A/N: Welcome to the first part of my should be two/three-shot. Huzzah. If you hadn't guessed, this fic is based upon the enchanted mirror Harry uses to communicate with Aberforth Dumbledore during DH. Yup. That one. Massive thanks to my beautiful wifey-cross-beta, our dancing days. Cassidy=perfect.
Let the games begin.
The first time it appears, he passes it off as a trick of the light.
He closes the creaking windows and bolts the frail door, though it hangs on its hinges, (breaking, broken, almost Harry himself) and when Ginny calls for him - her voice the rusty lilt of war - he closes his eyes and feigns sleep.
The mirror does not cross his mind for the rest of the day.
two.
He finds it again a few weeks later, maybe, caught beneath letters and documents and tainted ink. And perhaps it's curiosity that he looks into it, and perhaps it's not, but he sees his face the same as always, and if the furniture looks all wrong then maybe it was never right.
He drops it onto the hard wooden desk. The light flickers, catching the ribbons of drowsy autumn sunlight from the open window. When he looks again, all he can see is the tired face of a man lost in his delusional wanderings.
Harry Potter rubs at his eyes because - in the end - he is old and he is weary, and when he sees the flash of grey iris again, he knows it's not the light but himself, struggling beneath this fucking rise of insanity.
The silver eye blinks, muffles a cough, and is gone.
He pulls the duvet over his head.
three.
The third time comes around the following Saturday, and with it the realisation that he has but two options; he should contact St. Mungo's quite promptly, for he must be becoming quite insane, or two, he can (finally) look in the mirror and admit, this is real.
He isn't mad. He is haunted by the ghosts of people he knew, but didn't, because he was there for too little a time to know them at all.
Despite the former's dismal prospects, he finds himself hoping for it.
(He isn't sure what he'd do if he is right.)
He stares into the glass, but all he sees is a flash of Ginny's hair swishing behind him, and she laughs. Harry doesn't know why. She hasn't laughed for an age, it seems to him.
He turns around to ask her, but she is gone.
twelve.
The intervals between the sightings grow closer and closer, until one day they don't disappear when he throws it down onto the floor.
Blink, gone, blink, back.
It's that same day when he hears the first voice; so clear in the stuffy air of his office it is positively tangible. He cries out, alarmed, and Ginny runs to his aid, but he pushes her away before she can see.
She doesn't hear the voices, but like so many since the war, she just isn't listening.
"Is it working?"
It is a boy; about sixteen, maybe, with a mane of chocolate hair and amber eyes that glint with so much life. He has a heartbeat, and friends that breathe warm air, and joke, and laugh, and live.
Remus Lupin brings the glass closer to his face. Harry's end steams up with breath that isn't his own.
"Sirius, can you hear me?" He says, seemingly stuck between a state of not knowing whether to shout or to speak normally, and then, quite faintly, Harry hears someone say; "Well I am on the other side of the room, you knob. Maybe you should go outside."
Remus scrunches up his nose. "Why can't you?"
"Ah, my dear Remus, there are many a reason. For one; I'm clearly the more physically attractive friend," comes the voice from nowhere, and Remus laughs.
But then the mirror is falling away from him and Harry's breath is quickening, short gasps of suppressed excitement, and as suddenly as it appeared, the image is gone.
He stares at it for another three and a half hours, but the glass stays silent in his palm.
Sometimes, the silence is worse.
fourteen.
It happens twice more since that first time, but Harry misses them. The veil of sleep passes over him, dragging the tired man into that glorious state of semi-consciousness when all you can hear is the patter of rain upon the rooftops.
It's three days later - too early to distinguish between slumber and wake - the window pane streaky with rain, or tears, because Harry will never really know.
"Sirius. Orion. Black."
He sits up.
The boy in the mirror looks like Harry himself, but his eyes are hazel and his smile is too wide.
(His daddy doesn't see him looking on.)
Sirius must have replied, with Harry's own mirror, the man realises, because James is speaking again, and his image jolts up and down as he runs through a stone corridor that is all too familiar.
"She - I - Padfoot," his dad says, and his breaths come in short gasps. "Shit. Shiiiit."
Harry tries to stop himself from doing it, but he still he says, "What happened, Dad?" and his voice is so filled with excitement that it's as though he's a child again.
James replies.
"I'll fucking tell you what happened, mate. She kissed me. Lily motherhugging Evans kissed me. I - we were, I don't even know, we were just talking - and out of the blue she's just on top of me and my hand's in her hair and hers is under my shirt and -"
But he must have been interrupted because he stops, and smiles. Even through the glass Harry can sense the giddiness emanating from his body.
"I know, Pads. It's bloody mental. I ca - "
A flash of light.
The image cuts off, and Harry lets out a shout of frustration, almost tempted to smash this bleeding glass that has caused him such fucking grief.
He doesn't.
Ginny has learnt not to come anymore.
twenty one.
"Padfoot."
Harry jolts awake. The mirror is next to his ear.
It's his dad."Shit, Pads, where the fuck are you? It's full moon, if you hadn't realised. We need to be by the Hospital Wing; Moony's transforming soon. He's already down there. Poppy's losing her nut."
There is a pause.
James' face is illuminated beneath the unearthly glow of the Hospital Wing's lamps. He looks like a ghost, but - Harry contemplates - isn't that what truly he is?
He speaks again, and his voice is barely a whisper.
"You...fuck. Sirius, please tell me you are joking. Please - no, you... don't you dare fuck around with me."
His voice is rising to a shout; the deafening crescendo knives against Harry's eardrum, and the mirror is trembling in his grip. The man's vision is blurred momentarily.
He has learnt, over time, to expect that the sooner or later the image will crack, but it is always with a stab of pain that he places the glass down. Harry knows when it's coming. The edges will haze, the voices grow tinny in his ears.
He knows when it's coming, but it's still a shock.
He hears the words "Snape" and "willow" and an angry - though somewhat muffled - "shit."
It jerks out of focus.
The mirror does not re-activate for another 6 months.
twenty two.
Harry's life - or what is left of it - begins to heal.
The mirror is momentarily forgotten. New flesh grows over old scars, and, somewhere along the line, his head ceases its incessant pounding. He is healing. He's not Harry Potter, anymore, he's Harry, plain old Harry.
Just Harry.
The days that were once so long and monotonous seem to skip by in a haze of light. Ginny cooks meals worthy of her mother. Her eyes brighten and her body remembers how to laugh. She throws up in the sink one beautiful spring morning, and later that day, with excitement ablaze in her eyes, she tells him that she is pregnant.
The skin stretches over his eyelids and memories grow hazy in their rose tinted spotlight. He is - for the time being, at least - happy.
(Shouldn't he know? These things never last for long.)
One day, when the sun is bright over the lake and the grass is sticky with dew, he hears a noise.
"Sirius?"
And so it begins.
A/N: Reviews mean a book on the Marauders. Also - as a side note - feelings on Wolfstar? If yes...then yes. If no, no. Simples.