A/N
So it's been nearly a year since I last posted a chapter... Oops.
I've actually had the first part of this written for almost that long, but a fatal combination of a hectic year of uni, an intense bout of writers block, and my own eternal procrastination have resulted in this little hiatus. I'm still not completely happy with this chapter, but at a certain point you just have to click that ol' 'post' button, right?
I can't promise another chapter anytime soon, but I hope you will stick with the story nonetheless; there will definitely be one eventually! Thank you so much to everyone who has reviewed, and apologies for the wait.
Chapter 6
Lily awoke late the next morning, surprisingly well-rested considering the previous night's drama.
Whilst James had been with Sirius, Molly was giving her a tour of the house, preparing them a room and attempting to catch her up on all they had missed. The kindly woman had promised Lily her backlog of Witch Weekly, along with any old Daily Prophets she could find, and had delighted her with tales of Arthur's exploits at the ministry and the children's various successes at school.
The bedroom she had given them was of a reasonable size, with a large double bed, pair of antique chairs and very worn carpet. Officially declared safe by Mad-Eye just last week, it felt no more welcoming for it; everything from the furniture to the walls was dark – dark reds, dark purples, dark browns – and the curtains were so heavy that, when closed, the room slipped into near total blackness. Molly had done what she could, however, to remove the cobwebs, and Lily had cast a few charms herself to brighten the wallpaper and thin the drapes. At the very least the bed was comfortable, and the room offered a nice retreat from the jumble of newness and uncertainty downstairs.
They had received no word from Dumbledore since he left for the ministry last night, and only the promise of news in the morning had finally persuaded them to leave their vigil and get some rest. Now, her stomach squirmed at the thought of what that news might be.
Beside her head, the bedside clock warned day was fast slipping away.
To her right, a familiar tangle of black hair was peeking above the covers, the face below endearingly relaxed – and distinctly un-dead – as it snored gently into the pillow. She stretched and scraped her own hair back from her face, fanning the grimy locks across the pillow behind her. She needed a shower.
Adjoining their room was a very tall and narrow bathroom, which – cold marble floor and sinister, serpentine pipes aside – was comfortably equipped with a shower and large bath, magically extended beyond what the four walls should hold. Desperate to scour herself of the past fourteen years, she filled the tub to the brim and melted into the hot water, welcoming its power to unknot her muscles and settle her spirits. She rubbed her skin raw in an attempt to purge the coffin-stench, and emerged a new woman to the sounds of her husband arising.
"Morning," he called, as she eventually vacated the bathroom. He moved from the pile of clothes he had been hunched over to give her a light kiss. "How did you sleep?"
She grimaced, a little guiltily.
"Surprisingly well, considering." Surely no self-respecting parent should sleep so soundly with a child in trouble.
"Me too," James admitted. "Damn that feathery monstrosity of a bed.
"These are for you," he announced, gesturing to the heap of material he had been examining and shuffling a selection of colourful items in her direction. "They're Molly's; she apologises there isn't anything more your size." He pulled some items from his own half of the pile, a miscellany of frilled shirts and velvet waistcoats. "Sirius wanted to give you some of his mother's old clothes," he laughed, "but I thought the floor-length black dress and goblin-skin coat might not be quite your style."
"I don't know," Lily said absent-mindedly, inspecting one of Molly's dresses. "I think I could make it work."
She heard James' chuckle as he moved into the bathroom, a few items of his own tucked beneath his arm. As the sounds of the shower drifted through the door, she tugged the first dress over her head. It really was quite big. No matter how she tied the sash it was impossible to stop the fabric gaping in odd, unflattering places. She wondered briefly whether she should also borrow some of Sirius' clothes.
The sight of her husband returning a few minutes later rapidly changed her mind. He struck a pose in the doorway, arms outstretched as if to say 'What do you think?', and she couldn't help but giggle. The clothes were distinctly moth-eaten, and patches of the once plush, green waistcoat had turned grey and scratchy. The trousers were a thing of historical perplexity, which would no doubt have seemed out of place no matter what decade of the last century they found themselves in. It was a testament to Sirius' confidence and natural elegance that she had never before noticed how truly bizarre his wardrobe was.
"Merlin's beard," exclaimed Remus' voice behind them. Their friend stepped into the room and stopped short to survey the odd couple: Lily, drowning in her outfit, and James, stiff and uncomfortable in his. "Do you want to alert the fashion aurors, or should I?"
"Ha-de-ha-ha," Lily replied dryly. James swanned across to the full-length mirror, ignoring its disgusted yelp.
"What are you talking about?" he said, twisting to examine himself from other, equally as unsightly, angles. "I am definitely pulling this off."
("Don't kid yourself, darling", came the mirror's reply.)
Lily was about to make some retort of her own, when her husband suddenly stopped his turning and leapt closer to the reflection, staring intently at his own face. She watched, perplexed, as he began stretching his skin with his hands, searching through his hair, craning his neck.
"Lily," he said eventually, eyes glued to the mirror. "I'm old."
Lily moved to the mirror and inspected her husband properly for the first time since King's Cross. He was right, he did look older: a little fuller in the face, a little more creased around the eyes, perhaps even – though she daren't mention it – the tiniest speck of grey in his jet hair. Stepping into the mirror's frame, she saw similar changes in her own face (although there was no grey in her hair, thank you very much). Her skin was certainly rougher, more weathered, and her forehead was scored by two ever-so-slight lines.
"Weird," she murmured.
Remus's own matured face appeared between theirs, and an arm draped across each of their shoulders.
"Welcome to the club," he said wryly. He eyed their reflection with interest. "It is interesting, though. Even had you not aged a day, I suppose these couldn't be the same bodies you had when –" he faltered only briefly, encouraged by Lily's nodding and his own curiosity, "– well, after Halloween."
He didn't elaborate, but both grasped his meaning. The couple had awoken in a grave, after all, in which they had spent the better part of fourteen years; they should not be looking so fresh.
"In which case," he continued, and James finally tore his attention from the mirror, "perhaps your souls returned to your bodies with some imprint of that other life, reverting your forms to how they would look had the event never occurred." He shrugged and finished humbly, "You'll have to ask Albus."
Lily had fixed him with her famous Evans stare.
"Remus," she said slowly, "are you trying to tell me I'm thirty-five?" Their friend grimaced.
"I'm afraid it would appear so."
James groaned in dismay, and Lily looked dejectedly back at the mirror. Things did keep getting stranger.
"You know," began Remus, sensing her discomfort, "I didn't just come to insult your new outfits – although," and here he looked them up and down once more in amusement, "I think they do that themselves."
("Damn right," said the mirror.)
"I actually came to say Dumbledore has cleared things with the ministry, to a certain extent. The DMLE has agreed not to expel Harry for now, pending the outcome of a disciplinary hearing."
Two sighs of relief; some of the weight lifted from Lily's shoulders.
"Plans for his transport from Privet Drive are also underway" Remus continued, smiling. "Albus had hoped to wait for a few more aurors to be available, but given the circumstance we persuaded him speed should be the main priority." He clasped each of their shoulders. "Harry should be here by tomorrow."
Thirty-five or not, Lily's face split into a wide smile, and she seemed suddenly as happy and youthful as on her wedding day. She squeezed the werewolf's arm.
"Thank you, Remus."
Thirty miles away, in a small house in Surrey, sat a fifteen-year-old boy who was not so happy.
Harry Potter was slumped against his bedroom window, watching raindrops slide sluggishly down the glass. Had he the effort to glance at the clock, he would see he had been doing so for nearly forty minutes. Instead, however, his gaze was focused upon one particular raindrop, which had stubbornly clung to its place on the window for nearly as long as he had. Harry wondered bitterly whether it too was waiting on word from Dumbledore.
It had been around fourteen hours since he was attacked by Dementors, in which time he had received exactly four letters, one howler, and zero reassurance that things were going to be okay. He had not even received responses to the hasty notes penned to Ron, Hermione and Sirius.
His only solace was that he was not, of yet, expelled from Hogwarts. The thought alone was enough to make him shudder. Without Hogwarts he had nothing: no family; no friends, since they would surely forget him once he were no longer their classmate; no home, since there was no way he could stay with the Dursleys knowing summer's end brought no escape.
He supposed he could join Sirius as an outcast. The idea was of marginal comfort, but truthfully his godfather could be anywhere in the world and Harry had no way of joining him.
More raindrops overtook his stationary one.
A sharp rap on the door had Harry straightening in surprise, back cracking in protest at the sudden movement. His heart jolted in anticipation, but the opening of the door revealed no long, white beard – just an oversized moustache.
"What do you want?" Harry intoned, as the rest of his uncle's large form traipsed in. He stopped just inside the door with a nervous glance to the scattering of spell books and magical objects across the floor. If the narrowing of his eyes was a response to Harry's insolent tone, Vernon Dursley wisely chose not to comment.
"We're heading out" he said brusquely. "You are not to leave this room. There'll be no 'funny business' while we're gone."
Harry said nothing.
"I'm locking the door," the older man continued, clearly uncomfortable with the lack of reaction. "We might not be back for a few days."
Harry stared blankly at his uncle, and tried to decide whether he should care. Then he remembered he didn't.
"Okay," he said finally.
Vernon nodded and hesitated a second longer, as though wanting his nephew to ask where they were going. When Harry didn't, he nodded again and made his way out of the door.
Before it could close, the moustache appeared once more.
"We're going to a garden competition," Vernon said gruffly. "We won."
The door clicked shut and Harry heard the lock twisting, followed by the sound of voices making their way out to the drive. Turning back to the window, he watched his only living relatives drive away, and felt the silence of total solitude settle across the house.
When his gaze focused back on the glass, his raindrop had slipped away.
Lily and James spent the day like a pair of skittish horses, too filled with nervous energy to observe one activity for any length of time. They listened to the adults discuss current affairs, played games of exploding snap with the children and explored the hidden corners of the old townhouse, all with one eye on the clock. By the time evening finally deigned to show its face, Arthur must have answered a hundred questions about Harry's travel plans, and Molly had made twice that many cups of tea.
The couple's impatience was infectious, and as Remus left Grimmauld Place that night he too was brimming with anxious excitement at the thought of the coming night. In mere hours, Harry Potter would finally meet the parents he had lost so many years ago, in a reunion as nerve-wracking as it was miraculous. The fifteen-year-old had been through more than most, but how he would react to a bombshell such as this, Remus had no idea.
He stepped into the shadows beyond the wards of the house, and apparated to the spot Dumbledore had shown them at the beginning of the summer. It was a still night, and the crack of his arrival ricocheted effortlessly between the small houses of Little Whinging, sending a startled cat yelping from one hedge to another. In the quiet that followed, Remus made his way to the huddle of cloaked figures on the other side of the street.
"Nice night for it" a voice was whispering as he approached.
"Not much cloud-cover," responded a gruffer voice. "Evening, Remus."
"Evening, Alastor."
Remus smiled nervously at the faces peering out of the darkness, each figure hooded and clutching a broomstick. Of the six present, only Moody, Tonks and himself knew what awaited Harry back at Grimmauld Place. The other three – Emmeline Vance, Dedalus Diggle, and the young Elara Blackburn – knew nothing of the incident that had shaken the wizarding community barely twenty-four hours earlier. It seemed impossible that the rest of the world could be so oblivious, when for him gravity itself had shifted.
At Moody's direction, the group made its way through the silent suburban streets, slipping from shadow to shadow until they reached Privet Drive. The Dursleys' house was small and desolate in its pocket at the end of the street, eyeing the group with its darkened windows as though daring them to approach. Remus could discern no movement within the black of what he assumed to be Harry's room, if the broken bars that framed it were anything to go by. Beside the perfect lawn, the drive was empty.
"Looks like the family took the bait," he whispered, nudging Tonks with a bashful smile. "Good work."
With a murmured charm from its leader, the procession stole through the front door and creaked its way into the hall, dull thud of Moody's artificial leg the only sound in the house.
"Everyone ready?" Moody grunted as the last of the group traipsed in, Remus deftly catching the vase Tonks had collided with. Her apologies were lost amongst various murmurs of assent, and all eyes turned to the door at the top of the stairs.
Moody raised his wand, and the latch slowly began to turn.
'The headquarters of the Order of the Phoenix may be found at Number Twelve, Grimmauld Place.'
Harry glanced up from what he identified as Dumbledore's slanted scrawl to find Moody's disfigured face, inches from his own. The magical eye was performing a dizzying acrobatic display, flipping one way and another in reconnaissance of the darkened square around them; the other was watching Harry closely.
"Got it, lad?"
"Er, yes –" Harry stammered, watching in bemusement as the note was tugged from his hands and hastily set alight. The sudden flash of fire flickered between the seven huddled figures, stretching shadows across the hooded faces and dancing in the expectant eyes. Harry turned to Remus.
"What's the Order of the –"
"Not now, Harry" the werewolf said firmly, though not without a touch of sympathy. It was the same response with which he had shut down Harry's first flurry of questions, in the Dursley's kitchen.
'Not now, Harry. I promise we'll give you all the answers we can once we reach headquarters – plus quite a few more questions, I imagine…'
This last comment was one in a stream of cryptic remarks, enigmatic smiles and odd glances that had been thrown his way since the group first clattered into No. 4. Remus was the worst, beaming at Harry when he thought he wasn't looking, eyes an odd mixture of pride and protectiveness that Harry hadn't seen since their patronus lessons two years previously. Tonks, meanwhile, looked for all the world as though she were escorting him to a surprise birthday party, and had forgotten to tell her face it was a secret. Harry had warmed quickly to the young witch, helped by her steady complaints about the unnatural tidiness of Petunia Dursley's home, but the smug grin was starting to grate on him; he didn't like feeling out of the loop.
Neither had he forgotten his anger towards those who had kept him in the dark all summer. Thus far, his bewilderment and the promise inherent in Lupin's 'Not now, Harry' had been enough to keep him from lashing out at his unsuspecting guards, but he wasn't famed for his patience.
The sight of number 12 trundling into view temporarily displaced all thoughts of odd smiles and surprise parties, and he stared gobsmacked until the final bricks of the gaunt house forced themselves into place. He had spent four years in the wizarding world, yet magic still found ways to surprise him.
He regarded the front door suspiciously as they made their approach. It marked the last barrier between him and the answers he so craved, yet itself gave nothing away about the headquarters behind.
Not now, Harry, mocked its shabby paintjob and silver knocker.
"Make sure you're quiet when we go in," Remus said, perhaps forestalling the rush of questions he knew to expect from Harry. "At least until we're out of the hall."
At the touch of his wand, the door creaked aside, and Harry took his first steps into No. 12, Grimmauld Place.
There was light in the lanterns on the walls, but their efforts were feeble against the darkness of the hallway. Harry gazed around at what he could see – narrow flight of stairs, grimy portraits, velvet curtains – and wondered what on earth they were doing here. Before he could ask (yes, now Remus), there was a soft cry from the top of the stairs and the fast patter of feet descending towards him.
"Harry!"
Before he could formulate a response, his mouth was full of bushy hair and a girl's tight arms were squeezing the breath from him.
"You're here!" Hermione whispered.
"So it would seem," he whispered back. Something about their hushed voices and the darkness of the hall made his throat tighten, and had him clutching her more desperately than he would have liked to admit. In his weeks of pent-up anger, he had lost sight of how much he was missing his friend.
"It's so good to see you!" she exhaled. "We've missed you so much. I'm so sorry about all the letters over summer, I know it must have been really frustrating, but Dumbledore said –"
Mad-Eye cleared his throat.
"Touching as this is," he grumbled, "perhaps we could stop standing around like flobberworms and head downstairs?"
"Mad-Eye, you old romantic" whispered Tonks, breezing past them towards a door at the end of the hall.
Harry eyed Hermione. Her words had brought back all his feelings of frustration and isolation, and he wanted to tell her she should be sorry, to say everything he'd been thinking all summer right there in the grim hallway and make her tell him what had been going on –
But the others were still waiting, and the hallway was still quiet, and Hermione looked so near to tears that he decided it could wait.
"This way, Harry" Remus said, gesturing after Tonks. "Everyone's dying to see you."
"Tonks," Sirius teased, as the young witch bounded through the kitchen door alone, "you were supposed to bring Harry back with you."
It had been a couple of hours since Remus and the Advance Guard had left to collect Harry, and the atmosphere in the kitchen was near breaking point. Though voices remained light and conversation uninterrupted by the sounds of footsteps in the hallway above, there was an undeniable tension in the air, and in the inability of those present to keep their eyes from the door.
Sirius himself had long since conceded his conversation with Bill, thoughts too occupied by his godson and the events to come. The plan was simple – in theory. Since Dumbledore's intention to distance himself from Harry had been unswayed by the new circumstances, he and Remus would be the ones to take the boy aside and explain that oh by the way, your parents have returned from the dead. Lily and James were to remain hidden until Harry said he was ready, though Sirius doubted how long he could keep them away should the boy decide he needed time. The couple were no doubt already tearing at the walls of the bedroom they had confined themselves to, knowing their son was mere feet below.
The thought seemed to have occurred to Arthur, who quietly excused himself from the table and made for the door, exchanging a meaningful glance with Sirius.
Tonks, meanwhile, had clapped a hand to her forehead.
"Dungbombs, I knew there was something I'd forgotten!" She grinned at the impatient faces. "Relax, he's just coming."
As if on cue, the door opened again and there was Harry, looking overwhelmed but otherwise healthy. He gave a bashful wave.
"Hi…"
There was a general cry of greeting, and Harry was soon the centre of much hugging and hand-shaking. Ron clapped his friend on the back before pulling him into an embrace, and if the hug Harry returned was a little stiff, his smile was at least genuine. Sirius waited until the commotion had died down and Molly had finished her matronly fussing, before stepping forwards. The fifteen-year-old was clearly unsettled by the appearance of so many familiar faces in such an odd setting, but his eyes cleared when they landed on his godfather.
"Sirius!" he cried in delight, "I didn't expect you to be here!"
Sirius chuckled darkly as he clasped him into a bone-crunching hug, relishing the feeling of Harry finally here and safe. "It's my house, mate."
He waved away Harry's query, meeting Remus' eye above the boy's head and knowing it was time.
"I know you probably have a lot of questions," he began, and a hush settled over the kitchen. He clasped Harry's shoulder and steered him towards the door, away from the intense stares. "Come with us and I promise we'll explain everything."
Harry certainly did have a lot of questions. He and Remus did their best to answer them as they led him up the stairs – what was this place, what was the Order of the Phoenix, why had there been nothing in the Prophet about Voldemort – but by the time they were settled into a suitable room he was clearly still frustrated by the lack of answers.
"But what has Voldemort been doing?"
Sirius fumbled for a response, but mercifully Remus decided enough was enough.
"Harry, there isn't a lot more we can tell you right now," he apologised. "Some of the answers you want, we do not know. Some, you are too young to need to know –"
"But –" Harry objected, but Remus cut him off.
"But most importantly," he continued, nervous edge creeping into his otherwise authoritative voice, "there is something else we must tell you first, and once you know what we do I'm sure you'll agree it deserves priority."
Sirius sat fidgeting as Remus attempted to set the groundwork: explaining that their news would seem impossible, but Harry should know they would never lie to him; that a miracle had happened, but he should prepare himself or would no doubt be overwhelmed; that they were overjoyed at what had happened, but his needs remained their primary concern. By the time he paused for breath, even Sirius was losing track of what it was they were supposed to be saying. He took pity on the baffled boy in front of them.
"We're talking about your parents," he said softly, heart jolting as his godson's face jerked upwards. He took a deep breath.
"Harry, your parents... Lily and James – they're alive."
Preview:
'Your parents really are alive, Harry.'
There was that sentence again; the sentence that made sense, but didn't make sense. But it was Remus' voice bouncing around his skull, it was Remus saying it – and Remus was sensible, he wouldn't say something just because he wanted to believe it, he'd only say it if it was true and oh god what if it's true?
Harry allowed himself to understand the sentence for the first time, and hope – tiny and fluttering – buzzed up and down his oesophagus.
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