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Chloe Decker and the Heir of Merlin [Lucifer/Harry Potter]

Happy Deckerstar Summer Exchange to @kirayukimuras! I was intending this to be longer, but then summer turned insane... alas. Anyway, yes, the promised Deckerstar Harry Potter AU. (I have to tag @lightbringersamael for reasons, since we invented the details of this verse together.) Enjoy!

The choking grit of stone and smoke and dust, the burnt-ozone afterglare of spells, the pale, tremulous sunlight of the first day of the rest of everyone’s lives, bear down on Chloe Decker’s shoulders as she wades through the rubble of the courtyard. Hogwarts is blasted and broken, but still standing, still standing, and Voldemort is dead. It sounds like a dream, it sounds like a trick, he’ll spring up and order the battle resumed – but he doesn’t. It’s going to take a while for everyone to believe it. And yet just now, as the recovery of bodies continues, Chloe has only one thought – and one fear.

They said they last saw him around here, dueling his mother. There’s a particularly deep crater that could have been made by a giant, or a curse, or – Chloe’s breath catches painfully in her chest, she stuffs her wand in the filthy sleeve of her robes so she can have both hands for climbing. Reaches the spot, and looks down.

“Lucifer?”

There’s nothing. No sign. The broken rock shifts, and falls.

“Maze?” Chloe coughs, looks around for Lucifer’s best friend, his loyal shadow, co-leader of the “cool Slytherins,” the two of them among the few from their house who stayed back to fight. But then, Lucifer has been pushing the Carrows’ buttons all year, and Chloe doesn’t want to believe half the whispers about what they were doing to him – scion of the anciently pureblood Morningstars, who claim to trace their descent from Merlin himself, Lucifer’s defiance is unfathomable to them. They will have him or break him or both. When Chloe thinks of the bright-eyed, eleven-year-old boy named Samael, who she met just five years ago, wonders how they can only be sixteen with everything that has happened to them, everything they have done and not said, it makes something close to agony rise in her chest. He has to be here. He has to be somewhere.

“LUCIFER!”

Her shouts rings away across the blasted towers of Hogwarts without an answer.

Chloe takes out her wand again and starts levitating the rubble – it would be quicker to just Reducto her way through this, but she can’t take the risk of hitting him if he’s somewhere under there, grievously wounded and unconscious but still alive. If Harry can survive, why can’t he? She knows that Potter, a year ahead of her in Gryffindor, the captain of her Quidditch team, more or less a friend, is special, the Boy Who Lived – no one else is getting hit by Avada Kedavra once, let alone twice, and living to tell the tale. Surely Charlotte Morningstar, devoted Death Eater as she might otherwise be, isn’t killing her own son. Chloe can’t give up.

Swish and flick, she thinks, remembering first-year Charms classes. Swish and flick. Up go the pieces. There is spell damage everywhere. Whoever was fighting here was unleashing advanced and esoteric curses – far beyond O.W.L., possibly even beyond N.E.W.T., and Lucifer always did like to push boundaries, refine technique. Got detention at least a dozen times for being caught by Filch in the Restricted Section. None of it ever stopped him. Very little ever did – does. He is one of the most talented, and potentially deadly dangerous, wizards that Hogwarts has ever taught. Chloe knows there will be absolutely no tears shed if he’s discovered dead, if they’ve gotten a two-for-one special, taken down both You-Know-Who and a likely heir to the throne. That’s not Lucifer, that’s not the Lucifer she knows, who hates his insanely wealthy Slytherin family and the Dark Arts and everything they’ve chosen to be after they cast him out, but it’s hard to see past. He hasn’t made it any easier.

There’s only one block remaining to be moved. The rest of the castle is still being searched. This doesn’t have to be the last chance, but it feels like it.

Chloe’s voice comes out as a hoarse whisper. “Wingardium Leviosa.”

The heavy stone floats aside like a feather.

There’s nothing below but scorch marks.

Chloe’s breath feels driven out of her as if she’s taken an Impediment Jinx directly to the chest. She goes to her knees, staring down at the soot-stained tomb, knowing that is what it is, that Lucifer is dead, he is dead, and she is never going to see him again. The Ministry can breathe their sigh of relief. The peace can start. This is the happy ending.

Chloe remains where she is, not moving, until she can hear voices calling for her. Dan and Ella, by the sounds of things. They stayed to fight with the Hufflepuffs and Ravenclaws, respectively, and all three of them have spent quite a while living in the Room of Requirement with the other remnants of Dumbledore’s Army. Dan never understood, to say the least, Chloe’s friendship with Lucifer. Ella was more inclined to give him a chance (then again, Ella and Luna Lovegood are good friends, so that’s just Ella). And now Chloe gets to tell them. Has to tell them, and herself, and make it real.

“He’s dead,” she says aloud, and stands up, as Dan and Ella come clambering over the stones. “Lucifer’s dead.”

Chloe Decker was probably supposed to go to Ilvermorny.

Her parents are American – John, a wizard in Magical Homicide and Major Crimes at MACUSA, and Penelope, a Muggle B-movie actress. (Nobody actually calls them “no-majs” – it’s dated Depression-era slang, and if you’re feeling annoyed with the Brits, it’s “muns” or “plebs,” or – if you’re an angry young wizard of certain political leanings, “sheeple,” all of which makes you fairly indistinguishable from the rest of those biting their thumb at the Man.) But when Chloe is nine, John is transferred to the Department of Magical Law Enforcement at the Ministry of Magic in London, and it becomes a permanent position. Thus when Chloe turns eleven, she receives her Hogwarts letter just like the other young wizards and witches across the country, and of course she wants to go.

Her parents take a little while to be convinced. Penelope wants her to keep up with her Muggle school – she isn’t sure about the British system, the way you go into the magical world and never come out. No more math or English or any of that? The Statute of Secrecy does technically exist in America, but it’s treated much more as guidelines than actual rules – as long as you aren’t being baldly conspicuous, nobody really cares, and many magical children continue attending ordinary schools while being instructed in wizardry at home. Hogwarts is undoubtedly prestigious and English, like Oxford or Cambridge, but it, well, it’s a commitment. Are they going to send Chloe away for seven years and get some impeccably well-trained witch back, who knows Gamp’s Five Laws of Elemental Transfiguration by heart but can’t boil water or pay her gas bill without magic? Besides, British wizard society is so snobbish. They will look down on Chloe for being an American half-blood (Americans aren’t snobbish about the difference between magic and non-magic folk, they’re just ordinarily racist.) Is she sure?

Chloe is eleven. All her magical friends here have been anticipating their Hogwarts letters from the moment they got their first toy broomsticks. She isn’t trudging off to some dismal cement-brick secondary school in Clapham while they’re off to buy wands in Diagon Alley and ride the Hogwarts Express to an ancient, enchanted castle. Of course she’s sure.

Penelope gives in, with the caveat that Chloe continue a Muggle curriculum over the holidays. Chloe promises, with no actual intention to waste perfectly good holidays with more school. Her father takes her into London to buy her school things, and it’s there that she first meets Samael Morningstar.

If everything that Penelope was afraid of in the magical world had a face, it would be the Morningstars. They are possibly the most senior of the Sacred Twenty-Eight pureblood families – vastly wealthy, reclusive, powerful, and not inclined to mingle or trifle with the common folk. The father of the current generation, Deus, has been missing for years – there are all kinds of rumors about his absence. Some of the more lurid hold that he is serving multiple life sentences in Azkaban, but the most accepted story is that he was killed by a Muggle mob some years ago.

This is a source of immense shame to his widow, Charlotte, who has raised their nine children – Amenadiel, Michael, Azrael, Sariel, Raphael, Gabriel, Barachiel, Samael, and Uriel – by herself (and of course with the help of various house-elves and servants). All of them have been in Slytherin except Sariel, who ended up in Ravenclaw, and Gabriel, who was placed to much shock and horror in Hufflepuff. Amenadiel and Michael have left school; the twins Azrael and Sariel are sixth years, and there’s one down the list until the latest one, young Samael, due to start this year. The Morningstars are, in the opinion of their circle, what the Weasleys would be if the Weasleys had blood pride. There’s always another one of them, in other words, and everyone recognizes them. Except, of course, for Chloe. She has no reason to think that the small dark-haired boy, who she glimpses in Madame Malkin’s and Flourish and Blotts and then in Ollivanders, being shepherded by his statuesque, beautiful, but extremely intense blonde mother, is anyone special at all.

They manage to introduce themselves to each other quickly in Ollivander’s (the old man thinks it’s curious whenever two young witches or wizards come in to buy their wands together – binds them from the start, perhaps?) before their parents escort them off, both looking somewhat askance at the other. Finally, as he hugs his daughter on Platform 9 ¾, the train venting steam and ready to leave, John tells her quietly to be careful around the Morningstars. He’d just feel better if she did.

Chloe humors her father, is kissed by her mother, and then spends the entire ride to school in a compartment with Samael – or, as he tells her to call him, Sam – because he doesn’t want to sit with his older siblings, and no one else wants one of them hanging around causing trouble. Chloe thinks he’s nice, if clearly unused to interacting with normal people, but things take a turn for the unfortunate at the Sorting that evening. It’s gone along ordinarily enough (“Decker, Chloe” – “GRYFFINDOR!”, “Espinoza, Daniel” – “HUFFLEPUFF!”) But right after “Lopez, Ella,” becomes a Ravenclaw, “Morningstar, Samael,” is called up to the stool – and doesn’t even get the Hat on his head before it starts screaming “SLYTHERIN!” at the top of its lungs, and doesn’t seem able to recover for several minutes. It finally manages to finish (“Smith, Mazikeen” doesn’t quite send the Hat over the edge, though she also ends up in Slytherin PDQ) but that, to say the least, was a noticeable way to begin.

Things get worse when the Chamber of Secrets is opened and Muggle-borns are attacked. Half the school thinks the Heir of Slytherin is Harry Potter, and the other half is more than convinced that it’s Sam Morningstar, given the Hat’s gibbering meltdown over him at the Welcoming Feast. Chloe doesn’t think it’s either. She and Sam aren’t exactly friends, especially given the rivalry between their houses, but they manage to remain on more or less cordial terms, even throughout the difficult year. Chloe very much doesn’t want Hogwarts closed. She just got here – she doesn’t want to have to up and leave.

(Harry Potter saves the day, as it turns out, Harry Potter does.)

Sam Morningstar almost doesn’t return for his second year, feeling marked out by the events of the first, but in the end, he does. He does not make sense to most people. He is a brilliant student who never seems to pick up a book, enjoys the preferential treatment that as a Slytherin, he is given by Snape – and then talks back to the Potions master when he bullies Chloe. He forges an unexpected relationship with Remus Lupin, where he occasionally stumbles across his cohort in suspected Chamber of Secrets crime. He and Harry seem as opposite as it is possible to get, but two black-haired boys with strange pasts and stranger presents, about whom a touch of destiny clings – perhaps not so much.

(Remus Lupin resigns at the end of that year, and Sam’s waning faith in father figures just about disappears for good.)

Third year is Triwizard year. Fourth years and below are not, of course, permitted to attend the Yule Ball, but Sam contrives to get himself asked by a Ravenclaw seventh-year, Linda Martin, with whom he’s formed a certain friendship. They dance a few times, but he spends most of the night after that staring at Chloe Decker, who was asked by that absolute prat, the Gryffindor fifth-year Marcus Pierce. They’re – well, they’re friends by now, somehow still ignoring the ever-present Gryffindor/Slytherin divide, and frankly, if all was fair, he would have asked her. Or so he tells himself. He’s not nearly as self-assured around her (American half-blood, his friends say incredulously, where are your standards, Samael?) as he’d like.

Then Cedric Diggory is killed, and Voldemort returns, and petty considerations like the Yule Ball don’t matter anymore.

Samael gets kicked out of the house – and for that matter, changes his name to Lucifer – in the summer before fourth year, when his mother insists that he prepare to uphold the Morningstar name with the Death Eaters. He refuses point-blank. There’s a flaming row, and she orders him to leave until he comes to his senses. He ends up in the Leaky Cauldron, tending bar and clearing tables for Tom, for most of the rest of the summer. None of his siblings lift a finger to help him – not even Azrael, his favorite sister, who’s graduated from Hogwarts and gone abroad – and his resentment burns to the core. He grows a foot and changes his name and is barely recognizable when he gets back to school that fall, Professor Dolores Umbridge has inflicted her delightful self on the place, and Lucifer Morningstar is well and truly born.

“You need to stop acting like this,” Chloe tells him, in one of the rare moments she can get through to him – after another party, another bout of rule-breaking, lashing out at every single stupid Educational Decree there is, prevented from losing Slytherin too many points because the Inquisitorial Squad are all merciless suck-ups, and won’t dock their own house just because Lucifer is an idiot. “Samael – ”

She sees the look on his face, and catches herself. “Lucifer.” It’s clear she still can’t get her mouth around the name, her mind around the idea that this angry young man is the boy she first met. “Lucifer, I’m serious, I think she’ll really hurt you.”

Lucifer laughs. Ignores her. Blows her off, because of course he does. Looks down, later, at the words etched shining across the back of his hand.

I must not tell lies.

And thinks that the old bat need not have bothered with that, because oh no, he does not tell lies. He is starting to think he’s the only one.

(At the end of the year, when everyone sees Voldemort in the Ministry, when they accept at last that he is back, when Harry Potter is the hero again, Lucifer thinks he could have bloody well told them so.)

Fifth year, and Uriel Morningstar, who started Hogwarts last year, is desperate for his brother to pay attention to him. Wants to be part of Lucifer and Maze’s crowd, the cool Slytherins, but all Lucifer does is ignore, dismiss, or deride him. And yet, he pays ridiculous attention to that American half-blood, the Gryffindor, Chloe Decker. Everything she says, Lucifer hangs on. Has gotten more oddly protective of her than ever, their relationship odd and undefined and not quite more than friends, but not that either. Dan Espinoza, that gormless Hufflepuff, has been hanging around her as well, as if there needs to be any more proof of how low Lucifer has set his standards.

Uriel is the good son, the one who actually wants to do what he’s supposed to, for his mother to notice him – not just Lucifer, always Lucifer, even though he’s rejected the family and broken her heart. His brother was always the favorite, and finally, on the night the Death Eaters attack the school, as upon the lightning-struck tower, Albus Dumbledore meets his end, as there is fighting in the corridors, Uriel seizes his chance.

He darts around a corner, hides in the chaos. Pulls out his wand, points it at Chloe’s back. Remembers that you have to mean Unforgivable Curses. And thinks that he does, in fact, very much mean this one.

“Avada Kedavra!”

He is still a second-year, small and undersized, and as much as he thinks he has what it takes to kill, all that results is a weak scatter of green sparks. He braces himself to try again.

Then he glances up, sees his older brother running for him like a madman, sees the look of sheer, consuming terror on Lucifer’s face, sees Lucifer raise his wand, and then he doesn’t see anything else, ever again.

Sixth year is a strange, slow, shattered sort of hell.

Hogwarts is barely Hogwarts. Harry Potter and his friends, Weasley and Granger, are gone, rumored to be carrying out Dumbledore’s secret mission, but nobody has any idea what that is. The Death Eaters run the place with an iron fist, Snape is Headmaster, detention involves practicing the Cruciatus Curse on first-years, and Lucifer will not talk to Chloe, no matter how hard she tries. She is worried sick about him, and yet she can’t understand why she hasn’t been called in for questioning about her blood status. She’s well aware that she should be among the first to go, but the Death Eaters oddly seem to overlook it, or at least not care. (Which is, of course, most unlike them.)

Lucifer has odd injuries, strange actions. Chloe supposes he’s trying to distance himself from her to protect her – but she thinks the Carrows are torturing him, worse even than Neville Longbottom, the purebloods who won’t give in even when they should be the first in line to welcome the new regime. Chloe was in Dumbledore’s Army in fourth year with Dan and Ella; they try to protect the younger kids as best they can, but they’re all wondering how much longer they can take this. Disappearances are daily. Most of them don’t come back. The Daily Prophet is printing lies, the Ministry is a mouthpiece of the Dark Lord, and finally that night, the last battle, the final showdown, when Harry Potter returns and the castle makes its stand, before the bombardment starts –

Chloe and Lucifer lock eyes, across from where they’re standing. Nobody was sure they should let Lucifer stay behind at all, but Minerva McGonagall insisted that he had earned it.

Chloe feels, then, the weight of everything they have not said, everything they have kept silent, kept apart. He told her that his brother Uriel died in the castle attack last year, she knows he must be upset about that, and yet, on the eve of everything ending, she would give anything for one of those smashed Time Turners in the depths of the Department of Mysteries. Wants to turn it back, wants, somehow, to start again. To even have the chance.

Then the Death Eaters’ spells begin hitting the shield, and it is gone.

In the years after the Battle of Hogwarts, Chloe does her best to get on with her life, somehow. She returns to the rebuilt castle to finish her seventh year. She graduates with high N.E.W.Ts, starts dating Dan, and they get married and have a daughter, Beatrice. She takes a job as an Auror at the Ministry, under her old classmate, Harry, and one day, finds her own file. It’s been altered. Her blood status was changed from “half-blood” to “pure-blood,” and she has no idea why. But that must be the reason she was protected during that last, hellish year at Hogwarts under the Death Eaters. Lucifer changed it somehow.

God, she misses him. She takes all sorts of strange and difficult cases, rounding up the remnants of Voldemort’s followers. Has to remind herself that Lucifer is dead, because otherwise she’ll get an odd sort of sensation that she’ll turn around and see him. No sign of Maze, either; they got to be an odd sort of friends at the end, but Maze must have died as well. That’s it. They’re both dead. Gone.

(It’s hard to grieve without a body, without a final confirmation. It’s hard for the human mind to close a door, when the whispering always remains, the slightest chance.)

She and Dan both work hard. Too hard, probably, and things are more and more on the rocks, to which Chloe responds by burying herself in more work. There’s an explosive argument one night, Dan saying that he’s sorry he can’t be Morningstar for her, everyone at Hogwarts knew they had eyes for each other, they were in love, it would have been different if Lucifer lived. Chloe’s shocked, but she also can’t manage to deny it; she’s spent one too many nights alone with the memories. Dan sees it in her eyes, and something goes out of him.

They try to keep it cordial for Trixie. They still have to see each other at work. Chloe can’t imagine that this is ever going to stop, or change, or be different.

Finally, Harry knocks on Chloe’s door one day. Says he has something he wants her to check out. Some kind of tavern in Knockturn Alley, called Lux. Someone there who makes deals, this favor for that, this rare item for another, breaks artifact laws or at least soundly bends them, the sort of person that would make Percy Weasley break out in hives from a mile off. Rumored to have returned to the country after many years away, studying even obscurer and deeper magic. Wants her to have a quick visit, and see if this bloke is any kind of threat.

(There might be a strange look in Harry’s eyes, but Chloe misses it.)

And so, she walks down to Knockturn Alley that night, wand in her sleeve, Auror badge clipped under her robe, grim and set and ready to get this over with. Finds the place easily enough, ducks in. Despite its name, Lux is dim, lit by bobbing enchanted orbs, a rougher clientele than the Leaky Cauldron sipping exotic libations, watching her with beady eyes. Even with an effort made to scuff up, it’s fairly clear she doesn’t belong here.

Piano music drifts from the back of the house. A tall shadow bends over it, playing intently, and something in Chloe seizes up so hard she can’t breathe. Can’t think. Can’t hope.

The music stops. The man looks up.

“Hello, Detective,” Lucifer Morningstar says, and smiles. “It’s been a very long time.”

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