Chapter 81: Harry and the Parents

When he thought about it later, Harry was overwhelmed by how instinctively and completely he could feel that the man and woman embracing him were his parents. He could feel it in the way James' hand cupped the back of his head. He could feel it in the way Lily stood so close that it would have felt like hovering if she had been anyone else.

Somehow it didn't matter that they were only a few years older than he was— six years, to be exact. In his mind, he had unconsciously begun to imagine them as having aged the way Sirius and Lupin had even though he knew perfectly well that they would never grow old. But when he saw his parents, his imaginings vanished as if he had always known that they were somehow both right and wrong.

They told him how much they loved him a thousand times in a thousand ways. He didn't need to hear it. He had already known. But it was nice all the same.

"Harry," said James after what might have been a minute or an hour or a day. "Your journey is over."

The bliss that had wrapped itself around Harry since Teddy had deposited him in the odd, cozy room evaporated. Teddy had told him that he could return to his life if he liked, and he thought he'd made it abundantly clear that that was exactly what he wanted. He needed to win a Quidditch Cup with Ron as his teammate. He needed to be there to congratulate Hermione when she got an O on every single OWL. He definitely needed to see the grand opening of the twins' joke shop, which he was certain was going to exceed even Zonko's wildest expectations.

"James!" Lily gave her husband a playfully exasperated glare before returning the whole of her attention to Harry. "He doesn't mean that your mortal life is over. You'll be back with Ron and Hermione and Sirius just as soon as you want to be."

James stiffened slightly, not quite wanting to admit his error. "Of course I didn't mean that that journey was over."

"Your father really was a great leader," said Lily casually. "He inspired incredible loyalty wherever he went. He'd give a motivational speech to his Quidditch team and they'd want to fly through a wall for him. He'd stand up and talk at an Order meeting, and we'd all believe that we could win the war, no matter how dark our private thoughts might have been before he opened his mouth. You've met his friends. You know how much they revere him even now. So it really is a shame that the first time you've been able to see him in fifteen years, he decides to tell you that your journey is over while you're in the in-between."

"What I meant to say, Harry, is that the path you've been on since the day your mother and I died has come to an end. You… in a way, Harry Potter did die that day in Godric's Hollow. Instead you became the Boy Who Lived. It's why you were raised by your mother's… family instead of by any number of people who would have loved you and liked you for the boy you were and the young man you've become. It's why you were asked to face Voldemort tonight. But Voldemort is gone now."

"So I've finally done the thing people always said I did anyway?" asked Harry. He wasn't entirely sure that very much would change. Only a very few people would know that anything out of the ordinary had occurred during the Easter holiday. Strangers would still stare at the scar on his forehead; his friends would still be his friends; former Death Eaters and their children would still harbor an instinctive dislike for him.

"Yes," agreed James. "And while that may not matter very much to other people, it should certainly matter very much to you. When you look in a mirror and notice how much you resemble me— you're welcome, by the way— feel free to forget about it. You can stop trying to live up to whatever idealized version of your forever young, tragically martyred parents may have been haunting you ever since your eleventh birthday."

Harry had waited a lifetime to hear his father's voice and now he wasn't at all certain that he liked what James was saying. "Why shouldn't I be brave and try to protect people?"

"Those are perfectly fine impulses," said Lily. "But you can have them and just be Harry. My Harry. Not a child of prophecy, not an accidental Horcrux, not someone who has to live with relatives who treat him poorly because of who his mother happened to be. Just Harry."

Just Harry. He'd thought of himself that way, mostly, and been informed that this made him modest and humble rather than realistic.

"What we're saying," Lily continued, "is be whoever you want to be. Don't let Voldemort define you one little bit for the rest of your life. Choose your own path. When we gave our lives for you, we certainly did not want you to be chained to some sort of destiny."

"We wanted you to be free to lie on a beach and live off the proceeds of Sleekeazy's Hair Potion and Scalp Treatment for the rest of your life," said James.

"Sleekeazy's Hair…" Harry remembered that Hermione had used it on the night she'd attended the Yule Ball with Viktor Krum, but he didn't think he'd ever heard of it again.

"That is where the family fortune comes from. Your grandfather— Fleamont Potter— quadrupled the family's wealth by inventing Sleekeazy's Hair Potion and selling the company at a vast profit when he retired. Of course, the irony of it was that the only hair it didn't improve was his own." James grinned and raked his fingers through his messy hair. "But I'm sure you've realized that our hair is perfect the way it is."

Harry tried to grin back but found that he couldn't manage it. He couldn't joke about hair potion and living on a beach when his parents had died so that he might live. "Thank you," he said. "Thank you for my life."

James and Lily made almost identical dismissive gestures. "It was the easiest thing we ever did," said Lily. "He stood there and told me over and over to get out of the way, and I knew that I never would, not if he kept asking me for a year."

"He didn't give me a choice," said James. "But I'd known since before you were born that I would give my life for you and your mother, so I didn't need a choice."

Harry swallowed hard. He was never going to be able to repay them, and that somehow bothered him even when they told him that they had never meant for him to be in their debt. "Is there— er, well Teddy gave me a message for Lupin. Do you have any messages for people who are still alive?"

"No," said Lily quickly.

"Didn't we just tell you to live your own life and not the life that you somehow think would makes us proud?" continued James.

"All you ever had to do to make us proud was wake up in the morning and come home at night."

"Not that we underestimate what it must have taken you to walk out into the forest with Snape and submit to Avada Kedavra."

Harry thought again of the way Snape had lashed him to the tree, of his brief flash of fear that Snape wasn't Dumbledore's man after all. "Were you and Snape really friends?" he asked Lily.

She sighed, and he felt guilty all over again. He had never wanted to make his mother sigh. "It's complicated with Sev. You've lived long enough, Harry, to know that people aren't always simple and easy. Yes, we were friends. I loved so very much about him. His intelligence. His creativity. His sense of humor. His life was very difficult, so I don't blame him entirely for some of the choices he made. But he did make those choices and it did get to the point that we were no longer compatible and we were no longer friends. Even now, I don't condone his treatment of you, and believe me, if I had been there, I would have put a stop to it. And yet I admire what he's done. So I'd just as soon that he, like you, has an opportunity to live a life that isn't dominated by Voldemort. I hope that he makes the most of that freedom."

"Don't take your mother's compassion as a sign that we aren't furious about what's happened to you," added James. "Snape and Dumbledore and your aunt and uncle have all failed you in unacceptable ways, and there have even been moments where I would like to have had a word with Remus and Sirius. But we don't want to talk about any of them. We have you, we have this moment with you, and we want to talk about you."

"How much do you see of what goes on in… the other place?" Harry wasn't sure what to call the world where he lived. But his parents seemed to know not only everything about him but everything about everyone.

Lily ran her hand over his shoulders. "We knew everything about you as soon as you came here. Usually, we can only sense you when you nearly die. Chasing the Philosopher's Stone all by yourself, fighting a basilisk, that sort of thing."

"We always know when it's Halloween because Sirius and Remus call out to us," said James quietly. "I know we said we weren't going to do this, but tell Padfoot to throw a party and enjoy himself next Halloween. Tell Moony and Padfoot to take care of each other until I see them again."

"Already did that," said Harry, thinking of his last words to Sirius. He was so pleased to find that he had anticipated James' wishes before James had had a chance to voice them that he almost missed the concerned way that Lily nudged James.

"I know," said James to Lily. "But this had happened before, and he's always come out of it."

"What?" demanded Harry. There were many times he had been sorry not to have parents. But none of those times had involved his parents trying to talk over his head as if he wasn't old enough to understand.

James flinched. "Remus is much too close to the veil right now."

Harry knew instinctively that the veil was what separated his world from his parents' world. "Because he had to transform without any help in Azkaban." It had been a worry at the back of Harry's mind ever since the Aurors had arrested Lupin. "Is he going to die?"

"If I knew that, I couldn't tell you."

Harry opened his mouth to ask for a more satisfactory answer, but it seemed that his time in the in-between had run its course. The world was dissolving around him.

"We love you," Lily shouted.

"We're waiting for you, but do not be in any rush!" James added.

He felt their arms encircling him once more, comforting him, remaining after they should have faded.

Then he was opening his eyes on the forest floor.

To be continued.

Author's Note: Sorry for no chapter or review replies these past couple of weeks. I couldn't scrape up the time for either, and yes this chapter is on the short side too. This fic does what it wants, not what I want it to do. As always: best wishes to you in these trying times.

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Fighting the Odds by thejilyship. It is story number 13243178 on this site.

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A nice read if you're the sort of person who says "Mad-Eye Moody in the Haymitch role— that's brilliant." (I am very much that sort of person.)