Chapter Two
Sirius stood across the street from The Leaky Cauldron. He hadn't been inside the establishment since he was twenty-one years old. He wasn't eager to return there today. Last time he'd been here, he and James had a few pints to toast the Potters going into hiding, while Lily was home with a napping Harry and Remus and Wormtail were off on one of Dumbledore's assignments. The next time he'd seen his best friend, James was laying dead but not yet cold in the ruins of the house that Sirius had never been allowed to see before it had been comprised.
There were no happy memories here.
So why was he going in? For he would, eventually, when he found the courage. Remus was in there, waiting for him. He was always early for everything, so he'd be in there by now. He was probably sipping a glass of water and passing the time by wondering if Sirius would even show up. Remus had never been much of a drinker, he had too much self-control—had practically worshiped self-control. After hearing he'd quit his job out of fear of endangering the kiddies at the school, Sirius knew Remus hadn't changed much.
But why should he do this? It couldn't only be because Harry was planning to pound his arse into the ground if he didn't—as he knew Harry could do if he really wanted to. No, he needed his own reasons. But why should he be so worried? It turned out that neither of them was the traitor that had gotten the Potters killed, so what was the problem?
It was Harry. He was angry that Remus hadn't saved the boy from the Dursleys. But he was afraid that Remus would be angry with him for doing so without talking to him, as well. He had no real justification for that, other than cowardice. He could have found and talked to his old friend at any time. He hadn't. He wasn't sure he could explain why, not without a lot of grief, and it would be awfully useless to go in there without an explanation.
"Oh, go on," he said to himself impatiently, stepping off the curb and preparing to cross the street. "You used to be such a self-important little berk, and now you're dithering around like a—"
A car horn blared at him, and he leapt forward to avoid being struck.
"Get out of the road!" the driver roared, shaking a fist out the window.
"Sod off!" Sirius shouted back, then winced. He was the one walking out into traffic because he was distracted. He was at fault, and here he was picking a fight? He shook his head, and gave the man in the car an apologetic inclination of his head. Maybe it was best to go in with the subdued attitude he couldn't shake, not a constructed swagger. Maybe it would help to show Remus that he had changed a great deal since they'd last seen each other, not try to conjure up the youthful persona he no longer resembled.
He pushed open the door and took a deep breath. Tom, he of the head like a dried walnut, was still behind the bar, just like he had been for the past fifteen years. Sirius doubted he'd remember the black-haired youth who'd raised his glass to what turned out to be a death trap, but it still took him a moment to remember that he didn't even look like that anymore. Merlin, but being in England was making him jumpy.
He looked around, casting his eyes over the entire interior of the pub, and frowned. Maybe Remus wasn't here yet. Then his eyes returned to the table in the smoky, dark recesses of the far corner, where sat a man in patched robes. His longish brown hair, gone gray at the temples, framed a narrow and tired face with an obvious scar on the right cheek below the eye. It was him. He looked sickly and older than his thirty-five years, which inexplicably made Sirius angry, but he tempered it quickly. Sirius thought of all the many transformations Remus had been through the last fourteen years, without his friends to help him and hold him back. He had every right to look that way. Sirius didn't look like any spring chicken, either.
Sirius approached cautiously, and Remus watched him come with eyes that told him nothing. Remus had always been good at maintaining a calm façade, no matter what was going on inside him. He did briefly look away, to signal the bartender, who hurried over with a short glass in each hand. Remus gestured to the empty chair at the table, and Sirius sat down. Before he could speak a word, the glasses—smoking thickly—were set down before them.
Sirius stared at something he hadn't seen a hint of in years. "That's not . . ."
"Rochester's Gold Label," supplied Tom, sounding proud.
"I thought you might like it," Remus said, sounding neutral in front of the stranger but telling Sirius exactly what he needed to know. He heard what Remus couldn't say while Tom was standing there. Remus remembered the firewhiskey he used to order as a special treat. I remember everything, and I want to make it right.
Despite this, Sirius' nerves were shot to hell, and he downed the drink in one go. He let his breath out explosively, having forgotten just how good the stuff was. "Ah, thank you," he sighed. It settled in his stomach like the warm glow of heaven.
"I'll have a pint of bitter," he told Tom, who nodded and hurried off again, knowing when he wasn't wanted.
Remus toyed with his glass, somehow managing to look both amused and stern. He'd perfected that look early on in life. Sirius couldn't count the number of times he'd been the recipient of it.
"I'm not looking to go out on a bender, you know," he said calmly.
"Neither am I."
Remus raised an eyebrow.
"Not that I need to explain myself to you," Sirius said sharply, "but this will be it for me. I have a kid waiting for me at home who, despite knowing a good hangover cure and being no stranger to the condition, will nevertheless be bloody upset if I show up pissed, since he was the one who made me call you."
And that was all the invitation the conversation needed. Remus wasn't even looking at his glass, the smoke of which was starting to dissipate as he nervously played his fingers over the rim.
"Harry . . . how is he?" he asked, his voice cagey and a little hoarse.
Sirius shrugged, and paused for a moment to exchange his empty glass for the full pint glass being placed before him. He waited until they were very thoroughly alone in their dark corner before he answered.
"Let's call him Evan while we're here, please."
Remus looked like he wanted to respond, opening his mouth, but he just nodded sharply.
"Either way, he's great. Kind of going stir-crazy, pretty much locked up in the house, but then, so am I."
"If you want to be believable, you ought to be seen," Remus said soberly. "As someone who just moved here, you ought to be getting out, not going into hiding."
Sirius toyed with his drink, but didn't pick it up. "We're staying under the radar as much as possible, but we are making a very public shopping trip to Diagon Alley for his school supplies next week."
"You're staying under . . . what?"
Sirius grinned. It wasn't often that someone could confuse Remus Lupin. "Sorry. Just means keeping a low profile. It's a Muggle expression. I've got a million of 'em, most from when we lived in America."
Remus' face was nearly comical. "Where have you been?"
Sirius sighed deeply and crackled his knuckles in dramatic preparation. This could take a while.
"We went to New York, but we only spent a few weeks there deciding where to go next. We spent over a year in Wyoming, in a little desert town called White Valley that was not exactly a wizard town but did know about magic. Let's see . . . several months in Kyoto, Japan, where Evan spent most of the time learning Buddhist meditation techniques and practicing aikido, while I spent most of it with hookers. A year in Rio de Janeiro, in Brazil. I was working there, and Evan was going to a Muggle school." He tried to keep his voice level, but the faces of his Brazilian "family" swam to the surface of his mind, as they always did when he thought about living there. "Then another year in South Africa, in a little wizard town all populated by the descendants of white colonists, we hardly ever saw true Africans. Evan was getting rather unprofessionally tutored by a crappy Dutch teacher and I was going crazy. Then there were several months in another wizarding village in Austria, not far from Salzburg, where Evan got some advanced Potions training and I . . ." He smiled, fleetingly. "Organized a network of werewolves and kept the locals safe from a nest of vampires. Most recently and for about a year, Brisbane, like we've been telling everybody, where Evan decided to try his hand at being a Muggle eighteen-year-old and I taught Defense coursework to twelve and thirteen year old boys."
Remus was gaping at him. "I was expecting it to be a simple question," he said weakly. "You know, 'the wizarding underground of Chicago,' or something."
Sirius snorted at the very idea. "We stayed on the move."
"Wasn't it hard for Ha—Evan to have to leave his friends all the time to hare around the world?"
Sirius shrugged, feeling guilty, which led to irrational anger. "He never really had any. We had some friends in Brazil. Good friends. He thought we should stay there, but it was . . . never mind. And he had this girl in Australia, but he knew he shouldn't have gotten involved with her."
Remus appeared to realize there was much more to it that he wasn't allowed to ask about, at least not yet. He abruptly downed his drink, making a face that implied he was drinking poison.
"Urk. Give me a good cider any day," he muttered. Then he looked Sirius directly in the eyes for the first time this whole meeting. "I didn't come here just to catch up. I came to find out . . ." So calm up till now, just as Sirius remembered him, Remus shocked him when he abruptly turned on the angry rout, leaning on the table and eyes shooting fire. "How could you do that? How could you just leave and let everyone think Evan was dead? And that you were a murderer? Scratch that, you've always had the balls for it, that answers the 'how.' Why would you?"
Sirius, maybe just taking his cue from Remus, maybe just to release the left-over feelings he hadn't gotten out with Dumbledore, followed him into anger. It was only too easy, especially for men who'd been so close as children and adolescents.
"It's pretty easy," he hissed. "Because nobody else would."
"What is that supposed to mean?"
"Didn't you ever see where he lived?"
"No," Remus answered, short and without explanation.
"The Dursleys hated him, they hated everything he stood for. They treated him like dog shit on their shoes. They abused him. I saw them starve him and lock him up with my own eyes."
Remus looked stunned. "Locked him up?" he muttered.
"James and Lily were your friends as well, Remus. You ought to have been there. You ought to have taken him out of there long before I got free and did it. He'd already lost his parents, there he was losing his humanity—I couldn't allow it." Sirius was nearly panting with anger, and he clamped one very firm hand on Remus' wiry forearm. Remus grunted in surprise and tried to pull back, but Sirius gripped him tight, digging into his pocket with his other hand and tossing a few coins on the table. "We need someplace more private," he said roughly, and then a cracking noise, horrendously loud in the enclosed space, announced to the pub that the two had departed.
Remus jerked his arm away as soon as they had landed firmly on the ground at their destination—the hallway of Sirius' house.
"Where are we?" he demanded roughly.
Sirius didn't answer, too preoccupied with closing the curtains over his mother's shrieking portrait. "Should have known I'd wake her," he grunted in staccato, yanking at the curtains with each word. "Oh, do shut up, you ugly hag," he snapped as she wailed about blood traitors and vermin.
"What in Merlin's—oh, ugh, it's your mother."
"Remember her, do you?"
"Not really. But the portrait does sound very like that Howler she sent you when you moved in with the Potters. This is the old family place, is it?" he asked with interest, anger momentarily forgotten as he looked around.
Sirius grimaced at the sight. They'd gotten rid of the dust, but little else. There was still a troll's leg full of musty, moth-eaten umbrellas next to them that he'd nearly tripped over when they arrived. He decided viciously that it would be the first thing to go when he and Harry got to work.
"What are we doing here?"
"Talking. Without an audience."
"Right. I believe it was your turn?" Remus said sharply.
Sirius hardly thought the hallway was the place, and hoped that Harry was up in his room listening to music or something.
"All I was saying was that Harry was being abused and neglected by the only family he even knew he had, and no son of James and Lily was going to live like that if I could help it." The finish was a little lame, after the interruption. Maybe he should have taken his chances at the Leaky Cauldron.
"I think you were saying more than that."
Sirius clenched his teeth in an effort not to bare them and growled. "You're right. I was accusing you of being just as bad by ignoring the situation. You could have done something about it."
"Oh?" Remus said, his eyebrow up. "Like what? Petition the Ministry to give me care of a little boy? Me, the werewolf? Me, complicit in the greatest treachery of the war? You think they would have given Harry to me?"
"You could have tried."
"And what did I have to offer?" Remus snarled—in his anger, he sounded just as much like a wolf as a man, reminding Sirius uneasily of the transformation he'd witnessed so many times. "I didn't even have the assurance I would have a roof over my head from month to month. We all joked about it when we were kids, Sirius, but being a werewolf is no picnic. Do you have any idea how hard it is for me to find work, to put food on the table? I would never bring a child into a home like that. I would never bring a child into my home at all. I simply can't take that risk."
Sirius raked him with the most scathing look he could muster—which was decently scathing, all things considered. "You haven't changed at all, have you? Still hiding behind your condition to cover up your lack of courage."
"Courage isn't my problem!" Remus shouted, his face red with fury, making the white scar under his eye stand out even more. "I don't have a problem! This is about the fact that you've never had one ounce of common sense! You could have talked to me, Sirius! I would have listened to you if you'd come to me and told me the truth, even if you'd brought Harry with you. I would have believed you. I would have helped," he finished, his voice much quieter but sounding ragged and tired. "I would have helped you, if I'd known."
Was he trying to convince Sirius, or himself?
"Why would I seek you out?" Sirius asked in disbelief. "I didn't see you making any Sunday visits to ask me for my side of the story. I didn't see any reason to explain myself to someone who didn't care."
"Didn't care?" Remus hissed out, pain flashing in his eyes, a deep, unspeakable pain that brought shame to Sirius. "As if I could avoid caring, caring so much it hurt! What was I supposed to do, Sirius? By all reports, you'd gone completely starkers and murdered two of your three best friends, along with a whole street full of Muggles. You were expecting me to come see you, to watch you raving like a madman, and risk getting thrown in beside you as an accomplice?"
"No," Sirius said, changing tactics, lowering his voice. "I was too busy trying to hang onto my sanity to worry about whether anybody else thought it was working. And then, when I was out, Harry was the only thing that mattered to me. I had to see him safe. That was what was important. I wanted to find Wormtail, of course. Wanted it so bad I could taste it. But after all, what would James have wanted from me? Revenge, or a home for his son? I had to make the choice, so I did. And I chose right, dammit. Wormtail could wait, you could wait, but Harry needed to be loved before he lost the ability to believe it could happen. I got him away from those horrible people, I gave him a home, and I loved him so much I forgot how I'd lived before I took him."
Remus was staring at him. Sirius knew he'd stopped shouting, stopped sounding the least bit angry at all, and had reverted to something entirely different. Was he confessing? Perhaps he was. Confessing that he loved his godson didn't seem like such a bad thing.
"So you do? Love him?"
Sirius rubbed his face in his hands. "You sound surprised."
"I never thought . . ."
"He's James' son, Moony." He hadn't meant to use the comfortable old nickname, but there it was and there was no taking it back. Maybe he didn't want to take it back. "I had to make it up to James, and I tried so hard to raise Harry right, but after a while, it stopped being about that. I love him for himself, not just who his father was."
Remus didn't seem to know how to answer that. But that was all right, because he didn't have to, someone else did.
"That's good to hear," a casual voice said from Sirius' left and Remus' right. They both whipped their heads around to see Harry leaning against the doorjamb of the exercise room, wearing loose pants and nothing else, a bow staff clutched lightly in one hand and sweat shining along his hairline. "I was so worried that you were only pretending to care about me," he said in obvious sarcasm, giving Sirius a cheeky grin.
"I thought you were upstairs," Sirius said slowly.
"But I'm not," Harry replied, sounding almost cheerful. "What happened to The Leaky Cauldron?"
Sirius shrugged, smiling lopsidedly at Harry's off-beat sense of humour that could find this whole thing so amusing and turn it around like this. "We were making far too much noise for a Saturday afternoon."
"Merlin," Remus choked out. He was staring at Harry, his eyes drinking him in. Sirius didn't blame him. Despite the things they'd chosen to hide in his appearance, it was so obvious to him, as it was obvious to Remus. Every inch of Harry was practically screaming, "I am James Potter's son."
Remus shook his head in wonderment. "It's amazing. He even has James' shape, his height . . ."
"Always did envy Prongs these," Sirius said, slapping his hand affectionately against Harry's defined abdominal muscles.
Remus smirked a bit. "Didn't we all. You're looking right fit there, Harry."
Harry shrugged. "I try." He was grinning comfortably.
This was Harry. All cool appeal and sardonic wit, and it was just like him to be completely unembarrassed about being half-naked and eavesdropping on two people arguing. Remus seemed to have forgotten that he was uncomfortable and upset, and was just looking at Harry like he couldn't believe his eyes.
"Of course, I looked almost as good in my day," Sirius sighed.
"Because you've got so much to complain about when you look in the mirror now." Harry rolled his eyes. "Don't try to play the old man card. You nearly killed me in practice yesterday."
"Practice?" Remus queried.
"I shouldn't have expected you to get past the fighting and on to talking about hobbies and interests yet, hmm?" Harry mused.
"I was hoping to save that for the next argument we have in front of twenty people."
Remus shook his head in disbelief. "So . . . we're not having an argument anymore, then. Well." Still looking a bit stricken, he put out his hand toward Harry. "It's wonderful to meet you, Harry."
Harry accepted the hand and shook it. "You as well, Mr. Lupin."
Remus flinched. "I could take Professor Lupin from the students, but I can't have you calling me that. Just Remus."
Harry shrugged. "All right." He finally straightened up, rising from his casual stance against the wall to squeeze between the two men. "I'm going to get a quick shower. You want me to put something together for tea time?"
Sirius shook his head. "I'll have Kreacher do it."
He knew that would net him a concerned look from Harry, but Harry just went upstairs wordlessly. Maybe he thought that having Remus around would keep the peace between him and the house elf. He was probably right, Sirius thought with amusement; Remus had always been the calming presence when he was going to fight with someone. It made their argument just now feel even more strange—when had he actually heard Moony yelling at anyone?
"You staying for tea, Moony?"
"If you think I can survive here for that long," he said, suppressing a shudder as he followed Sirius to the kitchen. "How do you live here?"
"We're going to get started cleaning it up tomorrow. I've offered it to Dumbledore as headquarters for the Order, so we have to get it in shape."
"Kitchen doesn't need any work, though." Remus sounded impressed as they entered that haven of order and light.
"Harry and Kreacher spent two days in here. It's the only room in the house we bother with, right now. All the other rooms are full of my parents' old rubbish, dirt, and I think we've got a doxy infestation upstairs. I can't guarantee there aren't a few other creatures lurking somewhere."
Sirius was getting out dishes and rummaging in the pantry to take stock of what was available. Kreacher appeared as if by magic in the doorway of the room.
"Master desires tea now?" he croaked out.
Sirius, in deference to Harry's (heretofore unsuspected) delicate sensibilities, decided to be nice. "I'll get it. Thank you, Kreacher."
The house elf's bulbous eyes seemed stunned, after what he'd been getting from Sirius so far. Sirius tried to feel bad about it, and couldn't. Kreacher was a disrespectful and rotten old thing, no matter how nicely you dressed him up or how often you were polite to him.
"Master will let me do my duty, of course he will," he muttered, not to be outdone, slinking into the room and trying to crowd Sirius away from the pantry. "I will serve tea to Master and his friends, like a good house elf must."
"Great, then," Sirius said, exasperated, and gestured for Remus to have a seat at the kitchen table. He joined him, explaining how they'd found this table in a junk shop and thought it was perfect after it had been scrubbed down.
Then they sat there in silence. Maybe they weren't actively arguing, but Sirius didn't think they'd adequately resolved any of the issues that they'd been shouting about. He didn't know what questions to ask, whether it would be the right or wrong thing to simply start asking what Remus did for work or if he was seeing anyone. Once, long ago, they'd known everything about each other and not talking when they didn't have anything to say was a comfortable and natural thing. They'd allowed the suspicions of war to strip them of that familiarity. It was a mark of how far apart they'd gone, Sirius thought, that being quiet was creating such tension, when they used to be able to sit around for hours just studying and maybe planning some new bit of mischief. Kreacher was banging things around and muttering too softly to be understood, but it didn't really help.
Merlin, Harry, get down here, he thought plaintively. Maybe Harry would break his own rules, read Sirius' mind from upstairs, and hear him. Right, of course he will . . .
"So, erm, obviously you're not working at the school anymore," Sirius said, too cheerfully, "What is it you're doing now?" He winced.
But Remus smiled, obviously pleased with the question. "Collecting rare books for a Muggle."
"Oh," Sirius said, not having the faintest idea what that would entail. "And how is that going?"
"Very well," Remus said, lacing his fingers together and looking devilish. "He tells me what he wants and I track it down for him. I'm very mysterious about my methods, for obvious reasons. The other day, I delivered him a book he's been searching for going on three years, and he says, 'What you do is magic!' I had to bite my tongue to resist the impulse to say, 'Well, yeah,' like some cocky teenager. The students had far too great an influence on me when I was teaching."
Sirius chuckled. "What sort of thing do you use to find them?" Not an idle question; this line of work sounded truly fascinating.
"It's actually not so hard as it sounds," he admitted, losing the devilish look. "Many times, a book he can't find is simply in the possession of a wizard or witch, so I have my contacts in our world. Sometimes I have to use locator spells. There was one book he was looking for about six months ago that I couldn't find anywhere among private owners or the usual large collections, and then I was at Hogwarts to speak to the headmaster about an unrelated matter and I found it in the school library!"
Harry's feet thumped on the stairs, and Sirius was proud to realize that while Harry was certainly welcome, he no longer needed to be rescued. Harry poked his head in and said, "Am I interrupting?"
"Not at all, we're talking about work."
Remus was obliged to begin his explanation again, and Harry—as Sirius had suspected he would be—was intrigued by the occupation and had plenty of questions about it. Remus was very nearly a wizard treasure hunter.
"Aren't you going to have any tea?" was the only interruption Sirius made, when he realized Harry was not having any of the food or drink Kreacher laid out on the table for them.
Harry looked over at him, breaking the flow of conversation and said, "After all that coffee this morning? Are you kidding?" and returned his attention to the story Remus was telling him about the rather frightening negotiations carried out over a rare book in the possession of a man who'd been jailed for illegal vampire hunting. Sirius had to admit, it was a good story, but he wasn't used to Moony of all people being more interesting than he was. He'd obviously gone and become far too stable a father figure.
Well, not many of those would have followed the kid around the world and let him do basically whatever the hell he wanted for six years so long as he promised to keep up with his studies. Maybe he wasn't turning into a stale old man just yet.
-o-o-o-
"So, we've got my required books and ink and replenished my Potions kit. Great. Any chance we could get my wand now?"
Sirius sighed through his nose and gave Remus a meaningful look.
Harry just raised an eyebrow at them. He'd like to see how they took almost two months with no wand of their own, forced to borrow their godfather's to clean the house and simply unable to do other magic—unless one counted Animagus transformation, which was what had been keeping Harry sane through the boredom. After a sporadic history of completing the transformation, in which he could have counted the number of times he'd done it on his hands, he'd taken to becoming an owl almost every night at dusk. He had to get out of the house for a while and clear his head of the mouldy, depressing atmosphere. He came back in the wee hours of the morning, and slept until nearly noon. He couldn't wait to get to Hogwarts, just so he'd have something requiring his time and attention during the day other than trying to find the motivation to clean something.
Of course, if he'd had a wand, he could have been practicing his spellwork in preparation for his first year in a real wizarding school. But no, it had to wait until their public appearance as father and son.
"Oh, all right," Sirius said slowly. "If we must."
Harry was not amused. Sirius gave him an elbow in the ribs and ruffled his hair.
"Aw, come on, Evan, the moody teenager thing doesn't become you."
Harry had to admit that he was right (the moody teenager thing didn't really become anybody) and also he was amused by the way Remus' eyes still looked surprised every time Sirius called him Evan. They'd gotten so used to it that Harry had begun to feel that Evan Rivers was a real person and he was just as much Evan as he was Harry. Maybe that was a good thing, maybe it wasn't, but either way, he just wanted his damned wand already.
"Okay, okay," he relented, but he scowled and he ran his hands through his hair in a fruitless attempt to tame it after Sirius' attention. Why people always did that, he didn't know. "Where are we going?"
"Ollivander's," Remus answered before Sirius could. "There's no better wandmaker in the world."
Harry could have debated that point, but thought such loyalty from Remus was derived from real skill on the part of Mr. Ollivander, so he was content to see what the man had to offer. He was also strangely comfortable with how quickly Remus had become a part of their lives. Last week, they hadn't known each other; this week Remus was spending all day with them shopping for school supplies.
He felt it as soon as they entered the shop. This was one of those fateful moments he'd been afraid of. Suddenly, despite being happy that Sirius was reestablishing his friendship with Remus, he wished the other man weren't here. Something deeply personal and important was about to happen, and he wished it could happen in privacy. Even letting Sirius see it was stretching it. But he wasn't afraid. He was excited. A thrill ran up his spine, and goose pimples raised on his arms. An old man with strangely luminous eyes stood there looking at him, his face reflecting the same feeling going through Harry—anticipation with a touch of anxiety.
"We're here for a wand," Sirius said, his voice sounding too loud in the hush of the shop. Harry winced. It seemed inappropriate, somehow. "I'm John Rivers, the new professor at Hogwarts, and this is my boy, Evan . . ." He trailed off to turn and gesture Harry forward, but then he didn't speak again. He frowned at the expression with which Mr. Ollivander was watching Harry's approach.
"And I think you know which one," Harry said quietly.
The man blinked and seemed to start at being addressed by him. "Yes, of course," he said automatically. "Happy to help." He squinted at Harry. "Evan, was it?"
"Evan Rivers," he said. His eyes blinked over the brown contact lenses. He tilted his head just slightly to one side to be sure his fringe was adequately covering his forehead—which had makeup on it to begin with, but there was safety in numbers, even numbers of disguises.
"Well, well," the man said, rubbing his hands together with a touch too much enthusiasm. "Let's get to work." He retreated to the shelves and began selecting a few boxes from the precarious stacks of boxes that covered every inch of the shop. He handed them off to Remus and Sirius, encouraging Harry to try each one in turn. Remus and Sirius didn't argue about being pressed into service as shop boys, simply handing Harry a new one as he held each and quietly shook his head and discarded it to one side. Nothing was feeling right. There were a few that felt just as well as the one he'd gotten in Brazil, with the Iara hair core. But that one had never been entirely right for him, either, had it? Good enough for government work, but not what he'd imagined after hearing the way Sirius had described finding the perfect wand.
Finally, Mr. Ollivander approached him with one last box in his hands. He didn't hand it off to either of the other two men. He walked toward Harry himself, seeming the slightest bit short of breath. Harry suddenly wanted to run. He wanted to leave the shop and go back to Australia to live with Anna and to never look back. Instead, he took the box, removed the lid, and pulled the wand out, moving slowly and smoothly as if in a dream. This was the one. The wand that fit into his hand as though Ollivander had made it specifically for him, though the date written on the box proved it had been crafted before he'd ever been born.
"I'll take it," he said, his voice sounding light and carefree and maybe a little confused.
Mr. Ollivander wasn't fooled. "I will tell no one, you can trust me."
"Tell them what?" Harry asked, his bored Australian drawl his only defence against those entirely too-sharp eyes.
"That wand contains a phoenix feather at its core," the man began.
"I can see that," Harry said, looking pointedly at the writing on the box.
"That particular phoenix only gave one other feather for wand-crafting. That other feather resided in the wand of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named."
Harry tried to continue to look careless. "I've heard of him. Maybe he and I have something in common," he cracked, giving Sirius a crooked grin. "If you get me this one, I'll try not to murder everyone in their beds, Dad."
Sirius stood stiff as a poker, but he returned Harry's smile. "If that's the one you want," he said. It was a question. A powerful question.
"It is," Harry said, still calm. At this point, it didn't really surprise him, anyway. Why shouldn't he and Voldemort have matching wands? This whole thing had seemed so inevitable since the night of his arrival in England, he might as well stop trying so hard to fight it. At that thought, his back stiffened. Don't you dare think that way. This is your choice. It is always your choice.
"Yeah, this one," he said, meeting Mr. Ollivander's eyes again. "I will trust you," he said in a more sober voice. His eyes completed the thought without him saying it out loud. Don't make me regret it.
A/N: I know this chapter's a few hours early, but I'm pretty sure I won't get any complaints. I'm leaving on a camping trip first thing in the morning, so I won't have time to post it then. I just have to say, after getting such a flood of reviews already, that you guys are awesome, and I can't wait to share the rest of this story with you.
EDITED A FEW HOURS AFTER POSTING TO INCLUDE THIS:
Exciting news! Someone has nominated The Wise One: Book One: Becoming for a Quibbler Award! This is a new site, check it out at quibbler dot this-paradise dot com. (That you should vote for me while you happen to be browsing their site goes without saying.)
