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.

20. Chapter 20

Chapter 20

"Somewhat diminished."

A tense-looking woman with a sort of dour scrap of white cloth on her head leaned back from over me. Behind her the world slowly spread across my vision like an overturned glass soaking a tablecloth.

I was lying down on a sofa near the front door of a nice house. Lovely room, really, filled with the sleepy light of mid-afternoon, and that was curious, because the last thing I could think of that I kind of knew for sure I had possibly done was at night.

And I wasn't clear about what that had been, but I was fairly certain that I didn't like it at all.

What I also hated was that I didn't know why I was here, wherever that was, and not in the place where what was about to have happened next would have happened next, and something must have happened that made me forget, and that usually wasn't for any good reason, or any reason I would enjoy, anyway.

I really felt like I was missing… something. Or just missing.

Story of my life.

And I really felt like I had to use the loo. Like I was going to –

Poppy. That's who she was. She of the taut hat.

Hermione appeared over Poppy's shoulder like an unexpected stop sign. "You're looking quite atrabilious," she said.

I was feeling a little defensive at not knowing what was going on all of the time, and made a snap decision that I was going to start faking it.

"Wouldn't you?" I said, trying to sound anything but noncommittal. I mean, I probably did look a bit atrabilious. Not remembering can do that to you.

"Well, I'm not quite sure," she said. "Can you tell me what happened?"

My pants were tight.

"The usual," I said, trying to suppress the question mark.

"So you remember."

"Sure." They were really kind of uncomfortable, these pants.

"Then you remember the part about your… whilom home of Manhattan."

"Well, you know," I said. "Can't forget about that. It's where I was, you know, before."

"And the homeless man? And the girl? And Sirius? And Ginny?"

She was making it increasingly hard to fake it. None of those drops were landing in my bucket. Also, I was beginning to think a change in position was in order. What was the deal with these pants?

Hermione and I realized what the deal was at about the same time. She beat me to it. She glanced down at my middle, and paused. Her eyes showed a little more white all around, and her cheeks became convex - then slightly concave - before she averted her gaze and said, "I see that you remember Ginny, at least."

That's what the deal was.

Well, listen, my reader, and cut a man some slack. It wasn't as though I'd had any ownership of the damned thing for very long as far as I could remember, and it was horse-like, in that without any training it pretty much did what it wanted. And only in that way was it horse-like. I mean it's perfectly okay, it's just – hey, let's just drop that metaphor.

"How could I forget Ginny?" I said, trying to shift so that I might ease Hermione's embarrassment.

"You almost did, but not entirely," she said. "But I had to…"

There was a bottle in her hand with flowers on the label.

"You had to wash your hair?" I said.

"No, I had to wave this under your nose and… tell you I was her." This seemed to embarrass her more than the other thing.

"Oh," I said. I made a decision not to look her in the eye and simplify all of this. I'd promised her, after all.

But that didn't stop me from thinking.

"Just tell me?" I said.

Poppy cleared her throat.

"I mean, you didn't do anything else?"

"I see you don't remember our um… er… umquhile conversation," Hermione said, not allowing our eyes to quite meet.

"The one about who you're going to marry?"

"Err… yes, that one."

"Obviously I do."

"Then you know that I would never – that is to say, I couldn't possibly…"

"No, you'd just stoke the embers of my memory by waving a little shampoo around?"

"The sense of smell is our most primal," she said, trying to sound reasonable against all indications to the contrary.

Further attempts to make Hermione squirm a bit were interrupted by someone shooting a flamethrower fueled with beautiful into the room. "What the bloody hell is going on here?" said the most viciously attractive woman I'd ever seen. Her name was Ginevra, as if I could forget that, and she could make things burst into flame. Like me, I mean I was apparently highly flammable as far as she was concerned. I was entirely immolated, and not just my feet, either.

"He's waking up," Hermione said, quailing slightly in the presence of this smoldering wonder.

"And what was he before that?" she said, advancing in much the way that a wolverine might if it were intimidating a pair of lions, albeit somewhat willowy and retiring lions who weren't particularly aggressive and would rather avoid confrontation to begin with.

"Well, he was -"

At this point I began thinking furiously about something else.

My vision went all pale.

I was seeing a shape, or an outline, on a field of pale, white, nothing, whatever. A grey, sparkling, serrated, pebbled…a suggestion of a… the indication of the presence of a… a curtain of potential shimmering around some… some unnameable, unfindable…

I contemplated this, or anything but this, or something, for a time before becoming aware of anything else. Hermione was talking, but I was not anywhere near what she was saying, and something felt like I couldn't be, yet, and maybe what I had been seeing before was just anything but anything. I contented myself with watching Ginny get madder and madder. It was really something. I couldn't get enough of it. Her eyes grew darker and she frowned in a way that made me want to spread myself on her palm like Nutella, and if you, my patient reader, find yourself not knowing what that is, I suggest you put this down and go get some, spread it on something, eat it and contemplate that process from the Nutella's point of view.

Of course I had the usual moment of wondering where my memory of Nutella came from. But it didn't last.

"I couldn't know," I said. Pretty much to myself, I mean - Ginny didn't even hear me.

"So instead of calling the healer who is actually on the premises," she was saying to Hermione, "and knows him better than anyone else, you go all the way to bloody Hogwarts?"

Hermione chose her words like a crane chooses where to step. "It was just that you were a bit… well, you seemed like you needed your space…"

Ginny closed her eyes and took a breath, and when she spoke again she was bitter. "Yes, and that's just what I need, for more people to leave me alone."

Her friend gathered herself. "You make it a bit difficult not to when you go off by yourself and sulk for hours at a time."

Confronted with Hermione's newly revealed spine, which might ordinarily have placed Ginny behind her but not in a world where I supply the imagery, Ginny looked a little stricken.

"Hey, it's -" I said.

"You're right, Hermione," she said. I may as well have been talking to myself. "I said I'd look after him, but I've let… things get in the way of that. I know I'm failing him."

"Wait, you're not -" I said.

"Ginny, I seem to recall you recusing yourself from caring for Mr. Potter," Poppy said, thus proving that I could be ignored by more than one person at a time.

Ginny appeared to consider that statement longer than I thought was necessary.

"I did, but that's no excuse for being unavailable to someone in need," Ginny said.

Right now, all of a sudden, I needed to go to the bathroom.

"A Healer can not be expected to perform at her best if she allows her emotions to affect her caregiving," Poppy said, and I felt the subtle pressure behind her words, "as I believe we have spoken about in the past."

"I know, Madam Pomfrey," she said, "but I've brought him back before, and I know how, and you knew that," she said, looking back to Hermione with a small bit of her ire returning.

Hermione said, "He didn't want to return until he thought of you."

I was not the only one capable of silencing people. That stricken look returned to Ginny's face. I, for my part, was stricken by a need of increasing urgency. Yack, yack, yack. Couldn't these people get this done so I could -

"In point of fact," Hermione said, "he had quite a strong reaction to thinking about you."

That was my cue to see if Davy Crockett was still pitching his tent. Happily, he had mostly broken down the campsite. This meant I could maybe stop Hermione from giving me grief. I'd say something smart and funny and disarming, and everyone would laugh and we'd move on, and in particular I'd move on to the loo.

However, "That's not important to her" is what I said.

Hermione and Ginny turned to look at me, both looking surprised.

"I mean…" Ginny's eyes took the light from the windows and made it that smoky silver. The details. The line between her brows, her lips parted with hurt that I didn't understand but wanted to stop, her cheeks that made me feel lonely, remembering their softness from somewhere indeterminate but crucial. "That's not important now. What's important is I don't know where I've been or what's been happening and this talking isn't… I mean I'm right here, and nobody's listening but Poppy. Now I know you two would love to sit here chatting but I have a very pressing need to use the loo so if you don't miOH boy what on earth was, uh… yeah."

Poppy had waved her wand at me and after an alien and yet not altogether unpleasant feeling I'd been relieved of my pressing need, in a way that to my intestines felt like a stick of gum being sort of kindly chewed.

"All better, Harry?" she said.

"Warn a guy," I said.

Ginny came forward into my vicinity in a way that made my skin sing with electricity.

"You remember me first," she said, with a suggestion of impatience, from a very short distance away, close enough to see the tiny striations in the irises of her brown eyes as she bent over me. They made me think of how things are made of other, smaller things, and you have to know each smaller thing to understand the larger thing, and I didn't know what those bundles were called so I didn't feel like I could know her entirely but I'd look it up in Sirius' library as soon as I could because I didn't like being unprepared –

"I can hear you doing that," she said.

"Oh," I said.

"You're babbling inside."

"Yes, well, I do… do that."

"You remember me first," she said, reining me in.

"Yes."

"Not Mum or Dad, the ones you knew longest. Not your mum or dad. Not Sirius. Me."

"Yes." Looking her in the eye but not listening. Not listening at all.

"Even though I turned my back on you? Even after everything I've said?"

Nod and say yes. Nod and say yes. "Actually," I found myself saying, "I don't remember any of that."

Her eyes closed, long enough for her to have a private moment, just for herself, in which she could have the space to say something simple, like, for example, "Bollocks."

And she did, out loud.

"It doesn't matter to me," I said.

She opened her eyes again, and from six inches away, she managed to mostly avoid my gaze.

"I don't care what you said. I care that you're right here in front of me."

"Wh…" She paused. Hermione and Poppy were only a few feet away, so it was curious to me that she leaned a little closer to me and lowered her voice, as if it would do any good. Her tone was plaintive. "Why?"

"Why don't I care what you said, or why do I care that you're in front of me?"

I clearly had said that too loudly for Ginny's comfort. She closed her eyes again for a moment, suppressing something. Either she did that a lot, or I made her do that a lot. The other two women seemed to recede for a moment, and I wondered at the power this beauty had over me to make others appear to grow smaller in her presence, and then I realized it was because they were backing away to give us some room, and I thought to myself, it's what we think other people can do to us that's vastly more important to us, even if it's kind of an illusion. It's like a movie we make for ourselves, life is, a fictionalized documentary of the world, shot every moment, and even though the world already has characters and scenery, we tend to see them at one remove even if we don't think we do, and rewrite them according to how we want them or need them or feel that they should be even if we don't like them that way. But I wrote her strong and beautiful, because that's her through and through.

Her eyes had been open for a bit, I guess. She shook herself and said, "Both of those."

It took me a moment to remember what the things of which there were two and of which she'd spoken might have been, during which I might have wondered at how precious few things passed through my mind that weren't headache-inducingly hard to describe without abusing my native language. I briefly imagined only explaining things to people in Tagalog, so that I wouldn't feel so badly about saying things badly because I don't actually know Tagalog.

"I don't care what you said," I said in English, sitting up a bit, "because I don't know what you said. I don't remember it. As far as I'm concerned…" I thought about it. What I was saying surprised me. Memory was precious. Sometimes. "As far as I'm concerned, it didn't happen on my watch. As far as why I care that you're in front of me…" Some more reflection. "I like you there."

She pressed her lips together, irritated. Irked, even. Mad and frustrated. Beautiful.

"You don't even remember," she said, though it felt like she was saying it to herself. "You don't remember and you don't care, it doesn't matter to you." She took a deep breath, and I had no idea what was going to come out of her mouth.

"All right then, off with you two," she said, not taking her eyes off of something over my head somewhere, which was clearly fascinating.

After a pause, Hermione said, "Do you mean us?"

"I do."

"Right…well," Poppy said, gathering something up, "we'll just be outside, then, shall we?"

After another pause that was ended with a rustle of cloth and a yelp from Hermione, the two other women left.

"I can't." She spoke the fact.

I didn't know what the fact was. I hoped she was getting around to telling me.

"You just sit there, looking up at me like you do, like…only…you do, and it's okay with you that you don't know what happened before, or what I said or…did, because you just want me. Here. You want me here in front of you." Her cheeks colored as she went on. "Memory is the most precious thing to you, you're haunted by incomplete or missing memory, and all you want is to be able to know your own past, and yet you're willing to throw that out just so Ginny can sit next to you in the living room. I mean, what sort of stupid berk would let this happen?"

Maybe I was being stupid.

"Well, I'm not," she said. "I may be stupid, but I'm not going to let this happen. I'm not going to let you do this. Not for me."

So now I was definitely feeling a bit stupid. I was fairly sure now that I had no idea what she was talking about.

She looked at me for a moment. "Deasil, I'm not calling you stupid or a berk. It's me. On the one hand, I'm stupid because I'd let you think I was something I'm not, and on the other hand, I'm stupid for not going along with your wishes, but I can't let you think that I'm some… well, that I deserve your good will."

"Ginny, that's not -"

"So I'm going to do what you've been asking me to do."

"Wait, you don't have to, I mean, what have I been –"

"I'm going to show you what happened to your day."

''But how are you going to? Do you have a pensive?"

"'Pensieve'. No." She swallowed. "I'm going to look you in the eye."

Well. On my one hand I felt like I was being dipped in warm cream, in the sense that it sounded nice but made me a little uncomfortable. On my other hand, I was kind of a little scared for her.

"You don't want to do it," she said abruptly. "I suppose I can't blame you. After all the trouble I've –"

"Wait a minute, slow down," I said, talking over her. "I just can't see why you'd be willing to, that's all. Why now?"

"Why now, when I was so scared of it before, is that what you mean?"

"Kind of, yeah."

"The same reason."

"You're doing it because you're scared of it?"

"Are you going to throw away this golden opportunity or are you going to shut up?"

"I'll shut up in a minute. You need to make more sense to me." That was a large understatement.

"Can't you just…" She gestured in a vague circle. "…look in there and see what you need to know?"

"Not against your will," I said.

"You can't do it against my will?"

"I won't," I said.

She was about to reply, I could tell, because she was in the rhythm of this interplay and what would have been great just then was some kind of witty and yet cutting remark, something to keep her feeling strong, but then she just kind of dropped it. Also the room was fairly well lit by now.

"I know that," she said, looking up at me. I could have looked at her all day.

"I know!" She was shouting a bit. "How much of an idiot do I have to be?"

"Idiot how?"

"Has anyone noticed that glow doesn't actually come from anywhere?"

"…Idiot…how?"

"I know you won't do anything wrong, I know you won't take anything from me, I know you would protect me even from yourself -" There was something tickling my memory about that. Wasn't sure what. " – I know I have nothing to fear at all."

"Yes."

"That's bloody terrifying."

"Ah."

"But I don't run away from things. I'm a big girl. I'm not afraid of anything or anybody."

"Yes."

"Except this and you. So let's get to it."

•

What is hard to describe is: what things look like from someone else's point of view and the way they link with your own but from the wrong angles, and how the links themselves are tenuous because you can't even remember your point of view, and how what drags it out and returns it to you is something that looks like it but from somewhere else, and you can't really own the memory since it isn't yours until it sort of snaps from the other person's vantage point back into yours, and "snaps" is a good word because it implies a little pain, maybe, like a rubber band on the back of your hand to remind you to not smoke a cigarette or something, so it's like a period of looking over someone's shoulder followed by a bent-tree-branch-slapback rush and then a wobble, and then you know where you were and what you were doing.

What's also difficult to describe is the feeling of being admitted. In the sense that she allowed me to do what came naturally to me and hear and see her. Also, simply, in the sense that my being was acknowledged by her again, that there was a purpose for me being here, that there was something to this situation, our being concerned with each other. She wasn't acting as if I were not here, or avoiding me, or yelling at me and storming away, like the last thing I could kind of remember, which was in the pub after the whole running-from-Dumbledore-and-experiencing-Tom-in-aerosol-form thing. I knew that things had happened after that, and had a bit of apprehension about what they might be, but the main thing now was the admitting.

She admitted me to herself, and she admitted to me to herself. At least, I hoped for this, fervently.

Because something needed to be worth the completely unsettling feeling I was having right at that moment. It started fine, with her pale hand on my arm as I sat by her, looking into her eyes. It was a banquet for a starving man, and satisfying, though it would never be (I guessed as her pupils expanded subtly) enough. But what followed was a jarring, lurching pull, the kind of action that one does to get something over with quickly, like cannon-balling into a cold lake, and then there you are.

You are at the long dining table, sitting by yourself, drawn in silhouette. The light comes from the kitchen's faint nighttime lumos. You look small for a bloke of a bit under six foot tall, because of how you are holding yourself. Your shoulders slope. Your face is near parallel to the table.

I don't make any noise coming in. Passing behind you on the way to the kitchen. Your hair a little unruly as if from sleep, though that's how it is most of the time. The chair's rounded back, surrounding you a little. A mug of tea near your hand, untouched, no steam rising. Your shirt looks soft. Then the other end of the table, then the doorway, and then I became aware of her as she walked a little quickly into the next room and some light spell flared and settled into a dull wolfram glow. That brittle element, like her, incandescent without burning.

Now I was remembering.

I remembered feeling awkward at the table, where I'd landed some time earlier that night due to insomnia. It felt very much like my parents' house and not mine, hearing her moving quietly in the kitchen. That she probably needed this time and these empty rooms more than I. Most likely she was accustomed to the stillness, and needed it. She'd been here all along. Maybe I needed to find my own place for that. Maybe I needed to take my clumsy stupid self back to New York so she wouldn't have me stumbling all over her. I found myself getting up, pressing the table surface with my hands, wanting to retreat.

She appeared in the doorway, and I could no more run out of there than stop breathing.

(Stop breathing. Someone else, on her face on the ground, no, it was a man, with long silver hair. Not yet. Soon. Can't see this now. Was I remembering this now, or seeing it then? Couldn't tell.)

You look beaten, her memory persisted, holding yourself up with the table. I've disturbed you. Chasing you out. I'm the last person you want to see now, in your old home, haunting you like a ghost. I can't find words. I hate my silence. You open your mouth, and I watch you waiting to speak. Then you cough and say "I'm sorry – I was wrong" and look down again. Your arms, your shoulders, bent under all this. All I can make myself say is "I know you're sorry," and I expel a little breath, and I shake my head at myself. What I do when I'm like this. I say, "You're a git like my brothers," each word a stone clinking against the next. You look up at me and catch me. Green eyes clear and the weight behind them. I'm held in them and I see you, your revulsion, at me? No, at Tom, at his vile and defiling presence. Your desire to shed your skin, violently if need be, anywhere he has touched.

"I know, Deasil." I can't continue this. "I know," I say, and I want to show you that I understand, like no one else can, and yet I cannot open my mouth again. You want to get the stench of Tom off of you, and it comes from me as much as anywhere else. I need to get away, to wash off. Why my hand is reaching for you, behind your back as I pass you on the way out, I don't want to know.

Your form arches, slightly, as if you know I'm close. I want. To leave. Door. Cabinet, rug, stairs. Room. Dark.

My body shouted at her absence. I remember that clearly.

•

You are back at the table – it's as if you never left, though you have managed to change clothes. It's morning. Lily is sitting near you, holding the baby. The way she's not looking at me is a clear rebuke. You're her son, and I'm forgetting everything she's ever taught me. My mother is piling food on the table, her way of making things normal, and my father and your father are talking, their low voices warm and indistinct. I walk past Mum and go to the kitchen to find my mug, near the sink on a shelf that's not too high. Chipped on the rim in one spot, so I always hold it the same way. I could have fixed it ages ago, but I never have. I pour tea from the pot and warm it. When I walk back into the room it's like I'm seeing two aspects of the same thing – the baby peers sleepily over Lily's shoulder at me, and on the opposite side of the table you are looking at me, rueful and so sorry, so unbearably sorry. And so beautiful. I don't know how much of this I can take. It's old, and pathetically comfortable, and usual, and wrong. I just want my cup, and my place, and to be able to hide from myself by being normal, but when I see you I can't lie. Of course I'm of two minds about this. I want to be released by you. Yes, as I feel a pang of longing, remembering you kissing me, I want release. But every wish I have has its abiding shadow, the same one I've had since my first year at school, and this one resents you for permeating everything, the cup, the table, my home, the future, blocking my escape. You won't let me lie, so I won't let you see me. I need these old things. I have work to do. No one can take my life away from me again. I won't allow it.

My mother moves past me, telling me I look pale, and I realize I've been standing here all this time, and you haven't taken your eyes off of me, your eyes. I have to move, and so I do.

Right. She went and sat at the end of the table. It looked somehow too large for her, and her shape seemed unusually small. It made me think suddenly of her father, when his body was still bent with enchantment and the burden of carrying the mind of his wife, and then later, when we were standing together watching Molly doze in the hospital after she'd returned to herself, and his voice had been soft and thoughtful as he said to me, "I'm not used to sleeping alone."

She pulled out her wand and waved it, speaking the word "accio" softly, and a few moments later a small backpack came arcing through the door behind her, to land in her arms. She drew out a book and a roll of parchment that together were a little too large for the backpack, and with motions that bespoke a degree of resignation she opened the book and began to flip through it.

"You really are looking a bit peaky," Molly said to her without looking. "Are you still out flying about all night?"

Well, I thought that was a secret. Ginny did too, as evidenced by her open mouth.

"Flying about," my mother said.

"No," Ginny said, and paused. "I came down for a snack at about one."

"Why?" I said, my voice low for her, under Molly and my mother talking.

"I couldn't sleep," she said, also softly.

"I couldn't either."

"You weren't at your window," she said, almost accusing.

I felt breath leaving me. She'd been there.

"I was – my mind was on some things," I said.

The funny thing was, I couldn't remember what the things were that my mind was on. I couldn't quite extrapolate that from Ginny's memory.

"Was it," she said, her voice harsh and flat as static.

"Was what?" Ten points? For her, any time.

"It. Was your mind on – never mind." She tilted her book up between us, saying to herself, "Ruin a perfectly good snark. Bloody hopeless."

You know, you want to be angry, or hurt - I found I was saying to myself – and yet you really sort of like the edge in her voice. The ire. This thing you are in that surrounds you and that you are, that makes you enjoy even her insults - what is this thing, and why is it always so well-lit?

She abruptly turned away from me, and I was bothered about it until I realized that she was just using that glow to read by.

"What the bloody hell was that?" my father said.

"Get used to it," Ginny said. "It's like a bloody nightclub around him."

"And you've been to a few of those, then?" Molly's voice, both humorous and sharp.

"A fair few, and none of them like that," Ginny said. I imagined that her strategy was to counter brazenly and redirect. It seemed like a good idea. Why wasn't I mad at her?

"How could she go to nightclubs without your knowing?" Molly said to the room.

It was really quiet in there for a bit.

Finally my mother said, "That's what I'd like to know."

"She snuck," I said.

"What?"

I was breaking even. "She snuck out when you weren't paying attention."

"Is that even a word?" my father said.

"What's wrong with it? It's perfectly serviceable. I sneak out today like I snuck out yesterday."

"Seems to me that 'snack' would work better somehow," Arthur said, "and yet, perhaps, not…not really."

"Or 'snake'," I said.

Ginny's head was in her hands.

"'I snake out yesterday'?" my father said.

"No, that's not working at all," Arthur said.

"Had snaken?" I said.

"Snicken," my father said.

"The menfolk in this family," my mother said to the baby, "have really gone to the dogs. At least I have one more chance with you. Do try not to be an idiot, any worse than your gender has predetermined you to be. The first sign of blithering that I see and it's off to an all-girls' school with you."

"He might appear a little butch in the uniform," my father said.

"Might have a bit of a smile on his face when he left," Arthur said.

"Perhaps he could get a little coaching in how to walk in heels?" I said.

"I shall tell him all I know," Arthur said.

"Maybe we should get a second opinion," I said.

If you've never been party to good-natured male laughter, let's say that it's the sort of thing that makes you feel very manly, if you happen to be a man. You're part of a tribe, and you are not called into question. There's no weak link in the chain. You feel on some level that you could go out and fight the slavering hordes and these fellows would be right there at your side. It also makes you forget things for a moment. I wasn't sure, here in the present, what I was forgetting, but it seemed like a good thing to forget about.

When I looked over, though, Ginny was gone.

•

The sunlight is hateful.

I'd never felt that way before.

It prods into the creases of my bent arms, forces its way through my hair to my face. Burns the skin on my back through my shirt. Invasive. I don't want it on me. It's like loud music, shouting its will at me. The shrill, deafening sun. I'm a load of laughs today. Beautiful sodding weather gets me down. Just makes me feel more separate. And it digs up what little color I have in my skin in the form of freckles, my little hereditary gift. Like being covered in useless punctuation. A flash of memory, George teasing me about getting my period and Fred saying I'd had them for ages, and then after my first year, when I referred to them as little Dark Marks and even the twins shut up after that.

You have come out to the back garden with Sirius. I'd come out here to escape the laughter, which was largely harsh and oppressive to my ears, except for yours, which was even worse in that it made me wish I could be anyone but myself so that I could enjoy it. I wonder as I have many times before if during my blackouts of possession that Tom had somehow damaged my nerves, or at the least my ability to feel things like other people, and in a way it seems like such a stupid question. Of course I will never feel things like other people. And I will always feel things that other people will never understand.

Maybe Sirius knows about that a bit, having been somewhere other people can't imagine and somehow survived it. Maybe he does, but he doesn't understand what it is to have your mind repeatedly penetrated against your will until you have nothing left to fight with. I'm so tired of thinking about this. Over and over, every day. And you make it worse. To feel the difference between what I want and what I am allowed to have, between who I wish I could be and who, inevitably, I find myself being.

As the two of you approach my spot under the large hornbeam, I try to give you a baleful look, but the sun is too bright to do so effectively, and you ignore it. Sirius' face is still - as it always is - but yours is budding with a suggestion of a smile.

"It's lovely out here," you say, looking right at me. I'm pierced by you, effortlessly, which, like the sun, is hateful.

"Too lovely," I say, and I gather my things and make a show of moving somewhere else.

I hear Sirius saying "What's wrong with her?" and you saying, "Just choking on a sunbeam."

Oh, yeah. That was pithy of me. Then she walked towards the pasture, her hair somehow darker in the glare, and after a few moments she was gone between the trees, a blue figure of afterimage hanging in my vision.

"She's giving you a bit of grief," he said.

"She has her reasons," I said. "And whatever I think I've done to deserve it, she'll probably have reasons of her own that are either funnier or somehow more wretched than anything I could have thought of."

I couldn't help thinking then that there were things she could be even more furious about if she'd known about them, but I couldn't, now, in remembering with Ginny, think of what they might be.

"People don't say what's on their minds," he said. "Small things. Wasting…"

"People do what they can with what they have. It's necessary, this…" I gestured between myself and where she'd gone. "I may not understand it, but it needs being. The grief stuff is a small thing, it's just a moment, and here we are."

He was silent. Because his voice was still sheathed in a rasp from what I'd come to understand were hours of alternately screaming and howling, when he stopped talking it was like when the air conditioner goes off – the quiet was a little jarring.

"Besides," I said, "as she well knows, her not talking gives me time to think of other things I may have done wrong. It kind of lightens her load."

"You have a toothy inwit that bites both ways, Deasil."

And I said, "Yeah?"

And he said, "When you look at yourself, you."

He was doing that record-stop thing again. Until he started talking, it was like he'd turned to stone. "You reveal things about other people as well."

I said, "Uh."

Being with Sirius was good for something that ailed me, though I wasn't sure what it was, then or now. He'd shown up at the table after Ginny left, looking, if not exactly bashful, as though he had not been invited and was thinking if nobody asked he'd get through breakfast before it was discovered he didn't belong there, except he actually did belong there because my father had told him earlier that it was his home too and outside of any need for solitude that he should be here often, among people who, though criminally slow on the uptake, wanted him around always.

I might have said that he hoped he wouldn't be noticed at the table, but I couldn't imagine him hoping.

"Azkaban," Sirius said, apropos of nothing, "was a kind of taghairm."

I didn't say anything, because he didn't talk about prison much. I knew what a taghairm was, but I had no idea how.

"I was sealed in a small room, so there was no escape. Dementors would wander down the halls, stopping in front of a cell and drawing their sustenance through the same rusty grate we were fed through. You couldn't." He paused. "You couldn't get away, and they would pull out the worst memories and fears you could imagine. I thought changing into a dog would help at first, but it only simplified things."

Standing there in the sun, flooded with light, he still managed to do this: exhaling and having it sound more like tires on wet pavement, receding. Like I'd never see that car again. And it seemed a bit much, thinking that of each breath, an endless succession of sighing cars passing and gone, but the man had a bit of a dark side.

"After a while, you would be able to watch it happen to you." He looked out over the garden and the lawn, his eyes giving no indication of seeing anything. "There are so many things that happen, things you do. So much regret. Little…cruelties. Anger, and hatred, that seem so."

I waited.

"Small."

Yeah.

"I'd always felt more free as a dog. But that time made me feel like I was just wrapped in a loose dog hide. It didn't save me from anything. I could see all of the things I'd done. The. The truth." His feet made some dry noise against a stone. "Before, I could be a dog and act as if there were no world but what was before me. The moonlight. Scents. Hunting. But that," he said in a flat tone like a crude cave drawing of derision, "came to an end in prison. All these small things we think. They were revealed to me in my dogskin, things that seemed important but in the end are worthless. Petty." He expelled the last word, and it flashed in my mind like a wet nickel. "As I was inside Azkaban."

"Just because you were in there made you worthless? You weren't even guilty of anything."

"When you're trapped in a prison with Dementors all around you every day, you." A moment for the cause. "You'll find that you're guilty of something."

"What happened?"

"I felt myself coming away. Coming loose. From the days, from wishes, people, myself. And I can't go back and change that. I know things that other people can't. Explaining it is useless. I don't."

A bit of silence.

"Belong."

He looked up at me a little sharply after I spoke. The weight of his look didn't last, and he nodded his head after looking down.

I guessed he wasn't used to people finishing his sentences.

Much less accurately.

"That's one for you, Deasil," he said.

"I usually go by tens," I said.

"Cheater," he said.

It was almost a joke. I gave it some silence to frame it.

"I learned what was important in there," he said. "And what was without use. But I also learned something else about myself after I was out. In spite of what I knew, and what had been flayed from my body and mind in prison, I was unable to live as I knew life was." He held a stick in his hands and looked at it, and I wondered if he were going to break it, but he finally dropped it in front of him. "And the dementors."

Moment.

"The dementors had pulled out of me by force what I wouldn't admit to myself. Showed me how weak I was. How much I liked to fool myself. And now that I'm outside, I can't seem to look away from anything. I can't stop thinking about James in the courtroom. He knows he was scared, and I know that we were all fooled by Peter. But I still."

Moment.

"I still haven't managed to stop being angry for what happened," he said.

"You're like everyone else in this one respect."

"What would that be?"

"You're doing your best with what you have."

"I was right to." Another pause. "Think of you."

"We're supposed to be friends," I said. "You caught me."

"That I did," he said. "You remember that?"

"It happened before I started getting distracted every day."

He was quiet. But it was a nice shirt he was wearing.

•

I've been reading a book about spell damage but not taking any of the words in. The periphery of my vision is burned dark around the page by the sun. It's too hot and I'm punishing myself out here, shade or not, and all I want is to go inside, drink something cold and curl up. But it doesn't feel like my house so much anymore. Lily has been like my mother, but she's angry with me, and now my real mother is here but all she can think of is what mischief I'd got up to while she was gone. As if I were eight years old again. A part of her is still back in a time she wasn't here for. For my part, a hidden little girl that I barely recognize wants that time, and yet the person that I've become knows that there is no returning there.

And then, of course, there you are. Inevitably in the middle of all that, the wish to be with you. You don't think I'm stupid, you don't think I need you to protect me, you don't judge me for my idiocy concerning Tom – in fact, you know what it's like to have him in your head – and you have strong hands, and you…I'm not thinking about this right now, and anyway the reason it doesn't feel like home anymore is that you are here. It was safe before you returned. The thought is a lie, but it gets me up on my feet.

As I stand, I hear Sirius on the other side of the tree saying something about you needing a bit of houghmagandy, whatever that may be. You say that you don't think you could do that, and after a pause he says that maybe he doesn't think he could either. He says maybe he just wants to do something, to feel useful. He says his spellcasting is worthless. You ask him if he wants to do some practice with Ron. I want to be involved, can't be, miserable, resentful, helpless. I know you have to learn things, and not just to get by in the world and know how to use a floo or summon water on a day like this, but because some spindly fish-eyed hag saw that you have to kill Tom or be killed by him. I hate this collision, you and a stupid prophecy, you and Tom, with a roiling revulsion that surprises me. He touches everything, eventually. Every boy I ever dated, whether dangerous or kind, always ended up feeling to me like they were just beyond my reach, or that I was just beyond theirs. They couldn't understand, and they couldn't make him go away. In my secret heart, after a while, they wound up being boring to me, because there was nothing at stake, and because in a way that fuels my disgust with myself, maybe they simply weren't as compelling as a sociopath who made me believe his lies, who made me lie down in a damp stone chamber underground, so that I could die and he would live. When someone shows a girl that she's worth nothing and she believes it, even agrees – I suppose that's a hard act to follow. As you would say. Bloody hell, you two divide me down the middle. And if I were somehow able to remove you two, I don't know what would be left.

Well. I didn't know it was like that.

And I wondered why her memory was so bookish.

And I remembered something that happened before that, kind of, something about no one understanding Sirius and how he had to talk about things, that it helped even though it was hard to, and that my mother was a good listener. And something about how people take on shapes they didn't have before sometimes, when you're in prison, and become part of your life in imaginary ways, wishful ways, and how they grow and change as if they were real and there with you, but you have to remind yourself when you come out of prison that it wasn't really the person, just their image that…something, I can't remember. But a minute later I do remember that he stopped walking and spoke.

"Here. This." He took a small hand mirror from a pocket and placed it in my hand, though he didn't touch me in doing so.

"Do I have something in my teeth?"

Jokes passed by him like wind by a statue.

"It has a companion mirror," he said. It was framed in smooth black wood, with a handle of a little more than a palm's width. There was a simple "P" carved into the back. I wondered if he was going to give me this one and then set me a task to get the other one. That seemed unlike him. I was clearly not getting something and, in a rare instance for me when not knowing what was going on, I was quiet. I suppose that was how he was good for me.

"You hold one and speak the name of the other person holding one, and if they have theirs, they will appear in it and you can."

The clouds blossomed slowly overhead.

"Talk to them."

This meant so much, coming from this quiet, damaged man.

"Will you call me on it?" I said.

Leaves rustled from the wind. I heard a small animal's motion in the grass.

"Some time," he said.

I let it drop. Clearly the man had a bit of an influence on me. "It's time for lunch," I said. "Do you want a sandwich?"

"All right then," he said.

"After that I'm studying magic with Tonks and Remus – do you want to-"

"No," he said. After a pause he went on. "I don't think I can. Be around Remus right now."

"You feel like he left you in there."

He looked at me, sharply, briefly, as we walked back to the house. "He did."

"He didn't come to see you, or let you know he thought you were innocent."

"I got nothing from him."

"You know he hates himself, right?"

"I haven't forgotten what he's like."

"No, I mean - You used to run with him when you were younger?"

"I learned to be a dog so I could stay with him. The same as your father."

"Dad is a stag. I've never seen him do it, but that's what he said. But you were another canine, another predator."

This was where someone else might have said, "Hm." He was silent.

"You were more like Remus, like a reflection of him. Sirius, he was completely wrong to abandon you. No question about that. But if you already believe the world is painful and against you, and then your best friend, your double, seems to turn dark and goes to prison-"

A breath came from him – a hard-edged sound of disbelief.

I stopped talking.

"I can't decide if you're too kind or too perceptive," he said.

I had no idea, and said so.

"Not important," he said as we reached the door. I figured I was out of the woods, because his eyebrows agreed with me. In the sense that they looked good. Well-groomed with a suggestion of wildness. He was clearly trying to look like the wealthy guy he was. Stepping back into his life that was supposed to belong to him. Another thing we had in common.

•

Leaves whip my ankles. The broom's dark grain is broad and worn, pressing on my palms, imprinting them like whorls on a willow's finger. I hold the broom and the broom holds me. To dart forward, to lunge, is what a person does when they have only just learned to ride – a quick thrill, but unsubtle – but to rise over treetops, to hold steady amid the swaying and the rustle, to find the right moment to move, and then flash between branches leaving nothing behind… it's a thing it took me years to find patience for. I had been a chaser, as aggressive a flier as I could be, all elbows and arrow-straight, until I saw my first thestral and, fresh from the events that made it visible, I wanted to just fly, and the gaunt broken-mirror reflection of a horse had the way of it. I see you leave the house in the distance, followed by Remus and Tonks, and I think of how hungry I am, but even now I can't quite go back inside. You are looking for me, I think, in the grass or in the shade, but you don't think to look up, and I pull the handle towards me, turn to my left side and plunge into the canopy of green, ignoring the little tugs and scrapes, falling away from you, but it's my fall, under control.

Wait a minute, I remember this one, I thought. We were walking outside, and I had something in my hand. The mirror. The one Sirius gave me. We'd been sitting at the dining table, with the mirrors out, as he'd showed me how they worked, which was pretty simple actually. I say his name, and on his end, the mirror rattles a little, and he picks it up. I'd been thinking that if a cell phone company had got hold of these they would rule the world, and said so, but then Sirius had told me that no one who wasn't magical could see it work, and I wondered why that was. When we'd been in the movie theater and things hadn't been right-seeming to me – I felt like these two things were connected, but had no idea why. Anyway, I'd held both mirrors in my hands and was looking at the sleepy beveled oval shape of their frames, an easy arc that was kind of like a little bit of music that you might hear from a door down the hall that was momentarily open, or maybe like a mouth opened in surprise, and then I'd heard a startled exclamation from Charlie as he came in the room looking for my father. He was in a little bit of a mood, and he'd groused at my father about the house being so far away from any city of any size, much less London, and how people were getting killed at night (actually I think he said "nocturnally", which seemed rather prosaic) and having their bits chopped off, even if they were bastards, and clearly something was beginning, and we couldn't do anything about it from here, living in this rat-infested country house, and my father said that the house wasn't rat-infested, and it was the bloody country after all, there were bound to be animals about, and Charlie said he was always seeing them, and my father asked him if he'd forgotten all of his household charms or if he were just waiting for someone to do something for him, and Charlie gained a bit of color in his cheeks and said he could do perfectly well for himself, and he left.

My father never greeted Sirius. They would just start talking around each other. I'd thought it was odd at first, but as I saw it happen repeatedly I realized a few things – that there were so many things that would remain unspoken between them, and apparently one of those things was "hello", and that in a way it was my father saying, "you're always with us, you belong here, you're already here." He had a way of doing things like that – making situations that communicated, instead of words, sometimes.

"Pulling on his tether," he said.

"He'll break it," Sirius said.

"Yes," my father said.

I sat and looked at the two of them for a moment.

"There was a killing last night," my father said, "just off Diagon Alley – do you remember where that is, son?" I nodded, stiffly, for a reason I couldn't quite place. He went on to say the name of some guy that seemed familiar in this memory in some unreachable way, and said he was not a good man, and that his past acts had perhaps caught up with him. Sirius made a sharp hoarse sound and said that it should have happened sooner to the murdering bastard, and my father said that it would have spared a lot of people a lot of hurt, including Ginny.

I must have had a dark expression on my face. My father's was sympathetic. He said, "Some people turn up dead because of who they are."

"Do you think…" I was having a little trouble saying this, though I couldn't say for sure, watching the memory, why that would be. And, you know, telling this story with a spotty memory is hard enough without recalling a poor memory of something I didn't understand at the time but do now though I'm not saying what it is because the story needs to be told in some kind of an order and it wouldn't do to say, "Okay, page one, the end. Now, page two." Though I think I've done that before, but I've forgotten about it. Anyway, back to when I didn't know yet what I had previously known but know now, though I have to tell this as though I don't know.

"Do you think he deserved it?"

He thought for a moment. "Well, son, it's hard to say without knowing what he was doing or thinking when he died…but I think the point is that things have clearly gone off the rails for you if you wind up dead and …dismembered in an alley, whether you're good or, in Lucius' case, a bit of a bastard. Maybe there was something he could have done not to be on that path, and it seems that there would be, considering his wealth and influence. He might have stayed home with his family and had a nice cup of tea instead of going into that place." He ran his fingers through his hair, something I realized that I did as well. "In the end," he said, "a rich man known for cruelty and killing, even if unproven to the Ministry, dying in a crime-filled street with his wand out fresh from casting a Petrificus spell, which has no benevolent use as far as I know, does not seem very hard to understand."

I felt an inexplicable relief.

Ginny hadn't been around, so I couldn't remember anything else that happened for a moment, but then something tugged at me and I remembered Remus and Tonks walking in, at which point Sirius got up slowly and left the room, like smoke blowing away. We were all quiet for a minute, then we all went into the kitchen for something, probably a drink, and when we went back through the dining room to leave, I remembered I'd left the mirror sitting there and I picked it up, admiring its form again as I went out with Remus and Tonks, and so there we were. I remember turning it in my hand as we went out to a bit of open ground, and thinking that I was glad Sirius had remembered to come back and pick his up from where it had sat next to mine. Part of me wanted to call him on it already. I thought about it for a moment before I turned my raggedy focus towards the werewolf and the shapeshifter.

We talked about shields and what they are supposed to do, and I asked a lot of questions about why if you could prevent one kind of magic, then why not another, and Tonks stumbled along a bit trying to explain before elbowing Remus rather hard, which ended his increasingly smug expression. With a sharp look at her, he said, "Deasil, some curses are so powerful that there can be no shield from them. In the same way that diamonds are harder than wood, the killing curse is more powerful than any protego."

"So it's a question of degree," I said.

"Yes."

"But every spell or curse or whatever is all made of the same magic, though, right?"

"No," he said, coming to a stop. "Some magic is light and some is dark."

"Really?" I said.

He paused. "Yes, really."

"What – good magic and bad?"

He nodded.

"But can't you use magic for any purpose? Isn't that up to you?"

"Some spells, such as the killing curse, have no good use."

"None at all?"

"Can you think of one?" he said, a little impatient.

"What if I'm in terrible pain from a mortal wound and want to die?"

"Couldn't you be put to sleep instead, so that you could die painlessly?"

"Does the killing curse hurt?"

"How can we know that?"

"Do you have to be, I don't know, evil with a capital E to use it?"

"Doesn't it appear that way?"

"Do you know one way or another?"

"Do either of you," Tonks said, "know how to answer a question?"

Remus sighed. "Deasil, you didn't grow up around magical culture, so it makes sense that you wouldn't understand what the killing curse is to us."

"I think I do. It's a club versus a stick."

"Erm…"

"You never hear anyone say 'That guy got killed with a stick.' It's 'Someone killed him with a club.' He still got hit with a piece of wood. You could chop down the same tree and make a tennis racket or a pool cue or a club, or a shield that blocks clubs. So what's the difference between light and dark magic? Does one hurt and the other doesn't, or does one give you cancer, or what?"

He had a slightly pained expression on his face as he considered his answer. "It comes down to intent."

"So if it's all the same magic, then why doesn't someone make, like, a killing shield?"

"It's not that simple."

"Why not?"

He slid his hand through his hair, thinning and the color of his robe, more or less. Tonks was seemingly torn between amusement and curiosity.

Finally he said, "You've asked me questions I don't know how to answer. Maybe shields are not what we need to think about today. Why don't we concentrate on transfiguration?"

Tonks looked disappointed. "Bloody hate transfiguration," she said to herself.

"Not surprising, Dora," he said, "given that you can change your own form at will – it must seem boring."

"It's not that," she said, idly swinging an arm around. "It's just easier to make something look like something else."

"Yeah, that," I said, "how do we do that?"

"You mean an illusion?" Remus' face was stuck on pained.

"Yeah."

"Deasil, that's very advanced magic."

"Show me."

"Yeah, show him," Tonks said. She was having some kind of fun at Remus' expense, but it wasn't for me to interfere. Her, smiling, and something tugging at me inside. The memory of Remus and the way he saw her was not far from me, and that was a little weird, but I guess this is a roundabout way of saying I could see his point. I liked her.

"Oh…right, then," he said, and gestured with his wand. And just like that, Tonks's shoulders had a giraffe's neck sprouting from them. Her face bobbed gently, grafted onto the white and brown mottled fur, four feet or so above us.

"Why's he looking up there, Remus?" Tonks said.

"He thinks he's looking at your face," Remus said, also looking up, with a little grin beneath his moustache.

She looked resigned. "What do I look like now?"

"Giraffe," he said.

From my point of view, it was odd. I could see her looking down at me, but I could also see her looking across at me from her usual height. Both aspects were sort of equally there, though one was simply wrong, for lack of a better term.

It was funny, to me. I almost laughed.

Tonks' lower face wore a narrow-eyed expression. "Are you trying not to laugh?" she said.

It was beyond odd. They were two aspects, two possibilities of the same thing. It didn't matter which was more likely: there they were. No, that wasn't quite true. One was not really there, it was just sort of wishful thinking.

What made me laugh finally was the idea that Remus wanted me to see her as having a giraffe's neck. It was so mercurial coming from this careful-seeming guy. Some people, you know, you don't expect them to be creative in that way, especially people who haven't finished thinking about magic in any sensible manner. No, I hadn't forgotten that much. Good magic, which emitted butterflies and smelled of honeysuckle, versus bad magic, which made cats screech and burned your eyes and smelled like that smoke thing that Fred had left behind after turning me back from a canary into myself, and by this definition, that had been very bad, evil, dark, dank, smelly magic. Yeah.

So yes, I laughed, and Tonks shoved me a little, and then Remus had me try to do it. It was a fairly hilarious half-hour or so. Once he'd stopped trying to tell me how to do it, I set about trying it for myself. At first I couldn't get anything to happen, but then I thought about what Tonks might think was funny and had Remus looking like a platypus in no time.

So many things, for me, are about just finding a reason for doing them, a use for knowing them. Every time someone taught me something, I would ask a lot of questions that somehow managed to irritate my teacher, and I'd struggle mostly with why you'd want to do something in the first place, like levitating a feather with a stick or figuring out how far away two gannets would be from each other in a half hour if they'd started flying in opposite directions and one of them had eaten a fish weighing three hundred and fifty grams when in the first place it wouldn't take a half hour for the gannets to stop being startled by the thing that made them fly off in different directions to begin with and in the second place, half as far as that anyway because one of those gannets would have remained stationary, being dead from choking on a fish of that size.

It's around that point where someone throws up their hands.

Remus did not, however, which is partially to his credit and partially to Tonks', because she knew foolishness when she saw it. What I really liked about her was that she drew a line between Remus' habits and his heart. Not a foolish woman.

We were finishing up when Remus asked me where the illusion was that I was creating.

"'Where' meaning what?"

"'Where' meaning: is it in the world with us?"

"Well, no, I suppose not," I said.

"If it's not here," he said, gesturing around his head, which had so recently been sporting a bill (something I was apparently a fan of), "then where is it?"

"Uh. It's in the, uh."

"It's a little to the left," Tonks said.

He shushed her. "Give it a moment."

It was really quiet out there for a bit. Then I heard the wind in the trees and my breathing and I hadn't tried Quidditch yet and Remus needed some new clothes and what was that song my mother had been singing to my brother? And I had nothing. No idea whatsoever.

Tonks.

"It's in more than one place but not really anywhere," I said. "It starts in me and ends up in your mind and her mind."

"Spot on," he said. "So it hasn't any size or weight."

"Or, um…" I said.

"Yes?" he said.

"Limits," I said.

"Go on," he said.

"Well, if I can make you see a platypus head, why can't I make you see a… a… a really huge platypus head? Or an airplane, or Manhattan?"

Remus smiled at me. "Indeed."

•

What next?

You were downstairs. I saw you through the door and went upstairs to avoid you.

It was a "B". I'd thought it was a "P".

I really, really thought it was a "P".

I could have sworn it was a "P".

It had been a "P".

Now it was a "B".

Had it been a "P"?

I was sitting at the table again. Remus and Tonks had left, and some hours had passed. I was trying to like tea, actively, with a will and a mirror. I wasn't using the mirror to like tea with - I was just staring at it while I was doing the efforted tea-liking. I'd thought that this mirror had been emblazoned with a "P", but I guessed I'd not looked closely enough – and it would make sense that it was a "B", having come from Sirius. It was just that when he'd given it to me and shown me the other one…oh, wait, it had been a "B". I'd seen his clearly. Two matching mirrors, problem solved.

I'd just come from another little mini-adventure, in the way that things happen to me in clumps, and not that the clumps were comprised of things that had anything to do with each other or were resolved satisfactorily or where I won something or what have you, but these little chains of events would occur, and I would go through them, and then find myself sitting somewhere alone thinking of unrelated stuff – look, I'm not really saying there was a pattern to any of this, just that things happen to me and here I am. So, the adventure.

I'd been feeling unsettled. Something was on my mind (though as I unwound this memory with Ginny, I had no idea what that was, and apparently, nor did she), and I felt a great urge to talk to Bill about it. (Which seemed odd to me as I recalled it with her because I didn't remember talking to Bill ever about much of anything really.) So I asked my mother if I could stick my head in the fire and talk to Bill, and she said yes but I'd best throw some floo powder in first or I might look very surprised for a while, and I asked why, and she said that happened when you had no eyebrows, and I said "oh." or something witty like that. She said I should go down to the big fireplace, toss some in and very clearly say "Gringotts, office of William Weasley", and so, after some hesitation, rehearsal and lip-biting, I did so.

What I saw was like looking through a yellow-and-amber waterfall at an office room. Bill was seated behind his desk, flipping through sheets of thick paper. He looked up in surprise when he saw me.

"Well, now, communicating like the locals," he said, getting up and coming around to sit on the edge of his desk. His voice flickered and came and went a little, as if it were riding the edge of a flame. "What can I do for you, Deasil?"

"I, uh… I wanted to talk to you about yesterday," I said. (No idea what I was talking about.)

He became much more serious. "Maybe now isn't the time for it. Why don't we meet after work?"

"Sure," I said. "Where?"

He thought for a moment. "How about the Burrow? Can you remember that place?"

"The Burrow." Flashes of the bare floor, boxes. Windows a bit dirty. Empty counters, bare table that we sat at when we came in to talk. Moonlight outside. "I remember the kitchen."

"That's the part I always remember most too," he said.

"Well, okay, I'll just pop right in there. Five?"

"Five," he said. I noticed that there was a blur around his earring.

"Your jewelry looks fuzzy," I said.

"My – oh," he said. Not giving up the points. "D, you shouldn't be able to even see that. I Disillusioned it. Workplace decorum, you know."

"You can make things invisible in a bank?" I said.

He looked at me thoughtfully for a moment. "Doesn't sound very secure, does it?"

"No. Say, Bill, if I appear in the kitchen, doesn't it make the air pressure in the room go up?"

"Errm…"

"You know, like if a whole lot of people appeared in a room, couldn't you, like, blow the windows out or something?"

"Right then," he said, "don't bring a load of people with you, just on the off chance, eh?"

"Right enough. See you later."

"Bye for now, Deasil."

I pulled my head out of the fire and then realized that I wanted to ask him one more thing, I don't remember what, and discovered the hard way that you really do have to keep putting floo powder in or else it's just a fire.

I watched the smoke curl towards the ceiling from my shirt collar and contemplated my stupidity along with Charlie's assertion that the house was infested with rats. While jerking away from the hearth and performing a rather enthusiastic anti-flame dance, I'd seen a sizable one skitter along a baseboard before disappearing under a cabinet.

So, what with one thing and another striking me, I thought to myself, "What does this moment really need?" and answered myself, "why, some dried leaves soaked in hot water, and of course some sugar and cream added because otherwise it would taste like hot water with dried leaves soaked in it," and made for the kitchen, where I hoped things would be a little less weird.

I had a moment to think, as I put water on to boil (my father preferred to do this without magic, which I liked) and scavenged for a tea bag, about how I was actually alone for a little while. No one was teaching me, or trying to explain why I couldn't do something that I clearly just had, or, I don't know, avoiding me because of something I didn't understand, like Ginny had been –

I know. I know.

- and so I was enjoying a special moment, that of waiting for a kettle to whistle.

The world waited with me.

First the quiet.

The rushing sound.

The tremble of the brass kettle.

Was that the first of the large bubbles?

No…

That?

No…

The appearance of a large silver walrus in the kitchen broke my concentration.

The fact that it was speaking in Bill's voice didn't really rein it in.

"Sorry, mate," the walrus said, "Fleur reminded me of something I have to do five-ish. Call it six, shall we? Oh, and ask your mum what a patronus is. Cheers."

It humped its way to the door and then faded, silver swirls in the air where it had been.

Nothing lasts. Especially silver walruses, and peace.

The water was boiling now, anyway.

That was my little adventure.

So I was sitting there with my mirror, trying to like my tea, and feeling a little grumpy about things appearing out of nowhere and strangeness ensuing, when witha noise like a deck of cards being shuffled, if the cards had been made out of meat, perhaps, the twins abruptly appeared in the room with me.

"Deasil" and "Harry" came out of them simultaneously. I had to acknowledge the truth of it.

"Gentlemen," I said, standing up.

"Don't leap to any conclusions," George said.

"Wouldn't want you to get the wrong idea about us," Fred said.

"I think there's little danger of that, Fred," I said.

He looked at George for a moment, disbelief on his face.

"Do you usually talk first?" he said to his brother.

"No idea," George said.

"I was hoping that would be it."

"It's about fifty-fifty," I said.

"Ah, well, a mystery for another day," Fred said.

"But we have far greater mysteries to plumb," George said.

"Deeper, more abstruse…"

"More impenetrable, more arcane…"

Here we go, I thought.

"More convoluted, more…mysterious, even," Fred said.

"Hadn't we said that one?"

"I suppose so."

"Ineffable?"

"I think you've effed this one just fine," I said, with not much color in my voice. This was tiring. They were a bit much right now.

"This is a moody one we've got here," Fred said, crossing his arms.

"Positively saturnine," George said.

"Do you two travel around with a thesaurus or what?" I said.

"Strangely enough," Fred said as though I weren't there, as though they were just performing for each other or something, "he's not the only – what word were we up to?"

"Glum," George said.

"Morose."

"Sulky."

"Ooh, that's a good one. He's not the only sulky person around here."

"Take our young sister, for example."

"Mind your choice of words, George."

"Too right, you. She's been in a right snit all day long, apparently – how'd I do with 'snit', then?"

"I haven't got anything better."

"Won't talk to us except to shoo us off, head stuck in books she isn't reading, flying about like someone's chasing her." I had to admit they were observant. I hadn't seen them all day. "And here we come in to snatch up a bit of food and take our minds off of that cold hearted rejection at the hands of our only sister -"

"And what are we faced with?"

"Mr. Mopey."

"George," Fred said, "you've been holding out on me."

"Actually," he said, indicating me, "it was one of his."

"Well done then, Deasil, well done indeed. 'Mopey'. Excellent."

"So ordinarily we might not relate these two encounters," George said, "only our brother Ronald let slip that there had been a bit of a kerfuffle down the pub -"

"The cast of characters including one Michael Corner, inebriated, one Deasil Potter, stone cold sober, and one Ginny Weasley, vexed."

"Irate."

"Cross."

"I'm mustering a few of those myself," I said.

"And we gathered," George continued as he sat on the edge of the table opposite me, "that there had been a question of Ginny's honor, that a challenge had been submitted -"

"That her good name had been, shall we say, sullied -"

"Besmirched -"

"Questioning it would have been enough," I said.

"And that you appointed yourself her representative, and attempted to explain to young Corner the error of his ways."

"Which was not well received when the owner of the reputation showed up and observed you involving yourself in her business."

"And this is something," Fred said, "that our lovely and fearsome sister does not appreciate."

"In the slightest."

"I get that," I said.

Fred said, "Anyone that steps in and meddles with her affairs is bound to get the same treatment you did."

"So don't feel special in any way."

"Even we, her own flesh and blood – Ow!"

"Emphasis on the blood," Ginny said, appearing in the door with her wand out and her mouth firm. Fred was rubbing a red welt on his arm. "Let me see if I understand this correctly. You're lecturing this idiot -" That would be me. "-on staying out of my business. He probably doesn't even remember last night. You, on the other hand, should remember what happened the last time you warned a bloke about me. And yet here you are, poking your noses in again. One would think you like bats."

That went over my head.

"Oh, of course not, Gin-Gin, 'like' is surely not the word -"

"No, surely it's 'fear', our dear and terrifying sister -"

"Then why would it be," she said, tapping her wand into her palm, "that you insist on doing things that practically demand that I reacquaint you with them?"

"Unintentional, really -"

"Not what it looked like -"

"Really," she said. "Really. What it looks like," she said, rounding on all three of us, "is too little, too late. Maybe you should have stepped in when I was a little girl, all alone at school, instead of charming my hairclips to pop open at random. Maybe you should have stepped in when I was by myself against sodding Death Eaters sixth year. Maybe you should have stepped in when this cloudy-headed forget-all came here and broke our home into pieces."

It was quiet except for the roaring in my ears. I knew she was right. I knew I'd broken things.

"Actually we tried to," Fred said after a moment, "but you stopped us."

"Threatened us with wooden legs."

"We know better than to cross you."

The back-and-forth was fading out as I sat down. I kind of wanted to run, but I didn't have any energy, suddenly. I heard them going on, but I couldn't bring myself to hear it. It was a little too much. She was right. I broke things when I left, and when I came back I broke them again. It was just no good being here. I would miss my parents and my brother, and even her, mostly her, but it wasn't right that I take her home away from her, and the longer I stayed here the worse it got. Besides, at the heart of it, Tom had gotten inside me.

Maybe he'd left something there, and she could see it.

I couldn't expect her to just look past that.

When I came back from the place I'd been in, it was quiet again.

I looked up to discover the twins in an uncharacteristically somber and silent state. They were looking at her as if she'd gone too far. When I swung my ten-thousand-pound head around to look at her, her face was in her hands.

"I'll go," I said.

The look she gave me was that of a person faced by relentlessly repeated horrors, an almost pleading expression that I didn't understand.

"No," she said, her soft tone sliding between my ribs and piercing me, "…then everything will break."

She left the room. I counted thudding steps upstairs. Don't wonder how many it was. They took her away, which is all I can remember now.

After a pause, George said, "So… as we have said, I believe… erm … moody."

I wondered for a moment if we had been in the same room. How they could be so quick to joke about this was beyond me.

"Deasil, our Ginny says a lot of things in anger that we have learned not to take to heart," Fred said.

"Even when they're true?" I said.

"Well, we did prank her when she was little."

"And she was by herself when Hogwarts was taken over." I hadn't heard all of that story, clearly.

"And I did wreck everything when I came back," I said.

"Deasil -" Fred ran his hand through his hair, looking up at me, struggling with something. "Look, mate, we know none of this was your idea. We even know that the only reason Mum and Dad are back here is because you fought the forgetting charms."

"And it's likely that if you'd stayed here, you'd have been killed by Death Eaters."

"But -"

"Here's the point where you want to think for a moment before you speak." George's voice was a little louder, mostly to get my attention, I think. "Maybe you're going to start saying that somehow that wouldn't be a bad thing. That at least our lives would all be as they were."

"You know, like our friend Hagrid says," Fred said. "Codswallop."

"Even if you hadn't given us our parents back, your parents got you back," George said. "And we owe them. They took care of us."

"Molded us into the fine examples of manhood that stand before you."

"And molded Ginny into the perfect example of womanhood that was only just then terrorizing us."

"You can't go back," Fred said, "and take our lives away just because you feel bad now."

"We got what we got."

"And you got what you got."

"No point in wallowing in it."

"Unless what you got is…" Fred looked at his nails. "Fabulous."

"In which case it wouldn't be wallowing, so much as…"

"Reveling."

That last one was me. I was just trying to put the brakes on this, really.

George and Fred shut up for a moment.

I think the hardest thing for me at the moment was feeling her pulled apart – so much going on in there, and nothing I could do to ease it. I knew she was taking something out on me, but I couldn't imagine it being anyone else.

In some weird way, that made me feel close to her.

"Quick, this one," George said.

"I was actually going to use that very word," Fred said.

"Can you two just stop it?"

A table runner began, in a very subtle manner, to inch its way towards what might have been a safer part of the table. Two doilies jumped ship altogether, disappearing over the edge.

"Sorry, mate," George said. "We're just trying to keep it light."

"It's not working. It just sounds like noise. I can barely think straight as it is. I can't make sense of anything.

"I can't go on feeling like this," I said, "and I really can't drink."

The look they shared should have warned me. The other thing that should have warned me was the appearance of wands and two curling, twisting streams of light that hit me in the head.

All of a sudden, I felt a whole lot better.

It was like seeing Tonks with a giraffe's neck. I knew it wasn't true, or real.

I just didn't care. At all.

So things got a little goofy. I started by creating an illusion for Fred and myself that George's head had disappeared, to be replaced by something pale, round and partially split, that he usually kept covered, but which I felt he'd been talking out of anyway, so…

Fred's eyes got huge, and then he hooted with laughter. Which was funny, because the sound bore a vague relation to the noises emanating from George, though said noises were perhaps throatier, if a little buzzy. Fred managed to calm himself for a moment, and attempt to look thoughtful.

"He's going to need a bigger hat," he said, and we both guffawed.

I cancelled the illusion and Fred said, "Do me next!"

It takes a man with quite a sense of humor to want to look as if he has an arse for a head, and Fred was that man.

•

Naturally foolishness ensued. There was a lot of it handy. They brought their usual abundance and I had picked up my share of it. I had them (and myself) looking like everything and everyone I could think of. Fred was, in turns, Ron with very bushy eyebrows, Dumbledore bald and in a pink nightgown, and Bill with arms that dragged the ground. George made a fetching Hermione wearing something that looked a little racy for her, and really, you could see the resemblance when he appeared as Molly in Arthur's criminally horrid housecoat. It wasn't much of a leap once you got past the height - you could really see a direct line between them. Apparently, in my looking between the two, I'd made that visible to Fred, and he was laughing jerkily at the sight of George's face oozing into Molly's and back.

Then I remembered I was actually supposed to be somewhere later that night. At five. No, six. It was around five now, wasn't it?

Could I make it there? Did I really remember it? Let's find out, I said to myself. I drained out of the room in my house and appeared in the Burrow's kitchen. I must have been noisy about it – the glass in the windows rattled. Okay, I could do it.

Before I went back, the last thing I noticed was that clearly the rat problem was all over the place. I saw a fat one trying to squeeze out under the door. That was good for a laugh. That little tail – oh, boy. I had a bit of a cackle over that.

"All right, now, no popping away from us," the nearer one said, "we have to stick together to have proper fun, yeah?"

"No running off without us, Deasil," the other one said.

Didn't know which one said what. Didn't care. "If you say so," I said. "Who wants to look like… uh…something else?"

"Anything in particular?"

I thought. I guess I did. My mind was going any old way.

"What's the worst thing you can think of, D?"

At the moment I couldn't think of anything bad. So I turned to one of them with the appearance of one of my ears being kite-sized, and sort of bunched it up towards him. "Can you speak up a little?"

My leg was going off.

I conducted a quick pat-down of myself and discovered that my mirror was vibrating. Sirius. Here was a guy who needed a laugh. I imagined him looking at the mirror, waiting for me to answer, and looking at himself in the mirror, or maybe not, because maybe he didn't like looking at himself, but I didn't really care about that at the moment, and I thought, what if I look like him when I answer and so he doesn't know I've come on and then I say something and surprise him?

So I thought about his face, which I could recall in great detail somehow, and it made me wonder about the spell they cast on me, some kind of cheering-up thing, but not too much because, as I have said, I didn't care about it, or anything much really.

Looking like him, I reached out for the mirror with my intent and did my best to impress that image upon its recipient.

Which, as it turned out, was not Sirius.

It wasn't enough that rats were everywhere, but now here was a guy who kind of looked like one.

His entire face seemed to point forward in a lumpy way, with its peak at his splotchy reddish nose. His mouth was drawn up small, with his lower lip further back than his upper. He had barely any chin. A patchy stubble ranged across what there was of it.

"Well," I said, "you really are a rat-faced bastard."

The twins nearly collapsed in hysterical silent laughter.

"Is that any way to greet your old friend after all these years?"

"Oh, you're right, you're right," I said. "Errm – hi, rat-face. Long time no see."

I really thought the twins were going to need some assistance.

His mouth transformed into a sort of leer. "Say what you will, my old lag, but you won't be laughing when you're back with the Dementors where you belong." His face briefly went into shadow, and I could see that he was walking among trees.

It occurred to me that whatever I did now, this guy thought I was Sirius, which at that moment meant a huge opportunity to play a practical joke on my godfather. It might loosen him up a bit. That's what I was thinking, anyway.

"How do you reckon?" I said, trying not to laugh in spite of my great wit.

"It's little Harry," he said, his voice assuming a hoarsely melodic quality, like a little song. "Gone away and grown up, then come back, only to meet his end at the hand of his convict godfather."

He made a sound that was kind of like a giggle, except uglier, then his voice fell into a breathless rasp. "He's dead, you see. Burned up alive at the gingers' old shack. Fiendfyre did for him. And who do you think is dark enough and angry enough at Harry to roast his bones with the black flame? Ask any Auror. That darkest of the Blacks, that murdering sod, Sirius. You. And no one will ever suspect me, because I'm dead, and you will go back to prison for the second time for his murder, and only you and I will ever know the truth!"

I had to count to five, but I couldn't hold out any longer than that.

I shouted with laughter. I had absolutely no idea what he was talking about.

His face went from this repellant version of a smirk to a repellant version of surprise. His lips shrinking into a small "o" and his nose quivering didn't help him any.

I felt like I should know who he was, but I didn't care enough to pursue that. Now seemed like a better time for whimsy than anything else, and I had plenty, for better or worse, of that. Like for instance: was he maybe talking about the Burrow?

I wondered if I could do with this room what I did with the twins' heads and my face. I kind of had an idea, though I didn't know what it was, really. Just decided to go with it.

So I thought about the kitchen at the Burrow, where I'd just been. I remembered that room, more sharply than I had imagined possible. The uneven floorboards, the slight arch between the living room and dining room, the splitting wood around the windows in the kitchen, the battered counters and fading tile. The long table with a slight bend in the middle, the bare paintless chairs.

A bit drab, but it didn't bother me any. Not to put too fine a point on it, but nothing did.

How a chair half-pushed away from a table, covered with dust, could be funny to me, is something I can't imagine now. I moved the mirror around the room in a slow arc, as if shooting a home movie. That sounded fun. Like the gorilla movie I saw at the theater. Move in on the table, slowly scan through the kitchen, close up on a particularly interesting crack on the counter, kind of shaped like a dog. I think I might have added that in.

One thing left to show rat-face, I thought. The best part is, I thought, as I brought the mirror back to myself, that this is the only real thing he'll see.

Though it wasn't there, I felt a little loss as I slipped off Sirius' face like a comfortable winter coat. All of the image of him gone from me, I looked into the mirror and waved.

Rat-face did the same thing everyone does. His eyes went to my forehead. It was getting old. What people didn't usually do was squeal afterwards. I could see little red blood vessels in his eyes and on his cheeks, and his nose had a rosy cast to it. He shook. Not trembled, not shivered. His stippled jowls flapped, his yellow teeth were exposed and his mouth expanded, wet and dark pink. I waited, watching his tongue slither like a slug in acid, for him to yell.

It took so long for him to do it that I was actually a little surprised when he did. It didn't come out like I thought it would. It was great. It kind of sounded like "Gah, gah, gah," and it went on and on, getting louder until I wanted to just put the mirror down. As it was I moved it a bit away from my face. I became aware of George and Fred, on either side of me, trying to see into the mirror.

He fumbled and scrabbled in his clothes, still making the sound over and over. It was like really bad music. Not at all catchy, either. Finally he jerked a wand from somewhere. He shimmered then – the entire image became a blur.

The next clear image I could see was that of black flame.

His yells became screams, but I couldn't see his face any more. A sleeve, an arm, maybe, and then it was all black and billowing.

Somehow that reminded me of Ginny and burning up my parents' living room, and that had been really funny. Really, really funny.

So I laughed.

I was still laughing while George and Fred held my arms, with both of their wands out, saying "Finite" repeatedly, which sounded festive, kind of. Laughing while they helped me lie down, laughing until my stomach hurt and my muscles ached, laughing at their pale faces, at my own laughter, laughing, laughing, until I slept.

•

Why could I see myself on the floor, body rattling like its parts had come loose from each other, held in place by the twins, their shoulders tense, their glossy blue robes looking stupid and vain, while they shouted spells over and over that didn't work until I finally extinguished like a pinched candle and lay there still?

Because I was there.

Because I stole your father's cloak and came down invisibly to see you, and work up the courage to talk to you, but when things started I couldn't reach out, and then it went so wrong, and I could have stopped it all but I didn't. I suppose I was wrong to say I'm only afraid of two things. I'm afraid of everything. I ruined everything.

•

So it was done. She leaned back and looked at me.

There were still things missing. I still didn't know what had happened that I had been so upset about, other than my part in the death of the rat-faced man. I still didn't know why I was supposed to hate her.

"You were wrong about Sirius," I said.

"Excuse me?" she said. No fun at all.

"He knows what it's like to have his mind violated. The dementors did it every day he was in prison."

She was very still for a moment, looking at me.

"You got your period at eleven?" I said.

"Wh-" she said.

"Sorry. Just popped in there."

"Yes."

"Tough year," I said.

"I was going to say 'You have no idea,'" she said, "but that would be wrong."

"So."

"Yes."

"Is that it?" I said.

"I take it you mean 'Are we finished with the memory business' and not 'Haven't you got something more impressive'?"

"Yes."

"Yes."

"We're… we're done looking inside, now?" Pressure building.

"I believe I'd covered that just now."

"Right," I said. "Right."

And then there Lucius was, his expression of surprise and of fear, and a feeling of falling, his face receding into blankness as he died, the end of a thing, the difference between on and off, light and dark. That was what I had been upset about all that day. What I was meeting Bill about. What I had done. What I couldn't see when we were looking together.

I couldn't tell her. And I guess the only way I could keep from telling her the truth was for me not to know it myself. And now that she wasn't looking anymore, it came back to me, brutally, crushingly.

"Do you hate me?" she said, her bottom lip shifting to the right, as it did when she worried what someone thought, and it wasn't often that she made that expression, but I knew it, heartbreaking and precious as all her expressions were to me. My face must have been repeating all of these feelings, because she stood abruptly and went to the door, stopping just before she was through it.

"Never," I said.

Her shoulders released and she put a hand to her face. "Then what -"

I had to tell her.

I just couldn't do it now.

•

A/N: A long wait, full of new life and changes. Sometimes you're changing the way you think about things, sometimes you're changing planes, sometimes you're changing diapers. This is the long chapter that the short one preceding it had to be in front of and separate from. Thanks to Freja for funny parsing, and to moshpit and Sovran for somehow finding the time, and to J for liking the sound of my voice, and also for little J.