Magic In Numbers
May Eve's prompt: Harry meets Charlie from NUMB3RS, if you don't mind that fandom, no child!Harry please.
Note: I had never seen NUMB3RS before, so I started watching, it took a while to stop and write this.
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7,067,529,900+ World Population
315,364,716+ U.S. Population
4 Potters
1 Professor
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Harry Potter is a grown man, with children of his own – three of them in fact. So there is no proper answer to why he's dragged them along with him, so that Teddy can go to a class on the CalSci campus where a Professor Charlie Eppes will talk about math. Teddy had wanted Harry to come along, had begged and pleaded with his godfather until Harry had just said yes.
"Comfortable, dad?" Teddy asked gently; a hand on Harry's shoulder as if to steady him. Absently, Harry nodded, sitting with Al and Jim on either side. Jim took the aisle seat, putting himself like a wall between his father and the gathered class of muggles of all ages and races.
Jim has Ginny's rich brown eyes and Harry's black as night hair; he's fifteen and not afraid to hold tightly to his father's hand, his own hand is cold, and it's clear enough to Harry that he's nervous.
Jimmy looks at all the strangers, all the muggles, as if he'd take them all out if Harry so much as twitches wrong. For the sake of his oldest son's pride, he hides his smile. Jim had declined to be called James, once he realized that his name had been the name of his father's father- and that father's best friend, a grandfather he never set eyes upon.
He preferred to make his name is own with a short Jim, or Jimmy. Harry abided by that self-naming, knowing how it felt to live up to the shadows of great expectations. Jim and Teddy had shortened Harry's second son's name to Al, and Harry had said not a word against them. Lilu they had called Harry's little girl, a bit of a baby-name, but she liked it better than Harry's mother's name and the name of Ginny's best friend put together.
Their names had not been Harry's choice, but Ginny's wishes, but Ginny was gone, and her children would never likely forgive her for it.
It was a well known fact that where Harry went his children were bound and determined to follow him. It's why Harry had given up Ministry work, had given up a lot of things for them – and maybe Teddy was old enough to see that. Maybe that was why he wanted to go to muggle college, to get out of the Burrow with Harry and see something of the world, even if it was only a school in California.
So it was that Teddy had dragged his godfather out of the Burrow, into the light of the California sun, into a life that he'd forgotten how to live. Harry had lived for his children for long enough that he'd forgotten how to live for himself. Or at least that's what Harry had overheard Teddy telling Ron and Hermione when he'd asked for a portkey. He'd gotten one, so Harry guessed his best friends agreed with Teddy that Harry needed now to get out and live for himself.
Al can't seem to sit still with his brother so tense; he blinks up at Harry like a mirror back in time, with his own bright green eyes and messy jet black hair. He holds Harry's other hand, and Harry is content to have his sons on either side of him.
"Daddy, when is this going to start?" Lilu with her flaming red hair and baby brown eyes and freckles frowned up at the head of the classroom. At only nine, she'd not gone to school yet, but looked forward to Hogwarts with a growing enthusiasm. She'd still disdained to sit "the muggle way" and had climbed up on Teddy's lap like it was her right. Teddy let her do it, with a roll of his eyes. Teddy mimicked her red hair, but preferring wolf amber eyes.
"Soon as Eppes gets here, no doubt." Teddy told her, and her bright brown eyes looked about as if expecting him to portkey in at any minute. Charlie Eppes stood up from among the classroom's seats, and turned to smile at them all – his students for the next half-hour.
Harry could not have told Teddy that this Professor Eppes was not what he had expected at all, a man his own age, with his wild curly black hair and wary wide eyes. It was with a child's enthusiasm that he talked about math, about how the world worked and why. Harry did understand though, why it was that Teddy had wanted Harry to see him, Professor Eppes may have thought he was talking about mathematics, about the language of nature, but what he was really talking about was magic – and magic was talking back to him, a muggle. It was something so rare Harry had only ever heard of two others able to do it, Hermione Granger his best friend, a witch – and Harry himself, a wizard.
"What do you think?" Teddy asked softly as Professor Charlie Eppes talked about mathematical probability. He didn't use words like fate, chance, and destiny. The language was different, but similar enough that Harry could hear what was meant.
Professor Charlie Eppes was talking to magic – he called it mathematics, some called it faith, or science, or magic, or runes, or prophesy – but anyone could talk about that and not know what it was, truly. But this, this was talking to Professor Eppes, shining out of him, blinding.
"Bloody brilliant." Harry answered, and it was – he was.
Teddy settled back in his seat, a smug smile firmly on his face. This meeting wasn't for him, Harry knew now – Teddy had searched the world for something, someone, to wake Harry up by talking to, talking with, and talking about something he cared about – something called magic or mathematics that made Harry who he was.
When it was over, Teddy kept Jim and Al and Lilu at his side, seated, telling them to watch, to wait, there was something hushed and awed enough in his asking that they listened and watched.
They heard, they saw – beauty, a life being lived again.
"No one taught you to write all this, did they?" Harry asked of Professor Charlie Eppes, a small smile touching his lips as he stared at equations and expressions and equality. Mathematics. He shook his head, a touch awed, there were different ways of speaking the same language – some simply spoke, some wrote.
"No, not…really..." Charlie confessed, hushed, seeing that Harry understood what he'd written even without proof of education. Charlie had always had mathematics, it had rung in his head like a song until he couldn't help but try to write the lyrics. What he wrote down never felt as complete as a song, but it was close, as close as he could come.
"Would you like to hear it?" Harry touched the symbols, a glance behind him showed that only Teddy and his children were watching them in the room. The rest were gone, and Harry did not care where the muggles had all gone – all that mattered to him was this one, this muggle.
"More than anything…but, how could you…?" Charlie breathed with wild daring, and hoping.
Harry's touch lit up the mathematics like a light being switched on, like a key turning to complete a lock and open a door that Charlie couldn't.
"Magic." Harry spoke, as he listened to what Charlie had written with his mathematics. Harry could not write that language, he could hear it and speak it, talk to it as it talked to him – and Hermione could translate between what Harry heard and spoke, but she could not write magic into mathematics. Charlie could and had.
"What are you?" Charlie asked, eyes upon the lit up equations as he listened for the first time to a mathematical formula put to magic, like music.
"A wizard…." Harry's lips twitched at Charlie's sudden scowling.
"And you, Charlie Eppes, are a muggle genius, a spell maker, a sorcerer." Charlie's mouth opened and closed, soundlessly. Stunned, perhaps.
"Is he coming home with us, Dad?" Al asks from his seat, staring up at mathematics made into magic. Harry didn't answer, could not answer for the Professor – only Charlie could say what he would do.
"Yes, yes I will be – but where are you all from?" Charlie hovered over Harry, as if afraid of having him out of sight.
"The Burrow, of course, in Devonshire, have you not heard of either the Potters or the Weasleys?" Jim had gotten up to stand at his father's side, not liking Charlie to be so close to him.
"No, I can't say that I have." By the look of them all, Charlie knows – no, hopes – that is soon going to change.
"Come along Professor, would you like to meet my grandmother? She'll fix you right up, supper is soon – and tell you all about my da' and uncle Ron, his wife Hermione was muggle born, she's an alchemist – which is sort of what you are, da' is the only enchanter in the whole world. Your sort the alchemist, enchanter, sorcerer; your only born in threes. It's just how magic is, you know?" Lilu babbles as she gets up, holding out the portkey (a book Hogwarts: A History, Charlie notices among the child's rambling) Charlie reaches out to grip it, pausing when Lilu doesn't let go, smiling up at him – when Al beside her touches the spine of the book, when Harry holds onto a side – Teddy the other, and Jim sighs and touches the middle.
"Here we go!" Teddy chimes in, full of wicked glee. With that, they've gone away.
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Don Eppes gets a call several hours later from his brother Charlie, who chatters about telling their dad not to worry, that he'll be back – just not sure when, perhaps after this weekend, (he might bring some friends from "the Burrow" family) he's got to be doing something between solid study and research in mathematics, the more archaic mathematical kind, of course, not to worry...
That night Don Eppes for the first time in his life looks up the word that he thought his brother Charlie was defined by. Mathematics means knowledge, study, learning – but has no limiting definition, no ending.
He thinks it's never fitted Charlie better, for a word that his brother is, and does.