Which was why Severus found himself several days later once again in conference with Minerva and Potter’s trio while Minerva outlined what she knew of Albus’s plans regarding Harry and his future as hero of the wizarding world. But only that which regarded Harry, since even without secrecy vows Minerva was hardly the sort to betray people’s secrets. Initially Minerva kept stopping automatically when she started on a previously forbidden subject; that would take her a while to recover from.

Not that she really knew many of Albus’s secrets. Albus subscribed to the theory that a secret shared was no longer a secret, and besides, if people knew all the details of his plans they wouldn’t be heart-warmingly amazed when everything miraculously fell into place just as he’d predicted. Albus did so like amazing people.

“There’s a prophecy,” Minerva said. “I never learnt the exact details, but Albus said Harry was the one who would defeat Voldemort with a ‘power Voldemort knows not’. Albus,” she added dryly, “believes the power is love.”

Severus rolled his eyes at the typical Albus sentiment and the children all screwed up their faces. “How can love defeat anyone?” Granger asked. “What does he think Harry’s going to do, go up to him and give him a hug and Voldemort’ll just melt?” Severus flinched while Longbottom gave a nervous giggle.

“Knowing Albus,” Minerva said with a long-suffering sigh, “it wouldn’t entirely surprise me.”

“Hang on,” Potter said suddenly. “If he knows all this why isn’t he telling me any of it? Shouldn’t I know this stuff if he – like everyone else in the world – thinks I’m going to have to play the big hero? Shouldn’t I be preparing for it?”

“Albus,” Severus said, “likes children to be children and not worry their little heads about such things. He probably has a few tests in mind that will guide you into thinking heroically but he won’t tell you about adult business until he absolutely has to.” Longbottom looked unexpectedly annoyed by this.

“So I’m supposed to save the world but I won’t even get any actual training? And people think this guy is important?”

“They’re wizards, Mr Potter,” Severus told him. “They don’t do logical.”

“You’re not kidding.” Potter looked at him. “Do you think love could be the power he knows not? Because if it is we’re probably in trouble. No one ever—” He broke off hastily and refused to finish the sentence.

“Even if you were the most loved child in the world it wouldn’t help,” Severus said. That got everybody’s attention.

“Why not?” Minerva asked sharply.

“Voldemort knows love,” he said through suddenly dry lips. They all looked at him, questioning and curious. “He’s my brother.” Funny, he’d always thought the world would end if he ever admitted that aloud. Since it didn’t, he repeated it. “He’s my brother. By choice, not by blood. He knows love.”

“I’m so sorry,” Potter said softly, eyes wide with pain. And was that understanding there? Surely he was too young? How could it be that they one with the least experience of love was the one best able to understand Severus’s torn soul?

Severus swallowed convulsively and tried to pretend he’d admitted nothing. “Prophecies are bunkum anyway,” he said with a fair assumption of his usual bite. “The only reason they can be said to come true is because they’re so vague you can read anything into them and people who believe them make them self-fulfilling.”

“But Albus believes it,” Minerva said. “And so does Voldemort, judging by his attack on the Potters.”

“Then we have to act. If he is believed to be the one stated, Potter will be used.” Severus looked at the boy. “The prophecy may not rule your life, but other people’s belief in it will.”

Potter’s face took on an unexpectedly mulish look. “They can try.”

Minerva laughed suddenly. “Oh, I’m sorry, Mr Potter, I wasn’t laughing at you. It’s just that your expression was almost identical to one your mother used to get and I hadn’t expected to see it on you.”

Potter’s eyes lit up. “You knew my mum?”

“And your father. We both did,” she added, gesturing to Severus.

“Could you... could you maybe tell me about them sometimes? Aunt Petunia wouldn’t ever talk about them.”

Severus hesitated. “You may not like all you have to hear.”

“Worse than ‘useless vagabonds who got themselves killed in a drunken car crash’?” Potter enquired. “That’s all I ever got told about them when I was little but now I know at least half of that’s not true.”

Minerva looked appalled. Severus just nodded. “Then yes, Mr Potter, I will tell you about them.”

“So will I.” Minerva looked to Longbottom. “And Mr Longbottom, if you ever want to hear about your parents from a perspective not your grandmother’s...”

“Yes please!” he said eagerly.

“But what are we going to do about Harry?” Granger returned them to topic. “He needs training even if the Headmaster won’t give it to him. And...” She scowled. “We’ve been searching the library but we can’t find any reference to anyone who has his amplification skill without being able to do magic.”

“My own efforts have done no better, Miss Granger,” Severus told her.

Minerva frowned thoughtfully. “Though I’ve had little chance to do any research myself, I have to admit I’ve never heard of such a thing. If you would be amenable, Mr Potter, I should like to have a look at your magic.” Potter nodded. “Though there’s something I forgot to mention earlier. You recall I mentioned your mother’s self-sacrifice gave you protection against Voldemort’s attack?” They all nodded. “Albus said that that protection powered blood wards at the Dursleys.” She looked at Potter. “As long as you call home the place where your mother’s blood dwells, he said, her sacrifice protects you.”

“But?” Severus demanded.

“Since you broke my secrecy vows I’ve been to Privet Drive to study the wards. I couldn’t have done so before, because the Headmaster made me vow not to return without his permission, knowing I didn’t like the Dursleys and afraid that the temptation might be too much. But when you broke those vows you also ruptured other bindings. It’s probably a good thing I’m not married; it might have been difficult to explain to my husband why I was no longer married to him in the eyes of magic.”

The children winced. “That wasn’t supposed to happen,” Granger said in self-condemnation. “We shouldn’t have done it straight off, we should have practised it first. I’m so sorry, Professor.”

“If you’d waited I probably wouldn’t have let you do it once I’d had had time to think. Don’t be sorry, Miss Granger, I’ve lost nothing I’m not glad to lose.” She paused. “Where was I?”

“Studying the wards,” Severus supplied.

“Oh, yes, those wretched wards.” She looked frustrated. “If I hadn’t known Albus for decades I would believe he was going senile! What is it about magic that makes even the most intelligent people completely illogical? He knew what should happen and so he didn’t bother actually checking that it had happened. But I have checked. The wards are there, yes, but there’s nothing special about them. They might be about any well-protected wizarding home. Yet he is relying on these wards to keep you untouchable, Mr Potter.”

“Um?” Granger said suddenly. Everyone looked at her. “Oh, sorry. But why is the Headmaster in charge of where Harry goes? Shouldn’t there be a Child Services section of the Ministry dealing with this?”

“You’re thinking logically, Miss Granger,” Minerva said kindly. “This is the wizarding world. Albus Dumbledore is Albus Dumbledore therefore whatever he wants is appropriate.”

Granger and Potter were looking equally unimpressed. “I think I’m going to start wishing I was back in the normal world soon,” the former said with a sigh.

It was Minerva’s turn to subject Potter to a battery of tests and measurements, doing a much more thorough job than Severus had. Severus, as a potions’ maker, had only basic need for magical theory, but Minerva, focussing on Transfiguration, needed a far greater understanding. Granger looked over her shoulder and asked a few questions, clearly bursting with more but trying to restrain herself. Minerva’s answers were absent-minded as she focussed on deciphering her results.

“Albus is an idiot,” she announced suddenly, making the rest of them jump, then looked up and realised she’d just said that in front of students.

“Don’t mind us,” Potter said cheerfully. “We don’t mind. Insult him as much as you want. We can help if you want.”

Minerva smiled despite herself, a faint flush darkening her cheeks. “He was right in theory but wrong in practice,” she said, not taking Potter up on his offer. Severus felt this was a pity. “The magic of Lily’s sacrifice is grounded in Harry since it was cast on him and the power of it is welling up out of him to charge the blood wards – in theory. So far as that is concerned, the magic is acting as expected. But Professor Dumbledore failed to take into account the effect of the Avada Kedavra.”

“Effect?” Severus said snidely. “It had no effect. The damned thing was supposed to kill him! Sorry, Potter.”

“No problem, Professor.”

Minerva rolled her eyes at them. “I know it was supposed to kill him, Professor Snape. However, it didn’t. Therefore it was generally assumed that for some reason it had had no effect. Which makes no sense. The laws of thermodynamics do apply to magic, even if few wizards are aware of them. Energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed. Therefore the power of the Killing Curse did not simply vanish, it turned into something else. Nobody, however, has bothered to ask what.”

“It wasn’t dissipated, I take it,” Severus said.

“Not if I’m reading these results correctly.”

“Then what?” Granger asked, jigging up and down impatiently.

Minerva hesitated, looking uncharacteristically uncertain. “Essentially, it seems to have dammed up the Blood Magic power of Lily’s sacrifice. All that power is trapped in Mr Potter, pooling in him with nowhere to go. In effect, he is the place he calls home, the place where his mother’s blood dwells. The protection lies upon him directly, not upon the Dursleys’ house, and as long as he is living in his body it will always be there.”

“I trust you realise how ridiculous that sounds,” Severus said slowly.

“Oh yes.”

He sighed. “Then, since this is Potter, I’ll accept it.”

She tossed him a look and looked at Harry. “I’m afraid, Mr Potter, that I have to confirm that you are now a squib. You weren’t born as such, but from what I can tell all your native magic was burned up in the war between the Blood Magic and the Killing Curse. Had you had none of your own that battle would have killed you before the two reached a balance, but now none of the magic within you is actually yours.”

“How come he got a wand?” Granger burst out.

Minerva smiled. “An excellent question, Miss Granger. The wand responded to the magic within him, even though it isn’t his. It recognised Voldemort’s signature on the Killing Curse and it recognised the power of the Blood Magic. Therefore it accepted him as a magical being with the ability as well as the power to do magic. A Muggle has no magical signature because a Muggle can do no active magic.”

“Why can he share it, though?” Longbottom piped up.

“Blood magic is meant to be used. It’s meant to be active and the power within Mr Potter is actively striving to get out. However, without any magic of his own, he has no pathways to allow it to escape. But you or I, Mr Longbottom, do have those pathways.”

“But Harry needs to know what the power’s going to be used for before someone else can use it,” Granger pointed out.

“That is why magic is seldom stored in living things,” Severus told her. “All magic, even passive magic, has a component of intent within it. A non-living container, with no intent of its own, can store magic and release it without causing problems. Living containers, however, are extremely tricky.”

Minerva nodded. “Magical Theory states—”

“Magical Theory is a load of bosh,” Granger interrupted with annoyance. “It’s based on a lot of unproven assumptions, half of which contradict the other half and all of which are only believed because people have believed them for a thousand years! You can’t call it a theory. A theory is something that can be tried and tested, altered bit by bit so that all the time it’s changing to better fit the facts. A theory can never be proved, you’re always trying to disprove it. That,” she continued disgustedly, “isn’t a theory at all. Everyone just blindly accepts it as God-given truth because some ancient writer decided it was how the world should be and since he’s ancient apparently he knows better than anyone else. No genuine scientist would accept it as a theory for an instant. It’s not even a decent hypothesis! It’s only a ‘theory’ in the popular –and inaccurate – sense of the word and it’s ridiculous to base the entire teachings of magic on it!” Suddenly realising everyone was staring at her, she shut up abruptly.

Potter smiled at her. “Child of science,” he accused cheerfully. Then he looked at the adults, both equally stunned. “You should listen to her,” he said. “She’s been working on a framework that’ll allow the nature of magic to be tested properly so she can set up a true, logical Magical Theory.”

She blushed. “With Mum and Dad and Harry’s help!”

Severus shook his head, smiling faintly because this whole year was turning out to be so ridiculous. “When you three have done with it,” he said, “the magical world is going to look very different.”

-

Most of Neville’s out-of-class time was spent in a disused classroom that Professors Snape and McGonagall had authorised them to use. It was a room free of portraits, something the professors had warned them about; the Headmaster could easily learn anything the portraits saw, so if you didn’t want him to know, better not let a portrait see. This classroom was where Neville, Harry, and Hermione practised magic. They practised way more than the teachers realised, honing this strange skill of Harry’s. And not just in pairs either, with Harry boosting Neville or Hermione’s spells, but with all three of them working together. It had been really hard at first, trying to balance three lots of magic, but they were getting better at it now.

But they did more than just practice. The classroom had seen hundreds of books in the short time Neville had been at Hogwarts, because the three of them were also researching with intense concentration. Another three children, perhaps, couldn’t have done it all. But Harry and Hermione were trained to work had and well, the one by his relatives, the other by her need to understand the world around her, and Neville, appreciated for his own self at last, would have willingly done much harder tasks for the gift of friendship he had been given.

The teachers were no more aware of their research than their practising; the three of them hadn’t talked about keeping it secret, it had just happened. If the professors were like the rest of the adults in Neville’s experience then they wouldn’t like the nature of that research. On the other hand, Professor Snape and Professor McGonagall didn’t act like any adults Neville had ever met. So maybe they wouldn’t mind. Still, it was safer not to tell.

Hermione had organised it, of course. Hermione was the one who understood research. She’d shown them how to use the library properly and then assigned duties. “Neville,” she’d said, “you look for clues about Tom Riddle. Anything we can use to find out who he is, what he’s likely to do, what he did between school and coming out as Voldemort.” Neville sighed in relief at that, too relieved to even flinch at the name. He’d been afraid he’d have to read about his parents and Bellatrix Lestrange. “Harry, you’re good at piecing things together, you do the history of the ‘war’, tactics and people and everything. Not that they should call it a war,” she grumbled in an aside. “Guerrilla warfare maybe, but that wasn’t a real war. More like terrorism.” Harry and Neville exchanged grins; Hermione got annoyed at wizards a lot because she liked logic and they didn’t know what logic was. “Anyway, you do that, Harry, and I...” Staring at the pile of books she gave a sigh half happy and half resigned. “I’ll do magical theory.”

This research wasn’t the scrappy, assignment-done-the-day-before-it-was-due sort of research commonly done by children. It was all done methodically and with meticulous note-taking, because Hermione really was a child of science. Neville learned how to form and test a hypothesis, about the scientific method, how to begin building a theory that had stood rigorous testing.

And he learned more about magic after a couple of weeks with Hermione than he had in a whole lifetime surrounded by it. The three of them got together every couple of days to report on what they’d discovered and talk it over. Neville felt a little stupid and knew he rambled but the other two listened anyway with genuine interest so that he was starting to feel more confident. Harry, on the other hand, spoke clearly and concisely without any wasted words, because he wasn’t used to small talk. Hermione talked a lot in great excitement, not always quite on topic. Neville and Harry would just grin at each other and listen anyway. Hermione didn’t tell you things to show off how much she knew, she told you things because she found them so interesting she just had to share them.

Before Hogwarts Neville had never really known he was lonely. His life had been all he’d known and it was hard to miss something you’d never had and didn’t understand. But if he’d had to go back, knowing what he knew now, then he would be horribly, horribly lonely. An “Excellent work, Mr Longbottom” from Professor Snape or Professor McGonagall made his day, but it was with Hermione and Harry that Neville knew true delight. When Hermione hugged him in exuberant triumph or Harry grinned at him in shared success, Neville thought that he could live on these memories for happiness for the rest of his life. They were as delighted by his successes as by their own, they treated him as if he was just as clever and worth having around as they were, and they never ever looked at him with disappointment.

-

“Neville,” Hermione asked, looking up from the dusty tome she was buried in. “Neville!”

He pulled himself out of his own book to look along the desk. “Hmm?”

Harry looked up as well. The three of them were researching as a way to get their breath back after a particularly gruelling practice session.

Hermione was frowning thoughtfully. “What are the things you need to cast a spell?”

“Wand, will, and intent,” he said automatically. Every wizarding child knew that from before they knew they knew anything.

Hermione tapped the open page in front of her. “The books all say that too. They say these three things are important... It’s the one thing they all agree on. And not a single one of them stop to think that even more important is intention.”

“Isn’t intent the same as intention?” Harry asked. Neville had wanted to ask but had felt stupid.

“No, look.” Hermione drew figures on the desk with her finger. “You’ve got your wand, which channels the magic and transforms it into a useful form. Then there’s will, which is really a combination of willpower and magical power, though no one explicitly states it. Intent, which is what you want to do, usually with spoken words because that makes it easier to focus. But then there’s also intention.”

Harry and Neville exchanged puzzled looks and focussed on Hermione. Her face was alight with the glow that the search for true knowledge brought out in her. Not just to know what, but to know how and why as well.

“Look at it this way,” she explained. “If you cast a levitation spell on someone you can do it for a good purpose, a bad purpose, or a neutral purpose. Neutral would be stuff like lifting a couch to clean under it. But the good and bad... You could cast the spell to save someone from falling off a cliff, right? But you could also cast it to make them fall. Wand, will, and intent are all the same, but the intention is different. That means it’s both a Dark and a Light spell, it depends on how you use it. And no one seems to realise that magic actually cares. That’s why there’re Dark Arts.”

“What are you saying, Hermione?” Harry asked.

“If you cast a spell intending to kill someone, even if it’s for the best of reasons, then that’s Dark Arts. It doesn’t matter what the spell is. And the magic cares about it, so the feedback you get from the spell is the bad kind.”

“So you’d go Dark even if you never used a Dark Arts spell?” Neville asked in surprise.

“Exactly! But if you use the right intention, even with an unusual spell...”

“You’re thinking about Voldemort,” Harry said.

“Revenge won’t work. Hating him won’t work. It’ll just hurt us. Dark thoughts just lead to Dark magic. We don’t want to destroy him, we want him to stop hurting people. That’s a difference. So repentance, forgiveness, that’s the sort of thing we need. Restorative emotions for restorative magic. Justice should work too, but it has to be pure justice without emotions and I don’t think we can do that.”

There was silence as they digested this.

“Hermione...” Harry began. “Are you sure about this.”

“No!” she said with frustration. “All I have are thoughts and hypotheses! I’m trying to get closer to a working theory but there’s so much rubbish that’s been written. This is impossible!”

“Don’t be silly,” Harry told her. “You’ve only just started working on it, you can’t expect to figure it all out in a few months.”

“Crawl before walk, remember?” Neville added.

She smiled. “Okay, okay, you’re right, both of you. Sorry.”

“Sorry?” Harry asked with a smile. “For being a genius?”

Neville smiled too. “You can’t help it if it makes you a little crazy sometimes. Geniuses are like that.”

She laughed. “Watch it. I know more hexes than either of you.”

“We know,” Harry said promptly.

“That’s why we’re glad you’re on our side,” Neville agreed.