Author's Note:
This has been revised. While no new material has been added, I've attempted to clear up the clutter of language.

Rated: M

"This is a catalogue, a memoir, a detective piece, taking the perforated versions of a thousand narratives and building them up into a single story." – Harry Potter.

Prologue

He shelved the book and staggered back to his armchair and closed his eyes. A moment later, they snapped back open. "Accio Paper." A flurry of noise as the sheets beneath the books rose and toppled them on the floor. The bundle dropped onto his lap; they were white and fragmented with lines - muggle paper. Languidly, like in a dream, the room began to dance to his whims: the lights dimmed slightly and the air conditioning chilled at full blast. Upon the counter, a mug stirred and a jar tipped milk. A half-empty snatch of chips flew onto the side table, stewing some as it landed messily. The windows draped, the doors locked. And finally, a steaming mug gently floated into his waiting hands. He took a whiff, and a sniff, and began to write.

History's Inexorable March

It is strange watching your life through somebody else's words: like a dreamscape one is familiar with but can't accurately identify. All the signposts have been reproduced truthfully (or, being precise: reproduced to the best of their extent) but the roads connecting them are alien to me. The undercurrents of the events, the flesh and blood beneath the main body has been horribly deformed, attributing to me virtues I would never dream of possessing! But then again, I'm not wholly ignorant of this manner of marketing.

For years I've sat and permitted their dawdling. I've watched their world perform it's regular motions; initially, I confess, bewildered and stupefied at their superficiality but at some point along the line I have committed the same sin: I've blinded myself to my reality and been swallowed up by theirs. The only defense I can offer: I have privately-practiced the greatest contempt: a snide disregard for their traditions that generated not from any induced pretense, but from the nuts and bolts that constitute me.

But death, as it looms ever closer now, is an interesting mistress.

I've wished, I've hoped, I've pleaded for people to respect me, to revere me (if they wish to revere), to look up to me for what I wish to be renowned for. As a child, fame glittered to me. Now, when I posses more than I can affably use, the nature of my fame chokes me.

As Dumbledore, once ardently proclaimed in lieu of my lambasting of his notions: "the public has diluted me."

I've sat back; let the years reduce me with their monotonous stupor. But I cannot excuse my own inability to articulate my lifelong principles. I do, though, have another excuse to offer: I have been fighting my whole life, often for reasons I could not discern but invariably were out to get me.

So: this is my quest. This is my holy grail: the death, the conscious deliberate murder of my public self. Before my own.

But do not misunderstand: it is not for your sake, but for mine.

Chapter One
Falling Glass

Falling is the oldest art still practiced by man. After millions of years of evolution, we still haven't forgotten how to fall! The disorientation between perception and movement that began those eons ago has been inexorably passed down! Irrefutable proof that the theory of evolution is kaput! What do you have to say to that, Dara-win!

When we climb we fall away from the earth. Perhaps that's why those self-important idiots always had their heads in the clouds.

My mother's fall was one of the oldest, the most romanticized of them all: the oft barded fall from grace. You see, my mother fell from lofty heights into a cesspit whose existence she could have barely conceived. But this pit was green, bright and beautiful and strangely enticing. And it took her a further three years to sink to the bottom, when she found herself on the top of the world!

And so, without further ado, (some things must be performed by the narrative): how the glass fell.

But before that, a little thought: I'm piecing life together from the perforated versions of others, taking the A and C and devising from the sum of my knowledge on the B. So, in effect, I'm creating history as I go along, certainly differing from public supposition. In lieu of three differing histories, two of which can be adequately proved and disproved to be accepted, while the third is the cold hard amalgam of fact from wherein the others borrow their substance; which of them is real?

Perhaps, History will tell.

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My father was a clown. To understand that one needs to question who and what a father is but that does not need to occupy center stage at the present moment. Anyways…

With my father's (As a child I'd always been among an excess of the male species; perhaps that could excuse my lack of discretion and inhibition in my later years) waiting for their cues at the backstage (where they belong) it's my mother who needs to be dissected and understood. But to understand her, you need to understand those times: before me it was her that the age defragmented and reinvented. They took the truth and shattered it, and let it loose in the wind. All the kings men…

Her appearance, to begin with the fundamentals: she was not tall and had short boyish hair that framed a face set perpetually in stoic lines. Her eyes of course, were her most captivating feature: they throbbed with a roaring demanding cruel intelligence. Those eyes would lead her from cellars brimming with stench of the lawless, to jail beating, and Hells-on-earth and finally into the greedy arms of my second father who could scarcely have understood what he so greatly desired, and destroyed due to this ignorance the few precious remnants of the girl who, in 74, stood before the scowling face of a teacher and told –no, ordered- him to 'bugger down your muggle prejudice'… but back then, they were merely the unexceptional features of the resident bookworm (and mudblood to boot). She was a plethora of colors: white skinned, red haired, green eyed and mud blooded: A painter's mad vision.

But why you might ask, does it matter?

When my picture perfect vision of straight lines and a beautiful face framed with fiery hair dissolved into harsh contours with plump features, and I came by the erosion those unexceptional features had undergone to be molded into that picture-perfect frame; imagine my despair! We all search for beauty, and beauty lies in truth and if the fundamentals can be so callously distorted then, then what can't?

History, they say, is written by those who are left.

On a side note: she did become the death-eyed beauty in the photographs but it took Hells-on-Earth to change her, which really underscores an old belief of mine: people are their most beautiful in despair. And after her, a long list follows: there is Julian with his useless stick, and Martha and her singing and and… of course, me. Beyond them all, despair metamorphosed me. (Modesty is something I dare not posses!)

But before all that, we need to stick with beginnings.

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In 1974 history was being made. There were attacks and deaths and fear had begun its spidery way across the hearts and throats of men, elevating names to phrases, distorting the boundaries between the definite and the indefinable, and therefore the unconquerable (the man who coined the phrase "He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named" was soon after kidnapped to attend an assembly, thanked for his efforts, and put out with a relatively painless death.) And unlike the official version, there is more…

While a war was freezing over the world, something seeped through the Wizarding World's defenses: In March of 74, the east wing of the Ministry of Magic was destroyed, blown up, smitherified, by rouge muggleborn groups. There was anguish and out cries, and loud proclamations of eminent muggleborns against the rogues, denouncing them to be insular and instable, dangerous people driven by… you would know by now; the classic rhetoric. But what everybody failed to mention, the dirty waters no official speech ever tread over: the attack on muggle coaches leading to fourteen deaths that were not even given an inch of obituary space in the Daily Prophet. There is, of course, more…

While a man had begun touring the world sprouting 'Give peace a chance', another manner of preaching was beginning in the Wizarding World. To steal from my mother, 'Sneaky and subtle and, of course, brilliant.' Little pieces had begun to appear in the papers, nothing definite, only suggestive; nothing one could use as proof for anti-muggle prejudice, but words and situations that stuck to one's mind. When the Harpers met their green-lighted death at their country home, the Prophet reported it with 'like the muggle aggression in…'

And an old man fought for equality at the cost of justice… and, and I'm getting my chronology wrong.

So, backing up a bit: In March of 74 the Ministry East Wing was blown up. The attack had been planned, resources garnered and executed within a week. The security systems had not yet been geared to detect chemical explosives. But even then, the perpetrators had been crafty. Entering amongst the throng of complainers, protesters and workers, not a hair had been conspicuous. But, more importantly, their minds had been resourcefully protected, churning up thoughts into wild meshes, a conflicting mix that they could then use to furnish themselves with alibis and false motives. It isn't hard to imagine: three points forming a triangle at all times until the very end, with small deadly muggle packages, hidden and perfumed with a bit of magic - a cleaning spell here, a levitation charm there - to provide it the background buzz that magic has: muggle packages decorated to be inconspicuous in magical surroundings.

From the windows, pale March light pooled in. There was a sea of noise and floating upon it, swiftly but not too fast, the three points separated, to meet in twenty minutes, far lighter without the weight of explosives on their body.

And at two, or fourteen hundred hours, the East Wing burned. Did anybody realize the indirect reference? An allusion in blood.

And while 'The Who' was widely and infamously publicized, and the how was hushed, left to public imagination (but how much could those sheep quaking in fear imagine up anyways?), the papers and the Wizarding Wireless Network began their insidious crusade against muggleborns. Across the Atlantic the AntiMuggle Bill was passed in a country in the grips of hysteria, setting back a hundred years of progress. In Britain old men barricaded this 'Unprecedented manner in which we will weed out the disruptive elements in our society.' Old men can be irritating; they hang over like flies.

But more personally, in 74 Lily Potter was – (I've grown accustomed to saying that name) – correction: Lily Evans was expelled from Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry - for indecent behavior.

There were politics involved, of course. We can garner that by now so no need to elucidate any further. There were politics involved and Lily Evans was fired from the best job she would ever hold in her life. But let's get to the brass tacks: Lily Evans was fired because she had sex. (That was, of course, an excuse but it's nice to pretend for a while, to look at people and delude yourself. To believe, however superficially, that they actions are based honestly on the motives they proclaim… yes, it nice. A nice manner of escapism.)

Here I begin to extemporize (formulation of the B between the A and C): twenty-two people - sixteen innocents being forced to masquerade as muggleborn terrorists, the rest guilty of rebelling against racial oppression - had been executed the pervious day, so there were parties. Celebrations. Perhaps Lily became drunk on despair? And James, seeing the object of his affection (the why need not be understood but my mother made a wiry observation: lust leeches us) pounced? There is a haze of firewhisky and a lack of information. Only that she was found in an incriminating state of undress the next day by… again, I can only suppose.

And so, she was expelled. There was an embarrassing speech upon the degradation of values which, had she cared to listen to, would have embarrassed her dearly… or perhaps, she had listened to it, and it had driven her embarrassment to far deeper, a far more secret place; so much harder to reach that later… once upon a time, she would disregard the lashing words of a woman who hadn't been kind in twenty years and had forgotten how to be polite. She would disregard the words, pay no heed to that warning and it would lead her to her first, but not her last, Hells-on-earth.

At the tender fresh (like consumable meat) age of 16, history's vines have begun to transverse upwards; intertwining through her feet and heading slowly, slowly towards upwards… the glass, mon amis, has already begun it's downward decent: In March of 74, the inexorable march of history towards the present left its first-of-many footprints on Lily Evans.

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Imagine:

The gloomy promise of tears (as all such nights are invariably suffused with) in the air has enveloped her. She is walking but she doesn't know where. The road seems empty, like herself. One two…three…the numbers signify houses… six seven eight …twelve… the numbers munch on her steps; every house is alike and she feels she's standing at her backyard, looking into a mirror and seeing infinite reflections – no, no, No. Not her backyard anymore… and the rain finally pours; drums over her clothes… slides down, up and over and down again… it's cold hard sensuous touch awakens her. And suddenly, the night is dark again. She looks up: the stars come into focus. She'd never been religious but at times like these she can't help but wish… her parent's house is boarded and she has nowhere to cocoon herself. She has nowhere to go. She's adrift in her memories.

Are those tears or is that just the rain?

Another step and the Bobby House rises into view: the fog had curtained it. She smiles a fleeting smile and for that un-witnessed moment, the beauty that she would erode away into, shines.

She walks up the gray steps, watching the rain waterfall over them and down onto the street. She's tired and her trunk pulls on her arms with each step. She wonders why she just didn't store it somewhere.

Inside, it's bright and cold and lazy. A few men are longing, reclined over seats with hats tipped over their face and legs stashed on the tables. A cop moves towards her.

"Can I help you, miss?"

"Yes," she replies. "I seem to have lost my parents."

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On the fourth of February, a coach carrying soldiers and their families back to the army base from a weekend break, exploded.

He was sitting by the window watching the green blur of the world rush past him. There was a warm comforting presence in his arms: his wife. His daughter was walking around the carriage, but repeatedly walking back to the same man. What was that kid name?... Durs… no, something… ah, a turn of the chest and a sliver of light illuminated a name tag. Vernon Dursley.

He turned his head. His daughter. Petunia.

Eventually, any thoughts of Petunia brought him back to his other daughter. He sighed and his wife looked up at him. There was an understanding glance and she whispered, "Thinking about Lily, dear." It was an answer and the question was lost in the clang of the carriage as they moved across hills and back into separation. But he heard her anyways.

What do you do when novelty wears off and the glittering beautiful wonderful thing you once saw is actually just a big shiny knife. Magic: it disrupted the entire semblance of his life. He watched his daily motions and thought: they could do it so much better. He watched men dying of broken limbs: they could save him. He imagined her growing up, standing tall and proud above them, and proclaiming, "Sorry, dad. I can't help mum. It's against the rules."

It's against the rules. Against the rules. They had governed his life. Could he ask his daughter to abandon hers?

Who was his daughter, he often wondered.

Certainly not the harsh young girl that come home every few months of the year. He's watched them change her, year after year, and he'd stood helpless, with a smile on his face. Bursting in with a few questions over the phone: how does… wow, and that… who did…

He kneeled back against the carriage and closed his eyes.

This year, he wanted to get some answers.

He, of course, never found answers.

Death found him and in the outcry, that his death had not been mentioned in print to people who didn't care anyway, an east wing of a ministry was blown up. There were parties and a girl was expelled. The expelled girl reached the home of the man and wife, in a dank dark night only to find a big stick up: For Sale. The girl then fell on the grass and finally cried, with the air around her gloomy with the promise of tears.

What then, of the other girl?

When no relatives staked up a claim the police began their inquiry. They found something strange: another daughter with no mention in any local school. There were questions and Petunia gave hesitant, red-eye-rimmed answers. "She goes… up north… yes, a school… no I don't the address… not very close… name? Hogwarts." But there was no Hogwarts and there was no relief for Petunia. She knew all the answers but nobody believed her.

"Men you say? With lights shooting from sticks?... stopping bullets in midair! Dear lord, get a doctor, private. There there, Miss Evans… no need to get angry…"

But there was temporary respite in the bulky frame of a soldier whose name tag proclaimed 'Vernon.'

(Can I? Yes, of course, I've forgiven them, of course. They weren't to blame. Like my mother and me, they become too embroiled in history to know any better.)

So, while one sister was being romanced, another, who'd already left one life behind, was finding out in a police station that her other had also been shattered.

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Oh, yes: as wizards apparated into a couch, many miles away a mother entered into labor. As black-cloaked strangers raised their wands, a mediwitch hustled into a room. As muzzles smoked and bullets flew, women dived behind stiff angry shoulders… there were screams and mourns as magic enveloped a womb and failed to facilitate the processes of falling into life. As bullets stopped in midair, as men leaped with wild exclamations and tackled Cloaks that rarely felt the exertion of physical carnage, a father whispered then shouted then screamed… Push, push! Oh dear god! A squib!… As cloaks went down with blood spurting from their mouths, a Sergeant ordered… Fire At Will… and bullets rained and blood drained from pipes-down-there that never expected the barbaric onslaught they were facing… As a leg popped out a wand swiped down and halted, miraculously, the lethal paths of a dozen projectiles…

At the precise instant of Julian's Birth, a couch exploded. The date, of course, was the fourth of February. Vine-d with history and born without magic, a healthy gurgling ten chipper, Julian was doomed right from the start.

Next Chapter: Pandora's Box

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