Cross the Line
Appearances Deceive
By Anne B. Walsh
Harry pulled out the Invisibility Cloak and put it back on. He would try to extricate Hermione on his own while Ron was dealing with the raining office.... He still had a couple of Decoy Detonators, but perhaps it would be better to simply knock on the courtroom door, enter as Runcorn, and ask for a brief word with Mafalda? Of course, he did not know whether Runcorn was sufficiently important to get away with this....
And as he reached the foot of the stairs and turned to his right he saw a dreadful scene. The dark passage outside the courtrooms was packed with tall, black-hooded figures, their faces completely hidden, their ragged breathing the only sound in the place. The petrified Muggle-borns brought in for questioning sat huddled and shivering on hard wooden benches. Most of them were hiding their faces in their hands, perhaps in an instinctive attempt to shield themselves from the dementors’ greedy mouths. Some were accompanied by families, others sat alone....
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Chapter 13, "The Muggle-born Registration Commission"
xXxXx
A boy on one of the benches turned his head, looking towards the stairs, as though he’d heard something, and Harry stared. Sleek silver-blond hair, pale skin, long and pointed face—
But no, this couldn’t be Draco Malfoy. Besides the obvious impossibility of Malfoy being suspected of being Muggle-born, there was the fact that Malfoy had been involved in Dumbledore’s murder last year, and even the Ministry under Pius Thicknesse and Dolores Umbridge couldn’t let that pass uninvestigated. Besides, the look on this boy’s face, the mingled worry and tenderness, was something Harry had never seen on Malfoy.
Who’s that with him, though? Harry moved a few steps closer, trying to squint through the gloom. There was definitely a second person beside the boy, huddled against him. He made out a small brown hand clutching at the boy’s robes, then caught a glimpse of braids like Angelina Johnson’s as one of the dementors moved aside.
One of the doors on the left flew open, and all the Muggle-borns flinched back as a woman’s desperate voice echoed out into the corridor. "No, please, you can’t, my children, they need me, my husband, he can’t take care of them alone—"
"Should have thought of that before he married a Mudblood, shouldn’t he?" said a man from within the room with a coarse laugh.
"Not now, Yaxley," said the girlish voice of Dolores Umbridge. Harry’s hands tightened into fists, and he saw the boy who wasn’t Malfoy clench his jaw. The girl beside him lifted her head for a moment, and Harry blinked as her face came into view, tear-stained but determined.
I’ve seen her before—or someone who looks like her—
"If you continue to struggle, Mrs. Cattermole," Umbridge’s voice went on, "you will be subject by law to the Dementor’s Kiss. This is your final warning."
A quiet sob came from the courtroom, and a small woman with her dark hair in a bun appeared in the doorway, dementors on either side of her. Their gray-skinned hands held her upper arms firmly, and they glided away down the hall, half-pulling her with them, until the darkness shrouding them melded with the gloom beyond the torchlight.
"Next," called Umbridge from within. "Reginald Gray and Meghan Freeman."
The boy and girl Harry’d been watching got to their feet, hands entwined. Harry slipped between the dementors, trying to get a better look at the girl’s face, trying to remember—the face in his memory was small, too small to be a living person, it must have been a photograph, and one he’d seen many times but without ever looking directly at that particular face or knowing a name for it—
Before he knew it, he was inside the courtroom, and the door was closing behind the pair. Umbridge, seated on a dais behind a high and imposing desk with Yaxley to one side of her and Hermione in her guise as Mafalda Hopkirk to the other, waved her wand towards the single chair in the center of the room, creating another one beside it, a bit smaller. "Sit," she said curtly.
Harry sidled around the edge of the room, avoiding the dementors which waited in the corners; it was irritating him immensely that he couldn’t track down the girl’s likeness, and to make it worse, he now had the feeling that she reminded him of not one person, but two, the one he had seen only in the photograph and someone else whom he had personally known...
Gray sat down a half-second after Freeman, and both of them looked up at Umbridge without making any attempt to hide their dislike. Neither flinched as the chains on the arms of the chairs slid around their own arms and tightened to hold them there.
"Why are these two being investigated together, Yaxley?" Umbridge said, turning to the man beside her. "I somehow doubt they are relations..."
"Their rationalizations for being unable to prove magical blood are remarkably similar, Madam Undersecretary," Yaxley said, regarding Gray and Freeman as he might a pair of spiders he’d swatted with a shoe. "I felt it might save time to look into both together."
"Very well." Umbridge shuffled her parchments for a moment. "You are Reginald Raymond Gray?" she asked the boy.
Gray inclined his head, never taking his eyes from Umbridge.
"And you, Meghan Lily Freeman?"
"Yes—but it’s not the name I ought to have had!" the girl burst out. "And I can prove it!"
"Wait your turn, Miss Freeman," Umbridge said with a little smile. "Mr. Gray, I believe we will start with you. His questionnaire, Mafalda?"
Hermione, who had been staring intently at the boy, jumped at being addressed, then began to dig furiously through a pile of parchment beside her. "Where are you," she muttered, "I know you’re here, come on, come out, you know I’ll find you..."
Freeman gave a little gasp. Gray’s eyes swiveled towards Hermione and fixed on her.
"Here, here it is," Hermione said finally, shoving a small sheaf of parchment towards Umbridge. "And Miss Freeman’s—I’ll just hold onto that for the moment, shall I—"
"Yes, do." Umbridge flipped open the questionnaire Hermione had handed her and ran a stubby finger down the lines. "Ah, here it is—oh, I see. How very interesting. Tell me, Mr. Gray, do you have any evidence for this rather extraordinary claim?"
"None but my face," Gray said challengingly. "I’d be willing to take a blood test, but oh, that’s right, that’s a Muggle thing, and nothing Muggle can ever be good. Besides, you’d need some blood from my precious father, and he’s nowhere to be found. Not that I’d even know that, if someone hadn’t been kind enough to tell me who I looked like my first day here."
"Your attitude will not help your case, Mr. Gray," Umbridge said coolly. "Kindly restrain yourself."
Harry automatically dodged the Patronus cat which patrolled the entrance to the dais, his mind busy fitting pieces together. He’s about my age, but I’ve never seen him before—looks like Malfoy, but obviously he’s not—it sounds like he’s never known his father, and doesn’t care for him much—
The obvious answer certainly fit what Harry knew of Lucius Malfoy, and of Death Eater attitudes in general, but something still rang false about it. If he’s magical, why wouldn’t he have come to Hogwarts? He’d have gotten a letter no matter his blood—
"It says here that you’ve never attended Hogwarts, Mr. Gray," said Umbridge, still perusing Gray’s questionnaire. "Can you tell us why that is?"
"My mum didn’t want me to. She told me at the time she couldn’t afford it, but when I got older, she told me the truth." Gray’s eyes narrowed. "She thought it might make me turn out like my father. Arrogant. Treating other people like toys, like things, because I had power they didn’t." He looked deliberately around the courtroom, then met Umbridge’s eyes and sneered. "I guess she was right."
Umbridge sat up very straight with a little hiss, and Harry drew in a breath as the motion exposed something glittering against her chest—
The locket!
Hermione squeaked slightly as she saw it. Strangely enough, both Gray and Freeman also stared at it, their eyes going wide.
"Your distasteful slur on the proper wielding of power by those to whom it has been given," Umbridge said primly, "makes it obvious that whomever you may look like, you are no child of magic. Not that I would believe such a thing of a pure-blood in the first place... however, let us move on... Miss Freeman, you make a similar claim to that of Mr. Gray?"
Freeman shook herself slightly and focused on Umbridge again. "I can prove who I am," she said again, squaring her shoulders. "I have a letter, my father wrote it to my mother just before everything happened—"
"Mafalda?" Umbridge held out her hand, and Hermione passed her the old, tattered piece of parchment. Harry glanced at it out of habit and froze in place.
He knew that sprawling, untidy handwriting, knew it as well as he knew Ron’s or Hermione’s or Hagrid’s. He could still remember the first time he’d seen it, on a letter delivered by the tiny owl Ginny would eventually name Pigwidgeon, on his way back to the Dursleys after his tempestuous third year—
"Sirius Black?" Yaxley’s voice cut into Harry’s half-stunned thoughts. "You claim to be his daughter?"
"I don’t claim to be anything except what I am," Freeman said. "Read the letter. You’ll see."
"Anyone can write a letter," said Umbridge coolly, looking up from it. "And even if it were real, there is no guarantee that you are the child mentioned, nor that Black was truly your father. Your mother is a Muggle?"
"Was," Freeman snapped. "She’s dead."
"In that case, she could have been sleeping with any number of men during that time. This—" Umbridge held up the letter between thumb and forefinger. "—proves nothing." With a quick motion, she crumpled the parchment into a ball and tossed it aside.
Freeman cried out in protest, and Harry’s blood surged. His wand came up as if of its own accord. "Stupefy!" he shouted aloud. Red light flashed, and Umbridge slumped forward across the desk. A gust of cold air rushed over him as the Patronus cat vanished.
Hermione shrieked aloud. Yaxley turned to see where the threat had come from, spotted Harry’s hand emerging from under the Cloak, and fumbled for his own wand, but Harry’s was already out, and another "Stupefy!" threw Yaxley out of his chair to the ground beyond.
"Dear God, Harry—" Hermione began, clutching her chest, when a shriek from the floor made her and Harry both whirl. The dementors, no longer held off by Umbridge’s Patronus, were closing in on Gray and Freeman, who were struggling madly against their chains—
"EXPECTO PATRONUM!" Harry bellowed, and the silver stag leapt from his wand’s end and cantered around Gray and Freeman. The dementors shrank back from its light, and Harry pulled the Cloak off and ran down the stairs of the dais, scooping up the crumpled letter from the floor on the way. "Get the Horcrux," he told Hermione over his shoulder.
"How many of them do you have?" Gray said softly.
Harry stopped dead, staring at the other boy. "What?"
"Fox, not now!" Freeman snapped. "Are you going to let us go or not?" she demanded of Harry. "If you don’t, we’ll both be Kissed. Besides, we can help you."
"Give me a second." Harry pointed his wand at the chain binding Gray’s right arm. "Diffindo!" Nothing happened. "Hermione, how—"
"Try Relashio," Freeman suggested.
"Relashio!" Harry repeated, and the chains on Freeman’s chair clattered once and slid off her. She leapt up and darted for the dais as Harry repeated the spell on Gray.
"Thanks," the other boy said shortly, standing up and stretching his arms. "Given any thought to getting out of here?"
"Patronuses ought to get us past the dementors," Harry said as Hermione came running down the stairs of the dais, Freeman behind her clutching a pair of wands in her hand. "After that—" He broke off. "Why do you care?"
"Because I’m hardly going to be able to walk out of here on my own, Patronus or no Patronus," Gray said, accepting one of the wands from Freeman. "I don’t even know if I can do one with a stolen wand. Besides, yours seems powerful enough to protect a load of people. It’s the Ministry workers up in the Atrium I’m more concerned about getting past. Won’t take them long to figure out I’m not one of them, nor Meghan. How long’ve you got left on your Polyjuice?"
Hermione gawked at Gray. "How did you know?"
Gray snorted. "You’re not acting like fat-arse Ministry officials, you both smell of cabbage, and you called each other different names than the rest called you. Very interesting names at that. How many Weasleys with you?"
"I don’t see why we should tell you anything," Harry said coldly. "You seem to know it all already."
"Just good guessing."
"So how do we know you won’t sell us out?"
"Because as far as they’re concerned, I’m Muggle-born, so they’d give me a cell next door to yours in Azkaban," Gray shot back. "That’s if we weren’t both Kissed for attacking Ministry officials."
Harry drew breath for another retort, but—
"Stop it," Hermione said sharply. "He’s right, Harry, we do have to get out of here. And our best chance is now, while you still look like Runcorn. People are afraid of him, so if you act high-handed and threaten them, we might have a chance. But we have to hurry."
"Fine," Harry said shortly. "Try for Patronuses, then, you three, even some mist would help..."
"Expecto patronum," Freeman said clearly, and a great silver dog soared from the end of her wand. Harry stared at it for one instant, then turned away. Later, he told himself, later...
"Ex—expecto patronum," Hermione stammered. Nothing happened.
"Here," Gray said, holding out his hand to her. "Try it together. It’ll build confidence. Strength. That’s what a Patronus is all about."
"You seem awfully up on magic for someone who never went to Hogwarts," Harry said suspiciously.
"I read a lot." Gray hadn’t lowered his hand. "It can’t hurt to try," he said to Hermione coaxingly. "Just let me put my hand around yours and say it with you..."
The door of the dungeon opened, and a soaking-wet Ron shot inside just in time to see Gray wrapping his fingers around Hermione’s hand. "Malfoy!" he bellowed, and charged at them.
"Shut up!" Harry snapped, catching Ron’s shoulders easily—Runcorn was a large and powerful man, and Reg Cattermole was small and weedy. "He’s not Malfoy, he’s on our side, what are you doing down here?"
"We’ve got to get going, Harry, they know someone’s here, I think they said there was a hole in Umbridge’s door, we’ve got five minutes if that—"
Harry swore, but the words vanished under the sound of two voices both shouting "EXPECTO PATRONUM!" at once.
Ron stared, open-mouthed, at the figure which emerged from Hermione’s wand tip. "I thought hers was an otter," he whispered to Harry. "What is that thing, a wolf?"
"Looks like." Harry shook his head. "It doesn’t matter. Come on, we have to get moving." He waved his wand towards the door, directing his stag out into the hall, where the Muggle-borns awaiting questioning cried out in surprise as the dementors surrounding them shrank away from the silver light.
Freeman ran out into the hall with her dog bounding at her heels. "Listen, everyone, the Ministry’s changed its mind," Harry heard her say as he followed her out. "Mr. Runcorn says as long as we leave the country, they won’t bother us anymore. Everyone go home, get your families, and get to somewhere safe, if you have relatives in America or on the Continent, you can go to them..."
"Who’s that?" Ron muttered into Harry’s ear.
"Meghan Freeman, she said she’s—"
"Reg!" A woman separated herself from the crowd and hurried up to Ron. "Reg, I’m so sorry, it’s Mary, they’d already questioned her, they took her away, she’ll be..." She shuddered and glanced down the hall where the dementors had vanished earlier.
"Thanks," Ron said awkwardly. "For telling me, I mean. What do I do now?" he hissed to Harry as the woman scurried back to her own family. "I didn’t know he was going to try to help her, and now because of me he never got the chance—"
"We’ll deal with it later, Ron, we have to get going," Hermione said, appearing in the doorway behind him. "Harry?"
"Right." Harry stepped forward. "Miss Freeman is right," he said, waving to Meghan, who slipped out of the crowd to join him. "Take your families and leave the country, but do it secretly. Tell your friends, your neighbors, anyone you know who hasn’t been questioned yet. We..." He had a sudden brainstorm. "We don’t want to spend our valuable time and money chasing you down and locking you up, we just want you gone, and the sooner the better. Now let’s go. Who’s still got a wand?"
About half the crowd raised their hands.
"Okay, everyone without a wand stay with someone who has one, we’ll need to be quick. Everyone into the lifts, hurry up now..."
Gray and Freeman squeezed into the same lift as Harry, Ron, and Hermione. The three Patroni stood guard before the grilles as they clanged shut. Harry watched the silver shapes sink out of sight and wondered if they would stay around, or if they would disappear as their creators ascended. Stag, dog, and wolf...
He glanced over at Gray and Freeman again. Freeman had said something about being able to help them. Besides, if she truly was who she claimed to be, it was possible that number twelve, Grimmauld Place, and Kreacher belonged to her instead of to Harry. But there were things about both of them that didn’t add up, like how much they both knew about magic, and the way Gray had instantly connected his and Hermione’s presence with the Weasleys (almost as if, a traitorous portion of Harry’s mind whispered, Gray had expected Ginny to be along as well), and the question he’d asked just after Harry had told Hermione to get the Horcrux.
"How many of them do you have?"
He knew too much. Both of them knew too much, they were dangerous, he should leave them here to fend for themselves—
"Level eight, Atrium," said the cool witch’s voice in the lift, and Harry felt his heart jump into his throat as he looked out through the grille. A team of wizards was hurrying from fireplace to fireplace, conjuring walls of bricks inside each one.
"STOP!" he bellowed in Runcorn’s voice, bringing all activity in the Atrium to an immediate halt. "Everyone come with me," he said under his breath, and a few of the Muggle-borns trailed after him as he strode forward towards the unsealed fireplaces at the other end of the Atrium. Ron, Hermione, Gray, and Freeman shepherded the other ones out of the lifts and kept them together behind Harry.
"Albert?" said the balding wizard Harry’d seen earlier, frowning. "What’s going—"
"You’re to let this lot leave before you finish sealing the premises," Harry said, waving to his group. "They’ve been officially cleared—oh, and the one who was sent on to Azkaban just a bit ago, Cattermole I think the name was, get her back here, would you? There was a mix-up somewhere, she shouldn’t have been questioned at all."
Ron perked up. On Reg Cattermole’s face, it looked decidedly ridiculous.
"I don’t know, Albert," said the balding wizard, glancing at the Muggle-borns behind Harry. "We’ve had strict orders—"
"Are you trying to tell me that I should look a bit more closely at your family tree?" Harry snapped. "No respectable pure-blood would dither like this!"
"No, no, of course not, I’m sorry, Albert—"
"Good. See to the Cattermole woman, then. Don’t even bother bringing her back here, just send her straight home." Harry pointed to the lifts, and the balding wizard scurried away. "And you," he said to the Muggle-borns, "go on, get going."
By ones and twos, the men and women hurried into the fireplaces and vanished. Gray and Freeman hung back a bit, as did Ron and Hermione. Harry waved them in closer. "We’ll have to move fast," he whispered, "straight out the fireplace and Apparate to you-know-where."
"Someone’ll have to take me Side-Along," Freeman whispered, over Hermione’s, "It’s too small for all of us to go at once, we’ll splinch," Ron’s, "What if they try and follow," and Gray’s, "No, actually I don’t know where, maybe you could tell me."
"We’ll just have to be careful about positioning, Hermione—they can’t follow us, Ron, it’s still under Fidelius—and who said you were coming?" Harry demanded of Gray and Freeman.
Gray flushed with anger. Freeman put a hand on his sleeve. "We can’t make you let us come," she said quietly. "But we don’t have anywhere else to go. Both our mums are gone." She swallowed before going on. "Besides, we can help you. We know things you don’t know, and you might need to."
"We’ll swear an Unbreakable Vow not to betray you if you want," Gray added. "You name the terms."
Harry opened his mouth, not even entirely sure himself what he was about to say—
"STOP THEM! THEY’RE HELPING MUGGLE-BORNS ESCAPE!"
All five of them whirled. Yaxley had just come charging out of a lift, headed straight for them.
"GO!" Harry yelled, shoving Ron and Freeman towards a fireplace. Gray grabbed Hermione’s arm and charged for the one next to it, and Harry dived into the one beside that. He spun for a few seconds, then exploded up out of a toilet.
The door of his cubicle slammed open; it was Freeman, her face as pale as her brown-sugar skin would allow. "Hurry," she gasped, backing away to let him out. "You’re the last—" Her eyes went very wide. "GET DOWN!"
Harry ducked, and a spell flew over his head to shatter on the wall beyond. Yaxley had materialized in the toilet behind him, and his wand was already coming down to cover Harry once more—
A snarl rippled over Harry’s head, and Yaxley yelled in shock and pain. Harry threw himself upwards and around just in time to catch a cat-sized, brown-furred animal as it leapt away from Yaxley, who was clutching his throat, blood oozing around his fingers.
"Ron, go!" Hermione shouted. Ron spun in place and vanished. Hermione held out her hand to Freeman, who dashed to her side and clutched her arm. Harry took three steps back, his arm tightening around the animal he held. Yaxley was starting to get up, his hand was going into his robes, there was murder in his eyes—
A loud crack told him Hermione and Freeman were gone, and Harry turned on the spot, thinking only of the front step of Grimmauld Place, safely between Ron and Hermione, Freeman to one side, staring up at the house where her father had once lived—
Darkness, compression, the sense that he was working harder than he should have, and then he was there, panting for breath, slumped against the door with the serpent knocker above his head. Ron was sitting on the steps, wheezing. Hermione had a hand on her heart and another on Freeman’s shoulder.
"Fox?" Freeman said, looking closely at Harry.
Harry was nonplussed for a second, then recalled her using that name for Gray. "I didn’t see him," he began, but a fierce chitter from the area of his midsection cut him off.
"Fox!" Freeman cried gladly, holding out her arms.
Harry uncoiled his own arms to reveal a rather rumpled brown fox with large ears and a disgruntled expression. It sprang into Freeman’s embrace, licked her cheek a few times, then leapt down onto the step and uncoiled itself upwards to become Gray. "Not the sort of spot you’d look for a hero," he remarked, looking at the door knocker. "Good place to hide."
"Look," Harry said, stepping between Gray and the door, "I want some answers from you. Who are you, really, and how do you know so much about me?"
"I’ll tell you anything you want to know, but why don’t we do it inside?" Gray pointed at the door. "I don’t want to spend all night standing on the steps, and you’ve already taken us both inside the Fidelius, so it won’t do you much good to keep us out here."
"I think that’ll be my first question," Harry said, opening the door. "How do you know about the Fidelius?"
Gray chuckled dryly. "Once I’m done answering that one, I think you’ll have a lot fewer questions for me. For both of us." He glanced back at Freeman. "Or a lot more. Could be either at this point."
"Great," Ron muttered. "Just what we needed. More questions."
Single-file, the five entered number twelve, Grimmauld Place.
Author Notes:
Yes, another story. Don't ask me why I do this to myself. I don't know.