Disclaimer: I don't own anything that can be traced back to the Guding Light world or the Harry Potter world.

Chapter Nine: Love and Duty

He managed to hold off on thinking until he was lying in bed staring at the dark ceiling. The light of a full moon shone through the window, giving a pale gray illumination to the room, softening the edges of the shadows. He had long since fallen into the faintly romantic, partly philisophical, ridiculously poetic and symbolic thought that such things were a representation of nature that the dark had not triumphed-that the light still clang to life however feebly. He paused. The full moon. Two months since he left England. Moony was somewhere across the Atlantic, forced into his transformation by that white light, alone in his monthly foray for the second time in many years. It wasn't right- but very little was.

It was hard for him to feel anymore, but for this one night he would try. The War had done things to him, stolen part of what made him human. He had been seeing things straight out of nightmare since he was fifteen years old, and, at some point, he hadn't been able to take anymore and retain himself, if that made any sense. He waited for Anne to say it didn't and wouldn't he go to sleep so she could get some rest, but nothing was forthcoming. Maybe she'd just reinforced thebarrier between them andgone to sleep anyway, meaning he could think it all out freely without her poking around in his head. Their bond could be a nuisance at times.

He and Anne had both made a critical choice years ago, when they were little more that children thrown into a brutal adult war. To everyone's shock, he had been a Gryffindor and his sister had been a Slytherin-Anne said that they both had Gryffindor hearts and Slytherin heads, and she just listened to her head and he to his heart. The choice they had made on graduation had been subconcious, but no less real for that. He stopped feeling, pushed away everything soft in him that he could, essentially allowing the Slytherin qualities of his head to come out in the open. Anne, on the other hand, had fallen back on her own Gryffindor perspectives and traits, which she had taken far less trouble to conceal than he had his own other side. He knew his sister hadn't had a single friend among her yearmates, at any rate, which would indicate that she let the other Slytherins know she had some Gryffindor sympathies. The result had been Anne managing to find something to hope for even when the future seemed bleak while he just concentrated on day-to-day survival without any real conviction that the War would or could be won by the faltering light. Morgan had noticed it immediatly when she came back after the first time they had been separated. You're different....harder. You've let this War between our world and Voldemort change you, my love. No, I'm not condemning you. It's changed me, too. I may well be as bitter as you are, now, but better at hiding it.

Morgan. She had been the one great love of his life, and her death was one of the most completely wrong things he knew of. He could see her as if she were lying there beside him, her dark head against his shoulder. She had been heartbreakingly beautiful in all respects, but it had been her eyes that drew people to her, too big for her small, perfect face and always so kind, so trusting-it was often hard for those who didn't know her like he did, and there weren't many who did, to believe that she had been greatly feared by the Dark Lord's minions for her fierceness in battle. She had been small and slight, light and fragile in appearance. Physical strength might have eluded her, but she was the strongest person mentally that he had ever known, excepting maybe only Dinah. So many sides of her personality, all more familiar to him than his own face...the saint that most people saw, the bitter woman who'd lost everything to a then-undeclared rival, the lover only he knew, the loyal shield-sister, the figurative if not literal princess of the Wizarding World...there had never been and never would be another Morgan. James fought back the efforts of the painful knot in his throat to dissolve. He wouldn't cry like a woman, dammit. Potters never cried, and they never looked back. If one plan failed, they made revisions, if one weapon broke, they found a second. If one love died, they found another. He had to tell himself that.

Morgan had been the only woman he'd ever loved, and they had dreamed of a life together, not as a married man and his illict mistress but as man and wife themselves. They had been so close that winter of seventh year...they had had it all and lost it all in one dark night when Albus Dumbledore tried to play God. He had imprisoned Morgan in the Astronomy Tower at Hogwarts and simulated her death, leaving him with nothing but a pixie-lead Lily Evans, slipped a love potion by Dumbledore that made her become instantly enarmoured of James Potter who she hated, and a desire for revenge that kept him from killing himself. Years had gone by before Morgan's attempt to kill herself enabled her to escape and come back to him the night her career as his permanent mistress began.

He had known that something had to give when the problem he and Morgan named Arthur as part of an inside joke arose. Arthur had been their son, illegitimate but solid proof that the reason his long marriage to Lily had been childless was Lily herself. The boy had meant far more than that to James and Morgan, but the Family Council had only cared that it meant that the lack of an heir was Lily's fault. They had let the old dream take them again, that maybe Lily could be divorced quietly and they could marry and legitimatize Arthur or failing that have another son, and be a family, just them and their children and screw the Potters and the Wrights and the Dumbledores if they didn't like it. For two glorious years they had believed...but then it all came crashing down around them. Arthur died suddenly and unexpectedly within days of Lily announcing that she was pregnant. He had thought at first that the stupid woman was delusional, as she hadn't had a pregnancy since her last miscarriage before Morgan returned, and then that she'd bedded someone else and expected him to give a name to her bastard brat, but Lily had managed to present the family with a son who was only too plainly a Potter. He had never thought of Harry as his son...Harry was Lily's son, nothing much to do with him. He realized that now, looking at it objectively. Harry was just another pawn in the game of pureblood inheritance, albeit an essentially useless one given his mother's coming from Muggle blood. In all events, he and Morgan had known that it was over for them on the night of July thirty-first when Anne, forced to act as the midwife in the dark comedy of his marriage, announced grimly that 'the stupid bitch had a boy-a live bastard for us to have to support', to use her own words. Morgan's only reaction had been to say that no woman preferred to be the whore rather than the wife, but she'd settle for being his whore if that was the best she could do.

Fifteen months later, both 'the whore' and 'the stupid bitch' were dead.

Lily...there had never been any trouble in understanding Lily, but not because he knew her as well as he knew Morgan. Lily was a very simple woman, just as he'd told Beth Spaulding. She loved and hated with the same straightforwardness that the other Houses believed more or less incorrectly to be the hallmark of all Gryffindors. Having a twin in Slytherin and having the brain of one himself had shown him that the standard view was usually much too simplistic, unless you were dealing with people like Bella Black Lestrange, who was a representation of the pure evil that was thought to represent Slytherin, or the Weasley clan, who were stereotypical Gryffindors to the last man. Lily Evans had been so innocent...too innocent, really. She'd been woefully unsuited to the life he'd given her, unable to understand or comprehend what went on in the powerful family she had married into. The fact that she did not make a scene over his affair with Morgan was a by-product of the fact that she didn't know about it, not that she had been raised like a proper wife to know that she was supposed to smile and look the other way, as evidenced by her explosion when she found out about him and one former mistress, Mary Bradley. Mary herself had told him that she was ashamed for Lily, acting like she didn't know how to behave properly around her husband's pet courtesan. The wife and the courtesan were to ignore each other politely, not get into physical catfights. He had left Mary not long afterward, but not because of that-he wholeheartedly agreed with his little queen on that. No, the thousand days he had decided his and Mary's affair would span had ran out, and Morgan had come back within the week. Lily, naturally, had not understood that it was standard procedure for a man in his position.

He hadn't wanted to marry her. The only person he'd ever wanted to marry was Morgan, but Dumbledore's sick charade had taken that chance from him. Dumbledore had mixed up a variant of the potion Isaud had meant for Mark and Iseult that lead the fated love of Tristam and Iseult. Lily had trustingly drank the tea the old man had laced with it at the fateful meeting where they were told that Morgan was dead and had "left" James to Lily for some obscure reason that was really Dumbledore's belief in his pretended obsession with Lily. James had refused it, suspecting something when he noticed that Dumbledore had poured for himself before they came in. The result had been Lily instantly falling in love with him for all that they had barely exchanged ten words in seven years that weren't insults, making her essentially an Iseult without a Tristam. After a whirlwind courtship with Dumbledore prodding every step of the way, he had found himself married to her in July of '78, less than a month after they graduated from Hogwarts. He had been little more than a boy at the time, hardly able to think straight after Morgan's "death", never mind resist his parents and Dumbledore trying to push him into a marriage with the little Muggleborn chit he cared nothing about. Lily had wanted him, his family had wanted to give an impression of accepting Muggleborns as part of the Wizarding World, Dumbledore merely wanted him out of the way, and he only wanted the one thing he couldn't have-Morgan.

Despite his own unhappiness in the marriage, he had tried to make her happy...he had thought in his boyish sentimentality that he owed her that much, at least. He was old enough and had been through enough now that he knew that he had never owed Lily anything, but he had though so then, or maybe he'd just felt sorry for her. In any case, he'd managed to learn to care for her...he might have even come to love her, if in a rather fraternal fashion, had circumstances not been what they were. He had tried so damn hard, and for what? She loved him, or thought she did-how could she love him when she didn't even know him?-but that wasn't enough. She wanted him to be totally and completely hers...she didn't have an ounce of malice in her, towards him or his mistresses. All Lily ever wanted was to be loved, but he couldn't do that for her-the one thing she ever wanted from him. For some reason, it made him feel sad. She couldn't replace what he'd lost, and he had never been able to have any real communication with her beyond a few isolated incidents when, for no more than a heartbeat, they understood each other.

A major problem in their marriage, at least to the Family Council, was the fact that while Lily had no trouble getting pregnant, it was seemingly impossible for her to stay pregnant for more than five months. The whole point of marrying, from a pureblood point of view, was to produce heirs to carry on the family name and legacy. Even if their children would not be purebloods, the Potter name would have made them powerful players in the status game, but they didn't have any children. He knew that the other women in his family had made a bad situation worse, giving her the idea that she was only half a woman because she was, for all intents and purposes, barren. She had known that he'd loved Morgan, and feminine jealousy had been even more likely to flare up after 'another disappointment' than it was under normal circumstances-and even in the best of times Lily was prone to sometimes throwing his late love in his face just to hurt him whenever she was angry or frightened or in any other way inconvienienced. It had been a familiar pattern, unfailing as the progress of the sun-she would bring Morgan's name into it, a hard silence would fall, and then they'd fight until she ran to their bedroom crying and he went somewhere and got drunk. When Morgan came back, it only got worse.

Then she had Harry, and her insecurities vanished. For the first time in their married life, they had some peace. Lily was too busy falling in love with her baby to get jealous over Morgan, and he could do no wrong in her eyes simply because he was the said baby's father. James's own mother had been the most baby-crazy fool ever to live, but Lily was a close second. She had died for Harry, quite literally.

In so many ways, Morgan Dumbledore and Lily Evans had made him what he was. Whether that was a good thing or not was debatable.

Never forget me, Anne chimed in. Your sister the Slytherin Slut had her part in it, too.

Annamaria, forgetting you is impossible, he retorted, his humor restored by his sister's lighthearted remark. I just preferred not to mention you and your Slytheriness as being associated with two decent women.

I resent that! The words were angry, but the tone was jesting.

That was the point, darling.

You self-righteous Gryffindors don't have the sense God gave a goat, Anne pronounced. I'm going to bed. Have nightmares, Griffie.

The same to you, he thought back, and tried to keep from laughing out loud. He might have been a Gryffindor and Anne might have been a Slytherin, but he defied anyone to say that they weren't as alike a two peas in a pod-or two snakes in a bird's nest, to use a more fitting similie.


Author's Note: Another thanks to my reviewer. I'm glad you're enjoying the story, and I hope you enjoyed this chapter, since I've had to re-write it five times before it stopped sounding like a history book. James and Anne's psychic bonding is explained pretty well in a later chapter I'm working out pretty tentatively-I've got nine-tenths of the story worked out in my head already.In the next chapter, James and Dinah decide it's time to let the dead rest and move onward and upward.

Augusta