Chapter 25

This chapter is about Remus and me. Well. When I say "about" I suppose I mean it in the sense that after someone has gotten done screaming all the swear words they know and gone down their list of flounces, surly stares, stomps and angry moues and has switched to tearing up envelopes and other bits of paper and dropping them on the floor and on the bed and on the other person's favorite chair that they like in spite of the fact that it's that kind of velvety cloth that shows in great detail who was sitting on it last and how, and maybe dropping a few bits into a fan and letting them get strewn everywhere, that the way that it's scattered about the room is how this chapter is about Remus and me. It's all about.

After I came home, and found Ginny in my room as I'd hoped, except perhaps a rather more lively version due to my having startled the daylights out of her, and after we sorted that out and she examined me for signs of anything and came up with nothing, I said to her I wanted more lessons in magic, and after chewing on that a moment she said that it should be Remus again. Actually she said that it was his turn, but if I think too much about things like that I might get a complex.

So a few hours later found me in the drawing room, if that's what it would be called, and as it turns out the smaller room off of the main sort of great room or salon that guests might go for a little more privacy than that afforded the rabble out front used to be called rather more sensibly the "withdrawing room", and when pressed as to why it ended up being called something that means absolutely nothing as far as what its original function is, the sages of history have offered that it's an abbreviation of the original, to which I say that things must have gotten awfully busy in the seventeen-hundreds to need all that luxurious extra time granted by lopping off the "with".

I was dreading my lesson a little. There were a lot of things I didn't know. Not unusual for me, but before I didn't feel it so much, and that muddling through was pretty okay as long as I had Ginny at the end of whatever it was, or if Ron were there with an "all right, then" look or if one of my parents did that thing they did of saying something that reminded me I wasn't in this by myself, but I really kind of felt that in many ways I was in this by myself, that I had a murderous bone-house-building death avatar after me and a chip of him embedded in my head also, and I had no idea how that worked but it felt, in my worst moments, that maybe he was the likely one doing things, or that I was doing things like he would, and that was utterly awful, because not having much self for a long time and then having it is enough of a shock, and trying to figure out who one might be is difficult enough, without feeling like maybe one is kind of also possibly evil or something.

So my guardians, or assistants, or escorts into the unknown, if you will, were draped about the furniture waiting for me. Remus, the lean and rumpled werewolf, held a book in his hand and frowned at its content, while a ruff of pink indicated Tonks' presence in a couch under a blanket. I had seen her enough times to have learned that she was an Olympic-class loafer, able to occupy an entire settee without effort (in fact, that was rather the point), and had decided it must be physically tiring to be able to assume many forms other than her own - and I had been told that it was a little unusual for her to appear as she did before me, with only the hair altered, but that she'd said of it that she just didn't see the point around me.

Remus stretched in a way that was unsurprisingly lupine, baring his teeth a little in a way that I suspected he was aware of and that I was supposed to be aware of. "I'm told," he said, "young Deasil, that you have a mind to be schooled in the ways of magic. Take care, my lad, for within this hoary discipline there lie great and terrible truths."

"Mostly terrible, if this speech is any indicator," said the blanket.

He barely looked at the blanket before continuing, allowing a small bit of mischief to be reflected in his features. "Ginny says you have some questions and need some answers."

The blanket said, "And it's good that a young man has interest in these questions. And the answer is, slow and steady at first, until you are both in a bit of a rhythm, but you can speed up just a little as time goes on -"

"Nym." He was embarrassed, but amused.

"It's not time to ask about that yet," I said.

The blanket looked sympathetic.

"I think I just…need some of the underlying theory about some stuff. Just - so I know what I'm talking about when it comes up in casual conversation."

"Right," Remus said, sitting straight up and bringing his fingers together. "So where would you like to begin?"

"Horcrux. In the head. In my head. What does it, er, do?"

"That's right," said the blanket, "just ease on in, no reason to rush."

"You are not helping, Nym," Remus said.

"Am I here to help?" the blanket said.

"You are and you are," I said.

"See?" The blanket said.

"And you are encouraging her, which I should find utterly unsurprising," he said, but there was nothing angry about how he said it.

"We're friends," the blanket said. "That's what friends do."

"With friends like you…"

"You get regular back scratches so move on."

"Right," he said. "Right."

"Can we get back to death magic and that kind of crap?" I said.

"You must have questions," he said, looking insufficiently chastened given the impending doom aspect.

"How exactly is it that a horcrux keeps someone alive?"

Remus ran his fingers through his hair, as if knowledge made him overheated. "The general idea is that a portion of the creator's soul is anchored within an object, and so as long as the object endures, the person cannot truly be killed."

"So if someone, I don't know, buffs his head off with a power sander, he can what - regrow one?"

"No, it's -" Remus looked like he was trying to break something to me gently. "His soul," he said, his voice getting softer, "instead of going …beyond… when his body is destroyed, remains here, only incorporeal, you see, without a body, until it can either find its way back into one or is restored by a ritual -"

"Okay. Hold up. Questions. Lots of questions. You have to answer them before we go any further."

"All right, Deasil, fair enough."

"Where's beyond?" I said.

He paused. "Well. You know… or I mean, that is, maybe you don't know. It means where souls go when they leave the body."

"You just said 'Where souls go is where souls go'."

"Well. You see -"

"What's it like there?"

"Nobody's been there and back to say. Some people say they have gone part of the way there, but come back."

"How do you know souls go there, then? Couldn't they just, you know, evaporate or something?"

His eyebrow rose indulgently. "Ah," he said, "that part is elementary physics. Conservation of energy. No energy can be created or lost."

"I didn't say lost, I said evaporated. Like, you know, scattered everywhere. Spread out and intermingling with everything else, like smoke, or pollen, or the scent of… of something lovely. Like that. Becoming a part of all things."

He looked flummoxed. "Yes. Well, I… I suppose that is a… a lovely thought, Deasil."

"So what happens to lightning when it hits the ground?"

"What? I mean, it dissipates into the ground, unless it's captured by a spell."

"So it's still lightning when it's all in the ground?"

"Er, not precisely."

"Let's try another one. What's a soul?"

"Ah! Well… well. Erm. It's…" Lots of fingers through the hair. "It's really, erm, the essence of a person, the thing that gives them the spark of life."

"Like the charge in a battery."

"I suppose, well, just a moment, are those the little square things with the pointy bits and the little sort of spine and the fringe-y bit down at the bottom?"

"…No."

"I see."

"What the hell thing are you talking about?"

"I know what a battery does, Deasil."

"Okay, let's hope. I don't want to see you forcing all manner of pointy fringe-y things into my TV remote later. Then all souls are the same, like batteries."

"Well, no, the soul is particular to the person - actually it's the most singular aspect of a being," he said, looking for a moment kind of pleased with himself.

"So not like a battery."

His pleasure went out like the cat. "Not so much."

"So the soul is unique, it contains the personality of a person?"

"Not - not as such, I mean that would be more like a ghost."

"A ghost."

"A ghost is a remnant, if you will, an imprint upon the world of a person who is unwilling or unable to go beyond. It has no mass. In fact I suspect it's the lack of mass that drops temperature when they are nearby. Ghosts can pass through solid objects, and are usually constrained to a particular area that is significant to them."

"Different from a soul, though."

"Er, yes, because ghosts act like the person. They're mostly personality. They have will, they can move about and talk and so on."

"How do they move air to talk if they haven't any mass?"

He paused. "Perhaps they have a little mass."

"And they change the temperature around them, because they don't have mass so the nothing makes it colder?"

"It appears to be because of the absence of something."

"Presence?"

"No, Deasil, absence."

"I mean absence of presence."

"That's a rather strange way of putting it."

"What part of this isn't strange?"

"I take your point."

"But souls don't do that."

'No, souls don't do anything. They are simply the essence of a person."

"So, all of the things that make that person up. Their favorite color, the way they cough, their feelings about spiders and so on."

"Well. Perhaps not put exactly like that."

"But the uniqueness of the person."

"Look, Deasil," he said, and when people say that to you they are reaching a certain point with you, though I couldn't say what point might have been, but it was clearly an uncomfortable one to be perched upon, "other people don't like spiders."

"…Okay."

"What I mean is," he said, trying to wring meaning out of the air with his hands, "lots of people don't like spiders, but that doesn't make them the same. It - I - ugh. There are only so many things in the world, and you might meet people who had the same likes and dislikes as you, but you would still be you. Unique. To a fault, perhaps."

He thought he was funny.

"All right, then. So the soul is that thing, when you have removed all other characteristics that you may have, that is still unique to you."

"I suppose that, err, all right, yes."

"So it has no qualities but uniqueness."

"Yes."

"How much does it weigh?"

"Nothing."

"Right, no qualities, so no mass. Oh, but if you break it into pieces, than it must have had a size. And some mass. Otherwise what would you be breaking?"

"I…"

"And if it can do things like go beyond or get stuck in a book or something, then it has a location."

"Er…"

"And if it somehow interacts with the other bits of itself over distance with no physical contact between them, then it's got… it's got that going for it."

"You see this is where it -"

"But wait. So what's that black smoky stuff that happens when Tom's around?"

"That's, well, I don't know."

"It's not part of his soul?"

"Well, no. Nobody knows what a soul would look like, if it looks like anything."

"Is that his ghost?"

"I don't think I've ever heard of a ghost that look like that."

"Wait," I said.

He did, to his credit, wait.

"Wait," I said again. I was trying to put something together.

He continued doing his part. If I'm honest, I think he was probably relieved I wasn't saying anything else, but maybe dreading what I was working up to.

And this, I think, was it. "Nobody has ever seen a soul. Nobody has measured a soul. It has no qualities. You have to take away everything about what you know about a person, everything they know, all that stuff, and then you say what is left is a soul. But you can apprehend one of these things that has no qualities other than the fact that it isn't anything else, chop it up into bite-size morsels and jam it up things you find lying about."

He looked a little older at me.

"Well," I said, "that is fucking ridiculous."

Pub time again, I thought.

"Deasil," he said, trying to knead a disapproving look out of the doughy mass of bewilderment he now possessed.

"I think I've got it, though, Remus. It's like a riddle. What is it that has no qualities except that it isn't anything other than itself and nothing else, is there but there isn't anything there, but can be divided and located in different places?"

"What's that, Deasil?"

"A weird made-up idea you have in your head. Where's Ginny? I want to take her with me to the pub this time." I got up and left, walking past Tonks, who was nearly paralyzed with silent laughter for some reason, and patting her spiky pink head.

It was getting to where I felt like smiles could last even beyond when your face had finished making them. The time in that busy tavern, the light of a fireplace and candles, and flashes stirring on the surfaces of glasses, and all those people that felt just regular and human and how they talked and gestured and explained and nodded and laughed, and in the midst of it having her so near to me, our heads close and our words low and our own but also, because we both needed things to be this way, cheerful - and part of the river of voices in the room, and the bar stools smooth and sort of pleasantly uncomfortable and our bumping glasses, more than a few times, drinking to the amazing people we knew and to the demise of those we weren't that wild about, and coming back to the house clear-headed and peaceful and looking for some small homey snack, like some Sgt. Snackles in a bowl or something, and the warmth of a larder and how much of a gift it was to have food and shelter and companionship, and I thought about folks who didn't and that it really ought to be everyone's business to make sure everyone did have that, and I thought about what it does to someone when they don't have those things and what feelings and shifts in the color of the world might result from that.

Which is right about when Remus came wandering in to the kitchen, interrupting my snack search.

"Deasil," he said.

"Remus," I said, and I thought about doing one of those little nods that people do, but I thought I'd just looked like I was agreeing to something, and right now I wasn't, so I didn't.

"Good time at the pub?"

"I'm trying to make that what always happen at a pub."

"I thought perhaps we'd continue our conversation form earlier."

"I think you're wrong about some of that stuff, Remus."

"You are certainly entitled to your opinion."

"I don't think this is like an opinion. My opinion would be that you'd be happy if you married Tonks, or that you dress roughly because you think you don't deserve better. This is more like, you haven't finished thinking about these things and are mad at me because I pointed it out."

He started to reply, but then shut it down. It was as if he'd turned a key in a lock, and nobody was getting in. He was still trying to let me know he was being good about how wrong I was. I thought for a moment that maybe I was wrong. It was a short moment that suffocated in the airless vacuum of no I wasn't.

"You have your mother's tenacity," he said finally.

I looked him in the eye.

"You have your uncle's pocket watch," I said.

"How the hell do you know that?"

"Remus, can you tell me how I'm wrong, or are you just going to keep telling me that I am until I crumble?"

"Maybe I can't," he said, all brittle consonants. "Maybe I do lack the... the gift of language that you seem to have, and maybe I can't verbalize this to you, but that doesn't make it untrue."

"Gift. Nice. Look, to me maybe if you can't say it clearly then you can't think it clearly. I mean - I don't know anything at all. I just get what people tell me. You tell me, I don't know, that you love Tonks, well, it makes sense to me - who wouldn't? She's a sweetheart, and for someone who can look like anything you always get the real her from her. But I got a lot more than that. I'm being told that there's this thing nobody can prove the existence of that some evil git has cut into bits and jammed one up me, and as long as the bits are still around somewhere he can't die, and that sounds to me like a giant steaming pile of nonsense, but the guy who answers to 'scientist' is telling me to shut up and accept it. You can call it all something else, but that's what it is. And you want me to go along with it because you can't bear to... "

"Can you slow that down," he said, inflected like a statement, that seemed to imply that only the opposite could be true. Maybe I was pelting him a bit. I tended to pelt. I was a skilled pelter. Peltrescent. A master of peltrocity.

So I took a deep breath. "I know I'm somewhat intense about all this stuff, but you have to understand that it's not just that this is all really, you know, serious, it's that the way people talk about it feels like half code and half fairy tale. There is no conversation I've had about this that didn't include ideas or words that not only are unfamiliar to me but that don't feel like they make any sense at all. And considering that I have nothing to compare them to, that's saying something. Wouldn't I just accept this stuff as what's true and normal?"

"It would certainly be easier," he said softly.

"But I can't," I said. "What's happening here is clearly unknown territory to everyone that knows about magic stuff."

"It isn't unknown," he said, sounding miffed. "We apply what we know to this rather unusual situation you have found yourself in."

Well. That kind of felt like he was making it my fault, like I'd irresponsibly chosen to find myself in this wacky situation or something. I really couldn't muster any kind of response to that, so instead I picked up a bit of some odd fruit, some kind of large fat purple berry that floated up out of my hand almost immediately and that I had to swipe at to hold again.

"How is he supposed to have made these things anyway?"

"He had to kill someone. To take a life fractures the soul."

I waited for a moment for the awesome weight of that statement to settle on my shoulders. It apparently had the same weight as a soul did.

"Why would it do that?"

"Really, Deasil, murder is the most damaging thing one can do to one's soul. It breaks the soul in two."

"Why is it damaging to your… your nameless nametag? What harm would it do something that hasn't got any qualities? Is the soul inherently good?'

He looked at me with obvious distrust.

"Are there, you know, good souls and bad souls? I mean, they have no qualities…"

"Every soul. Starts out as good," he said, stiffly.

"Why? What makes it good?"

"Life is good. Don't you think," he said, sounding both incredulous and impatient, "don't you think that life is good?"

"Really? I think life is neutral. It seems to me people do good things or bad things and are happy or sad, or kind or cruel."

"You clearly don't have any children."

"Neither do you."

"I'm old enough to know how precious a gift they are. I remember when you were born -"

"That's to you. What does an infant know about that?"

"Their souls are pure and unstained," he said.

"But if souls don't have qualities, how can they have stains?"

"It hurts the soul, Deasil -"

"How can a soul hurt if it doesn't have anything to hurt with?"

"It's self-evident - it's just true, you can feel it, if you paid any attention," he said, loud in the little room.

"It's not self-evident - none of this is self-evident. Would I think any of these things if you hadn't told me about them?"

"Damn it all, Deasil, I would think you of all people know by now how damaging taking a life is! It breaks something in you! It scars - it ruins -"

Breath.

Ringing ears.

Muscles. My muscles. My shoulders, my stomach. Deasil's, Harry's, mine.

Won't go away. Won't black out. Won't forget.

"You will really, really say any old thing to protect your idea, won't you?" I said.

His face was red. Fingers long and brittle-looking, tangled together. His drawn eyes unusually wide. "Deasil, no, I'm sorry, I didn't mean that."

"You did," I said, going to the door where my mother was standing still, looking completely horrified. "You meant every word. You think that because these things have happened to me and I've - I've done these things, that I'm broken inside. Well, I think we agree on something. There is something wrong with me. Something bad and twisted and broken and ugly inside. But what you are saying is that it's my essence - my most individual self. I just thought I was sad about these things. What you think -" I said, looking back at him from what felt like a great distance, "what you think about me is very much the most awful thing I can imagine someone thinking about someone else, and it's all based on things you can't see or describe or even make sense out of for yourself, and it's so terrible to you to think about this invisible, undetectable shit not being real that you would rather saddle me with an eternal unmendable flaw than ever consider that you might be wrong."

He looked, strangely, at that moment, like what I'd imagined a ghost would.

I went past my mother to go somewhere. Not sure where. Her hand was on my shoulder for a moment, firm but gentle, not holding me back, but letting me know we were connected. I felt the pressure of her hand even as I passed out of her reach, and some part of me was beyond grateful for that, that thing that maybe nobody else could have done for me, even though the world was off-center, tilting and spun out of orbit. The feeling stayed with me as I climbed steps away from that room, through the last faint voice I heard from downstairs, which was my mother's.

"Get out of my house, Remus," she'd said.

A/N: One doesn't always have to agree with everything one reads, but part of this meditation on stories and what magic might be like includes lots of thoughts. And if one is to enjoy fantasy, one should allow for lots of things in a world created by a stranger.

I miss the people who read through these before I submitted them, because they always said things I would never have thought of. So if it's not them, it's not anyone. Any missteps are mine entirely.