Chapter 19

I want to talk about something else for a little while.

Not unlike me. I know.

The room that my parents gave me when I came home, and there's no other word for it than home now, was spacious but not extravagant. It held a large comfortable bed without fussy extra pillows that would be useless, and a few ancillary pieces of furniture, including a dresser filled with clothes by my mother and father, some bookshelves, a bedside table, and, most significantly for this moment, a vanity with a mirror on it, a large oval mirror about a meter in height.

I first encountered the mirror the morning after my first full night's sleep in the house. Upon awakening abruptly in a strange place (which, I realize, is strange coming from me, considering all places would be strange to someone who didn't remember anything), I heaved myself out of bed rather quickly, which turned out not to be a fabulous idea as I was somewhat tangled in my sheets (which sounds like a metaphor for something, doesn't it? For confusion or drunkenness or maybe the feeling you get when you're trying to do something in a knee-jerk kind of way without thinking about it because you're startled and wind up wiping out, which is what I did – oh, look, my sidebar got ahead of my actual story. Remember me?) and thus I fell to the floor like an armful of firewood.

The thing that got me up off of the floor was not my perky, resilient nature, but rather a few mocking words from near the door to the bathroom. I jerked up like someone had dragged me by my boxers.

"You'll want to watch that, dear," is what I'd heard.

There was no one else in the room with me.

Well, what magical crap is this? I thought, looking around – nobody under the bed, nobody in the closet, nobody in the bathroom.

"All right," I said. "Who is speaking, please?"

"Your boxers are in quite a state, dear," the voice said.

They were not.

"Okay, now, where are you?"

There was no answer. I came out of the bathroom and caught my reflection in the mirror. Wow - I did look a little rough around the edges. My boxers were a little wrinkly, and my hair was sticking out like it was trying to get away. I ran my fingers through it to try and flatten it a little. I thought briefly that it must have been a reflexive motion for me, but I couldn't remember doing it even though it felt natural enough, and –

"Not much point to that, is there, dear?"

The voice came from the mirror.

"It's a talking mirror – oh, sorry," my mother said from the doorway. She was looking back out into the hall with some intensity. After a moment, she said, "I didn't mean to burst in on you, it's just that I thought you'd be a little startled by the mirror – they all talk a bit. I'll just come back in a moment."

"Wait a minute," I said. It looked like an ordinary mirror. I couldn't find a mouth in its frame anywhere, and it was no thicker than usual. "Is it… smart or something?"

"It's an enchantment," she said, still looking into the hall.

"Is something coming?" I said.

"What?" Thanks for the tenner, nice lady.

"You keep looking out there…"

"Oh – oh…no, dear, I'm – I'm being foolish. You're my son. I changed you."

I thought about why she was being metaphysical with me and came up with nothing. "I feel about the same," I said.

She finally turned around and laughed. "Don't ever feel you have to be different." She came into the room and pulled a robe from the closet, handing it to me.

"Do they all do it?" I said.

"Do what?"

"Talk to you."

"Yes, it's a charm. They've been like that for generations. Your paternal great-great grandmother," she said, while doing something that appeared like stretching while trying not to look like stretching, kind of a sneak-stretch, like a sneak-scratch really, though that's more of a current comparison than a comparison I could have made then, not having seen sneak-scratches until I saw Ginny do it once in the company of some politicians from the magic government, and by that I mean the governing body of magic-using people and not how it sounds, I mean how it sounds to me, because magic government sounds like something automatic and mindless that you just switch on or something, but anyway it was a time Ginny wanted to scratch but thought she shouldn't, so she kind of did other things that looked like they weren't scratching but she really was scratching, and that's what my mother looked to be doing, though I couldn't figure out why she'd hide it from me, and maybe she wasn't and I just thought she was, but she was saying something about my great-great grandmother, so I should have been tuning that in and did, "was a rather gifted witch at charms."

For some reason I was expecting there to be more of an explanation.

"Erm – why?"

"Why was she gifted?" she said. I could hear a warm humor in her voice, and I knew she knew what I meant but was feeling playful. To me at the time this was a gift.

"No, why have mirrors speaking disparagingly about your boxers?"

"It's a custom in older families," she said.

"Insulting your underwear?"

"Enchanting day-to-day objects," she said, her grin like a climbing vine as she lowered her head. She was waiting to laugh. I really liked her.

"What else does it do?"

"Nothing else."

"Just pick on you."

"Right in one."

"No, uh, catoptromancy?"

She looked at me like I'd just said "catoptromancy" out of nowhere.

"How do you know what that means?"

"How so?" I said, cautiously avoiding the loss of points.

"You don't know anything about magic, but you know what catoptromancy is?"

"Yeah… you know, as one… does."

"Hmm."

"So this mirror isn't good for anything but riding you about how you look?"

"Not as such."

"Is it…you know, on all the time?"

"Yes."

"Weird."

"It's astounding what one can become accustomed to," she said.

"Where's its…"

"Yes?" Crafty woman, not knowing the game and yet avoiding a loss.

"…brain?"

"Doesn't have one."

"And no mouth either?"

"No, and the explanation for that will take a little time – how does breakfast sound? Your father…your father is going to cook this morning. He's quite good at it, really. He's done it since he was a boy."

It was the pause that pulled at me, her getting used to calling her husband that again, that made me drop the mirror thing for the moment, but the story doesn't end there.

The next morning I struck up a conversation with it, insofar as it was a one-sided conversation interspersed with occasional non sequitur critique of my state of disarray by the mirror.

The following morning I gathered that it was limited in response, but wondered if it could retain information. I put on a horribly wrinkled t-shirt and received a bit of commentary, and had an idea.

The next morning I put the same t-shirt on, and the mirror, after a moment, suggested that I abandon that t-shirt as it wasn't getting any better.

The next morning I put a blanket over it, and it said nothing.

The next morning, a bewildered and frowsy Ron helped me to make a t-shirt that said, "Mirror thinks for itself." I rumpled it a little before wearing it.

The next morning I wore one that said, "Mirror doesn't think for itself." I rumpled it a similar amount to the other before wearing it. I took one off and wore the other alternately a few times, standing there, until the mirror said the old one looked better and pronounced the new one "foolish".

So all other things being equal, it could remember, it could read, it had preferences, and to my mind it had self-awareness. I figured my mother was wrong about it not having a brain, but I couldn't tell where the mirror kept it.

The next morning the mirror objected to the pattern in the bedspread.

Over the course of a week or two, it began finding fault with a wide range of things in the room. The drapes (which of course took it far too personally), the color of the walls, the oppressive proximity of the bed, and so on. Its mildly chiding tone had developed a brittle edge. I gathered from its shift in demeanor, its terse and cutting comments, and the pauses that it would insert after delivering them that were just long enough for me to think it was done talking and start to say something only to be interrupted, that something was, not to put too fine a point on it, bugging the crap out of it. After several rambling complaints that gave the impression that the mirror was inconsolable, I struck upon the main irritant to its existence – the window. It was open often (especially since I was likely, of an evening, to be visited by a beautiful redhead, possibly on a stolen vacuum cleaner), and the breeze was irksome to the mirror – in fact, the paint on the frame had begun to crinkle and flake. This gave me a small burst of inspiration, the effects of which, on her inadvertent viewing of the results the following afternoon, caused Ginny to squeal in a way that I found to be inexplicably stirring, and she knew it immediately, based on the narrow-eyed gaze she leveled at me, but didn't say anything except that one would leave it to me to teach a mirror how to blink.

She hated it.

•

I was beginning to realize that I cared about what Ginny felt about things more than I cared about most other things. And that was occupying most of my conscious mind, standing there with Bill. I'm not saying I wasn't feeling anything else – I'm saying I had no access to it at all. Or I was blocking all access to that other and wanted no part of it at all. I was trying to lie to myself, and that was completely wrong, and I hated that completely. That didn't fit, like the rock in the movie theater. I didn't fit. I was wrong.

"Where am I?" I said.

Bill was silent. We were standing in a garden that was slightly overgrown, next to a towering house that in the advancing dark looked mostly like a gnarled and jagged talon. Bill had said it was his childhood home and nobody would come here, and side-alonged me, and that had been sufficiently like going down a drain that I never wanted to travel like that again. Bill had apologized and said he was having problems concentrating. I got that. I'd told him in the alley, as much as I could, about what I'd seen in Lucius. His name, which I would never forget now. Bill had closed his eyes while listening, and when he'd opened them, he'd given the body one sharp kick, which was like a blow to my own glass bones.

"It's called the Burrow," he said.

"It's above ground," I said.

"I didn't name it."

"That's not what I mean anyway."

"What is it, Deasil?"

"People who want to torture and destroy until everything is gone. Everything. Piling up the bodies until nobody is left. Red-eyed monsters who get inside of you and poison-" I tried to control my nausea. Couldn't talk about that. "Prophecies made by self-serving liars, talking mirrors, travelling by fireplace, sports on household cleaning tools, people turning into rats and dogs and deer and cats or juggling each other in the air or making giant lizards out of movies or –"

"Deasil," Bill said.

"Where the hell am I?"

He sighed. "It's just life," he said.

"Whose idea was this?"

"No one's," he said. "It just happens this way."

I knew he was right, but it just seemed hateful to me at the moment.

"I just -" My arms seemed to dangle, uselessly. They were all wrong. Too long, or something. I hated having them. Anything to distract me from talking, or maybe from listening to myself talk because I was surely going to talk.

"I just … got here," I said. She was right. It didn't matter if I just got here. It only mattered what I did, and what I did was…

"And I just killed that man."

"Deasil…"

"He said, I mean, I saw how he was, what he wanted. He was a …" I gulped up high in my dry throat. "He was a really bad man."

"Yes, he was, and -"

"He meant it, he meant what he said, he was going to… uh. Ginny." My forehead was damp, but my hand was dry. It came away with sweat gleaming on its surface.

"Do you know that?" His voice was like crackling paper to me, and it made me turn my head to him.

"I heard him. Inside."

"Because you're a Legilimens."

"Yeah."

He crackled at me a little more - probably he didn't, but I hated a little of everything just then: "Good enough for me," he said.

"We just left him there," I said.

"It was best," he said. "It may come out in the end, but it was the right thing to do for now."

I wanted to say, won't he get cold? Or what happens when someone finds him there? What if a child finds him? What would that feel like?

"Besides," he said, looking at the house, "bodies don't last long in Knockturn Alley. Someone always has a use for them." His tone was difficult to understand. Everything was.

"You can't tell her. You can't tell Ginny," I said. Her arm, scarred from fighting for her life, her sweet glowing life - her in a vast dark room, lying on cold damp stone, alone with a book and a shade, that sweet life ebbing low.

He looked at me for a quick moment and then turned away, scuffing his feet in the dirt path leading to the house. His voice flared in the quiet dusk. "Why not? He ruined her life! You avenged her! He'll never be able to hurt anyone again!"

I sighed. You will things to settle, and sometimes they do, a little, and you can act like the things that hurt aren't happening to you, or not any more anyway. Things re-assume their usual forms. The house, for one, no longer appeared threatening, now that I was still. Tall, and put together strangely like blocks stacked by a three-year-old, but it was just a house. "Bill, listen to me. Her life is not a ruin. You know how she would feel knowing I defended her again. I stepped in trying to save her instead of letting her take care of herself. She's a strong person," I said," but she doubts herself, and having someone else fix things without her is like… going over her head."

He thought about this for a moment and then looked back at me. "And you don't think she would want to know that you did this for her? You're her knight in shining armor, for Merlin's sake," he said, his voice perforated with bitter overtones. "You've slain a dragon for her. More than any of us ever did."

The words brought up that revulsion, rising like a snake inside me, filling my throat. I closed my eyes tightly, as if that would help.

"What?" he said. "He was an evil bastard. He's killed and tortured more times than anyone can know –"

Nausea. A feeling of heat. Sweat. "And I've only killed once, so that one doesn't count?"

He was quiet. He ran a hand through his hair, which was lighter than hers, and when it dropped to his side I saw his silver earring shining.

"I'm not saying that at all, Deasil."

"It was what I had to do, to step in. You see how things are going, and you know you can do something about it, and you do that. You can't sit there and watch it. It's just…" I looked him in the eye, her beloved oldest brother, and said, "It's too ugly."

It just happened. It was simple. It was almost easy. If I had no memory of my life before this, I had to wonder if I had done it before. Who I had been but couldn't remember. If that's who I really was, underneath it all.

Someone who could just kill someone else.

He inhaled brokenly, and I thought I must have shown him something without meaning to. "You don't want her to see that in you."

"No. No, I don't. Not any more than she already does."

He held my gaze. "This war is far from over. There will be more killing before this ends, and whether I like it in myself or not, I would rather be the one doing the killing than to be the one dying. And if that means I give up a part of myself to be a home to that horror, but it also means that my family will make it through this, then that's what I'll do. And my baby sister…my sister would do the same for us. For you."

Ginny. Ginny hurt. Ginny dying.

"Besides," he said, "what she sees when she looks at you is probably herself."

My turn to kick the ground. Dust stirred up in a listless whorl. For a moment I imagined kicking up enough that it would obscure the world from me. That I could stay inside the dust and not hear or know anything else.

But then, flickering into my mind just as it had been to see: the image of her ponytail, bouncing in the dark like a torch. And I knew that escaping – life or conflict or her – was no longer possible. Suddenly, the wish to talk to her and tell her everything was bright, almost blinding, but I beat it down, hard. Ugly, real, necessary. The same world that made her, that made my brother and Luna and my parents and Arthur and Molly, also made Lucius, and Tom. And made some ugly things necessary. I understood them wanting to protect her. And if all I could do was swallow this, keep it to myself…

Sighing, the snake inside coiling, slithering back down into my stomach.

"Tell her he attacked you," he said. "Don't tell her why you…why it happened."

"You have to understand something," I said. How to explain this. "I can't – I can't lie to her. I promised her, and things glowed, and I'm not sure what that meant but even if it meant nothing I can't lie to her. I can't not tell her the truth if she asks. And she can read me anyway, just like I can read her, even though I try really, really hard not to do it."

He gave me an appraising look before saying, "Are you okay with not bringing it up?"

I exhaled loudly. "Very, very okay."

"I'm sorry-" He said this abruptly, then hesitated. "I'm sorry I didn't do it – I couldn't do anything –"

"Bill, I wouldn't wish it on anyone."

Not even myself.

•

A/N: A baby changes many things, like for instance the meaning of the term "spare time" – which now is defined asa "something you don't get." For those patient enough not to abandon the reading of this story, I offer a blend of apology, thanks and encouragement. I'm not done telling this story – there's a lot left to do, and I can't wait to do it all. Thanks to moshpit and Sovran for reading along and good input; to those of the Metafic community who say that a chapter is as long as the author says it is; to Freja, whose good wishes go a long way; and to Jules and Jane, without whom, as the poet said, "all the toys of the world would break".