Phantom Limb

by rbackwards

A young man realizes he's been the victim of a prophecy. He struggles to make sense of his place in an unfamiliar world. Sound familiar? Nothing's familiar to this young man. Nothing except his aunt Arthur. New readers: give this one some time. 9/2021 - believe it or not, a new chapter is forthcoming.

13. Chapter 13

Chapter 13

Things work themselves out. People say that. They don't know what they're talking about. Oh, sure, things work themselves out if you turn your back on them, in the way that if someone throws a baseball at your face and you close your eyes and say, well, things will happen as they're meant to, then you may be meant to have a broken nose because you lack the will to duck. Things will happen on their own if you stand back, sometimes, and sometimes they won't, I mean this won't write itself if I stand back, though I hear there are quills that do it for you, but then it's not me doing it, and that's the point, isn't it?

In India and Nepal a long time ago a belief system was put together around many ideas, among which are the concepts of impermanence and dissatisfaction – that since the nature of everything around us is impermanent, and since the pleasure experienced from attaining a desire is transitory, one might better spend one's time not being attached to the outcome of things or the satisfaction of fleeting desires, and maybe where possible reduce the number of these desires – you know, you can't control everything, so try to stop wanting to, and do you really need all of those shoes? Well, I think that's noble, and also practical in daily use, and might make you live longer due to less stressing about who's going to win at Wimbledon, because you can't really do anything about it that doesn't involve kidnapping or a large sum of money or a trained python or what have you.

On the other hand, it's interesting to note that this belief system is a purely non-magical one, and that it developed at the same time as a completely separate and of necessity mostly isolated magical community, and the general viewpoint of this second group of people was something like, "Well, actually, we can affect the outcome of virtually anything, but we can see why you might want to approach things in that way, and because this tends to make you folks less ornery, we're good with that." This is more or less how I feel about it. I like magic, even though I'm happily ignorant of how it works, because it's all about doing things. Something needs doing, you do it. You can step forward, get your hands a little dirty, and all of a sudden things are the way you want them to be.

Hermione tries to do that without magic. She sees something that she thinks is wrong, and through a torrent of words and highly personalized logic she attempts to beat it into submission. Apparently that was what she was doing elsewhere in the hospital with Ginny. I was thinking about how the words "Ginny" and "submission" didn't seem to go together, and that if "beat" were involved it would surely be a beating that was directed away from her rather than towards her, when the door she'd exited opened, and Remus entered the room with a young man about my age. He was tall, had dark hair, and was handsome, and all of this made for a good impression. What ruined it was the very haunted expression on his face. He looked like he'd been told that everything he thought was wrong, that his life's purpose had been taken from him, or that someone was going to kill him very soon, or at least that something he'd thought was long gone was actually about to revisit him with terrible force.

Funny.

"Which is it?" Remus asked me.

"Which is what?"

"I'm going to introduce you. What do you want to answer to?"

"What would make the most sense, given the context?"

He thought for a moment.

"Harry Potter, this is Neville Longbottom."

I was at a loss. So many thoughts at once. I was trying to remember it all, but my head was much fuller than it had been, at least when I first came back to England, and now pathways that had been clear were convoluted. It was like stumbling into a dark room, trying to figure out what was in it, and I was hoping to miss the wading pool of tapioca entirely. Neville Longbottom. His parents were friends of my parents. There was something wrong with them. I found myself completely horrified.

I could not remember what had happened to them. But I suspected that it was my fault. And I wasn't sure what he'd gone through, but I was certain it had been lousy.

How I was going to get through this upcoming conversation was beyond me.

"I…I suppose you don't know who I am," he said.

Memory returning to me sometimes feels like being struck by a sheet of water, wet head to toe all at once.

"You saved Ginny," I said. "In the Chamber."

He looked a little surprised.

"You killed Tom," I said.

There was the problem.

His eyes closed. "I thought I had. Until you returned."

I was thinking to myself that I wanted to be direct with him, but I didn't want to look him in the eye somehow. I was actually a little scared of what I would see, but not sure why that was. So I settled for looking at Remus as I said, "I wonder if…if you would tell me what happened."

Neville sighed. "Merlin. It's been written so many times by so many people that it's a bit strange for me to actually tell it. It's been spread out so thin…and they never tell it like it was." He sounded bitter as he said, "Nobody cares what it felt like. They just want to hear the story."

"Ginny knows what that's like," I said.

His mouth tightened into a small smile. "Yeah, she does. She's been really good about listening to me complain about it. Actually I seem to complain about it because she's listening. But no one else would quite understand, would they."

"Maybe not like you," I said. "But Ron told me some of what it was like having people all over him after it was done, like they all wanted to celebrate with him, and he said that all he wanted was to get a good meal and a bath and fly on his broom, alone."

Neville considered this. "I spent a lot of time in my greenhouse, when I could, when they'd bloody leave me alone. Just tending to little things for a change, doing something that I … that wasn't horrible."

"So things were getting back to normal," I said, "and then I turned up alive."

Ruining everything.

I know I didn't say it out loud, but the room sort of sagged a little.

Neville's head came up. "Look, Harry," he said. "It's good that you're alive. Your family missed you. So many people were lost forever – it's good to get one back. It means that…that there's hope. If that side gets one back, then, so does ours."

Oof.

I was truly of many minds at that moment. Let's see. This Neville guy was really made of good stuff. Really heroic, if you ask me. I mean, in the real sense. Something needed doing and he did it. He even hated it and he still did it. He surely knew it would hurt him after and he still did it. And he went through so much, only to find out it wasn't over with after all, and his parents were tortured into insanity, and both of those things were dead-centered on me, and yet he found good in it. I was feeling very small at the moment. What else? He was apparently known as the Chosen One who'd killed Tom Riddle, lionized by the public at large, and now I show up to say Tom's only partially dead. Slightly dead. Only a mild case of deadness that'll clear up shortly. A sort of twenty-four-hour mortality. Some antibiotics and it'll just run its course. Oh, so even though he risked his life for everyone, it didn't really, you know, count. Because I wasn't dead. If I were dead the world would be safe.

I kept coming back to that.

"So – " I said, then paused.

"What if I walk up to him with a hand grenade in my pocket and pull out the pin? Wouldn't that fix everything?"

He looked horrified. Remus shook his head.

"Honestly," the werewolf said, "do you think it's a good idea to come back to your parents and then leave them again permanently?"

"Remus, I don't know what a good idea is. I ruined everything by being alive. I made everyone's suffering for nothing, I made his life, his struggle, completely pointless –"

That black and white grid rapidly approaching me was the floor. I addressed it with my face.

When I could see things other than red and blue blobs, some of them were Ginny Weasley. She was ready, as I could tell from her hand being up and swinging back, to smack me again. It was maybe the blow, or the surprise, but my mind was a little fuzzy. I couldn't seem to not think she was amazing, even when she'd served me up a dose of smack. There was a tiny bit of me thinking that things would be hard in the future if I continued to think she was beautiful no matter what she did. And not just a little beautiful. Her mouth formed an exquisite red slash, like the swipe of a sword, and her eyes, reflecting the light from the window, were a fierce silver. She surely could split the world in two, I thought as I attempted to regain my footing and find at least a little indignation in my heart, and did very poorly at both.

I think Remus and Neville were standing back a little.

"It's a good thing we're in a hospital, Potter," she said, "because you'll want to have your bloody head examined."

"I –"

"One word, one word about Neville's life being pointless and your dim little lamp will go out and stay out. He is my friend, and he saved my life, and he saved all of us while you were on your forgetful little holiday, so you don't know a bloody thing about it."

There was a silence.

"It-"

"There is no excuse for that whinging self-pitying crap coming out of you. The people who lived through the second war know what suffering is, not you. You never lost anyone you loved, you never had to stand up to someone you knew could kill you with a thought, you never put yourself between the ones you care about and evil so that they could live. Neville is what answers to 'hero' in the wizarding world, and don't you forget it."

"He knows that," Neville said quietly.

"What?" she said.

"He knows," he said again. "Remus told me about how he's a bit of a legilimens and occlumens. He was looking at me while we were talking, and I got a bit of what he's thinking. He's not pitying himself, he's sorry for the way that I feel."

She was slowed down a little by the tone of her friend. "What do you mean – how do you feel?"

"Scared," he said plainly. "I thought it was all over. I guess it's not. I thought I was chosen to be a hero, and it turns out I wasn't – he was. I've done the worst thing I can imagine, and it wasn't enough. It did some good, I know, and I'm proud of having survived it, but I'm – I can't be proud of doing it, because it was horrible. And that vile creature is going to come back, and he's going to want to kill me first."

Neville paused and looked at me as he said, "He knows."

Ginny looked quite torn. I suppose she was thinking about the fact that she wasn't the only person whose thoughts could be heard. Maybe also that she'd only heard part of a conversation and come in swinging. Maybe that she might have a bit of an issue with her temper.

I'm guessing, anyway. She sure wasn't looking at me.

When she did look at me, her cheeks were deep red, and her voice was tremulous as she said, "Well, you just watch what you say to my friend, regardless."

"I thought you were supposed to be my healer," I said.

"Well, I'm not," she said.

"What?" I was just throwing points away.

"Well, that's what I was talking to Hermione about, wasn't it?" she said, trying to sound impatient with me. "I recused myself. Conflict of interest." Christmas came early, and twice. She was helping me up, but not all the way up, so her forehead was even with mine. Her eyes were closed, and she leaned forward until our heads were touching. I could hear her breathing. She whispered, "I know I'm wrong, I know I'm an idiot, just don't make me say it out loud, and if you're feeling forgetful any, maybe this could just all sort of go away?"

I thought to myself that if I lived a thousand years, that in my satellite home injected with tubes and wires and having thought-movies streamed into my brain as I watch what remains of the nation-states blast each other into neutrinos, I would still remember her closeness, the sweet humidity of her breath, her lashes against her cheeks.

"You said that out loud," I whispered.

"Oh, bugger."

•

Neville, Ginny, Remus and I had all settled back down after I'd had a little spellwork done on my cheek so it wouldn't look like I was smuggling tubesocks but poorly. She wasn't quite looking at me, and I'd catch her shaking her head once in a while, like she was trying to free a hornet that had gotten stuck in there.

Neville was an easy speaker, even though he was quiet. He had started out as a shy boy and ended up as a quiet young man with a healthy stillness that I liked. He just wasn't likely to burst out with something weird, and I could use a bit of that. It was soothing, I have to say. I'd traded a possible kiss, and I mean one that was possibly going to be the best one ever, though admittedly perhaps my first, for a smack upside the head, and they were from the same person. That Ginny. She wasn't one to show how she felt, was she. I'd really have to stay sharp to see if there was something on her mind.

Neville was telling me about potatoes. He made it interesting. He told me about how they were a good example of why some things should not be done with magic. A long time ago, in the mid eighteen-hundreds, a very bright witch did some research into fertility charms, distilling them from larger ceremonies that had been performed seasonally by early magic-using people. She found that by casting these on her potato patch or whatever he said the ground was you grew potatoes in, there was a word he used and I can't remember it, but it was like if you called it a pride of lions or a murder of crows or a gaggle of geese, but potatoes, anyway I can't remember it and I don't remember everything anyway, but if she cast it on the place where she grew her potatoes that she could get often four times the yield that she did ordinarily, that is to say she would get a yield four times more often. Naturally this was a huge breakthrough and soon people all around the British Isles, who were inclined to, were swimming in potatoes. This was fine for a few years, until someone noticed that entire crops of potatoes were spontaneously turning up dead or riddled with disease, and gradually most of the magical potato crops and many of the non-magical ones had been utterly destroyed. People figured, well, we'll just grow something else, then – but nothing would grow in that ground. What became obvious after a while was that the use of magic is not without its cost in energy, and that the very life force that was stimulated by the fertility charms was drawn from too deeply, so that the potatoes that grew were of a less and less robust nature and prone to various kinds of bacterial problems, and also that the ground had had its nutrients removed from it so rapidly that nothing was able to replenish it. The bacteria became more common and spread to non-magical crops, the ground was useless, and a very bright witch was all of a sudden not very popular anymore, though, having no ability to see what the consequences of her actions might be, she was a little bit of a sympathetic character to me.

I began to think about my accidental magic bursts, and how they seemed to me now to have been caused by unexpressed magic from my absent-minded days. In those moments, a sort of magic-boosting effect would occur, in which everything engaged in a magical process would gain a bit of power. I wondered how many of those I had in me before I became either normal or fallow like the famine-earth, as they'd called it.

The potatoes story was a good palate-cleanser for me. Even though I managed to find a down-side where I lost all my magical abilities, it got my mind clear of a few things. I felt like I wanted to ask Neville about what happened with Tom, but I was a little hesitant to do it because he'd looked so miserable before. But it was why he was here, and reluctantly I had to accept that - I couldn't shy away from it if he wasn't.

During a lull in conversation I looked him right in the eye. I thought, "take a look around. See who I am." He looked surprised for a moment, then nodded.

I found myself remembering things from the recent past – the living room burning up, my first apparation, the darning egg, Arthur about halfway out of his drag, Ron grinning at Hermione, Luna's questions for Minerva McGonagall, Dumbledore's creepy little-kid act, Ginny very close to me, Ginny dashing up the stairs, Ginny laughing at something George said, Ginny telling me about the Chamber…

Neville's eyes grew wide, then thoughtful. He looked down, and I wondered if he wanted to keep his thoughts to himself, that maybe he didn't like what he saw and had made some probably deserved judgment about my character, and how could I blame him, he was the real thing and I didn't even know where I –

He was clearly smiling.

When he looked back up at me, what I heard was, "She took forever to talk about that with me. And I was there."

I nodded myself and then said, "Do people drink coffee in the wizard world or is it just enchanted pumpkin juice or something?"

Ginny looked like I'd just bought her a car. In the sense that she couldn't drive and had no use for one and wasn't entirely sure about why she would want one.

"No, just the juice," she said. It was the first thing she'd said in a little while, and I have to say that I actually missed hearing her voice, I mean it had been a while, I guess, and what on earth…

"Well, what do you drink as a sort of pick-me-up?"

"Besides tea?"

"Wait a moment," I said. "You can turn a man's leg wooden and ride house-cleaning tools around, but you haven't discovered coffee?" That gave me an idea, but we won't talk about it yet.

"That sounds worse than it is," Remus said.

"You have no idea," I said. "Once you've had a good cup of coffee in the morning, you won't want to get up without it."

"Sounds like it's an addictive substance," Ginny said skeptically.

"Well, of course it is, that's why it's fun. Besides, it's full of antioxidants and…and other things that you haven't heard of because you don't use science."

"Science is over-rated," she said.

"It is if you don't understand it."

"All right, Mr. Smart Science Man, why don't you just use dumb old magic to turn this chair into a goat and then I'll tell you what happened scientifically. Deal?"

The next sound was a bleat, followed by a squeal and a thud.

She glared balefully up at me from the black and white tile.

"It's a nice floor," I said. "I was there just recently."

"I'm not…even going to ask who taught you to do that," she said, "…because no one did."

"Right," I said. I couldn't tell you what I did, but there that goat was.

"I suppose you want the scientific version of what happened," she said.

"You did promise," Neville said softly. She swiveled her head slowly to him like a gun turret finding a new target. Having faced a dark lord in the past, he was unimpressed, so she came back to me.

"Right then." She did the mental equivalent of hitching up her trousers and took a deep breath. "So the molly-cools…they changed their order around and filled in the – the bits were there wasn't enough chair to make goat with…and then they animated and bang! There you go."

"The what changed their order?"

"Molly – er – mollycules."

"Filled in the bits."

"Yeah."

"My, my. How very scientific sounding," I said. "One might actually be fooled into thinking you have any idea what you're talking about."

Her eyes narrowed.

I waited.

Her cheek twitched.

I remained still.

Then a giggle escaped her and we all laughed. Well, on the outside I was laughing, but on the inside I was twisted up like an orange peel. That giggle. Now I had to try to make her do that all the time. Between getting her to giggle and making her furious, both for my own delight and amusement, it was going to be a dynamic relationship.

If we had a "relationship".

Suddenly I wanted to think about my impending death struggle a bit more. It seemed safe by contrast. I couldn't say why, but I thought maybe it had to do with the fact that she was so appealing to me in spite of the fact that she'd just laid me out on the floor. The term "cognitive dissonance" floated across my mind like a tumbleweed before a gunfight. I wasn't sure where I'd heard it before, but was fairly sure it hadn't been in the magic-using world. This thought was lost fairly rapidly – I had more important things to do.

I glanced at Remus and he abruptly began asking Ginny about her healing track and how long she expected for it to continue. When I turned back to Neville he nodded slightly and appeared to steel himself.

Okay, I thought. Time to meet the enemy.

•

What I'd been waiting for. The undeniable moment. So important, so crucial to this. All of my nights without sleep, my days of training, pushing myself, turning my body into a form I didn't recognize, a tool, soft boy edges burned away and replaced with what I hoped were soldier's muscles. Dragging out a sword, hating the weight, but using it every day. Keeping it to myself, but people noticed. Ron, Ginny, but both Weasleys letting me be, which they knew how to do. Luna, but she saw everything, seeing without watching, knowing why without asking, the furthest-away and closest person I know. And the worst, a few days before it was time, that vapid Romilda, who said, "Is that really Longbottom, has he changed the cut of his robes?" A girl I once thought was beautiful and misunderstood, before I knew how to talk to anyone, but whom I could now see as a surface-dweller, a skimmer, floating on a ribbon of tension above the real things, the whole world below her. Stung, though – a small bit of contempt for myself, hating the fact that I'd wanted, just a little, to be noticed by her. A brief and unhappy moment of feeling like I've wasted my time, sweating and straining and even moments of crying by myself when my muscles were too sore to move, fighting my Gran, Snape, Malfoy, my fear, so that this foolish girl can continue to be blind to me. But I will this to pass. I have to keep clear, so that she will have the freedom to do what she will, so that she won't live in fear because of her father, distant and oblivious, who married a Muggle woman he could control and marked his daughter as an enemy to purebloods.

It's not her fault, and that's why I have to act.

One day a few summers ago I was visiting the old Weasley house, and Bill chanced to take me back to the shed, asking for my help with something I've forgotten. He was building something, a rocking-chair, and in a moment while I waited for him I saw how the chair back was bent, a length of wood warped around a curve and clamped firmly in place. He had soaked the board so that it would not crack and it was forced into its shape, unnatural and yet useful. His father's hammer and saws hung behind it on pegboard, and I noticed the wear of the grips, hand-shaped, from years of hard use. It was a meaningful moment for me, but as time has passed, I now no longer know whether to see myself as the wood, twisted for a new purpose, or the hammer, a simple tool with a simple meaning, or whether the only "I" now is the clamp, forcing myself into a different shape, and my body no longer belongs to me. Dumbledore has been supportive, and truthful when he thought it was best, but I have come to believe that perhaps I am all of these things to him, and that in his eyes I am here only to fulfill a prophecy, that a woodworker doesn't think of what the hammer feels, or what the wood wants. He chose to tell me about the prophecy when I was visiting my parents, saying he'd kept it from me long enough, but I later felt that he had waited until I was there with them, to maybe make me feel it more.

I know he is a man driven by results, or more specifically what he can cause to happen, and there is a part of me that appreciates this, that has faith in it, because I know that I would not have been able to decide to do this on my own. It helps to have something undeniable at my back. Something that I can not escape. He told me that I have to prepare, and he told a little lie, saying that I would always have people around to help me, that I will not be alone in this fight. He said that he believed that the diary that possessed Ginny was a horcrux, a horrible artifact that contained a piece of the monster's soul, that others existed but that when all of them were found, that he would be mortal again, just a man, and that it was only a man that I would have to face.

In this, too, he was less than truthful.

I was not alone for most of it. When Ron, Ginny, Hermione and Luna found out about the existence of the horcruxes, they threw themselves into learning all that they could about them and figuring out where they might be. One night when I'd been unable to sleep, fearing that I could not do any of this and that the world had no hope if I was their savior, Hermione had come running into our darkened dormitory, tripping on Ron's quidditch gear and barking her shins before bouncing up and pulling me out of bed. She'd paused only briefly to berate Ron on his living habits before blurting out that Luna figured that the horcruxes would likely be icons of the school founders or something close to him, and also guessed that James and Lily's son had been one. Ron was immediately awake and pounding me on the back, saying, "You see, Nev? We can beat this! We can beat him!"

Dumbledore had never spoken to me about hope, but now I had some. And I got it from friends my Gran said that I would never have. And they were willing to go with me as far as they could, and sometimes farther. Ginny much later made it her mission to find the Ravenclaw diadem and, after disappearing for three days and nights, came stomping into the common room, covered in dust and burns and a little blood, and threw a smoking piece of metal at my feet with great finality. Through her disheveled appearance I could see a sort of grim satisfaction in her expression, as she said, "I owed you this one." I remember bowing my head, what that felt like, wrong and hurtful, not being used to this or knowing how to react. She marched up close to me, looked me in the eyes and said, "I still think I should be thanking you, but you can start with thanking me."

I did, and she nodded before heading for the showers.

The others were found, accounted for or assumed destroyed, in the case of the Potter boy, who'd been abducted by the traitor Sirius Black as a gift for his master. All but one – the snake Nagini, which Ron reckoned served as bodyguard and familiar and is the only creature its master would trust. I know that if I can kill the snake, the worst of it will be over.

I find the snake in Malfoy Manor. It has been left there in a cage, because Ron's plan has worked. He said we should unbalance the enemy by showing him a destroyed horcrux and then draw him out with a target to attack. We decided on Hufflepuff's cup, which Luna and I had retrieved, sustaining serious burns in the process, from the vault of the Lestranges, with the help of a goblin panel who agreed that for their crimes against my family that the contents of the vault rightfully belonged to me. We know that the ruined and shattered cup will draw him to the now-empty school to recover the remaining artifacts that he can.

I stun the few Death Eaters that remain to guard the doors of darkened mansion, a part of me dimly registering that this would have been unimaginable to me a few years earlier. I think that maybe I want to be able to feel proud, but I have learned something from my grandmother, that no one should thank you for doing what you are supposed to do, and pride is a hollow thing, something that does not belong in me. I make my way to the great room, listening to my breathing, trying to slow it. Fire for the snake, the sword for the man. The rugs are animated with scenes of torture and destruction, and if it's horrible for me to walk upon them, shouldn't it be for those who live here? Are they so different from us that this is not a horror, or is even a pleasure to them? What kind of people can they be? This thought all of a sudden shakes me, makes my limbs stiff with fear. I do not understand them, can not understand them, and this frightens me deeply. Who are they? What are they?

Then, just outside the door to the room, I encounter a tapestry. It has a vaguely medieval flatness to it, but there is something in it that flares in front of me with a terrible clarity. Two wizards, their wands trained on a man and woman, the couple curled on the ground, their arms splayed out in agony, the scene never ending, always in motion, their suffering continuous, eternal.

I know what those people are now.

The one man in the room is bent unnaturally around a column by the force of my spell before he can raise his wand against me. In this moment, I am both hammer and clamp.

I advance upon the cage. Deep shimmering green and black, and two yellow eyes, seeing me but not knowing truly what I have become. I wonder if I can simply take the snake away in its cage, set it free in a jungle somewhere, where it can merely be a snake and not something a man has made it. But there it is, the unavoidable truth, that it is a vessel, holding a shard of a monster's soul, and I imagine it as a sliver of obsidian, deep inside the head of the animal.

This is where I must be to get through this. An undeniable moment.

Fire for the snake.

I leave the manor a burning wreck.

At my school, though it doesn't feel like it's mine anymore. Just a place I have to be to serve a purpose. The night is quiet. They have not come yet. No dark mark, no destruction. They're so obvious in the most ugly way. We are supposed to tremble at their passing. I don't believe at this moment that I have any trembling left in my body. I move rapidly up to Dumbledore's office, where he has left me James' invisibility cloak. The room is otherwise empty. I manage a sound that I want to be a laugh but is more a ragged cough. This passive shield is all that I have to protect me. This is what you've given me, old man, after all I have done to escape my shell, my shyness, my own invisibility. A place to hide.

The group of students that I trained unwillingly for this day are hidden on the grounds at Dumbledore's request, in case this all goes wrong, if I am weak and stupid and I die, so that the few who believe this monster has returned can fight him, and maybe die as well. The prophecy says I'm the only one who can do this. It all seems so futile. Why are they here? Why aren't they at home with their families? If I succeed they won't be needed, the Death Eaters will run, or if they stay long enough to kill me, maybe that wouldn't be tragic. If I fail – they would at least have a little more time with the ones they love. And I'll be gone anyway, beyond caring. No, I hate these thoughts, and they won't help. I can stop saying this to myself. I learned a long time ago, when I'd hated myself for not fighting back against Malfoy, against Snape or my grandmother, that I could silence the clamor, pull away, remove myself from the moment. I wrap myself in the cloak and once more become invisible.

I wait just outside the gate. I know they will approach directly. He is too arrogant not to. When they begin to approach from the forest, I let out a harsh breath. It's like relief. I wonder if I can trust myself, if I'm going to just give in so that it can all be over, if I'm dead already. But as they get nearer, my heartbeats are moving my whole body with their force, and I know there is something inside me that lives, that has to live. The pale snake-faced monster, surrounded by hooded and masked figures, is within ten feet of me when I throw off the cloak and raise my wand.

With a gesture from him so small I barely notice it, my wand leaves my hand and whistles through the cool air.

He throws his arms up wide, a wand in each hand, and turns his head back to his followers, shouting, "Is this what they have brought to defeat me?" There are laughs, but then it all stops, I see it. This gift and curse. The thing I can not escape. The undeniable moment.

His throat. My sword.

I throw it but I don't see it fly. It will be true or I will have failed, and either way I don't think I can watch. My arm still extended, my body bowed as if in deference to him. It will be the last bow I give to anyone, either way. Silence. Then a roar, and the scattered implosions of pressure from apparation. I look up slowly. He's falling, pulled forward by the weight of the blade in his throat, red eyes widened in shock, mouth open but no sound, though I think I can distinguish, over the screaming people around me, a faint hissing.

He strikes the ground and the sword is driven further by the weight of his body, and this is worse, worse than anything, as his hands twitch, his feet rattle, as the cord is severed, and this can't, I can't take it back, no matter who or what he is, I can't stop seeing, will never stop seeing.

Even in death, he has taken from me. He will always have won.

•

Neville, I heard myself say to him. Fucking hell.

"Language!" Hermione's voice was shrill.

I turned around, slowly.

"Too fucking right. What the fuck was I thinking. Let me make sure the world doesn't fall the fuck apart because I said the f-word. Just shut the fuck up for a moment. Just give me a fucking second."

Obviously I was a little out of it. I hadn't heard her come in. But you know, I was a little out of sorts. A little cranky. A little horrified, and humbled, and awed, and "gosh" wasn't going to cover it.

"And what the hell do you do in the Unspeakable department? Try to decide what people can speak or not?"

"All right, D," Ron said, not entirely unamused. "Go a little easy, she doesn't know what you've been doing."

I liked Ron. He clearly had experience dealing with unreasonable people. Me, her, didn't matter. I liked him plenty. I figured he would be better at sorting this out than me. With apologetic looks at Ginny and Neville, I thought of my parents' house. Then I made a hole in the room and pulled it shut after me.

•

I want to skip ahead for a moment. I mean, so you know, I went home and moped and a few days later did something dumb to cheer myself up. But I don't like that I left, and I don't even like that I was harsh with Hermione, who means well or at least thinks she does as long as "well" is something defined only by Hermione. So I want to tell you about another time I was rude but it worked out better. It was a week later, after I'd met that weird guy in Diagon Alley. Things had progressed with that Ginny person I've been mentioning a bit, and I won't talk about that yet, because some things need to be in order.

But I can tell you what I did to cheer myself up. I was wondering if I could turn things into other things, and then if I could turn magic things into other magic things and if they would still work. I was wondering this because I saw Ron watching a Quidditch rerun on a pair of magic binoculars and started asking him questions about brooms. Like mostly weren't they a little uncomfortable to sit on. He didn't want to be bothered, so I wound up out by the shed looking for a broom. I found one that looked as though it hadn't been used in ages, and after a few minutes of hard thinking, I made it into something that to me was far more sensible.

Anyway, flash forward to a few weeks later after I'd learned to fly on a broom, and imagine a similar scene to the first night I'd flown. Clear night, stealthy knock at my window, meeting at the back door, under trees and then over them, and this vision, her hair shimmering with moonlight and her eyes deep with mystery, looking me up and down as I sat, at ease and graceful, upon my broom.

Only take the word "broom" out and substitute "vacuum cleaner".

It's at this point that I should explain how complex a woman Ginny is – that something could make her laugh hard enough to fall off her broom, which in turn made her furious at me (while falling) for doing that to her, and a bit breathless and… something I couldn't identify, when I caught her a few feet from the ground, so close that the power cord was dangling in the grass. She looked up at me in a funny way before I set her down. I wouldn't know what that had been until much later, but I have another story to tell, and I promised that I would, so here goes. Before the vacuum cleaner, after the weirdo.

I was back in the Alley, owl-shopping, and I believed I'd found my girl. She was a brown owl with yellow eyes and she wouldn't stop looking at me. The salesman had told me that she was a good-natured thing, just had a bit of a wobbly time of it in the air if he were to be completely honest, and he demonstrated by tying a package to her leg and asking her to fly it straight across the room to another perch. She flapped her wings gracefully, then launched herself into the air and immediately made a left out through the open window.

"It's just her aim, really," he said, "she just has a… a sort of tendency, if you follow me…"

"A little move to the left," I said.

"I know she's not the most-"

"I'll take her. We'll meet in the middle."

Now as I wandered out into the street with the owl in her cage, I said to her, "Now, you know I have to name you appropriately."

The owl did something I'd never seen before. She rolled her eyes.

"You know already, right?"

A little screech confirmed it.

"Come on, Widdershins is a lovely name."

She gazed at me, unblinking.

"It's as lovely as Deasil, so don't give me that look. We're in this together."

Abruptly there was a large Ron in my path where there had previously been none.

"There you are, mate," he said, a little breathlessly.

"And you," I said, thinking, why would apparating make one out-of-breath?

"Nice owl. Come on, I need your help."

"What is it?"

"Ginny and Mum are having a bit of a…"

"What about?"

"You."

"Where?"

"James and Lily's. You'll want to –"

I'd already bitten the apple. I appeared in the foyer, but I could hear the two of them going at it very clearly in the kitchen. It seemed a little early on for there to be a fight, but Molly had been taking her restoration as a call to play fourteen years' worth of catch-up on all of the issues she found with her children. This had been irking everyone, me included, for a little while, but it had been fairly innocuous until now.

As I approached, I heard Ginny's voice raised.

"I told Michael it was over, he's just not taking it well."

"And why exactly was it such a shock to him?"

"He thought things were going a different way than they were."

"This is exactly what I'm talking about. A man will come to expect things from a woman if she is too free with herself, you can hardly –"

"Too free with herself? You mean that just because I kissed him or a little more that he is allowed to think –"

"What do you mean by "a little more"? You can't just throw yourself at a man and expect him to –"

Ron had inched past me into the kitchen and poured himself a cup of tea. The man's calm was unbendable. A few other Weasleys were lurking in the background, as if they'd been trapped by a sudden squall and were waiting for the rain to stop.

"I didn't throw myself at him, at the time it was a mutual attraction, and I don't see what-"

"Obviously you don't see anything wrong with this, because you obviously don't care what other people think of you, though you might be at least a little concerned about what they think of your family –"

Well, this wasn't going well. No one was listening to anybody, really, no more than a few words before set the other one off again. This was much worse than their first meeting, which I haven't mentioned but which was actually rather tender. I'll get to it. Anyway, the problem here was that Molly was getting extremely personal in her attacks while Ginny was currently only defending herself, which worried me, because I'd gathered about Ginny that she only refrained from attacking in a fight when she was truly vulnerable. That was my trigger. Ginny vulnerable. Deasil protect.

"Are you calling your daughter a slut?" I said.

A bit of Ron's tea abandoned him hurriedly and struck out on its own.

"I – "

"Your daughter. Who you just met. Has less influence on what you think of her than these mysterious 'people' who we don't know and whom I suspect live only in your head, where apparently there is now a lot of extra room. I mean, if all of you could fit in there with Arthur, and he's clearly a smart man, however did you fit, unless you just aren't that damned smart? When the hell do you think we're living? 1776? And who do you think raised her? I'll tell you who did. My mother and father did. And they did a great job, and then she took it from there and made herself into this just about perfect woman, upon whom you now see fit to dump some neurotic pseudo-morality from the dark ages of arranged marriages and dowries and blessings on all the male babies only. This is a Weasley woman! The family has been waiting for her for seven generations, and she did not come through all this grief and fighting and turmoil and war to have you call her some garbage from before any of us were born. And I read up about this. A woman who looked at a man wrong could be forced to wear a scarlet letter and have her entire life ruined by that ignorant shit. It's not a cautionary tale about what a woman should do to keep out of trouble, it's an illustration of how stupid people used to be, and aren't we glad that we're not like that anymore? That we don't treat strangers in our community, much less our own flesh and blood, in such a barbaric way? Honestly, Mudbloods, Muggles, Squibs, scarlet women, what don't you people have a hurtful term for? And what, then, is the word for you?"

Her face was really quite red. The teapot was quivering on the table beside her, and I could see she was gathering up a head of steam to say "how dare you" or something like that, so before she could I said, "Maybe you should bring order to your thoughts before you speak."

My friend, silence.

She turned and walked out of the room.

Arthur just shook his head.

George said, "That was bloody brilliant."

Ginny said, "'Just about perfect'?"

Ron put a hand up to hide his smile.

After a moment Arthur turned to me with a weary look on his face. "Well, D, I have to say I might have handled that a little differently. I know we need to make sure that she's in the here and now, but she has been through a lot, and she really is a bit rusty at being a mother, or anyone individual really. And I really must take issue with something that you said. I won't have you walk around saying things that aren't true about my daughter."

The older boys' mouths were open. Arthur moved his tall frame over to Ginny's diminutive one, and he looked what seemed like a long way down to her upturned face.

"You can leave out the 'just about'," he said softly as he touched her cheek. Her eyes filled with tears, and she flung herself at him, hugging him tightly.

"I'm grateful for you," she said into his robe.

"Well,' he said, "I'm grateful for you too. All of you. And let us not forget that it's easy to look sweet when the person up before you was a little angry, right, Weasleys?"

There were a few nods around the room. After she released him, he unhurriedly turned towards the direction Molly had gone. "Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to go find my wife."

After he left, Ginny turned to me and I could see she was trying to have no expression at all when she said, "I can defend myself, you know."

"I have no doubt," I said, also trying to stay neutral. "I was just speaking my mind."

"I had quite a snappy comeback planned for her."

"I'll bet that you did."

"It would have put her in her place."

"Surely."

"You did take away my chance to speak for myself."

"I see that I did," I said. "I have only one excuse."

"Which is?"

"I know Molly very well, I think, and I'm certain it's not the last time she'll say something like that. But it's more than likely that the next few times she does that I won't be around – that is to say, she won't do it in front of me – and I wanted it to be unquestionably clear with her that I was on your side."

Her face remained carefully impassive. "I see."

This was getting a little hard for me to sustain. I wanted to tell a joke or something.

"But if that was inappropriate of me, and if I have prevented you from asserting yourself, I will promise to try not to do so in the future when I can."

She was fairly close to me now as she said, "That wasn't an apology."

"Not so much, no."

She spent a timeless time just looking into my eyes, not smiling or frowning.

"All right, then," she said.

That thing with the glowing might have been happening – I didn't really notice.

•

A/N: This took a little while longer than I thought – but Neville deserved his due, and I wanted the scarlet rant in there as well. It does matter that he tells the story out of order – really. And we'll get to Dumbledore next time, I promise. But I still maintain that I told you what's going on with him. Thanks to Phil for his inadvertent naming of Deasil's owl, to Freja for her tone which I hope to have successfully borrowed in spots, and to Jules for her perspective and filter and other-half-ness. Still open to suggestions as to the name of the Potter baby. Thanks so much to my faithful readers and reviewers. I like to think of this chapter as sort of a classic Japanese poem, kanshi, which often has four lines, the first two lines going together, the third line stating a new idea and the fourth joining all three lines - except that this isn't a poem, has more than four lines, and indeed more than three main ideas which are in no way joined together by the last one. And by the way, the word kanshi means "Chinese poem" in Japanese. Other than that the resemblance is quite eerie.