Chapter 10: Interlude - Lost and Found

Albus sat in his office, silently contemplating the letter in front of him.

It was dated March 27th, written in the hand of Charlie Weasley, and contained some very interesting information… Charlie had met Rose Potter – or at least, he insisted, had met a girl that looked very much like what the posters hung up at the Ministry of Magic predicted Rose would look like these days.

It wasn't like they could know for sure; nobody had actually seen the girl in five years.

Letting his eyes wander back to the Pensieve on his desk, Albus once again found himself thinking about the images swirling around in it. The girl Charlie had met was definitely at about the right age to be the missing Potter child: no older than six or seven, with a head of dark hair styled up into a plaited sort of updo curling around the back of her golden crown. She certainly looked familiar, but it was when she smiled – eyes lighting up in excitement as she paid avid attention to what Charlie had to say about dragons – that Albus was able to recognise her clearly:

Lily Potter's eyes, framed by a face that looked remarkably like what he would have imagined the late Dorea Potter to have looked like, some sixty years previously. The girl had James Potter's nose, his smile, his complexion…

There was no doubt about it: the girl in Charlie's memories was Rose Potter – she was the Girl Who Lived.

There didn't appear to be a scar on her forehead, but it was her. It had to be her. But what was Rose Potter doing in Europe? How had she ended up there, and why did Charlie's letter say the girl had been introduced to him as Her Royal Highness, Princess Hel of the Red Kingdom? It was entirely baffling, and more than a little bit alarming.

The Red Kingdom was an infamous place – firstly for being the largest completely magical settlement in all of Europe, and secondly for its extremely bloody history. Succession conflict after succession conflict had been fought for the throne, and the Crown Prince's own family had been massacred amidst one when he was still a boy.

He had been the only survivor that day.

And Albus meant the only, because not even the servants had been spared.

It was a dreadful story, and the thought of Rose being stuck in such a dire environment filled Albus with apprehension and fear. The poor girl was probably terrified, wherever she was. Was she safe? Would she continue to be safe for as long as they needed to negotiate for her safe return home?

Albus could only hope so.

Two short weeks after he had left Rose Potter in her aunt and uncle's care, Arabella Figg had handed in her first – and last – report to Albus. It had told him this: that the Durlseys no longer lived at Privet Drive.

When asked, the neighbours hadn't been much help. Apparently, the Dursleys had won the lottery, bragged about it loudly for a few days, and had then promptly packed up and left their house before Arabella could even arrive. But nobody could say where they had gone, much less where Rose was, because when Arabella had asked about her… nobody had even known the Dursleys had a niece.

Albus had immediately feared the worst.

But the Dursleys did not turn up dead. Instead, one of his spies had managed to track them down to a town in the countryside, where they apparently lived in perfect comfort. Albus had allowed himself a short moment of relief – believing that they really had only moved elsewhere, perhaps even to protect Rose – but as it turned out when Petunia Dursley shrieked and tried to slam the door in his face the moment he showed up at her doorstep, the Dursleys didn't have the girl.

They had never even seen her.

Two men had showed up at their doorstep one morning, one of them willing to adopt her, and the Dursleys had been more than happy to sign the paperwork and wash their hands of the whole affair. They had never received his letter, and flat out told him they didn't care. They didn't want the girl. Albus had eventually managed to persuade them otherwise, but the problems didn't stop there.

No, they had only just begun:

The Dursleys had been entirely truthful when they said they didn't know who had adopted their niece. They couldn't remember anything about the men who had visited them – not their names, not their looks, not their ages – nothing. A memory charm had clearly been placed on them, but as some gentle prodding had soon revealed, breaking it wouldn't do much good. The kidnapper had been thorough, his identity being kept secret by what looked and felt like a strong Fidelius Charm…

The Dursleys were therefore no help, and so Albus had been forced to start all over with the investigation.

To make matters worse, the Ministry had also found out about Rose Potter's disappearance, culminating in that disastrous leak to the Daily Prophet in September of that same year, when a ministry official had let it slip that Rose Potter had disappeared – that they had no idea where she was, or if she was even still alive. This blunder had put the Ministry under a lot of fire, who hadn't hesitated to throw him under the hippogriff as well, to buy themselves a moment of reprieve.

The pressure to find Rose had thereafter been ramped up to thirteen, rather than just eleven.

But even with the Ministry's help, Rose hadn't turned up anywhere they looked. She hadn't seemed to be anywhere in Britain – Muggle or Magical – and as it turned out now… that was because she hadn't been. Not in years.

She was in Europe, pretending to be a princess.

Hindsight was a funny thing, of course. Looking back now, Albus remembered reading about Rose in the international papers… without ever realising that it was her they'd been referring to. In fact – a little over five years ago, the Red Kingdom had announced that a new princess had been born to the Crown Prince. That she was officially recognised as next in line to inherit the throne. The child had already been a year old at the time of the announcement, but Albus hadn't paid much attention to that either: it wasn't all that uncommon for the older and more distinguished lineages to wait a while to publicly announce the births of their children, particularly if it had been a tumultuous pregnancy to begin with, and the healers weren't sure the baby would make it.

There had been no pictures in the papers though, and that should have been his first clue. A little further investigation into the matter had revealed at least a dozen more articles mentioning Rose, several of the more recent ones detailing her travels both within and outside Sicily, accompanied by a chaperone. There were never any pictures though, and now he knew why.

It finally clicked, much too late.

Rose Potter had been right there the whole time, and Albus had failed the poor girl in every way imaginable, by ignoring all of the legitimate leads he'd come across and discarding them as irrelevant…

Albus had failed her once, but he was determined to not fail her again: he would find Rose Potter and return her home safely. Then this whole nightmare would finally be over.

The headmaster was contemplating the possibility of having to teach Rose English (what if she'd never been taught it, growing up on the continent?), when a knock sounded on his door. Letting the thought go for the time being, Albus folded his hands on his desk, and called out softly:

"Come in."

…

Remus opened the door and all but barged into Dumbledore's office – he looked around frantically, half expecting to find Rose there already.

He had woken up this morning to something that hadn't happened since the war – a phoenix patronus, and Albus Dumbledore's voice filling his flat:

I found her.

Meet me at Hogwarts as soon as you can, the password is liquorice.

Hearing this, Remus had barely taken the time to get dressed before leaving his flat to disapparate, then using the fireplace at the Hog's Head to get to Hogwarts in short order. After that, he had climbed up several flights of stairs at a run.

He was out of breath, but this did nothing to quell his urgency:

"Is it true?" He asked, the palms of his hands slamming against Dumbledore's desk as he spoke with a boldness he wasn't usually known for, "You said you found her? Is she alright? Where… where is she?"

His former headmaster folded his hands, and although he didn't smile, there was a kind twinkle in his eye.

"I believe so, Remus. But please sit down. It's a rather strange story and I'm afraid I don't entirely understand it myself."

Five minutes and a dive into Dumbledore's Pensieve later, Remus sagged into his chair. Pain, relief, confusion, grief – they all flashed by in quick succession, so muddled and tangled up in each other that they all seemed to be one and the same.

It was Rosie.

Itty bitty Rose, and she was alive.

She looked well.

An impossible weight pressed down on him as he let this thought sink in, but at the same time he felt lighter than he had in years.

Rose was alive. She was well.

She was all grown up and had proper interests now – she liked dragons.

She was visiting dragons. In Romania.

But why Romania?

He didn't understand at all.

"Why there?" He asked hoarsely, looking up at Dumbledore, "What is she doing in Romania? How did she get there?"

Had she been there all along? Had they failed her so badly, they'd been looking for her in the wrong place?

But Dumbledore had no answers – he only shook his head.

"I don't know." He admitted, "She doesn't live in Romania, I can tell you that much – Charlie said they were only visiting."

They…?

Yes. Yes, there had been someone with her, hadn't there? A man with blond hair, who'd followed Charlie and Rose around at a more leisurely pace – Remus had never seen a human move quite that way. With the absolute confidence of a large predator.

Remus hadn't paid the man a lot of attention, much more interested in watching Rose, but just thinking about him sent a shiver down his spine.

Who had that man been?

Why was he with Rose?

"Do you know much about the Red Kingdom, Remus?"

"The Red Kingdom?" He gave Dumbledore a searching look, "As much as anyone does, I suppose. What does that have to do with Rose?"

"Everything, I'm afraid. The girl you saw – the one Charlie Weasley was showing around in his memories – she wasn't introduced to him as Rose Potter. She was introduced to him as Princess Hel of the Red Kingdom-"

Princess…?

What…?

"-also known as the daughter of the current Crown Prince. I can only assume that was the man who'd been accompanying her."

Crown Prince?

But that couldn't-

How?

Since when?!

Remus thought he'd been confused before, but his earlier confusion didn't even hold a candle to whatever this was.

It didn't make any sense; Rose, a princess of the Red Kingdom? Surely someone would have noticed if the Red Kingdom stole a baby – stole Rose Potter, the most well-known baby in the entire country – and started trying to pass her off as one of their royals!

And why would they do that in the first place?!

But thinking about the memories again – and trying not to think too hard about how wrong and invasive it was to view someone else's memories without their explicit permission in the first place – Remus fell silent.

He didn't like it, but now another, more plausible suspicion was taking over – what if they were wrong? What if it wasn't Rose after all? It wasn't like they knew for sure what she might look like nowadays; all they had were guesses – posters depicting what she might look like, not what she actually did look like.

Could the girl be somebody else?

"I didn't see a scar." He said finally, glancing back up at Dumbledore. This was perhaps the most damning piece of evidence, "I heard there was one? From… from when-"

But he couldn't bring himself to say it.

Dumbledore nodded.

"I suppose there is always a possibility. But scars can be hidden – it wouldn't be impossible to pull off." Remus envied Dumbledore's calmness; he was all up in knots and didn't know what to think – was it Rose? Did Princess Hel only look like Rose and was this just a weird coincidence? But Albus remained calm, and continued talking. Walked him through the evidence.

And Dumbledore was right – it was fishy.

Princess Hel's existence had been made public only a few months after Rose went missing, her aunt and uncle had had their memories modified, and there really was very little information to be found about the girl.

Entirely no pictures.

No mention of a mother, either.

But for her to have been kidnapped…?

Kidnapped by some country's royal family, who then went on and made the kidnapped child… a princess? Absurd. It all sounded like a crazy conspiracy theory. Something the Quibbler would come up with.

But if Dumbledore thought it was true…

… If Dumbledore thought it was true, then it had to be.

"All these years we've been looking for Rose, and she's been in Europe?" Remus shook his head, the whole thing still sounding surreal, "But why, Dumbledore? I don't understand. What could the Red Kingdom want with Rose? How did they even find her?"

"I don't know." The old headmaster admitted gravely, but when he looked up, there was still that twinkle in his eye, "I don't know the answer to that, but that's what I'd like you to find out."

A/N: A short interlude, as promised! Or at least relatively short, as I still ended up writing more than 2k words. Oh well.

Thank you all for reading, and please leave a review to let me know your thoughts!