Chapter 15

Now, I don't want you, my earnest and clearly patient reader, to think that all I do is hang out and chat up the birds. Although it is numbered among my favorite things in the world - talking to the women in my life - at that moment there were many other things going on concurrently, and sometimes, in the interest of holding a thought together, it makes the most sense to group like events together in my recollections, so that they are easier for me to make sense of. "Easier for you," I hear my fictional reader say, "But what about me? Don't you realize how jarring and obtuse this can be? How it gives a new depth to the term 'hard to follow'? Can't you just for once tell the story in the order it happened so I can make head or tail of anything?"

No, sorry.

It was after the day that Molly and I had had it out. Out in the back yard of my parents' house, Remus was training me in the manly art of feather levitating. You may be wondering what kind of day it was – was it one of those fictional days that dawned bright and clear, or perhaps a day wherein clouds hung low and the distant menace of thunder underscored a nameless apprehension in the humid air? Well, the truth is I don't remember, and anyway if I just tell you how things were then maybe you won't need a supplemental weather report to guide your feelings about everything. Besides, all of my attention at the moment that I recall was focused on a small brown feather that Widdershins had shed recently. And as unwelcome of an idea as it was to me, for reasons I will describe shortly, I was trying to influence its movement by waving a stick at it.

In a moment of weakness I'd allowed Remus and Ginny to take me to the wand store, owned by a Mr. Ollivander. When I'd asked what his first name was he'd acted like he hadn't heard me. He'd thrust a series of sticks in my hand and waited while I variously waved and pointed them at things. Some of the things I pointed at had exploded and some had wilted and one had collapsed with a very rude noise. Finally he'd dragged out an old, dusty box and, saying "maybe this one, I shouldn't wonder," handed it to me. A burst of red sparks had come from it, causing a small fire on one side of his dusty store, and we were ushered out with perhaps more vigor than was warranted. I'd barely gotten a chance to look at it and hadn't been able to ask why he shouldn't have wondered about it.

So it was this stick with which I was trying to influence the relationship the feather had with gravity. A few minutes of swishing and flicking, flicking and swishing, pointing and waving, and I'd given up on moving it and was instead writing profane words in the air, to identical effect. Remus was smiling slightly. He'd been trying a bit every day to show me more practical magic, while my mother talked theory with me and my father was off dealing with some legal problem he wouldn't talk about.

"You have to join three things together, Deasil – the intent, the word and the motion of the wand. The intent is the spark, the word focuses it, and the motion of the wand directs it to the object."

I finished with a very bad word before stopping. "Look, Remus, I don't mean to sound stupid, but why do I need to do this anyway? Can't I just work out a way to have it move, rather than do all this stuff?"

"I see your frustration, but the problem is that you'll be in many situations where the wand is what's being used, and you'll need to counter wand magic in kind."

"But why - Okay. But also – wandless magic is frowned upon, isn't it?"

"Not precisely. It's just extremely uncommon."

"Like out of fashion?" This was feeling increasingly pointless.

"No…"

"Quit hedging, Lou."

"Excuse me?"

"Lou, short for Loup Garou."

"Oh, very funny."

"So you'd heard that one."

"No, as a matter of fact."

"Then don't complain. My dad's stuff is getting a bit long in the tooth."

"Yes."

"Kind of like once a month when you –"

"All right, Deasil," he said in a low voice, "what say we move on to offensive spells, shall we?"

Everything but my mouth said "uh-oh". My mouth came out with, "Wouldn't you rather just talk about wandless magic? Inside, with a cup of tea? That looks like it might smart a little."

"Those are some words I connect with you," Remus said, "'smart' and 'a little'."

I thought, "That wasn't even funny. He must be angry."

His wand was moving rapidly and there was a reddish glow trailing from its tip, and the air was crackling with energy. The main thought in my mind at that point was "I don't want any of that on me." I stumbled backwards.

As the sort of fellow who lives in his head a lot, I find it difficult to talk about being physical. But this is kind of important. The world for me became an area surrounding us about twenty meters in diameter. A tree three meters behind me and to the left, a small rise with a hedge behind Remus, a breath of wind at my back. What I was looking for was right behind me. Not sure how I knew it was there or why I was looking for it. I had to let things happen. I continued to stumble as Remus released a jagged red beam in my direction, first a little to the left as I lost my balance and the beam arced past me, then recovering my balance but overcompensating and veering sharply to the right, around a second beam that made a sound like a hornet. In my flailing around I'd managed to drop my wand, so I bent down to grab it and another beam went over my head. Remus was moving closer and so I backed up, still bent over, and my heel hit a root, the thing I'd been looking for, and before I could right myself I was falling back, my wand coming up and a red energy rebounding from its tip, directly into the face of my instructor.

I had a brief glimpse of his eyes widening before he took to the air, appearing smaller as he receded, until he struck the hedge and went feet over head past it. I heard a sort of a grassy thud, almost coincident with my own.

The grass had a very pleasant smell.

From behind the hedge, I heard a strained voice saying, "That will do for today, I think." After a short pause, he used a curse word I'd never heard before.

You like some people right away. Or maybe it's not real 'like', but you want it to be. I have to say that I've felt that way a great deal since I came back to England, immersing myself in the family and the welcome and the flaming siren whose being made up at least half of the atlas of my life. The folks I've been surrounded by are by and large wonderful, interesting and loving, or at least funny. And it's funny how we remember things. Sometimes I remember things that I see only briefly at first in a way that is more vivid than if I have time to study them. It's as though the mind gets a good picture the first time - a perfect snapshot, sharp and essential - and if it's something you see a lot, then other things creep into your memory of it, faulty comparisons, value judgments and emotional associations, and the essence of the object or person is gradually obscured by the cloud of colored perception that each of us is surrounded by. Our personal fog that makes us who we are also robs us of the truth of things as time passes.

So here's what I saw. At the top of the hedge, headed towards where I guessed Remus to be, was a spiky shock of pink. It took me a moment to realize it was someone's hair, and believe me, it was only because there was a gait involved. Energetic strides, in fact. The pink stopped about where I thought Remus might by and disappeared from sight for a moment. But this isn't the thing that's clear in my mind. In a moment I'll get to it.

"You called?" a voice said, a woman's, an upturning, bright voice that had a timbre that could only be described, if not as "laughing", with a word using those letters.

"Just wanted you to meet someone," Remus said, sounding constricted.

"Need some help up, old boy?"

"Lovely," he said, and followed that with a few grunts that indicated he was being dragged to his feet. I was sitting up, stretching my legs, enjoying the grass and the sun, thinking about a time recently when I'd awakened to the sight of my two feet in front of me and how that was almost all that I knew about for a little bit, those two feet, and maybe some trees and a duffel bag. And thinking about that red crackly magic. And why it rebounded off my wand. And what was wrong with me that I stumbled around like that and why I needed that root in the ground, why it was so important. Though I kind of understood it.

But that's not the thing either.

The pink had reappeared. With a bobbing motion it moved towards the hedge, gradually revealing the face of a young woman, probably mid-twenties, a round face, large eyes that looked purple from where I was, and a grin that made my cheeks hurt for a moment until I realized it was because I was returning it, like I'd joined a joke already in progress that was already funny even if I hadn't heard the punchline. Two steps' worth of that grin I had to enjoy, two steps of a terrific affinity, then the thing that I remember so clearly.

Her eyes open wide, a little crossed, her eyebrows arched, her mouth a comic red twist, a flicker of blue in her hair, a lurch forward, her purple irises rolling down towards the ground, and her disappearing from view.

Another thud, accompanied by a feminine grunt, was all I heard.

That's what I remember.

It was so funny, somehow, that I couldn't even laugh.

Remus said the weird curse word again and said, "Are you all right?"

There was a moment of quiet, followed by her face popping up again like a cartoon daisy. "Wotcher, Deasil," she said. It was as if nothing had happened. She vaulted the hedge with improbable grace, landed with a roll and trotted up to me, extending her hand. It was warm and strong.

I got up and watched Remus walk around the hedge, a little slowly, and come towards us. I realized that I was still holding her hand, but that was all right. She was clearly going to be a friend of mine. She was okay with it too, I guess, as we watched him approach frozen in a sort of handshake.

He said, "I want you to meet my good friend," and he cursed again.

"What's with all the language?" I said.

"What?" Points for me. Lovely.

"You keep cursing. Does something hurt?"

"I'm not cursing."

"So does your friend have a name or what?"

He cursed again.

I looked blankly at him.

"It's no Deasil, but it'll have to do," she said.

Uhh… oh. "I'm sorry, I thought, I mean, I didn't know that was your name."

"You thought he was cursing?"

"Well…" Say no. "Yeah. You know, like, oh, tonks, my butt hurts from flying over a hedge and landing on it."

Remus was hiding a smile with the same degree of effectiveness as he might achieve by hiding a sperm whale under a throw pillow.

"You thought my name was a naughty word."

"Well, he did shout it out when he fell."

"I see."

"With some intensity, too."

"Yes."

"So I figured …"

"Hmm…" she said, then turned around and looked at Remus appraisingly. "I suppose sometimes it's a bit naughty."

Remus looked like he'd swallowed a starfish.

"You look like a trustworthy sort," she said, turning back to me.

"That's a good look to have about one," I said.

"Quite. I'm going to do something I don't normally do."

"I can't imagine," I said, "what that might be."

She narrowed her eyes at me slightly before going on. "Think of it as an inoculation."

"Against what?"

"Doing what you're about to do, only in the future."

"You talk like someone else I just met."

"Are you ready?"

"Will it hurt?" I asked.

"It depends on how you act," she said.

"Let me have it."

"Okay. My… first… name… is… Nymphadora."

There was a silence as she looked at me expectantly.

I looked around. Sun still out, I hadn't turned into anything, still male.

"…what now?" I said.

"What do you mean?"

"Does something else happen?"

"No, that's it."

"Oh."

"Well?"

"Well what?"

"What about it, then?"

"What? That's a lovely name. Is it a flower?"

"Remus."

"Yes?"

"He asked if it were a flower."

"That he did."

"No one has ever said that."

"He's a bit weird."

"You like that name?" she said to me.

"Yes, why wouldn't I?" I said.

She was silent for a moment. We were still holding hands.

"Are you single?" she asked.

"As opposed to plural?"

"You're thinking of 'singular'."

"Oh, he's definitely that," Remus said softly.

"Never mind," she said, "I'm not anyway. Let's get old furry-shorts inside and put some ointment on what hurts him, shall we?"

"Sounds like a plan," I said. "For someone else to apply the ointment."

"Oh, I'll be happy to do it," she said. "It wouldn't be the first time I –"

He said the word again, and this time it was very definitely a naughty word.

•

Some time later that day, I'd allowed Tonks and Ginny to talk me into going to a movie. I'd been sort of wanting to get out, even though I'd been passing wonderful time these days with my mother and father as we got further used to each other, and I wanted to find out if there were as many gorillas in films as I'd seen previously or if, as I had begun to suspect, the one I'd seen was a bit atypical. I had applied a glamour to the scar and changed the color of my eyes a little and was standing outside the door to Ginny's room, knocking.

"Just a minute, we're getting ready," Tonks said through the door.

"What's taking so long?"

"Girl stuff. Who did you just meet that talks like me?"

"Me. What's girl stuff?"

"Stuff that involves girls. I thought Remus said you were bright."

"Come on, Tonks, I just got here, I don't know a thing about girls. I don't know what girls get up to at any point."

"It's true," Ginny said, "he's completely clueless."

"Hey, that's not what I –"

"Right then, in you come," Tonks said, flinging the door open. Ginny was seated at a low table before a mirror. In front of her were several small pots of various substances, almost all of them in what looked like unnatural hues, and to her left bubbled a small brass pot over a blue flame that was notable in that it wasn't emanating from anything. No sticks or coal, just a flame around the base of the pot.

I wandered over slowly as Ginny regarded herself in the mirror and waved her wand around her hair.

I must say at this point that she was quite beautiful. I noticed after a strange tug in my stomach that there were no rugs or drapes of any kind in this room.

"So…" I said, casting about. "What are we doing here?"

"A bit of glamour, young Deasil, a bit of glamour," Tonks said.

"It looks amazing, whatever you've done," I said. I think I might have been sweating a little.

"I haven't really started yet," Ginny said, a faint redness on her cheeks that almost belied that claim.

"Wow. Perfect. Let's go, then."

"No, no, no, you won't get out of waiting that easily," Tonks said. "You and Remus are men, and Ginny and I are women –"

"Well spotted," I said.

"-and it is your obligation to wait for us while we beautify ourselves."

"Why?"

"Because it builds character to wait," she said.

"No, I mean why do you think you have to beautify yourselves? What's wrong with you now?"

"Nothing's wrong with us. Of course we are the embodiment of feminine pulchritude."

"Is that a sickness?"

"Beauty, Deasil," Ginny said, smiling.

"Then what are you doing, interfering with that?"

"I told you he was like this," Ginny said.

"Like what?" I said. "I'm just saying I don't think you need –"

"Hang on," Tonks said, "Just wait a moment here and you'll be changing your tune completely. Now turn around or close your eyes or something."

I wasn't getting this. I wasn't getting a lot of things. I went and sat in a chair on the other side of the room and looked away.

•

I thought about what Remus and Tonks had said to me after we came in from levitating practice. I'd asked him if he was all right and he'd said, "No harm done, Deasil. I suppose I brought it on myself – I made a common mistake in dueling you."

"What was that?"

"I was a little piqued, and I underestimated you. It just goes to show," he said, sitting down slowly in a chair, "that we aren't at our best when we let our emotions drive our actions."

"That would explain a lot," Tonks said from the other room.

He sighed and went on. "When I'm attacking you but I'm thinking about how mad I am, what am I not doing?"

"Thinking about what I'm doing."

"Right. Though I don't know how much it would have helped in any event. Either my aim is terrible or you're spectacular at evading spells. Every time I thought I had you, you managed to stumble free. I wonder if you might tell me – is that something you've practiced?"

"Of course he didn't practice it." Tonks' voice came into the room like a beam of sunlight. The kind that interfered with a restful sleep.

Remus looked mildly pained. "Is that true?" I nodded. "Then can you tell me about it?"

"Maybe," I said. Things about it made sense to me, but not all of it. There was this sort of fundamental logic to it that I felt a little shy about sharing, because it sounded strange to me, in that it was unlike anything my mother had said in our hours of magic talk, in which she'd begun telling me about the physics and nature of magic as practiced in Europe. (There were other approaches to magic practiced elsewhere in the world, but the European way was what Tom went with, so it seemed logical to learn about that, at least to understand what he might do.) I thought that Remus might be able to parse bits of this with me, but he seemed a little on the conservative side, which was weird to me coming from a werewolf. But then again, he didn't choose that for himself, so … "Let's see.

"When I realized you were going to attack, I found myself looking for something without really knowing why. There was a sort of… a key, a turning point, or a trigger, or something. Kind of how I was supposed to fit. You know?"

"No."

"Okay. You know how everything has its place in a moment, and how if you find your place everything will work out?"

"No."

"Uh…what do you mean?"

"What do I mean?" Remus said.

"Yeah," I said. "You know. Everything works out if you know where you are. Right?"

"Deasil, you've lost me."

"Look, it's like today, the thing that made everything work was the root and the tripping over it. Everything else led up to that, I was just a part of it. As long as I just went with it, I'd get to that and I'd fall over and the wand would be up and – done."

Remus was quiet.

"Deasil, Remus doesn't understand you," Tonks said, coming in to the room, "because he has a problem letting things happen."

The look he gave her was funny to me. I became aware of the fact that there were two conversations going on here.

"You see," she said, throwing herself into the loveseat he was sitting in and cozying up to him in one fluid motion, "Remus likes to think of why things should happen, instead of thinking about that things do happen. Whereas I," she said, twisting and dropping the back of her head into his lap, "am all about things happening. They happen to me, I happen to them, and things work out. Don't let him convince you to take yourself apart just so he can see how you work – just do your thing and let him figure it out. After all, it's not important how or why."

"Dora, every situation isn't the same –"

"No one's saying anything of the sort. However, most mysterious, magical and beautiful things in the world can be seen in countless different ways that depend entirely upon the bias of the observer. Seasons change and some people decide it's a goddess' daughter spending six months in Hades and some people decide it's a giant badger eating an orange, and they fight wars over things like that, and meanwhile the world continues on its elliptical orbit around the sun maintaining its tilt, and it doesn't care what the people on its surface argue about. Eventually people figure it out, but their beliefs shouldn't change what the earth does, right?"

"You're jumping around a bit," Remus said, but he was smiling down at her with a great and subtle fondness.

"That's me," she said. "Remus has a problem with accidents," she said to me. "Sometimes he thinks there's no such thing, and sometimes he thinks they're bad. Either everything has an explanation, or if he can't figure out what it is then it's not good. One of these days something wonderful is going to just drop in his lap and he won't know what to do with it except disavow it or explain it to death."

"One of these days," I said.

"Not you too," he said.

"Harry, I mean Deasil, is very comfortable with accidents, although they aren't exactly that with him, are they? Maybe to us, but he's just being part of something, isn't he? Aren't you?"

My new friend. "Yes, that's it exactly."

The limb was tingling again. The one I was missing.

•

"You can look now," Tonks said. Her voice was crackling with high harmonics, which I was rapidly coming to recognize as the sound of mischief.

I turned, listening to the sound of my jeans on the rough silk of the chair. A whisper, that almost sounded like a word. When the sound stopped I looked up.

Ginny looked a little embarrassed.

Mostly because her cheeks were now a bit red. Her eyes were outlined a little in black, as if someone drawing her had gotten preoccupied with a telephone call and just traced them, absentmindedly, over and over again. There was a purplish cast above her eyes, which made her eyes (which I knew very well to be lovely) look darker and more like someone had set jewels upon velvet, which is very nice if you like that but if you like beautiful eyes it's a strange effect because you don't necessarily want to see two eyes just sitting there on velvet. Her skin was a slightly different color - the freckles I'd been counting ever since I first saw them were mostly obscured by a thin coat of something that was not very reminiscent of her skin tone, or any skin tone I'd ever seen, if I thought about it.

Okay, I'm making this sound worse than it is. Maybe it's a bit of hyperbole. But in my defense as a biased observer, I should say that Ginny had the kind of face that made me pass out and forget who I was, that made rooms catch on fire, even, and that her face was one of the few things in recent memory (or any memory) that I could recall with no effort. It was a precious thing to me beyond beauty or attraction – it was familiar, and it placed me in the world. This seems like a lot to say about someone else's face – and one might ask, is it such a good idea to have another person, and more specifically their appearance, to serve as one's anchor in the world? People change, don't they? Well. I never said it was the smart thing to do. I was compelled to do it. I don't think it would have made any difference if she had been taller or rounder or thinner. Or if that changed over time, as people do. That clearly was not the point.

"I still know it's you," I said.

That clearly was not the point either.

Ginny's eyes were big, and she was taking me in. I wasn't sure if she was going to burst in to tears or yell or what, and it was a long moment.

But things went curiously well, like they often did with her. The smallest smile nudged her cheek, and she gave me a look before turning back to the mirror.

"What kind of a thing to say is that?" Tonks was outraged. "What about she's beautiful? Or she's a knockout? Or you're a lucky bastard to be seen anywhere near her?"

"That was already true," I said.

Ginny smiled a little more, but still said nothing.

"How insensitive can you be? It's not a bloody gorilla mask," Tonks said, "it's makeup. You know about makeup, don't you?"

As a matter of fact, I knew a little bit about it. I knew that Arthur had relied heavily upon it, though I didn't know why until later. And, you know, he wasn't a lovely woman, so he kind of needed the help. But that's what it was to me. Help. I didn't think Ginny wanted to hear about her father's makeup period, though. "Sure, I just don't-"

"This took time," Tonks said. "And effort. You can appreciate that, can't you?'

"Of course I can app- wait a minute, you did it, didn't you? I'm supposed to be apologizing to her, not you."

"That isn't – I didn't – "

"You're barking at me for being insensitive to her, but this is all about you." And your questionable makeup skills, my new friend.

"Is not!" She was trying to beat her way out of it, using the rather blunt tool of loudness. "You don't care that someone goes the extra mile to look beautiful –"

"Nymphadora." I refused to raise my voice. This was a little crazy. She was a little crazy. But as I looked at her I became aware of something other than the hair-changing-color thing. I remembered something. Remus. I made a connection, finally. This was Tonks, and I had heard her name before – I'd just forgotten it. I'd seen the way he saw her, some days ago at the hospital. The eyes I looked at were the ones he loved. True, they were hovering over a mouth that was currently berating me. But when you see things from someone's perspective, it's hard to see them any other way. So I waited for a moment where she paused for breath and said, "It doesn't matter how she looks to anyone, it's what she feels about it that's important, but how she really looks is perfect to me, no matter what that is, because that's her, and whatever she is is okay with me. Now or later. Ever. Now or ever."

That glow thing was funny – I never knew when it was going to show up. It was actually very pretty reflected in Ginny's eyes, and shimmered in her hair.

"What…" Tonks looked back and forth between the two of us. "What are you on about? What was that?"

"I'm just saying I don't like the make-up thing that much."

"Don't listen to him, Ginny, I think you look great. Deasil, this is not about you."

"So this isn't for men? It's so other women will think you're attractive?"

"Deasil, don't be thick, it's for her. It's a good thing. I mean, what would you call something that makes a woman feel good about herself?"

"Therapy?"

"Deasil…"

"A feeling of self-worth? What am I missing here? Why are you looking at me like that? Hey! Ow! Ow!"

Oh, just imagine it. It hurt. What else do you need to know?

Well, maybe that Ginny stopped her. And that when we left the house fifteen minutes later, Ginny's face was as unadorned as it had been when I first met her, and her expression was peaceful, and I couldn't stop looking at her.

•

Our departure was temporarily delayed by my abrupt transition into being a canary.

Or anyway, a five-foot-nine feather-covered guy with a beak.

"Never," I heard Ginny say to me as I regarded her in a sharper way than I am used to, impulsively tilting my head and taking her in with my right eye mostly, "eat candy out of a dish here."

Fred was summoned, and after emitting a hyena-like noise he said a few words, waved his wand around, did a little dance, and then handed me what looked like another piece of candy. Ginny gave me a subtle nod of encouragement.

I was dubious, but I gulped it down anyway.

With a loud popping sound, all of the feathers ejected themselves from my skin and the beak fell to the floor, clacking itself together for a moment before subsiding.

"One of yours?" I said.

"To be sure, though I'd no idea those were still about," he said, grinning in a way I know he hoped was infuriating. "We did have quite a run on young Ronald for a while there."

"What for?" I said.

He looked at me for a moment before saying, "Because we could, of course."

"So no reason."

"I wouldn't say –"

"And that gibberish and the waving and the little dance just now?"

"Well, Mr. Potter," he said, sounding like things were going a little strangely, which they might have been, "it's all in the presentation, you see?"

"So you do a lot of … meaningless stuff?"

"Someone needs a sense of humor," he said, still smiling a little.

"I think someone would need your sense of humor."

"Erm…"

"Did you know that my vision got better when I was under that … whatever it was?"

He looked thoughtful. "Really."

"Yeah. That actually seems kind of useful."

"Ah! You see?" he said triumphantly.

"Yeah," I said. "Too bad it was an accident, otherwise I'd have thought you were clever."

He looked very sour. This lasted as long as I could keep the smile off my face. Then his eyes narrowed, and he shook his finger at me. "Nice one, Deasil, nice one, but I think you don't realize what you've started, do you?"

I didn't.

•

All right. Imagine you're in a dark room with a lot of people, and there's a giant gorilla roaring and beating its chest and fighting a big lizard or two, and defending a woman who, while perfectly fetching and comely, would not be the first person you'd set up with a giant primate. Imagine that on one side of you, there's a pink-haired woman squealing with delight and watching through her fingers, making quite a bit of noise really, and that on the other side, there's a redheaded popcorn-consumption machine, her dark eyes shining blue-white from the screen, and in her compulsion to process the corn she has emptied her tub and now most of yours, all without wresting her gaze from the screen even to look down at what she's eating, and imagine that if you were the kind of fellow who would get an ego boost from being seen in the company of two beautiful women, then you'd probably be pretty chuffed at the moment. It's not that you would want people to think you're dating both of them or something, I mean maybe the thought crossed your mind for an unworthy split-second before you realized how unfair and disrespectful and weird that would be, and how real, deep and primary affection can only move in one direction for you, and not just one at a time, and anyway since no one could hold a candle to the redhead it would be a bit rough on the pink-head, who's a few years older than you anyway and fancies a werewolf and seems like a fast-friend, running-buddy sort of person and is a little crazy, and maybe the thought is crossing your mind that it would be nice to just have a thought that's a bit wrong and not even tell anyone about it and not have to deconstruct it to pieces, thank you very much, it's not like anyone would know about the thought except for you and, well, whoever is reading this, and maybe around this time you might imagine that you've gone from being chuffed to disgusted with yourself, not so much for the stupidity of the thought but the fact that you've stopped thinking about being in the theater, in the folds of this velvet moment, with these unique and literally wonderful people, and are now thinking about thinking about thinking. You can imagine that would be something of a curse, if you like.

The next thing you might imagine, were you in my shoes, would be a bit of extra detail in the film. The gorilla (and I was thinking that I'd been right about movies and that they actually did favor the simian in subject matter) had dealt one of the lizards a devastating blow, and the lizard had flopped down hard, on its side, throwing up a spray of dirt and small rocks. It looked amazing. For a moment my attention was drawn by a small sound on Ginny's side of me. It was a hollow clatter that came from the direction of what had been my tub of popcorn. I didn't see anything, so I looked back at the screen. I turned back to her a moment later when she cursed and spat something into her hand.

It was a small rock.

I might have thought that was odd, but I forgot about it completely when I was struck in the forehead by a twig a few seconds later.

I was thinking to myself, "You really do miss a lot seeing movies only on television."

Ginny said, "Deasil, are you…?"

"No, I apparently only do drapes and rugs," I said.

"What the bloody hell.." Tonks said. People were rising from their seats now, beginning to see that things had just gotten a little weird. The roars of the creatures were a bit louder than they had been, as if we had gotten closer to them, and debris and moisture were spraying from the screen. A tree trunk, visible at the edge of the frame, had been knocked aside by one of the combatants and was now resting half in the jungle and half on a few seats in the first row.

Something didn't seem right about this.

I said as much to Ginny, who said, "I think you may be right, there, Deasil, the bloody movie's spilling over into the theater – that's not the way it usually –"

"Where are they?" Tonks' voice was tense. When I looked at her she was scanning the crowd and the screen, looking for someone, her wand in her hand, all traces of humor gone. People began to move into the aisles.

"You don't think –" Ginny said.

"Yeah," Tonks said, "can't find them yet." She turned towards the back of the theater.

You might expect that since the trees had developed substance that the other things in the movie might follow suit, and sure enough they seemed to. One of the giant lizards, in circling the gorilla, lashed its tail and for a moment there it was, greenish and thick, rougher and lighter in color at the bottom, whipping though the air over the seats, and that was enough to encourage the slower moving audience members to shift into utter panic.

Something still seemed wrong.

"We've got to get out of here," Ginny said. She was calm, but energized. I really loved seeing her in the light from the screen. I wanted to tell her so, but something else was pressing.

"Do you still have that rock?" I said.

"What?" Ten points.

"The one you bit down on."

She opened her mouth to surely give me a piece of her mind for not being cognizant of our situation, but it closed again when she found the rock still in her hand, where she'd been clutching it since things had gone strange. She handed it to me without a word.

I listened to the shrieking for a moment, watched people climbing over seats and shoving each other in their panic. It was loud and full of motion and a little overwhelming, which was good for what I had to do – ignore everything else for a time.

The way it sat in my hand. The way that it was not a part of this. I couldn't slip on it or drop it or find it in the moment. It seemed completely inert. It had no relationship with anything.

"I don't think…"

"What is it, Deasil?" Tonks asked, not looking at me as she scanned the crowd.

"This thing isn't really… here. I mean, it's not really a thing."

"How do you mean?" The shouts of the crowd were making it hard to hear her.

"I think I'm… I'm just supposed to think it's here, but it isn't. We're not seeing what's really here."

Ginny now looked a little alarmed. "That's not good. Someone powerful is making this happen."

"Yes, but our handsome friend Deasil can see through it. Maybe he can stop it? Where are they!" Tonks was still searching, her face now in shadow as she watched the doors.

We had made our way to the outside edge of the row and were headed up towards the entrance. I thought about what she'd said. "Ginny, what is that spell you told me about that ends another spell?"

"Finite Incantatum," she said.

"What does it do exactly?" I noticed Tonks pulling out what looked like a compact mirror and thought that she took the makeup thing too seriously, especially since she was talking to it.

Ginny said, "It disperses the intentionality of a spell. The – the bit that means it." She was referring to a previous conversation we'd had, that strangely enough I'm not going to get into at this moment.

"So you do it," I said.

"Okay, but – Finite Incantatum! – see, it only works on a spell cast by someone of equal or lesser strength. Whoever did this," she said, gesturing at the smoke and the hind leg of a lizard digging into the floor, "is more powerful than I."

Well, okay. All I had to do was interfere with someone's will and this would all go away. That seemed completely impossible. How do you even begin to do that? Will is will. If I could distract the person doing it or something, maybe … but we couldn't see anyone doing it. My mind went a little blank for a moment. All that yelling and roaring and noise. Score, even, there was score underneath it all, and I think that started it for me. The music was louder than it might be, but I wasn't seeing an orchestra appear out of the screen, because that didn't make any sense. I mean, it might have if this were all logical, but it wasn't. It wasn't real, because it was subject to someone's whim. The score had no place, no potential, it was like the idea of music in a dream without the identity of music. The rock in my hand, smooth like a river rock but not from years of tumbling and friction, just someone's lack of imagination, not rooted in reality because it was someone's idea of what would happen. An incomplete idea, a doppelganger, not real. I regarded it forcefully now, feeling the way that a look can be an almost solid thing, how observation makes something collapse, like a jet of water crumbling earth away. One moment it was in my hand, and the next moment it had never been there.

Now all of you folks, why don't you see it like that? I thought.

In this now mostly empty theater, the only motion was from the screen, comfortingly flat. Someone had thought to turn the lights up, and I could see a litter of abandoned coats, draped haphazardly over seats like skins that had been shed in haste, and food cartons and cups thrown down, and now only the three of us.

"Let's get outside," Tonks said.

When we went through the lobby doors we came upon quite a scene.

The night had gone wet and shiny, and before us the street was deserted and the rain had soaked the ground and had begun to saturate the air. I could feel it in my lungs, cool and sweet after the warmth and closeness of the theater. Apparently reinforcements had arrived. There was a group of wizards standing in a circle, gathered by a streetlight. A few meters above them, several other people appeared to be tumbling in place against the dark sky. Whoever had done that with the movie theater had gotten these folks stuck up in the air, and the wizards were trying to get them down, but they were having absolutely no luck. They were shouting a lot, as if that would help.

Tonks was horrified, and rightly so, I thought. The people up in the air were still screaming. Ginny exhaled harshly next to me, and I noticed how tightly she was gripping her wand.

"Put that away, Ginny," Tonks said in a whisper, pulling us away from the doors and towards an alcove by the box office. "You can't help them."

"That's what everyone says, Dora," Ginny said with bitterness in her voice. "We're all supposed to stand back and wait for help –"

"That's right, and shut up!" Tonks whispered.

"But they've got it under control, don't they?" I said.

"Does it look like they do?" Ginny said, maybe a little loudly for Tonks' taste, as she winced.

I watched them for a moment. They definitely looked impressive. Flowing black robes, protective masks of a burnished silver, with faces molded into them, even. A little theatrical, maybe, but that was wizards for you, I thought.

But for the second time that night, I felt like something wasn't right.

As I listened more closely, I became aware, mixed in with the screams of the people in the air, of laughter. "Well, someone over there is not too fussed about all this," I said. "Someone's having a good time."

Ginny looked at me with shock at first, as if I'd just told her the reason that dogs bark is because they've forgotten what they were going to say but had to keep going.

"D." She paused, mastering herself. "Those people. In the black robes. They're not good wizards. They're not Aurors. Remember what Aurors are, like Tonks? They're not them."

"Ginny," Tonks said, "I think maybe you should –"

"Who are they?" I said. This was getting a bit confusing for me.

"Friends of Tom."

"Is that like friends of Dorothy?"

"What?" Ten points.

"How do you know about that," Tonks said, "if you can't remember anything?"

"How do you know about that if you're a witch?" I said. I was a little beyond whispering at this point. Tonks was poking me. Figuratively. I hadn't been able to get in contact with Hermione to figure out the answer to her question, and frankly the lack of an answer to why I barely knew who I was but might do passably on Jeopardy was weighing on my shoulders. That and the fact that I wasn't really sure what Jeopardy was.

"Why shouldn't he know what they are?" Ginny's voice was abrasive. I never thought I would think that. She was furious.

"Why should everything get dumped on his head? How about a little time?"

"He doesn't have a little time!"

"What are you talking about?" I said. A little loudly.

One of the robed figures turned slightly, then stopped. Then the figure twisted its head towards the three of us. There was no face visible – only a mask that I could now clearly see. A hideously smooth approximation of a face, but without any details that would make it warm, or angry, or at all human.

Like the rock in my hand.

Above, a twisting man lowered by several feet.

"Death… Eaters," Ginny said, as she saw the one turned towards us.

Tonks tense. Ginny angry, fearful. Those… minions, those drones, puppets. Like human, but only like human. Torturing these other people. Normal people? No magic makes you normal? No. These are all people. Some are more powerful than others, and some think that's an opportunity. Those masks are an illusion, a prop, that fools these powerful ones into thinking that power makes them better. This is all so – unfamiliar to me. I don't understand this. I want to go away from this, to recede. I don't want to accept this. This darkness.

Everything fell black in front of me, fell like water from a bucket.

And when I say that, I mean all the lights went out. There were a few shouts of anger, then several thumps and the sound of scrabbling on the wet pavement, followed by several crisp snapping sounds. As my eyes became used to the darkness I saw more robed figures surrounding the masked ones on the ground, and these all had real, human faces.

I put my hands on the shoulders of Ginny and Tonks and said, "Now it's time to go."

Much to Tonks' chagrin, we went, as I had read somewhere unknown to me, like a fist when you open your hand.

•

When we appeared in the kitchen of my parents' house (I was looking for comfort – I won't try to deny it) the first thing that happened was that Tonks and Ginny both threw up.

"Merlin, that was a rough one," Ginny said, waving her wand at the floor and disposing of the evidence.

"It's never like that for me," Tonks said. Then she straightened up and looked around her.

"Bloody hell, we're in Wales!"

"Yeah, back home, right? What's the problem?" I said.

"You know how we took the Floo to London and then walked and took a minicab to get to the theater, and all that?"

"Yeah…"

"Do you know why we didn't just apparate there?"

"No, why?"

"Because we CAN'T!" She smacked the countertop with the flat of her hand.

"We did." I was feeling a little sheepish, because I'd clearly messed up, but couldn't be sure how I had, though that never seemed to make any difference with me, I mean that just because I didn't know anything about anything didn't mean that I couldn't still be held responsible for not knowing about it.

"No, you did. We can't apparate that far. And even if we had the ability to do that, we'd honk ourselves dry the moment we did. As I think you may have noticed. And you took an Auror away from the scene of a conflict against her will. And what the hell happened back there?" This last was a shout.

My father appeared in the doorway, looking frowsy. "You're back, then."

"Hi, Dad," I said.

Tonks went on. "I mean one second the people are just –"

"Movie end early?" my father said. He ignored everything else in the room but me. This was a man with focus.

"You might say that," I said. "Do all movies have gorillas in them?"

"Many of the better ones, certainly," he said.

"- Then zap! Everything's dark and then the Muggles are lying on top of the Death Eaters and then the Aurors come in and poof! We're back here puking up our bloody shoes –"

"Death Eaters?" My father had become completely serious in an instant. "All right, from the top."

While Tonks told the story I watched Ginny. She looked a bit shaky. I stepped closer to her and said in a low voice, "Are you all right?"

"No, I'm not," she said, but when she looked into my eyes she was not fearful. She was good and mad. "I hate those plate-faced bastards. My whole life people have been telling me to hide immediately if I see one, and I'm bloody sick of it. It's not as if I haven't fought them before. They wouldn't have any power if people weren't so scared of them."

"You fought them?"

"Towards the end of the last dark times we were always being attacked by them in one way or another. They guarded the remaining Horcruxes, once they figured out that we were looking for them, they attacked the school – they even came looking for your parents and us, though they couldn't get past the Fidelius Charm on the house – that's a charm that keeps all but the people you allow from finding something. And of course, I've fought with Lucius Malfoy."

"That was the weird guy in the alley?"

"His father. It was that posh bastard that gave me the diary, and when I found out he had a bit of a runny nose for a while after. Later I fought him again with Ron and Hermione when we were captured and brought to his house. He got one in – " she showed the underside of her forearm, where there was a faintly visible scar " – but I stunned him while he was congratulating himself over it, and we got away." Her cheeks were red, and her eyes were bright and the pupils a little dilated, but she didn't look like fire was going to erupt or anything yet, and her hand was unclenched, which I now knew to be a sign that she was in control of herself. "And while Neville was facing down Tom at the school gates, I was fighting Inferi and vampires with the rest of the DA – Dumbledore's Army – and we were winning, too, though they all flopped down dead or at least stiff or flew away the minute Neville snuffed him."

There was a lot more talking that night, and a lot of other stories told, as more people came over and Tonks went back to the scene, with strict instructions not to bring me into it, and a great many more details were filled in about what had happened the last time Tom was powerful, and throughout all of it, I stood at Ginny's side, mostly holding her hand, not wanting to be away from her. She was strong, I knew, and life had taught her to turn her fear to anger and action, and I knew that however badly things might go in the future, that she would always take care of herself, that she was brave. But I also learned about myself that I could hate something. I hated what made her need to be so brave, and hated the man I had not yet met who brought this on her. Of all things, I wished that this all had never been so.

•

No one had heard from Dumbledore in a while, so it was decided that some of us should go to the school that he ran and talk to Minerva about what to do next, and also Hermione wanted to run some things by her before trying to make sense of my patchwork mind. I have to say it was irritating that she absolutely refused to theorize in front of me – for her, there was clearly no such thing as a wild guess. Anyway, I wanted to see the school. We apparated there the next morning after a noisy Potter-Weasley breakfast. The bad thing about that was that since I had no idea where it was, Ron had to side-along apparate me. It was not too pleasant for me – for one thing it seemed to take a really long time to get there, and I didn't like the neighborhood we went through, and I felt like I was being snorted through something. But we arrived whole and hale, and I thought it would have been rude to complain. I got a good look at where we were, in case I ever had to return.

We were outside a tall ornate gate, the metal curlicued and baroque in spots and starkly unwelcoming in others. Presumably the curly parts were there to indicate how nice it was inside, and the other parts were to indicate that you weren't necessarily the sort they liked in there. Once Hermione had opened it, I was able to see the castle some distance away, across a broad green sparsely populated with students, and I was momentarily captivated. Another possible life. Like the nature of my magic, profoundly unlikely, and like my memory, unreachable. There were spires and towers and massive stained-glass windows, and it was a different stone than the buildings I could remember, of an enduring kind, and it made the city I'd known seem transitory.

Through giant wooden doors, then, and down long cobbled passageways and up stairways that moved indolently from landing to landing, guided by the sleepy light from stained-glass windows. We were occasionally obliged to wait while the steps swung around. I at once respected the obvious sense of humor and was irritated by the sheer inconvenience. Was there reasonably such a thing as tardiness at this school?

It was clearly the end of a class period, evidenced by a rush as of tides, and a sound of relief and exuberance, and (to add yet another disjunct pair of metaphors to the pile) a thundering herd of kids erupting into the halls. It was a little hard for me to be around all of them, moving so rapidly, so many faces and stories, their essences buffeting me as they swirled past.

Wait, there was one…

A girl, beset upon, head down, on the edge of tears, her shoulders hunched to make her a smaller target, perhaps. Behind her, three taller boys, intent and predatory, calling out to her, cruel humor in their voices but without expression. This struck me as ugly. I mean I had a physical reaction to it. Fists, and a frown that bent my vision, and I was two steps away from the others, just close enough to hear the boys taunt the girl and watch things move, like the mechanism of a clock, all synchronous and seemingly inevitable, as the boys swung in an arc around her, winding closer, the spring tightening and the word "mudblood" reaching my ears and the hand of the tallest boy descending towards her shoulder. A moment that suddenly ceased to move through time.

You know, though, anything can go wrong with anything, even the inevitable, like, say, a loose tile in the floor that causes someone to lose his balance, his wand spinning through the air as he falls and striking another boy in the face, throwing up sparks, causing him to stop abruptly and collide with a third boy, who is larger and trips, propelling them both to the ground on top of the first one.

The girl was gone with a flutter, like a startled fish.

The crowd, intent on its movement, flowed over the pile of what I now recognized to be assholes, breaking over them and adding to the heap. In moments there was utter pandemonium, broken only by Ron's shout of "Break it up, midgets!" People froze, seeing us for the first time and deciding we were to be listened to.

"Ron, honestly… All right then, carefully now," Hermione said, "you need to disperse in an orderly fashion so that no one gets hurt…."

"That's right, move along," I said a little loudly, "Nothing to see here, just a few idiots on the floor…"

"What is the meaning of this?"

A wraithlike figure was ascending the stairs we'd just come from, a black-clothed figure, a gaunt man with a sharp nose and shiny black hair that stopped at his shoulders. He looked like the Jack of Bastards. His robes appeared to billow a little unnecessarily, even after he'd stopped moving. I felt that was a little suspect. He examined the situation, taking in the sullen boys at the bottom of the dogpile, the clearly unwelcome presence of Hermione and Ron, and then me. There was the usual flicker of the eyes up to my forehead, then a look of surprise, which didn't beautify his countenance any, followed by a glare of unexpected intensity.

His voice was nasal, and rasped like sand in a bathtub.

"I suppose I shouldn't be surprised to find a Potter at the center of this."

I squinted at him. "Come again?"

"It bears all of the signs – arrogance, childishness, lack of respect…" He was chewing on the words like they tasted good to him, if a little tart. "You presume to order my students to disperse. What makes you think that you have the authority or the power to tell them or anyone how they should behave?"

Where on earth was this coming from?

"Uhh…"

"And the final hallmark," he said, "weak-mindedness."

One of the girls in the hall stepped forward timidly. "Professor, the boys were after Phoebe Bennett again, and they –"

At first he didn't even look at her while he spoke. "No one is interested in your infantile prattle, Miss Preston - nor is your poking your nose into matters beyond you necessary or welcome in any way." He slowly turned his head toward her. "In fact…" He glared fiercely at her for a moment while she twitched slightly as though she were having a terrible headache. "I would say that everyone is weary of your intrusiveness and wishes you would go back in your shell. Your presence was at the very most only bearable before. Perhaps even that boy would agree. Twenty points from Hufflepuff for inappropriate activity on Hogwarts grounds, and I'll see you in my office Saturday at noon."

Her cheeks flushed with shame. She started to clutch pointlessly at her forearms and backed away from him. When her other friends reached for her, she moved away from them rapidly, shaking off their entreaties, and disappeared down the hall.

"Potters," he said with contempt, turning back to me. "Always jumping in where they are not welcome, always so egotistical as to imagine that they know best, always telling others how to act – it's no wonder you all live in isolation, because no one wants to suffer through your sanctimonious acts of petty heroics. It's pathetic."

The hall was rapidly emptying itself of students. It was like magic, really, though it wasn't. I was clearly expected to have a bad reaction to this. Ginny's fist was balled up, Ron had squared his shoulders and Hermione looked very angry.

Oh.

He'd just spoken ill of my family.

You know the expression "Put his foot in his mouth"? I'd just heard it the other day. Hermione had used it about Ron. It created a funny image in my mind at the time. Not exactly a literal image, but it was a funny one, and I'd told Ginny about it. She'd thought it was strange and we'd said no more of it, but it's curious what pops into your mind in moments of stress. And I suppose you can guess what I did. Accidentally, as if it weren't me, but I guess I did it.

Maybe you can't. I guess I turned his teeth into feet. It had to have been me, anyway. Who else would have done something like that? It was really weird. They made a horrible slapping sound as he attempted to tell me how he felt about that. Little toes twitched, and some of the feet were actually a little hairy. One had a sock on it.

Hermione said, "Well, that just makes my mind hurt."

"Won't be able to unsee that one," Ron said, shaking his head.

"That will teach him to run his mouth," Ginny said.

It was silent other than some groaning and various wet sounds.

"Nothing? Nobody thought that was funny." Ginny said.

"Not so much," Ron said. "Bit hard to top the choppers."

"You have many other fine qualities," I said.

"Name two."

I covered my face. "Can we make it a different number than two? I don't want another smack."

I got one anyway.

"Ow! Hey! What's wrong with Compassion and Humor?"

"Everything in its time," she said, "but I'm not sorry for you and that wasn't funny."

I laughed out loud. "Now that was funny."

No one had moved to assist Snape. He'd stopped smacking and growling and was merely glaring at me hatefully. And when I say "merely" I mean that he wasn't also stabbing me with a pitchfork. This required some dealing with. He was drooling with anger. Well, maybe he was just drooling with little feet in his mouth, and exuding anger.

"All right," I said, turning to him. "I…don't…know…you. You came up to me and insulted my family. Where I come from that's not a good thing to do, especially since I've become very fond of them. You're about their age, I'm guessing. My next guess is you dislike my parents for some reason, and you think it's okay to hate me as well because I'm theirs. I can only imagine how you might have been if I were smaller and unable to defend myself – in fact, judging by the way the hall cleared and what you said to that student, you're no stranger to bullying. What kind of a creature," I said, warming up but keeping my voice even, "would attack someone presumably weaker than himself, because he was mad at someone else connected to that person? Short answer, a bastard. Long answer, someone who secretly feels helpless, who was hurt by other people and wants someone to take it out on…"

I paused, looking him in the eye. It was different than it had been. He didn't want me to. He had something to hide. He wouldn't let me see it.

Wouldn't let me see what?

Well, it's kind of like saying, don't think about a baboon's red posterior. There it is, big as life.

•

I coveted her. She was kind to me, but she didn't love me. James humiliated me and she still didn't love me, didn't come to me with sympathy and care for me. She and James had …they had finally gone off and been happy together, leaving me alone. Love was for other people, then? If that's how it was, then I would have what I could take by force. I would align myself with people of power, even though their agenda was meaningless to me, and take what I wanted from the world. But I had not imagined that those people would target her, would require her death, and in my disdain and apathy for their darker purposes, my disconnect and my ugly pride at being above it all, I had inadvertently led them straight to her. When they attacked her house, it was only the purest luck that the Weasley woman had been there in her stead. But when the Dark Lord had been destroyed, rather than relief, the only feeling I had was hatred. I hated the Dark Lord for failing me. I hated the Weasley woman for being so disgustingly noble, in a way that I could never manage. I hated Lily, for being so unreachable, even by death. And for all of these thoughts and more, of course, of course, I hated myself. And you. You are what happens when she doesn't love me and chooses him, you are what happens for other people but never for me.

•

I shivered.

"What is it, Deasil?" Ginny was holding my hand.

His face had returned to a footless state and was tight as a fist.

I couldn't answer her, only him. "You didn't know how to make it any better, when you were younger," I said. "You didn't know how to be anything more than hurt or angry. But you've seen things no one else has. Has it taught you how to make it better?"

He didn't want to hear that. "How dare you look at my thoughts?"

"Severus," I said, still even, "how many times have you used your gift to harm? Just because you could? You know better than anyone how terrible it is to feel helpless – why, then, is that the first bloody thing you do with people?"

"Don't pretend to understand me –"

"No, Severus, it's worse for you than that. I know you."

"Then you know your father is not the fine man you think he is."

"He was an arrogant kid. He grew up. What did you do?"

His wand was out almost faster than I could see, but in the same blur of motion it sailed across the room and wedged itself in a crack in the wall.

"No amount of hexing will make this untrue," I said. "You betrayed them to him, and you hate yourself."

"That's not - what just – what did you do?" he said.

"I didn't do anything," I said. "You did that. It was just really unlikely."

Something in his eyes changed. His mind was working, and I wasn't sure how. For some reason I didn't really want to go in there and find out, either. I didn't like the neighborhood at all.

The flat sound of his voice was a contrast to his manner. "I appear to have misjudged you," he said as he pulled his wand from the wall and examined it thoughtfully.

"More than you know," I said.

With another look at me, he fluttered out of the room. Perhaps billowing was the effect sought, but it was definitely fluttering.

Hermione turned to me and said, "What do you mean by 'more than you know'?"

"No idea," I said. "It just seemed better to keep him guessing."

•

We continued up towards the Headmaster's office, now temporarily occupied by Minerva until Dumbledore returned to the nearer side of wacky-land (which according to the Weasleys was as close as he got to sane at his best), and we'd stopped by a large statue, a gargoyle, and Hermione was saying something apropos of nothing about lemon curry, when without any warning my head blew up. Oh, not right away – first someone drove a hot nail into my forehead and then set fire to my stomach, and neither of those things would necessarily indicate a cranial combustion event of any kind, so it was still a bit of a surprise to me when everything went red and I became acquainted for the first time with a very particular sensation that was beyond my memory.

It was the worst damned headache you can imagine.

I couldn't think. I could barely feel hands on me, couldn't open my eyes but a little, could only faintly see Ginny, her face tense, just for a moment, so that the afterimage, which was all I seemed to have of the world, was indistinct, and dreadful, because it was leaving me, or I was leaving it, and it all was going away.

•

I could start with being cold.

Which was good, because I was able to skip some steps and infer from the cold that there was such a thing as "I", that I was, and that I could feel, and it was such that given the arbitrary choice between a state of not-being and of being, that one might find some things to support the not-being side, because it at least, to start out with, didn't have the cold, and the cold was, to put a further value to it, unpleasant.

Beyond the cold, there was also hardness, and discomfort associated with that. Apparently I had a body, and it was the thing telling me about the cold, and if a body can be said to have an ideal fit with other things around it that are not it (ah, the birth of the universe), then this was not that fit. I began to hope that I could have some influence on how they interacted, but that was not working as I might like. Parts of me could move, and parts of me would not.

Do you know, I thought you were a statue.

Someone said that.

I thought perhaps – there was a whistling, shaking , airy sound – perhaps I was imagining you.

My awareness was uncurling like a fern. I was upright. That was okay. But still, not all of me could move. Reaching. Hands. Okay. Chest moving, breathing, though painful. My back, my sides, cold and stiff. My legs, held still, yes, held that way. One foot, able to move a little.

But you're still here. It is difficult for me to know. Coming and going as I am.

Time to try for sight.

It was dark. A large space. Gray surfaces, patches of green. An orange glow, a fire. A fire on a stone floor overrun with algae. A man in front of the fire. An old man, a white beard. Something on the floor between him and me that I couldn't resolve. He was hunched forward, his shadow darkening the space in front of him, in which he prodded with a short stick.

"This looks like…extispicium, perhaps. Not simple, and not easy to arrange. Finding the right sacrifice – couldn't have been an accident, I must have been the one who… but I would never…"

I had no idea what he was talking about.

"I must have read about the practice…or else he knew… but it must be me, it's my hand in this, but I can't remember if I…I must be the haruspice, I must be trying to – to…" He trailed off. For a moment there was only the crackling of the wood, the old man a ruined statue surrounded by an ocean of night.

He sagged to the side, dropping his stick. It was wet with something dark.

"You're here, I think," he said. "Do you know?"

I didn't know him. I didn't know anything. I couldn't move my head very much. I was stuck.

At that moment, I found in my mind the image of a stone figure I'd seen somewhere, her hands held out.

"Do I know what?" I said.

He took a long moment getting to his feet. The dark liquid was also on his clothing, on his hands. He listed to one side for a moment, regaining his balance, and I saw that the thing in front of him was the eviscerated corpse of a large red bird.

"Why am I trying to read the future?" he said.

I was stuck, somehow, in some dark room, with a man who was insane. He thought he was some kind of sorcerer or something. Did he have me tied up? I just wanted to go home, if I knew where that was, and if I knew who I was.

"I know it's wrong – it's worse," he said, the dark carving deeply into his forehead, "because the missing times are getting longer and it's so hard…so hard to find the difference between us, so I can draw the line. Know who I am."

He took a step toward me, slipping a little in the entrails on the floor, and I felt a rising panic.

"Find yourself again, and you can help me," he said, his voice full of air, as if there were a hand on his throat, "draw the line and make him go away." His face was in shadow, but as he finished speaking I thought I saw a flash of red in his eyes, as though they were reflecting a spark from the fire, and I wanted to run, but I couldn't, and my head began to ache.

"No," he said, backing up, "I have him for now."

With that he turned and shuffled into the darkness beyond the fire.

What was that all about.

I mean, get serious. This crazy old guy has me bound up somehow in this dark place, he was killing birds and trying to tell the future? Give me a break. Get serious. What is this place, anyway? What is that - some kind of statue, the giant head of some guy - and what looks like a giant skeleton, like a snake or something, I mean what kind of freak show is this? Get serious, I've got to get out of here. Get serious! "Get serious!"

I guess I shouted that last. I heard it echoing off of the walls. The walls, I couldn't move because that's where I was. Half in the wall, half out. I must have appeared here. I knew who I was, and I knew somehow for the first time what I was shouting.

"Get Sirius!"

The next thing I heard was, "We're coming! Where are you?"

I knew that voice. It was Ron's. I kept bellowing until I heard them approaching and saw lights moving toward me. Ron, Hermione and someone else I didn't know came past the fire and stopped a few feet away, taking in the scene. Then Hermione jumped forward and grasped my hand. "Merlin," she said, "how did this happen?"

"Just a little bad aim," the man said, "nothing to get in a twist over, he got himself in there and he can get himself out, right, Harry?"

"Er, we don't call him that now, he goes by –"

"He'll always be Harry to me," the man said, stepping closer. His face, though a little thin, was a good face, and his dark eyes glittered with the suggestion of humor.

"Come here, then," he said. "Come to your uncle Padfoot."

I remembered.

The world jumped a little in front of me, and the stiffness was gone, along with any ability I had to hold myself up. But wiry arms caught me, not letting me fall. Just like they used to. I wouldn't fall off the broom. I wouldn't fall off the roof. I would never fall. And something else. I remembered when I wouldn't sleep, when I wouldn't settle, disturbed with the wordless fear that all children must have suffered, and my father's weary voice. "Get Sirius."

He would always calm me down.

"Ahh, Harry, you've grown a bit – are you able to stand?"

I felt like a rusty spring. "Only a little."

Wait.

Oh!

"We're in the Chamber of Secrets," I said.

"Right in one," Sirius said.

"Augurium ex avibus," Hermione said softly, looking at the dead bird.

"Dumbledore was here," I said.

Ron had been looking around but now fixed his gaze on me, saying nothing.

Hermione dragged the bird carcass to the fire and dumped it into the center of the flames, which roared upwards for a moment before subsiding.

"He's in some kind of trouble," I said. "He was asking for my help."

'What did he say?" Hermione said.

"Where's Ginny?" I said.

"He said 'where's Ginny'?"

"No. Where's. Ginny?" I said. "She didn't come down here, did she? It would be too…"

"Too what?" Her voice came from not far away. I willed my legs to have some strength and took a few steps toward the sound. In a moment she appeared out of the darkness, looking a little pale. But never more beautiful. A great wrench gripped my chest as I thought of her here, what it took, and before I had too much time to think about it she ran forward and flung her arms around me.

"You didn't need to come," I said into her hair.

"You were here," she said. Her voice was steady. "I came to be with you."

•

A/N: For anyone wanting to add a little more color to the story, I have a myspace music page where I'm beginning to put music that I've written to describe some of the characters and scenes. If you liked the scores to the first three films, then this may amuse you. It's at myspace dot com slash phantomlimbscore. That doesn't make this song fiction at all – just fiction with underscore. Or maybe it makes the music fanscore. I hope you enjoy it.

I need to thank Jules for reminding me of how Deasil sees things – if this one's a little hard to follow, especially outside the theater, I have the dubious honor (read as "cop-out") of passing the buck to her. I also need to thank the smartest Dane I know, Freja, for encouraging me to within an inch of my life. Lastly, I borrowed a line from Dashiell Hammett. I hope he and his estate don't mind, and I hope he would be at least a little amused at the idea that his words would end up in Harry Potter fanfiction. But I should state that no money changes hands, I don't own anything but my own non-derivative thoughts, and this is all in fun.