No real excuse for the wait this time -- though, in my defence, it is quite a long chapter. Can't quite keep track of who I replied to and not, but my happy, humble thanks to loveandpeace09, ngayonatkailanman, skimble on the rails (awesome name, by the way), sums96, and Biggles Mad (I would have known for sure who you were even without your sig!)
Chapter Four -- James Meditates
Harry hadn't broken enough Magical Transportation regulations that day, so he capped it by his Apparition to an unknown spot, based on squinting out the window to where an official helpfully pointed out the Stomalimne Hotel.
Being Harry Potter, he didn't Splinch himself. Though he was a touch dizzy.
The Stomalimne Hotel was painted in surprisingly splashy colours and had a crowd of surprisingly worked-up people milling around, staring at the sky. Harry gave it a cursory glance, saw nothing, and proceeded to hightail it inside to room 804. Relieved to have finally arrived (and still a bit weak from what Magda had so delicately expressed as "puking up all meals on arrival"), he showed the crowd some mercy as he muscled his way through without once resorting to small explosions or minor hexes.
Midway through, he found the normally relaxed Teddy elbowing people out of the way recklessly, which gave Harry further pause. Teddy making use of his elbows was a scary enough proposition even when he was trying to take care. Harry was pretty sure he cracked a touristy-looking woman's rib.
He didn't have time to say anything, though, as Teddy seized him by the arm and dragged him back through his wake of now-cautious people.
Only one man was brave enough to tag along. Harry wheeled round, wand at the ready, when someone tugged at his sleeve. It was a dull-faced sort of fellow in star-spangled trousers. Harry blinked.
"Excuse me," said the apparition, who had a heavy accent to complete the hallucination. "Would you be Mr Lupin?"
Harry blinked again. It had been a hell of an hour already, and, frankly, the last time any wizard had ever failed to recognize who he was had been at least a decade ago. And he had been undercover and using Polyjuice Potion at the time. There were even a surprising number of Muggles who sometimes seemed to point and gape at him, something Dudley had never adequately explained despite considerable interrogation. "No," he said, and gestured toward Teddy.
The apparition promptly turned forty-five degrees. "Excuse me. Would you be Mr Lupin?"
"Not now," said Teddy, in exasperation, tossing a business card in the man's general direction. "Send an owl."
And he promptly put the front door of the hotel between them and him.
Harry (after, of course, giving the lobby a quick once-over) raised his eyebrows, thus making Teddy hold still for at least three consecutive seconds. "Well handled."
Teddy pulled a face. "Harry," he said, in an agonized undertone, "he's trying to jump out the window."
"W-What?"
Harry nearly bolted. Only Teddy waving his arms in X's like a referee flagging in a rogue Quidditch flyer halted him. "Victoire's with him!"
"Why aren't you two restraining him!?"
"It's difficult -- "
"How?"
"You'll see -- "
They eschewed the internal Floo system, which had a line neither of their nerves could handle, taking the steps two at a time. Predictably, Teddy fell flat on his nose after the first flight or so. Harry didn't stop.
"Why's he trying to jump?" he shouted over his shoulder.
"Demonstration," gasped Teddy, who had got to his feet again with the ease of much practice and was now trying desperately to catch up with Harry's blistering progress. "A protest -- for -- world peace -- "
"What the hell does defenestration have to do with world peace?"
"Harry -- if any of this -- made sense to me -- I wouldn't -- have called -- you down here!"
Fair point, Harry acknowledged absently. In his peripheral vision, he saw Teddy clutch at the railing so as to not trip again as he rounded the corner. He nearly flipped himself over the banister in the process. Harry decided to ignore this in favor of the more novel insanity. He had already knew the room number, after all, and he barged onto the eighth floor without hesitation, magically busted open the door of the fourth room.
Directly across from him, James was indeed propped precariously on the small balcony. Victoire had wisely gone for her wand...
... but only to Conjure a rope. Which she had tied round James's ankle and was now desperately trying to knot around the handle of the bedroom next door. Deciding to gape later, Harry whipped out his own wand.
"Uncle Harry! No!"
With a dim feeling that Hogwarts standards must be falling tragically, Harry bellowed: "Accio James!"
Next thing he knew, the world had become all noise: namely, one great big bang, surrounded by fast, excited yelling. Slowly, he tuned back in. The voice was Victoire's.
" ...we've tried every type of spell we could think of -- charms, enchantments, hexes, chants -- nothing affects him, not even runes -- "
He was on the floor again. The spell had failed that violently. Harry cast a bleary look around, not seeing much except a red-gold blur that didn't resolve into Victoire's hair until she repaired his glasses and pressed them back onto his nose.
How long had be been out?
"James?" he called. "Are you all right? -- Victoire, hush a moment, will you? -- James!"
He was positive he heard a voice even after Victoire had stopped talking. He was pretty sure it was James's, but it kept going on and on without even acknowledging his calls.
"We can't force him to do anything, we're trying to reason with him but he won't listen to us -- you have to go talk to him, Uncle Harry."
"Is that crowd chanting for James?" demanded Harry, getting to his feet.
Teddy, who was trying and failing miserably at lassoing James's ankle, looked over and up at him. "Yeah."
"Hell." Harry crossed the room to the balcony in a few long strides, a bit horrified by what he could understand of James's speech, and blinking in the bright sunlight.
"They're saying jump! jump! jump!" translated Teddy.
Harry lost a precious second gaping down at the enthusiastic crowd. "You're joking."
"Yes, because it's hysterical," said Teddy, who was beginning to sound just that. He shoved Harry onto the balcony next to James (Harry almost fell off).
"James Potter!" he thundered, vaguely aware of the crowd cheering.
"Hi, Dad," said James sunnily. Then he looked askance at Harry, who had wedged himself in the three inches between James and the railing. "Oy, you're blocking my way."
"James, you need to get inside."
"Sorry, can't just yet. I'll come up after I jump."
"We're eight stories up!"
James waved a hand airily, the way he normally did when someone told him that if he didn't go to bed shortly he wouldn't be able to wake up early tomorrow for x uncool activity.
"I just covered an entire continent by Floo in under forty minutes," said Harry, folding his arms. "Don't you think I get a nice to see you, Dad, let's sit down and catch up a bit?"
"Dad, you're standing in the path of world peace."
James's eyes were big and earnest. Unnerved, Harry decided that the whole reasoning bit was a waste of time; if it hadn't been his own son, he would have come to the conclusion long before.
"No," he said casually, raising his wand. "I'm not standing in the path of world peace." He made a sweeping motion. "This is."
When he brought the wand down it was in a fulsome shower of sparks. They started to disperse rapidly, but the seeming chaos started to cross in and out of itself, so that within seconds it had formed into the shape of a monstrously large hippogriff.
Harry flicked his wand. The sparkling hippogriff dove.
He didn't need the crowd's reaction to be translated this time; screams of panic are a universal language. Harry kept the corner of his eye on James, further disconcerted to see that James wasn't sulking at the disbandment of his audience. Expression very even, perhaps even serene, James hoisted himself up on the balcony railing, purpose in every line of his young body.
Oy! thought Harry. Said Harry, "Maceritur!"
This time, his wand was pointed down; the street below turned into foam padding. James, one leg up and over the railing, paused.
After a moment's blinking consideration, he gracefully landed back on the balcony, and with all possible dignity walked back into room 804.
Harry was pretty sure he heard Victoire breathe, "Oh thank God." It was hard to tell, inasmuch as next moment she was shaking James with almost criminal violence, and shrieking about what a such-and-such twerp he was.
Teddy, slumped against the wall, just ran a hand through his hair shakily. Harry looked at him, then back at James and Victoire, and then back at him. "Tell me the two of you have alcohol on hand," said Harry grimly, preparing to rescue his eldest child from permanent hearing damage.
--
Trying to talk to James was something like hell. Harry was terribly anxious that he had been replaced with a magical copy. He couldn't test the theory with any diagnostic spells, of course, because they only knocked him out and left James unaffected.
It was hours past nightfall, and the only progress Harry had made was to convince James to take a bath, which he hadn't done since yesterday morning. James was warm to the idea, although he insisted on calling it an "ablution," which made some parts of Harry shrivel and die a whimpery death, and other parts wonder where James had even learned the word.
He was leaning outside the bathroom, where the door was still open because Harry didn't entirely trust James not to drown himself in order to protest child abuse or something, and they were calling back and forth to each other, though it was mostly a one-sided conversation.
"What made you want to jump?" asked Harry, as calmly and clinically as possible, in hopes of identifying what sort of curse James had been put under.
No reply.
"James, what made you want to jump?" Still no reply. "James!"
Then he heard the sound of bubbling. James was breathing out bubbles into the tub. Perhaps Victoire had it right with "twerp."
"James, do you want me to come in there?"
At the threat of invaded privacy and offended masculinity, James withdrew his head from the water with a splash. "Dad, it wasn't going to hurt me," he said, with an exasperating sort of patience.
"It was eight stories."
"I would have bounced," James said, still quite patiently.
"You would have -- James, you're almost a fully-trained wizard, you would not have boun -- "
"The pure, spontaneous magic of our youth still resides deep within us," insisted James. "We just have to unlearn our reliance upon wands and incantations, and get in touch with the inner fire."
"Right. Look, James, I'm going to the play that card that I don't often play -- you know, the one where I have probably traversed more deep magic than any other wizard alive."
James's silence was palpably lofty. Harry found himself forced to lecture in a way that would have done Percy Weasley proud.
"Even wizards who aren't trained in magic lose the strength they had when they were young. If you don't learn to channel it, it gets weaker, not stronger -- and by your age it would be too late to protect you from twenty-seven metres of gravity."
"I'm afraid you're butchering simple physics as well as the laws of magic, Dad," said James gently.
It was Harry's turn to slump against the wall, clutching at his head -- not because his old scar hurt, but simply because he had the mother of all headaches after several hours of this unshakably mental doppelganger-James.
"Sandwich?"
Victoire's voice was sympathetic and very soft. She had tiptoed over; she and Teddy had been conversing in hushed whispers over in the kitchen while Harry tried his hand with James.
"Thanks," said Harry dully, taking it out of reflexive Auror training and even longer-honed common sense (in unknown situations, make sure you're well fortified).
Teddy poked his colourful head round the corner. "Any luck?" he asked hopefully, though still in the same hushed hospital sort of voice.
"Well," said Harry, "at least he no longer thinks he can right the wrongs of the world by his smell alone."
"That is progress," agreed Victoire, with a reflexive sniff, though her eyes remained worried. "Do you think it's a curse of some sort?"
"Must be. But I've never heard of anything that makes you immune to magic." Harry finished stuffing the sandwich into his mouth, but shook his head as Victoire offered a second one. " 'Jump, jump, jump', indeed," he fumed. "What were they thinking? And where was law enforcement?"
"They're corrupt all the way through," whispered Teddy. "MLE, Aurors, Hit Squad, the courts, everything. All in One-Hit Halkias's pocket."
"I know that. But even corrupt departments tend to want to disperse small riots on the streets. I'm shocked I haven't been called to task for that damn hippogriff."
"No, really. They do nothing," said Teddy earnestly. "I'm supposed to be writing a story on it, actually -- haven't made any of the appointments I lined up since James went off his nut, of course, but from what I hear their absence today isn't any surprise."
"Let's not bring them into it, then," said Harry, rising to his feet again. "I'm going to see if I can get him to bed without too much talk about, I dunno, the way the stars remind us of our ultimate insignificance, or whatever."
"That's it?" asked Victoire, voice no longer quite as whispery. She and Teddy looked positively disillusioned. "But what are you going to do?"
"Not sure just now. But everything is brighter in the morning," insisted Harry. "Our ingenuity not least of all."
He pretended not to notice the doubtful despairing looks passed between the two young people as he entered the bathroom, with the stance of one ready to do war. But just before opening his mouth to address James, a thought struck him.
"Oh, but just in case it isn't," he added, casually peering round the doorway again, "just in case we wind up having to call grandparents down here -- you two might want to move your stuff into separate rooms again."
Victoire and Teddy only blushed a little.
