Lovely Lie

The fight in the Potter farm trunk, which Hermione would have called an altercation – “A very stupid one, mind you.” And what everyone here calls the Incident – with emphasis on the emphatic capitalisation and title – prompts another big meeting. But, seeing as they don’t feel comfortable gathering in any trunk belonging to either House like before – just not yet, hopefully! – and many of them are curious about “the outside world” after the “fishing expedition” that was the LAD-item summoning, it’s decided that they’ll hold the meeting in the corridor outside the tent.

Harry still tries to dissuade them, even as the house-elves cheerfully have at the corridor again, meticulously cleaning another stretch of it, this time up to the spot where he and Teddy were spat out by the Veil. He tells them how dreary it is, full of encrusted animal droppings and probably other unmentionables, and populated by odd glowing fungi and lethal-looking bat-like things… and stops when some of them instead express their interest on those. Apparently, he’s saddled with people that are too much like Neville and Hagrid!

Suffice to say, it prompts the emphatic, strict, dare-not rule about NOT taking samples back home, or touching them, or even straying outside of the ward-bubble’s boundary on either side of the corridor. There’s no need to tempt them, after all! And everyone must swear on this – also to return to the trunks via the currently open one on the first sign of trouble – before he lets them go outside and into Nada’s temporary care.

It causes increased grumbling and doesn’t endear him to the daredevils, but he’d rather get that than losing everyone to a preventable thing, really.

Besides, what he receives now is far milder than what he received in his second year at Hogwarts, let alone during the fifth year, forget what would have been his seventh year, so why not?

Seeing how the trunks’ residents – he is more inclined to call them just “the residents” by now – bring seats along – picnic blankets or matts, stools, benches, armchairs, even sofas – to the meeting, instead of just standing round, he approaches Aleksei about making the ward bubble more permanent. So more time is spent bringing out the wardstones and redoing the wards that encompasses the extended stretch of relatively safe zone along the corridor. And, meanwhile, Nada has the unenviable task of wranglin the various individuals based on the types of seating they have with them and how tall the individuals are, the higher and the taller the farther back, and definitely not along House lines.

And then… well, Nada and Ewan somehow suggested “proper self-introduction” when he despairingly asked them how he could help reblur the House lines, and he doesn’t look forward to it at all, but it might work. So, when the sorting’s all finished, he trudges to the front of the congregation – which is placed along the spot where he was spat out by the Veil, just so that no other sits too close to it and the residents can quickly return to the trunks during emergency – carrying Kan, with Nada carrying Teddy behind him, and settles himself and Kan in the tennis-referee-like chair from before that someone has brought out for him.

Having the sole attention of these many people is still quite unnerving. Especially since Kan doesn’t like it either and chooses to curl up tight again in his lap, though the stubborn little one refuses to move elsewhere without him. But it needs doing, and Harry James Potter is quite familiar with unpleasant things that need doing, so he forges on.

He doesn’t talk about the Incident. He doesn’t even talk about this corridor and their earlier plan of moving away from it. Praying for luck, he just plunges into stories of his life since what he knows of the very beginning, which he only ever told his friends at Hogwarts in fits and starts and definitely separately. And, for greater understanding, he begins from even earlier.

He tells them of Lily Evans and her elder sister Petunia and her childhood friend Severus Snape. He tells them of the Marauders that were headed by James Potter and Sirius Black, down to how bullyish they behaved. He tells them of how Sirius bated Snape with a wolfy Remus, how Peter betrayed the Potters for power, how Dumbledore the elder ordered Hagrid to retrieve Harry and send him to Petunia, how Sirius hunted for Peter and got framed into spending thirteen years in Azkaban without trial instead. He tells them of ten miserable years spent with the Dursleys, the cupboard under the stairs, the Harry Hunts, the suspicion of the neighbours, the boa constrictor incident, spending his eleventh birthday on the floor of a storm-racked sea-side hut, spending his twelvth birthday caged in his bedroom, spending his thirteenth birthday being Aunt Marge’s belittled servant, his first ever birthday party and holiday when he was fourteen, spending his fifteenth birthday broken out of what Fred dubbed “Durzkaban” early to live with Sirius who was incarcerated by circumstance in the childhood home the man hated so much, Sirius falling into the Veil when Dumbledore’s secret group came to save five fooled foolhardy teenagers from Death Eaters and Voldemort….

He pauses, takes deep breaths, realises that Sirius fell through the Veil, just like he did, whips out his wand, and summons a Patronus that is fueled by the burning hope of meeting his godfather again here, perhaps even now.

What comes out of his wand is not Prongs, is not a griffin, is not even the dragon he faced in fourth year. But he can’t care less about it right now, neither of the shock and awe of his audience.

“A message to Sirius Black, please,” he requests to the blob of rich gold-silver light that hovers in front of him, pulsating gently.

He watches then as it rises to the ceiling of the corridor, then darts here and there, but ultimately returns to him, plopping as if dejected.

He feels dejected, himself, and the Patronus winks out soon after, as he fails to maintains it in his new state of emotion.

A Patronus fails to reach a recipient of a message only in three occasions, he remembers Hermione once said, after they got that warning from Kingsley during Bill’s and Fleur’s wedding: if the recipient is dead, if the recipient is under a strong ward that prevents messaging or identity recognition or both, or if the recipient is too far gone to remember who they are.

He dreads to think to which category Sirius belongs to and why, especially given the fact that the man fell through the Veil two years ago.

Just… so many things could have happened in two years, especially to a confused and admittedly-not-so-balanced someone with limited resources.

Sirius might not even be here, if the Veil doesn’t always drop people in the same reality, or if it moves from place to place in that destination-reality.

He reluctantly explains it all to his gaping and murmuring audience, when Mitchell – Ewan’s eight-year-old son – leans forward with wide eager eyes from the sofa he shares with his parents and uncle Owen and pipes in the question.

“We could search from time to time,” is Najib’s practical solution to it, unasked for but very much appreciated. “You could teach any of us who cannot cast it yet if you would, my lord. Then we all could help.”

The “all” part in the statement makes Harry perk up and beam brightly, for once un-self-consciously.

`At last! No more just House Potter or just House Black!` he thinks. `Maybe Nada and Ewan did have a point about all this.`

Well, now he has to deal with the residents’ useless rage against Albus Dumbledore and the Dursleys. But this is more manageable, he thinks. Albus Dumbledore is dead and the Dursleys are a reality away from them, after all, and they do have the plan to escape this dreary, claustrophobia-inducing place and keep living to focus on.

He reminds them of that. And, being surrounded by ancient, crumbling concrete and tarnished metal with piles of ancient unmentionables heaped beyond the ward-bubble like this, the reality is far starker, far more tangible. It’s not a surprise, then, that they quickly move away from the topic of his life to making a practical plan for Harry to execute for them all.

And then Celine wonders aloud, “Lord Potter, do you think any of your friendz will follow us ‘ere zomeday? We need to prepare for zem if zey do.” And Harry, in the process of situating the clipboard he’s just borrowed from Nada on his lap without dislodging Kan and still keeping it away from the child’s ever-curious hands, freezes.

Kan freezes, as well, and most in the audience likewise.

Then Owen summarises it in just one stunned, heart-felt word: “Fuck.”

Harry chuckles in automatic response, and clearly hears burgeoning hysteria in his own voice, in the laughter that slowly gets louder and wilder.

He ends up burying his face in Kan’s tresses, smelling the scent that may be alien but is rather familiar to him by now and thus comforting.

Because, the very thought of his friends being Veiled for any reason…!

A mortified Celine apologises profusely to him when the tears come out, but he waves it off.

When he has regained some semblance of composure, he lifts his head – though Kan is now clinging stubbornly to his neck, so it’s not much of a difference – and wipes the tears off of his face, and tells them all, “Let’s don’t borrow trouble,” and knocks on the wooden panelling of his seat for good measure before he continues, “Let’s hope nobody follows us here. But if any does, we could leave markers that they will be able to follow, so they don’t get trapped in here, especially if they don’t have any resources with them.”

“We can put tings here too, right? For them?” Rangga sounds anxious, and he is not the only one.

Harry sighs. “Maybe,” he allows. “Some resources, and a way to contact us. But we’ve got to keep in mind too that people who got thrown here could be some convicted Death Eaters, or people who hate me enough to follow me here just to kill me.”

Kan trembles in his arms, hearing it through the thoughts filtered by his mind and the bond they share, but he isn’t going to shelter the child from reality and have it ambush them later on.

Besides, Kan isn’t leaving his arms until the child themself wants to go, so they got all the comfort and attention they want while dealing with this. It’s more than he ever got for all the horrible revelations he’s been faced with thus far, so it’s all right… right?

Anyway, the discussions and professional debates that crop up afterwards almost immediately blur the line between Houses Black and Potter, even between the different age brackets and profession groups, and he counts it as a definite win, even more than Najib’s stated inclusion of everyone.

Especially when a group of people of mixed Houses go back into the tent and come out half an hour later bearing trestle tables, which they set up side by side to the left of the tent going in and proceed to load with platters of simple but hearty and newly cooked dishes, also pitchers of hot and cold drinks and towers of accompanying glasses.

They even have a box of live worker bees for Kan to snack on, however weird and worried and vaguely nauseated Harry feels, watching the child quickly and expertly catch and strip each bee off sting and wings and all before popping it into their mouth and crunching down. But at least they’re happy?

Well, and they soon get distracted by and move away with Mitchell Grady, too, with Nada trailing placidly but watchfully after them. So Harry is free to load a plate and fill his own stomach with minced pie and thick sticks of flavoured fried potato slathered with mushroom gravy, polishing it down with sips of a glass of chocolate milk with minty aftertaste.

It’s an impromptu picnic of a family, after all, and he never expected it, but he relishes joining in it now.

He is used to rolling with all that reality gives him, anyway.

Speaking of rolling with the reality, though….

With the glass of minty chocolate milk in one hand and his plate of food in the other, he winds among the milling groups in search of his quarry, and finds her on the far side of the cleared area with… her relative, probably? Or just her co-worker?

Ayuningtias is her name, he now knows: one of the first three people he ever met among the two Houses that he is somehow in charge of. Also the woman who sent Nada to him. And the one who explained about how Hermione got them all here.

He wants to ask her a very niggling something. Something that he didn’t realise until a few people tried to sneakily rearrange the trunks along House lines instead of according to what they contain, early in the – thankfully short! – cold war between the two Houses.

Well, seeing him, the woman – who insists to be called Tias – introduces him to her little sister Ayuningsih or just Ningsih – he’s right! – first, but it’s okay. It’s the polite thing to do, and he does need to know more about the people he is in charge of. She then goes straight to asking him if she could help him with something, anyway, and he makes use of the courtesy offer, for once, so it’s all right.

“How did you manage to get everything into a trunk in just three days? If Hermione even gave you that much time?” he asks. “And, don’t expanded trunks have limited dimensions? I never knew you could fit an entire land into one!”

Oddly, she grows sombre instead of proud and/or delighted with his near explicit praise of the feat. Her sister, likewise.

And then she explains, her voice quiet and even more thickly accented than before, and her gaze heavy on him, “Prefious Lord Potter did nothing about us. We never met him. We only hear about him, about him married, and about you. Den he dead, and you missing. We don’t know if you dead or not. But people in Eng-land – you famous in Eng-land, dey say, and not because you Lord Potter. But you missing. Not nice, not know about current Lord Potter two times. So we ting hard, we can do what so we closer to you. We contac oder Lord Potter places, and dey contac oder places. Dey contac House Black, because you aprently also Prince Black because you godfader.”

She shrugs, and stutters to a stop for a reason he can’t fathom, her face tighter than before. And it’s her little sister – who looks little like her, but eh – who picks up the tale, concisely jumping right to, “House Black have knowledge for it, House Potter have wood for it, so we build trungs, we start fill it when you start magic school. We want get close to you. We make place inside, den start put our tree dere, den oder tings like hall. We put illusion after put tings in trung, so oder people not know we move. Illusion will go away a mont after we go. We go day before you go. We go into trung, den Lady Ermi put trung in library. It plan, anyway.”

“And others did the same? So Hermione’s visit just clinched it – just gave you a definite timeline for the move?” he inquires further, just as quietly as they answered. When the sisters nod, he lets out a deep, silent sigh, then bows to them with an equally quiet, “Thank you.”

What else can he do? It’s all long done and finished, by now, and he can’t fault their loyalty.

He’s quite moved by it, in fact.

And daunted. So very daunted. And no longer eager to finish his meal and drink till nothing’s left.

Bitterly wondering, too, `What if they got to me before Hagrid did? What would’ve I done? How would’ve I viewed the Wizarding world? Is it why Dumbledore barred Remus from me? And never told these people – my family, more than half of the Marauders, by House affiliation alone – where I was?`

The mood carries him past the natural end of the meeting, past herding Teddy and Kan for and through a bath – Kan loves soft-scented bubble baths too much – and past all the hassle of settling down for the… well, everyone considers it night, but nobody is sure whether it’s night or day on the side of the planet they’re at, and nobody really cares about it. But all three are nestled in his bedroom, at long last, with Teddy joining him and Kan in the bed, seeing as the little menace cries whenever he tries to get the imp to sleep in the crib, and now he has to wrestle with the aforementioned mood just so that he can rest, forget sleep.

He envies Kan, who is once more curled under his armpit and snuggling tight, and Teddy who lies cosily spread-eagle in the nest he made for the baby beside his pillow. Because they plonk into slumber just so, breathing softly and regularly, feeling fuzzy in a contented way in his head next to his own mind. And, even with the two presences radiating sleep-peace-content-warm-home-safe right in his head, he still can’t stop thinking.

Well, Ron would call it “brooding”, or even “sulking”, but he refuses to call what he’s feeling any of those. He’s not grumbling over detention or Snape or the latest attempt to kill him by Voldemort or some such, after all. It’s his family he’s thinking about, more a family than the Dursleys, though Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia at least gave him a roof over his head and some food in his stomach, after finding an unwanted him just lying on the porch in a November night, with just a measly little letter explaining the death of Aunt Petunia’s little sister.

While he knows Aunt Petunia did hold something about her little sister close to her chest, still. Because he remembers grief lurking in her eyes when their eyes met when he was little, before he had to wear specs, though he didn’t recognise what the feeling was at that time.

No, he didn’t. Not until he was far older and seeing it in Sirius’ eyes when talking about James. Not until “the Battle of Hogwarts” and George had to deal with Fred – half of his soul, he once quietly and seriously confided – dying right in front of him.

Grief touched him, then, too, and he tastes it even now, in the tears he can’t let out because it will disturb the children – his children, whether he wants the responsibility or not, while he barely knows the idea of what a good childhood is like – and because he won’t be able to stop once he starts crying again.

And then something – something unfamiliar – nudges at his mind, feeling curious-confused-wary-concerned, and he jolts, and Kan wakes up with a start and an all-too-quiet fuss, and Teddy stirs. And, just so, grief turns into fear.

Fear and anger.

`Who are you?!` he snaps at the new presence in his mind, which recoils in a jumble of emotions that roughly translates as, `Oh wow he notices me! Oh no he notices me! Now what should I do? Why is he here? How can’t I see him?`

The presence doesn’t seem much older than he is, if at all. It doesn’t seem malicious, too, just somewhat careless and all too curious.

And he has been dealing with a certain all-too-curious someone for some time, now.

`Why not another one?` he thinks privately, exasperatedly, sarcastically, even as he tries to detangle himself from an even-clingier Kan. Then, as he gives up and bundles the little brat into the sling meant for Teddy, wrapping the bony little being thoroughly in a blanket for good measure, for added concealment that he knows Kan appreciates, he sends back to the unknown presence, `Who and where are you?`

He finds he doesn’t appreciate it when the other sends back bemusedly, `On… Level forty-five… I think? In a… quite dirty corridor. And I can see that… someone?… has cleaned a stretch of it, quite thoroughly. And, there is… a tent, a pristine-looking tent, somewhere near the far end of the cleaned area. Are you… inside? Did you clean this place?`

The jumble of statements and questions filters into his mind and translates through his perception into, `A magical being is somehow, suddenly here. They see. And they want to meet me.`

He wants to flee. He wants to pack the tent up and just run. Because he and Aleksei warded the place against non-magicals but not magicals. The unknown presence could just stroll into the warded area, and the only thing preventing them to do so is… what? Caution? Politeness?

That last point calms him down a little. But he still closes the currently open trunk next-door, shrinks it and returns it to the shelves, then takes the time to dress himself properly in his “outside clothes”, packs meals and water for three individuals with differing needs into the waistbag, enough for three days just in case, coaxes Kan into the expanded pack whose flap he doesn’t close but makes sure Kan will if things get dicey, and puts Teddy in the sling instead. Only then does he shoulder the pack and stride out of the room, hopefully not for the last time.

He puts on the strongest Notice-Me-Not he can round him and Kan before he strides out of the tent, and retreats the best he can from the intruder’s presence in his mind for good measure.

He packs the tent up with a tap of his wand on the discreet rune sewn half-hidden into the door-flap, hands the rolled-up piece of their home to Kan for storage in the pack, and only then does he look round. Deliberately. And notice that there’s indeed someone standing at the far side of the cleared area, courtesy of the few Lumos balls left shining high up near the ceiling by the residents.

And that someone is loitering close to the place he and Teddy was spat out into by the Veil.

Right by the wardline, in fact.

The profile becomes clearer when he carefully grabs for the Lumos balls, to lower them and have them trail in front of him as he cautiously stalks towards the unexpected – and, frankly, unwelcome – guest to this temporary home of his. It’s a man, or at least male-looking, much taller than he is and well-built but… young. Possibly older than he is by a couple of years or more, but hunched over, all small in presence and uncertain, and it doesn’t seem to be an act.

The loneliness he can feel radiating from the other youth, as well.

The dingy, smelly, filthy clothes the other wears, likewise.

Which somehow makes it easier for him to swallow, when they at last stand face to face, separated only by the invisible but tangible wardline, and Harry notes that the other has possibly blond hair – judging by the eyebrows, lashes and uneven stubble, which are far cleaner than the dirty, matted hair – and small blue eyes.

`He is not Dudley. Dudley isn’t here. it’s just coincidence. He is taller and musclier than Big-D, too.`

He forces himself to ask, “I’m here. What do you want with me?”

And only when the other looks puzzled does he realise that he is speaking in English while the language in this place seems to be not at all English.

So, resigned to the ludicrousness and risk of it all, he hesitantly extends part of his mind towards the unknown presence that might be this other youth’s, and conveys the same points through impressions and sensations.

The other frowns a little, looking and feeling unreadable for a brief moment, but he answers, and that’s all Harry wants for now.

Apparently, this other youth and his people living up there sensed ripples going upward from this place, and he’s spent long trying to find the source of the ripples.

Harry scowls at it, though not so much at the other youth. This bit of nosiness isn’t the latter’s fault, after all.

It does mean that he and his people can’t stay here any longer, however. So, bittersweetly and even somewhat regretfully, he conveys `Wait right there. I’ll be back soon` to the other, then strides over to the wall beside the spot of air that still tingles, even now.

Tasking Kan to spy on what the other is doing while his back is turned prevents the child from being overly mentally fretful, oddly enough. But it works, and Harry isn’t going to question it, not right now.

He just goes right to work, carving the impression of the Veil split by lightning deeply into a visible spot on the wall via careful aplications of Diffindo. Then, under it in lines one below another, he carves “SPEAK NO EARTH LANGUAGE”, “LEVEL 45 UP FROM GROUND”, “↑5000 LEVELS TO SURFACE” and “FOLLOW MAGIC TRAIL”, and hopes madly that those who might come later are not hostile towards him.

Not his friends, either, however painful the thought is. Just, they deserve to live well on earth, not outcast forever wherever here is.

Then he lopes over to the far end of the cleared area to retrieve the wardstones there by hand, in the sequence that is safe for breaking the ward bubble for possible later use, which Aleksei taught him while they were setting up this more permanent warding arrangement. Into Kan’s hands comes each of the slates, and down they click-click-click into the pack one by one, and he praises the child effusively for the care they put into storing the magically charged things.

But soon the last of the wardstones returns to the pack, and he and Kan – who is peeking from behind him, with their arms hooked round his neck as far as those little spindly things will go – are left just looking out into the space that was packed with picnicking people just hours ago.

It feels so very empty, now, and not just because there is a lack of people there.

Still, Harry is grateful that the other youth doesn’t say anything, doesn’t do more than observing unobtrusively, and doesn’t urge him to move along.

He is grateful, too, when his disclaimer and warning of `This doesn’t mean you can study and experiment on me or mine, and this also doesn’t mean I’m going with you all the way` is received with a mental acknowledgement and a physical nod by the other.

And then both step away from the cleared area, which will no doubt be reclaimed by the pre-existing wildlife in no time at all now that there is nothing barring them from it, and Harry resigns himself to the first real step to carving a new life for himself and his people in this new universe.