Chapter Text
Hogwarts, July 1st, 2005
“My condolences, Mr Potter. He was a great wizard.”
“Thank you, M. le Président.” Harry Potter forced himself to smile as the leader of the Republic of Magical France clasped his hand
“Courage, mon ami! Even without him, we’ll stand firm!”
“We will.” It wasn’t as if they had any other choice.
“Of course! You’re his heir; you’ll do him proud!”
Harry’s smile froze. As much as he had disliked the Boy-Who-Lived title, he much preferred it to being known as Grindelwald’s Heir. People didn’t expect the Boy-Who-Lived to start another Crusade in Europe.
M. le Président nodded at him and left, presumably to take his seat. Or to check the buffet. Harry didn’t care. He just wanted to get this funeral over with.
Trust Grindelwald to make trouble for Harry even after he had finally died!
And there came the next guest to say his regrets. Harry nodded at Chancellor Müller.
“Mr Potter! My condolences.”
“Thank you, Chancellor.”
The Prussian leader shook his head. “My country owes him so much. I owe him so much, too - but I’ve never met him. Did you know that? I always hoped that he’d leave Nurmengard, that I would get to talk to him… And now it’s too late.”
Was the man crying? Harry felt guilty for his earlier thoughts. For most of Europe, Grindelwald was the greatest wizard of his time. Statues of him had been erected in most magical quarters - both in those countries that had been conquered in his name and in those that didn’t want to be conquered and tried their best to placate the more fanatical followers of Grindelwald. Such as the two making their way towards Harry as Müller walked off, still wiping his eyes
“Hans! Katrina!” Harry smiled at them. Of all the guests attending the funeral, those two veterans were among the few Harry knew to be genuinely sad about Grindelwald’s death.
“Harry!” Hans nodded solemnly. He looked older than the last time Harry had seen him. No, he looked old now. The Storm Wizard gazed at the coffin behind Harry. “I should be there, with him. I was his bodyguard.”
“If you wish to stand guard…” Harry started.
The Storm Wizard shook his head. “No. If Meister Grindelwald had wanted me to guard him, he’d have told me so. Ordered.” He nodded, a little shakingly, patted Harry on the shoulder, hard enough to make him stumble, and walked away.
Katrina shook her head. “He’s taken Meister Grindelwald’s retreat hard. He never understood why Meister Grindelwald did it. Why he had to withdraw to Nurmengard.” She sighed. “It took me a long time to see it, so I can’t blame Hans. He was his guard, more than anything else. He trained recruits, but he wasn’t a leader.”
Harry nodded, not sure what Katrina was talking about. The witch had single-handedly started six international crises and one war with the Ottoman Empire, so it wasn’t as if she was entirely stable or sane.
“Meister Grindelwald knew that if he kept leading us personally, we would never grow strong enough to inherit his cause. Only by forcing us to stand on our own feet did we learn to do what we had to do to complete his vision.” Katrina smiled, bowing to the coffin. “He truly had no equal in wisdom or courage, sacrificing himself for us like that. We cannot do any less than honour him by continuing his great work.”
Harry winced. He knew what that meant - another crisis or war next year. Probably the Sublime Porte - lately, Katrina had once again been talking about ‘restoring Constantinople to Europe’. But trying to stop the witch was futile; she had too much support among the Storm Legions.
Mostly thanks to her fame as Grindelwald’s right hand in the war. Another mess the old wizard had left to Harry and the others to sort out when he retreated from the world into his old cell, with only a frame for Albus’s portrait as company.
Flashes drew his attention, and he had his wand out before he realised that it was just the journalists taking pictures. This was the event of the year, and so every newspaper and wireless station in Europe was covering it. Xenophilius was in the front, of course - the man was a legend among the journalists. And completely crazy, in Harry’s opinion. Starting a newspaper, The True Quibbler, to compete with The Quibbler because he felt he had become part of the establishment wasn’t too weird, but to spend a page in every issue to attack himself as either a mad revolutionary or a corrupt shill for the establishment? He made Luna look sane, and Harry’s friend had been trying to interview the Sultan’s Vizier in the middle of duelling him during the Second Battle of the Thermopylae.
He rubbed his left hand at the memory. That had been a bloody conflict, indeed. Bad enough to gather ‘the old gang’, as Ron had put it, together, just for the propaganda effect. They had won, in the end, but it had been a close thing. Harry had almost lost his left hand, if not for Hermione digging up some new treatment in her library.
But that battle had cost him dearly anyway. Harry clenched his teeth. If he ever found who had started the rumour that he was the son of Dumbledore and Grindelwald, magically created and carried to term by Lily Potter, with James pretending to be the father to protect Harry… Well, Harry would show them what Grindelwald’s heir could truly do! That anyone actually believed this drivel beggared belief. Well, Snape apparently had embraced the idea that Lily hadn’t had a child with James, but the man had never been really stable after his interrogation. Harry simply hoped that the students at Durmstrang would see through his madness.
Of course, Harry holding the Eulogy wouldn’t help matters, but he hadn’t been able to turn the dubious honour down. Hermione had threatened to do it instead, and anyone who had ever endured her speeches in the ICW knew that she would have made Fidel Castro proud.
“Mr Potter.” McGonagall nodded at him, then glared at the coffin. The Headmistress probably wouldn’t ever forgive Grindelwald for turning Dumbledore’s old office into a shrine - and casting a curse on it to keep anyone from changing anything in it. Bill had told Harry at the last Weasley gathering that his colleagues among the Curse-Breakers had stopped answering the witch’s letters.
Harry gently shook his head as he watched the old witch walk away. At least that had been the only significant change at Hogwarts. Unlike Durmstrang, Harry’s old school hadn’t had to hastily reform before some of the more fanatical followers of Grindelwald - or the more pragmatic ones, like Hermione - declared it a bastion of his enemies that should be razed to the ground. Hermione had wanted to do it anyway until she had received a complete copy of their library.
Although Harry imagined that there would be pilgrimages to Hogwarts now, as well as to Nurmengard. Well, it wasn’t his problem.
“Harry!”
“Arthur.” Harry smiled, genuinely for a change. Arthur hadn’t let his position as the Minister for Magic change him. Well, he had gone completely bald, but that might have been his age - or his grandchildren. Who’d have thought that babysitting a triplet of Veela was even more stressful than raising Fred and George? Although the twins hadn’t been able to transform into birds and throw fireballs around when they threw a tantrum. At least Molly could keep them in check.
“How are you holding up, son?”
Harry shrugged. “As I expected, I guess.”
Arthur looked around.
“Ginny won’t arrive with James until the funeral is about to start. We don’t want to expose him to too much attention.” Or to too many of Grindelwald’s more gullible followers who thought James was his grandson. Grown wizards swearing fealty to a baby on the street in Diagon Alley made it rather tiresome to check out if the latest Firebolt had arrived. And when they promised to conquer Italy for James, it led to international crises.
“Good thinking, son.” Arthur smiled in that self-conscious way of his. “Ron’s fetching Hermione from the Ministry. Apparently, she took a detour to her office after returning from Geneva.”
That explained the absence of Harry’s two best friends. Or perhaps they didn’t want to listen to Molly using the opportunity to once more urge them to start having kids. Not even Hermione arranging for every couple in her acquaintance to ask Molly to babysit had managed to curb that - Molly hadn’t even been fazed by the Tonks’ werewolf metamorphmagus. That was one witch you didn’t want to cross.
“Molly’s cooking a roast tomorrow,” Arthur said. Which was his way of asking if Harry and Ginny would attend the family dinner.
“There’s no match tomorrow, so we’ll be there,” Harry answered. Unlike his wife, he didn’t have to worry about his schedule - unless there was a war to be fought somewhere. Or he had to impress someone to prevent or defuse a crisis. He just hoped the British Storm Wizards wouldn’t be using the Quidditch pitch for their training again; that always caused a row. If it were up to Harry, he would have moved The Burrow away from the main military base of Wizarding Britain long ago, but the Weasleys were stubborn to a fault; Harry knew that very well - he had married one. He had slept a month on the couch before Ginny had let him name his son James, even though she hadn’t had a better alternative!
“Good.” Arthur nodded at him, then left.
After the representative from Magical Scandinavia - a werewolf, of course, whom Harry pointed at Remus when the witch had mentioned she wanted to discuss ‘the werewolf question’ - had paid her respects, Hermione and Ron finally arrived, followed by Luna and Ginny with James on her arm.
“Mate!” Ron greeted him.
Harry quickly cast a privacy charm - pictures in the press of Ron’s wide smile wouldn’t mesh well with the nominally sad occasion.
Hermione rolled her eyes. “He’s been like this since the morning.”
“You were in Geneva for the day!” Ron retorted.
“I know you, dear.”
Ron chuckled. “She got me there.” He turned to Harry. “Guess!”
“Guess what?”
“Guess why I’m so happy!”
“He finalised the acquisition of Malfoy Manor,” Luna said. Ron glared at her, but the blonde grinned. “Another scoop for me!”
“How did you know?” Hermione asked.
“I saw Draco at the travel agency in Diagon Alley this morning. He would only leave his manor if he had to,” Luna explained.
Harry coughed. They might have overdone his interrogation a little - Draco had never really recovered from their last encounter, and finding out that his father had been killed in the assault on Voldemort’s hideout hadn’t helped his recovery any. On the other hand, it was Draco. “Did you overhear where he’s travelling to?”
“The New World,” Luna said. “It was probably the farthest he could reach from Diagon Alley where they’re still speaking English. I would have gone to New Zealand, but you need a special agency for those trips. And Draco would probably end up in Australia instead with his stammer if he used the Floo Network at any point during his trip.” A stammer for which Luna’s most infamous interview with Grindelwald had been at least partially responsible. According to Madam Pomfrey, even mentioning the wizard’s name had caused Draco to experience flashbacks to his interrogation, and Luna had done a series in The Quibbler.
“Good riddance,” Ron said. “Cost me a small fortune to bankrupt him. I’ll raze the manor to the ground, too. Just to stick it to them.”
“Good thing you have a large fortune!” Luna said, beaming at him.
And the seed money for Ron’s fortune had been acquired by looting half of Europe, Harry thought with a wry smile. The same went for Hermione’s library, of course. Or all of the furniture in Harry’s home. Well, a man, even a world-famous wizard, had to eat.
Ron grinned. “Smart investments. Of course, my dear wife’s doing her best to bankrupt us by spending all our gold on more books.”
Hermione huffed but looked pleased. Ginny giggled, which made James laugh, even though the boy was too young to understand what they were talking about. Although Harry was sure he was old enough to start flying. But Ginny disagreed - as if you had to be able to walk to fly a toy broom!
“So, you’re still stuck with the Eulogy?” Ron said.
“Someone has to do it,” Harry said. “Might as well be me.”
“Grindelwald’s heir is the logical choice,” Hermione said. Her smug smile didn’t fool Harry, though - he knew she had wanted to do it, and use the opportunity to push the Magical World around a little more by using Grindelwald’s name, as she had done ever since the wizard had retreated into Nurmengard. And take hours to do it. Harry could really do without a day-by-day retelling of Grindelwald’s life.
Luna raised her hand. “I could do it!” She took a deep breath before anyone could stop her. “He conquered Europe twice, he freed its oppressed people, he defeated the Dark Lord and all his minions, he set things right in the world, and he did it all for love! Precious, free and pure love that transcended death even without the help of Necromancy!”
Just as with the rumour that if you spent a year meditating in one of Nurmengard’s cells, you would grow as wise as Grindelwald, Harry couldn’t figure out whether Luna was joking or serious. Either way, he was very glad that no one could overhear the group. Their reputation as the most dangerous wizards and witches in Europe would never recover if anyone actually knew what they talked about in private.
He shook his head. “Thank you, but I’ve got my eulogy ready.” Half of it was composed of shameless lies and the other half was speculation. In other words, it was a typical eulogy.
But Harry had long since learned that no one was interested in hearing the truth about Grindelwald. Especially where Harry’s ancestry was concerned.
If he ever found out who had started that rumour...
*****