Disclaimer: Jo’s world, I just play here.

Summary: You can’t teach an old monkey new tricks with pants on.

A/N: Yes, yes, I know, this chapter took entirely too long. Frankly, I don’t have good news for you guys. There is a slim chance that one more chapter will be coming, but then I’m leaving for 18 months, so don’t expect another update until at least December ’09. More on this after the chapter.

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Chapter 29: Interlude

Harry paused for breath, feeling as exhausted by retelling the events as he had from just living them. The wound in his hip had throbbed when he told of its origin, and even now ached more than usual. Hermione, Ron, and Professor McGonagall had fallen into a stunned silence, while Draco appeared to have fallen asleep.

“That’s incredible,” Hermione breathed. “I- I’ve read your book, when I first learned I was a witch. It wasn’t your name on it – I mean, it wasn’t Aries Hesuchazo…”

“I’d almost forgotten about that,” Harry laughed. “Master Tobin published it under a pen name while I was at Atlantis U, since I was still a jailbird at the time. He even sent the royalties to my vault at Gringotts, so I was able to take the trip to South America with no problem. Plus a few others.”

Draco snorted suddenly, something he never did while actually asleep, and Harry turned to see him with an amused look on his face.

“Oh yes, a ‘few others,’” he drawled. “Do tell how you spent the twelve years of Voldemort’s absence.”

Harry groaned at the confused and interested looks he was receiving from his listeners.

“Well, I’d always wanted to travel the world,” he offered lamely. Too lamely, apparently, as Draco decided to pick up the story line again.

“First it was South America, and while on that side of the pond he simply couldn’t skip North America. The next thing we know it’s Australia, Japan, Russia, Tibet, one African tribe after another, not to mention the non-human races he visited. He’d always spend at least six months in one place, just to make sure he really understood what was going on. He’s got a new book coming out in a couple of months called Internationalis Magicalis, a monstrous 800 page tome that is actually being called ‘the foremost compendium of international and interspecial magical lore and custom’ according to Scribe Scribley’s Magazine.”

He said all of this in such a disgusted tone that Harry was torn between sinking into the floor and hitting him. The former seemed preferable when Hermione’s eyes lit up like a Weasley in a prank store.

“Holy Cricket, I read that review!” she almost squealed. “My parents said they might get it for me as a graduation present.”

“Well, it’s nothing that great,” Harry backpedaled. “It’s mostly just a compilation of my journal entries. There are a few things I couldn’t include, because the people I visited asked me not to.”

Hermione’s eyes lit up again, and Harry cringed. How could he have forgotten that the only thing his bushy-haired friend was more passionate about than learning was the rights of magical beings?

“What about you, Ron,” he said quickly, attempting to head off the millions of questions that he could feel approaching.

The redhead looked startled to be addressed.

“I…dunno mate,” he finally shrugged. “I mean, it’s hard to believe, but here you are. I guess you defeated You-Know-Who without us after all.” Ron’s bitter tone felt like a slap in the face and Harry reared back,

“Well, he’s hardly defeated,” he said. “I mean, he’s still out there right now.”

Ron hardly looked appeased, and Harry was at a loss on what to say. Luckily, McGonagall chose that moment to display the wisdom that had brought her to the esteemed post of Hogwarts’ Headmistress.

“Well, I’m sure we’d all like to hear the rest of Mr. Potter’s tale, but it will have to wait. The students may tend to sleep in on Hogsmead weekends, but they will not stay abed forever. Shall we meet in my office, say, 7:00 tonight? That will give us all plenty of time to rest.”

“That sounds wonderful, Headmistress,” Harry nodded, standing fully and stretching his bad leg a bit.

“Very well, Ms. Granger, Mr. Weasley, why don’t you take Mr. Potter up to Gryffindor tower for the day. I’m sure he can glamour himself adequately.”

“Excuse me?” Harry looked startled. “Professor, I’m sorry, perhaps I misheard you. You are aware that I can’t enter Gryffindor tower, aren’t you?”

“Mr. Potter,” McGonagall’s lips pursed into a thin line. “I assure you I paid utmost attention to your whole tale. If the mark alone were enough to keep you out, Mr. Malfoy would never have been granted entrance. Now I insist you at least try to maintain a sense of normalcy and return to the tower for what is left of the night.”

Harry felt like arguing, but one look at the stubborn face of his former head of house and he knew better. As useless as a trip up to Gryffindor would be, it would be equally useless and take quite a bit more time to stand his ground against a lioness such as she.

“Fine,” he conceded, stealing a significant look toward Draco as he followed the two students.

The trek up to the tower was one long awkward silence. Harry couldn’t think of a thing to say to his friends that wouldn’t widen the already deep chasm between them, and he had a feeling Hermione and Ron were having trouble wrapping their minds around the whole situation. After all, to their point of view, he hadn’t been gone but a few hours. Worse, though, the half-dozen flights of stairs were murder on his already aching hip. About the only thing that would let him sleep tonight would be one of Sev’s special formula pain potions.

Maybe Charles had an extra one lying around.

The Pink Lady was bleary-eyed, but awake when they arrived. She barely looked at them as she yawned delicately behind one hand.

“Paaaaa-aaaaassword?” she asked.

“Bumble-mumps,” Hermione enunciated.

Rather than opening, the portrait lady came fully awake with a start.

“Oh, my, that hasn’t happened in a while,” she muttered, then looked more closely at Harry, who reapplied his familiar face. “Oh, dear, you know you can’t come in here.”

“But Professor McGonagall said that it wasn’t the mark –” Hermione protested.

“I’m afraid I don’t know anything about marks, my dear,” the Pink Lady interrupted gently. “But it’s my job to detect the taint of dark magic. Only a fresh spell can stop me from opening, and this poor lad’s been using it this very night, he has.”

“Thank you for your time,” Aries bowed low, “I apologize for disturbing you again with my presence.” Without another word, he turned and stalked off. He could feel the astonished gazes of his young friends on his back, but did not turn to meet them, and they did not come after him.

Just before he turned the corner, he could hear the portrait say.

“Poor young man, he’s always so polite about it too.”

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Charles took the gently whistling kettle off the range, deftly pouring hot water into his antique teapot and readying two cups. McGonagall may have been Dumbledore’s inheritor, but even the ancient headmaster hadn’t known as much about the school as Aries did. If a Master Spellsmith, particularly one who had personally done ward work on the castle, said he couldn’t enter a particular room, then he bloody well couldn’t.

Not to mention how very embarrassing it would be to be called a dark wizard right in front of his two former best friends. Or were they current best friends now? The redhead – for he had quickly reverted to his more familiar guise – shook his head, dismissing the inane thoughts. The Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger he knew as Defense teacher were rowdy, over-eager, and eminently childish. They would suit Aries like a glove.

Sure enough, Charles had no sooner settled down at his desk with one cup of tea than the door to his quarters burst open and Aries stormed in, grabbing the other cup off the tray and settling down with unnecessary dramatics in his favorite armchair. Charles shook his head in amusement and stood.

“Gryffindors,” he commented in the most aggravated voice he could muster, throwing himself down on the couch.

Aries snorted and cracked a weak smile.

“Come off it,” the redhead cajoled. “They’ll be alright.”

“Charles, I was just called a dark wizard, by a portrait no less, in front of them,” Aries complained. “Do you really think they’ll listen with an open mind to the next part of the story? Killing the McKinnon’s dog is child’s play compared to the atrocities I’ve committed since the Dark Lord’s return.”

“They have to grow up sometime, Aries,” Charles commented quietly.

“But why now?” Aries demanded standing up. “Cor, they’re so young. I remember being that age, I felt so grown up, thought I’d seen evil and felt pain and suffering. But I look at them now and I feel like they don’t know anything.”

“They know more than you think.” Charles walked to his desk and pulled out a folder. “I don’t know if you recall, but I held Mr. Weasley and Ms. Granger each back at the end of class two days ago. I wanted to talk to them individually about their plans.”

“And they told you?” Aries demanded, eyes going wide. The redhead shrugged.

“Well, I may have added a bit of truth serum to their tea, and a few subtle coercion charms aimed at my own trustworthiness,” he admitted. “In any case, did you know that Ms. Granger has been researching coercion and memory charms herself? And Mr. Weasley has learned how to disguise the ghoul in his attic – no mean feat, I promise you.”

Aries finished the last of his tea.

“So what?” he muttered into the cup.

“So,” the defense teacher pushed, “the two of them have promised that, on the day you decide to leave Hogwarts, Ron will disguise the ghoul as himself with a bad case of dragon pox, and Hermione will remove herself from her parents’ memory and send them to Australia; all so that they can accompany you.”

The Death Eater stared glumly at the dregs of his tea. He could see a star broken in two and what looked like a mangled carrot. Vague memories came to him, from what could only have been a year or so previous in the proper timeline; he and Ron gleefully making up morbid meanings for the shapes of their tea leaves.

As he watched, the cup blurred and swam in his vision, and a single drop fell, splattering the carrot.

“They’ll hate me,” Aries whispered.

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Ron shrugged off Hermione’s attempts to set him down by the fire so they could talk. He was so tired – physically and mentally – that he was sure he would be asleep before his head hit the pillow. As it turned out, though, his head hit the pillow, and he stared at the ceiling, thoughts chasing each other like Quidditch players in his head.

He thought he’d gotten used to being best friends with Harry Potter. Thought that, after Dumbledore died, the fight would be pretty straightforward – him, Harry and Hermione finding and destroying each Horcrux until Old Moldy was dead. But he should have known that, with Harry, a bloke had to expect the unexpected.

Still, in this case, ‘unexpected’ was putting it mildly.

Ron could count on one hand the ways this older Harry reminded him of his best friend. His Harry was gung-ho, never backed down from a fight, and never let a stinking Slytherin tell him what to do. This grown-up Harry was laid back, had been avoiding his fight for twenty years, and clearly relied on advice from not just one but two Slytherins; Death Eaters no less! His Harry had once, in grief-driven anguish, attempted the Cruciatus curse and failed; this Aries Hesuchazo had murdered innocents. His Harry wouldn’t even use dark magic in a duel; this stranger had used it this very night.

The fiery redhead turned over restlessly and his eyes lit on Harry’s trunk. Quickly, not allowing himself to think twice about it, he jumped out of bed and started rummaging inside. Within seconds, Ron’s hand clasped around an old, well-creased piece of parchment.

“I solemnly swear I am up to no good,” he whispered, waiting impatiently for the spindly lines of ink to form the familiar map.

Here was his own name, there was Hermione’s; the Headmistress was pacing in her office. It took him a few moments to find the defense professor’s personal quarters, as he expected it to be much closer to the classroom, rather than two floors up and half a wing over, but there they were, their dots nauseatingly close together:

Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy.

But then the names flickered, fading in and out, as if the map itself couldn’t decide who they were.

Harries Hesuchotter, Ariery Pottzo, Aries Hesupotter, Harry Posuchazo.

The dizzying display continued until Ron could feel his eyes crossing – or perhaps that was from tiredness – and decided to go back to bed. He fell asleep with a frustrated frown that stayed through the night.

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Unknown to his young friend, Aries was having an even worse time getting to sleep. He had much experience going without sleep, sometimes for many days at a time – and once as long as three weeks, though the resulting fire convinced him not to try it again - and was nowhere near tired enough for exhaustion to overcome his own troubling thoughts.

Instead of thinking about the parts of his story he had yet to tell, the time traveler was dwelling on the same event that he always returned to, whenever he gave himself a moment to think. It was the one secret he had kept from Charles, and that he never intended to reveal, if he could help it. A secret that he had been running from for the last sixteen years.

His hip throbbed again, and he thought he could almost pretend it was because of Charles’ uncomfortable couch, if it weren’t for the anxiety keeping him awake. The fear that he would soon lose three of his best friends; the certainty that someday he would lose them, in order to win the war.

As if a dementor were near, Aries’ thoughts were inexorably drawn to the memory that had replaced that of his mother’s death as worst. Only a handful of the most evil wizards had ever created a Horcrux, and fewer still had written down any findings. Only one wizard had ever made a Horcrux out of a living creature, so there was no instruction manual, no warning label, no frame of reference at all.

Still, Aries knew what had happened the night his parents died. Had felt it in the depths of his own soul.

And he knew what, in the end, would have to be done. A part of him felt it would be easier if his friends hated him; so he wouldn’t have to say goodbye.

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The next morning – well, early afternoon – found Aries rummaging through Charles’ potions cabinet. He desperately needed a headache cure, preferably one made by Severus, but at this point he would take anything.

“Burn paste, Upperton’s cut-ease, doxy antivenin,” he listed as he pulled out various bottles. “Why does he need doxy antivenin?”

“Just in case my practical lesson on doxies gets as out of control as Lockhart’s did,” Charles answered right behind him. The redhead raised a concerned eyebrow when Aries jumped and twisted around to face him. “Are you doing alright?”

“Yeah, I’m fine,” the brunet lied. “Just got a bit of a headache is all. D’you have one of Sev’s potions laying around?”

Charles wasn’t buying it – taking one of Sev’s potions for a ‘bit of a headache’ would be like using basilisk antivenin on a doxy bite – but he would let it slide. If Aries was feeling bad enough to not notice when someone was coming up behind him, the last thing he would need would be a heart-to-heart.

“I always keep some around, but you won’t find it in a cupboard,” he answered. “Here, I keep it in a lockbox in my bedroom.”

“I thought these quarters were secure?” Aries demanded worriedly, looking almost wildly around the halls as Charles led him by the elbow.

“They are as secure as any other room in Hogwarts,” the redhead assured him. “But I’m sure you remember just how many of those you managed to get into as a student. The last thing I need is some over-curious child overdosing and wasting my personal supply.”

The lockbox was safely tucked away in a drawer of Charles’ bureau, and in no time at all he had retrieved the correct potion and Aries had taken the full dose. It was always interesting to watch someone take that particular potion; specifically formulated to counter the severe migraines that resulted from overexposure to the Cruciatus curse, it was a little more than twice the recommended intensity of apothecary potions. It also had a bizarre – and thankfully temporary – side-effect of aquamarine polka-dots. As Aries’ face relaxed into an expression of sheer relief, the blue spots blossomed, then slowly faded away.

Sev maintained that the side-effect was caused by an unavoidable reaction between the holly berries and the unicorn hair, but Charles privately thought that the potion master could have easily done away with it if it weren’t so entertaining.

“Ready to face the day?” the redhead asked. “We should be just in time to catch the end of lunch in the Great Hall. You can finally see what the view is like from the staff table.”

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Severus stalked up and down the dissatisfyingly short corridors of his small muggle home. White hot fury surged through him every time he tried to calm down, as he remembered anew the betrayal of the previous night. He hadn’t slept, trying instead to distract himself with potions, but even that proved disastrous. Far too many items in his lab had been gifted to him by Aries; all he’d ended up with were three ruined cauldrons, a lab full of poisonous fumes, and a new source of frustration.

If there was one thing the potions master prided himself on, it was his personal control, the mental acuity that had enabled him to master Occlumency during a time of war. Now, however, he felt that he would have to Obliviate himself in order to ever occlude again. His thoughts were in a state of ever-increasing turmoil, particularly as he recalled what had occurred after disapparating from the Forbidden Forest.

As if finding out his best friend and one true ally was actually that miserable Potter brat hadn’t been bad enough, Severus had almost gotten himself killed before he realized that neither Voldemort nor the other Death Eaters had any recollection of the event at all. Of course, it wasn’t hard to piece together – Aries had used his Master’s Forgetfulness Ward several times before, and had given Severus a Voodoo charm against memory-alteration for his last birthday – but a little warning would have been appreciated!

Or, barring that, perhaps telling the truth from the start!

Severus impulsively grabbed his small reading lamp and dashed it against the wall, immediately repairing it, summoning it, and throwing it again, imagining Potter’s face instead of the faux-wood façade.

Oh, that brat was going to pay.

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! IMPORTANT!

Author’s Note: I am about to leave on an LDS mission – meaning I will be completely away from all internet/computer access for 18 months. Please do not leave reviews asking when the next chapter is coming until December 2009 (other reviews are acceptable, and I will read them when I get back.

I realize this is very bad news for those of you who have faithfully supported me by reading and enjoying this story, but your patience can and will be rewarded when I return.

Thank you for all your love and appreciation.

PANTZ,

Emy