(XII) - 'The Hanged Man'

Harry Apparated outside his doorstep and hesitated. He could feel his blood pumping. He could hear it beating as it rushed around in his ears. He had to get that under control. He took a deep breath to steady himself, and placed his hand on the doorknob.

Ron would be rounding up whoever was left in the department and putting out a general alert for the Aurors to gather at the Ministry. Procedure for assembling and briefing a team in an emergency situation was to take no more than two minutes. Add to that the time to fetch the remaining Aurors in the Ministry and it would be three minutes, approximately. The team would then move, covertly, to around Harry's apartment. The time to allow for that would pass four minutes, definitely. The site then needed to be secured – no hostile elements in this case but a moderate probability of Muggle witnesses. That would put the time between four and five minutes. Approximately.

Then a containment perimeter had to be established, preventing Apparition, the activation of Portkeys, et cetera. Harry's block of flats was a small space but it was tall. That would add time. Maybe three minutes for a full team. But he was unsure if Ron could get a full team, and wasn't certain Ron would wait until he had one, so that further increased the time. Call it upwards of five minutes.

So he had to keep calm for around seven to ten minutes, approximately – a huge margin. He had to keep calm even though he was going into his apartment completely blind – all he knew about the situation was that Darcy was part of the Hecate's case that Ron had been assigned to, and that Darcy was potentially dangerous. If he had the chance, he'd make sure to get his wand. In the meantime, he grimaced as he thought, the staff would have to do.

He turned the doorknob. Zero minutes passed.

"Hello, I'm home," he called, opening the door and stepping into the apartment in a single smooth movement. His eyes swept the room within sight. Ginny sat in the chair she had claimed as her own, her knitting project in her lap. She had a smile on her face. There was nobody else in the room he could see. The leather folder lay on an arm of the couch.

"You're late," she admonished him, "Mrs. McIntyre arrived before you did."

"That's the Ministry for you," he said. Keep your voice even, he thought. "Has she been here long?"

"Five minutes or so." Ginny looked back down at her knitting needles and started to weave them together slowly. "She said she was going to explain some of the, what were they called, probability anomaly tests, over a pot."

One minute passed. Harry wondered if he had time to duck into the bedroom and covertly grab his wand when Darcy emerged from the kitchen with his kettle and a pair of cups. "I don't know how good this will be, because I so rarely make tea myself, but – hello Harry – I suppose it's like riding a bicycle, isn't it? Do you want a cup, Harry?"

"I'd love one," he said, and sat in the other chair. Darcy disappeared back into the kitchen, and Harry turned his thoughts briefly to his wand again, and then to the staff that was still in his hand. He wasn't quite ready to set it anywhere, even if it was within arm's reach. Holding it made it visible, but on second thought that made it a conversation piece, didn't it? It should be as visible as possible.

He tightened his grip around the staff as Darcy came with a third cup, set it on the coffee table, and began pouring tea. Two minutes passed.

"Are staves back in fashion, or are you trying to bring them back?" Darcy asked with a note of humour in her voice. Harry smiled back, thankful he had something to do with his face so that the relief wouldn't show clearly.

"It's an Ollivander custom," Ginny said with a smirk. She had thought Harry's retelling of the meeting with Ollivander slightly absurd, and had insisted he was going funny in the head in his old age, and this came through clearly when she spoke.

Darcy either missed this or chose to ignore it. "I thought he had retired," she asked Harry.

"Moved on to other projects, I guess," he said. "He has a new store, although you'd never know it was his."

"When my mother was in school, there was a course in the staff." Darcy sat on the couch, and looked from Harry to Ginny, holding her teacup. "She said it was an excuse for the students to blow holes in rocks out by the groundskeeper's hut."

Ginny snorted laughter at this, and Harry joined her in what he hoped was not a weak smile. Three minutes passed. Or was it more like four? Harry glanced about the room quickly, and his eye fell on the magical clock that sat in the corner. It was a replica of the clock at the Burrow; a gift he and Ginny had received for their wedding, and they had been fascinated to see a third hand on it grow longer over the past months. It still didn't have a name on it. Harry couldn't read where the hands on the clock were, and didn't think Darcy could either, but she might if she had some reason to look in its direction.

Harry shifted his gaze away from it, thinking very clearly, Why can't wizards have normal clocks?

Ginny folded her knitting needles together, set her project aside, and reached for her teacup. Darcy was saying something, but Harry didn't hear her. He was having a very strong instinctual feeling, an intuition welling up from his training as an Auror, and he was acting on it without thinking.

"Ginny," he said in a flat, commanding voice. "Don't drink the tea."

Ginny froze. So did Darcy. Harry, continuing on instinct, lowered his staff so it was aimed in Darcy's direction. "Talk," he said.

Darcy placed her teacup on the coffee table, and said in a calm (on the surface, at least) voice, "I can't."

She's an Unspeakable, Harry's intuition screamed. She's an Unspeakable, she's turned rogue and Ron's on her case.

"Try." His voice remained flat but he could feel his heartbeat again.

"I'm not Darcy McIntyre. There isn't a Darcy McIntyre, it was a potioneer team that did the work, but the rest of the story of the development is still true. I didn't lie about studying the potion's side effects, or my theory about it."

Harry seized on her wording. "What was a lie?"

"The mortality rate of those who overdose. One survived." Her voice was slow, like she was choosing her words very carefully.

"That's you." She didn't contradict him, so Harry made the assumption this was true but obscured by the Unspeakable censor.

"I have a theory," Harry said. "You believe your theory about the catalyst. If you can manage something incredibly dangerous and reckless, the overdose symptoms disappear. I have a theory that your idea of dangerous and reckless was to try to give my son the same luck curse I've got to try and engineer another catastrophe on the scale of Voldemort's takeover, just to save yourself from the Felix Felicis overdose."

"Couldn't you say it worked out for the good, in the end?" Darcy asked. "If you didn't have the prolonged luck that first crippled and then killed the Dark Lord, how would he have died?"

Time slowed for Harry. In the heavy silence that followed, he was able to consider Darcy's question, weigh the prospect of continuing the debate to stall for more time, and also be staggered at the surreality of arguing the benefits and drawbacks of turning his child into a magnet for danger and bad fortune.

Several things then happened in rapid succession. Darcy's hand jerked. Time sped back up for Harry and the whole world came into a perfect focus that came only with rushing adrenaline. Darcy pulled her wand from inside her robes. A mighty fireball erupted from Harry's staff. Darcy dove to the side. Harry's chair fell backwards from the force of the spell. Darcy aimed a spell that flew high above Harry's head and cracked a picture-frame hanging on the wall. Ginny, who had remained silent through the whole tense exchange, tossed her cup of tea at Darcy. Hot tea splashed across Darcy's face, and she dropped her wand and held her hands to her face. Half a dozen loud pops went off in the apartment, and a team of Aurors, led by Ron, Apparated into Harry and Ginny's living room. Half a dozen wands were aimed at Darcy. The couch continued to burn. Ginny fetched for her wand, and doused the fire. Smoke settled on the ceiling of the apartment, and a very long silence followed.

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Harry, Ron, and Ginny sat around the table at Ron and Hermione's apartment. It was late, but none of them felt very tired just yet. After Darcy had been turned over to the Unspeakables, there had been very little for them to do – the Unspeakable Department had their own internal prosecution system, Ron had said – and none of them wanted to remain in the apartment that needed to be aired. They had spoken very little, but had managed to pool their knowledge about what had just happened. There was a stillness among them; not shock, exactly, but possibly a close relative.

"How much of this do you think you'll be able to talk about?" Harry asked Ron, "You know, now that you're not working with the Unspeakables."

"They said the details fade after a week," he replied, twisting his empty bottle of Butterbeer in his hand. "But they were so sodding vague about everything. I wonder if you'll remember more than I do, since you figured out a lot of it on your own."

"That would happen anyway," Ginny said, but her heart wasn't in teasing her brother.

Ron stood up from the table. "I'm getting another beer," he announced. "Want one, Harry?"

"I want one," said Ginny.

"Nice one." Ron opened the fridge and took out two bottles.

"Mum drank when she had you," she said with such a serious tone that Harry couldn't help a short bark of laughter. Ron tried to look disapproving, but he couldn't make his smile vanish. Ginny was smiling, too.

"So, are you lucky?" Ginny half-asked, half-wondered.

"I don't know," said Harry. "Setting our couch on fire, was that lucky?"

"I could get copies of all that paperwork from Eliott, maybe," Ron said. "Maybe the tests were in there, you could find out for yourself."

Harry shook his head. "I don't think so," he said, and drank from his bottle.

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Later that night, when Harry and Ginny lay in bed together, Harry could sense something from his wife – could sense her smiling in the dark, in a way that only couples of many years would recognise and understand. "Hm?" he asked of her, although she hadn't said anything.

"You think we're having a son," she said. For a second he couldn't understand how she had arrived at this idea, and then he did. He had said it. Not child, but son.

"It was just a thing I said," he explained," I don't know..."

"You think we're having a son," Ginny repeated.

"I guess I do," Harry said after a moment of thought.

"You think we're having a son," she said for the third time, like this would make his thoughts into reality, and drifted off to sleep.



09-02-10