Chapter 4

One would imagine that at some point the subject of my being abducted from a comparatively normal existence into one somewhat more…what would one call it? Bohemian? Sequestered? Whatever. It might be expected to come up. Also, one might expect that when it came up that the abductor, in addition to having, oh, swiped a happy child from his parents into a less-than-whirlwind life of obscurity and semi-oblivion due to repeated poorly-cast memory charms whilst suppressing his knowledge of his magic or anyone else's and preventing him for no apparent reason from having any meaningful interaction with anyone, also happened to be standing in the next room, well, that steps might be taken. Many rapid steps, towards the door leading to that room, by a woman I had recently found to be my mother.

For those readers who are obliged to re-read that passage to make sense of it, I can only say that it's clearly the product of someone who can rapidly put things out of his mind.

She had listened, not speaking, as everything I could recall came out in a rambling jerky narrative of disconnect and fragmentation, lonesomeness and longing for the unknowable. She was listening intently, but her face went from understanding nod and sympathetic moue to shaking head and testy sigh and finally to a universal danger sign if I've ever seen one, breathing through the nose with mouth pressed shut. Everyone has a point beyond which they can accept no further, hear no more without action. She was clearly a kind woman, a woman who chose warmth and harmony over ire and discord, but after all (I think now in retrospect) this was her son, and what had gone on was unacceptable, and there would be sorting, and retribution, and probably witchcraft. I was dragging myself out of the bed I was in, reaching feebly for her retreating form and saying, "Wait, now, don't you think – She didn't mean –"

"I'm sure she didn't, dear, but I just need to see her…just – see her…" I'm sure she thought she sounded reasonable. This was something I couldn't take care of by myself, so I did the first thing I could think of.

"Daaaad!"

She tugged the door open. If it had been locked, or barricaded, or nailed shut, it would still have opened.

My father stood right there in the doorway, my brother in his arms, and he began, "Now hang on, Lil –"

"James Potter, I hope you enjoyed making our second child, because if you don't get out of my way a third will be an anatomical impossibility."

"So be it," he said earnestly, widening his stance. "I promised you when we married that what was mine was yours and if you feel the need to destroy bits of me, I suppose it's your right – but I also promised to be your balance, and maybe hexing Arthur right now would cause more trouble that it's worth.'

"You have no idea how much trouble this is worth!" she said in a fierce whisper.

"I think I do," he said softly, and I realized that my brother's presence was intended to calm her, or at least prevent her from exploding. "I know how you feel, like no one else in this world, and you know that. But I've been talking to Arthur and I think you should consider listening before hexing."

She looked very much like she was considering catching on fire, so I said, "He looks like Mum."

She half-turned to me, and her eyes seemed to lose focus. After a moment, she caught up and said, "Yes, he does. Why don't you come and say hello to him?"

I stepped forward, a little woozy from getting up too quickly, and got a good look at him for the first time.

Strangely enough, he did look quite like her. (I hadn't actually seen him, I was just bluffing.) He had a dab of red hair and he was wrinkled and somnolent. His mouth was wet, and he looked to be a little streamlined, as if somehow he'd recently been squeezed out of somewhere. Imagine that. No, on second thought…

He was my brother.

I went from having one odd aunt and knowing nothing else, not even the lack of anything else, to having a mother, father and brother in one day.

"Hello," I said. His entire face frowned. This fascinated me. I reached my hand out to touch his head, right at the crown, and felt his skin, warm and delicate, almost painfully delicate. His little life, a flicker of energy, and a stirring of recognition. I suppose to everyone else it appeared that the room got a bit brighter, but for him and me, it got maybe a little darker around us. It felt like we were gathering something together from all around us and something was forming from it. His eyes opened, still blue, and something passed between us. I felt a stir in my stomach, an understanding. I knew him and he knew me.

My father said, "Nothing by halves, eh?"

My mother smirked at him. "They're clearly both ours."

I was someone's.

My father said, "Well, little man, I'd like you to meet your big brother, H- Deasil."

"The 'h' is silent," I said absently as I continued to look at my brother.

My mother half-laughed, but there was something else behind it. My father said, "Well, we haven't named him yet, but he's the shortest one here, so you'll know to whom we are referring." He looked at his wife directly, asking a question. She answered it with a shake of her head. "In any event, Lily's had a moment or two with you to talk, and I think it's time Mr. Short Pants spends a little time with his Mum and Long Shanks has a bit of time with his aging father."

"Prematurely senile," my mother muttered as she took the baby, but there was amusement coloring her voice, and it reminded me of the way that some jellyfish have bands of color that shimmer over their bodies, and I wondered how I remembered them because there was nothing around them in my mind, no memory of an aquarium or a TV show, just the memory of them and their beautiful ripples of polychrome, until very recently unseen by any human eye.

"Did he just…uhh…" is what came out of me. I felt that my brother and I had something in common. Things just came out of us seemingly at random.

My father's expression changed, but to his credit only very slightly. He gave Lily a look that said, "I did not plan it this way, but there you go, luck of the draw," but it disappeared when she glared at him for attempting to hand the baby to her.

"Ah, well, my sons," he said philosophically, "some conversations are best held over baby's crap, in the hope that the words will appear more sweet by contrast." Lily gave a loud snort of laughter, looked horrified, and then laughed some more. He gave her a searching look, and she composed herself, I think trying to look like the sort of person who has never had a negative thought in her life, much less one about pummeling her son's cross-dressing aunt.

"I promise you three that I will not do any damage to Arthur. I do want to ask questions, but none of them will hurt," she said. "And I'll bring along a bodyguard to help," she added, deftly taking the baby from him. "Good eye," she said to me.

"Actually it was more of a sonic, uh…never mind."

She bustled off downstairs.

I felt the room get a little smaller. He watched her go with a grin on his face that changed completely when he turned to me. I was sorry to see it go, and began to wish that I hadn't made his life more complicated by being here. Maybe I was okay where I was, levitating blankets and forgetting everything.

He must have seen something in my face, because he stepped forward and put a hand on my shoulder. "I'm sorry," we both said.

He looked surprised. "What on earth do you have to be sorry about?"

"Your life. I mean, your life is wonderful. You have a new baby. Things are –" I gestured around at objects in the room. They seemed solid and like they were meant to be here. Bed, nightstand, dresser. Not like…me. "I'm just not sure I…"

His voice was very soft but full of feeling. His hand remained on my shoulder. "You have always belonged here. Our house was bent and broken when you were taken away. Lily and I…have always missed you. There's always been noise and activity here, you know, the boys in and out and even Ginny's known to make a bit of racket, and they all have their own sounds…but even now, when it's quiet around here, do you know what I always think?" He looked down, and his hand squeezed my shoulder, not painfully, but firmly. "I think, 'that's the sound of my son.' I heard your absence and I swear, it has been deafening. I never," he said, looking me in the eye, "ever got over it, because I knew that only one thing would fix it – having you back here with us. I know you don't remember much at all, but you should know that while you were with us you were loved by everyone around you, and your mum and me most of all. I have missed you like my right arm, like breathing, and if you want to stay here, I will do everything I can to make this your home, and be your father, your family, that has always belonged to you."

I liked him. All this time, I mean, I hadn't missed anyone, but I was missing everyone, or everyone was missing. It must have hurt, though I didn't know what it was that hurt. And his hurt must have been so much worse than mine. There was a little tremor in his voice at the end, and I wanted to do something to make him feel better. I tried to think of what fathers liked (theoretically, of course) and couldn't come up with a thing. So I did something I could not remember ever doing. With anyone. I hugged him.

What I thought was something along the lines of, "Is it the right thing to want this, just stepping into a life, already in progress? It all feels right, but do these people belong to me, and do I belong to them? Or is it just something I want?"

What I said was, "What boys and who's Ginny?"

He shook a little, but it was with laughter. His hand thudded on my back. "Funny how you do that. Lily does the same thing. Things just occur to you."

"It's what told me we were related," I said.

"Okay," he said, pulling away finally and wiping his eyes. "We have a lot to cover, but I want to ask you something first – how much do you want to hear of this? Are you feeling all right?"

"Should I sit down? Are we all devil-worshippers or something?"

He said solemnly, "No, but there are goats involved."

At my "uhhhh" he laughed again. "Not really. I suppose I shouldn't joke much with someone to whom this all seems bizarre."

"Maybe at first," I said.

"Okay. The boys and Ginny. They're the Weasley kids. Since their mother and father haven't been with us, they've been here at the house. There are a lot of boys, and one girl. And they would all be irked at me for characterizing them as such. Young men and a young woman. She's the midwife you met last night, the youngest, and the young man you met today is Ron. Then there's Fred and George, the twins; Percy; Charlie; and Bill is the oldest. Everyone lives elsewhere now but Ginny."

"What happened to their parents?"

He sighed and looked down. "It's complicated."

"What isn't?"

He shook his head. "It's just hard to explain, because we don't understand all of it. The Weasleys are friends of ours. Lily and Molly were very close, actually. Molly adored you as well. You should know that above all else. She loved all of her children fiercely, and she loved you like any one of her own. She was kind, and firm, and had a temper, and everyone loves her very much."

"Tense."

"No more than to be expected."

"No, I mean your tense keeps moving around."

"My…"

"Not like the army camp-out canvas things – the past, present, future things."

"Oh. Well, you see, Molly's alive, sort of, but she's not responsive at all. For the past fourteen years she's been – sort of asleep, in a special room at St. Mungo's, that's the wizarding hospital, and we haven't been able to rouse her. There's no pain or suffering as far as we can tell, and she's perfectly healthy, just not … here."

"What made her like that?"

"She made a sacrifice. She did a noble thing and put another person's life before hers. It was wartime."

"And their father?"

"You know as well as we do," he said. "He's your aunt."

I had virtually no experience with anything up until the time I started remembering things from day to day, so it is from subsequent experience that I speak when I say that sometimes no amount of drinking or bludgeoning one's self with a shovel will make certain things make sense. Though I might have tried to make either method work on this occasion. Fortunately, I had nothing to hand and so went on with our conversation. I clutched my head a little, shook it as well, but nothing worked. It continued having been said.

"Okay," I said, lying a bit. It wasn't. "Okay. Arthur is a man. I get that. I was a little slow to get that because I forgot stuff from day to day, and besides, you take people as they come, right? He says he's my aunt, he's my aunt. Only he's not really my aunt, he's a friend of my parents, who abducted me when I was four for reasons no one understands entirely. His wife is in a coma for some reason, he goes funny and eventually, though not right away, decides to grab me and disappear, leaving behind …"

"Seven," my father said gamely.

"…seven kids. Who you raised instead of raising me. He hides my whole history from me, day by day. But Arthur's not so good at magic, and eventually what he's done to make me forget who I am starts to fail, and I start to have a bit of a self to work with. What I find out about that self that doesn't even seem to be me, is that he can do things. Nothing weird, mind you, just popping around places, animating blankets and curtains and stopping things from falling and then blowing them up. She – he - …Arthur drags me to England by making me hold a pinwheel, drags me here with a darning egg, and drops me in here like a turd on a birthday cake and says, 'All this was yours. Deal with it.'"

"Err, the…"

"So the reason the Weasley kids have no dad is me. The reason I have had no parents is Arthur. And the only reason I haven't run out the door screaming is you and my mother." I took a deep breath.

"You should –"

"I mean, in spite of everything else, in spite of all of the other things I don't want to believe, or can't believe, or can't allow space in my head to even think about believing, I believe you, and her. I believe that magic must be real, I believe I got a little on me, and I believe that Arthur may be absolutely batshit crazy but he loves me and has cared for me in his own inexplicable and damaging way, and he had a reason for doing all of this, and I really want to know what that reason is."

I was breathing a little heavily. He waited for a moment, and when he saw that I was done, he held out his hand to count points.

"Arthur…man. Molly…coma. Seven siblings…check. Arthur funny, check. Abduction, check," he went on, his voice singsong, "memory charm, poor magic, wake up, blankets, things blowing up, pinwheel, darning egg? Darning egg, turd, cake, Arthur loves you, you believe us."

I was impressed. Clearly my mother married the right man.

He took a breath. "Now let me talk. You are in no way responsible for any of this. We don't know what happened to Arthur, and I imagine since there's no screeching or banging, your mother is making strides in the area of figuring that out. The Weasley kids are grown now, most of them are older than you – in point of fact, you played together when you were a child. Yes, it was hard for them when their father left, but they have managed to get this far because they are wonderful people and we love them as if they were our own. They are generous, kind and open-minded, and there is no possibility of their blaming you for any of this."

I should have bet money on it. The door banged open. There was even more red than last time. And chopsticks. Lots of chopsticks.