Chapter 16: Interview Under Caution

DISCLAIMER: Does nobody look in to what House Elves have to offer despite them being instrumental in confounding at least two of the bad guys' major plots? If so, I don't own Harry Potter.

CHAPTER 16

"We've a lot to talk about, then," Moody says. "Give me the telephone number and I'll call later this morning about a convenient time to come and talk to the Dursleys and have a long chat with you."

-oOo-

"Well, I'm pleased to tell you Mr. Reynolds that you have passed your driving test."

"Well, that's a relief. One hears about it being stressful, but…"

"Quite. You're older than the usual candidate …?" The examiner has her clipboard on her knee and is ticking off the last few boxes.

"I learned abroad," I tell her, because the past is a foreign country, "and I'm given to understand by my broker that my insurance rates are about to go down radically now I'm no longer driving on a foreign license. Which is expired anyway."

"Ah, that would explain the only three minors thing on a first test. Been driving a while?"

"Since I was seventeen," which is the unvarnished truth. And this is my fourth test, and second pass, it took until my third try the first time around. Sneaking a peek at the clipboard on the tweed-skirted knees next to me, it looks like I've managed to sell the illusion of a much younger driver fairly well. The only fly in the ointment is that I'm going to have to do this again under the much stricter late 90s regime when my kid identity grows up. Fortunately, that's the only time. Once you've got a British driving license, that's it until you're seventy, when the shelf-life shifts to three years. This test qualifies me under the old rules, too, which means my license is also good for goods vehicles up to twelve tonnes laden, motorcycles, small buses, agricultural machinery, towing trailers with all the foregoing, and tanks.

With the paperwork signed I get Petunia from the test centre waiting room. I've had to have a fully-licensed driver along while I've been driving on a provisional, and she was good enough to play the part for today.

"You passed, then?" She says, tucking her novel - Jackie Collins, may she be forgiven - back in to her handbag.

"I did, so let's get you home."

It's a sign of how far back in history we are that I have to nag Petunia about wearing her seatbelt properly: they were only made mandatory three years ago and she appears to have caught Vernon's opinion of 'nanny state nonsense.' She does, however, rather enjoy driving - and riding in - the car, which is a Mark IV Spitfire almost identical to the one my old self will own in about ten years.

Vernon and the boys have been fascinated with the near total tear-down and re-fit I've done. I'm not really up to repair spells more complicated than the most utterly basic rust removal and dent straightening - primitive transfigurations I can nearly do just by touch alone, never mind the wand - so I've had to get it into shape mostly the hard way. Having a great deal of money and almost nothing but free time for the moment meant I was able to overhaul it in less than a week. The new paint-job is booked for next week. I'm torn between keeping the (probably) original-fit overdrive or getting a sensible gearbox fabricated and fitted, because the overdrive is one thing I really don't miss. I've already made one change, though. The hardtop has a shrinking charm fitted - it's a very standard runic spell, in all the books, usually applied to things like furniture - so I can take it off and put it in the boot with a couple of wand-taps. Today, being rainy, it's firmly on. I've owned one soft top in my life and they're really not a good idea in the British climate.

We make desultory conversation all the way back to Privet Drive. Turning in off Magnolia Drive I hear the distinctive sound of Moody's magic: at a guess he's left an alarm charm to let him know when we're back. He's already spoken to Petunia - I'd primed her to expect his call ("Magical police, but at the Bodie-and-Doyle end of things rather than Dixon of Dock Green, we want him on our side so be cooperative") and given her a card with the proper words and response for guest-right.

I had a crafty look at her memories of the interview. The rules of guest-right prevented him from slipping her any kind of truth potion in her tea, substituting a sneakoscope on the kitchen table that he warned her straight up would sound off if anyone lied in its presence. And Moody does not need truth potions, veritaserum or otherwise, to get a witness talking. I'm honestly impressed: I'm trained in the same skills and got quite a lot of experience before I moved away from litigation, so even if I'm nobody's idea of a master of the art, I can recognise one in action. He could and probably should give masterclasses: he has her unburdening herself utterly inside an hour. Turns out she actually did have a soul that was in dire need of confession: she was actually thanking him by the end of their little chat, ugly-crying into the bargain. She also had full and complete particulars of the Errors and Omissions Of Albus Dumbledore and was a direct witness of several of them.

It turns out that Moody has your classic Old-Fashioned Copper's soft spot for kids and very hard and spiky spot for those who would harm them, so - reading between the lines of what he said to her after finishing their interview and in our subsequent telephone conversations - what I've done to the Dursleys is no-harm-no-foul in his book. I've no idea if he's ever nicked an actual offender against children, but I can readily imagine him showing such an individual why a millstone round the neck and cast into the sea really is the soft option for such. I won't go so far as to say he's got a cob on at Dumbledore as a result of what Petunia told him, but he's certainly been given plenty of reason to come to the view that his brief to 'look into this Reynolds character' was entirely disingenuous. Today is the day that he and I are due to have our sit-down chat.

As we're getting out of the car - Petunia dashing for the front door to save her perm - I notice a slight distortion in the rain. Does he ever take that invisibility cloak off? "Well, don't stand there like cheese at fourpence, Moody, y' scouse git. I'll be getting the kettle on."

"Woollyback humour at its finest. We should have passwords and countersigns," he says, following me in. There's a blare of magic that removes the rain drips from the doormat and he emerges from under his invisibility cloak. He is, by wizard standards, not that outlandishly dressed. The suit and mackintosh are a good three decades behind the times, but it's not like there aren't plenty of elderly muggles still cutting about in their demob suits as late as the eighties. My grandfather was buried in his in 2001.

"Shibboleths work better," I say. "Pre-agreed security tokens can be compromised. The whole Merseyside-Lancashire thing is a shared cultural context that isn't a wizarding one, much harder to fake and not obviously a security measure. On top of which, you are expected, if early. And I heard your alarm charm at the end of the road, and I know the sound of your magic." I'm quite pleased with the implicit agreement that he and I are to have at least a working relationship. I suspect he's a bit too damaged and me a bit too dubious about wizard law enforcement for us ever to be what you might call friendly. Cordial civility will do.

He chuckles. "Take your point about me bein' expected. As for your suggestion, I like the way you think, but the scouse-woollyback thing happens among wizards as well, and the wrong 'uns know it too. You know the Beatles, though? Most of the filth don't."

"I do. Lyrics?" It's an obvious source of challenges and countersigns, and outside the cultural context that your pureblood bigots and their Death Eater militant arm come from.

"Verses, not choruses."

"I'll have to memorise some. Stick with stuff off Sergeant Pepper to start with, it's the only one I'm really familiar with."

"Well, if you want to change that, send me a postcard, drop me a line."

"Stating points of view? Yeah, I'll get the other albums and refresh myself. We'd not have this problem with the Stones, mind. How'd you take your tea?" We're in the kitchen by this point, and I'm putting the kettle on.

"Black, and one. Milk gives me wind. Not been able to figure out the curse to break it, it's a funny one."

"Probably not a curse," I tell him, "you're probably just allergic to it and it's getting worse as you get older. Just avoid dairy and get the calcium you need in your diet elsewhere. Plenty of muggle books on healthy nutrition, read up on lactose intolerance." It's the eighties, non-dairy milk isn't a supermarket staple item yet as far as I can tell, and the soya milk you can get is fuckin' rank.

"Familiar with muggle healin'?" he asks.

"Had my fair share of health problems when I was first alive, raised three kids. You pick up a thing or two. And I was a muggle, so it was that or nowt."

"And Dumbledore was certain you were a wizard ghost. I wasted a lot of time chasing that for him. As for the music, never cared for the Stones. Only really know the Beatles because the muggle side of the family were mad for the buggers at the time, good tunes though. Better than the bloody Hobgoblins, that's for sure. Have to say I was mostly soured on muggle music when Dylan went electric."

I have to pause in making tea so I don't laugh boiling water all over the place. Never would have expected a dyed-in-the-wool copper like Moody to be upset that Dylan stopped being quite so political. Takes all sorts, I suppose. "At some point," I say, "I'm going to have to have a listen to wizarding popular music. My expectations ain't what you might call high, I mean, what's the magical population of Britain?"

"Somewhere around ten thousand wand-carrying, possibly as many as fifteen thousand, maybe three times that again in squibs and knowledgeable muggles. Which, yeah, is about what you'd be used to as a largish village, small town type of place."

"So, wizarding music is basically the pub gig scene from the town I grew up in? Yeah, my expectations are not high."

I get the pot steeping and float it to the table, along with the sugar bowl, the milk jug (while I'm firmly of the view that pouring it into my tea straight from the bottle is completely acceptable, I'd never hear the fucking end of it from Petunia) and a couple of mugs. "Won't take it amiss if you cast a few detection spells on it, you've a reputation for common sense."

"That's not what they usually call it," he says, pointedly setting his sneakoscope on the table.

I give the sneakoscope a once-over. I've seen this model in shops and it's the high-roller version, and from the looks Moody has modified it himself. I'm pretty sure I can beat one - self-control short of occlumency will beat most standard models, and while I don't doubt that Moody's model will beat all but the best occlumency and I've no idea how good I actually am, there's a trick to interviews like this and rule one is Not Lying. Choose your words carefully, certainly, and guide the conversation away from difficult topics, but don't lie. Because, while No Comment sounds decidedly fishy, it's not damning evidence - not evidence at all, in a lot of jurisdictions - the way that a lie contradicted by other evidence would be. "Yeah, well," I say with a shrug, "it's a dangerous world. Caution pays. I can respect a man who recognises that."

"Makes me wonder what precautions you're taking."

"Relying on guest-right, and letting you make yourself comfortable with the refreshments is proper to that. That and ancient enchantments that'd do for you if you tried a hostile move. Which you won't. As you noticed the magic on this place is mind-affecting. Helping you to decide in favour of caution and de-escalation."

"De- what? Never mind, I can work it out from context. Who says that?"

"Thing from non-magical law enforcement. They train 'em to calm things down if they can." They did in my day, at any rate. We're in the slightly less civilised 20th century here, they've probably only just stopped teaching 'six officers and a bloody good hiding' as standard arrest procedure.

"So part of the defence here is calming charms?"

"Not in so many words, but there's a decision-affecting element, like in most defensive magics and with a cautious lad like yourself? It'll be tilting your thoughts toward doing everything in a proper and legal manner."

"Well, part of the file I've got on you shows you doing most of what I could find - don't think your shenanigans with the Registry of births escaped me, but I'm treating that as a minor matter, it's a help to Secrecy if nothing else - in a proper and legal manner. Seems only fair."

"Most of Dumbledore's cockups wouldn't have happened if he'd taken the time and trouble to do what I did with the courts and the bank. Or delegated it to someone who would." I pour two mugs and let him pick. He jabs his wand at pot, mug and sugar-bowl with short blats of magic.

Petunia walks in at that moment, having made her customary dash for the loo as soon as she got in. "Oh! Mister Moody. Hello." She's visibly trying not to bring up any of the last conversation she had with him, which is good: while I've told him that she's given me full particulars of the interview, I neglected to mention that I got it with legilimency. Which is not a crime, but only doubtfully legal and definitely bad form.

"He's early," I say, and offer him the Eyebrow Expectant.

"Deliverin' a warnin'. Dumbledore's agitating to get Sirius Black out of Azkaban, bein' very cagey as to why. Black's got a history with young Harry -" Ooh, that is interesting. As much for Moody taking it on himself to give us a warning about Dumbledore's actions as anything else.

"Ah, I knew about that," I say, to Moody's evident surprise. "The man's innocent. And of course Dumbledore didn't consult his friend in the Department of Magical Law Enforcement about correcting a miscarriage of justice."

I catch Moody and Petunia alike up with Sirius Black and Peter Pettigrew and their Unfortunate Series of Events, and the story I gave Dumbledore. Moody ends up having to beg Petunia's pardon for the language he uses. For my own part I'm quietly pleased that while Dumbledore did set Moody after me, fortunately in terms that let him follow the trail I left of doing things mostly-legally, he is also taking the miscarriage of justice seriously enough that from the sound of it he has made progress.

"Although," Moody says once Petunia is mollified, "I've given Dumbledore plenty of reason to think I'd not approve o' what he's doin'. There's been a lot o' missed opportunities with the Death Eater crowd, and the old man had the political weight to stop that happenin'. I've given off at him about it more'n a few times. And, fair's fair, I thought Black was guilty same as everyone else. Didn't know he'd not had a trial though. Whole point is bringin' the b-, sorry, the scoundrels to where they have to answer for what they've done. If it was just about gettin' 'em out o' circulation I'd not have near so many scars. Explodin' curse to the jacksie and job's a good 'un. Capturin' 'em's a lot harder."

I nod. It's a part of how I've always known Moody isn't dishonestly bent. A vigilante with a warrant wouldn't take the risks he plainly does. A man who doesn't feel himself hindered by duty doesn't get insecure enough to turn so paranoid you take care to keep your hands in plain view while making him a cuppa, and don't complain when he performs small detection spells on the tea service. "Do you know how much progress Dumbledore is making?"

"He's saying he has vital new evidence under lock and key at Hogwarts and Black needs a retrial. First trial, if you're right about that. He's in an' out the Ministry like a fiddler's elbow, and Barty Crouch is dogging his heels insisting that Black can't be allowed to get out on whatever technicality Dumbledore has cooked up."

"Well, the murder victim still being alive and well is a technicality, if you like," I allow with a grin, covering up my absolute horror at realising I've been forgetting Barty Crouch Junior more or less since I first popped up in the cupboard under the stairs, "although quashing the charges of betrayal would mean beating a confession out of Pettigrew." Or, more likely, Snape brewing a largish batch of Veritaserum and keeping well out of the rat's line of sight.

"Still," I go on, "you say the problem is Barty Crouch? Have you had word of his wife dying?"

"Last year, why?"

"Well, the visions and divinations I based my tip to Dumbledore on - which you'll note have come good enough for him to, from the sounds, capture Pettigrew - include the little problem of Mrs. Crouch having died in Azkaban, not at home as is popularly supposed, because she took her son's place. Polyjuice potion, if I had to venture a guess. Barty Junior is kept hidden at home, so if you want to remove the obstacle to Black's freedom and get one of the more rabid villains back doing bird, you now have an anonymous tip. Crouch the elder has been using unforgivables to keep his son subdued into the bargain, which ensures he's taken off the board if you can secure the evidence. And I'll say again what I said to Dumbledore: Black getting out early cuts off some very nasty potential futures and opens up some pretty good ones into the bargain." It's not so much that I'd forgotten Barty Crouch as that I just hadn't made the connection between 'trying to plan for the Tri-Wizard tournament' and 'making sure Tom doesn't have a competent agent to send in the first place'. I'd had all kinds of thoughts about reversing the imposture by freeing Moody from his own trunk and forcing mind-altering potions down Barty Junior's throat to milk him for every scrap of intelligence he had.

"And when were you planning to report this vision, Mister Anonymous Informant?" Moody is quite rightly audibly annoyed with me. Which, fair enough. I decide he really doesn't need to know I plain forgot.

"When I had an auror I could rely on to keep the tip anonymous, an auror who to my pretty certain knowledge isn't bent," Moody actually is a bent copper, by the standards I hew to, but he's honest bent, which is to say he'll cheerfully fit up a villain, use his discretion for minor offences by decent people, and straight up kill anyone who offered him a bribe, "and when it would be useful to the war effort. It's not like the little shit is going anywhere, after all."

"Language," Petunia puts in, fascinated despite herself.

"Crouch is only the big obstacle," Moody allows, simmering down a bit. "There'll still be a fight. Arcturus Black wants his heir out before he dies, pretty unlikely bedfellow for Dumbledore that one is, and I'm hearing rumblings that Abraxas Malfoy is weighing in against him. They're a pair of the bigger old beasts on the Wizengamot. The fight's going to be one for the books, not that I can see what Malfoy's angle is."

"The inheritance, I would have thought," I say, maintaining a diplomatic silence about the fact that from my own perspective 'big beast in the Wizengamot' is more like 'big crab in the rockpool', "Sirius is the last of the main line of the Blacks, and Malfoy's daughter-in-law is the senior claimant to the entails that's still alive, at liberty, and not disowned."

"Makes sense," Moody nods, "Buying his son's liberty probably didn't come cheap, getting the Black fortune would go a long way to refilling the family vault."

I spot the opportunity to start releasing some kompromat into the wild. "Trying to erase the stain of his son having been enslaved probably isn't any cheaper, I reckon. That ugly tattoo they all got is an old Roman slave-marking spell. You might want to spread some nasty rumours that nobody knows what effect it has on the slave's mind to have that thing on him. Even without whatever dark-arts malarkey got added to it. I mean, are we just hoping that if they go doolally and start murdering, raping and cannibalising their nearest and dearest they do it in that order?"

Petunia looks aghast, and Moody outright hoots with laughter. "Going to mention that to Dumbledore next time his pet Death Eater comes up in conversation. Oh, and if your identity ever gets out, no part of your anonymous tip came from divination. It's completely inadmissible evidence, even in support of a search warrant."

I snicker a bit. As long as you know just how bent they are and in which direction, bent coppers are people you can do business with. Practically the dictionary definition of the beast. While I've got the family Crouch in mind, the third member impinges on my thoughts and I raise her with Moody, "The other thing that's worth noting is that Crouch is using the elf at his house to maintain the cover-up. It's not certain, but he's more likely than not to blame the poor thing for him getting his collar felt and give her clothes. If you're present for that, tell her to come here. Without my interference she'd have kept it up for ten years, and an elf like that is useful. Plus it keeps her somewhere you can find her for further interviews."

Moody rocks a hand. "Not actually admissible, elf testimony. Stupid, I know, but -"

"Intelligence is intelligence, even if you can't lead it in evidence before a court," I point out.

"True," he allows, nodding.

"Are you going to explain why we're giving house-room to an elf?" Petunia asks.

Between Tom, my own reading - Hermione in the books is actually not the first to get a wild hair up their arse over the subject of elfish welfare, there are a number of books on the subject - and actually doing some thinking, I've got this. I had been trying to figure out a way to get Dobby free earlier than in the books, but Winky is probably a better choice for looking after a home and kids on account of not being, you know, completely insane. "Wizards call them house elves, but you'd know them as Hobs, where you grew up. Where I was from, and points north into Scotland, they're called Brownies."

"As in -?"

"As in what the Brownie Guides are named after, yes. Spirits of place who live in homes and care for them. They used to be a lot more widespread before magical secrecy, but they're a very real boon so long as you remember the basic rules, which are: treat them with respect, never give them clothes and don't offer payment like they're not part of the family. Rewards in plenty, you'll more than likely want to, but always framed in terms like 'doing something nice for a good elf', never payment for services rendered. We'll have to ask the elf, if she comes, whether she's happy to make and wear her own clothes, but you should never offer an elf clothes, it banishes them from their home. Most of them dress in adapted household linens, towels and bedding and such, to emphasise that they belong to the house as much as the furniture, fixtures and fittings."

"What do they do?" Petunia's looking proper fascinated, this is stuff out of actual fairy-tales.

"Whatever they can to help, just like the Brownie Guides named after them. Housework, cooking, gardening, minding the children, those are the usual things, you'll probably find she's capable of a lot if you ask nicely. They like high standards to be maintained, so you'll have no problem."

"They're powerful in defence of their home, as well," Moody adds, a hint of scouser political consciousness in his tone, "they'd be a real problem for law-enforcement if the ministry hadn't geased the lot of them to be law-abiding in the face of warrants to enter. They'd still manage to make nuisances of themselves if the sort of people I have to deal with weren't also the kind to treat their elves like sh- like slaves."

"Which they're not," I emphasise, "even if it is possible, even easy, to reduce them to that condition by taking advantage of their need for a home and terror at the thought of being thrown out of it."

Petunia looks affronted, "As if I would do any such thing," she snaps out. I don't pass comment. She actually has form for doing precisely that, with Harry, so if we get Winky here I'll be watching her. I'm hoping that her past as a Brownie Guide will give her at least some sentimental regard for elf-kind.

After a pause for Petunia to digest what she's been told, I go back to addressing Moody, "Since the subject of inheritances came up, are there such things as wizarding lawyers? I've been looking over the records of the mess Dumbledore let the Ministry make of the Potter estate, and they've sold entailed property in ways that I could get set aside if they'd done it on the muggle side. I'm not hopeful of doing the same on the wizarding side, but getting the bleeders squabbling over money strikes me as, well …"

"Fun way to spend a wet Wednesday? Probably, but don't get y' hopes up. About the only magical jurist who'll work with you and is worth the spit to insult him with is Elphias Doge, and he and Dumbledore have been tight since forever, he's not going to embarrass dear old Albus on your behalf. Plus the current makeup of the Council of Magical Law is mostly people who'll have benefited. I looked it up too, sorry to say it's about standard for that office." Moody has also read the analysis of the shenanigans with the Potter estate. After a more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger chat with Huw he sent out copies of the file without billing for it by way of apology.

I sigh. "And by the time I've got myself positioned to be able to out-bribe everyone else, we'll be out of time to start an action?" I've got the money to, I suspect, bury the Wizengamot in gold, and not the cheap Goblin stuff either. Trouble is, you can't just give a dose of Samsonite to a complete stranger: corruption is always part of a long-term relationship and I haven't established any of those. Yet.

"Time doesn't start to run until Harry's twenty-three," Moody tells me. "I know a thing or two myself, I'd help you but I've got a real job."

"Fair enough," I say, "although I'd be obliged for a reading list if you've ever the spare time to write one. Was a lawyer when I was first alive, trained in a much harder school than I suspect most wizard jurists were. Causing some mayhem before the courts might well be a useful trick for when we're winning the peace in a few years' time, those families are in serious need of some disruption."

From the look on his face Moody likes the sound of that, which is of a piece with him preferring Dylan's earlier political stuff. Since he'll be retired from the Aurors in a few years' time - unlike most, who serve as Aurors as a stepping stone to future politics, he's a lifer - there's every chance I'll be able to count on him for help.

"Speaking as we are of matters legal, I checked the register of Knowledgeable Muggles. Mrs. Dursley here is on it, I took the liberty of updating with her married name and new address. How'd you want to proceed with Mr. Dursley and young Dudley? Technically you're in breach of the Statute and I should be making arrests and calling in the Obliviators."

"Tricky," I say, "Petunia's on the list because she's Lily's sister. Can't put Vernon and Dudley on without drawing attention to this address, another of Dumbledore's oversights. You could mention me as the reason for 'em having to know, but that'd still be a way Ministry attention could come here because my presence is not obviously explicable. What we need is a loophole. I think I need to read the actual text of the Statute of Secrecy, I flat-out refuse to believe that something drafted in the 17th Century doesn't have a few oddball grandfather clauses and exemptions and savings that can be twisted to fit."

"I'll leave it in your hands. I've carefully not noticed the possible breaches so far for Harry's sake, get at least a legal figleaf over what you're doing while you still can. The other thing I want to take an interest in, just so's I can be reassured I don't have to take a professional interest in it, is how you come to have that body. Unusual thing for a dead man, that. You mentioned alchemists, last time we spoke?"

I shrug. "Nothing particularly exciting about it. It's a clone grown from donated genetic material, accelerated to a biological age of six years. I'm using homebrew ageing potion to appear as an adult when I need to."

He looks more than slightly gobsmacked. "Grew a body?"

"Don't sound so surprised," I tell him with the cheekiest grin I can muster, "women do it every day."

Petunia snorts at that, "He's got this whole joke about 'unskilled labour.' Treat it with the contempt it deserves."

"What?"

"Well, you see, the process of delivering a naturally-grown baby into the world is called 'labour', resulting in a pun or play on words -"

Petunia slaps me across the back of the head. I deserved that.

"Magic can't create life, though -" Moody puts in, leaving the question in his tone. He'd probably have a raised eyebrow, if he still had eyebrows.

"Ah ah," I say, wagging a finger, mentally calling up the pre-planned 'genetics for wizards' spiel I've been working on, "life mostly isn't created. Life replicates. The thing you want to look up, you'll want muggle libraries, is DNA. Short for Deoxyribonucleic Acid, which is a bit of a mouthful so everyone uses the abbreviation. It's in every cell of every living creature, certainly all the non-magical ones, some of the magical creatures may well make other arrangements, nobody's done the research yet so we don't know. That substance contains the complete blueprint for the organism it's in, yours slightly different from mine, ours from Petunia here. Without rehashing the Birds and the Bees, the DNA in you is half from your mother and half from your father, and theirs from their parents in turn, right back to when life first arose, or was created, you pays your money and takes your theological or abiogenetic choice. The means whereby the DNA creates the organism and all its traits is, well, complicated, but again you can look that up elsewhere. Point is, you started out as two cells, one from each parent, that mixed the DNA together and then you started replicating and thereby growing based on the information that resulted. Bit of alchemy, you can make that happen in a reaction vessel rather than a womb. I started with living matter and grew it like a cutting from a houseplant."

"And this DNA? You mentioned a donation?"

"Yeah, Harry was happy to, since all it involved was rubbing a swab across the inside of his cheek and it'd mean that I'd be effectively his twin brother. Identical twins occur in the wild, of course, and they have identical DNA. I just made the same process happen a few years later than it would have done inside Harry's mum. Hell, if I'd stopped the process at the equivalent of nine months of growth and just lifted the results out and bottle-fed him, Harry would actually have a baby brother."

Moody's nodding along. Copper he may be down to his bootnails, but he's a wizard copper so not the know-nothing proud-of-his-ignorance sort you get so regrettably often on the nonmagical forces. He's in a branch of law enforcement that requires a lot of knowledge: you have to be at least slightly nerdy to even get the entry-level qualifications. "You've a look of a Potter about you, I will say that."

"Harry being happy about it helped the magical part of the process along. The sound of a child's laughter, and all that. Very good for keeping the dark influences out."

He nods. "That'd do it. Be helpful if you documented the whole thing."

"With all the alchemists who helped looking over my shoulder? They'd've had my guts for garters if I didn't. I'm still getting helpful little notes about what I could've done better. Not that there was any great innovation involved, a lot of it's old stuff, just put together in a new way that replicates some stuff they're working on on the nonmagical side. They'll actually be doing this completely without magic in about ten years or so. First mammal they do it with is a sheep, mid nineties some time."

"A sheep?" It's not just Moody looking bemused by that, Petunia's eyebrows are heading for her overpriced perm as well.

"Proof of concept that it can be done with mammals. They need a surrogate mother to implant it in because they don't have magic to make an artificial incubator, and sheep don't complain about that sort of thing. Plus, it's not a commercial enterprise, they're doing it to learn more about the process. Which is good, it means they publish and I can crib off their research, which I'll be reading over the next thirty years or so. Seer, remember, if I read it in the future I can know it in the present."

"This is muggles doing this?" Moody looks like he's having some trouble with this. He might have a notion of muggle culture - he's mentioned having a muggle side to his family, and he can navigate muggle records and courts - but I suspect he and eg. New Scientist are strangers to each other.

"A lot of alchemy requires no magic at all. The muggles kept it up after Secrecy came in - they call it chemistry nowadays - and they've got really good at it. And life is, at its most fundamental, chemistry."

"Yeah, really want to read those notes. How much am I going to have to study to understand them?"

"Quite a lot, I'm sorry to say, although you can skim a lot of it if you just focus on the magical elements. Which are, you'll find, very much not-dark. I included a fair amount that wasn't strictly necessary that was positively light magic. It was the first attempt, and really giving it large with the elements of joy, life and family helped my chances of success along. With enough refinement, we might one day be able to do it as a purely businesslike thing. Be helpful for people who need, say, replacement limbs grown."

"I could take that as an offer, and take it amiss into the bargain." Moody is, of course, a prime candidate for replacing missing body parts with grown replacements. Whether or not that would actually work with curse damage I don't know yet, but that's why we do experiments. If he was at home to bribes, it would be an ideal one.

"It's not an offer. That sort of application is years off, and nobody with anything at all to lose should be relying on cloned homunculus bodies until the likes of me have confirmed that this definitely works long-term. I mean, in theory this body is exactly equivalent to an organically gestated one, but the practical results won't be confirmed until I've lived a good few years of normal human lifetime in it. I was dead, so I was an ideal candidate for the experiment: nothing to lose, you see?" There's a body-swapping ritual - Tom learned it as a possibility for his own immortality - that might make full-body transplants possible, but it'd have to be carefully reworked before I would consider it. That one isn't just Dark Magic, it's Magic For Complete Arseholes. Worth it as a back-burner project, though.

I get the file out and take Moody through it, while Petunia heads off for an unspecified GP appointment and after that to collect the boys from school. Thankfully, the minimum standard for being an Auror - of Moody's generation, he's mildly scathing of the new kids coming through, but I put that down to standard old-bloke whining - includes a solid grasp of the magical theory that the dark arts are grounded in. Not just the true Dark Arts, the magics fuelled by the ills of the human heart (hatred, wrath, the will to power over others, the things that the theorists all call maleficium in a rare display of consistency) but the wider category of transgressive magic, the stuff that requires illegal or immoral acts to work. He's not just satisfied that it isn't dark magic, but also that he's okay with me having had a five-year-old child present for it. Like I'd've risked Madame Flamel's wrath by upsetting a child.

He does point out that there are laws regulating magical experimentation that I have broken left, right and centre. They are, however, considerably beneath his jurisdiction as an auror. When the Committee on Experimental Charms decides to prosecute, they bring in the Magical Law Enforcement Patrol to serve the summons. Although, according to Moody, they hardly ever prosecute anyone for anything, since most people either do their paperwork properly or don't bother the neighbours enough to get a complaint made.

"The big question I'm left with, though, is how come you've got magic if you used to be a muggle?"

"Yeah, that's a tricky one. Look, you understand that the only way a secret stays secret is if everyone that knows it is dead, right? And even then it's not perfect since necromancy is a thing."

"Granted. I'm more'n a bit resistant to most forms of interrogation, if it helps."

"Oh, I assumed as much. The thing is, I didn't come back, I was sent. And, so far, I have never spoken aloud as to who by." Moody didn't think to ask Petunia about how I got to be magical, although she did volunteer that I'd spoken to Lily on the Other Side. Harry is a direct witness to me getting my magic, of course, although nobody treats five-year-olds as obvious subjects for interview, not even the likes of Moody. Paranoid he may be, but he still has some of the regular blind spots. "The problem I've got is that any detail I offer - and for what it's worth you have my assurance that no dark arts were involved - is a crack that the chief bad guy is smart enough to pry open to get at the secret and him knowing anything about it would be an utter disaster. With hindsight, I should've been cagier about how I came to be where I am and what I am, so at the moment I'm relying on the information being in the hands of people the bugger won't think to abduct and interrogate. You, however, are in a capture-prone trade and I have this horrible vision of you waking up with a bunch of missing memories and a belly full of Unctuous Unction and a new best friend with a poised quill."

"I'm not easy to capture," he observes.

"Not the same as impossible. There's at least one set of futures where you get captured and impersonated. Mostly by Barty Crouch junior, as it happens. I had more than one reason to take him off the board, and I wasn't entirely ruling out summary execution."

"Or murder, as we in the law-enforcement community like to call it."

"Well, in a peacetime context that is what it'd be. I'm calling him an unlawful combatant guilty of grave crimes against the laws of war. Sneaking out of jail like that is perfidy, if nothing else, and he was in for torture to start with, which he should've hanged for."

"Not arguing about the hanging, although we use the Dementor's Kiss -"

"Barbarism," I put in, which it is. I have no qualms about capital punishment in wartime - in peacetime it's a straight-up bad idea if you know anything about how criminal justice works - but adding the horror of being devoured by blasphemous abominations is just disgusting.

"As may be. Point I'm driving at - and don't think I haven't noticed that you've changed the subject - is that we're supposed to bring 'em in, not kill them out of hand."

"You're supposed to bring 'em in. You're a busy. Sometimes it's good politics to treat a war like crime and punishment - like what's going on in Northern Ireland, they're not shooting the provos they capture, they learned from that mistake in 1916 - but every bit of wizarding justice from the wizengamot on down is just too broken to make that work. And it is a war, and it isn't over. We've got a temporary armistice at best, against an opponent who're preparing all manner of perfidy against the day hostilities start again. All I'm asking for you on this point is to ask me no questions I'd have to tell you lies about, but there is going to come a point where the proportionate response to the enemy's perfidy - and I'm using that word in its strict legal sense, it's a crime against the laws of war and has been since long before the Hague and Geneva conventions - will include warlike operations in reprisal. Which will mean killing at least some of the bleeders."

Moody takes a moment to think that over. I know he's nearer my opinions than Dumbledore's on this sort of thing, and I'm not trying to persuade him over the line that circumscribes his role as an auror. I do want to move him - and any of his colleagues he can persuade - closer to it and look the other way when I - and whoever I can get on board to help - start fighting back in earnest. I'm hoping that couching the argument in legalistic terms will tickle his policing instincts.

"You haven't specifically stated an intention to commit a specific crime. Let's leave it at that. I've got to say that if I do get wind of such as you mention, it's going to put me in a very hard place. I'm one of the louder malcontents at the Ministry, but that don't mean I'm not true to my salt, if you take my meaning."

"Loud and clear." Between the lines, he's telling me that as long as I don't get caught he's not going to lose any sleep over it.

He nods. I should imagine that if we fail to the point of an actual war breaking out he won't be waiting for the Crouch Authorisations this time around. "As for the original point, how you got to be magical?"

"Still going with 'no comment' on that one, sorry. Unless I can be sure that the opposition can't replicate it, or use the fact of the possibility as propaganda, I'm keeping my mouth firmly shut."

"Propaganda?"

"They're already claiming that muggles are stealing magic for their own children. Really don't want it getting out that someone who was a muggle now has magic, they'll say I stole it and it's evidence that they were right about the muggleborns all along. Horseshit from start to finish, of course, but so far the only people who know that about me are you, Dumbledore, and the three alchemists who were my main helpers, and none of you know the details." Not strictly true: Perenelle Flamel and Sam Hartlib both got the full story, but they don't interact with the wizarding world at all. I'm assuming Perenelle told Nicolas, it's the sort of thing he takes an interest in. Harry also knows, but I'm not pointing a loaded Moody at a six-year-old.

"Don't like it, but, aye, I see the sense in not saying anything. And," he muses, "I don't have any evidence that it's dark magic."

"If you run into it again, look for that evidence. What happened to me was a once-in-a-lifetime fluke that I wasn't expecting. Making it happen, I'm pretty sure, could only be done with some fairly nasty and heavy-duty dark arts. Which is why I don't want it out there that it's even possible, when all's said and done. Don't want to give the buggers ideas."

"I'll drink to that," he says, raising his mug, "they've got enough of their own to be going on with. One last thing for today, though. If I go looking for muggles named Malcolm Reynolds, what am I going to find?"

"Not me. As I see it, you get a new name when you're born, I'm entitled to a new name after I died. And, bluntly, as far as my family are concerned dad died in a road accident and that's an end of it. The last thing they need is wizarding bollocks intruding on their grief. I picked the name from one of my favourite telly characters, from a show that'll be made in about twenty years. Benefit of being a seer, I get to watch stuff when before it's even made."

Moody huffs his amusement. "Not just scholarly papers you foresee, then?"

"Nope. Show's going to be called Firefly, you'll be retired by then and it's worth getting a telly for, trust me on this. If things are settled here by then, I might even go visit the production company and convince them not to cancel it after thirteen episodes, which they do in most of the futures I've foreseen. And, for the record, the Star Wars movies after the first three are all tripe apart from Rogue One, but the telly series are all pretty good."

Moody waves off my predictions for muggle popular culture with evident amusement, before taking his leave. Reiterating his warning about the Statute of Secrecy issue - which is within his jurisdiction, but currently in the no-harm-no-foul category so he's exercising his discretion - he apparates out just before the boys get home. Probably as well, Harry's not yet confident with strangers, and they don't come much stranger than Moody's face.

It's the day after Moody has left that I get to Flourish and Blotts and find a book that includes the full text of the International Statute of Secrecy - not amended since it was adopted by unanimous resolution of the Wizengamot back in 1693 - and a couple of hours with notepad and highlighter finds me a truly hilarious possibility. It won't even cost that much.

-oOo-

Moody raising the subject of my life as a muggle spurs me on to a bit of investigation, so the next night I leave my body sleeping and apparate north. I appear over the summit of Parlick Pike, a location I'm familiar enough with by day and by night that I'm sure is the same back here in the eighties as it was when I was last here in the summer of 2019. I don't like to think what the consequences would be of trying to go somewhere that hasn't been built yet, or won't look like my mental picture of it for years to come. From here I can see the summit of Beacon Fell, which lets me apparate there.

Beacon Fell is a lot more like my dim recollection of going there as a kid than any of my more recent visits. The forest - godawful Forestry Commission serried ranks of non-native evergreens - is only man-high at this date. It'll be full grown by the twenty-teens, and subject to widespread calls to fell the lot and plant a proper forest. The trig pillar is where I remember it being, though, and on the horizon I can see Blackpool Tower lit up against the dim purple of the late summer evening. That gives me one bearing, and the lights of Longridge and Preston give me two more.

After that, it's a quarter-hour of line-of-sight apparations in the direction I need to go, picking up landmarks one after another.

It brings me to the home I was living in with my oh-so-loving family back in '86. I want to know if this universe's version of me can be helped in some way. As I've mentioned, not as bad off as Harry, but still having a rough go of it. Siblings too. It's a neighbourhood almost exactly like the one the Dursleys inhabit: a cul-de-sac of twenty-odd houses built to four different designs. Mixed up a little better than the Magnolia Road Estate in Little Whinging, but then not every housebuilder is quite so clueless.

That there's something wrong is obvious right away: by this point in history there should be the upstairs extension built and the loft conversion done. They aren't. The conversion of the integral garage into an indoor room is done and the replacement garage out back is built, but all of the work upstairs that I remember helping with as a young lad? Hasn't happened yet although it should have.

I could put that down to them having moved away. Speaking in my capacity as Master Of the Bleeding Obvious there were definite problems in that house and while divorce was a lot less common in the eighties it wasn't unknown so it's possible that my parents, in this universe, got over their mutual Stockholm Syndrome and split up and I'm about to invade the privacy of whoever bought the place.

What's stopping me is that here, in this most extremely muggle of neighbourhoods, I can hear magic. I shouldn't be able to. Twenty years before this particular night, the spot where I'm floating indecisively wondering what to do next was a field full of cows. There just hasn't been time for wizards to move in, never mind them having any reason to buy one of these places. Let alone the one I spent my teenage years in.

The sound - high, shrill, atonal piping - is coming from my old house, so after a moment to centre myself - there are some painful memories for me here - I advance on the property line. As I approach something detects my presence, and a signboard twists into existence from thin air, startling me terribly.

What the fucking FUCK?

DEPARTMENT OF MAGICAL ACCIDENTS AND CATASTROPHES

BEWARE

HAZARDOUS MAGIC ON THESE PREMISES, APPROACH NO CLOSER.

By Order, C. Fudge, Investigator, DMAC

There's a note attached in small print that states that on or about 23rd August 1981 a magical accident of unknown origin took place on these premises rendering them uninhabitable for a period estimated at not less than thirteen years. Whether that's a real estimate or just a standard it-ought-to-be-gone-by-then period I don't know, and the note only warns that the property has been deemed safe to remain undemolished under muggle-repelling charms but represents a particular hazard to magical persons. There are no other details.

Now I've come close enough to see the sign, I can see the house itself clear of the spells that were obscuring its true appearance. The garden is overgrown, the windows filthy and cracked, one of them outright missing, and litter and detritus has piled up in every available nook and cranny. Blown in where the rest of the neighbourhood can't see it any more, it has accumulated in drifts and heaps.

What happened? I wonder.

I decide to ignore the sign - I'm a lot less susceptible to damage than I am when corporeal, and confident I can bug out fast enough if I don't let myself get taken by surprise - and press forward a few feet up the driveway.

Malignity. Nails on a blackboard, the wild eyes of a dog about to bite, the whimpers of a terrified child, the shiver of a walked-over grave. And oh god, the smell of blood.

I stop. It's not the putrid filth of Tommy-boy's magical leavings, but it's still nasty. Cornered, vicious, rabid animal nasty at that.

Absolutely no way am I going any further with this until I know a lot more than I currently do. I've got an address and a date and plenty of money. Investigation is therefore trivial, and the house won't get any more abandoned in the meantime.

I am, of course, limited to strictly muggle means of investigation, and I should do most if not all of it myself. My old family have clearly already had magical trouble, serious enough to drive them out of their home, I don't want to be adding to it. Plus, me taking an interest in this family is a potential clue to the time travel aspect and the last thing I want to do is leave breadcrumbs that the enemy can follow to that particular disaster. It's an even bigger bombshell than the getting-magic thing which even Moody felt ought to be compartmentalised.

Until that's done, however, I have far too little information to even begin to speculate.

AUTHOR NOTES

I owned a decidedly-clapped-out Mark IV Spitfire for about eleven months in the mid 90s, until I discovered that I could either restore the thing or afford the insurance, not both, on the pay of a very junior lawyer. It was going to be even more of a white elephant when the baby arrived. Absolutely lovely car, though, if you kept ahead of the maintenance.

The bit about older driving licenses qualifying you for an alarmingly broad range of vehicles is no exaggeration: I passed my test in '88 and am qualified on things I've never driven and wouldn't know how to. Including, at the time, tanks. (Tracked vehicles are now on a separate test). The UK driving test is quite stringent, though. Most people would rather hang than have to try and pass a second one, it's among the penalties for motoring offences and regarded as one of the harsher ones.

Wizarding population: there are as many guesses about this as there are commentators on the Potterverse (JKR's pronouncements aren't worthy of note; they don't make sense in the context of what we see in the books.) and I've gone with a magical society that isn't majority wizard-and-witch simply because a society big enough to support a full quidditch league that consisted entirely of wand-wielders wouldn't be able to hide the way they do, but which still has the numbers to support eg. a quidditch league. If you think that it makes a nonsense of the stated aims of the Death Eaters for wizarding Britain to be like this, well, sure. It's not like any of the other steaming piles of racist claptrap that litter history made any objective sense in their contexts either.

Wizarding law: I don't propose to infodump heavily about my thoughts on how the legal system of a tiny society of magic-users might work and also generate the things we see in the books. Rest assured I have worked it out, and will explain as I go along. The loophole in the statute of secrecy will come up later. It's the kind of thing that happened all the time in 17th century legislatures and will let me take advantage of one of the more picturesque bits of English real property law.

"Dose of Samsonite" - Samsonite brand briefcases were, for quite some time, the packaging of choice for large amounts of anonymous cash and bearer bonds when tendered as 'arrangement fees' and 'consultancy payments'. How the figure of speech arises is, I trust, obvious.

My statements about the laws of war should not be taken as legal advice for your particular situation: always consult your lawyer before engaging in warlike operations or committing atrocities. (More seriously: it's a figleaf argument that only passes the laugh test because of the jurisdictional muddle that the separation of magical and muggle worlds creates.)

Maleficium is a term for malevolent magical practise that was coined in the witch-hunting manual of the 15th Century, the Malleus Maleficarum. Which also advanced the proposition that harmful magic was only worked by women, because the authors weren't just murdering, torturing gits, they were misogynist pricks into the bargain. It takes some doing for the late medieval Catholic Church to sack you for being an arsehole, but the authors of Malleus Maleficarum managed it. (That their work was then used as the field manual for protestant witch-hunting, which was much more … enthusiastic than the catholic version, is one of those amusing little quirks of history.)

Moody's a busy in the sense that 'a busy' and 'the busies' are Liverpool dialect for 'a policeman' and 'the police' respectively. If you want to hear the scouse accent, the most reliable source is Dave Lister in Red Dwarf, which is all over Youtube. You could also look up Brookside, a soap opera set in Liverpool, but not all the characters in that are scousers. The ones that are do use some scouse dialect, although a lot less than the real life versions do.

And oooh, yes, a new mystery.

Fanfic recommendation: The Perils of Innocence by avidbeader, which is only on FFN to my knowledge. In which Harry gets dumped by the Dursleys in residential care, to his considerable benefit. Very well put together, surprisingly well read-in on British life for a US (I think) writer, and includes a priceless interaction between the distinctly parvenu (even if they're not, they act like it) Malfoys and the actually-aristocratic Finch-Fletchleys.