Main Content
Hi, Acid!
Post New | Import | Log outSearch works
Archive of Our Own (BETA) Site Navigation my home fandoms works people bookmarks tags collections
Actions Add Chapter Edit Edit Tags Delete View Entire Work ← Previous Chapter Next Chapter → Chapter Index
View full-page index1. Invasion 2. The Sage 3. A New Beginning 4. Smoke and Mirrors 5. Energy 6. A Dream within a Dream 7. The Line of Fire 8. Silence 9. Firebolt 10. The Tunnel 11. Broken Glass 12. Birthday
Bookmark Comments Share
Copy and paste to link back to this work: (CTRL/CMD-A will select all)
Chapter 7: The Line of Fire
Harry has plenty of infuriating traits. He is too impulsive, too stubborn, too honest; his outrageous ideas lack any scrap of common sense. He always calls these ideas 'brilliant', even though they're anything but. This morning I don't even bother asking what mad idea has invaded his head. He cries 'let's go!' and rushes outside. I merely pocket my wand, my keys, and my banknotes and follow him out to face the summer day, too bright and too warm to be comfortable. It isn't hard to gather from Harry's inspired grin that this plan of his is supposed to do wonders for my bleak and gruesome existence. After all, he's added me to his list of causes. As well as getting magic back in his spare time, he's on another mission: he'll make sure I don't 'waste' my life, even if it kills me.
Harry's idea turns out to be King's Cross, revoltingly full of activity this time of day and year. I hold back the dry cough undoubtedly caused by all the fumes of Muggle streets, thread my way through the noisy mob with their shopping bags and their luggage trolleys, and count the seconds until this ridiculous tour is over. King's Cross must be familiar territory to Harry, just as it is to me. He rushes ahead confidently, not even pausing to read the signs for guidance. I follow him through the brightly lit hall, past the row of moving stairways, past the white walls lined with advertisement posters, telephone booths, and rows of Muggle machines with their tilted windows glowing like the surface of a pensieve. I slow down and let him hurry ahead to the platforms, where the Muggle plastic and shine gives way to brick arches and dim globe lights.
Through the entrance and to the left, Harry reaches the barrier between platforms nine and ten, and starts examining it closely before I even have a chance to catch up. I glare at him silently until a rowdy group of teenagers is completely out of earshot. "What are you doing?"
"Nothing. Just thought it'd be nice to have an outing, maybe go for a visit." He shrugs and gives me the most infuriating grin.
He grinned. At me. He has to be up to something, but before I can ask, he vanishes through the wall leaving me to glare at the time-worn bricks. Well, well. This isn't a leisurely excursion after all. I knew he had something planned from the start: something foolish and ridiculous, something akin to testing the wards of Platform 9 ¾. I suppose I should let him find out for himself how hopeless his plan really is.
Soon enough he reappears, frowning at the bricks. I try not to smirk too obviously at his disappointment. "Surely you didn't think you'd get onto the Platform just by swanning through the barrier?"
"Yes, actually. I did," he glares bitterly: at me and then at the wall again, accusing both of us of non-compliance. "I thought it would let me through. And when it did, I thought I'd find a way to get you through. And then we'd only have to follow the tracks far enough, to Hogsmeade. And Hogwarts'd be there, just off the train station. And YES, it's MENTAL; you don't have to tell me that. I KNOW!"
Why does everything with Harry always have to be about Hogwarts? It's just an abandoned castle, untraceable and unreachable behind its perimeter wards. Even if I took him to Scotland and managed to find the exact location of the castle, which is a nearly impossible task by itself, I'd only see ruins in its place, just like any Muggle would. Yet Harry still tries to reach the Hogwarts of his dreams in the most bizarre ways imaginable. "Just because you can walk through ordinary walls doesn't mean you can do the same with magical ones."
"Why not?" he frowns. "It only keeps out Muggles. I can't hold a wand in my hand, but I'm still a wizard! I'll prove it if you want; in Parseltongue!"
It isn't that simple. "The wards were set to admit living beings. Wizard or not, you don't have a physical body to trigger them."
His eyes light up. "Maybe if both of us try it. At the same time."
"It's impossible." I hiss under my breath, moving a little closer as I search his expression, "Why do you keep doing this? Out of duty? Insecurity? Because you want to make my life better? You've already …"
"What? No!" he cries, furious. "Make it better yourself! I won't. Not everything's about you!"
Impossible whelp!
"It's just …" he drops his head back against the wall, blinks at the dim lights and starts talking softly into the space quickly filling with crowds. "I really want this: magic and Hogwarts and everything like it was before." His voice trembles for a second but then he narrows his eyes and continues. "It's my home. And now it's empty and falling apart and no one I know wants to go anywhere near it." He seems calm as he speaks; only his transparent fingers dig into the bricks as if he is determined to pull them apart one by one, to get through this barrier one way or another.
He slumps down in front of the barrier, disappointment hollowing his gaze. For the first time, he seems out of place in the Muggle world amid its noise and its people: scurrying on and off the trains, laughing and talking, unaware of Harry's presence and hardly noticing mine. In all this commotion he is lost, just as I was when I came here once and pressed my palm against the unyielding brick, desperate to reach the world hidden just beyond.
It's as if all his dreams are locked away behind this stark and ordinary wall, a gateway to another world with possibilities unsuspected by the milling crowds. The passers-by pay the wall no mind, just as they do not see Harry. At least he's shielded from the consequences of their disregard as I move in front of him, dour and glaring, blocking the way for any stranger who might try to invade his personal space unawares. "You wouldn't have gone far," I murmur softly, "even if you did manage to get onto the platform."
"Why?" he protests.
"The railway splits into several tracks."
"So what?"
"Harry," I peer at him. "Which way is Hogwarts?"
He blinks up at me quizzically, then his eyes widen and he waves an arm: half vague direction, half abrupt surrender. "I haven't got a bloody clue!" He laughs then, harsh and sudden as if I'd told him a joke. "Last time Ron and I just followed the train."
I remember that little incident well; how could I not? If it were anyone from my own House, they would've been reprimanded much more harshly, except no one in Slytherin would've been idiotic enough to attempt such a prank. "Unfortunately it'll be hard to find any flying cars to take us to Hogwarts this time around," I tell him sternly and resist the urge to add: 'And even if there were, I certainly wouldn't let you drive.'
I take him by Lincoln's Inn Fields on the way back. It's much warmer today, but the park looks almost the same as the last time we were here. The same green foliage and blue sky everywhere above us and the chirping pack of sparrows – scruffy and hopeful and agile like Harry himself – bouncing on the footpath and lining up in pairs and threes on tops of the benches.
I sit on the very edge of a seat that is furthest away from the rest and Harry plops down in the middle, right next to me, as close as he can get. Does he realise how awkward it is to have him so near? I glare; he moves a few inches away but still remains unsettlingly close.
When he speaks, his voice is soft, and serious, and slightly wistful. "If I was alive and asked you… what I asked you before, would you say yes?"
"Ask me what?" I stall, even though I can easily guess what he means.
He glances up at me and refuses to look away. "You know what. Would you at least think about it before turning me down?"
Would I? My mind drifts to the memory of a waiter from The Cheshire Cheese – the young man who looked so much like Harry – and for a few brief seconds I allow myself to dream. I imagine Harry working in that pub, stumbling into the tables because he forgot to bring his glasses to work that morning, grinning at the visitors, and perhaps even flashing me a tentative smile. It'd disappear, of course, when he realised exactly who was sitting at one of his booths. He'd be much more subdued and cautious about smiling at customers in dark corners after that.
But maybe, just maybe when I was on my way out he'd catch up to me before I left the narrow alleyway and entered Fleet Street. His touch on my shoulder would stop me dead in my tracks and when I'd turn around to face him, he'd ask in that sincere, stumbling manner of his, stretching forward, so close that I'd see my own stunned look reflected in his glasses. "Professor? I saw you and – I'm wondering, maybe – would you like a cup of tea sometime?" I'd glare down my nose at such a ridiculous offer and he'd give me another utterly hopeless grin and I'd … Oh, this is absurd! Harry would never think to ask me. Most likely he'd pass me without a second glance because Molly Weasley said his sweetheart was waiting across the street since three and he couldn't wait to see her. Foolish brat, why does he even bother asking these questions? He wouldn't even think of talking to me, if he was alive today.
"No," I shake my head.
"Why not?" he stares incredulously.
How can he not see this? "I'm all wrong for you. Not to mention too old, too poor, and with too many things to regret already." I've made enough mistakes of my own; I don't want to become one of Harry's mistakes.
"Forty-five isn't old." He shakes his head. "Mum and Dad would've been forty-five."
"Precisely!" I cry. He just saved me hours of proving my point.
He merely shrugs. "So what? And I don't care about how much money you have; s'not like I can use it. And y'know what else? You're being too harsh on yourself, like always."
I'm not harsh enough. "I'm just stating the truth."
"Right, then," There's that determined glint in his eyes, the one that never bodes any good whatsoever. "While we're being 'truth'ful, I'm wrong for you too."
"You?" Frankly I've never bothered to look at it from that angle, never really thought of Harry as unsuited for anyone. "Why?"
"I'm too reckless. And not clever enough." He shrugs. "You need someone to beat you in chess and talk about clever things like Hogwarts: A History and Muggleborn genetics and magical osmosis and I don't know about things like that. And I don't keep my word. Why'd you ever trust me?"
"Why, indeed." But somehow I do not doubt him, perhaps because he has enough sense to question himself.
"But no one's ever absolutely perfect for someone else!" Harry cries. His eyes are vivid; the gleaming strands of his hair practically stand on end with his emphatic energy. "What's really important isn't being perfect all the time, it's about doing what you've said you'll do; sticking with it, and doing your best to make it work!"
I remember him in his seventh year, always showing up for Advanced Potions even though he stood no chance of receiving a passing mark from me, and as I smirk at the memory, a question escapes before I have time to consider it. "Were you as stubborn in your romances as you always were in my classes?"
He blinks. "I haven't had any… Oi, why?" he gives me a sudden cheeky grin. "D'you mean if I can remember the ratio of asphodel to wormwood, I'm in with a chance?"
"Absolutely not." I declare in my most conversation-quelling tone before turning away. "Let's go."
"What? Where?"
"Charing Cross Road. Then home."
He blinks. "What do we need on Charing Cross Road?"
"The Leaky Cauldron." I call out over my shoulder at him. "Shall I leave you here then?"
"Oi!" he yelps. "No! Wait up!"
For all my show of walking away, I do still wait for him to catch up. Despite all of his faults, I'll never leave him behind. For one thing, I doubt he'd let me leave him: I suspect that the whole world is open to him, whether he realises it or not, and he can move in it with the speed of thought if he wants to badly enough. But what's more important, I doubt I'd let me leave him. Harry has a knack for stirring up my life, like a gust of wind will lift dead leaves from the earth and set them dancing; and it's almost as if I've been following him all these months.
In my past I've hid in the shadow of the rich, the famous, the powerful, and I wonder now how much of what I feel for Harry is driven by my old craving to follow someone, anyone: the shining indiscretion of my youth, or the demagogue determined to dominate the Wizarding world, or the only man who ignored my Mark and trusted me enough to rescue me from Azkaban, or the ghost who took over my dreams, or even the brief image of a young man disappearing into the busy crowds of Fleet Street.
Harry's fame has faded away. The only things he owns now are his dauntlessness and his dreams, but at least this time I've placed my trust in someone who isn't rich or power-hungry – or hardly even tall enough – to be the next Albus Dumbledore or the next Dark Lord. Perhaps I've learned my lesson at last.
I still have nightmares sometimes. But everyone has; I know that. Even the Boys have them.
My nightmares are about that day of course: always the same thing. That morning Fleur snapped at me about something and said that I should not even be here and she should not be babysitting me at this age, so I left her and told the goblin at the entrance to tell her to Apparate to China if she asked about me, and I went to buy ice cream at Fortescue's because if I was old enough not to be babysat then I was certainly old enough to cross the street without her.
I did not finish the ice cream; there was an explosion.
By the time I ran back there was nothing there: just an empty hole and piles of rubbish and dust rising from the pit and people screaming everywhere and no Gringotts.
I remember crying something. Fleur. Bill. But they never answered me.
That was when she showed up.
"Oh, poor dear, you shouldn't even be here." She dragged me back, away from the crowd and I noticed then that her Auror robes were covered in grime and blood and that underneath the layer of dust her hair was the most terrible shade of purple.
"Don't worry," she said. "I've got you now." She had a faint scent of perfume at her collar – the kind my sister sometimes had – but I did not see Fleur anywhere, so I took a deep breath and held onto her shoulders.
What was I thinking? I should have let go of her or pushed her into the pit and ran when I had the chance!
She is horrible. Nymphadora. Worse than all of my aunts together in the same room, and that is saying something! What does Papa see in her? Anyone – oh, hell – anything would be better than she is. They only ever married because it was easier that way for them to keep the Boys and me.
I did not care then, but now the Boys are gone for most of the time and I cannot mind her on my own. The fact that she is twice as old as me does not mean that she does not need a nanny! She does, every hour of the day, and I am tired of watching her.
She is all wrong for Papa and me. She is too young, too scatterbrained, and too childish. She keeps calling me 'dear' and makes funny faces, although it was not even funny back when she could still make her face look like other people's. She cannot cook. Our house was a disaster until Papa started staying home with us and told her to find a job, and he only did that because she nearly burned down the house cooking one day. We would have been starving without takeaway until Papa learned to cook.
I help him in the kitchen sometimes. We bake bread on Sundays before the Boys show up for dinner. He makes the sweet rolls and I roll out the long baguettes with sesame seed and garlic. And Papa always covers his hair with flour, then he ruffles my hair and says that we look like two peas in a pod. He makes me laugh when he says that, even though there is no reason for us to look alike.
He is not my real Papa. I just started calling him that: not right away but a few months after Tonks introduced him and the Boys. I was really sick later and he helped me the most when I was feeling bad. And I started it first; no matter what the Boys say, they are wrong. The Boys started calling him that too, but after I did; it was easier this way for us after everything. I think we were all looking for someone to call Papa.
People do not pay much attention to me nowadays. And I do not mind. Better that than to have people gawping at me and politely trying to pry out what happened: why I look the way I look. I learned not to worry so much about my hair or my face but others still do at times, even more than they did before I got sick.
Take my aunts for example: I look a lot like them nowadays and not because we are related. It is just because they are old and grey and I am the way I am. They all talk about how pretty they used to be and how pretty I could have been. That is why I have not spoken to them in years. There is only so much of 'chère pauvre Gabrielle' I can tolerate! I prefer it when people do not pay attention to me at all.
I have learned to be quiet, and most of the time they do not notice that I am here.
It is much harder when people do notice me and ask me things, and then I am supposed to lie and hide things from others. Things like where I come from or who Grand-mère really was or that thing about our damned back door.
I hate our back door. Our front door now has a wardrobe in front of it and behind the wardrobe it is boarded up and never opens. So we use the back door to go in and out. It opens into two different places. Papa says it is because our house still has some of the old magic left in it. But if you ask me this old magic is a pain.
If I twist the knob to the right it lets me outside. If I turn it to the left it lets me into the courtyard and that is a dead end. Papa says that it was not always a dead end and that one of the walls in the courtyard was a way to get into Diagon Alley but I have never seen anyone get into Diagon Alley through there. Fleur and I always came to Diagon Alley by Floo the normal way.
Sometimes the door opens into the courtyard anyway no matter how I twist it. Nymphadora says it is because I have some veela blood and it confuses the wards and Papa says that the door simply does not like me. I think she is wrong and Papa is right! Because usually the door does that when I forget my key and then it hits me hard in the back and latches behind me. And then I have to slide the rubbish bins next to the wall and climb on top of them and then on top of the wall itself to get to the actual outside, not the fake one. By the time I reach the fire escape ladder and look back to where I came from, the narrow ledge I climbed over disappears and turns into the solid wall of the building. If anyone ever saw me do that it must have been very strange because they would have seen me climb out of nowhere. But no one ever watches or pays attention to me until I climb down the ladder.
And I am just stuck waiting in front of our locked back door until Papa or Nymphadora comes home with the key.
I really, really do not like our door. I kept asking Papa to fix it for ages but he says he cannot do anything. I keep telling him that he can! He can put in a new door, the kind that would not lead to the courtyard at all and then I would not have to climb over the wall each time I get stuck there. But Papa refuses to listen. He says it might come in useful one day but how can it? I was complaining about the door to Papa, but he just said he would make up a new rule for me about not mentioning the door any more and then I had to stop.
There are rules in our house about certain things. Like the one he made for the Boys and me about never bringing friends from school home with us. Or one for Nymphadora and Papa that means they have to talk about a fake motorbike accident when Papa wears short sleeve shirts and someone asks about the scars on his arms. The truth is he only rode a motorbike once, with a friend, and vowed never to ride it again; when he first told this story to the Boys and me we laughed at him for hours. But his scars are not from the motorbike at all: they are from the time he used to turn into le loup-garou every month.
We also have a rule about telling the people who work in the record store that we are friends of the bookstore owners and telling the bookstore owners the exact opposite thing. And there is another rule about not letting strangers in. I think Papa made this rule especially for the bad kind of strangers who have sour faces and dress like they have just attended a funeral, like this one down in the alley. He is of the same age as Papa but much skinnier and looks like he has not slept in a week. That must be why he is talking to himself. I have heard somewhere that people can go mad if they do not have enough sleep.
I do hope Papa comes home soon!
"Of all the foolish things!" the stranger says loud enough that I can hear him from my ladder. "I doubt if it's even the right place." And then he gives a stern look to something or someone.
There is a faintly shining outline of a person next to him. Ah! Le fantôme! A real one! I thought there were none left any more but this one is evidently genuine. He is moving and I can even hear him speak.
"This has to be the record store," the ghost points to the right. "And that's the bookstore," he says and waves to the left. "So this door has to be it! Two places, three doors. S'what Hermione meant when she said we could find it from the back, right?"
"Have it your way." The man with the ghost grunts and knocks on our door again. No one answers him, of course. I do not think I would open the door for someone like him even if I was inside our house at the time.
"I reckon I can look inside and see if anyone still lives here," the ghost says, and the man glares at him.
"I 'reckon' any brute can break the door down and do the same," he responds. "That doesn't give you any excuse to strut through locked doors without permission."
The ghost backs away from our door. He does not look very happy about it.
"If we don't see anyone here in the next half-hour," the man turns around. "You can stick your head in."
I remember him! I especially remember his face. He came to see Grand-mère back when she was still alive. Fleur was chosen to compete in some tournament in Scotland when she was still studying at Madame Maxime's Palais des Beauxbatons, and he asked Grand-mère to bring me along to see it as well. Grand-mère batted her eyelashes at him and fluttered her fan stylishly in that way she had been teaching me to do, but when somehow he still would not plead with her to accompany us personally, she sighed and said that as long as all the gentlemen at his school were as distinguished looking she would certainly consider it. She smiled most pleasantly and served him her special rose-petal tisane and invited him to stay the night rather than travelling back right away. But he looked at her, and listened to her, and drank her tea, and actually refused her; cool and unmoved as he turned his back on her and walked away. She was most displeased with her inability to persuade him. I tried not to let her see me giggling. When the tournament holders sent someone to escort us to Scotland it was not him but a very prim, very old lady in a green tartan hat and glasses. Grand-mère was quite disappointed at that. It had been a while, she said, since she had encountered a suitable challenge and she was distressed that she had let him slip away.
And I remember the ghost too now, only he was not a ghost back then. He was the nice boy in the tournament who rescued me from the lake. Fleur was supposed to do that but she made a mistake and lost the tournament instead and Harry – I think it is Harry, yes, I am quite certain – won it. It is such a pity to see that he died so young.
"Harry," I tell him when the ghost floats nearby. "No one is home right now. Would you ask him to stop knocking?"
He looks up, jumps and cries out and stares at me the way my aunts always gasped and stared at Grand-mère when at her age she still managed to catch the attention of all their beaus. I never thought I was capable of startling a ghost before. It always used to happen the other way around.
"Er. Who're … How'd … where'd you come from?" he asks.
I jump off the fire escape ladder, pull the hood of my sweatshirt back over my cap and crane my neck at him. "I live here!"
He drifts closer to the ground. "Oi! See, I told you someone was home," he yells over his shoulder at the man in dark clothes. "Sorry," he says to me then. "He's a bit cynical. Can you let us in?"
"I cannot. I left my key inside." And the door latched. I hate our door!
"Who else lives with you?" the man says.
"Er … and what's your name anyway?" Harry asks.
He does not recognise me at all! They both keep looking at me and I wish now that I had stayed on my ladder and stayed quiet. People always stare at me, and ask me too many questions when they see me, and I hate it when they do that. I hate it when they do not remember who I am just because I look different now. And now I wish I had not started talking to them! Sometimes I wish I was invisible all the time, like our house is to the people out on the street.
I look again at the person climbing down the fire escape to make sure she even is a girl. The way she stares at us reminds me of Luna: the way Luna'd look right through people sometimes, instead of at them. But she's too young to be Luna, isn't she? There's something strange about her, something dried out. She reminds me of how Colin Creevey looked when he was Petrified by the Basilisk. She's short enough to be a firstie, and frail and sharp-faced like a bird, and her skin's so pale it's nearly grey. She pulls the hood over her head, probably trying to hide her hair: all chopped off, and the fuzz that's left is dull and dry. Even her eyes are as colourless as the rest of her, and as narrow: she's squinting at us like she doesn't trust us. Or, no. Not at us: at Snape.
"Back off a bit," I mutter to him when she doesn't answer either of our questions. "You're making her uncomfortable."
I turn to her and smile. "Sorry, er. Do I know you?" Oops, wrong question: she frowns even more at that and backs away.
"Perhaps if you weren't so quick to forget all the damsels in distress you've saved over the years," Snape hmphs over my shoulder, "then Miss Delacour wouldn't be so cross with you."
What? I just asked her name! S'not an insult. Wait, I saved her? I did? Delacour? Fleur's little sister? How was I supposed to remember that? She doesn't even look … oh. Course she doesn't. She's part-veela, like Fleur, and veelas were magical.
"How'd you know?" I peer suspiciously at Snape, like the girl just did.
"She has the same voice as her sister. All you need to do is listen and pay attention."
I did listen! I did. S'just I was paying attention to Snape instead and I can tell his voice apart any day and . . . oh, sod it! When he gets like that, I can't really prove my point any more than I could during his lectures.
It's getting late. Around the corner the sun tints everything above the third storey with soft orange. Footsteps and laughter resonate from the street. A man and a woman emerge from the shadowed alley leading around the block. The man, with his dusty brown coat and dusty grey hair, seems out of place, like someone who'd faithfully browsed the bookstore to the right every Sunday since the sixties, but now for once had walked too far and took the wrong turn. The woman on the other hand, with her tank top and jeans and her wild hair cropped short and dyed a piece at a time, seems no older than the kohl-smeared and metal-studded girls who spend hours in the record store to the left, looking for the most recent collections of wails and screams under a bright label. You'd think they wouldn't give a second look to one another during their weekly routines – him reading quietly between the narrow shelves, and her headbanging away at the listening stand – yet they seem to know each other well.
"Right, give it back! And the lighter too." the woman cries. She is older than I thought, but her form is thin and gawky and she scuffs her heavy-booted feet and carries her shopping bags slung casually over her shoulder. Her laughter is young too, loud and as clear as a bell. Her hair has splotches of red and orange and is wild, like Harry's, though cropped shorter than his. Her features are softly feminine on a heart-shaped face. I've seen that face before. Once or twice anyway, since she never bothered to keep it the same for more than a day. She is Tonks, older and with different hair. I shouldn't be as surprised as I am to see her again.
Tonks' companion hides something in the back pocket of his trousers, just out of reach, and shakes his head. "Tsk! And you call yourself an officer of the law when you can't even conquer one vile habit?"
"Ha! D'you know what Mad-Eye would've said to that? I'll tell you what," she exclaims. "He would've stood up, took a dried tobacco leaf out of his pocket, held it up for everyone to see and then blew a smoke ring out of his pipe and said …"
"Dear?" the man – Lupin, can it be? – rumbles interrupting her mid-sentence.
"Yes?"
"You're going to end up looking like Mad-Eye if you don't stop smoking," he parries and sidesteps, squashing something at Tonks' feet.
"Oh, shush." Tonks jumps back. Something rattles in her grocery bags. "I saw that! Leave off!"
"Saw what? There's nothing to see."
"You!" she chuckles. "Keep your feet off my bootlaces."
"They're untied," Lupin protests. "I'll step on them anyway," he demonstrates with another attack at her feet.
"Oi, sod off!" Tonks whirls around. "I'll send you shopping alone next time."
Lupin winces and tries to dodge the heavy bag hitting him on the back of his knees. "Ow! You win, you win." He stops her by the shoulders. "Hold still," he says and kneels down. "Let me tie them."
"Well, hurry up then." Tonks shifts her bags into one hand and yanks at his windblown hair, grey at the temples but mostly the same dusty brown as the rest of his clothes.
"I'm getting too old for this," Lupin winces – hand over his knee – when he tries to get back up.
"Too old, too poor. Yeah, yeah," she says as she offers him a hand and then drags him upward. "Not too old for this, are you?" She hands him the shopping bags, then slides her arms around his waist, and kisses him. He drops the bags and steadies them both. From the easy, familiar way they touch it's obvious they're far more than friends.
Harry is watching them too, and after Tonks' last reply a grin lights up his whole face before he throws me a look. I make damned sure there's no similar smile on my face: there is really no reason to beam at the sight of two immature, uncontrolled adults pushing the limits of juvenile behaviour.
"I didn't quite get that," Lupin says to Tonks when they part. "Try again?"
"Bloody liar," she purrs, her hand threading through his hair and pulling. "Reckon I ought to teach you manners."
"You could give it a go, though it's never worked before. Ohh no you don't!" He catches her wrist, stopping her hand before it reaches into his back pocket. "Nice try," he smirks.
I look up at Harry and catch him looking at me. He glances down then and his expression resembles Tonks', caught by Lupin stealing a pack of cigarettes from his pocket. Such a flustered, caught expression he's trying not to show, but he can't even begin to hide it. For a second guilt pangs in my chest – guilt for crushing his hopes so roughly – and I wonder if it's fair to expect him to give up the only contact with this world that he still has, the place he feels most alive: his dreamscapes. My dreams.
Harry finally stops his poor attempts at subtlety and lets that smile of his free again. It's moments like this – when I can read what he's thinking in a single glance, when he gives me this openness and honesty, without a single attempt at hiding his thoughts – then I know for certain that the madness of last night's dream is far from over and far from settled between us. I doubt if it ever will be settled. I only hope that I can be strong enough to follow through with my decision and keep him out. I fear his constant presence will weaken my resolve as time passes. Subtly but surely, one smile, one 'good morning' at a time Harry will continue to tempt me to change my mind, without even trying to do so. Without realising that it's impossible for us to leave behind every bit of common sense, jump headfirst into this madness, and survive it like these two insensible fools.
"We should go inside, y'know." Tonks bumps her nose against Lupin's and makes no effort to move.
"Yeah," he replies, his eyes closed and his face content, but doesn't move either.
Ten seconds later they split up their shopping bags, and manoeuvre – hands still linked – through the narrow space between the rubbish bins and the wall. Their laughter, rich and deep, resonates all the way through the back alley.
As they come close I take a step from the edge and into the shadows; Harry, obviously not concerned with being seen, remains where he was. "Gab's probably worried," Tonks says as they come near the corner.
That gets Miss Delacour's attention: immediately she jumps up to her feet. "Do not call me that!" she yells and marches right over fixing them both with a stern glare fit for Molly Weasley, which looks rather grotesque coming from the pale, waif-like girl. "And could you find somewhere else to do this instead of outside? There are plenty of rooms upstairs."
Lupin smiles at her. Tonks rolls her eyes. They keep their clasped hands together and simply raise them over her head as they pass by her – Lupin on the left and Tonks on the right. "Honestly," Tonks exclaims, "you're old enough to …"
"Nymphadora left the iron on this morning," Miss Delacour interrupts triumphantly after she recovers from the shock of being ignored. "That is right, again! Papa, tell her!"
Tonks and Lupin trade the matching, tolerant grins. Tonks' hand sneaks lower down Lupin's back and she arches a red-tinted eyebrow: "I am standing right here, dear."
The girl gives her another fuming glare and doesn't speak. Lupin coughs and reasons diplomatically: "Remember, I did ask you to help her around the house."
"Help? Do you mean 'keep an eye on her so she does not set it ablaze'?" the girl inquires with an irritated tone. "She is a fire hazard! Why did I agree to this?"
Tonks hmphs. Lupin maintains a neutral face and quickly steps in between. "Yes. Well. What are you doing outside?" he switches topic carefully.
"I reckon that Little Miss Perfect forgot her keys again," Tonks suggests in a singsong voice which earns her a cross glare.
"Please! You are twenty years older than me, Nymphadora. Stop acting as if you are twenty years younger."
"Don't call me that bla …"
"You're sixteen. That'll put Dora, … er, Tonks in negative numbers," Lupin steps in again, taking great care to emphasise the surname.
"Precisely! Someone without a single brain cell," the girl exclaims and waves her hands in frustration, her French accent coming through stronger than usual. "I am finished discussing this. You have another shirt with a hole in the back now, Papa. And, oh, we have visitors."
Miss Delacour points in my direction and I cannot remain unnoticed any longer. Instead I glare back at the idyllic trio.
"Severus!" Lupin and Tonks echo each other and exchange forcibly delighted smiles. While Tonks' is rather breezy there is no missing the beastly smirk appearing on Lupin's undistinguished face. "Here you are," he drawls. "After all these years. How … remarkable."
"Visitors?" Tonks questions, looking past me. "But where is the rest of … oi! Whoa!"
I scowl at them and wonder whether a straightforward insult would be a proper way to start a conversation. But then Harry moves forward and they both follow my line of sight and apparently that is enough to make them notice Harry at last.
I take great pleasure in watching the forced smile fade from Lupin's face, replaced by genuine shock.
"Er … hi?" Harry stammers, glancing with caution at Lupin and then at Tonks.
"Wotcher, Harry!" Tonks beams, completely oblivious of Lupin's flabbergasted face, and waves her hand, freed from Lupin's white-knuckled grasp. With a relieved smile, Harry responds with a wave of his own. Tonks eyes Lupin and finally, after not seeing the expected reaction, grabs his wrist and pulls it up in a puppet-like greeting.
Between them, Miss Delacour rolls her eyes and abruptly extends her own hand, palm up. "Key?" she clarifies grumpily after a few seconds' worth of blank-eyed stares and finally sends Lupin and Tonks collaboratively digging through each other's pockets in search of one.
She plucks the key, an ornate slip of metal like the minute hand from a grandfather clock, out of Lupin's grasp, turns on her heel, marches right to the door, and swings it open with two clicks of the old lock. Billows of smoke escape from the inside and she coughs, covering her mouth with her sleeve.
"What happened?" Tonks exclaims. "One burned shirt can't cause all…"
"Obviously not!" the girl rasps. "I was making dinner before I got locked out of the house."
"I knew I should've brought takeaway," Tonks mutters staring into the doorway dim with all the smoke. Miss Delacour is already inside banging something unmistakeably metallic together, presumably in the kitchen. Tonks and Harry follow her not far behind; Harry simply disappears through the wall as Tonks rushes through the doorway. There's a bang and a hiss of running water hitting a scalding hot surface and instantly turning to steam. Lupin flaps the door back and forth rapidly to fan the air through the doorway and only then notices me still standing outside. He puts on a pleasant smile. "Why don't you come in, Severus? Leave the door open."
I shut it behind me, just to spite the irksome beast who is certainly not in any position to give me orders.
"It is ruined! Terrible!" a French-accented voice cries from the most smoke-filled corner.
"Now, there is no need to yell," Lupin calls out.
"S'brilliant," Harry sneaks a delighted grin at me, floating in the midst of all the chaos and happily enjoying the bitter scent of smoke. I narrow my eyes at him. Ghosts! Serve them toast once and they expect a four course meal every night.
That's when the worst of the smoke hits my nasal passages. I cough, dry and deep; it doubles me over and I can't seem to make it stop.
"I'm fine," I gasp, interrupting Harry before he can express the worry on his face in words. "Just need fresh air."
It's fascinating to see that the old wards still work in this place, and that the back door of the Leaky Cauldron still leads into an abandoned courtyard with two rubbish bins and a dead end that once used to be an entrance to Diagon Alley. The air here is clearer, without the petroleum stink of Muggle London or the smoke still lingering inside the Leaky Cauldron rooms. I am glad to be out of both sets of fumes, and out of the clutter and noise of the two hapless guardians trying to fill the role of the parents to an adolescent girl. Harry is still inside, buoyed by the clouds of their impromptu burnt offering, and I leave him to his banquet.
The lock behind me squeaks and turns and the girl slides through a gap barely thin enough to let a cat in. The opened door admits the muffled noise of conversation followed by the bang of heavy window frames sliding open.
"I have met you before," the girl says; that French lilt a little stronger in her voice. "But I forget your name." She stares at me quizzically, expecting a reminder.
"Snape."
"Ah." Her thin mouth quirks into a smirk and she nods toward the door she just came through. "They call me by your name sometimes. They say it to anyone who tires of pretending to be under constant Cheering Charms." She glances at me, quick and timid, like a mouse. "You do not know who I am, do you?"
I arch an eyebrow at her. "Quite the opposite, Miss Delacour. I remember you and your family quite well."
"Quoi?" She looks shocked. "Which one do you mean?"
I think back to Gabrielle's grandmother. She must have been Albus' age by the time we met, but her human shape seemed no older than Fleur. She was as elaborately gowned as Madame Pompadour, her white hair piled high in a magnificent display of an ingredient that would've cost me a small fortune per a single strand at the Knockturn Alley apothecaries. Long habitation among humans had taught her to wield the enchantment of her seductive presence well, but I knew what I would be getting into before I walked into the room. I prepared by burying all in me that was capable of response behind a labyrinth of Occlumency and it worked. When I failed to immediately fall at her feet in a paroxysm of lust, she smiled behind her fan and offered me tea, laced with Amortentia judging by the smell: I could recognise the sharp fragrance of Lucius' cologne anywhere, even mingled with the clear cold ozone scent of high-altitude flight. She was addicted to the power her presence granted her over men, so unaccustomed to failure she fell back on an easily detectable stratagem.. I returned her smile, and politely sipped my tea. After all, I could brew neutralising potions and I could certainly drink them in advance. They worked impeccably, of course, and I watched her fury grow, smiling inside all the while. Frustration added colour to her cheeks that no rouge could duplicate.
From that memory of triumph I turn to Gabrielle's sister, Fleur, at the lake during the Tournament, her veela beauty overwhelmed by her human hysteria at her failure to rescue Gabrielle. I remember her wide smile when Harry broke the surface and she saw her younger sister at last.
And that memory leads to Fleur taking up with the eldest Weasley lad, working with him at Gringotts, and from there it is impossible to escape the black pull of the memory of the burning pit in the earth that was the financial hub of our world.
Too many children were torn from family and home all over the world and forced into new families. Gabrielle had been unfortunate enough to fall into the clutches of a werewolf and a social misfit, who have apparently taken their own slant on Moody's vigilance obsession: 'Constant Cheerfulness!' Ghastly. Still, it could have been so very much worse. "Both of your families," I tell the girl. "They are particularly hard to forget."
Harry sticks his head through the wall. "Oi, Gabrielle? They're looking for you."
She rolls her eyes. "Quelle surprise," she mutters over her shoulder as she goes inside dragging her feet.
I watch Harry pace back and forth on thin air, in between staring at the wall next to him about five times a minute.
"It won't open," I inform him. "Save yourself the trouble of trying to walk through it."
"I know it won't," he frowns. "I'd need a wand for one thing. Oi!" his gaze rests on my pocket. "Could you maybe?"
"No!"
"Please."
Impossible whelp. I take out my wand and give the brick above the rubbish bin three taps with it. "Satisfied?"
As expected, nothing happens.
"Are you sure it's the right brick?"
"Yes! I am certain many have tried this before with just the same results."
"Well, it doesn't hurt to try it again," he argues. "Maybe it'll work this time."
An old saying appears in my mind: madness is repeating the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome. "It didn't. And it won't. You won't find a way in, so just save yourself the trouble of examining every brick on every wall that used to have a magical entrance."
He glares at me, then turns around and gives the wall a kick. As I expected, this wall, like the one at King's Cross Station, is one of the few that remains completely solid for him; all he manages to accomplish is one stubbed toe. "S'not fair! Nobody else has magic, but you'd think the anti-Muggle wards'd let a ghost through, but they don't 'cause I don't have a body." He stares at me, long and hard. "It'd make life so much easier if I had one," he says in a way people usually refer to new quill or a haircut.
And if the body he finds has a brain capable of logical thought, that would solve even more of his problems! It can't be good for a ghost to think such thoughts. It can't be good for a ghost to want an easy life. Life! Ha!
"Oi!" Harry exclaims suddenly. "Y'think we could ask Ginny to open it?"
"Ask Miss Weasley?" I cry, my voice sharp with disbelief. A heavily-pregnant squib, whose only magic is filtered through her link to her wizard foetus and is further destabilised by being focused through a wand not her own? You want to ask her to open the way into the world whose destruction we fled seven years ago? Why not ask her to stand in for Hermes, or Anubis, or Virgil, while you're at it? I give him my most forbidding glare, expecting rightful fear and immediate cooperation. "Over my dead body. In which case, I assure you, you will have more luck possessing it like the bothersome spirit you are and opening the damn arch yourself!"
Harry looks so eager I wonder uneasily if my last words could've been misinterpreted as sexual. "Can I?"
What? I take a quick step away from him. "Certainly not!"
"It doesn't need to be a dead body," he points out ever so helpfully, "Just a willing person."
He can't be serious about this. "Don't be macabre, it doesn't suit you."
"No, listen, I mean it! I think it'll work," he insists.
He is serious! I peer at him down my nose. Madness! "Just how sure are you?"
He doesn't budge. He faces me, unblinking, and for once I don't even miss my lost Legilimency; even without it, his eyes show his complete belief in what he says. "Sure enough to know it's worth trying! You believed me about Ginny's baby. Well, this is just like that!"
Just my luck if it is. It doesn't make knowing what I have to do any easier. "I used to have a bad reaction to the Imperius Curse." I step away from the wall I've been leaning against. "If I couldn't throw it off it turned … unpleasant." I take my wand out and hold it tight, drawing comfort from its familiar grip, even though that's all it's been good for in recent years. "I imagine being possessed might have a similar effect."
Harry's face is sombre with sympathy as I explain; but when I fall silent his eyes widen in surprise. "But… you'll let me?"
"I trust you," I husk. "Just make it quick."
"All right," he squares his shoulders, as if he's fighting down nerves. "Hang on. Never done it before."
Just perfect! I curse the moment I ever allowed myself to mention possession in his presence.
"Hold still."
Harry moves right in front of me, face to face. His hands reach out and hesitantly linger – without actually touching – at my temples. For a brief second of exchanged glances between us, I hold my breath and wonder if it's worth the sacrifice of his company to keep him out of my dreams, when he doesn't even need dreams to disturb my thoughts, when he can make my blood race with mere proximity.
"What are you do…"
"Shh. Try to relax." He leans closer. If this was one of his dreamscapes and he was solid our mouths would be an inch from colliding but they don't and how can I possibly relax like this? I stare – through him, at him – and Harry stares back for one brief second and then ducks his head down and moves forward and I feel the same tingling spark I felt when he ran through me before. But this time, it's not a fleeting frisson; it spikes in a wave of dizziness so intense I close my eyes. When I open them I see my wand hand moving without my own volition, my arm lifting to reach for the wall in response to another's will. I am a prisoner inside my own skull, as helpless to influence events as an Azkaban inmate is to control the gulls he sees beyond the bars of his cell window. It is as if Voldemort cast Imperius on me and forced me to watch a Polyjuiced stranger – no, my own body – move without my control: to see my hands brushing against the brick wall, to raise my wand tapping the stones. I am not strong enough to overpower the caster and slip from the grasp of his will. Helplessness crushes me; I panic and my chest burns with pain as in front of me the bricks quiver and turn with low scrapes and grindings, folding onto themselves, forming an archway that grows wider and wider.
And then suddenly, just before the burn in my chest drives me to my knees, I am back and I can move again. Through the gap in the wall I see the cobbled street twisting out of sight. I haven't seen it in so long I've begun to think of it as a foreign scene glimpsed on a postcard or in a magazine. Or worse: as a dream with no more relevance to me than an illustration in a book of myths.
But it's real and it's right in front of me.
I lean against the brick archway and gasp for air. It's the air coming from the other side, rich and free of the industrial reek of the city streets, heavy with the loamy scent of rain, wet earth, and bricks. The air itself is glistening with rain brightened by the last rays of the evening sun behind us. Everything shines in gold: the wavy cobbled footpaths amid the dark mass of abandoned storefronts, the grimy glass in storefronts themselves. The silence beyond is broken only by the patter of raindrops against the bricks and the low squeaking of a wooden sign swinging on the breeze.
"Bloody hell," Harry says right behind me. "It worked. WE OPENED IT!"
The last twinges of pain ebb away and I straighten out of my lean against the arch, though I leave a hand resting on the bricks to help disguise the movement. I'm understandably reluctant to draw Harry's attention to that side-effect of my moment of instinctive panic.
"You can come in now, the smoke is …" Lupin's standing behind us in the door leading to the Leaky Cauldron; his voice grinds to a halt and his expression glazes over with shock as he stares from the wand in my hand to the archway that minutes ago was just a plain brick wall. "Snape!" he cries at last, breathless. "What the hell did you do?"
Behind him, Tonks appears, flustered and pale, with a layer of soot across her forehead.
"Diagon Alley!" she grins. "Right, what're we standing around for?"
"Wait," Lupin puts his hand on Tonks' elbow. "Maybe we shouldn't go all at once. It's been years; there's no telling what's happened here."
Tonks raises an eyebrow and a hand. "Oi, Auror, remember? I'm trained to handle this. I should be telling you to stay behind." And with that she strides through the archway onto the cobbled road.
"Papa, she would be as much of a menace at home," Miss Delacour scolds Lupin as she walks past me. "Let's go."
"You're staying here," Tonks and Lupin order more-or-less in unison.
"Fine," she huffs and sits down next to one of the rubbish bins in the courtyard, stretching her legs across the archway. "But you will hear about it the next time you ask me to help Nymphadora around the house!"
I take my hand off the wall, and the bricks forming the edge of the archway scrape as they begin to turn. Quickly I place my hand through the opening to keep it from closing. "Hurry, then," I call over my shoulder. "There is no telling how long this will last."
Harry rushes past me onto the cobbled street after Tonks and takes a wild look around. "Everything looks fine," he calls. "It's just how we left it."
"Just remember, if you see or hear anything strange, run back into the house and let the archway close, don't worry about us," Lupin tells Gabrielle as he leaves her standing right in the middle of the entrance.
"I will," she says, leaning against the wall. "I have my key this time."
Lupin smiles and lifts her hood, ruffling her hair. She winces, tugging the hood over her head. "Be careful out there."
"We will," Tonks chimes in. "It's my job."
Lupin and Gabrielle both roll their eyes at that.
"Do hurry," I sneer at Lupin as he blocks the archway. "I prefer not to wait for you until the next full moon."
"Severus," he smiles pleasantly, "You're quite safe. I haven't had to resort to Wolfsbane for the last seven years."
Mangy beast. I don't know what enrages me more: his saccharine simpers or the fact that he's found a cure in the disaster that destroyed our world.
It stops raining by the time we turn the corner but the cobblestones are still wet in the middle of the street beyond the shelter of the eaves.
"Look, the Magical Menagerie," Tonks points at the windows of a nearby store. Glass shards fringe the windows' empty frames like a predator's fangs. Piles and piles of cages, disarranged and broken, fill the darkness within: skeletons of metal and wood. I glance away after a moment, stopping myself from looking for the remains of any trapped creatures in the cages that still seem intact.
Tonks approaches the storefront cautiously until she is underneath its ruined streetlamp, crooked and leaning against the brick wall. Her face is white and grim as she waves at a patch of footpath a few steps from the door. "I stood right here that morning," she says and I have no need to ask which morning it was. "First the Wireless stopped and everyone on the street went silent except for all the animals making noise and rattling their cages. And then the owls from Eeylops Emporium broke through the windows, right through the glass: sent feathers flying everywhere. Scared the wits out of us with all their screeching and flapping. Then the Magical Menagerie beasties followed them down the street: through the doors, mostly. I don't know how they got the cage doors open so fast, and all at once. Uncontrolled magic maybe; crups have these bursts sometimes when they're really scared. People were calling out, 'Catch them!' And then the blast from Gringotts shook the entire street. And it's like the bloody owls knew something was wrong before we did!" she exclaims bitterly. "They knew, and we didn't suspect a thing before it was too late." She grows silent and looks up, as if still expecting to see the owls flying away right before the disaster hits. Then her gaze seeks out Lupin. "But it's all right. Look, we're back," she says uncertainly, as if convincing herself that it's true.
"Yes, we are," his hand lingers on her shoulder for a while before they resume walking.
Diagon Alley isn't quite 'just how we left it', no matter what Harry says.
Most of the wards still work, but ironically that fact also works against us, as Lupin discovers when he tries to get into Quality Quidditch Supplies. After three unsuccessful tries and an attempt to break through the door he's thrown backwards against the opposite wall. Five minutes later we revive him, as it turns out, from the side effect of a short-term memory charm. "What happened," he asks, blinking and giving us confused looks. As Tonks explains, I ponder how lucky we are that the memory charm wasn't set to a longer amount of time and Lupin still vaguely remembers walking through the Diagon Alley entrance. We're also lucky that we didn't discover this fact through something harsher, like anti-theft wards.
"I must've wanted to see if the brooms still work," Lupin speculates, eyeing the locked door to the Quidditch supplies store. "That's the first thing the Muggles were looking for besides the wands. Rumour has it they still went up in the air after everything happened and of course after Muggles were through with us you couldn't find a Wizarding broomstick in all of the British Isles."
Harry eyes the windows interestedly at that. "Bet my old Firebolt's still in the cupboard," he whispers to me, grinning. "Too bad I can't ride it. If I could I'd've showed up at my aunt and uncle's door long ago to pick it up and left through the window, wizard style. Would've loved to see their faces." I think of one of his dreamscapes then, the one where he recreated the room with the barred windows and the silent house with the unmoving pictures on the wall and the unlit cupboard. It was so small the broom would never have fit in it, without being shrunken.
Tonks helps Lupin up and they keep going into the purple shadows of the winding street, followed by Harry not far behind them. I can only guess that they're driven by the same senseless urge that drove the ancient Muggle explorers in search of undiscovered lands through miles and miles of empty ocean to their eventual deaths. If James Cook was a wizard, he would've been sorted into Gryffindor.
Lupin and Tonks divide up the street. She takes the left and he the right, trying doorknobs and peeking through dusty windows, just as children often looked through the dark windows of Honeydukes after closing time. All the doors seem to be locked. They don't try their chances with the wards any more.
They keep up with their routine until we reach the pit where Gringotts used to be. The empty hole in the ground is not so raw and jagged-edged now, smoothed over by grass and ivy cascading down its sides. Nature's had seven years to take over the ruin and it's done so, one cracked brick, one patch of empty ground at a time.
On the footpath before me, between stones ringed with moss and crusted with lichen, I see something that seems to epitomise the whole Alley, its familiarity and strangeness: a knut, its bronze gone green with verdigris.
I try to get it out with the toe of my boot but it's stuck between the two cobbles wedged deep into the pavement, so deep that it's turned into part of this place. Diagon Alley has been waiting for us, abandoned all these years, with its empty stores, ruins, and coins lost amid the cobbles. Most likely it will have to wait a few more years before we see any sort of movement on these streets.
I look up. Harry hovers over the edge of the dark pit where Gringotts used to stand. I take a few steps toward him.
"It can't be true," he says softly.
"Harry?"
"I'm all right," he shakes his head sending his transparent fringe flying. "Just, y'know, I heard it before, and I saw it in your dream, but it's different, somehow, to see it like this. It's really gone. Empty. This whole place is."
"It won't be empty forever," I murmur, and I'm not just saying it to comfort him. I believe it; simply because it's logical to assume that someone someday will repair the broken windows, swing open the warded doors, find all the galleons, knuts, and sickles lying forgotten in the dust. Perhaps none of us will, but we are just the first to set foot in this place, and someone else, someday, will eventually come here and make it their home.
"I s'pose not," Harry says thoughtfully and looks up at me with a faint smile. "Thanks."
"Why?"
He shrugs and his smile turns wry. "No reason."
Of all the things I'd imagined doing if I ever returned to Diagon Alley, receiving thanks from Harry Potter had certainly never crossed my mind.
"Look," Tonks yells pointing behind the half-collapsed store on the other side of Gringotts, "A chunk of the wall is missing."
Harry's face lights up. "D'you reckon the wards'd still work if you don't try to break in?" he asks, but then he rushes ahead without even waiting for a reply. Nonetheless, I let Lupin crawl through the hole in the collapsed side of the building first. I do not want to risk a memory charm: however faint the chances might be, I would rather not lose Harry's last words from my mind.
I remember this place. Even in this state, poorly lit and with one corner of the room reduced to mere rubble. The fireplace on the other side is still intact, and so is the jar of floo powder sitting on the mantel. It's the same place where seven years ago I rushed in and tried to floo to Malfoy Manor without success. I remember accusing the owner of letting his floo powder go stale but now I suspect that the owner had nothing to do with it.
Lupin pokes at the powder that has solidified in its jar long since. He shakes the jar upside down but nothing comes out.
Tonks crawls over the rubble inspecting the jars and the phials on the shelves, their labels covered by a thick layer of gritty dust.
"What're these?" She plucks something small and pale from a dusty wooden box. "Funny little thing, innit?" She rubs the dust off it then holds it to her eye to peer at it closely. "Pretty." She's holding up a capsule-shaped orb; now that the glass is free of grime, the liquid within glows like a white opal, almost like Harry himself when he's fully visible.
The instant I see the colour of the fluid and the fact that it's sealed into airless, stopperless ampoules rather than any ordinary phials, my blood freezes in my veins. The ingredients come back to me at once: salamander bile, dragon saliva, erumpent fluid and half a dozen more components, any one of which could reduce the whole room to ash. I feel the urge to yell 'Run!' but any sound freezes in my throat.
Tonks stops eyeing the ampoule and gets ready to toss it up in the air, as if it's a ball and she wants to play catch.
Ever so slowly I take a breath. I didn't live through two Wizarding wars and the collapse of our world just to be blown to bits by a bloody clumsy accident of a careless former student. "Miss Tonks," I advise her in my most composed voice. "Put it down, before it puts us down. Gently."
She shudders from seven years of ingrained classroom instinct, and for a second gives me the same horrorstruck look as the young and pink haired version of herself who'd just blown up a cauldron full of mangled ingredients. This time however she doesn't hide behind a different face and try to talk her way out of trouble. Instead, thank Merlin, she listens to me for once and sets the tiny ampoule down into the box. "All right, it's back in, relax," she shrugs.
As Tonks moves away, Harry floats up to the box and peers interestedly into it. I smirk humourlessly when his gleam illuminates the alchemical symbols on the box's dust-shrouded sides. Just my luck. That was no stray ampoule: we're sharing a room with a 3x7 storage chest of the stuff. Better still; one glance shows me the chest is completely full: there are opalescent gleams in every cushioned compartment within. "Paranoid git," Harry looks up from his fascinated examination, chuckling at me. "S'not like they're going to blow up any second."
"No, indeed," I inform him dryly. "They only explode if the potion comes into the slightest contact with air." I glare pointedly from the glass ampoules to him until he too backs away from the crate. "Oh," he says. "They do?" and his lips spread into a slow, appreciative smile. "Wicked!"
I peer down my nose at him as I lift an ampoule from its compartment in a single – and above all, smooth – movement, and hold it up to his face, pointedly comparing its luminescence to his, side by side. "Ignis Alba, Mister Potter; White Fire," I enunciate. "Half the time I think you're made of it: how else can one explain such an explosive personality?"
Harry snorts, then gives me a wide smile, although I certainly didn't intend the remark to be a compliment. Behind my back Lupin has the audacity to laugh. Tonks echoes him.
Suddenly Harry's face grows stern as he glances past me. "Oi, what's that?" he exclaims, pointing toward the gap in the wall that we had climbed through.
"What?" I ask.
"Outside," he frowns. "I saw something move."
Lupin and Tonks step toward the wall, away from the light. "Was it a person? A beast?" Lupin questions in low tones.
"Dunno," Harry shakes his head. "I only noticed a shadow: small. It was fast, whatever it was."
While the others are occupied, I slip a few ampoules into separate pockets. Just in case. It's not the safest way to transport them, but unlike Gryffindors and their fondness for playing games of catch with incendiary potions, any damage I will do with them will be fully intentional.
"We should head back," Lupin says, his nostrils wide. "Gabrielle's all alone out there and I don't trust this place."
All is silent as we step outside. The sun hides behind the pointed roofs and the twisting street grows darker as we start making our way back to the Magical Menagerie and the archway beside it. We keep clear of the empty, sinister windows and doors of the warded buildings, and we stay out of the shadows of their roofs: darkened silhouettes against the orange sky. Our footsteps echo eerily through the empty alley. Harry is in the lead, followed by Lupin and Tonks. I am last in line, and I cannot forbear from glancing behind me occasionally, driven by an awareness even more unsettling than the sense of Harry's invisible scrutiny that I've felt in the past. There is an uncomfortable weight on the back of my neck; my shoulders hunch, as they did in school, in expectation of curses yet to land. It's as if the entire alley is watching us from the shadows, wondering why we came back after abandoning it so long ago.
A startled cry comes from around the last corner leading to the archway.
"Gabrielle?" Tonks cries out and runs forward.
"I am all right. It just surprised me," she calls back. "Just look at this. It is unbelievable!"
"Whoa!" Harry's eyes go wide as he turns the corner. "Oi, it's a … alive." I cover the distance between us in three strides and look where he points.
A baby sits in the middle of the street. Pale and unclothed. No, not a baby, I realise as it turns around to look at us. It's too small to be a human child: though it's hairless and pink, it's no bigger than a kitten and its ears are long enough to drape over its shoulders. The creature is certainly not human, but it's a living, breathing, moving creature nonetheless.
Gabrielle kneels at the entrance and reaches out toward it, holding onto the side of the arch to prevent it from closing. "Hi," she says. "Come here, we will not hurt you."
It rises up on shaky legs and makes a first step toward her.
"It is a house elf!" Gabrielle croons softly. "How peculiar. No! Stay where you are, you will scare it." Despite her warning Lupin takes another step but Tonks stops him by placing her hand on his shoulder and squeezing. Gabrielle takes the cap off her head and waves it gently above the ground to gain the elf's attention. Scrawny and almost hairless herself, she looks like a bigger version of the creature. The house elf stumbles toward the offered hat, wide-eyed as an owl with its long ears twitching curiously.
The sight isn't enough to convince me yet, but maybe Diagon Alley is not as dangerous as we thought. From what I've seen so far, the place is like an orphaned child aged beyond recognition, worn thin and drained by time and loss, left lonely and prone to silence; but if you lean close and look at it a certain way, if you coax it out of the shadow, there is still hope and a spark of former beauty and life.
"I didn't know there were any house elves left here," Tonks grins at Lupin.
Left here? I think of the shadow Harry saw in front of the store. The elf is pulling at the cap, but Gabrielle doesn't let go. It bites into the edge, pulling the threads loose. "That is not nice!" the girl exclaims. "Where are your manners?" She reaches for his long, pointed nose with one finger, intending to give it a tap.
As she does so, I gasp "Don't touch it!" The old horror of inevitability closes over me, relived in nightmares a hundred times – the certainty that everything is about to go catastrophically, unstoppably wrong – exactly as I felt it at Knockturn Alley, before the explosion.
My warning comes too late; the house elf lets out a piercing wail. The air trembles like a mirage as a burst of magic rushes past us to hit Gabrielle, who is thrown backwards against the opposite wall of the courtyard. Lupin jumps to her, but Tonks is faster. With a low grind the stones of the archway begin to turn and close as Tonks throws herself forward and squeezes through the narrow gap, her body keeping the stones from closing any further. Her hand grabs the side of the closing arch, but there is a second rush of energy past me and Tonks disappears, shoved through the gap and away from it by the sheer force of the spell. Spell? Yes, it must be, the wandless, wordless magic that the house elves have always had. The stones seal themselves after her with an ominous rumble, trapping us in Diagon Alley. Lupin is at the wall a second too late, his hands scraping against the stones like a beast's digging claws.
I turn away from him and watch as tiny shadows materialise from their hiding places and the first waist high figure emerges from between the buildings. There are more on the roofs and dozens scuttling like rats from every possible dark hole. But these are not house elves as we have known them, any more than this is the Diagon Alley of old. The house elves we knew were cringing, obsequious, pitiable, mere bond-servants or slaves. These creatures are barbarians, and warlike-looking ones at that. Instead of ragged Wizarding cast-offs, they wear animal furs, feathers and claws; thin, polished stakes pierce their noses and earlobes.
"Bloody hell, the house elves are attacking!" Harry yelps, always realising the obvious a moment too late. Just when I think this can't get any more surreal I take a second look at the elves. The stakes piercing through their ears and noses are wand handles – a variety of polished wood, ebony, ash, and willow, probably from the Ollivander's shop – only now they're broken off and sharpened and most likely aren't used as intended by their creator. The nearest elf stretches his face into a feral grimace and waves his empty hand, pushing another bolt of pure magical energy through the air toward us, using nothing but his bare palm, with three tiny shrunken heads and a few galleons dangling off his wrist on thin leather bands.
I sidestep the curse. It flies past me and hits the wall. Reflexes honed in decades of Wizarding warfare have my wand out of my pocket in an instant, its point aimed unerringly at the angry mob of creatures closing in on us. Of course, all such reflexes were rendered useless seven years ago. Behind me there is a sharp crack of wandless Apparation and the tiny child disappears from its spot next to the wall, reappearing almost instantly at the foot of a frowning female with black circles painted with soot around her large, protruding eyeballs. The child clutches at her knee and lets out a demanding cry.
Slowly I step away, until my back is against the solid wall and there is nowhere else to go. The house elf closest to me snaps his fingers and my wand handle grows searing hot. Pain forces my grip to loosen and the sharp pull of a summoning charm rips my wand from my hand. My wand flies through the air like a birch arrow, embedding its tip in the rot-softened wood of a window frame. One of the elves reaches for it.
"More are coming," Harry cries and suddenly steps out in front of us in a uselessly-protective gesture. Groups of waist-high creatures are quickly filling up Diagon Alley, all wearing feral and threatening frowns. Another spell is thrown right through Harry this time; it does him no harm, yet leaves a shallow dent in the stone wall right above my left ear as I duck out of the way.
"Do something!" Lupin cries.
What can I do? There won't be enough time for Harry to even attempt to open the entrance a second time before the elves attack. My hand slips into a pocket, closes on one of the ampoules. "Harry, move!" I yell as I throw it down between our attackers and us where Harry just stood.
The ampoule smashes on the cobbles, and explodes into a pyramid of flame, wide as the street, tall as the buildings on either side, burning fiercer than any natural fire, with a flaring white heat.
There are gasps and yells beyond that blinding white wall of flame, but there's no way of knowing what's happening on the other side. Another name for Ignis Alba is the Fire Unquenchable; neither water nor cold nor spell nor lack of air will put it out, and it will burn as long as there is any organic matter within reach of the flame. All I can do is hope that the elves didn't lose their ancient fear of fire – a threat to a household – when they lost their servility.
The first shadows emerge through the smoke-covered roofs. "Run!" I yell at Lupin and do just the same, ducking another spell. "NOW!" I feel the magical surge crackle right next to my head. Blasted elves. I don't know how they managed to retain their magic through it all.
"Run where?" Lupin cries behind me. "We're trapped!"
I grab him then and shove him into a narrow, shadowy gap between the solid wall and the first store in the street; I leap in after him at once.
"Hey!" Lupin startles, looking around wildly as he runs. "This wasn't here a few seconds ago."
Harry follows us closely. "It wasn't," he confirms. "What is this place?"
I make sure that we are far enough into the dark alleyway and that we haven't been followed before I stop to catch my breath. "This is the back way into Knockturn Alley, Potter, and I didn't expect you to notice it at all, but Lupin on the other hand … I'm shocked." I stare at the beast in a mockery of innocent surprise. "And to think, you held a job for a year as a Dark Arts expert!" I abandon the faux-surprise in favour of a sneer. "Pitiful."
"Defence, Severus," Lupin retorts in a manner entirely too self-righteous, considering I just saved his pompous arse. "But I'm not surprised that you would know every way into this place."
Which just goes to show the depth of his ignorance. What matters is not what I know of the way, it's what the way knows of me. "The back way into Knockturn Alley moves around. The only ones who can find it truly belong here."
"Listen to yourself." Lupin scoffs. "You're a Muggle, just like the rest of us. Stop pretending to be a Death Eater and face the facts."
Lupin may delude himself that he is normal, but that's just another luxury I can't afford. If the loss of magic has lightened his burdens, it has done nothing much for mine. Subconsciously my right hand covers my arm, below the elbow, where the Dark Mark still remains. The first time I found this way into Knockturn was right after my Marking. "I'm not 'pretending', you cretin. The mere fact that we're standing here proves that, unlike you, the Knockturn Alley wards can still recognise the Dark Mark, whether it's active or not."
Harry frowns at me as I snarl at Lupin, and I round on him. "What?" I bark. "Some scars never fade, or have you forgotten, again?"
His eyes flash. "How can I? You keep reminding me."
I take a deep breath and try to calm myself enough to stop the lingering dry cough. "Touch nothing," I warn Lupin. "These wards won't let you go unharmed."
We make our way through the winding street which is quickly turning dark after sunset. Knockturn Alley with its uneven roofs and sinister archways finally ends, leading back into Diagon Alley at the turn near Gringotts.
Harry checks the road first for the presence of the elves and then motions for us to cross. Carefully we make our way into the half-destroyed building where just an hour before Tonks had almost broken an ampoule of Ignis Alba.
Lupin sits down against the far wall, next to the fireplace. Harry hovers over the shelves but then makes his way closer to me, sitting down on the edge of a table.
Lupin takes a garish pink lighter out of his back pocket and flips the cover, staring at the small flame it produces. "At least Tonks is all right," he sighs.
"At least Hermione won't need her S.P.E.W. badges anymore," Harry echoes him.
Gryffindors! If there is a positive side, they'll team up to find it no matter how vague it is. I raise an eyebrow at Harry. "S.P.E.W.?"
"Yeah," he nods. "Society for the Promotion of Elfish Welfare."
For once I can't stop myself from laughing out loud at the irony.
"What?" he frowns. "I didn't name it."
"You may tell Granger that she has her work cut out for her. It appears that the elves do not require their welfare to be promoted any longer."
"Heh, I'd say!" he chuckles. "Hang on, lemme check on them again," and disappears through the wall.
I make sure the burn on my wand hand isn't blistering. Lupin is still examining the jars on the mantel when Harry flies through the locked front door.
"They're waiting by Flourish and Blotts," he announces. "If we get round them somehow, I might be able to open the archway again."
"Not without a wand," I shake my head. "They summoned mine."
"Oh," Harry blinks at me, "then how're you going to get out of here?"
How indeed? "I've been more preoccupied with staying alive than planning our escape."
"But we have to go back, maybe there's another way out," Harry protests.
"Really?" I drawl. "In that case, you may wish to ask the Defence expert" I smirk humourlessly at Lupin, "how to avoid a pack of rabid house elves."
"We might not have to go all the way back. I have an idea," Lupin pokes at the unlit hearth. "The Leaky Cauldron has a fireplace. The coals should still be hot."
A fireplace? Is that his brilliant plan? To whisk us away by a Floo that hasn't worked for years? "Have you lost your mind?"
Harry drifts up behind him, craning his neck to peer interestedly over his shoulder.
"It doesn't hurt to try," Lupin shrugs and picks up the jar of solidified floo powder.
Try what? Using a magical network that hasn't been active since the blast? I should know: I tried this very fireplace and it didn't work. "Oh, please do. And if you give it a few centuries, maybe the house elves will reinvent Floo transportation as well as the Wireless and the sodding Knight Bus. I, for one, do not intend to wait that long."
Lupin kneels at the fireplace with the lighter, ignoring me.
"Er, there's some paper at the counter that'd probably burn," Harry says to him.
"Thank you," he replies ever so politely, smiling at Harry and pointedly not looking in my direction. A minute passes before he coaxes a small flame out of the ash-covered coals and crumpled sheets of paper. With a pocket knife, he manages to break off a few chunks of the solidified powder. He crushes them further between his fingers as Harry watches intently, and carefully tosses them into the small fire.
The flame remains exactly the same colour as before.
"I told you it wouldn't work."
"It should," Lupin protests. "I've tried it before at the Leaky Cauldron and the powder never failed to cause a reaction. It never worked for transportation, but I always assumed that's because the destination fireplaces weren't lit."
I imagine Lupin spending his days in front of a burning fireplace and wasting handfuls of floo powder while naming random locations: Hog's Head, Three Broomsticks, Hogwarts. A Gryffindor, he probably didn't know when to quit.
"You have floo powder at home?" Harry beams.
"Not any more," Lupin shakes his head sadly. "I ran out, years ago." Squandered the lot of it, the idiot. He stares at the jar in his hands. "This batch must've gone bad."
I see the first shadows moving at the nearby intersection and press myself flat against the wall. "Silence! They're coming."
Lupin exchanges worried looks with Harry. "We need something to barricade the entrance."
"There's no time," I hiss at him. "Put the fire out now! You can see it from the street." Perhaps if we sit this one out they won't notice us. Maybe then we might stand a chance of getting out of here unharmed.
Instead Lupin pulls off his coat and leaves it hanging over the mantelpiece, blocking most of the light. "No," he says calmly. "That's our only way out."
Harry moves past me and pokes his head out through the gap in the wall. "They're getting closer," he whispers. I lean over to see for myself. "No!" he stops me. "They'll see you. They have very good night vision." For once I regret that I do not have Harry's ability to stay perfectly invisible to others if he wishes. Behind the shelves I hear the muffled sound of a clay jar breaking: Lupin, still messing about with the floo powder.
"Listen," Harry says. His glasses glisten in the first light of the moon – nearly full – rising over the rooftops. "Just wanted you to know, I didn't forget about your Mark back then," he whispers hastily. "I know what you were – are – and … And I don't care."
"It takes more to make a Death Eater than an ugly tattoo, Potter."
"I know! And I should hate you, and I know that too. But I don't. I can't! Lately I've started every morning just waiting for you to wake up and say something to me, and I've watched you sleep for hours and I can't hate you." He blinks and looks down, as if afraid that his outburst was heard by Lupin.
I take pity on him. "How close are the elves?"
He glances outside, seizing on the distraction I offer. "Close," he whispers. "Maybe they'll turn around."
Unlike Harry, I am not so optimistic. They're about as likely to suddenly turn around in the middle of the street as they are to call us 'Master' and ask us the meaning of S.P.E.W.
"Remember I asked you what you'd do if I was alive?" Harry says then. "I never told you what I'd do."
I quirk my mouth into a small smile. "Enlighten me."
"I reckon I ought to show you instead. This is the perfect time for something drastic." He's standing too close. Even in this sparse light I can see every silvery strand of his fringe. He bites his lip and looks at me, a question lingering in his stare.
I don't need him to ask that question aloud. I clear my throat. "You aren't alive, Harry. And that's another thing" like the Mark, "I'd prefer not to forget."
Behind me the flames sizzle and flare green. "See," Lupin smiles triumphantly, "that did the trick. All I had to do was to use the powder from the bottom of the jar."
"Shh," I hiss at him; if the house elves' sight is keen, surely their hearing is also acute.
Soon there is another round of crackling and sparks with Lupin's voice enunciating "The Leaky Cauldron". I turn around. He's still here.
"That's odd," he says. "Perhaps the fireplace back home went out."
And perhaps if I knock him out and offer him to the house elves they'll let me go. "Silence!"
At last he listens to me and ducks behind the row of shelves, first throwing a handful of ash over the flames.
"They're here," Harry whispers. I freeze against the wall, behind a pile of rubble. In my chest the air feels like lead. My own heartbeat pulses at a frantic pace in my ears.
All is silent and in that silence my thoughts cycle frantically. Perhaps they won't notice us. Perhaps they'll turn around. But logic tells me that they know we're here, that they're gathering their forces, organising for the attack. They've lived in this place for years. They've turned Diagon Alley into their home, and we are the invaders.
In the moonlight falling through the gap in the wall, I see a long-eared shadow moving silently closer. I press myself deeper into the shadows and hold my breath until the air starts to burn my lungs. I notice my hand moving of its own accord, searching my pockets instinctively for the wand I no longer have. I close my fist around one of the ampoules instead, smooth and deceptively cool in my palm.
Across from the entrance, Harry's worried gaze is fixed on me. His face shimmers with the same pale opalescence as the incendiary potion. Seeing his determination makes me want to believe that there's a chance I will get out of this alive.
Slowly, the shadow begins to move away.
Without warning the silence is shattered by a loud metallic ringing from Lupin's direction. I startle, gasp, and gasp again; it's as if the sudden shock has driven all the air from my lungs.
The shadow at the entrance twitches and the elf gives a shriek that's even louder than the ringing.
The tightness in my chest expands into shooting agony, sapping the strength from my limbs. With a desperate effort, I throw the ampoule through the gap in the wall. It explodes into brilliant white, blocking the entrance.
If I live through this, the thought flies through my mind, I'd very much like to see what Harry considers 'drastic'. I'd let him bring me into his dreamscapes, and maybe even see where they would lead.
Through the deep white fog thickening in my mind, I think I hear Lupin's distant voice: "Found your mobile? I thought you put it through the wash last month." But the words make no sense. Harry? Then the irregular beat in my ears drowns out all other sound and the world fades away.
I wake in an unfamiliar place, thirsty and with an atrocious headache. The pillows are too soft and so is the bed. The darkened room is larger and emptier than my own bedroom. A narrow rectangle of light spills from the half-opened door. I can hear traffic outside the window and two muffled female voices in the doorway.
"Oh, dear, it'd be fine if you just let it grow an inch or two and stop wearing a cap all the time. It's such a beautiful light colour."
"It's nearly grey! People mistake me for an old woman and offer me their seats on the bus."
"Well, I s'pose we could dye it," there is a sound of a drawer opening and someone rummaging through it, "Pink or green?"
"No, stay away!" There's a squeal and a shout of: "Papa! She is doing it again!"
Tonks' triumphant laugh is overlapped by another girlish shriek. "Papa!"
"Er … Tonks? I think she looks fine as is," a tentative voice – Harry's – interrupts.
He's answered by an exasperated sigh. "I do not! It is grey!"
I listen to them bicker for another minute until Harry's head pops through the wall right over the headboard and looks down at me. "Hi there," he grins and emerges fully, perching on the side of the bed. "You're awake."
Harry and his habit of stating the obvious. I arch an eyebrow at him. "Really? I haven't noticed."
He narrows his eyes and gives me a stern glare. "Very funny! Everyone was worried."
"Oh, I'm sure they were worried sick." I drawl in my driest voice.
"They were, and so was I!" he cries. "What happened?"
I look around and let my eyes get used to the dark. I recognise the room now. It's changed a lot since I've been here last, but I've stayed here once: it's one of the upstairs rooms over the Leaky Cauldron. It used to contain a bed and a chair, but now bookshelves and a small table have been brought in. The light from the doorway falls across the spines of some of the books: I can make out Magical Beasts and Hairy Snout, Human Heart wedged in between a copy of the Metropolitan Police Manual and a pamphlet titled The Gender Agenda: Women Officers Clearing Hurdles Together.
"I should ask you that question," I finally answer. I wonder how much Harry has really worked out.
"Dunno," he shrugs. "After you started that fire you just collapsed on the spot. Remus had to drag you into the fireplace. We're lucky Tonks found her mobile and called him just then. That's how she knew to light the fire. D'you remember anything?"
He doesn't know. Good. "There must've been an incapacitating spell among the wards set on those ampoules. Or I simply managed to set off one of the slow-acting wards in Knockturn Alley," I say nonchalantly. "Fortunately they've been weakened over time."
"Oh," Harry forces out a harsh laugh. "You scared me. I thought you were … er, forget it. It's mental."
I try my best to sound casually reassuring as I ask with my best butter-wouldn't-melt-in-my-mouth smirk: "How could you think I would be so callous as to burden dear Lupin with awkward explanations of my demise, in addition to everything else he went through today?"
Harry chuckles shaking his head. "Good," he beams at me. "Great to have you back!" His hand slides over the blanket to my elbow, not quite touching it. "I don't think I'd want to haunt anyone else."
"You'd be better off with someone else. You should've taken up Granger's offer."
"Nuh-uh." He shakes his head furiously. "If you weren't here I'd probably go back to Hogwarts. I think I like haunting places more than people …" he looks up at me grinning. "'Cept for you."
"Stubborn brat. What am I going to do with you?" I turn down the blanket and shift over to the edge of the bed. The room starts swimming in front of my eyes and for a second it looks as though there's more than one Harry staring at me.
"Er," they say in unison. "Maybe you shouldn't try sitting up so soon."
"I'll be the judge of that." I blink and remain still, clutching the edge of the bed until the throbbing in my skull ebbs and the two images of Harry slowly ease back into one.
"You must be better," Harry smirks. "You're back to your usual pleasant self."
"I'm fine. See?" I swing my feet over the edge of the bed and onto the floor and try to ignore the fact that my body feels twice as heavy and my limbs numb. "What time is it?" I glance at the window. It's pitch dark outside.
"Ten," Harry answers. "You've been out of it for a while. Tonks was ready to take you to the hospital, but your breathing turned steady again and you seemed to be better so Remus said to wait and let you rest."
"Ah, of course! Murdering me didn't work the first time, so he was hoping his feral little friends would finish me off," I mutter searching for my second shoe next to the bed. "What was his fallback plan? Suffocating me with a pillow?"
"He's not evil," Harry frowns. "He and Tonks took care of three students from your House. Raised them, helped them to adjust to Muggle school. They're all coming back to visit this weekend."
I nearly laugh at the picture of Lupin keeping some of my Slytherins out of trouble. I hope they were all first-years, troublesome little buggers. "Did he? I suppose it's a step up from throwing them to the wolves."
"Oh, stop it!" Harry cries. "Remus isn't a monster! He was worried about you."
Of course he was; so distraught that he never left my bedside. But mercy or weariness prevents me from voicing this observation, and from wondering aloud why Harry was the only one who bothered to check whether I was awake. "Waste of effort," I grumble instead. "There was nothing to worry about."
I follow Harry down the narrow staircase to the room that used to be a pub downstairs at the Leaky Cauldron. It's much better lit now than it used to be. The tables are all gone except for one in the corner by the fireplace where Lupin and Tonks sit, laughing, half-hidden behind takeaway boxes scattered on the tabletop.
"… the old times," I catch a part of their conversation. "Remember when Kingsley and I and you and your Boys and half the people from Diagon Alley we hardly knew all turned up and stayed upstairs that summer? I won't miss all those bloody arguments over who had money for food." Tonks laughs. "And remember how we had to draw straws each week for who'd do the cooking, and I drew the first short straw and kept threatening to leave before the week was out? Look at me now, years later everyone's moved on and I'm still here."
"With us," Lupin says softly to her. "We're here too. And I got better at cooking."
The girl, her hair still grey despite Tonks' earlier threats, squeezes herself in between them, quiet and still, very much like the Leaky Cauldron that occupies the space between the record store and the bookstore, unnoticed at the first glance.
"Papa, did you know Tonks could run that fast?" she asks quietly. "I did not."
Lupin smiles. "She has plenty of hidden talents. Dodging house elf attacks isn't all of them by far." He gives her shoulder a cheerful little pat. "There's our SuperTonks."
Tonks guffaws and her hand reaches out to tweak his ear. Lupin bats it away. His face reddens as Tonks' smirk widens, then she notices me on the stairway. "Severus. You're better."
"Dinner?" Lupin gestures with a polite smile. I shake my head.
"Here," Tonks grins. "Have a shot of this. We're celebrating." She upends a hip-flask over an empty glass and slides it in my direction.
I arch an eyebrow as Gabrielle warily takes a sip from Tonks' nearly empty glass and makes a face at it, reaching for the water. "Celebrating?" What is there to celebrate?
Lupin chimes in. "The reopening of Diagon Alley, the first foray into the Wizarding world and the first successful Floo transportation this decade. Though I probably shouldn't take all credit for that one, after all there were other parties involved" he glances at me pointedly "but mainly this historical date will go down in history as the day Tonks finally used her mobile," he concludes with a smile so polite it can hardly be called real. "Care to make a toast, Severus?"
I refuse to spare him another look. Instead I walk over on my still shaky legs and pick up the offered glass. Out of the corner of my eye I glance at Harry and the sceptical way he's eyeing the whisky in my hand, the same way I sometimes catch him looking at the bottles in my kitchen.
I raise the glass to Harry. "To magic," I toast, but after only the tiniest sip of the spirits, I cast most of the glassful into the fireplace. The burning coals hiss and the fire flares briefly white, reminding me of the last ampoule of Ignis Alba, still in my shirt pocket. As I put the empty glass back on the table I watch Harry hovering over the flames, his glow mingling with theirs until he seems almost a part of them, a risen phoenix, beaming as he shares in the toast to magic, in his own unique way.
"Let's not get ahead of ourselves here," Lupin says, draining the rest of his glass. "We don't have magic back yet. But we will soon! Severus, have you heard about Molly Weasley's youngest?"
"Oh?" I allow a sarcastic smirk to linger on my lips. "Can't say I have." Behind me I hear Harry's muffled snort.
"And now that we know that the Floo works, with most of the fireplaces spelled to keep the coals hot for weeks, we have a way to access the Wizarding world again," Lupin exclaims to the nodding Tonks without paying any attention to my answer. "We just have to light them, one after the other, and keep them lit."
I look at them and wonder what good it can possibly do to risk one's skin to relight the fireplaces just for the sake of being able to Floo from one ruin to another.
Behind them Gabrielle Delacour rolls her eyes and casts me a knowing look. "It is past their bedtime," she mouths. "They get that way."
"So," Tonks asks him with a mischievous glance. "That'd mean you'd want the rest of your blasted floo powder back? Besides the handful in your pocket?"
Lupin's eyebrows climb up to his forehead. "You had it? I knew there was another jar."
"Someone had to take it away," Tonks shrugs. "You singed your eyebrows and we were tired of you yelling into the fireplace for days. But you can have it back if it makes you happy."
"Best of luck," I deadpan at the still stunned Lupin. "Next time, do make sure you use a sealed container to transport the floo powder by Floo, otherwise you might end up arriving at your final destination entirely singed." I lean against the mantel and take a deep breath in hope that warm air will calm the dry cough still threatening to burst out of my chest at any minute. Then I turn toward the door.
"Stay," Tonks offers. "Have another glass. And drink it this time!"
"No, thank you," I reply. "I'd best be on my way. Good evening." I turn and walk away without regrets.
"Wait," I hear in the alley behind me and at first I think it's Harry asking me to slow down, but he is just as surprised, looking back. Gabrielle is standing outside with the mobile in her hand. "It is late," she says. "And you do not look strong enough to walk. I can call a cab for you."
I almost accept her offer. It's the only genuine one I've had here all day. "It's not necessary, Miss Delacour," I murmur. "But thank you."
"Come back this weekend," Gabrielle offers. "This place is busier then. The Boys will be glad to see you; you taught them, didn't you? I like you," she smiles a thin-lipped smile at Harry and me. "You are nice to your ghost."
At that I give a small smile and a nod, but I don't reply aloud. It's easier to keep silent than to lie, and I already know that I probably won't be able to come back, not this weekend, not ever.
She still stands in the doorway, mobile in her hand, as Harry and I turn the corner, a short, hooded outline – dark and thin – against the yellow rectangle of light. I wish I could've afforded a cab. It's a long way home and I'm already out of breath, and it'll take all of my concentration to keep Harry from noticing and worrying.
I make sure I am alone at first, although Harry never bothers me in the bathroom any more.
I don't usually use the electric lights, but just this once candles aren't enough. There are plenty of things going through my mind as I stare into the mirror. I press two fingers into my left wrist and count my pulse. My hands are cold and clammy: they rarely get like this. It's unusual. This isn't right.
I must remain calm. It certainly won't do to give in to panic.
I unfasten the buttons of my shirt, first the sleeves and then from my neck down. I pull the shirt off and look carefully in the mirror at the scar that stretches in a jagged white line from my right shoulder diagonally across my chest. I examine the wide band of scar tissue inch by inch. Is it my imagination or has it grown wider over time? It seems so in this light, but I can't tell for certain. I should have thought of it sooner and taken precise measurements over the course of several months. I would've, if I hadn't been too reluctant to know for certain how little time I truly have. But my time is running out and there is no denying it any longer.
I try to measure my pulse again and stare in the mirror; without my magic, observation is the only crude diagnostic method I have left.
The scar has to be the cause of the symptoms. How else can I explain the chest pains radiating to my spine and causing me to slump forward each time I feel them, the shortness of breath, the dry cough I've had lately, if not from the scar spreading?
In the last few weeks I've grown complacent, thinking that, like Harry, I had all the time in the world. I was wrong.
My scar is growing, and with the way it's cutting through my chest, so close to my heart, fibres of scar tissue must have begun to infiltrate my lungs and the membranes around my heart, stretching and inflaming them. Those swollen tissues, or build-up of fluid around the heart, would in turn place more and more pressure on the heart itself. I am in no position to diagnose the details of what is happening to me, yet even now I can't stop myself from wishing for a miracle. If only the complications from splinching were as easy to reverse with the wave of a wand as splinching itself, but I descended into unfamiliar territory after leaving the wound untreated for this long. Now I am dealing not so much with a wound itself but with years' worth of damage to the infiltrated tissues around it. And going to a Muggle doctor is still as much out of the question now as it was years ago when the wound was fresh.
Although the National Health Service supposedly ensures that even people who can't afford to pay for their own medical care can receive treatment, in practice the wait for specialised operations often lasts months or years. But the reasons I can never show this scar to a Muggle doctor have nothing to do with my poverty. No doctor worth the name would fail to notice that the scar tissue is not confined to my skin, but is a solid plane stretching through the entire thickness of my body. Faced with clear evidence that I have healed from an injury that sliced me in two, all the effort I had put into hiding from the Muggle authorities would be wasted. With my careful cover blown, I would be subjected to medical research, out of the eyes of the public and beyond the feeble protections of Muggle laws, as all too many witches and wizards were, in the dark days immediately after the disaster.
If only Ginny Weasley's magic was controllable enough to cast a Healing spell. Even a diagnostic charm would show the extent and nature of the damage, let me take measures to prolong the time I have left. If this was anything less delicate than cardiac blood vessels I'd take the chance. But as things are, I'd sooner let a Muggle idiot with a scalpel hack me into pieces than have an instant heart attack from a botched spell focused through a borrowed wand, powered by second-hand magic from a foetus, and cast by a squib who didn't even finish her magical education.
No, I must accept the inevitable rather than avoiding it by clutching at false hopes of future and magic and time. I do not have time. My heart will fail. I had hoped it would be months but at this rate, I doubt I even have weeks to go.
It's nothing new. I've been living on borrowed time ever since Lucius shoved that portkey in my hand – no, even sooner than that, since I gave myself up to Dumbledore – and I certainly shouldn't be surprised now that my time has finally run out. It's a wonder, really, that I've lasted this long, a pawn to two powerful masters for years. I am fortunate to have a warning days before the event, instead of no warning at all.
I'll have to finish matters I've been putting off. I'll have to burn some of my notes and decide what to do with my books. I'll have to write a few letters; I'll have to see Draco about my will. I'll have to make sure I take care of everything before it's too late.
Except it already is too late, and everything I have to do isn't worth fretting about. Why must I worry about my books and my possessions and this forsaken flat in the middle of nowhere? None of it matters. Harry's the only one who does, and I can't take care of him in my will. How does one provide for a ghost? How does one say farewell to one?
I have to believe that with time Harry will forgive me for not giving him much warning. Leaving him unprepared for what lies ahead is the last thing I want to do; I hope he'll understand that. His company during these past months had made my life bearable, made me think that it was worth something more than borrowed time. I wish I could recompense him for his willingness to fix my life, and do something for him in return.
Harry, hopeless fool, dreams of the way things used to be and of the way they might have been. He wants happiness and playful banter and joint shopping trips with delays in the back alley. He wants himself alive and me not caring about such trivialities as my age or the consequences of my actions. He dreams of magic and Hogwarts and I fear that is where he'd end up after I'm gone, wandering the abandoned castle for years without a soul to talk to, waiting for a miracle that would never occur, losing himself in a world made of dreamscapes and ruins. But I don't want that for him. I want him to live, not to go on haunting an empty ruin. He hardly had a chance to enjoy life while he was still living it. And perhaps for that reason I feel obliged to help him make at least one of his dreams come true, since it's not in my power to fulfil the others.
I draw a bath and watch the mirror fog up with steam. The ideas that begin forming in my mind are the most insane and impossible sort, the kind Harry would call 'brilliant' although they're anything but that. Still, what do I have to lose?
I think of random things: of the fireplaces at Hogwarts, the Great Hall, and the nearby classrooms. If only one could get past the wards to reach them. I think of my personal wards: carefully crafted, coded to my own magical signature since I didn't trust any other method for fear of Polyjuice and a variety of transformative and camouflaging spells. The pains I took to secure my rooms have, ironically enough, placed them completely beyond my reach now, but the Hogwarts wards might have a weakness somewhere. They have to have them. Wards as complicated as those in a castle with as many exits as Hogwarts can't remain absolutely foolproof. There have to be security breaches and exceptions we did not consider when we recast the protective spells year after year. There are passages into the Hogsmeade cellars and hidden doors leading into France or India. With so many ways out of the castle there has to be at least one remaining way in.
Now that we have a relatively safe way to travel through the Wizarding world, it is only a matter of time until more fireplaces are lit and more passages become available to the first explorers who dare to venture into the ruins of their former homes. All it would take to get to Hogwarts nowadays is one person and a successfully lit fireplace. The others will follow, sooner or later.
It's not exactly Hogwarts reopened, as Harry wants it, but at least he won't be so alone in it when my time comes.
Harry is gone. I look for him, in my room and in the kitchen, dark and silent as a tomb, before I realise that he's left this place for good. It's a dream, I reassure myself. It's only a dream. How many times will my nightmare shift into this new version of itself before it lets me out of its clutches? My flat feels empty and dark and cold, and I don't want this to go on any longer. Through the narrow corridor, I return to my room still hoping to find Harry sitting on the windowsill or looking at the bookcase.
I step inside, but the place I walked into is too small and dark to be my room. The ceiling is too narrow and my room certainly doesn't have dry roots brushing against my face. The tunnel. I turn back, but there's only the tunnel wall behind me and in front of me, and I can only run either right or left.
It's not real, I tell myself. But that doesn't help. In the dark I can almost sense the werewolf's panting. How long will it take for the nightmare to run its course this time? It all ends there sooner or later, and Harry wouldn't be there to pull me away before the monster's jaws snap against my shoulder. This time I must let the nightmare last through the massacre. It's better this way, for both of us.
The distant creak of a door breaking down sounds in the distance followed by an echoing howl. At the same time, a chilling thought enters my mind: what if this isn't a dream and when I wake up, Harry will still be gone? My heart races and my chest is heavy. This isn't good. It's not good at all. I must remain calm through this, which means that running is out of the question. I can't afford to risk heart failure because of a sodding nightmare!
I shut my eyes and remain as quiet as possible against the cold tunnel wall. Maybe if I pretend long enough I can convince myself that I am elsewhere and make the dream change. Why not? Harry used to do this all the time. I am at home, I tell myself. I am in the hallway about to walk into my room. I haven't done it yet and the doorway is right in front of me, right over there. All I have to do is take one step forward and …
"Come on, what took you so long?" the familiar voice urges from the room. Relief washes over me and, eyes still closed, I step forward into the illusion. It's dark, but it's a warm and comfortable kind of darkness without a cold draught or invisible eyes watching from the shadows, and it almost seems real. By feel I find my way over to my chair and sit down, resting my head against the worn leather. Finally, I'm safe; Harry's rescued me out of the nightmare yet again.
It's not real, I remind myself. It's no more real than the tunnel, just one of the seemingly harmless dreams that I asked Harry not to create again. And yet he did. He is a few steps away. I can hear him as he moves in the dark: awkward footsteps and strained breathing. He exhales, blowing life into the candle he is holding in his hand and the darkness fades. The flame flickers and stays lit, casting long shadows on the rows of books along the wall and reflecting in Harry's glasses, and so looking twice as bright as a candle usually does.
"Before you say anything, this is the last time," he speaks before I can. "I promise. Would you like an oath?"
I shake my head and stare at the candle and its twin reflections. "No."
He nods. "Thanks. You won't regret it."
I look down and blink, trying to rid my vision of the bright green remainders of a candle flame dancing in front of my eyes. I really should ask him to end the dream. I have no right to let this continue, but now that I am here, I can't bring myself to halt it. Besides, he promised. I trust him to keep his word.
"So," he sighs, standing awkwardly in the middle of my room. "S-since you're here…"
His feet are planted firmly on the floor. Slowly I look up, noting the way the candle in his hands leaves flickering gold highlights on his glasses and in his tousled hair. He seems too short now; I've grown so accustomed to finding his face at or above my level as he hovers, airborne and transparent.
"Stay?" Harry blinks at the light. "Just for tonight." He falters. "M'not going to try anything. Honest! It's just the last time I'll get to be near someone like this. For a while at least."
He doesn't know how right he might be. And if that's the case, I will not let him spend his existence alone, not if I can help it. Harry is not an ordinary ghost. He feels and he lives and he is so easily hurt by the silence of the others. He needs someone to keep him company, someone to let him know that he exists and matters in this world, someone to talk to and maybe even someone to love. If it's the last thing I do, I will make sure he has that. I need to know that he won't be left alone when I'm gone.
The candle weeps hot wax, sliding down over the narrow base of the candle holder and onto Harry's fingers wrapped around it too high. Silly fool does not pay attention to it at all. On its own accord, my hand reaches out. I stop myself halfway before ever touching him and drop my hand down limply against the arm rest. Should I tell him the truth? Or should I wait until the time comes that I can't write my condition off to warding spells or advancing age?
I wrestle with myself just as I do with my thoughts – with my own limbs, the direction of my gaze, the expression on my face. Can Harry read my thoughts in his dreamscapes? He watches intently, as if trying to figure out a puzzle. I know that look, it's the same look he had just before he acted so rashly in the last dream. This time he doesn't move, just gives me a smile, wistful and bitter. "If you trusted me enough to possess you," he says softly, "then why don't you trust me enough to touch me? What did I do wrong?"
It's not him I don't trust, it's myself. Isn't that clear to him by now? I am too involved in him to stay rational.
"Answer me."
Suddenly I have nothing to say. I look down at my traitorous hand, at Harry sitting down on the floor, and try not to think of what this urge for contact signifies. I really shouldn't make this any more complicated than it already is.
I should not, especially when it's all so perfectly clear. I've wondered why I didn't stop this from happening before. Why didn't I stop Harry in my last dream? But the answer is so simple I mustn't avoid it. Deep inside, I wanted it, as much as he did. I still want it, selfishly and madly: his company, his smiles, his impulsiveness and his dreams. As impossible as it seems to be affected this way by a scrawny whelp barely old enough – not old enough, not bright enough, not ambitious enough – not Lucius. No, he is not Lucius at all. Yet I am still drawn to him when I have no right to be.
"Fine," he spits out and his breath makes the candle light flicker. "Don't answer."
I look then and see the desperation flickering in his eyes like the trembling, unsteady light of a candle flame.
"You didn't do anything wrong." He did only what his heart and his mind told him was right to do. Only it isn't right at all and it won't ever be right. He's dead and I've been living on borrowed time since Lucius shoved his portkey into my hand, and this time is finally running out.
"It's 'cause I'm a ghost, isn't it?" He asks and runs his fingers through the flame of a candle, back and forth. Dumbledore used to do that often, touch the flame briefly with his fingertips and pull back, as if petting a timid animal prone to biting. Harry is not as quick but if the exposure to the flame burns him, his face doesn't show it. "With you, I don't even feel dead," he shrugs and tilts his head at the flame. "I feel alive." He sets the candle carefully on the floor at my feet then and reaches out toward me then with the same hand that seconds ago reached so boldly into the fire.
"See."
I do not see. I've shut my eyes and my face is as tense as my fingers digging into the edge of the seat. It's such a foolish, absurd thing to fear, but I am afraid: afraid that if do watch him reach out I'll pull back, but even more afraid of what might happen at the contact if I don't pull back in time.
All is dark and for seconds I cannot tell if the air around me was stirred by his motions or by my own breathing. "Feel that?" he whispers. Then I do feel: the slight pressure of his lips, no, his fingers, at the corner of my mouth.
"This is real."
It is. It feels more real than all the recent years of my life spent trying to avoid human contact. I turn my head, I freeze, I hold my breath until I nearly cannot feel the softness of his fingertips travelling across my mouth and my jaw line. Until I can pretend that it's just an illusion, but then his knuckles, dry and rough, scrape against my neck, his fingers sliding along the tight inner edge of my collar, pulling it tight: not enough to choke but enough to be uncomfortable. I swallow harshly and his fingers still for a second at the hollow of my throat, then make their way down freeing the topmost button on my collar through its buttonhole. The loss of its pressure feels awkward as the collar loosens instantly against my neck. I can't do this, I must stop him, touch him, say something. I can't pretend any longer.
"Don't." I finally speak, abrupt and dry. I should've stopped him much earlier than this. I should never have agreed to this dream, just a dream. "It won't last." It can't. This won't make anything better. I'll only wake and I'll hate it that I cannot touch him. It won't change the facts: that my time here is so short, while he could be here forever.
"Don't what? This?" he murmurs, his fingers fumbling at another button. "Look at me." It sounds like a command. But instead of the following slap of Lucius' fine leather glove against my jaw there is only Harry's touch, warm and soft.
I open my eyes, slowly, and find Harry's face inches from my own, staring at me in a manner that should feel more discomforting than this. His searching gaze should not be so disconcerting, the lower edge of his glasses fogging up slightly and his eyes shining in the dark: vivid and bright. The sight of his mouth, opened slightly, should not make me want to move forward and meet him halfway.
"I can touch you," he says softly, and the desperation on his face is that of a child believing with naïve conviction that people live forever and death is a lie just because it hurts too much to think otherwise. "And if feels real. S'all that matters. It is real, 'till morning."
"Precisely! Until morning."
"Yes!" he cries. "And the morning isn't here yet! No reason to hurry it. Is there?"
"And what do you suppose will happen if we don't hurry it? Or in all the mornings afterwards?" And what will happen to him in the morning when I'm no longer here?
"Not like we've got anything to lose," he protests.
We indeed have nothing, and that is the only way we lasted this far. "Harry," I tell him – he looks up, his eyes green and glistening – "Harry, listen. The best way to hurt someone who has nothing is to give him just a glimpse of something wonderful. Something he can't keep." And in that way, perhaps, he had already hurt me.
His fingers travel to rest on my shoulder, then forearm, and finally cover my hand. "I see," he sighs but then his eyes grow wide and hopeful and he adds breathlessly, in a ragged whisper. "So can I? Keep you."
Hopeless fool! What does he think he is asking for? I don't own my life, so how can I give it away? If only it was mine to give, I think I would let him have it. But I can't. And therefore he will have to settle for the next best thing. 'Having nothing, nothing he can lose.' I'll make sure that's the way it's going to stay for him.
And so I curl my fingers slowly, stealthily around his and hold on until his eyes on mine are no longer wild, until he loses his death grip on my wrist. I try not to think about how strange my hand looks over his, bony and pale and laced with a network of veins. Even now I am too afraid to tell him the truth, so I choke out a white lie that rings too close to the truth, in a voice too low to rise above a whisper.
"You already have me."
I shouldn't have said that to him, but it's too late and I can't take it back. He flinches and his grasp turns nearly strong enough to hurt, nearly strong enough to break a bone. Slowly he raises our clasped hands to his eye level. His lips are dry and cracked on my skin, and probably bitten to the point of going numb. I can feel his breath, warm against my hand. I can see the green of his irises. I can feel the growing ache deep in my chest. Imagined? Real? "No," I tell him softly. Don't push this any further. Don't force me to end this.
For a moment the look in his eyes suggests he'll do something rash and reckless and sudden – drastic – but he simply drops his forehead against my hand, his hands grasping it tight. "I hate you," he says. "For saying something like that and then stopping me, like this. I can't help it! Is it too horrible of me?"
A wry snort – mine – surprises me as much as if heard from Harry's lips: a sound of weary, ironic amusement at a world where there is nothing else left to do but laugh in spite of it all. "You're in good company," I murmur. "I already hate myself."
He scowls. Now he looks more like his normal self. "Don't," he says. "S'not your fault; I told you."
Yes he did, many times, but I'd rather not fight with him at a time like this. I'd like this last meeting with him in dreams to be memorable for something other than an argument. "Can you do something for me?" I ask him instead.
"Name it!"
I think of his first dreamscape and Harry changing the surroundings rapidly from one place to another. "Take me somewhere."
He nods. I think he too understands the urge to make this last meeting memorable. "Close your eyes."
I do. At first nothing changes, then there is a bare change in the sound. Running water beneath us growing stronger, more substantial every second and a rumbling echo above us. I lift my face to it.
"Go on," Harry says.
I open my eyes then and see the wide stretch of the bridge against the blue sky. Feel the cool breeze against my skin, tugging at my hair, making the waves dance at our feet. The river is right beneath us, all around us, wide and shining and invitingly peaceful, splashing drops of cool water against my face.
I know this place. In just a few minutes' walk from here the Strand leads onto Fleet Street where Molly Weasley works. The bridge we are under is Waterloo. The same bridge I took him to see a few weeks ago. The same bridge the careless brat jumped from into the Thames, just to see the river up close. I am looking at the Thames' waters in a way I never expected to see them: as Harry had seen them, after jumping over the edge and walking on water far underneath.
"Is this good enough?" Harry asks from a few feet away.
Good enough? It's just right. This place suits him.
I leave the shadow underneath the bridge and walk toward him. Walking on water. It should be as unsteady and unsettling as walking on ice, but the ripples rise to meet my feet, helping my balance instead of hindering it, adding a spring and a bounce to every step. Harry gives me one of those beaming smiles that leave no doubt in my mind: whatever thoughts are running through his head, they are undoubtedly 'brilliant'.
"What are you smiling about?" I murmur, wry and fond.
He shrugs and the smile still lingers on his face. "Just thinking, I s'pose."
"What about?"
"Y'really want to know?"
"I asked, didn't I?"
"All right. Remember what I said in the park," he mumbles.
My vision of the Cheshire Cheese and Harry in it comes rushing back. "I certainly do."
"I reckon if I was alive and asked you, you'd say yes. It wouldn't be too hard to convince you. I thought of it today, seeing Tonks and Remus, together. If they could make it, maybe, just maybe there's hope – I mean – would've been hope for us too."
I know what he's doing, the fool. He desperately wants hope and a future, something he and I can never have. And it's not fair of me to offer Harry even a glimpse of something I can't ever give him, no matter how much he wants it to happen. "It's no use thinking of what could've been," I mutter guiltily.
"Course," he nods and his smile fades from his face. "But you'd still say yes. If I was alive, I'd've made sure of it."
This may be the last time I'll ever see Harry like this, as his dreaming self. With his hair a dark solid mass tangled by the wind, and his hands warm in mine and with his eyes bright green and surprised looking up at me with an unspoken question. For a brief second I picture myself losing my head, allowing myself to act on impulse, taking a chance: the one I'd never take but can't stop imagining, no matter how impossible and reckless it seems.
I think of Harry again, at the entrance to the Cheshire Cheese, not paying any attention to me as he walks out. But this time I stop him before he passes me and disappears down Fleet Street: I call out his name and catch his eye and I do not let him look away. I walk closer and closer until his back is against the brick wall of the alley and he has nowhere to go. Then I lean forward, reaching out, keeping him there, keeping him still, and without thinking twice, without any idea of what'll happen afterwards, I grab his shoulders, press my mouth against his, and taste the warmth of his lips, on pure abandon, just as he would do. Just as he has already done. I picture us without repercussions in a world a thousand dreams away.
"What're you thinking?" Harry murmurs. It ends my reverie at once. I look down at him and drink in the sight of his sunlit face and his carefree smile and his bright leaf-green eyes shining, and I try to memorise every unruly hair falling onto his forehead and every gleam reflecting in his eyes, the warmth of his breath and the feel of his skin. It will have to be enough; it will have to last me until the end. This moment is a gift, a treasure I never expected life to drop into my hands, just like this, without any warning whatsoever.
"Nothing," I tell him when I can speak past the lump in my throat. "Water under the bridge."
He blinks at first, but his silence doesn't last long; it never does. "'Course," He waves his arm at the ancient river and gives me that boyish grin. "Loads of it."
Impossible brat!
Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Snape is paraphrasing Albert Einstein.
Tonks' pamphlet The Gender Agenda: Women Officers Clearing Hurdles Together is an actual publication.
