The house on the hill stood abandoned, haunted by shadows and rumour, overlooking the village far below. Once it had been a monument to pride, the home of a lesser noble family, but now there was only one left who loved it – and none left to love him. And slowly he too was fading, unable to keep the manor house to its former glory.

In fact, the man’s life was almost empty save for the antitheses to love – distrust, dislike, even fear. When the former inhabitants of the house were brutally murdered fifty years ago, the lonely man had been the prime suspect as a discontented servant of the house, but nothing had ever come of it legally and now the youth of the village had taken to harassing him for their own petty amusement.

That night, the lonely man – Frank by name, formerly a gardener in service to the old family - was tending to his affairs in the small, run-down cottage he did his best to keep neatly at the edge of the hilltop estate, when he saw a light on inside the dilapidated manor. Thinking it must be the village boys here on a dare again, he grumbled to himself and retrieved a gnarled walking cane from the coathooks beside the door before setting off up the hill towards the house.

To Frank’s surprise, there were no shouts of laughter, no overdramatic stage whispers of teenage boys telling scary stories as he had expected by the flickering firelight in the windows. Instead, as he hobbled into the house, he heard adult voices – one high-pitched and coldly domineering, the other quaking and servile. He might have thought them squatters, with the fire in the living room, had their conversation not been so strange, and he crept closer to the golden slash of light carved into the wood floor by the open doorway, curious despite himself to hear their conversation better.

“There is a little more in the bottle, my Lord, if you are hungry,” said one of them, the one with the beseeching, servile tone.

“Later,” replied the other, his voice high-pitched for a man and cold like a sudden Arctic gale. “Move me closer to the fire, Peter, it brings me strength.”

There was a scraping noise, as Frank saw through the gap in the hinges of the door that a chair was pushed across the floor by a short man with thin, balding hair and tattered clothing that hung loose on his body, as if he had once carried more weight. That must be the servile one, Frank guessed, as he turned his right ear – the good one – to the door, better to hear with.

“Where is Nagini?” the frost-voiced man asked, his tone growing weaker and whisper-thin in the dark.

“I – I don’t know, m-m-my Lord,” the servile man stammered fearfully. “She – she set out to explore the house earlier, I believe...”

“You will milk her again before we retire, Peter,” the cold-voiced man told his servant – the short man, Frank presumed, and apparently named Peter. “I will need feeding in the night. The journey has... tired me, greatly.”

This was all very strange, and Frank shook his head and cleaned his bad ear with a finger before putting the good one back to the door to listen, just as the servant – Peter – began to speak again.

“My Lord,” he began, clearly anxious to be questioning his master. “May I ask – how long are we to stay here?”

“A week,” the master replied, with just a trace of irritation audibly creeping into his crepe-paper-thin voice, so thin and weak it was as if he were not quite real. Or not quite alive. “Perhaps longer,” he continued, as Frank shook off his discomfort and told himself he was being childish. “This place is moderately comfortable, and the plan cannot proceed yet. It would be foolish to act before the Quidditch World Cup is over.”

Now Frank was bewildered, as well as more than a little spooked. He was quite sure he was only deaf in one ear, and yet he had heard the frost-paper-voiced man say the word “Quidditch” – not really a word at all – quite seriously, as if it meant something.

“I – I beg pardon, my lord,” the man named Peter apologised, a soft whispering sound of cloth indicating that perhaps he bowed or otherwise humbled himself. “The – the Quidditch World Cup, my Lord? I – forgive me, but I do not understand, why should the Cup be of any concern?”

“Because, fool” the master snarled, his thin voice no stronger in his anger but somehow still carrying an edge of danger, weakness and all. “At this very moment wizards are pouring into the country from all over the world, and every butter-fingered boffin from the Ministry of Magic will be on guard, alert for any signs of unusual activity, checking and double checking identities... they will be obsessed with security lest anything go wrong. So for now, we wait.”

Frank had long passed from bewildered into positively baffled, half-convinced he’d fallen asleep in his chair and was hallucinating the whole conversation. Ministry of Magic, wizards... either this was all a dream, or they were speaking in code, he decided. And if they were speaking in code, that made them criminals or spies – dangerous.

“My Lord is determined, then?” Peter asked quietly.

“Certainly I am determined, Peter,” the as-yet unseen master replied with a menacing hiss.

The master’s derisive treatment of his servant’s name hung in the air, an uncomfortable pause, until Peter began to speak again. “It – it could be done without Harry Potter, my Lord -” the servant stammered, his words tumbling from him in a rush as clearly he feared to challenge the unseen man. “He is well-protected, watched at all hours – it would be difficult to get close.”

Once again there was a pause, though instead of hanging insidiously in the air the servant’s voice dissipated, leaving only the echo that quickly faded under the almost physical, pressing sensation of the master’s growing ire. “Without Harry Potter? I see...” he breathed, and Frank shuddered at the very tangible feeling that his ominous whisper left in its wake.

“M-my Lord, I do not say this out of concern for the boy!” Peter yelped, almost as if he expected to be struck for his insolence. “It is only – since it’s not his blood you need – perhaps it would be better to return to strength and then finish him? It – it is not as if you have any shortage of enemies, finding a suitable replacement now that he is... tainted, should not be difficult.”

There was a hissing growl then, low and dry as the breeze that rattled through the open windows. “I could,” the man addressed as Lord murmured, but it did not sound as if he was considering the suggestion – no, he was gathering himself like a snake before striking. “It was a blow, to learn his blood would be denied to me. But if I must sacrifice building my rebirth from his very flesh... I will not sacrifice the satisfaction I will gain from seeing him quail before me, quiver and sob with terror at my very presence. If I cannot build my resurrection from his blood, I will christen it with his fear.”

“But – but my Lord,” Peter pleaded. “I could find you another – you know I can disguise myself competently... I am your most loyal, most devoted servant but I fear I am not your most able... If something were to happen and there was only me...”

“Stop,” the other man hissed, cutting off his servant’s pleas as effectively as if he had shouted. “Your devotion is no love, your loyalty self-serving – you are a coward and your begging reveals it. Oh, you tend me dutifully, but I see every expression of disgust, feel your every flinch – regretting that you ever returned to me. Would you even come back, Peter, were you to leave and seek another for me?”

“My- my Lord!” Peter protested. “I – I have no desire to leave you, your health is my only wish-”

“You lie,” came the hissed voice, full of reproach. “Do not pretend to be more than you are, Peter Pettigrew. You are a craven, and you are of use to me as what you are – sneaking, scraping, servile. No, I need you here. Who else would milk Nagini? How else would I survive, when I need feeding every few hours?”

“But my Lord – you seem so much stronger now,” Peter replied.

“Liar,” the snake-voiced man murmured, though there was little disappointment in it – it seemed he expected such things from this man. “I may have a hold in the physical world once again, but I am still weak and you know this. Were you to leave even for a day I would once again lose what little health I have managed to regain under your fumbling ministrations! Now, silence, worm, and do not question me further.”

Peter Pettigrew’s spluttered protests fell quiet at once, and for a long moment Frank, frozen in aching fear, could hear only the crackling of the fire. Then the man who had not named himself spoke again, more measured as if his outburst had sapped his strength. “I have my reasons for wanting the boy. Some of my own followers even believed me defeated at his infant hand – without breaking his spirit, there is no guarantee I can sway their fickle fidelities my way. I have waited thirteen years now – a little longer does not matter now. All I need from you now, Peter, is a little patience and courage – courage you will find, unless you wish to feel the full wrath of Lord Voldemort turned upon you instead?”

“Yes, my Lord,” Peter replied sullenly. “But I must – I must speak, the plan, it is – Bertha Jorkins’ disappearance, it can’t go unnoticed forever and if we proceed, if we murder-”

“If?” the other voice replied, silky-smooth like the blade of a well-wrought knife. “If we proceed, if? If you follow the plan, Peter, the Ministry need never know that anyone has died. And you will do so quietly and without fuss. Come, Peter, take heart! One more death and our path to Harry Potter is clear. I would hardly ask you to do such a thing alone. By that time, my truly most faithful servant will have returned.”

“I am a faithful servant,” Peter muttered, with just a trace of petulance.

“Peter, I need someone with brains, whose devotion is to me and not themself – and you fill neither requirement,” the other voice retorted sharply.

“I found you,” Peter said, definitely sulky now. “I was the one who found you, not – not him, I brought you Bertha Jorkins, you wouldn’t have him without me,”

“That is true,” the steel-smooth voice whispered, sounding drily amused by the thought. “Brilliance I had not expected you to possess and yet so disappointing as it faded, as truth be told you had no idea what use she could be when you found her.”

“I – I thought she’d be useful,” Peter protested weakly.
“Liar – again, Peter, you’ve lost your manners in my absence,” the voice said, cruel amusement even more prominent now as he taunted his servant. “I will not deny that her information was crucial, for without it I could not have formed our plan, and for that you will have your reward for bringing me what I needed – even if it was done unwitting. I will allow you to perform an essential task for me... yes, one that many of my followers would give their right hands for...”

“R-really, my Lord? What-” Peter stammered, terror chasing the sullenness from his voice.
“Oh yes,” the other man drawled, as if something about his own turn of phrase had amused him further. “But it would spoil the surprise to tell you now, and we can’t have that... worry not, Peter. You will have the honour of being as useful as Bertha Jorkins was.”

“You – you’re going to kill me too?” Peter squeaked, his voice a painful sort of mixture between hoarse and high-pitched.

“Peter, Peter, Peter,” the cold-voiced man mocked him softly, “why would I kill you? I killed Bertha because I had to. She was fit for little better after my questioning, quite useless... besides, it would have been terribly awkward had she gone back to the Ministry with the news she had met you on her holiday – Aurors and their pet Dementors, magic-seers... no, no. You would have been more useful to me had you escaped before the Ministry knew you were alive, but little matter... No, Bertha had to die. Loose ends, can’t have them.”

Peter muttered something just as Frank leaned away to clean his ears again, too quiet for him to hear. The other man laughed a mirthless laugh, and cold enough to make the summer night feel chilly along with it. “We could have modified her memory? Honestly, Peter, I wonder how you ever finished school,” he drawled mockingly. “Just as I broke the charms on her memory, any powerful wizard could do the same had we let her go. It would be an insult to her memory, Peter, should we not use what she gave us...”

Out in the corridor, Frank’s sweaty hand slipped from his walking cane and it clattered to the ground, sickeningly loud in the tense quiet filled only by the crackling fire and rattling windows. His knee, never the same since he’d fallen while trying to mend his roof twenty years back, crunched and gave out, sending him sprawling to the dusty floorboards with the wind knocked from his lungs. He trembled, ill with fear, thoughts racing in a mind that had refused to slow with age. These men talked of murder so casually, implied kidnapping – that Harry Potter, whoever he was, he was in danger - and now they knew he’d overheard them...

“Peter, do open the door... Nagini has a guest for us,” the cold-voiced man told his servant, so casual that it took a few moments for Peter to respond. But Frank missed whatever Peter said as he struggled for breath and turned over onto his back, dragged himself backward with aching hands curled into claws by age as something terribly long and heavy slithered its’ way onto his chest, driving what little air he’d managed to drag back into his lungs from them again as it weighed him down. It was so hard to hold his head up, so hard to get even a glimpse of it, but finally he managed to back into a wall and push himself up against it just far enough that he came eye to eye with an impossibly large snake. Not even like the enormous constrictor snakes you might see in a zoo, this was unnatural. Its olive-green head was much the same size as his own, though of course flatter, and each malevolent yellow-green eye was longer from side to side than any of his fingers.

“Dinner, Nagini,” the cold-voiced man said almost sweetly, and Frank struggled away but there was no escaping the inexorable weight of the great snake as its’ head drew back, weaving slightly in the air as it assessed him and then, baring its’ great jaws, struck before he could do so much as scream, its terribly long fangs sinking into his neck while the short figure of presumably Peter, shadowed against the firelight, watched them from the doorway. There was nothing Frank Bryce could do for Harry Potter now, whoever he was, and as he lay dying of the venom his last thoughts were of his wife, dead too young. He’d be with her again, now. A green light flared brightly through his closing lids and then he was no more.

_____________________________________________________________________

 

Far far away, in a narrow bed in the upstairs room of a Suffolk townhouse, a teenage girl awoke sweating in the dark, her heart racing with terror as she struggled to place where she was, whether this was real or another dream. She clenched her hands into fists until she smelled blood – real. Slowly, weak with exhaustion, she rolled out of bed and padded across the room and opened her door as quietly as she could, though it still creaked a little and she cursed it – she wasn’t used to the layout of this house yet, all her muscle memory was wrong. Down the stairs, skipping the creaky step – only the creaky step was in the wrong place and she stepped on it so loudly she winced, then padding barefoot across the kitchen floor in search of the cupboard. A beam of moonlight filtering through one of the kitchen windows lit up the dining room clock and she groaned softly – four-thirty in the morning. Too late to get back to sleep, too early to do anything decent. She bumped face first into the pantry door, forgetting it opened with a strange folding mechanism as she fumbled after a glass, and finally tiptoed to the tap and began to run herself some water.

“Can’t sleep?” a man’s voice asked, sleepy with concern. The girl yelped and startled, dropping her glass into the sink where the water spilled out down the drain. It took a moment to recognise his face, the dream still crowding her senses, but the moonlight helped her place the rounded angles of his face and the luminous eyes, reflective in the low light but usually the same deep brown as her own, and Lavender breathed a sigh of relief.

“Dad, I’ve told you about sneaking up on me,” she grumbled, but didn’t resist as he pulled her into a hug. “Bloody wolf-paws, can never hear you now. What are you doing up at this hour anyway?”

Lavender’s father grumbled, a low sound that echoed in his chest under her ear, and she felt his muscles shift as he shrugged. “It’s almost full moon. So close it feels like if I just ran enough, thought about it hard enough, it’d push the change over... but it never does, so I can’t bloody sleep with all the useless energy it’s giving me,” he explained. “Biology’s my excuse – what’s yours?”

Lavender extricated herself from the hug and rubbed her eyes, trying to chase away the edge of a headache that brewed behind them. It wasn’t the first time she’d had strange dreams, sometimes they even intruded into her waking hours – the worst had been at the end of her third year where countless visions of possible futures and choices had woken her and then flashed through her mind for hours, intersecting with the present until she’d wanted to scream with pain – had her body been her own, she might have. Other times, like this, they were single events so clear it was as if they were happening right that moment – and deep in her gut Lavender knew that was the case, even if her rational mind said that was ridiculous. But while she knew it, she wasn’t sure how to convey so to anyone else.

The best thing she could do was tell part of the truth – too much and she’d be seeing St. Mungos’ psych ward a lot more personally than she had when they’d visited her mother after the suicide attempt. “Weird dream,” Lavender replied, as she returned to filling her glass. She gulped down the water, luke-warm from the pipes but in that moment the best thing she’d tasted in years, grounding her wandering consciousness in her body more firmly. “Think I’ll shower, shake off the rest of it, then... I don’t know, if you can’t sleep and I can’t sleep and I suppose Mum can’t sleep, we could all watch a movie? Not like you’d have to worry about waking me up now.” she joked wryly.

Luke Brown laughed and shook his head. “Good idea, but fair warning – your mum had the same idea, moon’s had her up since about two so she got in the shower. Lucky thing this place came with a bigger hot water cylinder but...”

“The shower’s gonna be full of hair,” Lavender groaned, and she put her glass back down on the bench before she stomped over to the bathroom door from behind which she could, now she was a little less spacey, hear the faint sounds of the shower. “Muuuuuuum! Leave some hot water for me!” she hollered through the door, and burst into laughter when her mother responded with an indignant yap.

“I’ll be out soon!” came Jessamine Brown’s voice through the door, muffled by the water. Truth be told Lavender didn’t like leaving her mother alone behind a locked door, not since her father had taken her straight from the train station to the St. Mungo’s psychiatric ward, but her mother’s voice was lively enough that it eased some of her worry.

Lavender grumbled to herself and fetched another glass of water, then rifled for the not-very-secret diary she kept behind the bookshelf, in which she’d taken to keeping notes about her dreams and visions and very stubborn weird feelings. A pen was clipped to the cover for ease of access, and Lavender flopped down at the dining room table to write while she waited for the shower to be free. Sometimes her visions were true, sometimes not – and only by piecing them together, forming a broader picture, could they be useful. Could she be useful. She had a responsibility to be.

_____________________________________________________________________

 

On the other side of the country, another teenage girl awoke from the terrible dream, gasping for breath as her stomach surged with nausea and her lightning scar burned as if carved anew. She opened her eyes – ordinarily appearing green, though everything looked a little greyish to her with the full moon approaching, and groaned despairingly at finding only blackness. Even breathing aggravated her stomach and she stumbled from the bed and out of the room purely on muscle memory, her very blood fizzing with nerves as she crashed into the bathroom and threw up bile until her stomach ached and her throat was raw.

“Rhiannon?” a soft voice asked, and cool fingers brushed Rhiannon’s sweat-matted hair from her too-warm cheeks. Luna, as familiar and refreshing as a hillside stream. Rhiannon leaned into their hand with a soft whine, until Luna sighed and shifted, xir free hand taking hold of one of Rhiannon’s and gently urging her to stand. Rhiannon stumbled as she did so, and she must have looked blank because Luna cupped both her cheeks in vir hands and closed Rhiannon’s useless eyes with his thumbs. “Come on, I’ll help you downstairs. Get some water then a shower, and maybe you’ll feel a bit better,” she suggested. Fae flushed the toilet, a painfully loud sound in the echoey space of the bathroom, and gently led Rhiannon out and down the stairs, then settled her onto the corner of a couch, where a cat’s collar jingled softly as it shook itself and then padded into her lap with a yawn and a stretch – Rhiannon wasn’t quite sure which cat it was at first, all three were long-haired, but a closer inspection with her nose told her it was Dudley’s cat Hope and she snuggled the sleepy feline closer while Luna retrieved some water.

It was hard to remember any specific details of the dream, so bad was the pain in her head, and when Luna brought Rhiannon the water she gulped it down so eagerly that it spilled all over her face – and unfortunately, onto the cat. Hope made a startled sort of mrrrp? sound but didn’t shift from Rhiannon’s lap, and Rhiannon dimly remembered Dudley complaining that she followed him into the shower at school.

“I’ll be back in a moment, alright?” Luna told Rhiannon quietly, squeezing her shoulder as she passed by on the way to the bathroom, Rhiannon would’ve flicked an ear had she had the correct sort – it was sometimes hard to remember what shape her body was, this close to the full moon – and cocked her head as she heard the sudden hiss-splash of the shower turning on. Luna returned and reached down over Rhiannon’s shoulder to tickle Hope’s chin before she picked up the cat who miaowed piteously, and deposited her on the floor.

“C’mon, Rhi. You need a shower – clear your head, wash off whatever’s bothering you,” he murmured, and led Rhiannon into the downstairs bathroom where ze left her to her own devices, knowing how sensitive Rhiannon was about her body and even moreso when unable to see it herself. Rhiannon felt her way across the metre or so of space to the shower and collapsed onto the chair Luna had kindly set in there for her use – after Dudley’s bad hip had given out and he’d fallen over in the shower sometime last year, the Lovegoods had invested in a collection of mobility aids for the two werewolf children and right now all Rhiannon could do was stare blankly at where she guessed the ceiling to be, leaning back against the chair with her arms limp at her sides and legs crooked before her. It was almost as if she weren’t quite in her own body, foggy and distant in the aftermath of the dream, and the rhythm of the water splashing over her lulled her into a half-way sleeping state of semi-consciousness that her aching mind welcomed.