Harry Potter’s eyes fixated on the muggle photograph in front of him. He couldn’t have been more than two years old and he was surrounded by Dursleys: an irate, red-faced Vernon who seemed as though he’d rather be anywhere but there, a surprisingly young and anxious-looking Petunia, and baby Dudley was, well…baby Dudley, just as he’d seen him in a hundred different pictures around the house growing up, only not in the center of the photo for once. Whoever had taken the picture clearly was interested in capturing him on film, despite the fact that all the Dursleys seemed to be pushing him into the background.
Dozens of thoughts flurried around in his head. Why hadn’t he seen this photo before? Who had taken it? What was it doing here? Harry forced his eyes away from the picture for a moment and gathered the other items which had fallen out of the folder into his arms. Placing it on top of the wooden cabinet, Harry decided there would be time to answer these questions later, after he had done some more digging (and it would be better to try to answer them with Hermione around, Harry reminded himself). He went to open the same drawer to the file cabinet as he had opened before…only to find that he could no longer budge it.
“What?!” Harry exclaimed in disbelief. He tugged at the handle again, but the drawer still would not move. It was as if someone had nailed it shut in the few moments it had taken him to recover the folder and examine the photograph. After a few valiant last efforts, Harry gave up trying. None of the other drawers opened for him either. ‘Some kind of protection charm,’ he thought to himself. ‘It must be.’ Realizing that he was not only denied access to further information, but that he would not be able to return the folder to its original location, either, Harry decided to simply take it with him so that he and Hermione could examine its contents together.
Harry stealthily made his way out of the Serpent’s Tooth’s business offices, careful not to disturb anything else that might indicate that someone had been in here that shouldn’t have been. As he stepped outside the door, folder in hand, he saw that Violet was gone, but Hermione was sitting quietly at one of the tables, examining something small in her hands. When she caught sight of Harry, she shot him a surprised smile and beckoned him to sit down next to her. “That certainly was quick,” Hermione pointed out, as her eyes darted between meeting Harry’s and trying to take a peek at the manila folder in his hands. “What did you find out?”
Harry explained to her what few pertinent details he had learned: that Atlas Filch worked here, that Frank Nichten-Teach’s office had been largely cleaned out and about the mysterious baby picture. Hermione, as Harry had expected, was most interested in the photograph. “Have you ever seen this photo before? At the Dursleys, or in your photo album you got from Hagrid?” Harry shook his head no. “How odd.”
“It isn’t that strange that the Dursleys wouldn’t have wanted to keep this picture around,” Harry said wistfully. “They’ve always made a point of losing pictures with me in them. You should have seen what they did with the ones I got from school before I went to Hogwarts.” He let out a halfhearted chuckle. “But why would one of my old baby pictures end up in Atlas Filch’s office? What am I to him?”
“It is an intriguing mystery,” Hermione assured him, although her eyes continually darted to the folder he had swiped from Filch’s office. “But it’s not the one we came here to solve. So if you don’t mind…” Hermione raised her eyebrows and the two of them immediately started looking at the information Harry had swiped.
Luckily for their cover story, there was a lot of information about the Youth Masque in here: what it was about, what activities went on, the winners for each year, etc. There was also a copy of the same story out of the London Times that Harry and Hermione had found in the Dursleys’ garage. Joined to it with a paperclip, however, was another piece that he immediately brought to Hermione’s attention. “‘Serpent’s Tooth’ reopens as a gentleman’s club,’” Harry read aloud. “‘Attempting to overcome the nefarious image it took on after becoming associated with a grisly double murder last year, club owner Frank Nichten-Teach announced that his establishment would be altering his clientele to serve an older crowd…’” Harry screwed up his nose curiously. “That’s odd. You’d think a little thing like a murder investigation would shut the place down for good. Wonder why he bothered to try to change the image?”
“I don’t know,” Hermione replied honestly, her eyes never leaving the sheets of paper in front of her. “But apparently it worked out well for Mr. Nichten-Teach and Mr. Filch. Their profit margin skyrocketed once they converted the place to an adult club.” She then frowned one of her trademark suspicious frowns. “Frank Nichten-Teach’s signature gets less and less frequent on these financial records. It’s as though he was being phased out.”
Harry wasn’t listening to her anymore. His entire attention was focused on a photograph. Hermione glanced up for a moment and let out a small sigh. “Harry, I know your baby picture is fascinating to you, but I’m certain there are other relevant artifacts in this folder. If you would just…”
Harry shook his head dumbly and this seemingly interrupted her. “It’s not my baby photo.” Gently, he laid the photograph in front of Hermione.
“Your mother?” Hermione questioned, and although she got no response, she knew that this was indeed Lily Evans. Hermione’s hands flew to Harry’s pile of information and what she read there made her eyes go wider. “Harry, her costume took top prize twenty years ago. The year that her parents were murdered.” Her eyes turned sad as they examined the image of Harry’s mother from what seemed like so long ago. “She was Juliet.” A half-smile broke out across her face. “But your dad was Mercutio. Not exactly traditional, was he?” She looked up at Harry expectantly.
Harry couldn’t really put his finger on what he was feeling at that exact moment, except that he was exceptionally worried about Hermione. “Are you sure you want to go through with this, Hermione?” he asked her softly. “The last time something like this happened, people were murdered,” the word felt cold and harsh in Harry’s mouth, “and nobody had to use the Killing Curse to do it. This is the Muggle world, Hermione. It may seem like less can happen to us here than in the Wizarding world, but killers can be just as dangerous and we can’t use magic to combat them. We’re out of our element.”
Hermione bit her lip and shot him an inquisitive look. “Why are you telling me this, Harry?”
“I’m just giving you a chance to back out,” Harry explained apologetically. “I know when you agreed to spend time with me this summer that this wasn’t what you had in mind. It would be a lot safer for you if I did this alone.”
“Are you ‘backing out’?” Hermione asked him with derision in her voice, as if he had just suggested she switch houses from Gryffindor to Slytherin.
“I can’t,” Harry said with a sigh. “They were my grandparents. Whatever happened to them, whatever my parents were involved in, it could be happening all over again. I can’t just walk away from that. I can’t pretend like it’s nothing.”
“Then neither can I,” Hermione retorted stubbornly. Before Harry could say anything else to dissuade her, she grabbed his hand and pulled him up. “Come on. We’re done here. But we do have a lot of planning to do.”
“Planning?” Harry asked, a puzzled expression dominating his forehead. “For what?”
Hermione smiled disarmingly. “Why, the Youth Masque, of course.”
***
Following Hermione’s advice, early the next morning Harry Potter wrote a letter to his former Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher, Remus Lupin, asking for his own recollections about that summer and anything else that might help he and Hermione understand exactly what it was that had happened. Harry stuffed his quill back into his knapsack of school supplies as he finished up the letter, tied the note to Hedwig’s leg and sent her off to find Professor Lupin.
As Harry watched her fly off, a slight twinge of sadness overcame him. ‘Sirius would have probably known about it, too,’ he thought wistfully. ‘He was my father’s best friend. He would have been the perfect person to ask.’ If only he hadn’t rushed off to be the hero, Harry would have had the chance. There was no point in dwelling on it now, however. Sirius was gone.
Unhappily, Harry turned his attention back to the book in front of him. It was an illustrated history of Medieval costumes that Hermione had checked out for him out of a muggle library, with instructions for him to pick out a costume he might like to wear. Given that Hermione was planning and organizing everything else about the Youth Masque, it really didn’t seem fair for Harry to be resentful of the fact that he had to do this, but nonetheless it struck him as completely pointless. However, when he had suggested that he simply go as “Spiderman or something”, Hermione had given him such a disgusted look (one she usually reserved only for Ron) that he agreed to choose an authentic costume on his own.
None of these muggle outfits particularly suited his fancy, although Harry thought it might be worth a laugh to go as a wizard (or at least how muggles thought wizards dressed). However, about the time he had completely given up, he caught a reference to the Lady of the Lake and his eyes quickly fell upon a rather dashing knight’s costume. “Sir Lancelot,” Harry read aloud. He seemed to recall the name from one of the accounts of Merlin’s life in Professor Binns’ History of Magic class, but, as he usually repressed anything related to that particular class, he couldn’t remember anything specific about the knight. No matter. One costume was as good as the other, he supposed.
As he pushed the thick tome underneath his bed, he barely noticed as another one was slammed in front of him by Vernon Dursley. His uncle’s face was already red, but he didn’t look angry. As a matter of fact, he looked…scared. Harry couldn’t imagine why, as he hadn’t done any magic in a while, he hadn’t received any owls from anyone and there had been no dementors (or dementoids, as his slightly clueless Uncle Vernon called them) in sight all summer. Then he looked down at the book in front of him.
“‘Growing and Being’?!?” Harry questioned as a frown filled his face. The frown only grew as he examined its contents. “What kind of a book is this?”
“It’s as I feared, Petunia,” Vernon told his wife as if Harry wasn’t in the room. “They haven’t taught him anything at that freak school of his about…that thing.”
“What thing?” Harry asked indignantly. His voice seemingly shocked the two of them, as they recoiled slightly from the sound of it. Maybe they had forgotten he was there.
“I…it’s alright to be confused,” Aunt Petunia told him in what came very close to passing for a sympathetic voice. “Just look over the book and if you have any questions, feel free to come to us.”
Uncle Vernon shot his wife a reproachful look. “Yes, well, perhaps Dudley might be better with that sort of thing. It is his textbook, after all.”
“What are you going on about?” Harry demanded to know, confused as all get out. “Why are you giving me one of Dudley’s old schoolbooks and why would I want to ask him any questions? None of this makes any sense!”
Instead of answering his questions, however, the Dursleys promptly retreated from his bedroom as quickly and quietly as they had arrived. This left Harry alone with the book and his own befuddlement. He considered placing the textbook on his shelf and forgetting about it for the time being. However, he had taken a shorter time than he had expected to choose his costume for the Youth Masque, and Hermione wouldn’t be here for another hour, so he cracked the book open and examined its contents.
After looking over the text for about ten minutes, Harry was officially unimpressed. Sure, there were some technical terms he had been unaware of, but most of this stuff he had found out from conversations with Dean and Seamus over some of their longer games of exploding snap. ‘Alright, so some of it might have been exaggeration, but still, I can’t believe the Dursleys thought I made it almost to sixteen without knowing…’
And then it occurred to him. The reason they had given him the book. Hermione. They were afraid he might do things like…uh…that illustration on page 167 (the one that had “Don’t Do This!” written in marker over it)…with Hermione.
Harry nearly laughed aloud. Oh, he knew that the Dursleys thought that Hermione was his girlfriend (and, in fact, if they didn’t think so it would have been extremely difficult for them to meet over the summer), but he had no idea they had them convinced this thoroughly. I mean, he and Hermione weren’t even acting differently around each other.
Harry froze. If it was so easy for the Dursleys to believe that he and Hermione were dating without them doing anything special around each other, what did it say about their relationship? Did it say anything at all? ‘Or does it say everything?’ Harry asked himself. Wait, where had that thought come from?
Harry shook his head as if to clear it. No, it couldn’t be. Hermione had feelings for Ron. She was planning to ask him out once they went back to Hogwarts. That was that. Hermione couldn’t be his girlfriend. She was about to become Ron’s.
Feeling as if this should put the matter to rest, Harry rose to his feet, stretched and left the muggle textbook ‘Growing and Being’ sitting next to his bed. Taking more care to choose his clothing than he normally did, Harry found his way to the shower, turned the water all the way to hot and stepped in.
Thinking about how lucky he was to have an ample supply of water again after how horribly hot and dry it was last summer, Harry took an especially long shower, letting the water run over his head and shoulders. He toweled off and dressed quickly, getting a sinking feeling in his stomach that he was running a tad late. Sure enough, when he emerged from the loo, there was Hermione looking irritable and flustered.
“Can you believe that that idiot cousin of yours still wants to try and impress me?” Hermione asked, as the two of them exited the Dursley household and made their way to her green moped. “It’s like he’s trying to steal me away from you or something.”
A thought suddenly struck Harry like a thunderbolt. He didn’t want Ron to date Hermione. He wanted her for himself. “Yeah,” Harry replied, his mouth suddenly going dry. “I can believe it.”