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Chapter Forty—Brothers, Family, Friends, and Voldemort

"And it's not like they can really make us do anything we don't want, right?"

"Right."

Jonathan paused and looked into the train compartment. Fred and George stood there, heads so close together that Jonathan would have thought there was just one twin if he'd been a little further back. He raised an eyebrow at them when they jumped apart. "Are you planning some kind of prank?"

"Of course!" But Fred's smile didn't reach his eyes.

"Of course," George echoed when Jonathan looked at him. He didn't smile, though. He just stared at his hands as if he wanted to cut them off and fling them against the wall.

Jonathan stepped into the compartment and shut the door. "Are you going to make me drag this out of you? Because I really don't want to, but I can if you make me."

Fred and George traded a long look. George nudged Fred, and Fred nudged him back. It was George who finally said, "We aren't looking forward to our summer, that's all. But it's not like our family can make us do anything."

"I thought your family had accepted your Sorting," Jonathan said, startled. That had been what the last letters from Molly Weasley said, anyway.

That got another special, silent twin-look, and then Fred cleared his throat awkwardly. "They have. I mean, they're not going to march up to the school and force us into Gryffindor. They can hardly do that."

George nodded, his eyes unusually grim. "Yeah. But Percy whinged at us most of the year. He insisted that the Hat made a mistake and that we were getting 'coarser' being around people in our House. And either we never noticed before, or it's just because we were around him instead of getting letters from him, but our little brother Ron is really prejudiced against Slytherins. We can make him back off if we play pranks, but—"

"Then Mum gets upset about her little baby crying." Fred rolled his eyes. "Like we said, they can't make us do anything. It's just going to be a hard summer."

"Then you can come over to mine."

George blinked at him. "I mean, thanks, mate? But we'd still need our parents to Apparate us there."

It was Jonathan's turn to roll his eyes. "Are you wizards or not? You do understand that Floo powder exists for a reason, right?"

"The last thing we knew—"

"You weren't on the public Floo network."

Jonathan scratched the back of his neck. Right. Well. It was true that he didn't think to announce it when Mum and Dad put them back on. They were less paranoid than they used to be, and Jonathan thought they might even believe Harry that the war was really over, instead of Dumbledore, who insisted it could begin again any second. "We are now. The address is Potters' Haven."

"Not the address that you use other places, is it?"

Jonathan shook his head. "But there are private Floo networks and public ones, you know. So this is the public one." He hesitated, then added, "I think you should meet my brother, too."

"We've met him. Short bloke."

"With those green eyes that look at you like you're the center of the universe." George smiled at Jonathan, who felt himself flushing. He wanted to protest that Harry didn't look at him that way, but he couldn't. So he cleared his throat awkwardly and shook his head.

"There's something important about him that you should know. Something really important." He knew that Harry might not want to bring even more people into the knowledge web, as he sometimes called it, but Jonathan felt that they could trust the twins. Hell, they could trust Acanthus and the Parkinsons. If Harry needed to, he could make the twins promise whatever the Parkinsons had promised.

Fred and George exchanged glances. Then Fred nodded and said, "Sure, mate. If there's something important, of course we want to know it." They put on innocent looks that didn't hide the way they were grinning.

Jonathan smiled at them, relieved. He knew he remembered Harry telling him that Fred and George had been trusted allies of his in more than one life. He would just have to see if they could be in this one, too.

"Harry. I just wish I understood you more."

Harry halted with his hand on the banister. He'd been about to go upstairs after another conversation with his mother that was mostly lies and half-truths, and then he heard her say that.

He looked back at Lily. She had her head bowed over a stack of papers that she was proofreading for leaving Hogwarts seventh-years trying desperately to achieve apprenticeships and jobs in the wider world. That didn't hide the weariness at the edges of her eyes, or how her hands rested heavily on the quill and the parchment.

Harry took a deep breath and came back down the stairs. There's always Memory Charms if she absolutely can't handle it, he reminded himself, when he cleared his throat and Lily's startled eyes came flying up to him.

"Mum, there's something important I should tell you. Can I tell you? And have your word that you won't go running right away to Dumbledore?"

Lily sat up, her hair swinging behind her shoulders. "Harry—I am my own woman. I won't go running to Dumbledore for any reason that's not excellent."

Harry sighed shakily. Honestly, he felt a little more conflicted about Albus after he'd heard the man admit how afraid he was of Voldemort. But he still wasn't going to trust him with deep secrets. And part of him thought he was being foolish to do it with any of the man's old loyalists.

That foolish part didn't keep him from saying, "All right. But I had the impression that you were really, really loyal to him."

"Not—as loyal as we were during the war." Lily's face was troubled. "That's why you've been waiting to get close to us, isn't it? Because you thought we approved of everything he did, and you don't."

"Well, yeah." Harry walked back over and sat down on the couch in front of her. "You seemed open to him training Jonathan, or having Sirius train Jonathan, and those gifts that Remus gave Jonathan and me for Christmas—you know they were meant to determine whether we're Light wizards or not?"

Lily sat up so straight that two of the essays on her lap spilled to the floor. She didn't appear to notice. "What?"

"Oh. You didn't know." A second later, Harry felt stupid. Of course they hadn't. Harry knew because of his lives; Jonathan knew because Harry had told him. Remus, assuming that he did have full knowledge of what the Lightpath pendant and the mythical koi did, only knew because Albus had told him.

"Sorry," Harry added.

"What would have happened with those gifts if you weren't a Light wizard?" Lily demanded. "Or if Jonathan wasn't?"

"The chain of the pendant would have burned my fingers," Harry said. "Honestly, though, it doesn't work the way Albus thinks it does. I'm not purely Light, but I'm also not purely Dark. There's no way to find out a wizard's allegiance or their intentions with something so simple. Albus was willing to try that because he wouldn't have trusted me if I'd just told him and he'd asked where my allegiance lies."

"Where does it lie?" Lily whispered. She held out her hand and took one of his. For the first time in this life, she didn't look absolutely frightened by the fact that Harry was speaking to her as an immortal creature, with an immortal creature's knowledge.

"With my brother. With Sirius. With—friends that I'm starting to make." Harry still didn't think this was the best time to tell her that he'd been corresponding with Voldemort for years. "It's not that I hate Albus. But I am going to oppose him when he tries to say that he gets to make decisions for me and Jonathan and all of us."

"You didn't say it lay with your family."

"No." Harry met her eyes and swallowed. "I had a talk with Father a while ago. James, really. That's the way I think of him. He didn't really understand when I told him that I think Remus has to accept his inner werewolf if he's to stop being a monster. And he said that he would talk with you about accepting me as the Master of Death and treating me less like a little boy. I trust he didn't?"

For a moment, Lily flinched. Then she shook her head and murmured, "No, he didn't. I—don't know why. Maybe he thought things got better on their own when Jonathan went back to Hogwarts after Christmas."

Harry sighed. "Only because James wasn't around as often and wouldn't see the way we've been clashing."

"Have we been clashing?" Lily's hands were tight around the parchments now, as if it was vital to prevent any more of them from sliding off her lap. "I thought we were having—disagreements. The way any young man and his mother might when he wants one thing and she wants another."

Harry looked at her steadily, and Lily's gaze fell away before his own. Harry nodded slightly. "That's the difference, Mother. We can't come to an accord. Do you want me to be a young man or a child? Are you ready to acknowledge that I'm the Master of Death, or do I need to withdraw again because you're not ready to hear it?"

Lily closed her eyes tighter and tighter. Then she asked, "How did your other mothers deal with it, in the worlds where you lived with them?"

"They never knew."

Bright tears gleamed along the edges of Lily's closed lids. Harry waited for her to whisper the words he could almost see burning in her eyes even without Legilimency: I wish I didn't know, either.

But instead, Lily pulled herself back from an abyss that Harry couldn't have helped her cross, and exhaled shakily. "Then—I have to stand up to a challenge that they didn't. I am strong. But I have to tell you something first." She sat up and shifted the stack of parchments to the floor. "I have to tell you why I wanted you to be normal so badly."

Harry flinched at the word "normal," but a soft bell of hope rang in him. This was the thing that had been holding Lily back for so long, he was sure. "Go on."

"When you were kidnapped, it changed everything." Lily said it to her hands and the floor. "The only thing I could think of was getting you back. James despaired, sometimes. Sirius did, too, but then he would rally and say that he wouldn't give up hope until he actually saw your dead body. Albus was—not encouraging. I think he mainly wanted to figure out whether the prophecy about Jonathan was still in play." She sucked in air.

Harry swallowed. Yes, that sounded like Albus, and James and Sirius. "Go on."

"I had this—fantasy, I suppose." Lily shook her head; the soft sound of her hair moving around her neck was loud in the room. "That you would be found, and you would be fine, completely unchanged by your time with Voldemort." She gulped his name. "Or you would be affected, but it would be something we could heal, and then everything would be like the way it was before."

She looked at Harry. "Instead, you came back and everything was strange."

Harry nodded. Honestly, he should have suspected this before. Of course mortal human minds reacted to trauma in ways that he'd long ago left behind. And of course Lily would have wanted to dream that everything would be normal with two normal children bound for Hogwarts in a normal world, anyway. That was human, too.

If that is human, what am I?

Harry refused to pay attention to that thought for a second, and smiled at his mother. "Okay. Then I'll just ask that you not tell James or Dumbledore. If you do anyway—" He rolled his neck. He was a lot more concerned for Jonathan than himself, but he settled for saying, "They might do their best to interfere, and I don't think they should."

Lily caught her breath, and then nodded. "If you think they shouldn't, Harry…"

Harry told her the truth—selectively. He didn't tell her that Sirius was in on things, if only because she might have relaxed too much. He did tell her his doubts about the prophecy, that he had deceived Albus about his role in the war, and that he thought Remus could be much more than he was now. And he told her that he thought Voldemort meant peace.

That last revelation caused her mouth to fall open, a little, and she stared straight at him with unblinking eyes. Harry bit back a chuckle and raised his hand to wave back and forth in front of her faces. Lily snapped out of it then, and looked down at her hands with her cheeks burning like torches.

"You think he means it."

"I'm very, very good at telling when people are lying," Harry said simply. "And I spent years with him, remember." Lily swallowed, and Harry reached out to take her hand. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry that I couldn't be the son you wanted when I came back from the kidnapping."

"I have to remind myself," Lily whispered, "that if you were an ordinary child, you never would have survived it. Or at least not as whole mentally as you are now. And—you've known other Voldemorts in other worlds, of course."

Harry nodded, glad that they were heading away from that topic of conversation to one that made his mother less viscerally uncomfortable. "Yes. None of them would have been capable of even pretending to declare a truce, let alone pretending for as long as this has lasted."

"He and his Death Eaters really haven't made any attacks, have they?"

"No. Not even attacks disguised as something else. He's holding back."

"Do you—do you think that he might try to take over wizarding Britain through other means? Political means?"

Harry struggled to hold out of his eyes exactly how much he thought that, and exactly how little it was his problem if Voldemort behaved like any other politician that the wizarding public elected. "It's possible. But even that would indicate that he's changed, wouldn't it? Either he's sane enough himself to run a credible campaign, or he's humble enough to let someone else take part of the visible power and stand behind the throne."

Lily let out a choked laugh and covered her mouth with one hand. The other didn't let go its grip on his.

"What?"

"You just—if I'd listened to you, I would have given up my fantasy of being normal a long time ago. I'm sorry, Harry."

Harry looked at her evenly. "I can frame the words in more childish ways, if you wish."

Lily shook her head, and then stood. Harry looked up at her. She seemed to be debating with herself about something, but he wasn't sure what.

Then she leaned over swiftly and hugged him.

Harry leaned against her for a second, luxuriating in that hug. Then he hugged her back—not as hard as he would hug Jonathan when he got home from Hogwarts, of course, but a lot harder than he had in years.

"Thank you," Lily breathed into his hair. "For trusting me and being honest with me."

Harry nodded at her with a small smile. He hoped this mood would last. She accepted things right now, but he had seen people like her change their minds in the past and retreat when things got too hard. Remus had in this lifetime, even.

But he could hope that she wouldn't.

Jonathan stepped off the train with a significant nod at Fred and George. He was going to have them over to the house somehow. Even if his parents said no, he was sure that Harry would be able to arrange it in a way that would hide them.

The Weasleys were easy to spot, with their ginger hair standing out. Fred and George heaved identical sighs—for once, Jonathan didn't think they'd really meant to do that—and started towards their parents.

"Jonathan!"

Jonathan would know that voice in a thousand lifetimes, in a million words.

"Harry!" he shouted back, and bolted through the crowd. Suddenly all the elbows and trunks and owl cages that had seemed so hard to get through before melted away. There was a clear path, or clear except for a few negligible people, between him and Harry.

He'd seen his brother at the Easter holidays, and during the term whenever Harry could get some time to come to Hogwarts. It wasn't enough.

It'll never be enough until he's there, too. But we only have a year left, Jonathan thought hazily as he held out his arms and Harry jumped straight into them, laughing as his magic washed over Jonathan.

It was a wonder to him how no one else in the train station felt that buzz of magic and turned around to see who was causing it. But Jonathan supposed some people really were that blind. He would have been himself, once.

It made him wonder what remarkable things he was missing in other people's lives.

And then he busied himself in hugging his brother, while their parents put their arms around both of them, and forgot to worry about it for a little while.