096.asc

// 16918
//== Roles, Pt 7

// 16919
//__A/N: For those who have not read canon: The wooden sign has somewhat
//changed, but the inscription here is the same as in J.K. Rowling’s original.__

// 16920
//__The fourth meeting:__

// 16921
//__(4:38pm, April 17th, 1992)__

// 16922
//The man wearing the worn, warm coat, with three faint scars etched forever into
//his cheek, observed Harry Potter as closely as he could while the boy looked
//around politely at the rows of cottages. For someone whose best friend had died
//yesterday, Harry Potter seemed strangely composed, though not in any way
//reminiscent of unfeelingness, or normality. __I don’t wish to talk about
//that,__ the boy had said, __with you or anyone.__ Saying ‘wish’ and not
//‘want’, as though to emphasize that he was able to use grownup words and make
//grownup decisions. There had been only one thing Remus Lupin had thought of
//that might help, after he’d received the owls from Professor McGonagall and
//that strange man Quirinus Quirrell.

// 16923
//“There’s a lot of empty houses,” the boy said, glancing around again.

// 16924
//Godric’s Hollow had changed, in the decade since Remus Lupin had been a
//frequent visitor. Many of the old, peaked cottages looked deserted, with green
//leafy vines growing across their windows and their doors. Britain had
//contracted noticeably, in the aftermath of the Wizarding War, having lost not
//only the dead but the fled. Godric’s Hollow had been hard-hit. And afterward
//still more families had moved elsewhere, to Hogsmeade or magical London, the
//deserted houses too uncomfortable a reminder.

// 16925
//Others had remained. Godric’s Hollow was older than Hogwarts, older than Godric
//Gryffindor whose name it had taken, and there were families which would reside
//here until the end of the world and its magic.

// 16926
//The Potters had been one such family, and would be again, if the last Potter so
//chose.

// 16927
//Remus Lupin tried to explain all that, simplifying it as best he could for the
//young boy. The Ravenclaw nodded thoughtfully and said nothing, as though he had
//understood it all without need of questions. Perhaps that was so; the child of
//James Potter and Lily Evans, the Head Boy and Head Girl of Hogwarts, would
//hardly be stupid. The child had certainly seemed highly intelligent, for the
//little time that they had spoken in January, though at that time Remus had done
//most of the talking.

// 16928
//(There was also that business with the Wizengamot which Remus had heard rumors
//about, but Remus didn’t believe a single word of that, any more than he’d
//believed it about James betrothing his son to Molly’s youngest.)

// 16929
//“There’s the monument,” Remus said, pointing ahead of them.

// 16930
//Harry walked beside Mr. Lupin toward the black marble obelisk, thinking
//silently. It seemed to Harry that this adventure was essentially misguided; he
//had no use for grief counseling, that was not Harry’s chosen path. So far as
//Harry was concerned, the five stages of grief were Rage, Remorse, Resolve,
//Research, and Resurrection. (Not that the usual ‘five stages of grief’ had any
//experimental evidence whatsoever that Harry had ever heard about.) But Mr.
//Lupin had seemed too sincere to refuse; and visiting James and Lily’s home was
//something Harry felt he ought not to turn down. So Harry walked, feeling oddly
//detached; walking silently through a play whose script he was not interested in
//reading.

// 16931
//Harry had been told that he wasn’t to wear the Cloak of Invisibility for this
//journey, so that Mr. Lupin could keep track of him.

// 16932
//Harry was morally certain that Dumbledore, or both Dumbledore and Mad-Eye
//Moody, were following them invisibly to see if anyone tried for the bait. There
//was no way Harry would have been let out of Hogwarts with only Remus Lupin for
//a guard. Harry didn’t expect anything to happen, though. He’d seen nothing to
//contradict the hypothesis that all the danger centered on Hogwarts and only
//Hogwarts.

// 16933
//As the two of them walked closer toward the center of town, the marble obelisk
//transformed into -

// 16934
//Harry drew in a breath. He’d been expecting a heroic pose of James Potter with
//wand leveled against Lord Voldemort, and Lily Potter with arms outstretched in
//front of the crib.

// 16935
//Instead there was a man with untidy hair and glasses, and a woman with her hair
//let down and a baby in her arms, and that was all.

// 16936
//“It looks very… normal,” Harry said, feeling an odd catch in his throat.

// 16937
//“Madam Longbottom and Professor Dumbledore put their foot down hard,” said Mr.
//Lupin, who was looking more at Harry than at the monument. “They said that the
//Potters should be remembered as they had lived, not as they had died.”

// 16938
//Harry looked at the statue, thinking. Very strange, to see himself as a baby of
//stone, with no scar upon his forehead. It was a glimpse at an alternate
//universe, one where Harry James Potter (no Evans-Verres to his name) became an
//intelligent but ordinary wizarding scholar, maybe Sorted into Gryffindor like
//his parents. A Harry Potter who grew up a proper young wizard, knowing little
//of science for all that his mother was Muggleborn. Ultimately changing… not
//much. James and Lily wouldn’t have raised their son with what Professor
//Quirrell would have called __ambition__ and what Professor Verres-Evans
//would have called __the common endeavor.__ His birth parents would have
//loved him very much, and that would not have been much help to anyone in the
//world except Harry. If someone had undone their death -

// 16939
//“You were their friend,” Harry said, turning to look at Lupin. “For a long
//time, since you were children.”

// 16940
//Mr. Lupin nodded silently.

// 16941
//Professor Quirrell’s voice resounded in Harry’s approximate memory: __The
//most likely difference is not that you care more. Rather it is that, being a
//more logical creature than they, only you are aware that the role of Friend
//ought to require this of you…__

// 16942
//“When Lily and James died,” Harry said, “did you think at all of whether there
//might be some magical way to get them back? Like Orpheus and Eurydice? Or the,
//what was it, Elrin brothers?”

// 16943
//“There is no magic which can undo death,” Mr. Lupin said quietly. “There are
//some mysteries which wizardry cannot touch.”

// 16944
//“Did you do a mental check of what you thought you knew, how you thought you
//knew it, and how high the probability was of that conclusion?”

// 16945
//“What?” said Mr. Lupin. “Could you repeat that, Harry?”

// 16946
//“I’m saying, did you think about it anyway?”

// 16947
//Mr. Lupin shook his head.

// 16948
//“Why not?”

// 16949
//“Because it was already done, and over,” Remus Lupin said gently. “Because
//wherever James and Lily are now, they would wish me to act for the sake of the
//living, not the dead.”

// 16950
//Harry nodded silently. He’d been pretty sure of the answer to that question
//before he’d asked. He’d already read that script. But he’d asked anyway, just
//in case Mr. Lupin had spent a week obsessing about it, because Harry could have
//been wrong.

// 16951
//The soft voice of the Defense Professor seemed to speak in Harry’s mind.
//__Surely, if Lupin truly cared, he would not need special instruction for
//something as simple as thinking for five minutes before giving up…__

// 16952
//__Yes, he would,__ Harry answered the mental voice. __Human beings
//wouldn’t suddenly obtain a skill like that just because they cared. I learned
//about it because I’d read library books, produced by a huge scientific edifice
//-__

// 16953
//And that other part of Harry said, in that soft voice, __But there is
//also another hypothesis, Mr. Potter, and it fits the data in a much less
//complicated way.__

// 16954
//__No it doesn’t! How would people even know what to pretend, if nobody
//had ever cared?__

// 16955
//__They don’t know. That is what you observe.__

// 16956
//The two of them walked onward toward a certain house, past a long row of
//occupied wizard cottages and other cottages overgrown with vines.

// 16957
//Coming finally to the house with half its top blown off, and green leaves
//growing over into the inside; behind a shoulder-high wild-growing hedge lining
//the sidewalk, and a narrow metal gate (Mr. Hagrid had probably stepped right
//over it, being unable to fit through). The gap in the roof was like a giant
//mouth had taken a circular bite from the house, leaving spines of wood, what
//had maybe been support beams, sticking out. To the right side a single chimney
//still stood upright, uneaten by the giant bite, but leaning dangerously without
//its former support. Windows were shattered. Where there should have been a
//front door were only splinters of wood.

// 16958
//To this place Lord Voldemort had come, __silently, making less noise than
//the dead leaves slithering along the pavement…__

// 16959
//Remus Lupin put a hand upon Harry’s shoulder. “Touch the gate,” Mr. Lupin
//urged.

// 16960
//Harry reached out a hand and did so.

// 16961
//Like a fast-growing flower a sign burst from the tangled weeds in the ground
//behind the gate, a wooden sign with golden letters, and it said:

// 16962
//On this spot, on the night of 31 October 1981,

// 16963
//Lily and James Potter lost their lives.

// 16964
//They were survived by their son, Harry Potter,

// 16965
//the only wizard ever to withstand the Killing Curse,

// 16966
//the Boy-Who-Lived, who broke You-Know-Who’s power.

// 16967
//This house has been left in its ruined state,

// 16968
//as a monument to the Potters,

// 16969
//as a reminder of their sacrifice.

// 16970
//In a blank space below the golden letters were written other messages, dozens
//of them, magical ink that rose to the surface and gleamed brightly enough to be
//read before fading and giving way to other messages.

// 16971
//So my Gideon is avenged.

// 16972
//Thank you, Harry Potter. Fare well wherever you are.

// 16973
//We will always be in the Potters’ debt.

// 16974
//Oh James, oh Lily, I am sorry.

// 16975
//I hope you’re alive, Harry Potter.

// 16976
//There is always a price.

// 16977
//I wish our last words had been kinder, James. I’m sorry.

// 16978
//There is always a dawn after the night.

// 16979
//Rest well, Lily.

// 16980
//Bless you, Boy-Who-Lived. You were our miracle.

// 16981
//“I guess -” Harry said. “I guess that’s what people do - instead of trying to
//make it better -” Harry stopped. The thought seemed unworthy of this place. He
//looked up, and saw Remus Lupin gazing at him with a look so gentle that Harry
//wrenched his eyes away to the blasted and broken roof.

// 16982
//__You were our miracle.__ Harry had always heard the word ‘miracle’ in the
//context of how, in the natural universe, there was no such thing. And yet
//looking at the ruined house, he suddenly knew exactly what the word meant, the
//note of grace all unexplained, the blessing inexplicable. The Dark Lord had
//almost won, and then in one night all the darkness and terror had ended,
//salvation without justification, a sudden dawn from out of the darkness and
//even now nobody knew __why__ -

// 16983
//If Lily Potter had lived beyond her confrontation with Lord Voldemort, she
//would have felt that way when she saw her baby alive, afterward.

// 16984
//“Let’s go,” whispered the baby boy, ten years later.

// 16985
//They went.

// 16986
//The graveyard’s entrance was guarded by a lockless gate of the sort that kept
//out animals, with a place to stand while you moved the door from one side of
//the standing-place to the other. Remus took out his wand (Harry was already
//holding his) and there was a brief blur as they stepped through.

// 16987
//Some of the stones rising up from the ground looked as old as the wall in
//Oxford that his father had said was around a thousand years old.

// 16988
//__Hallie Fleming,__ said the first stone that Harry saw, in a carving
//almost invisibly faded with the erosion of time. __Vienna Wood,__ said
//another.

// 16989
//It had been a long time since Harry had visited a graveyard. His mind had still
//been childlike the last time he’d come to one, long before he’d seen within
//Death’s shadow. Coming here now was… strange, and sad, and puzzling, and
//__this has been happening for so long, why haven’t wizards tried to stop
//it, why aren’t they putting all their strength into that like Muggles do with
//medical research, only more so, wizards have more reason to hope…__

// 16990
//“The Dumbledores lived in Godric’s Hollow too?” Harry said, as they walked past
//a pair of relatively new stones saying __Kendra Dumbledore__ and
//__Ariana Dumbledore.__

// 16991
//“For a long, long time,” Mr. Lupin said.

// 16992
//They walked further into the graveyard, far toward the end, past many deaths
//that had been mourned.

// 16993
//Then Mr. Lupin pointed at a linked double headstone, of marble still white and
//unaged.

// 16994
//“Are there going to be messages there?” Harry said. He didn’t want to deal any
//more with the way that other people dealt with death.

// 16995
//Mr. Lupin shook his head.

// 16996
//They walked toward the linked white stones.

// 16997
//And stood before -

// 16998
//“What is this?” Harry whispered. “Who… __who wrote this?__”

// 16999
//JAMES POTTER

// 17000
//BORN 27 MARCH 1960

// 17001
//DIED 31 OCTOBER 1981

// 17002
//“Wrote what?” said Mr. Lupin, puzzled.

// 17003
//LILY POTTER

// 17004
//BORN 30 JANUARY 1960

// 17005
//DIED 31 OCTOBER 1981

// 17006
//“__This!__” Harry cried. “The __inscription!__” There were tears
//welling up in Harry’s eyes, at the brightness out of place and unexplained, the
//touch of grace where no grace should have been, the mysterious blessing, tears
//welling up at

// 17007
//THE LAST ENEMY THAT SHALL BE DESTROYED IS DEATH

// 17008
//“That?” Mr. Lupin said. “That’s the… motto, I suppose you could call it, of the
//Potters. Though I don’t think it was ever something as formal as that. Just a
//saying handed down from long, long ago…”

// 17009
//“This - that -” Harry scrambled down to kneel beside the grave, touched the
//inscription with a trembling hand. “__How?__ Things like that can’t just
//be, be __genetic __-”

// 17010
//Then Harry saw what tears had blurred, the faint carving of a line, within a
//circle, within a triangle.

// 17011
//The symbol of the Deathly Hallows.

// 17012
//And Harry understood.

// 17013
//“They tried,” Harry whispered.

// 17014
//__The three Peverell brothers.__

// 17015
//__Had they lost someone precious to them, was that where it had begun?__

// 17016
//“With all their lives, they tried, and they made progress -”

// 17017
//__The Cloak of Invisibility, that could defeat the Dementors’ sight.__

// 17018
//“- but their research wasn’t finished -”

// 17019
//__Hiding from Death’s shadow is not defeating Death itself. The
//Resurrection Stone couldn’t really bring anyone back. The Elder Wand couldn’t
//protect you from old age.__

// 17020
//“- so they passed on the mission to their children, and their children’s
//children.”

// 17021
//__Generation after generation.__

// 17022
//__Until it came to me.__

// 17023
//Could Time echo like that, rhyming, between this far into the future, and that
//far in the past? It __couldn’t__ be coincidence, could it? Not this
//message, not in this place.

// 17024
//__My family.__

// 17025
//__You really were, my mother and my father.__

// 17026
//“It doesn’t mean resurrecting the dead, Harry,” Mr. Lupin said. “It means
//accepting death, and so being beyond death, mastering it.”

// 17027
//“Did James tell you that?” Harry said, his voice strange.

// 17028
//“No,” said Mr. Lupin, “but -”

// 17029
//“Good.”

// 17030
//Harry rose up slowly from where he had been kneeling, feeling as though he were
//pushing up a sun upon his shoulders, raising the dawn above the
//horizon.____

// 17031
//____

// 17032
//__Of __course__ other wizards have tried. I am not unique. I was
//never alone. These feelings in my heart, they’re not so special, not in the
//wizard world or the Muggle one.__

// 17033
//“Harry, your wand!” There was a sudden excitement in Mr. Lupin’s voice, and
//when Harry raised his wand to look at it closely, he saw that it was gleaming
//ever so faintly with a silver light, welling out of the wood.

// 17034
//“Cast the Patronus Charm!” urged Mr. Lupin. “Try casting it again, Harry!”

// 17035
//__Oh, right. So far as Mr. Lupin knows, I can’t -__

// 17036
//Harry smiled, and even laughed a little. “I’d better not,” Harry said. “If I
//tried to cast the spell in this state of mind, it’d probably kill me.”

// 17037
//__“What?__” said Mr. Lupin. “The Patronus Charm doesn’t do that!”

// 17038
//Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres raised his left hand, still laughing, and wiped
//away some more tears.

// 17039
//“You know, Mr. Lupin,” Harry said, “it really takes a __baroque__
//interpretation to think that somebody would be walking around, pondering how
//death is just something we all have to accept, and communicate their state of
//mind by saying, ‘The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.’ Maybe
//someone else thought it sounded poetic and picked up the phrase and tried to
//interpret it differently, but whoever said it first didn’t like death much.”
//Sometimes it puzzled Harry how most people didn’t seem to even __notice__
//when they were twisting something around to the 180-degree opposite of its
//first obvious reading. It couldn’t be a raw brainpower thing, people could see
//the obvious reading of most other English sentences. “Also ‘shall be destroyed’
//refers to a change of future state, so it can’t be about the way things are
//now.”

// 17040
//Remus Lupin was staring at him with wide eyes. “You certainly are James and
//Lily’s child,” the man said, sounding rather shocked.

// 17041
//“Yes, I am,” Harry said. But that wasn’t enough, he had to do something more,
//so Harry raised his wand in the air and said, his voice as steady as he could
//make it, “I am Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres, the son of Lily and James, of
//the house of Potter, and I accept my family’s quest. Death is my enemy, and I
//will defeat it.”

// 17042
//__Thrayen beyn Peverlas soona ahnd thrih heera toal thissoom Dath bey
//yewoonen.__

// 17043
//“What?” Harry said aloud. The words had popped up into his stream of
//consciousness as though from his own thoughts, unexplained.

// 17044
//“What was that?” said Remus Lupin at the same time.

// 17045
//Harry turned, scanning the graveyard, but he didn’t see anything. Beside him,
//Mr. Lupin was doing the same.

// 17046
//Neither of them noticed the tall stone worn as though from a thousand years of
//age, upon it a line within a circle within a triangle glowing ever so faintly
//silver, like the light which had shone from Harry’s wand, invisible at that
//distance beneath the still-bright Sun.

// 17047
//__Some time later:__

// 17048
//“Thank you again, Mr. Lupin,” Harry said, the tall, faintly scarred man was
//about to depart once more. “Though I really wish you hadn’t -”

// 17049
//“Professor Dumbledore said that I was to portkey us back to Hogwarts if
//anything unusual happened, whether or not it seemed like an attack,” Mr. Lupin
//said firmly. “Which is eminently sensible.”

// 17050
//Harry nodded. And then, having carefully saved this question for last, “Do you
//have any idea of what the words meant?”

// 17051
//“If I did, I wouldn’t tell you,” Mr. Lupin said, looking rather severe.
//“Certainly not without Professor Dumbledore’s permission. I can understand your
//eagerness, but you should not go trying to uncover any ancestral secrets of the
//Potters until you are an adult. That means after you’ve passed your NEWTs,
//Harry, or at least your OWLs. And I still think you’ve picked up entirely the
//wrong idea of what your family motto is meant to say!”

// 17052
//Harry nodded, sighing internally, and bid Mr. Lupin farewell.

// 17053
//Harry went back through Hogwarts, to the Ravenclaw Tower, feeling strange, and
//strengthened. He would not have expected any of that, but it had been all to
//the good.

// 17054
//He was passing through the Ravenclaw common room, on the way to his dorm.

// 17055
//That was when the shining creature came to him, gleaming soft white beneath the
//candlefires of the Ravenclaw common room, as it slithered out from nowhere, the
//silver snake.

// 17056
//__Þregen béon Pefearles suna and þrie hira tól þissum Déað béo gewunen.__

// 17057
//Three shall be Peverell’s sons and three their devices by which Death shall be
//defeated.

// 17058
//- Spoken in the presence of the three Peverell brothers,

// 17059
//in a small tavern on the outskirts of what would later be called Godric’s
//Hollow.