JK Rowling owns all these characters and is filthy, filthy rich. I own only this particular plot and any characters I may have invented, and I am not any kind of rich. No copyright infringement is intended. -JM
"Daddy, I want to hear the story again," Victoria whispered from the doorway of her mum and dad's office. Her mum had warned her not to make noise and wake the baby, but the house was so quiet this afternoon that she could be sure of her dad hearing her even if she whispered. She waited, slouching against the doorway, kicking one bare toe against the doorjamb and bouncing up and down on the ball of her other foot.
Her dad was hunched over his desk only a few feet away, his forehead resting on the palm of his hand. He twirled an eagle-feather quill in front of his face, his eyes out of focus and staring past the quill at the wall in front of him. He'd been in here all afternoon, in the office which grew dark as the sun wheeled around to the west, but he hadn't put on any lights. Victoria knew her mum wouldn't be pleased that she was disturbing him, but he rather looked like he needed disturbing.
He hadn't heard her. She tried again, louder: "Daddy!" Her dad dropped his quill and lifted his head. He smiled at once: Victoria was dirty from head to foot, having played outside with the neighbors' children (Muggles, but quite nice ones) all afternoon. One of her knees was skinned, a smudge of dirt sullied one freckled cheekbone, and strands of her flame-red hair were slipping out of the neat plait her mum had fixed for her that morning.
Victoria grinned back at her dad, and he held out his hand to her. "C'mere, love," he said, and Victoria ran to him, jumping onto his lap and kissing his cheek, making him laugh. He caught her under the arms and settled her so she was sitting on his lap with her legs tucked under her, facing him. "What've you been doing out there, eh?" he asked, rubbing at the smudge on her cheek with his thumb.
She waited to answer until he was quite done cleaning her face. "We played in the sand pile," she said, forgetting to whisper, "And then Mummy gave us sandwiches, and then Rick let us play with his new bike for a little bit, and Daddy, I almost rode it without someone holding the back. I almost did."
"That's great," her dad said. He was still smiling, but only a little bit, not in the knowing way that most adults smiled at her. That was one of the things Victoria liked about her dad: he always talked to her as if she was a grownup, too. He always asked her opinion about things, and he never, never just let her win when they played games, like other dads did. The wizard-chess set he had gotten her last Christmas came out almost every night, and she had yet to beat him at it. But someday, she would.
"Hey, have you thought about what you want for your birthday?" Victoria's dad asked. Victoria was going to turn five in two weeks, on July 31.
"Well, I've been thinking," she said. "And I still can't decide." Five was an important birthday; it meant that one was very nearly a grownup. Asking for a doll or a paint set or a new set of robes just didn't seem quite right.
Her dad frowned. "That is a problem." He appeared to think about it for so long that Victoria had to grab his quill off his desk and begin tickling his ears with it, to make him laugh again. Daddy's ears always got very red when he laughed, which he didn't do enough lately, or when he was angry, which he hardly ever was. He batted the quill feather away from his ears and tickled her too, a little bit, on the tummy. She squealed.
"Would you like," he asked, grabbing her around the middle as he stood up, "A bike like Rick's next door? So you can ride it to your Muggle school in the fall?"
"I don't know, Daddy..." Victoria dissolved into a fit of giggles as her dad swung her around and around the room. Her legs flew out in front of her. When her dad finally set her back on the floor, she staggered, dizzy, and had to catch at his shoulders for balance.
"Or how about a new broomstick?" her dad asked.
"I don't need a new broomstick, I've got your old one," said Victoria, still out of breath. She was already quite tall for her age, and her dad had told her that as soon as she was as tall as the broomstick, he would teach her to ride it. It couldn't be long now: she measured herself against the top of the broomstick every day, and she was fast gaining on it. There couldn't be another broomstick in the world as fast as her dad's, anyway.
"Well what then?" he asked.
Victoria looked into his eyes, blue like hers; he was kneeling on the floor next to her. "What would you like to give me?" she asked.
He looked at her very strangely then, and Victoria thought, just for a panicked second, that she had said quite the wrong thing. Her dad's eyes were glassy and she thought she saw his chin quiver. He moved suddenly, giving her a crushing hug that knocked her breath out, nearly. "I'd like to give you the whole world," he said. "Just the world the way it used to be. That's all, my Vic."
Usually her dad called her Tori, her favorite nickname. Story Tori, he called her, because she loved to tell and hear stories. He only called her My Vic when he was having a Down Time. That's what her mum called it when her dad didn't want to talk to anybody or eat anything, just wanted to sit with his head in his hands, in a dark room. There had been many Down Times lately. Especially since Harry was born.
"Daddy," she said, wanting to talk about something else, suddenly, wanting him to laugh again. "Will you tell that story again?"
Her dad broke away from her. "What story?"
"The story you were telling those men the other night. The story about Harry Potter. You never told that one to me, and I..."
She didn't know how, but she had said the wrong thing again. Her dad sat back on his heels, his mouth slightly open. The room seemed very dark, suddenly, and his eyes were shadowy and deep, and his hands on her shoulders had gone icy cold. He looked, and felt, like a ghost.
"Daddy doesn't want to tell that story again, darling," said Victoria's mum.
Mum was standing in the study doorway, her arms folded across her chest. Her hair was disheveled, bits of baby food spotted her blouse and denim skirt, and she had stuck a pencil behind one ear: all sure signs that the commotion in the study had disturbed her while she was working. That was never good. At the sound of Mum's voice, her dad seemed to relax all at once; at least, he let go of Victoria's shoulders and allowed her to step back a few paces. He was winded, like he'd been running, and he put a hand to his forehead.
"But why, Mummy?" Victoria asked. "Why don't you want to tell it, Daddy? You told those men-"
"It doesn't matter why," said Mum. "And we haven't got time now, anyway. You need to get into your bath."
"A bath?" Victoria almost whined. "But why, Mummy? I'm not dirty..."
"Because I want you clean for dinner, that's why," her mum replied, walking into the room and lighting one of the lamps with her wand. "Grandma and Grandpa are coming."
"Oooh, Mummy, really? Can I go with you to meet them? Can I please go to the train with you?"
"No, you can go down the hall and draw your bath like I told you."
"But I don't want a bath, I want to see-"
"Victoria Molly Weasley." Her mum's voice was hard and flat, her eyes narrowed.
Victoria said not another word; she turned and fled at once down the hall. A minute later, her parents heard water running into the tub.
Victoria's mum turned to her husband, who had climbed again into his desk chair. She grinned. "I'm getting rather good at playing the Bad Cop around here, aren't I?"
He smiled back, but the smile was watery and vague. "Hey, you even scared me that time." He picked up his quill again and ran his fingers along the grain of the feather. "I thought she was in bed the other night. When they came. I didn't think she'd hear."
"Me too."
He cleared his throat. "Are you done for the day?"
She rolled her eyes, but the man did not see it; he had turned back to the desk and was again resting his forehead on his hand. "Yeah. Harry finally decided to go down for his nap, and I managed to get that last case report done. Just in time for a weekend with my parents."
"Good," he said.
The young woman frowned at him. Something was definitely wrong; a weekend with her parents was most definitely not "good." She walked over to the desk, slipped her arms around her husband's neck and rested her head on his shoulder. He was studying the blank parchment in front of him and frowning. "How's it coming?" she asked.
"It's not," he grumbled, catching her hands in his own and bringing each, in turn, up to his lips for a swift kiss. "The words just won't come."
"Don't worry," she said, almost whispering. "They will. If I know my Ron-and I think I do-you will find the words to tell this story." She paused. "You loved him too much not to."
"I don't know," he said.
"Well I do," she said, straightening up and ruffling his red hair with her fingertips. "And when have I ever been wrong?"
He frowned up at her. "Do you want a list?"
She laughed softly and leaned down to kiss his lips. "No, I want you to have at least a page done by the time I get back here with-" another eye roll "-the in-laws."
Before Ron could reply, a piping voice sounded from down the hallway. "I'm taking my bath, Mummy!"
Ron's wife smiled again. "Watch them for a bit?"
"Yup." He nodded.
"Sit with her while she's taking her bath."
"Uh-huh."
"And if Harry wakes up-"
"I know."
"Kay. Bye, love." Another quick kiss, and she was gone.
He had left the bathroom only for a minute, he told himself. The sounds of his daughter's splashing and soft, echoey singing reached him in the hallway. He had taught her an old favorite of his, "Ninety-Nine Flagons of Firewhiskey on the Wall," something for which he was likely to catch hell when his wife came home, just like he and his brothers had caught hell for singing it at The Burrow. At the moment, he didn't care. He shuffled across the hall and stood in the doorway of the baby's bedroom for a few moments, then walked over to the crib.
His son lay sleeping under a pale blue blanket, thumb in his mouth. Ron studied the child. This was no ordinary Weasley: this one would have more of his mother in him. The nearly-two-year-old boy's sandy hair had finally begun to thicken and curl in the last few months, and his eyes had long ago faded from baby blue to soft hazel. An embroidered plaque above the boy's crib, a gift from his Aunt Ginny, featured his name, Harry Albus Arthur Weasley, in rainbow colors, surrounded by bunnies, hippogriffs, unicorns and flowers.
The little boy's face was flushed, and traces of tears remained on his cheeks from his latest bout of crying. This discontented child cried almost continually, or so it seemed to his father: so different from Victoria, who, as a baby, had been content to lie for hours alone, amusing herself with the sound of her own voice, as she was doing now while she took her bath. There was nearly always a stream of uninterrupted chatter from Story Tori, whether or not she had anyone listening to her. Little Harry was different: needier, perhaps. More helpless.
Ron wondered, as he reached into the crib to brush a sweaty curl from his son's forehead, if he'd ever have anything in common with this child. Harry was smart as a whip, that was certain; his first word, uttered at the age of barely twelve months, had been "Fly." He'd said it while watching his sister zoom around the backyard on her toy broom. Tori loved to fly already, and was also quite smart; she could already read and couldn't wait to go to school in the fall.
Ron backed away from the crib, trying not to wake Harry. He wished he could think of a way to tell his story, Harry's story, the story that had haunted him for years and that he was trying so desperately to write, so that his children would understand. He wished, more than ever, that Little Harry's namesake was still around, to tell the story for him.
Hermione perched on the edge of her daughter's bed, tucking the covers around Victoria. The child snuggled down under the warm blankets, squeezing her stuffed orange Beater's bat (a gift from Uncle George), her red hair spread out over the orange flannel of the pillowcase. Everything in the room was orange, after Tori's and Ron's favorite Quidditch team, the Chudley Cannons. Hermione prayed that the girl's sense of color-scheme would change as she grew older.
"Did you have a good time tonight, with Grandma and Grandpa?"
"Yes, Mummy."
"Did you like the present they gave you?" To Hermione's chagrin and Ron's delight, Victoria's early birthday present from her Grandpa Granger had been an assorted box of Weasley's Wizard Wheezes, including some very familiar two-color Skiving Snacks and a few Canary Creams, both of which Hermione had refused to let Victoria eat.
"Yes. Mummy, can't I try the Canary Cream? Dad's eaten them lots of times, he told me..."
"All right, but mind you do it in the backyard and not in the house. I don't want feathers all over. And be careful the neighbors don't see you." Hermione paused, smoothing the blanket. "What were you talking about so long with Grandma tonight?"
"Oh," said Tori, and grabbed the corner of her blanket, pulling out some of the frayed threads. "She asked me if I could do any magic yet. I thought it was silly of her, wasn't it, Mummy? Because I'm not old enough at all yet, and I can't do anything besides the stuff I do by mistake, like when I'm angry or something. You have to be eleven to do real magic, don't you?"
"Yes," said Hermione, "You have to be eleven and at Hogwart's. You're quite right."
"Then why did she ask me? Wasn't it silly?"
"Well, darling...Grandma often gets a little nervous around magic and wizards. There was a bad time, a little while ago, where it wasn't safe at all to be around wizards and witches. Especially for Muggles like Grandma and Grandpa. For a long time they couldn't even come to visit me, and I couldn't go home to them for the summer, the last few years I was at school. It was a bad time, that's all."
Victoria was quiet, steadily fraying her blanket. Her mother studied her face: so serious. She was so like her father, this one: carefree and joking one minute, showing thoughtful, startling insight the next. Sure enough, Tori continued, "Was it the same Bad Time Daddy was talking about the other night? When the men came?"
"You were supposed to be sleeping, miss."
"I know." Tori shifted a bit under the covers, reached out both her hands and touched her mother's hand in one of those spontaneous, affectionate gestures that still took Hermione's breath away with their sweetness. "I know I was, Mummy, and I'm sorry, really. But Daddy is in a Down Time, I know he is, and I heard him talking to the men and I wanted to know what he was saying."
How to explain to a child? Hermione tried. "Tori, Daddy remembers an awful lot about that Bad Time before you were ever born, when all the scary wizards were hurting people. Daddy remembers things about that time, awful things, that he wishes very much to forget. Trouble is, people won't let him forget."
"Why won't they? Is it because of Harry Potter?"
Hermione gasped, and tried to cover it with a cough. "Yes, it is. Harry Potter was quite a famous wizard, you see, and...and Daddy was his best friend."
"And you were his friend too."
"Yes," Hermione answered, her voice far away and small. "I was." She shook herself, then reached up and brushed the hair off of her daughter's forehead, planting a kiss there. "You sleep now, all right?"
"All right, Mummy."
Hermione turned out the light and lit the night-light with her wand, leaving the door open a crack. She stood outside her daughter's room for a little while, listening until the girl's breathing had slowed to a calm rhythm. She went softly to Harry's room, then, standing in the doorway and studying the sleeping lump of her son. Harry had played happily with his grandfather after dinner tonight, and for once had gone to bed quietly: no tantrums, no crying. She smiled at him in the dark and blew him a kiss, leaving his door open as well.
Her parents were installed on the pullout couch in the living room, her dad already snoring loudly enough to vibrate the floor boards. At the end of the hall, one more room remained lit.
Ron had been so quiet all through dinner; luckily, her parents had been too occupied with the children to notice. Hermione knew he was thinking about the Ministry visit four nights ago. The fools had, as usual, been compiling a report for some official State document, and could just as easily have looked up the official record of That Night's events. But they had much rather hear it from a direct eyewitness, as they had explained to Ron, leaning forward in their chairs. They had much rather hear it, they said, from a friend.
So he had been forced to relive the whole thing again. Voldemort's defeat. And what had happened to Harry. And what it had all cost.
The bedroom door creaked a little as it opened. Even if she had been meaning to enter the room unnoticed, she couldn't now, he thought, she couldn't sneak up and play that hateful game on him, that game where she pretended to talk about other things when all the while she was leading him back around to what was really bothering him. God, he was tired of it. Ron silently ground his fists into his knees to drive out the thoughts, even as they pressed in on him: Pretend you're tired, Don't let her start talking to you.
He didn't know where those thoughts came from, sometimes. He'd been fighting them ever since that night at the Ministry, that foolish night in their fifth year when the six of them, underskilled and overconfident, had taken on a dozen or more Death Eaters. Of course, with Harry leading them, they couldn't have failed, but Neville's nose had never been the same, and Hermione still had fleeting pains under her ribs sometimes as a result of the curse that had almost killed her.
He himself...he shuddered to think about the brain that had wrapped its tentacles around him and left him with thoughts...such horrible thoughts, not only visions of pain and torture, but unyielding cynicism and deep depression and psychotic hallucinations. All the Dr. Umbly's Oblivious Unction in the world would not get rid of all that the brain had given him. Nothing he had seen since, even the horrors of their sixth and seventh years at school, could compare.
Hermione kicked her shoes under the bed and sat down with a deep sigh. The room was silent for a moment, and then he heard her crawling across the bedspread toward him. He didn't move as she slipped her arms around his shoulders and kissed him on the cheek.
"I love you," she said.
"I love you too," he answered, then cringed. It had sounded awful, like an automatic response, something he really didn't mean. Even though it wasn't. He did love her, down to his very soul. He turned to face her, putting his own arms around her. "I do love you. Don't forget that, all right? Even though I might go a bit batty writing this thing?"
She smiled, seeming to relax a little, now that he was talking, at least. "Darling, you've always been a bit batty."
"Har har." He lay back on the bed and covered his face with his hands. "Do you really think I can write it? And get people to understand? The truth, I mean?"
Hermione stood up again and began changing into pajamas. "What did I say this afternoon? I'm never wrong about these things, so what I think is that you should just shut up and do as I say, and get the damn thing done."
Ron peeked at her from underneath his hands; her back was to him, and she was pulling her pajama top over her head. He grabbed the pillow from her side of the bed and threw it at her; it beaned her on the head just as her pajama top fell down over her shoulders. She whirled around, but he was lying back with his hands behind his head, whistling at the ceiling.
"Oh, you're in trouble for that one," Hermione said, her eyes narrowing.
Ron grinned. This kind of trouble, he could definitely use more of.
HARRY MY FRIEND
by Ronald Weasley
INTRODUCTION
I don't know how to begin telling this, unless I start with That Night. The details you'll already know, you can pick up a hundred different books and they'll all tell you the same thing: Harry Potter defeated Voldemort, caused him to lose his wizarding powers and become a mortal human being who is now rotting away in an ordinary prison cell. In the process, seventeen-year-old Harry Potter died. What the books won't tell you is what it all meant. The extent of the sacrifice that Harry made. Harry, who had just taken top grades from his final exams at Howarts. Harry, who was starting a brilliant career as an auror. Harry.
Saying his name is painful now, as painful, in its own way, as saying Voldemort's name used to be. Voldemort is not what he once was; he is now only Tom Riddle again, a Muggle. A mortal. My wife and I named our son Harry. He is now almost two, and he will grow up never having to know (I hope) the kind of fear and pain we all lived with for so long. And still, his name is painful to me. Because, I know.
I know as well as anyone else how important Harry's sacrifice was. I lost my mother, my father, and two of my brothers, in the space of two years, to Voldemort and his followers. I lost friends, and many of my friends lost family. We lost people, people we loved, to a man who cared no more for human life than he cared for other people's pain. He twisted and perverted the art of wizardry, at which he had enormous talent, into a quest to beat death.
And that is where Harry bested him. The Prophecy stated that Harry would have a power which Voldemort knew not. No one knew what this power was, but not one of us dreamed that it would have nothing to do with wizardry at all. Nothing to do with who could cast the better curse or throw the quicker hex. It would have to do, instead, with simple human love.
For all Voldemort's power, he was still afraid of death. When push came to shove, he would not lay down his own life for the sake of his cause, or for his followers, nearly all of whom died defending him.
Harry did not fear death. When the last moment came, and he saw what he had to do in order to defeat Voldemort, he only turned to me and said, "Don't forget me." He was sad, and full of regrets about the life he'd never get to lead. But he was not afraid to lay down that life to save his friends.
Many call him Hero, or the Boy Who Lived, or The Great Harry Potter. I call him only Harry, my friend. I miss him terribly. And I want to tell his story, so you can know him the way he really was. He was always uncomfortable with the extra attention he got because of his scar, and I know this book would only cause him to squirm, like he used to do when people stared at him. Harry, wherever you are: I'm sorry, mate. But if I don't finish writing this, Hermione will murder me.
CHAPTER I
We were eleven, and we rode in the same compartment on the train to Hogwarts...