Unravelling
The silence around The Burrow’s kitchen table was almost loud compared to the events of just a few hours before; it practically screamed in John’s face as everyone stared expectantly at him. The only person who’s attention was not focused on him was Ron; he slouched stonily in the corner, avoiding everybody else and twirling his gold wedding band around his finger. The Grangers weren’t there - Mr and Mrs Weasley had set them up in a bedroom while things were being decided.
The tension seem to last an eternity, as all awkward moments somehow do, and John didn’t want to break it; but they needed to get moving, get their act together so that they could find Hermione and Ginny and put this whole mess behind them. John cleared his dry throat and immediately it seemed to unleash the flood in Ron that had been building steadily over the last while.
“So, what’s the plan?” asked John.
Nobody answered his question, but Ron snorted dismissively and stood up; he towered over them so much that John had to strain his neck to watch the constantly shifting emotions on his face.
“Plan? Yeah, what is the plan, ‘John’? We don’t know where they are, what’s happening to them even now, how long he’ll keep them alive! All I know right now is that my best friend is no longer M.I.A. after four years and my wife and sister have just been kidnapped by the man who hated and taunted us at school. Tell me, Potter, what is our plan? If you care enough to stick around to help, that is.”
John flinched at the cold use of his true surname; he hadn’t heard that name connected to him in so long, not even by himself … and to listen to Ron scream it at him like this hurt, not that he blamed him.
“Boys, let’s calm down for a minute,” pleaded Mr Weasley. He stood behind his wife, his arms wrapped around her shaking form in a sign of wordless comfort.
“I’ll calm down, all right!” snapped Ron crossly, his eyes full of distaste. “I’ll be calm once Hermione and Ginny are safely back home, and he is out of my sight.” He pointed accusingly at John.
“Ron …” John whispered.
“Shut up. I don’t want to talk to you.”
“Ron, please,” said David.
“What was your part in this, David?” exclaimed Ron. “The two of you must’ve been having a real laugh at us all this time, imagining the poor clueless Weasleys; never mind what it would mean to us knowing what we know now, and only because of Malfoy!”
“That’s enough, Ron,” John said sharply. Everyone froze. “Why do you think I never told you? That David never did? This is exactly the reaction I expected. I never told him my true identity - just enough that he knew that I was once close to you. He figured it out eventually, but he promised he wouldn’t tell, and he didn’t. I came back to see you and Hermione marry. Hell, I never thought Malfoy would have the guts to come here; it’s me he’s after,” his voice grew soft and remorseful, “it’s my fault he took them.”
“You’re damn right it’s your fault.”
“I knew he wanted revenge on me; he’s been chasing me in America for months now. I put his father in Azkaban, and his family was penalized really harshly for their part in the war. I never should have risked coming here and putting you all in danger.”
Everybody else’s eyes softened slightly, all but Ron’s. He continued to ignore him, glaring at David for some incomprehensible reason that John could not figure out.
“And you!” he said accusingly to David. “You were supposed to tell us something like this! It was your job!”
And there was that silence again. What was that about? John looked back and forth between David and the Weasleys. Everyone was looking at Ron now, all sporting similar looks of shock and … guilt? What on Earth was going on? This fight had gotten way out of hand.
Ron’s face was flaming red, but he spun back onto his stunned family, nearly screaming. “There! I said it! It’s out, over, done with! And you know what? I’m glad. It would have come out sooner or later.”
“David,” said John, his voice low and menacing, “what is he talking about?”
“Aw, crap, Ron!” David had moaned while Ron was shouting. He turned to John now and said, “This is not how you were supposed to find out, John. I’m sorry; this is gonna sound so, so bad. Do you remember how I told you I met the Weasleys while rebuilding Hogwarts, and that we became pretty friendly?” He met John’s eyes, and John, in all his confusion and anger and shame could not deny that his friend looked truly miserable to be saying this.
“Yes, I remember.”
“Well, that’s not the whole story. You see, I specialize as an Auror in tracking and protection. After the Hogwarts renovations were complete … well, the Weasleys kind of … hired … me to look out for you. They were all so worried; didn’t want you to end up dead, or worse - so I was supposed to follow you to America, befriend you, and report regularly back to them that you were okay.”
“Are you telling me that you pretended to be my friend, for four years!” He could not believe that he had been betrayed like this. “Are you kidding me?”
“John, I never pretended; you have to understand that, if nothing else! A few months into our training course at the Auror Academy, as we became real friends, I stopped seeing you as an assignment, and as a real person who had just made a mistake.” He looked up at John, and John could see that he was fighting to hold back tears. “I still occasionally told the Weasleys that you were doing okay, keeping busy, things like that; but it was never in less than a friendly gesture.”
“You lied to me, David, how can I trust you now?”
He stared down at his shoes miserably. “I don’t know.”
John looked around at all of the Weasleys and David; he could not believe this. All of this time, and David had been their man. At the moment, he didn’t even care that there wouldn’t have been a need for this if he had just stayed. He didn’t know these people anymore, and he definitely did not know David. He shook his head once, trying to get rid of the itch telling him it was time to run. Despite everything, he didn’t want to run anymore. So he just walked out the front door, slamming it shut loudly, leaving them all behind him again.
He found a large tree stump, half rotten after many seasons of frosting and defrosting, and sat down, holding up his head with his elbows perched on his knees. It was night time and chilly, the waning moon watching him ruefully, and John shivered with the wind. He thought about a lot of things; he thought about himself, about everyone probably laughing behind his back inside The Burrow; about how again he was faced with the questions of: who was he? And, what was he really doing with his life? He was different now, changed in some way from the man that he was prior to leaving America, and he thought he knew how - it was John. John felt different, like he was disappearing … because he had never really been John, he realized. That was just an excuse he had made to hide from himself.
But he wasn’t hiding anymore. Everything had been brought out explosively into the open tonight. He was Harry, Harry Potter, and he had known that all along; it had just felt right that, when he left his old life behind, he would have to leave his name behind too. He would have to start thinking of himself as Harry again; but he had been John for so long …
He was interrupted suddenly from his musings by soft footsteps coming towards him through the grass. He looked up, expecting maybe David coming to plead his apologies some more, and was surprised to find Audrey, Percy’s wife, approaching instead.
“Hi, Harry,” she spoke quietly, “can I sit down?”
“No offence, but I would really rather be left alone at the moment.”
“I know,” she replied, chuckling nervously and taking a seat beside him anyways. “That’s why I have talk to you.”
He sighed resignedly and ran his hands through his shaggy hair. “What?”
“I am going to give you the same advice that you gave to Hermione - yes she told me,” she answered his silent question. “Don’t be too hard on them. They meant well, and they did it only because they love you.”
“Funny way of showing it.”
“Well, people do funny things for the ones they love, don’t you think?” Her voice took on a hard edge. “For instance, did you not do the same just four years ago?”
“It’s not the same thing,” he said stubbornly.
“In what way?” she retorted snippily, and he was surprised by the sudden hostility in her tone. “You left them because you thought they’d hate you for causing the death of so many, of their family, and you couldn’t live with that. They spied on you because you deserted them and they wanted to make sure that you wouldn’t die without them knowing about it. You both committed wrongs and now it is time to make up for them.”
“It’s easy for you to say though. You’re not emotionally involved; we don’t know each other and, therefore, you can’t say you were hurt when I left.”
“Harry,” Audrey sighed, standing up, “the Weasleys have been my family for three years now, three amazing years since I met Percy, and I love them all dearly. So, yes, I have been hurt by this. Do you honestly have no clue how much they adored you - how they still do, despite your absolute stupidity and ignorance at the moment?”
He stared at her blankly and she rolled her eyes. “I have never met more stubborn people in my life.” She huffed irritably, strolling across the dewy grass and back into the house.
When he had first come out here the darkness had been comforting, like shelter from everything inside; now, it was just suffocating. Audrey’s words lingered in the cool air between him and the house, staring him in the face with every turn he took. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he knew she was right - annoyingly right, and he felt like screaming again. But there was no time; they needed to find Hermione and Ginny before it was too late.
He stood up and took out his wand, holding it lightly as he swept it the length of his body. He could feel his appearance changing at once: his hair was growing thicker and he knew that if he checked, it would be coal-black instead of brown; his nose grew longer and his shoulders filled out slightly; his eyes were by now their original shade of green and he hastily exchanged the contacts for his old wire-rimmed glasses. With his wand safely stowed and his hands shoved deep into the confines of his pockets, an older, changed Harry Potter stepped through the door and into The Burrow’s warm kitchen.
Nobody saw him enter at first and he caught the tail end of a hushed conversation between the Weasleys while Audrey hesitatingly relayed to the others what Harry had said outside; they stopped abruptly when he cleared his throat and at least all had the decency to look a bit sheepish when they realized that they’d been caught. There was a stunned moment where everyone took in his familiar, but slightly matured features after not really seeing him for so long, and then Mrs Weasley gasped loudly, lunged around the table and pulled him into a bone-cracking hug.
“Harry … oh, Harry!”
“Hey, Mrs Weasley,” he replied, patting her back gently.
She pulled back, holding his face between her hands and scrutinizing him intently; the rest of the gang had now crowded around them, most of them smiling. “Harry … I knew it; I just knew it! There was just something too familiar about John Fischer - we can call you Harry now, can’t we?” she gushed.
Harry chuckled despite himself. “Yes, I’m Harry now.” His brows furrowed. “And, you knew?”
“Well, I didn’t know, know, but really, dear, you should have realized that you couldn’t hide forever. Not from me.” She beamed up at him. “You’re still awfully thin, though; come now, I’ll whip up something for us all to eat.” She ushered him into a seat and the Weasleys and David sat around him. Only Ron seemed unaffected by the happy reunion and he slumped moodily behind everyone else, leaning against the wall in favour of a chair.
The sight of his mother cheerfully rushing around the kitchen, as well as the delicious aroma emanating from her pot on the stove, seemed to rouse him, however, and he addressed the table at large with a scowl.
“So, what? We’re all buddy, buddy again and Hermione and Ginny are left to fend for themselves?”
Bill answered, “Ron, be rational; we have no idea where they are - no clues, no traces … there is nothing that may assist us in finding them.”
“We’re not leaving them behind,” said David determinedly. “But we are not rushing in blind either; we need a plan first.”
“Yeah, that’s great, but where are we going to find one of those?” said George. “We need information.”
“I agree; we have to be prepared,” Harry said as Mrs Weasley set a large steaming bowl of soup in front of him. His voice was small. “Draco Malfoy is doing this to get revenge on me; that’s what his guy who we interrogated in America said. So, just taking the girls won’t solve anything. He’ll use them as bait to lure me to him; so I expect we should be hearing from--”
A sharp tapping on the window over the sink interrupted him. Turning his head towards the disturbance, Harry saw a sleek black owl pecking at the glass, an envelope tied to its right leg.
“--him soon,” Harry finished.
“I’ve got it.” Ron let the bird in and unattached the letter; immediately, the bird flew off. He slit it open, pulling out a small scrap of parchment and what appeared to be two photographs.
“What is it?” asked Mrs Weasley. Ron was reading the paper with a confused expression, but right as he was about to answer her, he glanced at the photos and had to run to the sink, the recently digested soup coming violently back up.
“Ron, are you all right? What did the note say?”
He shook his head, looking like he wanted to puke some more, but he quickly washed his mouth out with a glass of water. “Don’t … look at those … photographs,” he panted.
“Surely they can’t be that bad, Ron,” said Percy. He picked them up and stared at them for a long time before putting them back on the table face down; his face turned a pasty white.
“I told you.”
“What’s in the pictures?” demanded Mrs Weasley of her son.
“Hermione and Ginny, bound and gagged to chairs. They don’t look good,” muttered Percy. Everyone gasped, their features becoming downcast.
“It’s the note that I don’t get. Looks like nothing I’ve ever seen before,” Ron said.
Audrey unfolded it tentatively; Percy and Harry looked at it over both of her shoulders. It seemed like gibberish to Harry, but evidently Audrey understood it because she sighed deeply, appearing resolved.
“What does it mean?” asked Percy, his brows furrowed.
“It was written by a British Muggle poet back in around the year 1600 for a play called Hamlet,” she said slowly. “Although how Malfoy could possibly know it is beyond me; I only recognized it because I’m Muggleborn and my sister studied it in school when she was seventeen. It was a very sad play: about a man who finds out that his horrible uncle killed his much beloved father and then took his brother’s crown and married his wife. It follows the son’s quest for self-discovery and revenge.”
“Does he get it in the end? His revenge, I mean,” asked Harry.
“Yes, and no; you see, they all end up dead in the last act. This is the line from the play written on the note:
“Our indiscretion sometime serves us well / When our deep plots do pall; and that should learn us / There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, / Rough-hew them how we will.*
“And then there is this small sentence on the bottom.” She peered between squinted eyes at the tiny words. “It says: Go to the place of the fire. I wonder what that means?”
“That line from the Muggle play,” prompted Ron impatiently, “I don’t understand what it’s saying. What does it mean?”
“He is saying,” she observed them all sadly, “that sometimes the things we don’t plan for work out in our favour, but it is a moot point, because when our plans fail there is a higher power looking out for us, fixing our mistakes, and we just have to learn how to use that power to our advantage.”
“So is there no hope then?” said David, “If Malfoy believes that he has some higher power over us “ fate, if you will “ working in his favour.”
“There is always hope,” Mr Weasley answered for her, leaning over the table to stare them all in the eyes, “but we must be willing to fight for it.”