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.

17. Chapter 17

Chapter 17

The next things that happened were the school doctor coming in and kicking my tires and things were ducky for a bit, and then my Dad and Tonks and Lupin came in, and then there was a conversation about what was going on with my magic, and then Dumbledore turned up, and there was a little excitement while we ran around the school, and then a few accidents happened and I had a talk with someone who sounded like me but wasn't, and I had two new reasons to be pissed at the old wizard and lots of questions about what I was supposed to become, and someone got the stupid beaten out of them, and I'm only telling you this now because it's just stressful to have to wait for things to unfold in a story and I want to spare you that worry, so that if I take a little sidetrack or backtrack you'll still know what's coming and not feel like you're being kept in the dark needlessly, like for instance Ginny and I had this talk before all the Hogwarts business and I just went right past it, didn't talk about it at all, but I was thinking about it the whole time leaving the chamber and it was just that I didn't want to keep the whole story from you and figured you'd rather hear about Sirius' time in jail and Trelawney's stupid life story than have me break that up and natter on about some other thing that had nothing to do with either of those things, but that's all done and it's time to natter.

I don't have to breathe. I'm writing.

After movie night with Ginny and Tonks, soon to not become a tradition, and after a lengthy and irritating debriefing by a man named Shacklebolt during which Tonks insisted on interrupting to say we were just witnesses and had nothing to do with anything, I wound up drinking tea in the kitchen with Ginny and wondering if I intended to stay up until negative-four-million-o'clock, B.C., which was the effect tea had on me, and also wondering why it was constantly being offered at all hours and maybe if my family were so weird because of being overly stimulated by caffeine. The house felt very empty now that the cops had gone. It was the same effect as if they'd had mud all over their boots and were eight feet tall and had left marks on the walls and doors from scraping up against them and had left without cleaning up. Though there was no mud and the walls and doors were unmarked. And they were all of average height except Kingsley. But other than that the resemblance was striking.

Tonks had lingered long enough to say that she hoped I appreciated her leaving me out of it. I said I didn't know what difference that made, and she said there were a lot of things I didn't know, and I said for instance I didn't know what her problem was, and she squinted at me in a way that was supposed to communicate ire and her hair turned yellow for a second and I asked if the color indicated she was thoroughly pissed, and then she told me I was a little like Remus and if I thought that were a good thing I would be mistaken, and I said that it was clear that she loved Remus dearly and that I liked her a lot too, and she tried to reply but conflicting things seemed to be competing to come out of her mouth at the same time and her hair was flickering, and she turned a frustrated glance on Ginny before leaving.

"I suppose you're my problem now," Ginny said.

Oh, good, I thought at the sweet-shouldered woman as she leaned on the table, fix me. They were sweet because they were bare in her sleeveless shirt, and because when I looked at them I imagined them moving, and the miracle that her motion was. Someone had not done this for me, made her for me, drawn her from my wishes freehand and rendered her warm and achingly apparent for me in all my favorite colors. There wasn't anyone there to do it. But if there had been, and I suppose this sort of thing is why some people think there is, they had certainly done a fair amount of research into what I might like in the form of woman, and then beat me over the head with the fat book they wrote about it before dropping me, woozy and verbally incontinent, into her neighborhood.

"How am I a problem to anyone?" I said.

"You manage," she said. Then she asked me if I wanted tea and thus here we were.

"So Death Eaters," I said.

"Yeah," she said. "Bastards." She sipped her tea matter-of-factly, if such a thing is possible. Maybe she was just trying to sip it as though they were bastards. Though how one could do that is beyond me, I mean it's like trying to sneeze as if someone owes you money, but it was kind of working, so I suppose you have to hand it to her.

"They were torturing those people."

"Yeah, until you did whatever you did."

"I didn't do anything," I said. "Things came out like they did."

"But you…" She looked at me, straight and clear, not accusing but knowing. "…you helped all that along."

"I… maybe I did, I'm not entirely certain, but I sure did want things to turn out differently than they might have. That I know."

"And it seems like you have some say in that," she said, and it seemed she was trying to help me along to something.

"It doesn't feel like it," I said. "You make it sound as if I'm this mighty wizard, and all I'm doing is seeing how things might go and what fits in a moment."

"But you don't just see it, it happens. The way you want it to."

"No, it doesn't. It happens the way it wants to. I don't feel one way or the other about it when it happens. Or maybe I do, but that doesn't have anything to do with it."

"So what were you feeling when you watched those bastards torturing people?" She was beginning to sound indignant.

"I didn't know they were torturing them at first. I thought they were trying to get them down. Then I figured it out and I started to think about how wrong they were." I resented, in a small way, having to say this out loud, because it really made me feel like an idiot. With any luck she'd see that and not rub my face in it.

"Of course they were wrong to do what they did, master of the obvious – how can you not –"

No such luck.

"Ginny," I said, touching her hand, which had become a fist. I wanted to take her all in, every feature, as I spoke. I hadn't touched her in a while, and it was still a big deal. Remarkable that the strings and pulleys in my dumb clumsy puppet-arm could make it over to her. "What I mean is that they were all wrong there. Like the stone in the theater. They didn't fit in the world."

"Deasil, this is all perfectly clear. I know they don't fit. They're murderers. What is your point?" She spread her fingers out like she was palming a basketball, or squeezing some stupid guy's skull.

Why aren't you listening to me? "You aren't hearing me. I'm trying to explain it. Why can't we just – why don't you just look me in the eye and I'll show you?"

She became still.

"What's wrong with doing that?" I said. "You'll be able to see what I mean."

"I don't…" She looked at her teacup. It was decorated with a small painting of a rose that bloomed and then folded back into a bud in a sort of loop. I wondered if it did that when it was shut up in the china cabinet, and the idea of it sitting there in the dark, just sort of doing that over and over even though no one was looking at it, kind of made me a little sad. What the hell was my problem. Get back on the horse, D.

"I don't think I can do that. With you," she said.

"Uh… I'm not sure it could even be done with anyone else."

"Why don't we just…talk?" She started moving the teacup around in circles. "Why don't you have another go at explaining it to me?"

"Why won't you just read my mind?"

"Unwilling to do a little work, Potter?" she said. You know, she couldn't quite look up while she was saying that.

"I'm always up for work," I said. "But I really want you to understand this."

"Most people actually have to talk to each other."

"Most people don't hear each other without anyone speaking."

"Yes, but that's just – well, it's sort of instant intimacy, isn't it? All you have to do is show up; you don't even have to try. And I'll tell you something – if you think you can just waltz in easy as you please and have your way with – I mean, have things your way, you're sadly mistaken."

"No, not without some work," I said.

"That's right, not without – what?" Ten to me. Her indignant expression, sharp like cinnamon, should have made it fifteen. The shift to tension, however, meant there weren't enough points in the world for me to be ahead. Her voice was stiff as if it were made of blocks strung together. "You presume an awful lot."

"I suppose I do, Ginny. I guess I must have let that one kiss throw me."

Oh. I didn't mention that, did I? I got ahead of myself. It happens. Memory. Like gauze curtains in a strong breeze, in and out of a window, and the window is now, and inside is the past, and outside is the future. Clear enough? I know it isn't. Okay, then. We had not kissed since that first time. I started noticing it … let's see. About five minutes after we stopped. But it didn't get really bad until minute six. At minute ten I merely thought I was going to have to bury myself like one of those desert frogs who live without water for years at a time – I just couldn't imagine life being any kind of decent without more kissing. Maybe I'd bury myself with only my lips showing, so if she happened by she would not need to have also brought a shovel. But she had been very red, and she'd gone for a kind of wink that she'd missed by a mile and sort of snuck out the door, except with me watching her. It was one of those moments that made breathing seem uncomfortable. I'd just made some comment about how I'd like to know where I learned to kiss, and I'd wondered if it were something I said. With her out of the room I felt like there was too much air in there. It was the story of my short life. Only enough of something to know I had been missing it all along. Hey, loser, like chocolate? It's been here your whole life, and it's free, but we're all out of it.

"It wasn't just one," she said, standing, "and it wasn't a guarantee of more, and it would take more than some work for you to have what you want from me."

"What exactly do you think I want from you?"

That was the right question, apparently, because it pointed the bulk of her ire away from me, transformed it into a big fluffy pillow and allowed her to beat herself over the head with it but not do her any harm. You can tell when someone's doing that because their eyes squeeze mostly closed, their heads shake back and forth and their mouths open up some and then close and then reopen. A lot. She looked like she wanted to say the word "you," but every time it started percolating, something made it dissolve.

After a while it finally took form. "You know what you want!" It was a flimsy form at that.

"And what is that?"

This woman, who could have hit me in the eye or given me a wooden leg, and I know how that sounds but if you'll remember, that's something she actually could do, actually looked a little scared. I began to regret this conversation. No matter what I thought it might resolve, I didn't want her to suffer. Some sensitive part of her was being prodded, and I knew what it was like to get that and not want to answer. But she looked as if she were going to try it, though on the extreme end of tentatively.

"You want…to kiss me?"

"Yes, that's one thing," I said.

What I hadn't expected was relief.

She thought I wasn't going to agree with that?

Huh.

"I also want us to know each other," I said.

"I think I can pick you out of a crowd by now," she said.

"You know what I mean. And I know that it's going to take work. You're kind of weird."

"Ah… heh… I'm kind of weird, am I."

"Yeah. You like me, as long as I'm a little far away from you. You've taught me more than anyone about all of this magic stuff, taught me how to fly a broom, helped me learn to count your crazy money, and you kissed me, I mean we kissed. And that was… something. It was unbelievable. Even if I had ever done anything remotely like it, it still would have been nothing like that."

She thought of saying something, but didn't, though briefly her forehead looked like it had knuckles.

"But then you ducked out," I said. "You ran away, and I didn't – I don't – I hated that."

Sympathy and regret smoked, but it was crankiness that caught fire. "I didn't run away!"

"I heard your steps," I said. Soft though they were, little pats on the stone floor, recalling her slender frame - I had heard them recede into nothing, far too quickly. Not a bad sound, but a wistful sound, because I knew what made it, and it was light and sparse and precious, the last drops of water from an empty glass.

"My mother, who I had just met, was lying in a bed down the hall – I was beside myself," she said.

"You were beside me."

"I was in a … a very vulnerable state."

"You were in an open state, and so was I. Wait a minute - "

She knew things were going further south but she was in it all the way, I guess. She said, "You should have known that's how things were."

"You're… wait a minute, you're … you're saying that I took advantage of you." I couldn't believe it.

"Well… in a manner of speaking – "

"Helpless." I said. "You're telling me you were helpless and weak and vulnerable and that I took advantage of you."

She didn't like those words one bit. But she wasn't as fast a talker as me that day.

I said, "You were like a helpless, foolish little girl who didn't know her own mind and was thrown by seductive talk from an irresistible man with bad intentions, is that it?"

"Oi! I'm not a foolish little –"

"And I'm not irresistible and I don't have bad intentions. We've had this conversation before. I'm not that guy. What are you doing?"

"And I know my own mind," she said, her voice rising in volume.

"If you did you wouldn't lie to me like that."

"I never said I wouldn't lie to you!"

"But do you want to?"

"No! Yes! Bollocks, I'm still doing it!"

"Doing what?"

She gathered herself. "Telling you the bloody truth!"

"No, you aren't," I said. "Not on purpose."

"I – I never said I wouldn't lie to you," she said again, this time with less surety behind it.

"This is all why you don't want to kiss me anymore. You couldn't do that and lie."

"That's not – I don't – " She shook her head. Her hair moved like a melody played by Indian violins. Which of course I couldn't remember hearing, but I knew them when I saw them, or at least things that moved like they sounded. "I can't bloody talk around you, Deasil. I keep getting into these fights, but then I realize they're with myself, and you're not even breaking a sweat. There's not one solitary thing I can -"

"I think you're wrong about that," I said, trying to quell my own frustration, both at her and that I was getting preoccupied with the movement of her hair in the middle of all this. "I think you have problems when you try not to talk around me. Look, I may be wrong about this because I have been trying not to read you so you're mostly a complete mystery to me except for the parts I'd figured out before and anyway what do I know, but it seems to me that things go better when you're honest with me. I know that sounds completely selfish coming from me and maybe it is because I sure do a lot better when you are, but when you tell me how you feel or… or show me, it seems like… I don't know, I mean, doesn't everything seem kind of… you know, really great? Like, fabulously great? Big, gulping lungfuls of great? Like everything is going to be all right? Or is that just me and I'm making a fool out of myself?"

She had this way of being closer to me than I thought she was. Funny thing – I wasn't sure if she was going to deck me or turn my head into a ham or what. But I'd figured out something in my short waking life. Whatever it was, I wanted to be there to find out.

I must have been thinking that fairly loudly into her eyes. There was even a bit of glowing going on. Oh, well, I thought, maybe she'll knock me unconscious and end my being such a complete and utter –

She chose an entirely different option, the curtain-twisting thunder smooch from volcano paradise island.

Called curtain-twisting, because that's what they all did. Every one of them in the house. Apparently fixing them required magic, because they were quite wound up. Thunder, because my ears were roaring. It certainly felt like something really loud was happening. Volcano paradise island, well, that should be fairly obvious. If the lava doesn't get you and the earthquakes don't tear you to pieces and the ash flow doesn't burn you to a cinder, and the natives don't kill you and roast you on a spit, and you're not eaten by sharks or step on a stingray, then there's no better place to be on earth.

Probably good that Ginny won't be able to read this. She would have hated the word "smooch."

•

When we could breathe again, but still take in each other's breath, we spoke.

"I really do like that," she said.

All of the poets in the world came rushing out of history, breathless with inspiration, and knocked at my door, blushing with endearments and sonnets and praises of great beauty and grace for me to speak.

Unfortunately, I was not in at the moment and said, "My feet feel hot."

I will say that it is special, when your forehead is pressed to someone else's, to know they are smiling because you can feel it in their brows.

"So do mine, you foolish man," she said. She was so right, I was foolish, addled, my eyes were half-open and slow, my nose nudging hers, my awareness of how her mouth moved, how warm she was. How it was good for something to feel absolutely right after this evening. I guess the wrongness really affected me, more than I thought.

"Just… don't go away right now," I said. "Just let us stay right for a moment more."

What I felt on my cheek a moment later turned out to be the warmth of her tears.

"I won't…I'm not," she said. "I'm not."

•

It was a weird quid pro quo. We kiss, she tells me about some horrible thing that happened to her. Lots of thoughts popped into my head. I'm a little in love with misery; I'll show you mine now; as long as you're in there… these were things I imagined she was saying to me by doing this. Probably none of those literally. No, actually all of that was totally wrong. I'd ask you to forget that whole line of thinking, except the idea of forgetting is abhorrent to me. I don't want to forget anything. When I have any control over it, I don't.

Anyway, she pulled away from me, though not too fast, which was good because I didn't therefore die from it. She sat back down at the table, looking at my shoulders and hair, I think, and smiling, and I felt measured, but in the best possible way. I wanted a whole lot more, but I didn't exactly know what more was, so I sat also, bumping arms with her, on her side.

"I'm going to talk more now," she said.

"Okay, I'll try to … I'll be… I'm ready, go ahead."

A sighing laugh. "You don't have to do anything special, just listen." She lowered her head a little, and I could see her profile through a curtain of hair, smiling a little, before it went away and she pulled her hair behind her neck. I tried not to think about that soft skin under her delicate ears and how my nose would get along famously in there, I mean if there were a thing made for noses in the way that hats were made for the head or socks for the feet or a carport for the car or something, then my nose would fit in the place below her ear like it fit in whatever that thing that fit the nose would be. Though why anyone would need a nose cover was beyond me. Bring Lassie home, Deasil. Who's Lassie? Can't you be serious? Maybe it got cold, the nose. Maybe there's too much sun, and you need a … Oh, Ginny's talking now.

"I want to explain something to you," she said, slowly rubbing the table with her finger in a way that made me remember I had change in my pocket, "and I'm not sure what it is. But it seems that when I… when I tell you something, like you said, things get better. So I'm going to have a go at it. Save all questions for the end. There will be a short quiz after." Again, the hint of a smile, but that made me know that this wasn't in any way likely to be funny.

"After the diary was destroyed and we got out of the chamber, my family got weird around me. You know how there's a point beyond which if you don't talk about something, people assume you don't want to or can't, and so they just sort of don't talk about it either?"

Say yes. Let her know you get it. "No…" Nice to know I can always count on myself to say the right thing.

"Well, that's all right, anyway that's what happened. I didn't go blubbering to Lily or James, and my brothers mostly felt like they were late to all of this, and so they tried to be protective in retrospect, which was well intentioned but a bit useless, really. And annoying, after a while. It wasn't that I didn't want to be around them, just that I felt like they had absolutely no idea of what I'd been through and no amount of words would explain it to them. In the end they gave me a lot of room to be myself and come to them, which for them meant that they didn't have to ask me any uncomfortable questions and for me meant that I was mostly alone. The other students at school all knew about it somehow, I guess Dumbledore felt he had to tell them -" That hoary, grizzled idiot. "- and they all treated me like I was a … well, I don't know, but they were all maybe a little scared of me, as if I might start petrifying them at random or something. All of them but Neville and Luna. Even the teachers treated me differently. I'd swear that Flitwick used smaller words when I was around. But none of them was as bad as Snape."

She palmed the tabletop and sighed. "The first day of term on the following year. The first day. I had that greasy bat for double Potions first thing. Do you know what he said to me? 'I gather that your first boyfriend was a bit too much for you.' In front of everyone. All my friends and the Slytherins for good measure."

"What did you do?"

"I said, 'I guess he was a bit too much for you too.'"

Like. Like her. A whole lot. Even if I have no idea what she's talking about, sounds like he deserved it.

By the way, I hadn't met him yet. This is what happens when an irresponsible force meets an impressionable object. My whimsy meeting my attention. Stories come out like they do. Anyway.

"I'm sure that went over well," I said.

"It was a lot of detentions, which weren't any fun at all, but that was only a problem for me. The worse thing was, he took a huge number of house points for what he called my 'cheek', and my classmates were very irritated with me."

"House points?"

"You remember that the students at Hogwarts are sorted into four groups when they begin school there?"

"Yeah. Still not clear on why that's a good idea."

"I don't know if it is or not, really," she said. "To my mind it makes the people in a certain house sort of conform unconsciously to a type. What if you're courageous but bookish, and analytically savvy, and loyal to your friends?"

"Then you're Hermione."

She laughed. "Exactly. She got stuck in a house of bold loudmouths who charge in without thinking when she was clearly the type to do research. She felt like an outsider the whole time she was there."

"Oh. She didn't have any friends?"

"She had friends. Ron, and Neville, and Luna in spite of herself, and me, and the twins."

"The twins? Really?"

"They initially thought she was hung up on rules and would never so much as look out of line, but a time came when she was able to help them pull a huge prank without breaking any school rules, and they sort of forged a bond with her after that. Also it didn't pay to antagonize their brother's girlfriend."

"I guess not."

"House points," she said.

"Which are?"

"Every time a person in any house does something that's recognized as outstanding, they get awarded points for their house. Also, if they do something against the rules or bad, points are taken away. At the end of the school year, whichever house has the most points wins the House Cup. So in any event, because Snape had taken so many points from me and by extension my house, everyone in the house was pretty angry with me. It didn't occur to any of them that he might just be a slimy bastard out to get me, so they all decided to blame me for putting our house at the bottom. Even though he regularly took points from my housemates, they were never as many as he took from me."

"I wonder why they didn't see what he was doing," I said.

She looked at me for a moment. "Because they were stupid gits. That's what I went with."

"They were stupid, I agree. They should have stood by you."

"Right. Yeah. Thanks. In any event – I'm talking like you, aren't I? We're just wandering all over…"

"Uh, Gin, if you wouldn't mind getting to the point?" I tried very hard not to smile.

Her mouth stretched in mild derision, directed probably at herself as well as me. "One would think this would suit you," she said.

"It absolutely does," I said.

The red stretched a little wider, and then she went on. "Third year was more of the same from Snape. The year had started out badly enough. We went to the world cup with Neville, and got attacked by Death Eaters. Bastards. I'm going to call them bastards from now on. Is that okay? Good. Then when we got to school, someone had the brilliant idea of holding a tournament, and not a polite one, mind, but full of dragons and angry merpeople and grindylows and that, and one of those bastards disguised himself as a professor and managed to get Neville into the tournament even though he was too young, I think he confunded the goblet, and…"

Okay, I'll admit it. My mind didn't just wander. It rambled. It ranged. It mounted up on a bowlegged camel and dashed far, far away, to a place where things were peaceful and it understood all of the words thrown at it and nothing interfered with its holy meditations on how Ginny's bottom lip moved and how there was a perfectly ivory band of white under her pupils as she looked earnestly at me, telling this completely incomprehensible story. I felt a little bad about it, but honestly, sometimes it was all too much. The strange words, the alien nature of the creatures and plants, and always the underlying magic, so different from the formal magic that people practiced - and different from no magic at all, the simple lives of non-magical folks that, for all of the powerlessness and bending to the will of probability, made me feel a little homesick.

She was charging on ahead. "…so he dumped the egg in the water and all of a sudden the screeching became mermish voices singing and they said that…"

Clearly not safe to come out yet.

Look, I've half a mind to just skip all of her telling the story. It went on and on. I missed a lot of it anyway. Not because I was ignoring her, not by any means. And not to belittle her telling of it. It was just that so much of it was beyond me, and she told her story so matter-of-factly that I understood how all of that was normal to her, and even if I didn't catch it all I still got the important thing, the shape under the water, the underlying feeling of her and the life she lived in and its pace and meaning to her.

What I gathered was that Neville had to compete in this crazy tournament with three other students, two of which were from other schools, and he wasn't really supposed to be in the tournament but somehow he got sucked into it, and Ginny and Ron and Hermione helped him get through it, even though he had to fight a dragon which he somehow subdued with some kind of plant, and he also had to swim in the lake for an hour or something and rescue a friend of his, though he actually tried to rescue some other people too. The whole time this was going on, Snape was ridiculing him every day in class, and making Ginny's life miserable with detentions and insults, and she'd said something about it to my mother, and Mum had gone to Dumbledore and pitched a fit, but Dumbledore had said that he would speak to Snape but he trusted him to be a good teacher and he suggested that maybe Ginny should try to keep her head down a bit in the meantime. My mother had not liked that one bit but clearly this was beyond anything she could prevent because of who Dumbledore was, and Ginny insisted it was something she could handle, so my mother stepped back. Nothing really got any better, and then at the end of the tournament Neville was even with this other guy from school, but the guy did something to help Neville so he kind of let the other guy reach the end first, but the goal was enchanted to be a portkey (I knew what that was, at least) and the other guy vanished as soon as he touched it. His body turned up a few weeks later. So Neville felt really guilty and it kind of changed him, and he started training really hard after that, and Snape latched on to the idea that Ginny had helped Neville and started giving her grief about that every day, and she of course gave back a bit, sometimes arguing with him and sometimes just spiking his food with prank stuff from her brothers. Neville had won by default, so eventually he was presented with a bag of gold that he didn't want, so he gave it to Ginny, and she decided to give it to the twins to start a joke shop. I thought that was very generous of her and said so, and she said that she knew that things were getting tougher all over and everyone needed a good laugh now and then.

"Aren't you going to say anything to all that?" she was saying to me. "I've been talking for a while now and you haven't said a word."

I thought for a moment.

"I like your way," I said.

"My way of what?"

"Telling me things. You know, not the in-the-eye way, the talking way."

"Oh."

"And I…"

"What?"

"I like the…sound of your voice."

Her eyes were soft as she looked up from the table.

"Not just the sound of it," I said, "I mean I like what you're saying and how you see things. I know there's more, and I can't wait to hear it. I really want to hear it. No matter what it is."

Her face was lovely in the light from that glowy thing and she leaned towards me, saying, "All right, then," and bumping my nose with hers.

A moment later when a loud pop occurred behind us, she was half out of her seat with her wand out. Being a little proximity-intoxicated, I kind of swung my head around slowly.

It was only one of the twins. George.

"Bad time to sneak up on someone," she said, as she put her wand down. It made a little extra noise on the table.

"What's up, George?" I said.

He looked a little irritated. "Right – how do you know which one of us is which?"

"You're different people," I said.

That got me a bit of a look. It lasted for a few seconds, until something else occurred to him, and a smile crept up his face.

"Ginny Weasley," he said. "Am I interrupting something?"

She didn't say anything for a moment, so I said, "Well, yeah, as a matter of fact we were just about to–"

"Tea, George," she said. "Would you like. Some tea."

"Oh," he said, "how delightfully formal. I do love a nice cup, you're forced to. Funny how a bit of dried leaf soaked in water can turn any occasion into –"

"What kind. Of tea. Would you like."

"My stars, let me think," George said. "I've always been partial to Earl Grey, but then a little green tea might be good – antioxidants, you know, though I believe there is some blueberry herbal that also has – yes? Hello?" She was advancing on him. I wasn't clear on why he was so effusive about the tea, or why that irritated her – because that's what she was, clearly irritated.

It was a tense stillness. George appeared to be trying to look innocent, but he also appeared to be trying not to look scared as well. Ginny's wand was on him in a way that you wouldn't think of as friendly, even if you liked redheads pointing sticks at you, and you know I wouldn't pass judgment if someone did fancy a bit of that, though I would be unwilling to facilitate it in any way at all, and I'm also in no way implying anything weird about George, I mean anything at all, and if I could ever ask anyone to forget something it would be this whole train of thought.

Abruptly, Molly emerged from a doorway with Arthur behind her, sort of in the manner of a toy train. They were very focused on something else. Arthur was staring at Molly's back. She looked kind of determined, but only kind of. Without looking towards us she said, "George, don't tease your sister." Arthur made a distracted gesture, a wave somewhere among the points of "It's not important", "Cut that out", and "How'd that fly get in here?" They disappeared into another room.

It took a bit of the edge off.

Oh, I thought. He's teasing her. That was something brothers and sisters did, apparently. What he was teasing her about, I had no idea.

George and Ginny had watched the engine and caboose pass through together. I'd been aware of their heads turning in tandem, and they remained trained on the door their parents had gone through.

"Amazing," he said. "Didn't look up, just came in, and the woman knows I did something and calls me on it."

"She's good," Ginny said. George stared after them for a moment, with an expression I couldn't read on his face, maybe because I was used to a whole different set of them on him. It seemed to take him a moment to collect himself. But he was resilient, if nothing else.

"Well, must be off," he said. "I would hate to break up a mood."

George grinned in a slightly manic way at me before disapparating in a puff of brown and yellow smoke. I hadn't seen that one before.

I discovered why George had grinned at me when my eyes started to water from what had to be the worst thing I have ever smelled. Like some creature that only ate rotten eggs crawled into someone's colon to die. I mean it was enough to chase her beauty from the front of my mind to contemplate knocking myself out so I wouldn't smell it anymore. Ginny looked both disgusted and furious.

"It's one of George's new ones," Ginny said. "For the shop."

"He does that and then sells it?" I said.

She laughed a little. It was sunlight on water. Which I might actually have seen. Oh, great, more weird, only less. "No. It's a prank you can buy. It used to be that you would use a dung bomb, that's a little blob of really horrible stuff that bursts with impact and makes this really horrid stench, but you could always see the thing because it made smoke. So the twins invented a variant that has no residue and no color unless you want it to, so it would be easier to make someone think that their friend had made a raspberry." She observed my expression. "If that were your goal, I mean, if there were a need to, you know… bollocks. Explaining raspberry pranks. Ginny's getting cuter by the second, isn't she?"

Yes. "Nope." Really, yes. "Yes."

Ron chose this moment to burst in to the room but was stopped in his tracks by the stench, which did sort of hit you like a sturgeon, which is not a common turn of phrase, I realize, so clarity demands an indication that I mean a large stiff fish swung at you with some force.

"Whew! Who sent the howler?" he said.

"Wasn't me," I said.

A little later I said, "Or her. Of course."

Ron gave me a look and was about to say something else that might have been educational, but stopped immediately.

"Of course," he said.

"It was one of George's," Ginny said.

"Came all this way to spread the warmth?" Ron said.

"Would have been a lot worse if it had been warm," I said.

"Keep it to yourself," she said, "or they'll make that a feature."

•

Okay, we've gone far afield. But it all did happen, just not in that order. Though after we cleared the air and Ron left wondering aloud about what happened to all the bloody curtains, I told Ginny that the Death Eater guys I saw, and I hate using the term because it's so stupid, but anyway those guys were unlike anything I'd ever seen before and though I knew what they were after a little bit, I couldn't stop thinking about how wrong they were, and that it was different for me because I'd had a clean slate and not grown up around them, and she accepted that. Then she thanked me for being a stubborn git, kissed my cheek in a way that made my feet feel hot again, and went up to her room. Nothing else happened that night, and I won't be revisiting it. So you know.

But anyway, we were up in the school's medical center place, though I'm sure they had a better name for it, and a stretchy woman had just come in and started running the list of plosive consonants that she favored. And when I say stretchy I mean that she looked like someone had pulled hard on her hair and stretched her face back tightly against her skull, giving her a somewhat tense expression, and then anchored it with a silly white hat with flaps on it. And while we're at it, when I say running the list of plosive consonants, I mean she was saying "Puh…kuh…tuh…buh…" and so on. Look it up - I did, later. She seemed to be mostly oriented on Sirius.

Eventually he said, "Hello, Poppy."

This stopped her.

Hermione said, "He was innocent all along, Madame Pomfrey. He's been released."

"Well, I can see that," she said. She took a moment to make a decision, then stepped forward and said in a steadier voice, "And of course he was innocent. Well, let's have a look at you, then. You'll be wanting some restorative potions and –"

"We're not here for me," he said. "We're here for James' son."

She took me in like you take a glass of water thrown in your face for no reason. "I thought…didn't he…"

"Nobody's ever glad to see me," I said.

"Poor dear," Ginny said. "Bit of a party-crasher, aren't you?"

"And why are you here then?" the doctor said to me.

"He apparated half into a wall," Ron said.

"That cannot be so," the doctor said. "He would not have survived that."

"Well, I had been feeling a bit run-down," I said. "Maybe it was just a little spot of death, all along."

She hmmph'd as she approached me with her wand. "Where on earth did you learn to apparate?"

"I didn't."

"Who brought you along then? Sirius?"

"He didn't do anything, except help rescue me. I did it myself."

"Was it accidental magic, then?"

"No, I meant it," I said. "Sometime it happens when I need to get away from something, but I can make it happen when I want to. I was having a massive headache and I just let it happen, I guess."

"D- Harry has known nothing about magic for most of his life. Be silent, D," Ginny said to me with the tiniest gleam in her eye. "He came back to us some weeks ago and has been rendering his own kind of magic since then. No wand, no incantations, just making things happen. A bit of dissociative response, leading to subconsciously-driven manifestations of magic."

Oh, yeah. She studied this. I'd forgotten that she had taken a leave from the university or whatever it was. You know how you see something new in someone and it just adds to the whole picture, reminds you that there's more depth to this person than you're commonly aware of, and you think it's just the best thing ever and she's the best thing ever and you hope that you have something to offer in spite of your being functionally a month old and having a candle-flame of an attention span?

Maybe you don't.

"So unless I'm mistaken," the doctor said, "you're telling me that this boy is practicing potentially dangerous magic without any training or knowledge and thus endangering his life and maybe the lives of others?"

Hey, uh, wait, is the gist of what I thought.

"Well, then, there must be no doubt at all that he's a Potter. Recklessness runs in that family."

I peripherally noticed Ron closing his eyes and shaking his head slightly.

"You know…" I said.

"Oh, I think I do know," she said. "Your father had the same lack of sense when it came to himself."

"That isn't…"

"He was in here every other day, it seemed. Crashing into something, blowing something up, or dragging one of his friends in here because of some foolish stunt he'd pulled. It was bad enough that he put himself in danger, but taking other people with him…" She had collected some little bottles of something and was now poking her wand at me, and even though it hadn't touched me it felt spiky and invasive. "Completely thoughtless."

"What is it with people slamming my family today?" I said.

"And one would think," she said as she waved her wand a little too near my face, "that Lily would have taught him something, but she was too doe-eyed over him to do it. Not a word of remonstrance, no, just calm as you please, oh, he'll be fine, he meant no harm, honestly-"

"This is going a little too far. I don't even know you." That wand work was really starting to irk me.

"I know everything I need to know about you – otherwise you wouldn't be here, fresh from some foolishness that you had no business being caught up in."

"You don't know where I've been," I said. "You don't have any idea what happened to me."

"Maybe if you would learn to keep out of –"

"Lady," I said, "you need to shut up now. And stop waving that thing at me!"

And shut up she did. Although she was still making a mistake, in that she was fixing her mouth to let me have it. I could tell. She was getting ready to rain it down on my head, because it was her sacred right to put me in my place.

So I said, "Not another word or I'll bill you."

She paused, gathering herself at that statement, and then said "Of all."

That's as far as it went. The rest were quacks. The intent was still there, I mean you could hardly mistake her tone, but it was all duck talk at the moment.

Ron looked like I'd just bought him a Quidditch team.

"D, that – that's just not right," Ginny said. She wasn't laughing, but only just.

"Why doesn't anybody else get told that?" I said. Pomfrey was pointing her wand at herself and squawking frantically. I made a mental note to tell Remus that his method of magic sucked. Mine was inexact and quirky and unreliable, but lots of it was funny.

"You need to listen to me," I said to her. "This garbage about my father causing you trouble has got to stop. What on earth are you doing here if injuries are such a personal affront to you – like these people should be stunting their lives so you can have longer tea breaks? And what the hell gives you the right to take shots at injured people anyway? Would you do that if I had just met you in the hall? Honestly, this school seems like a nightmare. I just met one teacher who takes his own inner drama out on the students, and now a doctor who thinks she gets to punish patients for needing her help. How long has this been going on? Why don't you try to smack around healthy people and see how you like that?"

She wasn't quacking anymore. The bill was stilled. I had her attention. That was all I wanted. It was really something watching that utterly alien feature get drawn back into her skin until her face was normal.

"I… I am unaccustomed to having a patient transfigure me in my infirmary, and without a wand, and lecture me on how I treat the people in my care. Nevertheless," she said, perhaps sensing the imminent likelihood of growing other animal bits if she didn't change course, "I have clearly offended you with the manner in which I have spoken. You are asking me to look inward in a place where I … but you are very like James was. And it is equally … difficult to see you in trouble. It reminds me of the many, many times I treated him in this infirmary. Broken limbs, contusions, singed flesh, missing eyebrows, scratches, dog bites, head injuries…let us say he kept me busy for seven years, and I knew him very well at the end. If I am… harsh concerning him …"

"It's… you just… what you mean is… okay, I've got nothing."

Ginny smothered a laugh with a fake cough. It lasted a little too long. Basically it only served to draw attention to her for its volume, duration and utter falseness. I mean the heads turning was a thing to behold – it was like something I could kind of remember where a whole lot of the same things turned at the same time. The quality of my internal metaphors was not great, and I was wondering if they would ever get better.

"What she means is, she hates to see such a fine specimen of manhood injured in any way. Really, it hurts the soul. Hello, Poppy," my father said, entering the room with Remus and Tonks. A few quick steps and he was kissing her cheek and making her blush.

"The real reason I was in here all of the time," he began, only to be shushed by the doctor.

"Nothing changes, even after all of this time. He's supposed to be grown up and married," she said.

"Well, Poppy, you know how it is, you never forget your first."

He got a smack for that, but not a hard one.

"Your son was just telling me how wrong I was to ever speak ill of you," she said, coming back over to me.

"I can see how mistaken I was," I said.

"Hmm," she said as she began to wave her wand at me again.

"And for what it's worth, I'm very sorry about the duck thing."

"What duck thing?" my father said.

"Harry was trying to get me to stop complaining about you, and he wandlessly – well, he transfigured me a bit."

"Deasil, she means no harm," he said. "She's taken care of me for many years. And, you might consider not transfiguring people against their will. They will generally find it unpleasant."

"Severus did," I said, and there were immediately a group of suppressed snickers from my friends.

"What's Snape doing here?" Sirius said.

"Bullying students and hating my parents," I said.

"Well," my father said, "you might consider not transfiguring most people."

"He's a professor here," Sirius said, taking that in. "What in hell is wrong with the old man…"

"Harry," Poppy said, "when did you say you started showing your magic?"

"Well," I said, "I think I may have done some when I was younger, but I don't remember. It's a long story, but the short form is I haven't been allowed to remember anything from day to day for most of my life, since I was a small child, so I couldn't say when I did anything at all, or if I did."

Her face was, if possible, even more tight. I imagined someone had given her hat a few turns while I wasn't looking. "You appear to have a somewhat tumescent magical core. Perhaps it's due to your not using magic even through your maturation at seventeen."

"I matured at seventeen?" I said.

"All wizards and witches do."

"Who picked that?"

"What?" Thank goodness, some points. I was getting low.

"I mean, no matter who you are and if you're short or tall or whatever, on your seventeenth birthday the lights come on in the house?"

"I don't make the rules, Harry."

This was a sensible answer. "Okay, so what does that imply?"

"You've got a bit of a surplus of magic," she said. "It's hard to tell if it's temporary, or if your capacity for magic has expanded…I'd like to run some more tests…"

"Uh, can you just tell me if being one with a wall has done me any harm?"

"No, for one reason or another," she said, "you appear to have escaped injury."

"Try not to sound disappointed," I said. "I'll try to strain something later if you like."

"You are clearly his son," she said. "And he was always one of my favorites."

Then after a pause, she leaned forward and said in my ear, "Cheeky bugger."

I don't think anyone else heard her. That was all right. And when she straightened up, it appeared that someone had given her hat a few twists in the opposite direction. She was all right with me.

The fire flared in the fireplace, and Minerva's head appeared in it. "Deasil, are you there?"

"Yes," I said.

"I have just spoken with the headmaster," she said.

"Where are you?" Hermione said, her voice tense.

"In his office. He came in, asking if I had seen you, and I'm afraid that I told him you were likely in the medical wing."

"Did he seem weirder than usual?" I said.

"That's what I am trying to tell you. When he left the room, for a moment I noticed his eyes turning red. I fear…"

"That is really, really not good. Is that ever good? The red eye thing?"

"No, it is not," she replied. "I am going to attempt to clear the school of students, but you may need to take steps."

"Lots of them," I said.

"Thank you, Minerva," my father said. "We'll find our way out." Her head disappeared from the flames.

"Right," he said, turning to Sirius. "Humpbacked witch."

"Safe as I recall it," Sirius said. "Everyone follow us."

We all scrambled to the door and made our way out. I was wondering why my father was calling Minerva names and why Sirius thought it was safe to do so. We were passing the slowly spinning stairs going downward, and this also seemed inexplicable to me – I wanted out of there – and I wound up lagging behind a little, at which point I happened to look up a few levels and saw him leaning over the balustrade, looking down at me.

What I was not prepared for was how red his eyes actually were. Even from this distance, they were glowing and as expressionless as a cigarette lighter. There was only one thing that could have made it any creepier, and that would have been him seeing me, smiling, and laughing before pulling his head from view.

"Uhh – he's coming downstairs," I said.

The hallways around and below us were filling with students.

Through the crowd I could see my father and Sirius herding the others and some students into a passageway behind a statue. I knew I had to follow them quickly if I wanted to get out.

I knew this. But at the top of the next landing, I saw a familiar face. The girl who I'd seen before, threatened by the group of boys that wound up wiping themselves out. She was frozen in fear. The current of students roiled around her, but she was still, clutching a bag to herself.

Well, this should only take a second, right?

I went up the stairs two at a time for the first four stairs, then came to the realization that I was still pretty beat from the apparating and all that, and in a much less swashbuckling style I continued up, edging through the kids until I reached her. She didn't acknowledge my presence until I put a hand on her shoulder.

"Time to go," I said.

"You – you," she said.

"Me," I said. "I'm the guy helping you today. Listen. One foot in front of the other, down the stairs, outside, go be safe. Okay?"

"Okay," she said.

She didn't move.

"I, uh, I hate to rush things," I said, "but there's a crazy guy coming down the steps and he's likely to, uh, you know, do something crazy, and we don't want to be here when that, uh, you know."

Nothing. People all around us, feet squeaks, crowd babble, shoulders, books. She was as still as the statue of the humpbacked witch downstairs. Oh. That explains that.

All right. Time to cut through the fog. "You." I pointed. "Run." I made perhaps the most idiotic arm gestures possible to indicate running. "Now." I had no pantomime for that. "Your boyfriend needs you outside."

Well, it worked. She gasped, then darted down the stairs after everyone else. I was shaking my head at the girl, only kind of aware of a staircase from above swinging towards me. When I turned to look at it, I saw Dumbledore standing calmly at the top of it, smiling at me.

Okay, then, time for me to go.

Except the stairs leading down had already swung away from me.

Who designed this nuthouse?

I turned and ran.

It's funny how when you do something by mistake, like making a wrong turn, down a hallway that had nothing to indicate it was the right way to go, like anyone else going down it for instance, but instead had other indications like the sound of their footsteps going the other way, that you don't stop doing that thing right away. A part of your mind keeps you doing the thing, hoping that something will pop up and show you it was the right thing to do in the first place, and maybe those other people had actually been the ones who goofed, and so you keep on, say, running, though not with the same vigor or spirit that you'd had before, but that part of you that wants it not to have been a mistake is saying, "Come on, now, keep it lively, you're doing well," and as things continue to be indicated to the contrary it says "now, you've got to have a good attitude about these things, or it'll never work out," and then when you realize you're all the way down the hall and it's quiet except for the approach of a crazy guy with a wand who wants to burn you to a cinder, the voice is saying stuff like, "this is all because you don't think positively enough, well, you want it to be the wrong way, it's the wrong way – happy now?"

Maybe it's not like that for most people, but it is for me. I was running out of corridor, and running out of places to run. I found a door, a plain wooden door, and went through it. There was a lock on the inside, which I put to use, and then I had a glance around the room I was in to see if there was a rock I could hide under. Not really thinking clearly at all. Not trying to disappear or blend in with the plain stone walls or hide behind the eight-foot mirror standing off to one side. My thoughtfulness had simply deserted me. I needed something to snap me out of this, and I had no idea what that would be.

What did it was the smell of burning wood and a horrible pain in my forehead.

The door I had come through had smoke rising from it, and cracks were appearing in the panels. The iron latch I'd fastened was beginning to glow white.

This meant someone wanted in.

With a noise something like an abrupt asthmatic cough, the door suddenly stopped being a door anymore.

Through the doorway came my grinning pursuer. Not hurried at all. Just parting the smoke like he owned it, like it was his pet. He stopped a few steps inside, and issued a soft laugh.

"Why is it that I'm never happy when you are?" I said.

"It takes different things to amuse us."

"Seems like everything's making you smile these days."

"Ah, but as I have said before," he said, "whenever I smile, the back of my head frowns."

He was all wrong.

And what's more, it didn't feel like him. He was hiding something.

Well, here I was. Being handed a giant shite sandwich. Time to take a bite.

"You've been hiding it long enough," I said. "I want to see who I'm really talking to."

"Yes," he said. He pulled his hat off in a ragged motion and it fell to his side on the floor. A kind of liquidity came over the false image of his head, and then he bowed, now bald, and slowly revealing, like a horrid sunrise, the swelling form of a second face on his head, this one incomplete, stretching his skin from beneath until it whitened. No nose to speak of, a lipless mouth, and eyes of the same red that his front pair assumed when the other, whoever it was, dominated.

"Your name is … Harry."

I couldn't tell how it was able to speak. Where did the air come from to push out this muffled, congested-sounding voice, what muscles drove the lips into motion? I watched Dumbledore's head bob as if retching, forcing the sound out of this sluggishly-animated mask. It was truly ugly magic.

"At some point," I said. "Who are you?"

"We have … met before," the mask said, pumping words out laboriously. "When you were … a baby."

It was really, really nasty magic. It made the word "baby" sound obscene, which was some trick.

"You … cast me … out of my … body."

Tom.

I said, "And you replaced the old one with – this old one?" Not exactly a step up to me.

"He was my… teacher, he… thought he would… save me. He was… always a… fool."

He thought he could handle this thing? I'd heard Dumbledore had a lot of middle names, and I assumed one of them was "Hubris."

"So you're riding him." I thought for a minute. There was something I wanted to know, and at that moment it seemed more important than any other question I could think of.

"Does it get sweaty under the hat?"

I didn't say it was important.

"This is surprisingly simple," the mask said. It sank below the horizon of his skull as he raised his head and stared, red eyes brighter than they were before.

Dumbledore advanced on me, his hands swinging unused at his sides, the palms facing backwards. For some reason that made me aware of how scared and disgusted and unnerved I was. It gave the impression of him being a marionette more than anything. I felt severely unprepared for any of this, and took a few steps backward as he approached. How did I end up alone? Why did we split up? There was something here that I needed, but I hadn't found it. Hadn't quite located it. Still backing up, hearing the scrape of my own feet on the stone, looking around, the room was empty except for the mirror, but I didn't need that, all I needed was some .. little … oh boy, he's right close now, what am I supposed to –

And I lost my balance and fell over backwards.

He had come up to my feet and stopped. One of my heels was resting on a bit of raised stone.

That was what I was looking for.

He was still. Not looking at me anymore, but into the mirror.

"I see…I…" he said. "I see socks."

Oh. Well, then.

"I see…fire," he said. "I see the end of … I see…that is not my vision. That is not what I see!" This last was a bellow. His face contorted, veins visible in his neck, an old man's neck, and his hands came up clenched, and then grasped his head. "I see you now – and you are not me! Expectoro!"

His head shook so hard that his slack skin flapped audibly. A black mist seemed to rise from him, like oil smoking in a pan. As his eyes rolled up in his head, the mist rose up and disconnected itself from him with a hissing sound - then, moving like a swarm of bees, it descended, before I could think to do anything, and surrounded my head. A moment of the most intense claustrophobia, a gagging sensation in my throat, my scar burned fiercely, and the next thing I knew, the room was empty.

No mirror, no tragic/comic Dumbledore. No noise from the corridor. No temperature. Nothing.

Nothing but a viscous, oily black substance covering me entirely. I struggled to see through it, but all I could really see were giant floaters that lazily connected over my field of vision, drawn together by surface tension. In the middle of the cold I felt, somewhere, a voice, my voice.

"You're a curious one," the voice said. A different me? I didn't think so. It was hard to be sure.

No. "You're the one made out of smoke," I said.

"This… this is what fate has sent to conquer me," he said. "You're an infant. No one's bothered so much as to clean the afterbirth off of you. There's nothing to you. There's nothing to know at all. Friend to house elves, a wizard of autism, a sword with no edge."

A hissing in the silence, then he said, "A world with you as a weapon does not deserve to continue."

Tom was a bit of an ass.

"Seems like I'm enough to put an end to you," I said. Which sounded stranger than one might expect, because I increasingly felt like I was talking to myself.

"Why would that be? Because of the ramblings of a charlatan, a cheap tin seer? Do you expect that I would defer my existence to the will of that three-knut fortune-teller?"

"Because you don't belong here," I said. "Not like I want to or know how to, but here I am."

"Nor shall I bend myself to your will, newborn."

"Bend… or break, we all have a choice," I said.

"Bravado," he said, "from someone so freshly dropped at the world's doorstep. You know nothing of conflict, and nothing of my power."

"Probably," I said. How was that bravado?

"A war will change you."

"That seems fairly obvious. Sounds to me like you think that will help you."

"You will do things that hurt you more than they hurt your worst enemy. You will become the thing your family has fought to destroy all of these years."

"Why would I do that?"

"Because: in order for you to save the ones you love, you will have to become like me. You will have to murder me. And you will have to murder all of my Death Eaters, because any one of them that's left will surely try to kill you or your family."

"You're telling me… to kill your followers?"

"I'm telling you who you will become. It is inevitable."

"Yeah, but…how do you know? How are you an expert on what happens to anybody?"

A sound that was not a sound, a sigh like light reflecting off of a blade.

"You come to me already mortally wounded, newborn."

"You sound like you've been hit in the head a few times yourself."

"You have no understanding of what I am and no way of –"

"You're right," I said. " I don't understand you. But I do have a way."

The room turned inward upon itself, and I went for the source of the voice, something that had been around me but in this inverting space was now within me - what had been like an oily coating around me, a polychrome slick, was now its inverse, a glistening form, a black lump like a brain mass, hints of horrid color glimmering from its irregular surface, and I knew that this was my target, and I reached for it and held it and plumbed it, expecting great depths but not ever, ever this much darkness.

Boy. Mother insane, dead. Father gone. Finding power in himself, more than he could begin to understand. His unformed will shaping things. Finding fear in himself, masking it with fear from others, holding his fear underwater until it drowned, clutching his arms, taking something of him with it, or was that the girl who laughed at him? Or was it with him? But what good was she if she could die? Her limp fingers useless, her hair pointlessly lovely in the water. The power the overwhelming thing, now that she was gone – he had done this, he controlled her, it. And the rarest of moments in his life – a twisted empathy. If this could be done to her, could it also be done to him? No, he refuses it. He will command it and he will visit it upon the weak, revealing their flaws. He finds ways, as he grows and it grows, to hide himself away in many places. People become things. Those who run from him have no hope. Those who embrace him are doomed without knowing it. He will stack up their bodies and build a castle strong enough to resist all attacks, to feed the enemy and leave himself untouched. When all fires are finally extinguished, and all corpses are ash, he will remain, and death will die.

The space we were in spasmed, inverted, and I was surrounded once again by the cloying black film of his will. A revulsion I could not begin to escape.

"Well, I've really had about enough of this," I said. "Get off me."

"I have possessed you. I'm joined with you now – we are the same. You cannot throw me out."

Great.

I was trying to remember what Dumbledore had said in the chamber, something about seeing the difference of something so he could be free, and just now he'd seen one thing in the mirror instead of himself, and then something else, and maybe because I felt like I was talking to myself that something was especially important about this, I felt like I had to figure out how to get this other me away, but my mind was racing, and I couldn't make myself focus on the problem.

I was thinking of a hot dog stand.

Not the whole thing, just one part. Just a small part of it. The place where the relish was. On an aluminum tray, with a mostly-clear plastic lid, that had a white plastic spoon sticking out of it. I'd passed the stand, must have passed it often, and over time a question had built up and remained like a mineral stain on a faucet, because I'd asked it so often of myself, the same time every day, so that I could remember it. Was that the same spoon forever? Did he clean it or just let it sit there day after day? Then one day there was someone there, getting a hot dog, and after he slathered relish all over the hot dog, the vendor took it from him and dropped it in a hidden trash compartment, replacing it with a new spoon. I had no idea why I remembered it, why I passed the thing, where I was going, what brought it to my mind. And this, to me, was very familiar. And as far as I knew, a very singular experience.

The difference between him and me, in this case, was very simple.

"I may not know who I am," I said, "but I know it isn't you."

A schism, a crack from the core to the stars, and one last thought from that oily presence – "Not yet." Then Tom was gone.

The universe vomited me on the floor. The scar on my head burned. I felt like I never wanted to be in a small space ever again. Like even a tight sweater would be too much. Like a hug would be too much. Like a handshake would. Like a wave from across the room.

I shivered a little and tried to look around. The room was fuller than when I left it. In front of me was that big idiot Dumbledore, Mister Problem-Solver, looking at me like I might do something weird. I thought that was a little rich. And somehow, naturally, he'd taken the time to put on a hat. Surrounding him, with lots of pointed wands, were my family.

My family. Who would probably hate me later, if Tom was right.

Dad, Sirius, Remus, Tonks, Ron and Hermione. And Ginny, looking furious and scared. If I had been Dumbledore, I'd have been just a bit worried about my own personal safety.

But I wasn't the bastard here. "It's actually him now," I said. "Tom was in there with him, but he left." The thought alone was enough to raise bile.

The wands all slowly, as if in a ballet, shifted over to me.

"He left me as well," I said, my throat thick with memory. "Didn't anybody see some black smoky stuff a second ago?"

"That's what that was?" Ron said. The wands lowered. Ginny looked torn, as if she wanted both to come to me and to run away as fast as she could. I couldn't blame her at all.

"I'm assuming that's what it was," I said. "What the hell do I know about anything? You people live here, in this... Don't any of you know what's going on?" It came out a little fast, because I hated talking, because I didn't trust that what would come out of my mouth was actually all me talking. This happens when you've heard your own voice in your head saying things you aren't thinking.

"That's what it was," my father said.

"Merlin, the students," Hermione said.

"I believe Tom would not try the same failed trick four times," Dumbledore said, with a glance at Ginny.

"Three times," I said.

"Pardon?"

"The second one worked on you, jackass."

Ginny released her breath but said nothing.

"Deasil," my father said, coming to me. His countenance warm, filled with concern, he held my hand and passed his wand over me. I registered Hermione and Ron dashing from the room, but I was busy noticing that a hand on my shoulder was in fact all right with me. I figured he was going to reprimand me for being disrespectful, but instead he said, "Can you tell me what happened?"

I really, really liked him.

"I can tell you what I saw, but most of it was way over my head," I said. That would be a bit of a theme with me. "Dumbledore came in after me, he had a face on the back of his head, we talked a little and I figured out it was Tom–" Gasps for everyone. A round for the lot. I was buying. "-and then he came at me, and I fell down and he saw himself in the mirror and started talking about a sock and then fire and the end of something, and then he started yelling at himself, and then a black cloud thing came out of him and got all over me, and then Tom and I talked and he tried to take me over but I thought about a spoon, and he left and here we are."

"Oh," he said.

"I saw my heart's desire in the mirror," Dumbledore said, "and then I saw another vision, a vision most…terrible, and I knew it wasn't mine, and thus I was able to draw a line between us and cast him out from me." He looked down at me and this really annoying little smile started at his mouth. A moment later, his eyes started to crinkle up and he said, "I knew that you would understand what I said in the Chamber, and you have proven-"

"I don't know what the hell you're talking about," I said. "Or smiling about. If you knew how to fix this you should have told me how to, not given me a stupid riddle. Or you should have told somebody else a long time ago. What's wrong with you?"

That stupid look melted.

Sirius made a small sound, not a laugh, but when I glanced at him I liked his sideburns.

"It was luck that got you out of this one, old wizard," he said to Dumbledore.

"What is he doing here?" the old man said.

"He's a free man, Albus," my father said. "He was wrongly –"

"This can not be allowed," Dumbledore said. I noticed at this moment that Sirius had no wand. Surely it would have been out by now. "This information is too sensitive-"

My father shouted, "He has a right to know this as much as –"

"He is unstable and unpredictable, as always, and from a Dark-"

"You're wrong about him," Tonks said, "you haven't been here! You don't know what has happened!"

Dumbledore was shaking his head slightly, and in a similar way to that other stupid expression, another expression was congealing on his face. A regretful look.

This wasn't good to me. Not that much of anything was. I began to get to my feet.

"It is for the best that he should forget all of this," Dumbledore said, drawing a wand from his sleeve to begin to point it at Sirius. "You will understand in time."

The next sound was his wand clattering to the floor. It rolled to a stop at Sirius' feet.

Dumbledore closed his eyes, frowning faintly. "This is foolish. It is for the best, and I do not require a wand for this." He opened his eyes again and focused on Sirius. "Obliv-"

The word didn't finish as it was interrupted by a loud slapping sound. A red mark appeared on Dumbledore's face, followed by his expression of surprise.

Then a thudding blow sounded, and he doubled over, his arms and body concave around a deep impression in his middle. Another, and he straightened up, his mouth slack, uncomprehending, and then another thump, and another, his body buffeted about by something invisible like a loose sail in the wind, his robes flaring and caving in, the tempo rising, small bits of words making it to his lips before being slapped away, a shoulder bent, an arm flailing, spittle flying, snapping cloth, dry thuds and his breath being expelled by force, and finally a shattering silence.

Evidently the blows were the only thing keeping him standing, so without ado he dropped like a bag of hammers to the floor.

It was very still in the room. I found it significant that no one present came to his aid.

I made my way over to him, and bent down by his head. My hands shook a little, and my scar was still burning, though not as badly.

"No more obliviations," I said. "I fucking hate obliviations. You're not the king of magic land. You're a human being like the rest of us.

"And don't you forget it."

•

Thanks to Jules for the idea of the Mirror of Erised drawing the line between Dumbledore and Tom, and for her laughter even though it induced coughing fits, and for another gift, a perfect gift, that only she could give me. And thanks to Freja for being a singular reader and a gentle usher. If it's keeping her interested, I must be doing something right. I made use of the HP Lexicon to remind me of where things were in Hogwarts. I never imagined that I would give a nod to John Donne in anything, but there it is in Tom's mind. And also a Patton Oswalt reference viz. the usage (though not the origination) of the phrase "bag of hammers". If the usage offends, then my apologies, Patton, from one geek to another. I know how every other fandom appears to one who's not into them.

Since I haven't posted a disclaimer in awhile, here's one. I'm very glad to have the opportunity to use this universe created by JKR and owned by her, or perhaps someone else but not me, to try to learn how to write - for my own education and amusement. All I get from this is a sense of accomplishment. It's not like my writing name is in the phone book. Nobody knows who I am, and that's fine with me.

Thanks for 10000+ hits on SIYE and 8000+ on ff dot net – but it's the six hundred and seventy-nine total hits on chapter 16 that mean the most to me. You folks are persistent, and clearly not thrown easily, and I like that in an audience.