smile on his face. Andromeda remained the undisputed champion of poker-faces among the staff, her neutral expression not shifting an inch. And a lot of the other teachers were suddenly very interested in their paperwork, even if Harriet could see them straining their ears.

Harriet loathed Umbridge. It was a well-known fact by this point, and it was both perfectly understandable and pretty obviously mutual. However, usually Harriet very deliberately avoided being rude to the woman's face.

The fact that she wasn't bothering with that anymore either meant that someone might be going for a wand soon, or Harriet was in a truly foul mood. Either way, it would no doubt be prime gossip-material for months to come, and thus definitely worth listening in on.

Umbridge was puffing herself up in outrage, face a blotch of red, but Minerva spoke up before she had a chance to.

“If my worry was simply down to time available for the paperwork involved, I would've hired Peeves.” Minerva said bluntly.

Harriet was pretty sure that Hooch had just whistled lowly to herself at that particular statement. Not that she blamed her. Minerva could be just as cutting as Andromeda when she had an opportunity for it.

“Well, we'd need to hire him as part of the faculty first.” Sirius rubbed his chin, trying to pretend like this was an actual suggestion for who ought to be the new Deputy Headmaster, and not Minerva using absurdity to drive home a point. “Tradition, and all that. But there's definitely a precedent, what with Binns.”

There was a clear moment of silence, as everyone turned to stare at the woman who'd been hired suspiciously quickly when Binns happened to pass on completely unexpectedly. A woman who'd reworked the curriculum and would sneer at most anyone attempting to convince her that Binns was a competent historian or teacher.

“That is true.” Harriet said simply, pretending at obliviousness. “However, staff-members are expected to avoid harassing the students. And I'm not sure if he'd agree to such limitations.”

Minerva made an aggravated noise. “If you two are quite done?”

Sirius smiled and mimed zipping his mouth closed. Harriet simply turned her attention back to the Headmistress and settled back in her chair slightly.

The point of pretending at obliviousness was to not admit that she was pretending, after all. Doing anything more deliberate to imply that she was 'done with her tomfoolery', would just make it too obvious that she'd been something other than innocently oblivious.

Minerva clearly realized that that was as much as she was going to get, because she shook her head and turned back to the instigator of this particular batch of antagonism.

“Dolores. I don't know what the Ministry might be playing at, but you're not a full member of this faculty.” Minerva said sternly. “And as your stay with us will come to an end, come summer, any promotion to such a long-standing responsibility would be absurd.”

Umbridge's face had turned pale, and she was clearly holding herself back from barking out that she deserved all of the promotions for forever. It was very much like watching an adult scolding a child, and Harriet was enjoying it immensely.

Minerva turned back to Filius. “That said, Filius, are you certain you cannot continue to hold the position until the end of the semester?”

Filius shook his head, face serious. “I'm afraid not, Minerva. It's interfering with my House's study-circles, and both OWLs and NEWTs are approaching.”

Umbridge made a low noise in her throat, clearly latching onto the idea of teacher-run study-circles and assuming that favoritism – rather than common sense – was involved.

Ravenclaws might be renowned as the House of learning and knowledge, but it was also the House with the most absurd amount of distractions. Tell a Gryffindor to study a subject and they might end up picking a fight with someone over quidditch, tell a Hufflepuff and they might get caught up teaching someone else something else, tell a Slytherin and they'd demand some kind of payment, tell a Ravenclaw and they'd study every subject except for that one.

It was like herding cats.

The fact that they were also the House that took the most pride in their academical brilliance also tended to result in an extremely high degree of stress in comparison to the other Houses. After all, if they weren't given excellent grades, then they weren't provably intelligent, and then their entire worldview started to crumble.

It was basically exam-stress and existential dread all wrapped up in one delicious bundle of mental and emotional trauma.

Filius's regularly scheduled study-circles helped to at least compensate for the easily-distracted nature of so many members of his House. Less to have them learn from a teacher, and more to have a teacher present to forcefully bring the subject back to what it ought to be, since the Prefects generally tended to fall into the same pitfalls themselves.

“I believe Miss Granger might benefit from sitting in on a few of those.” Harriet said, in large part to keep Umbridge from saying something nasty and force them to listen to her voice. “Her work in limiting herself to the subject at hand has definitely improved, but I believe she's still trying to learn all of the knowledge in much the same way.”

Filius glanced up at her, then tilted his head thoughtfully, before nodding slowly. “That wouldn't be a bad idea. I've spotted a few of the signs in some other students as well.” He looked around the room at the other Head of Houses. “If all of you don't mind?”

Harriet leaned back in her chair and silently basked in Umbridge's impotent fury, as the rest of the teachers expressed nothing but pleasant enthusiasm for Filius' idea of an inter-House study-group for their more scatter-brained students.

Sometimes, life was good.

XXX

The official study-groups becoming inter-House – at least temporarily – had some interesting effects.

Miss Granger did indeed attend, twice. The third time, she refused the invite, and grabbed both Mr Potter and Mr Weasley and dragged them off into the library to do their studying on their own terms.

Harriet wasn't entirely surprised by it. The girl had a tendency to absorb knowledge, and then obsesses over it. In all likelihood, she wanted to properly try out whatever 'techniques' she'd managed to glean from Filius nudging the students along in the general direction of what they ought to be studying. And her two friends were her forcefully-volunteered guinea-pigs.

Harriet was fairly certain that the girl wasn't going to be attending the study-groups in the future either, likely having decided that she could do things faster and better on her own, even with the other two members of their 'Golden Trio' dragging their feet.

It was still a good thing for the girl to learn, because Harriet remembered a certain rant from Hermione a few years into her work at the Department of Mysteries. The summarized and more child-friendly version of it amounted to her being very upset about having missed out on a handful of studying-techniques, and how that must've amounted to several years worth of study-time that she hadn't been able to cram into her head before leaving Hogwarts.

Miss Granger would likely be able to dodge that particular frustration, and there certainly were students who actually really needed the study-groups to be made more public. So it all evened out.

However, nobody had managed to sort out who ought to be the new Deputy Headmaster yet.

Umbridge still seemed convinced that she could just... somehow brown-nose her way into the position by having Fudge write a letter of recommendation, which went... about as well as could be expected.

Harriet honestly didn't know if the man was trying to help Umbridge, or if he was trying to use this new-found interest of hers in Hogwarts as an excuse to replace her as Senior Undersecretary, and wanted to make sure she wasn't tempted to return to the Ministry.

Filius might've spread a few of his 'official study-groups' around to other professors, but he still refused to actually continue to hold the position of Deputy Headmaster. Pomona continued to reject it, and both Sirius and Andromeda were far too new to their positions as Head of House to commit to even more responsibility.

Harriet herself was thankfully out of the running on behalf of threatening to dump the Board of Governors in a pit of fire-ants, that one time. They'd deserved it, and Harriet didn't want to be Deputy anyway, so it all worked out.

Madam Hooch, Madam Pomfrey, and Madam Pince, were all out of the running due to not being 'proper professors'. Filch was a toe out of line away from being fired outright, after some of his honest feelings and open comments about disciplining children were brought into the light.

It was one thing to threaten children with being locked up in a dungeon somewhere during detentions. It was crass and possibly traumatizing, depending on ages and situations, but it could be seen as an attempt to intimidate the students into good behavior. To actually believe that the children should be hung from the rafters by their toes because they'd tracked in mud?

Hogwarts was supposed to be a safe place for children, and even if some of that standard appeared to have slipped in a very disturbing manner underneath Dumbledore, Minerva was determined to make things better. The fact that Filch didn't have anywhere else to go was immaterial in the grand scheme of things. If he couldn't behave as a caretaker, then a caretaker he shouldn't be.

But still, that left Minerva with a few very awkward potentials.

Septima Vector and Sybill Trelawney were of the same mind in regards to public interactions with others, and generally avoided the Great Hall like the plague. Whilst at least Vector would probably be very meticulous in dealing with any paperwork, neither of them were exactly a reassuring image for a Deputy Headmistress to project.

Charity Burbage was trying to reform century-long prejudices by brute-forcing her subject, which whilst landing her some results, also didn't make her a lot of friends among the 'traditional' purebloods. She'd probably be a good choice, personality-wise, but nominating her was a mine-field of political back-stabbing waiting to happen. And Harriet's own war against the traditionalists' views of history weren't helping matters on that front.

Bathsheda Babblings barely remembered to show up to her own classes on time, which was why she'd learned to more or less live inside of her classroom to make sure that didn't happen. Putting her in charge of anything that wasn't her favored subject of study would be about as helpful as nominating Mrs Norris for the position.

Silvanus Kettleburn had retired during the summer in order to preserve his remaining limbs, and Hagrid had technically stepped up into the position. However, the man spent very little time actually inside of the castle, and the idea of trying to convince him to do more paperwork than absolutely necessary was more or less insane, not to mention the fact that he was as new to the position of 'Professor' as Andromeda was.

Which left Aurora Sinistra, who was a fairly reasonable option – if rather blatantly young. However, the woman didn't feel comfortable out-ranking a lot of her old professors, and had basically reacted to the potential of a nomination by blatantly avoiding everyone for several months now. After all, if they couldn't find her to talk to her, she obviously couldn't officially be nominated for the position.

Needless to say, Harriet was willing to bet that Minerva had one hell of a headache on her hands.

XXX

Harriet managed to keep a perfectly straight face until the door closed behind them, before she broke down giggling.

Sirius stopped, turning around to stare at her in confusion, along with several others.

Andromeda also turned, but her expression was more a resigned kind of exasperation than anything. “You didn't.”

“I-...” Harriet hiccuped a little from her giggles. “I may or may not have given Sybill a really nice bottle of whiskey, and suggested. Suggested, mind you, that she enjoy it with Minerva.”

Andromeda took a deep breath, clearly praying for strength. “Of course you did.”

There was a muffled snicker from Sirius, as he realized exactly what was so funny. “Funny way for a third eye to work.”

Umbridge was thankfully still inside with Minerva and Sybill, likely trying to express how bad of an idea Sybill's recent promotion was, and that Umbridge ought to be the one promoted. Without actually saying that, of course, because that'd run counter to Umbridge's attempts to butter-up Minerva.

Filius chuckled lightly. “Well, I suppose a 'thank you' is in order, even if I doubt you thought this far ahead.”

Harriet shook her head, still struggling for breath from her fit of giggles. She really hadn't expected this at all.

She'd just figured that Minerva deserved better-quality whiskey than what she'd been trying to combat her headache with, and then quickly realized that if Harriet gave Minerva the whiskey herself, the woman would just double-check the bottle a hundred times over to make sure that it hadn't been tampered with. Possibly to the point where the magic would end up making the whiskey go fizzy, which would've ruined the point completely.

Much easier to talk someone else into doing the whiskey-deliverance. Though asking Sirius to do it would've given similar results, and Andromeda disapproved enough of Minerva's drinking that she'd instantly rat-out Harriet.

Which made the obvious choice someone who also drank a ridiculous amount of alcohol, even if it was a different kind. So Harriet had gone over to Sybill and suggested she take it, all the while promising that Harriet merely disapproved of the poor quality of Minerva's current stock of whiskey. And that she might feel a little bit guilty about how quickly Minerva was working her way through it.

The fact that Minerva had responded to Sybill's sudden arrival – dropping a bottle of high-quality whiskey on her desk, and declaring that her 'third eye' had told her that Minerva needed it – by pausing for one long moment, and then immediately promoting the Divination Professor to become the next Deputy Headmistress? That'd been completely unpredictable.

Minerva hated Divination, and she wasn't all that fond of Sybill's tendency to predict her students dying in suitably dramatic fashions.

Best Harriet could guess, the fact that Sybill had been able to somehow predict Minerva's dwindling whiskey-stock and gone to the effort of getting her some really high-grade stuff, meant that perhaps there was some truth in the subject after all.

Either that, or she'd suddenly remembered Harriet's 'defense' of Umbridge's attempt at becoming the new Deputy. As in, since Sybill clearly wasn't doing anything else sensible with her time, she might as well help Minerva with the paperwork.

In some way, perhaps Harriet ought to feel guilty for sort-of-on-accident manipulating Minerva into grabbing one of the professor she disliked the most as her new Deputy, but on the other hand this was quite possibly the most hilarious thing she'd ever done.

It wasn't quite on the level of making Peeves a faculty-member, but that'd been a long-shot attempt in the first place. Not even Sirius had had much hope, and he'd been the one who'd actually pushed for trying it.

XXX

Not a lot of things changed when Sybill became the Deputy Headmistress.

Harriet was pretty sure that Miss Granger had spent an hour screaming into her pillow in outrage, once she'd found out, but that was neither here nor there. She probably wasn't alone in that either, and Harriet couldn't exactly blame them.

Sybill wasn't exactly a good teacher, and her subject wasn't really the kind of thing most people took seriously. Prophesies might be real tangible things, if the Hall of Prophecies in the Ministry was considered, but those were rare and had very little to do with the actual class of Divination.

Honestly, Harriet wasn't convinced that it was entirely bogus, but she also wasn't entirely convinced that Sybill had the faintest clue as to what she was actually doing. It always felt like Sybill was too busy trying to cloak everything in mystery that any actual truths involved would be entirely accidental.

Unfortunately for Harriet's certainty on the matter, she'd never really delved all too deeply into Divination as a subject once she left Hogwarts. Oh, there were some rituals and spells that did the whole 'far-seeing' thing that Divination might technically classify as, but that wasn't really proof one way or the other.

Harriet had definitely run into some magics that were supposed to deal with predicting the future, but an overwhelming majority of those were down to predicting weather and crop-yield, rather than the personal fortune of an individual. Hell, even the ones that claimed that they did exactly that tended to be bizarrely obscure to interpret, to the point where Harriet wasn't entirely convinced that they were even magical to begin with.

But hey, if a strange person in robes showed up and predicted whether or not people would be starving or not by the next year? Harriet doubted that a lot of important people would be willing to question their ability to guess whether or not things would go badly somehow for the important person specifically. After all, if the crops were bountiful, then the owner of the crops would undoubtedly achieve great fortune as well.

It wasn't exactly rocket-science, for all that it was pretty close to being a car-salesman.

No, Harriet wasn't going to decry Sybill's subject or her ability to teach it, because quite frankly it was an elective that'd always been somewhat frowned upon as being suspicious. And if people dedicated their lives to believing that stuff, despite whatever evidence existed that it was bogus, then by all means they should be allowed to dedicate their lives to it.

As for Harriet finding Sybill's particular brand of 'mystery cloaking' to be obnoxious? Well, Harriet wasn't technically a historian, so she probably shouldn't go around throwing rocks in glass houses and all that.

She'd been a Professor before, and she was one of the foremost experts in a tangentially related field, but she wasn't a historian.

So, whilst Sybill's promotion was met with some outrage from a few of the students – and, technically, one temporary faculty-member, though Umbridge really shouldn't count – it wasn't hugely impactful in the grand scheme of things.

Minerva lost a lot of her more frenzied appearance, which made Harriet properly realize that the woman really had been spreading herself far too thin these last few months. Umbridge sulked and seethed, which was kind of hilarious and met largely with disgust from all students who'd figured out why. And Sybill made a few more public appearances than she usually did.

Harriet wasn't exactly expected to speak to the woman, and neither Sirius nor Andromeda had any particularly keen interest in Divination, and they were the two professors Harriet spent the most time around.

Hagrid was nice and all, but Harriet's sense of humor was probably a bit too shifted into the Slytherin-spectrum of things for the man to be entirely comfortable around her. And even if Hagrid got along with most people, he never seemed entirely at ease in a Hogwarts that would bar its doors to Dumbledore.

It was a bit sad, to see the man so obviously excited at teaching, and yet so melancholic about Dumbledore not being around. And since Harriet herself hadn't ever technically met Dumbledore – in this time-line – herself, it wasn't the easiest of things to hold longer conversations with Hagrid. It always seemed to circle back around to old stories about his work, and how thankful he was to Dumbledore for hiring him on as the groundskeeper.

Harriet wasn't entirely comfortable reminiscing about a Dumbledore that wasn't already six feet under, and her unsettled-ness whenever the man was brought up meant that she and Hagrid tended to mostly avoid each other. Amicably so, mind you, but avoid each other nonetheless.

XXX

Harriet wasn't actually allowed to write the tests for the history OWLs, since they were standardized by the Ministry, so she'd tried to tailor the last few months for the fifth years towards them actually passing the exams.

Personally, she'd rather they know important and interesting things, than whatever propaganda-based sludge the Ministry tried to shove down their throats in order to honor 'tradition'. But she knew her students might not agree with that when it came time to actually write the exams, only to find out that they hadn't learned anything of what they needed to know to pass.

She was passionate about her subject, but she wasn't cruel enough to inflict that kind of suffering on her innocents students.

Of course, that didn't stop her from going off on tangents every now and again, and of course sometimes that led conversations towards her favored subject of Curse Breaking.

Harriet wasn't entirely sure how Umbridge had managed to hear anything at all about what she'd been teaching though, considering how most students avoided the woman like a plague.

“Unimportant? Really? Yharnam? The infamous City of Blood-Healing? The only city to ever openly defy the Statute of Secrecy?” Harriet tilted her head, giving the woman her most skeptical stare. “The lost city whose disappearance caused blood-magic to be banned in nearly every European country overnight?”

Umbridge shied back, looking both extremely offended and utterly gleeful. “There's no need to teach students about such a horrible place, surely!”

“It's not directly in the curriculum, no. But it was a question that came up, and I'm somewhat uniquely well-versed in the subject.” Harriet admitted, not bothering to fight the woman's belief that 'the knowledge of bad things' was in itself a bad thing.

Never mind that Yharnam had been held in very high esteem for the better part of a century, and that the way they'd coexisted openly with muggles had both proved and disproved some of Grindelwald's ideas around magical supremacy. Proved, in the sense that coexistence was possible, disproved in the sense that magical supremacy wasn't something that could really be achieved long-term.

It's very hard for coexistence to function in any way with segregation. They're rather fundamentally opposite, after all. Either people mix, or they stay separated. And if the idea of magical supremacy was actually achieved, long-term it'd either mean that a lot more half-bloods were being born, or someone decided to kick off a civil war.

Not that magical society as a whole wasn't overly prone to civil wars being started seemingly at the whims of whatever Dark Lord happened to stumble into an opportune moment to exploit.

“And why is that, Miss Azalea?” Umbridge smiled sickeningly sweet, apparently hoping that Harriet would reveal that she was in fact somehow related to such a dark and horrible place, and therefore automatically be a bad person.

“Well, I found it, to start.” Harriet sipped at her tea. “It's in northern Italy, hidden in a valley. I imagine that it looked quite beautiful, once.”

Umbridge rocked back, blinking stupidly at her for a long moment. “What?”

“I found it?” Harriet turned, frowning slightly. That must've come up in conversation before now, right? It was public knowledge. “I'm a Curse Breaker, mainly. And Yharnam was my-... my big project, so to speak.”

Umbridge continued to gape at her, mouth opening and closing like a fish on land.

“Northern Italy? Really?” Andromeda sat down next to her. “I would've thought that it was in France.”

“Didn't I tell you?” Harriet frowned at Andromeda. “I'm sure we talked about it when that article in the Quibbler came out.”

Andromeda smiled indulgently at her. “Yes, and you went on for quite some time about their culture and what they were trying to accomplish when the city disappeared, but I don't recall you actually mentioning Italy.”

Harriet had the good grace to blush. “Well, the plague that finally caused the disappearance was very fascinating from a magical perspective.”

“And became the basis of a lot of the misinformed myths around werewolves today, I remember.” Andromeda nodded, a note of amusement in her voice.

Harriet still desperately wanted to know what exactly the people of Yharnam had done to the lycanthropy-curse to cause it to mutate and transform into the monstrosities Yharnam had been so infamous for in her own time-line.

And perhaps there'd be a clue there, in the deepest reaches of the city's hidden catacombs.

Harriet could hardly wait.

XXX

Honestly, Harriet only heard about it through the rumor-mill, and she wasn't entirely sure how much had been exaggerated or not, but the end result seemed to be pretty clear-cut nonetheless.

Umbridge had talked to Mr Malfoy in regards to something – that likely had nothing at all to do with his school-work – and Mr Malfoy had insulted her, possibly by laughing in her face, possibly by actually doing something insulting. And Umbridge reacted to it with all the grace one could expect from a woman who was obsessed with her own righteousness.

Somehow, Filch had ended up involved as well, and now both Umbridge and Filch were out of Hogwarts. Permanently.

From the way the rumor-mill was spinning things, it didn't look like Umbridge would be going back to gainful employment at the Ministry, because apparently Lucius Malfoy seemed to have taken offense to the woman, and Fudge was far too deep in the man's pocket to not immediately cut ties with her.

So that was her life and career ruined. Good stuff. Couldn't have happened to a more deserving toad.

It was also pretty darn close to the actual exams kicking off, which meant that there was no chance to get a new teacher for Potions. It also meant that Umbridge might've managed to get through the full semester and then been welcomed back at the Ministry, if she hadn't done that last push.

Which made Harriet a bit suspicious about the circumstances.

Umbridge was a brown-nosing politician and a horrible person. She wasn't stupid. And trying to punish the spoiled heir of a powerful family? That didn't exactly sound anything except stupid.

It was possible that Umbridge was so blind to her own position at Hogwarts that she hadn't realized how the students all despised her. It was possible that she'd been trying to leverage a favor of some sort from the Malfoy-family, and had been met by Mr Malfoy laughing in her face, and then lost her temper to the point of burning all bridges.

Unfortunately, as all the truths about how the situation had started off was entirely down to the rumor-mill, Harriet wasn't going to be receiving any real answers on the subject.

Either way, Umbridge and Filch were both gone, Mr Malfoy had ended up in a slightly better standing among his peers for being the final straw to drive her out, and life continued on as normal.

More interestingly, Harriet had been informed by the officials in charge of Yharnam, that Gringotts had decided to bully their way into the dig.

Gringotts practically owned Curse Breaking in this time-line, so the idea of an upstart non-entity having access to a place as infamous as Yharnam was probably immensely aggravating to the goblins.

The dig might've been able to bar Gringotts from getting full access, but they likely didn't want to offend the bank too much, and the bank very much wanted access to the new and unexplored catacombs.

They were still waiting until summer to start, but – purely as a safety-precaution, of course – a team of Gringotts Curse Breakers would take part in the expedition.

Harriet hadn't exactly received a list of names or anything remotely like that. Just a heads-up that she wouldn't be alone in her Curse Breaking-efforts, and that she'd probably have to at least pretend to play nice with the goblins as a result.

She wasn't overly worried about it, because it was generally a good thing to have backup, especially when you went into something as unpredictably dangerous as Yharnam. But she also wasn't all too thrilled at the idea of the goblins deciding to claim credit for the whole operation, which they'd no doubt try to do.

It was less about Harriet's pride in her accomplishments, and more that Harriet didn't like other people to have their reputations artificially inflated. It always reminded her too much of Lockhart to be comfortable.

No, Gringotts would try to bully its Curse Breakers into letting them claim full credit for clearing the catacombs, and Harriet would remain a weird in-between entity of clear competence but no directly provable accomplishments.

Whether they'd succeed or not, Harriet couldn't tell.

Perhaps they'd all get themselves killed in the catacombs, and Gringotts would return to its practiced method of simply sending more Curse Breakers until someone survived it, and then understandably be able to claim full credit when someone did.

Perhaps Harriet would die, perhaps the others would die. Perhaps the others would be too traumatized by Yharnam's horrors to go along with Gringotts plan, and would instead forcefully foist off all credit onto Harriet's shoulders – regardless of whether or not that'd be true.

Harriet hadn't even met the team, let alone seen the catacombs, who knew how it'd work out?

XXX

Unlike what was the case with OWLs and NEWTs, the results for the end-of-the-year exams were expected to be presented to the students before they were given their summer-homework.

Now, for a practical subject like Potions or even DADA, that wasn't much of a bother. After all, it would usually be easy to determine if a student passed or failed before they'd even made it back out through the classroom door.

Theoretical subjects were a little bit more iffy. Harriet needed to give her students time to actually sit the exam, before she started reading through whatever answers or arguments they'd given, and then she had to figure out whether or not those answers were correct or not. Not to mention where on the sliding scale of 'correct' they'd land.

Madam Pomfrey was again called in for supervising the Potions exams that weren't the OWLs or NEWTs and then gave everyone an automatic pass so long as they didn't burn the classroom down, since grading students wasn't really in her job-description. Sirius gleefully set up an obstacle-course of various dangerous things, and graded students depending on how far along they made it and how injured they were at arrival.

Andromeda did a bit of theory on a few of her years, but mainly focused on practical spell-casting, same as Filius. Pomona treated it more-or-less like a normal class, except without a teacher to aid them, which could cause some chaos depending on how reliant the students were on being prompted into action.

And so Harriet was relatively alone in actually being buried under paperwork as all of her students needed to have their exams properly graded before summer-break started.

Which was why Sirius was hanging upside-down from the ceiling on the fourth-corridor this morning, after the man had cracked a few too many jokes about how she only had herself to blame for her current workload.

Harriet refused to feel guilty about the fact that they'd only managed to get him down by noon, several hours after he'd originally been found. He'd known the risks, he could damn well experience the consequences.

It wasn't like he'd been in any real danger, and Harriet had even been so nice as to make sure that he was strung up in his pajamas, rather than in his robes, so there weren't any worries about indecencies. Crimes against good taste? Oh yes. And lots of it, from how eye-watering Sirius's pajamas were, but nothing indecent.

Andromeda obviously kept her face carefully neutral and made a single dry comment about how Sirius's anti-green habits seemed to have mutated a bit far into 'rainbow' over the last few years. And then went back to her more regular-scheduled exasperation in regards to Harriet's antics.

Minerva had shaken her head, and gone off to do something different, throwing a comment over her shoulder that Sirius could damn well get down from there himself, like the adult he was supposed to be. She'd really mellowed out after Sybill's appointment as Deputy and Umbridge's sudden departure. Why, for a second there, Harriet was pretty sure that she'd nearly smiled.

Sybill made a brief appearance as well, said something about her third-eye bringing her there, and then promptly exclaimed something obscure and mysterious-sounding about rainbows indoors and hurried off. Her fans among the student-body were suitably awed.

Filius poked the spells for a little bit, cracked a cheerful joke about how Sirius should maybe try to stay on Harriet's good side in the future, and then continued to poke the spells some more whilst explaining and praising the spell-work to all who'd listen.

By the time Sirius got down from there, he was too resigned to it all to really bother with holding a grudge.

The Weasley-twins on the other hand had finally figured out which one of their professors had let them take the fall for harassing Umbridge all those months ago, and they seemed to be caught between awe at a teacher doing something like that to their own coworker, and justified outrage at having been played as scapegoats for it.

Not particularly keen on starting a prank-war with the Weasley-twins when she was already buried in work, Harriet officially gave them unofficial permission to be up and about after dark. As long as they didn't do anything too extreme.

Considering that she'd caught them nearly every time they'd left their dorms over the last year – even if she'd been rather merciful in point-removal and detentions – that really wasn't an insignificant thing to promise.

Supposedly, Sirius was very confused as to why the Weasley-twins decided to throw a party in the dorms that night, and Harriet had no intention of explaining it to him.

If Sirius didn't want to replicate the Marauder's Map and ruthlessly hunt down students to the point where he could use not-being-hunted-down as a valuable concession in order to avoid a prank-war? Then that was his problem.

Also, if Harriet told Sirius, Andromeda and Minerva would figure it out within a day, and then they'd glare at her again.

Chapter Text

The final results of the House Cup, as it was revealed during the End-of-Term Feast, was in all likelihood due to a combination of things.

Snape not being around to inflate his own House with unearned points whilst ruthlessly taking points away from the other Houses. Umbridge's feud with the Weasley-twins, as well as Harriet's many own encounters with the twins after-dark. Filius's distraction with temporarily becoming the Deputy Headmaster, as well as him opening up the Ravenclaw study-sessions for the entire school. And Andromeda cracking down hard on misbehavior and racism in her House.

All in all, the – perfectly deserved, honestly – winner of the House Cup was Hufflepuff.

Slow and steady does indeed win the race. Unless someone else rigs it, that is.

It was also entirely possible that half of Ravenclaw had gotten distracted with training themselves up to the point where they could actually understand and replicate some of the warding-techniques in Harriet's book. As in, they'd been neglecting their actual schoolwork in order to figure out a puzzle that needed an awful lot of time and dedication to solve.

Their grades hadn't ended up suffering noticeably, but Harriet was fairly certain that Ravenclaw as a whole had been a bit too involved in their own thing to pay much attention to the opportunity of earning House-points. Which ended up showing.

It definitely didn't hurt that, though Gryffindor managed to win the Quidditch Cup, Hufflepuff hadn't been far behind them in points. Oliver Wood had been spontaneously bursting into tears ever since the award-ceremony had happened, and it was a little bit hilarious.

After that, things happened very quickly.

Minerva thanked them for the year, confirmed that Lily Potter would indeed be available for the position of Potions Professor by the next school-year, and that the Board of Governors were happy to have her. Apparently, the underlying threat of a second Umbridge showing up was more than enough to happily pretend as if Lily being hired wasn't a violation of tradition. Also, Sybill would remain as Deputy Headmistress, because she and Minerva made a surprisingly good team in how differently they viewed the world.

During the summer, Filius would be immersing himself into some more relaxed and esoteric research, Sirius would be crashing at the Potters and go drinking with a few old friends, Andromeda would be spending time with her husband, Pomona would stop by at Hogwarts through the summer to make sure the greenhouses remained at least somewhat supervised, and Hagrid was visiting a dragon-reserve.

Minerva wished Harriet well on her trip to Italy, and explicitly asked Harriet to not get herself killed, because Minerva was quite done with hiring new professors all the time. This was met with a few chuckles, until Andromeda pointed out that she really needed to avoid getting permanently maimed as well, since she wouldn't be able to teach from St Mungos.

A few of the professors looked a little bit uneasy about the reminder of exactly how lethally dangerous Harriet's 'hobby' really was, but they were distracted from it easily enough when Sybill started giving mysterious predictions about the future.

Considering that at least one part of those predictions included Harriet threatening the Board of Governors with bodily harm, Harriet was pretty sure that Sybill had just stolen it from Minerva's reoccurring and vocal mutters about Harriet's tendencies to cause her headaches.

It didn't exactly mean that it was a false prediction, considering the likelihood of it happening again, but that didn't mean that anyone really needed to take it seriously either.

After that, goodbyes were said by all, and Harriet made her way back to her quarters to get her things. She'd already packed the day before, having become a lot more organized in how to best streamline travel since her school-days back in her own time-line, after she'd spent most of her life constantly moving from one place to another.

Once she'd grabbed her trunk and made doubly sure that everything was relatively clean and that she hadn't left anything important behind, Harriet made her way out of Hogwarts to grab the portkey that would take her to Italy.

From there, she had to take a train, and then the Italian equivalent of the Knight Bus, and then actually Apparate the final distance, before ending up in the valley of Yharnam.

By then it was already too dark to really get started on anything exciting, but Harriet did get to meet the crew of Gringotts-aligned Curse Breakers that she'd be working with.

There was Kagome and Inuyasha Higurashi, two of those very few specialists who could talk circles around Harriet's understanding of their specialties. Argo, an information-broker of sorts who focused on various obscure parts of history, and who wasn't actually employed by Gringotts, despite having a working relationship with them. And there was William Weasley, who was still straddling that line between being inexperienced enough that Gringotts could outright dictate what he did, but who was well on his way to being promoted into a position where he could actually make that choice for himself.

Kagome's specialty was purification rituals, and undoing various miasma-curses. And considering how Yharnam was supposed to have been doing horrible experiments for prolonged periods of time, having her around was likely to be very enlightening. Inuyasha's focus was barrier-wards, and Harriet had a lot of very visceral memories of trying to puzzle out all of his papers on them, and accidentally lighting the things around her on fire from sheer frustration.

It wasn't that Inuyasha was bad at the actual work, not by a long shot. He just seemed to have absolutely no interest whatsoever to explain what he did to the rest of the world, because his papers seemed to be sixty-percent grumbling about having to do paperwork at all, and the rest was him breezing through what he'd actually done in the least helpful manner Harriet had ever read.

It was a bit like asking someone what they'd done to fix the car, and having them respond with 'I hit it a few times with a hammer'. It honestly raised more questions than it answered, even if had somehow ended up working.

Inuyasha was still better than Lockhart in the fact that he actually knew what he was doing, and that he didn't spend all of his stories talking about how handsome he looked at any given time, but at the same time... At least, with Lockhart, he had the excuse that he was too incompetent to properly explain what he'd 'done', whereas Inuyasha was just being annoying because he could be.

Over the years, and before the married couple had ended up among the casualties of Yharnam, Harriet had met plenty of people who'd vouch for Inuyasha's clear competence. They might've done so grudgingly, but for all that he was either illiterate or pointedly secretive about his methods, the man was amazing with a wand.

Argo was a bit more of a mysterious figure. Harriet had kind of been trying to avoid all reporters like the plague, and Argo had never seemed overly interested in interviewing her. But considering the woman's somewhat tenuous relationship with Gringotts, there had likely been some kind of semi-political reason for Argo to stay away from her.

After all, Harriet had been a challenge to Gringotts' authority in Curse Breaking, and from what Harriet had read in Argo's reports, she sounded like she would've been more than clever enough to have seen that confrontation coming for a long time.

Argo had been a neutral party of sorts, being more of a historian than a Curse Breaker herself, even if she'd been on – and even outright funded – several expeditions. It'd been a clear blow to everyone when she'd disappeared in Siberia several years back.

As for William Weasley, he was currently considered a bright up-and-coming Curse Breaker. And Gringotts should've had no reason to send him to a place as lethally dangerous as Yharnam, unless they were trying to make a point.

Harriet was an independent Curse Breaker, but she didn't exactly have a lot of clout to her name. However, the Higurashi-couple did, and so did the always-neutral Argo. So if all of those perspectives agreed that Harriet was only as useful to the expedition as Mr Weasley, then that was plenty of proof that Harriet was untrained and really not competent enough to be a danger to their reputation.

The fact that William Weasley was actually well on his way to being promoted, and probably should've already been so some time ago, was hardly worth speaking of.

So Gringotts had made its move, and it was as aggressive as always.

That still didn't prepare Harriet for the shock of coming face-to-face with a very dear friend of hers, even if William didn't have any of Bill's prominent scars from the Battle of Hogwarts.

Thankfully, Harriet quickly managed to distract herself from the emotional misery implied by watching the handsome unblemished face of the person she talked Curse Breaking with the most. Mainly by remembering that Inuyasha Higurashi was an illiterate buffoon, and that Harriet still held a grudge about that, despite knowing that the man had died in Yharnam.

After the initial introductions had been made, and Harriet had spent a little bit of time giving Inuyasha the stink-eye for his very bad habits with literature, the five of them started going over what might be expected from Yharnam's catacombs.

Harriet wasn't sure how much fire might affect whatever might hide in the catacombs. The beasts of Yharnam feared the flame, but whether that was instinct or learned behavior from the Hunters attempting to cleanse them with fire, was anyone's guess.

In all likelihood, there'd be some kind of overlap, but the extent of it was up in the air. The seals on the catacombs must've been placed before the ones that removed Yharnam from the map had been, but how much earlier wasn't known.

Both Kagome and Argo had been very interested to hear the full story about how Harriet had unraveled the seal that the withered old beast-hunter had placed on the city. How it had worked, and what Harriet had done to it and the anchors that it'd been fastened to.

Kagome admitted that there was definitely traces of miasma in Yharnam proper, but that it seemed too fractured to properly coalesce into something dangerous.

Miasma and lingering malice weren't really directly magical things, for all that they could be affected and even amplified by it. It was what birthed poltergeists, though Peeves was a much more benign version than his fellows. After all, Peeves hadn't tried to strangle any of the students in their sleep, or even maimed anyone.

There were of course spells that helped to dispel that kind of malice before it really had time to fester and coalesce into something violent, but a lot of the time just giving the surroundings time to recover from whatever had happened would be enough to do the job.

Then there was a brief pause where Kagome very pointedly asked what Harriet's issues with Inuyasha was, and by the time Harriet's rant had ended, William was bodily hauling her away from where she'd been trying to beat Inuyasha's face in with her fists.

Inuyasha looked just as ready to fight back, if he could just convince his wife to let go of him, but despite that Harriet got the weird impression that Kagome was giggling to herself about Harriet's rant about her husband's complete ineptitude with paperwork.

In the end, they didn't get much done after that, when Kagome very loudly decided that they'd all had very long days and should go to bed like sensible human beings.

XXX

Perhaps thankfully for everyone's sanity, William started a discussion about the first layer of wards around the catacombs during breakfast, so Harriet was too distracted to remember some of the viciously satisfying remarks about Inuyasha's inability to write that she'd thought up when she was supposed to have been sleeping.

It didn't stop either of them from shooting each other rude gestures whenever there was a lull in conversation, but the wards surrounding the catacombs were far too fascinating for Harriet not to focus most of her attention on those.

Unlike the norm, the first layer of the wards didn't actually include an element of hiding things away, but instead seemed to have been created to lure things inside. Except, the end result was still an obfuscating effect, as if what it'd lured inside warped the perception of the world to the point where wizards and muggles alike would've been hard-pressed to spot it.

Kagome pointed out that whatever had been caught didn't seem actively malicious, but that it also wasn't anything she'd seen before, halfheartedly mentioning that it reminded her a little bit of sealed demons whose prison had begun to fray at the edges, but that the warding-seals didn't have any real signs of fraying at all.

Inuyasha was more interested in the immediately following second layer of wards, which indeed looked a bit like a barrier-ward, but seemed to be focused on neither living things nor magic. His best guess was that someone had tried to set up a barrier against time, which should be ridiculous but also likely meant that it was something they'd have to be very delicate with unraveling.

William and Argo were both taking notes and trying to find references to everything being discussed. It was a bit weird to see the young man look so enthusiastically overwhelmed, when Harriet was more used to Bill being one of the few people who could actually keep up with her – as long as it was vaguely related to necromancy, at least – but then she supposed that was to be expected when he didn't have the two decades worth of extra experience that he'd had in Harriet's time-line.

The first layer of wards was actually making Harriet wonder about some of the stuff she'd noted about Yharnam and its history before.

The spirits of the dead belonging to the Church of Blood-Healing had been stark raving mad. Unstable and violently insane, even in peaceful death. And she'd only ever seen that happen around spots where greater demons had managed to briefly break into their reality. Except, there weren't any traces of demonic influence anywhere around Yharnam.

In hindsight, there were a few things that existed on similar 'Other' planes of reality, who could theoretically maybe be to blame for it. Except, that didn't make any sense, because Others didn't really care enough about humanity to specifically drive somebody insane. Not to mention that there should still be traces of whatever rift it'd arrived through if it'd appeared in Yharnam or anywhere in the area.

However, if there really was an Other somehow involved in the mess, and the first layer of wards was designed to bring the attention of an Other to it? There was some possibility that the Other would respond by warping reality around it to the point where it wouldn't be easily discovered by the uninitiated. Which could be interpreted as what had happened around the first layer of wards.

Basically, the presence of an Other should've been impossible by any stretch of the word, but it would explain a few things about both the history of Yharnam and why some of these wards were designed the way they were when compared to the particulars of how they seemed to actually work.

Nobody was particularly enthused by the idea that perhaps some members of the Church had managed to trap an Other inside of the catacombs under their city. In no small part because time didn't really pass in the same way for Others, meaning that there was every chance that it was still down there somewhere.

Now, it wouldn't be quite as lethally dangerous as if they'd trapped a grater demon, but in all likelihood they'd need to remove the Other from this plane of reality if they wanted to properly clear out the catacombs. And that wasn't a task to consider lightly.

Everyone feeling suddenly a little bit more nervous about what might be lurking underneath them, they turned back to the task of actually figuring out how to unravel the first set of layered wards in order to actually break through into the catacombs.

And William's arithmancy was infinitely more helpful in that process than Inuyasha's suggestion of just hammering it a few times to figure out the resonating frequency that the layers had been weaved together with.

Fascinating as that explanation was, Harriet didn't think that just shaking the wards loose from each other would do them much good. For all they knew, the attention-attraction first layer had also managed to attract the 'attention' of the other layers, to the point where trying to undo the connection in order to then unravel the layers separately was more likely to trigger a cascade-failure than be immediately helpful.

XXX

In the end, they were both right.

An extremely gentle tapping on the wards to pick up the faintest hints of the resonance proved that the layers were far too intermingled to separate. However, in order to actually deal with the barrier-ward they needed to separate the layers despite how that was impossible.

That left either bombarding the ward from a distance until it collapsed in on itself, and then hoping that the cascade-failure wouldn't be big enough to reach them wherever they'd hid away – or that it would destroy the entrance beyond recovery or trigger other wards hidden deeper in the catacombs and spread the cascade-failure through the entirety of the area as a result.

Or they could with utmost gentleness try to untangle the wards from each other, and hope that nobody sneezed.

Understandably, they chose the latter option. Which was why Harriet's everything ached by the end of the third day, after having spent the better part of sixteen hours trying to keep her wand perfectly steady at the risk of instant death.

So far, the dig had been off to a great start. Harriet hadn't found a ward-sequence that bizarrely tricky in years. Yharnam in general might've been lethal and violent beyond compare, but their actual wards had been fairly lackluster in the grand scheme of things. It was just hard to concentrate on wards when a monster the size of dragon and with the temper of a half-starved wolverine is breathing down your neck.

But this? This was some very high-level stuff, and Harriet loved it.

The others sent her a few funny looks when she practically vibrated through breakfast the following day, not able to wipe the grin off her face at the possibility that the catacombs would be filled with even more crazy wards than that one. But if they thought her enthusiasm was strange, or if they simply didn't expect that this was what she looked like when she was excited, Harriet didn't know.

She didn't particularly care to find out either, because the catacombs were open, and discovery awaited. Stopping to ask questions about unimportant things was completely pointless.

The architecture of the catacombs seemed to be very similar to what she'd seen around Yharnam. Less spires and gargoyles perhaps, but then it was difficult to make spires underground . But with the architecture so similar, it at least proved that the ward they'd broken through had been put there by the citizens of Yharnam, and not something older.

Harriet hadn't really doubted that, because wands were still relatively new inventions, and those wards had definitely had signs of wand-work on them. But it was nice to have more solid proof than a ward that had already been dismantled.

Then of course they had their first encounter with the beasts of Yharnam.

Inuyasha and Kagome both proved themselves perfectly capable of fighting back, even if the suddenness of the attack had taken them by surprise. And at least the rest of them held their ground.

Not that that helped them much, considering how the beasts kept slowly pulling themselves back together in death. Which meant that there was some kind of regeneration-ward down here. Though how it worked and who it affected, Harriet couldn't guess. From the brief experiment of giving herself a paper-cut, she knew that it at least wasn't affecting them, only the beasts.

Harriet left the others in a reasonably defensible position, and set out to track down whatever anchor there was keeping it operational. It wasn't the easiest bit of magic, tracking down the general direction of a focal point for the area-of-effect, especially considering how the catacombs had been built as maze-like as Yharnam itself. Except, being underground as it was, it didn't have any convenient locations to climb and map things out that way.

Again, it wasn't exactly easy, but with the Stone as an eye Harriet had a bit of an advantage that others wouldn't have. Unless they had some very well-made glasses, or were Mad-Eye Moody, that is.

Finally, she managed to track the effect down to a set of very foreboding doors. And beyond the doors was a very big dog.

A dog that spat fire. Because of course it did.

By the time Harriet managed to kill the damn thing, and unravel the ward that kept the beasts from dying properly, she smelled like she'd been vacationing in a volcano. It didn't help matters that the ward that she'd unraveled was a piece-of-the-whole curse. As in, a ward anchored in a monster that served as the support for something bigger. A relatively small part of the support, too, from the look of things.

The others were still alive when she got back, and hadn't actually been injured, which was a good thing. Yharnam-injuries had a notorious tendency to fester in terrible ways, back in Harriet's own time-line, and it was good that they were taking that threat seriously.

Inuyasha was going around making sure that the beasts were well and truly dead. Argo was taking pictures of everything she could fit in a frame, and probably some that she couldn't. And William was talking slowly with Kagome who looked disturbingly pale, even if she still managed to complain about Harriet running off on her own and worrying them.

“Are you alright?” Harriet interrupted the woman, feeling a bit worried herself.

Kagome made a face. “This place is... not very nice, to someone sensitive enough to pick up on the background-misery.”

“Ah.” Harriet nodded. Yeah, she could see how that might be a thing.

Centuries of lingering violence and blood and desperation and madness, likely didn't feel like sunshine and rainbows to someone capable of picking up on it.

Harriet was suddenly quite glad that her expertise wasn't in exorcising poltergeists and lingering malice. It looked unpleasant.

XXX

By the fifth 'cursed section' that they stumbled across, Harriet finally admitted that she might've underestimated how big the catacombs really were.

Each of the sections had a version of that first 'support ward', and yet despite how many they'd disassembled there wasn't a single hint that what the wards were supporting was being destabilized. Meaning that, however many support-wards there might be for that bigger overarching curse, completely removing five of them didn't even cause it to shift around.

If Harriet had to guess, they'd probably be down there for several weeks, even if they dismantled three or four of those sections every day.

That didn't mean that the sections weren't interesting by their own merit.

Ignoring how some of the beasts inside the catacombs looked different from the ones Harriet found on the streets of Yharnam, or the giant monsters serving as the anchor-points being their own brand of bizarre and disturbingly twisted, or even the impressive barrier-wards that separated the different sections from each other, the architecture told a story of its own.

Harriet had seen hints of religion in Yharnam, even beyond the constant references to the 'Church' of Blood-Healing, among strange statues with a great many eyes and a lot more limbs than normal. Originally she'd been wondering if it was stylistic spiders, referencing what had happened to the spider-like experiment that they'd called 'Rom'.

However, she was sincerely starting to doubt it. Which meant that they were more likely some kind of reference to 'the formless Oedon'.

There were a lot of strange names of religious figures in Yharnam. Rom, the failed experiment who was a spider-creature with too many eyes, yes. But also Oedon, who didn't have a shape, though that was pretty much all there was to know about them, despite how it seemed like everyone in Yharnam had worshiped them at some point.

Beyond that, there'd been a single reference someone had found in a library during her year at Hogwarts that mentioned a 'Paleblood', which didn't really have any explanation whatsoever, except that it might be a different word for 'Old Blood', or it might be something that 'descended to lend them aid', or it might be both. Along with a few mentions of a 'Mergo' who 'wept eternally' which could probably mean any number of things, and nobody had managed to find anything other than that. And Kosm, which might be a different name for enlightenment in general, but only seemed to be mentioned in notes belonging to the highest ranks in the Church of Blood-Healing, as if it was a carefully hidden secret.

All in all, Harriet could safely say that Yharnam's religion was about as complicated and strange as most religions were. And that it was still surprisingly non-complicated for a people who'd gone to all that effort of turning an entire city into a magical circle.

Regardless, the catacombs had more statues, and – through the proof of Argo's many taken pictures – it was clear that some of them were of a different make than the ones above-ground. Possibly because they were older, and that the style had shifted into something different over time, and possibly because they'd been made to represent something different.

Historical culture wasn't Harriet's strong suit. She was more a collector of rituals and spells, with a fondness for more non-magical historical anecdotes. And she was happy with that. There were plenty of historians out there who could make more sense out of it than she could, even if Harriet could cheat and ask a few spirits to help her figure out some bits and pieces of it.

Spirits were unfortunately not the best at actually explaining their culture without explicit questions about very specific things. Which was pretty much the same as it was for people. It was difficult to sum up a culture when all you had to go with was the fact that you'd lived in it for your entire life to the point where you wouldn't ever question the details of it. And spirits were notoriously bad at learning anything that they hadn't already learnt during their life.

Even Bill had agreed to that, back in Harriet's old time-line, even if his focus on necromancy hadn't exactly meant that he spent a lot of time talking to spirits. Mostly, he'd been too busy dismantling whatever kept those spirits trapped on their plane of reality to bother listening to them.

Which was fair enough, it wasn't like spirits generally had a lot to say, except to bemoan all of the missed opportunities in their lives.

XXX

“Is it just me, or are these things getting bigger as we go?” Inuyasha asked, frowning.

“I-...” Harriet glanced around at the bodies of what might've once been trolls. “I don't think so? But there's definitely an argument to be made for them getting stronger. Which is interesting.”

“Oh?” Argo sidled up to them, apparently done with taking photos for now.

“Well, we've already established that this area is older than the area before this.” Harriet motioned with her hands. “And it's been going on like that for quite some time, becoming older and older.”

“And if the monsters are also growing stronger...” William made a thoughtful noise as he trailed off.

“You think they grow stronger over time? Or that the monsters used to be stronger?” Kagome's own frown was growing warier as she likely imagined being forced to fight ever-stronger enemies as they made it further in.

“It could also be that they train somehow.” Harriet shrugged. “Personally, I'm worried that the sections that we've eliminated are somehow being used to fuel the magic in the others upon their destruction.”

“If that's true, could we redirect the magic somehow?” William asked.

Both Argo and Inuyasha turned to look at Kagome, who was frowning in deep thought.

“Maybe?” Kagome finally said, not sounding very sure about it. “There are certain directional cleansing-rituals that might work for that, if that's really what's happening. But they're not easy to set up, and if we're wrong they could easily hurt us.”

“Hurt us how?” Argo asked, a little bit too quickly for her not to be worried about it, even if her expression looked much the same as always.

The woman had an impressive poker-face.

Kagome grimaced. “Think-... Think 'turned inside out by the backlash', and you'll be pretty close.”

Harriet made a face at that. She'd seen a lot of magical backlash over the years, and she'd even seen a Curse Breaker be turned inside out once, back in Spain. Neither of those things were something she was remotely interested in experiencing for herself.

“That should probably be a last resort.” Harriet concluded, and the others nodded. “Until then, is there a way to track the magic to see if that's what's happening?”

Harriet had a few spells that might classify, but one of them required sacrificing a living person, and another was a ritual that would include Harriet eating one of the anchors. As the anchors were half-rotten and in many cases likely used to be people? Harriet wasn't super enthusiastic about volunteering to perform either of those spells.

The others all shook their heads.

“Maybe if it wasn't already connected to the rest of the sections through whatever it is that it's supporting?” Kagome shrugged. “It's too much of a scatter-shot to be used on something that we already know is interconnected.”

Harriet sighed. “Well, I can think of a few things that would probably manage it, but let's not resort to cannibalism and human sacrifice just yet.”

Inuyasha made a choking noise, as if he'd nearly swallowed his tongue. “What the hell?!”

Harriet glanced his way. “The Aztecs were very enthusiastic about human sacrifice, and there's a lot of peculiar magic from the arctic circle, if you know where to look. But even if eating one of those rotting corpses would work, it might technically turn me into another anchor, depending on how the whole thing is set up. And at that point who knows what would happen.”

There was a long moment of silence, before Argo pulled out her notebook.

“Do you pick up literally every bit of magic you can find?” Argo asked, sounding honestly curious.

Harriet scratched her head, a little bit embarrassed. “It's kind of a habit? A lot of it's very interesting, and some of it is really useful for Curse Breaking, but mostly... yeah?”

“Well, better to know and not need it, than to need it and not know it, right?” William grinned at her.

And yeah, that pretty much summed it up.

XXX

“Huh, that's weird.” Harriet dodged out of the way of another lunge of sharp teeth, a little bit distracted as she disemboweled the monster.

“What is?” Argo asked from where she was taking potshots over Harriet's shoulders at the attackers, still clutching at her wand in a white-knuckled grip.

“The architecture here is different.” Harriet sent a flesh-disintegrating curse towards a monster that'd been sneaking up behind where Kagome was trying to cover Inuyasha's blind-spots.

“I don't think now's the right time to be admiring the architecture!” Kagome interrupted, bowling over a duo of skeletal wolves with a blasting-curse.

She probably wasn't wrong about that, but Harriet liked to pay attention to things that could be useful to figuring out the details of how a dig fit together, and catacombs that shifted into an entirely different architectural style as they went deeper seemed like it could be important.

The first few sections had definitely been built in Yharnam's style of things, and for all that this section seemed to be just as labyrinthine as the earlier one, the style was completely off. The workmanship was different too, and it honestly reminded Harriet more of an underground version of some of the magical communities who used to live in the dark forests in northern Europe, with the root-systems of some kind of fossilized plant replacing the tree-branches.

Harriet would love to go into depth about that, especially considering that the areas around Yharnam shouldn't have been in contact with those communities since a century past the fall of Rome's Western Empire.

Which would translate to about a millennia before Yharnam had been founded.

It wasn't exactly unheard of for cities to be founded on the ruins of an older city. It was in fact one of the more common ways to found a city. All the building-material would be right there for the taking, if you just disassembled the older buildings, and ruins often meant that both fresh water and some other resource could still be found in the area.

There were absolutely cases where something made the city uninhabitable to the point where nobody could resettle the ruins, but if a place had been habitable once, the rule of thumb was that it could be habitable again.

Still, a city founded in the times after Rome's fall from grace? Harriet couldn't recall any name that might fit, and that left her very curious. Yharnam's rise to fame had been meteoric, and it'd fallen just as quickly. What were the odds that it just so happened to have been founded on a ruin that was completely unrelated to the miracles that Yharnam had managed in healing-magic?

Harriet used a wide-effect blasting-curse to clear the path, and then blasted the door to the section-anchor open. There was a roar from the other side, and Harriet grabbed Argo by the collar to drag her out of the way of the fire that was spewed out through the doorway in response.

Lips twitching upwards, Harriet wondered if she'd managed to nail the section-anchor in the face with the door. It definitely sounded like she'd hit something with it.

Kagome yelped as she and Inuyasha stopped well short of running into the actual flames.

“Hold the door, would you?” Harriet shouted at them, before leaping through the smoldering remains of the door-frame.

She was pretty sure Inuyasha said something foul in response, but Harriet really had to focus on the fact that they'd managed to get their hands on another one of those fire-hounds. This one was pretty much the same size as the first one that Harriet had gone through, but from how her first volley of spells nearly bounced off of its fur, she guessed that she would be in for a bit more of a fight this time.

A wave of her wand turned the ground underneath the hound into a swamp, but that didn't do much when it could leap halfway across the room in an instant, blasting fire all the way.

But if she couldn't catch it before it leapt, she just needed to catch it when it landed. So, with that uncomplicated plan of action, Harriet used a wind-spell to launch herself straight into the ceiling. The impact would've stung if she hadn't managed to throw in a cushioning-charm before she hit, but she did and so it didn't.

From there, she just turned the entire floor into a swamp. The hound couldn't actually exit through the people-sized door-frame – which did leave Harriet with questions about how it'd been brought inside in the first place – and that meant that wherever it might land would be a swamp. Easy.

True enough, the hound leapt again, trying to catch her from where she was clinging to the ceiling, and landed back in the swamp. So Harriet turned the swamp solid, and then started on an animation-unraveling charm.

It wasn't exactly the best thing for the job, but it very specifically didn't actually target what was being animated, as much as it targeted what was animating it, so the hound's magical resistance wasn't an issue. It also took a long time to cast, which was why she'd needed to immobilize it first.

The hound responded by breathing more fire at her, but she'd been cloaked in a dozen fire-resistance spells since she'd crossed the threshold. She was reckless, not an idiot. And true enough, the fire-resistance held. Half of them came undone under the heat, but that still left her with the other half, so it was fine. She just needed to finish before it could do that a second time and-... Said and done.

Harriet watched in satisfaction as the hound started to crumble, losing control of its limbs, even as it remained intact. She'd need to fix that to make sure that the anchor remained destroyed, but that wasn't really all that complicated.

By the time Harriet had extracted herself from the ceiling, and started properly disassembling the hound's corpse, Argo and the rest stumbled inside.

Harriet threw them a small wave, and got back to her work. She'd let them rest for a bit after this, it was still early in the day, but the monsters had definitely become tougher. More resistant to magic, quicker on their feet, and a lot more capable of powering through shield-spells. Thankfully, they'd figured that out before anyone got hurt, but it'd clearly given Argo a nasty shock.

XXX

By the time the architecture changed for a second time, they were deep enough that the makers of the place had resorted entirely to magical wards in order to keep the air clean. It wasn't an unusual solution in old magical mines, but it wasn't exactly something any of them had expected to find under Yharnam.

Harriet had been expecting catacombs that would perhaps shine some light on the experiments that had lead to Yharnam's destruction. She hadn't expected miles upon miles of tunnels and traps and increasingly dangerous monstrosities. Nor had she been expecting the architecture to change so rapidly.

It was as if there were cut-off points. As if certain sections had been made by an entirely different culture than others, rather than one culture developing over time.

It was entirely possible that she was mistaken, but she doubted it. Some of the more blatantly long-lasting wards were very unlikely to have been made with a wand. The style was different, and the delicate and stream-lined nature of wand-work didn't suit those things at all. Which would've meant that the tunnels in the area predated the Roman Empire.

Which made some sense, because the 'architecture' they were currently making their way through was more akin to a re-purposed cave-system than anything else.

It was still something of a marvel, with traps of gigantic swinging blades to go along with wards designed to boil people alive. And it still looked impressive and beautiful in its own way, even if it had been partially flooded with groundwater, and was infested with monsters.

Harriet was willing to admit guilt for the bloodstains and a few of the charred spots, but she could hardly take all of the blame for the disrepair or the nasty smell that lingered everywhere.

They'd started using their own air-filtering spells after Kagome had brought up the likelihood that the smell could be a result of the malice of this place condensing to the point of actually turning into a full-blown miasma. None of them really wanted to take the chance to breathe in what amounted to a gas made entirely of Dark magic.

And for all that the purified air was easier to breathe, it didn't actually get rid of that lingering smell of still waters and rot.

As for the monsters themselves, well, they'd become substantially more lethal. Meaning that either they were 'powering up' from the other sections being eliminated, or they were growing stronger because they were closer to some kind of power-source. Though what the hell kind of power-source would be able to give strength to undead monsters, Harriet couldn't say.

Argo had taken to hiding entirely behind the rest of the group, only really working to make sure that the 'killed' monsters didn't recover enough to attack them in the back. William was a bit more active in taking pot-shots when he could, and was generally keeping anyone from stumbling across uneven ground or actual traps during their fights. And Kagome and Inuyasha continued to fight back-to-back, bringing down monster after monster.

Harriet mostly just killed everything that moved, and then left the others by the doorway to the next section-anchor, so that Harriet wouldn't be overrun by the smaller monsters, and that the others wouldn't get themselves killed when the inferi-giant covered in sharpened chains decided to do a pirouette.

Oh, she might've appreciated the help, but unfortunately the rest of the expedition wasn't quite as good at surviving things that ought to have killed them, as Harriet was. Which was why Harriet often joked that her specialty was to simply not die.

And if her fighting the section-anchors gave the others an opportunity to rest up so that they could move on afterwards, well that was just good time-management.

By the time they found the actual thing that the people of Yharnam had been trying to depict with all of those many-eyed statues, they'd been down there for nearly two weeks.

Turns out, it wasn't a demon, at least.

It didn't really seem like a proper Other either, because it wasn't really warping the fabric of reality the way an Other would've. But it was distorting it a little bit, so that was probably the best designation for it that they had.

Unless they wanted to call it a 'fragment-Other' or something.

From an academical point of view, it was a fascinating find.

From Harriet's perspective, it was a lot of... unpleasantness.

“Just kill it already!” Inuyasha yelled at her from where they were all desperately running away from the giant laser-beams cutting through where they used to be.

Which was easier said and done, really. Harriet had been trying to kill it from the moment she first laid eyes on it. It was really resilient to magic, and it sure as hell wasn't actually animated by anything. It was just there, holding onto the section-wards like a voluntary anchor, which was insane.

An Other might not be deliberately malicious, but they sure as hell didn't really help people either. Generally, they just undid reality around them until people started to drop like flies from the non-reality-miasma. They weren't directly hostile, but they were so incompatible with reality that they might as well be a bomb.

The idea that an Other would decide to help some people out in the deepest spots of Yharnam for who-knows-how-long? To deliberately place itself inside of the ward-functions, and then not move?

Harriet seriously wanted to know what the hell these people must've bribed the damn thing with. It might only be a fraction of an Other, but that was still plenty of Other enough that it ought to have been instantly lethal to whatever poor sods managed to catch its interest.

Then again, Harriet had been throwing spells and curses at it, and it hadn't even managed to kill them in return, despite obviously trying to do so.

Perhaps it was just a really defective fragment of an Other? Then again, Harriet didn't even have the faintest of clues what the hell the thing really was . She'd resorted to calling it Other simply because it didn't actually fit any other available category, but it sure as hell didn't actually fit into that category either.

But they really could do without the giant laser-beams that were blasting apart the walls and ceiling and floor. This deep underground, who knew how much the structural integrity of the place could be compromised by even a few collapsed walls?

Wanting to at least stop it from aiming at the rest of them, Harriet sent a few 'false regeneration' curses into what passed for the Other's face. They were spells designed not to destroy, but to force the victim to regenerate mass to the point of basically exploding from the inside-out, and the way they worked, they should bypass most magical resistances.

Needless to say, they did basically nothing at all, though Harriet was pretty sure the damn thing grew more eyes . As if it needed more eyes. It already had more eyes than half of Aragog's entire brood combined.

Then again, eyes were generally pretty vulnerable, as far as targets went.

Decision made, Harriet conjured a plank of wood, and used a particularly nasty bone-shattering curse to turn it into a mess of needle-sharp splinters. First a strengthening spell on the splintered wood, and then an old 'follow the leader' type of anti-pest charm to make sure that all of the splinters hit their target.

The Other made a not-sound as it clutched at its face. So it could be hurt with physical attacks. That was good to know.

Harriet wasn't the best at conjuration, but she wasn't completely inept. And one conjured javelin later, Harriet sent it hurling into the Other's neck at a speed that broke the sound-barrier.

It left her ears ringing unpleasantly, and the shock-wave felt a bit like being kicked in the chest, but at least it finally seemed to be enough to bring the Other to its knees.

No, wait, it was twitching-... and it keeled over dead.

Harriet stopped to take in the scene, not entirely sure whether to be disappointed in herself for not trying that earlier, or in the Other for being so pathetic that it could be killed by a conjured javelin. A supersonic javelin aimed straight at the neck, perhaps, but still. It was just a javelin.

“Anyone have a better name for that thing other than 'Other'? Because I really don't think it should qualify as an Other.” Harriet asked as she turned to the others.

Argo made a disbelieving face as she stared at her. “Azalea, I think you might be the scariest person I've ever met.”

“Seconded.” William agreed from where he was helping Kagome to stop leaning on her sprained ankle, he looked rather pale.

Which was a bit extreme. “It's not like it's a real Other, just some kind of fragmented version of one, I think?” Harriet frowned at the corpse. “Hell if I know what that means though.”

Argo didn't look entirely convinced, but then she realized that the fight was over, and brought her camera back out again.

Information-brokers were pretty impressive people.

XXX

“Whatever is down there is-...” Kagome trailed off, shaking her head. “I've felt death-curses more benign than whatever that is.”

They'd been down in the catacombs for nearly three weeks now, and they'd made a lot of progress. And with every section-anchor they destroyed, whatever ward all of them were supporting were beginning to grow more unstable.

Harriet would've been pretty worried about that except for the fact that Kagome shared Harriet's feelings on what the ward actually was. A seal.

Oh, whatever it was sealing might be terrifyingly lethal, but seals like that were about as likely to trigger a cascade-failure as the average levitation-charm. And honestly, that would've been a lot more terrifying.

No, something had been sealed in the deepest depths of Yharnam's catacombs, and it'd likely been sealed there since before the rise of Rome, with several separate cities having been founded on top of it only to be abandoned or destroyed very suddenly.

Considering Kagome's highly educated opinion on whatever the sealed thing was, Harriet was willing to bet that whatever was down there likely had something to do with that constant rise and fall of city-states.

“Could it be related to that Other?” William asked, frowning thoughtfully at his own notes.

There was a moment of silence as everyone weighed the possibility of running into another Other that had been sealed away somehow. It wasn't a great thought, but it should've warped the catacombs into something entirely different if there really had been a trapped Other down there, unless it was just as fragmented as the one Harriet had killed with a supersonic javelin.

Harriet shrugged. “The nastiness might be what lured that fragment-Other here, or why it stayed still for long enough that it could be used as a section-anchor. Beyond that, who knows?”

“I'm not super-thrilled about the idea of accidentally releasing the end of the world, you know?” Argo chimed in.

“Technically, it shouldn't be able to properly form in our reality for long enough to do more than maybe turn Italy into an island.” Inuyasha pointed out.

Kagome smacked him on the arm. “Inuyasha! That's not helping!”

Going unsaid was it was just as possible that whatever was down there had served to condense miasma to the point of actually turning it into an active disease of sorts, which could very well have wiped out the planet, depending on how contagious it turned out to be.

It wasn't the most likely of options, not the least of which because it would be unlikely that that kind of concentrated miasma would make it to the surface, and that the five of them would likely be far too dead to properly carry the disease out into the open air.

However, thankfully for Argo's clear discomfort with the idea of their imminent demise, nobody actually brought that up.

In the end, it didn't really matter what was down there exactly. Whatever it was, it was a clue to Yharnam's sudden fall, and in all likelihood it was also a clue as to how it'd risen to its unquestionable prominence in the first place.

The rise had been unnaturally quick, and whilst perhaps some of that could be contributed to some new technique or spell or ritual that they got their hands on, the catacombs were telling a very different story.

For so many different civilizations to have risen within the same area in seemingly rapid succession? It would have to be an almost cyclical meteoric rise to power and sudden destruction, and whilst that wasn't entirely unheard of, Harriet sincerely doubted that it was unrelated to why the catacombs were so extensive.

Best guess, some people stumbled across something in the depths of the catacombs, used whatever it was to perform their miracles somehow, and then were destroyed by it. Though, considering the way that there'd been fewer and fewer hints of what Harriet would've called 'Yharnam-like' tendencies, Harriet wasn't entirely certain if the Church of Blood-Healing had ever actually made it this far down.

That didn't mean that it was unrelated however. After all, the attraction-w ard at the opening of the catacombs was likely an attempt to keep the beasts within from reaching the city proper. And that could probably imply that they'd escaped previously, which would easily explain how an unprepared civilization could fall practically overnight.

So, whilst Harriet was fairly certain that whatever could be found in the deepest depths of the catacombs, it had likely remained untouched by Yharnam itself. But that didn't mean that their predecessors hadn't done something to it, or left Yharnam some piece of a puzzle down here that they'd then thoroughly hidden away since.

In the end, it didn't really matter what ancient horrors might await them as they continued to press forward. There was a secret to be uncovered, and Harriet's greatest weakness had always been her curiosity.

Chapter Text

There were plenty of magical creatures capable of mimicking the cries of an infant. However, Harriet had yet to encounter anything that could do it through heavy magical wards and walls made of solid rock.

Also, usually those creatures either affected everyone, or only a single person at a time. As it was, they'd all heard it, but the times at which they'd heard it varied awkwardly between them. There didn't seem to be any common nominator between anything in particular and the people being affected at the time, but it was definitely the same noise that they were hearing.

An infant crying.

Harriet had experienced creepier things in her life, but a seemingly invisible and intangible infant, constantly crying? Harriet would admit that it was definitely up there in things she'd rather not encounter again.

Kagome had noted that it seemed like whatever malice was deeper down seemed to stir whenever someone heard the crying, so there was likely some degree of correlation there. Though who knew whether that was because the crying was being carried to their ears through the miasma, or that the miasma was somehow affected by the child's tears.

It was also interesting in how it seemed as if whatever inscriptions and statues that could be found in the area had become solely dedicated to Oedon.

Oedon had always been a big part of the architecture, but it'd almost seemed like an afterthought at times. In the first few levels of Yharnam, the main subject had been that fragmented Other, and then the two of them had been more or less battling equally over the architects' attentions from there, with maybe an inscription or two mentioning the endlessly weeping Mergo.

Or... perhaps, the actual translation was more 'crying' rather than 'weeping'. Which might explain what they were currently experiencing.

Oedon, who seemed to almost be the origin-cult of whatever Yharnam had been founded around. Rom, who was an extremely recent addition to the group. 'Paleblood', who was earlier than Rom but definitely didn't predate Yharnam's founding. Kosm, who was maybe a little bit older than Yharnam but not by any more than a century or so. And Mergo, who had apparently been referenced for a damn long time.

Lovely.

“So, just a random and hopefully completely pointless question.” Harriet turned to the rest of the group. “Does anyone here have an idea of how long it should take an Other to grow up?”

Argo was the one who caught on first, from how quickly the blood drained from her face. The woman then hurriedly made to sit down, which was probably for the best considering how wobbly her legs looked.

“Please tell me that you're not saying what I think you're saying.” William looked pretty pale himself.

Harriet gave him a smile that was more of a grimace. “I never quite figured out the whole 'eternally crying Mergo', but the references are pretty old.”

“Even if that's so, Others shouldn't be affected by time in the manner we perceive reality, right?” William didn't sound so sure, but his voice was steady which was impressive in its own way.

“They shouldn't, but they also shouldn't be able to stick around for any actual stretch of time either.” Argo pointed out, her voice a few octaves higher than normal.

“So what, we have a cult worshiping a baby? Why the hell would they do that?” Inuyasha frowned.

“Maybe what the baby represent? Maybe who the baby belongs to? Maybe something that an Other can give them, even if they're just a baby?” Kagome shrugged, breathing deeply from where she too had taken a seat on the floor.

“Baby-experiments. That's great.” Argo's voice managed to climb another few octaves. “Of course someone would find a baby-Other and decide to poke it with a stick until it kills everyone.”

Kagome didn't seem any happier about the prospect, but if Harriet was guessing she'd say that it was more to do with the idea of someone taking advantage of a child, rather than what a baby-Other might be.

From what Harriet had seen of her, Kagome was a very righteous young woman, and considering that she was already married, Harriet was willing to bet that Kagome had at least considered having kids of her own at some point previously. So, people being mean to a baby, even if it was a baby-Other and who knew what the hell anyone had done to it – if anything at all – probably rubbed her the wrong way.

Harriet was honestly more worried about the 'Other' part of the baby-Other.

It shouldn't be possible for an Other to be stuck in one place for so long. It shouldn't be possible to seal it away. And whilst babies cried for lots of different reasons, the odds that it wouldn't decide to just up and leave by crawling its way through reality? It didn't sound very plausible.

Which either meant that some crazy maniac had figured out a way to seal an Other to a specific plane of reality, without causing either the Other or reality to instantly explode. Or something was very wrong with the baby-Other.

XXX

Harriet honestly wasn't sure whether she ought to laugh or cry.

Inuyasha and Kagome had both been a massive help in unraveling the final ward after the last section-anchor had been destroyed. They'd expected that it'd be something nasty inside, and they'd expected that there'd be a baby-Other.

But there was just something viscerally miserable in seeing a pregnant woman tied up, beautiful white dress covered in blood, and with murderous hate exuding from her like a visible miasma. She could barely move, but even so, she was using the blood she was covered in to attack everyone around her.

And the baby-Other's cries reached a crescendo at any time Harriet tried to attack back, as if trying to protect its human mother.

Everything was beginning to make sense. It wasn't painting a pretty picture by any stretch of the word, but it was starting to make sense.

A cult worshiping the 'Formless Oedon' managed to somehow bring the Other into their reality for long enough that it could impregnate a woman. The Other then disappeared, and something with the pregnancy went wrong, whether accidental or intentional on the part of the cult who desperately wanted Oedon to return to them. Though considering that she was tied up, Harriet would be betting that it wasn't an accident.

So there was a pregnant woman, likely cut open in some nasty way in order to bring the father of her child back into their reality. And there was a baby-Other on the verge of dying just as it was being born, crying desperately for its mother. Both of them wrapped up together in the furious hatred against everyone who'd been the cause of their situation.

Harriet had seen more than a few dying pregnant women who left curses against those who'd hurt their unborn children. But usually those were made with the magical power of a 'sacrificed' human infant, not with the magical power and reality-bending properties of a baby-Other.

It all kind of made sense. The reason why the Other-fragment had been there, the reason why civilizations built upon this place would inevitably come crashing down-... It all made sense.

William and the rest of the group had retreated up the catacombs after the wards fell, because Kagome was getting lightheaded from the miasma of malice that'd become noticeable for all of them.

Honestly, Kagome's ability to dispel this stuff would've been massively helpful, but she wouldn't have been much use if she'd gone unconscious from exposure to it, and she'd admitted herself that it was unlikely that she'd manage to do anything against it until it 'stopped replenishing itself'.

So somebody needed to deal with the 'anchor' of the malice, and when it came to killing dangerous things, Harriet was their best option.

Blood, blood, and more blood. It was like fighting against that one beast-hunter in the clock-tower, only a lot more disturbing.

And then of course, halfway through a barrage of spells, the pregnant woman ripped apart the ropes that bound her, and pulled out a sword made entirely of blood.

Which honestly made the fight resemble Harriet's tussle with that beast-hunter even more. Only there was a big altar-thing smack down in the middle of the room, which both helped and hurt.

It seemed like she was attacking mostly by line-of-sight, so it was a good chance to dodge out of her attacks, but it also meant that Harriet ended up feeling uncomfortably predictable in her movements.

Flesh-rotting, blood-boiling, bone-shattering, disintegration, fire, lightning-... Harriet continued to send barrage upon barrage of curses at the pregnant woman, not that they seemed to do much except upset the baby-Other.

Still, it wasn't like Harriet could really do anything else than keep hitting the woman with violent spells and hope for the best.

She wasn't an exorcist, and even if she was, the rules got more than a bit tangled when an Other was involved, baby-Other or not.

Then again, if the baby-Other had really been caught in a state of perpetual death for the span of several millennia, stabbing its human mother was unlikely to really do much of anything at all. No, Harriet needed something a bit more specialized.

Thankfully, she also knew a lot of counter-curses, and she'd been digging through exorcisms pretty recently, so those were still fresh in her mind.

An anti-animation charm, a forceful calming-spell against restless spirits, a direct expelling of lingering ghosts-... Harriet started to use the pregnant woman's blood-attacks to paint out a ritualistic circle that should collapse any openings in the fabric of reality, and force any Others back out of their plane of reality.

It wasn't the easiest thing to set up, but it was a decent enough place to start at, and she needed to start somewhere.

Unsurprisingly, it didn't do much more than cause Mergo to start crying louder, so it was back to the drawing board. Quite literally this time, considering that the next ritual also required a ritualistic circle, meaning that it was back to blood-painting the ground around them.

It wasn't exactly easy to dodge the pregnant woman's attacks, but it wasn't exactly difficult either. She was a lot less prone to sudden movements than the beast-hunters had ever been, even if she was very enthusiastic about throwing her weaponized blood around, and Harriet was very good at dodging.

Honestly, if Harriet had been reliant on magical shields or transfigured barriers, she would've probably been very dead by now. It was one of those times that she really appreciated that she'd never been all that enthusiastic about learning how to incorporate Dumbledore's more visually impressive dueling-ability into her own fighting-repertoire.

A banishing-spell against vengeful spirits, a counter-curse against undead, a blessing of rest against the restless dead-... and Harriet triggered the ritual designed to dispel malicious miasma.

It didn't seem to do much of anything at all, but that just meant she now knew even more things that didn't work. She'd figure it out sooner or later.

Or she'd die. That was always a possibility, she supposed. But Harriet's 'niche' was survival for a reason.

She was really hard to kill.

XXX

In the end, what finally brought the fight to an end was a mix of a lot of different overlapping rituals and spells, and quite frankly Harriet really didn't blame the rest of the group for looking horrified when she explained the details of it.

Honestly, she was more surprised that she hadn't accidentally 'exorcised' all of Yharnam straight into nonexistence in the process, than that the whole thing had actually managed to kill the baby-Other and its mother.

There was a variation of a banishing-spell that could vanish a ghost from their plane of reality by targeting its ability to cling to it. On top of that, she'd improvised three different circles of ritualistic cleansing-magic into working together after having painted them with the woman's blood on both ceiling and walls and floor. And that wasn't mentioning the fact that she'd dropped Fiendfyre on her head just to make sure.

The fact that none of the rituals decided to explode was a miracle in its own right, but the Fiendfyre had probably been pushing it. But then, Fiendfyre was actually not all that hard to cast, when you actually knew how it worked.

It was presented as some grand kind of 'duel of wills' between the caster and the Fiendfyre, but that was only because most wizards casting it had very little idea of why the Fiendfyre wanted to burn them alive, and so didn't understand how to just... have it not do that.

It all came down Fiendfyre being a fire that could burn anything and everything. Could. There were some things it burned easier than others, some things which it 'preferred' to concentrate its unstoppable hunger on. And one of the big things it really enjoyed devouring was magic.

Use Fiendfyre on a remote island to try to light a campfire? You'd be dead long before the campfire burned out, because you were the only thing with magic in the vicinity. Use Fiendfyre in the middle of a place with a high degree of saturated magic and which was filled with magical objects? It'd explode out of control in an instant as it devoured everything. Use Fiendfyre against the focal-point of wards that were likely millennia old, whilst at the same time triggering a whole slew of exorcism-magic on it? The Fiendfyre found its target.

Oh, it would still probably have murdered the hell out of all of them if it hadn't decided to try to burn away a baby-Other, or that it'd been caught in the area-of-effect for the banishing-spell. The timing had needed to be pretty much absolutely perfect, or either the Fiendfyre wouldn't have had an effect on the baby-Other, or the Fiendfyre would've survived and killed all of them in the aftermath.

So yes, a certain degree of horror from the rest of the group was perfectly understandable.

Still, with the baby-Other killed and the wards all destroyed, all that remained was writing up everything that everyone had collected about things, and then going through it to come to some kind of consensus for what they'd found and what it might imply.

Kagome's description of the problem with the malice-miasma very quickly started going over Harriet's head, which was always an exciting experience.

Argo mostly spent her time cross-referencing pictures that they'd taken from the catacombs with things from other digs and from Yharnam in general, trying to build up time-lines for who'd actually been the 'original founders' of Yharnam.

And William was mostly keeping himself busy with trying to translate whatever notes the rest of them made into something that he could actually understand. Which was fair enough. For all that he was very much an up-and-coming Curse Breaker, he didn't quite have the years upon years of experience that made most of what they were writing make sense to Harriet.

As for Inuyasha, he grumbled endlessly as he meticulously wrote down every detail of whatever the hell he'd done to break down the barrier-wards between the sections, without triggering a cascade-failure. And Harriet nodded along to a lot of things, and kept her wand aimed at Inuyasha's head, to make sure he didn't have any funny ideas about trying to skimp on explaining stuff.

He was the single-most expert in barrier-wards, and yet Harriet had seen completely green Curse Breakers write better explanations about how to take down a barrier-ward. Inuyasha pissed her off on so many levels, and if there was the slightest possibility that Harriet could convince the man to turn over a new leaf and actually write properly , then she'd take it. Even if that meant that she had to take notes with her non-dominant hand, in order to keep her wand constantly trained at Inuyasha's head.

She'd learnt how to write decent notes with her left hand a long time ago. And watching Inuyasha squirm in misery as he was forced to continue writing page upon page was viscerally satisfying on a level where Harriet would've probably been perfectly willing to pay for the experience.

XXX

It was nearly mid-August before they made it back up to the surface, and Harriet was very grateful for her own forethought in assigning a book for her classes before leaving Hogwarts. Less reasons for Minerva to strangle her with her bare hands and all that.

Still, with the start of classes drawing uncomfortably near, Harriet ended up cutting short some of the aftermath-discussions about the implications of the Yharnam catacombs. She was still available by owl, and it was mostly going to be the tedious job of double-checking things from what they'd known previously, so nobody could really blame her when she had other things on her schedule.

The discussion had given rise to some interesting theories about where the 'old blood' that Yharnam often referred to in its medical texts might've come from. And that wasn't even getting into the possibility that the only reason why Yharnam seemed to have a connection to lycanthropy was that it'd been experimenting with the 'origins' that the curse had originated from, rather than the curse itself.

As in, there was a possibility that they'd accidentally stumbled across some of the truths surrounding how the lycanthropy curse had been created all that time ago. Which could imply a whole lot of other things that Harriet was pretty sure she wasn't qualified to figure out.

She was a Curse Breaker and a collector of ancient magic, not a spell-crafter or a historian. It was entirely possible that it would imply some really interesting tidbits about magical history, and perhaps it might give people some hint as to how to go about finding a cure for the affliction, but Harriet really wasn't qualified for making that kind of guess about where things would be going from there.

On a relate note, they still didn't know where the 'old blood' might've come from, because the fragment-Other hadn't bled – even when it'd had a javelin stuck in its neck – and the baby-Other had been deep enough down that they'd stopped finding signs of anyone having been down there for possibly millennia.

Oh, there were the many different sections of the catacombs, and the barrier-wards, and the way that the magic of it all became progressively more dangerous the farther down they went. But that was-... At this point, their going theory was that it was a magically mutating barrier-seal against the death-curse of the baby-Other and its mother.

In other words, the odds were pretty good that Yharnam hadn't really managed to delve all that deeply into the catacombs, for all that they'd added their own layer on top of what had already existed.

Which left a big question-mark as to where in the world the Healing Church might've found the blood of an Other.

If the baby-Other was Mergo, and its father was Oedon – who was 'formless' and therefore likely didn't bleed either – that left three unknowns. And Harriet was willing to bet that the fragment-Other wasn't part of that list.

Every reference Harriet had found on the subject supported the idea that 'Rom' used to be a human, who'd achieved 'greatness' thanks to 'Kosm'. And the transformation was recent enough that it seemed to be recorded in Yharnam-proper, in as much as Yharnam had proper records about anything at all.

That left two potential origin-points for this 'old blood'. Paleblood, and Kosm. Considering that Kosm was a highly-prized secret of the Healing Church, and Paleblood was only really mentioned by a few scattered pieces left behind by the beast-hunters? The odds were pretty good that the Other that had given rise to Yharnam had been Kosm.

Unfortunately, nobody had the faintest clue where they'd found Kosm, or what had been done to get the Other to bleed, or much of anything at all about it except for the fact that it was considered a 'path to enlightenment'.

Considering that there'd been one reference to the 'primordial sea', and the fact that Yharnam wasn't all that far away from the coast, Harriet would probably resort to looking around the nearby coastline in the hope of stumbling across something unpleasant. But the odds of finding remnants of something like that several centuries after whatever the encounter had consisted of, and in the wake of the Church of Blood-Healing likely doing everything in its power to completely erase it from history and shroud it in myth, the odds of anyone actually finding anything was probably slim-to-none.

But again, that wasn't really important, because upon returning to Britain, Harriet was far too busy with the dawning horror of realizing that Minerva had decided to host the Triwizard Tournament.

Actually, reading between the lines a bit, it was more that the Ministry had tried pushing for international cooperation – likely to try and distract people from the Umbridge-incident – and Dumbledore had pulled a few strings, and then Minerva had had the wonderful job of hosting the actual event dropped in her lap.

Harriet made a note to get the poor woman some high-grade whiskey in apology for having been unreachable throughout the summer. But her main focus was on the fact that apparently the students of the other schools would be joining the seventh-years in their classes. Which didn't sound so bad, until Harriet realized that a few of those seventh-years were likely going to be taking their NEWTs in Magical History, which meant that Harriet now suddenly had to teach NEWT-level students, despite how no Hogwarts-students had decided to study it beyond OWLs this year.

So she was going to have to teach a class which she really wasn't qualified to teach, let alone had any experience with or made any preparations for.

Fantastic.

XXX

“It's not so bad, I'm pretty sure they're bringing up a few professors of their own anyway, and even if none of those are their own History Professors, they'll still be in contact with those teachers for homework and stuff.” Sirius leaned back, looking lazily amused.

And that was a good point, but it didn't really stop Harriet from worrying about it.

Sure, she was more than adequate at teaching history up to OWL-levels, but NEWT was an entirely different level. And technically, Harriet had never sat her own NEWTs. She'd been hired by the aurors in the wake of the war nearly on her reputation alone, had gone into teaching DADA with pretty much the same qualifications, and had taken a spin into Curse Breaking by following a an almost-family-member around with a notebook.

What little Harriet knew about NEWT was what she'd gleaned from Hermione's complaints, and one year of teaching DADA to a bunch of children who were more interested in hearing about whatever story Harriet could dredge up about her past than they were in actually learning the material.

Harriet could probably pass the NEWTs in Magical History with very little effort on her part, but could she teach her students to do the same? And even if they were attending her lessons in 'name only', it wasn't like they wouldn't already be very busy even without Harriet trying to teach them things that they either already knew or would never need for their NEWTs.

She could admit that she was a little bit intimidated.

“That's all well and good for you, but some of us actually take their subjects seriously.” Lily sniffed from where she was buried in her own paperwork, doing another set of 'final adjustments' to her curriculum.

She was seriously beginning to remind Harriet of Hermione's more obsessive moods. Lily had had all summer to prepare for this, and had probably done those 'final adjustments' about sixteen times over by now.

At this point, she was likely doing it more out of nervous habit than any actual belief that she'd improve what she'd already decided on. Harriet supposed she could sympathize, even if Harriet actually needed to do it, herself.

Run off to Italy to risk your life fighting against horrible abominations to magic and reality for a few weeks, and suddenly the backlog paperwork went completely out of control. So unfair.

“I take my subject plenty seriously.” Sirius said, feigning terrible offense. “But worrying about it without first experiencing the classes for yourself is just going to drive you to an early grave.”

“How very sensible of you.” Harriet drawled, sending him a halfhearted glare. “But unlike you, I've never actually set up a curriculum for NEWT-level students before, seeing as Minerva dumped this in my lap yesterday.”

“How did your vacation to Italy go anyway?” Sirius grinned at her, not deterred in the least.

Harriet sighed, before pushing away her paperwork and straightening up. When Sirius was in this kind of mood, he wouldn't let anyone around him concentrate on anything except himself.

“It went fine.” Harriet made a vague motion with her hand. “Found some interesting tunnels, fought against a few inferi, and poked a bunch of wards. Didn't really have the time to compare all our notes properly, but that's what happens when you try combining two full-time jobs. We can still do it by owl so it's not the end of the world.”

“Geez, how can you make fighting inferi sound so boring? Where's your sense of drama?” Sirius complained.

“I mean, it's exciting the first few times, but then it kind of just-...” Harriet shrugged. “It's interesting, sure. But more for what's around the inferi than the inferi themselves. It's like going jogging, it might get your blood pumping, but it's not exactly a riveting experience.”

Sirius hung his head. “You're the worst. At least let me enjoy a little bit of the childish wonder and excitement about it.”

“I think you're more than childish enough as is.” Harriet said with a sigh.

Sirius made an offended noise. “I'll have you know I can be way more childish than this!”

“That wasn't what I meant, and you know it.” Harriet hung her own head, perfectly aware that he wasn't going to be shutting up about this for several hours at the very least.

Lily sent her a wryly pitying grin, clearly knowing Sirius well enough to come to the same conclusion.

XXX

Unlike Sirius's complete and carefully cultivated disregard for history, both Andromeda and Filius spent a bit of time grilling her for information about interesting magics that she'd encountered.

Sure, Sirius had asked about what she'd done, but there was a big difference between someone fishing for a good story and someone fishing for the sake of academic curiosity. Harriet knew that better than most, she'd grown up with Ron and Hermione as her best friends, and they were on completely different ends of the spectrum.

Filius's interest mostly revolved around the wandless wards that honestly hadn't been all that extraordinary in comparison to other digs. Wands were a relatively new invention, and there'd been a great number of different foci between different years and cultures, so stumbling across a 'wandless ward' was something of a regular occurrence as long as the dig was old enough.

Harriet wasn't entirely sure, but if she were to bet, it'd be on Filius toying with the idea that at some point even their current wands would be outdated. And how that might change how they were perceived by their descendants.

Andromeda turned out to be a bit more interested in the time-line that Harriet had tried to cobble together. Of the first civilization that'd sprung up around Mergo, and the guess-estimates on when the other civilizations in the area had risen and fallen, before they made it to the founding of Yharnam and its subsequent rise and fall.

Which was how Harriet accidentally admitted to having fought and killed a baby-Other.

The look on Andromeda's face could be most easily summed-up as 'horrified and frustrated exasperation'.

“Harriet, perhaps fighting against reality-warping monstrosities from a different dimensional plane, should be something you mention beyond how it's 'an interesting implication of the time-frame'.” Andromeda's tired glare made it clear that it wasn't really a suggestion.

Harriet held up one finger. “First off, I don't think that fragment-Other should count, because dying to a javelin to the face is way too pathetic.” She held up a second finger. “And secondly, I'm pretty sure that I fought a woman on her death-bed, who was using the baby-Other that was her dying child to puppeteer herself into moving.”

Andromeda pinched the bridge of her nose. “Harriet, that doesn't make it sound any less horrifically dangerous.”

Harriet frowned at her. “It should. She'd been stuck down there for over a millennia, I'm pretty sure that she wasn't any more 'aware' than a particularly sneaky inferi. Even if she was a bit harder to kill.”

“'A bit', Harriet?” Andromeda raised an eyebrow at her. “And what, pray tell, did it take to kill her?”

“Fiendfyre?” Harriet said, though it came out as more of a question underneath Andromeda's skeptical stare.

“And?” From Andromeda's narrowing eyes, she'd clearly noticed.

“A few exorcism-spells, and uhh... three blood-powered rituals working in unison?” Harriet was leaning away from the woman at this point, more than a bit uncomfortable about the sudden turn this conversation had taken.

Andromeda took a deep breath, pinching her eyes shut for a long moment.

“Harriet, I understand that your chosen career is a very dangerous one, and that you're very good at surviving it despite this.” Andromeda sighed. “But please don't try to brush something like this under the carpet.”

Harriet frowned at her, not entirely sure what she was getting at. Mrs Weasley had screeched a bit like a banshee the first time she found out about the inferi-dragon, so Harriet had learnt to not mention that kind of stuff around people who'd make a big fuss about it. It made it easier for everyone involved.

“Nymphadora hasn't chosen the safest of careers, I know this.” Andromeda said after another long moment of silence. “And I'm sure she'd go out of her way to convince me to not worry. But there's a big difference between downplaying how closely a hex brushed past her, and with refusing to admit that she came face-to-face with You-Know-Who.”

Harriet opened her mouth, before closing it again. “Umm?”

Andromeda sighed again, and got out of her chair in order to pull Harriet into a gentle hug. “I'm glad that you're safe, Harriet. And I understand that you don't want the people around you to worry, but please don't hide things from me.”

Harriet felt her jaw drop a little, but even if she couldn't find the words or even the voice to speak, she could still nod.

Nod, and pretend as if this wasn't the first hug she'd received since the last time she'd seen Teddy.

XXX

Lessons started with very little fanfare.

The students had all been informed that the Triwizard Tournament would be taking place in Hogwarts this year, and that quidditch would therefore be canceled for the year. Minerva hadn't been happy about that decision, but it was hard to preach 'school unity' when the Houses were all but hexing each other in the corridors over their current quidditch-scores.

Admittedly, the rivalries didn't run quite that deep, and Slytherin had been very subdued about their regular house-pride ever since Snape had gotten fired. But that hadn't stopped a few Gryffindors from gloating about their supposed victory in 'cutting off the snake's head', and it hadn't stopped those Gryffindors from getting hexed. Even if, in general, there was an unspoken truce even before the Tournament reared its head, and nobody really wanted to rock the boat.

However, no matter what degree of restraint was shown by the Houses, allowing for quidditch would end up showing Hogwarts as a school divided, which wasn't the best impression for their international neighbors.

There were some mutinous grumbles from the quidditch-crowd, but it was a decision made by the Headmistress, and she really didn't look any happier about it than they did.

Beyond that, Lily Potter took to the Potions curriculum like a duck to water, and her students were quite torn about it. On the one hand, she was a muggleborn and the mother of a current Gryffindor – which just wasn't done – but on the other hand she taught her subject well, and she wasn't Umbridge.

There were very few people who couldn't be favorably compared to someone like Umbridge.

It wasn't that Umbridge was the most evil of people in the world, but rather that she just... fit in. Dark Lords and dark wizards were one thing, they killed people, they tortured people, they hid away in dark corners of the world and did unspeakably horrible things. People like Umbridge just sort of sat down at a desk across from you.

It was the difference of trying to understand how someone could kill thousands upon thousands of people in a different country, and recognizing that some bureaucrat had just ruined the lives of people you loved. And even more hateful than all of that, was that she would've gotten away with it, if she hadn't reached a bit too high a bit too quickly and brought the political might of a man like Lucius Malfoy down on her head.

Umbridge and her ilk tended to hit closer to home, even among those who had Dark wizards in their families. And her ability to work the system long enough to get as far as she did, was one of the main reasons for the real level of antipathy she received.

Regardless, classes were classes. Harriet didn't have any sixth-year students, whether that was because they didn't want to learn more, or because they didn't like her teaching-methods, or because they hadn't been sure she'd be returning for another year, Harriet didn't know. She didn't particularly care either.

She'd moved on from the 'introductory' year of trying to undo most of the learned stupidity from Binns, and was now working on actually teaching the subject properly. But even then, it wasn't really something she was overly worried about.

Harriet had been anticipating returning for another year since basically the moment she'd been hired, and had planned her curriculum accordingly. Minerva wasn't the kind of woman to break something that was mostly chugging along in an agreeable direction, and she was also rather busy with her own workload, even without trying to track down a History Professor that Harriet would approve of.

Perhaps normally Harriet wouldn't need to 'approve' of her replacement, but considering that she'd very deliberately made sure that her predecessor wasn't around anymore because she disliked his curriculum, it'd be silly of Minerva to try hiring a new professor without first making sure that Harriet wouldn't kill off that one too.

Harriet wouldn't actually kill off someone just because their curriculum was racist propaganda, but she'd happily drag their names and reputation through the mud for it, which would likely result in Minerva being forced to fire them due to public outcry. So that mostly amounted to the same thing.

The lessons really didn't change much from what it'd been like by the end of the last year. There were some summer-homework that needed grading, and she needed to figure out how she was supposed to deal with teaching NEWT-level students, but other than that the thing that occupied her time the most was trying to sort out everything they'd encountered in Yharnam's catacombs.

Argo would want a full explanation of how they'd broken through all the wards, or what kind of weird spells Harriet had used for dealing with the baby-Other. That's why she'd come along after all, information. And she wasn't going to let any of them skimp out on giving her more of it, which Harriet mostly approved of.

It was a good policy, but it meant that Harriet needed to figure out how the hell the spells had interacted when she'd fought against the baby-Other, and that wasn't exactly easy. Thankfully, Inuyasha and Kagome would likely be held to similar standards, so Harriet would be in for some very interesting reading in the future.

She was really looking forward to it.

XXX

Trying to transform a three-dimensional space, where several magical circles overlapped, into a readable arithmantic equation wasn't the easiest thing to do.

Sure, she could recreate the magical circles, and then draw a brief display over how they would've been placed around the room, but the actual arithmancy involved was hard to accurately translate. And that was before Harriet started poking at which spells she'd used in what order and how they would've interacted with the magical rituals.

She did succeed at it, more or less, but it was the kind of equation that she'd have unpleasant dreams about in the near future, just from how long she'd spent staring at the blank parchment.

No, much more important was that Inuyasha had actually written down what the hell he'd been doing to the barrier-wards. None of that 'bounce it and then twist it and you're done'-bullshit, but actually proper written instructions.

Oh, Harriet was able to guess exactly how that particular turn-of-phrase had come about, going from some of his explanations, but he actually explained it this time. It was amazing.

Harriet might've freaked out a few of her students with the gleeful skip in her step, but at least she hadn't leapt out of her seat in the middle of breakfast and started shouting about how she'd known that the asshole could write if he actually bothered to try.

Harriet very politely kept that comment inside until she had a chance to write back that he should've been writing like this all along, and that he was a horrible person for failing to do this earlier.

The fact that she turned it into a howler was nobody's fault except Inuyasha's.

Harriet had read books worth of texts from Inuyasha where he'd completely failed to explain anything at all ever, and the idea that he managed to explain more in a few short pages of text than over all those years combined, was plenty of reason to yell at him.

Then again, it looked like karma might've caught up with her despite that.

The second week into September, breakfast was interrupted by regular mail, and then that regular mail was interrupted by a hush as a red letter was delivered to the staff-table. Specifically, a smoking red letter delivered straight to Harriet.

It wouldn't be the first time a parent wrote to her to complain about her 'completely inaccurate' curriculum, but it would be the first time anyone actually dared to put it into a howler. That kind of insulting gesture was something you did to your kid to traumatize them for a wrong-doing, not something you did against an adult whom you'd never met before.

Andromeda took a deep breath, and then sort of visibly braced herself, clearly understanding that Harriet was far too curious to open something like this privately. Which really proved that the woman knew her far too well by this point.

“SIXTEEN DIFFERENT WAYS!” A definitely familiar voice shouted at her. “YOU SHOULD'VE DIED IN SIXTEEN SIMULTANEOUS WAYS!”

Harriet blinked. Argo had sent her a howler? And if she was complaining about how close Harriet had been to dying, then... she'd probably already made it through the arithmancy for what she'd done against the baby-Other. Considering that it'd barely been a week, that was pretty damn impressive.

As expected from Argo, she wasn't the foremost journalist on Curse Breaking for no reason.

“I THOUGHT IT WAS JUST THIRTEEN DIFFERENT WAYS, BUT I TALKED TO HIGURASHI AND SHE CAME UP WITH THREE MORE WAYS!” Argo continued. “I DON'T CARE THAT IT WORKED, BECAUSE IT SHOULDN'T HAVE!”

Harriet blinked, three different ways? Purely from Kagome's specialization on purification-rituals and miasma? Harriet felt a brief twinge of worry that she'd failed to consider how the ridiculously malice-miasma might've affected things.

“AND DON'T EVEN GET ME STARTED ON THE FIENDFYRE!” Argo interrupted any further stirrings of unease. “HOW THE HELL DID YOU KNOW WHAT WOULD HAPPEN?! DID YOU ACTUALLY TRY THIS BEFORE, YOU LOONEY?!”

Harriet couldn't quite hide the way her lips twitched in amusement, despite everything. Fiendfyre wasn't something one should really use in proximity to any kind of magic that you didn't want completely destroyed, including yourself.

In fact, the best way to control Fiendfyre was to give it a specific 'path' of magic to entice it to burn in a certain direction. Which in this case translated to triggering a lot of magical rituals focused on a single point, and then using that magical discharge to convince the Fiendfyre that whatever was over there was much more interesting than anything else. The fact that the whole thing triggered a dimensional break with a cascade-failure was part of the idea, because it meant that the Fiendfyre would be caught in the backlash and be unmade as a result.

It wasn't exactly a safe kind of setup, and it wasn't one that even Harriet felt comfortable with resorting to, but it was a well-practiced method of limiting the damage of Fiendfyre back in Harriet's old time-line. She couldn't quite remember who'd been the first one to do it, but it'd been around the time when Yharnam had first been uncovered, and one of the reason why Fiendfyre had been so prevalent in how Yharnam was handled.

“YOU CAN'T JUST TRIGGER A CASCADE-FAILURE WHILE YOU'RE INSIDE OF IT AND EXPECT IT TO WORK! WHY THE HELL DID IT WORK?! I HATE YOU SO MUCH!” Argo continued to rant. “I'M NEVER GOING ANYWHERE WITH YOU EVER AGAIN! I'LL RETIRE ON THE SPOT! I'M A PURE PAPERWORK-JOURNALIST FROM HERE ON OUT! FUCK YOU!”

And then the howler caught on fire, leaving a ringing silence in its wake.

Harriet sincerely doubted that Argo would actually manage to retire. She was a very curious individual, and from what Harriet had seen from her over the years before she'd disappeared in Siberia, there was no way she'd ever be satisfied learning new things from behind the safety of a desk.

A woman after her own heart, kind of.

For all that Argo often visited digs, she didn't usually participate in the actual dig to the extent that she had with the Yharnam catacombs. Normally, the woman looked at the wards from a distance and made some notes, watched the Curse Breakers bring down the wards and made some more notes, and then looked around a bit before going home.

Honestly, if she was rated on the Curse Breaker-scale of reckless endangerment of their own life, then Argo was quite possibly the most cautious woman alive. But Curse Breakers were a lot more prone to reckless madness than even people like dragon-keepers, so that was a bit of a faulty comparison.

However, all of that wasn't as important as the fact that the entirety of the Great Hall was staring at Harriet, looking somewhere between gleeful and absolutely horrified.

Harriet glanced at Andromeda's white-knuckled grip on the table, and sighed.

This was just going to be one of those days, wasn't it?

XXX

After having gone through a lecture from Minerva and Filius about why Fiendfyre was bad – and that Harriet should stop finding inventive new ways to not-die on the off-chance that she inspired her students into finding a way to get themselves killed – Harriet had to deal with her students.

Despite how Argo's howler instantly became prime gossip-material, and several students tried to press for details about who Argo was and if Harriet and her were dating – it always came back to romance with teenagers – only a handful of students seemed to actually be interested in what Argo's howler had been referencing.

She did hold a few lectures about how inherently uncontrollable Fiendfyre was, and the way that it sought out magic – and the magic in living things – to the point where using it in an area with a lot of magic was a good way to instantly turn everything into a sea of fire.

Someone might be able to control a campfire's worth of Fiendfyre, but the odds of actually keeping something like Fiendfyre reduced to that kind of size without immediately turning it into the size of a mountain-side was pretty damn slim. Especially when the magic that it could feed on wasn't concentrated on specific spots.

Dropping a cursed amulet in Fiendfyre was a good way to use Fiendfyre, because the amulet was very small and highly magical. Using Fiendfyre to burn away a ward was extremely reckless and highly likely to kill everyone in the area, because wards were big things, and even if they were magical enough to distract the Fiendfyre for some time, they were also fragile enough that they'd collapse long before you managed to wrestle the Fiendfyre back into a reasonable size again, meaning that before long you'd be dealing with a gigantic mess of Fiendfyre that was no longer being distracted by the magic in the wards, which left the most concentrated bit of magic in the area to be the caster themselves.

Needless to say, using Fiendfyre was extremely circumstantial, even for people who 'mastered' the spell. And Harriet did her best to drive that point home in all of her students, because the idea of anyone experimenting with it inside of Hogwarts was a very easy way to kill everyone inside of Hogwarts, including the caster.

After that, things went mostly back to normal.

Up until someone brought up the security surrounding the Tournament in the staff-room.

Tradition dictated that they used the Goblet of Fire to pick the champions for the different schools, but that Goblet wasn't exactly... nice. There were no real limitations on who could get picked beyond that their name was placed in the goblet.

That meant that someone needed to draw an age-line to make sure that the lower-years wouldn't put in their names and then get themselves killed. However, that wouldn't be enough to stop someone older from dropping in the name of another person, basically 'volunteering' that person, whether they were of age or not and whether they agreed or not. Nor would it stop someone from folding a paper-airplane and getting their name in that way.

No, there needed to be a bunch of wards to keep anyone from messing around with the selection-process, and despite how there would be specific security-personnel, Harriet was unlikely to be outmatched in ward-making experience by anyone that the Ministry or the other schools brought to the table.

Which meant that it would be up to Harriet to design a warding-scheme that made sure that nobody too young were able to place their name in the goblet, and that nobody was able to forcefully place the name of someone else in the goblet.

Considering the upswing in ward-breaking that Hogwarts had seen last year, it also meant that it would be up to Harriet to make sure that none of their students actually 'picked the lock' on the ward and bypassed it, or brought it down entirely.

She couldn't exactly say that she relished the opportunity, but it was a somewhat interesting conundrum.

The easiest way to do it was to draw an age-line, but then she'd need a ward for revealing the name of the person entering it, so that she could use a word-sensing ward to match that name against whatever might've been written on the paper they tried to drop inside, and then a ward to burn any parchment where the names didn't match or where the parchment was 'unaccompanied'.

She also needed to set it up so that a ward would make sure that nobody taped a bit of hair to a paper-airplane would be enough to classify it as being 'accompanied' or have the age-line reject even the smallest sliver of 'too young person' that tried to enter. But depending on how she set that up, she could end up having the age-line rejecting people because they'd hugged their younger siblings earlier that day, so she'd have to be careful about that too.

All in all, it was an interesting problem to work with, even if she knew that there wouldn't be a fake-Moody running around trying to kill off the Boy-Who-Lived.

Chapter Text

The arrival of the other schools was very similar to what Harriet remembered from her own time-line.

It didn't mean that watching the Durmstrang ship emerge from the lake wasn't impressive, but it was less of a surprise and more of a professional understanding of the complicated magic involved with transporting something so large over such a distance.

Oh, the carriage from Beuxbatons was nothing to scoff at, but it was really just a scaled-up version of some of the spells on Sirius's old bike. It didn't really need much more than that, with how the Abraxan horses provided most of the movement, and it was impressive to see creatures like that, but Harriet was rather partial to be more impressed with complicated magic than with beautiful magical creatures.

After you've stared down an inferi dragon or two, very few things really held a candle.

Regardless, she was for the first time introduced to all of the staff-members of the different schools who arrived at Hogwarts – seeing as they'd held to themselves in her old world, and she'd been a student with no contact with them. Not that there were a lot of them. In fact, Beuxbatons had brought with it only their own equivalent of a DADA professor, one Professor Tintin; and Durmstrang had only brought with them their Potions Professor, one Professor Einzbern.

Harriet wasn't entirely sure of what had influenced which teachers were brought along for the ride, but she suspected that Professor Einzbern had been chosen because Durmstrang didn't trust Hogwarts's Potions-curriculum, which was really fair enough. For all that Lily was perfectly competent, Snape hadn't been a very good professor, and Umbridge had been all but actively sabotaging her entire subject.

It took more than a month of functional lessons to convince a foreign school that the controversies had been dealt with.

No, Professor Tintin was a much more interesting addition. Less because of the motivation behind his inclusion – the Tournament was a violent kind of thing, after all – and more because he gave some insight into how very different the curriculum for Beuxbatons was.

Defense Against the Dark Arts was built around the idea that magical creatures could and would eat and kill the unwary, and that being able to defend yourself against those, as well as against your fellow students was just common sense.

In comparison, Professor Tintin's subject was more of an auror-preparation-course, with things like investigative detective-work being part of what was taught, along with procedures for how to act and who to contact in case of an emergency.

If Harriet were to bet on the reason why the subject was taught like that, it'd be because of Grindelwald. Not that the man had really been able to dictate much of the curriculum directly, but rather that the French Resistance during the war had convinced Beuxbatons on the importance of knowing how to organize themselves against an occupying force.

A bit of detective-work to make sure that the students didn't run screaming into a fight as if it was a polite duel, and some administrative reminders about how to contact the French equivalent of aurors in case they were needed.

It sounded like a very sensible curriculum, until you realized that students from Beuxbatons had a tendency to organize themselves outside of the French government. Admittedly, being constantly taught how to contact aurors in emergencies went some way to unify the magical side of the country, but the way the curriculum was formed, Harriet wouldn't be surprised in the least to see half-a-dozen vigilante-groups popping out of the woodwork on any given week.

It did help explain why the French hadn't really had a Dark Lord – or even the inkling of a Dark wizard rising to power – since before the war however, even in Harriet's old time-line, seeing as the vigilante-groups kind of policed each other to the point where their auror-equivalents were considered more jailors or prison-guards than muggle police-officers.

Was it the best option for avoiding a Dark Lord rising? No, probably not. But with the way the vigilante-groups ended up de-centralizing what amounted to 'justice', big class-differences had a tendency to implode violently, making it very difficult for a Dark Lord to properly stir up opinions. Oh, there were plenty of racist people who'd buy into an 'us vs them' rhetoric, despite seeing what that led to long-term, but it was difficult to recruit people for those kinds of groups without stumbling across the information-network of at least one of the vigilante-groups. And then it immediately imploded into violence extensive enough that the government couldn't pretend that nothing was happening.

Again, it probably wasn't the best of systems for avoiding Dark Lords, but it seemed to work for them. And whilst Harriet had been vaguely aware of the French vigilante-groups from her own work, back in the day, she hadn't known that it all traced back to Beuxbatons the way that it did. She'd figured that they were just wholesale remnants from the French Resistance. Small groups of friends and families that just 'kept an eye out' because they either remembered needing to do so during the war, or because they'd been raised into that kind of life during peacetime.

More an entirely cultural thing, than one that was being actively supported by their center of education. So, listening to Sirius and Professor Tintin discussing their different subjects was definitely an interesting experience.

Also, he had a small terrier who was always with him, and it was hilarious to see Minerva's face scrunching up whenever she spotted it.

XXX

There were a few awkward comments from the Ministry and the other schools when they found out the extents Harriet went to in order to keep any of the younger students from placing their name in the Goblet.

Thankfully, before Harriet was able to say something insulting about their surprise, Minerva managed to point out how wards had become something of a fad among the Hogwarts students, and that a simple age-line was unlikely to survive that kind of concentrated attention.

Madame Maxine clearly guessed who might've been the source of the sudden interest among the student-body, but mostly just nodded sympathetically and didn't push the subject further. Karkaroff started glaring suspiciously at pretty much everyone, either not convinced that Harriet was the origin of the interest, or simply suddenly expecting students to have set up horrible wards around any corner.

The only real problem was from Minister Fudge who made a lot of whining noises about how wards were dangerous things and that they should be regulated and not taught to students ever at all for any reason, didn't they know that? Unfortunately, Minerva managed to convince the man to shut up before Harriet could think of a suitably obscure and ironic curse to make his life hell.

Bagman and Crouch both raised an eyebrow at the whole thing, but clearly didn't actually give a damn. Harriet doubted that the way they ignored Fudge was entirely motivated by how rocky the man's political situation had become in the wake of the Umbridge-incident, but she wouldn't bet against it either.

Bagman was unlikely to think further than where he might find a source of money to repay all the money he owed, but Crouch at least was a deeply political animal.

Regardless, with any objections silenced, and with Harriet having already worked out the best way to set up the wards around the Goblet, things went surprisingly smoothly.

Minerva presented the Goblet of Fire to the Great Hall in a suitably flashy manner, and then Harriet smiled and gave a little wave to all of the disappointed younger students when the age-restriction was brought up. From the despairing disappointment on a lot of faces, they knew an impossible task when they saw one.

Oh, there were plenty of ways to bypass the wards, but they all focused on causing the wards to resonate and then using that to unwind the age-line, the tampering-ward, and the intent-ward from where Harriet had crammed them all between an anti-compulsion-ward and a name-recognition-ward. And that wasn't mentioning the various little traps that she'd included in the design in order to muddy the waters and interrupt anyone from breaking through.

It was still a ridiculously light-weight ward, meaning that the odds of it triggering a cascade-failure within itself was slim-to-none. And even if it defied the odds and exploded in someone's face, they'd have a better chance to cause wide-scale destruction if they'd been slinging tickling-charms at the castle walls, so at least nobody was going to wake up to a great big hole in the ground where Hogwarts used to be.

So, whilst it was technically entirely possible for someone to break through the wards and dump their name in the Goblet of Fire, they'd either have to be on the level of an active Curse Breaker, or be so miraculously lucky that Liquid Luck would've been a down-grade.

Harriet didn't doubt that a few of the students would try their luck despite the fact that Harriet admitted to being the maker of the ward, and it was in fact quite likely that a number of students would try to outsmart her wards just to prove that they could.

Which probably wasn't the best kind of situation, but it was what it was. And at least it wasn't an age-line that could be bypassed by having an older student put in a younger one's name instead, or by having someone forcefully volunteered, or by throwing a paper-airplane.

Really, the fact that – in her old time-line – Harriet had been the only one forcefully volunteered at a too-young age was a damn-near miracle. An age-line. Had they really been so completely clueless about how pathetic of a restriction that was?

Harriet shook her head, a strange nostalgia causing her to sigh.

The difference a solid education can make, without charlatans playing at being professors, or bullies masquerading as teachers scaring the students away from asking questions.

For that, if nothing else, Harriet took a quiet sort of pride in the certainty that Binns would never darken Hogwarts's halls again. He might've not been the worst offender – that'd been Lockhart in her old world, and Umbridge and Snape in both – but there was no doubt that he'd been part of the problem.

For all that learning History from ghosts sounded like a marvelous idea, in practice it should never have happened. Ghosts were finicky at the best of time, and not really present enough in reality to draw any kind of conclusions that they hadn't already made before their deaths, and even those conclusions often faded away with time.

It was like making an animated portrait teach art. They might be able to give a few interesting insights, but there wasn't enough 'person' left in them to actually teach.

And if Harriet ever found out which headmaster had completely ignored getting a new History Professor in the wake of Binns' death, she'd-... She wasn't entirely sure what she'd do, but it would probably include one of the portraits in Minerva's office and a bucket of paint-thinner.

XXX

The actual ceremony for the selection of champions was oddly peaceful.

Harriet had known logically that there wouldn't be any fourth champion, and that it was unlikely that three other champions were chosen, considering how it was less of a lottery and more of a magical selection-process. But still, Harriet couldn't quite help but wait for the second shoe to drop.

Then lessons started back up again, and Harriet was left to figure out how to handle her new NEWT-level class.

Harriet wasn't sure if it was a surprise or not, seeing Miss Delacour enter her classroom. She'd always known that Fleur had taken NEWTs in Magical History and Ancient Runes – amongst others – but she hadn't really equated that to the idea that Miss Delacour would be part of Harriet's students.

It didn't really change anything, but it did make her blink.

Regardless, the first few lessons with the foreign students amounted to Harriet trying to get some kind of summarization of what they'd covered previously, and what they probably ought to cover in the future.

Thankfully for that, it looked like both of their respective History Professors had treated it as if Binns would be the one teaching their class, and had set up a 'self-study curriculum' accordingly. And with that as a reference-point, it wasn't too much of an effort to set things up in a reasonable manner.

They were a bit more distractible than her younger years, but then those students had been exposed to the rumors surrounding Harriet for over a year now. Sooner or later, the breaking-and-entering into Hogwarts, the forceful exorcism of her predecessor, and her abilities as a Curse Breaker became mundane.

It didn't stop a few students, like Miss Lovegood, from asking about her latest exploits, but they rarely bothered with trying to get more details on old rumors.

Yes, she was a Curse Breaker more than a proper History Professor. No, she wasn't affiliated with Gringotts. No, she didn't have any problems with the goblins. Yes, she had a few problems with Gringotts as an organization in regards to Curse Breaking. No, she wasn't going to expand upon that. No, she hadn't murdered the previous History Professor. Yes, she had threatened to pour fire-ants down the robes of every single member of the Board of Governors. No, she wasn't allowed to attend political meetings anymore. No, she wasn't romantically involved with anyone. Yes, she'd written a book on Curse Breaking. No, she'd never counted the amount of languages she'd actually learned.

Honestly, that last one had come as a bit of a surprise. She really only had herself to blame, considering that she didn't ask any of her new students to speak English, and simply answered them in it for the sake of the rest of the class. But still, this was the first time her knowledge of languages had really come into question

And whilst it was true that she'd never counted the amount of languages she'd learned, the truth of it was somewhat more complicated. Learning languages from dead people was surprisingly easy, when you were constantly surrounded by texts and stories in those same languages.

However, Hermione considered languages to be an academical subject, and was therefore very competitive about it. If Harriet picked up a new language, then Hermione needed to pick up at least one new language.

It'd driven Ron spare, and so he'd ended their 'competition' the only way he knew how. Or, he'd ended it at least.

Ron only knew a bit of French, but he was fluent in Welsh. So, whenever either Harriet or Hermione would mention a new language that they'd picked up, Ron would switch to being completely unable to understand any language other than Welsh. As in, he'd deliberately go out of his way to find warning-labels that he could ignore because they weren't written in Welsh, and he'd continue to do so for basically the rest of the day.

After the first few weeks of this, Harriet and Hermione had unofficially removed languages from things they talked about, because whilst it was kind of funny to keep Ron from killing himself in absurd ways it was also very time-consuming and kind of annoying.

Harriet really didn't begrudge him it though. Ron lived with Hermione, and that meant that whenever Hermione decided to learn a new language, she'd end up bombarding the poor man with constant gibberish, unless he wanted to try picking up the language along with her. Which, considering that it was Hermione, was practically suicide.

Asking the woman you love what she'd like to have for dinner, only to have an unintelligible response that you'd later find out was 'I'll be eating out today', wasn't exactly the nicest of feelings.

Ron's answer was unconventional and disturbingly effective, and if it wasn't because Harriet didn't particularly feel like babysitting a suicidally pedantic Welsh person, she would've considered it absolutely hilarious.

Harriet missed them both terribly.

XXX

Filius looked up from the paper, looking caught between dry amusement and dread for the future. “Sixteen times, was it?”

Harriet hung her head.

William had finally pieced all of his own observations together, delayed as he'd been by Gringotts constantly poking at his texts to try and convince him to write Harriet's own contribution in a less flattering light. They'd tried to do the same to Inuyasha and Kagome, but there was a big difference in how willing they were to try influencing a promising barely-independent Curse Breaker of theirs and how willing they were to annoy two well-established experts in their fields.

Neither Argo nor Harriet had been amused by the delay, but where Harriet was long since resigned to the goblins being determined to save face, Argo had been taking it a bit more personally. She'd been instrumental in getting Gringotts to back off, seeing as she was a neutral party who'd be all too happy to write something horrendously scathing about them if they continued to try convincing the participants to lie about what had actually happened.

As for the actual paper, Inuyasha's bit on barrier-wards had been really quite extraordinary, though Kagome's explanation of the malice-miasma and purification-rituals really did go way over Harriet's head. In comparison, Argo's digging through old references and getting accurate dates for the different pieces of the catacombs was very well done and not really any kind of surprise. William only really contributed in the sense that he showed how far he still had to grow, having the theoretical language down pat but with very little proper understanding with which to explain what had been happening around him.

Harriet's own piece was probably not revolutionary to anyone who'd read her book on Curse Breaking, but she was happy enough with how it'd turned out. However, with all five of them helping out with the various observations about the arithmancy of the spell-work that they'd found and the spell-work that they'd used against that, it was easy to spot the disbelief between the lines.

It wasn't that hard to deceive a ward into letting you pass through unharmed, as long as you had some idea of what the ward was willing to let through. And alright so she'd dealt with most of the ward-anchors on her lonesome, but it wasn't like dangling from the ceiling and throwing ancient forgotten curses at them was really all that impressive. Also, the fragment-Other was hardly worth mentioning, even if it'd taken a bit of quick thinking to realize that it was more vulnerable to physical attacks than magical ones.

The baby-Other though? Harriet could kind of admit that their disbelief was well-placed. She'd known that it was very likely to kill her, or possibly implode the entirety of the catacombs, but she'd judged that it'd be better to risk it than to let the baby-Other continue poisoning the air for another dozen millennia.

None of the others actually disagreed with that assessment, but they all had very loud opinions about exactly how insane Harriet's solution had been. Inuyasha sounded kind of horrified and impressed all at once, Kagome sounded like she would've liked to tap into Minerva's whiskey-stash to settle her nerves, William sounded very young and very awed, and Argo sounded like she'd already emptied her own whiskey-stash in the aftermath and was now hungover and bitter about having already drunk all of her good booze.

Harriet was pretty sure that it didn't sound quite like that to other people who didn't know them, but it was always hard to not read between the lines when she was reading the work of someone she knew.

Regardless, with their conclusions on the Yharnam catacombs properly published, they'd leave the remnants of history that remained to the proper owners of the dig. Harriet wasn't sure where things would be going from there, but the observations of the rest of the expedition was likely to shine some light on Harriet's own report on Yharnam proper, which would no doubt leave some people guessing about how dangerous that place had really been.

Honestly, Harriet was just glad to be able to avoid establishing what had in her own world been Yharnam's indisputable reputation as the Curse Breaker graveyard. They'd lost more than enough people to that place as it was.

She would very much appreciate if Filius didn't spread around the paper to the rest of their coworkers, but that was most likely a lost cause. Even if they were unlikely to understand half the terms that were being mentioned in that paper, it was still a paper detailing the adventures of their youngest coworker. There was no way they wouldn't be willing to push through a bit of a headache in order to properly gossip about it.

No doubt, their foreign guests would be just as curious, if only because they'd be swept along for the ride.

The Hogwarts rumor-mill was like that.

XXX

Harriet had expected the gossip, and the ribbing about her recklessness from her coworkers. She hadn't quite expected the academical interest from her students – though she really should've known better by now – or Lily having a small giggling breakdown about how hard she'd worked with the exorcism-ritual before summer.

Apparently, she thought that Harriet was suddenly infinitely more qualified than Lily in actually performing it, and was terrified that she'd needlessly put her son's life on the line with her own inexperience. And Harriet didn't have the faintest clue what to do about that.

Thankfully, Miss Lovegood had saved Harriet's proverbial bacon by deciding to publicly grill Harriet about cleansing-rituals. After the fourth time she admitted that something Kagome had written had completely gone over her own head, Lily's sudden influx of faith in Harriet's ability with exorcisms took a comforting nosedive.

All's well that ends well.

An unsettling amount of students also had their interest in learning how to use Fiendfyre rekindled, but that was quickly shut down with a reminder that using the spell literally any place in the vicinity of Hogwarts would have the flames immediately latch onto the castle's wards, spiral completely out of control, and kill everyone.

It didn't exactly convince all of the students, Mr Malfoy in particular looked especially mutinous, but Harriet would rather have them burn themselves alive in their family-homes than in a school filled with hundreds of other people.

After all, children certainly shouldn't be experimenting with Dark magic when they weren't even technically allowed to use magic at all outside of Hogwarts. And any parent who failed to anticipate that, and who was then surprised when their children did something reckless and stupid that ended up with all of them dying?

Well, unfair as it might sound, Harriet would be willing to categorize that as just being bad parenting in a nutshell. And she wasn't actually paid to deal with parents, or with students who weren't in school. If they wanted to get themselves killed, then she would express her remorse, feel a bit guilty, and absolutely refuse to second-guess herself.

Her constant worrying had been the main cause behind her complete inability to remain as the Defense Against Dark Arts Professor. She'd learnt to ignore her fame from a young age, and though the fawning was off-putting, it hadn't been all that special.

No, her reason for quitting was quite simply that if Harriet was supposed to teach children to defend themselves, then she was responsible for the children knowing how to defend themselves. And children were absolutely dreadful at defending themselves.

Harriet could've waded through the entire population of Hogwarts and not broken a sweat. And the realization that she could do that, meant that she was failing her students.

So, rather than fall back into that particular pitfall of responsibility, Harriet's entire purpose at Hogwarts was to teach children about History. Preferably in a way that allowed them to spot propaganda, and keep them from reenacting some of the more miserable moments of the past.

There was also the understanding that not everybody enjoyed History, or would ever find it useful.

Harriet was an odd case, in that her career as a Curse Breaker had been built partially on her knowledge of Magical History. And Hermione's fascination for History had helped her with legalese a lot. But Ron? Ginny? Luna? Filius? Tonks? They'd all been some shade of garbage with History, and it hadn't really affected their lives at all.

Oh, very few people had needed to know how to defend themselves quite to the level that Harriet had needed it, but self-defense was the kind of thing that you might suddenly need in an emergency. Whereas History was something you could leisurely pick up at your own pace when you felt like you needed it.

Harriet herself hadn't really been at all interested in History – beyond a certain enthusiasm for quidditch – until she'd been well into her twenties. No, if Harriet's students didn't want to actually learn History during class, then she wasn't going to lose sleep over it.

Her job was to give them a path to learning, and to hopefully cram enough into their heads that they passed the exams with decent enough margins that nobody looked at them funny. Beyond that, it was entirely up to their own will to learn.

And if they wanted to kill themselves by experimenting with dangerous Dark magic far away from any supervision that Harriet could be reasonably expected to provide? Then that was their own damn fault.

XXX

“No, I'm just asking why you want a reporter entirely known for her constant vilifying and mudslinging to work on what's supposed to be a friendly competition?” Harriet stared at the Minister, and pretended not to notice the way Minerva looked moments away from putting her head in her hands.

Originally, Harriet had kind of assumed that Skeeter had grabbed her place as the reporter for the Daily Prophet simply because of the chance to 'interview' the Boy-Who-Lived. But considering that Mr Potter wasn't part of the champions in this world, Harriet was beginning to suspect that she just wanted to see if she could stir up trouble on an international level.

The woman was nothing if not predictably gleeful about controversies.

“Miss Skeeter is a perfectly capable reporter!” Fudge sputtered.

“She's a highly competent gossip, yes. But she's about as well-known for her standards of reporting as the Ministry is known for its qualified Potions Professors.” Harriet smiled nastily at the man.

She wasn't entirely certain that Fudge had given the go-ahead for Skeeter's presence as a way to further distract people from the Umbridge-incident with new scandals, but she didn't doubt that the thought had occurred to the man.

Fudge squeaked, his face trying to both pale and turn red at the same time. “This is slander!”

“Oh, I'm sure that your pet-newspaper can use their pet-mudslinger to call it that.” Harriet drawled, honestly kind of hoping that the man drew his wand on her.

She'd wanted to hex Fudge for a great many years, but he'd disappeared in the wake of Voldemort's second rise, so she'd never really gotten the opportunity.

“Harriet.” Minerva said sharply, before turning towards Fudge. “Minister, Miss Skeeter's reputation precedes her, and I don't want her anywhere near my students. I'd ask that you find another reporter for the tournament.”

Fudge's face finally gave up on paling, and instead went completely red. “You can't think to take this woman's side, Headmistress!”

Minerva raised an eyebrow at him. “It's well-known that Miss Skeeter often finds herself writing about things that should be allowed to have remained private business. And whilst that's all well and good for adults caught in the public eye, our students deserve some privacy. They're young still, and foolish behavior is unfortunately inevitable. However, I wouldn't trust Miss Skeeter to not publish every inch of that teenage foolishness to the world at large, regardless of if she was only hired to write about the tournament taking place in its vicinity. So no, Minister, find another reporter, Miss Skeeter is not welcome here.”

Minister Fudge glared at her for a long moment, before turning on his heel and marching back towards the fireplace. “This isn't over, Headmistress!”

Harriet doubted that Fudge really had enough political capital to waste on getting Skeeter set up for releasing as many distracting scandals to the public as she could manage. He'd definitely try something, but he probably wasn't going to be using the Ministry or the Wizengamot to bully Minerva into accepting Skeeter.

There was a chance that he'd try to reach out to the other schools involved, but odds were good that they'd be hesitant to agree with him, considering that Minerva was so firmly against it. They might not know who Skeeter was from a personal perspective, but they were likely to be able to guess that Minerva had a good reason for not wanting her around.

No, most likely, Fudge would try to lean on the Daily Prophet somehow. Maybe have them publish something about how Minerva was obstructing free speech? You could never quite tell what he'd come up with.

“That went well.” Andromeda commented dryly as the Minister disappeared in a flash of green.

Minerva sighed heavily, before glancing towards Harriet. “I know why I opposed it, but I wasn't aware you'd been following Miss Skeeter's career.”

Harriet shrugged. “I do try to keep up with the news, and the Quibbler is unfortunately only released weekly.”

Minerva groaned, pinching the bridge of her nose. “The Quibbler? Really, Harriet?”

“Oh, it's a lot of borderline-nonsense, but it's really the only British magazine that properly avoids politics.” Harriet explained, smiling. “It also lets me get a better grasp of Miss Lovegood's homework, which is a nice bonus.”

She really was Harriet's favorite student.

XXX

Fudge's plan became obvious when the Daily Prophet responded by claiming themselves to be horribly short-staffed.

According to them, Skeeter was the only reporter they had available. And it wasn't like they could hire someone new for the event, because they needed to be able to trust that the reporter was of the kind of quality they were known for.

The fact that the Daily Prophet was known as a respectable newspaper purely because of a horrific lack of competition was of course overlooked. Their only competition was the Quibbler, which was known for publishing random conspiracy-theories and bizarre puzzles, and Witch Weekly, which was known for excellent coverage of makeup-tips and ranking lists of eligible bachelors.

Admittedly, the Quibbler was also a family-business, so it was unlikely that they had any 'extra reporters' to spare. But if it was a choice between some of the reporters in Witch Weekly and Rita Skeeter, Harriet would take her chances with the well-known gossip-magazine.

But the Daily Prophet didn't really need a good excuse, just an excuse that they could wave around as 'reasonable' for long enough that Skeeter managed to sneak in when the arrangers were too pressed for time to complain.

Of course, the exact details of what the Daily Prophet demanded of any non-Skeeter reporters were also absurd.

They couldn't be working for a 'competitor', since that would be a conflict of interest. They needed to have several years worth of articles under their belt, written in English of course. And they couldn't be returning from retirement in any way, since that would be an unnecessary strain on their health.

Basically, they needed to be an active reporter, who had written their articles in English, but who hadn't ever actually written for any British newspaper.

It was, quite frankly, a ludicrous kind of blanket-requirement that proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that Fudge was leaning on them. But it wasn't like Minerva could really tell the Daily Prophet how they ought to run their business, even if she could restrict their access to the school.

It was all very upsetting, until Harriet recalled that the lingua franca of Curse Breakers was English, because of how entrenched Gringotts was in Britain and its unquestionable monopoly on the business.

As in, Harriet happened to have just finished writing a paper together with one of the foremost reporters in the field, who just so happened to technically qualify for all of those ridiculous requirements, since she was insistently independent.

Which was why she'd sent Argo a letter about it.

The idea that the Daily Prophet was actually as short-staffed as it claimed was absurd, but just like Hogwarts had been unable to reject Umbridge due to their apparent desperation, it wasn't like the newspaper could publicly reject Argo if she made a very official application for the job.

It'd be more cashing in on a favor than it'd be something that Harriet thought that Argo would actually be interested in. But regardless of if Argo would demand a favor in return, or if she'd grudgingly declare them 'even' in the aftermath, Harriet didn't terribly mind.

Everything she'd ever heard about Argo painted her as a good person, and as far as she knew from having met the woman herself, that held true. And for all that she could get a bit high-strung in lethally dangerous situations, she was normally pretty laid-back about things. Ambitious, and definitely on the greedy side of the spectrum, but more likely to cash in on a favor by demanding a bit of menial labor than anything really bad.

Harriet was pretty sure that she might get roped into being an extra wand for one of the woman's expeditions, but that really just meant that Harriet would get to be part of an expedition without having to pay for the travel-expenses. So it was difficult to feel in any way worried about the prospect.

No, if Harriet could convince Argo to work as the reporter for the Triwizard Tournament, then everything should work out mostly okay. It'd be a bit sad if she didn't get to see Fudge's face when he found out about it, but that was life.

Thankfully, a recently-revived centuries-old international tradition shouldn't be completely abhorrent to investigate for someone as thoroughly devoted to the recording of history as Argo was.

Harriet wouldn't put it past the woman to find something to complain about though. After all, Harriet was fairly certain that she knew the woman enough to guess that teenagers risking their lives for the entertainment of the masses probably wasn't something she really approved of.

But hey, that just meant that they could be grumpy about it together.

XXX

“You owe me.”

Harriet glanced up at Argo, and nearly winced at her expression. “That bad, huh?”

Argo slumped down in a chair next to her, and through obvious force of will didn't resort to burying her head in her hands. “Some days I ask myself why I work independently. Why I deal with half the shit I do, instead of working for a salary like normal people.” She shook her head, grimacing. “Do you know what he wanted?”

Harriet frowned. “If it was something unprofessional, I might know someone capable of egging his bedroom whilst he's in it.”

Argo blinked, a little bit surprised, before giving her a look that was caught somewhere between fond and vaguely disturbed. “That wasn't-... Umm, thanks?” She shook her head. “No, he was just-... He kept going on and on about what their readers wanted. And apparently, the readers themselves don't actually know what they want? But they want it to be scandalous, and shocking, and involve some kind of romantic thing?”

Harriet smiled slightly. “Sounds like the Daily Prophet, alright.”

“Azalea.” Argo said with careful slowness as she glared at her. “I can't write romance for shit.”

“Then just mention the number of times Lucius Malfoy checked his reflection.” Harriet's smile grew a bit wider. “That's basically the same thing.”

Argo opened her mouth, paused, then closed it again. “Alright, first off, nobody named Lucius Malfoy is involved with the Tournament at all, so I don't think that'd fly. And secondly, if that's an established thing, then it's not 'scandalous' enough.” She paused again. “And thirdly, that's not how you write romance, you asshole.”

Harriet raised an eyebrow at her final point. “How would you know?”

Argo scoffed. “Just because I don't give two shits about writing it, doesn't mean I don't enjoy a good love-story.”

Harriet silently mimed scandalous shock, even if her expression didn't really shift at all.

“Oh, put a sock in it.” Argo glared at her. “Not everyone likes to spend their evenings unwinding by cobbling together three incompatibly separate arithmantic systems in order to launch supersonic javelins at things.”

Harriet glared back. “They're perfectly compatible. Math is a universal language.”

“One of those systems uses 'three' as a base-number, and the other doesn't have a writing-system, because they communicate magic entirely through music.” Argo gritted out through clenched teeth.

“Yeah, but if you're not tone-deaf it's really not that hard to figure out.” Harriet denied. “And the three-base math is just a bit cumbersome, not incompatible.”

Argo took a deep breath, and then slumped back in her seat. “Whatever. You owe me.”

Harriet frowned a little bit at having her argument ignored, but sighed and let it go. “Fair.”

“And also, what the hell kind of romance is he expecting from a death-tournament for teenagers?” Argo frowned. “I don't think that's a good environment for romance.”

Harriet shrugged. “Romance crops up when people are under pressure, maybe? Still don't get why the world should know about the love-lives of a bunch of teenagers, but yeah.”

“Did I make out with Weasley during the catacomb-crawl? No?” Argo made a disgusted face. “Then I'm pretty sure that that idea is bullshit.”

“I mean, that's fair and all, but it does definitely crop up a lot in high-pressure situations.” Harriet grinned at her. “Maybe you were too busy checking out Kagome's arse to think about tonsil-checking William?”

Argo blinked at her for a long moment, before her nose scrunched up. “Higurashi is married, dumbass. Why the hell would I be checking out her ass?”

Harriet sighed, waving the question away. “Fine fine. It's not like I think writing about the love-lives of teenagers is a good idea, anyway.”

“Oh?” Argo raised an eyebrow. “And what else do you think might be scandalous enough to satisfy that weirdo? I'm all ears.”

Harriet rolled her eyes. “You don't actually need to satisfy him. It's not like he can fire you, considering that you're now his only chance to cover the tournament. And if he doesn't cover the tournament, Fudge will have his head, because the whole point of this is to be as big and loud as absolutely possible, to make people forget about the Umbridge-incident.”

Argo frowned, before sighing. “That's all well and good for you, but you don't actually have to work with him.”

Harriet sent her a bright smile. “I still happen to know someone who might be willing to egg his bedroom, you know.”

XXX

“She seems like an interesting young woman.” Andromeda admitted neutrally as she finally put away the Daily Prophet.

Harriet was the only one at the staff-table who were fighting a losing battle against grinning with glee, but there was still a lot of interest among them in regards to Argo's first article on the Triwizard Tournament.

Pomona was carefully regulating her breathing, likely suddenly very aware that one of her 'Puffs were going to be risking their lives for the sake of entertainment. Filius looked somewhat grim, but also satisfied. Likely, he hadn't considered that the Triwizard Tournament would be quite so lethal to its contestants, after his own experiences with the dueling tournaments of his youth, but was happy to at least receive a warning.

Sirius and Lily were both looking itchy, as if they desperately wanted to hex something, but there was also a degree of visceral approval there to be seen. Sirius had spent several months going head-to-head with Umbridge, so odds were pretty good that he wasn't exactly a huge fan of the Minister who'd sent her. Lily was-... Well, in the wake of the ransacking of their daughter's grave, the Ministry as a whole hadn't exactly been very enthusiastic in helping the Potters with investigating the Dark families who might've been responsible, so there was a not-insignificant amount of ill-will to be found there.

Karkaroff and Madame Maxine were both giving Minerva side-glances, probably trying to guess how enthusiastic Minerva had been about reviving the old tournament. And Minerva was exchanging silent toasts with Sybill, who was cooing about how dreadful the future looked for all participants and anyone vaguely related to those participants.

Argo had gone all-out in regards to distracting the public from the Umbridge-incident with scandals. However, she'd done so in a way that Minister Fudge was likely to be highly unappreciative of.

Wizards and witches were, as a whole, a lot less worried about death and injuries than most muggles. In part, this was due to them being capable of surviving situations that muggles wouldn't, and in part it was because of their medical magic nullifying a lot of the long-term dangers associated with most injuries. There was also the fact that magic was volatile by its very nature, and after the first dozen-or-so times that you'd broken a few bones and burnt away all your body-hair in a small-scale explosion, it was difficult to get worked up about the dangers associated with explosives.

However, that was part of the problem with the Triwizard Tournament.

It was designed to entertain wizards and witches of all ages. But with all wizards and witches learning from an early age to not be overly concerned about all manner of injuries, that meant that the tournament needed to really endanger the champions in order to actually entertain their audience.

It wasn't enough to put them up against a clever puzzle, or a complicated obstacle-course. No, in order to truly convince the audience that the champions were performing impressive feats, they needed to pick fights with nesting dragons or similarly suicidal things. Which, inevitably, meant that the champions tended to die gruesomely whenever they didn't manage the task with absolute perfection.

There simply wasn't a lot of room for error involved, and if you tried to reduce the risks, the tournament would become so stale and boring that nobody would be remotely interested in the outcome.

Everyone knew that the Triwizard Tournament had been canceled in the late seventeen-hundreds, and everyone knew that there'd been failed attempts to get it started back up since, but the actual reasons why had been lost to time.

Until Argo served it up to the public on a silver platter, along with a very easy-to-understand summary of why anyone had considered 'catching a cockatrice' to have seemed like a good idea.

Apparently, fading entertainment-value had convinced the Tournament-officials of the time to take a few more risks.

As for why several Headmasters over the years had attempted its revival, it usually came back to them trying to shift attention away from some kind of scandal. Which Argo very specifically chose to not comment on, with regards to the current 'revival attempt'.

If Harriet had been able to guess that Argo would be this ruthless about her writing, she would've been even less hesitant about owing the woman a favor.

This was fantastic .

And Harriet hadn't even seen Fudge's hilariously outraged face yet.

XXX

“Explain to me again why I have to be the model?” Harriet growled as Argo pricked her with another needle.

Argo made an annoyed sound. “Because I don't want pictures of my face to circulate everywhere.”

“You already told me that you're legally dead, do you really think they'd still be looking for you?” Harriet rolled her eyes at the woman.

Argo scoffed. “Of course not. But that doesn't mean that they won't start doubting my elegant demise if my face starts appearing in the newspapers.”

Harriet sighed, and returned to staring at the wall. “How did you 'die', if you don't mind me asking?”

There was a long moment of silence, before Argo coughed awkwardly. “Heart-failure.”

Harriet raised an eyebrow, despite knowing that the woman couldn't see her. “Aren't you a bit young for that?”

There was another embarrassed sounding pause. “Well... I might've gone on a very dramatic tour of every brothel in Athens. In a single night.”

Harriet snorted a laugh. “That'd do it.”

She coughed again. “They're nice women, and they were perfectly happy to play along. I made sure they all had personalized invitations to my funeral. All seven-hundred of them.”

Harriet nearly choked. “Seven-hundred?”

“A very dramatic tour.” Argo snickered a little. “All of my relatives were appropriately outraged about it. Well, that, and the fact that my funeral costs used up any money they might've inherited from me.”

“Still, seven-hundred? How would you even have time?” Harriet asked.

“It was more along the lines of seventy.” Argo admitted, warming up to the subject. “But I needed it to not be out-of-character for me. So I had to spend a couple of months just visiting as many of them as I could find the time to.”

Harriet hummed thoughtfully, as the clothes were adjusted again. “Wouldn't there have been easier ways of faking your death?”

“Well yeah. But this way I managed to stash away a bit of a nest-egg for my new identity, without rousing suspicion. Not to mention that it was an amazing funeral.” Argo moved around to her front again, grinning like a loon. “They were crying about how I'd been too young and talented in bed to have died so young. And the way everyone else squirmed was hilarious.”

Harriet paused. “Wait, did you seriously attend your own funeral?”

“I was number six-hundred-and-eighty-three.” Argo cheerfully agreed. “I wore a mourning veil, and I was too distraught to actually speak. It was great.”

Harriet smiled, trying to imagine it. “So, why name yourself 'Argo'?”

Argo made a noise, even as she circled back to being behind her. “Well, there were a bunch of reasons, not the least of which because it sounded nice. But you know, it's supposed to be a ship partially designed by Athena, the goddess of Athens and wisdom.” Argo snorted. “I was always going to be dealing with history and information, and I'd faked my death with the help of the women of Athens. It felt appropriate.”

“Makes sense.” Harriet agreed with a nod, only to wince back into perfect stillness.

They'd already been at it for well over an hour, but Harriet did owe Argo a favor, and serving as a model for recreating some of the fashion she'd seen in Yharnam wasn't that much of a hardship.

Harriet had always been more interested in magic than in general culture, even if she'd picked up a lot of the latter when pursuing the former. Enough so that it was all the more obvious to her that all things in history were connected.

A society that considers corpses to simply be dead flesh are much more receptive to creating complex magics around the idea of somehow making use of those corpses. Whereas a society that considers corpses to be a sacred thing to be carefully laid to rest, would likely come up with some interesting ways to make sure that the graves wouldn't be disturbed.

But that obviously wasn't accounting for the environment of the two societies, where it might turn out that they were neighbors with each other. So one society becomes very good and inventive about breaking through defenses, and another becomes very lethal about defending things. Or they might both sort of side-eye each other and agree to disagree in their own separate plots of lands.

It all came down to the context.

So, whilst long-lost fashion wasn't even remotely one of Harriet's interests, she couldn't exactly fault Argo for wanting to preserve and recreate what they'd seen of it. It was part of the whole of Yharnam, and deserved to be treated as such, though Harriet personally would've preferred not to be the one wearing the makeshift beginnings of a noble's dress.

She also wasn't overly fond of standing still for hours at a time whilst Argo pricked her with a needle. Even if she could wholeheartedly understand Argo wanting to do something actually productive with her free time, instead of continuing to report on the political mess that was the Triwizard Tournament.

Chapter Text

Despite Argo's best efforts, and her viscerally detailed rendition of the truths behind the Triwizard Tournament, they couldn't actually cancel the tournament once it'd been started.

The champions had joined magically binding contracts when they'd been chosen, and so they needed a tournament to compete in. There were some arguments about even more stringent safety-precautions, but the dragons had already been on their way to Britain, so it was a bit too late for second-guessing.

Which – from the rumors Harriet had been hearing – had put the Minister in some hot water.

Harriet wasn't overly worried about the champions. They'd managed to survive just fine against the tasks in her own time-line, and the only death had been due to outside interference. And Voldemort wasn't around anymore.

Though she'd tried to make sure that all three of them received some kind of warning about being up against dragons. Which had been easy, considering that Madame Maxine and Karkaroff were responsible for Mr Krum and Miss Delacour, and Pomona had come to a similar conclusion in keeping Mr Diggory alive.

So, by the time the First Task rolled around, and the champions were officially told what it would consist of, none of them were really all that surprised.

Behind the scenes, Albus Dumbledore had volunteered for helping out with the creation of the golden eggs that the champions were supposed to retrieve, and for all that Harriet had very deliberately made sure to avoid encountering the man during his visits, she was glad for it.

Harriet knew Mermish, but it wasn't exactly an extensive understanding of it. Hell, for all that she could read and write it mostly fluently, the only dialect she could actually speak and reliably understand was Caribbean, and that was nearly a different language all on its own.

And for all that several members of the Ministry prided themselves at being able to speak it, Harriet trusted those people to be diplomatic about as much as she trusted Skeeter to be confidential.

If they were planning on working together with the Merpeople living in the Great Lake during both the creation of the golden eggs and during the Second Task, then Harriet wanted to make sure that none of the Merpeople decided to stab someone in retaliation for something horrendously racist that they might've said.

And even if Harriet really didn't feel like digging up the complicated relationship she'd had with her own version of Albus Dumbledore, she could appreciate the fact that the man was already on good terms with them.

So, she'd carefully avoided him during his visits in a way that nobody should've considered as too deliberate, and she carefully kept her mouth shut about using herself as a possible translator. It wasn't like she'd be a very good one anyway, so it was fine.

No, the really interesting part of the First Task was being given the opportunity to actually see the First Task with her own two eyes.

She'd been stuck in the tent back in her own time-line, after all, so this was very much a new experience for her.

It'd also be the first time she'd be unquestionably exposed to her students being put in harm's way, and she wasn't entirely sure how she'd react to that, but at least she wasn't in charge of teaching DADA.

Which was all well and good until Miss Delacour pulled off a ritual of enchanted sleep on a dragon .

She'd known logically, in hindsight, that Fleur had done the same in her old world, but she hadn't actually thought about that. Mostly, she'd been too busy thinking about how dead she would end up being if she made a mistake against her own dragon, and she also hadn't really been aware of what a ritual of enchanted sleep required from the user.

Originally she'd been thinking that it'd just been a spell for sleep or suspended animation. Not an actual ritual of enchanted sleep. That was the kind of thing that required a few hours worth of preparation and then a lot of arithmancy and mental fortitude to keep on track.

It made a hell of a lot more sense than trying to use a suspended animation-spell on a dragon, since it wouldn't be as lessened by the dragon's inherent magical resistance. But it was also completely insane to use against a dragon, because it took several hours to set up, and required you to not get burnt alive by the angry dragon before that. Except Miss Delacour set it up in the span of barely a few minutes.

And then Minerva took points off the girl because the dragon snored a bit, and the hem of her robe caught on fire.

Andromeda wrestled Harriet back in her seat before Harriet could start to yell at the judges about their complete incompetence and general lack of ability to understand ritualistic magic.

It didn't actually stop her from yelling, but it meant that she didn't march down from the audience and start hexing anyone. So it was a partial victory for Andromeda.

Still, it showed just how badly ritualistic magic was understood by people who were considered at the forefront of magic. Which was incredibly aggravating, because it wasn't like anyone had gone around trying to hide it away.

It was widely known that ritualistic magic was very different from wand-magic. However, it was also widely known that wands made a lot of things a hell of a lot easier, and generally better. Which was something of a partial truth.

Ritualistic magic was different from wand-magic, but less in the sense of either one being 'better' somehow, and more that it was simply a very different way to tap into magic. A good way to describe it would be to use the power of a tornado to turn the page of a book.

It wasn't necessarily that ritualistic magic was more powerful, just that it was a lot less controlled, and generally had a tendency towards various domino-effects. Setting up a ward with a magical ritual tended to result in a ward that very quickly warped itself into something unrecognizable.

That wasn't so bad when all your ward did was stop unwanted people from wandering around your property, but it became a bit of a problem when your ward was designed to do that in a specific way. Such as 'alerting the ward-maker' morphing into 'constantly barrage the ward-maker with infinite bits of information'.

It was the kind of effect one could usually see in old family-wards, where they'd gone from simply keeping attackers at bay, to turning attackers inside-out and burning them alive. It usually wasn't much of a problem, seeing as most countries had laws in place that allowed for 'inventive' defenses of your land, though there'd been some instances where the wards had been a bit overzealous in what constituted as an 'attacker' and the owners had been forced to take them down.

So ritualistic magic wasn't exactly better than wand-magic, any more than the opposite was true. It was more prone to seemingly completely random things happening, and it generally required a lot more preparation and commitment to whatever effect you wanted, but it was still just magic.

However, that big difference in preparation and commitment opened up some interesting opportunities to 'customize' a ritual for a specific scenario. A levitation-charm made things float, but whilst a levitation-ritual generally needed to be very specific in how it achieved the same result, it could also be a lot more impressive in the right circumstances.

Levitating an entire castle into the sky sprung to mind.

That'd been pretty tense, constantly having to double-check to make sure that the levitation-ritual wouldn't be affected by any of the wards that they were breaking apart. Still more a bizarrely circumstantial experience than a violently terrifying one, but it really had been an impressive kind of expedition.

Hogwarts didn't actually teach ritualistic magic, because of some trouble back in the sixteen-hundreds, but it taught enough arithmancy that its students should be able to replicate a ritual if they really wanted to.

But, even if you prepared it in advance in your own head, actually committing yourself to the ritual was something that took time. Harriet had spent most of her life poking at some kind of ritualistic magic or another, and had at one point been invited to do a lecture on it to a lot of experts in the field – and realized that she was one of the handful of people, out of hundreds of attendees, who actually knew what she was talking about – but setting up the kind of ritual that Miss Delacour had done for the First Task was something that would've probably taken Harriet well over two hours at least.

It was-... Harriet had never really considered Fleur to have been all that impressive during the tournament in her own time-line. In some part, it was likely due to Harriet holding a subconscious grudge about the girl's casual dismissal of her at the time, along with being too worried about her own survival to pay much attention to anyone at all, not to mention the outside-interference that had been the false Mad-Eye Moody.

But considering this first showcasing of her abilities? Harriet was pretty damn certain that if Miss Delacour somehow failed to win the Triwizard Tournament, it'd be because of external sabotage.

There was a big difference between being a capable young witch or wizard, capable of representing their respective schools, and being able to do something at seventeen that people with decades worth of experience and specialization would never have managed.

So yes, Harriet was a bit upset with Minerva for having taken off 'style points' for not quite managing to pull it off to utmost perfection, when what she actually did was impressive enough that she could probably have been given a Masters in Ritualistic Magic on the spot.

Alright, so Karkaroff had been even more stingy with his points, but that was because he was a racist toerag who should've been shat out into the English Channel a long time ago. And Crouch and Bagman had also been horribly biased, because they were incompetent buffoons and nationalistic to the core. But Harriet had expected better from Minerva .

XXX

“I didn't know you were cheering for the opposite team.” Argo grinned at her.

“I'm not?” Harriet blinked at her, a little bit confused. “I don't really care who wins, I just think it's stupid that a truly impressive showcase of magic scored so poorly with the judges.”

“Fine fine.” Argo's grin turned into a small pout. “You could at least give me something interesting to write about, you know.”

“I thought you had plenty of interesting things to write about already?” Harriet said wryly. “Or did you run out of graphic historical deaths to mention?”

Argo had done very well in distracting the public from the Umbridge-incident, but instead she'd riled up a lot of people about the problems associated with the Triwizard Tournament. She'd also started to sort out some of the details behind how rushed the restarting of the tournament really had been.

Albus Dumbledore had made a few petitions to revive the old tradition during his years as Headmaster. It'd been part of his attempts to try to keep Magical Britain from isolating its children from the rest of the world, to spread awareness and culture between countries. And it'd always been shut down on behalf of monetary concerns.

The Triwizard Tournament was a huge investment of funds, and no country was all that enthusiastic about hosting it. After all, it wasn't like the schools themselves had enough of a budget to arrange for the Tasks all on their own.

However, Minister Fudge had suddenly decided to host the Triwizard Tournament a few scant months before the start of the new school year.

Dumbledore had helped with some of the arrangement, since he'd already been in contact with the other Headmasters previously, and had a long list of suggested improvements and safety-regulations from back when he'd tried to restart it himself. But the truth of the matter was that it'd been a terribly rushed affair, and nobody had really looked into a lot of the things that should probably have been looked into, prior to the Triwizard Tournament being announced.

Harriet really hadn't been all that surprised that it'd been a rush-job, considering that nobody had even mentioned it until she'd arrived back at Hogwarts right before summer-break ended. But the extent of the rushing had been borderline absurd.

And, of course, it all came back to Fudge's desperate quest to find some way to distract the public from his part in the Umbridge-incident. An incident which had apparently also severely soured his relationship with both Chief Warlock Dumbledore, and Lucius Malfoy. Both of whom had been at least partial allies from the political side of things.

Though the idea that Malfoy and Dumbledore could ever agree on anything was somewhat laughable, apparently they'd come to share a mutual dislike of Umbridge. And Fudge, who'd been the one to provoke that dislike by sending the woman off to Hogwarts in the first place, was currently reaping the benefits of their disapproval.

Needless to say, the opinion – not mentioned in the Daily Prophet, of course – was that Fudge would be lucky to simply lose the next election as Minister, and much more likely to be outright dismissed from office.

The Daily Prophet was also very visibly gnashing its teeth in regards to Argo's continued coverage of the Triwizard Tournament.

She was supposed to distract people from Fudge's faults by finding scandals connected to the tournament, not expose the scandals that Fudge was responsible for in regards to the tournament. But they couldn't exactly dismiss her either, when it was clear that her articles was currently one of their main selling-points to their customers.

In the eyes of the Daily Prophet, Minister Fudge's opinion was very important, to the point where their customers didn't necessarily need to know everything interesting that might be happening. But at the same time, their customers were the ones who were buying their newspaper, and – by extension – were the ones who were paying their salaries.

It was a very visible kind of internal conflict, if you knew where to look. But Harriet was mainly aware of it because Argo constantly whined about it.

Apparently, it was very annoying to be the focal point of the whole mess, and she would absolutely use it to get Harriet to pay for their drinks.

XXX

Despite Andromeda's insinuations on the subject, Harriet had been perfectly aware that the Yule Ball required dress-robes, and that Harriet needed to attend it.

Admittedly, she hadn't remembered that fact until a few days before Andromeda had decided to remind her, but she had been aware, so it counted.

However, she didn't really want to try wearing a dress, let alone trying to learn how to walk with heels. She'd been forced into them enough times – what with Argo's experiments on how to accurately portray the fashions of Yharnam – that she knew perfectly well that it wouldn't be fun for anyone if she was stuck like that for several hours.

Which left dress-robes. Minerva and Andromeda might both decide to have some kind of opinion on that, but it would be perfectly allowed according to the rules of attendance.

She didn't particularly care what color they were, so she'd simply thrown herself at Madam Malkin's fashionable mercy, with a caveat to avoid pink. Harriet was sure that it was a lovely color, but she'd had some very unpleasant experiences – recent experiences, even – of a certain toad who coated themselves in it, and she didn't want to remind herself of that every time she caught a glance of her sleeves.

Which had resulted in a silky green ensemble, to 'bring out her eyes'. Harriet wondered whether Andromeda would approve of wearing her house-colors, but supposed that it was something of a moot point.

Most importantly was pretending as if she'd been prepared months in advance, and hadn't been forced to pay Madam Malkin's extra for a speedy delivery.

Still, with her dress-robes taken care of, she was all set. It was just a shame that the rest of the castle couldn't be as practical as herself.

Harriet could distinctly remember her own Yule Ball, and the hellish mess of looking for a date that'd led up to it.

Now that she was on the outside looking in however, it became a lot more entertaining, even if it was frustrating in a different way.

The girls traveled in packs and giggled whenever any of their classmates made eye-contact with them, and the boys clumped together and muttered about it.

It was all so very ridiculous, and Harriet deeply pitied everyone involved.

Several of the staff-members had joined a betting-pool over who asked who, and whether they'd actually agree to it or not.

Filius had put a decent sum on Miss Granger managing to go with both Mr Potter and Mr Weasley, because – as the most academically brilliant girl in their year – Miss Granger would see fierce competition over her affection, but she also clearly favored both of the boys. The obvious answer to this conundrum would be to just accept both of their advances at once, and so that would obviously be what Miss Granger chose to do.

Minerva had already bet against him, with her own bet that she'd favor Mr Weasley over Mr Potter, since they were both very fond of bickering with each other, whilst Mr Potter mostly stayed on the sidelines.

Harriet had responded with a bet of her own on the massive upset of neither Mr Weasley nor Mr Potter actually asking Miss Granger out. Defending it with the sincere argument that the odds of either of those socially awkward brats managing to suck it up for long enough to actually do anything about their feelings – existent or not – was completely absurd.

Sirius had briefly tried to argue against the idea that his godson would be so socially inept as to completely fail to notice a pretty girl. Until Lily had asked Sirius about how many girls he himself had dated, back when girls around the school had sighed in his wake.

Sirius had then spent the better part of an hour trying to get Lily to tell him that she'd been kidding, and that that had never happened, because surely he couldn't actually have missed it if he'd at some point been popular with girls. Lily mostly just looked at him with pity.

To be fair to Sirius, he'd likely been too busy avoiding his family's influence, and playing pranks on people, to pay much attention to anyone who hadn't been himself or a close friend. But that didn't exactly make it any less true.

Still, whilst that particular series of events had been hilarious and awkward at the same time, the whole shebang was really too ridiculous for words.

If the boys wanted to ask a girl out, they just needed to damn well ask them. If the girls were so nervous about being asked out that they'd resorted to traveling in packs, then they could damn well find a boy and ask them out instead. It wasn't rocket-science.

That didn't mean she was going to actually try telling that to the hormonal teenagers who were desperately trying to gather up their courage. Rejection was a painful thing, and it was pretty nasty to be exposed to it before you'd really figured out who you were and what you wanted to do with your life.

Thankfully, none of the staff-members needed to go hunting for a date, because if Harriet had been forced to bear witness to adults behaving in the same way, she probably would've started hexing people.

Regardless, the preparations for the Yule Ball were anything but painless.

There was the aforementioned constant nervous tension in the air from the students. There were even a few students who'd clued onto the idea of romance for the first time and had decided that the staff-members were also gendered individuals whom they could make eyes at, which was vaguely disturbing but mostly just reminded Harriet of her days as the Boy-Who-Lived, where people would crane their necks to see her walking past them in a hallway.

Then there was the actual physical preparations of figuring out which government officials would be attending, what would be done for the necessary music, and planning for how the decorations ought to be set up.

All-in-all, even if life-and-death struggles hadn't been included and aimed at actual children, Harriet dearly hoped that the Triwizard Tournament would crash and burn at some point, purely to make sure that there was no repeat performance for another year.

She'd had quite enough of this as it was.

XXX

The actual Yule Ball was pretty much exactly as Harriet remembered it being.

The Great Hall was decked out in beautiful splendor, and the participants were a sea of bright colors.

There were a few people who reacted specifically to Harriet's own chosen wardrobe for the evening, but beyond Andromeda sighing softly, and Argo nearly choking on her tongue, nothing much was said.

James Potter was in attendance as his wife's plus-one, and they were very politely pretending as if their son didn't exist. Miss Granger was also found on Mr Krum's arm this evening, so it looked as if Harriet had won that bet, not that she was in any way surprised.

Ted Tonks was briefly introduced to Harriet, before Andromeda swept the man away towards the dance-floor. He seemed like a good person, and it was obvious how much he adored his wife.

Harriet couldn't quite help the stab of sad worry towards Andy and Teddy, back in her own world. But this particular evening was full of distractions.

Dumbledore was there as well, and seemed to be very carefully keeping his distance from the Potters, though neither side appeared to really be sending glares at each other or even be pointedly ignoring each other. So they probably didn't hold too much of a grudge about their falling out.

It was definitely entertaining to watch Argo choking on her tongue, but even that fell mostly by the wayside, once Harriet realized that Dumbledore actually wanted to talk to her.

She really didn't want to dredge up the numerous complicated feelings she had in regards to the man who'd manipulated himself into being a sort of grandfather-figure in her life, before tossing her into a war-zone.

Oh, it wasn't the same person, but it was still the same person. And whilst Harriet might've forgiven her own version of him, it'd been in the aftermath of his death, and with a general understanding that he couldn't hurt her any more than he already had.

Now, with a version of him still alive and kicking, and likely plotting something or another, that emotionally distanced forgiveness was on thin ice.

So, rather than try to awkwardly hold a conversation with the man, Harriet decided to dodge him entirely.

She wasn't really all that fond of dancing, but Ginny had liked it, way back in the day, so Harriet had at least learned enough to get by. And it'd be a lot harder for Dumbledore to involve himself in a conversation if Harriet was clearly occupied with someone else.

A quick invitation to Argo later, and Harriet successfully danced her way past Dumbledore's desire to talk. Quite literally.

Unfortunately, they couldn't actually dance the entire night away. Even if Argo would've been up for it, Harriet didn't think either of them really had the stamina for it.

There was also the fact that Argo had of course spotted the fact that Harriet was trying to dodge Dumbledore, and she was an information-broker to her core. Dangle an interesting tidbit in front of her nose, and you'd have your hand bitten off.

“He reminds me of an old man I used to know.” Harriet relented. “Not a bad man, just-... Looking at him, there's a lot of complicated feelings that I thought I was done with. And I shouldn't blame him for those, but he's a scheming kind of man, and I don't really want to find out what plans he might be trying to slot me into.”

Argo stared at her for a moment, before scoffing lightly. “Do you really think there's a plan that'd survive having you in it?”

Harriet frowned at her, because of course there was-... Except-... Actually, had Harriet ever really been involved with any plan that didn't go pear-shaped within moments of implementation?

There were a few of Voldemort's old schemes, but none of those actually worked out to the extent that Voldemort would've wanted, because Harriet kept surviving what she shouldn't have been able to survive. And Dumbledore's wise advice had seemed like a very complicated set of plans, except the man would've had to have been omniscient to be able to figure out half of the crazy things that should've been impossible to predict.

So, the long and short of it was... no. Harriet had never encountered a plan that'd survived her, unless it was ludicrously bare-bones and specifically included her surviving it.

Surviving things was her specialty for a reason, after all.

Said and done, with a sigh and a nod, Harriet allowed Argo to lead them off the dance-floor and straight to where Dumbledore was politely making it seem like he wasn't waiting for them.

“Mr Dumbledore, did anyone ever tell you that you should've been looking deeper into exorcisms?” Harriet asked.

She sincerely doubted that Dumbledore hadn't known, or at least suspected, that Mr Potter's scar had been a horcrux. But that wasn't the only time a problem of his could've been solved with an appropriate exorcism.

The man's eyes twinkled brightly at her. “I did wonder what happened to Professor Binns.”

The confrontation from there quickly shifted away from whether or not incompetent ghost-teachers ought to be exorcised – entirely theoretically, mind you – and into some of the intricacies of ritualistic magic.

Dumbledore was a wand-user to the very core, and it showed. He'd been raised with a wand in hand, and he'd been taught with a wand in hand, and he'd taught others with a wand in hand. He was technically aware that ritualistic magic was a thing, owing largely to his apprenticeship under Nicolas Flamel, but he understood it about as well as Harriet understood the intricacies of Kagome's purification-rituals.

Of course, that didn't mean that he hadn't read Harriet's book on Curse Breaking, which included a lot of rituals. Some of which actually happened to be eerily reminiscent to the processes of making a horcrux, though with several caveats about how mindbogglingly stupid the idea of messing with your own soul actually was long-term for the user. Not to mention a long list of easy 'how to' in regards to counteracting whatever the ritual was supposed to accomplish.

Ancient Dark magic was really only dangerous because nobody remembered how to deal with it anymore. Well, that wasn't true. But ancient magic wasn't any more dangerous than recent magic, and the main thing that killed people was the giant obscure unknown of nobody actually understanding how forgotten magic tended to work.

So, whilst Dumbledore was very much a complete novice in regards to ritualistic magic, he had a very clear focus in getting Harriet to explain it to him. Even if he seemed to disagree on Harriet's ideological opinion about how magic should never be erased from history.

By the end of that conversation, Harriet finally pointed the man towards Lily. With a mention that she'd performed a rather extensive magical ritual just last year, and that perhaps he should talk to the woman about her son's scar acting up.

Dumbledore had turned very pale for a moment, and sent her a very sharp glance, but Harriet had just kept smiling.

It wasn't that she was overly happy about dragging the Potters into the line of fire, so much as that she was fairly certain that Dumbledore had already been trying to figure out how much young Mr Potter classified as a 'necessary sacrifice', and that forcing the confrontation early was a much better idea than letting the man plan as if Voldemort was still around and kicking somewhere.

Argo might've had a point about plans not really surviving Harriet's involvement, but that didn't mean that other people were safe from them. And it wasn't like Dumbledore wanted to sacrifice people for the Greater Good. He just wasn't willing to ignore that one life was still just one life, no matter how infinitely precious, and when measured against each other, he'd pick the option with the least amount of casualties.

A ruthless chess-master, perhaps. A manipulative old coot, absolutely. But not an evil man.

And sweet Merlin, but Harriet still missed having that unfailing wisdom standing at her shoulder. Even knowing that he was raising her to walk to her death.

People were complicated. Relationships formed in the gray sludge of a seemingly peaceful war-zone, even more so.

XXX

Lily wasn't all too happy with her, but then Harriet hadn't really expected her to be.

Dumbledore had finally found out about Voldemort's demise, and the destruction of a large number of horcruxes, including the Boy-Who-Lived's scar. And Harriet could guess that, even if Lily's grudge against Dumbledore about the Chamber of Secrets had faded, she was now a lot more cross with him over the realization that he'd suspected that something was wrong with her son, and hadn't seen fit to tell her about it.

But at least everyone was on the same page, and Dumbledore wasn't secretly trying to think up theoretical ways to destroy a horcrux without killing the person it was attached to. That could've probably ended badly in the long-term.

Also, it was their own fault for not running interference between Harriet and Dumbledore, when the man clearly wanted to talk to her.

On a more cheerful note, Harriet finally had a decent overview of her performance as a NEWT-level professor, thanks to a few exams before Christmas finally being corrected. It seemed pretty okay-ish, and the other History Professors seemed happy enough with Harriet's teaching-style.

So, if Minerva didn't manage to find an acceptable replacement History Professor for Hogwarts for another year, Harriet wouldn't need to be overly worried about continuing to teach the NEWT-level students.

That was definitely a plus.

Beyond that, Miss Delacour had apparently read Harriet's book on Curse Breaking, and was now regularly trying to ambush Harriet about details in it. Which was why Harriet somewhat forcefully introduced her to Miss Lovegood the moment the girl returned from Christmas holidays.

Apparently, the girl had been on a trip with her father to Norway. Where they hadn't found any proof of any of their conspiracy-theories, but also had failed to disprove any of them. They were quite happy with it.

From what Harriet had seen after her somewhat-forceful introduction between them, the two of them seemed to get along a bit like a house on fire, and Harriet was really looking forward to whatever craziness they might decide to cook up. Miss Lovegood always had the most interesting ideas.

Lessons in general had continued on like they always did, though it was quite obvious that some of the younger years were heartbroken about not having been allowed to attend the Yule Ball. A few of the older years were heartbroken too, but that was more to do with who had and hadn't gotten dates, and with whom those dates had been.

Miss Granger, Mr Weasley, and Mr Potter were all sort of walking on eggshells around each other. Apparently, there'd been some kind of confrontation about the girl's date with Mr Krum, and it was all very awkward.

Thankfully, Harriet had won her bet, and so she could simply grin smugly at everyone else whenever her coworkers grumbled about how they should just kiss and make up.

Also, unlike what had happened in her last time-line, there wasn't any Skeeter-article about Miss Granger leading anyone on. So the girl was still riding the social high of having been the date of a champion of the Triwizard Tournament, and renown international quidditch-star.

It really was amazing what a less gossip-prone reporter could make of the whole shebang.

Hagrid had apparently had some kind of falling out with Madame Maxine, likely over his giant-heritage. But there wasn't anything like that being displayed on the pages of the Daily Prophet, so who knew.

Argo had mainly focused on pretty pictures of the decor, and of a colorful sea of people dancing happily, along with some politely bland mentions of the excellent music. It was all very... lacking in controversial topics, and the editor was likely gritting his teeth about it, even as he was silently thanking his lucky stars that Argo hadn't found some way to spin the event back to pointing out flaws about Minister Fudge.

She was usually quite good at that.

XXX

Harriet finally found out what Skeeter had been doing – now that she wasn't in charge of reporting on the Triwizard Tournament – a few days into February.

Turns out, she'd been trying to find dirt on Harriet. And, upon realizing that she couldn't actually find any mentions of Harriet, she'd decided to draw on a lot of conjunction.

Which was how the woman had stumbled across a rather unfortunately truthful correlation between Harriet's first appearance in Magical Britain, and the desecration of the grave of Rose Potter.

Now, none of the Potters actually trusted Skeeter as far as they could throw her, so it wasn't like they were suddenly banging on Harriet's door to demand to know what she might've done. However, it was very obvious that Lily had gone from grumpy about Dumbledore's knowledge about Mr Potter's scar, straight into absolutely furious at the implications that Skeeter was aiming at someone she considered a friend of the family.

That didn't stop their students from whispering about it whenever Harriet entered a room, but it meant that a lot of people got to experience being glared at by the woman.

But the whole thing did bring up a good point.

The Potter-family had been languishing in uncertainty for nearly two years now, not knowing what had been done to their daughter's final resting place, and likely imagining all of the worst-case scenarios.

Considering that none of them really deserved to have that heaped on them, Harriet was starting to chafe a little under the knowledge of exactly how she'd arrived into this world.

She wasn't particularly fond of the idea of shouting it from the rooftops, but she really shouldn't be keeping people who were actually being hurt by it in the dark. That'd be pretty hypocritical of her, considering how frustrated she'd been when the adults of the Order had discussed the war and completely refused to tell her anything at all, despite her life clearly being one of those on the line.

No, she needed to figure out what to do about that. And how many people she really ought to tell.

The Potters, obviously. And probably Sirius as well, since he was basically a Potter in all but name. Maybe Andromeda, considering how much time they spent together, and how often Harriet dodged around talking about her past with various half-truths. And-... Oh, yeah, she'd probably have to tell Argo as well, purely to keep her from sniffing out a secret on her own and being mightily cross with her for not telling her earlier.

But that wasn't exactly something she was looking forward to, and it didn't really address a suspicion that'd been niggling at Harriet ever since Skeeter's article had been released.

Harriet had mentioned her name once before legging it out of the country to try and get some kind of emotional distance to sort her thoughts out. And that was-...

Now, there was technically the possibility that someone had managed to get Ollivander to talk about all the wands he'd sold, and that they'd managed to figure out Harriet's wand and then managed to get a date and a description of her. But she hadn't used her name at the time, and she'd never really talked about her wand to anyone, and Ollivander was notoriously cryptic about everything he did, and they wouldn't have been expecting her to buy her wand from him at that precise point in time regardless.

No, the only true time she'd mentioned her name had been when she'd established an identity with the goblins. Which had been a meeting that should've fallen under the non-disclosure agreement that was part of the treaty that'd served as a foundation for Gringotts.

As in, back in the day when the goblin rebellions had been going strong, someone had come up with the idea of Gringotts as a way to keep the goblins satisfied and far removed from the general public. However, no wizard or witch worth their salt would've been willing to give the goblins all of their gold for safekeeping, unless there were a lot of caveats about how Gringotts was allowed to act when it worked as a bank.

One of those caveats was them being unable to use their clients' money in order to directly invest in businesses, serving instead only as a kind of market-place for people looking for investment-opportunities. And another was that a whole slew of identity and inheritance issues were completely drowned in non-disclosure agreements.

So, for Skeeter to have managed to track down the exact date for Harriet's presence in Britain – that she'd never spoken of to anyone – that either meant that she'd made a lot of guesses and managed to stumble across the exact right source of information to get a reasonably certain identification about it having been her. Or, and this was a lot more sensible and a hell of a lot more damning, Skeeter had managed to get a goblin to violate a non-disclosure agreement.

Now, the first one was about as likely as Skeeter turning over a new leaf and becoming a non-sensationalist reporter, and the second one was vaguely terrifying.

See, all goblins were very aware that Gringotts was based on those ancient treatises, and that messing with the rules established by that was a very good way to have Gringotts violently collapse. And as such, none of them would be reckless enough to actually provide Skeeter with any information whatsoever, and Skeeter would've been at least partially aware of that.

Which meant that it wouldn't have been Skeeter's idea to go poking at Gringotts to see if they'd know anything. And it wouldn't have been a single goblin being a bit reckless with their employment to have actually spoken about it. This was the kind of thing that could launch Magical Britain into a war with the goblin-nation, and there really weren't enough gold in anyone's vault to justify that risk.

Unless someone who was in charge of Magical Britain unofficially promised that they would absolutely not go to war over it.

In other words, it looked like Fudge and Gringotts had decided that they hated Harriet more than they hated each other. And they were using Skeeter to expose anything unpleasant that they could vaguely theorize at.

Harriet had known that Gringotts didn't like her. They'd never been very fond of independent Curse Breakers, but she'd clearly misjudged how much their displeasure had been curtailed by her indisputable fame, back in her own world, because this sounded like they were very close to hiring some form of assassin to hunt her down.

Not that that would really result in anything except a very unpleasant time for whatever assassin picked up the contract, but Harriet didn't particularly want to have assassins running around underfoot in Hogwarts. There were kids around.

Still, first things first. Before she could go around pointing fingers about Gringotts and Fudge violating an ancient treaty to do away with people they didn't like, she needed to talk with Argo about exactly how much information actually existed of Harriet.

And that discussion would inevitably lead to Harriet admitting to being from another world, if only to explain why there were literally no other records of her, so she should probably just bite the bullet and figure out how to explain all of that mess to the Potters without ending up hexed.

XXX

“Alright, so this is a complicated story, so I'm going to start in the middle so there's no misunderstandings, and then we can branch out from there.” Harriet warned her audience. “In 1993, when I was thirteen, my godfather, Sirius Black, broke out of Azkaban.”

Sirius raised a hand. “Uh, this is news to me? I feel like I would've noticed? What with the Dementors and stuff?”

Andromeda was frowning. “Harriet, how old are you?”

Harriet made a face. “That's a bit of a complicated question. But safe to say I'm somewhere between fourteen and thirty-eight, even counting chronologically.”

Lily was looking confused, but James had gone remarkably pale and stiff.

Harriet was very much planning on continuing her story, but James interrupted her.

“If Sirius was your godfather, then-... You're Harry, aren't you?” James said softly.

Harriet sent an awkwardly sympathetic smile the man's way. “I was , for about thirty-five years, give or take. I kind of stopped counting my own birthdays after I hit thirty. Ron kept better track of them than me, anyway.”

Young Mr Potter's mouth slowly dropped open, a very strange expression on his face. And he wasn't the only one.

“I was a single-child and an orphan.” Harriet continued before more questions could pop up. “I was raised by my muggle aunt and uncle. For a given value of 'raised'. And there's a lot of stuff that happened over the years during my time at Hogwarts. And then a lot of stuff happened after Hogwarts too.” She made a face. “Not all of it nice, not all of it bad. But there's a lot, and I'm not sure we have the time to go through all of it.”

“We can make time.” Came the steady reply from James, a very familiarly stubborn tilt to his jaw.

Harriet waved him away. “The point is that life was pretty good, and I got involved in Curse Breaking when I was twenty-three. Life was even better after that, even if I was maybe a bit of a workaholic. But the gist of it is that I stumbled across a dig where some of the warnings implied being 'banished from life', and then I woke up six-feet underground, naked, and in the body of a prepubescent girl. Also, I'm not dumb enough to go back there. Reality-banishment is crazy, even if that somehow didn't kill me.”

“That's why you know there shouldn't have been any records of you being in Britain.” Argo concluded in the ringing silence, before pausing. “Wait. How did you get a wand and an established identity if you woke up naked? How did you get the money for it?”

Harriet smiled blandly at her. “You don't actually need a wand to enter a Gringotts-vault. As long as you don't actually, you know, ask .”

Sirius made a gleeful sound. “You broke into Gringotts?”

“No, of course not. That'd be illegal.” Harriet continued to smile blandly. “But I might've found some spare galleons whilst getting a bit lost, looking for horcruxes. And that conveniently covered the costs for my wand and identity.”

“Why didn't you come to us?” Lily interrupted the slowly growing jovial mood, her face set.

Harriet made a face, then sighed. “I panicked? I think? I'm used to weird things happening, but I didn't even register that I was emotionally distraught until I was struggling to fall asleep a week later in the outer edges of Yharnam. And I've never really had adults to turn to? So I don't think I would've gone for it, even if I'd thought of it.”

“Wait, how many horcruxes did you destroy before you told me about my scar?” Mr Potter asked.

“Two?” Harriet scratched her head. “I needed the money, so that was the Cup. And then I grabbed the Ring too.”

Harriet very carefully didn't mention that she'd only done that because she'd wanted to carve out her own eye in order to replace it with one of the Hallows. She hadn't even been stupid enough to tell that to Hermione and Ron, let alone a bunch of strangers. The Stone was hers , and that was the end of it.

Things continued somewhat in that vein, with Harriet answering questions, and probably horrifying everyone about what her life had been like. It hadn't been so bad, but there had been a lot of things trying to kill her. And apparently Lily and James were kind of projecting themselves into parental figures for her, and being suitably upset about how uncaring the people around her had been.

This continued up until Sirius asked a question that Harriet had hoped they wouldn't have.

“How did you lose the horcrux in your scar?”

Harriet took a deep breath, and slumped a bit. “I took a second killing-curse to the face.”

Lily made a small sound of horror, and made as to reach out to her, but Harriet pulled back as well as she could from her seat.

“Look. I get that you think I'm your child. But I'm not. I grew up an orphan, and even if you share the same names, you're very different from my parents.” Harriet sighed, frowning a bit. “And even then, I stopped being 'Harry Potter' the moment I arrived in this place. I'm Harriet Azalea now. Through and through.”

It was kind of rude to bring up the fact that she'd been magically thrown out of the family, but if she needed to fight dirty to get away from hovering parental figures who were her own age, then that's what she was going to do.

“So, why am I here?” Andromeda finally asked. “I understand the Potters and Sirius, and I'm guessing you need Argo's help with something. But why me?”

Harriet paused, feeling her lips tug into a small bittersweet smile. “Well, to start with, I was the godfather of your only grandchild.”

Chapter Text

In the end, that conversation had continued well past young Mr Potter's curfew.

There'd been questions about why Harriet hadn't gone back to being male, which – in the wake of Harriet commenting that it was a bother and that she'd already fixed her only real issue she'd had with being female – led to a discussion about whether or not literally removing your womb in order to avoid having your period again was an overreaction or not.

Lily had seemed pretty horrified about it, Sirius seemed torn because his mother likely would've been completely outraged and he was fundamentally opposed to anything she wasn't opposed to. James mostly worried about potential health-problems that might appear because of it, and Mr Potter spent most of it being very confused about what they were talking about.

Argo mostly laughed herself sick, before collecting herself, and then breaking out into giggles again. Apparently, the idea of Harriet – crazy reckless and lethally competent Curse Breaker that she was – had reacted to periods by metaphorically screeching and running away, was inherently hilarious to the woman.

Things didn't really calm down until Andromeda interrupted the discussion in order to hug Harriet.

Trust Andromeda to see right through Harriet's annoyance with periods into her core certainty that she really wasn't cut out for being a parent.

She'd tried with Teddy. She'd done everything she could to raise him right, even if she couldn't let go of her first true passion in life. She loved Curse Breaking. The idea of trying to live without it was terrifying, but it's hard to be a parent when you spend most of your time on the other side of the planet.

She'd tried, and she'd managed to make time for the big events, but the small ones? The everyday ones? She only ever heard of those from Andromeda.

Harriet had grown up an orphan, and she wouldn't wish that aching loneliness on anyone. And even if maybe Harriet would've been more present than a dead person, her only excuse for it would've been that she loved her work more than her child.

Basically, she would've rather shoved a handful of barbed wire down her own throat, than condemn any child to the ordeal of having her as a parent.

Was removing her own womb a bit of an overreaction? Well, not really. Considering some of the wards that she'd encountered over the years, being surprised by her own period could've had lethal consequences when she accidentally spilled blood, not to mention the pain and general misery that she had no desire to be exposed to.

From there, she had two options if she absolutely needed to stop having periods, she could perform a ritual every other month to pause it, or one single ritual where she would never have to worry about the problem again. The fact that the latter option also made it impossible for her to have children? She was fine with that.

And if she ever retired some day down the line, and found herself absolutely needing to have a kid of her own, she could damn well adopt one. It wasn't like a kid needed to be hers by blood for her to love them. Teddy had proved that much.

Harriet very carefully continued to not mention the fact that she'd also carved out her own perfectly-functioning eye as well, because even if there was a perfectly reasonable explanation, she wasn't dumb enough to share it with anyone.

She didn't particularly care about what gender she was, and she was honestly mostly alright with being biologically eighteen and being able to get around her bad knees, but Harriet was the Curse Breaker with the Stone hidden in her eye. That was a piece of her identity that she wouldn't ever let go of without a fight.

Not much more of note happened, beyond Argo making some noise about determining Harriet's exact biological age, for her 'peace of mind' or something. Harriet wasn't entirely sure what she was on about, but Argo breathed a sigh of relief when it turned out to be eighteen, and Sirius started to snicker gleefully from his corner, so Harriet was probably just missing a joke or something.

XXX

Despite a very good showing from all three of the champions in the Second Task, their limelight was stolen by Argo forcing through an article about Gringotts violating the treaty of non-disclosure.

It was the kind of thing that had the entire public up in arms, because everyone had a vested interest in making sure that Gringotts didn't go around 'bending' their rules. After all, one of their rules was that they wouldn't steal from people's vaults, and everyone had a vault with the goblins.

Harriet didn't, but that was because she was crazy and kept all of her money carefully stashed away on her person. She'd never gotten along with Gringotts, even in her own world, and hadn't wanted to tempt fate.

So a lot of people were very upset about the idea that Gringotts was breaking their rules. And, of course, Gringotts responded very quickly to that public outcry.

They found the goblin responsible for the leak to Skeeter, and they beheaded them.

Fudge hurriedly held a speech about how the leak had been silenced and that panicking was unnecessary, and that the Ministry trusted Gringotts and didn't want to kick-start another completely pointless war.

Except-... Except nowhere in the treaty did it ever mention that Gringotts could casually behead one of their goblins, especially not if they'd committed a crime against a non-goblin. That was the Ministry's territory.

Oh, the Ministry might hold a really pathetic trial about it, and then conclude that the goblin should be beheaded. But it was the Ministry's decision to do so, since it was a non-goblin who'd been affected by their crime, not Gringotts'.

Now, obviously, the truth was that Fudge was just trying to sweep the whole thing under the rug as quickly as possible. However, the fact of the matter was that as a result he was now in official violation of the treaty himself.

And, after a harsh conversation with Argo about what that actually meant, the Daily Prophet had unofficially blacklisted Fudge. They could see where the winds were turning, and even if Fudge was in power currently, he was either going to get thrown out of office, or launch Magical Britain into another war with the goblin-nation. So they didn't particularly want to be known as being all that supportive of him.

In other words, despite only being hired on for the Triwizard Tournament, Argo was given the official green light to write whatever the hell she wanted about what was actually going on between Fudge and Gringotts.

So she did.

By late March, Fudge and the administrators of Gringotts were dragged before the Wizengamot for violating the treaty between them.

Or, they would've been. Except, Fudge basically went into hiding, and Gringotts barred its doors, so no trial could really be performed.

Sure, they could be tried in absentia, but the Wizengamot needed someone from the goblin-nation to be present because of some of the rules of the ICW, and since all the goblins were locked away inside of Gringotts, that wasn't going to happen.

Everything was officially at a standstill. The Ministry couldn't work, because their Minister had run away before anyone could toss him out. Businesses couldn't pay or be paid, because all of the money was locked away inside of Gringotts. And the Triwizard Tournament was dead in the water.

A few weeks later in early April, Harriet finally got sick of everyone complaining about how incompetent the aurors were for being unable to break into what amounted as a fortified embassy, or track down a man who'd likely been planning his escape since the first time he started taking bribes.

Thankfully, she knew a few tracking spells that would've probably have been made explicitly illegal if anyone had ever remembered that they'd existed. And she'd broken down wards a hell of a lot scarier than what could be found at Gringotts.

She didn't particularly look forward to the idea of basically going to war over this, but at this point Magical Britain would starve itself to death from economical problems. She couldn't just sit back and hope someone else fixed the problem, even if she despised the idea of getting involved in politics.

She wasn't educated in politics, and she didn't have the patience for politics, and her reading-comprehension of legalese was basically nonexistent. Law-making and politics was for people who'd be able to stand before the Wizengamot and not outright hex the members into oblivion for being annoying.

Said and done, she sent an owl to Dumbledore to ask him to gather the full Wizengamot for the trial, and she'd go fetch their wayward defendants.

XXX

The courtroom turned abruptly silent as Harriet slammed open the doors with a wave of her wand, and then continued to drag Fudge and the six goblins into the middle of the room.

Fudge was puking slugs and sniffling pathetically to himself. One of the goblins was still struggling against the heavy iron chains binding him, another was still reeling from a concussion, and the other four were various shades of resigned and outraged.

And after Harriet, another dozen goblins entered the room, all looking nervous but determined.

It took even Dumbledore a few moments to gather himself, and then the trial started with all of the formality demanded of it.

Harriet mostly tuned it out, because she was trying to make sure that the concussed Gringotts-administrator wouldn't die on them. She hadn't expected him to stand right behind the ruddy door, and so she'd miscalculated a bit.

He needed to be coherent in order to properly defend himself – as much as he could defend himself, considering how deeply they'd all dug themselves into a hole – and if he died because Harriet had been handling him too roughly she'd never forgive herself. He was a bastard, but Harriet hadn't signed up to be an executioner, and she wasn't ever planning on doing so.

It took them a bit to go through all of the accusations, and then Harriet made a loud bang with her wand, before motioning to the dozen non-chained goblins who'd followed her into the courtroom.

“The Wizengamot has read its accusations. The goblin-nation will now add its own.” She said with all the blunt certainty of someone who'd absolutely hex anyone who tried to interrupt things.

Gringotts was a complicated institution.

The bank had been originally founded as a way to link the Wizarding World and the goblin-nation together, after a few too many wars. But with its founding, it'd also severely limited what goblins were allowed to do. Goblins worked for Gringotts, or they didn't work at all.

That might not have sounded so bad if there'd been enough space for all goblins to work as bankers. Even if they might not have enjoyed the work, it would've still been work that they could've performed.

However, as time went by and Gringotts became an ever-more-present part of goblin-life, things started to shift. Goblins became less 'goblins' and more 'Gringotts employees', and the profits that'd kept the rest of the goblin-nation afloat, had instead been completely monopolized by a select few. The administrators of Gringotts.

For all that goblins were supposedly infamous for their greed, they really weren't any more greedy than the average human. They were perhaps more prone to appreciating sparkly things, but that could range from enjoying jewelry to hoarding cool-looking river-rocks.

The problem was that they didn't have a 'private sector' for work. There was Gringotts, and there was wandering off into a forest, never to be seen or heard from again. Which was why Gringotts desperately tried to expand into everything it could get its fingers into, in order to lessen its own unemployment-rate.

Which obviously led the bank to getting even more money, and making higher profits. And then those profits helped to widen the gap between the administrators and the regular goblins even further.

Goblins were bitter and nasty to people, because they lived and died at the whims of corporate greed. And they couldn't escape, because Gringotts was the only place where goblins could work.

So, the reason why Harriet was followed by a dozen goblins who weren't accused for violating the treaty, was that Harriet really didn't want to have to do this again. And unless the Wizengamot managed to settle an adjustment of the treaty that would allow for goblins to themselves dissolve Gringotts' complete monopoly on their lives, there would undoubtedly be another situation like this sooner or later.

Harriet hadn't really been all that aware of Gringotts in her own world. They hated her, and she kind of undermined them at every turn when it came to Curse Breaking, but she'd never really tried to understand them.

However, it was hard to ignore that something was rotten in Gringotts, when a small group of goblins had gone so far as to beg her to allow them some opportunity to change things, even as Harriet had been dragging their leaders kicking and screaming out through the door.

She only had a vague understanding of the problem, and she wasn't even close to figuring out any kind of solution for it, but they deserved to have their voices be heard.

And she could at least do that much.

XXX

“I thought you were a Curse Breaker, not-...” Lily made a vague gesture with her hand. “Not whatever that was.”

“I am?” Harriet wasn't sure what kind of question that was. “It's not that hard to break into Gringotts, I told you this once already.”

“They'd closed their gates and fortified themselves in place!” Lily exclaimed. “That's not 'hard to break into' that's taking on an entire nation single-handedly!”

Harriet supposed that she had a point. The guards of Gringotts were good at what they did, and what they did often amounted to stabbing people who disturbed the peace. But that just meant you had to remember not to get stabbed. Hardly something worth making a fuss about.

“No matter how good you are at stabbing people with a spear, there are some inherent limitations with trying to stab someone with a spear.” Harriet started. “First and foremost among them being that you need to be able to get close enough to stab them. So I just didn't let them do that. It's not that hard.”

“Wouldn't they have surrounded you?” Sirius asked.

“Yes? But there are plenty of spells that can be used to trap people, or stick them to walls.” Harriet shrugged. “It was a bit messy trying to track down the goblins in charge when I was in the middle of not getting stabbed, but yeah. I wouldn't recommend it or anything, but it wasn't that bad.”

“I'm starting to wonder about the whole Curse Breaker profession.” Lily muttered to herself, shaking her head.

Argo made an offended noise. “I'll have you know that it's Azalea who's crazy, not the rest of us.”

“Oh yeah, you used to be a big-shot, didn't you?” Sirius perked up, always eager for a good story.

Harriet made a face. “I guess? It was a bit complicated, and there's a bunch of specialists who can still talk rings around me, you know.”

“How many?” Argo asked flatly.

Harriet paused, put on the spot. “Well, there's Kagome... and some of what Inuyasha does can definitely scratch at it sometimes, and... there was a guy in Tibet? I think? Oh, and there's this complete tosser from Panama who I think can actually smell hidden things or something? I hate that guy.”

Argo remained silent for a long moment, before making a small frustrated sound. “Alright, so that's four. Three-and-a-half, considering Higurashi makes sense to you. And you've literally just named the four absolute top specialists in the world .”

“Yes?” Harriet tilted her head, a little bit confused. “What's your point?”

“Wait.” Mr Potter spoke up, reminding everyone that he was still there, and had not in fact gone to bed yet. “Didn't Professor McGonagall recruit you at wand-point?”

Sirius started to virtually vibrate in his seat, glee on his face, clearly not having heard this story before.

“Yes, how did she manage that?” Lily asked, sounding suspiciously calm.

Harriet opened her mouth to defend Minerva's ability with a wand, but ended up closing it again. She was pretty impressive, but she hadn't even really been comparable to Ginny in a snit, let alone Hermione or Ron.

“I didn't want to use anything dangerous?” Harriet shrugged awkwardly, a little bit embarrassed. She'd always liked her old Head of House, and it was hard to imagine fighting her for real.

“You fought with the Headmistress of Hogwarts, underneath Hogwarts's wards, whilst holding back, and you didn't fold immediately?” Sirius asked for clarification, eyes wide.

“Fold?” Harriet frowned at him, a bit confused. “I suppose it might've ended quicker, but she was pretty mad, you know? I'm not dumb enough to surrender my wand when a woman that angry goes after me.”

There was a long pause as everyone stared at Harriet.

“Are you telling me... that you fought Minerva McGonagall, when she had full control of Hogwarts's wards, whilst you were holding back, when she was spitting mad, and you... won?” Sirius asked, sounding more than a little bit horrified.

Harriet made a face. “I mean, it was more that I let her get it out of her system and waited for her to calm down, which took like... ten-ish hours? I think?”

There was another long pause.

Argo giggled, a little bit hysterically. “See? She's like this all the time!”

“Umm, do you know anyone better than you in a fight?” Mr Potter asked, sounding curious.

Harriet blinked at the younger and very different version of herself. “That's kind of-...” Harriet frowned thoughtfully. “Hermione knows more spells than I do, and Ron is better at switching between offense and defense. Luna is really good at being creative with what she does with her spells, and Ginny is really good at moving around. But... they're kind of specialized, so if you know them well enough you can just exploit the openings and win that way?”

“Is there anyone in the world who knows more spells than your Hermione?” Mr Potter asked again, sounding rather skeptical of this idea.

“Well, no? She's a spell-creator in her spare time. We had to drag her out of the Department of Mysteries a few times when we were younger. But I think she's just absorbed everything that they know by now.” Harriet smiled, nostalgically fond.

Argo clearly clued into whatever Mr Potter was doing, because she asked her own question. “How does Ginny move around?”

“She generally takes a bunch of brooms with her, and then she jumps between them.” Harriet shook her head, still smiling. “She's really hard to hit, but she gets tired pretty quickly. I don't think she's ever lasted past two hours.”

Argo made a strange gesture with her arms, as if to present Harriet to the rest of the group. “Harriet Azalea, ladies and gentlemen.”

Harriet frowned at her, not sure what she was getting at. But she was interrupted from asking by Sirius beginning to smack his head against the table.

“I think I need to sit down.” Lily said, staring at a wall, and very obviously not making any moves to find a seat.

“Oh, but the inferi are boring after the first few times you encounter them.” Sirius muttered to himself, continuing to bang his head against the table. “Of course they're bloody boring when your friends could probably take down Dumbledore, and you think they're 'pretty good'.”

Harriet blinked. She'd-... She didn't think she'd ever really considered any of her friends going up against Dumbledore before? And now that she was thinking about it, she wasn't entirely sure who'd win.

Didn't that mean that her friends were pretty scary?

Wait, but Harriet could distinctly remember a few playful spars where all four of them turned against Harriet and Harriet still won, despite being outnumbered. But that'd just been because they hadn't had a lot of practice working as a team, right?

Except... now that Harriet really thought about it, hadn't Ron and Ginny complained about having planned on setting that up beforehand? As in, maybe actually tried practicing to fight together before challenging her?

But Harriet wasn't that good, right? She'd nearly lost an eye that one time... to a spell that'd veered off oddly after interacting with an enchanted object, when she hadn't been able to sleep properly for nearly three weeks, because Scrimgeour kept changing her schedule on her.

Harriet briefly considered questioning everything she'd ever known about her own skill-level when it came to fights. But then she remembered that she had classes early in the morning.

If she was going to have to have a midlife-crisis, then she was going to damn well have it over the weekend.

XXX

The Third Task came and went, without any resolution to the Gringotts-situation.

Not for lack of activity, mind you, but rather because the Wizengamot – under Dumbledore's stern gaze – was making very sure that this kind of situation was never encouraged into existence again.

Apparently, he and Filius had been having very long and serious talks about goblin-discrimination and how easily that translates into the emergence of another Gringotts. So, whatever was actually happening on that front, Harriet was fairly convinced that it was going in the right direction.

Fleur Delacour became the new Champion of the Triwizard Tournament, and celebrated by lifting Miss Lovegood over her head and spinning.

Which was weird, because Luna and Fleur had never been all that close in Harriet's old world. And now-... Now she wasn't entirely certain as to what their relationship was.

Harriet had introduced the two of them to make sure that Miss Delacour didn't accidentally kill all of them when experimenting with the wards in Harriet's book. But she hadn't really paid much attention to how their relationship had developed from there.

Considering the age-difference, Harriet hoped that it wasn't romantic in nature. It might be a bit hypocritical of her, considering the massive age-difference between Remus and Tonks, but it was pretty different when one of them hadn't even sat their OWLs, and the other one should've just finished their NEWTs.

She wasn't really going to start interfering, because Miss Delacour wasn't a Hogwarts-student and what Miss Lovegood did outside of school was between herself and her father. But she did hope that it was either purely friendship, or that Fleur was willing to keep her hands and feelings to herself until Miss Lovegood was properly an adult.

And not 'graduated from Hogwarts'-adult, but an actual 'has an established career'-adult. There was a difference, and Harriet had seen some really disturbing people trying to pretend that there wasn't one.

She was pretty sure that Miss Delacour was a better person than that, but it was the kind of worry that sprung to her mind when they danced around each other happily in a way that was very reminiscent of what Ginny and Harriet had used to do whenever Ginny won a quidditch-game.

Less outright snogging though, so Harriet was just going to pretend that that comparison was her own overactive imagination, and simply refuse to acknowledge it.

Miss Lovegood was pretty good at seeing through people's motives, so she would've probably clued in if Miss Delacour was up to no good. And Mr Lovegood was pretty protective of her too, so it would probably work out alright, whatever the exact nature of their relationship turned out to be.

Beyond that surprise, the reactions were rather varied.

Hagrid had teared up when he realized how many lethally dangerous creatures had ended up getting hurt whilst doing their jobs of trying to stop the competitors from getting to the center of the maze. Andromeda clapped politely and looked as if she was planning to excommunicate anyone who was too cheerful about Hogwarts's loss.

Karkaroff was huffing in impotent fury, barking angrily at anyone who came too close to him. Minerva was grumbling under her breath and likely desperately wishing that she hadn't vowed to quit drinking after the spectacular hangover she'd ended up with in the wake of Harriet interfering in the Gringotts-situation. And Madame Maxine was beaming with the vicious pride of a woman vindicated.

Sybill was loudly bemoaning her own faulty interpretation of what her third eye had told her, which apparently was that it was their graphic defeat that she'd seen, not their horrible demises. Several students were hanging on her every word, clearly convinced that she'd merely misinterpreted the signs because the defeat had been so mercilessly vicious.

So she certainly seemed to be having fun.

Sirius was pouting as he paid out whatever he owed to James, who'd managed to snag a place in the audience, and who was all but crowing in glee at having apparently placed his bet on the right champion. Lily was sitting next to them and looked very exasperated with them both.

Argo took lots of photos, purely professional once more. Young Mr Malfoy was seething in outrage, along with a very carefully silent portion of the other Slytherins who'd likely been hoping for either Durmstrang or Hogwarts to emerge victorious.

All in all, it was a much better ending for the Triwizard Tournament than what Harriet remembered from her own time-line. And she was happy that she could say that she'd played a part in that.

But she was still hoping that the whole thing fell apart after this, because she really didn't want to deal with another Yule Ball.

XXX

There hadn't been any solutions to the Gringotts-situation by the time summer-break rolled around either, but then that should've perhaps been expected, what with the Ending Feast being barely a few days after the end of the Third Task.

Harriet had watched a lot of tearful farewells, not the least of which from a certain Mr Krum to a certain Miss Granger.

Considering what she'd seen between Miss Delacour and Miss Lovegood, Harriet couldn't actually tell for sure if Miss Granger and Mr Weasley would end up together in this world. Perhaps she'd changed things so fundamentally that even that seemingly absolute certainty had shifted. Perhaps she hadn't. Time would tell, and it wasn't really any of Harriet's business, regardless.

Still, the idea of things changing from what she'd known in her own world had reminded her of a certain dig that'd gone to hell over in Siberia.

From what people had managed to piece together in the aftermath, the Curse Breaker in charge had been... either under the influence of something very nasty, or had been trying to get everyone killed.

They'd ignored a lot of general safety-regulations, and had somehow managed to convince the people around them to do so as well. Which was strange, but could be down to them having trusted that the Curse Breaker in question had known what they were doing.

The end result had been a blizzard that'd lasted through two summers , and the complete burying of whatever they might've found under a newly formed glacier.

It wouldn't happen for another decade or so, in her own time-line, but she'd already proven that things could change rather substantially from things she'd barely interfered with at all. And she'd just lost Gringotts its monopoly on Curse Breaking, so that was probably rather significant.

It wasn't the first time Curse Breakers got themselves or others killed, but-...

But, normally, Harriet hadn't gone back in time and gotten to know one of the people who'd disappeared under the ice. And even if Argo would probably be very offended if Harriet ever admitted exactly why she maybe wanted to poke at it without Argo in the area, it was still-...

It wasn't like she needed to tell Argo that that's why she was going to Siberia. And besides, Argo was clearly already invested in the idea of going to a warm beach somewhere, rather than play around in the permafrost.

Harriet knew this, because Argo had invited her. Though the invitation in itself had come off sounding a bit weird. Harriet wasn't entirely sure why Argo wanted to visit a nude beach, beyond her admission to never having gone to one before, or why some of the whole invitation had sounded eerily scripted, as if she'd been practicing it to herself.

Harriet sincerely doubted that Argo had wasted her time trying to practice inviting Harriet along to a nude beach. That sounded more like something Ron would've done when trying to convince Hermione to go on some romantic date that he was too embarrassed to mention in casual conversation, rather than something the always-confident Argo would've bothered with.

Still, she'd see how much time she still had left before the school-start once she'd finished in Siberia.

It could get pretty chilly, even during the summer and without two-year-long blizzards, and relaxing in a warmer climate than Hogwarts in autumn was probably not a bad idea in the aftermath.

She hadn't actually managed to tell Argo that, but she guessed that Argo must've expected it, because instead of continuing to mention the beaches, Argo had pressed a key into Harriet's hand. A key that was supposedly for Argo's apartment in Crete.

It'd be interesting to see Crete again. She'd only really dropped by for a few things several years ago – or, several years from now, respectively – so she wasn't sure how much would've changed.

But hopefully she'd be able to finish her work in Siberia with a few weeks to spare to go meet up with Argo before school started up again.

She wasn't entirely sure what Argo actually planned to do in Crete, but was guessing that it probably included finding a warm beach to relax on, and if the woman had an apartment there then she probably had some interesting work-related things around as well.

Harriet smiled a little to herself as she fiddled with the small boat she'd bought to get to where she wanted. It was definitely something to look forward to.

A bit like having someone to come home to after an expedition-...

Harriet paused, suddenly a little bit unsure about her train of thought. Harriet rifled through her pockets to pull out the key again. Why had-...

Harriet felt her face suddenly heating up, as she was suddenly reminded of Argo inviting her to nude beaches . And then that she'd given Harriet the key to her apartment .

But that couldn't be-... Harriet would've realized if-... Right?

Harriet made a small whimpering sound as her mind was suddenly enthusiastically assaulted by images of what Argo might look like when visiting a nude beach.

In lieu of a cold shower, Harriet could really do with that several-year-long blizzard right about now.

XXX

Somewhere between the fifth and sixth century, a Dark Lady – or Lord, the records seemed to imply Lady, but from some of the phrasing it was also possible that the Dark Lady in question had merely stumbled across it – had come up with the brilliant idea to end the world.

Rather than doing so by trying to conquer or enslave people, she'd reasonable come to the conclusion that human-made empires tended to fall, often before they finished conquering the entirety of the world.

Instead, her idea had been to cut out the risk of human error, and simply have nature to the job for her. After all, it wasn't like anyone could fight back against a natural disaster. It would do what it decided to do, the best anyone could hope for was to endure it until it was finished.

Unfortunately for her plans, that same unstoppable existence made nature very resistant to someone trying to manipulate it into ending the world. So, ever the enterprising Dark Lady, she'd decided to set up a nature-based cascade-failure that should swallow the world.

Which had led her to the rather inhospitable Siberia and its long winters.

The basic idea was to use a ritual to cause a blizzard, which would then cover the area with so much snow and ice that it would trigger the start of a new ice-age. However, not wanting to settle for grand ecological destruction, the Dark Lady had been planning to set up a bunch of resonating anchors across the world for similar rituals to trigger time and again until the entire planet would be covered in ice.

Needless to say, she only ever managed to get the single anchor around Siberia operational before she'd finally died.

Considering that she had records and personal notes on the project spanning the course of nearly three centuries, Harriet was willing to guess that she'd been forcefully prolonging her life to get even that far. And from the many notes that mentioned rituals and potions that might help with 'combating rot', Harriet was guessing that she'd very much reached the end of her rope.

By the time a 'magically ageless' body started to rot, the wizard or witch inhabiting it would start to lose their ability to think straight. It was one of those things that Bill had a lot more experience with than Harriet, but from how confused and faltering the notes after the first few mentions of that tended to be, she really couldn't find reason to doubt it.

So the Dark Lady had been unable to finish her life's work of killing all life on the planet, because her body had rotted away from under her before she could finish it. Good times.

However, her anchor in Siberia had been very much functional, and from how it'd been set up, Harriet was guessing that her old time-line had done a pretty decent job at disassembling it, even if they had been ignoring a lot of the usual safety-precautions.

This wasn't a blizzard designed to last for two years, it was a blizzard designed to continue raging for the better part of a decade. And the fact that it'd been unable to do so, likely meant that the expedition in her old world had at least partially lessened its ability to do what it was designed for.

It still took Harriet the better part of two weeks to disentangle the ritual until it could be recorded and removed in its entirety, but it was definitely an interesting experience.

So Harriet had had plenty of time to rethink Argo's invitation to nude-beaches and the like. Oh, Argo was very attractive, and the thought of her undressed to that extent was definitely distracting, but Argo was also an incorrigible tease.

She'd probably realized that Harriet liked women after the whole confession about her origin, and the fact that she'd dated a girl at one point, and had decided to make fun of her a little.

It was maybe a little bit sad, but mostly just a bit embarrassing that Harriet had been reading anything into it. Argo liked to tease, so she'd obviously tease her friends if she had the opportunity. It just made sense.

Still, an invitation was an invitation, and Harriet really was curious about how Crete might've changed since the last time she'd seen it.

Which was why Harriet eased the door open after she heard Argo's voice calling from inside to do so.

It was a nice apartment, neat to the point where Harriet was willing to bet that Argo had cleaned it up before Harriet arrived. Argo was very good at organizing things, but Harriet had seen the woman dealing with the paperwork of Yharnam, and the idea that she'd have a coffee-table that wasn't filled with coffee-mugs and scattered pages was somewhat absurd.

And that was about as much of it as Harriet managed to notice before she spotted Argo standing by the couch, bending over to pick something up from the other side, giving Harriet a very clear view of the sheer lingerie she was wearing.

Harriet's throat made a weird noise as her heart suddenly decided to pump all the blood in her entire body into her face.

Argo glanced over her shoulder, a sly smile on her lips that shifted straight into relief the moment she spotted her. “Oh thank god. I was starting to worry your were straight.”

Harriet made a high-pitched sound as she tried to bring some air into her suddenly constricting lungs, and tried to ignore her heart racing a mile a minute.

Argo paused, then her lips shifted back into a smile. A very fond but also clearly amused smile. “Breathe, Harriet. You can save making that face for when we inspect the bedroom.”

Following the command, Harriet took a deep breath, and then another, feeling more like a fish on land than a sensible human being.

“There you go.” Argo sauntered over to her, exaggeratedly swinging her hips with a gleefully anticipatory grin on her face, until she was close enough that Harriet could feel her own breath on Harriet's suddenly very dry lips. “Did anyone ever tell you that you're as dense as a rock?”

Harriet could definitely remember Hermione mentioning something to that effect, a great many years ago. But the details of it were very hard to place, because Argo was wearing lingerie and smiling at her.

Argo's smile shifted back into that happily fond one again. “Don't worry, I'll be gentle.”

And she was.

She really really was.

For sixteen hours straight.

Apparently, Argo really hadn't been exaggerating when she'd mentioned that she'd been named an unofficial patron saint of physical pleasures after her funeral. She definitely lived up to it.