Lagrange Points

Lagrange Points

I.

You, child, you are so young and the sound of your voice frightens me from where I've been hiding between reality and dreams with my head against the cold, hard glass of the window. You want to know whether I'm really asleep, and oh! how I wish I had the courage to sit up and open my eyes and really look at you.

You are so young, and I am so sorry that so much chaos has been wrought around your fragile body. Are you really thirteen now? God, you must be. How quickly time passes, how easily did my age begin to show in the wrinkles on my face and the grey in my hair. You will look at me as an authority figure, and quite rightly, since that is what I am to be to you. But, I... I will look at you and see my friends looking back, accusing me, missing me, hating me.

Your voice continues, smooth and low and yet nervous for all that it's worth. It twines and tangles with the voices of your friends, and the sense of isolated family comes back to me in a rush. The best friends, the team, the group in which nothing is sacred and little is secret. But just you wait; your secrets can only escalate from this point forward, I promise you. I think painfully of the changes that will come as you grow and pursue your own paths; may they never be as disastrous as mine have been. Truly, I can only find the world bearable through the appropriated eyes of children. I wonder what I will see through yours.

Every look will be painful, I know that without even opening my eyes. I don't want to open my eyes, I think... I want to keep them closed forever so that I might keep my pain inside myself where it belongs, and not subject you to it. I never want to hurt you, you see. Not you, not anyone else. Harry, my child, but not my son.

II.

I am still hiding, I believe, in my private purgatory, as I watch you move and laugh and worry with your peers, a single special fish in a wide sea of many, swimming along exactly as you should be. I am pleased that you have found home, and even uneasy peace, and through my own jealousy I seek to congratulate you, but cannot find the words. I opened my eyes to you so reluctantly, to see that yours had already closed. Fear had writ herself upon your face and you looked so small and fragile that I wished I could protect you forever, from the inside and the out.

But I have forgotten what it is to be an adolescent boy, I fear, and you are no delicate piece of china that lives its life in perpetual anticipation of the day it is to be dashed upon the slatted wood in anger or dropped onto the linoleum in slippery accident. You are strong in a very human way, and though your body would be easily broken, I am still afraid that I am inadequate as your protector. I hear you talk of Sirius Black in the bewildered, excited tones of one who is being stalked so maliciously, and hate myself all the more. I wish Sirius would simply go and enjoy the fruits of his laborious freedom, instead of pursuing you and torturing me with guilt and memory. I wish you could come to me, and we could both understand that you are safe.

Through my own pain, I truly can see your fear, just as I can see your scar through the untidy strands of your dark hair. I want badly to touch it, to trace it with my fingertips, feel that small, smooth flaw that means so much. I wish I could take it away from you, lift it like a burden too great for a child to bear. And when you look back at me, with your wide and solemn eyes, I wonder whether you think similarly of the scars that cross my face. Some day, perhaps, we will both reach out in silence to touch what we are so curious about, to feel the seams of each other's most painful memories.

III.

I regret that we have found each other in the desolate no-man's land that we both inhabit; that place between good and evil, right and wrong, adult and child, man and beast. We both tread this place with cautious footsteps, afraid that at any moment we may step upon something dangerous that will facilitate our end. I am afraid that we would both prefer not to move at all, but necessity and stubborn pride will drive us until the day our throats are cut.

We never asked to be what we are, and every morning I awake to fight those bitter feelings. My body is deteriorating more rapidly than I would ever care to admit, and it is with great humility on my part that I accept your presence while I require use of my cane.

We are brought together by your fear; ostensibly, we are here because of schoolwork and pedagogy and even our favorite murderer, Sirius Black. But the underlying reason is fear, fear and a clash of wills. But if you are truly afraid of fear, dear child, I find myself wondering what other emotions you would prefer to push aside. Indeed, you are both trusting and suspect, possessive and gregarious, loving and reserved. We are all creatures of contradiction, some more than others; and, in my eyes, you most of all. Your life itself is a paradox... are you 'The Boy Who Lived?' Or are you 'The Boy Who Did Not Die?' Some say that life and death are not entirely separate states of being, that every moment we live, from conception onward, is also a moment of death. The cells of our skin die and we brush them away without thinking; we shed lifeless hairs and eyelashes without pain; our nails grow long and we cut away the superfluous, nerveless chitin. But if our lives are truly spent doing little else besides preparing for death, should we live every day with the grimness of a hospice? Or should we choose to see our minute deaths as rebirths, and endeavor to infuse the minutes with the gaiety of a nursery? I do not know the answer.

IV.

I have come to both fear and anticipate your visits, perhaps as a drought-inflicted area shies from the thunder and welcomes the rain. But seeing you is rarely comparable to the great noises that echo in the clouds or the soft suppuration of a much needed shower. No, Harry, you are like the lightning, and very much so. To meet with you, in the classroom or the forest, is a fierce, brief illumination: of love, of hatred, of determination, of apprehension, of good humor, of precocious youth... it makes no difference. It is not quite pleasant, but not quite un; it is fraught with impatience and intensity, a brief flicker of the outside world. I am reminded of a line from the greatest love story our culture has yet known: "It is too rash, too unadvis'd, too sudden;/Too like the lightning, which doth cease to be/Ere one can say it lightens." The words and the simile therein are lovely, but the implication, I fear, is not. In haste is companionship found and in haste is it broken. Will fickle intentions slip from the razor's edge? Or will we walk forever in that place between moments, with no thoughts in our heads but that of those of the spring rain?

And then you are gone, leaving me with a peculiar tightness in my chest and an ache that neither rest nor witches brew can remove. It is the ache of memory, of separation. But I always square my shoulders and prepare for the next blow you will bring upon me, because I am not certain whether I would care to live without them.

It is Sirius Black who acts as the unusual interloper in our platonic affairs, and from afar he has managed to tempt the fragility of your well-being and my sanity. I wish to put my arms around you to protect you, and yet cannot. I cannot even do the most logical thing, the thing that might be able to keep you safest of all, because fear of rejection and a lingering misplaced loyalty has bade me to keep my mouth shut. I do not want to betray the past, nor jeopardize your future... so for the present, I will do nothing.

V.

Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot, and Prongs are dead. They died years ago; I already buried them once and am unsure whether I can manage to repeat such a painful task in the weary guise of my elder self. To see that map in your hands is sickening to me, as if you had scavenged the grounds for our corpses and then displayed them with such pride and unwitting satisfaction because you did not understand that they were dead things. And dead things are not to be trifled with.

We were dead long before your parents were so shamelessly murdered, and for that I am almost thankful; you see, Moony would never have been able to stand the tragic loss of every one of his friends, to prison or to oblivion. But Remus Lupin could, and did. The end of our schooling marked our unceremonious passage to adulthood, and even our beastly alter-egos succumbed to the sensibilities of maturation. I think we all mourned them, reabsorbed some of our own qualities that we had sacrificed to give life to our personas. And for every full moon since then, I have been nothing greater than the wicked, mindless creature I was meant to be, no more imbued with the child's spirit I had once carried with me like a lucky charm.

I hate you for possessing it. I hate you for allowing me to have it with such obedient reluctance. I hate the way your eyes plead with me, coercing without intention, as only a child's eyes can. I immediately feel the urge to burn that idiot, dangerous map, lead you to my own bedchambers, put you to sleep, and spend the night watching over you. But the map will not burn, nor tear, nor become waterlogged, and you will never come with me because there are rules and laws that the civilized world obeys. And I obey them as well, although a part of me is displaced from polite society.

Juliet was such a wise girl: "O! swear not by the moon, the inconstant moon,/That monthly changes in her circled orb,/Lest that thy love prove likewise variable." But, my dear, how many times did we swear by the moon's inestimable hold over the human race, the unfortunate lycanthropes doubly so. We are all lunatics, we men, women and children, our blood following the oceans with the idle brushes of Diana's sweet hand. The most perfect works of art are created with the rise of the full moon; the most tender acts of love and the most beautiful murders bask in her cold, silvery touch.

I think that there can be no greater upset that bewitched piece of parchment can bring to me, and yet the delicious irony of fate feels compelled to toy with me again. The name of a dead man twitches upon the map, moves with a jerky speed and unmistakable life. I am appalled; it must be a joke, a mistake, anything but what it is. My mind endeavors to resurrect not one, but two dead creatures... for surely that is where he has been hiding all this time, beneath the veil of a childhood exhumed. Beneath the veneer of Wormtail, a little boy named Peter Pettigrew lurks in the neglected body of a man. The repugnance of the idea shocks me, and bids me turn my thoughts toward a higher truth.

We have all been living a terrible lie. The truth is no better, but it will change our smug little world so drastically that it can hardly be considered an unworthy truth. And I fear these ills will reach climax tonight, when the world is at its most vulnerable.

I am sorry, Harry, that we are all so trapped here, in this place that is never all good nor all bad, on this Earth that rests so stubbornly between the realms of Heaven and Hell. I am sorry for the battles that will ensue, and the beliefs that will explode into turmoil. I ask only that you do not curse my name when all is said and done, and that you may someday forgive me for whatever ills I dare provoke.

For you, my dear, have yet to experience true betrayal; you have yet to experience the terror of being hunted like the animal you are and the sick relief of being caught... and, though I know it is all in vain, I pray that you never do.