Chapter 7: Devastated
James Potter took his anger out on the ground and steps and stones, not caring that his bruised ribs and jaw ached with the impact. He wanted to feel the pain. The pain meant he was alive and not some magically reanimated corpse as that git Harry and his idiot friend would have him believe. He was not dead; he was as alive as anyone. He felt the stones with his hand and knew he wasn't a ghost.
Ghosts can't feel anything. Ghosts can't touch anything.
He stomped up to the Gryffindor tower and climbed in through the portrait hole. The common room was bustling as it always was. Students were clamoring for the good chairs by the fire or arguing over what their notes read. He had been attending Hogwarts for years and it was always the same, but for the first time he didn't recognize a single face. He saw a hint of AJ Solorio in one girl's face and a bit of Tildy Moorehead in another, but there was no one person that looked completely right. Where were all the Gryffindors he knew?
James raced up to his dorm and found it, too, was all wrong. There were posters and pictures spell-o-taped to the stone walls of people he didn't know and familiar Quidditch teams were filled with players he had never heard of. He spotted the name H. Potter on a trunk and threw the wards off it with a hard wave of his wand. His fierce and angry fingers dug through the trunk; he didn't know what he was looking for, but he would find it even if he had to destroy everything that prat owned.
He found a photo album and tore into it. That git said James was his dad, but they were the same age. It was the most ridiculous thing he'd ever heard. But he saw the photos in the album and he was there with Evans, older and not quite as cocky, but it was definitely him.
"Impossible," James muttered. He stowed the album under his arm and ran down the stairs to the common room. He knew there was no one he could talk to there, but there were people, loving and kind people, who would be able to give him answers. He pushed through to the fire, ignoring the cries and calls and people addressing him as 'Harry.' He took a fistful of powder from the jar on the mantle and threw it into the flames.
"Godric's Hollow," he said and disappeared into the green flames.
"What's with Harry?" Seamus asked. Neville shrugged and Lily looked confused.
oOo
The rain pelted down on him, making James wet and cold as well as angry. He should have arrived in the fire of his parents' house, but instead he came to the grate of The Lamb and Flag, the nearby pub. There were enough people drinking that no one noticed him in the fire, and he had run from the pub before anyone drew attention to him.
He was still running. His house was just ahead on the left and he wanted to get inside and out of the rain. Without looking where he was going, the boy ran down the lane toward his house. There should have been lights up ahead to guide him, but it was dark. He glanced up and skidded to a stop on the wet pavement.
His home was unrecognizable. The garden was overgrown in a way his mother would never have allowed. Ivy had overtaken the cottage and claimed the once polished windows. The roof… the roof was missing from half the house, blown outward by a curse. He rushed forward to find his parents, though he knew that the explosion would have killed anyone in the room. He also knew it had happened quite some time ago.
A sign rose from the ground as he grabbed the gate. It was covered in respectful vandalism offering encouragement to Harry. James sneered but read the sign anyway.
On this spot, on the night of 31 October 1981,
Lily and James Potter lost their lives.
Their son, Harry, remains the only wizard
ever to have survived the Killing Curse.
James stopped. He couldn't keep reading. He was dead. But it was only 1976. He was only sixteen years old. He didn't have a wife or a son. He was alive, dammit. What the hell was wrong with the world?
He turned and ran to the kissing gate and the cemetery beyond, searching through the stones. He found the ones he sought, his parents' graves. The single stone held both their names, Charlus and Phinella Potter; they died a year after he would be leaving Hogwarts. He turned his eyes away, too horrified to believe it.
Just a few rows over he also found his own stone, with Lily's name carved beside his. He wanted to say that it was a mistake, that Evans hated him and would never agree to marry him, that it was some other James Potter who happened to love a woman names Lily. But the date of birth was his, twenty-seventh of March 1960. He couldn't hold back the wave of sickness and dove behind a grave to vomit. It was wrong. It was all wrong.
The taste of sick lingered in his mouth as he went back to his grave. It helped somehow. He was cold and sore and angry and the taste of vomit completed the wretched circle. He stared at his grave and Lily's beside it. He had fought for years to get her attention, and apparently he would get it. That seemed a small consolation for dying so soon, for leaving a son in the world.
"'The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death'," James read the epitaph with something resembling a laugh. He was standing over his own grave. If that wasn't defeating death, what was? "Well, they got that part right."
He couldn't stand there any longer and went back to his parents' stone. Sitting himself down in the muddy grass by their feet, he cried. It didn't matter; no one was around to see it. The rain disguised his tears so even he didn't know just how many he was shedding for them. They had been old, his parents, older than most when they had him. He knew they would die eventually, but he had hoped magic could keep them going on until they reached one hundred years old or more. He had wanted them to see him become a proper adult with a wife and children.
He sat until the rain stopped and the moon shone down on him. He was cold and miserable and he wanted it that way. It's how he felt inside so it seemed fitting that he should feel that way outside as well.
That git had been right, he was dead.
oOo
Harry sat at breakfast the next morning trying to keep his eyes off Sirius. The boy who would be his Godfather wasn't being so courteous; he was staring at him unashamedly. Harry was used to being stared at, but not by dead people. Hermione still couldn't explain why the man had come back from the grave as a teenager and not as the one who had fallen behind the curtain at the Ministry. Sirius Black, his Godfather, had been nearly forty when he died, not sixteen.
"Will you stop staring?" Ron insisted.
"Can't help it," Sirius said. "It's freakish."
"Oi!" Harry said.
"Even that's that same!" Sirius grinned and pointed at Harry's indignation.
Harry wanted to say more, but he didn't want to have Sirius drawing any more attention to the similarities between Harry and his young father. Harry didn't particularly care for his father as a teenager, he found him annoying and rude and he fought dirty. Harry's inner thigh still ached from where his father had kneed him viciously during their scuffle, attempting and thankfully failing to hit his privates.
James came into the Great Hall late and fell onto the bench beside Sirius. He glared across the table at Harry. "I'm listening."
"Where the hell have you been?" Sirius stared at him. The boy was in a state, deathly pale and his hair unnaturally flat against his head.
"Visiting my parents," James said. "They're dead. House was blown to bits." He looked skeptically across at Harry. "Did you really survive a killing curse?"
Harry nodded and lifted his fringe to show the scar.
"You haven't got one of those," Sirius commented, suddenly very impressed with Harry.
"I am aware," James bit out the words. He didn't know why Sirius was so intent on making it seem like he and Harry were the same person. They looked alike, but that was it. The kid was clearly a git, even if he was James' son. "So, what are we going to do about this?"
Harry shrugged and looked to Hermione. She was back with her nose in the Muggle book again. The girl hadn't slept all night, having stayed up to read through it twice hoping to find an answer to what had happened. Clearly none came to her in the long hours of night and she was forced to read the book again. "Hermione!"
She jumped and stared at him. "What?"
"Let someone else have a go, would you?" He grabbed the book from her hands and flipped through it. He wasn't nearly as stupid as she seemed to think he was, and if given the chance he could solve his own problems. Even ones as large and annoying as his teenage father.
"I was thinking about that poem you read," Hermione said.
"What poem?" Ron asked.
Harry found it in the book and passed it over to him. Ron read it aloud:
"'What had been hidden will rise up again,
Beware those who seek it for their own gain.
Though the lines of wizard and witch are strong,
A new one will find it, not one who seeks wrong.
The blood of the maiden must surely be spilled,
For the source of evil to be truly killed;
When words of nightmare and terror are spoken,
And the wall between ghost and man is broken.'"
"There," she said. "The 'source of evil', I was thinking that might mean Voldemort."
"Wait. It says 'blood of the maiden'," Sirius pointed out. "Some girl is going to have to die?"
"We need to go to Dumbledore," Harry said.
"No!" Hermione insisted. "I can fix this."
"Hermione," Harry stared at her in disbelief. "Someone's life is as stake."
"Yeah, ours," Sirius said.
"Shut it!" Ron glared at him. He didn't like that strutting boy with his long hair and arms hanging all over Hermione. If he tried that she would slap him, but when Sirius did it she giggled and blushed.
"Make me, ginger," Sirius smirked and held Ron's eye as he slid an arm around Hermione.