Disclaimer: JKR would never put her characters through what I do. She would also never make the Grangers such aholes. I am an awful writer--JKR is a bestseller. Who is the one writing on her mother's borrowed computer at 9pm? Moi...I think I've made my point. I don't ownie...don't suey. I chop suey.
Previously:
Oh, right. They were what Lupin had called Muggles—non-magic folk. No wonder they didn't understand what was going on with her. But she wasn't going to try to explain everything to them. That would be what her father called cheek, and cheek was not to be tolerated. She didn't want a repeat performance of last night. Her body ached all over—especially her back. She left the park still thinking everything over.
Chapter 3: Anything Is Possible, in which the Blacks make a comeback and Hermione is frightened of tyrannical parents.
"Hermione Rose!" called her father sharply. Hermione hurried down the stairs of the Magnolia Crescent home, bemoaning her sluggishness. She was going to be late to the dinner table. Again. And she was going to be in trouble for it. Again.
"What have I told you about being prompt to the supper table?" her father asked sternly. Hermione hung her head, ashamed that she had once again bungled her day. Would she ever learn to go about living the right way?
"Being prompt to the table shows good manners and refinement. Lateness shows a certain degree of vulgarity and a lack of concern for others' feelings," she recited from memory. "I'm sorry, Dad," she added quietly.
"Apology accepted. Please have a seat," he said, to her surprise. They said grace and began to eat. "Now, Serena, how was your day?" her father asked her mother. The brunette woman launched into an epic story about her day, just as she did at every supper. Hermione tried her hardest to appear attentive, even though the story was the same day after day. Lack of attention showed a lack of respect for the speaker. But the days of her mother were always full of root canals and ritual dental cleanings.
Her father went next, and his day's summary was much the same as her mother's, as usual. Hermione quietly cut her chicken as she listened.
"Well, Hermione Rose, how was your day?" he asked her when he had finished telling Serena about a particular patient that always afforded the husband-wife dentist team a laugh. She swallowed the mouthful of spinach before she replied.
Her story was painfully brief, and she didn't go overly into detail as she described the day from when she left home to when she returned home. "Well, I finished school today. We had a ceremony to celebrate the commencement of the summer holiday before we left. I went to the park and talked to one of my classmates after school."
"Thank you, Hermione." The meal continued with her parents' discussion of work and her respectful silence. She felt guilty. She had left Mr. Lupin and their discussion out of her account. She should not have withheld any information, especially such an important part of her day. She berated herself mentally, but still felt no need to add it to the story of her day. She'd then have to explain magic, and she wasn't brave enough to do that.
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Harry James Potter lay in the cupboard under the stairs in number four Privet Drive, staring at the ceiling of the cupboard. Magic? Voldemort? What was all this supposed to mean? Why did he seem to remember Mr. Remus Lupin—but under a different name, some sort of a nickname? He almost remembered the face of the kindly man…he assumed he must have seen him at least once before when his parents were still alive.
He hoped he hadn't seemed too desperate for news and stories of his parents and their friends. All he had known of his parents were their names and the false circumstances of their deaths. Even the latter had been shattered today.
He applied himself to counting the spiders that crawled over him in the dark, not wanting to dwell on the information he now he had of his parents and the strange man he seemed to know named Remus Lupin.
Four…five…six…oh, there's two more, that's eight. One for every year of my life. Oh, look, there goes one back again. That leaves seven. Seven—one for every year I've spent without my parents. Harry shook his head, trying to clear it. His eyelids drooped. He let them fall. Please, please, he thought. Let me dream about my parents for once. I want to see them again. For the first time in most of those seven years, Harry Potter fell asleep with a smile on his pale, thin face.
Dream SequenceHarry felt the oddest sensation. It seemed that he was seeing through someone else's eyes. He saw a black-haired man that looked nearly identical to himself—older, of course, but the man would have been his twin except for his hazel eyes. Somehow he knew the man was his father. A red-haired woman entered the room, just as he noticed his host body was crying. As soon as he saw her emerald-green eyes—the same shade as his—he knew that it had to be his mother. She picked up the body—Harry felt it was his—and hugged him close. He realized that he must be himself as a young child—a baby.
"Is your daddy being a prat to you again, Harry?" she asked with a laugh. He saw the man—James Potter—reach up to ruffle his already-messy hair as he defended himself.
"It was Harry's idea, Lils," he protested. "I don't know why I went along with it, except he's too young to understand—"
"James Andrew Potter, you know very well that the whole thing was your fault! Who said it'd be a good idea to play Exploding Snap? With a one-year-old, no less? Harry doesn't talk enough to suggest that. And don't you lie to me, sir!"
"But Lils, Harry was enjoying himself perfectly—until they blew up in his face," he admitted. "But I didn't set it off on purpose! I—"
"Oh, give it a rest, James," she said good-naturedly. "Everyone here knows you're guilty. Right, Meghan? Sirius?" She turned so that Harry could see a smiling, pregnant woman with black hair lying on the ground, her head in the lap of a likewise black-haired man. He assumed the woman's name was Meghan and the man's was Serious.
The woman, presumably Meghan, nodded conspiratorially—or at least as well as she could from the man, presumably Serious's, lap. "It was all James's fault," she said in agreement, her sapphire-blue eyes twinkling with mischief. "I saw the whole thing, right in front of me. Isn't that right, Sirius, love?" she said sharply, as the man who was probably Serious looked about to protest hers and Lily's statements.
"Oh, oh yeah, right," he tried to defend, to salvage himself from the hole he'd already dug far too deep. "Yeah, Meghan's right," Serious said, flashing an apologetic look toward James that said Sorry, but a man's got to do what a man's got to do. James responded with a quick Can't argue with the women, mate look.
"Fine. No one ever wants to listen to what I have to say," James pouted. Lily, Meghan, and Serious laughed as he walked very pompously out the door.
"Don't trip on your ego, Minister Potter," the man named Serious called after him, his odd gray eyes dancing merrily. The woman named Meghan slapped his knee from her position in his lap. "Be nice." Serious looked both confused and affronted at this statement. Harry laughed inwardly.
End Dream SequenceHarry sat up in bed, so quickly that the room spun. No, that was because he hit his head on that shelf. Who was Meghan? Serious? Besides friends of his parents, that is. How close of friends? Almost enemies? Closer than blood? Meghan had looked like she could be related to James. Was she his aunt—the one Mr. Lupin had spoken of? Where did she live?
He didn't have the time to ponder it now, however, he thought wryly as Aunt Petunia— Petunia Evans Dursley, Lily's sister—pounded on the cupboard door. "UP!" she screeched. He winced. He'd have to think about it when he wasn't trying to cook breakfast for his tyrannical foster-family.
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Remus John Lupin sat at the kitchen table of his tiny house in Little Whinging. An owl made his—or her—way in through the open window. Remus paid him—or her—and accepted his copy of the wizarding newspaper, the Daily Prophet, which, although not prized for its accuracy in reporting, was nonetheless the most reliable. He idly took a sip of his morning tea—caffeinated, with four spoonfuls of sugar—
—and spit it right back out when he saw the front page.
"PADFOOT?" he shouted. When he had opened his eyes that very morning, he had a feeling of some foreboding, but nothing like this!
In bold black script, the headline of the front page read: IMPOSSIBLE DEFIED: SIRIUS BLACK ESCAPES AZKABAN! Remus threw down the paper as if it had suddenly sprouted eight to ten legs and lots of bristly black hair. He remembered Sirius Black. Sirius Orion Black, also known as Padfoot, had been James Potter's best friend from the time they were both young boys. He had seemed the logical choice when the Fidelius Charm had been performed. The Secret-Keeper was the only one who could disclose the address of the house. Sirius would never have told anyone the address. He loved Lily and James like brother and sister, and his godson Harry—why, they were like father and son. He had no reason to betray them to the self-styled Lord Voldemort.
But he had.
Remus picked up the paper again, though his thoughts were far from the article's cut-and-dried words. He'd belonged to Voldemort even then. Even a wonderful relationship and marriage with James's younger sister Meghan Aletha Potter hadn't kept him tied to the Light. Remus sighed. He didn't know what Voldemort had to offer Sirius, but it was good enough to him that he'd handed James, Lily, and Harry, his second family, over to Voldemort. Remus once again let the paper fall, not wanting to read about how Sirius had murdered another of his closest friends, Peter Pettigrew, and twelve Muggles with a single curse—in the middle of Muggle London.
"What would you think if I told you I had seen Harry, Sirius?" Remus asked aloud. "What would you do? How would it make you feel? How could you?" he shouted to the ceiling. "James, Sirius? JAMES? We three, yeah, all three of us, we were best friends from the minute we met! You let that go! God, Sirius, Lily! Your sister, practically! The girl that never did you harm unless you did her harm first! And—Meghan, Sirius! MEGHAN! You LOVED her, you bastard! Don't you remember how long it took you two to damned well figure out that you were made for each other? Remember the look on James's face when you two started holding hands? Do you remember the day Ashley was born? Yeah, your daughter. EVERY SINGLE THING, Sirius, you destroyed it all!" He picked up a glass ornament from his table and threw it at the wall as hard as he could. The crash was satisfying.
Remus closed his eyes. "Did you know the name of the Death Eater that killed Meghan?" he demanded of the air. "Did you laugh and joke together at your 'meetings'? Did you know he was going to kill the girl you married? Did you even really want to marry her? Or was it all an act? Was your 'master' planning her death the night you made me measure around her ring finger? Why? Why, Sirius? You could have had it all." Remus let his head fall, his forehead dropping neatly into his hand. "Am I next, Sirius? Is Harry?" he whispered.
The formerly snarling, insane picture of Sirius Black on the Daily Prophet had stopped still. When Remus fell silent, he opened his mouth, trying to tell him something. But the man had already closed his eyes against the flood of emotions he was experiencing.
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Meghan Aletha Potter Black, also known as Pearl, also known as Louise Campbell, also known as Six-Feet-Under-For-Seven-and-a-Half-Years, woke with a start early in the morning of 10 June 1989. She sat up in her bed in her third-floor bedroom at Gryffindor Manor in Godric's Hollow, her eyes suddenly flung open to their fullest extent. She thundered down the stairs to the smaller dining room, where her parents, Elizabeth Anne and Andrew John Potter, already sat. Andrew's mouth was slightly open in shock or unpleasant surprise, and Elizabeth was blinking heavily and quickly at the Daily Prophet.
Meghan had never died. Narcissa Malfoy had simply knocked her out for a week, enough time for the pompous Minister of Magic, Cornelius Fudge, to stage her "death" spectacularly, as well as her two-month-old daughter Ashley's "death". Ashley, now seven, still lived, with her mother. She had decided to stay in hiding with Ashley when she heard, and stayed in her parents' house but for the time she played Auror Louise Campbell, Mrs. Potter's widowed niece, a comic brunette with Meghan's blue eyes.
"What is it?" she asked in her low voice, dangerously, recklessly. Deep down, she knew she should be patient, but she wasn't in the mood to be patient. Something was wrong. She was determined to find out what. Elizabeth handed her the paper, mutely. Sirius Orion Black's face stared at her from the front page. She looked into his suddenly shocked, open eyes with hidden, jumbled thoughts. "No," she whispered.
What the black-haired woman was hiding was the fact that she knew the truth. Sirius was innocent. He hadn't betrayed Lily and James. He could never keep any secret from her. Even the biggest, juiciest secret of his life had come out during a late-night talk, she in his lap, his arms around her waist as they talked about anything and everything. She had asked a careful question, and she'd felt him stiffen. She'd pressed the subject until he'd told her.
He hadn't been the Potters' Secret-Keeper.
He couldn't've been a Death Eater, either, because every waking moment he spent either with Ashley, Meghan, her parents, James, Lily, and Harry, or his Auror partner Kingsley Shacklebolt. She had made certain of this the night after Peter died and Sirius was arrested. Over and over she'd gone through the past year, searching for one single time he couldn't be logically accounted for. There had been none then, and there were none now.
The Auror had felt like killing Peter herself—with her bare hands. But she had kept her last promise to Sirius faithfully, even when she dueled Narcissa Malfoy in the younger Potter family's Godric's Hollow home. "Sirius," she murmured, picking up the paper she'd dropped in shock to read the lies about her love.
She had manufactured a professional actress's face in the seven years she'd lived without her brother, her sister-in-law, and her husband. Now, she rearranged her shock into a mask of fury, letting occasional flits of the worry she truly felt show through.
"Are you alright, dear?" Elizabeth asked kindly, carefully. She knew—or she thought she knew—how her daughter felt about her formerly imprisoned 'former' sweetheart.
"Actually, no, Mum, I'm not," she said honestly. If he had to escape, he could at least have taken me with him. Then she remembered. Right. Remember, Meghan, you're dead to the rest of the world. You haven't been in contact with anyone for seven-and-a-half years. Elizabeth patted her daughter's hand reassuringly. Oh, Sirius, Sirius, she thought. What should I do? James is dead, Lily too, Harry's hidden. I've lost Remus. Do I have anything more to lose? What should I do? Who should I tell? Sirius, I'm so lost, love. What would you do?
The answer came to her in a breath, just as she was throwing the stirring, perfect images of her friends and family out of her head. Write to Remus. Owls can find everybody, even if humans themselves can't. The brown-haired werewolf appeared in her mind.
She ate her breakfast slowly, methodically, and read through the extra-thick paper, noting the countless articles that were related, in some way or another, to Sirius's recent escape. Her father left about halfway through the Prophet, she would recall later, muttering something about meeting Fudge on time. Her mother headed off to do something or other three-quarters of the way through the third section. Finally, the woman, alone in the room, set down the paper, stared at the once-again-snarling face of her beloved, and headed back up the stairs.
Pulling out a Muggle ballpoint pen—she preferred the feel of the Muggle implement to that of a quill—she tapped her lip with the pen. Finally setting it to the paper she had on her desk, she began to write.
Dear Remus, she wrote,
Hello, old friend! I know you haven't seen or heard from me in seven years, more or less, and you think I'm stone-cold dead. But really, I'm not. SURPRISE! I'm alive, but I've been hiding. I've been keeping a rather dangerous secret for those seven years on a special person's orders, but I think you'd like to know it, in light of recent events. Send me an address, and I'll be there for a visit exactly two weeks from today. Thanks! See you soon, MAP 10 June 1989
She folded it up, addressed it quickly, tied it to Hermia-her-tawny-owl's leg, and let the owl go before she changed her mind. "It's for Remus, Herm! Deliver it for me, if you can find him! This is important," she called after the owl.
She answered with a loud hoot as she winged off through the sunny June morning. Meghan sighed, in delight, almost, sat down on her bed, and opened her favorite novel. It was a good thing she had the day off work. She could hear Ashley stirring in the room nest to her. Oh dear.
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Remus Lupin had called in sick to work—now a small job in a nearby branch of Flourish and Blott's—so that he could straighten out his thoughts. But right now he was going through a scrapbook he himself had made of the Marauders and Lily's seventh year at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry (known simply as Hogwarts).
The smiling, laughing, vibrant Sirius, sharply different from the howling, unkempt one on the front of the Daily Prophet, held Meghan's hand or laughed with the other three Marauders in every single picture. The man sighed.
"It was all perfect, Sirius. There was James and Lily and you and Meghan—you could have had a life with Ashley! How could you do that to Harry? You took away his parents. He was one year old! You swore you'd take care of him! You promised Lily and James! Look at yourself here, Sirius. Compare it to yourself now. Which would you rather be—?"
An owl he'd never thought to see again was winging her way through his still-open window. His eyes widened. Hermia, Meghan Aletha Potter Black's tawny owl, stopped in front of him, familiar bold, slashing handwriting addressing the letter tied to her leg. Oh yes, he knew that handwriting very well. Carefully, his hands trembling a bit with apprehension, he untied the letter. He saw the name. Remus Lupin. Oh shit.
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A/N: Pardon Remus's language
M: I thought I had nice handwriting...
LP: Don't worry about Meggie
M: Don't call me that.
Thanks for reading...we enjoy any feedback you have...although I suck at feedback personally...sorry. I promise I will review the next story I read!
Luv,
LysPotter