On the 12th July 2065, the Knight Bus pulled up outside a special street in London. Not many people used it anymore— not since the new Wizarding Taxi Service had been set up a good forty years before, promising all of the convenience of the Knight Bus with none of the motion sickness. But so far it had still managed to cling on to life, though now it mainly served aging witches and wizards who still remembered it from its glory days, and the odd group of young people riding it for a dare (and usually getting very sick in the process— though that was probably mainly the fault of the large quantities of firewhisky they often brought with them).
Today, the only passenger getting off at the Diagon Alley stop was an elderly man— though not as old as you might think, for a wizard— with snow white hair that still never lay flat, bright green eyes that looked out through round rimmed glasses, and a lightning shaped scar on his forehead.
“G'bye Mr Potter!” the conductor called out.
“Cheers Ted!” the old man called back, “And hey, tell your Grandad I said hi!”
“I will Mr Potter!” the young man said, grinning widely. “He’ll be right chuffed at you remembering him. He still talks about the war, y'know. Says you and him were instrumental in defeating Voldemort… oh, sorry.” he paused, clearly having only just remembered that you weren’t supposed to say his name in front of the older generation.
“It’s fine, Ted.” Harry said. “Fear of a name only increases fear of the thing itself, after all.” and he walked down the steps, only just resisting the urge to laugh. Stan Shunpike obviously hadn’t changed a bit if he was going round telling people he’d been instrumental in ending the war. Harry was only surprised that he wasn’t claiming to have won the whole thing single-handedly.
He waited, under the pretence of reading a poster some muggle had stuck on what they thought was a brick wall— something about a missing cat— until the bus had hurtled off again, down the road and round the corner. Then he reached inside his bag, a new one that Hermione had bought him for Christmas last year— “it’s the latest one, Harry. You could hold a house in one of these things! Makes that one I took horcrux hunting look like a cupboard.”
“Yeah,” Ron had added, giving Hermione an affectionate kiss on the cheek as he did so, “who know? Maybe some day they’ll finally have invented a bag big enough to carry all your books.“— and he pulled out his invisibility cloak.
He didn’t really need it all that much nowadays. Gone were the days when he couldn’t walk down a street without being begged for autographs. People who didn’t know him didn’t tend to recognise him much now. Sometimes he felt sure that, no matter how much he aged, in the public eye he’d always be the tall, skinny teenager who defeated Voldemort. He couldn’t really blame them for choosing to stop time there. Occasionally— but more often when he visited Diagon Alley, where the ghosts were particularly strong— he’d find that he started thinking of himself, not as the young man he had been, or the old man he had become, but as a boy. A small, skinny, rather undernourished boy in hand-me-down clothes and broken glasses fixed with tape.
“You look just like your father,” he remembered someone— so many someones— saying to him, “except for your eyes,” an image pops into his head, of a pale man with greasy hair dying on the floor of the Shrieking Shack (now the site of the Remus Lupin Werewolf Support Society, another of Hermione’s projects, he’s still got his badge somewhere)— “you have your mother’s eyes”.
The eyes, at least, are the same, but nobody’s said he looks like his father for decades. Not since his once jet black hair turned first grey, then white, and his face gained one too many wrinkles to ever again remind anyone of a man who’d died at 22.
Besides, there was nobody left now who had known his father. The last of the Marauders had died in the war, the few teachers, classmates and Order members who might remember him were long gone. Perhaps there were a few left— wizards live so much longer than muggles— but, if so, Harry never met them, and if he did he doubted that any of them would connect the laughing boy they had known with the old man they saw before them.
It was strange to think how much the likeness had mattered to him once. He used to feel like it connected him to his father in some way, felt proud when people commented on it— now he was almost glad they’d stopped.
The shadows of the past hung over him far too much already.
He hestitated, making sure that he was fully covered by the cloak, and then walked through what any muggle would have seen as just an ordinary, rather grubby, brick wall with a cat poster on it, and what anybody with even a trace of magic in tgem would have clearly seen as the doorway to the Leaky Cauldron.
It was, as always, rather crowded in there, and Harry had to make quite an effort so as to avoid jostling someone and possibly causing a panic. He did end up accidentally knocking over a pint glass, so that it’s contents spilled all over the table and dripped onto the floor, but luckily the owner didn’t see who did it, and so instead of panicking merely started a rather loud argument with the man standing directly behind Harry. Harry himself made his way out of the back entrance and into the alley, before he could cause any more trouble.
At first glance, Diagon Alley was the same as it had been that first magical day that Hagrid had taken him to buy his school supplies.
There was still the same atmosphere of freedom and excitement— it would have reminded Harry of the end of term, if that time hadn’t always been associated in his own mind with grim despair and a longing to go back to school— that you always got in those few places where witches and wizards were free to use magic without worrying about running into muggles. Still the same tempting but (Harry had to remind himself even now) totally unecessary magical objects placed tantalisingly in the windows of shops— including a solid gold and silver chess set, and a globe that not only rotated in midair, orbited by a miniature moon, but also appeared to change cloud formations depending on what the weather was like in different parts of the world.
Hell, since wizarding fashions seldom changed dramatically, instead cycling through endless variations on the theme ‘cloak and pointy hat’, it could even have been the same people passing by him now as had passed by him all those years ago, if it weren’t for the fact that they would all be much older now, and a lot of them were probably dead.
But there had been changes as well.
Olivander’s was still there, only now it was not run by an Olivander, but by somebody else— Harry couldn’t remember the name now, but there’d been a thing about it in the ‘Prophet a few years ago. Some ex-Durmstrang student had decided to reopen it under the old name. There had been complaints at the time, but they had since died down. Apparently she made very good wands.
Madame Malkin’s was gone though, replaced by Wizwitch, a shop that according to the sign, sold “all the latest fashions, at all the lowest prices”.
Weasley’s Wizard Wheezes was still doing good business— nobody had even heard of Zonko’s Jokeshop nowadays— but the site of Flourish and Blotts was now home to Longbottom’s Garden supplies (young Frank Longbottom had inherited his father’s love of Herbology, if not his talent for teaching).
And, of course, the space that had once been set aside for Florean Fortescue’s Ice Cream Parlour (and now had a small plaque mounted outside it to commemorate that fact) was now occupied by a great stone building, with a mural of a golden bird painted over the doorway, flapping its wings in the flames, and below it the words: ORDER OF THE PHEONIX MUSEUM.
As always, Harry had to pause for a moment upon entering the museum (it was free admission, of course, Hermione had been very insistent about that). No matter how many times he visited, he never got used to it.
In front of him, behind a wall of glass not disimilar to the one he had one vanished to free the python at the zoo, stood sixth plinths. On them, in order, stood an old diary with a hole through the middle; a ring with a cracked stone (a replica— Harry had never told anyone where the real one was); a broken locket with a serpentine ’S’ engraved on it; a golden goblet; a silver tiara set with a blue gem in the middle, and, on the last and largest plinth, the reconstructed skeleton of a simly enormous snake.
In front of the display, an eager looking museum attendant was talking excitedly to a group of children and their parents, telling them about the origins of each horcrux and how it had been destroyed.
These attendants were the reason Harry was wearing the cloak. They tended to be Wizarding War enthusiasts, and tended to be knowledgeable enough about it that they might just be able to recognise him even if he didn’t look much like the pictures on the Chocolate Frog Cards anymore (did they even still do Chocolate Frog Cards? Now he came to think about it, he hadn’t seen a Chocolate Frog on sale for years).
He didn’t mind them too much, but he knew that if they knew he was here then they would insist on making a fuss, dragging him around all the displays and showering him with questions about the old days.
Ron had refused to set foot in the place since the first visit, and nothing he, Hermione and Ginny could say had been able to persuade him otherwise. “Theykept following me around,” he complained, “asking what it was like. So I told them: it was bloody awful and we kept nearly getting killed— and they laughed, like they thought I was joking.”
“Well,” Hermione had said, “you can’t expect them to take it as seriously as we do. Most of that lot weren’t even born when You-Know— when Voldemort was defeated. It’s all ancient history to them.”
“It’s payback, Ron,” Ginny had said, “for all those times you didn’t pay attention during Binns’ history classes. Somewhere, up there,” she pointed at the sky, “a thousand goblin rebels are laughing at you.”
“Whatever.” Ron had been adamant, “I’m not going back in there again.”
Hermione and Ginny didn’t visit much now, either.
“You’ve got to let go.” Ginny always told him, whenever he suggested it. “Yes it happened, and yes it was dreadful and important and we mustn’t ever forget it— but it’s over. And it was all such a long time ago. At some point, you just have to accept that, or you’ll go mad.”
“I’ve managed to avoid insanity so far.” he’d said the last time, trying to lighten the mood.
“Yes.” She’d replied, but she’d looked doubtful.
It wasn’t a question of forgetting it, he thought as he walked by Gryffindor’s sword in its glass case, and the portrait of Albus Dumbledore mounted on the wall (he could have sworn it winked at him as he walked past). There was no chance of him ever forgetting it. He still had the scars, for God’s sake. He still woke up screaming sometimes, convinced that it was all happening again and that this time he wasn’t going to be able to stop it, clutching his forehead against phantom pains in his scar.
He’d walked past quite a few exhibits by now— including reconstructions of the DA room and the Chamber of Secrets, and a gruesome replica of Mad-Eye Moody’s enchanted glass eye, swivelling round to glare at the small children who came to gawk at it. Harry occasionally thought about complaining about that— it didn’t seem quite respectful enough, somehow— but, on reflection, he thought as he watched a little girl tap the glass of the case and squeal as the eye turned and fixed upon her, he couldn’t really think of anything Moody would have liked better.
“Keep them on their guard!” he’d have said, what remained of his mouth smiling in approval. “Constant vigilance!”
Harry almost laughed, but the sound died in his throat when he caught sight of the next exhibit.
‘In Memoriam’ the black banner read, over the wall of framed photographs of everybody who had fought and died in the first and second wars against Voldemort. Fred, Tonks, Lupin, Snape, Dumbledore, Colin Creevey… all the people he couldn’t save.
That was the question he kept asking himself, the question that always drive him here, searching the past for answers.
Was it worth all the death, all the pain, all the fighting? Standing here, invisible, with a crowd of the dead waving at him happily from their frames, Harry wasn’t so sure.
They all looked so young.
Then, in the centre, was photo that was different to all the others. A group photo, rather than one with only one or two subjects, a photo that reminded Harry of standing in the house that had become his godfather’s prison, in the conpany of a man who had seen so many terrible things that his sense of perspective had been skewed to the extent that showing a boy the faces of his dead parents and their dead friends could be seen as a treat.
There they all were, still smiling. Lily and James, Frank and Alice, Sirius, Remus, Wormtail, Mad-Eye and all the others. ‘The Original Order of the Pheonix’, the label underneath read, followed by a list of names and birth and death dates. A lot of death dates.
For a moment Harry envied them their frozen moment of happiness. There were horrors in their future just like there were horrors in his past, but at least they didn’t have to remember them. The woman who had his eyes, and the man who looked so much like he had looked that it was as if he was looking at his 21 year old self again, had no idea that their son would be an orphan mere months after the photo was taken.
Suddenly, he heard a patter of feet behind him, and only just managed to leap out of the way before their owner— a small boy, about four years old, wearing a bright green cloak and clutching a toy wand— barged right into him. As it was, the boy ran past him, eager to get a closer look at the pictures.
He was young, probably much too young to know what he was looking at, andHarry watched him as he peered into the frames, waving back at all the funny little people inside.
“Phineas!” Ah, and here were the parents. “Phineas! Wait for Mummy and Daddy!” a flustered looking woman in a pale purple cloak was running after him, followed by a dark grey cloaked man who must have been her husband.
The boy continued studying the pictures, when suddenly simething seemed to catch his eye. “Mummy! Daddy! Look!” he said, jabbing a finger at the photo in the centre.
“Yes, sweetheart.” the woman said, “that’s the Order of the Pheonix. Remember, we told you about them? They helped defeat Voldemort.”
The child nodded, and Harry looked down in amazement at this child who would never know what it was the flinch at the name ‘Voldemort’. Who would never be told that his value was reduced down to his blood status. Who would never need to cling to photographs and stories and likenesses to feel a connection to the oarents who were now standing in front of him.
Yes. It had been worth it.
But the child wasn’t finished. “I know it’s the Order of the Pheonix.” he said, “but look!” he pointed again, more urgently, and Harry realised that he had singled out one of the figures in particular. “That man looks just like Harry Potter!”
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